As they say, all good things must come to an end, and they also say that development costs money and money doesn’t grow on trees. Gearbox Software has announced that this fall’s update to Battleborn will be the last. The fall update was announced at PAX and includes new skins, map and balance tweaks, as well as new boosts and taunts.
But never fear, those of you who actually bought this game and intend on continuing to play it. The servers for Battleborn will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Never fear! Battleborn is here to stay. Nothing is changing with Battleborn, and the servers will be up and active for the foreseeable future. We announced the Fall Update for the game at PAX including some new skins, themed around some of your favorite Borderlands characters! That update will also include some updated title art (more full bar titles!) for the more significant challenges in the game, as well as some additional Finisher Boosts and Taunts. Also, there are minor balance changes in that patch.
Creative director Randy Varnell has moved on to new projects, likely including Borderlands 3, which 90% of the Gearbox staff is currently working on. Battleborn launched in May 2016 and got lost in the midst of Overwatch’s massive overtaking of first person shooters. On Saturday night, the game peaked at 106 players on PC.
An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.
One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:
DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners
DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.
The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.
But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.
In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.
This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.
Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.
And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.
This is what black people looked like in the wild west.
I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.
Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.
I have a distinct advantage over traditional media with MMO Fallout; I don’t run ads, I don’t have sponsors, and I have given minimal thought to opening a Patreon. As an entity, I am completely unaccountable for boosting views to their maximum potential, and as a result I enjoy the unique trait of not being beholden to being the first to publish a breaking story. I do try to keep the news relevant, but at least I have the time to do some fact checking.
Which leads me to this week’s failure to communicate: A number of news websites are running retractions and corrections after it was revealed that stories on Reddit are not entirely trustworthy. A user in the Star Citizen community claimed that he had managed to obtain a refund in excess of $45,000, in the form of three $15,000 refunds for his clan, and that the process had been a "nightmare." This got picked up by a number of websites, I won’t be calling them out because that’s not the point of this article.
So let’s go through the piece and I’ll offer my thought process that came to ignoring this news piece:
"It was a nightmare getting the refund, we are a commercial org and pooled the money to buy the completionist packages, and used a corporate card to buy them, so we had major issues with getting refunded to the same card, paypal and then providing ID. Total it took about 5 weeks to get sorted. A lot of time was spent trying to explain the situation to some woman called "Schala" and just getting the same answers copied and pasted backwards and forwards, they definitely try to delay you as much as possible in the hope you’ll forget or give up."
First let’s get out of the way that this is a first party Reddit story and therefore automatically less credible than your average "Zombie Elvis Lives in Reno" story on the Enquirer (he still performs in Vegas as a member of the Blue Man Group, as anyone knows). On policy, I don’t trust anything that is posted as a story on Reddit, even if the person has "evidence" in the form of easily doctored screenshots and gifs, and doubly so if said poster claims it’s "impossible" to fake navigating a website in a video. It is possible, and it’s very easy.
I also had trouble believing the part of the story that they were trying to delay as much as possible in the hopes that the issue would be forgotten or that he would give up. I don’t think any company thinks that a customer is just going to give up on nearly fifty grand.
Now I don’t claim to be a licensed journalist with a fancy journalism degree, but I know enough from experience and from watching all three seasons of The Newsroom to know that stories must be verified before they are printed. In the thread, another moderator independently verified the refund claims, a factor that isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. You’re verifying an anonymous source with another anonymous source.
So the proper thing to do would be to contact Cloud Imperium Games for confirmation which evidently nobody did before rushing this story to print. CIG has come out since then and stated that the refund was more along the lines of $330 and that the refund was handled smoothly and without issues, also noting that most of the story regarding delays was completely fabricated.
And in case you had any remaining doubts, the user subsequently deleted his account. Case closed. I’m hesitant to attribute the story to "haters" as some in the Star Citizen community have, if anything this is a case of an attention-grabbing headline driving the news on the backs of "well we did say it was just an allegation." And judging by the number of comments on individual articles, it was a success.
