Category: News

Project Gorgon Imitates Star Citizen: $500 Mostly Unusable Game Package


Project Gorgon is bringing home the news today with the grand opening of its real money shop. At the top of the shop is a $500 USD “Horse Lord Package” that includes a free horse mount with basic riding skill, saddlebags for storage, a second free horse for breeding through the game’s husbandry skill, five years VIP, a player house, the ability to create 20 snack cakes per week, a custom in-game title, and a staff of leadership.

Now $500 may seem worth it just for the 20 snack cakes, but the intrepid players might be thinking; “but Omali, there isn’t a riding skill or husbandry in the game! You’re insane!” I am, but you haven’t misread anything. Neither riding or animal husbandry are currently in the game.

Notice:  Some features, including Riding and Animal Husbandry, are not yet implemented at this time. Your account will receive these benefits when the features become available. In addition, your VIP membership will not start until VIP benefits are available.  Stay tuned to ProjectGorgon.com for specific announcements.

If you’re too cheap to go for the $500 package, there are cheaper $50 and $75 packages that include the horse mount and VIP membership.

Source: Project Gorgon Shop

Guardians of Ember Enters Open Beta…Again


Guardians of Ember is now in the open beta phase. Fans of MMOs featuring high-adrenaline carnage can download the game now and get straight into the action!

Guardians of Ember, the hack and slash title from Runewaker, has entered open beta for the second time. You may remember Guardians of Ember as the game that was pulled from Steam after publisher Insel Games was caught trying to publish fake reviews for Guardians of Ember and Wild Buster. Now published by Gameforge, the title is looking to make a strong return to Steam and other store fronts.

Source: Steam

Albion Online Goes Free To Play April 10


Albion Online is officially going free to play. Starting April 10, you’ll be able to jump into the fray without being required to buy a game pack. Free accounts will be under no gameplay restrictions and can take part in all aspects of the game. The business model will not be changed, being built on premium status as well as a vanity-only cash shop.

As a thank you to their present customers, Albion players who buy the game before April 10 will receive a Specter Wolf mount, 1,000 gold, and 3 days of claimable premium. Starter packs will be discontinued as of April 10 and will be discounted until that point.

Overall, the game is doing very well. We have a fully staffed development team of 35 people, just released our sixth major post-release update, and have a stable and growing player population.

However, we’re also convinced that Albion Online can be taken much further. Our mission is to bring back that old-school, hardcore MMORPG feeling, to as many players as possible.

In today’s world, a 30-dollar paywall – the price of our cheapest game pack – is a massive deterrent for trying out a new game, especially one as unconventional as Albion Online. We believe that by removing the initial paywall we will be able to grow Albion Online as a game and continue to further expand our development team to bring you even more content updates and exciting new features going forward.

Ultimately, we believe this step will help us realize our long-term vision for the game.

Survived By Is Being Survived By Everything Else, Sunsetting In April


Early Access bullet-hell roguelite Survived By has been officially declared deceased. Human Head Studios announced the impending closure today with supporters receiving full refunds. The title released on December 5, 2018, and unfortunately just hasn’t gone as well as Human Head had planned. Steam Charts shows that Survived By launched to a peak of 2,500 players in December which quickly plummeted to 369 in January and slightly over 100 in the last month. As of this publishing there were 13 people online.

The announcement has been posted below for brevity.

After much deliberation and sadness, beginning today, we will be ceasing development of Survived By. We greatly appreciate the time you’ve spent playing Survived By since our launch in Closed Beta and all of the feedback you’ve provided.

This decision hasn’t come easily. We still believe in the core idea of Survived By, but after careful consideration of the game’s progress since its inception, we feel we won’t be able to reach the vision we originally conceived.

We plan to keep the Survived By servers up until April 19th, 2019 and disabling all in-game real money purchases later today. To anyone who has supported Survived By’s development, we’ll be giving full automatic refunds to everyone who has ever purchased items or packs in the coming weeks.

Thank you all, Ancestors.

–The Survived By team

Source: Steam

World of Warcraft Hosts Welcome Back Weekend


In case you really wanted to rekindle your addiction, Blizzard has announced the next Welcome Back Weekend for World of Warcraft. Running March 21 to the 24, you’ll be able to log back in and have access up to the last expansion purchased, or Legion, whichever is greater. In addition, players will be able to complete the Battle for Azeroth trial experience which allots three hours of gameplay in Battle for Azeroth (or up to a certain quest). The trial experience can be played with up to twelve characters per account.

