Category: Editorials

PSA: [RuneScape] For People Stuck In the Desperate Times Quest


I wanted to post this PSA for those of you who, like me, waited until this week’s update to finish the RuneScape quest Desperate Times. At one point in the quest you’ll get to the area from the quest Missing, Presumed Death, and get stuck. Why? Well you’ll get to the area above and not know where to go. The door is closed and won’t even respond to your interactions, there aren’t any other paths forward, and you’re basically screwed.

Or are you?

Long story short, the door shouldn’t be there. The door isn’t there, but for some reason the latest update has brought back entities that should be invisible to the player. The good news is that Jagex is aware of the bug and working on a fix. The better news is that you don’t have to wait until they are removed. Grit your teeth folks, because the method to get around this bug until Jagex actually fixes it is to…click past the door.

Yep, just click past it as if it wasn’t there, because it isn’t really. Your player character will just walk right through. There are a few doors on the way and a couple elements to just ignore. This only seems to be affecting people on the NXT client, so alternately you can boot up the Java client and they shouldn’t even be present.

Steam Powered: Valve Negligence Lets Developers Impersonate Them


Meet Wizhood, a game developed and published by Valve. Well not developed or published by Valve. Or maybe it is? The Steam store says it is.

On the latest edition of “Valve Is A Negligent Publisher,” it looks like the folks at Rakarnov Studios noticed that Valve will allow anyone who pays $100 on Steam to impersonate anyone else, including Valve themselves. The game Wizhood was noticed by intrepid Steam watchdogs to have changed its name, unabeited, to Valve itself. Maybe for nefarious reasons, maybe to see if it would actually work, maybe for poops and giggles. Either way, the name change was allowed with absolutely no oversight or confirmation required from Valve.

Even better, looking up Valve’s catalog of games now includes Wizhood as a title right under Half Life 2: Deathmatch and above Half Life 2: Episode 2. Unfortunately for Wizhood, it does not automatically include the game in the Valve Complete Pack.

Looking at the Steam database it appears that this change was made back on June 26 and may have been a tactic to increase visibility with the Steam summer sale having started just a day prior. Incidentally you can pick up Wizhood for 49 cents, a 75% saving over the standard $2. If you have any inclination of picking this game up, we suggest you do so now before the sleeping giant that is Valve wakes up.

Demonstrable: Small Saga Public Demo


Small Saga is utterly adorable. I found this title while browsing through the latest Kickstarter games and after playing through the demo I really want to talk about it. The good news is that Small Saga has already reached its goal. I won’t be contributing to the campaign because I was burned out on those years ago, but it is definitely going on my watch list for the estimated release in July 2021.

Currently being created by Jeremy Noghani, Small Saga is an RPG that plays like Final Fantasy with an isometric overworld that is reminiscent of the likes of FF Tactics or Tactics Ogre. The main narrative exists underneath London in the underground world of Rodentia. You play as mouse brothers Verm and Lance, who hear about a place called heaven where there is more food than anyone can imagine. Heaven is also inhabited by the gods, but to get there Verm and Lance will have to get past a sewer’s worth of lawless rats and one mean vole.

The demo is short and absolutely fantastic, and not just because it features tiny animals wearing people clothes and doing people things. Combat is turn based and takes a hint of inspiration from games similar to Bravely Default where characters draw from an energy pool that slowly increases each turn. You can unleash your best attacks but then have to wait in order to build up the energy, or you can go ahead with your basic attacks and do less damage.

I recommend you check out the short demo over at Itch.io. You don’t even have to download it.

Beta Impressions: MapleStory Rolls Out the Pathfinder


I played a bit of MapleStory this week.

It probably comes as little surprise to my readers that I still have an active MapleStory account, and even less so that Nexon invited me over to check out the upcoming Pathfinder class release for the game.

The Pathfinder is sort of an oddity as a character class, as the story revolving around this character is that she has been blighted with an ancient curse. What this translates to is that your character starts out with reduced stats. Thankfully it doesn’t stick with the player very long, even by MapleStory standards, and by skill level four the curse has been weakened out and removed from your system.

