Category: Editorials

Jeremy Soule More Than Five Years Late On Album, Starts Patreon Asking For More Money


Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

When it comes to fraudsters showcased here on MMO Fallout, Jeremy Soule may be the worst. The composer of famous soundtracks for numerous games including Skyrim, Guild Wars, and Baldur’s Gate, Jeremy Soule’s talent in composing music haven’t exactly translated into successful businesses.

In 2005, Soule founded the company DirectSong with the purpose of selling albums from his various creations. At best, the service was a wholly incompetent mess that delayed orders by months into years on end and couldn’t figure out digital distribution of simple MP3 files. At worse, it was a running scam and never had any intention of providing the products that Soule was selling at a premium cost. I brought this up in my initial Crowdfunding Fraudsters piece, but check out reviews of the service and you’ll see people who waited 3+ years for their soundtracks to be delivered, and others who had to wait upwards of a year for a response from DirectSong’s customer service about refunds.

The Northerner: Soule Symphony #1 was crowdfunded on Kickstarter back in 2013 with an estimated shipping date of September 2013. Five years later, it has still not released and all signs point towards the songs not even being fully written. But Jeremy needs money, so he’s started a Patreon account in order to solicit additional funding for his works. For $5 per month you’ll gain access to old and new music from Soule and for $10 per month you’ll have the rare opportunity where Soule will actually talk to you, about music product and business techniques. $10 for advice on business, you really get what you pay for.

Meanwhile if you check over at Kickstarter, you’ll see hundreds of comments from people discussing their horrible customer experience of dealing with Soule and the Max Steiner Agency, with refund requests taking close to a year, others not being responded to at all, emails bouncing from the company’s refund address, and more. Soule is more than five years late putting out an album that should have been out in September 2013, and he doesn’t seem to be anywhere near completion.

The Northerner Diaries, a sketch album released by Soule in lieu of the album that backers paid for, is available to listen to for free on Youtube.

Indiegogo: Gamers Raise $130,000 For Politics-Free Gaming Website


Are gamers sick of politics in gaming? If you look at the success of a recent Indiegogo campaign, the answer looks like a pretty confident yes. Exclusively Games is an upcoming website that promises to be “[a] place for fans of gaming who are sick of politics forcing [its] way inside. All games, no politics.” The campaign started with the goal of raising $5,000 and if you haven’t seen the photo above, has accrued well over two thousand times that amount.

Started by Youtuber Jeremy Hambly, host of the channel The Quartering, the goal of Exclusively Games will be to offer a website where gamers can talk about games with no political strings attached. Hambly does not plan to run ads on the website and will support Exclusively Games solely through merch, patrons, and fundraising drives.

“My only goal is to create a place for fans of escapism. This website will provide a forum, videos and articles covering topics related to just about everything gaming with just one rule, NO POLITICS! We’ll cover video games, coin-op, retro, card games, tabletop games & everything in between.”

The campaign ends approximately 30 minutes from when this article is published.

Source: Indiegogo

(Disclaimer: I contributed a small amount ($30) to this Indiegogo campaign)

[NM] How Counter Strike: GO Keeps Its Battle Royale Poppin’ Fresh


Counter Strike: Global Offensive recently went free to play, adding in its own Battle Royale mode in the form of The Danger Zone. Danger Zone is a bit different from your normal battle royale jazz, chiefly being that it’s a faster game with up to 16 participants in each fight on a smaller map (18 in teams). The mode initially leaked more than two and a half years ago when files referring to a survival game mode were discovered in the base game.

That said, I wanted to discuss some of the features that separate CS: GO from the crowd.

1. The PDA

The PDA is your best friend in Danger Zone, it’s an upgradeable device that tells you where you are, where you should probably be going, and generally where other players are located. The map is divided into hexagonal slices which at the start of each round serve as locations you’ll pick a spot to land in. You can order weapons with money found throughout the map and have it delivered to you by drone. Fun tip: You can drop your PDA on the ground and the drone will drop whatever you purchased on top of it rather than you. If you think someone might follow your drone, you can set up an ambush.

Which brings me to upgrades: You can buy upgrades that allow you to track other player’s drones, as well as an upgrade to see which zones are about to become unsafe as well as an upgrade that makes enemy positions more specific. These upgrades can rarely be found in the wild.

