MMO fails to perform for the umpteenth time.
Tag: Wild Buster
Champions Of Titan Is Back For Round 3 (In Chinese)
No localized in English, unfortunately.
Continue reading “Champions Of Titan Is Back For Round 3 (In Chinese)”
Whatever Happened To: Insel Games?
It’s been nearly a year and a half since we talked about Insel Games here at MMO Fallout, so I thought why not check in and see if they even still exist?
The last time we talked about Insel Games was in February 2018 when the company did something very, very stupid. Insel Games popped up a few years back to crowdfund the western releases of Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, two top-down ARPG titles that performed fine enough on Indiegogo. Wild Buster raked in roughly $13k and Guardians of Ember a slightly more impressive $80k. Wild Buster even boasted Serious Sam and Duke Nukem among their character roster.
I’ll let Insel Games describe themselves:
“InselGames is a small independent publisher of online games based in Malta. Members of our team have worked on games such as Last Chaos, Fiesta Online, S4 League, Florensia, Everquest 2 and Planetside 2. Our goal is to bring you the best independent MMOs with a fair business model (TLDR: no pay-to-win)!”
I know what you’re thinking: What was this big stupid thing that Insel Games did? Well, the CEO got caught attempting to manipulate Steam reviews for Wild Buster after the title didn’t meet initial expectations and Valve gave the company the big boot. All of Insel Games titles were removed and the developer was banned from the store front. However it happened, Insel Games lost or gave up the publishing rights to both Guardians of Ember and Wild Buster. Guardians of Ember transferred to GameForge while Wild Buster renamed itself Champion of Titans and moved over to IDC Games.
You might be thinking that Insel Games just dissolved and died off, what with their getting banned from the largest PC game store and losing what few titles they had publishing rights to, and you would kinda be right. Right now the Insel Games website has two titles listed under “Our Games” with no mention of their prior published titles. The first game is World of Fishing which some of you may vaguely remember. World of Fishing shut down two years ago with players receiving free keys to Guardians of Ember as compensation. Whoops.
The other game appears to be titled MAD: Revenge of Narc. The website notes that this is a working title, but I’m assuming that it too is dead. I can’t find any mention online of an MMO with this name, and reverse searching the three screenshots on their website also doesn’t turn up any results. The Malta business registry similarly doesn’t have any status listed for the company.
So it looks like Insel Games is basically dead, assuming their domain isn’t simply waiting for whatever funds have already been invested in it to dry out.
Wild Buster Relaunching Under New Publisher As Champions of Titan
Wild Buster hasn’t had such great success on Steam, especially after Valve severed its ties to Insel Games over that whole fraudulent review fiasco and removed their entire library from the platform. In response to the lack of simoleons flowing in and likely several angry phone calls with developer Nuri Works, Insel Games has agreed to transfer publishing rights to a new company, IDC Games who will relaunch Wild Buster under the new moniker Champions of Titan.
Unfortunately this means that all of your progression is going to be wiped.
With these changes also comes the necessity for a server wipe and new game client which means that all character progress will be reset and you need to re-register your account. While this might sadden some of you it simply is the best way to ensure a fair start for everyone and a growing community from the point of the re-launch.
Those who backed Wild Buster have been promised compensation in the form of rewards for the upcoming Champions of Titan relaunch.
(Source: Steam)
PSA: Wild Buster, How To Unlock Duke/Sam, Turn Off Annoying Voices
Wild Buster launched today, and there seems to be some confusion on how Founders can unlock Duke Nukem and Serious Sam, or any of their founders items for that matter.
- Create a Wild Commando (Sam) or Titan Trooper character (Duke).
- Skip the tutorial because you aren’t five.
- Go to the Mailbox bot right next to the first portal.
- Click on the Event Tab
- Retrieve the skins.
- Right click on them to equip.
You can unequip the skins and place them in your stash if you want to share them between characters, but skins and mounts can only be redeemed once.
Beta Perspective: Wild Buster Is The Final Fantasy XIII of Diablo Clones
I’m having quite a bit of fun with Wild Buster, the latest MMOARPG to hit beta, but the game is rather one dimensional and I have a feeling that’s going to hurt its potential.
If you haven’t heard of Wild Buster, this is the Diablo-style game that has hinged some of its marketing on the inclusion of Duke Nukem and Serious Sam as official, licensed characters. The game is currently enjoying its last beta weekend before early access, so I decided to jump in and give my two cents.
Final Fantasy XIII was rather creatively labeled a corridor simulator, and if you translated that element into a Diablo clone, you’d probably end up with Wild Buster. Not to say the game is poorly designed; combat is smooth and responsive, the visuals aren’t half-bad, and there is plenty of loot to go around without going overboard. There are a number of classes across the two factions that operate quite distinctly from one another, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of tomfoolery in the cash shop department at least at this juncture.
But the level design is horrendous, a series of re-skinned corridors where the only option is to go forward, defeating small groups of trash mobs with the occasional mini-boss style character, before you eventually face off against the big boss of the dungeon. Games in this genre generally make use of randomly generated dungeons to provide players with a varied landscape.
These games are mostly pretty linear but provide an open enough area to make up for that, but in Wild Buster you’ll just be going down hallway after hallway, without even the illusion of being able to move around. Even the bosses themselves seem poorly designed, mostly tanks with high health counters and stunning attacks, whose fights mostly boil down to increasingly spawning trash mobs and area of effect damage totems.
Wild Buster also seems to have some vestigial features in place, like being able to jump which doesn’t seem do much of anything. At least in the first twenty levels you won’t encounter anything that requires you to jump, nor do enemies appear to have attacks that can be jumped over.
Still, the hack and slashy, killing monsters in large quantities aspect is keeping me playing Wild Buster despite the grievances that I have with the beta at this time. I get the feeling that Wild Buster won’t so much fade out of my interest as much as it will hit a hard dead end where I just stop playing.
Oh and the game committed the cardinal sin of using “might’of” is a word as though that’s still okay in 2017.
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