This week I played the demo for an upcoming MMO called Citywars Savage.
Citywars Savage is a quaint little upcoming MMORPG with a pretty cool premise. On the surface the game promises hack and slash combat coupled with crafting and resource management. Dig a little deeper and on the list of planned features you’ll find the ability to build and claim your own territory to battle against other players and their cities.
The demo itself took me roughly 45 minutes to play through, it takes you through a mostly linear pathway where you’ll learn how to make money, how to buy and equip better gear, and battle it out against the monsters dotting the small landscape. If Citywars showcases any idea well, it’s how good you can make a game look with some filters, lighting, and fog effects. It runs great, and ends with you killing the Death Knight.
Of course the big feature that’s being advertised with Citywars is the ability to hire and program your own NPCs. Looking at the store page, Citywars will have a graphical interface to streamline the process of coding your own NPCs to do stuff like gather resources and handle crafting while you’re out doing better things. I’ll be fully satisfied if I can program my NPCs to chatter while they are going about their business. It’ll be like having my own RuneScape bot farm.
I’m pretty sure I also encountered a dev while playing, as the game has voice chat and immediately zipped over to me and started chatting about how to access various interfaces. Now that’s customer service.
I can’t wait for more of Citywars to come out and I recommend checking out the short alpha that is available on Steam.
Cyber Watch is a shovelware title hastily cobbled together in the Unreal Engine and tossed onto Steam for a couple of bucks in the hopes that enough people will buy it and not refund it to make a little bit of profit. Tossed onto Steam by a ragtag group of seven named individuals, Cyber Watch hopes to abuse the fact that it is “under development” to avoid criticism while not making use of Steam’s Early Access label.
The first thing you see on Cyber Watch’s store page is:
*****NOTE*****
THE GAME IS STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT AND IT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL VERSION OF THE GAME.THERE IS STILL A LOT TO IMPROVE AND ADD
SO IF YOU WANT THE FULL EXPERIENCE OF THIS GAME PLEASE WAIT FOR THE FINAL VERSION TO RELEASE.UNNECESSARY REVIEWS WOULD NOT BE APPRECIATED.
What you get is a barely functioning pre-alpha build of a game whose working components I have to assume were built into the Unreal engine or available as an asset pack on the Unreal store. From untextured, very basic maps to weapons that may function halfway or break your character (see aim-down-sights in the screenshot below), to “vehicles” being nothing more than untextured RC cars that sloppily plant your character mode behind it.
Cyber Watch also blasts Neffex songs through your speakers at about ten times the volume of the rest of the game.
To further cement the idea that Cyber Watch is a hastily cobbled together mess of a prototype, as of one week ago this game wasn’t actually called Cyber Watch. SteamDB’s history shows that Cyber Watch was previously titled The Battle Of Bellum up to January 1, 2020. It was previously listed for a January 18 release date before the team just dumped it on the store on January 12. The Battle Of Bellum it seems would have been a third person action adventure game judging from a prior description:
“This game is a third person shooter game.This game is full of acton and adventures.”
Prior Steam listings also have The Battle Of Bellum listed as a single player game with achievements, so it seems like the team threw out what they had at the last minute and opted instead to push a rushed featureless prototype of a shooter on the store in the hopes that slapping a “this is unfinished” sticker would stifle criticism and people would buy the game regardless. It might have worked if they had listed the game as early access. They didn’t.
It isn’t going to work. I personally bought the game to drop a review and received this response from the developer:
“THERE IS A BIG NOTE IN THE DESCRIPTION……MAYBE….. MAYBE YOU DIDNT SEE IT…..ITS OKAY ……EVERYTHING YOU ARE SAYING IS ALREADY MENTIONED IN THE DESCRIPTION……SO DONT WASTE YOUR TIME ON COMMENTING LIKE THIS”
Posting in all caps always makes you correct, and trust me there is no way anything associated with this game is not a huge waste of time.
Thankfully with the way Steam goes, Cyber Watch will be buried in the history books with the rest of the low-effort shovelware to come out on Steam.
Out of a Tweet and into King’s Row, it’s the ongoing copyright-infringing adventures of none other than Space Comabat! With the blindness of a bat, the strength of a bat, the constantly orbiting flock of bats, and the ability to wield two large sharp metal objects…like a bat, Space Comabat uses his echolocation abilities to seek out the fruity nectar of evil!
