Fortnite: Downtime, weapon swapping, week 10 challenge leaks, and Ninja’s Vegas tourney

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Epic Games is super sorry about all the Fortnite downtime earlier this month, so sorry it spent 11 seconds talking about it in its latest dev video, which is less time that the rockin’ video intro took. The studio also says that it’s keeping an eye on weapon swapping changes (it already rolled back some of them) and that it’s still working on swap animations and tinkering on various quality-of-life issues, including trap identification.

Meanwhile, several sites are covering what they believe to be leaks about the game’s Week 10 Challenges; players are looking at seven new weeklies, among them headshot damage counts, chest-searching in multiple named locations, and skydiving through floating rings. Can’t say as I’ve ever had a quest to go skydiving in an MMO before.

Finally, ESPN has a piece up on popular streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, whose Vegas event at the new Luxor e-sports arena charged competitors $75 to come try to kill him (winners took home $2500). E-sports are getting weirder.

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Enter to win a copy of Wild Terra from Juvty and MOP!

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B2P MMORPG sandbox Wild Terra isn’t resting on its laurels: Developer Juvty Worlds patched up for the faux-holiday at the beginning of April, adding “crystal” equipment and letting players vote on gear. Want to give it a go? Juvty has issued Massively OP a bundle of keys for the B2P game, worth $14.99 apiece on Steam, to distribute to our readers. There are no regional restrictions, other than the caveat that the game must be available to you on Steam for you to use the key. Read on to enter to win!

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World of Warcraft’s new communities system aims to bring players together in Battle for Azeroth

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Among the various features and additions coming with World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth this summer, communities has gotten buried in all of the excitement. Yet this tool may generate some excitement when players experience it in action.

Blizzard Watch has a preview up of how communities work now that an early version is up on the alpha server. Communities will allow players to create cross-realm groups in addition to regular guilds (guilds will automatically become their own communities as well). The idea is that players can fashion specific types of communities and keep everyone in touch across the game.

There is also an option to create groups based on Blizzard’s BattleTags, in case you want a community that spans multiple Blizzard titles.

The article notes that many of the community features have yet to be activated, so there is a lot that we have yet to learn about the flexibility and function of this system.

Source: Blizzard Watch

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Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s next patch reveals our future story

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The next patch for Final Fantasy XIV is something we should all watch closely. Because it’s going to tell us plenty about where we’re heading in the next expansion.

We haven’t yet been told that we’ll learn about a new expansion this year, but we have a fan festival on the calendar, we’re moving through the middle of the patch, and FFXIV moves on a content delivery schedule reliable enough to set your clock by. So we know that announcement is happening this year, and we can all bet on it coming out in June of next year. (If it’s running really late, maybe July.)

And this is the patch where we’ll find out where we’re headed. Not that we’ll be told yet, of course; we were never actually told in-universe that we were heading to Ala Mhigo until it happened, after all. But this is the point when threads need to start collecting into a useful form, and so it’s best to watch closely and see which elements are being picked up and tugged along for our next destination.

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Camelot Unchained works on trading, the UI, and building code ahead of July’s beta

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July 4th is getting closer, which means the Camelot Unchained team is in high gear polishing up the build for the beta that’s finally set to launch come Independence Day. Last week’s dev update was relatively short for the longwinded CSE; there were no player tests this weekend, but the studio discusses its asset decluttering rules, building code, a big UI update, class animations, chat UI, character creation, the trading system, and the trait system. Maybe the most interesting bit (for regular players) is actually the screenshots at the very end of the update on the Dragon Fang scenario.

“The hill we are currently climbing in the assembly of this map, is the creation and placement of these large, SPIKY, rock walls, growing outward from the Place of Power which resides in the center of the map,” explains CSE’s Tyler Rockwell. “All these rocks also need to be very performant so we can have hundreds of players fighting it out in this zone. Next week we’ll try and finish up placing the majority of these assets to show off more of the map in the update!”

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City of Titans restructures its development approach thanks to Unreal’s plugins

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Due to the scattered locations of City of Titans’ team members, the devs have long since attempted a modular approach to building the superhero MMORPG. However, this format started to “break down,” and the team stepped back to look for a different approach.

This came in the form of Unreal Engine 4.18, which finally allowed its users to attach plugins to other plugins. After that version came out, the City of Titans team had a path forward and spent a few months restructuring the project to function within this new framework. Thanks to the change, the team said that the pace of development should be much better.

“Now that plugins can work with other plugins, all of the various game components can be plugins,” the devs said. “This means that interdependency and modularity are no longer mutually exclusive — they can be both at once […] Because everything is in the same place, everything — to the extent anything this complicated ever does mind you — just works.”

Source: City of Titans

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VR-based ARK Park has patched in free locomotion and better tutorials

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How’s virtual reality dino land ARK Park doing since its early access launch one month ago? Magic 8 Ball says reply hazy. Steam’s aggregated review score is currently “mixed,” with even even positive reviews admitting the game lacks content and scope, which lines up neatly with our own impressions of the game.

Snail (apparently rightly) believes one of the game’s major problems is the movement system, and it’s just addressed that with what it’s calling a “major update,” which is already being received well by the community.

“One of the biggest issues is locomotion. You wanted free movement so here it is! Our dev team has been working hard on the movement system and now you have the option to choose between teleportation and free locomotion.”

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EVE Fanfest 2018: CCP Falcon on EVE’s community team layoffs and having Hilmar as a CEO

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It’s safe to say that it’s been a rough year for CCP Games, with the company pulling out of VR game development and laying off around 100 staff worldwide. The entire EVE Online community team was reported to have been slashed down to just two employees, and many of the studio’s most experienced PR staff were let go when the Atlanta office was shuttered. EVE players (including me) came down hard on CCP and on CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson in particular, and some inside the company were notably shaken.

EVE Online Community Manager Paul “CCP Falcon” Elsy was one of the few members of the community team left after the layoffs, suddenly finding himself organising the 15th anniversary Fanfest without a team. It’s now been almost five months since the layoffs, so I caught up with Paul at EVE Fanfest 2018 recently to find out how the company has coped with the loss of so many skilled community staff. He also clarified CCP’s role in tackling harassment outside the game client in the wake of a recent virtual scuffle on the Open Comms show, and gave a fascinating account of how Hilmar himself dealt with the recent layoffs and how he’s been getting more involved with EVE lately.

Read on for our massive in-depth interview with EVE‘s Community Manager Paul “CCP Falcon” Elsy.

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Final Fantasy XIV invites the community to design physical DPS gear

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Thus far, Final Fantasy XIV has run three gear design competitions for the community, inviting players to design gear for tanks, healers, and magical DPS jobs. The winners of all three have already shown up in the game, to boot; winning designs have been implemented in subsequent patches, expanded to fill all of the various roles (the caster DPS design is the design being added for dungeon gear in patch 4.3). So how would you like to fill out the remaining gear designs?

The design contest for ranged and melee DPS has just kicked off, with the same rules as prior installments and a variety of prizes for players to enjoy. This time, players can enter for either category to be included, so if you have something in mind for Monk but not necessarily for Bard, you’ll submit it separately. No promises are made about when the designs will be added to the game after the contest, but our suggestion is to get drawing and put the designs out there if you’ve got a knack for costuming.

Source: Official Site

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Bless Online outlines key changes for its Steam release

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When Bless Online launches on Steam early access next month, the version that western players experience won’t be identical to the client that is already running in Korea and Japan. This is because Neowiz is making a few important changes to tailor the game to a different audience, and in a new dev blog, the developer explains exactly what those changes will be.

Bless’ combat system has received the most attention in the transition. