Monthly Archives: May 2019

Fig Releases A New Campaign Format – Open Access

Press Release

Fig.co, a community-powered platform and publisher, has announced Open Access, a new funding vehicle for indie developers that is open-ended, content-driven and helps to create long tail awareness. Rather than the traditional specific funding goal for a 30-day campaign, Open Access, which is in Beta, allows indie developers to create an open-ended funding campaign tied to a development roadmap and a series of feature-based milestones showing planned content.

“The traditional crowdfunding structure no longer works for video games and a 30-day campaign isn’t enough time to properly build long-lasting awareness for an indie game. As much time as it takes to build a great game, it takes just as long to build a strong community,” said Justin Bailey, founder of Fig.co. “Given the current environment and considering what it takes to create a game that fans are excited to play, we are announcing Open Access. It provides developers with the ability to immediately and positively impact their financial situation, the game’s development cycle and organically sustain awareness growth. Phoenix Point and Kingdoms and Castles as prime examples of developers that continued the community efforts they started during the campaigns and grew their community.”

Open Access utilizes a unique open-ended structure to test out game features through milestones, which are tied to content. Backers pay for rewards and receive immediate access to the latest build of the game (games receive free updates throughout the development cycle). All game sales through Open Access are transmitted immediately to the developer rather than at the end of a “successfully” funded campaign.

Kicking off Open Access are indie developers Lost Pilgrims and Fowers Games have launched campaigns for their new titles. Based in Budapest, Hungary, Lost Pilgrims is made up of video game and tabletop RPG fans who are dedicated to creating a game that matches modern standards with an old school shape and feels. That game is Vagrus – The Riven Realms, a 2D strategy-role-playing game for PC, and its campaign begin today, May 8th.

In Vagrus, you play as a caravan leader surviving on a harsh, post-apocalyptic, dark fantasy world, in charge of an armed traveling company (comitatus) that can engage in trading, fight as mercenaries, and explore perilous locations for treasures. Vagrus offers branching narratives, turn-based JRPG-style combat, as well as elaborate trade and crew management systems in a vast, hand-crafted sandbox world to explore.

“We have always had plans to run a crowdfunding campaign, not only to gain support for going faster and further with the project but also to engage players about certain aspects of the game. Fig’s Open Access model combines the best traits of a traditional crowdfunding campaign and Early Access within a positive environment, so it just felt right immediately,” said Gabor Szutorisz, Studio Lead, Lost

Fowers Games, founded by Tim Fowers, has a reputation for crafting unique gaming experiences, from popular board games like Paperback, Burgle Bros and Fugitive to digital games like Turning and Clockwords. Tim and his small team are bringing Pegleg to Fig’s Open Access on May 15th. Pegleg is a mix of a tower defense game and pinball. You play as pirates defending their beach from waves of giant crabs and sea creatures. Aim your cannonballs precisely to wipe them out.  Build pegs that give your shots special powers.  Combine powers to create insane chain reactions – like a frozen, lightning multi-ball. Faceoff in boss battles against enormous monsters from the deep.

“Open Access feels like the natural form of crowdfunding for video games. You get all the excitement and community, without the arbitrary massive funding totals hanging over the process.  Early backers get to play the game but will have the incentive to spread the word. By bringing their friends, milestones are unlocked, providing new features and content for everyone.”  Tim Fowers, Fowers Games.

Vagrus’ campaign starts today, May 8 and Pegleg’s campaign will commence on May 15, 2019. For more information, please visit Fig.co.

SteamCraft Review (PC)

by Jason Parker (Ragachak)

I’ve never been all that good at crafting awesome machines in any game I’ve ever played. I just don’t have the knack for engineering. Despite that, I was really excited to try SteamCraft, especially when I saw that you can purchase builds similar to what other people use in the in-game shop, without real money! You just have to use the Silver you get for winning matches to purchase and assemble a sound death-machine. That means even schlubs like me can get into the game and dive into combat. Thankfully, I had three pre-built machines ready to go in SteamCraft. It’s a very straight-forward game. SteamCraft is done in a Steampunk style, and whether your vehicle flies through the sky or rolling on the ground, you have to be ready for any situation, and anything goes. You build your vehicle with almost no restrictions. You can’t mix-and-match weapon types, and your only other limit is the Steam Power (which is increased with Account Level-ups). Anything else goes!

