Category: News

Stellaris Director Blames Sexism For Poorly Received Voice Actress


Stellaris is attracting controversy over a recent trailer showcasing voice overs coming in a future update. While the video itself (above) is pretty uncontroversial, the response is. Response to the militarist voice has been rather negative, with members of the community remarking that the gravely, snarling voice sounds out of line with what players expected from a militarist, with some speculating on the single line simply being a bad script or poor directing.

Rather than take the criticism at face value, Stellaris Game Director Martin Anward instead ignored the negative response as anticipated sexism toward the “aggressive-sounding woman,” stating the following:

Let’s just say that having some men on the internet being upset about an aggressive-sounding woman was not an unexpected development.

For the record, here are a handful of responses to the Youtube video. MMO Fallout went through eight pages of responses before Wiz replied and couldn’t find one instance of complaints toward the Militarist voice being a woman.

Not a fan of the militarist one, but that’s just me.

for instance the militarist one, she sounds like she’s about to scream “blood for the blood god!”, which very well might be what player has in mind when designing his empire,
but fanatic militarist empire might be much more about war, tactics and discipline than about bloody combat.

Kinda wished the militarist actress sounded more stoic, deliberate, and overall “commanding”. She sounds more like the leader of space orcs than the admiral of a death fleet.

The militarist voice is not just annoying, it is stupid and a bit offensive. Who thinks that militarists should sound like insane Marvel Comics supervillains instead of, you know, actual professional military persons?

Honestly, I’m probably going to offend someone, but as soon as I heard the militarist one, I wanted to puke. It’s just too much. If we’re going to hear this repeating over and over again during gameplay, it’s going to be way too distracting and out-of-place.

Anward’s claim of sexism doesn’t meld with, say, the Utopia trailer which features an “aggressive-sounding woman,” yet did not receive similar complaints.

To be clear, what I am saying is not that the Militarist VO is perfect and beyond all critique, what I am saying is that we had a script for the Militarist VO that called for a more ‘crazy’ approach, and we picked the actor (after auditioning both male and female voices) that did the role best, knowing that picking a male voice would have been a safer bet no matter the quality of the actor. So it’s a bit amusing, like I said, to see the backlash and the absence of self-distance and self-reflection coming with it, because we *knew* this would happen and chose to pay that price.

So Anward admits that they purposely wrote the character to be ‘crazy,’ but the negative response over the character being crazy is apparently due to sexism. Anward also completely ignores that the strategy genre has had a long list of “aggressive-sounding women” playing the role of military advisers, from Civilization to Alpha Centauri and Command & Conquer who are well received by the gaming community.

Menaphos Expansion Will Be RuneScape’s One and Only


Menaphos was meant to be the first RuneScape expansion, big content packages dropped on players every three months introducing new mechanics, new areas, and new quest lines. By estimations, the second expansion should be on its way for a September release, however recent news has revealed that Jagex is scrapping the development style after one go. While there will be larger content packs released in the future, there won’t be a release structure similar to the planned 3 month release window.

In a post on the official RuneScape website, Jagex revealed that while the idea was sound, the development of expansions had taken an unexpectedly high amount of focus away from other aspects of the game, which suffered as a result.

For the foreseeable future, content plans include bringing back polling to gauge player feedback for updates. Additionally, the content teams will be working on updates that have been in the works for quite some time, such as the bank rework, mining and smithing updates, and invention batch 2. The team is also taking a look at other community issues such as reducing the “dailyscape” daily task grind.

Finally, the big RuneScape 2018 poll is available for players. Jagex polls the community every year and uses that information to plan the next year’s content. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: RuneScape)

[Humble Bundle] $12 For 10 Capcom Games


The next Humble Bundle is here, offering cheap games, most you’ll want to play. Running now and continuing through the next two weeks, the latest Humble Bundle offers items by developer/publisher Capcom. In short, the list is mostly populated by Resident Evil games, including the recent remake of Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil. You’ll also receive Umbrella Corps, which can be immediately deleted from your profile via Steam customer support.

At most, you’ll need to pay $12 to unlock all ten games.

(Source: Humble Bundle)

Pay $1 or more

  • STRIDER
  • Umbrella Corps
  • DmC: Devil May Cry

Pay Average or more ($7.28 as of this posting)

  • Umbrella Corps: Digital Deluxe Upgrade
  • Dead Rising 2: Off the Record
  • Resident Evil HD Remaster
  • Resident Evil 0 HD Remaster
  • Resident Evil 6

Pay $12 or more

  • Dead Rising 2
  • Dead Rising 3: Apocalypse Edition

Valve Drops 40,000 Accounts In Mass Ban


It may not surprise you to learn that Valve bans thousands of Steam accounts every day for cheating, between two to four thousand VAC bans and just as many game bans on a daily basis. A website that tracks and estimates inventory value determined that a total of $7,387 in items were taken out of the market along with the banned accounts. This makes for the highest ban day in Steam history, by a long shot.

In case you were wondering about timing, the bans were laid down right after the end of the latest Steam summer sale. VAC bans will extend to all accounts that share the same phone number and will ban that phone number from being reused for three months. In addition, players will be unable to move items from VAC banned accounts, meaning those expensive weapon skins are now permanently stuck to a tainted account.

