Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
A popular modding tool for GTA V among other games was taken down about a week ago, when the creators received a case and desist letter from Take Two. Obviously the modders felt they had no choice to avoid legal action.
OpenIV had been going since 2008 and as well as GTA V had been used for modding it’s predecesor GTA IV and Max Payne 3. A lot of people used it and a lot of people loved it. However, the notice gave the developers little choice and they took down all the files and ceases distribution entirely.
The player response has not exactly been favourable to Take Two and Rockstar, with the Steam rating of reviews given to the GTA V game going from a highly Positive percentage down to Mixed – with many of the new reviews stating the takedown of OpenIV was what was causing them to review it as Negative now. Now a petition has popped up on Change.org asking Rockstar to ‘save’ the mod by allowing the team behind it to distribute it again, as well as asking that modding “be deemed legal again” across the series.
“The closing of OpenIV leaves 10,000s of people without access to be able to mod their games, and leaves 10,000s of people without the ability to continue their hobbies. All modding used by OpenIV is for singleplayer use only to make the game more enjoyable, the software OpenIV was never used to mod multiplayer or Grand Theft Auto Online so it does not harm anyone.”
However, the response from Rockstar a few days back disagrees on that last point about the mods being kept to singleplayer, as they stated that the reason Take Two had to tackle OpenIV was that it had been the basis for a number of recent malicious mods that “allow harassment of players and interfere with the GTA Online experience for everybody.” They have also stated that they are working to find a way they can “continue to support the creative community without negatively impacting our players.”
It’s time for the weekly look into gaming Kickstarter campaigns.
Starting with a look back at ones I’ve previously covered, it’s a wide spread of mostly bad news I’m afraid.
Many campaigns have finished this week unsuccessfully, with one being cancelled before it could finish. The cancelled one was The End is Nahual: If I May Say So, with an update after cancelling saying that the team is going to seek funding in other places for the game. Of the failed ones there was Sons of the Void, which unfortunately has now had its development cancelled as a result of the failure; Lost Cities, which apparently is still being released on Steam soon regardless; BLANK, which is still being continued and has just been Greenlit on Steam; Abstract Arena, which had no updates even prior to the ending of the campaign; Fake News!, another one with no updates (and the site still lists it under the game’s previous name – Lizard People); and PipPow, which hasn’t been updated since the campaign finished, although that was merely seven hours before the time of writing.
There is also one campaign still going with less than 48 hours, and a monster task of making up over 4000 euros – The Salt Fortress. Strangely despite its pedigree, Project Rap-Rabbit has also been struggling to raise funds. It has a week to go and the developers recently released a video of gameplay footage in a big to try and drum up interest again.
However, there is a little bit of good news. Firstly Rememorex which I covered last week has passed its goal so we can expect to see that one getting made. Also spaceBOUND is nearing completion having reached its goal weeks before – so that one will be listed next week as a completed successful project.
First up we have a game based on the popular tabletop RPG Pathfinder.
We here at the station love tabletop RPG, and Pathfinder is one of the favourites among some of the staff. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a isometric single-player version of the game, in which you customise your character the way you would when starting a Pathfinder campaign – race, class, stats and abilities. There are 7 races available, over 10 classes and the developers say that while the core story will take 40 hours, the additional side-quests will take you that long on top of that. 80 hours worth of play doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
Pathfinder: Kingmaker has a $500,000 goal, of which it has made $396,642 with 29 days to go.
Next we have another RPG, this time done in a minimalist top-down style.
Darkened Abyss is a game where you play as someone who has fallen down into the abyss of the title. You’ve lost your memory and as you climb your way out, you encounter ancient works and relics which slowly help you piece together who you are and what has happened. The game itself is played in very dark light to make seeking out discoveries that much more hazardous as you don’t know what could be around the corner. You’ll encounter monster, untouched buildings and puzzles on your way through the abyss.
Darkened Abyss has made $240 of it’s $6,000 goal. It has 30 more days to run.
Next up is a game that describes itself as a “nightmare action-rpg”.
