Black Desert Online is officially available for pre-order on Xbox One ahead with developer Pearl Abyss revealing that the title will launch on March 4. Owners who pick up a founder’s package will be able to access the game early, with Ultimate Edition buyers gaining access on March 1. Ultimate edition copies grant the most in-game rewards and exclusive items, including pets, horse armor, costumes, currency, and more.
The final chapter of the Stormblood storyline hits Final Fantasy XIV today (January 8) with the launch of patch 4.5, A Requiem For Heroes. In the first part, players will have access to a wealth of new content leading into the next expansion, Shadowbringers, including the third and final chapter in the fan-favorite Return to Ivalice Alliance Raid series, new main scenario quests, challenging trials, and more.
Following today’s content drop is the blue mage job which hits live servers on January 15. As a limited job, the blue mage provides solo gameplay learning its abilities through fighting monsters and is available to all players who have achieved level 50 Disciple of War or Magic class/job and who have completed the main scenario for A Realm Reborn.
Fans can look forward to more information on the next FFXIV expansion at this year’s European Fan Festival on February 2, 2019.
Guild Wars 2 is always looking at ramping up the action and drama, and everything comes to a head on January 8 as Tyria’s finest finally take on the elder dragon Kralkatorrik.
In the culmination of the ongoing story started with Path of Fire, players will rally the forces of Tyria to defeat the crystal dragon before it can destroy the world as we know it. With Aurene’s vision of her own death at the hands of Kralkatorrik and the other struggles among the group, players are in a race against time to bring this powerful creature down once and for all.
In addition to the new storyline, All or Nothing introduces a number of features including:
All or Nothing launches Tuesday, January 8, and is free for all Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire owners.
In celebration of its eighteenth birthday, Jagex has overhauled two of its oldest skills this week as mining and smithing are updated to be more in line with the last decade of updates. Both skills have been optimized and made more user-friendly and useful with powerful new masterwork armors being made available.
David Osborne, lead designer, stated:
“Reaching our 18th anniversary is an incredible milestone and it’s apt two of the original skills that launched way back in 2001 have been given a new lease of life. The Mining & Smithing update has been a thoroughly collaborative effort with the community, with polls and beta tests providing invaluable input as we fine-tuned and polished the new mechanics and armour.”
An overhaul to mining and smithing has been voted among the most requested RuneScape updates for the past few years. More details on the update can be found at the main RuneScape website.
Source: RuneScape
Jack Thompson is much more than the pathological liar on a never ending quest to destroy video games. He’s also a disgraced ex-lawyer disbarred over ten years ago for no less than 31 charges of inappropriate conduct inside and out of the courtroom, for intimidating and harassing opposition, whose rambling court arguments have been described as bizarre and idiotic by the Florida court, and for coining the idea that teenagers can learn how to properly fire weapons by playing Doom, a game so primitive that you can’t look up and down in it.
But like Freddy Krueger’s sleazy uncle who sells used cars, Jack Thompson refuses to duck out of the public scope and just can’t stop lying. Unfortunately Florida’s least competent attorney has conned another newspaper into publishing his latest attempt to twist the death of children for his Quixotic quest, the Tallahasee Democrat, which we have linked in an archived form for your pleasure and their lack of advertising revenue.
Thompson, who was once scorned by a judge for faxing pornography to the court, has his sights still set on the Parkland school massacre that took the lives of seventeen students and staff members. He writes:
“Cruz’s own mother, now deceased, attributed his violence to his video games and withdrew them as temporary punishment. In “Call of Duty” you use smoke canisters to hide from your virtual reality targets — something Cruz did in reality. So video games don’t just increase the appetite to kill; they train teens to kill efficiently.”
Here we see Thompson’s master trick that I’ll refer to as “it makes sense as long as you don’t think about it.” Any child over the age of five could tell you what a smoke canister would do, but for someone of Thompson’s caliber this can only be the work of a trained killer, one trained on evil video games. Thompson likes to pepper in his conclusory statements with lies about video games that he passes off as just common fact, like the idea that games “increase the appetite to kill.”
He continues:
“The majority of video games 19 years after gamers Klebold and Harris authored Columbine, are sold to individuals whose ages are not verified.”
