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Black Desert Online is one of many MMOs from Korean makers that has been trying to extend their audience to the West. For some time there’s been concerns among the western players though about the game being “pay 2 win” – a concern that does have some evidence given that the premium items from the in-game store you use real money within do actually come with in-game benefits.
A few days ago the developers Daum decided that those items should now be available to all, but by making them sellable for the in-game currency silver they’ve just caused new problems. Fans are concerned that this change will encourage people to spend more money to get the items to then sell so they can build up their silver amounts, to the point where a number of groups actually had in-game protests with picket signs and everything.
Others took to the forums to outline why they had a problem with the changes, with one such user actually making a long and detailed post about p2w vs non-p2w games and how generally those who chose to make their MMOs non-p2w stayed in business a lot longer. Others talked about making chargebacks to get refunds, fed up with the way that the game was. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they’re being listened to. In fact, judging by the evidence the posts are being removed and the users receiving warnings and even bans.
Most of the details of various people getting warnings and bans can be found on this post on the PCGaming Reddit (screencap here in case topic is removed), but the author of the long and details post contrasting p2w and non-p2w games made their own post on their WordPress blog in which they express disappointment and even some foreknowledge that they might get into trouble for making their forum topic in the first place.
While throwing around the word ‘censorship’ is generally not something you should do haphazardly (it’s quite the accusation after all), if Daum is removing most or even all of the negative feedback they are getting for their change it’s not reflecting well upon them. However one of the things we can notice from all the screencaps provided is it seems like the chief forum mod handing out these bans is just the one person: CM_Aethon. From the WordPress blog it does sound like Aethon has a history of being difficult to deal with among the forum users.
While we can only go on the evidence we have right now, which is all from the side of the users, it does sound like this isn’t the end of the matter. If Daum makes a public response we will cover that and then we can see how the story develops.
Last year, Bethesda unveiled Fallout 4 at it’s E3 conference. So many were asking, what could they bring to 2016? The answer: A lot.
Since so much was revealed, I’ll just run down the major bullet points now with more detailed articles to come:
Dishonored 2 gameplay was shown, with some awesome footage of Emily in action.
Dishonored 2 will have a sweet collector’s edition featuring Corvo’s mask and Emily’s ring. But supplies will be limited.
Prey isn’t dead! Its getting a reboot headed by Arkane studios and it looks great.
Fallout Shelter is getting a huge update and a PC version.
Fallout 4 is getting about 90 DLC packs. Experiment on people! Build Rube Goldberg machines. It looks nuts!
Quake is back! Quake Champions was revealed, although we have to wait for Quakecon in August to get more info.
Skyrim is getting a remaster for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
The Elder Scrolls Legends is coming, and its now going to be on Mac, Android and iPad as well. Plus, it has a campaign mode!
The Elder Scrolls Online is getting an update called One Tamriel, which will let players explore the world freely after the tutorial. No level restrictions.
Doom is getting a DLC called Unto Evil.
id promises more play modes, playlists, SnapMap updates and more coming to Doom in the next few months.
Fallout 4 and Doom are getting VR versions for HTC Vive in 2017.
A brief clip during the Quake trailer seemed to tease a new Wolfenstein.
It looks like a pretty epic year for Bethesda, with a little something for everyone.
If you’re looking for a nice juicy story today, boy have I got a good one for you.
Back in 2013, the board of directors voted out of the company Red 5 Studios ex-CEO and lead design on their MMO game Firefall, Mark Kern. Now Kern is appealing to the sci-fi MMO’s community to “let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be” – i.e. as he wants it to be.
Kern made the appeal through a post on Firefall’s subreddit, which has since been deleted, in which he said that he would buy the rights to the game, but only once it was a failure. He also claimed that the company had taken his vision for the game and ruined it, so he wanted to buy the rights and remake it in his ideal.
“I would only offer to buy Firefall if the IP fails and the game is shuttered or due for shuttering,” Kern wrote on Thursday. “Also, buying a failed IP is cheap. You get the code, the art assets, the tools, the name, the customer lists, the story and characters, etc, but nothing else.
