Editorials – Page 80

Top 5: Arguments Against Vanilla Servers Discussed

Vanilla servers are still the big topic being discussed here and on other gaming websites and forums, so for this week’s Top 5 I decided to compile a list of popular arguments against such servers and discuss them. As always, the list is in no particular order.

If you’d like to add your two cents or explain why I’m wrong, feel free to drop a comment in the box below or contact us via email or on Twitter (@mmofallout).

5. It Will Pull Resources From The Main Game

A half-truth, based entirely on how the developer handles it. Jagex managed to avoid this problem with Old School RuneScape by starting out with a shell team dedicated to bringing the game online. Once the game proved successful, they hired on additional members without cutting resources from the main RuneScape game.

If Blizzard were to pull developers from the main World of Warcraft and therefore cause delays and hinder content on the live service, that would be entirely the fault of poor planning or low confidence rather than the result of an inherent flaw in private servers.

4. Players Will Eventually Get Bored And Leave

This argument I tend to agree with more than anything, and it is true that any MMO will eventually lose players if content stagnates and development ceases. A classic server that exists as a snapshot of its time will bring in players to relive their slice of nostalgia, players who will eventually get bored and leave. That’s the argument, classic server purists would disagree.

Which is why the best course of action would be to take Jagex’s approach with Old School RuneScape, by allowing the players to vote on whether or not new content should be added, the will of the people is irrefutably listened to. By putting up new content to the approval of a high majority, Blizzard can keep the game fresh while maintaining the vision that the community has demanded.

3. Players Don’t Really Want A Vanilla Server

I understand where this is coming from, but it is false and a bit condescending. Effectively it downplays the demands of a consumer on the allegation that they are clouded by rose-tinted glasses and that you, the objective bystander, know what they want more than they do. It also ignores the popularity of vanilla pirate servers.

But, like I said, conceptually you are not wrong in this line of thinking. Customers, in many cases, genuinely don’t know what they want or aren’t willing to admit it. Electronic Arts gave a talk back when Battlefield Heroes was in its prime that the people giving the loudest criticism of paid-for weapons not only bought weapons in greater numbers but spent exponentially more than the average. Similarly, as a famous example, New Coke failed in the market despite doing very well in focus testing.

Again, it isn’t completely wrong. There is a perpetuated myth among subscription purists that the $15/month model is not only objectively better for the industry, but is more popular among consumers, a theory that fails when put to the market.

2. Blizzard Has No Obligation To Provide Vanilla Servers

What can you say about this one? It is 100% correct, Blizzard has no obligation to create a vanilla server just because the community asks for it. If Blizzard has looked into the idea of launching classic servers and has decided that the negatives outweigh the positives, that is their decision. It won’t make private servers any more legitimate.

A lot of business decisions are made simply because the creator folded his/her arms and said “I don’t want to.” CVS was making a killing off of selling cigarettes, and decided that it didn’t want to. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes because, in spite of his commercial success, he wanted to bring the series to a conclusion.

The people claiming that Blizzard has an obligation to provide vanilla servers are fringe at best.

1. It Isn’t Profitable

This myth would hold more credibility if it wasn’t almost ritualistically proven wrong on so many angles. Forgetting the number of Vanilla servers that have been shut down over the years whose small teams were raking in a nominal fortune of ill-gotten gains, classic servers have steadily become more popular in the legitimate space. As with virtual console games, the response to demands for classic servers grew fundamentally out of its popularity in the grey/black market.

Old School RuneScape is currently in its fourth year of operation, with a massive population that rivals that of RuneScape 3 and occasionally supersedes it with concurrent users. Lineage II has a classic server in a couple of regions that is reportedly successful.

Incidentally, the people scrambling to complain that “if it was profitable, Blizzard would have done it already” are missing two key points. First, that they can’t name any instances of a company launching a private server only to have it fail while the main product succeeded. Second, that Blizzard doesn’t lean much on profit as its reason for not considering a vanilla server.

Rather, they talk about technical issues and artistic vision. Despite what armchair technicians will tell me, reviving a game from 2004, built by people who may no longer be working with the company, and on hardware that they don’t have anymore, is a massive feat. When Jagex wanted to create Old School, they faced a major problem that nobody in the company was familiar with the old systems.

So yes, Vanilla World of Warcraft might be financially unfeasible for Blizzard, or at least a massive risk, because unlike a group of private server operators tinkering with code, their employees need to be paid a salary.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: League of Legends MMO

670de8ff4ec53dd692d0c4ce9c175c84_original

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

Dear potential content creators: Stop using unlicensed content as the basis of your projects. It is not only misleading from a consumer standpoint, it is illegal and will result in your campaign being shut down faster than you can say “cease and desist.”

Today’s crowdfunding frauster article is for the League of Legends MMO, a game not developed by Riot Games and not approved for development by Riot Games. It is, instead, in the works by the decidedly not-Riot Games studio…Kamron Nelson, a self-professed “lore enthusiast” from Salt Lake City. Nelson wants to raise $5 million to pitch a League of Legends MMO to Riot.

