Today’s Early Access Fraudsters comes in the form of Lonath Online, a title by 4NetGames that is by all measures a scam. How much of a scam?
If you head over to Lonath Online’s forums the two stickied threads you will see are warning people to stay away. Stay far away. 4NetGames is the product of one developer who apparently decided to just up and abandon his work way back in 2016, leaving the game in a state where it is still online and being sold for money ($7) while not actually functioning as a game as the server is offline. Yes, the forum moderator is recommending you stay far away.
Although I’d rather not do this, it has been too long. I’m marking Lonath online as abandoned(?), but 4NetGames may just be on hiatus for a little while. I have no idea if he plans to ever return or work on Lonath Online again. It has been (as of now, on the 21st of February) been marked abandoned.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them, I will try to help out as much as possible.
EDIT: Servers are officially OFFLINE, please do not purchase this until the developer (if) comes back.
Lonath’s website is gone as is its social media presence, and the developer has been unreachable for years. Given Valve’s reputation for poorly responding to broken/nonfunctioning/abandoned games, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that users have been reporting Lonath Online for the past four years only to have absolutely no action taken.
Is the game selling copies? Presumably no. Is it wasting valuable real estate on the Steam store? Definitely. From my search I haven’t been able to find any other titles created by 4NetGames, but we’ll be keeping in eye out in case anything pops up under this developer title. To give people a heads up on who they are giving money to.
Paycheck: City RPG is the latest MMO to hit Steam Early Access and for first impressions the game is leaving players wanting.
At its core, Paycheck is shaping up to be a role playing game in the biblical sense; players actually playing roles such as shop owner, police officer, and thief. Developer Happy Dog Interactive LLC has promised functionality to address players who might try to make the game a living hell for others just trying to play by the rules.
“One of the biggest challenges in designing a game like this, is how do you ensure constructive gameplay? In other words, how do you prevent players from constantly shooting one another for no reason? Our solution to this and other gameplay related problems are the Fair Kill System and the Fair Arrest System. These intricate systems enable players to have fun in their respective roles without having to constantly deal with problematic players.”
The good news is that Paycheck: City RPG is free to play. The bad news is that it doesn’t seem to have launched into Early Access with much to do, and players are wondering why their time is being wasted. Complaints seem centered around the lack of activities and specifically the absence of anti-griefing mechanics that the Steam store page talks about.
“This game is a long way from being playable, very buggy with not many things to do. The map is way too small for the type of game it is. Players start with weapons and new spawns start same place every time and can get killed straight away. There is no real character building mechanics so its kind of just a TDM game at the moment.”
One player logged in to find a low population being harassed by a single person.
“My first five minutes into a server there was just a cop in spawn arresting people the minute they spawn in, and since anyone can be any job they want this just allows trolls to do stuff like this. I only played about 30 minutes because there was only 5 people on the server and one was just standing in spawn waiting to arrest people like i said before, but i hope this game reaches it’s potential it’d be fun.”
Another review notes a lack of enjoyment of being a shopkeeper when one can’t interact with their store.
“this needs some serious help. the game was pushed back for whatever reason and still feels terrible. driving a car is a nightmare, being a store owner makes no sense, cant even lock a room or interact with your store. i think this game needs to be worked on longer it wasnt ready for this launch.”
Many of the reviews agree that the game has potential to be something good. Someday, just not right now. For now, you might want to give the game some extra time in the oven before diving in.
Activision Blizzard has released their fourth quarter financial reports and if you were hoping the company would burn to the ground following last year’s Hearthstone debacle, well you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
The positive side of this year’s Q4 report is that Activision didn’t pair an announcement of record revenues with hundreds of layoffs. We still expect the company to siphon a few hundred million in taxpayer dollars for simply existing in 2019. Unfortunately Activision hasn’t been able to keep up its record results from last year as the company has seen multiple straight quarters of revenue loss. Sad for the investors, but since Activision isn’t infinitely expanding not quite a surprise.
Despite this, Q4 results exceeded expectations according to Bobby Kotick.
“Our fourth quarter results exceeded our prior outlook for both revenue and earnings per share,” said Bobby Kotick, Chief Executive Officer of Activision Blizzard. “Our recent Call of Duty® success illustrates the scale of our growth potential, as we expanded the community to more players in more countries on more platforms than ever before. With our strong content pipeline across our franchises and momentum in mobile, esports, and advertising, we look forward to continuing to delight our players, fans and stakeholders in 2020 and beyond.”
Net revenue dropped from $2.3 billion for Q4 2018 to $1.98 billion in 2019, while overall net bookings similarly fell. Activision boasted a monthly average user rate of 409 million with a large portion coming from King (249 million) and of course the ongoing success of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch.
Investors are happy because Activision increased dividend payouts by 11% and you have to focus on the important things.