First, I take umbrage with Thompson’s use of the word “authored” in reference to the Columbine shooting, but this is another example of Thompson making unsubstantiated, ridiculously conclusory statements with no evidence to back himself up. The kind of conduct that would get one disbarred from the Florida bar association.
“All that is necessary for this dangerous fraud to stop is for states and the national government to apply deceptive trade practice laws that are already on the books to video game sales. This approach will be simple, constitutional and effective.”
I’ll explain this since, as a disbarred lawyer, Jack Thompson is not familiar with how the law works. We’ve already gone down this road of litigating video game sales to minors, and the fact that you have managed (without evidence) to argue that video game retailers are selling games to kids despite claiming otherwise, is irrelevant to everything. Deceptive trade practice laws have to do with lying about the features/functions of a product in order to con people into buying it, it has nothing to do with claiming that you don’t sell something but selling it anyway.
Here is the Federal Reserve’s definition of a “deceptive trade practice,” as per the Federal Trade Commission:
An act or practice is deceptive where
• a representation, omission, or practice misleads or is likely to mislead the consumer;
• a consumer’s interpretation of the representation, omission, or practice is considered reasonable under the circumstances; and
• the misleading representation, omission, or practice is material.
And as I said, we’ve already gone down this road. Feel free to peruse the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association to read about how our supreme court held that a law barring minors from buying mature rated video games is unconstitutional. States do not have the right to determine which video games are too violent in the same way that they cannot decide which Grimm fairytales are too violent for children.
You also have to appreciate how the Tallahassee Democrat refers to Thompson as a “retired lawyer,” which is a fancy way of saying disbarred on dozens of charges of misconduct and fined $43 grand. The website also references Thompson’s involvement in a case surrounding a school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky. They left out the embarrassing details, like how he convinced the parents of three dead highschool girls to take part in a ridiculous lawsuit against two pornography websites, the film “The Basketball Diaries,” Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, claiming that all of the defendants had a hand in inspiring the 14 year old shooter. The lawsuit was dismissed at trial and then dismissed again by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Perhaps if video games were the impressive trainers that Jack Thompson has claimed they are for the past twenty years, he could have sat down with a copy of Phoenix Wright and learned how to be a proper attorney.
I am a neglectful person. First I barely acknowledge MMO Fallout hitting nine years old last year, and now I look back at the archives and find out that I never published a predictions piece for 2018? You really get your money’s worth with this website, let me tell you.
So in that vein, let’s look forward at 2019 with a new column I like to call “MMO Fallout’s Tips For 2019.” This one is for consumers and the industry, so strap in folks.
1. For The Industry, Know Your Audience: This is a big one, it’s going to prevent a lot of you from getting laid off in the coming years. 2017 and 2018 were the years that big players in the industry snubbed their noses at the consumer, and the consumer hit back with the kind of force to qualify as a crime in ten states plus the district of Columbia. I’m sure most people didn’t think we’d ever see a year where Star Wars, Battlefield, Fallout, Tomb Raider, and a whole host of other games would crash and burn in the same 12 month period, but here we are.
So lesson #1 for 2019 is know your audience, and you may notice that I didn’t say “do whatever you’re told.” You need to know your customers, and that means filtering out the voices of people who aren’t going to buy your product. For instance, you wouldn’t listen to a vegetarian’s advice on the proper way to market steak because they will never buy a steak and their threat of boycott is meaningless. Imagine that, but with video games. For example, Battlefront II took what people hated about EA’s other games (the heavy microtransaction use) and amplified it up to eleven for this release. It didn’t work.
Compare that to Spiderman, a game that while having its flaws figured out what people wanted out of a Spiderman game and they were rewarded in piles of cash money. Square Enix, despite their constant claims that people don’t want turn-based RPGs, released Octopath Traveler on the Switch and lo and behold it made bank. In fact, a lot of big publishers who ported their games over to Switch saw an enormous return on their investment. Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s almost as if we exist in a customer driven industry and listening to the customer will get you paid.