This project’s goal is to get Riot Games to work on this project with us, not to steal or infringe anything whatsoever. We love Riot and the game they’ve created; we just want an MMORPG based on the League engine that will allow us to explore the vast amounts of Lore we’ve been missing.

I assume that Nelson is using the term “us” in the royal sense, in the same vein that I use to reference to other, nonexistent staff here at MMO Fallout, because the Kickstarter page doesn’t indicate any real development team other than Nelson himself and a couple of Deviant Art users. If there is an actual studio that will work on the game, it has gone unnamed.

Like most pieces featured on Crowdfunding Kickstarters, the League of Legends MMO appears to be the creation of an “ideas guy,” someone with no apparent development background who decides he can create a game because he played a lot of them. Such mentality leads to financial disasters like Greed Monger, wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and resources, and contributes to the already tainted reputation of crowdfunding.

So how does Kamron plan on investing the five million?

The money from this Kickstarter will go directly to Riot as an upfront ‘let’s make this game’ offer. If the project does not get fully funded, which is likely, no one is charged anything. It is RISK FREE unless fully funded.

Here’s the problem: Raising money to develop a game with rights that you haven’t secured and making promises that you can’t keep. It assumes that people are willing to fork over $5 million as a deposit in the hopes that waving said money under Riot’s nose will make them willing to work with an unknown entity to create a game with their own engine and characters.

By comparison, let’s look at other big crowdfunding efforts. Psychonauts 2 brought in $3.3 million as an established franchise with a big name attached (Tim Schafer). Shenmue 3 brought in over $6 million as an established franchise with big names attached and major corporate backing.

So the League of Legends MMO is funding hopes and dreams with the hope that everyone will get their money back should the campaign succeed but Riot says no anyway, handing their money to a guy that no one has ever heard of. Luckily the $5 million goal means that this project will fail long before Riot’s lawyers feel the need to get involved.

Beta Perspective: I Can’t Heap Enough Praise On Overwatch

I don’t think a lot of people had much faith in Overwatch when we first heard of it, after all consider the circumstances. Blizzard just got done telling us that their MMO Titan was being canned because it wasn’t fun, but that the remains of the title would be stitched together in a Frankenstein’s monster-like fashion to create a new game. It makes you wonder what exactly Titan was, and why it sucked.

Functionally, Overwatch is what would happen if Team Fortress 2 and a MOBA made love and had a child. It is a 6v6 first person shooter with a massive cast of unique characters on numerous themed maps over several game modes. Rather than Team Fortress 2’s nine classes, Overwatch currently provides 21, split into four groups (offense, defense, tank, and support).

A Team Fortress 2 player would find themselves much at home in Overwatch. You have Pharah as the soldier with her rocket launcher and rocket jump ability, Torbjorn as the engineer capable of building and upgrading an automatic turret, Widowmaker as the sniper, Mercy as the medic with her medigun, D.Va as the heavy, Tracer as the scout, Junkrat as the demoman, and probably Winston as the pyro. There isn’t really an equivalent of the spy, the TF2 character that can disguise and go invisible.

Even Call of Duty fans have a dedicated character in Soldier 76, a hero who carries an automatic rifle that alt-fires rockets.

Even within each category, the characters vary pretty wildly and have a number of uses. In support, for instance, Mercy isn’t just a follow-and-heal character. While useless in combat, her staff can heal and it can also boost damage, while her ultimate ability can be used to resurrect characters on the spot. Lucio, on the other hand, is capable of using his offensive weapon to damage enemies or to knock them around. His Crossfade ability can regenerate health or amplify movement speed. Symmetry has a weapon that builds damage the longer it connects, while her sentry turret slows enemy movement.

But it still doesn’t reduce the versatility of characters. Even non-support characters have healing powers that vary from simply boosting oneself to providing area of effect healing and shield. They give every character the potential to just massacre the enemy team, regardless of their type. Roadhog, for instance, already being a tank with ridiculous defense and health, can bring enemies in close and then utilize an ability to heal himself. Widowmaker, with her sniper rifle and ability to scale to higher places, can be absolutely devastating in the hands of a sharpshooter.

The increase in characters allows for some devastating combinations. If you’ve looked up videos on Overwatch, you’ve probably seen the combo where Bastion (a giant robot) transforms into his stationary turret mode on the Payload objective and just mows down people while Reinhardt (a tank character) protects him with his shield.

There are three game modes planned for launch as well as a hybrid mode. Escort has one team escorting a payload while the other team runs down the clock. Assault has an attacking team trying to capture control points while the defending team tries to run down the clock. Control has both teams fight over control of capture points which control adds to a meter which, when full, ends the round. Hybrid starts out as assault and eventually becomes escort.

