Category: Editorials

Steam Cleaned: Cyber Watch Dev Manipulates Review Scores To Counter Mine


Update 1/17/20: Cyber Watch is still up to its shadiness. Another positive review from a user who created their account on January 15 expressly to play Cyber Watch and nothing else and leave a positive review within 24 hours of creating their account.

In addition, our friend kaushikarathi7 has changed their name and moved from India to Germany.

Original Story:

Cyber Watch’s developer is dumb, they are really dumb, for real. And they just made a fatal mistake.

Cyber Watch is a low quality Unreal shooter that I chatted about just a day or so ago, and I went back on the Steam page today because I wanted to see if anyone else got duped into buying the game and left a review. What I found was even better, three positive reviews two of which contain snarky references to my commentary on the game. Even better, they all come from relatively new accounts with one product. Let’s dive in.

The first review is by a user named bhadana9474, a new account that owns one game and hails from Uttar Pradesh, India which also happens to house Cyber Watch’s developer. Keshav Bhadana, where have I heard that name before? Oh right, he’s listed as a developer for Cyber Watch. I like how he references the developer’s inexperience as “from what I can tell,” as though he only has second hand experience and isn’t actively working on the title.

Now let’s look at review #2:

Another account that only owns one game from Uttar Pradesh, India. What are the odds! Ashish Chaudhary…where have I heard that name before? Okay you know where this is going, Ashish is also a credited developer on Cyber Watch.

Oh my lord, a third account that only owns one game and hails from Uttar Pradesh, India. WHAT ARE THE ODDS? 100% evidently. Kaushika Rathi, where have I heard that name before? Actually this is one is a trick since there is no Kaushika Rathi listed in the developer section. There is however a Kartikay Rathi. Related to the developer? Boy it would be a hell of a coincidence if someone named Rathi from the same area of India just happened to set up a Steam account, only buy Cyber Watch, and leave a positive review within the same time span as the actual developers and after playing ten minutes.

I was born on a day and that day wasn’t yesterday.

Review manipulation is of course grounds for immediate termination, and the attempt to manipulate Cyber Watch’s review score is just as poorly thought out as the game itself. All images referenced above have been archived in order to keep the data sealed fresh for your enjoyment.

Source: Archive, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7

Demonstrably: Citywars Savage Is A Cute Little Demo


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.

Early Access Fraudsters: Cyber Watch Is Cyber Shovelware


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.

Diaries From King’s Row: Space Comabat Pilot Issue


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.

Drink your Ovaltine, and buy war bonds!

Whatever Happened To: Those City of Heroes Successors


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.

Destiny 2: Devil’s Ruin Exotic Sidearm Available


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.

Kickstarter Ketchup: Eminence: Xander’s Tale Dead Of No Revenue


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.

Diaries From Gielinor: The Yak Track Made Me Hate RuneScape


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.

Early Access: Inferna Is A Quaint Little Grinder


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.

Early Access Fraudsters: Hellion Is Cancelled, Yet Still For Sale


Hellion needs to be forcibly removed from Steam.

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.