2. For Consumers, Spend What You’re Willing To Lose: This is the part where most Youtubers and consumer advocates will tell you “stop preordering,” and frankly most of you would do well by following that advice. I hate to impune on my audience or gamers in general, but the vast majority of you do not have the strength of will or patience to deal with the industry’s increasingly shoddy development practices, and you could save yourself a lot of money and anguish by simply not preordering that new game simply because it has a cool keychain that you’ll lose within the next two months.
But I’ve been writing in this industry long enough to know that making ultimatums just ensures that people are going to do the opposite of what you say, so instead of “don’t preorder,” I will suggest that you don’t spend what you’re not willing to lose. Is $20 too much for Planetside Arena if the game comes out and it sucks? Great, don’t preorder it. If that game in early access were to cease development tomorrow, would you not buy it today? Then don’t buy it. Why subsidize a disappointing failure when there are so many others willing to throw their money away? And let’s be fair, there’s millions of games available for you to play. If you don’t get that release now, are you really going to miss it in five months if it isn’t good?
3. For the Industry, Start Working On Those Lootbox Replacements: I consider myself to be pro-market, which is a fancy term meaning that I sit in my ivory tower and watch people be exploited by the evil games industry. Big thanks to my college civics professor for this apt description.
I think it’s safe to say that loot boxes, while not about to die completely, are in a decline across AAA premium priced games, as well as more notable free to play titles. Developers are going to need to move on to safer waters if they want to remain viable (or avoid the ire of the base) in the years ahead. Thankfully the work has already been done by Epic Games, and many developers are moving on to seasonal battle passes as a way to sell cosmetics without their game being banned in Belgium.
Personally, I love the battle pass. It’s basically an incentive to keep playing the game and just do what you’d do anyway, and I assume tit for tat it probably provides a more stable basis of income for many developers. Particularly I like it in games where you have the ability to cheapen or fully pay for future passes if you maange to do well enough, such as Fortnite or Realm Royale. There’s also merit in the Annual Pass, similar to Destiny 2 where you pay $35 and it gives you access to expansions over the next year.
This does mean actually developing content so we’ll see how it goes.
4. For Consumers, Don’t Place Your Bets On Launch: MMO gamers will be well aware of this tactic because they’ve been dealing with it for years. How many MMORPGs have launched with the promise that they will never go free to play with cash shops? How many have kept that promise? Unlike the MMO industry, however, where free to play is done to avoid bankruptcy and sunsetting titles, the rest of the industry is a bit more insidious in its operations. In case you haven’t noticed, 2018 brought in a number of titles conveniently delaying their cash shops until a while after the game launched. Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Battlefield, and a few others come to mind.
Because they weren’t ready? Nonsense, whenever we see games that launch too early the cash shop is always the first thing to be finished and presented in its full form. Is it because they don’t want review scores and day one purchases to be affected by the presence of a cash shop? I think we’re getting closer to the truth. 2019 is going to see more games pulling this maneuver, launching without predatory pricing models and then putting them in once the initial sales are done and everyone is past their refund limit.
5. For The Industry, Choose China Carefully: The Chinese gaming market is one that has only become more divisive over the past year. Culturally Chinese gamers see less of a fuss in cheating, leading to many western games being overrun with hackers to the extent that the Chinese government has made cheat development for online games a jailable offense. I wish I was joking. The market is also massive and growing at an exponential rate, leading many developers to begin catering to this growing audience. And that’s where the problem lies.
You see, for as massive as the Chinese market is, it is also under the authoritarian rule of a virtual dictatorship that puts strict controls on what its population can see. This came to a head late 2018 when Ubisoft made a large number of aesthetic changes to Rainbow Six Siege in order to ready the title for release in China, sparking a backlash by existing players. PUBG has faced a nationwide ban because the concept of survival deviates from socialist core values, and numerous games have allegedly seen demands to make changes for various offenses including blood/gore, sexualized female characters, “inharmonious chat,” missions including fraud, and rewards based on rank.
With 2019 here, you can certainly expect more developers to start altering their titles to pander to the Chinese government. Whether western gamers will be willing to tolerate it is another factor entirely.
