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A lot of strange things happen in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community seems. Maybe it’s just because it’s such a big one; but this story’s certainly a new one for me.
Over the last few days an exploit was discovered which let chat bots invade game lobbies – even private ones – to spam whatever they wanted, and what’s more they were unkickable too because of it. So what did one of the main users of the exploit use it to do? Erm, complain about security issues in CS:GO as well as how Valve’s handling it…
As you can see in the screenshot above, the user is trying to stir up the community into a one-day boycott of the game in protest of the “hackers and bugs” he sees, claiming that Valve is more interested in making money from the game through selling skins and cases than fixing these security issues. There’s even a Reddit thread discussing the exploit and the user in question.
Ironically, despite the user’s claims, Valve have responded to that thread saying that they “have deployed a temporary solution to help mitigate the exploit” and that they “will continue working on it throughout next week”.
Stay weird gaming communities. You brighten my day up tremendously.
It’s time for your weekly look into some of the interesting stuff going on with gaming Kickstarter campaigns, starting as always with a little update on things I’ve previously covered.
We’ll start with the good news first as there’s quite a lot of it! Many of the previously covered campaigns have concluded with full met and in some cases very much bypassed goals. Among these are LEGRAND LEGACY, Tortuga 1667, The Pedestrian, Pitch Deck, Sundered, and finally, having made its goal in time – BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION. We look forward to seeing these campaigns progress into good games.
However, it’s not all good news. Project Life has 20 hours to go on its campaign as of time of writing, and it has made barely any of its target so I can’t see it succeeding which is a shame. The funding campaign for the Apocalypse Now game has now been cancelled and crowdfunding has moved to a dedicated site at ApocalypseNow.com with Kickstarter backers being able to grab a tier above the one they pledge to as a thanks for their support thus far. The campaign hadn’t been going well anyway, so we’ll have to see if this game becomes a reality.
Finally, there has been no change in the status of the Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game, although it has now emerged that Frontier were not the ones filing the claim, but rather someone outside of the company. The matter is apparently ongoing and I will update if we get any further news.
First up we have a game that pays homage to 1940s murder mysteries.
Innocence is a survival horror-type game that is a throwback to the same classics of the genre during the PS1-era,and has two playable characters – one a female and the other a male. They are put onto a case located on an island that a year ago was the talk of everyone for the murder of a nine-year-old girl, only to be greeted by a great sense of supernatural uneasy that isn’t helped much by the island’s residents.
Innocence has a $7,500 goal, with stretch goals up to $20,000, and has made $21 so far. It has another 49 days to go.
Next up we have another game that aims to bring back the good old days of survival horror. I swear this wasn’t intentional on my part.
Daymare: 1998 is another survival horror game with people in the team who worked on Resident Evil games in the past and the sub-title of the campaign page describes this game as “Resident Evil 2 Reborn!” Third-person, with puzzles to solve, a need for strategic fighting and resource gathering, it’s pretty much what you would expect from this genre. The team behind it are hoping to get it released on Steam, PS4 and Xbox One if successful.
Daymare: 1998 has 24 days to go, and has made €25,740 of its €180,000 goal.
Next we have a game that I’ve been hearing about a lot this week on Twitter.
Shardbound is called a “tactical Collectible Card Game that gives streamers and their viewers exciting new ways to interact and play together on Twitch!” on its campaign page, which tells you which audience the developers are targeting with this game. Interactive gaming on Twitch is a big thing, and its nice to see another one in the works. The game has been in the works for 2 years and is currently in a private pre-Alpha testing phase.
Shardbound’s promotion has paid off, as they’ve already made their $50,000 and bypassed it. It has 25 more days to go though, so who knows where it’ll be at the end of that?
Lastly we have a game that sounds like a survival crafter game, but hold on.