More updates are planned after launch, obviously, including new heroes and new maps, as well as new game modes. If there’s one thing you can expect from Blizzard, it is that the Overwatch that exists a couple of years from now will be massive in comparison to what we get at launch.

The only real downside of the beta so far is the prevalence of matchmaking throwing you into a guaranteed loss about twenty seconds before the match ends. It’s an inevitability in any game that has matchmaking, and Blizzard has alleviated the frustration by making it so you do not gain a loss if you backfill a match, however you can score a win if your team is victorious. It’s relatively simple functions like these that Blizzard is known to put in their games to make them a bit more fair.

It is a testament to these games when you can do poorly without going full tilt, even though the nature of the game demands a balanced team and I’ve had a few moments of shouting obscenities at my computer because my team was attacking on an escort map and my team just would not stop camping in their own spawn area or those public games when your team throws the game away because three members just wanted to be snipers. The game gives suggestions based on your team, but it doesn’t force you to pick a balanced list of characters so if you have a team of tanks and the enemy team is balanced, you’re screwed.

I see massive eSports potential from Overwatch, just from the litany of gifs showing up online. There are already tournaments planned, and hopefully Blizzard adds spectating tools in the same with Valve has with Counter Strike: GO, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2. I can’t wait for the full launch of Overwatch. If you haven’t gotten into the game yet, the beta was extended until May 10th mid-afternoon EST. Even if you can only get a few games in, I wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s been a long time since I’ve come out of a game this positive.

The game will also make a killing out of the loot system. Basically you have an overall level that is functionally meaningless, but every time you level up from experience gained in each round you get a loot box that is full of random skins, victory poses, sprays, etc. When the game goes live, you’ll be able to buy them with credits as well. Longer play sessions can lead to better experience gains, since you get a boost from staying in a match through successive rounds. You’ll also apparently be able to toss away the stuff you don’t want for credits to eventually earn the stuff you do want.

I never tell my audience outright to spend money on a game just because I told you I liked it, so I really recommend getting into the beta while it is still live.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Sacrament From Kickstarter To Paytreon

1lg

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

Today’s Crowdfunding Fraudsters come in the form of Sacrament, a game that describes itself as a sandbox for everyone, by a small team of people who have no idea how to build a game. Remember Greed Monger and how that project went? Jason Appleton was just a businessman who evidently got the idea that video games were like a vending machine that you just put money into and the game came out. If you look around the room you’ll see neither Appleton or Greed Monger, the latter was canned and the former ruined his reputation in the gaming community.

But let’s cut our teeth and dive into yet another independent “developer” made up of guys who don’t have any experience making games but played some games and are pretty sure they’ve got the gist of it down. Like an obese man who eats a lot of cake and decides to open a bakery, the folks at Ferocity Unbound are pretty certain that their years of experience raiding and presumably crossing their arms and harrumphing at how the current crop of MMOs and free to play suck, and how much better it would be to go back to a time when MMOs all had subscriptions and companies went bankrupt like it was going out of style.

Sacrament has already tried and failed to obtain crowd funding, via a Kickstarter campaign that raked in just a couple thousand out of $250 grand. Now the company is looking towards Patreon, demanding monthly payments for a game that doesn’t exist and may never launch, by people who might not have the know-how to deliver on their promises. On the other hand, the benefit of Patreon is that unlike Kickstarter which requires a real product, they aren’t actually obligated to return any of the money should the project go belly up. Gamers with too much expendable money can pledge upwards of $50 per month.

If you’re interested in donating more than fifty grand, you can go ahead and contact the developer directly.

So instead of making this cut and dry, I took a little look at Sacrament’s website only to be overwhelmed with a gigantic wall of text that says pretty much nothing. Donald Trump couldn’t make a wall out of empty promises this great. You really need to see the kind of stuff that this developer is promising.

Naturally, Sacrament will have no levels.

We chose, instead, to take out the levels and incorporate tiers, which work as a difficulty scale. Some players will live in tier 12 where their difficulty is at its cap, some will find that grouping up and taking on tier 16 is where they love to be, others will simply take on the game until they are bleeding at the fingertips. We wanted the players to be able to go back and forth between tiers seamlessly and feel as if they were still earning their fight rewards.

You might be asking yourself “what does any of this mean? How do tiers work if there are no levels? What do the tiers signify? How do you rise up in tiers and how is going from tier 1 to tier 12 any different from calling them levels? What are the difficulty differences between levels?” Sure, the description of one of the bigger mechanical changes doesn’t actually contain any information on how the system works, but that’s not important. What is important is that this system is for you, the player.

Tell me more!

PvE will consist of 20 tiers. The first 15 tiers will have three zones – or locations – dedicated to the player’s progression through each tier. The final 5 tiers will be raiding tiers (larger group overworld content and actual 24 and 36 player instanced raid content) where you will have to beat all of the raids in order to flag yourself and move on to the next tier. Let me be very clear here… You will have no character levels, only tiers to show your strength of character!

