After a little time off over the holidays, welcome back to your weekly update on what looks interesting in the world of Kickstarter gaming campaigns. This is a quietish period for campaigns but new ones do pop up every week, and the last few weeks have brought at least one change – Kickstarter campaign pages now look a lot cleaner.

First of all, let’s clear up those previously covered that have come to some resolution over the holiday period. Starting with bad news, a number of games have finished short of target; including Project: Liberty (with the last update being about a delayed trailer), Blanco (no updates),  Legend of Decay (again, no updates), Left for Dad (last update from weeks ago), Twin Flames (last update says that they’re going to keep going with the project though), Never Not Shooting (the last update being on an enemy type), Knock-Out (their only update being about using social networks to get word out), Monkeys On Your Back (with the last update thanking people for support), Arcade Tycoon (with an update after close showing a version they got out despite the campaign’s failure), Nin (the last update showing off VR mode gameplay), One Up This (the team are now working to make the game available on a print on demand site), and with no change in the status of Berghein‘s campaign page, it’s probably safe to say that game won’t be coming out too soon either.

As always though, we do have some good news and the previously covered campaigns that met targets or finished with well met targets during the holiday period are DämmerLicht, Undermine, Plague Road, Renegade Line, SECTOR 6, and Bitdude. All are wonderful looking games and we can’t wait to see them out and on sale.

Sundered

First up, we have the next game from the team that brought us Jotun.

Sundered is described as a “horrifying fight for survival and sanity” in its title, and is a replayable metroidvania game that deals with eldritch power. You play as a character named Eshe, in a world of caverns and relics of terrifying and terrible power. Use their power as your own and defeat demonic bosses, but be careful – eldritch power comes with a cost and the more you embrace it, the smaller your own humanity becomes. Will you resist, or embrace its call?

Sundered has a CA$ 25,000 goal, and has reached its 100% mark during my writing of the article. It still has 31 more days to run though, so who knows how far it can go?

UnDungeon

Next up is an action/RPG with roguelike elements to it.

UnDungeon has pixelarty graphics and is set in a world formed from seven former worlds, merged into one by the ‘Shift’. Seven immortal ‘Heralds’ travel this world in ruins together and between them will decide the world’s fate. The game will be released for PC/Mac/Linux, with console releases planned if the game reaches certain stretch goals – which means it’ll need to do well if you want to play this game on the Playstation 4 or Xbox One! (Or the Switch…? Possibly?)

UnDungeon has 27 days to go, and has made €34,748 of its €50,000 goal so far.

Pixel Princess Blitz

Thirdly, another action RPG, but with a beautiful looking art style.

First of all, this campaign is filled with funny, quirky little comics to explain what the game is and what the story is all about. I love that, it’s such a fresh way to get this information across. There are some roguelike elements to this one too, with random encounters, loot to pick up, randomly generated dungeons and enemies and fast-paced combat. And as I said, the art style is lovely. I really hope this one does well.

Pixel Princess Blitz has a €77,700 goal, with 23 days to go. It has made €35,528 so far.

Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game

And we’re finishing with a physical game based off of a digital one.

Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game seeks to bring the world of the video game, wide and sandboxy with an emphasis on forging your own path, into a role playing setting. And it could probably work – there is a lot to do in the video game and this campaign is aiming to get a core manual and four supplement books published for your role playing fun. Who knows, maybe if it gets funded we’ll get a copy for the office here at the station.

Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game has a £45,000 target with 29 days to go. It has made £19,821 so far.

Skyrim Special Edition brought us back into the world we all enjoyed playing when the game first released, but as with everything it did come with a downside. Skyrim had grown quite the sizeable modding community, and with Special Edition being 64-bit a lot of mods that previously worked with the original Skyrim became incompatible.

While a lot of mods just changed cosmetics (everyone’s see the Thomas the Tank Engine dragon reskins right?), there were also a lot of mods that expanded and built upon what Bethesda had already made and just made the game even better than it already was, to the extent that a lot of people now find it very weird to play without those mods enabled. One of the biggest casualties was Skyrim Script Extender, which helped a great many more Skyrim mods run as it helped increase the amount of commands Skyrim could run and handle at once. One of those that used it was SkyUI, which tidied up menus and allowed players to easily customise and toggle other mods on and off simply. Mods don’t need SkyUI to run, but it makes them a lot easier to handle with it.

