Quest Online has revealed that Alganon will be coming to Steam next month. Alongside a number of other fixes and tweaks, support for Steamworks was added in the latest Alganon patch. According to Quest Online, Alganon will officially be on Steam next month.
Implemented support for SteamWorks backend services. Yes, Alganon is coming to Steam next month! This is the store landing page.
The link does not work as of this publishing.
(Source: Alganon)
Final Fantasy XIV’s first expansion, Heavensward, releases June 23rd and introduces new stories, an increased level cap, a new race, new battles, new dungeons, and new mounts. More significantly, it introduces DirectX 11 graphics, offering better quality visuals at the expense of higher system requirements. To better prepare players for the road ahead, Square Enix is offering a benchmarking tool.
You can download the benchmark tool here.
(Source: FFXIV Press Release)
Pathfinder Online is currently in “early enrollment” (read: alpha/beta) while charging a subscription, a combination that doesn’t exactly see customers falling over each other to sign up. Regardless, Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey took to the forums to express his disappointment in player recruitment being “almost zero.” He suggests that players head to other websites including Reddit, news websites, and the Eve community to openly discuss their activities.
Settlements that are committed to growing should have someone delegated to be visible in these places making regular posts and talking about the cool stuff their Settlement is doing. When the wider community sees activity and fun, that is a powerful attractant.
Dancey’s comments have been criticized by community members, pointing to the game’s early access state coupled with the subscription putting players off.
Ryan, I strongly feel that mass recruiting efforts now are premature. The kind of people we’d be able to pick up from the mainstream sites are people who will login for a week, see a game which is very immature, draw incorrect conclusions, and never come back. The longterm success of the game will be much better if we wait to recruit those people until we have a chance to actually keep them.
I think the real failure was in the original business planning by the people in charge. Seems like what they suspected was a MVP that the target audience would pay money for was grossly miscalculated. Maybe this would have worked 10 years ago.
I will not go and try to make the game look like a million, using sugar-coated words and focusing on telling the positive stories, while completely ignoring or downplaying the negative parts in front of other gamers. So I’m doing the best I can for GW, and that is, being silent.
(Source: Pathfinder)
(Disclosure: This is a collaboration between MMO Fallout and Poki.com.)
When I look at games like Big Farm, I see a genre soured by the greedy actions of a monolithic developer that tried and miraculously failed to build an empire out of monetizing its own property at the cost of public relations and long term success. I am, of course, referring to Zynga, the least threatening cash vampire since Uwe Boll started his directorial career, and the only company capable of collapsing the public relations of an entire genre.
There really is nothing inherently wrong with time management games. They know what they are and they don’t claim to be what they aren’t, and they don’t spend much time reaching outside the demographic. On the spectrum of gaming, you can’t get much more casual without going into the territory of games that play themselves, or perhaps a pedometer, but they certainly have a wide audience who enjoy them daily.
Big Farm, as its name implies, is a game that starts the player off with a small farm that inevitably grows into a big farm. This is accomplished by building fields out to grow plants and raise animals which are then sold to the market for money or used as resources to grow further goods.
The process does get pretty involved later on. Eventually you’ll be doing things like growing corn to turn into chicken feed in order to raise chickens to collect their dung to turn into fertilizer to grow apples in your orchard and compost the fallen leaves from the trees into humus which can be used on your corn seeds. That’s a mouthful.
The number of buildings, what you can grow, and how much you can store is all governed by an overall level which raises as you complete simple quests (gather x, build y) and gain experience. Higher levels allow for more buildings, expanding the farm, upgrades, and new plants. Along the way you’ll have to worry about factors like population, happiness, and space. You need more houses to hire workers, but more houses decreases happiness which increases production costs. To make your workers happy, you need to build decorations which take up precious farm space. It’s a balance of cost vs efficiency that is completely up to the player.
As far as the cash shop goes, Big Farm primarily sells convenience goods. What few non-decorative buildings you can buy are pretty cheap and offer little bonus as an alternative. Luckily you can amass a small fortune in gold through the game’s level up rewards, by completing quests, and through email promotions by Good Game Studios that are constantly being sent out.
Players can compete against each other in blue ribbon missions that usually involve harvesting more of a certain plant than everyone else, with rewards going out regardless of what place you end up in. Big Farm’s version of a guild is called a cooperative, where players can collaborate on missions with big payoffs, and contribute towards bonuses that reward the entire cooperative.
Big Farm’s ultra-casual nature is sure to drive many gamers away, but for those who enjoy time management games, it’s a decent looking game without the overbearing cash shop butting in. If you take it as a race to the finish, you’re going to see a lot more popups asking you to fork over for some gold, but for those of you who recognize that it is something to be cultivated over months instead of days, you’ll have a much more enjoyable time.
