Category: Editorials

[Community] Wild West Online, Another Bad Weekend, and Humble Pie On Refunds


Wild West Online might be the worst game of 2017, and its alpha weekend rollout might be the worst pitch to buy a game that I have seen since The WarZ did it years ago, but I have to give some kudos to the team. Let’s talk.

This weekend marked the second alpha test weekend for Wild West Online, a game that I have not shown much mercy to. The first weekend was written off as a technical test, an idea that I fully rejected at the time and will continue to do so. Once again, it doesn’t matter what WWO Partners calls the weekend. From the perspective of a customer, I don’t really care that all you were hoping to do was test server capacity and various other bugs. WWO offered two weekends to test the game before the guaranteed refund period passed, after which you’re out of luck and stuck with whatever the game gives you.

This is, regardless of what you or the community call the weekend, a trial period for the product, where you’re trying to convince people that the game will be worth their money. To present the offer of two whole alpha tests to figure out of the game is worth keeping your pre-order, and then to turn around and showcase that with much of the game’s content turned off, is at the very least mildly insulting. It’s like a restaurant offering free samples on its soup, but the sample itself is an uncooked piece of an onion that was part of the recipe. It’s a poor indicator of the full product and you start to wonder who in the kitchen decided to use this to gauge consumer interest.

The second alpha weekend did some polishing on the first, but didn’t really add anything new. As a result, I once again have to conclude that there isn’t enough in the game to warrant buying it at this stage, and that the preview weekend wasn’t enough to convince me that the game can’t go entirely south before launch.

I will give kudos to the team for holding up their end of the bargain this time. After seeing how little progress had been made with the second weekend, I submitted an email to Xsolla’s support with a simple message with my receipt code and game key and asked for a refund. I received it, barely a half hour later. I’ve offered my doubts on Xsolla and Wild West Online, especially after how the refund policy for WarZ was botched, but I will give credit where credit is due: They held up their end of the bargain and gave me my refund with no questions asked. Looking at the forums, it appears that other users also aren’t having an issue getting refunds as well and most are receiving responses within a half hour as well.

So kudos for that, Xsolla.

[Column] Bluehole Studio Doesn’t Have A Moral (or Legal) Leg To Stand On


Bluehole Studios this week decided to release a press release stating that it is considering “further action” against Epic Games over the Battle Royale mode recently added to Fortnite. According to the release, Bluehole is concerned over similarities between the two games, and how Epic uses Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds in conversations with the community and press in comparison to Fortnite.

“We’ve had an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout PUBG’s development as they are the creators of UE4, the engine we licensed for the game. After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.”

As someone who has been following actual cases for years, I’ll give this as simply as I know how: Bluehole Studio doesn’t have a leg to stand on, either legally in court or morally in the court of public opinion. And since PUBG is running on Epic’s Unreal Engine, any action taken by the former against the latter would accomplish little more than a self-inflicted gunshot to the leg, just ask Silicon Knights how that worked out.

So let’s take this piece by piece.

1. (Legal) Bluehole Studios Doesn’t Own The Mechanic

You can’t copyright game mechanics, it is not within the purview of United States and UK law, and the EU has not weighed in on the matter yet. It is, however, possible to protect your game mechanics through trademark, however the process is extremely time and resource intensive, and I can say by simply pulling up a list of patents owned by Bluehole (a list of one) that they do not own the patent for a Battle Royale game mechanic. In short, Bluehole Studios has no legal standing because they don’t own the concept. Neither does Brendan Greene.

For legal precedent, we can look at exactly the kind of company devious enough to patent a game mechanic, and of course I am talking about Namco Ltd. Back in the 90’s, Namco patented the concept of having a mini-game that can be played during a game’s loading screen. The patent didn’t actually have the chance to be legitimized in court, as Namco never used it to sue another developer, and it expired in 2015. There are heavy doubts as to whether or not Namco would have won such a lawsuit, but the threat was enough to keep some developers from taking the risk.