New allies have entered the fight for Azeroth, and you’re needed on the frontlines. This weekend, we’re upgrading all inactive WoW accounts to allow you full access to the game and all of your characters without a subscription. You’ll also be able access the Battle for Azeroth™ trial experience, even if you do not own the expansion.

Rejoin your guild, rally your comrades, and get back in the fight.

Source: World of Warcraft

Story-Driven RPG Lyn: The Lightbringer Arrives On App Store and Google Play


Acclaimed illustrator Jeong Juno, best known for his work on Lineage 2, has teamed up with Nexon for LYN: The Lightbringer, a new story-driven RPG. LYN boasts a beautiful cast of 3D-rendered models converted from two-dimensional characters, all designed by Jeong himself.

“Many centuries ago in the realm of the godlike Daeva, Light and Darkness erupted into war. After 200 years of peace, a pillar of light burst forth and the Girl of Light arrived, compelling the world to move once more. In this stunning RPG, players join the mysterious hero Jean to explore an enchanting but treacherous landscape, ripe with countless collectable characters.”

In addition to its story mode, LYN also offers an adventure mode, rank blitz, online PvP Arena modes, three-player cooperative boss raids, and more. More information can be found on the official Facebook page.

Snapshots: Trust In Destiny


Today’s Snapshots comes to us from Destiny 2 where I’m going to take a moment to bring attention to my beautiful hand cannon Trust. It probably isn’t the best hand cannon in the game by far, but it has heart and looks pretty damn cool with the copper skin I attached to it.

Look forward to a new Snapshots every whenever-I-remember-this-column-exists.

Valve Promises To Nuke Review Bombs


It’s safe to say that (outside of the revenue share) one of the best promises that Epic Games has made to potential games is the option to avoid a phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent on Steam and the internet as a whole: Review bombs. A review bomb, for those living in bomb-proof shelters, involves large numbers of people leaving negative reviews for a game. In the last few years, this has ranged from insertion of DRM, something stupid said by a community manager, the developer entering a publishing deal, an anti-China joke, bad updates, etc.

Valve, in their consistent refusal to deal with community issues, has remained silent on the problem of review bombs. They have instituted what amounted to a bandage in the form of a graphical chart where customers can see if the negative reviews are consolidated to a very short time span.

In a blog post released this morning, Valve has announced that the company will revisit user reviews starting with off-topic review bombs. According to the post, once Valve identifies a review bomb, it will mark the time period and remove those scores from the review score calculation. The reviews will not be deleted. If your review is caught in that time frame, unfortunately you are out of luck as well as the system does not go into each individual review to curate them.

“Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we’ll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched – if you want to dig into them to see if they’re relevant to you, you’ll still be able to do so. To help you do that, we’ve made it clear when you’re looking at a store page where we’ve removed some reviews by default, and we’ve further improved the UI around anomalous review periods.”

Source: Steam

Reminder: Playing PUBG Is A Criminal Offense In Gujarat


PUBG Mobile: It’s not just a shooter you can play while walking down the street, it’s also a crime if you live in the Indian state of Gujarat.

It may sound like a joke that over a dozen people have been arrested after being spotted playing the battle royale shooter, but more than a dozen people in India found out the hard way just how serious the police are taking this law. The Indian Express reported this week that ten people were arrested for playing the shooter, following the game’s ban earlier this month. According to the same news story, twelve cases have been registered so far in the city of Rajkot.

“Our team caught these youths red-handed. They were taken into custody after they were found playing the PUBG game. We have registered two cases against them under IPC Section 188 for violating the notification issued by Police Commissioner and under Section 35 of the Rajkot police arrests 10 for playing PUBG despite ban Gujarat Police Act,” SOG police inspector Rohit Raval told The Indian Express.

Six more youths were arrested for playing PUBG despite the outright ban on the title. PUBG received a ban by police commissioner Manoj Agarwal, who stated his opposition to addictive mobile games negatively impacting behavior, attitude, and language of students and children.

No Man’s Sky Dropping Beyond Update This Summer


No Man’s Sky is seeing another big content drop this year in the form of Beyond, set to launch this summer. Not a whole lot of information is available right now, however Beyond appears to be an overhaul to the game’s online multiplayer mode.

As stated by Hello Games founder Sean Murray:

“No Man’s Sky Online includes a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together. While this brings people together like never before, and has many recognizable online elements, we don’t consider No Man’s Sky to be an MMO — it won’t require a subscription, won’t contain microtransactions, and will be free for all existing players.”

More information on Beyond is set to release in the coming weeks.

Source: Playstation Blog