If you haven’t quite figured it out, the Pathfinder class is the latest hero added into a game with a heck of a lot of classes. I enjoyed the time that I had to play with the Pathfinder not just because I tend to play the archer class more in MMOs but because the character is just sort of an all-around bad ass. The Pathfinder is a bow-wielding class, of course, but the focus appears to be more geared toward crowd control. Many of the attacks and especially those that you receive toward the start of the game are geared toward just inflicting mass damage against anything stupid enough to come too close.

I should also note about the curse dampening that the class doesn’t start out gimped by any measure. Your character is effectively slightly less powerful in an area of the game that comprises of the tutorial locations. I assume there is some effect of some stats starting out with a 20% debuff, but considering how low your stats will already be starting out, the Pathfinder isn’t exactly going to be the Dark Souls of MapleStory classes. I’m sorry for having written that, but I had to get the joke in.

As you level up even further, the curse becomes more of a blessing as you not only overcome the stat debuffs but then utilize that ancient curse on your foes in the form of an offensive debuff attack. You also gain the ability to call forth a shadow raven with associated skills later on to improve that mechanic. The shadow raven hangs around for a while and attacks your enemies.

During my time with the Pathfinder, I also checked out the Secret Forest of Elodin theme dungeon which was as adorable as I have come to expect from MapleStory content. I won’t spoil the story for you, but it has to do with nightmares, hearing scary voices in the woods, and making sure that the good and decent folks are safe and sound. This mission, to the best of my knowledge, was already made available in the live game on June 12 (my birthday of course) and is available to all players at least level 30.

I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to play through the Adventure Island, but the even is running in the live game until August 27 and is looking to offer a ton of very cool rewards. The gist of the event should be familiar to MMO players. Players at level 61 can start earning adventure points to convert into adventure coins by killing monsters within 20 levels of their character. You can also make use of AFK items to obtain experience and coins. As the event goes on, higher ranks are being rolled out with better items, better tasks, and better passive stat boosts.

I can’t wait for the Pathfinder to hit the live server, which it will on June 26. It was a fair amount of fun for the time I had playing on the test server and I think that MapleStory players are going to enjoy it along with the various events ongoing that will make leveling another alt a bit lighter of a load.

Stay tuned to MMO Fallout for more MapleStory talk, or just head over to the official website and take a dive in for yourself. Big thanks to a number of people for bringing MMO Fallout on board to check out the class.

Diaries From Azeroth: We Only Said Goodbye With Words


I died a hundred times.

In the six hours that I have put into my Tauren druid over the past two days, I found myself in the same frame of mind going into WOW Classic as I did with Old School RuneScape many years ago: A lot of enthusiasm and confidence that this iteration will do just fine.

Money is far slower to come by, especially early on in the game. I think my retail characters would laugh at the idea that my level 9 druid takes a fair amount of time to scrap together a few silver to buy fishing training. I was actually overjoyed to fill up my bag on Venture Co mob equipment drops after fighting and dying to their mobs for half an hour only to come back and sell them for a cool three silver. Just had to sell one of my bandages and I had enough for the five silver cooking upgrade.

Another thing I saw plenty of during the opening days of the stress test was some real community interaction between players. Druids would cast buffs on other classes, you’d see people helping out and pulling extra mobs off of players, healing them during combat, and just generally answering questions in chat. There was plenty of trolling in chat, sure, but it was rather lighthearted and not so malicious as you’d see in other titles or maybe even in live itself if anyone talked in there.

As someone who started playing World of Warcraft back near the game’s launch, Classic isn’t so much hardcore as it is slower and more meticulous. Your health and mana pools don’t go as far, and enemies are better matched at your level and above, so you’re far less likely to pull more than one creature at a time and you’ll find yourself running out of mana or energy much faster. Mounts are a bigger achievement because of how expensive they are, the fact that you’ll be waiting until level 40 until you can acquire them, and the relatively lower speed of acquiring currency. Enemies drop quest items at a much lower rate, increasing the time you’ll need to spend farming areas with much lower spawn rates.

Everything designed around World of Warcraft Classic is built to be taken…slower. You buy your skills, you cycle your buffs, you level your weapon skills (remember those?), you read the quest text. Available quests don’t show up on the mini-map, NPCs for completed quests show up as dots and only once your draw near to them, and quest locations don’t show up on the map at all. Combat is slower, spells are slower, many of the abilities that you might know as being instant or nearly instant are not that way at all. Pulling in one equal level mob can be a deadly fight, two is almost guaranteed death. Mobs are far more likely to resist or block your attacks, and when you don’t have much mana to spare it can be deadly.

