Tag: Defunct

Rift’s Progression Server Is Dead, Sunsetting At End of Month


Rift’s progression server experiment is coming to a premature end. As posted on the official forums, Rift’s progression server will come down on March 31 with character transfers occurring the following week.

As part of the sunset, all accounts with a level 50 character on Prime will be receive a level 65 character boost pack as well as one million loyalty points. Unfortunately if you’re at capacity for characters on the live servers, you’re going to have to decide who is getting deleted.

The decision may not surprise Rift players, as one can find multiple threads on the main forum discussing low population on the Rift Prime server.

Source: Rift

Skybound Puts Down The Walking Dead, Terminates Game Contract


The slow death of Overkill’s The Walking Dead has finally come to an end, as the game has been pulled from digital store shelves with the console version officially cancelled. This news comes alongside an announcement from Walking Dead creators Skybound Entertainment that the media company has terminated its contract with developer Starbreeze, and effectively ended their ability to sell, maintain, or update The Walking Dead.

“We did our best to work with Starbreeze and resolve many issues that we saw with the game, but ultimately OVERKILL’S THE WALKING DEAD did not meet our standards nor is it the quality that we were promised. We are exceedingly sorry to our fans and share their disappointment in the game. We remain dedicated to providing our fans with the most premium quality content we can offer, and will continue to look for alternative video game options for the IP.”

Steam has already pulled The Walking Dead from sale.

Source: Variety

What Happened: Global Adventures Abandoned And Left To Die


Global Adventures is a game that MMO Fallout gave away beta keys for back in December 2017, and the fact that so many keys were left to grab is probably an early warning that the game was going to go down like a wet fart. Actually, the fact that the game shut down rather quickly in China should be the first indication that a release westward would be a commercial failure, but here we are.

Like many of its kind, Global Adventures hit closed beta and then…disappeared. The last Tweet sent out by the Global Adventures account is from January 6, 2018. The latest news post on Steam is for maintenance on February 16, 2018. There are reviews in March that suggest the server was still online at that point, followed by a review in July noting the server being dead.

In their infinite disregard for community relations, Suba Games has never acknowledged the abandonment of Global Adventures, nor did they allow for refunds from players who purchased packs only to have the game abandoned in beta. Months later, they haven’t even bothered taking the game off of Steam or delisting it from their website. In fact, the only official acknowledgment comes from Suba’s community manager, who points to the developer PixelSoft suddenly disappearing after failing to fix major bugs in the game.

“I would like to clarify this time around that Suba Games is a publisher, not a developer. The developer for Global Adventures is PixelSoft, who seemingly disappeared after constantly failing to fix major bugs and making excuses about it. This makes it so Suba Games cannot deliver their promises of giving out exclusive rewards during open beta, as there probably never will be an open beta. Of course, I do not agree with the idea of selling early access and opening a closed beta cash shop when the developers have proven to be shoddy already.

“Since PixelSoft abandoned the game, there’s nothing Suba Games can do but to follow suit and abandon the game as well. Again, this does not excuse the terrible business decisions Suba Games ended up making to disappoint the fanbase of the game, especially with their no refund policy.”

Does anyone else remember Global Adventures’ short lived relevance?

Jagex Kills Off Mobilising Armies Mini-Game


For years now RuneScape has had a bit of a problem with its mini-games, namely that there have been a lot of them added throughout the years and very few are actually populated by any traffic. Couple that with the fact that many of these mini-games include rewards, and you simply have a growing list of virtually unobtainable items. Back in 2015, Jagex introduced the minigame spotlight, adding a Thaler currency and rotating spotlight to showcase various minigames and encourage people to play them.

It didn’t work out so well and Jagex has been slowly datamining and determining which minigames are played enough to remain in-game and which ones need to get the boot. Unfortunately Mobilising Armies is the latest game on the chopping block. The minigame was removed as part of today’s update, with Jagex detailing how the rewards will be disbursed to remain accessible to players:

  • Defunct currencies will be automatically converted to other currencies.
  • Mobilising Armies is no longer a completion cape reward.
  • Hi-Scores will be preserved.
  • Locators can now be crafted in Divination.
  • Cosmetics now a reward in the Thaler shop.
  • Low level ring imbuing is now a Soul Wars reward.
  • High level ring imbuing is now a raid reward.

(Source: RuneScape)

Dirty Bomb To Stay Online Despite Development Ending


Dirty Bomb is a free to play shooter developed by Splash Damage and published by Warchest Ltd. The game launched in June 2015 and has garnered a mostly positive 79% approval rating on Steam with an average concurrent player count of nearly a thousand at any given time, according to Steam Charts.

Despite this, it looks like the game hasn’t been performing as well in the money department as Splash Damage announced today that development on the title would cease. An announcement posted on the game’s Steam forums today revealed that a coming bug fix build in the next few weeks will be the last that the title will see.

After regaining publishing rights for DB nearly two years ago, we staffed up a load of developers and tried our best to deliver a Dirty Bomb experience that would be feature-rich with tons of new content, while maintaining its great gameplay feel & balance. Unfortunately, despite all the added time and resources, there were some challenges we couldn’t overcome, and we were not able to make DB the success that we hoped it could be. The bottom line is that we can’t financially justify continuing to work on the game we love.

According to the announcement, official servers will stay online as long as the community numbers support it. In addition, all merc packs purchased by January 31, 2019 will be refunded.