SteamCraft is a team-based game, with a few modes: Capture the Base and Team Deathmatch. These are very cut-and-dry. Capture the Base has no respawns, and the first team to either kill the other team or capture their base wins. These matches tend to be short, lasting no more than a few minutes at a time. Team Deathmatch is a first-to-25, but it feels like it respawns you very close to where you died, and a smart team is going to pick up on that and camp your side down for easy wins. Steam advertises a regular Deathmatch, but I’ve yet to see that one in all of my matches. There are two servers, EU and US, but here’s the main problem of the game: The actual servers are all but empty. It didn’t even occur to me immediately, but it should have – I was absolutely stomping my way through every game going on average 8/10-1 in Team Deathmatch. That’s when I realized that the names I saw were in every single match over the last week.

Perhaps it’s because the game has a price tag (even if it’s only 10 dollars). I’m fine with the game having a price, and the price tag on this game is reasonable. Had it gone free-to-play, it could have easily walked the pay-to-win path like other games in this genre. One of the major problems with the game could be solved simply by having more people taking a chance. Perhaps a demo? That might be one way to alleviate that. I’m grateful that there are bots, so you don’t have to wait for hours just to get a match, but they don’t offer a whole lot of challenge once you have your bearings in game. I will say that the enemy AI is pretty sharp, in that as soon as you round a corner or are in firing range, they will immediately turn to start taking you out. If you have the Tesla gun, that’s probably not an issue, because it does absolutely vile amounts of damage.

The Tesla Gun is one of five weapons you can use on your vehicles: Machine Gun, Tesla Gun, Railgun, Rocket Launcher, and Mortar. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weakest overall felt like the Railgun. It’s treated like a sniper rifle, but it has a horrific rate of fire, so if you miss, or don’t take out something critical (a tire, a weapon, et cetera), that time and shot are wasted. It deals great damage, but with how fast battle tends to be, it has a higher skill ceiling. The Tesla Gun is my favorite though. It doesn’t fire quite as far but you simply hold down the fire button, lightning fires from the cannon, and it unloads on anything in range. Conversely, you can run the Machine Gun, which seems to fire into infinity, and has no need to reload. If you’re visible on the screen, you can be shot by it. So ultimately, it’s up to you what guns you want to run. This does lead me to one of the cool things about this game. The real key to success is to target parts of your opponent’s vehicle. If you blast all of their guns off, they can’t fire back. Take out a few wheels? Now they can’t get away.

I’ve heard that once you get flight unlocked (level 9) that the game is incredibly easy, but I haven’t noticed that. Once I was able to take to the skies, as soon as an enemy saw me, I was being shot at. The first gyro isn’t very fast, and being in the air just felt like a liability. That’s why I kept the tires on my car with a gyro, so I can still drive around if needed. There’s a function that I really like about this game though, it’s a special part called “Flipover”. If you get stuck on terrain because you have run out of speed/have fallen over/any other problem, you can use Flipover to bounce your car back to a mobile position. This is also useful when you are short tires and want to try and at least move a tiny bit. The combat is pretty fast and furious, but it doesn’t really seem like it matters to have multiple guns on your vehicle. When I used three Railguns, I only saw one bullet get fired. They do look cool mounted up on your vehicle though, I’ll say that.

On that note, the actual vehicle building is pretty easy and fun. All vehicles require a Core, which can be purchased in the shop. Then you build the vehicle around that core. The defense of your vehicle depends a great deal on the blocks/parts you use. I’m still quite bad at building from scratch, but it’s fun to do anyway. As you level up, you gain access to new types of blocks to build with. While you do spend Silver on the building blocks for your creation, they’re pretty cheap (15-50s on average). If you don’t buy enough of a block type, you have to go back to the shop and buy more. What I think would improve this, is instead purchasing the block type, and having a “crafting fee” to make more of them. That way the player doesn’t have to constantly go back to the shop and guess at how many they need. Since this is a Steampunk game, you work with a lot of wood, like Oak, Pine, and Hazel.

As you grow in account level, you gain access to more parts you can purchase, which cannot be bought with any sort of microtransaction. The downside? Leveling is tedious and feels like it takes forever after you’ve leveled a few times. You get double exp for your first win of the day in both modes, but that’s not going to be enough. This is one of the other major faults, how long it takes to get anywhere. But at least, if you’re like me and want to buy a model off the in-game store, you can. You just have to grind up some ridiculous amounts of Silver for it. But it’s not real money!

 

Rollin’ with Sisyphus: 3/5 (Good)

The concept of SteamCraft is very good, but it’s lacking in a few key ways. The lack of people to play against makes the gameplay significantly less challenging. On top of that, there’s not a lot to seek out and try to achieve, other than getting new parts, weapons, and ways to build. This is a game that I feel could benefit from some kind of lore and single-player content. That way, when you’re tired of grinding the two types of matches, you can do something else in-game. You need something to chase other than more parts. I’d be okay with just chasing new parts if the game gave me an unlimited amount of them once I unlocked them, instead of having to chase and grind more silver to get more guns. For a retail price game, the grind for anything in game feels like it’s a mobile game. I still haven’t earned any cool paint jobs for my vehicles.