2. Buying Weapons

Danger Zone just wouldn’t be a proper Counter Strike mode without the ability to buy equipment and thankfully Valve haven’t overlooked that feature. You can buy some pretty rudimentary weapons from the shop with your hard-stored dollars, including weapons, armor, ammo, grenades, and upgrades for your PDA. Money is found strewn about the level and if you manage to kill someone you get to watch as their body explodes into a pile of cash.

Weapons and equipment can be found throughout the level, however guns tend to be far less available and with very low ammunition sources than finding cash and hunkering down and ordering through express Amazon Prime delivery. You can also choose to be even more of a jerk and shoot down someone else’s drone to grab whatever they are delivering, or just keep your eye on the sky and follow them to their destination, pop the guy in the head once they come out to claim the delivery.

3. The Explosives

One item you’re bound to come across while playing Danger Zone are grenades, and plenty of them. Other battle royale games have grenades as well, but those who play Counter Strike will be familiar with how grenades in this game can save your life when properly used in a pinch. Among the items available to you is the distraction grenade, an explosive that simulates gunfire wherever it is tossed. The molotov cocktail is great for creating a buffer between you and someone else, or for flooding a room if you know someone is hiding inside of it.

But here’s where CS: Go gets even fancier. While PUBG and its many clones might also have grenades, molotov cocktails, and smoke grenades, CS: GO has breaching charges, remote activated bombs that can be used to cover your ass or more likely to catch someone by surprise as they walk into a room.

4. HVT and Hostages

High Value Targets, or HVTs, are a great addition to The Danger Zone. The gist of the feature is that a random player becomes your target and if you manage to kill them the game will give you an additional $500. One benefit of this system is that you are constantly aware of where that person is on the map, letting you set up an ambush or avoid them if you aren’t properly armed up yet.

Hostages meanwhile are a holdover from the standard Counter Strike game types, and don’t really need any explanation as to why they’re there or who is holding them hostage. Picking up a hostage will slow your movements and obscure part of your screen, but if you manage to safely get them over to one of two extraction points on either side of the map, you’ll net a cool $500. Given the length of time this will take compared to the relatively short length of each round, you’re going to have to dedicate most of your time to this activity.

5. In Conclusion

Given how overloaded the battle royale scene is becoming with cheap knockoffs, it’s good to see not just Valve putting out a big update but also leaving an interesting spin on the genre that makes The Danger Zone worth playing.

Bad Press: The Curious Case Of Anthem And Stream Bans


For today’s bad press, I’m going to single out a certain Youtuber who goes by The Quartering even though he isn’t the only offender here.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to Youtube drama news over the past couple of days, an incident occurred last week after a user began streaming alpha footage of Anthem, the upcoming game by Electronic Arts. Anthem is still under a nondisclosure agreement, meaning anyone playing it is not allowed to talk about it or show it to the general public. These NDAs are very common in the gaming industry both for official testers and members of the press. I am personally under at least one NDA at any given time, usually in regards to timed press releases.

In this specific case, a number of Twitch users clipped a stream in which the user is booted from Anthem only to find that not only has EA revoked his copy of Anthem, but that his entire library is just gone. More interesting, it didn’t seem that the user’s account was banned, but just that his library was emptied by EA.

Cue the outrage, dial up the EA hate squad, and tell my wife I won’t be coming home for dinner. An unknown user has posted video of an unverified story with unfounded accusations and generally no real evidence to back up the claim. When has anyone ever lied on the internet? Why wouldn’t it make sense for EA to just wipe an account with no warning or notification, instead of simply banning the player? Did anyone receive confirmation that the guy even owned any games on the account? Did anyone follow up with the streamer? Did anyone follow up with Electronic Arts? Did anyone do any critical thinking or investigation whatsoever?

But the pesky concept of facts and evidence didn’t stop Youtube channels like The Quartering and the internet’s dramasphere from jumping on the drama with an overblown and arguably reckless disregard for the truth, with the headline “EA STEALS Players Entire Collection Over Anthem Alpha Stream!” What games did the user lose? I’m sure Jeremy can’t tell you and hasn’t performed any actual research outside of reading an article he found online. He even reads in the video that it is possible that Anthem was the sole item in the user’s library but continues regardless with the baseless accusation that EA STOLE from him.