SmuggleCraft is a game about hovercrafts. More specifically, it’s a quest-based hovercraft game in which you smuggle stuff, customise your craft and participate in a storyline with branching narrative. This is apparently a racing game, but it does seem like the developers wanted to make it more than just that which is nice. Smuggling quests can be legal or not so, and which ones you accept and even if you choose to follow through or steal the cargo for your own needs can have an effect on your narrative for the rest of the game.
SmuggleCraft has made $3,863 of its $15,000 goal, with 25 more days to go.
Space Pirates and Zombies 2 is a sequel to an indie game called Space Pirates and Zombies from 2011. Right now the sequel’s been in Early Access for about a year, but it would seem that the developers of the game have been having some trouble behind the scenes and because of it a much anticipated gamemode has had to fall by the wayside.
Developers MinMax Games put out a post on their Steam community page recently that broke the news to the game’s community that unfortunately the planned multiplayer arena mode has had to be scrapped, along with a lengthy apology for having done it. The problem it seems that is due to a lack of multiplayer backend functionality in the Unity game engine that they’re building the game in, they just can’t get Arena to work as well as they feel good releasing with the game. They state that they “have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4. But at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.”
As mentioned, many players were really looking forward to the multiplayer and had even hoped that the game might one day get a co-op campaign mode too. Needless to say, the scrapping of Arena has kind of nipped those hopes in the bud. It does seem though that the majority of players have taken the news well, with most of the responses to the post being quite positive and a number of players saying that they have respect for MinMax’s honesty with them about the state of the game and the now-dropped feature. Always nice to see people on the Internet acting rationally for once.
If you’re curious about the game though, you can pick up Space Pirates and Zombies 2 right now from the Steam store for $19.99/£14.99.
At the moment Microsoft are pushing their idea of cross-play between Windows 10 and Xbox One hard. ReCore and Gears of War 4 were both released as Xbox and Windows exclusives, with Play Anywhere also being a big thing they’re currently pushing. Halo Wars 2 will be the next, coming out on February 21st and according to Phil Spencer Microsoft are planning to focus hard on PC gaming in 2017.
His words were that Microsoft has a “bigger and more differentiated” first-party lineup for this year, with highlights including Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2. Spencer believes that “2017 is going to be an incredible year for Xbox One and Windows 10 gamers” but they’ve still got a ways to go before they can overcome the reputation for PC gaming that ‘Games For Windows Live’ left them with years back.
Only time will tell if Microsoft can live up to the promises Spencer is making. I hope that they will somewhat, I really am looking forward to Sea of Thieves with the other station staff. If you want to read the full interview where Spencer talked about this, the full article can be found over at VG247.
One of the big things about multiplayer survival sandbox games is that… well, griefers are a thing. People who get their kicks ruining other people’s stuff when they’re off-server (and sometimes still on-server) are generally not thought of highly, but people still do it. Now it seems it’s become such an issue for one recently released that the developers have had to step in to put in a fix.
Conan Exiles’ official servers have been suffering from EU players logging on to find out that while they were sleeping players from the NA and Asia regions have come in, and destroyed their camps overnight (and vice-versa). Obviously this doesn’t feel fair to them and Funcom have agreed because they’re now region-locking official servers – which means only EU players can access EU servers, NA players access NA servers and so on.
“We have decided to East/West region lock the official servers for three reasons. The language barrier and the different playstyles is proving jarring for a lot of players. Also, the vastly different time zones between regions made offline raiding an unavoidable issue for a lot of players who would wake up to all their stuff being completely ruined.”
This does mean that for the moment there’s no official servers for Asia, SA or Russia but Funcom are hoping to get some up within the next week. The other snarfu in this has been that clans who are formed of players from multiple regions have suffered a little bit, and some players are even asking for a refund on their game because of it.
Either way, if it was that much of an issue region-locking had to be done it really has to be for the best. From what I’ve seen of it, Conan Exiles is a challenging game to play, so I can see why people would consider griefing to be a very big issue in this game.
