Korea. It’s a country where you can be jailed for cheating at video games, now one you can be arrested for selling account boosting services.
Today’s news comes from ESTNN, an e-sports website. The Korean government has passed a law set to go into effect in six months that will see professional account boosting, being paid to log into someone else’s account to increase their ranking, punishable with criminal charges. Individuals found guilty can be sentenced to up to two years in prison or a maximum fine of about $18,000 USD.
Montreal-based developer Typhoon Studios today formally announced Journey to the Savage Planet, a first person adventure game set to launch on PC, PS4, and Xbox One in 2019.
As an employee of Kindred Aerospace, which proudly touts its rating as the “4th Best Interstellar Exploration Company”, players will be dropped onto an uncharted planet deep in a fictitious, far-away corner of the universe. Launched with high hopes but little equipment and no real plan, players are tasked with exploring, cataloguing alien flora and fauna and determining if the planet is fit for human habitation.
“This is a passion project for our team, many of whom came from larger companies including Ubisoft, Eidos and WB Games to embark on this indie game adventure with us,” said Reid Schneider, executive producer and co-founder, Typhoon Studios. “It was a dream come true to reveal our project at The Game Awards,” added Yassine Riahi, technical director and co-founder, Typhoon Studios. “We were thrilled to see the positive reaction from viewers and we’re eager to get Journey to the Savage Planet in your hands next year!”
Typhoon Studios is made up of industry veterans including Alex Hutchinson (Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed III), Yassine Riahi (Batman: Arkham series, Army of Two) and Reid Schneider (Army of Two, Batman: Arkham Series).
Maplestory 2 has revealed the first phase of the Skybound Expansion, introducing a new class, new events, and special rewards.
The update promises to be the game’s biggest yet, bringing with it the new Soul Binder class. The Soul Binder is a hybrid magic damage dealer and healer. Players will continue their Epic Quests with new missions assigned by each faction leader and travel to the Sky Fortress, a new staging ground warship that flies high above the world. Additionally, Skybound sees the release of the Maple Arena, a 1-on-1, best of three matchup where players can show off their skills and obtain new PvP gear. New chaos raids are being added with hard adventure dungeons adjusted to help players gear up for them.
For the first month of the update, players over level 10 will receive a care package including 30 elixers, 30 master potions, and a level up booster ticket. Once players hit level 60, they can claim additional items including a level-up potion to instantly boost an alt to level 50.
Fallout 76: It’s a game that was afforded maybe two hours of good press before Bethesda drove it straight into a brick wall.
Bethesda’s games are notoriously buggy, but evidently not even their support system can escape the company curse. Such is the story of Reddit user Jessiepie who found her account suddenly able to view the support tickets of other users including their email addresses, home addresses, receipts, credit card details, and every problem that they are currently having with Fallout 76 and more specifically receiving their replacement canvas bag.
For their part, Bethesda claims that the issue has been resolved. As one user on the forums put it,
“That’s a shocking departure from their usual meticulous attention to bug-free systems. “
Turns out Daybreak isn’t the only company that can split its games in half.
It’s been a while since we last heard from Derek Smart’s Line of Defense, the Planetside-competing open world shooter. According to the latest dev blog, 3000ad is wrapping up remaining features and continuing to port the game to Unreal 4 engine.
“The current focus is on improving the art assets, wrapping up remaining (the game is already content and feature complete, so there’s nothing to cut) WIP features, tweaking and debugging several items, and completing the game while continuing on with the UE4 port in parallel.”
As a result, Line of Defense will be split into two products: Line of Defense will become a session based game with up to 64 players per server while Line of Defense – All Out War will continue the persistent MMO version that has been in development for the past few years. The closed beta servers are expected to go online at some point in early 2019.
“We are expecting to push a new test build to those with access to our CBT servers at some point in Q1/19. No firm date yet. And no, we don’t expect to open the game to additional testers at this time. Those of you who already own a copy via the CBT which we ran for over a year, will retain access until final release.”
