Category: Editorials

MMOments: The Exiled, No Land For The Sheep


(Editor’s Note: MMO Fallout received a key from the developer for the purposes of reviewing. The opinions of this website cannot by swayed by anything short of a case of Orbitz drink)

I started playing The Exiled a few days before the actual launch, and my first thought was basically the same that I had with titles like Darkfall. “Yea, it’s fun, but I have a feeling it’s going to push a lot of people away very early.” It’ll be hard to move forward with an impressions piece without talking about the ten ton elephant in the room, so I’m going to get it out of the way now: The whole labeling as free to play is going to annoy people, and already has. The game has a seven day trial, after which you have to chalk down at least twenty bucks to keep playing. Overall it isn’t a huge deal, but I feel like not mentioning this would bring up issues later on.

The Exiled is a PvP sandbox MMO with nearly full loot and a considerable number of you just crossed this game off of your wishlists. You control your character with the WASD keys, attacking through a combination of mouse buttons and keyboard commands. Your character can make, equip, and use any weapon or armor in the game without having to deal with a class system.

The rules in The Exiled are that while you keep your gear on death from other players, your inventory is open for looting. There is some solace in the fact that you drop to the ground and start regaining health, after which you get back up and can continue whatever you were doing without having to trudge back from a spawn point, since most gankers are willing to loot your bag and leave you be. The game, as you might expect, instantly turned into a numbers game with gangs of clans roving the countryside and wiping out random solo’ers.

I’m not making any big discovery by saying that this is a niche game in a niche market, if you could take the perception that games like The Exiled has and give it a physical manifestation, it’d be somewhere in the realm of opening a store, locking the door, hiding the key under the doormat and standing at the window giving the middle finger to whichever carebear customer has the gall to ask “are you open?” And if the store owner himself isn’t enough to drive away customers, you can bet that the tiny vocal minority of obnoxious, mostly toxic cult followers of the genre will do their part to make the game as intolerable as possible, be it running train through the starting zone to harass new players, shouting “gg kill yourself” in chat, and generally operating “for the lulz” because the game lets them do whatever they want and they’re too busy telling people to go back to World of Warcraft to notice the population decaying around them.

And this is where The Exiled falls shortest, in that I don’t think that the developers at Fairytale Distillery looked at similar games when they were creating this, or if they did then they didn’t learn anything. There are zero repercussions to acting like a jackass in The Exiled because there are no safe zones and no reputation system. Like I said, you can just run train through the starting zone and nothing’s going to stop you, outside of there being nobody to kill. While it’d be nice to imagine clans going up against one another, we all know that isn’t happening. Instead you have the hardcore gank squads, some of the most risk averse gamers in existence, only going into fights where the odds aren’t even close to even.

The bulk of the game is pretty shallow at the moment, comprising mostly of activating nodes and fighting off waves of mobs that try to destroy said node, hoping that at no point during the five minute wait that a clan will come along and steal the node out from underneath you. The AI is incredibly basic at the moment, as mobs mindlessly make their way toward the node with no ability to navigate the terrain aside from a straight path, not bothering to move around whatever is blocking their way.

The farming technique perfectly encapsulates how The Exiled exists now: A long, arduous grind that can and likely will be stripped from you at any given moment. Some people love this, and I won’t vilify them for their tastes. But when it comes to the genre, there are other games that have long established themselves and managed to throw in some semblance of fairness, even though you are never 100% safe.

In a way I like and can appreciate how The Exiled handles its inventory management. You gain experience through killing mobs, however there is a wholly separate material called Flux that can be used in crafting new gear or it can be converted to straight experience, which also means that if you get attacked you can at least scuttle the flux, level up in the process, and not come out of the encounter completely empty handed. Even abilities are subject to looting, since you obtain abilities as scrolls and must bring them to a dojo in order to learn the associated skill. Each class relies on a specific reagent in order to level up said skills, so killing and looting players isn’t just about stealing their stuff, you can also gain some heavy leveling materials in the process.

I suppose what makes me reel in agony even more than the long grind splattered with setbacks due to ganking is that the game wants me to do this all over again every month when the servers reset. No thank you, if you’re going to give me a job then it can either be fun or you can pay me for it. At the very least, while the MMO genre is all about a continuous carrot on a stick, gearing up to where you can run dungeons with the best until the better dungeons requiring the better gear comes out, you’re always making progress. Stripping that away on a regular basis only ensures that The Exiled will appeal to a limited portion of an already limited audience.