“So why buy it at all? First, its my game. I created it, and I hate to see what they did to it and what they did to the vets. Second, I want to finish what I was not allowed to finish because the Executive Team thought “WoW with guns” would be better. But first, Firefall has to die. There can be no confusion that the version I want to make is DIFFERENT and not a continuation. For that, Firefall (current) must end. So don’t play it, don’t buy anything for the game. Just let it crash, so it can live again as it was supposed to be.”
Understandably the community reacted with a bit of confusion and a lot of outrage, which resulted in the then deletion of the post. The most upvoted reply to the post was by another worker ‘gotkerned’ who basically called all that Kern was claiming “full of shit” and said that he must be “so delusional at this point that you really believe yourself.”
“There was no “Executive Team” making actual decisions. Nobody except Mark could make real decisions. Mark rarely showed up to work though, so lots of decisions were made in absentia, and many were countermanded when he decided to show up. The state of Firefall is the result.
The eSports focus? Mark. Founders Packs? Mark. Higher-tier frames? Mark. (He wanted to sell a new one monthly, so he could be like League.) Real-money, per-use paint jobs? Mark. Vehicles, Pets, and dozens of other random features that were irrelevant to the core gameplay? Mark. The completely fucked up UI? Mark. He thinks he’s a UI genius, and put himself directly in charge. Stage 5 and the clusterfuck that was the bus? All Mark. Cutting PvP? Mark again (and he told the forums before the devs).
The vaunted “story”? All bullshit. Was in constant flux. Major rewrites to support whatever feature was the flavor of the month.”
Of course the game and its developer have been having a lot of troubles recently with a soft-launch in China Nov 2015 also coming with a memo to staff members that payroll couldn’t afford to pay them over the holiday period. Then Feb saw investors The9 pull out of Firefall, leaving Red 5 to sell off shares for $76.5 million to a Cayman Islands holding corporation in March.
Still, in terms of ballsy moves this takes the cake. Too bad the post was deleted…
… But thank goodness for webcache. The post and replies can be read here if you’re interested.
Today Jesse Cox hosted a live one on one with Assistant Game Director Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas about LEGION and we had some big announcements.
The main announcement:
Development of the World of Warcraft: Legion expansion is well underway, and we’d like to take some time to update everyone on how things are progressing.
Assistant Game Director Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas will be joined by online gaming personality Jesse Cox to discuss a number of topics, including Class Halls, max-level content, the Demon Hunter, and a status update on what our next priorities are for Legion development.
We’ll be going live at 9:00 AM Pacific/12:00 PM Eastern time on the official World of Warcraft Twitch channel at twitch.tv/Warcraft. We’ll see you then!
Yep, Alpha is over… Beta is Thursday!
WOOHOO!!! and even better folks, loads of beta keys will be going out AND a load more will be offered from bigger sites, including our friends over at wowhead. So keep an eye here for news on that!
Talking about WoWhead, Perculia did a great job of live blogging (saved me a ton of writing) and here’s the full run down of points from the live chat:
Beta Information
– At BlizzCon, many people remember that beta would “start in a couple of weeks.” However, when they thought about it more, beta in the industry is a polished demo. The WoW beta would be pretty unpolished (like 2/3rds of specs unimplemented.) So an alpha happened instead with invite waves over the course of a few months.
– Finally at a point now where all specs, artifacts, dungeons etc are implemented. Legion right now is in the last stretch where it still needs to be polished.
– Ready to move into a formal beta! Current plan is to take alpha down over course of next day and send out big beta invite wave. 2pm Pacific on Thursday is when the formal beta for Legion begins. Characters will be wiped.
– Plan for only one character wipe, so they can get solid feedback from leveling up again.
– In the beta, you will start by completing the Broken Shore scenario, and then move into Legion content in new Dalaran. New Legion content starts with the artifact acquisition questline for your spec.
Class Order Halls
– Class Orders. Garrison 2.0? Not really. The Garrison was a personal private space. Fantasy was raising up an army. The Class Order Hall is a shared social space, a clubhouse for your class. There’s a different sort of customization and interactions. You are a paragon of your class and shape how your hall grows. The Order Hall serves the other core world content, while the Garrison felt like a standalone feature. The Order Hall has content that leads you out into the world.
– There are personalized class-specific quests in the Order Hall, you can recruit great champions. There are missions but they are very pared down–not dozens like Warlords. The missions have greater impact and are much less frequent. We know some people are scarred by the mission table!