Epic Games this week has announced the unveiling of the Epic Games store, a new digital distribution platform that aims to court third party developers and publishers with lucrative rates. The digital platform will launch with a library of hand-curated titles on PC and Mac and will eventually expand to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.
What Epic is offering is a platform where developers take a cool 88% cut of revenue. This puts the platform in stark contrast to Steam where the developer takes home 70% (65% if using the Unreal engine). For developers using the Unreal engine, Epic is willing to eat the usual 5% royalty fee. Epic also promises that developers will have control of their news feed with no store-placed ads or cross-marketing of competing games visible.
More information on Epic’s store will be available on December 6 at the Game Awards.
Funcom today launches their latest title: Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.
The title promises to combine the turn based strategy of XCOM with realtime stealth and exploration of a post-human world reclaimed by nature and mutants. In a world where nuclear war has not only wiped out the last vestiges of humanity, you take on the roles of several mutated animals and humanoids to find Eden, a legendary safe haven in the wasteland that is the post-apocalyptic Earth. Or it may just not exist.
Mutant Year Zero is available on PC, Xbox, and Playstation. Xbox Game Pass owners can get their hands on the game as part of the subscription now. willing to wait two days will find the game added to their library on December 6.
For years now RuneScape has had a bit of a problem with its mini-games, namely that there have been a lot of them added throughout the years and very few are actually populated by any traffic. Couple that with the fact that many of these mini-games include rewards, and you simply have a growing list of virtually unobtainable items. Back in 2015, Jagex introduced the minigame spotlight, adding a Thaler currency and rotating spotlight to showcase various minigames and encourage people to play them.
It didn’t work out so well and Jagex has been slowly datamining and determining which minigames are played enough to remain in-game and which ones need to get the boot. Unfortunately Mobilising Armies is the latest game on the chopping block. The minigame was removed as part of today’s update, with Jagex detailing how the rewards will be disbursed to remain accessible to players:
Defunct currencies will be automatically converted to other currencies.
Mobilising Armies is no longer a completion cape reward.
It is December and that officially means that RuneScape is in full holiday swing. For the month of December and into January, Jagex is rolling out holiday weekends with various buffs and bonuses. You can check out the link at the bottom of this article to see what is in store, the first holiday weekend is already up and running.
30th November to 3rd December: Elite Dungeons & Dungeoneering
7th December to 10th December: Deep Sea Fishing & Fishing
14th December to 17th December: Combat & Slayer
21st December to 24th December: Gathering & Support Skills
28th December to 31st December: Minigames
4th January to 7th January: Player-Owned Farms & Farming
In addition, players can log in every day to grab a new reward from the Advent Calendar.
Fallout 76 is just two weeks out of launch but it doesn’t look like the controversies are going to burn out any time soon. In addition to the ongoing server issues, players this week began raising complaints in regards to an alleged bait and switch regarding the game’s collector’s edition.
Put on the market for $200, the Fallout 76 collector’s edition includes the game, a lifesize power armor helmet, figurines, a map, and exclusive in-game items. The collector’s edition also advertised itself as including a canvas duffel bag to keep the aforementioned helmet safe and sound.
Unfortunately it turns out that players are not receiving the canvas duffel bag but instead found a lower quality nylon bag. One player contacted Bethesda customer support only to receive a response that the canvas bag was a prototype that was found to be “too expensive to make” and that Bethesda wasn’t planning to do anything about it.
Bethesda followed up today by apologizing and announcing that the company would be offering 500 atoms as compensation to players disappointed with the falsely advertised product. 500 atoms translates to roughly $5 worth of in-game currency.
We understand and respect that there is disappointment with the bag in the Power Armor Edition. We are sorry. Please contact Bethesda Support to provide proof of your CE purchase. They will assist in granting your account 500 Atoms.
MMO Fallout 