No character levels, only tiers, right. Makes perfect sense. Hey this isn’t one of those games where there are no “levels” but instead the game uses skill levels that are effectively the same thing, right?

If a skill maxes at 100 and you achieve it in PvE then step into the Arena for the very first time. Your Arena rank is 1 your skill is downgraded to the max for that rank, let’s say 5. As soon as you reach rank 2 your skill is now 10, hit rank 3 and it is automatically 15, so forth and so on.

Thought so.

Sacrament is not your typical theme park MMORPG where the player is led by the hand from start to finish on a leash. While it may be an easy way to ensure players go exactly where the developers want them to go so they can literally control content, Sacrament’s content design is strong enough not to force people to do any quests. From the moment of inception of this game, there were a few key elements that existed before even writing any concepts down, and this was one of them.

Absolutely no hand holding. You’ll be leashed through each tiered zone, but they will not hold your hand at any point through it. It’s completely different from current games, just like how the tier system is completely different from levels. It’s totally different guys! Nostalgia, Everquest, this new generation, am I right?

But let’s talk about grouping. Since your game has no levels, there shouldn’t be any problem with two players of varying experience getting together and knocking down a boss for some sweet loot, right? I mean, the whole new thing about MMOs is allowing players to group up with their friends without having to wait for the lower guy to level up.

Unfortunately, since you are not flagged for the tier, your items are not assigned to the primary loot table and so seeing them drop will be less likely. However, even when one does drop you cannot loot it off of the corpse and cannot hold the item until your tier. This is one of the incentives of flagging for each tier. You’re still getting a sufficient amount of experience and currency drop (equal to what monsters in your tier would drop plus 5-10% per tier above your own) to give you plenty of reason to take on the more difficult content.

Sacrament is very friendly to people who want to group with their friends, just don’t expect to get any loot without the game holding up a giant middle finger. Also hold the phone here, experience in what? Your game has no levels, so what is the experience going toward? And why does gear need a specific tier flagged to use? Once again, how are tiers any different from levels when you are locking away loot, areas, and the ability to not just loot but equip gear? In the end, what is the difference between “you need to be level 12 to equip these pauldrons” and “you need to be tier 12 to equip these pauldrons?” Other than the completely user-unfriendly mechanic of having the game deny loot because you’re not high level enough, an issue that every other MMO seems to have figured out.

It should also be noted that while the game does penalize you for taking on content above your level, there is no penalty for farming content below your level. No handholding garbage, you got that? This is a hardcore game for hardcore people, now stop farming things stronger than you and start farming things weaker than you. Alright, tell me about the raids.

Side note, I honestly didn’t expect the raids to be this ridiculous. I’ve included just a small snippet of how Sacrament has thought up its raid bosses, but just get a load of this example.

At 75% of the boss’s health he roars and a Yeti comes down into the fight. The Yeti boss cannot be directly damaged by players, but summons waves and waves of adds that must die within proximity to the Yeti causing fire damage that burns the Yeti’s flesh and fur until it is dead. Once the Yeti is dead the boss will then obtain a small shield that cannot be damaged by players directly and will summon a wave (or two) of adds that must die within proximity of the boss to drop the shield and allow for the raid to continue to DPS the boss (if enough of the enemies are not killed within proximity of the boss then another set of adds AND a mini boss spawns again); this will happen once every 30 seconds.

I’m not even playing the game and I’m already searching for the unsubscribe button. Do they expect people to put up with this? This is about a quarter of the boss fight description, and it is described as a “mild raid” to boot! It not only sounds convoluted but frustrating and just one gimmick played over and over and over again. The first raid you hit is a 12-player PUG dungeon at tier 5, which if you read above is when people actually start seeing each other. Yep, the game starts off your interactivity with a 12-man dungeon. These don’t sound like game pitches as much as the ramblings of a mad man who went insane while playing World of Warcraft Vanilla and now runs around town trying to put together a 40-man raid on Walmart.

But that’s not enough, I need some ridiculous concept shoe-horned in for the sake of “hardcore” street cred. Give me a boss that can murder everyone in a zone.

The PvE/Crafter raids, Blended Raids, are unique and designed for your Epic Quests for both PvE players and Crafters. These raids will force the PvE players to fight off hordes of NPCs to provide the Crafters opportunities to create items that will allow the raid to progress or speed it up. Sometimes the Crafters must craft an item that prevents all players from dying to a zone wide one shot or build a wall that can allow players to hide behind it while the boss goes on a rampage.

This is all I’m going to specifically talk about as far as game mechanics go, you can probably anticipate where the game is headed by what I have written above. You can find everything at the main website, but it’s all a bunch of the same convoluted, overly-complicated functions you find in similar games. I not only have to question the marketability of a game that forces players through these ridiculous, multi-tiered raids, but I question the abilities of the developers to implement such complicated systems.

So let’s look at the three founders and their bios. If they don’t immediately tell me about 90’s nostalgia, you can count my money withdrawn.