I’m singling out The Quartering mostly because of Jeremy’s consistent advertisement of an Indiegogo campaign for Exclusively Games, a service that he is launching in order to get the politics out of games and focus on the games journalism. The campaign claims to be tired of “the same BS Hot Takes from our existing options in terms of video game news,” and yet here’s Jeremy. Making BS Hot Takes, putting out conclusive headlines with no real evidence. Imagine if he had, say, checked the user’s stream and was able to find a clip where it showed prior to entering the game that there were no games in the user’s account?

None of this changes the fact that EA would be within their rights to ban the user’s account for violating the nondisclosure agreement, and that an account ban would be the least of the person’s worries depending on the terms of the contract. But hey, everyone hates EA right now. Why bother putting in the basic amount of research or verifying the facts when few people are going to come to their defense?

Is this the kind of integrity that $68 grand buys?

[NM] PSA: How To (Possibly) Fix Battlefield V’s Tides of War Progression


This week Battlefield V released the Tides of War, the first chapter in what will be a seasonal event similar to season passes in other titles but without the extra fee. Week 1 runs from December 5 to December 12 and rewards a medium machine gun for completion, the VGO. Since this is a Battlefield game, you may have noticed that this feature has launched in a rather buggy state. Many players are noting that various challenges are simply not functioning, specifically the final task of getting one kill with a stationary vehicle.

MMO Fallout has discovered a possible workaround that should fix this for many (your mileage may vary) of you. It looks like most of the progress-stopping bugs can be fixed by specifically playing on the map Arras. I was able to test other maps and couldn’t get any kills to register the task, but one kill with the stationary machine gun on Arras and the task was complete.

Again, your mileage may vary. In many cases it appears that the other tasks down the line are simply not registering until they miraculously start for no rhyme or reason.

[NM] Battlefield V Hit By Disappointment Bug, 50% Off One Week After Launch


How much does Electronic Arts value $30? One week of play time.

Hopefully those of you out in the netosphere didn’t put too much investment into your $60 Battlefield V purchase. In addition to having to wait over a week compared to the Origin Premier subscribers to get into the game, early adopters will need to come to peace with the knowledge that other people are getting a much better deal just seven days later. Target must be seeing the effects of EA’s “don’t like it, don’t buy it” campaign, because they are already discounting Battlefield V on Xbox and Playstation down to $30 just one week after the official launch date. Best Buy meanwhile has dropped its price down to $39.99 with Wal Mart undercutting them by 11 cents at $39.88. Incidentally the only major US store showing enough faith to keep the game at full price is Gamestop.

Is Battlefield V floundering? Sources say…possibly. Eurogamer posted a story this week that Battlefield V physical sales are down more than half over Battlefield 1. It seems unlikely that Target would be effectively putting the game on clearance price a week after launch if sales were as good as they normally are for Battlefield titles.

[NM] Bad Press: Don’t Read Too Much Into Konami’s Trademark Renewals


Konami this week silently renewed its trademarks for Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid in Europe and the press is already speculating on what this could mean: A Playstation Classic lineup? Remakes? Remasters? A surprise announcement at the game awards? Don’t hold your breath.

This story comes up whenever a developer is found to renew trademarks in some territory and while the speculation will certainly bring in views and thus ad revenue, the answer is rarely newsworthy. Right now the only upcoming Metal Gear related release that the public is aware of is Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation Classic. Apart from that, all is silent over at the smouldering remains of Kojima Productions.

That said, the fact that Konami is renewing the Metal Gear trademarks is nothing to get prematurely excited about. Outside of defunct developers, this process is done essentially on an automated basis or by third parties in order to ensure that said trademarks don’t lapse. Nintendo still owns trademarks for games dating back to the arcades and NES games from the 80’s that they have no intention of ever selling or developing sequels for, yet don’t want the trademark to lapse.

Konami may never develop another Metal Gear Solid game again, but they aren’t going to let the trademark expire because that means other parties could use it, and if there’s one thing that game developers hate it’s other people making use of their unwanted property.

[Column] Fallout 76’s Black Friday Sale Is A Warning Against Pre-Orders


Gamers were angry when Square Enix put Shadow of the Tomb Raider on sale for 34% off just a month after launch. They were just as angry when Bethesda knocked 50% off of Wolfenstein II a month after it hit store shelves.

