Category: Editorials

PSA: Wild Buster, How To Unlock Duke/Sam, Turn Off Annoying Voices


Wild Buster launched today, and there seems to be some confusion on how Founders can unlock Duke Nukem and Serious Sam, or any of their founders items for that matter.

  1. Create a Wild Commando (Sam) or Titan Trooper character (Duke).
  2. Skip the tutorial because you aren’t five.
  3. Go to the Mailbox bot right next to the first portal.
  4. Click on the Event Tab
  5. Retrieve the skins.
  6. Right click on them to equip.

You can unequip the skins and place them in your stash if you want to share them between characters, but skins and mounts can only be redeemed once.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Jeremy Soule and The Northerners, a Five Year Ballad


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

Today’s Crowdfunding Fraudsters sucks, and not because of the content but the subject itself. I’ll be the first to admit that I had, and despite this piece, still have a lot of admiration for Jeremy Soule and the career and artistic vision that far outshines anything I will ever produce, and this isn’t me trying to deflect a potential very angry correspondance. If there is ever a time to use the phrase “this man has more talent in his little finger than I do in my entire body,” Jeremy Soule is a pretty solid contender. The man created some of my most favorite soundtracks in gaming history, from Skyrim to Guild Wars, Company of Heroes and Baldur’s Gate, and of course the fan favorite Rugrats: Totally Angelica Boredom Buster. 

But in order to successfully dive into the curious case of Jeremy Soule and The Northerners, we need to separate the creative mind from the businessman, because while the creative side of Soule is a man ahead of his time, the businessman is an incompetent fraudster with a massive ego and a fraying, incredibly angry line of ripped off customers.

So let’s dive in.

1. Birth of an Album

Way back in the long distant past of early 2013, Jeremy Soule launched and successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign for The Northerner, a symphony by one of the greatest video game music composers since Tommy Tallarico. Expected to launch in September 2013, The Northerner would be Soule’s first foray into the grand traditions of classical music. For fans, this meant more music from one of their favorite composers, and generally a safer genre to back on Kickstarter over gadgets or video games. As with any campaign of this style, the pitch seemed foolproof. Here you have a known composer backed by reliable people, asking for $10 grand, making over $100 grand, who says the only risks are the summer recording sessions going as planned.

“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.”

Now of course I wouldn’t be here writing this article if The Northerner had come out on time, or at all. After its successful funding, the campaign went pretty silent until September.

Updates following the initial September 13 date offer occasional reminders that Soule is indeed still alive and working, however by November the following year a recording location had still not been chosen. In June 2015, Soule posts an update announcing that the symphony would be recorded in November. That is November 2015, two years later, for those of you keeping track.

“Today, I am happy to announce that the Symphony will be recorded in November. In the last several months I have traveled the world to survey places of inspiration and possible recording venues.”

The post is followed up in October with a tease that backers will in for a surprise in November. The surprise? Nothing, the campaign would go pretty silent until the 28th, where Soule would not only ignore the previously announced November recording date, but announce that he had so much content that a prequel album would be created!

“In this process, my sketch material has been accumulating. And of course, as with any creative project, the “extras” turned out to be too valuable to discard. So a prequel album became necessary. Today, I’m thrilled to announce Diary.”

So instead of having one album now two years behind schedule and counting, Jeremy Soule could add another to the workload while not actually producing either. As one backer puts it, Soule is basically announcing that after two years of traveling around the world, all he has to show for his time and the backer’s money are some rough, formless edits which themselves aren’t even ready to be listened to.

The next update in February points toward a fall 2016 release for Sketches (the prequel album) and a full symphony release in 2017.

The symphony is absolutely still in progress. I anticipate the Sketches to land late this fall with the full symphony to follow in 2017.

I don’t feel like you need me to spoil whether this went according to plan.

2. The Northerners Doesn’t Exist, And Neither Do Its Instruments

Following months upon months of semi-regular updates including nothing but sheet music, Soule finally updates in Feburary 2017 and his update includes a comment that you might want to take a second look at. And a third, and perhaps a fourth.

When I started this project back in early 2013, I had an idea in mind and a timeline in which to accomplish it, but as I began the work, it grew bigger and more complex. I realized that technology didn’t exist for some of the music I was writing, and that the project would take longer due to these limitations, and its increased length.