But as a result, the game feels more impactful. Leveling is a part of the experience, not just an inconvenience to get you to the end-game. Going into a group of level 9 mobs at level 8, then returning at level 9 to see how much better you fare is a treat. You won’t go from struggling to beating them with ease with just a level or two, but the fight gets easier. You have to cast one or two less spells, or spend less time running away from fights, or less time out of combat healing. You might have ranked up a spell or an ability in that time, or in my case started patching up my armor for some better defense.

How my life melds with World of Warcraft Classic will be interesting once the game goes live later this year. After all, the me of today is much different than the me of 2005 who had far less in terms of responsibility and time management structuring. I have no interest in gaining access to the beta or taking part in future stress tests as my time is far too precious to put hours into a character that will be erased within a few weeks. Still, for the six hours I played during the stress test, I felt like I entered a portal back into a simpler time in the MMO sphere where walking around and taking in the scenery was enjoyable and not just an inconvenience.

Diaries From Washington DC: The Division 2 First Ten Levels


The Division 2 is a very Division-esque title, which is going to be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you approach the franchise. If you like your sequels to take the prior title and expand upon it, you’re golden. If you hated everything about The Division down to its core mechanics, you’re not going to find much to love here.

I want to talk about some immediately obvious positives in The Division 2, and particularly that the game is a whole lot less jank than its predecessor. The Division was pretty great when it came to movement and it’s kind of amazing to think back to the trailers when we were mostly all in awe at the simple idea that your character would close a car door automatically while taking cover behind it. That said, movement in the original game was kind of rough in spots and your character felt like he was walking on a treadmill leading to more confined areas being a real pain to get through. Additionally, while enemy AI wasn’t terrible it wasn’t exactly intelligent, and Ubisoft balanced this by making the game into a bullet sponge festival.

Thankfully The Division 2 has mostly fixed all of this.

Enemy AI is going to surprise you quite a bit as you experience what this game has to offer. Evidently the Washington DC wasteland still has plenty of brain food, as raiders will intelligently flank you, use grenades to push you out of hiding, send in suicide melee squads to force you from your cover, and just generally utilize more coordinated tactics than you might anticipate from such a game. It’s almost unfair at times when you get pitted against a dozen or so baddies in an open space and suddenly find yourself knocked out of cover while the sniper forcing your attention made way for the two guys who just appeared behind you. Unlike its predecessor, I have rarely come out of a death concluding that the game was cheating me.

On the other side of this coin the bullet sponge enemies are mostly gone and good riddance to them. I would say that The Division lands mostly on the realistic side of the Tom Clancy media spectrum so the idea of having gang leaders walking around with no noticeable body armor but somehow still needing two full reloads of shotgun shells from close range in order to kill is just ridiculous. The Division 2 still has named enemies, and they are more powerful than their low-tier mook buddies, but they aren’t sponges. They might have armored vests or helmets, and take a couple more shots to put down. There are a few enemies scattered about during missions that are covered in full body SWAT-tier bomb squad armor that take a lot of bullets to kill. They are far less present and can be dealt with easier than their predecessors.

It’s also nice to be able to walk around the various locations without your character bumping into everything like a drunken bumper car operator.

The game itself is freaking gorgeous. Obviously I’m saying this from the stance of someone with a computer good enough to run the game on its highest settings but boy did Ubisoft put a lot into making the DC wasteland look beautiful and create a living world in the process. The city itself tells a story and everywhere you look you can see the remains of failed quarantines, rescue efforts, and people just trying to survive. You come across a regular bounty of random events including public executions, propaganda broadcasts, and more, that can be easy targets for some quick loot. My personal favorite are the supply drops, where you’ll come across three supply crates that you can salvage for gear and resources. The caveat to this is that the various other factions are also out for these and can actually steal them from you. As far as random encounters go, the supply crates offered the most varied fun for me.

Gear, at least in the first ten levels, has been pretty great. The Division has been throwing enough stuff at me via the main missions, side missions, and generally tracking down and looting stuff in the wilderness that I haven’t felt bereft of new toys to play with.