At least there is a ton of variety in what you can unlock, and there are so many creations you can make in this game. I’ve seen it all so far – I’ve even seen mobile bathtubs. The actual gameplay is sound though, and it’s so fun to blast vehicles to bits and pieces. The tedium of the grind and the lack of players is disappointing, but the rest of the stuff is genuinely fun. I can see fans of this style of game really sinking their teeth into the actual creation of vehicles. Despite the negatives, the game is still a fun physics-based vehicle shooter! It would be far more fun with more than bots to do battle with. So for fans of vehicle building and vehicular combat, I recommend giving this game a look.

Pax Nova Enters Early Access

Iceberg Interactive and Greywolfe Entertainment are proud to announce their Sci-Fi 4X strategy title Pax Nova has launched on Steam’s Early Access Program. The Early Access SRP is 24.99, and it will have a 10% launch discount as well to celebrate its launch. Pax Nova is a 4X strategy game where players control the fate of one of several factions, divided by three races. There are new worlds to explore, and star systems to discover, each with their own secrets and dangers. Today’s video also has some tips and tricks aimed at newcomers to Pax Nova, to help them get started.

Iceberg Interactive CEO, Erik Schreuder says, “Knowing the scale of this game and the permutations that go along with that, I believe Pax Nova will be an innovative and exciting addition to any 4X strategy players’ game collections”.

Mike Domingues, lead developer at Greywolf Entertainment on the move to release Pax Nova in Early Access:

“Having developed several games in the past, listening to the community is vital in order to increase player satisfaction and game success. Since Pax Nova is an ambitious achievement, we really want to ensure that we get as much feedback as possible from the community in order to keep developing the game to its complete potential ahead of the full launch”.

PIllars of Eternity II: Deadfire Celebrates First Anniversary With 5.0 Update

Obsidian Entertainment and Versus Evil announced that the 5.0 update for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is officially out today. This is also the first-year anniversary for the launch by Obsidian, and they continue to add new content, balance, and fixes with update 5.0. This also includes the release of the turn-based mode. The update provides a further refinement to ship-to-ship encounters as players navigate the exotic open ocean of the Deadfire archipelago. Obsidian has also written in new story content recorded by the original actors which improve story aspects with Woedica and Eotha characters in the game.

5.0 also adds the final God Challenge and turns on not only the other God Challenges but also Solo (no companions allowed), Trail of Iron (hardcore mode) and Path of the Damned (the hardest difficulty) for players truly seeking to test their mettle. Obsidian is also providing a revised set of the Pillars of Eternity pen-and-paper rules for everyone to be able to try out. Anyone who is interested in playing a tabletop game in the world of Eora can click this link. Those who already had the rules either through backing the game on Fig or in the Deluxe or Obsidian Editions of Deadfire will also get the updated ruleset.

Furthermore, Obsidian is holding a competition for the Ultimate God Challenge where players can get an embroidered patch from Obsidian and their name, class, character, and level engraved on a plaque for prosperity to be hung in the Obsidian offices. For full guidelines for the competition, check out the latest Deadfire Backer Update on Obsidian’s forums.

Update 5.0 Features in detail

  • New Ship UI – An update to the UI has been implemented that will come up any time players engage with a ship on the seas that brings a more elegant way to ship-to-ship encounters.
  • Turn-Based Mode Out of Beta – Thanks to feedback from the community, Obsidian have made a lot of changes to turn-based mode to account for bugs and balance fixes and it is now in full release with the 5.0 patch.
  • New Story Content Added – After listening to feedback on the critical path of the game when it came to reactivity with Woedica and Eothas, Obsidian has been able to go in and write new lines and get them recorded by the original actors to add more to that aspect of the game.
  • The Ultimate – The final God Challenge will be live with the 5.0 patch. This challenge, “The Ultimate” will turn on all other God Challenges, Trial of Iron, Path of the Damned, and Solo mode.

Added Extras

  • Revised Paper Rules – This can be downloaded by visiting eternity.obsidian.net. Those who had the PnP starter guide as a digital reward through the Fig Campaign or those who have the Deluxe or Obsidian editions of the game will also get the updated rules.
  • Ultimate God Contest – Those who complete the challenge and show Obsidian proof through either a YouTube playlist of their playthrough or links to videos via Dropbox (all submitted to theultimate@obsidian.net), can have the chance to get a patch sent to them from Obsidian. The first 12 to complete the challenge will get a patch, but will also have their name, their character’s name, their class, and level, engraved on a plaque in the Obsidian offices*.

*All submissions subject to judgment from Obsidian team members and can be disqualified as Obsidian see fit.