Emphasis my own. This distinction is what truly separates the part time crowdfunding fraudsters from the full time professionals, the developers who fund games knowing full stop that the goal isn’t enough to see through to completion, the silicon valley nerds that fund technology knowing that it’s not possible. They don’t convey this to backers, mind you, after all the campaign’s listed risks just wax poetic about how the summer recording session will hopefully go smoothly. Soule conveniently forgets to include the line “oh and the technology for major parts of this symphony don’t exist, and we have no idea when they will be invented.”

Just to reiterate, in no way am I implying that Soule is an incompetent musician, I think his work speaks for itself. Instead of just sitting on his ass, taking in the sights, and going on vacation on his backer’s dime while the technology is built, Jeremy Soule has been spending the past years actually inventing said technology. At this point in the conversation, I could make a snarky joke along the lines of “oh what does Soule need to invent? An electric violin?” but I’d be purposely misrepresenting his statements and I’ll leave that to the Youtube drama channels.

In reality, and as described through his Facebook, the instruments that Soule is inventing sound insanely difficult to build and will be available for other musicians to purchase once they are refined. One instrument, for instance, aims to reduce the mechanical tones of synthesized music by utilizing a breathing tube, allowing the artist to give a more natural feel instead of the on/off binary style of standard keyboard synth. Regardless, backers weren’t too happy to find out that not only was Soule crowdfunding his campaign knowing that it wouldn’t be completed until nonexistent technology was invented, but didn’t really bother explaining that caveat to his backers when he gave the very generous anticipated date of September 2013.

I know what some of you are saying, and you are 100% correct: The comment I quoted above is fake, Jeremy Soule never wrote it, nor did anyone affiliated with Soule. Now I know you’re confused, because I just linked to the official Kickstarter update where that was indeed posted in an official capacity. Let me explain:

This ship is so tightly organized (that’s sarcasm) that a producer, one Gloria Soto of the Max Steiner Agency, posted essentially fan fiction as an official announcement from Soule himself. The statement was written as what a backer hoped Soule would say, including an apology for missed deadlines and a wish that backers would hang on until the final product could be launched. Soto assumed that the post was written by Soule and posted it as an official announcement, and since Kickstarter won’t let creators delete posts after a certain period of time, it’s up there forever.

But this statement, while not from the horse’s mouth, was canonized by the horse’s jockey. Soto stated to Kotaku that all the backer did was re-post what Jeremy has said in the past, and she did so in exactly the condescending and unprofessional manner in which we’ve come to expect from a business who might, for instance, lack the professional courtesy to check with a client/partner before putting words into his mouth and posting fake statements as irrevocable official releases.

“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 kind of professionalism that results in never posting a followup notice that the previous one was an accident, or anything at all. The February post is the last update on the Kickstarter page, at no point did either party decide it might behoove them to say apologize for posting a completely misleading apology letter which, incidentally, also promises monthly updates to matter how big or small the achievements may be, a promise that was neither made nor kept by anyone affiliated with The Northerner.

I have been hard at work, and have failed to give timely updates, and I am very sorry for that. Going forward, I will be giving monthly updates, no matter how big or small my achievements in that time.

The best we can hope for is a PS by Soule at the end of a Facebook post.

P.S. the latest update on Kickstarter wasn’t from me but a fan. I agreed with the sentiments of what he said so the agency did post his words as an update (partially by mistake). But in retrospect, I am coming from a place of humility when I say I’m trying my best. You deserve that! Thank you again!

I’m going to reiterate this for emphasis: If you don’t follow Jeremy Soule on Facebook or happened to miss the end to this post, there is nothing official to indicate that this campaign update, the last update posted on Kickstarter, is completely fake. In ten months, nobody involved in this campaign has had the basic professional courtesy to take five minutes and post an clarifying update. Nobody; not Soule, not Soto, nobody. The kind of substandard communication that wouldn’t fly at an Elementary School bake sale is evidently enough for a six figure symphonic production.

3. Taking the Retro Computers Ltd Approach to Refunds

Soule rightfully acknowledges in this post that backers are angry and understands that some may want to back out at this juncture. And for those backers, Jeremy Soule wants you to know that he will accept your demands for a refund if you still don’t want any part of this charade.

