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The publisher The9 Limited has recently acquired the licensing rights for a sequel to Tencent’s popular free-to-play FPS game Cross Fire.
The company has stated that the joint venture it entered into with Oriental Shiny Star Limit has reached a deal with the developer of Cross Fire, Smilegate. It grants The9 Limited exclusive publishing and operation rights in mainland China for a five-year window length of time.
They will pay $50 million to the Korean-based studio at the outset of the deal and will pay up to another $450 million in royalty payments and bonuses based on the achievement of specified development and operational milestones of the sequel.
Cross Fire boasts 500 million players across the world and it also currently holds the world record for the most players online concurrently in a single game at over 6 million.
Fallout Shelter took its audience by storm when it released this summer, being much more popular than had been guessed. While the hype has died down a little since (and some has been taken by its big brother – Fallout 4), Bethesda are still updating the little app game.
October saw an update for Halloween that added new content to the game where you build and manage your own Vault, and now Bethesda have released an update with new content for Thanksgiving. Outfits, associated foods, decorations and more have been added for your Settlers to discover and make use of. You have to wonder if this means that we’ll get a Christmas or other holiday themed update very soon. I bet everyone’s Vault could do with a bit of tinsel.
Launched for the iOS and Android in June, Fallout Shelter managed to bring in $5 million in its first two weeks alone. But then if the base building part of Fallout 4 is any indication, fans of the game have wanted to construct their own piece of the Wasteland now for a long time. No wonder it did so well.
Somehow some people have managed to get hold of Just Cause 3 before its official release. People besides those reviewers and media outfits that get sent copies for working purposes that is. Square Enix have therefore released information about an upcoming pre-release patch to try and get people to maybe hold off until the actual release date.
The patch will be across all platforms and improves a number of things as well as righting a few bugs that were found. The full patch notes are below and some are suitably funny, although most are the usual plain language to avoid confusion I’d guess.
Fixes and Improvements
The Medician Department of Nature Conservation has pored over every inch of our beautiful island for cracks and removed them
The Medician Department of Motor Vehicles has taken measures to acquire poorly-tuned vehicles and burn them
Di Ravello’s Militia has been given a refresher course in combat and spatial awareness as per the General’s recent mandate
The Medician Department of Infrastructure has made some adjustments to certain roads to prevent traffic jams
Various stability/crash fixes
Various camera fixes
Various Havok destruction optimisations
Various localisation fixes and updates
Various worldsim improvements
Missions, Challanges, Random Encounters
Various minor mission bug fixes
Various minor challenge bug fixes
Fixed some various issues with Random Encounters
Graphics and Animation
Various LoD optimisations
Various lighting optimisations
Various animation optimisations
Audio
Various level and EQ adjustments
Rebels riding along with Rico will now be less rude and not talk over each other
Fixed a few rare audio distortion issues involving destructible objects with lots of moving parts
It’s time for the weekly update in what’s what in the world of Kickstarter gaming campaigns and we’ll start off with the good news first.
Successfully reaching its target the day after my last update, GOAT ARMY is going to get made and distributed to the masses at large. As well Kick Ass Commandos met their admittedly very small target shortly after last week’s article and still has plenty of time for more funds to come in before they end their campaign and make their game keys Christmas presents to their backers.
Pankapu has also bypassed the three-quarter mark too with 12 more days to go. It might be a squeak but it has the potential to get itself funded before the deadline comes and passes. The Odds Game is also at the two-thirds mark with 19 days to go to make just over $1,000 AUD.
Of course, there’s also always some bad news and unfortunately three previously covered games finished their campaigns way short of their target goals: Vanity’s Dawn, Econia and Cold Blooded. The maker of Econia though has updated to say that this is not the last we shall hear of the game, so that’s encouraging (the other two had no updates I’m afraid to say).
Also worth mentioning is that GOTY the Card Game after a nice surge at the beginning of its campaign has not done too well in the last few weeks and has 6 days to go to make up an amount of about two-fifths of its goal yet. If you’re interested in a game about game development with real life stories from actual devs included, check it out!
Starting us off this week is the weekly card game, and this time the setting is the centre of the big time stage productions – Broadway!
As a Broadway producer your goal is to put on smash hit, sellout stage shows; but that’s the same goal of your rival producers too. The first to put on 3 smash hits wins the game, and you do that by assembling your shows’ casts and each Cast Set has a Diva, a Leading Man, an Ingenue, an Antagonist and two Chorus cards. There are also Understudy cards that can replace any of the others in a set. The game has already been designed and fundraising is only happening so that the printing costs won’t price the card game too high for consumers.
Casting Call has a goal of $2,500 and with 33 more days to go it has made $875.
This is a game that takes many elements into one game to create a game set somewhere in time and space.
A “2D top-down shoot ’em up with RPG and rogue-like elements”, Blacksea Odyssey sees four hunters competing for the honour of taking down the biggest game around – the Titan of the Stars – armed only with harpoons and a spear. A space shooter at its core, the developers are going for an experience that combines elements from many of their favourite games and will hopefully have some replay value as well.
Blacksea Odyssey has made $5,442 of it’s $10,000 goal with 13 more days to go.
This next one is an app game… and I’ll admit that i chose it because it was pretty unique in the results of new campaigns.
IRL is an RPG game that is set… erm, in real life. Sort of. Using the app on your phone you can track down loot or your friends, fight, gain experience, scan bar-codes to gain items, sell items and apparently even find rare loot that can be traded in for actual physical prizes (although the ones listed are small like free drink etc, still not to be sniffed at). The campaign page even has a list of suggestions for what you can do with it… and it includes cosplaying which I will get behind 100%.
If you’re interested in this one, IRL has a goal of $485,000 with 28 days to go although it has yet to make anything.
This game is another RPG made in RPG Maker, but it has an adult story included. Although some of that might be due to the references to ‘herbs’ made.
The titular characters are two deliver baked goods and those ‘herbs’ to places all over their world. Along the way they deal with the typical RPG road hazards – wild life, monsters, cliffs and your odd bandit… at least until they happen upon a mysterious package containing an item of such power that an evil force is willing to kill them both to get hold of it. The battles are apparently avoidable as well, and the gold is not a problem. There is the small matter of there being just one save point in the game though, so if you relish a challenge this might be worth looking at.
The Adventures of Sam and Hunni RPG has 29 days to go, and has yet to make any of its low target of $250.
Released recently for their free-to-play MMO game, the Ascendancy Supporter Packs that Grinding Gear Games made available for players of Path of Exile were quite widely criticised for their poor value.
Fortunately it seems like the developers were listening to the feedback, as Chris Wilson took to Reddit only an hour after their launch to apologise for the lack of value of the packs. They contained new Gargoyle Pets, Forum Titles, Portrait Frames, Points and the Awakening Extended Soundtrack; with Ascendancy T-shirts, Art Packs and new Portal Effects also being available in the higher packs. Unfortunately they were also rather pricey for what was on offer.
“Many people are disappointed with the value proposition of these new supporter packs,” said Wilson. “While I am personally very pleased with the new effects, and handled the pricing myself, I am very ready to admit I was wrong. We will be adding portal effects to the two lowest packs and will be creating new weapon effects to go in all packs (four tiers total). Like with other recent packs, higher packs include all lower effects. The team are hard at work on these new effects and we’ll unveil them as soon as we can (next week?).”
Any packs that have already been bought will receive the new content once it has been released as well.
Always nice when a developer listens to its fans, isn’t it?