This week Space Comabat travels to King’s Row to visit his informant Genevieve Sanders and discover what is sending the city’s hooligans to the hospital.
“Space Comabat, it’s a good thing you showed up. The Skulls have been pushing their drug Superadine to Galaxy City refugees, and the crime rate is skyrocketing! You need to find out who is supplying The Skulls.” Space Comabat is on the job. Time to seek out some Skull Gang ne’er do wells and politely coerce some information out of them, with justice!
Looks like these ruffians haven’t been getting their daily iron. Space Comabat can fix that!
After giving his adversaries a little lesson in how crime doesn’t pay, Space Comabat finds a clue to who might be behind the Superadine. It’s a printed receipt with a business address and phone number plus Twitter account and IRS employer ID. “Who knew street drug dealers accept all major credit cards except American Express,” says Space Comabat. “Now let’s see who is running this shindig. It looks like the operator is one Toothbreaker Jones.”
“I wonder how he got the name Toothbreaker Jones,” Space Comabat asks nobody in particular.
At the Superadine dealer, Space Comabat enters to find a building full of desperate addicts. “There are a lot of crime junkies in this building,” says Space Comabat, “and thankfully I’ve got plenty of detox to go around.”
“Space Comabat? I thought yous got moidered by Joey Fatone back in Atlas Park!”
“Nobody likes a liar, and I’m going to wash your mouth out…with justice!” Space Comabat continues to deliver some much deserved retribution to The Skulls littered throughout the building until he finally comes upon Toothbreaker Jones flanked by his two henchmen.
“If we knock Space Comabat out of the picture, maybe the boss will let us in on the next shipment.” Space Comabat quickly dispatches Toothbreaker Jones’ henchmen and draws out the boss man himself.
“Space Comabat! I’m going to break your teeth!”
“The only thing that’s going to be broken here is the clavicle of evil” shouts Space Comabat as he shatters Toothbreaker Jones’ clavicle with his metal rod. Space Comabat leaves Toothbreaker Jones to lie in a puddle of regret until the police can come by and pick him up. He returns to Genevieve to report his success.
“You’ve taken down one of the suppliers, but Toothbreaker Jones mentioned something about a shipment headed for King’s Row. We’ve discovered another Superadine den, head over and find out what you can about this shipment. If we don’t stop The Skulls, this drug problem could become a full pandemic.”
“Oh there’s going to be a pandemic. A pandemic of justice!”
Will The Skulls obtain their shipment of Superadine? Can our heroes stop this dastardly drug before it turns King’s Row into a psychotic nightmare? Tune in to the next episode; same Space Comabat time, same Space Comabat place.
Every once in a while I get an email asking “Connor, why don’t you talk about those various City of Heroes successor games?” That’s an oddly specific question, and one that harkens back to a time where any article I wrote about NCSoft would result in a flurry of emails threatening to boycott my website or trying to get me fired for not mentioning whatever CoH successor was crowdfunding. Now I’m not going to name names (because I don’t actually remember who did it) but having a PR rep from a volunteer project reach out to chastise me for not mentioning their game in an article about City of Heroes, and to imply that I was being paid by another project to not mention them? Eventually it’s not worth talking about anybody.
But 2020 is a new year and a new decade and the fervor over NCSoft is over, and I’d like to know where the Kickstarter money I threw in seven years ago went, so it’s time to catch up on those City of Heroes successors. Do we even need these titles now that they have taken so long to release that a secret underground moleman community has been discovered and shared their private server with the world? Who knows. Are any of these games actually going to see their way to completion? It’s been eight years.
In no particular order because God forbid I get emails asking why one project was listed above another, let’s just dive in.
1. Valiance Online – It’s In Alpha
Valiance Online is the Unity-built successor to City of Heroes and one of the few on this list that did not run a (successful) Kickstarter/Indiegogo campaign. The investor alpha was made available back in October 2017 and those interested in getting in on the project can donate a minimum of $25 to gain access to founders perks. From a quick glance it looks like the alpha server was taken down back in November 2019 for a big update and has not yet come back up.
If there is one complaint that can be lobbied at the Valiance Online people it is that their communication is terrible. The news section hasn’t seen an update since November 2018, the forum is a mess to navigate, and the Twitter also has not been updated since November 2019 during the latest maintenance update. As a title that started very early compared to the other COH successors, I feel like Valiance Online may have blew its load too soon. I remember playing a pre-alpha four or five years ago and just very quickly losing interest as the game was many years off of release.