“And for those who want to say goodbye and withdraw backer support, please know I will refund you without hesitation. Simply email refunds@maxsteineragency.com.”

Unless you email and and simply don’t receive a response. In past crowdfunding fraudsters articles regarding Retro Computers Ltd, one issue that seems to come up a lot is that RCL thinks it can get away with claiming that no refund is refused, a promise easily disproven when you have a list of customers who have been screaming about unanswered refund requests on Indiegogo for months on end, and yes Suzanne, I am still reading your Indiegogo page.

And Soule has been no stranger to this, in fact you can go on Kickstarter back to 2014-2016 and see the streams of customers complaining that they were sick of waiting and wanted refunds, only to be ignored until they caused a major public scene. Now obviously Jeremy Soule himself is not sifting through emails, slamming his fist on a giant deny button as he twirls his mustache, adjusts his monocle, and watches the angry Kickstarter peasants beg for their money while sitting on a throne made of said backer money. That’d be the job of the Max Steiner Agency Inc.

Good old Max Steiner Agency, and who else but Gloria Soto? In her statement to Kotaku, Steiner mentions that the, ahem, true fans are still on board and the rabble complaining on Kickstarter are mostly trolls who have already been refunded. Nothing to worry about, Soto is working with Kickstarter to get those ruffians pushed off.

“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.”

Best of luck with that, you can see how the “blame it on the trolls” technique has worked with the Vega+.

More recent posts on the Kickstarter page point toward refunds taking 3-5 months, if not longer, to process and be returned. Other more vocal backers have noted in the comments of being offered refunds in return for them to stop raising a ruckus in the backer comments section, which some have refused and others have accepted. Further reports from people are indicating that a number of refund requests are being approved but the backers still not seeing their money months down the line.

4. The HoloCOST of Doing Business

What would a story like this be without a good Holocaust analogy? If you answered “much better, thank you,” you would be correct. We’ve talked about his business, about his campaign, now let’s talk about Jeremy Soule the person. Jeremy Soule hates music piracy, he hates it so much that in his opinion it’s basically the worst thing since the holocaust with music creators being just like the Jews.

But don’t take my word for it, let Soule’s own argument convince you.

But forget the Pirate Bay… Piracy is now mainstream. Not since the Holocaust have we seen so many people of a select group forcibly stripped of their livelihoods in a public euphoria of false morals. As one who is of Jewish descent, I can say that I make this statement in a very narrow fashion, but there are similarities. Creators are being vilified, laughed off and treated with indifference by scary multitudes of people who care not for artists’ lives or liberties–let alone the concerns involved in the making of art. The new “norm” is being heralded as “liberation” from the “contrived” and “unfair” standards of fees and payments that have traditionally been worked out in a fair market society. Instead, this is the new unfair market society. The “Jews” in this valid analogy are creators. We are losing our homes, our futures and our ability to take care of our children. Laugh. I dare you. And unlike the streetlamp lighters, the world still needs creators!

I have nothing more to add to this.

5. The DirectSong Fraud Racket

So we know that Jeremy Soule hates people stealing music, but did you know he hates piracy almost as much as he evidently does actually delivering the music that he has sold?

You can find Soule’s music at his company DirectSong, a name you may be familiar with thanks to the fact that the Guild Wars community a couple of years ago was getting ready to launch a class action lawsuit against the service due to it being a gigantic fraud racket. DirectSong was founded by Jeremy Soule in 2005 and currently holds an F rating with the Better Business Bureau, and has effectively been labeled a scam by the communities for the games around which Soule composed and sold the soundtracks to.

DirectSong doesn’t sell physical products anymore, and that’s because of people who didn’t receive their physical discs for months if not years on end, some reporting never receiving anything to this day, with virtually no support from DirectSong on shipping or offering refunds. You can search DirectSong on Google and find hundreds of stories from people like this one, who ordered their Skyrim soundtracks and Guild Wars 2 and didn’t receive their product for upwards of three years. And while you’d think that delivering a digital album would be easier, DirectSong still managed to screw it up and delay delivery for months upon months, a feature as simple as providing a link.