LUCAH is apparently a game about finding oneself, set in a world that is very sketchily drawn in. The game is a simplistic looking pixelart style one, with dark background and a nightmarish tone to it. You play as one of the ‘Marked’, able to use both melee and projectile-based combat styles to ward off the horrifying things that attack you. There is a demo available on the page if you wish to try before you back, and it will be released for PC, Mac and Linux in 2018.
LUCAH has 27 more days to go to make $20,000. It has made $8,168 so far.
Finally we have a game that requires you to build a gang to rule the street racing scene.
The Underground King is a “strategy racing manager RPG”, in which you tinker with junk cars, fix them up, recruit lowlifes off the street to form a team and compete in street races to earn infamy and money. The campaign page itself has a quote from Jim Sterling which praises it and says that this is apparently the last game ever to go onto the now-dead Steam Greenlight. If Jim Sterling likes something, that’s a pretty good endorsement for the game.
The Underground King has made €2,558 of its €15,000 goal and has 23 days left to run.
Thr first of E3’s big panels for 2017 has concluded, and despite my fears, it wasn’t all mostly devoted to EA Sports and what we could expect from this year’s FIFA game.
To give a quick summary, it started off with a drumline for Madden 18 along with a trailer, but we actually started with some Battlefield 1. There were also trailers for the expected EA Sports games – FIFA, more info on Madden and NBA Live (which also accidentally made a cameo during a later part), along with the announcement of two more games. One of those, A Way Out is a co-op game that looks very interesting, and the other was Project Dylan which was finally given a name – Anthem. Unfortunately it only got a teaser of less than a minute, so we’ll have to wait until Xbox’s panel to see more. Need For Speed’s latest game Payback looks to have some interesting narrative to it as well. The most time though was taken up by Stars Wars Battlefront II.
The followup game to the first Battlefront aims to address the concerns raised during the first game through feedback that was described as “constructive” on stage. This means that this time the game will be coming with a singleplayer Story Mode, as well as seeing the return of the Skirmish game mode. There will also be ‘seasons’ of post-release additional game content, and from the sounds of it every single one of them will be free for people who own the game. There was also a big multiplayer match played live on stream, with some impressive looking vehicles and fighting going on. Obviously this was all being played on very good machines, so hopefully it will still look just as good on lower-tier machines. More details can be found on EA’s press release for the game located here.
Need for Speed Payback was also pretty good looking, with footage of part of a mission being shown off called Highway Heist. The game sets you playing as three characters as they take on ‘The House’ – a criminal group who holds all the cards. So a plucky underdog story, and from the gameplay we saw which depicted a lot of car road battling action (complete with cinematic slow-motion crashes as enemies were totalled) as well as scenes that wouldn’t look out of place in an action movie – seems Payback might be one to keep an eye on.
Battlefield 1 was announced to be getting eight new maps this year, two of the night maps with the other six being part of the upcoming expansion In The Name of the Tsar, which will take the game to World War I’s eastern front in September. The Russian army will becoming in the expansion, along with the women’s battalion of death. Lastly they teased a new small-squad competitive gamemode which they said they will give more details on at Gamescon in August.
A Way Out was one of the standouts for me this year, with the co-op experience that follows two men as they escape prison together then go on the run looking amazing. It was deliberately planned out as a splitscreen couch co-op game, and the idea of being able to see both men’s POV is cool. We also saw that one player can be in the middle of a cutscene while the other one is still playing.
As for the sports games, we got the standard fare. FIFA 18’s story mode will be following their protagonist of last year’s game Alex Hunter, as he continues his journey so that could be interesting to watch. Madden is also going to be getting a Story Mode called the Long Shot on a man who witnessed traumatic events and must recover from them through the sport. Finally NBA Live 18 will be using both tournament and street court play to round out your character’s stats, with both sets of play effecting the development of them as a player.
Of course, the big reveal everyone was watching for was the promised teaser for Bioware’s ‘Project Dylan’ and we got it. The teaser was short and only showed off what looked to be a very sci-fi game with lush jungle environments, a large wall and power armour suits. We’ll see more details in tomorrow’s panels though, so stay tuned.