Namco’s patent very likely would have failed because patent law stipulates that your patented item can’t have existed, and there are verifiable records of games with mini-game loading screens existing before Namco patented the idea in Ridge Racer. Likewise, the existence of numerous Battle Royale style games ensures that, even if Bluehole decided to head over to the patent office and absorb that cost, that they would ultimately fail in their attempt at ownership.

2. (Moral) That Time Bluehole Tried to Steal Lineage III

Out of the two parties involved in this dispute, incidentally Bluehole is the one most acquainted with criminal theft, a matter that MMO Fallout covered heavily back in its infancy. Back in 2009, civil and criminal charges were brought against multiple Bluehole Studios employees alleging that they had stolen trade secrets and assets while employed at NCSoft and used those assets in creating the action MMO Tera. Six employees were found guilty, with jail sentences being handed out as part of the criminal proceedings, however Bluehole as a corporate entity was found to not be guilty. Those employees, as you might expect, haven’t been working at Bluehole since then.

But still, there is a certain level of hypocrisy for a company with an established record of employees going to jail for stealing from another developer, to start pointing figures and making threats, over a mechanic that it doesn’t own, against other developers. Bluehole didn’t start the genre, even if it does have the most popular game in it as of present, and it doesn’t own the genre. If Bluehole does take the threat further, they open themselves up to a world of hurt from Epic’s legal team. Let’s not forget what happened to the last developer that tried to take Epic down in a frivolous lawsuit.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

The Destiny 2 Review: Burning Down the House


Destiny 1 was a pretty earth shattering game, not in the sense that it broke new ground but in how many people it managed to snare in its repetitive yet addictive gameplay. While the title was a bust in many minds thanks to broken promises and features that seemed obviously slashed for time, Destiny carried a certain I don’t know what that kept people engaged for a long time after launch. Where other titles sell seven figures and watch their communities quickly die off, Destiny’s users were still logging in crazy hours two years after launch, hunting down all of the game’s exotic gear.

Destiny 2 feels like someone took an MMO and sheared off the leveling experience, leaving only the end-game gear grind and some bits and pieces left over. Those of you who played through Destiny will be familiar with most of the mechanics from this sequel, and as many will already know or quickly realize, the “true game” as some would call it doesn’t really start until you’re level 20 and beat the campaign.

Neither of which take a particularly long time to complete, but the story and world seem far more fleshed out an interesting than they did in the previous title, in which a great portion of the game’s lore was locked away off-game on the Bungie website. All you really need to know going into this game is that you are a Guardian, a special person who literally can’t die as you are gifted powers by the Traveler, a construct that came to Earth and then died, bequeathing humans with its powers of light. As a Guardian of the light, your job is to protect the light, all of those people who can die, and fight off the coming darkness.

Destiny 2 starts off with an invasion of the tower by the Red Legion, led by the big baddie of the campaign Dominus Ghaul. Seeking to claim the Traveler’s gift for himself, Ghaul destroys the last remaining human city, captures the Traveler, and nearly kills you (the player). The ensuing campaign is all about taking back what was once yours, and reclaiming the Tower and driving off Ghaul and his forces.

Thankfully, unlike its predecessor, Destiny 2 treats its characters as though they are real people and not simply cardboard cutouts to vendor weapons to players. I honestly couldn’t tell you if any of the characters from Destiny 2 were in Destiny 1, and for all intent and purpose they might as well be completely new people. But with Zavala, Cayde-6, and other side characters like Failsafe help build a world that is interesting to learn more about.

Once you finish the campaign, the game opens up and everything becomes available. You have four planets, each of which has its own set of public events, missions, patrols, faction currency, and more. You’ll be able to embark on missions that offer varying challenges in return for powerful, game changing exotic equipment. I managed to get my hands rather early on a Sunshot, a hand cannon that carries explosive rounds and causes everything I shoot to explode and damage those around them.