Who knows, Valiance Online is clearly in active development with things to show for it. Hopefully they can take that stretch toward beta and make the game more widely available.
2. Ship of Heroes – Character Creator Beta
Ship of Heroes has progressed far enough to have released a character creator beta test back in November where players could go in and create characters, have a costume contest, and even test out their powers and walk around the ship. Ship of Heroes is a City of Heroes successor set on a spaceship traveling through space (as they do). It is built on the Unreal Engine and pretty regularly puts out news updates with screenshots of how the game is progressing.
Of the games on this list, Ship of Heroes seems to be in the best position to put out a launch product first considering it is being run by an actual company with faces instead of a rag tag group of unpaid volunteers. Not to diminish the work of the other games on this list, but Ship of Heroes just seems to be in the strongest position as an organization of developers.
3. City of Titans – Character Creator
Of course I would be remiss to talk about Ship of Heroes launching its character creator tool without also mentioning City of Titans by Missing Worlds Media who launched their own character creator a couple weeks earlier. Out of everything on this list, I have to say City of Titans feels like the closest to an actual spiritual successor to City of Heroes. Where the other games on the list are creating a modern superhero MMO, the videos and screenshots released by Missing Worlds Media make the game look like it is trying to stay true to form and bring gamers back to the world that they had once lost but can incidentally now play again.
Admittedly out of everything on this list, City of Titans is the game I’m most looking forward to.
Missing Worlds Media is a bit of an enigma for me as they regularly want to have their cake and eat it too. City of Titans was funded in 2013 to the tune of 678 thousand smackers, yet whenever I talk about the game coming along at a snail’s pace and far beyond the campaign’s original delivery date, I get inundated with comments about how the team is staffed by unpaid volunteers and that I should just shut my stupid face about it. I don’t know what to tell you; you’re either a dev pulling 700 grand plus to fund development or you’re a group of volunteers making this game for free in your spare time (ie; people complaining about efficiency should shut up). You can’t expect to be treated as both when it’s most convenient.
4. Heroes & Villains – ??????????????
Heroes and Villains is a superhero MMO created and run by the players with an official website that looks like it was optimized to run on Windows 95. Of the current titles on the list (#5 notwithstanding), Heroes & Villains gives me the least confidence. If the team is working hard behind the scenes, they are keeping a very tight hold on things. They regularly update the website with new notes about progress being made but it’s three or four lines of commentary with nothing of actual substance to show or back up that the game is making any real progress.
The website has concept art from 2013-2015 and the Youtube channel was last updated three years ago with test animations while most of the forum has been abandoned for years. Plan Z is made up of volunteers similar to City of Titans but unlike Missing Worlds Media doesn’t have $700 grand in crowdfunding revenue to work with. Out of everything on this list (again, #5 notwithstanding) it is literally a hobby project that some folks are working on in their spare time.
If this game does launch or for that matter even release a beta, it will be quite a surprise.
5. Redside – Dead As A Corpse
Redside was an attempt by Brass Lampworks to make a City of Villains successor. Unfortunately the project launched its Kickstarter to the complete disinterest of nearly everyone with a dollar to spare and ultimately pulled in $170 from four backers. The website for developer Brass Lampworks is no longer in operation and it’s clear that the game has been killed in the crib.
“This game is designed in the spirit of NCSoft’s closed MMO “City of Villains” This MMO will work the same premise, but a new direction. We will have a cast of completely different characters on masterfully crafted storylines, updated graphics, cross platform functionality, and possible VR in future updates.”
Maybe it’s because the Kickstarter expressly stated that the money was to “get the ball rolling” and not to create an actual product. Maybe it’s because the creator was not a game developer and had no idea what he was doing, instilling no confidence that pumping money into this void would result in anything except a bunch of backers getting swindled by someone playing on their nostalgia.
In Conclusion
If you want to play City of Heroes, you can absolutely do so right now thanks to the Homecoming server. It is just as jank as you remember and boy howdy is it glorious.
The Devil’s Ruin Exotice Sidearm is finally available in Destiny 2, and the process to get your hands on it is…surprisingly short.