Bonus: Get Yourself A VPN: Those of you who read MMO Fallout know that I’m not a big fan of sneaky data collection, but you might not know that I do a fair bit of work through a VPN. A proper VPN can keep your data secure, your identity private, and even allow you access to content that is arbitrarily closed off to your country. to your country. Thanks to my VPN service (I use NordVPN, but there’s a good review of the best ones here), I can trick Netflix into letting me watch Rings, the 2016 horror movie where a killer video is uploaded onto the internet, and is exclusive to the UK for some reason. I watched the cursed video from behind a VPN, and now Samara thinks I live jolly old London England. She won’t be finding me anytime soon.
RuneScape is officially 18 years old, old enough to vote and in many countries even drink, but Jagex today announced that its flagship title is entering adulthood at an all-time high. According to the Cambridge developer, RuneScape is enjoying its strongest year to date, with more than five million downloads on Old School RuneScape on iOS and Android since launch. In addition to this record, RuneScape is also enjoying the highest paid membership total over the Christmas period since 2008, while lifetime revenue for RuneScape surpassed $1 billion.
Jagex CEO Phil Mansell said:
“2018 was a fantastic year for our RuneScape games, which have truly come of age. The franchise has been growing consistently for five years, and we’ve seen a surge of further community growth with the move to mobile. Old School RuneScape’s successful mobile launch was made possible by our incredible team who’ve been able to make this classic game play smoothly in a mobile form-factor, and which allows players to enjoy the convenience of completely interoperable PC to mobile cross-play. This achievement showcases our living games philosophy; bringing deeply engaging community experiences to players wherever they are.”
Jagex has hired more than 100 new members to the team, while monthly active users have more than doubled over the year.
Source: Jagex Press Release
Today’s news comes to us from Japan, and if you thought the recent Korean law criminalizing paid boosting was an overreach, just wait until you see this.
Japanese lawmakers passed an amendment to the Unfair Competition Prevention law that makes the modification of save game data illegal within the country. The law not only effects services that create tools to modify game saves but allegedly also includes individuals who make the modifications on their own games.
Guilty parties may be punished with forced payments to the game developer, as well as prison time of no more than five years and fines of no more than 5 million yen, possibly both.
Nintendo appears to be behind this new legislation.
Source: NintendoSoup
Star Control Origins has returned to digital store shelves following its removal from Steam and Good Old Games just a few days ago. Star Control: Origins was removed from Steam and Good Old Games following a DMCA takedown request by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, two individuals with whom developer Stardock is currently fighting in court over disputes regarding the Star Control franchise.
In the course of their lawsuit, Stardock requested that the court grant an injunction preventing Ford and Reiche from interfering with the release of Origins. The judge denied the request, stating that Stardock developed Origins with the full knowledge that a serious copyright dispute was likely to arise, and that any harm is of its own making.
“Plaintiff was aware of Defendants’ copyright claim to Star Control 1 and 2 since the development of Origins commenced, however, and was aware of the contours of the present copyright dispute since at least December 2017,” Armstrong writes. “Thus, whatever monies Plaintiff invested in Origins was done with the knowledge that serious copyright disputes were likely to arise or had arisen.”
Origins is currently 50% off on Stardock’s store.
Source: Stardock
Nobody likes a cheater, I know this because of how many times the phrase has appeared in court dockets whenever Epic Games takes a Fortnite cheater to court, but Blizzard really hates toxic gamers and isn’t afraid of laying down the banhammer to let them know just how unwelcome they are. Case in point, Blizzard’s Korean sector has released a partially redacted list of over 18,000 usernames of Korean gamers banned for toxic behavior including abusive language and non-participation which presumably refers to players either ducking out of games or deliberately going AFK to throw a match.
The list of names is heavily redacted and involves the Korean player base, so odds are no one on the list will be familiar to anyone reading this website. It also seems unlikely that Blizzard will replicate this tactic in North America or Europe.
As stated by Blizzard (and translated somewhat poorly through Google):
“As indicated in previous blog, players who use inappropriate language in the game will be subject to silence penalties and will not be allowed to access the game if the silenced penalties are repeatedly used in inappropriate language without sanction Sanctions are under way. In addition to profanity and inappropriate language punishment for players who reported to bimaeneo acts such as deliberate interference ally, the game has been absent from recent enhancements, for more information on this Notice can be found through.”
The entire list of names can be found at the link below.
Source: Battle.net
MMO Fallout 