Strikes are Destiny’s answer to MMO dungeons, these are three player instances that have you completing various objectives in return for glimmer and gear. While the standard strikes are open for matchmaking, the more difficult version does require communication and thus you’ll need to form your own fireteam. Same goes for Raids, high tier dungeons with gear requirements that require you to know who is doing what and when, and thus is not available for public matchmaking. Crucible is once again the place to go for player vs player matches.

But you’ll find plenty to do in Destiny 2 on your own as well. Public events dot the landscape on each planet, and each event has a secret trigger that unlocks its heroic version, increasing the difficulty while also increasing the rewards. You might be annoyed to find yourself in a zone where nobody else is farming events, but that can be pretty quickly fixed and more often than not you’ll find yourself surrounded by players who seem to know exactly what they’re doing.

Thankfully Destiny 2 continues its series staple of having some of the tightest gunplay in the genre. Just about every weapon has a satisfying kick as you blow off a Fallen’s head, shatter a Vex’s shield, or take down some big bad guy who is just asking for a shotgun blast to the face.

Destiny 2_20170913002506

In a lot of ways, Destiny 2 feels like Destiny 1 and Destiny 1 more like Destiny .5. While the maps are wholly new, the enemies you’ll face in them are virtually identical to those from the previous game. Rather than building on to the currencies of Destiny 1, Destiny 2 streamlines or outright removes them. And while customizing your character is much more in-depth thanks to shaders being per-body part, it’s hard not to see through the cynical cash grab that was making them single use and placing them as part of the cash shop. You can get a ton of shaders through gameplay, but they come in packs of three, for your four pieces of armor.

I don’t have many gripes with Destiny 2, but considering how the original improved greatly during its first two years, it only seems logical that Destiny 2 will continue to be improved upon post-launch.

Valve Changes Score System To Block Review Bombing


Review bombing is an increasingly popular phenomena by which large scores of Steam users downvote a game for the purposes of protest, be it against the developer or against an idea that the developer supports/does not support. It is similar to metabombing, a similar tactic used to lower the Metacritic score of a piece of media, and is seen by some as an effective mob tactic.

While the actual effectiveness of review bombing has been held in serious debate, Valve has finally taken notice of it as a prevalent issue on Steam. On the official website, Valve talks about the numerous solutions that they debated implementing to stop said practice, including removing review scores, adding temporary locks on reviews, and changing the way that review scores are calculated.

Instead, reviews will now be shown on a graph, so that players can easily see if a title is suddenly hit with a lot of negative reviews.

"In the end, we decided not to change the ways that players can review games, and instead focused on how potential purchasers can explore the review data. Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you’re able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period. As a potential purchaser, it’s easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it’s something you care about. This approach has the advantage of never preventing anyone from submitting a review, but does require slightly more effort on the part of potential purchasers."

As previously stated, the actual effect of review bombing on sales is in question, but Valve owns the store and believes that it is having a detrimental effect on the Steam storefront.

Beta Perspective: Wild West Online Is Hot Trash A La Mode (Hold the Ice Cream)


An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.

One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:

DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners

DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.

The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.

But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.

In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.

This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.

Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.

And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.

This is what black people looked like in the wild west.

I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.

Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.

Marvel Heroes: Venom Available On Console…For Limited Time


Gazillion Entertainment has announced that Venom is now available on PS4 and Xbox One, but only for a limited time and only with real money. The pack with Venom will be available until September 27, although the announcement does not state what will happen afterward. The Omega pack costs $20 on PSN.

For a Limited Time, Venom Unleashes the Power of the Symbiote in Marvel Heroes Omega on Consoles! Available now through Wednesday, Sept. 27, the Lethal Protector brings his own brand of anti-heroism to consoles as the game’s 42nd playable character. He’s available through the “Marvel Heroes Omega – Venom Pack,” which can be purchased in the PlayStation Storeand Xbox Marketplace, as well as through a bundle in-game. The pack includes Venom, two XP boosts, two Marvelous Loot Boxes, and an alternate suit representing another popular symbiote persona for Eddie Brock: Anti-Venom!

(Source: Marvel Heroes)

A Response to the Venture Beat Cuphead “Controversy”


Let’s talk Venture Beat and Cuphead.