This week’s list of free Epic Game Store titles includes Carcassonne and Ticket To Ride, but gamers might be looking more forward to next week’s offering.
Starting February 13 and running through the 20, you’ll be able to get your hands on Kingdom Come: Deliverance at no cost. Kingdom Come launched in early 2018 from Warhorse Studios and publisher Deep Silver. A story-driven RPG that features an open world, challenging combat, and an authentic feeling medieval Bohemia. Kingdom Come currently holds a mostly positive rating on Steam where user reviews are allowed.
Also available alongside Kingdom Come will be Aztez. Aztez bills itself as a hybrid beat-em-up and turn-based strategy game. It originally launched in 2017 by Team Colorblind.
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
-Mark Twain
“CliffyB is an out of touch fossil who needs to permanently retire.”
-Me
Cliff Bleszinski is back folks, and he’s ready to give us all some learnin’ with the efficiency and reliability of a two-fingered woodshop teacher. Grab something stronger than a beer, you’ll need it.
CliffyB is a guy who has had a bit of a history of being what you might call a callous BS artist, one ready and willing to burn some bridges with people he thinks he doesn’t need to rely on for income. He’s doing that again. This whole charade has been going on since at least 2008 when Cliffy announced that Gears of War would not be coming to PC due to the amount of piracy on the platform. Cliffy was lying of course, Gears wasn’t coming to PC because of an exclusive deal with Xbox. I don’t think anyone was gullible enough to believe his excuse. It wasn’t until 2015 when Cliffy was selling Lawbreakers that he finally came back and apologized to the PC group only to get a whole lot of the cold shoulder. Oh and he chose this time to snub Xbox players.
See here’s the thing about Cliffy’s statement and apology; they only talk to a very small group of people. You have a tiny portion of the gaming public who know who CliffyB is, a smaller portion who would buy a game based on his name alone, a smaller portion that care enough about his opinion to specifically not buy a game that they would have otherwise because of a personal snub from ten years ago, and an even smaller portion who would actually go and buy the game out of forgiveness if apologized to seven years down the line. Nowhere in that list is enough people to take a game from success to failure.
Just look at Ubisoft who have sold gangbusters on PC despite at one point claiming the platform had a 95% piracy rate.
But CliffyB’s back to tell us why Lawbreakers failed and I’m guessing this egotist isn’t going to really be accepting any blame. For those who don’t remember, Lawbreakers was an uninspired hero team shooter that launched in 2017 on PC and PS4, failed out the gate despite positive reviews, and shut down its servers in 2018. So what was the culprit? It was the wokeness.
“Instead of the story being “this game looks neat” it became “this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms.” Instead of “these characters seem fun” it was “this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier.” Instead of “who am I going to choose” it became “white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews” instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.”
Not really. Yea a dozen people were complaining about the gender neutral bathrooms, but do you really think that it was a big factor in why Lawbreakers failed? Shoving your political ideology into a game is going to lose more than zero sales, no matter what that ideology is. For a niche game that PR blunder could absolutely tank early sales of a game that wouldn’t have sold much anyway. It does not ruin a “billion dollar franchise” as Cliffy wanted it to be, just look at Life Is Strange which performed just fine. How about taking a gander at Overwatch and Apex Legends?
Lawbreakers presented itself to the public as a dull, uninspired game. The aesthetics were generic and boring, the characters are dull and forgettable, not to mention visually indistinguishable during gameplay, the game’s only gimmick wasn’t enough to sell it on, the casual audience that should have made the focus were tossed aside in favor of a tiny hardcore audience, it launched a month before Destiny 2, had no single player content, didn’t have basic multiplayer modes (team deathmatch) that most players flock to, had extremely weak and cringeworthy (#skilledAF) marketing, no visibility, a steep learning curve, useless tutorials, and virtually no way for a new player to learn the ropes while getting steamrolled by hardcore FPS players. Everything Cliffy says to explain his failure, as usual, is demonstrably wrong.
In short, Lawbreakers was screwed from the start on fundamental design flaws, just slightly more so from Cliffy being a rat. Why buy a new game when you already own Overwatch, is what I presume many of the few people aware of Lawbreakers’ existence said to themselves. Now being an out of touch narcissistic fossil, CliffyB spent the following months refusing to take measures to save the game and refusing to (publicly) acknowledge that the title was failing. Instead he went on the attack against the only people who had offered his game support since the only place Lawbreakers was showing positive results was in the review scores. The games press.
He told us to fuck off for not eating the propaganda that his game was doing fine despite public data showing exactly the opposite.
“They’re just looking for clicks, man,” Bleszinski says of the games press. “They’re just looking for ad revenue. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, and they’re welcome to print whatever they want – but as far as I’m concerned, they can fuck off. We’re going to keep making our game for our fans.”
A bold statement as Cliffy’s studio is burning to the ground around him.