1. A Lost Relic
First step in getting your hands on the Devil’s Ruin is to actually start the quest by completing a run of the Sundial on Mercury and defeating champions. You don’t actually have to defeat a certain number of champions, just finish the Sundial and the quest step will be available in the same window you pick your reward weapon from at the end of the run. Turn in the quest to Saint-14 at the tower and he’ll give you your next assignment.
2. A Tour Through History
For this step you’ll be sent to a crucible map, but don’t worry! You won’t actually be playing a crucible match. Instead your job is to collect weapon fragments in the Twilight Gap. Head over to the Earth Defense Zone and click on the quest popup in the lower left hand corner. You’ll be taken to an instance zone where you will need to hunt out and find robot corpses scattered throughout the level.
You’ll hear some interesting chatter between Saint-14, Osiris, and Shaxx as friends catch up with each other and talk about the old days.
3. Enjoy The Gun!
Is that it? I told you the quest line was short. No padding, no killing a battalion of enemy troops, nothing. Just a quick trip and a fun conversation.
Devil’s Ruin has the Close The Gap trait which lets you hold the fire button down to charge a staggering laser. It also has the pyrogenesis trait that causes a fully charged laser to refill the magazine from reserves. It is a versatile weapon that should be powerful in either PvE or PvP.
What do you get when you combine an MMO environment and an RPG dialogue? A game that is dead as a corpse.
In doing my end-of-decade round of Kickstarter follow up stories, I came across Eminence: Xander’s Tale only to discover that the game has very recently been pronounced dead in the water. Eminence is a rather interesting sounding title; a hardcore trading card game that operates on the Yu Gi Oh! Battle City rules of letting the victor take a card from the loser. It was successfully crowdfunded to the tune of £52,037 from 669 backers and launched on Android/iOS in 2017/2018. Eminence launched without the MMORPG part of the Kickstarter campaign.
Will it get there? No. Google Play shows not-so-great install numbers (100+) and the folks at Aeternia Studios posted just a couple of months ago to announce that development is no longer active on Eminence due to the simple fact that nobody wants to play it and as a result nobody wants to fund it. The Eminence domain has also been gone for an undetermined amount of time after May of 2019.
“The Kickstarter funding we raised was not anywhere near enough to finish the first version of the game. Unfortunately, unexpected events happen, we under estimated how much we needed in terms of resource to deliver the game.
So we raised additional funding from some external investors under a new company. With this new funding we were able to deliver the game for both iOS and Android.
However, the game hasn’t made the revenue we hoped to keep supporting the team. We managed to hold on to one of our devs to help support the game for bug fixes and maintenance out of good will. But eventually he too had to move on.
We haven’t given up on the game. But with no funding and resources it’s difficult to provide any support or maintenance hence the lack of updates to the builds.”
It’s a tale as old as time. Dev funds game, does not anticipate the game going over budget, and the game doesn’t see its way to completion. It happens on a daily basis in both indie development and the AAA gaming sector and is an unfortunate reality of this industry and many others.
I’ve made several comments over the years about how Jagex seems to struggle with conflicting priorities, and nothing really exemplifies that in recent history more than the Yak Track.
For those of you who play RuneScape, the Yak Track ends today (January 5). I liked the idea of the Yak Track in theory; an alternative to the battle pass that was given away for free to those who shelled out additional money for the Premier Pack. It’s pure selfishness, but for people like me who are still grandfathered in at the $5 monthly subscription you kinda have to give us something in the bundle to make that price difference worth it.
The Yak Track was such an exercise in tedium that it made me resent RuneScape. I managed to swallow 25 of the 50 levels and theoretically can’t really “quit” the game because I have 600+ days accumulated in excess membership thanks to various giveaways over the past 15 years. I’ve just spent the last couple of months playing the Twisted League in Old School RuneScape.
Contextually the Yak Track couldn’t come out at a more ridiculous and dare I say stupidly contradictory time in RuneScape history. It represents a mind-numbing tedium that Jagex has gone back and forth on in terms of stamping out in the game.
The Yak Track is a battle pass that presents players with 50 tiers of rewards with each tier having its own option of one of two tasks. Some of the tiers are joke tasks, like collect 28 cabbages or talk to an NPC, something you can do it 5 minutes. The majority of the tasks however are ridiculously tedious. Fletch thousands of bows, make thousands of potions, invest endless hours into slayer, etc. It isn’t fun and it’s a stark reminder of one of Jagex’s worst business practices that the company has admitted it is trying to push away from.