Now in case you haven’t noticed, I tend to avoid covering controversies involving game journalists being bad at video games. Polygon’s video of Doom was embarrassing on a level that the people involved should have known not to publish it, but the factor that blew it out of control was the lack of context. There was no commentary on the video, nor was there an explanation about who was playing and why they were so bad. I’ve pointed this out when talking to/about developers, but it’s not proper to leave plot holes in your messaging, because the internet has a tendency to fill in those holes and by default assume the worst.

It also doesn’t help that Polygon has a history of publishing articles that are at best outrage clickbait, and at worst an open admission that the author has utter contempt for playing video games and gamers. Polygon hadn’t reviewed Doom at that point, so people weren’t sure whether the person recording the footage was going to be scoring it. As I said in our previous coverage, my dad doesn’t understand how to use a DVD remote control, I probably wouldn’t put much faith into his “this thing is a piece of crap” review. But the review came out, by another person, and Polygon ultimately gave the game a respectable 8.5.

But we’re here to talk about Venture Beat and Cuphead, specifically a video lacking context and commentary that popped up on their Youtube channel of Dean Takahashi playing the game and failing miserably. In fact, the video is titled “Dean’s Shameful 26 Minutes of Gameplay.”

The video above is from Gamescom, with Venture Beat’s writer managing to fail at the basic tutorial when the instructions are literally spelled out for him on the screen. Watching the video from start to finish, you might think that the message conveyed by Venture Beat is that the game is too hard, and therefore we might be looking at a bad review similar to Polygon’s Doom video.

Well that’s not the case. In fact, Takahashi seemed to quite enjoy it while admitting that he was terrible at it. An accompanying article explains pretty clearly that Takahashi has respect for the lost art of skill-based games.

While my performance on the captured video below is quite shameful, as I never finished the level, I think it shows quite well why Cuphead is fun and why making hard games that depend on skill is like a lost art.

And this is where we come to the video’s number one and pretty much only flaw: There is no context. Like the Polygon video, there is no commentary either live or post where Takahashi or another Venture Beat editor describes what is going on. Having a post-recording commentary session where Takahashi and the guy who convinced him it was worth uploading watch the video and talk about the game while laughing at his dismal performance would drastically alter the mood of the video, letting the viewer know that VB is in on the joke and it’s all in good fun. Entire Youtube channels are built on guys playing video games badly and then reacting to how badly they play, so it works.

Imagine adding in context like explaining that the guy had 26 minutes to play a game and the developer just sorta handed him a controller and said “go with it.” Time crunch, plus a potentially crowded and loud showroom floor is the kind of context this game is missing. A staffer standing over your shoulder and/or constantly talking to you while you play can easily distract from what is intended to be a difficult game. Again, we’re not told any of this.

Venture Beat doesn’t even link to the article I posted above in the video, stripping it of what little introspective context that it might have had. You wouldn’t know that the article existed unless you read the website and happen to stumble on it.

Ultimately in both cases we’re dealing with a video that was released in a context that nobody wanted that should have never been published in the form that it was. Venture Beat thought that the video was hilarious and published it thinking that the internet would find it hilarious, kind of like when a group of friends get drunk and record one guy in the group doing bad impressions because they’re drunk and think it’s hilarious, so they post it to the internet so everyone else could find it hilarious, but then find out that sober people outside the group don’t find a straight video of a man stumbling around, drunkenly mumbling half-quotes from 80’s movies funny. It’s an inside joke that should have stayed inside but didn’t because when you laugh at something long enough, you forget that the outside world doesn’t share the same context that you do.

And yes, people are going to be offended no matter what you put out and question your journalistic integrity, it’s the way of the internet. The proper response is for other outlets is to not all simultaneously put out a “no you’re stupid” response about how being good at video games is actually a bad thing.