Because of this, the team who made Skyrim Script Extender are planning to release an update for their mod sometime in mid-March, making sure that it will work with Skyrim Special Edition now. The last update in late December suggests that they’re making good progress, but still have a long way to go before they finish which is why they estimate March is when it’ll be available – and then only a beta version. The completed one will take even longer.

Once it and SkyUI are back, maybe the Skyrim modding scene will go through a second upsurge in mods being created. And maybe we’ll get an even funnier widespread mod than the flying tank engine dragons.

Nostalrius have been in the news quite a bit in the last few months, if you follow what goes on in the World of Warcraft and its gaming community. Unfortunately while the story has taken another turn, it’s not one that makes Nostalrius look that good in the eyes of the community. They have just asked a server hosting their source code, Elysium, to shut down – effectively handing them a cease-and-desist.

First of all, a little history so you can put that into context. World of Warcraft has been around for a very long time, and in that time an awful lot has changed as expansions brought new story and updates patched in and out certain things. Like anything else, nostalgia grew and Nostalrius was one result of that. The server launched on a private French server back in 2015, running a version of the MMO that was just like it used to be, back in the ‘good old days’. This was of course before Legion launched and players were feeling Blizzard had lost their way a little bit with WoW, so it got very popular. The only issue with this is that such projects? Technically illegal in the Blizzard’s Terms of Use for the game. However, because the Nostalrius team ran it so professionally, no one was really against them doing it. The team’s aim wasn’t to make money or steal the IP, they said their aim was purely to make Blizzard realise how big of a demand there could be for ‘legacy’ servers – servers that ran an older version of the game for those who missed it.

Fast forward to April of last year though, and Blizzard finally sat up and took notice of Nostalrius’ numbers. They handed down orders to the Nostalrius team to shut up shop as they were running an illegal server. The news was announced and in the days leading to Nostalrius’ closure; people paid tributes to the team, held vigils in server for the game and generally just poured out a huge amount of support and love for Nostalrius and its team. The team then managed to gain around 278,000 signatures onto a Change.org petition asking CEO Mike Morhaime to consider official legacy servers, and after all the support and outcry Blizzard then sat up and took notice in an entirely different way. Before Blizzcon they invited down members of the French team behind Nostalrius to talk about what they had been doing and about legacy servers, and people through they’d hear more about Blizzard’s official plans at Blizzcon or at least it would get a passing mention.

However, Blizzcon came and went with no mentions of legacy servers and the Nostalrius team seeing it as a sign that Blizzard were going to either drag their heels on the idea, or possible weren’t ever going to consider it announced they would be releasing their source code to allow other servers to take up their banner and continue to prove to Blizzard that legacy servers would be a good idea. They eventually ended up handing it over along with access to their character database to a Ukrainian team, which led to the creation of Elysium – which in many respects is Nostalrius respawned although Nostalrius characters had to be manually requested to be carry over to the new server.

So yes, one team behind an illegal server is asking another illegal server to stop using their source code – source code they handed to them in the first place. This hasn’t gone over well with the community, mainly because it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.

Their excuse is that Elysium has missed the point of their mission, saying “we have the feeling that the main objective was missed”. They feel like Elysium has now built up a reputation as a ‘pirate’ server instead of a ‘fan’ one, and thus promoting people ripping off the game and setting up their own servers instead of trying to encourage Blizzard to eventually implement official legacy servers. “Until this stigma is removed, it’s unlikely any true progress towards official legacy content can be achieved.”

Elysium on their part have come back with a reply that said they’re going to maintain “All characters that have existed in the game world since Elysium’s launch” and that “all Nostalrius specific data will be wiped.” They believe that the process will take several weeks and will involve a transfer of the game’s files to their own core which they believe is now “equal to or superior to” the one they inherited from Nostalrius.

“Nostalrius handed us the torch, we have no intention of putting it out,” the statement says. “The environment within the game is wonderful, and is one of the key points to why we are so passionate about it. Fun, polite, social, and yet we find a completely different environment on social media.”