Just take a gander at the customer support message provided to the left where DirectSong takes ten months to respond to a customer complaint about links and, wouldn’t you know it, the person delivering the flippant response is GLORIA! I have no idea if this is the same Gloria from earlier but we are all entitled to our dreams.

 

You also can’t buy Guild Wars 2’s soundtracks from DirectSong anymore, that job has been relegated to the possibly better suited for delivery folks at Amazon. DirectSong, meanwhile, has a 1/10 score on reseller ratings with most of the complaints mirroring the inability to ship product within a reasonable time and delaying orders by months into years.

Thankfully it looks like DirectSong knows how to deliver mp3 links within a timely manner, but let’s not put too much pressure.

6. But to wrap things up…

Late last month, Jeremy Soule announced via Facebook (not Kickstarter) that December 20th would mark the launch date of Northerner Diaries.

December 20th, 2017 is the release date for Northerner Diaries. Hope you enjoy!

Keep in mind that this is not in fact the launch of the symphony, but merely the vignettes of his ideas. The ones we were promised two years ago. As for the symphony that will soon be five years old, well there isn’t much news on that front. While falling far, far behind on your work for a Kickstarter campaign might not be as terrible as, say, the Holocaust or even music piracy, you would think that Jeremy Soule or the fine folks at the Max Steiner Agency would have come to learn the PR value of keeping your backers updated and not presuming that they follow you through third party channels.

For those who backed on Kickstarter and don’t read Soule’s Facebook page, they have no idea that the Northerner Diaries is supposed to come out this month, because nobody bothered to tell them. Nobody bothers to keep the primary source for backers, the easiest and most accessible resource to ensure that your message gets to the people who gave you money, are informed. It’s like Soule is on stage at a concert, and instead of using his microphone to announce his next song, he’s decided to write it on a slip of paper and hope the crowd passes it around to everyone.

And poor communication and an inability to deliver seems to be the staple of a Jeremy Soule business.

PSA: Get Two Free Ubisoft Games In December


In case you just weren’t getting enough free games on PC, Ubisoft has come out with two titles to pad your playlist. From now through December 18, you’ll be able to pick up two Ubisoft titles if you happen to be in the right place at the right time, and if the price is right.

From now through December 11 you’ll be able to pick up World in Conflict, an innovative RTS in a cold war environment. From December 11 through the 18, you can grab a copy of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Check it out over at Ubisoft’s website.

Community: How To [Not] Play Battlefront II


This may not be particularly surprising, but poking fun at Battlefront II is what all the cool kids are doing this week.

The news this week is picking up on a story regarding Battlefront II and its AFK (AFC if you’re on Xbox/Playstation) problem, notably surrounding the cause of this shall-we-call-it player behavior anomaly. Polygon has a piece by Ben Kuchera (or Ben Kuchechera) titled “Star Wars Battlefront 2 players are ruining the game with rubber bands,” a headline that is not incorrect but goes into detail about how players have figured out that you can rubber band your controls to keep your character moving and thus farm credits while not actually being at the computer (or television). You can learn how to cook delicious meals with fresh ingredients provided by Blue Apron, or whatever grocery company is sponsoring your favorite podcasts, and come back ready to unlock Darth Vader by the time your delicious Thai Curry Beef is ready to eat.

Right now you can get a minimum amount of credits just for showing up, which is what these farms are after. You can increase the amount you earn by doing well and taking part of each objective — and credits are given for playing the campaign and arcade mode as well — so this is merely the easiest way to get credits without putting any actual work into the process.

Polygon’s piece is half right, focusing on part of the picture being that Battlefront II’s progression system is a slow and arduous grind and any game with such system will encourage AFK grinding. The other part of the issue, of course, is that the game rewards players handsomely enough just for being present and doesn’t reward them all that well for putting effort into your gameplay. You can see this in the Angry Joe review, where the difference between first place and last place was a mere 20 credits, 350 vs 330.

AFK grinding is an issue in numerous games for a variety of reasons, from games where items hold real value to games where progression is slow, and games where players simply aren’t rewarded enough for participating or are rewarded too much for just being present. Regardless, it’s hard to ignore the impact that such negative behavior has on the overall community, especially in game modes like Hero v Hero where one player grinding currency can effectively ruin the game for his team.