I started playing MMORPGs with the first EverQuest, though I missed the launch by about a year. I was an active duty Marine at the time with two deployments, so leveling up through the game wasn’t nearly as enjoyable for me as playing the game at any level. I kid you not… I spent two years between Orc Highway in GFay and Crushbone. Yep. It was a blast, too!

MMOs of the 90s were fun and enjoyable; they’re where I cut my teeth in MMO gaming. Creators of recent MMOs have missed something. Many are so caught up in recreating the success of one title or another that they miss the mark when creating a fun game to play.

Gaming is my passion. From the first time I picked up a SNES controller and popped in that Zelda cartridge, I’ve been fascinated by video games.

Alright, nostalgia is one thing. I’m going to need to see your credentials. Do any of you have development experience?

Nearing the end of our time with ESO we had begun to discuss the concepts of a new game with two of our friends, Kraive and Ahdora, and I quickly realized that between the four of us we had quite a bit of insight and information. I drew up some documents to see how much information about game systems we could come up with and a month and a half later we had an entire game hashed out. I’m talking from the ground on up.

To my surprise, shortly thereafter I was asked by one of those friends if Kraive and I would give input on an idea he and his brother had for an MMO. I was even more surprised to find that it matched so closely with my own idea about the direction in which a game should go. Thus began a whirlwind collaboration on concepts: the beginning of what was to become Sacrament. In just a few short months, we’d hammered out the vast majority of our core game concepts. Things went from a dream to very real, very fast.

Personally I’m a long term player. Many can look at the sheer number of titles I’ve played and assume I’m one of the locusts, travelling from game to game until the next one comes along. I played Everquest for 6-7 years, I met my wife during a short break but I had intended to return to EQ. I had tried the other titles of the time but EQ was where I always returned.

So we have a development team made up of the “idea guy.” Alright, so you don’t have any credentials. Can you sufficiently play to the 90’s kid gamer?

This game addresses concerns that have been expressed by the gaming masses for years. Concerns that have heretofore either gone unanswered, or have been given only lip service. Sacrament offers so much to so many different kinds of players. I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of this project, and I cannot wait to share this with everyone. Consider Sacrament nourishment for your starving gamer soul.

I could use some nourishment, because reading through the website was exhausting.

This is what happens when the gaming press pays attention to every indie dev with a failed crowdfunding campaign. What isn’t surprising is that the game has a very small following of players willing to throw a substantial amount of money into the void, people who will no doubt be yelling at the press for not properly scrutinizing the developers a couple of years down the road when they dissolve pre-alpha.

Sacrament’s Patreon hasn’t started yet, the developer is still fleshing out details. May the buyer beware.

MMOments: Meg’s Cases In May [RuneScape]

rs2client 2016-05-03 22-16-05-40

This is going to be a short piece. RuneScape is getting into May and that means another month-long update. Meg is an NPC normally found in player owned ports, she asks the player questions and disappears for a while to show back up with a reward based on how well the player answered her previous questions. This month Meg is sending the player on various short mini-quests, real simple stuff that only takes a few minutes each day and rewards a small lamp containing experience.

The update, naturally, is a precursor to a future update. Jagex has been teasing the eastern lands, a completely new continent, for well over a decade now. I’m speaking literally, the Eastern Lands are an archipelago first hinted at back around 2005, probably earlier. So Mega May is a daily quest that tasks players with figuring out mysteries. Right now all we know is that there is a ten part “The Eastern Mystery” series, a six part “Robber from the Darkness” series, and a ton of seemingly unrelated quests. The finale, currently unknown, says that you’ll have to visit Meg in the ports to find out why there is no description. Player owned ports are where the player first sends ships to the eastern lands to open trade.

The mini-quest series runs until mid-June, which I’m assuming is going to be the big unveiling of the Eastern Lands update or some big hint of it coming at some future points. It isn’t a well kept secret, but one of Jagex’s shticks has always been the secret that everyone knows about.

In other RuneScape news, the start of the month means it is time to check your giant oysters.

rs2client 2016-05-03 22-19-45-83

[Not Massive] Dark Souls III Bans A Mark of From Software’s Incompetence

Dark Souls III battle against giants

From Software is putting the kibosh on bad gameplay in Dark Souls III and you’d better watch out, especially if you’re not cheating, because the developer doesn’t understand how to protect its own customers from exploits in its game design. The premise is simple, the system detects anomalies and “invalid data,” such as equipment modded outside of its capabilities or players absorbing more souls than can be feasibly obtained, and restricts online play to those players. Again, simple, right?

“The warning message will continue to be displayed until the Dark Souls III server team has determined whether or not a violation of the End User License Agreement (EULA) occurred. At that point the account/profile will either have restrictions placed on it (to limit the online interactions during multiplayer sessions and a further penalty message of ‘You have been Penalized’ issued) or the ‘Invalid Game Data’ warning message removed.