The first ten levels of Division 2 have taken up around five and a half hours of gameplay, and so far I have to say I am enjoying this far more than I did with The Division. I am looking forward to discussing the game more as I continue playing.

[Column] Thankfully Nothing Happens In This Industry


I’m back, nerds!

I’d like to start off by denying a few rumors I’ve seen floating around the internet, specifically that I was expelled out of law school because I sent my cat in to take the final exams for me. This is completely untrue, the cat managed to get fantastically passable grades considering the short study period and that she actually has more training in holistic plumbing. Second, and this is not meant to be a comment on my fellow writers, but I honestly expected that the announcement of MMO Fallout going on vacation would be met with less attention. I was incredibly touched that Massively and other websites decided to add a farewell address but I honestly expected to quietly sneak away into the darkness with naught but a few comments here on the ol’ blog. Again, I find myself humbled and thanked Massively OP by dropping some legal dockets in their lap in my absence.

Thankfully the gods are smiling down upon me in their sick and twisted monkey paw way, because I specifically recall asking for a reason to be able to focus on my final exams and did not include sending my gaming PC to the depths of hell to my list of exemptions. My PC burned down, almost literally since my hardware monitor pinged my CPU at well over 100 degrees Celsius before it blew out and took the rest of the computer with it, leaving behind nothing but the smell of something burning. As such, I have spent the last few weeks without a computer capable of doing much while I waited for my new friends at IBuyPower to build and ship my new gaming rig. I specifically went with a gaming laptop this time around because there is absolutely no way I’m going to spend long periods of time gaming on a laptop. The thing is awesome, and I will be talking about it (not a sponsorship, I paid full price for this laptop).

On the topic of the topic of this piece, the last month has gratefully seen nothing going on in the gaming industry. Nothing at all. I’m sure most of you are much more in tune with what’s been going on than I am, so spending ten hours writing a catch up piece is just going to remind me why I went on vacation in the first place.

I know a few developers whose games I have notoriously dragged down were glad to see me go. Get ready, it’s a new era of MMO Fallout goodness. I have a large supply of Canada Dry ginger ale and I’m ready to rip and tear.

[Column] I Came Back To Call Daybreak A Dead Husk


Hey folks,

You may have heard comments down the grapevine that MMO Fallout is planning on a comeback of sorts, but right now I’d like to pick up the mantle to talk about how Daybreak Game Company is a dead company with a bare bones, barely functioning development team. They just don’t care anymore folks. How do I know they don’t care? Whoever wrote the patch notes couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the spell check and left numerous obvious errors in the final publication.

So what brings me back briefly from my vacation early to talk about a game that I specifically said that I would never talk about again? The launch of Season 4, or the last season that I expect Daybreak will launch for H1Z1. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room to really get you excited for what Daybreak has to offer this season: The company has gone and slashed the price of the season pass by 50% over last season. That’s right, for around the cost of a two cheeseburger value meal (#9) at your local McDonald’s, you can feel disappointed and ripped off.

That’s a joke, folks, McDonald’s value meals are far less disappointing.

And what do you get for your money? Jack-freaking-squat. Season 3 annoyed me into quitting H1Z1 because the challenges were stupid and mostly broken, as was free for all, but ultimately I stuck around to complete the season pass because it didn’t take long and there were a hell of a lot of cosmetics to be unlocked. By comparison, Season 4 offers one outfit split up over the course of the season as well as accompanying AK-47, M17, and crossbow skins to match. Eleven items total. The rest of the pass are coins (2,600 total) and experience boosts. Enough coins to buy one and a half rare skins.

  • Scrub M17 (Level 1)
  • Scrub Jacket (Level 1)
  • Scrub Skirt (Level 18)
  • Scrub Pants (Level 40)
  • Scrub Backpack (Level 55)
  • Scrub Offroader (Level 60)
  • Scrub Shoes (Level 65)
  • Scrub Armor (Level 80)
  • Scrub Crossbow (Level 90)
  • Scrub AK-47 (Level 100)
  • Scrub Watch (Level 100)

Eleven bleeding items total. Stamp missions have been completely removed from the game, as have daily login rewards. You do now have the privilege of occasionally finding locked chests that you can pay a discount in order to unlock (ala Team Fortress 2) and you’re in luck because there are now six rotating arcade modes.