Since we won’t be releasing any additional Mercenaries, we’re going to refund the All Merc Pack DLC to everyone who purchased it by January 31st, 2019 – the money you spent will go back in your Steam wallet and the unlocked Mercs will remain in your account. We know many of you love DB and still play it religiously, so we will keep servers up for you to enjoy, as long as there are a meaningful number of players using them in the supported regions.

(Source: Steam)

Daybreak: Just Kidding, We’re Working On Keeping Just Survive Online


Just Survive is shutting down this year, except it isn’t.

H1Z1 savior Jace Hall this week announced in a Twitch livestream that the less popular half of H1Z1 (or whatever it’s calling itself these days), otherwise known as Just Survive, will not be shutting down in October as originally planned. Last month we learned that Daybreak Game Company had received a sizable investment from NantG and that the PC version would be renamed Z1 Battle Royale and have its development taken over by a joint venture between Daybreak and NantG Mobile lead by Jace Hall himself.

At the time, Hall noted that NantG was unable to negotiate the transfer of Just Survive. Evidently that situation has changed since the original comment. Jace Hall noted in the livestream that discussions are still underway on the exact details of how Just Survive will continue, but it looks like it will become a mode within H1Z1.

“What that means is Just Survive will continue and our intention is to put it into a maintenance mode for a moment but then we want to work with the community over time and figure out the right way to re-integrate Just Survive as a mode inside of Z1. There’ll be a survival mode, you’ll see Just Survive.”

(Source: Twitch)

Wildstar To Shut Down, Carbine Studios Will Close


Carbine Studios will close its doors and Wildstar Online will shut down, according to an announcement released today by NCSoft. Kotaku broke the story, noting that the layoffs at Carbine will include 50 people and comes after at least two projects failed to gain traction with the studio’s parent company and publisher.

NCSoft stated to Kotaku,

“WildStar players who have spent money within the game will be refunded purchases from July 1, 2018 until the payment system is shut off. We are also in the process of identifying the teams that will be doing the work to bring WildStar to a close. These decisions are very difficult to make and we are in the midst of shifting as many of our teammates as possible into other roles within the organization.”

NCSoft’s reluctance to shut down Wildstar came off as confusing, despite effectively ending major content support and refusing to even acknowledge the title by name in its quarterly earnings reports. There have not been any concrete details released as of yet on when Wildstar will sunset its servers.

As of this article, the official Wildstar website has not posted an announcement related to this news.

Just Defunct: Daybreak To Shut Down Early Access Just Survive


Daybreak Game Company has announced that Just Survive, formerly known as H1Z1, is to sunset on October 24 after three years of early access. In the announcement, Daybreak noted “we are no longer in a position to fulfill its greatness and the current population of the game makes it untenable to maintain.”

Just Survive was part of our first Early Access project, and we learned a great deal during its development. As with any open world game, the greatest stories came from our passionate players. From the incredibly skilled base builders to the free-ranging gangs, and all of the players named variations of “ImFriendly” and “PleaseDontShootMe”, we hope everyone had amazing adventures across Pleasant Valley and Badwater Canyon.

Originally launched into early access in January 2015, Just Survive released as H1Z1 before being split off into two products and renamed H1Z1: Just Survive and ultimately dropping the H1Z1 moniker altogether. All in-game purchases for Just Survive have been disabled.

In May, Daybreak thanked players for their continued support while laying out plans for the future of the title.

(Source: Daybreak)

RuneScape Classic Officially Shuts Down


The earliest commercial version of RuneScape has shut down today after seventeen years of service. RuneScape Classic, previously known just as RuneScape, launched in 2001 with a handful of servers and an even smaller handful of developers, going on to amass far more interest than creator Andrew Gower could have ever anticipated. In 2004, RuneScape launched a major update to its engine, introducing RuneScape 2 and relegating the initial version to the now unsupported “Classic” title.

Jagex has kept the Old School servers online for fourteen years despite not officially supporting the product, and eventually shut down the ability for new accounts to even access the servers due to the sheer number of bot accounts and Jagex’s inability to provide updates due to the game no longer being supported. Account registration was periodically opened up over the years, and in May it was finally announced that the servers would be brought down for good due to accumulating bugs and Jagex’s inability to keep the game properly supported.

Players gathered to watch the servers come down for one last time today, with the event permanently etched in digital stone via the Twitch link below.

Lawbreakers Will Shut Down In September, Now Free To Play


When Boss Key Productions announced its closure back in May, the question of its two titles sunsetting became a matter of when, not if. As of today, competitive shooter Lawbreakers has been made officially free to play in preparation for the servers to sunset in September. No information has been posted to Radical Heights, which is already free to play, on when that game will follow suit.

The announcement in its entirety has been posted below. All in-game purchases have been disabled and no refunds are being granted.

(Source: Steam)

Dear LawBreakers,

In light of the unfortunate news regarding Boss Key Productions shutting down, we regret to announce that we will be sunsetting our support of LawBreakers on September 14, 2018 as we are not able to operate the game.

Our servers will remain open until then and the game will be made free-to-play on Steam for all players effective immediately. Please note that any and all new in-game purchases will also be disabled and we will not be able to accept any refund requests.

We truly appreciate your understanding in this difficult time and we want to thank you all your support and being a part of the passionate LawBreakers community.

Thank you for staying with us throughout this journey.

-The LawBreakers Team