Today’s Screenshots comes from The Division beta on PC. If you do manage to get into the beta before it ends today, you’ll receive an exclusive item that will unlock once the game goes live on March 8th. For everyone else, The Division is available for pre-order on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Check out MMO Fallout’s preview of The Division coming later today.
Brutal Force isn’t available for purchase on Steam, it hasn’t been since its store page was removed many months ago. According to Steam Charts, the game is mostly forgotten: 0 plays this past month, one person the month before that, and an all time peak of 5. The developer (Enterchained) website no longer exists, and their only presence on Desura hasn’t been updated in five months.
The idea of an indie game showing up on Steam and subsequently making fading into obscurity isn’t surprising, after all the indie gaming industry is not unlike the restaurant business in that 60% fail in the first year and 80% fail within five years. That statistic is for restaurants, and I’d be willing to bet that it is higher for indie developers.
Brutal Force is a perfect reminder to other indie developers, and AAA for that matter, that gamers see everything. As Gabe Newell said in a 2013 Nerdist interview with Chris Hardwick:
One of the things we learned pretty early on is ‘Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet – because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.’
Back in July, Brutal Force’s base price was lowered to $4.99 USD, and in August the game saw a price cut of 75% to $.99. A few hours after the sale went live, the price was hitched to $1.99 yet still carried a 75% off rate. Several hours after that, $3.24 with (you guessed it) a 75% off label. You can see at this link that the game is already 99 cents base price when it goes on sale but stays the same, only to jump to $7.99 and go on sale for $1.99, to jump to $12.99 the next day and dip to $3.24 on sale.
Raising the price of a product right before putting it on sale is illegal in the US and Europe, plus other countries. In the US, at least, a retailer must have sold the item at the price that they hiked it up to for a reasonable amount of time prior to the new sale. To use Brutal Force as an example, Enterchained would have had to sell it at $7.99 for a “reasonable amount of time” in order for the price hike during a sale to not be considered deceptive.
The game has long since been removed from Steam and exiled to the furthest corners of the internet also known as Desura. The developer no longer seems to be in business, as their social media accounts have been deleted and their website is gone. The only remnants of Enterchained that will remain behind are the masses of bad PR floating around Reddit and other websites discussing how the company tried to pull a fast one and ultimately lost.
If you bought a new computer with an AMD CPU/GPU, you may be eligible for a free video game. AMD is currently running a promotion beginning February 15th and running until December 31st, or whenever the keys are exhausted, and includes a long list of eligible products. The choice of games is entirely based on what hardware you have with delivery contingent on whether or not the required hardware checking tool will recognize it as part of your system.
To receive the Key Code for an Application, you must purchase an Eligible System during the Campaign Period. Eligible Systems consists of a computer system manufactured and branded by one of the Participating OEM Vendors and System Builders (listed below) and containing one or more of the Eligible AMD Products (listed below).
Numerous users are reporting that the software isn’t recognizing their eligible hardware.
(Source: AMD, Announcement)
I consider myself something of a fan of RuneScape, having played it continuously since 2004 and racked up more than four thousand hours of gameplay, and I’m sure few would disagree with that statement. That being said, I’ve been heavily critical of Jagex as a company and certain facets of RuneScape as a game, and nothing has caught my attention quite like RuneScape’s bloated, near-useless client.
It’s no secret that RuneScape has become massive over the years, straining the client to the point where it’s basically held together with gum and tape. The old client’s days were numbered when the big browsers announced that the end of days were coming for Java support, due to its instability and general habit of opening massive security holes in people’s computers. For RuneScape, Jagex made the attempt to jump ship a couple of years ago with an HTML client, a venture that has so far come up empty thanks in part to the platform itself not coming along as quickly as expected.
Jagex could have launched NXT with none of the visual upgrades and this would instantly be my update of the year. The current RuneScape client is incredibly janky, depending where I am in the world and what I’m doing it will either run smoothly or horribly and turning the graphics down does absolutely nothing to fix this. In the NXT client, I am able to set everything to its maximum value and still manage to play the game at over 70 frames per second. I teleport, I start skilling, killing things, moving around to new areas, and the game remains stable and smooth as butter.
But to top it off, Jagex has made the game look better than ever. The draw distance is now massive, as far as the eye can see, and holds up RuneScape’s unique graphical styling. The new client has made it painfully obvious in some areas how laughably small the world is, a fact previously hidden by the game’s short-sighted draw distance, but for the most part so far Jagex has done its job to play tricks and make the smallness of the world a lot harder to notice.
My first real thought while playing on the NXT client is the depressing thought that this beta is going to end in a few days, and at least until the client launches sometime in…sometime, I’ll have to sit through the old client for the time being. There are numerous visual bugs that are present in the beta, but since the game is running on the live servers there isn’t much of a reason not to give it a go if you are eligible to play this weekend.