Chaturday: Destiny 2 XP Change Tastes Like Someone Got Caught Red Handed


For today’s Chaturday, I want to talk about Destiny 2 and Bungie, more specifically a recent announcement regarding experience gains and how the game has been effectively lying to players since launch.

For those of you not in the know, we learned this week that Destiny 2 has been effectively lying about experience gains and limiting them for players who farm experience. Once a player hits level 20, which does not take long, every level thereafter rewards a Bright Engram, an item sold in the Eververse store (cash shop), for free. As such, Bungie has a monetary interest in encouraging players to drop real cash on said Engrams.

One player, through heavily researching his gameplay and how the game doles out experience, discovered that the game would limit experience during more intense activities. Furthermore, while the game would display experience gains, the actual experience given would be limited by up to half if the player was participating in public events.

Bungie responded to the growing complaints by confirming not just that the experience throttling was present and intentional, but that it was not working as intended and would be shut off.

“We’ve seen community discussion around XP gain in Destiny. After reviewing our data, we agree that the system is not performing the way we’d like it to. Today, we’d like to describe what’s going on under the hood, and talk about what you can expect going forward when it comes to earning XP in Destiny 2.

Currently, XP will scale up when playing longer or fixed duration activities like Crucible competitive multiplayer matches and the Leviathan Raid, and XP will scale down when playing activities that can be quickly, repeatedly chained, like grinding Public Events. We are not happy with the results, and we’ve heard the same from the community.

Effective immediately, we are deactivating this system.

As a result, players will see XP earn rates change for all activities across the board, but with all values being displayed consistently in the user interface. Over the course of the next week, we will be watching and reviewing XP game data to ensure that these changes meet our expectations, as well as yours. Any additional updates to this system will be communicated to you via our official channels.”

In all likelihood, the answer probably lies within a poorly tuned algorithm intended to prevent some of the easy farming zones that cropped up in Destiny 1. That said, it’s hard to ignore the convenient coincidence that the game is giving misleading numbers on the exact system that Bungie ties its microtransactions to.

For a time in which consumers are already becoming jaded enough thanks to the predatory launches of titles like Battlefront II and Need for Speed: Payback, it makes sense that people are reading this news and immediately assuming the worst: that Bungie deliberately capped experience gains to promote their cash shop.

It’s also hard to view their response as anything other than a company that got caught red handed. It’s great to see that Bungie actually responded and is indeed making changes (although players are still reporting nerfed experience rates), the announcement will probably do little to calm a community that has been airing its grievances for various reasons since the title launched a few months ago.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Community] How Gazillion Entertainment Can Salvage Itself Post-Marvel


Marvel Heroes is dead, and potentially so it Gazillion Entertainment assuming they don’t have the resources to get another game up and running before they declare bankruptcy. With Marvel’s ARPG gone and another game possibly coming down the line, I want to put my money where my mouth is and offer up a few tips for Gazillion on how to interact in this post-Heroes world.

1. Fire Your CEO, David Dorhmann

Before Gazillion Entertainment can do anything, they need to fire or somehow oust current CEO David Dorhmann. Let’s be honest: Your community, what few return after you took console player’s money and skedaddled barely six months later, despise your CEO and view him as one of the major reasons that the game many spent years and hundreds if not thousands of dollars on is shutting down, outside of you evidently not being able to comprehend a contract. Judging by Glassdoor reviews, your employees hate him just as well, and even David Brevik can barely contain his ability to not call the guy a sleazy, womanizing predator.

His reputation for inappropriate conduct, especially towards women, is something that “industry insiders” are aware of talk about behind closed doors. His conduct has been tolerated because he often controls the money flow and is a good talker. This is a problem at some tech companies and needs to be addressed much more assertively.

All that the public needed to know about Dorhmann’s character, we learned during a livestream where he berated a female employee. It doesn’t matter if either he or the employee tried to brush it off as “just a joke,” we all saw how it went down. Do yourself a favor and boot him out, because I’m willing to bet that if Disney won’t do business with you in part because of your CEO’s shennanigans, neither will most other licenses.