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

[Community] Turbine Is Now Making Mobile Junk


Turbine is a hard company not to view in revulsion, considering that the company interest in developing real video games probably left when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online were spun off to Standing Stone Games, the rather underhanded way in which Turbine scraped what little they could off of Asheron’s Call while lying about their intentions to hand the game over to the community, and some disapproval over the announcement that publishing of LOTRO and DDO would be handled by Daybreak Game Company. All of this came alongside the announcement that Turbine would be focusing on mobile game development, a statement that qualified the company as no longer having anything of value to give to the industry.

Well you weren’t wrong. Turbine has announced its next game, and it appears to be exactly the cynical, cash grabbing, pay to win mobile strategy game that many of you immediately though of when you heard the words “mobile developer.” A popular franchise shamelessly slapped onto the same Evony clone that Chinese developers have been ripping off and releasing by the thousands over the past decade, one that will no doubt exist for a year before fading into obscurity, because as we have repeatedly seen not even a high profile property skin like Game of Thrones is enough to guarantee success in the saturated mobile market, and will disappear as silently as it came.

Head on over to the official website and you will find several paragraphs about the registration bonuses but virtually nothing about the actual game mechanics. There is a good reason for this, games of this caliber have no mechanics and if advertised as they truly are, a game where the player most closely allied with the Iron Bank of Braavos will win, well less people would want to sign up. Games that, even in the context of video games, have utterly no point and slow down to incentivize you to pay money to go nowhere, like paying for the gas to run your car on a treadmill.

I’ve railed against games so boring that the developer builds in bots so they can play themselves, on a level so rough that my joke review actually got covered at the Game Developers Conference in China, but despite the presence of an auto-play button, you can argue that there is a game there for those who want to play it. You couldn’t make an auto-play button for the vast swaths of identical city building games, because there is nothing to play.

So rather than continue beating down Turbine, I’m going to count my blessings that Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online are in the hands of a leadership that actually care, or at least are willing to pretend that they care, that Warner Bros. and what remains of Turbine are no longer handling it.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Funcom Boasts Best Half Ever As Conan Exiles Propels Profits


Funcom’s second quarterly revenue report is out, and the results are as expected, positive. The combined success of Conan Exiles and Secret World Legends has propelled the Oslo developer to its best half in the history of the company, nearly halving their debt and increasing equity by 40%. Sales of Secret World Legends have exceeded company expectations, although the sales had little effect on this quarter’s revenue due to its late release and will not be seen until the next release. Overall revenue increased 79% over last year.

To complement its success, Funcom has rebranded as Funcom 2.0, with a brand new logo of a screaming face on a burning flag, to convey the developer’s passion, ambition, and history.

Two new games are currently in production at Funcom, with the Oslo studio working on a new Conan game and the Durham studio in the concept stage on a game that will be dependent on the success of Secret World Legends. In addition, Funcom has announced that it is partnering with Bearded Dragons to produce a new game for 2018. Funcom had previously revealed that Johnny Depp will be involved in a TV series based off of The Secret World.

(Source: Funcom)

[NM] Sonic Mania Gets Review Bombed Over Unannounced DRM


Sonic Mania is the latest target of Steam review bombing as users leave frustrated, negative reviews to protest unannounced design decisions.

Launched on PC just yesterday, Sonic Mania is currently on the receiving end of a number of negative reviews in response to Sega’s decision to use Denuvo DRM. While Denuvo has shown to be quite divisive among the community, the news of its presence in Sonic would likely have not drawn as much controversy were it not for Sega omitting it from any advertising prior to release.

Sega has stated that the omission was a mistake and that the game being unplayable offline was entirely unintended and would be investigated along with reports of issues with controller setups. Sega Europe released a statement earlier today, deploying a patch to fix offline mode.

Denuvo is a form of Digital Rights Management that has been employed by a number of developers over the years. Its goal is to prevent piracy by performing regular checks on the copy’s legitimacy. For many titles, this protection translates to an inability to play offline, as the game will not function without a solid connection to the Denuvo servers. It appears that Sonic Mania was an unintended victim of this protection, as Sega has patched the game to function offline.

Sonic Mania still has a mostly positive rating, despite the aggravated customers.