Code Vein Network Test Announced for May 2019

CODE VEIN - First Trailer _ TBA - YouTube

Bandai Namco announced that they will be hosting a Closed Network Test for CODE VEIN later this month, on both Xbox One and Playstation 4. This will let players create their character, play through the opening segment of Code Vein, and tackle an online co-op dungeon. Registration for this can be found in this link. Additional details will be given (times and dates) soon.

Venture into the land of CODE VEIN and uncover its secrets. Players will be able to craft their own unique character and customize their experience by equipping numerous weapons, items, Skills, and Gifts to accommodate their favorite combat style or gain a competitive advantage against impossible odds. Various A.I. controlled partners will also be on-hand to explore the interconnected world with their own specialized attributes and personalities.

Conan Exiles – One Year Anniversary Update

Conan Exiles is celebrating its one-year anniversary, and with it comes a wealth of new content. This free update adds a new dungeon, a new mini-dungeon, more pets, and several NPC settlements/cities received revamps. To celebrate this, there will also be a prolonged Steam Free Weekend, lasting from May 8th until May 12th, 2019. Get ready for the Sunken City and the Scorpion Den! This DLC is entitled “The Riddle of Steel” and is named after a central plot point to the Conan the Barbarian film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This update also adds several unique statues and figurines of Arnold as Conan, as well as iconic helmets from the movie, commemorative warpaint, and other decorative items. This DLC is not a part of the four core DLCs planned for 2019 and is therefore not included in the Year 2 Season Pass. Instead, the studio has simultaneously released a free update, which includes two new dungeons, a total revamp of several locations, new NPCs, and a new feat, “Witch Doctor”, allowing you to summon wights and skeletons to your side. The Riddle of Steel DLC is available for 6.99 later this week, and will hit console soon after.

“We thought we’d do something a little different for the anniversary,” explains Funcom CEO Rui Casais. “Although the game is based upon the world created by Robert E. Howard during the 1930s and the subsequent comics, the movies enjoy a huge cult following. Many of the Conan-fans today would probably never have heard of Howard’s work if it weren’t for Schwarzenegger’s breakthrough role as Conan the Barbarian. We therefore thought it would be a good idea to combine the anniversary of our bestselling game with a homage to Schwarzenegger, Thulsa Doom-actor James Earl Jones, and their like,” he says.

The Riddle of Steel

  • 18 Statues and figurines of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan.
  • 5 iconic helmets from the movie, of characters such as Thulsa Doom and Rexor.
  • 5 unique placeables from the movie, such as King Conan’s Lion Throne.
  • 6 statues and figurines of Valeria from the movie Conan the Barbarian.
  • 6 statues and figurines of Subotai the Hyrkanian archer.
  • 3 decorative warpaints from the movie.

Anniversary-update (free update)

  • New dungeon: The Sunken City.
  • New dungeon: Sepermeru Silver Mine.
  • New feat: Witch Doctor, allowing you to summon undeads.
  • Total revamp of several locations, with new enemies and additional bosses.
  • New items, both lootable and craftable.
  • Tons of UI fixes and balance passes.

Rising Lords Announced For Steam

Rising Lords announced

Rising Lords is an upcoming medieval tactical strategy title for PC, from development studio Argonwood. The German development studio has players controlling a lord or lady, and are given full control of their territory. They can lead armies of serfs, collect taxes and resources, dictate food ratios and field work, forge weapons, and build mighty cities. The game features free will decision-making mechanics, so players can give their people knighthood, or dump them on a battlefield far, far away. But beware – peasants can revolt against their leaders. More info can be found here.

“We have a blend of the most prolific aspects of strategy games, digital board games, and deck-
based card games to create incredibly deep gameplay for our players,” said Chris Fernholz,
founder of Argonwood. “With a dedicated single-player campaign and robust multiplayer
functionality, Rising Lords brings a modern approach to some of the all-time classic strategy
games.”

Rising Lords Features:

● Striking the perfect balance – Play with juggle production, resource gathering,
diplomacy and treason, tax and rations – all vital in being a successful lord

● Strategic battles – Besiege enemy cities to starve them out, go all-out attack, or wait for
them to come
● Simultaneous multiplayer – Up to four players can make moves at once so there’s no
need to wait for each individual player to take their turn
● The psychology of war – Play mind games with opponents by robbing or insulting them
● Subtle variables – Morale, terrain and fortifications have a huge impact on battle and
the tide can turn quickly
● Customization – Tailor a leader’s look or skills and craft the perfect cities and troops
● Risks and opportunities – React to figures that visit the province. Find ways to take
advantage, and work quickly to eliminate threats
● Take a pick – React to 50 different events and collect unique cards to surprise the
enemy