2. Don’t Replace Marvel Heroes With Original Character The Game

Over at the Marvel Heroes forums and Reddit pages, I’ve seen a lot of posts from people hoping that Gazillion would take the existing Marvel Heroes framework and simply remove everything that was Marvel related and replace it with something else. Just like how Gazillion stripped the game of everything Fantastic Four related when Marvel pulled that license. This is not a good idea.

The thing that made Marvel Heroes great was the fact that you could play as Marvel’s characters and not just that but collect a wide variety of cool looking costumes from the comics and movies to boot. I can’t help but feel that a re-skinned Marvel Heroes would fall flat on its face as you would lose the iconic characters who would inevitably be replaced with generic Roboman, Gooman, and more. In addition the Marvel license helped, but not really since the game was quickly losing players, cover up the fact that parts of the game were just a mess. PvP was a dumpster fire, Gazillion wouldn’t recognize a deadline if it beat them over the head with a brick, and the end-game was in a state of limbo for a real long time.

In order for the resurrected corpse of Marvel Heroes to have any chance at success, Gazillion would need to replace the license with another license. Why not DC Comics? How about Dark Horse comics and their various IPs? Or Valiant Comics? There is a treasure trove of non-Marvel heroes to collect from Valiant once you fire your CEO and get to work salvaging your business.

3. Be Less Generous

In the business world, there is generosity and then there is plain recklessness. Gazillion on the PC side of Marvel Heroes was just plain reckless, and basically gave away the house leaving not a whole lot left for players to really indulge in when it came to real money purchases. It’s rather humorous because Marvel Heroes launched with such a stingy system that Gazillion tried so hard to reverse that they basically swung the pendulum in the completely opposite direction, going from giving nothing away to giving everything away.

I don’t feel like this is a controversial statement, and most long-term Marvel Heroes players would agree with me. I’ve put in hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into this game, and I absolutely stand by the fact that Gazillion gave too much away for free and the company’s revenues suffered for it. Unfortunately by the time Gazillion was done kissing everyone’s feet to make up for how greedily they acted when the game launched, it was too late to go back and reduce those giveaways because it would push too many people away. The experience rates, boosts, speed of character acquisition, the costume blender: All great ideas if you want people’s good will, but good will doesn’t pay the bills.

4. Recognize Those Who Brought You Here

This one is going to be a bit more obscure. Whatever Gazillion does with their next game, assuming one exists, you have to give something to the people who stuck with you this long. Nothing overly grand, just don’t forget that this whole ordeal with Marvel Heroes is your fault, not the customers, and you owe something big to the people who continued pumping money into a project that you inevitably blew for one reason or another. The supporting customers are why you’re here today, and if your next project is hoping to bring them back, you need to show them more recognition than “thanks for all the fish.”

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Beta Perspective: Wild Buster Is The Final Fantasy XIII of Diablo Clones


I’m having quite a bit of fun with Wild Buster, the latest MMOARPG to hit beta, but the game is rather one dimensional and I have a feeling that’s going to hurt its potential.

If you haven’t heard of Wild Buster, this is the Diablo-style game that has hinged some of its marketing on the inclusion of Duke Nukem and Serious Sam as official, licensed characters. The game is currently enjoying its last beta weekend before early access, so I decided to jump in and give my two cents.

Final Fantasy XIII was rather creatively labeled a corridor simulator, and if you translated that element into a Diablo clone, you’d probably end up with Wild Buster. Not to say the game is poorly designed; combat is smooth and responsive, the visuals aren’t half-bad, and there is plenty of loot to go around without going overboard. There are a number of classes across the two factions that operate quite distinctly from one another, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of tomfoolery in the cash shop department at least at this juncture.

But the level design is horrendous, a series of re-skinned corridors where the only option is to go forward, defeating small groups of trash mobs with the occasional mini-boss style character, before you eventually face off against the big boss of the dungeon. Games in this genre generally make use of randomly generated dungeons to provide players with a varied landscape.

These games are mostly pretty linear but provide an open enough area to make up for that, but in Wild Buster you’ll just be going down hallway after hallway, without even the illusion of being able to move around. Even the bosses themselves seem poorly designed, mostly tanks with high health counters and stunning attacks, whose fights mostly boil down to increasingly spawning trash mobs and area of effect damage totems.