Here’s the problem: A major part of Dark Souls III involves being invaded and summoning other players. What happens if a player drops you an item and that item has been hacked? Good luck, you’ll be banned. If a player invades your world and is using a cheat that grants you massive amounts of souls? Too late to turn back now, you’re getting banned. Get invaded by a player using a hack to give himself invincibility or infinite Estus Flasks? Your next invasion is by the ban hammer.

Now From Software has a workaround for this that is very easy to follow. You simply need to constantly back up your save data onto a third party (they recommend a USB drive or a cloud service) and just use that backup if your data gets corrupted because someone ruined your file because From Software allowed them to and subsequently punished you for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To make matters worse, the anti-cheat system is obscure by design. You’ll never really know when and where your file got corrupted, who corrupted you, and what was corrupt. Did the system flag your account two days ago or two hours ago? Is your backup safe or are you royally screwed? Why doesn’t Bandai Namco have a cloud system that saves your last non-corrupted file? It also doesn’t help that, by Bando Namcai’s own admission, the system is falsely flagging some users.

It also begs the question of, if the anti-cheat system is worth anything, why cheating is still rampant in the game? Forget the guy who gets banned because someone entered his world with infinite Estus Flasks, what about the guy invading other players worlds with his infinite Estus Flasks? What about the guy using the hacked dagger to modify the save game files of others?

All of this screams of a developer that has no idea what it is doing when it comes to online gameplay, stepping into pitfalls that other, more competent developers, figured out how to avoid years ago. Cheats like aimbots and wall hacks will never go away. Allowing players in an online environment to dupe and hack items, not to mention allowing them to trade those items over your servers, is basic protection 101. It’s the same sort of incompetence and inexperience that led to Grand Theft Auto Online becoming a cheater’s paradise while Blizzard figured it out back in the days of early Battle.net.

The Dark Souls series is one of a kind and deserving of all of the praise it gets, but protecting your online game from cheaters and preventing legitimate players from getting caught in the net is an entirely different understanding. From Software should be baking sanity checks in at more than one avenue to ensure that players aren’t bringing their hacked items into other’s worlds. It’s a simple checksum that exists server-side and that compares equipment and items to pre-defined limitations. If those limits are breached, the offender is booted. Again, so simple it makes you wonder why neither From Software nor Namco Bandai ever thought to put it in. It allows people to do whatever they want on their own game without infecting the gameplay of others.

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

Riders of Icarus Giveaway

It’s giveaway day here at MMO Fallout, and today’s game is Riders of Icarus, a mount-flying MMORPG from Nexon America and WeMade Entertainment. We have one hundred keys to give away for the second closed beta test, beginning today (April 21st) and running through Thursday April 28th. If you happen to be visiting PAX East, you can pick up closed beta access in your attendee bag.

Players who previously participated in the closed beta will automatically be in for this round. There is no need to grab another key. Since we only have 100 keys to give away, the codes have been locked to one per IP.

Riders of Icarus tasks players with taming hundreds of different mounts, from ferocious bears to fire-breathing dragons. Players in North America, Mexico, Europe, Australia/New Zealand, and parts of South America are invited to be among the first to experience mounted aerial combat with dragons and bears! Well maybe not flying bears.

New players can grab a key below and follow the instructions to redeem. For the full list of supported regions, check out this page.

For NEW Closed Beta participants:

Download and Install Nexon Launcher – http://download2.nexon.net/Game/NexonLauncher/NexonLauncherSetup.exe
Create Nexon America Account
In the upper right hand corner click the down arrow next to your profile name
Click “ACTIVATE PRODUCT” to enter your key and click “NEXT”
Select Riders of Icarus from the games list
Click “PLAY NOW” to start pre-downloading the game

[keys id=17025]

Beta Perspective: Fantasy Tales Online

20160418164821_1

It’s very obvious, or at least it should be, when you’re dealing with an independent MMO made with passion. Fantasy Tales Online, as I’ve been told, is being developed by a team of three people at Cold Tea Studio. Right now the game is gearing up for Steam early access, and I was contacted and offered a key to get in a little early.

As far as graphics go, Fantasy Tales Online is virtually future proof. It is retro-inspired but not basic, the kind of style that will still look good in ten years time compared to making a polygonal game that looks like it was born out of the early Everquest era. FTO advertises customization, dynamic raids, player housing, a massive world, and more. But can it live up to the hype? Sure, why not.

The sure sign of an addictive game is one that steals time, and somewhere along the line after booting up Fantasy Tales Online I lost five hours. I hate to make comparisons to other games, but it feels like a higher functioning RPG MO, which is in turn an homage to RuneScape Classic, which is probably why FTO set my clock forward the length of a short work shift. It also bears a strong resemblance to another game that is taking up a lot of my time, Stardew Valley.

FTO is played from a top down perspective using the mouse, keyboard, or combination of the two. You can move by clicking or using the WASD keys, and you can mostly disregard the mouse by enabling targeting which places a key binding over interactive objects on screen. A very handy tool that you don’t normally see in games, and as you’ll hear me say quite a bit in this game’s coverage, it’s the little things that go a long way.