– One problem with the Warlords mission system was that it competed with other content. It became a way to easily get anything–crafting stuff, items, currency, gold. When faced with a choice of going out or doing a mission for same reward…pushing the button was a compelling choice.
– There are dungeon and raid missions in Legion, but the reward will be a quest item to send you into the instance to get an item, not a cache that has an item.
– Order Resources – get them out in the world. At the start, you’ll likely send resources on your Order Hall tech tree.
– Order Hall customization – you could customize Garrison (guards, music, buildings). Order Halls have less visual customization but you can customize the gameplay. Order Halls are iconic locations that have been around long before you–you wouldn’t totally redecorate it. However, the Artifact Weapons have visual customization.
– Order Hall fantasy – you are a champion but also part of a group of famous peers. Think King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table.
Legion Questing
– There are several quest systems in Legion. There is a one-time epic storyline that unfolds over course of leveling which you unlock at your own pace (tracking down conspiracy as a Mage, raise new set of Four Horsemen as Death Knight, etc).
– Complementing that is a World Quest system – at a given time, everyone in your region can do those quests. The genesis for that idea was Garrison Missions for players–open up a map and see whole array of things for you to do with various objectives.
– What if you have limited playtime? The more rewarding quests will be around for a few days (chance of a mount, cool item drop). You won’t miss it because you were at work. The quests that have a short timeframe (eg 4 hours) will have generic rewards like gold.
– Every day when you log in, there is an emissary that asks you to do specific sets of world quests to aid a faction (eg all Dreamweaver faction quests in Val’sharah). Do four quests for the emissary and get an awesome chest. These emissary quests kind of work like Hearthstone dailies – they pile up for a few days, so you can catch up on ones you missed.
Legacy/Pristine Servers
– Heated topic with lots of feedback from fans.
– The developers on the Warcraft team are not directly involved in meetings – they’re focused on Legion.
– Response to Pristine Servers – the pros and cons. A big con against it, which is valid, is that it’s still the same, fast, leveling experience where you end up in your Garrison in a few days.
Leveling Experience
– The leveling-up experience in classic zones is pretty broken right now and not well tuned. It’s way too easy and it was neglected for a bit. Due to ability changes over the years, you basically feel invincible (even before heirlooms). You’re running around more vs actually fighting. The pacing of the game isn’t what it should be. They’ve been looking to fix this (even via hotfixes now).
– Barriers of entry to new players – Blizz realized around the time of Cataclysm/Mists of Pandaria that it was a daunting experience for new players who wanted to play with their max-level friends. To help this, they made leveling through past expansions faster and faster…but now leveling isn’t paced correctly. With the addition of max-level boosts, there is less of a need to rush people through leveling, it can be a satisfying well-paced experience. You shouldn’t be out-leveling zones before you finish a story.
– Potentially able to add flexible zone tech to old zones. They’d have a wider level range so you could stay in the zone without skipping the story.
Demon Hunters and Classes
– Demon Hunter double jump is awesome – you could probably double jump/Glide from Highmountain to Azsuna.
– Ion partially picked a Shaman because he wanted to tank!
– There will be 3 in-game cinematics just for Demon Hunters which you won’t see in the beta. You’ll have to play one on live!
– Demon Hunters: very flashy, high-mobility, a lot of fun to play.
– What about other races for Demon Hunters in the future? Anything is possible. The lore dictates that only Elves can be Demon Hunters and they went back and forth on it for a while. For anyone who had a picture of a – Demon Hunter in your mind, you think of Illidan. So they wanted to deliver on that fantasy. For the future…Demon Hunters could instruct other races in their rituals…but that would be something to consider for the future.
– Other race/class combos? Gnomes can be Hunters in Legion with awesome Mechanical pet family. However some don’t work, like Tauren Rogues. (Although Dagg the Subtlety Rogue Ogre is awesome.)
Artifact Weapons
– The concept of Artifact Weapons: incredible weapon of power and lore. You can level up and customize a weapon for your spec. From an art perspective, they worked closely with the art team. The Ashbringer was the first artifact weapon created since they had a solid idea about the fantasy. However they didn’t want everyone to have exactly the same powerful weapon. So they had the idea from the outset for radical visual customization. Challenge was to keep weapons distinctive while maintaining silhouette.