Boy will/should they be livid now.

Fallout 76 launched eight days ago and Bethesda has thanked their loyal fans by giving everyone else a heavily reduced price. The few loyal fans, anyhow, since if the game’s UK sales figures are any indication there aren’t many of them left. 80% down over Fallout 4? Ouch. Not even two weeks after launch, Fallout 76 has been slashed a mean 33% off down to $40.

And critics aren’t going easy on the game either. The Playstation 4 version currently stands with a 50 average critic rating on Metacritic, the PC version at 55, and the Xbox One at 50.

It’s worth noting that this is a publisher-led sale, meaning Best Buy, Gamestop, and Amazon didn’t just unilateraily decide to drop their prices for Black Friday. If you purchased the game from one of those sources, it might be worth getting in touch with customer service to see if you can get a price match.

Best Buy will match a lower price within 15 days of purchase, which would cover early adopters. For Gamestop that is at the store’s discretion.

For everyone else, may this be another warning against early adoption. You might view your early sale as a sign of loyalty to Bethesda, but they sure don’t view the same about you.

Impressions: Hellgate London Is Lazy And Incompetent


What else can I say? A whole lot.

Incompetence is a word that has dogged Hellgate: London from the day when Electronic Arts and Flagship thought that a subscription on a Diablo clone would be a guaranteed money maker. Following the completely timely demise of Flagship Studios and the departure of Bill Roper, Hellgate traded hands over to the less incompetent grasp of T3Fun and publisher Hanbitsoft, continuing support in Korea and even releasing expansion content. Hanbitsoft relaunched Hellgate in the west in 2014 and almost immediately put the game on life support until 2016 when the servers finally shut down. It wasn’t ideal, but for those looking to play online at the time, it was their only choice.

With 2019 just around the riverbend, Hanbitsoft has finally brought back Hellgate: Global for what is now the third attempt at resurrecting this dead horse. In spite of the general public attitude, I don’t actually blame Hanbitsoft for not bringing the game back online with functioning multiplayer. This game has failed about three times already as an online service and while launching as a single player only title might burn some bridges, it overall reduces costs on what is guaranteed to ultimately be a failed project and means Hanbitsoft won’t have to go through the process of shutting down servers again when this game inevitably becomes a ghost town in two months.

I know Hellgate fans don’t want to hear this, but the game has as much widespread appeal as a Milli Vanilli reunion, and probably not as much as that. There isn’t any notable commercial success to be had with this IP, and I say that as someone who owns all three novels.

While it is no secret that T3Fun took the Korean Hellgate: Global (see the character’s haircuts) and basically lobotomized its online play to re-release as a standalone single player game, they didn’t so much add a new coat of paint as they did cross out the “multiplayer” in Sharpie and write “singelpleyur”. The online play may be gone, but the intrusive chat screen is still there and boy does it like popping up every time you change levels even though you keep hiding it. Also present are the achievements tasking you with killing and being killed by other players of specific classes and that 30% experience boost that never seems to go away. The ability to fail in your equipment forging is still there, I don’t know why and I hope someone hacks the game and releases a patch to fix it. This feature only exists so shady publishers like Hanbitsoft can push cash shop items, and it doesn’t make sense in a single player game that doesn’t have a cash shop.

One positive of this is that all of the microtransactions (what few there were) from Hellgate: Global have been removed. Many of the cash shop items that were in Global are now available for purchase from in-game vendors. You’ll definitely want to keep a large number of auto-dismantlers on you as they are cheap (20ea) and stack by the thousands, and there is that guy in the Greenwich town hub that hands out daily one-hour auto-dismantlers.

But let’s talk about the big issue:

Hellgate: London also suffers from a massive, game breaking bug right now where the game drops to 1-2 frames per second and will stay there for extended periods of time. I’m talking minutes at length. I played this on a desktop computer loaded with an Nvidia 1080 FTW, an i5-4460 3.2ghz, and 32gb of installed ram. I’ve also played through every iteration of Hellgate: London and have never seen this before, although I have seen people claiming that this issue was also present in the prior iteration of Hellgate: Global specifically on Windows 8 and 10 computers.

I kept an eye on the game as it stuttered and found that it never went outside of the general 1.1-1.3 gigs of ram usage, so it’s not an issue with my hardware. I did find a post on the forums mentioning that running the process in compatibility mode for Windows 7 should help. It didn’t.