Jagex, like Ubisoft, has a habit of creating a problem and then selling players the solution. Don’t want to slog through 30+ tiers of godawful grind for this time-limited event and cosmetics you’ll never be able to obtain again? Well Jagex will sell you bonds to skip the content that they artificially inflated the tedium for in order to sell you bonds to skip the grind that they artificially inflated to make you pay real cash to skip. Nothing stokes resentment quite like the company that has had numerous apology videos over the past few months about their predatory monetization practices doing exactly what they are apologizing for, while they are apologizing.
It also dampens the fact that two weeks after the Yak Track launched, Jagex overhauled the way daily quests in RuneScape work because they saw players getting indignant about the tedium of taking excessive time away every day for dailies that didn’t really reward them. Yep, Jagex will overhaul a system so you don’t need to talk to an NPC to turn in a daily task while at the same time instituting another system that forces you to mine three thousand coal for 1/50th of a reward tier.
I’d like to believe Jagex’s thousandth apology and promise to do better when it comes to predatory microtransactions, but they could at least wipe the crumbs off of their face before promising that they’ll stop stealing from the cookie jar.
Inferna is a quaint little murder box that is kinda fun to run around in for a bit and kill mobs. If it wasn’t free to play, I’d suggest staying away from it.
As part of MMO Fallout’s year end checkup on various early access games, I decided to check out Inferna which launched into early access on December 20 of this year. Inferna is what AAA developers would probably refer to as “minimum viable product,” in that the developers over at the properly named INFERNA LIMITED have created some base systems and tossed the player into a map with gratuitously sprinkled in mobs of varying size, shape, and level.
Otherwise there isn’t a whole lot going on in Inferna at the moment, which is to be expected from a game that literally just launched into early access a week ago. There are some basic equipment enhancement systems in effect, mobs occasionally drop gear that can be sold to other players or to NPC shops. There is the option to create a personal shop like you tend to see in Korean MMOs and plop it down in town to sell items while you are off and about obtaining more goods.
Honestly there’s not a whole lot to talk about with Inferna. On a positive note the developer has clearly been hard at work pushing out patches, and in my short experience the game seems to have a vibrant and active trading community. If you’re expecting a game that is feature complete, you’ve immediately made a mistake by downloading an early access title. If you want a free game to tinker around in for a bit, give it a download.
As for me, I’ll be making a note on my big paper calendar to check in on Inferna in a year.
The tale of Hellion is one that should leave you with a fair amount of hesitance to purchase any future product from Zero Gravity (assuming the company doesn’t buckle and cease to exist within the next six months before putting out its next title). Hellion has lots of bugs, Zero Gravity has no intent on fixing those bugs. Rather than push the game through early access and release a finished product, Zero Gravity has decided to abandon the title and cease patching it, ripping off the early access tag and just pushing it out as-is.
Granted, Zero Gravity isn’t done making money off of the game, as they reduced the price to $14.99 and are still selling it. As if to add the fraudulent cherry on the ice cream sundae, Zero Gravity is still advertising Hellion as though the game is still in development. There are features listed on the store page as “work in progress” despite there no longer being any work or progress being put into the title. How’s that for fraud? The company’s own lead production artist and investor even publicly blamed the decision on individuals at Zero Gravity choosing to cut and run to use the funds for their own projects.
The plus side of all of this is that Hellion’s reviews are in the toilet, currently sitting at a 29% mostly negative rating with comments dedicated to warning potential buyers that the game is nowhere near finished and has been abandoned. Should Zero Gravity release a new game, it will no doubt be held to increased scrutiny and the tale of Hellion’s abandonment will surely be reinforced at every possible moment.
For all this and more, check out SidAlpha’s video on the topic.
Fraudster:
2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;
It’s that time again. Two years have passed since I posted the first Crowdfunding Fraudsters dedicated to Jeremy Soule and The Northerners and the fact that we are coming back for round three should tell you everything you need to know about how much progress has gotten done in the last two years. December 2019 now marks over six years of delays since The Northerner was originally supposed to be launched, that being September 2013, and keeping on brand with Soule’s incompetence as a businessman, the latest launch date promise has come and gone without as much as a peep from the man himself. In fact, it’s gone without a peep from the Kickstarter community.
I can’t imagine there is anyone left with faith in Soule’s ability to deliver a product.