Right now The Exiled suffers from long time to kill on basic creatures, a lack of diversity within weapon subsets, and motivation outside of grinding resources, among other problems. That being said, the game is still in early access and early on at that. I’d recommend holding off on your seven day free trial for the moment, but keep the game on your radar. It might become something one day.

[NM] Switch Coating Designed To Prevent Children Swallowing Compels Adults To Consume Instead


The Nintendo Switch hits store shelves in barely a couple of hours after this article goes live, and if you’ve been paying attention to the industry news than you’ve surely seen the latest distraction that everyone is talking about: How does the cartridge taste? As it turns out, Nintendo actively coats their Switch cartridges with a bittering agent to stop kids from putting the cartridges in their mouths and risk swallowing them. Since the console is not readily available, the effect will have to be seen.

While the bittering agent may have been intended to stop children from putting the cartridges in their mouth, the spread of its news seems to have only encouraged adults to give the carts a taste of their own. Search for Switch Cartridge Taste on Google and you’ll find tons of websites with adults giving their testimony on how the cartridges taste awful, extremely bitter, and just overall unpleasant. So far nobody has attempted to test the Switch cartridge durability when passed through the entire digestive process, but that is likely only a matter of time.

Good Reads: 12 Surprising Health Benefits of Video Games


Good Reads is a new column I’ve been thinking about starting for a while now to bring attention to some other pieces I’ve found on the web that I think are worth my audience’s attention. This week’s bit was sent to me by a reader and is a list of how gaming can actually promote healthy habits. Naturally this isn’t the case for everyone, but I do have to agree on the points of creativity, stress management, and multi-tasking, among other points.

Let’s first consider the benefit of taking our mind off things. We become so engrossed in the games that we forget about the reasons for the stress. If you struggle on a night with stress and poor sleep, you could find that a bit of video gaming helps. It will help you unwind from a long day, and you focus purely on the missions in front of you.

The title sounds pretty clickbaity, but it is an interesting read. As someone who has had some bad issues with stress management in the past, I can personally relate to a few of the points on this list.

Link: Positive Health Wellness

Greenlight Fraudsters: Asset-Flip Developer Dentola Studios Files Bogus Copyright Claim


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

Dentola Studios is a shady indie developer peddling premade Unity store projects and trying to sell them via Steam Greenlight. How do I know this for a fact? Because the photo above and the photo below are both the exact same thing, however they come from two sources: The first, said shady developer’s Steam Greenlight page. The second, the Unity asset store it was purchased from for $20 USD. We have officially hit a low point.

But let’s continue, because Dentola Studios, whose titles are now under the name Jaffstook, a guy so trustworthy that he actually has a VAC ban on his account, has been religiously deleting any comments showing where you can buy said asset packs for a mere $20. First is Escape From The Tribe, better known as Archer Hero Must Die. There is Castle Defense, or Monster Defense. There’s Endorforce, I could honestly go on all day, or more accurately however long it would take to list all six games.

In response to criticism from Youtubers like SidAlpha, Dentola Studios has begun filing bogus copyright claims. This studio is claiming copyright on a game that they didn’t make, just purchased a license for, compiled, and threw on Greenlight to hopefully sell. Dentola has no more rightful ownership of their games than a Craigslist seller claiming copyright on the Tonka Truck name.

One statement that I will say for the record is that while they may be blatantly shady folks with no discernable programming talent and an evidently bankrupt moral code, there is no evidence of Dentola doing anything illegal. Like it or not, the premade packs on the Unity Store are perfectly fine with someone buying the product and selling it as is.

Now filing a bogus DMCA takedown is potentially illegal, because you do so under the penalty of perjury which can result in fines and even jail time should action be taken against the aggressor (pro tip: In cases like this it usually never is). For Dentola Studios, no doubt oblivious to the can of worms that they have just opened, this assuredly means nothing less than a reputation tattered and burning, their actions stamped into the internet’s history forever, and a gaggle of Greenlight watchdogs ready to follow them and document their deeds for the rest of their lives.

I’ll leave you with these words: If you want to know what happens when you act like this, take a look at James Romine’s desperate attempts to rebuild his shattered reputation after the Digital Homicide saga. Go to a man whose name is now synonymous with internet villains and ask him if it was all worth it. Also all editorial complaints are to be directed to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com.