Gazillion Entertainment has announced that Venom is now available on PS4 and Xbox One, but only for a limited time and only with real money. The pack with Venom will be available until September 27, although the announcement does not state what will happen afterward. The Omega pack costs $20 on PSN.
For a Limited Time, Venom Unleashes the Power of the Symbiote in Marvel Heroes Omega on Consoles! Available now through Wednesday, Sept. 27, the Lethal Protector brings his own brand of anti-heroism to consoles as the game’s 42nd playable character. He’s available through the “Marvel Heroes Omega – Venom Pack,” which can be purchased in the PlayStation Storeand Xbox Marketplace, as well as through a bundle in-game. The pack includes Venom, two XP boosts, two Marvelous Loot Boxes, and an alternate suit representing another popular symbiote persona for Eddie Brock: Anti-Venom!
Bungie has announced that a piece of equipment after it came to their attention that said armor bears the mark of a “hate symbol.” The company announced the alteration via Twitter, noting that the armor bears a striking resemblance to the Kekistani flag, a meme that has become synonymous with the alt-right, a collection of Trump supporters, along with the frog Pepe and other such memes.
“It’s come to our attention that a gauntlet in Destiny 2 shares elements with a hate symbol. It is not intentional. We are removing it. Our deepest apologies. This does NOT represent our values, and we are working quickly to correct this. We renounce hate in all forms.”
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons posted the following on Twitter in response to the announcement:
“At Bungie, our company values place the highest emphasis on inclusion of all people and respect for all who work with us or play our games.”
The announcement has been met with both positive and negative reactions across the net. The term “kek” was popularized in part due to World of Warcraft, where cross-faction language changes “lol” to “kek,” with the latter slowly replacing the former in online chatter. While the Kekistani flag has been labeled a hate symbol by some outfits due to its resemblance to the swastika, supporters claim that the flag is a mockery of ethnic nationalism, not a symbol of support for it.
Regardless, it appears that Bungie is having nothing of it.
Middle Earth: Shadow of War is the long awaited sequel to Shadow of Mordor, a highly rated open world fighter that takes place in everyone’s favorite land of Mordor. Players once again control of Talion as he forges a new ring of power and attempts to keep control of it for use in the war against Sauron and his forces of darkness. The game doesn’t officially launch until October 10, but it just so happens that I was in the store and they miraculously had a copy on the shelf already. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity for an exclusive review, so I took it.
The more I play this, the more I’m pretty sure that this is an unreleased prototype spinoff, possibly taking place in between the first two games. My local store had a copy called the Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition, and frankly within ten minutes I could tell that this would revolutionize gaming as a medium. To start, the special edition was clearly mislabeled and thus rang up for about $4 at the counter. The cashier didn’t seem to care that I was getting this product more than a month early.
And I know what you nerds are going to say: Why focus on Pepperoni as a character when she was such a minuscule factor in the books and never made it into the movies? Look, I love Lord of the Rings just as much as any of you do, likely a lot more. I’ve read the books literally three thousand times each, and I’ve been waiting what feels like decades for the Tolkein Estate to finally release the rights to Pepperoni for her own game. In fact, just the idea that pervasive sexists are fighting so hard against her appearance as a lead character should be all the evidence the Warner Bros needs to put her front and center.
The most surprising thing of Shadow of War’s Pepperoni spinoff is that it not only isn’t compatible with any of the current gen systems. Instead, Pepperoni Edition is compatible with most microwaves and convection ovens. It does contain a code for 100 coins in the main game, however. The cashier told me that this game doesn’t play as well on the microwave, so for the ultimate experience I went with my trusty convection oven. After a quick 10 minute installation process at 400 degrees, I was ready to go.
Let’s get into Pepperoni as a character in Shadow of War. It’s nice to see Warner Bros. finally giving us a gritty female character, one with a tough, crispy outer shell that actually hides a rather saucy personality underneath. We see a character that is both sweet and a bit tart, always ready to help when called. The dialogue can get a little cheesy in parts and it lacked a really meaty ending, but overall the presentation is one that you can really sink your teeth into.