1. Jeremy Soule Is A Talented Fraudster
I said it before and I will say it again, Jeremy Soule isn’t some two-bit hack fraud who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he wasn’t capable of publishing. No siree, he’s a two-bit hack fraud of a businessman who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he was completely capable of publishing yet has not. Just ask about his DirectSong business. One that more than six years after the intended release date has still not been released! Remember back in the good old days when Jeremy Soule promised that the only risk that might delay the project was scheduling during the summer months?
“I will be working with the same team that has provided reliable and excellent support throughout my career. Recordings aren’t easy to make, but if planning is done within a reasonable time frame, the process can go smoothly. As we have delved into the initial planning stages of the recording session, scheduling for the summer months affords us enough planning time for a recording of this nature.” -Jeremy
Summer scheduling. Oh and we later learned that the instruments Jeremy Soule had planned to use in creating The Northerner Symphony hadn’t been invented yet and wouldn’t be for some years after, but why would you want to put that as a risk on the Kickstarter page? Telling people you are technologically incapable of delivering the thing you are asking for funding for might put them off of giving you a large sum of cash money with virtually no legal strings attached.
I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Soule had released a new single this month; Friðr. It’s from the album The Moon & The Night Sky. I’m not sure if the person who uploaded it to Youtube has permission to do so, but you should listen to it now just in case since Jeremy Soule thinks that music piracy is just as bad as the holocaust.
More on that later. Actually, more on that now.
2. This Article Profited Jeremy Soule By $10
Jeremy Soule made $10 from me writing this article, and much like backing The Northerner it was mostly a complete waste of money. I didn’t back The Northerner.
Last time I wrote about Jeremy Soule I noted that he had launched a Patreon, which December 2018 me was smart enough to know wouldn’t provide anything useful within the “weekly Q&A” sessions that Soule publishes once every whenever-he-feels-like-it. This time around I wasn’t that smart, and I ended up giving $10 to Soule’s Patreon so I could get access to all of his posts in the hopes of finding something relevant. I didn’t. Only a lot of curated Q&A’s asking Jeremy why his farts don’t stink.
Back in January, Jeremy posted his grand announcement that he would be releasing two new albums in 2019: On the Spring Equinox we would see The Northerner: The Moon and the Night Sky.” On the winter solstice we would finally get our hands on The Northerner. Pretty freaking grand, huh? Two albums in one year! Well I see your two albums in one year and raise you…no albums in one year.
Yea, The Moon & The Night Sky was more like The Pie In The Sky, and didn’t release. Who could have seen that coming, am I right? Jeremy Soule posted on his Facebook page:
“I’m currently putting the finishing touches on this album. It’s taken a bit longer than expected, but I want it to be right, and it’s close. While I had hoped to have had it to you sooner, I’m proud to say that this music is amongst my best work. This is the official album cover and I’m also excited to say that I have brought the Old Norse language to life in an operatic setting.”
And as we all know, when Jeremy Soule says he’s just about done with a project, he’s just about done with a project. Except for every time. To the best of my research (Soule’s Patreon, Kickstarter updates, social media), I was only able to find the single posted above as the only release related to Soule’s new side-album, in addition to Kickstarter posts from 4-5 months ago lamenting that this new album will also never be released. Screw the Spring Equinox, Friðr got released on December 5.
Enjoy the $10 Soule, I hope it goes to a good cause like a big paper calendar. Because you’re terrible at release dates.
3. The Max Steiner Agency Pulls Out
In preparation for writing this article, I sent an email to the Max Steiner Agency under the guise of someone thinking Soule would be releasing his album on the twenty first as announced, and inquiring about any planned press releases. The response I got was astounding: Max Steiner is not managing The Northerner and has no information about the status of the album. They are still working with Soule generally, just not on this album.
Crazy huh? Because I’ll be honest with my readers. I don’t have the greatest memory of stuff I wrote two years ago, but I distinctly remembered The Max Steiner Agency being a big part of the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters piece. So I looked back and found that yes indeed, they were a big part. Specifically Gloria Soto who made a completely unprofessional jerk of herself in an email to Kotaku.
“It still rings true. All the Backer did was re-post what Jeremy has said in the past. Which is still true. What part do you want to understand? Are you a Composer that has ever tried to write a symphony?”