Star Trek Online: Agents of Yesterday Hits Consoles


The latest expansion pack for Star Trek Online hit consoles today, bringing with it the usual slew of new content, task force missions, new ships, and more. Agents of Yesterday brings players back to the 23rd century, putting them face to face with fan favorites from the original series including Chekov, Scotty, and Cyborg Crewman 0718.

Check out zones from the original series, utilize a new specialization tree, and protect the past from a new threat.

(Source: Perfect World Entertainment press release)

[Community] How Valve Can Make Steam Direct (Closer To) Perfect


Steam Greenlight, the process through which developers pay $100 to gain access to submit their games for players to vote to sell on the platform, is going away. In its place is Steam Direct, a process through which developers will be able to pay a per-game fee to guarantee access to the store front.

The new system has been heavily criticized despite a lack of information at this point in time as to how much it will cost and how developers will be able to recuperate said money. Regardless, I’ve decided to put in my two cents on what Valve can do to implement Steam Direct in a manner that improves over Steam Greenlight.

1. Keep Those Fees Flowing

I don’t personally care if Valve is charging money for games to be submitted, and I don’t even particularly mind if they pocket the money from it either. I’d like to see that cash go toward improving the platform, and it likely will since Valve has funded continued updates like reviews, curation tools, better support for refund policies, even though Greenlight money went to charity. For the most part, however, I view the idea of a $100 per title barrier to be just what Steam needs: hurdles for developers to jump over that aren’t damning for the legitimate little guy. Don’t forget, the per-instance fee is what prevented Digital Homicide from using the justice system to harass 100 Steam users, and I have no doubt in my mind that the Romines wouldn’t have had half of their inventory on Steam if they had to pony up $100 for each submission.

Valve is talking somewhere between one hundred dollars and five grand for the submission fee, and in all honestly I think they’ll err toward the lower end. The highest I’d honestly go if we’re discussing a per-title submission fee is $250, and frankly that’s on the high end. This is also disregarding Valve’s statement that the cost will be recoupable, although they haven’t said how. I also assume that there will be different rules for mod submissions.

Let’s face it: $100 isn’t a lot of money if you’re selling a video game, if you can’t recoup that then maybe your game doesn’t belong on Steam. I know that’s not going to be a very popular opinion, but it needs to be said. We already have a place where budding developers can go and dump their experimental free games that won’t sell $100 worth or were just made as a hobby, it’s called Itch.io. Cobbled together a flash game and want to provide it for free? There’s Newgrounds. Steam Greenlight already costs $100, if Valve went with my idea of keeping the price, the only major difference is it would be more costly to dump a few dozen games on the service.

Ultimately, Steam isn’t a dumping ground for weekend projects, high school finals, and troll/meme games. That’s Itch.io. There are other distribution channels.

2. Use That Money To Fund Moderation

This is important, the fee for submission should be going toward improving the store front. By that, I mean it shouldn’t take months upon months of player reports and negative press for you to remove dead games that are unplayable due to offline servers, whose developers are out of business and never bothered to take their store front down. We shouldn’t have to deal with developers like Karabas who make bullcrap claims that they’ve won awards from shows that haven’t happened yet.

Ultimately, Valve’s increased dividends from developers putting down cash for their direct placements should go into improving the infrastructure that they use for said platform, like how the money you pay at toll booths (theoretically) goes toward keeping the roads maintained.

In fact, let’s go a step further and set up the Steam Direct Sponsorship fund, for developers who are doing great work but for one reason or another could never afford the placement on Steam. Let’s say they’re a developer from Venezuela where $100 USD translates to a fair grand. Let some of the money from submissions go into a kitty for these guys and gals, they can submit their game Shark Tank style and let Valve decide which are worthy of passing through.

3. Throw the Whole System In the Trash

Ultimately Steam Direct is the wrong solution implemented to fix a problem that only exists because Valve decided it should. The problem could be solved through curation of games that come in through Steam, as Valve did before Greenlight, but Valve doesn’t feel like curating. They have the money, but don’t want to spend it. They have the employees, but thanks to the flat structure anything related to customer service has been slowly automated over the past few years because nobody wants to do the work and there isn’t anyone in charge to force said work.

So the ultimate solution, the one most guaranteed to never happen, would be for Valve to take quality control into their own hands.