Some appearances are easy to unlock but others reflect significant accomplishment like killing a Mythic Raid boss or PvP. There are even secret appearances that you need to figure out how to unlock!
Dungeons and Raids
– “Done a disservice” to dungeon gameplay. Right now, dungeons are fun for the first month – run a few each night, find people in guild. Then…raids open and that dungeon loot becomes obsolete. That’s been the story for the past many years.
– Mythic Dungeons in 6.2 were a trial for how to keep dungeons relevant in Legion. In Legion, when you beat Mythic Dungeon, you get a keystone that lets you run them at a higher level.
– Definitely some inspiration from Greater Rifts, but some key differences. If players run dungeons for longer period of times this expansion, they need more variation. Mythic dungeons will have affix modifiers that appear at different threshholds/levels. Affixes do things like “massively reduce tank threat,” “when you kill a non-boss enemy, it explodes to buff other enemies.” The affixes are fixed for the entire world for a given week, so there isn’t heavy RNG where one group has it easy and the others do not.
– These affixes will change how you approach the dungeon week to week. They will also create group variation–there won’t be one set group of specs that is best for every set of affixes.
– Dungeons are being set up as an alternative path, or a complement, to raiding.
– You can keep leveling up your keystone by completing the dungeon in a certain timeframe. These are less hectic than Warlords Challenge Mode times. If you handle the difficulty comfortably, you can move up to the next one. For the highest level dungeon you clear in one week, the next week you’ll have an awesome chest in your Order Hall with loot, as well as a new keystone that’s around 70% of your past best, so you don’t need to grind from Level 1 again. Similar to when a new season starts in Hearthstone – you lose some ranks, but you don’t go back down to Level 25.
Transmogrification
– You will be collecting and permanently learning new appearances in Legion. It will be easier to customize your character’s look.
– Artifacts: visually, you’ll be sorting through dozens of potential appearances. But you can also transmog over your artifact.
World Quests
– World quests are evolution of system. In Mists of Pandaria, there were a lot of daily quests. However the negatives were the reward structure (Valor Gear behind reputation), and limitation of daily quest system (you were behind everyone else if you missed a day). There was also a lot of repetition. If you did the quests diligently, you rescued the same panda dozens of times.
– World Quests improve upon daily quest structure. There is far more variety with hundreds of world quests and variety of quest rewards. You won’t see same quests over and over again.
– There are Legion factions with cool rewards when you hit different levels, but it’s not like the MoP system where you had to do dailies for reputation for Valor Gear.
– Ion admitted to feeling daily quest fatigue in Mists of Pandaria. The moment the game feels like a chore, the moment its less what we want it to be.
– What about the people that liked familiarity/getting dailies done quickly? The map is very user-friendly, it’s easy to see what the rewards are at a glance and where all the quests are.
– In Legion, outdoor world quests have story component. Giving people variety (can meet objectives 6 ways) is good but you need context behind it, not just raw mechanics to kill and loot things. Story is essential, which was lost sight of a bit in Warlords.
– “Gameplay first” doesn’t mean “gameplay only.”
We have a release date for World of Warcraft: Legion–August 30th, 2016.
Legion includes powerful world-drop Legendary items, a new transmog system, the new Demon Hunter class, Class Halls, and a major profession revamp.
You can prepurchase Legion for $49.99 (£34.99) for a Level 100 Character Boost and early access to Demon Hunters, or prepurchase the Digital Deluxe Collectors Edition for $69.99 (£49.99) to get Reins of the Illidari Felstalker and Nibbles, as well as some perks for other Blizzard games.
Defenders of the Alliance and the Horde—a great and ancient enemy has set its sights on Azeroth once more, and soon the land will be consumed in a storm of fel fire. On August 30, kingdoms will burn, heroes will fall, and the world will stand on the precipice of destruction with the launch of World of Warcraft: Legion!
All hellfire is about to break loose, so steel yourself for the return of the Burning Legion by pre-purchasing World of Warcraft: Legion digitally at www.wowlegion.com. Players who pre-purchase will receive an instant level-100 character boost, as well as unlock early access to the new Demon Hunter hero class prior to the expansion’s release.
The Warlords digital deluxe items ( Reins of the Dread Raven and Dread Hatchling) will not be available to purchase when the prepatch hits. These items are currently available for $20 (£15) on the Blizzard Shop.