Wild Buster also seems to have some vestigial features in place, like being able to jump which doesn’t seem do much of anything. At least in the first twenty levels you won’t encounter anything that requires you to jump, nor do enemies appear to have attacks that can be jumped over.

Still, the hack and slashy, killing monsters in large quantities aspect is keeping me playing Wild Buster despite the grievances that I have with the beta at this time. I get the feeling that Wild Buster won’t so much fade out of my interest as much as it will hit a hard dead end where I just stop playing.

Oh and the game committed the cardinal sin of using “might’of” is a word as though that’s still okay in 2017.

[Column] Lawbreakers Free Weekend: Hook, Line, and Nobody Bought It


I didn’t play Lawbreakers this weekend. I did the last free weekend, and at some point on Friday had the intention of downloading it again to play for the weekend and, considering the $15 price tag, perhaps finally buy it. But something stopped me from even bothering to download the client for free, investing little more than the few hours of weekend time that I could give to this title: The player count.

I’d consider it a bad sign if the peak population of Lawbreakers topped out at one thousand on a free weekend, but it didn’t. No, Lawbreakers peaked out Friday night at 420 concurrent users, then Saturday night at 378 and Sunday night at 266. By this morning, the game is already back down to the low teens. Naturally the Saturday and Sunday population figures don’t come into count when talking about my decisions on Friday, but in consideration of the fact that the last free weekend for Lawbreakers drew in a peak of over one thousand and this weekend looked like it couldn’t hit half of that, I came to the conclusion that even putting in the time to download would be meaningless as there was no chance of me buying the game and supporting a dead community.

It is a pretty safe bet that I’m not the only person who either looked at the population figures and turned the other way or actually downloaded the game and ended up scoffing at just how few people are even willing to give the game a try for absolutely free. Boss Key Productions has called this game a “marathon, not a sprint,” but the game is constantly losing momentum and at this point will need a miracle in order to reverse the trend.

Perhaps Boss Key Studios should hire the No Man’s Sky developers on as consultants, there is a game that managed to patch up what seemed to be a sunken ship and turned it into a rather popular title in the course of a year.

[Community] The Sense of Accomplishment, or Buy Our Freakin Lockboxes


Electronic Arts may have won the award for most disliked and tone deaf comment on Reddit in the history of the platform. Those of you who follow Battlefront II are likely aware of the criticisms that the game has received in regards to its progression system, namely complaints that it shamelessly gates power behind random loot box drops that are also available for real money. The comment popped up in a thread titled “Seriously? I paid 80$ to have Vader locked?” The post took umbrage with the fact that Darth Vader, an iconic Battlefront character, is locked from use unless players do some extensive grinding to unlock him.

According to another Reddit thread using graphs and charts, it has been calculated that Battlefront 2 requires approximately 40 hours to unlock a single hero or villain, as the game doles out currency rewards based on time played rather than points earned. Alternately, of course, you can bypass this grind somewhat by plugging real money into the system and buying loot boxes.

In response to the complaint, a representative from EA’s customer support posted the following comment:

“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we’re looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we’ll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.”

You heard it here first, Battlefront wants to provide you with a sense of pride and accomplishment, not frustrate you with an intentionally crippled progression system designed to deeply encourage loot box purchases. The comment currently stands deep in the red at negative 274 thousand votes in just 19 hours.

And now, please enjoy some of the better angry and snarky responses in said thread.

“If the unlock took maybe 2-4 hours that would be fine, but this is essentially saying “You don’t need to pay but if you don’t good luck””

“Locking iconic characters behind credit walls that will take dozens of hours to get one is just insane, especially when I am willing to bet you have tons of heroes planned which will be behind similar paywalls?”

“If I had a credit for every downvote you’ve gotten I could finally unlock Darth Vader!”

“More so how much do they expect the average gamer to play this game? To unlock 3 hero’s I would have to play 120 hours, there are few games I have played 100 hours and that goes for a majority of people, people will get bored long before that and move on to another game once the grind becomes too much.”

“And Vader costs 60k, it’s bizzare.”

“Isn’t that also 40 hours for 1 hero assuming you buy nothing else at all. The opportunity cost for missing out on everything while saving up for a single big ticket item is tremendous.”