Final Fantasy XV, Tomb Raider Drive Square Enix 9 Month Sales


Square Enix’s latest income report is out and the results are pretty positive. For the nine month fiscal period ending December 16, net sales amounted to 190 billion Yen, a 24.4% increase over the same period last year. Operating income meanwhile dropped nearly ten percent, although Square is expecting a positive outcome by the end of the fiscal year in March. Sales this period were driven by big blockbuster hits including Rise of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV.

Over on the mobile side, sales have been boosted thanks to strong performances by Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, Hoshi No Dragon Quest, and Dragon Quest Monsters Super Light. Square Enix’s MMO’s have seen a significant drop in income over last year due to the lack of an expansion pack release during the period. The upcoming launch of Stormblood will no doubt rectify that, however it does not come out until the next fiscal year.

You can check out the entire release at the link below.

(Source: Square Enix)

Homicide By Any Other Name: The Latest On The Romine Case


Here at MMO Fallout, the dead truly never stay down, and nothing says painstaking existence quite like the story of Digital Homicide and the lawsuit by James Romine against Jim Sterling. Those of you new to this discussion are going to have to read the archives, after going on two years of discussing what Digital Homicide is and what they do, frankly I’m sick of retelling the same story every other month. When we last left this story, the judge had dismissed Romine’s case unless he could present a counter-argument through an attorney. Key part of this phrase, through an attorney. Keep that in mind for the weeks ahead, it is very important.

Since Romine decided to file yet another 73 page document, I went through and plucked out some of the more interesting facts/claims that were made this time around. See below:

  1. Romine is now claiming that Jim Sterling is a direct competitor, as Sterling is “a member of a development team” currently working on a Steam release, thus alleging jurisdiction in Arizona because said game will no doubt be sold in Arizona.
  2. The idea that Romine has been using alternate accounts to put out other games and hide his name, because having either Romine or Digital Homicide attached to your name is guaranteed rejection by the gaming public, has basically been solidified in legal documents. Romine planned on using the Micro Strategic Designs name to ‘rebrand,’ an effort that was ruined because the developer messed up and accidentally placed the game in a Digital Homicide bundle, thus revealing the connection.
  3. The goal at the time was to completely retire the name Digital Homicide, because the name itself was irreparably damaged thanks to bad press and extremely low rated games.
  4. Romine believes that it is unfair for Digital Homicide’s poor reputation to follow to a new company owned and operated by the same people.
  5. How easy it is to game Steam Greenlight: According to the court documents, Attrition: Nuclear Domination made it through Steam Greenlight with just 500 yes votes. If you’re wondering how all of these bad games get through, here is your answer.
  6. Romine has more alternate accounts, under the names Vampier Straud, TheMac, SimplebutFunGames, and Micro Strategic Designs. There are seven total, four owned 100% by Romine.
  7. Valve nearly gave Digital Homicide the boot in 2015: According to the documents, Valve nearly gave Digital Homicide the boot in October 2015, stopping only because Romine begged (his word) them not to, promising to remove his future products to avoid having everything shut down. Incidentally, Valve would ultimately terminate their business with Digital Homicide following aggressive legal action from the latter.
  8. Someone sent a bag of poop by mail to Digital Homicide. Don’t do that.

How will the court respond? There’s only one way to find out. Tune in next time, folks.

[NM] The Sorceress: Worthy of its Fake Awards?


Not too long ago I talked about The Sorceress, a game so good that it fraudulently touted itself as winning numerous awards and promptly banned anyone who dared to say otherwise. But how bad can a game be that, in a theoretical alternate universe, managed to take home best graphics, best atmosphere, best action, the Indie World Award, and the Dev Gamm award that hadn’t even happened yet?

Pretty bad.

The sorceress tells the story of a world torn asunder by bad creatures, and you the sorceress are the only one that can stop them. The game tells you this through broken English narration and recorded video of the main character hitting things with her sword while numbers pop out. You’d be forgiven if you mistook this for a bad fan-made machinima project, all it’s missing is the five frames per second video and the ‘unregistered bandicam’ logo splashed at the top.

You often hear game critics talk about developers not bothering to put any effort into their quests, but I think Karabas Studio should be claiming a patent on the concept. The second quest you receive in the game is from an innkeeper and literally just says “I need to kill 2 Skeletons. Can you kill the skeletons for me, please?” So you kill the 2 skeletons, come back, and receive a healing potion. Your next quest? “I need to kill 10 skeletons. Can you kill the skeletons for me, please?” It has nothing to do with the broken English, that I could at least have some sympathy for.