The context of this piece should be noted for clarity. Soto here is attacking a Kotaku writer after her agency incompetently mistook a fan-written apology for an official statement by Jeremy Soule and posted it as an official update to the Kickstarter campaign. Like any professional adult, Soto attacks the question and condescends to the author’s intelligence, on the grounds that Kotaku writer never wrote a symphony, so shut your stupid fudging mouth on our PR snafu. Oh and in case you’re wondering, nobody has clarified the post’s authenticity to this date directly to backers. Soto at the time went on to separate the “true fans” from the “trolls” asking for refunds, noting that she was working with Kickstarter to get them removed as they had already been refunded.
Narrator: They were not removed, and many of them allege they were not refunded.
“What I do know – is that we are receiving a lot of support from the true fans. Currently- The ones making noise are backers that I have refunded – have become trolls – which I am currently working with Kickstarter to get them removed from posting on our page.”
The Northerner has so many true fans that as of this writing (noon on December 22), not a single person has bothered to comment on The Northerner not meeting its latest deadline. Or at all in the past two weeks. Boy for a company that isn’t managing The Northerner, the Max Steiner Agency put its name on the Kickstarter campaign, was handling refund requests for angry backers, and was actively attempting to work with Kickstarter to shut down dissent over the minor issue of the campaign being years late.
Now I’m not saying that Max Steiner is lying to me. After all two years have passed since these comments, it is completely reasonable (and likely) that the agency told Jeremy Soule it would no longer be managing his project. I can’t imagine having their name attached to The Northerner has been anything but negative, cue Gloria Soto making the company look even worse. It would also explain why the sparse updates to the Kickstarter campaign began being signed by “The Northerner Team” as of January this year, whereas before they were being signed by Jeremy Soule himself.
4. It’s Gone, It’s All Gone
The more astute MMO Fallout viewers might notice that this article is lacking in the citation department. That is 100% 2017 Connor’s fault, as he did not archive anything.
Here’s the problem: A lot of our statements from Jeremy Soule came from his Facebook page. Back in August, Jeremy Soule was accused of sexual misconduct. That’s not the focal point of this piece. Soule was not arrested, nor have charges been filed, but all of Jeremy’s social media accounts have been nuked from orbit in the interim. These quotes we got back in the first Fraudsters article are gone, you can go back and check the links to see that they are mostly all dead. This is my fault. We generally archive comments in case of exactly this type of scenario. It wasn’t done.
I’d fire myself, but I’m good friends with the boss and I’d just be back in the office tomorrow like nothing happened.
I decided to do some digging to check out the other missing links in this whole racket, and unsurprisingly nothing else is functioning. The Northerner Facebook Fan Page URL has been hijacked and currently redirects to a blog by someone named Carol Causey who hasn’t updated her Weebly page since 2016 and appears to be a spam page for another service that is equally no longer operational. The Jeremy Soule Facebook Fan page link redirects to a parked domain that was apparently once used to spam human growth hormone products. Fun times.
I looked up Jeremy Soule’s symphony website: http://northernersymphony.com/, since Soule’s Kickstarter has people sending emails to this domain to change their address in case they moved in the last six years. I sent an email myself to this address and have not received a response which judging by the Kickstarter comments is not out of the ordinary. The domain itself however is nonfunctional and a quick look at the Wayback Machine shows that it never was, displaying a “Server Engine Upgrade In Progress…” since May 2017.
And since we’re checking out URLs, it’s probably germaine to point out that Jeremy Soule’s DirectSong service no longer appears to be operational. You can read up on the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters about the DirectSong fraud racket.
5. In Conclusion…Again
One positive side of this piece is that with $10 I gained access to uncompressed copies of Jeremy Soule’s music, and through the magic of internet I now have those copies sitting on my computer forever. What isn’t forever is my Patreon membership which was promptly cancelled. Enjoy the $10, Jeremy. I hope it goes toward something productive like a sourdough bread starter since we all know it’s not going toward printing Kickstarter rewards.
Otherwise I get the idea that I’m the only one paying attention or even caring about The Northerner at this point, and I didn’t even back the thing. As a fan of Jeremy Soule’s work, I came into writing this Crowdfunding Fraudsters article with the slim hope that December 21 would come around and my skepticism would be proven to be totally unfounded, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
If there are any Northerner fans in the audience who are still holding out hope for a release, I’d like to hear from you. Mostly just to know you exist.
MMO Fallout 