“That’s fucking rich. Just be honest. The truth is you know very few people are going to sink a full work week into this game and you’re hoping that somebody is desperate enough to buy credits to unlock the character. It has nothing to do with providing a “sense of pride and accomplishment.” This is a flat-out lie and you know it. How naive do you think your player base is?”

2017’s Predictions Revisited: How Did We Do?


It’s that time of year, folks, where MMO Fallout looks back on our predictions for this year in order to hand ammunition to the very people who regularly remind me that I have no idea what I’m talking about. This year I did pretty well, out of 30 mostly serious predictions I would say that I only got about 6 wrong.

And when you’re done remembering the year, take a gander at this list of tips to keep your memory sharp into your 50s.

So let’s recap.

  1. Nostalrius getting a cease and desist and Blizzard announcing Pristine Servers: Nailed it on both counts, minus the part about Nostalrius allowing the cease and desist to escalate to a full on lawsuit.
  2. Laura K Dale would continue leaking Switch news: Also true, although we will never really know if Nintendo tracked down the person leaking the information.
  3. Steam overloaded with trash games: Yep, in the form of Steam Direct, Valve has never allowed so many shysters and con artists on their platform as they did in 2017.
  4. Firefall shut down: Called this one, although the folks at Red5 didn’t even bother to acknowledge the allegedly existing console version when announcing the PC sunsetting.
  5. Pathfinder Online will shut down: 100% wrong on this one.
  6. SAG strike ends: Called this one on all accounts, that there would be concessions on both sides and people would go back to not pretending to care about voice actors receiving residuals.
  7. Trions Worlds would bungle a launch: This is like predicting that the sun will rise, so I’m not exactly looking for kudos.
  8. Phantasy Star Online 2 still not coming to the west: And it still isn’t.
  9. MMOs launching in the East and dying before coming to the west: Kritika Online has already shut down in Southeast Asia before coming to Europe/Americas.
  10. Decent selling HD remakes with extras: Kingdom Hearts, Metroid, among other games.
  11. HD Remakes with microtransactions: As sure-fire as it seemed, I’m pretty sure that not a single game released an HD remake with microtransactions shoved in.
  12. Resident Evil 7 the first major VR game and streamers: Both happened, first being that Resident Evil 7 was a smashing success for VR and a streamer eventually did make a video that he crapped his pants.
  13. South Park: South Park released and it could indeed be summed up as “pretty good,” and the game was criticized for its poop jokes.
  14. Activision and Call of Duty: Well Activision didn’t hold development on Call of Duty, but WWII was a return to the series roots, and Activision has not explicitly addressed the falling sales from Infinite Warfare.
  15. No Man’s Sky gets updates, no players: Half correct on this, did not anticipate that people would flock back to No Man’s Sky in the numbers that they did.
  16. Bulletstorm Flops: It did, and odds are you’ll find Bulletstorm heavily discounted at your local game store. Currently Bulletstorm has less than 10 people playing, and peaked at launch at 1,200.
  17. Video game movies: Only one video game movie released stateside this year, the Resident Evil film. It didn’t underperform in box offices, but I’m guessing most of you already forgot about it.
  18. Daybreak becoming a home for wayward developers: Stay tuned.
  19. Valve being sued: Did not happen.
  20. Governments will pay attention to lockboxes: It’s starting to happen, although gamers are not seeing the inherent worthlessness of these boxes in many games.
  21. Troll games and Ukranian money laundering: Troll games have become more prevalent on Steam, and the platform is definitely still being used for money laundering by Ukranian developers.
  22. Yooka-Laylee Launch: Right on this one, the game launched and it was pretty well received.
  23. Game from ex-STALKER developers: I’m going to fit Escape from Tarkov into this list.
  24. Star Citizen misses its release dates: All of them.
  25. Camelot Unchained: The game didn’t launch, therefore the rest of the prediction is meaningless.
  26. Conan Exiles launches, Funcom realizes that developing MMOs is pointless: Yep, enough that they decided to reboot The Secret World as a non-MMO.
  27. Darkfall Reboots: They launched but have not yet cannibalized each other.
  28. H1Z1 will bring on new lead developers: 99% sure this happened.
  29. I get a lawsuit threat from an indie developer: More than once.
  30. John Smedley joins new startup: Of course he did.