While her motivations aren’t as in your face as, say, Talion wanting to survive and destroy Sauron in the main game, it’s pretty clear from the get go that Pepperoni is all about sustaining the survivors still hiding within Mordor. She wants to enrich life back into the lands via copious amounts of iron and protein. The game really goes far to show the gritty, greasy reality of life in Mordor and while I wouldn’t exactly call this game “profane,” it is dirty enough that you will literally need some napkins in order to walk out with your hands clean. Perhaps some wet naps.
The delivery method of Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is going to irk some customers. The idea of games slowly becoming more of a service than a product has become more popular over time, but this is the first game made entirely out of consumables. The box came with 40 consumables that must be individually installed, of which I used a baker’s dozen for this review. Now I can see why this cost $4 at the store, most will beat it in less than a week while hardcore games can probably get through it in a day. I did severely burn my mouth on the first three consumables, but that’s the cost of games journalism.
There is little doubt in my mind that this review is going to get slammed on social media because “oh it’s not a real game,” and “oh Connor you don’t know what a real game is, you’re not a real games journalist.” Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition doesn’t cater to the ‘hardcore gamer,’ the unemployed basement dweller who has all the time in the world to memorize button combinations. You don’t need quick reflexes to play this game well, nor do you need to memorize insane codes or find secret areas. Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition can be played both solo or co-op/competitive, but there is no online option.
MMO Fallout Verdict: 4.5/5 – Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is a welcome spinoff of presumably a great game. It’s simple to install, engaging to play, and features a filled out protagonist with clear cut motivations. Will it win the hearts and minds of hardcore gamers? No, but the general public will find something to love in Pepperoni’s cheesiness.
Old School RuneScape this week saw the launch of Fossil Island, a new batch of content for the retro RuneScape. Fossil Island opens up a ton of new content, including the much awaited launch of skeletal wyverns. You can collect fossils, take part in one of several new skilling locations, and uncover new artifacts to fill the expanded Varrok museum.
“Fossil Island has been something of a myth in RuneScape and the community for a long time,” said Mathew Kemp, senior product manager, Old School RuneScape. “The first design documents were drafted more than a decade ago, so we were really pleased the Old School RuneScape community voted so overwhelmingly and backed its development and release into the game.”
More on the update can be found at the link below.
Malaysian gamers looking to spend their hard earned ringgits on fresh picked video games are being met with a disappointing notice that the service has been blocked by the government due to allegedly offensive content. Users attempting to access the store are being notified that access has been blocked by the government.
The game in question, Fight of Gods, is a side scrolling fighter that allows players to take control of various real deities including, but not limited to, Jesus and Buddha. The Malaysian government had apparently issued a 24 hour warning on Thursday to Valve to remove the game or face restrictions. The blockage of Steam appears to be part of that warning.
“This is a very sensitive issue, and it is totally not acceptable. We can never agree to such games. The government must take immediate action to ban the game’s sale here,”
Fight of Gods publisher, Taiwanese developer Digital Crafter, has issued a statement that they are contacting Valve to rectify the matter.
"We are disappointed that such freedom of choice is not given to everyone and in particular that the game has been forcibly removed from sale in Malaysia, although no direct communication has been received by us as to the reasons for this. Nevertheless we respect any rules and censorship imposed in any given territory."
Users in Malaysia can still access Steam, just not its store.
Now in case you haven’t noticed, I tend to avoid covering controversies involving game journalists being bad at video games. Polygon’s video of Doom was embarrassing on a level that the people involved should have known not to publish it, but the factor that blew it out of control was the lack of context. There was no commentary on the video, nor was there an explanation about who was playing and why they were so bad. I’ve pointed this out when talking to/about developers, but it’s not proper to leave plot holes in your messaging, because the internet has a tendency to fill in those holes and by default assume the worst.
It also doesn’t help that Polygon has a history of publishing articles that are at best outrage clickbait, and at worst an open admission that the author has utter contempt for playing video games and gamers. Polygon hadn’t reviewed Doom at that point, so people weren’t sure whether the person recording the footage was going to be scoring it. As I said in our previous coverage, my dad doesn’t understand how to use a DVD remote control, I probably wouldn’t put much faith into his “this thing is a piece of crap” review. But the review came out, by another person, and Polygon ultimately gave the game a respectable 8.5.
