Tag: Early Access

Bless Online Is A Mess Online; Neowiz Apologizes, Compensates Players


Bless Online launched into early access this week and the launch was a bit of a mess. Between server lag, outages, maintenance, and the existence of a rather treacherous item dupe exploit, players were up in arms with some demanding refunds for their founder’s pack purchases.

In response, Neowiz posted an apology, promising fixes and outlining plans for the weeks ahead. Since the game initially launched with just a few servers, more servers have been added and much of the lag seems to have subsided.

Bless Online’s Early Access was always intended to be a growing experience, with systems and content being added in the weeks and months ahead; this is why we chose the Steam Early Access program. We are sincerely sorry that our players were led to believe otherwise, and we are happy to allow refunds for those who feel they cannot wait for the new content to arrive. We hope that you will return to the world of Bless when the features you expect are in the game and ready for your participation.

As part of its compensation, Neowiz has granted accounts approximately $20 in Lumena, the game’s premium currency.

(Source: Steam)

Memories of Mars Hits Early Access On June 5


505 Games and Limbic Entertainment have announced that the open world survival game Memories of Mars will hit early access on Steam on June 5. Memories of Mars tasks players with surviving the harsh surface of the red planet, periodically wiping the planet’s surface as part of the game’s season system. Some talents and abilities gained through the season will cross over to the next, not leaving players completely empty handed when the new season starts.

(Source: Press Release)

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)

Early Access: Tower Of Time Hands On Impressions


Tower of Time is hoping to continue the legacy of games like Baldur’s Gate and so far my time with the early access version has proven it a worthy successor. It strikes me as exactly the kind of title that hardcore RPG enthusiasts would be happy to get their hands on, the combination of strategic gameplay, stat building, and a so far compelling story that’ll have you up until two in the morning trying to figure out the best builds for your characters.

In short, this game is pretty fun, and it’s also tough as hell.

Rather than trying to go over every aspect of the game in this preview, I want to discuss the meat and potatoes of Tower of Time, that being its combat encounters. I find myself rather impressed by the fact that a game where you’re not directly controlling your characters requires as much attention to be paid as this game does. While you don’t control your character’s standard attacks, you do direct them around the field of combat and activate their special abilities when necessary.

Combat in Tower of Time is very heavily reliant on line of sight mechanics, with battles easily won and lost based on how you position your characters and keep them working with each other. Kane is the party tank, able to raise walls and absorb damage while your other party members pepper the enemy with attacks. Maeve is a marksman, high on damage but low on defense abilities. Aeric is a druid, able to summon an ent and more adept at party healing than Kane.

There are also plenty of ways to customize your characters, and you’ll need to be paying attention to the deficits in your team in order to properly build in response to them. For instance, I upgraded Maeve’s arrows with the ability to inflict blindness, making Tower of Time one of the few games in which casting blindness on NPCs is useful. Blind is great in this game because combat encounters at least early on have a habit of throwing wraiths at you which cast an ongoing life drain as long as they have line of sight. Now Kane’s wall can break this line of sight, but it can easily just push some enemies into attacking the more vulnerable characters. By giving Maeve the ability to blind them, I could very quickly put a stop to multiple life drains.

In a sense, you can think of each match like its own tower defense mini-game, like a puzzle of sorts where you need to carefully move your pieces around the board to handle each threat as it appears. For me this has basically come down to getting my ass handed to me on a silver platter in some matches a couple of times before I figure out the best way to maneuver my characters around. Arrow Time, Tower of Time’s branded bullet time effect, is both helpful and necessary to keep the action from getting overwhelming, not to mention handy in keeping track of who is targeting who (seen above).

You’ll have the opportunity to bring on more companions, up to seven from the looks of the roster, but the few hours I’ve spent in the game so far have only given me access to three. Presumably if I play the game as intended and put more time into crafting/enchanting gear using the available facilities in town.

I look forward to diving further into Tower of Time.

