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Nowadays fighter games aren’t a particularly active genre of games… at least, they’re not really in the spotlight as much as they were in the heyday of Mortal Kombat and Tekken. So when an Italian studio who traded mainly in a sub-genre of indie horror films known as ‘splatter films’ announced in 2011 that they were planning to make a fighter called Death Cargo, the fans of those fighters got excited. Even more so when supposed beta footage was released showing that the studio’s previous works was going to have an effect on the game itself – it was going to be a gorefest.
Problems have only emerged recently when people who purchased the game found that despite receiving e-mails confirming their purchase, and downloads being available… they’re still not actually getting to play the game. What’s more, some of these people claim to have been banned from the forums set up for the players of Death Cargo when they tried to bring this up there.
The company in question is called Necrostorm, and the instructions they’ve been sending out for the download of the game are a little bit… odd. They claim that it’s all in the name of stopping piracy, and honestly they’re pretty standard up until the point it asks for you to e-mail back to THEM a code provided by the .exe file downloaded to which they will reply with an activation code. They will then provide a further code a few hours later for the ‘file creator’, although it could take up to five days for the ‘file creation’ process to be completed. Many of said that they still don’t have a working game even after that time has passed though, taking to other popular gaming forums to talk about their troubles.
Necrostorm have protested against people accusing them of running a scam, saying that anyone who was banned from the forum was so due to people making such accusations of their intents. And indeed they have been providing everything they should… except for an actual working game.
Good news for the players of games set to lose their multiplayer servers with the closure of Gamespy: another company has stepped into the breach to scoop up and restore multiplayer services to them all.
Gameranger, a service started originally to facilitate multiplayer on Mac computers, is filling the gap to allow players of games like Grid and Battlefront 2 to continue to play online after Gamespy closes on the 31st of this month. And what’s more, they aim to make the experience even better than it was before. They’re dedicated to fixing as many bugs as they possibly can for their new players.
Scott Kevill is the creator of Gameranger and says that his service can dig into the internals of the game to fix bugs, game-breaking or small, and also to hopefully improve on the overall performance of the games they now host. It was also developed to allow support for games, without the need for updates meaning players can just hop in and play. Kevill hopes that by taking on the task of supporting the games that he can keep their communities together instead of letting them fragment.
Gamespy closes at the end of the month, but it seems despite the questions about how the games that weren’t going to be moved to new servers would survive, everything is going to be okay. The remaining games are now in safe hands. Here’s hoping that the move can be made with minimal disruption to players.
“We are making a new Unreal Tournament”. Seven words that will make many a gamer either punch the air with excitement or give them cringing reminders of just how much the more recent entries sucked and hopes this won’t be another of those. Epic Games’ community manager Stacey ‘Flak’ Conley used those very seven words to confirm the company’s plan to build what they’re already describing as their “next-gen competitive shooter”, which is planned for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
However, this time the game is taking a whole new approach, with a different business model and more focus on the Community. The Unreal series of games have maintained a long tradition of mod support, which is partially responsible for its enduring reputation; and now, the company wants to involve its loyal community from the beginning, letting them contribute ideas from the very first line of code, using forums and Twitch streams to keep in touch. As for modding itself, Players will be able to make maps, weapons, and near total-conversions to add into the game even if they can’t get them into the main code.
“Unreal Tournament is the perfect kind of game to do this with,” project lead Steve Polge said. “It’s always had a very open community.”
To facilitate the distribution of mods in the new game, the new Unreal Tournament will feature a marketplace from which they can all be downloaded. Modders will have the option to make their mods available for free or at a price, letting mod authors get recompensed directly for their work for the first time. The biggest news however is that Epic Games won’t be following suit and using the marketplace to implement micro-transactions into the game. In fact, the company don’t plan to make money from the game directly at all if reports are to be believed – not only is the new Unreal Tournament going to be free to play, but all Epic Games-published extra content will be offered freely as well!
The studio warned that the game will take many months to be playable, and will start off with a focus on standard Deathmatch only. Other series-standard modes like Capture the Flag and Onslaught will be added over time. Not that long-term series fans shouldn’t be used to waiting: The last major title in the Unreal series of shoot-em-ups was seven years ago, when Unreal Tournament III hit stores in 2007 releasing on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
You might have heard a while back about a special monument that CCP were planning to erect in Iceland. The Reykjavik-based monument has been up only a short time and contains the names of many, many players of their long-running game, EVE Online. So to have had it defaced within a week really seems to have struck a nerve for them.
A few days ago, a name was scratched off the monument and CCP are not pleased to put it simply. “What’s happened is absolutely disgusting. It’s an insult to the entire community and is clearly the work a person who believes that behaviour in a virtual world is a valid reason to make a real life personal attack on someone, and deface public property.” they wrote, making clear that they do not condone acts of real-life vandalism especially for reasons of personal grudges developed within the game.
A good deal of the EVE community seem to share this viewpoint, and apparently several players, including some from the culprit’s alliance have come forward to provide information. While CCP are reviewing footage from the monument, they invited the offender to come forward and make themselves known before they are caught. They would count this as a ‘gesture of good faith’ even though they still plan to take action anyway.
Three players have since been identified to have been involved with the incident and have had their accounts in both EVE and DUST banned, while a further fourth player has been suspended for six months for indirect involvement. All four have also been banned from future Fanfest events, but CCP have decided not to make the account names of the players public due to the community’s reaction to the vandalism of the monument and fear of backlash against the four.
It’s quite the reaction, but even if you think the incident is being taken a bit too seriously, you can’t deny that the defacing of a monument dedicated to a number of long-term players of a popular game is a very sad reflection on some gamers.