The problem seems to stem from specific enemies that are causing the game to chug to a halt, because it isn’t remedied by looking at the ground as is a popular fix for games where certain textures being rendered on screen can slow everything down. I have also come across a few other game breaking bugs, including one where certain equipment slots will blank out and keep the item equipped, but you can’t see or use it and the game won’t let you equip anything in that slot until it just randomly fixes itself, which can’t be done by rebooting the game.

If you’re a fan of Hellgate and don’t mind missing out on the expansion content, take this suggestion: Get yourself a copy of the original retail edition and install London 2038, which reenables online play and is currently in open alpha.

If you really want to play Hellgate with Global’s added content, sit this one out until T3Entertainment fixes it, which there is no guarantee they ever will. Until then, give this a pass.

Bad Press: Disappointed With Diablo? You Are Toxic and Hate Women


The next Diablo game has been announced and this is only the second time that Blizzard is playing damage control. Yesterday at BlizzCon, Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal, a mobile spinoff set in the franchise universe between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. The game will be coming to Android and iOS devices, with pre-registration already open as of this article’s publishing.

Needless to say, the crowd was not amused after Blizzard revealed the title, and it looks like the developer was caught heavily off guard by the overwhelmingly negative response. The BlizzCon announcement was met with heavy booing from the crowd, several sarcastic questions during the Q&A (“Is this an April Fool’s joke?”), with Blizzard’s reps eventually shouting at the crowd. The Youtube videos have been heavily downvoted with the cinematic trailer sitting at 227k downvotes to 7.6k upvotes, and Blizzard went as far as to reupload the trailer in an apparent effort to reset the like/dislike ratio.

But this wouldn’t be a Bad Press article without examining how certain members of the games media have used this as an excuse to show their contempt for gamers, like Gamespot’s Mike Mahardy who in response to the April Fool’s joke stated:

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Don’t be too harsh on Mike, his company has bills to pay and the Blizzard advertising coffers are enormous. Madeleine Rose over at J!nx, where you can buy hundreds of Blizzard-branded products at a fantastic markup ($70 for a Diablo III hoodie), was astonished and grossed by the “entitlement” of the community.

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IGN’s Sean Finnegan went on the offensive, calling gamers the “most cynical, toxic, and entitled fandom in all of entertainment.” Sean fights for the users, just not the ones who don’t like the products made by the guys who advertise for the website he gets a paycheck from.

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Over at Mashable, the website for superfans and not for the casually curious, Adam Rosenberg penned the Op-Ed “Diablo Immortal controversy is really just entitled gamers shouting,” where he proceeds to call gamers assholes for not responding positively to the announcement. (Archived link to article)

“A segment of the Blizzard fan community is mad because of some stupid bullshit they’ve manufactured entirely out of their own ignorance. That “April Fool’s joke” guy was an asshole for asking that question. And if you’re holding that guy up as some kind of a hero, or even just attacking Blizzard for making something you’re not into, you’re an asshole too.”

Mashable’s Kellen Beck responded to a self-described tantrum by throwing a tantrum with an op-ed titled “Diablo Immortal is actually fun, you entitled babies.”

“From what I saw and played, Diablo Immortal is a fun, quality Diablo game that retains that special something that makes the franchise so special. You don’t have to play it, but whining online makes you sound like a literal infant.”

Professional public relations account director Will Powers (formerly DeepSilver and Playstation)

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Thankfully there are plenty of members of the press taking a level headed approach and actually discussing the game itself. Polygon’s Ryan Gilliam wrote “Diablo: Immortal feels like a Diablo game, just not one that’s for me.” Owen S. Good of the same Polygon wrote a piece noting concern that the game is being developed by NetEase and looks a lot like a reskin of another one of NetEase’s mobile titles. James over at IGN posted a hands-on noting that the controls are intuitive, the dungeons are impressive with more complicated bosses, however characters do not show armor changes in this development build and there is no resource pool.

A number of photos have circulated of the Diablo: Immortal booth at BlizzCon being virtually disregarded with hardly anyone in line or using the demo units.

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Of course, this is just a small snippet of what can be found on the web. It’s always good to have a reminder of how quickly some people in the press get angry when customers don’t just shut up and get excited about products.