Tag: Steam

Early Access: Battle Royale Survivors Is Lazy Dreck


I had to give Battle Royale: Survivors a look, it just had to be done.

Battle Royale: Survivors is the latest in the long line of developers jumping on the PUBG bandwagon and if you’re thinking that this game looks like a twinstick shovelware title built off of the Unity engine, well you’re right on two of the three points. Survivors isn’t a twinstick game, although it would be a much higher quality product if it were. What it is is a shovelware title built on Unity that hopes to piggyback on an existing trend.

Survivors launched into early access on June 18, by which I of course mean that the game launched riddled with bugs and unfinished features, but a functioning cash shop where you can purchase money packs up to the best offer at $24.99. Cash can be swapped for TK, the in-game currency, at a base rate of 2,000TK per $1 USD, meaning the loot boxes run for between $2.50-$3.50 apiece, plus an extra dollar for keys for the higher two options. Additional characters will run you nearly 10k TK, or $5 give or take. Alternately you can grind TK through the games at such a snail’s pace that the game will become unbearable long before you even get close to unlocking your first crate.

Unfortunately the cash shop won’t be able to save a game that is currently sitting at barely enough players to fill up a quarter of a standard battle royale match, and I sit here waiting for my latest match to hit the bare minimum ten players needed to get started.

I’ve already noted that Survivors is not a twin stick shooter, but this is important because the isometric camera might have suggested otherwise. In this game you move with the WASD keys and your character attacks where your are pointed. This leads to shooting mechanics that are so poorly handled and controlled that I found myself constantly coming in the top 3 simply running around in the open with some sort of melee weapon and zerging out my enemies.

Shooting mechanics in Survivors are worthless, to the point where holding a weapon is a detriment in many situations. You can hold the right mouse button to aim, but you move so slow and the aiming itself is so wonky that anyone can run up behind you and start whacking away with a baseball bat, the janky controls and laggy nature of the game allowing them to just jolt left and right while you fumble and try to hit them. In addition, weapons are stupidly underpowered to the point of being useless in their own right.

Which isn’t to say that this title has zero good ideas. The idea to implement fog of war makes it possible to sneak up on people, and the wonky controls actually make it a viable strategy because you can’t really easily keep a 360 degree view on your surroundings. Unfortunately, that’s it. It’s the spicy dijon mustard in the dog food sandwich.

View post on imgur.com

But I call this game lazy because that is exactly what it is. Hastily cobbled together on Unity to throw into early access and hope that people pay far more than the game is worth for the simple act of changing your default character. Nowhere else is this idea of laziness more blatant than the massive buildings that will block your view and make huge swaths of the map impossible to interact with.

If Survivors became a twin-stick shooter, where your character faced the mouse and you had a reticle, the game would be 25% better. Otherwise, right now this game feels like yet another cheap, lazy, unity-based shovelware title. One where the game conveniently tells you to shove off after you complete a match and doesn’t let you continue playing. Really, it’s for your own good.

Bless Online To Offer Big Update On America Day (July 4)


Neowiz has announced the next big content patch for Bless Online hitting Steam digital shelves on July 4. The update introduces new royalty quests, daily missions available at level 45 that offer better rewards than standard quests and can be completed up to 15 per day in return for rare pets and mounts, among other things. In addition, Basel George is a new area that can be tackled at level 45 with a group.

Finally the update will make market changes and improvements to the market UI.

(Source: Producer’s letter)

PSA: Shadowrun Returns Free Until Saturday


The Steam Summer Sale might be bumping, but right now you can get your hands on the isometric game Shadowrun Returns for the virtually free price of $0. Available via the Humble Store and delivered as a Steam key, the Shadowrun Returns Deluxe Edition still retails for $25 and includes the base game as well as the Anthology DLC and soundtrack.

But like any great deal, this one is time limited and will end mid-day Saturday. Our time wizards peg this promotion as ending at 1p.m. EST on June 23.

The Crew 2 Hits Open Beta, Mostly Negative Reviews


The Crew 2 open beta has officially begun for this weekend, and it looks like gamers aren’t quite happy about what developer Ivory Tower is offering.

If you head over to the Steam page, where The Crew 2 currently stands at 37% positive, a large portion of the negative reviews seem to focus on poor handling of the game’s various vehicle types. The Crew 2 lets you race using cars, boats, and planes, all of which control rather rigidly according to early Steam players. While many of the reviews acknowledged that the graphics and performance are a positive, although frame rates are apparently locked to 60, some reviews pointed to the game’s “cringey millennial dialogue” as a point of contention.

Thankfully with the open beta running until June 24, you can try it out for yourself with the only cost being bandwidth and time.

The Netherlands Litigated On CS:Go Lootboxes, So Valve Killed Trading In the Netherlands


Gamers in the Netherlands woke up this week to find out that they are no longer able to trade or market items in Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2. Following a ruling by the Dutch government that Valve’s systems constituted a violation of its laws on gambling, threatening criminal prosecution unless the word of the law was met, which according to Valve wasn’t actually detailed in said threat.

So in response, until Valve can better understand how to work under Dutch law, they have gone ahead and disabled trading entirely for users in the Netherlands. This change affects Counter Strike: GO and Dota 2, however since the ruling affects any game where items can be won by chance and then traded outside of the game, more Steam titles may be caught up in the future. So far the Dutch government has only noted the two of Valve’s titles.