Everyone had a feeling the Elysium wasn’t going to be allowed to run without any problems, but I doubt anyone saw where the problem would come from. I don’t think this is over by a long shot.

Yesterday was actually Friday the 13th. I actually totally didn’t notice.

Anyway, Gun Media have been developing an asymmetrical multiplayer game based around the movie series of the same name (Friday the 13th that is), and saw yesterday as a good chance to release another trailer depicting some gameplay and revealing how one of the other Jasons will work.

This Jason is the one from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, and the film sees him being revived by a bolt of electricity from the dead. Which technically makes this Jason a supernatural undead killer. He has the ability to phase shift after fleeing camp counselors which makes him very, very hard to outrun if he sees you. He’s also armed with a spear, just in case they are keeping just out of reach.

In the more general area, Jasons have now been revealed to having throwing knives and darts that stun counselors for a second if it hits, letting the killer catch up easier. Oh, and it seems that friendly fire and team killing is completely possible if you’re with the counselor team, as during the video a counselor being chased is hit by a car being driven by some other counselor players. Ouch.

Check out the new video below:

Today saw the first of a new experiment Blizzard are trying with their game Hearthstone, a livestreamed Q and A to keep players up to date on what the developers are thinking about and how certain processes work as far as changes being made.

The stream lasted only an hour at most, but during it we got to hear a number of different thought processes that show how Blizzard watch their game and seek to keep the balance both in the meta as well as making the game interesting for both new and experienced players.

As far as keeping it accessible to new players they talked about how they’ve tweaked the Casual mode in the past to make it more welcoming for those just beginning to learn how to play. They said that in the past Casual had a few bugs, but now that it takes many things into consideration including card collection size, previous win rates and tries to match newer players against other new players so players play people of their own skill level more often.

With experienced players, they talked about how they’ve noticed that ranked ladder is beginning to feel very grindy to most players and measures they were thinking about with how to address that better. These included upping the total of bonus stars awarded upon the start of a new season, the addition of more brake points besides just the one around Level 20, and also possibly extending the win streak beyond Level 5. All these were just thoughts and ideas though, it was never said that all or even any of these would be coming to Hearthstone in the future.

As far as the meta balance, there was talk about how they think that Standard and Wild will become much more distinct once the next rotation of card sets happens. Right now, only two sets are outside of Standard, Naxx and Goblins vs Gnomes; but the next rotation will take many more sets out and limit them to just Wild decks. This means that a certain deck type could be very different in Wild to how it appears in Standard and it was hoped that such a thing would encourage the growth of more Wild-focused tournaments from fans and other groups.

There was also discussion about the rumours of possibly retiring some Classic cards to Wild too, versus what has generally happened before which is a nerf or effect change. Right now, neither option has been decided upon and Blizzard are still weighing up their pros and cons to both before decisions get made either way. Retiring to Wild might be more extreme, but there is also the question of people who come back to the game after months away and get confused with cards changed by nerfing – so it wasn’t stated either way that one or the other would be happening.

With the recent addition of the Streets of Gadgetzan set, the meta has changed already quite recently although it’s now had a few months to settle down into a regular routine. Speaking of what they saw, we were told that a lot of experimentation happened during the first few weeks as you would expect, before patterns began to emerge.

One of the biggest surprises to the team was that Pirate decks have been on the rise in Ranked ladder with the new Gadgetzan cards, with Warrior, Rogue and Shaman all making use of that Minion type heavily for weapon buffs. In fact, so much so that they expressed a little concern saying that the percentage of those decks in use right now was just a little bit higher than they generally like to see, and that if it didn’t change enough they might need to step in to tweak something to redress that balance. We were told it was not so much how many decks of that type exist, as much as which cards were seeing overuse in many decks – for example before its nerf Undertaker was seeing use in as many as 40% of decks at the time. Arena-wise, they have seen more Priest and Mage players beginning to claw back higher win rates.

So right now, that is the state of how Blizzard see the meta of the card game playing out. While nothing said in this Q and A can be seen as confirmation of things coming, we were told that 2017 is planned to be another big year for Hearthstone. Whether or not they’ll continue to do these Q and As is also to be seen as of yet.

If nothing else, we learned that those people with pirate decks should prepare themselves for choppy waters if Blizzard do decide to interfere there.