I’ll be playing RuneScape quite regularly through the weekend.
If you’re looking to get your hands on some new digs in Marvel Heroes, you’re in luck. Until Tuesday February 23rd, when you but a hero or costume from the Gazillion store, you’ll receive a free random token for a hero or costume respectively.
The random token comes with the possibility of giving you a hero or costume that you already own. The sale only involves individual heroes and costumes sold through the in-game store, no other packs are included. The costume pack does not include the new Rocket Raccoon Symbiote costume.
(Source: Gazillion Press Release)
Bioware has announced that the next chapter in the Knights of the Fallen Empire story will launch on March 10th. Titled Disavowed, the new story content brings back Major Jorgan to assist the player deep behind enemy lines. It will be up to you to decide how far the Major can go.
Disavowed will be available for free to subscribers, with an HK-55 helmet given out to anyone who subscribes by March 1st. New players can jump right in with a level 60 character.
(Source: Bioware Press Release)
Jagex, makers of the wildly popular RuneScape, today announced the latest game in the MMO series. Dubbed RuneScape: Idle Adventures, the title is a little different than what RuneScape players might be accustomed to. Set in the world of Gielinor, the player takes on the role of the wielder of the Elder Artefact known as the Needle. Play sessions will last a few minutes and boil the MMO gameplay down to loot, levels, and watching your character train.
It’s an addictive, quick-to-play RPG boiled down to the basics of levelling and looting. In a typical session, you’ll spend a few minutes making choices for your customisable hero, then leave him or her to train, fight and quest in real time.
RuneScape: Idle Adventures is being developed by Hyper Hippo, who you may be familiar with from their work on AdVenture Capitalist. The game will be free to play and releases on Steam later this Spring with iOS and Android releases later this year.
(Source: RuneScape)
Throw in $5 for the Humble Bundle and get your hands on a pirate costume and a Dancing Blade companion. The Dancing Blade is just that, a floating sword, and comes pre-packaged with a maximum rank of 30 and will need to be upgraded in order to level any further. The striker companion increases critical severity while active.
The latest Humble Bundle has arrived, this time themed around popular wiki site Gamepedia. Gamers willing to throw in some money will be come out with items for numerous titles including Neverwinter, Dirty Bomb, Heroes & Generals, and more. If you’re not looking to spend a whole lot of money, you’re in luck: The most you’ll need to pay out is $12 for absolutely everything, plus you don’t have to worry about other customers driving the average price up.
For MMO gamers, there are numerous skins and boost packages up for grabs. For everyone else, there is always the free games.
Pay $1 and get the following:
For $5, tack on the following:
And finally, at $12 you get:
(Editor’s Note: As I was gearing up to publish this, the news broke that Blazing Griffin is pushing the release date back to deal with the exact issue that this article covers.)
The Ship Remastered is set to go into Early Access on Monday, and while most developers do their best to get a game in working order before putting it out to the public, Blazing Griffin will be taking a new approach of making the game unplayable for most customers. You see, when the game does go live on Monday, it will do so with neither online play nor bots, meaning if you have no one to play with on a LAN, you have no reason to purchase the game, at least not at first. Assuming all goes according to plan, and the developer keeps up with its schedule, online play will hit the game after a few weeks.
There is little doubt in my mind that launching a game into Early Access with the most important function not yet implemented is going to do some early and likely irreparable damage to Blazing Griffin’s status, between the bevvy of negative reviews that will no doubt pop up to the number of people who will purchase and then very quickly apply for a refund, after giving said negative review. Regardless of Blazing Griffin’s reasons for launching this early, it is pretty irrefutable that early negative impressions can outright kill a game in early access, and in a business format that already has a negative public image, can kill the funding for a game before it even has a chance to succeed.
What more, the very real concern of killing off interest in the game with a misstep right out of the gate is something that Blazing Griffin should be well acquainted with, having tried and failed to grab community interest in a The Ship game just a few years ago. Back in 2012, BG attempted a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of merely £128,000 to create The Ship: Full Steam Ahead. The game just broke eighteen grand from about six hundred people. The Ship on Source only retains its tiny community because you can’t walk two feet without tripping over ten free copies of the game.
As a game that will function primarily over online multiplayer, The Ship absolutely relies on a healthy, active community in order to remain viable in the market, and once people start jumping ship (no pun intended), the population effect tends to snowball. Yes, Blazing Griffin stands to obtain some useful information from launching in Early Access with just LAN, but they also stand to lose a lot more in the long run from the people who will either see the lack of online and put the game on their ignore list, or those who buy the game and refund it within the two week window because online hasn’t been added yet, only to never look back.
I say this not to trash The Ship and Blazing Griffin, but as a long time fan of the series that would like to see its next iteration not fall into the same pit as its predecessor: A dead community leading to a defunct developer, and that doesn’t help anyone.
MMO Fallout 