After you kill the skeleton king, the game gains more of a semblance of plot, but not really. There are monsters in a nearby dungeon and they want to destroy the town. If you want to stop them from doing that, you’re going to have to kill them. That’s pretty much it.

The controls and mechanics in the game are an utter mess, almost as if it was developed by someone who didn’t have the faintest clue on how to create a video game, from the action hotbar that doesn’t work much of the time to the health/mana potions that are button operated and have no cooldown between use. Your first interaction will likely be wondering why the hell none of the NPCs are interactive until you figure out that the developer has mapped that button to I. Yes, I, the universally accepted interact button.

The dungeon that makes up the breadth of the game is a one way series of corridors randomly dotted with a small assortment of lazily cobbled together generic fantasy mobs. Enemies in the game respawn so quickly, including bosses, that by the time you’ve cleared out a room the one behind you has repopulated. That’s assuming of course that they don’t just immediately respawn where the previous one dropped. That’s also assuming that you can manage to stay locked on to an enemy, since the tab targeting barely functions and using the mouse to target is like trying to walk a cat on a leash.

There are a ton of little things here and there that should be second grade knowledge when building a game, but somehow still managed to be missed. Inventory management is, well, nonexistent. You can’t move items to different slots, you can’t drop stacks, and the button disappears whenever you do something. In order to drop the stack of 20 ‘sculls’ (their spelling, not mine) that you’ve collected, you need to click the skull, click drop, rinse, and repeat. And be sure to drop them in a place you’ll never go back to, the items stay on the floor forever, even after shutting the game off, and you pick them up automatically by walking near them.

By the end of the game, your inventory is a cluttered mess of teleport gems and keys that are forever placed at the earliest spot you had an open inventory space. The teleport gems, presumably a workaround to the game’s awful spawning system, teleports you deeper into the dungeon since you respawn at the front when you die. There is a five minute cooldown, however there wasn’t a visible countdown that I saw. You just have to keep using the item until it works.

Characters and enemies in the game are a mixed bag of store bought assets, including your player character who appears to be a random stock anime girl. You pick up palette swap armor and weapons over the course of the game that don’t affect your appearance, since that would require someone with modeling knowledge and thus be far beyond this game’s technical budget. Armor and weapons are just six color swaps of the same items, and there’s only a small handful of enemies that the game reuses prolifically.

Enemy AI is, expectedly, idiotic. Since mobs respond based on your proximity alone rather than to damage received, it is entirely possible to set yourself up with longer range spells and just keep peppering them from afar. In fact, this is how I beat the final boss. A sad, but not unexpected end to an equally sad and not all that unexpected game. You should keep your eyes open, for a game with early 2000’s graphics and not a hint of atmosphere, the draw distance is disgustingly short, rarely going as far as the length of the room you’re in.

I managed to beat The Sorceress in under five hours, because part of me wanted to finish the game and prove some semblance of “it wasn’t all that bad,” but I’m not going to turn this into a cost analysis based on the seven dollars I paid because it was five hours of pain and frustration. In a world where one-man games are becoming increasingly high quality, where Steam is getting piled on like a landfill with trash, games like The Sorceress don’t have a place, not even for the people who like the ‘so bad it’s funny’ aspect. It’s not funny anymore.

One thing I didn’t mention about the game is the graphics, since they are Unity assets and it doesn’t seem right to pass judgement on something the developer didn’t make. It’s like praising your dad’s baking skills over the Marie Callender pie he picked up at Wal Mart and moved from the tin over to a fancy looking plate. What I will say is that the assets are the gaming equivalent of a ransom note made out of cut up newspaper clippings, with characters that look like they were hastily ripped from a dollar store toy box and thrown together without much thought to consistency or quality.

By all counts, my coverage of this game will no doubt see more traffic than the actual game itself will see sales. The best we can hope for is that games like this continue to be smothered in the white noise that is the current Steam release climate.

The Exiled Hits Steam February 23rd


The Exiled is an upcoming game that promises to merge survival strategy with skill-based PVP combat, and the last time we covered the title was to point out how the developers plan on handling low server population during alpha. The good news is, we’ll be able to see just how well that works as the team at Fairytale Distillery has announced a launch date of February 23 for early access launch on Steam. Early access packages will be available starting at $19.99 and going up to $79.99, containing cosmetic goodies based on which option you choose.

Even better, all players will have access to a 7-day free trial in case you’d actually like to play the game before you throw down real money on it. For more information, check out the FAQ here and the game on Steam.

(Source: The Exiled)