But we’re here to talk about Venture Beat and Cuphead, specifically a video lacking context and commentary that popped up on their Youtube channel of Dean Takahashi playing the game and failing miserably. In fact, the video is titled “Dean’s Shameful 26 Minutes of Gameplay.”
The video above is from Gamescom, with Venture Beat’s writer managing to fail at the basic tutorial when the instructions are literally spelled out for him on the screen. Watching the video from start to finish, you might think that the message conveyed by Venture Beat is that the game is too hard, and therefore we might be looking at a bad review similar to Polygon’s Doom video.
Well that’s not the case. In fact, Takahashi seemed to quite enjoy it while admitting that he was terrible at it. An accompanying article explains pretty clearly that Takahashi has respect for the lost art of skill-based games.
While my performance on the captured video below is quite shameful, as I never finished the level, I think it shows quite well why Cuphead is fun and why making hard games that depend on skill is like a lost art.
And this is where we come to the video’s number one and pretty much only flaw: There is no context. Like the Polygon video, there is no commentary either live or post where Takahashi or another Venture Beat editor describes what is going on. Having a post-recording commentary session where Takahashi and the guy who convinced him it was worth uploading watch the video and talk about the game while laughing at his dismal performance would drastically alter the mood of the video, letting the viewer know that VB is in on the joke and it’s all in good fun. Entire Youtube channels are built on guys playing video games badly and then reacting to how badly they play, so it works.
Imagine adding in context like explaining that the guy had 26 minutes to play a game and the developer just sorta handed him a controller and said “go with it.” Time crunch, plus a potentially crowded and loud showroom floor is the kind of context this game is missing. A staffer standing over your shoulder and/or constantly talking to you while you play can easily distract from what is intended to be a difficult game. Again, we’re not told any of this.
Venture Beat doesn’t even link to the article I posted above in the video, stripping it of what little introspective context that it might have had. You wouldn’t know that the article existed unless you read the website and happen to stumble on it.
Ultimately in both cases we’re dealing with a video that was released in a context that nobody wanted that should have never been published in the form that it was. Venture Beat thought that the video was hilarious and published it thinking that the internet would find it hilarious, kind of like when a group of friends get drunk and record one guy in the group doing bad impressions because they’re drunk and think it’s hilarious, so they post it to the internet so everyone else could find it hilarious, but then find out that sober people outside the group don’t find a straight video of a man stumbling around, drunkenly mumbling half-quotes from 80’s movies funny. It’s an inside joke that should have stayed inside but didn’t because when you laugh at something long enough, you forget that the outside world doesn’t share the same context that you do.
And yes, people are going to be offended no matter what you put out and question your journalistic integrity, it’s the way of the internet. The proper response is for other outlets is to not all simultaneously put out a “no you’re stupid” response about how being good at video games is actually a bad thing.
MMOARPG Wild Buster dubs itself a “gritty science fiction hack’n’slash MMORPG” with PvP, PvE, and now apparently Duke Nukem. In an announcement posted today, developer Insel Games announced that the Duke would be joining the roster of heroes. No piracy here, the inclusion of the babe-rescuing, cigar smoking, Ash parody is fully licensed with the blessing of Gearbox. Insel Games also hints in its Indiegogo campaign that more than one character may be from another property.
What Hack’n’Slash MMORPG would be complete without a badass cast? That’s why we are thrilled to announce the addition of the legendary Duke Nukem to Wild Buster: Heroes of Titan’s already deadly dozen!
See the story on Steam, view more details about the game on its website, or check out the trailer below. Insel Games is aiming for an October launch, with early backers gaining access to alpha.
While her motivations aren’t as in your face as, say, Talion wanting to survive and destroy Sauron in the main game, it’s pretty clear from the get go that Pepperoni is all about sustaining the survivors still hiding within Mordor. She wants to enrich life back into the lands via copious amounts of iron and protein. The game really goes far to show the gritty, greasy reality of life in Mordor and while I wouldn’t exactly call this game “profane,” it is dirty enough that you will literally need some napkins in order to walk out with your hands clean. Perhaps some wet naps.