(Source: Gamer Revolution)

Steam: Devs Cannot Discount Within 30 Days Of Price Increase


With the Steam summer sale upon us, it might be useful to look back at a not-so-new but not-so-well-known policy laid out by Valve in terms of how and when developers can put their games on sale. According to the terms of service as laid out by Valve, vendors are not allowed to discount their games within 30 days of a price increase, cannot change prices while a promotion is live, and cannot run another discount for two months following a launch discount.

These rules were likely put into place to prevent a repeat of previous years where some developers would increase their costs right before a big Steam sale and then discount it to make it look like the game is at a big markdown, such as a $20 game boosting its price to $50, then offering 50% off and selling at $25 so people think they’re getting a great deal when really they’re paying even more than the regular cost.

The full rules breakdown as follows:

  • You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 2 months.
  • It is not possible to discount your product for 30 days following a price increase.
  • Discounts cannot be run within 2 months of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events or other specific Valve-organized sale events.
  • Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 30 days of releasing your title or 30 days from when your launch discount ends.
  • You may not change your price while a promotion is live.
  • It is not possible to discount a product 100%.
  • Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

Chaturday: The Seeming Lack of Non-Trolling Offensive Games


I’ve been thinking long and hard about Valve’s new policy regarding offensive games and how this could negatively affect their user base, by which I mean I haven’t been giving it much thought at all. My attention, however, has turned to the idea that Steam will be flooded by horrifying, bullying, aggressive, abusive, games designed to be abusive and bullying, because the media told me to prepare for it and when have they ever published sensationalist material?

If you consider the history of offensive or controversial games, the list is actually pretty small once you filter out the titles that were deliberately cobbled together in a week by a guy using pre-built assets. A guy whose motivation is little more than a stupid joke for his friends or to intentionally bait the games press into writing outrage clickbait about his title, thus increasing its sales potential from zero to three because such coverage rarely results in sales if the game is genuinely awful.

Even then, what you are left with is a pile of games that were controversial for other reasons than its direct content, like Persona 5 bullying streamers or Baldur’s Gate pushing a low quality expansion. You just don’t see serious developers, or even semi-serious indie devs, trying to create games in the same vein as Active Shooter Simulator. As incredible as it may sound, there isn’t much money in that sort of controversy, and the negative blowback can be more damaging than any potential sales revenue. Just ask Konami what it thinks about Six Days in Fallujah.

Which leads us to the group that will for the most part be making these games: Tiny fly-by-night indie developers that nobody has ever heard of before, virtually indistinguishable from the troll accounts. If a game like Active Shooter is submitted again to Steam, would it even be given the consideration that it might not be a troll title? Or Gay World? I have my doubts.

I suppose the goal here is two-fold to discourage troll developers: You’re spending $100 to submit a game that has a high chance of being flagged and dumped as a troll game and you’re not getting that $100 back. If, by chance, the troll game gets through the initial screening, odds are it will either be drowned in the sea of Steam games and nobody will see it or the wrong person will see it, raise a ruckus, and we’re back at square one.

Will that discourage trolls? Hell no, and to further my point I point toward the Something Special for Someone Special, a wedding ring in Team Fortress 2 that broadcasts a global message to all servers upon activation. The ring costs $100 and that price hasn’t stopped thousands of people from purchasing it and some using it to broadcast messages like “Anne Frank has accepted Adolph Hitler’s apology ring,” because those messages aren’t checked. $100 for a joke is nothing for a large swath of people, even if the payoff is people see it for five seconds and then it’s gone.

The developer behind Active School Shooter denies that his game was meant to troll the public, a claim that ultimately falls on deaf ears considering his previous list of published titles including White Power: Pure Voltage and Tyde Pod Challenge. Most trolls will deny that they are in fact trolls, meaning Valve will need to use their critical thinking skills to determine if the next Active Shooter Simulator is a troll game.

On second thought, Valve only declared the game a troll title because of its association with Ata Berdiyev, so we might be doomed in that department.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Valve Addresses Fake Steam Games Again, Again, Again, Again


Valve is once again taking on fake games plaguing Steam, this time focusing on achievements. In a leaked post to the private developer forums, Valve announced that games will now be subject to confidence constraints that will limit how many achievements a game can have and how those achievements affect your account, until the game is validated as being an actual product that people are buying and playing.

The post notes that, until a game is validated as being genuine, it will be limited to 100 achievements and progress will not be visible, nor will it count toward global achievement numbers. Achievement games have become more prevalent on Steam due to Valve’s lax restriction and quality control on products, with an entire genre forming around games that offer thousands of achievements with no real underlying game, generally simply requiring the game to be launched and idling to generate achievements.

This move is very similar to one that Valve took against trading cards, where Valve placed limits on which games would be eligible for the marketable, tradeable cards. It is important to note that unlike trading cards, where an entire black market of mostly Russian bots formed to farm games developed purely to profit off of fraudulent card sales, that achievements are absolutely worthless in Steam other than for decoration and ego purposes.

(Source: Twitter)

[Video] Remedy Entertainment Unveils Control


Remedy Entertainment and publishing partner 505 Games have announced Control, set for PC and consoles in 2019. Players take on the role of Jesse Faden, director of a secretive agency in New York when the world is invaded by aliens. Players will have to master a variety of powers, loadouts, and reactive environments.

“Control represents a new exciting chapter for us, it redefines what a Remedy game is. It shows off our unique ability to build compelling worlds while providing a new player-driven way to experience them,” said Mikael Kasurinen,game director of Control. “A key focus for Remedy has been to provide more agency through gameplay and allow our audience to experience the story of the world at their own pace”

Remedy Entertainment is known for their work on Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break.

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