If you do decide to check out Big Farm, you can find it and other MMOs (as well as other games) on poki.com.
[Update]: Tripwire Interactive has expressly forbidden the use of paid mods in its EULA for Killing Floor 2.
Your Mods must be distributed for free, period. Neither you, nor any other person or party, may sell them to anyone, commercially exploit them in any way, or charge anyone for receiving or using them without prior written consent from Tripwire Interactive.
[Original Story] About a day has passed since Valve’s announcement of paid mods on Steam, beginning with Elder Scrolls Skyrim, and the backlash is mounting against the new system. A petition on Change.org to remove the mod shop has drawn over forty thousand signatures at the time of this publishing, while a number of people are flooding paid mods with bad reviews.
Fears that Valve’s hands-off approach to curating content would result in stolen content being listed were confirmed when a fishing mod was pulled for using assets from another mod without permission. The creator of Fore’s New Idle Animations, a mod that many other Skyrim mods rely on to function, has expressed his opposition against mods being released for money.
Valve has also seen criticism over its policy of taking a 75% cut of revenue.
As part of an effort to curb damage from account theft, Neverwinter bags are being made bind-on-equip. The update took place during today’s maintenance and includes the greater elven silken bag, bag of holding, and greater bag of holding.
The update also adds a runic bag of holding:
Over the course of our game, we have added more potions, refinements and additional items that you will find on our adventures through Faerûn. However, we haven’t made efforts to increase the inventory space. The Runic Bag of Holding will add that additional space for those players looking to bring along more loot as they explore the world.
Bags already equipped will not be bound until they are equipped again.
(Source: Neverwinter)
Russian gamers will be sad to learn that the local Lord of the Rings Online servers will be shutting down on June 1st. Mail.ru, the publisher of Lord of the Rings in Russia, was either unable or unwilling to renew their license with Warner Bros. and as a result the service is coming to an end. To end the game on a high note, players will be able to visit a tavern where they can level up and obtain equipment, talents, and more.
In addition, everything in the cash shop has had its price reduced to one mark, although new player registration and adding money to accounts has already been disabled. Mail.ru is planning on offering bonuses for several of their other games: Allods Online, Perfect World, and Dragon Nest.
(Source: www.lotro-russia.com)
Neverwinter has a new lead designer, one Scott Shicoff, previously content lead on Star Trek Online and creator of the Sword Coast Adventures. As part of his new duties, Shicoff is looking at Neverwinter’s latest update, Module 6, to see what hasn’t quite worked out.
In the coming weeks and months, our team will use this to shift Neverwinter from where it is now into what we feel is a far better place. Most of our goals are to make the game better by improving the aspects noted below, while others will bring the game closer to matching the growth of our players and our original vision for Neverwinter.
The team will be performing surgery on multiple areas of Neverwinter from invocation, xp rewards, dungeons removed, and more. The first change, set for release in the next update, is to bring experience rewards for campaign areas to a more consistent level.
We are only reducing XP given by repeatable quests in the Tyranny campaign areas. Other quests are unaffected. I know this isn’t an ideal scenario, but to help compensate for this change we will be running our double XP event for an entire week, starting Thursday, April 23 and ending Thursday, April 30.
You can read the entire letter at the link below.
(Source: Neverwinter)
Here are three words you probably never expected to read: Meridian patch notes. Regardless, yesterday brought with it a new patch for the world’s first 3D open world MMORPG. The changes mostly consist of infrastructure updates, but there are also updates that people have been waiting diligently for since before some of you were born.
We’ve added some improvements that have been on many players’ wish lists for the last 20 years, and also started work towards bringing some major content from the 90s back to the game.
You can create a server 103 account at the website below. Meridian 59 previously had gone open source and is now maintained by its community.
(Source: Open Meridian)
Old School RuneScape’s latest poll doesn’t finish for another couple of days, but the figures are pretty much locked in. Chief among the long list of questions is whether or not players would like to see a resizable mode added. 95% of respondents (over 45 thousand) said yes, with a toggle to turn the feature on and off.
Also currently on the approval list are shared slayer tasks, Zulrah drops, new spell animations, achievement diary rewards, buffs to certain equipment, changes to teleports, left-click smith option on anvils, and more. A couple of questions did not pass community approval, including changes to the Fountain of Rune, an Armadyl male helmet, the ability to gain multiple bear heads, and changes to npcs in low level wilderness.
Over on RuneScape 3’s side, players voted on larger but less frequent updates, with weekly bug fixes and “ninja fix” micro-updates in between. Abyssal Demons won the poll on which slayer monster should receive rare, elite spawns, and the Seren and the Elves quest was the most popular suggestion from the Runelabs March poll.
(Source: Old School)
MMO Fallout 