Six rotating arcade modes for a game that can barely get people into its standard modes. I played a few rounds of arcade mode on launch day and found that Daybreak can just about break 40/100 players at peak hours on a week night. The arcade modes are all based around ideas that probably took a good half hour to program into the game, such as headshot damage only, faster run speed, ATVs only, and pistols/explosives only. And this update was delayed by a week! And the season only runs for 36 days this time around for reasons I can’t honestly comprehend.

As far as game updates go, H1Z1 Season 4 is the That 70’s Show Season 8 of video games. Topher Grace is gone and so is Ashton Kutcher. Instead we get Randy, a guy so hated by the audience that he doesn’t even show up on the cover of the season DVD set. At this point, I can only assume that Daybreak is in need of a big success like say DC Universe Online becoming a smash hit on the Switch, and by smash hit I of course mean the game releasing and making a lot of money as opposed to just getting a lot of people to download, notice that the game has major performance problems, and uninstalling before investing anything in the title.

Now it’s time to go back into my hole and read legal documents. Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Giveaway] MU Legend Item Pack


MMO Fallout has partnered up with Webzen to give away item codes for MU Legend in anticipation of the long-awaited Gates of Glory update this month. The event runs until June 4 at midnight, however the codes can be redeemed until June 11 at midnight (UTC). These coupons are working right now and can be redeemed right away. Coupon codes can only be used once per account, so we ask that you please not deprive others by trying to collect multiples.

(Editor’s note: We’d also like to remind viewers that MMO Fallout is hosted on a stale ham sandwich and as key giveaways require us to turn off the caching program, the website may experience intermittent difficulties. We thank you for your patience, and suggest that you slam that refresh button at a reasonable rate.)

The following items are included in each code:

  • Guardian of Balance (Blue) Chest (7 Days) x1
  • Wings of Balance (Blue) (7 Days) x1
  • 7-Day Platinum Service Ticket x1
  • Time Traveling Pet Box x1
  • Talisman Lucky Box x3
  • Growth Potion x3

How to redeem your code:

  1. Go to http://www.webzen.com/Coupon.
  2. Log in with your account.
  3. Select your server and character and enter the coupon code (without hyphens).
  4. Click “redeem coupon code”.

If you are new to WEBZEN, please see the following:

  1. Create a webzen.com account.
  2. Go to http://www.webzen.com/ to download your game client and install it.
  3. Choose a server.
  4. Create a new character.

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[Rant] Another Day, PUBG Tries To Claim Ownership of “Chicken Dinner”


It must be a day ending with Y, because PUBG Corp is once again trying to fraudulently claim ownership to something it definitely didn’t create.

If PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has anything to tell us here at MMO Fallout about Brendan Greene, it’s a tale of a man deluded by his own creation. While nobody would argue the success of PUBG and that the game popularized the Battle Royale genre and made way for the titles that follow, it’s hard to get past the vast delusion of PUBG Corp. and its dreams of owning just about everything related to video games.

In its grandiose claims, PUBG Corp made bold-faced lies to the Korean courts and attempted to present a history that they were the first game to use a frying pan in a comedic fashion in a shooter (they weren’t). They go on in the lawsuit to claim ownership of everything from health bars to grenades, two story tall buildings, real-world weapons, and more. We’ve seen various thinly veiled claims from Greene and PUBG Corp. that would imply a belief that they deserve royalty payments from any game in the Battle Royale genre, as well as consultation from developers who might dare to create a title that PUBG Corp didn’t. All this despite PUBG Corp apparently having no problem plagiarizing from other sources.

Of course it should also be noted that of the parties present, only Bluehole has seen employees be criminally convicted and sentenced to prison for stealing from other developers.

But now PUBG is getting in a fight with the Chinese Intellectual Property Administration and once again it is over claims to something they didn’t create. PUBG Corp. is suing over the phrase “winner winner chicken dinner” which they are attempting to trademark. The trademark was rejected as it isn’t a formal business trademark, and now PUBG is taking the government to court. The phrase has been in existence since before 100% of the employees at PUBG Corp. have been alive, but that isn’t going to stop their lawyers from frivolously claiming ownership of what very clearly isn’t theirs.

I will follow up as soon as PUBG Corp. attempts to claim copyright ownership of the concept of people bleeding from gunshot wounds.

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.