It should be noted that Boss Key Studios did not continue to make games for their fans, of which they had next to none since Lawbreakers was in the low double digits of players. Their future would entail hastily cobbling together a shoddy prototype battle royale game in five months and shoving it out with both untextured buildings and a fully functioning cash shop in the hopes that maybe some whales would come around and keep them financially afloat. They didn’t, Radical Heights was a humongous flop and cemented in many minds that Boss Key was incapable of an original thought and solely existed to lazily jump on the bandwagon of whatever was popular at the time.
It’s also quite comical when you consider that Epic threw together Fortnite BR in two months and how much success that had.
I have bad news for you, Cliffy: Nobody outside of a few dozen gamers ever cared about your gender neutral bathrooms. I don’t even think most of MMO Fallout’s readers can remember a single other thing about what made Lawbreakers “woke” without looking it up. I certainly can’t. It was a passable game that couldn’t attract customers because of its dull, uninspired design from a company run by a narcissist who refused to accept its failings until it was far too late to turn back. Lawbreakers wasn’t sold as woke, Boss Key spent next to zero time promoting the game to the “woke” crowd or talking about its diversity.
The public wasn’t turned off because your characters were too ethnically diverse and weren’t sexy enough, Cliffy, they didn’t like the characters because you can’t tell them apart in a lineup. Your excuse also doesn’t hold up when Lawbreakers was full of the kind of macho dude-bro content that would push the woke crowd away regardless.
All you need to know about Lawbreakers is in this video:
So now it’s time to come to the big question of the day, and that is: What is CliffyB selling? What income generator is Mr. “I have an attractive wife and a Lambo” looking to push now that he’s throwing a group under the bus to grovel to another whose money he thinks he’s spurned? I presume it is related to Cliffy’s autobiography which should in all good graces be titled “Denial Isn’t Just The River I Drowned In.”
The Vertigo might be the most pathetic thing I have ever seen pop up on Steam.
I saw The Vertigo in my Steam release list when it showed up with the January 30 launch date. It costs $2 and I wouldn’t buy it as a joke since it is a battle royale game with no bots (presumably) and not a single person playing it. It would be a bigger waste of my money than Cyber Watch. Judging by the screenshots, it looks like The Vertigo was compiled over the course of a day since it uses untextured flat models, the default placeholder character models, and what I assume is a combination of placeholder blocks and asset store items.
I’ve seen low-effort trash but this is truly the lowest of low. Even worse is that SteamDB shows that this game was once categorized with in-app purchases. The Vertigo doesn’t look like it’s worth $2, and you’re going to ask for more from the nobody stupid enough to give you money? How dare you. I decided to look up the developer, Chango Games, and I’m honestly not sure if I’m being punked.
Head over to the Chango Games website and the first thing you’ll see is a teaser page for a game called Slash. I have no idea what Slashed is, but Chango Games is proud enough of it to label themselves “Creators of Slashed and Vertigo” at every opportunity. I know it’s available for pre-order at a $10 discount and they’ll send you a Steam key. Slashed isn’t on Steam, it doesn’t even have a database entry.
Also the website uses Dark Souls III trailers to advertise Slashed.
I should note at this point that the website absolutely takes you to a Paypal link that will allow you to pay Chango Games $20. I’m not stupid enough to see what happens if I paypal them the money. The more I view this website the more confident I am that someone spiked my sugarless Virgil’s root beer with LSD and I’m just muttering nonsense into this WordPress editor while spamming photos of my cat.
Chango Games also sells $1,000 t-shirts that say “$1,000 t-shirt” on them. At this point I’m 99.99% certain this is all an elaborate trolling operation. There is a gallery page that appears to be nothing more than compiled sets using pre-bought asset packs. I think I managed to find one or two of the asset packs used in the screenshots.
It’s 2a.m. and I’ve been trying to make sense of this “developer” for the last three hours, which very likely makes me exactly the kind of sucker they hoped to rope in with this weirdness. So congratulations, Chango Games is either a ridiculous troll group or a deeply incompetent developer. I’m not sure which is worse.
Black Desert Mobile’s latest update drops in the Field of Valor for a limited time.
The Field of Valor can be joined as a party of five and encompasses killing monsters for 30 minutes. In order to participate you will need to collect and spend tokens which can be gained from log-in rewards and rare drops from enemies and chests. Party members in Field of Valor share rewards so you don’t need to kill everything yourself in order to reap the benefits.
Joining the Field of Valor is the Shakatu’s Shop event. Players can make purchases at the shop to obtain random gear with the possibility of obtaining some of the most powerful items in the game. Shakatu’s Shop is also available for the next week.
Day of Dragons is in Early Access and barely qualifies as a game, but that hasn’t stopped developer Beawesome Games from teasing additional income generators in the form of paid DLC dragons.