20160418173208_1

There are a lot of little things that make the world less stagnant and boring, while also giving players little hints on where they can go next. Walking through the mines early on, I noticed a rat immediately get smashed by falling debris, warning the player of impending danger. NPCs run around the towns, giving random bits of dialogue and pointing toward places of interest while actually giving the area a living feel. I accidentally said hello to one of the NPCs, I won’t lie.

Dungeons are where Fantasy Tales Online becomes something of a Diablo-esque romp. Each dungeon you enter is randomly generated at the start, a series of interlocking rooms with plenty of mobs to mow down and loot to obtain. There are traps, a few simple puzzles inserted so far, and bosses at the end that will probably knock you around the first few times you make your way through. The first boss you encounter has a trick that took me a minute to figure out, you have to knock out the support beams to destroy his armor. For some reason that makes sense.

I like how quests are written, if only because it’s a nice change from the usual first person view of quest text. Quest lines are a bit more like Dungeons & Dragons, written from the perspective of an outside narrator giving exposition. “Mayor Donnoville say this time he would like you to eradicate one hundred squirrels.” Now I read the quest dialogue in pretty much every MMO that I play, and I can get behind any game that strong-arm’s the player into reading the text to know what is going on. Quests are somewhere between standard and RuneScape, a bit heavier on the story and slightly more in-depth than you standard go here and kill the things until you get the stuff.

20160418182258_1

Crafting is pretty basic at the moment with the most fleshed out area being the ability to create a wide variety of potions that boost health, strength, armor, etc. There isn’t much to say here other than that reagents can take up a large amount of space in your backpack along with potions and loot, and since you can only have one buff active at any time it’s best to travel light. Inventories at the moment can’t be expanded and you’ll quickly find them filled with loot.

Of course, the game is not without its flaws. This is early access, after all, and the only glaring issue that I can find at the moment is that your character’s attacks are rather unreliable, which the guys at Cold Tea Studio have attributed to a few unfixed bugs. While generally not a problem, your character will occasionally not engage in combat without multiple button clicks. It is semi-frequent and, if inattentive as myself, will probably get you killed a couple of times.

Another gripe I have is with the game’s crafting system, if only because it is different and I am inattentive. Right now, you need to manually remove your ingredients and final product from the crafting screen, not unlike Minecraft. If you don’t remove your items, they are wiped after about an hour (according to one of the crew in chat).

20160419213959_1

With about eight hours of game time so far, Fantasy Tale Online is shaping up to be quite an entertaining game. I look forward to seeing what the small team can accomplish. For now, I will continue leveling and providing coverage.

[Column] Is The Division The Good Guy?

TheDivision 2016-02-20 09-09-09-82

I don’t think the Division are the good guys.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, The Division takes place following a biological terrorist attack on Black Friday in New York City, where terrorists use money infected with a virus to kill a lot of people. The Division is a government organization that only shows up when all other options have failed.

Immediately I started asking questions like “how does the Division work exactly? Are all agents assigned jobs where they can just up and disappear whenever there is an incident? Or are the jobs fake? Wouldn’t someone eventually figure out that their co-worker goes missing whenever a big tragedy occurs? Like how Clark Kent disappears whenever Superman is needed? Wouldn’t it be kinda obvious when a large group suddenly book plane tickets toward ground zero?”

But first, let’s talk about Tom Clancy.

The universes created by Tom Clancy are filled with amazing characters like Jack Ryan, Ding Chavez, John Clark, and scenarios that if not exactly realistic were at least reasonable for the alternate timeline that they took place in, and were generally based off of some person or event in the real world. It was Die Hard plausible: Bruce Willis could take on a whole group of terrorists solo, but still destroy his feet on some broken glass.

Tom Clancy, despite his lack of military experience, was a mastermind of warfare, on a level that baffled actual military leaders. If his universe had a war, he simulated war games to see how it would go. His writing predicted strategies years before they actually happened, like the use of airliners in suicide bombings or Russia’s invasion of Georgia, and described creations before the public even knew about them.

The Division doesn’t have a shred of Tom Clancy’s DNA on it, but frankly none of the games do. The most involvement he had with the video games was founding Red Storm Entertainment and writing the books that some of them are based on.

Tom Clancy also had little regard for the government, stating the following:

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.”

This’ll be important later on, but back to the game.

My problem with the factions in the game is that they take popular Clancy tropes and fit them within the walls of New York City. If you’re looking at The Rikers make sense, they are all inmates that broke free and stuck together. Rioters aren’t really a faction as much as they are a collective name, but the cleaners are simultaneously the only enemy faction with a motivation other than survive/destroy, and also feel the least inspired.

After all, they are a faction call the Cleaners, whose goal is to “cleanse” the city, oh and their rank and file is made up of former cleaners (janitors, garbage men, custodians). It’s a Scooby Doo level of storytelling where the characters names are a pun of their jobs. I wonder what Mr. Shipping & Receiving does for a living.

