Tag: Steam

ATLAS Hits Steam To Mostly Negative Reviews


ATLAS is “the ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world.” At least, that’s how it was advertised by Grapeshot Games. Following multiple last minute delays, ATLAS hit Steam Early Access on December 22 and early access is exactly where it will stay for a good long time.

But Steam users aren’t impressed. The game currently sits at a mostly negative 22% positive despite approximately thirty seven thousand people logged in and playing at 10am on Christmas Eve. People are citing ATLAS as effectively being a DLC item that was spun off into its own game, compounding issues revolving around latency, connection, and various other bugs.

One player stumbled upon a hidden menu in ATLAS that is directly from ARK, as others in the same Reddit thread have been notating similarities between the two titles.

If you picked up ATLAS at launch, we’d like to know your experience.

Editorial: Wild West Online Doesn’t Care, Can’t Even Be Bothered Cleaning Its Forums


Wild West Online, the latest racket supported by the industry’s lead fraudster Sergey Titov, has landed itself in a shallow grave along with all of Titov’s other half-baked products. Given Titov’s modus operandi when it comes to releasing games, Wild West Online has been abandoned not even half-finished and plans are already underway to launch a spin off! Yes, everyone’s favorite Wild West shooter will be made free to play and fired back onto the internet in the form of Frontiers, the base game, and Magnificent 5, the battle royale title.

As of this writing, Wild West Online has one player online on Steam. As for WWO Partners Ltd, or whatever new shell company Titov has set up to continue this game’s existence, they’ve stopped keeping up a facade of caring. The forums have descended into a mess of spam and scam links, and of the six staff members listed on the forums, nobody has bothered posting in nearly two months while most haven’t even logged in since May or earlier.

Which is all par for the course for Wild West Online and its predecessors.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Maplestory 2 Receives Biggest Update Yet


Maplestory 2 has revealed the first phase of the Skybound Expansion, introducing a new class, new events, and special rewards.

The update promises to be the game’s biggest yet, bringing with it the new Soul Binder class. The Soul Binder is a hybrid magic damage dealer and healer. Players will continue their Epic Quests with new missions assigned by each faction leader and travel to the Sky Fortress, a new staging ground warship that flies high above the world. Additionally, Skybound sees the release of the Maple Arena, a 1-on-1, best of three matchup where players can show off their skills and obtain new PvP gear. New chaos raids are being added with hard adventure dungeons adjusted to help players gear up for them.

For the first month of the update, players over level 10 will receive a care package including 30 elixers, 30 master potions, and a level up booster ticket. Once players hit level 60, they can claim additional items including a level-up potion to instantly boost an alt to level 50.

For more information, check out the official website.

Epic Games Offers 88% Revenue Cut To Developers


Epic Games this week has announced the unveiling of the Epic Games store, a new digital distribution platform that aims to court third party developers and publishers with lucrative rates. The digital platform will launch with a library of hand-curated titles on PC and Mac and will eventually expand to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.

What Epic is offering is a platform where developers take a cool 88% cut of revenue. This puts the platform in stark contrast to Steam where the developer takes home 70% (65% if using the Unreal engine). For developers using the Unreal engine, Epic is willing to eat the usual 5% royalty fee. Epic also promises that developers will have control of their news feed with no store-placed ads or cross-marketing of competing games visible.

More information on Epic’s store will be available on December 6 at the Game Awards.

(Source: Epic Games)

Hellgate: London Launches To Steam, No Tokyo Content For Launch


Hellgate: London is back, again, again, and this time it is hitting Steam as a single player only game with the Tokyo expansion that Hanbitsoft added on after Flagship Studios went bankrupt. There are no microtransactions or cash shop items, and the game is available for a single purchase of $12.99 with a launch sale of 25% down to $9.74.

There is one caveat, and that is that the Tokyo content will not be available right now. The team is working on stability in the main quest and will release it as a free update.

As it was mentioned before, HELLGATE: London Steam Version has the latest update client of the Tokyo Version, which has all improved UI / UX / Content. However, due to internal circumstances, Tokyo content is temporarily unavailable in order to provide you with a smooth gameplay. Once stability of the Tokyo Main Quest is settled, you will receive a notice for FREE UPDATE. Until then you can still enjoy playing London, Stonehenge, Second Attack and Abyss maps.

MMO Fallout will have an impressions piece up in the next couple of days.