Early Access Title Tower of Time To Launch This April


Fledgling developer Event Horizon is getting ready to release their CRPG Tower of Time early this year on PC, and players are meeting the title with open arms and positive reviews. Boasting 30 hours of story gameplay on launch, Tower of Time promises to harken back to the days of Baldur’s Gate and the Might and Magic series. Starting with two adventurers and adding on to the party as they progress, players will travel through the Tower of Time, collecting randomized loot, customizing your adventurers, and taking down the game’s more than 100 enemies.

Tower of Time’s focal feature is the Arrow-Time combat system, which players may recognize as similar to Bioware RPGs of old. Arrow-Time allows you to slow down or completely pause a battle, survey the field, and plan your strategy.

Currently in early access, Tower of Time is enjoying a very positive 96% overall rating.

(Source: Press Release)

[Community] Wild West Online, Everquest Next, and Guaranteed Refunds


I refuse to advocate or advertise Wild West Online’s preorder scheme, but I am going to tell you why I don’t trust buying into it and how it all comes back to Everquest Next, zombies, and Sergey Titov.

As one of the most incompetent and shady developers in this industry, MMO Fallout takes great caution when covering any game that even smells lightly of Titov’s touch. The rumors that he was involved in Wild West Online’s development, in fact just the idea that the game is using the engine that his company made, is enough to warrant intense scrutiny. If you’ve been following the game’s impending alpha launch, then you’re probably aware of the next “too good to be true” marketing trap: The guaranteed refund.

Let’s look at Wild West Online’s guaranteed refund policy, shall we?

So, up until the second phase of Alpha testing, we’ll let you refund your early bird purchase with no questions asked. This gives you a chance to play the Alpha yourself, and opt-out if you think the game won’t develop into the game you wanted. There are no restrictions on amount of time you have played, and there are no limits on how long you owned the game — so long as you decide before September 27, 2017 you will be granted a full refund.

Sounds great, right? No questions asked refunds for the first alpha wave, what could possibly go wrong? Well, let’s go back to Titov’s The War Z, which also had a no questions refund policy going into its alpha. The thing about getting rid of that policy so early in development is that developers tend to promise features that are coming if players just hold on a little longer, until after the refund window has passed. War Z waited until beta and launch day to implement some of its more egregious cash shop items, including the four hour respawn timer, making unpopular changes and refusing to implement features that it promised would be available for launch if players just held off on hitting that refund button.

Even more, let’s take a look at Daybreak Game Company and Everquest Next: Landmark, a game sold entirely on the premise that if you wanted a refund during alpha, you could have it with no questions asked. Of course, it wasn’t until after the refund window passed that Daybreak would announce the cancellation of Everquest Next, Landmark’s sole reason for existing, and basically doom the game to an early death while simultaneously telling players “hey, we offered you a refund window and you didn’t accept it. Tough luck.”

Steam has a refund window of two hours of gameplay, fourteen days after purchase, with exceptions in the case of developer malfeasance. Rather than buy into, and vicariously promote, players supporting a system that will present them with a completely unfinished game, one that has historically used a disguise of customer friendliness to hide a system that can be easily abused and then defended under the premise that the customer should have known that the product was incomplete, I’m going to go with this website’s running policy: Don’t preorder on a system that looks too good to be true.

And to wrap up, I don’t trust a refund system by Xsolla as far as I can throw the company (and if you haven’t figured out, I can’t throw things far). Once again, let’s go back to a name that finds itself on some of the industry’s sleaziest con jobs, and talk about the War Z’s guaranteed refunds. Back in 2012, War Z had a guaranteed refund policy which Xsolla promptly rendered moot by denying refunds. They pulled every excuse out of the book, from losing orders, not being able to find accounts, transitioning companies, and even quoting the terms of service saying that all sales are final.

The one that Hammerpoint copied from League of Legends.

So with Sergey Titov’s engine and Xsolla “all sales are final” handling the refunds, I’m going to do all I can and simply recommend that players don’t get caught up in the “guaranteed refunds” system like it is a safety net. It isn’t, and until you have the much more reliable safety of Valve overseeing the transaction, I recommend sitting it out on Wild West Online.

NM Impressions: Crash Force


(Editor’s Note: Copy provided by publisher)

Crash Force is a great looking game with a lot of problems, which is fine since the game is in early access and that is exactly what it is good for. I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last two weeks, and while the foundation is strong and the premise is fun, the game definitely needs more time in the oven before it can be considered fresh baked.

The premise of Crash Force is simple: It is an arena shooter where you play as hovering ships. As a modern shooter, Crash Force introduces MOBA elements in that each ship is in a way its own class, utilizing various weapons and perks to play the game in different ways. You have lighter, faster moving ships, ships with drones, ships with mines. Some can teleport, some can stun, others can even reverse time and regain health. Throw in a metric ton of decals to customize your ship with and you’ve got an arena shooter worthy of your $10.

Crash Force is your everyday arena shooter. You pick a bot, enter into a match, and shoot at your opponents until they are destroyed with the optimal goal of killing more of them and being killed the least. Your ships are tightly controlled and responsive to button inputs, and all of this takes place on an array of diverse maps with blooming colors, open fields, and tight corridors. You can play the game online, Crash Force automatically substitutes bots when there aren’t enough players who hold their own well enough.

While the game is rather fast paced, Crash Force hits some hitches with the number of stuns that can be played out at any given time. Instead of a simple indicator, the game spells out “stunned” and “confused” with a to-the-millisecond timer for how long the effect is in place. A one second stun seems like forever in a game where ships are whipping around and darting in and out of sight, while stuns and confusions can be useful in a strategic term, in the sense of gameplay they tend to be obnoxious and too common, jolting the gameplay to a halt while you watch your ship blow up.

And here is where Crash Force’s biggest problem lies: The fast paced nature of the game does not gel well with the kind of information that the game pumps into you. You have ammo/health/energy indicators in one corner, powerup cooldowns in another, the map in a third, and rankings in the fourth, with the center displaying your hits and relative combat information. There is far too much spread out too wide for this game, and it makes combat unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. Crash Force’s interface would have worked twelve years ago when most screens were still on 800×600, but you can see in the screenshots that it is far too spaced apart with too much screen space dedicated to large kill text/icons.

I’d like to see Crash Force’s UI get overhauled, and to further that point, I found a stock photo of a minimalist UI (source) to use as comparison. Rather than throwing them to the side of the screens, you could allow the player to keep their attention at the center of the screen by making the health/energy/ammo counts meld with the crosshair, with the cooldowns only on screen when activated and somewhere near the center crosshair. In this game nobody has time to count ammunition.

As a snazzy little arena shooter, Crash Force is turning out to be a solid indie title. It just needs a few simple tweaks to the interface and stun/confuse mechanics to balance it out. I’d like to take an extra look at it once it fully launches and some of the issues are ironed out. Interested parties can check the game out on Steam for $10.

Early Access Fraudsters: Shady Developer Lord Kres Is Still Shady


(Editor’s Note: You may notice that this article makes no use of screenshots from the game Voxelized and only utilizes third party Youtube videos. This is rare, but we do it to mitigate any potential frivolous take down requests being sent to our host over use of copyrighted material. Enjoy.)

Steam Developer Lord Kres is a con artist who by all means should already be barred from ever selling a video game on Steam again. When it comes to writing an Early Access or Crowfunding Fraudster column, I do so with a level of grace and caution. As I regularly reinforce, many of the subjects are people who are merely in over their heads, independent developers with a vision and neither the experience nor the finances to see it through to completion, enthusiastic gamers who think that they can crowdfund money to bribe a developer into creating a sequel, or seasoned veterans who start campaigns knowing that the funds are not enough to see the project through to completion.

In the case of Lord Kres, we are dealing with a shady name that has already been punished once by Valve for blatantly defrauding customers. Let’s talk about that.

The subject of our backstory is Journey of the Light, a title released in 2015 under the promise that the game would be incredibly difficult. The Dark Souls of puzzle games, if you will, but cranked up to a thousand because the puzzles turned out to be so difficult that nobody was able to finish the first level. Not a single person, aside from the developer himself. Now that’s hardcore gaming! Suspecting that something was up, a few intrepid sleuths took a look at the game’s code and came up with a fantastic reason why not a single person had been able to pass the first trial: The game was designed to be unbeatable.

Oh and the last six levels of this seven level game didn’t actually exist. At all. It was a real life Xantar from Wayne’s World.

In his defense, Lord Kres claimed that the levels did exist and were accidentally removed from the game due to a bug added in a then-recent patch, an excuse that sits just above blaming the two armed man in terms of believability, or Kres’ subsequent claims of being sick to avoid answering questions. In case you’re wondering whether Kres then turned around and immediately patched those levels back into the game, like he would if he had been telling the truth, he didn’t. Instead, Valve opened Journey of the Light up for refunds regardless of time played and removed the game from the Steam store. Incidentally, the soundtrack is still shown on the store, but you can’t buy it.

One thing that can be said about Lord Kres is that the guy is crafty. According to numerous forum posts, users were told that hints to completing the first level were hidden within the game’s trading cards. Those cards are useless in completing the puzzles, and (according to user reports) conveniently don’t drop until after two hours of gameplay, the general limit for Steam’s refund policy. Clever girl.

What is still on sale on Steam from Lord Kres is Voxelized, a prototype with virtually zero content. Voxelized started out as a low quality Minecraft clone, as seen in the video below:

It later evolved into a not-as-low but still low quality Minecraft clone with a lot of bloom and using Unreal assets.

And most recently, the game has transformed into an Unreal engine asset flip with no gameplay.

Eagle eyed viewers might be under the impression that Lord Kres has no vision for this prototype game that he is selling on Steam in Early Access, and if you hold this opinion then you’re probably right. As laid out in the mission plan, Kres wants a fully fleshed out world with some animals maybe? I don’t know, some guns, whatever. Let him know what you want and he’ll probably put it in.

  • Maybe you would want to see some animals?
  • Maybe some Guns, Swords or Armors?
    Let me know what you want.
  • I am also planning a Full Control Support
  • And Full HDM Support (Head Mounted Display)
    Workshop is a planned feature

It’s important to note that Voxelized has been on the Steam store for two years, since March 19, 2015 to be precise, before being changed to the content-void Minecraft prototype into the content-void Unreal asset flip. Naturally this has left some of the buyers pretty annoyed, to which an alleged moderator showed up on one critic’s Steam page to tell him to kill himself. Unsurprisingly there have been numerous reports of people being banned off of the Steam forums for writing negative reviews or critiquing the title.

So here’s where we stand: Lord Kres is an established fraudster who had previously attempted to pull a con job by selling a game as finished while secretly making it unbeatable and then making up excuses as to why the levels weren’t in the game. Despite this, Valve is still allowing him to sell a prototype that has radically shifted in a different direction, two years after entering Early Access, and despite having no content describing itself as “fully playable.”

The game in it´s current state is fully playable and the features still in development do not affect to the gameplay. Main reason for adding Voxelized on Steam in Early Access:

Just as a side note, you have to appreciate that the game is still called Voxelized when there doesn’t seem to be anything voxel-related in the game.

With luck, either Valve will put this game to bed where it belongs (sleeping in a coffin six feet under) or the constant negative reviews will contribute to Steam’s algorithms burying this title into the nether regions where nobody will find it. Or hey, maybe MMO Fallout should open up a publishing wing, buy the assets, and make a game that isn’t completely muck. It’s always worth considering.

Best Of Greenlight: Streets of Rogue


Best of Greenlight is a space where I’d like to talk about games that are deserving of your attention, rather than focus entirely on shady independent developers and their shady asset flips and shady copyright takedown notices. The best part about the current spotlight game is that you can play it right now: It is currently in the middle of a free weekend.

Streets of Rogue looks a lot like The Escapists, is developed by Matt Dabrowski, and is currently in early access on Steam. I know what you’re thinking, ‘another retro-inspired hardcore rogue-lite?’ I’m not deaf to your complaints, in fact I’m willing to admit that if it weren’t for the free weekend that I probably wouldn’t have given this a shot myself. What this package contains is a rather charming game, with tight controls, a variety of systems, and more. In short, it actually makes an effort to set itself apart.

The core of all dungeon crawling rogue-lites is pretty much the same: You go through a dungeon, you kill the things, you get loot, and you level up. Ultimately your character dies and you start it all over again, albeit with some sort of overarching progression system that gives you a little more to go on with each passing session. Streets of Rogue is more than just that, rather than populating the level with a host of angry creatures and letting you have at it, the game actually encourages some level of diplomacy, provided you’re willing to go along with it. If you’d rather just go through each level and massacre the whole map, more power to you.

First thing you’ll do before being thrown into the fray is choose your class for that session, each one with their own strengths, weaknesses, and starting items. The soldier for instance starts with a machine gun and regenerates health when it is under 20. The gorilla, meanwhile, has a very powerful attack but his stupid gorilla brain can’t talk English, and therefore can’t interact with characters, his stupid gorilla hands can’t use guns, scientists hate him and will attack on sight, and bartenders don’t want him in their bar (have you ever seen a gorilla pay his bar tab? Point made). A number of factions populate the world, from cops to the ongoing feud between the blahd and the crepe gangs, scientists, and all kinds of strange bedfellows.

But what makes the game pretty unique is that you’re not just going through a dungeon while fighting off a range of NPCs, rather each map is a procedurally generated zone consisting of a random assortment of characters, an assortment of tasks, and you are given pretty free reign to take on those tasks as you see fit. For example, you have to terminate a character who is hiding behind a locked door. You can knock on the door and see if they’ll come answer it, beat the door down with your fists (provided you’re strong enough), blow it open with a weapon, go outside and shatter the window so the NPC comes to investigate, use a lockpick on the door, use a charge on the door, or go to the outside ventilation system (if the building has one) and inject something into it to either kill or force out the inhabitants.

To give another angle to how the AI reacts to events, in another mission I was tasked with killing a scientist in his home, which had a big mean looking bouncer standing right outside the door. I blew a charge on the door bringing the bouncer down to very low health, which was enough for him to decide the job wasn’t worth it and quit right there on the spot. In another instance, I had to terminate a character being held prisoner in the local jail. After taking out the guard and using the computer to unlock the cell doors, I found my target in a fight with another prisoner. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who wanted this guy dead.

I find the fighting to be extremely satisfying in Streets of Rogue, every punch and whack met with a sickening crunch as your target gets knocked back, even more so when you manage to punch them so hard that they crash through a wall. With the AI system in place, it’s very easy in certain areas for small fights to break out into riots, with buildings exploding and people beating each other to death as the police show up and start blasting indiscriminately, resulting in some bystanders getting shot and either joining in or freaking out and running off. Companies love using the buzzword “the game is different every time you play!” and I think this may be one of the few times that that promise actually comes true.

Your currency for meta progression is chicken nuggets, which you’ll receive for completing missions which are required in order to progress to further levels. Chicken nuggets can be used to unlock traits, rewards, and more.

Since Streets of Rogue still has a day and change left on its free weekend, I highly suggest you give the game a try. Otherwise it sells for $14.99. If you do give Streets of Rogue a try, let us know what you think in the comments below.

MMOments: The Exiled, No Land For The Sheep


(Editor’s Note: MMO Fallout received a key from the developer for the purposes of reviewing. The opinions of this website cannot by swayed by anything short of a case of Orbitz drink)

I started playing The Exiled a few days before the actual launch, and my first thought was basically the same that I had with titles like Darkfall. “Yea, it’s fun, but I have a feeling it’s going to push a lot of people away very early.” It’ll be hard to move forward with an impressions piece without talking about the ten ton elephant in the room, so I’m going to get it out of the way now: The whole labeling as free to play is going to annoy people, and already has. The game has a seven day trial, after which you have to chalk down at least twenty bucks to keep playing. Overall it isn’t a huge deal, but I feel like not mentioning this would bring up issues later on.

The Exiled is a PvP sandbox MMO with nearly full loot and a considerable number of you just crossed this game off of your wishlists. You control your character with the WASD keys, attacking through a combination of mouse buttons and keyboard commands. Your character can make, equip, and use any weapon or armor in the game without having to deal with a class system.

The rules in The Exiled are that while you keep your gear on death from other players, your inventory is open for looting. There is some solace in the fact that you drop to the ground and start regaining health, after which you get back up and can continue whatever you were doing without having to trudge back from a spawn point, since most gankers are willing to loot your bag and leave you be. The game, as you might expect, instantly turned into a numbers game with gangs of clans roving the countryside and wiping out random solo’ers.

I’m not making any big discovery by saying that this is a niche game in a niche market, if you could take the perception that games like The Exiled has and give it a physical manifestation, it’d be somewhere in the realm of opening a store, locking the door, hiding the key under the doormat and standing at the window giving the middle finger to whichever carebear customer has the gall to ask “are you open?” And if the store owner himself isn’t enough to drive away customers, you can bet that the tiny vocal minority of obnoxious, mostly toxic cult followers of the genre will do their part to make the game as intolerable as possible, be it running train through the starting zone to harass new players, shouting “gg kill yourself” in chat, and generally operating “for the lulz” because the game lets them do whatever they want and they’re too busy telling people to go back to World of Warcraft to notice the population decaying around them.

And this is where The Exiled falls shortest, in that I don’t think that the developers at Fairytale Distillery looked at similar games when they were creating this, or if they did then they didn’t learn anything. There are zero repercussions to acting like a jackass in The Exiled because there are no safe zones and no reputation system. Like I said, you can just run train through the starting zone and nothing’s going to stop you, outside of there being nobody to kill. While it’d be nice to imagine clans going up against one another, we all know that isn’t happening. Instead you have the hardcore gank squads, some of the most risk averse gamers in existence, only going into fights where the odds aren’t even close to even.

The bulk of the game is pretty shallow at the moment, comprising mostly of activating nodes and fighting off waves of mobs that try to destroy said node, hoping that at no point during the five minute wait that a clan will come along and steal the node out from underneath you. The AI is incredibly basic at the moment, as mobs mindlessly make their way toward the node with no ability to navigate the terrain aside from a straight path, not bothering to move around whatever is blocking their way.

The farming technique perfectly encapsulates how The Exiled exists now: A long, arduous grind that can and likely will be stripped from you at any given moment. Some people love this, and I won’t vilify them for their tastes. But when it comes to the genre, there are other games that have long established themselves and managed to throw in some semblance of fairness, even though you are never 100% safe.

In a way I like and can appreciate how The Exiled handles its inventory management. You gain experience through killing mobs, however there is a wholly separate material called Flux that can be used in crafting new gear or it can be converted to straight experience, which also means that if you get attacked you can at least scuttle the flux, level up in the process, and not come out of the encounter completely empty handed. Even abilities are subject to looting, since you obtain abilities as scrolls and must bring them to a dojo in order to learn the associated skill. Each class relies on a specific reagent in order to level up said skills, so killing and looting players isn’t just about stealing their stuff, you can also gain some heavy leveling materials in the process.

I suppose what makes me reel in agony even more than the long grind splattered with setbacks due to ganking is that the game wants me to do this all over again every month when the servers reset. No thank you, if you’re going to give me a job then it can either be fun or you can pay me for it. At the very least, while the MMO genre is all about a continuous carrot on a stick, gearing up to where you can run dungeons with the best until the better dungeons requiring the better gear comes out, you’re always making progress. Stripping that away on a regular basis only ensures that The Exiled will appeal to a limited portion of an already limited audience.

Right now The Exiled suffers from long time to kill on basic creatures, a lack of diversity within weapon subsets, and motivation outside of grinding resources, among other problems. That being said, the game is still in early access and early on at that. I’d recommend holding off on your seven day free trial for the moment, but keep the game on your radar. It might become something one day.