The Division reminds me of the Jedi from Star Wars. They’re a secretive group that, when deployed, become judge, jury, and executioner. Their ranks have a habit of getting wiped out or going rogue and turning evil, and the few people that know about their existence don’t seem to hold them in much high regard or trust for those exact purposes. For all of their claims of being the “good guys,” they’re really more the anti-heroes. The Ghost Riders of their world.

If you play The Division with this mindset, everything makes a lot more sense. You casually stroll down the street and have full authority to murder anyone marked red on your map. Random civilians are absolutely terrified of you, and who can blame them? As the game tells you, regular people have no idea what the Division is, and you don’t wear any sort of marked uniform. To them, you’re just a bunch of heavily armed thugs gunning people down at your own discretion.

And naturally once your character goes off the grid (the dark zone), they are free to go rogue and murder other Division agents and loot their goods. Since no one can see what you’re doing, you can return in the good graces and assumption that you were a total angel during your time away.

Quick: Tell me who is responsible for the terrorist attack in The Division? You don’t know, do you? Considering that the Division is in place as a counter-terrorism force, you don’t do any counter-terrorism. Cleaning up New York City should, arguably, be a job for the National Guard or military, and considering the Division is a last resort group, it doesn’t seem like all options were really exhausted before you were called in.

I’d like to think that, were he alive, Tom Clancy would have put the kibosh on this story or at least put more emphasis on the whole government overreach aspect. You’d probably have a scene where President Jack Ryan fires the head of the Strategic Homeland Division (yes the same President Jack Ryan who assassinates the dictator of the United Islamic Republic on live television) before turning the operation over to Rainbow.

There seems to be at least some self aware understanding that the whole operation has gone tits up, the Division is only welcome because as much as some agents are making things worse, there are others that are actually helping, and the story does eventually come to a decent conclusion. I’d like to see some followup, even better if it is in a companion novel, on how the public reacts to the Division.

With all the civilians still in New York City, I find it hard to believe that their actions are remaining quiet this whole time, even if the word on the street is questioning why the hell this group of people wearing no uniforms and carrying military weaponry descended on New York and started massacring everyone.

[Community] The Demand For Legacy Servers

triadwars 2015-10-10 07-34-51-20

Free servers are the MMO equivalent of regular game piracy, they’re likely never going to fully go away and developers have different approaches on how to deal with them. The gaming community is split on how private servers should be regarded, and there are plenty of legitimate and illegitimate reasons for their existence.

If Nostalrius has proven anything, it is that vanilla World of Warcraft continues to be the holy grail of a large number of MMO gamers. It proves that there is at least heavy interest in the concept. Whether or not those players, plus the unknown quantity of gamers who want vanilla WoW but won’t play on pirate servers, will translate into a profitable venture is unknown, but that’s just it: The number is unknown.

To not misquote Blizzard, they never really talk about profitability when it comes to classic servers. Rather, the answer is generally about artistic vision and supporting the live game going forward. I have little doubt that an official classic server with the Blizzard seal of “this won’t get shut down pending a lawsuit” would be profitable, and I’m sure that their bean counters have come to the same conclusion. So the only choices are artistic vision and technical feasibility.

On the technical side, it’s hard to argue that such a venture would be impossible. It’s been done, numerous times by people working out of their house, in fact it’s been done better. Nostalrius was capable of supporting a massive number of players in a server.

I suspect, and don’t hold me to this, that a classic World of Warcraft server is and for years has been on Blizzard’s potential project list. When Jagex launched RuneScape 3 along with the Evolution of Combat update and players began leaving the game, I suspected that if the population dropped enough that they would launch a classic version of RuneScape 2. Lo and behold, I was right. I feel that World of Vanillacraft doesn’t stray too far from that theory.

Because creative vision doesn’t mean jack when your subscriber numbers are falling and your customers are badgering you to please let them give you money. Right now, Blizzard is in a place where the ebb and flow of expansions and microtransactions are keeping that ace firmly placed up Blizzard’s sleeve. Should those sales dip, I have a feeling Blizzard will come across a functioning version from 2005-2006, and all of a sudden those claims of artistic vision will have been just a prank, bro.

And just as with Old School RuneScape, I suspect that WoW Vanilla would do amazingly well within its first months, enough to fund the hiring of dedicated developers and get the content train rolling in a way that didn’t diminish from the old school style of play. You’d gradually see small tweaks and bug fixes turn into regular content updates, kind of like Old School RuneScape, and who knows? In a few more months its population could rival that of the main game.

But, like I said, we’ll never know until Blizzard tries. Jagex has Old School RuneScape, Daybreak Game Company gave its blessing to Project 99, hasn’t sued the Star Wars Galaxies emulator, Lineage II has its classic servers, etc.

I’m not saying Blizzard is obligated to provide a classic server, but never say never.

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: