Lord of the Rings Online Lays Out 2018 And Beyond


Standing Stone Games Executive Producer Severlin posted a short announcement on the Lord of the Rings Online forums this week detailing the company’s plans for the title going forward into the rest of 2018 and beyond. The post talks about changes to classes, festivals, and more, including the coming update that will take adventurers to the Lonely Mountain and also increase the level cap to 120.

Let’s look ahead to Update 23! We will be journeying to the Lonely Mountain, and from there following the eastern paths to the Iron Hills, and north to the Grey Mountains. We’re excited to put these important parts of Dwarf culture and history on the map. Update 23 will also come with an instance cluster and, later in the year, a new raid. Our new instances will be designed for both groups and solo players, allowing everyone to see the storyline that unfolds in those instances. Full groups will also be able to enter into the more dangerous tiers of these adventures. The new landscape has 80 new quests, and the Black Book of Mordor will continue its story into these new regions. Update 23 will also increase the level cap to 120.

More information can be found at the link below.

(Source: LOTRO)

Impressions: Torn on Android


I live in a detached house somewhere in the city. My clothes consist of a pair of trainers I found in the dump, some leather clothes I bought at the local clothing store, and a crowbar and Glock 17 that I carry around for personal safety. My job as a bag boy at the local grocery store helps pay for my modest accommodations, but I mostly get my income through gambling at the casino and finding various items at the dump and selling them at the pawn shop for cash. I found two personal computers thrown out by some guy, they work so I sold one and kept the other for when I’m smart enough to use it for its intended purpose: Writing viruses and selling them on the open market.

I may have also waited for a dude to get out of the hospital, only to mug him and put him back in the hospital. With my crowbar.

Such is life in Torn, a game that by its own admission is meant to be played for the long term. Torn has been running on PC for a long time, it has thousands of people online and living their lives in the city at any given time, with tens of thousands online over any 24 hour period. It is a completely text based game and it just launched an app for Android devices that I was invited to take a look at. Over a week later, I’m hooked.

Torn is something of a life simulator, not in the sense that you’ll need to click the button to eat your morning bowl of pizza before heading off to work at exactly 7:30am or you’ll be fired and screw you if you think you’re going to have a real life and play this game, but in the meaning that you’ll be doing life things like going to the gym, betting money on League of Legends games, beating up a random stranger and sending him to the hospital, and then losing the money you stole from him playing craps at the casino.

There is always something to do in Torn, some new feature popping up as you level up, some new goal that comes your way, some new activity to take part in. Upon hitting level three, I gained the ability to visit the bookie at the casino where I found out that players who I believe are employed by the casino (in the video game sense) are able to set up betting pools on actual events. I bet $100 that Fnatic would be Flash Wolves in an actual League of Legends match and came out with the winning bet. There are also bets on real life sports games, in fact I threw down a grand on the 6/4 odds that Manchester United will beat Chelsea in an FA Cup match later this week.

Otherwise I like the fact that everything in this game is going toward an overall goal. Having a job doesn’t just provide a daily income, it boosts your various skills and grants points that over time allow you to do things like steal out of the till and get some cash. Education not only unlocks new things but grants boosts to various stats like intelligence which in turn allows you to get promoted at work faster, upping your daily income even further. Running low level crimes like searching for cash or selling bootleg DVDs gives experience that can lead you to bigger crimes, but getting caught will reduce that experience.

I’m looking forward to continuing to play Torn and will continue to document my experiences as they come about. I apologize to anyone for whom the formatting of this page is absolutely borked because of the mobile screenshots.

Boss Key Shuts Down After Radical Heights Flounders


Following its launch into “extreme early access” after five months of development, Radical Heights developer Boss Key has announced that it is going into extreme defunct mode. Big boss Cliff Bleszinski released an announcement on Twitter today noting that the servers for Radical Heights will remain online for the near future, however the studio itself is effectively no more. Radical Heights launched into early access and managed to pull peak numbers of less than 13,000, higher than Lawbreakers and around the same numbers as Gearbox’s Battleborn.

Nothing has been confirmed for the future of Lawbreakers, and as of yet Boss Key Productions has not made any official announcement on the Steam pages for either title. The Twitter account for Boss Key Productions has similarly made no acknowledgement of its closure.

(Source: Twitter)

GamersFirst Now Owned By Little Orbit


GamersFirst announced this week that it has been acquired by developer Little Orbit, with new CEO Matt Scott addressing the communities of APB and Fallen Earth to detail their plans for the future.

“There’s been a lot of speculation over the last couple months about who would be crazy enough to take on this game. And I’m not going to try and sugarcoat it, we know that the confidence in this game is at an all time low, and odds are you haven’t heard of us at Little Orbit. But that’s OK. There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m not writing this letter to make unrealistic promises or layout a grand roadmap. Instead, I’m going to ask for your patience as we get organized and that you give us a chance to show you that we are sincere in our efforts to make APB Reloaded the game we all know it can be.”

Scott lays out a roadmap for All Points Bulletin for the months ahead, including a new mode, maps, challenges, clothes, vehicles, and the much awaited move to the Unreal 4 Engine. The Fallen Earth post doesn’t go into detail on any planned updates, but Scott does wax nostalgia of his days playing the title.

“Nothing is going to happen overnight with Fallen Earth. But it’s clear to me that there is something special here worth rebuilding. We need to spend more time mapping out exactly what that looks like.”

(Source: APB: Reloaded, Fallen Earth)

PSA: Get Gloria Victis For Less Than Five Bucks


For nearly two weeks, you can get your hands on Gloria Victis for less than five dollars. The Humble War Gamez Bundle is up and running and you can get your hands on a number of titles for more than the average price, $4.29 as of this writing, and pick up fantasy MMO Gloria Victis as part of the bundle.

You’ll also receive Panzer Corps, Panzer Corps: Allied DLC, Mercenary Kings: Reloaded Edition, Insurgency, as well as Day of Infamy Deluxe Edition and 8-Bit Armies. At $10 you can add on the Rising Storm 2: Vietnam Deluxe Edition. Charitable donations to go to Comic Relief Red Nose Day.

(Source: Humble Bundle)

Jagex Will Shut Down FunOrb In August


It’s been eight years since Jagex ceased development of FunOrb, and the developer this week announced that the service will be coming to an end later this year. The decision, according to the announcement, comes down to changes in hardware and software leading to FunOrb’s library of games becoming increasingly difficult to access.

Over the next 3 months we’ll be slowly winding down FunOrb. After 8th of May 2018 it will no longer be possible to purchase new FunOrb membership, and after 14th of May 2018 it will not be possible to create new FunOrb accounts. However, we’re not turning the lights out just yet. To make sure that everyone has a chance to enjoy these games one last time, we’ll be keeping the servers online until 7th of August 2018.

Membership will cease to renew after May 8, and players with combined memberships with RuneScape will need to choose a new membership option. FunOrb was launched in 2008 as a mini-game portal and remained active for nearly two years until Jagex ceased development of new titles in early 2010. The website has remained in maintenance mode since then.

(Source: FunOrb)

Additional fun fact: I ran one of the two main FunOrb fan websites, solidified in carbon here.

Alpha Signups Open For Rend, Open World Survival Game


Starting today, players will be able to get their hands on the invite-only alpha test for Rend, an upcoming faction-based fantasy survival game from Frostkeep Studios. Frostkeep is a new independent studio made up of a number of industry veterans from World of Warcraft, Overwatch, League of Legends, and more.

Launching into early access later this year, Rend promises to challenge gaming tropes by introducing factional combat, RPG mechanics, win/loss conditions, and more into a world of survival.

“Our goal at the start of this project was to continuously grow and improve Rend by gathering direct feedback from our players every step of the way,” said Jeremy Wood, co-founder and CEO, Frostkeep Studios. “As we lovingly craft this game with the help of our players, this project remains just as much theirs as it is ours, and this public alpha marks a significant milestone as we offer even more players around the world the opportunity to enter the world of Rend and join our community.”

More details can be found on the official Steam page. Alpha signups can be found on the official website.

(Source: Press Release)

Denial of Service: US Judge Sentences Warcraft DDoS Attacker To Prison


The odds of getting caught while firing off denial of service attacks against corporate servers may be low, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that the act is any less criminal. Romanian citizen Calin Mateias found that lesson out the hard way when a judge issued a one year prison sentence and $30,000 in damages after the man was found guilty of attacking the World of Warcraft servers. The distributed denial of service attacks lasted from February to September 2010 and were primarily motivated out of a “juvenile desire” to beat his rivals.

Yes, a 37 year old man will be spending a year in prison because he so desperately wanted to beat people in World of Warcraft that he committed a criminal act. Mateias was also required to foot Blizzard’s costs in preventing his attacks at the time, which ran close to thirty thousand dollars. In case that doesn’t paint enough of a picture, Mateias used the online handle “Dr. Mengele,” after the infamous Nazi doctor.

(Source: BBC)

Star Trek Online Wholly Ditches The Subscription


Star Trek Online is about to go free-er to play, with the announcement that subscriptions are going away and being replaced with a starter pack. While existing subscribers will be able to continue as usual, new players will not be able to sign up for a monthly subscription and will instead be directed to park their wallets in the Elite Starter Pack. The pack contains:

  • One new Character Slot
  • 20 Shared Bank Slots
  • 5 Captain Retrain Tokens
  • An Increase on your Energy Credit Cap to 2 billion Energy Credits

The starter pack essentially includes what a subscription would have normally unlocked, at the cost of one month’s subscription, leading some to speculate that Perfect World is just canonizing what many players have already been doing but in a more convenient package.

(Source: Star Trek Online)

Chaturday: But the Cash Shop Works Fantastically


I read a piece this past week questioning if the bad boy developer image is dead and boy do I sure hope so. For the most part, I believe that attaching names to games is going away, and I think the facts would back me up on that.

Let’s be frank on one thing regarding Radical Heights: This game’s success or failure will ultimately have little to do with the public reception of Cliff Bleszinski. Are there a handful of people who are refusing to play Radical Heights because CliffyB called PC gamers pirates ten years ago? Yes, most likely. Is that number statistically significant? No.

Not nearly as influential as the fact that Boss Key Productions decided to spend a whole five months in development before shoving the game onto the Steam store amidst a sea of other half-baked products. Radical Heights has the misfortune of existing as effectively a lesser Fortnite. Both games are free to play battle royale titles, both utilize graphics to make them accessible on lower end machines, but one of those two games is effectively in alpha and is still using placeholder mesh buildings.

From a gaming perspective, indulging in Radical Heights right now seems pointless when Fortnite exists and has a massive, healthy user base. It’s akin to waiting outside of an Olive Garden while the building is being constructed when the Olive Garden a block away is open and has a full menu.

But Radical Heights isn’t necessarily doomed just because people aren’t playing it right now. The Battle Royale genre may be dropping corpses left and right, but the world looked at Fortnite BR and a lot of people thought that would never catch on either.

It also risks languishing in a PR hell where launching into early access essentially starts your game’s relevance timer with the press. If Radical Heights rushes its way to launch, they’re probably doomed. If they spend too long in developmental hell for the next year or two, they risk missing the exact ship that the launched early to catch. Remember We Happy Few? That game still hasn’t gone gold two years after launching into early access.

I like to look at a developer’s culture and design philosophy when talking about their potential for success or failure. Take Monte Cristo, French developer who in 2009 launched Cities XL. I expressed my concerns on my old website that Cities XL was doomed to failure and that its income scheme showed a deep misunderstanding for the market.

Cities XL not only launched with a mandatory subscription to play online, but arguably crippled its single player mode in order to make the online version look more attractive. What Monte Cristo banked on was that they would have the market cornered by being the only online Sim City style game on the market and that people would pay whatever price they asked for the opportunity to participate. What they didn’t understand is that given the absurd proposition of injecting subscriptions into a genre that had never seen them before, that people would simply say no and move on.

Radical Heights launched into early access in an increasingly saturated market with unfinished textures but a surprisingly well molded cash shop and currency purchasing. Its success or failure will depend partially on the culture at Boss Key and how it convinces gamers to give them a chance and keep playing.

But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.