(Source: Steam)

Frostkeep Studios Unveils New Game Modes For Rend


Frostkeep Studios this week announced the debut of two new game modes for Rend on the public test realm.

The two game modes are called Classic and Exploration while the original game mode will be renamed Faction War. In classic mode, players will battle for supremacy by sieging each others’ bases, waging war, capturing territory, and collecting bounties. Exploration, meanwhile, is an entirely PvE mode that does not allow for player vs player combat. Both modes allow for players to join up in clans, however progression is per-character and there is no reputation system.

In addition to these two new modes, ascension points are seeing a change from per-server to globally tied to player accounts. AP gained from any activity will count for all servers.

For more details on upcoming Rend updates, check out the roadmap.

[Not Massive] Alan Wake Returns To Steam, On Sale 80% Off


Back in May 2017, we reported that Alan Wake would be permanently leaving Steam following a license dispute with Remedy Entertainment. As it turns out, the game had a few pieces of music that were expiring and Remedy was either unable or unwilling to pay up to have said license renewed. The game was put on sale at 90% off and has remained off the store ever since.

Until today, when the title unexpectedly returned. There hasn’t been an official news statement posted, however Remedy Entertainment commented on Twitter to thank Microsoft for renegotiating the rights to the licensed music, allowing the game to return to store shelves.

Big thanks to our partner and Alan Wake’s publishers who were able to renegotiate the rights to the licensed music in Alan Wake, so that the game can be sold again.

If you for some reason did not pick up Alan Wake during its initial 90% off farewell sale, you can get it now for 80% off, or $3 USD (Your local prices may vary). You can also find it on Good Old Games at an 80% discount. Spinoff Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is also 80% off if you’re into that sort of thing. Peter Calloway is directing an Alan Wake TV show.

[Not Massive] Steam Users Are Angry Over Early Tomb Raider Discounts


Shadow of the Tomb Raider is currently on sale and customers aren’t happy.

The third and final installment in the latest Tomb Raider reboot series, Shadow of the Tomb Raider launched on PC on September 14 to pretty favorable reviews and Steam numbers. This week, the game was discounted 34% off on October 16, 47% off for the Croft edition bundle that contains extra DLC. Since the sale began, the game has been bombed by negative reviews citing the game’s sale price. So why the issue?

Normally sales would be a great thing, but early adopters are not happy about Shadow of the Tomb Raider going on such a deep discount a month after launch and not even during a heavy sale period for Steam. More specifically, many of the negative reviews appear to be coming out of China where players are expressing frustration between two major topics: That the game is going on sale so soon after launch and of long wait times to import the game into China adding to the fact that the game is on sale so soon after many received their copies. In short, people feel burned that Square Enix discounted the game so heavily and so quickly after launch.

It seems more than likely that Square Enix is offering this deal because sales from Shadow of the Tomb Raider have been far less than anticipated. Back in September, Eurogamer noted that Shadow’s physical sales in the UK were down 70% from 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot, a more troubling idea considering that Tomb Raider initially launched just on the Xbox and this time around launched on all three major systems (PS4, Xbox One, PC) simultaneously. It also doesn’t help that Shadow cost about $100 million to make. Not a good sign.

Oddly enough, Amazon has the Playstation 4 edition of Shadow of the Tomb Raider on sale for $44.95, a 25% discount, while the Xbox version is only 5% off at $57. I guess we know which version sold better.

We fully expect Square Enix to comment on Shadow’s sales as the company has been pretty forthcoming about its opinions in the past.

Jagged Alliance Online To Sunset November 30


 

Jagged Alliance Online: Reloaded is the latest victim of online-only games, as developer/publisher Cliffhanger Productions announced last week that the servers will come down in November. Initially launched into open beta way back in 2012, developed by Cliffhanger Productions and published at the time by Gamigo. In 2015, the game was rebooted on Steam, now self-published by Cliffhanger, for a base asking price.

“It is with great regret, that we have to announce the servers for JAO will be closing by end of November and the game will cease to exist. We kept the game running for as long as we could – for a long time now it cost us more than we earned- but unfortunately we don’t have the means to continue to do so any more.”

Cliffhanger Productions is currently advertising its next title set for launch this fall: Jagged Alliance: Rage! Rage is a spinoff set 20 years after the first Jagged Alliance. As for Jagged Alliance Online, the game has been sitting at single digit average player counts for well over two years now.

(Source: Steam)

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)