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I like games with a little random element to it. Give me choices and give me various outcomes that come from them, and let me figure out the best way to handle this. Win or lose by my own choices.
FreeHolder is one of those games, setting you in the role of 3 recently escapes slaves trying to make a living for themselves on a small farmstead in the time of Romans. Every year you will have a goal of money and grown wheat to meet to keep your farm. As you go along, your characters level up and gain new abilities to help you keep up with this, as well as being able to accumulate new tiles of land around your farmstead (which granted does push up rent, but also maximises places to gain resources).
There are a few goals to keep in mind. You must of course plan your months of the year wisely to ensure you have grown enough wheat to meet the tariff. You must keep an eye on the money you have and try to make yourself more than enough just in case. You need to make sure there is enough food to feed all your characters and keep them healthy, fuel to heat the housing in the winter months, building materials in case you want to construct new buildings or paddocks, reagents in case someone is ill and so much more. Add to this that some food items are perishable and need to be eaten first otherwise you lose it entirely. At first it’s a bit confusing to figure out, but once you know where to find things you can probably keep your stock up high enough to not have problems.
There are areas outside of the farmstead of course, and these consist of a number of small towns you can go to gain information and make use of opportunities, a tavern where you can meet various… interesting characters, and the main city where the main market is located and where you will likely be selling on extra supplies to mount up your monetary total. Believe me, set someone aside to keep doing that at least once a month and you will do well, but make sure you don’t sell things you might need.
The game is a little bit confusing to play at first, as the direction is a little lacking. The market interface especially took me a while to figure out. Once you know what to do though, the game plays very well. It does its best to give you as much information as possible, although it is usually the more important stuff such as “you need this much wheat and money”. Each character is assigned a certain number of ‘turn’ slots they can use per month, with a few actions taking more than one of these. Using them wisely is key as the move slots do not pass over from month to month; and these slots get reduced if a character is ill.
FreeHolder is available now on Steam Early Access (which means the game could change a lot from the version I’ve reviewed now) from $9.99 or £6.99 – and there’s even a demon available if you wish to try before you buy. I would recommend this game, as it’s a decent little game and I don’t see many turn-based roguelikes based in the Roman Empire era.
Earlier this year, Zenimax and Oculus’ legal fight over whether or not the Rift was constructed with the use of copyrighted code that belonged to Zenimax that had come from John Carmack, as well as whether a non-disclosure agreement had been violated came to an end. The court found that while there had been no misappropriation of trade secrets, there was substantial evidence to suggest that copyrights had been infringed and the non-disclosure agreement violated – landing Oculus and their parent company Facebook with a $500 million fine as a result.
That original lawsuit had been asking for $2 billion and at the time it was wondered if Zenimax would choose to go further and try to prevent Oculus Rift and related products that used the code from being sold. Now it seems that they’ve decided to go ahead with this, filing an injunction to demand products using the code be removed from sale. The wording seems to hint more at the software side of things, but the hardware itself won’t be much use without the software to run.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the Oculus Rift though, merely that if successful new code would have to be developed under a ‘clean room’ environment which means the team would have to have no knowledge of the existing code that came from Carmack. Not the end, but certainly a massive headache especially for a VR company that’s fallen behind in recent months behind the Vive and Playstation VR.
Oculus had already said that they were planning to appeal the decision from the lawsuit, and with this new injunction Facebook has called it “legally flawed and factually unwarranted.” Indeed a partner at IP law firm McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP, Joshua Rich, spoke to Ars Technica and said that because Zenimax had not gotten the jury to agree on the trades secrets claim that the injunction rested upon “a relatively weak argument” and that the best they could hope to get from the injunction would be the ‘clean room’ recoding.
Whatever the result is, it’s just another obstacle in the way that’s going to hinder whatever long-term plans Facebook had for the company when they bought it a few years back for $2 billion (although we now know it was closer to $3 billion). Only time will tell if Oculus can climb back from this.
So, recently NASA made quite the discovery, finding a star nearby in galactic terms with seven Earth-sized planets orbiting, three of which are inhabitable possibly. This star is a red dwarf called TRAPPIST-1 and is approximately 40 light years away, so now a great many space-based games with accurate starmaps are updating to make sure that this new discovery is included in their game. One of these is a favourite of the station staff, Elite: Dangerous.
Developer Frontier have announced that the TRAPPIST-1 system will be coming to the game with update 2.3, otherwise known as the ‘Commanders Update’. The information NASA released will be used to construct the system, but interestingly enough it seems that Elite’s own system for generating star systems got eerily close to the true TRAPPIST-1 system only a short distance away. A system already exists in game close to where the true-life TRAPPIST-1 system is, with seven planets orbiting a brown dwarf which is only slightly smaller than a red dwarf star. Of course, NASA still has details to discover so the game TRAPPIST-1 system will be updated accordingly over time as more details are released.
Already the Commanders Update will be bringing a lot to the game, including the ability to name your ship, a new camera system, the Commander creator and the ability to join friends in a single crew – so really this discovery and its addition is just a lovely bonus to the game.
TRAPPIST-1 will not be in the first round of beta testing, but Frontier hope to have it in for the second round.
Just like any popular multiplayer game, For Honor already has its cheaters using any means to win. Seems Ubisoft have decided they’re going to tolerate very little of that though, as there’s already been bans for cheating and quite a few of those for first-time offenses.
Posted through an update on the Ubisoft blog, Ubisoft have spelt out that they’re going to be taking the game’s name to heart and are not willing to put up with those who try to give themselves an unfair advantage. Already around 400 accounts have been caught and banned for cheating or hacking, while a further 70 have been banned for reasons of an offensive nature – including emblems, harassment and other misconduct all flagged up by other players in game.
“For Honor puts a huge emphasis on skill, so it’s important that it offers a level playing field – and to ensure that nobody has an unfair advantage, the developers have rolled out EasyAntiCheat, a program that detects and flags those who break the rules.”
Once an account is flagged by the program, there are then members of the dev team who will review the case to hopefully weed out false positives. If an account is found to be doing things they shouldn’t then a number of different courses of action are taken, “warnings, temporary suspensions, or permanent bans against identified players… fairness is hugely important to the game’s creators, so bans are being handed out to first-time offenders.”
Bans will be handed out on an account basis, not a hardware one, and there will be a system in place for appeals if players feel they have been unfairly banned from the game.
