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Video Game Conventions Returning in Full Force: FFXIV to Give Away Polygonal Grapes

News
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Everything from Final Fantasy XVI to Path of Exile are having their conventions return to their regular cadence. During 2020-2022 it was rather rough for travel and events. Now, in 2023, it seems that more and more games are returning to their yearly fan meet-ups. That’s awesome! To celebrate, this year’s Final Fantasy FXIV Fan Festival is rather awesome: You get a small tote, some nice pins and a stress ball of grapes. This joke is not only rather neato but it also is a return to the things that make the video game community awesome. For some context, some grapes in FFXIV had bugged out and were rendering in their low-polygonal version. A lot of games will derender an asset the further you are from it since you can’t see the fidelity. In this instance, the game wasn’t properly rendering the grapes. It’s neat that games are returning back…

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Twitter’s Temporary Rate Limiting’s Wide Impact on Gamers

News
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Gaming is the most social activity online. The only other more social activity is FaceTime, due to its liminal space intrusion into your life when someone calls. Social activity requires platforms that allow users to connect. The entire basis of the Internet is to send and receive from other users in other locations. Twitter has recently rate limited users on a temporary basis, which has greatly slowed the flow of information between communities. There’s a crisis unfolding on the Internet’s most social town square. Twitter’s pathway to monetization continues to be rocky. Decision after decision has left users a gasp at what to do when their normal that had been consistent for so long rapidly changes day after day. The long and short of the current crisis is that new users, regular users and paid users all have different amounts of posts they can view per day. The limit seems…

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Idleon Developer Claims pay2win Update Is for Marketing

News
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LavaFlame, the developer behind IdleOn, released a controversial update in which players would need to spend between $200 to $500 for a companion that gave unbelievable advantages. For roughly three weeks the developer remained silent as users critical of the update were banned. Today an update for the game was released in which the developer explained his logic in the following post: A note to those wondering where I’ve been and are eager to get back to more content: as you hopefully understand, I felt it was best for me to stick to my main mission as a creator — working and delivering on actual content for people to enjoy. Put simply, what I’ve always cared about most is that A: my game is fun, and B: a whole lot of people play and enjoy it. For A, the game itself hasn’t changed, no new or old content restricted; my…

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Legends of IdleOn Companion System Sparks Backlash Due to Gambling Mechanic

News
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On June 17th Legends of IdleOn received the companion update which brought the new companion shop. The companion shop has a gacha like system where you pay real world cash and receive a random pet, with one of the pets being “Doot” which grants a considerable advantage that allows you to have all of your divinities from World 5 as active. This is a very strong bonus in the game. Some Quick Math If we assume the average cost of a single Doot is: Taking into account basic probability and the geometric distribution, with a .28% original drop rate and after 5,660 gems reaching tier 3 and having a x3 drop rate, we figure it would be about 176.05 chests to get a Doot. Gambling in an Idle MMO So that’s a lot of money for a big advantage in an idle game and quite weird that such a strong…

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Hi-Rez Studios Undergoes Transformation to Hi-Rez Ventures

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Hi-Rez Studios is removing the mantel of being a game studio and undergoing a transformative business process, to say the least. The community is biting its nails about what this means for the games they love dearly, but the people who are being put in charge know what they’re doing. Let’s break down the announcement and I’ll share some of my expert thoughts on the recent changes. The announcement was posted to LinkedIn. Hi-Rez Studios to Become Hi-Rez Ventures This is just a means of branding themselves away from developing games and being a multi-channel organization that supports games and funds the development of games as well. The branding around “Hi-Rez” as the prominent owner of any particular game will likely disappear in the near future as “Hi-Rez” becomes a “parent company.” The subsidiaries have already existed as modulars within Hi-Rez, but this reorganizes them into clearly defined self-contained entities.…

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Escape from Tarkov’s Developers Target Dataminers

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It looks like the developers from Escape from Tarkov have had it with dataminers. Dataminers have been plaguing the Escape from Tarkov’s development team for a while now, but it looks like it’s gotten to the point where they’re releasing an official statement and looking to take action against those who do it. As a reminder, this is a PvP only game, so any kind of unfair advantage isn’t cool. Battlestate Games has made it clear in their statement that they won’t tolerate data mining anymore in their game. The community response is mixed. They don’t want cheaters, but it looks like some information is really desired. There’s a lot of back and forth in the 980+ replies including some of the wiki editors who got caught in a ban getting unbanned: That’s kind of a wild saga to follow. Escape from Tarkov is $49.99 as a pre-order currently with…

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Saying Goodbye to The Realm Online

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Today while I work on the YuriCorp Community Minecraft server, I am reminded of the origins of online multiplayer games: MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). MUDs were text-based online games, often accessed using Telnet, that allowed multiple users to play together. MUDs were the genesis of the MMOs we play today and early attempts at adding a graphics layer were the very first series of MMOs. That includes The Realm Online. The major downside of early MUDs was that they were entirely text-based. In the 1990s, with slow dial-up internet connections, text was really the only viable option. However, the evolution to graphical MUDs happened quickly. One of the first major graphical MUDs was The Realm Online, released in 1996 by Sierra On-Line The Realm Online was quickly relegated to forgotten memories as Ultima Online (1997) released and was a completely superior experience while EverQuest launched in (1999) making The Realm Online…

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Star Marine Is Canceled Again

Editorials
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Star Citizen is a game that still kindly asks you for your money for some reason unbeknownst to anyone. Chris Roberts himself at this point likely is included in that list, although we’re past half a billion in funding now and Star Marine still is dead. I wrote in early 2016 that Star Marine was canceled which was, looking at the last decade, quite right. It languishes today not as a separate FPS game but a broken buggy module within Star Citizen with three maps and no players and soon to disappear altogether as a separate mode. Much like someone who is trying to convince you that their AI product, coded by ChatGPT is going to be the one, Star Citizen continues to languish as a cult around a product made of dreams and sunk cost fallacy. At this point even just removing Star Marine would probably be good for…

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The Rise, Fall and Future of Lore: Why Recent Indie Games Failed and How to Fix Them

Editorials
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Lore and worldbuilding have the power to ignite passion in players and fuel an immersive experience. At their best, lore-driven games create a sense of mystery and discovery that motivate players to explore each part of the world. However, some recent games have exploited lore and ambiguity primarily as a marketing tactic, rather than using it to enhance gameplay or build meaning. This phenomenon highlights the need for more balanced, player-centered design. When developers commit to transparency and ethical practices, lore can be used to strengthen community trust and craft impactful stories. But that depends on valuing immersion and artistry over profits alone. We’ll dive into the history of lore focused games, what happened and where to go from here. This is all inclusive of the entire indie scene, even if there’s a heavy emphasis on mascot horror. It makes the best example and we’ll avoid referencing mascot horror to…

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Who Are Inarius and Lilith and What is Sanctuary (No Game Spoilers)

Guides

Players can be quite confused at who Inarius and Lilith when they have almost no exposure to either of them before Diablo IV’s launch. Inarius is a rogue angel and Lilith is a rogue demon who created Sanctuary as a means to escape the Eternal Conflict between angels and demons over the Worldstone (the focus of Diablo II). They birthed the nephalem which eventually over time became humanity. That’s everything. We have a ton of technical lore history below, but if you’re just curious who they are that’s about the best summary I think you can have. When they introduce themselves in the game as the mother and father of Sanctuary, they’re not lying. There’s a lot more technical info on the situation than that, but we first need to talk about what came about to cause them to create Sanctuary. We’ll then go into a mixed bag of topics…

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