(Source: VAC Database)

Dev Shenanigans: ZULA Offers Rewards For Positive Reviews


ZULA is described as an MMO FPS developed out of Istanbul by Lokum Games and available on Steam (your mileage may vary). The game has a lot of positive reviews, and if you look closely you’ll see players posting their usernames in the reviews for all to see. This is important, as the reason for posting such information is that Lokum is promising rewards in return for positive reviews.

The notice as posted on the main website (roughly translated into English by Google) promises a 3-day AWP sniper rifle as well as an entry for an even better gift in return for positively reviewing the game and marking said review as useful.

Here’s what you need to do to participate in the event.  We ask you to write a nice review article on your game in the store section  on Steam, and to recommend the game and mark it as useful. Also, do not neglect to write your in-game character name when writing a comment, because we have a wonderful surprise to support our players!

We present a 3 day AWP Samba to each participating actor . In addition, we will give a 30 day Cheytac Y?ld?r?m gift to our 3 players with the draw to be made at the end of 1 month . Event participation prizes will be sent every 3 days.

As an aside, if you don’t live in Turkey or have a way of falsifying your location, don’t bother clicking that Steam link, the URL will present as invalid and you’ll receive an error saying that the store page isn’t available in your region.

Offering rewards in return for positive reviews is against Steam’s Code of Conduct for sellers. It can and has resulted in games being pulled from the Steam store. Whether or not Valve will take action in this case will have to be seen.

(Source: ZULA)

Funcom Celebrates Traffic Surge, Plans Roadmap


This may come as little surprise to gamers, but Funcom today is celebrating the initial success for Secret World Legends, boasting that the game is at the highest player activity in years.

“We are very encouraged by the initial success of Secret World Legends; it has been years since we last saw a surge in player activity like this in the Secret World universe and it is a very good start leading up to Steam launch on July 31st,” says Funcom CEO Rui Casais

For players more interested in seeing what content Funcom has in store, you’re in luck. Along with the news of the population surge, Funcom released its roadmap for the months to come. This week marks the launch of elite dungeons with scaling difficulty.

Later this month will see the release of the Transylvania story missions with the special event to unlock Tokyo either in July or August and related world content. You can check out the roadmap at the link below, which goes through to next year.

(Source: Roadmap)

MU Legend Cracks Open Beta In September


MU Legend has announced its open beta will be coming in September. When the servers go live, players will be able to get their fix whether they speak English, French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Dennis Czybulka, COO at WEBZEN, commented: “The September MU Legend OBT launch for the global audience has been decided with two fundamental aspects in mind: entertainment and quality.” He continued: “As a team of gamers ourselves, and taking into account the feedback from our Korean version of MU Legend, we have decided to tickle the very end of the summer for a global release, which will contain many more features than previously thought. The MU Legend team is now putting in a lot of hard work to provide the best game delivery possible. I’m very proud of the commitment they have shown, involving several departments and hundreds of passionate people utilizing their technical and gaming skills. We will keep everyone updated regularly as we continue to deploy improvements.”

Interested gamers can check out more information at the official website.

(Source: Webzen Press Release)

Red5 Studios Gives 24 Hours Notice: Firefall To Shut Down


Red 5 Studios today unveiled the announcement that should surprise few: Firefall is finally closing down its servers. Firefall has been in limbo for a long time between the staff being laid off, server outages, and a total lack of development, at some point the game completely stopped functioning past a certain point with graphics card firmware which remained unpatched. There were plans at one point to port Firefall to the Playstation 4 which quietly fizzled out, there was more than one instance of Red5 being unable to fulfill payroll, and the Chinese cashmire company that owns Red5 became effectively worthless.

With heavy hearts, we regret to inform you that after much review and analysis, Red 5 Studios have decided to suspend the Firefall efforts on 7th, July 2017. Thank you for being an important part of the Firefall experience and for your loyalty and dedication to the online community.

Your efforts and loyalty will not go without recognition, however. Firefall is currently developing a mobile version of the game and all of Firefall’s founders and players will be rewarded greatly in the new game. We will be sure to provide everyone with more updates as we have them.

Thank you for your support and enthusiasm throughout the years; we will see you at the next battle.

MMO Fallout listed Firefall shutting down as one of our 2017 predictions.

Firefall will first announce that the console version is cancelled before revealing that the PC version is shutting down either simultaneously or a week or two later. Nobody will be surprised, however the last few hours will draw in a lot of people to watch the world burn.

(Source: Red5)

One Month Later: Battleborn’s Free Trial Doesn’t Retain Numbers


It’s been one month since Battleborn started its free trial, and while the game received an early boost it looks like most of those customers aren’t sticking around. While the game peaked out on Steam at 1,561 concurrent users, the last week has seen those numbers fall to an average of 417.9. The number is still much higher than May’s average player count of 82.2, but complaints of long wait times for queues on the forums and the fact that this is just one month out of launch spells bad times ahead for Battleborn.

Overall, the free trial launch failed to bring the concurrency numbers to even 10% of Battleborn’s launch peak of 12,070 so while the number did increase over pre-trial numbers, it wasn’t by much and those numbers are falling quite steadily. Effects on population for the console versions is more difficult to determine.

(Source: Steam Charts)