Beawesome Games is taking some flak from their community regarding recent teasers for the “Blitz Striker Amphithere,” a paid DLC dragon set to release in Q3/Q4 2020 for the low low cost of $5.99. Despite raising over half a million dollars and being on the top selling list in December on Steam, Day of Dragons currently stands with three dragons all of which are placeholders in the form of bought premade assets from the Unreal store.
Some of the angry sentiment comes from Kickstarter backers who are upset that Beawesome is advertising paid DLC dragons when the dragons that people had already paid money for as part of the game’s Kickstarter campaign are nowhere in sight. Additionally, others are taking umbrage with Beawesome teasing paid DLC dragons when they have yet to finish a single dragon that was not bought from the Unreal engine store. Beawesome has claimed that there are over a dozen dragons in development or scheduled for development. There are seven Kickstarter-exclusive dragons.
All of that of course is meaningless since if you look at the latest developer list on the Day of Dragons Discord, you’ll see that they do not have a character rigger/animator or a visual FX artist on staff. For now backers will have to make do with what they were given. A glorified tech demo. One run by a man of dubious ethics.
Good news, everyone! The bad news is that you’re going to be taking on a LOT more Terminators with the second part of the main story quest. The good news is that you’re going to have a much easier time of it.
#1: Talk To Rasa Aldwin, Get A Compensator
You’ll need to talk to Rasa Aldwin to pick up the second story quest for the Terminator event. Starting the mission will unlock the Termination Compensator which deals 30% additional damage to a Terminator’s weak point. It rips through Terminators like butter. While you’re at Erewhon, I recommend upgrading your Mk14 Termination sniper rifle by going to the store and printing up a new one. Since you’ve likely gained some levels since you first obtained the sniper, this one will have higher stats and do more damage. Easy peasy.
Rasa will send you to hack an antenna because the Terminators are going hog wild and frankly life on Auroa was simpler when it was just the Sentinel army turning it into a militaristic dystopia. Head over to the location on the map and you’ll need to hack an antenna which picks up an electromagnetic signal coming from a nearby base. There’s some heavy Terminator activity and you’re going to need to find out what it is.
#2: Investigate The Electromagnetic Pattern
Head over to the marker on your map and get ready for a fight. You’ll come upon the Smuggler Coves base under attack by several Terminators which should be no problem to take down now that your superpowered sniper can rip through them like a fork through shredded pork. The Sentinel occupancy here isn’t that great and most of the soldiers will be dead by the time you get there, so your only opposition should be the couple of Terminators.
Investigate the disturbance and you’ll discover that the facility is none other than a T-800 production plant. They’re making more Terminators! Destroy the four cooling vents to force the airlock to open and head on inside.
#3: Terminators Everywhere And Not A Drop To Drink
You’ll face a slight variation of the T800 models down here. There are more of them in a tightly confined space but they are nowhere near as powerful as their fully kitted out brethren. You should have no problem taking them down with a full clip of the Mk14 sniper. Same rules apply; whittle down the blue health bar and then shoot them in the chest until they go boom.
Get to the control room and you’ll take on the big Terminator himself. Same rules apply but in a smaller room. Watch out for the Terminators that spawn during the fight.
#4: Escape And Talk To Rasa
Once you terminate the Terminator the building will begin its self destruct sequence. Escape past the large number of Terminators (don’t stop to fight them) and lock the facility behind you. Enjoy the fireworks.
Return to Erewhon and talk to Rasa and you’ll be officially done with the story mission. At this point you should be essentially done with the battle pass assuming you have completed the prior daily missions. If not you still have through February 6 to get those remaining daily missions completed. You can take part in the daily missions going forward for their various rewards.
Digital Homicide will go down in history as one of the most embarrassing blights on the gaming industry. Since one of the two Romines has decided to put himself back into the public eye by publishing propaganda about the company’s short-lived history, now is as good of a time as any to bring up the company’s titles in reference to…Warcraft 3?
Yes, Warcraft 3. Following Blizzard’s PR nightmare last year regarding Hearthstone and Blitzchung, the company finds itself once again being nearly universally roasted over the release of Warcraft 3: Reforged. You name it, customers are probably angry over it. Misleading advertising, reduced animations, broken servers, merging the remake with the original client, Blizzard’s EULA stating they own any mod you make, the list goes on and on and on.
But you know the proverbial shinola has hit the fan when your AAA game is rated lower than Digital Homicide’s worst-rated title. More than 10,000 people have voted on Warcraft 3 on Metacritic and have given the game a 0.6 rating. By contrast DigiHom’s lowest rated game is The Slaughtering Grounds which stands at a 0.9.
Yes, Warcraft 3 is viewed less favorably than a developer that tried to launch frivolous lawsuits against 100 Steam uses and a Youtube critic for being mean.
MMO Fallout 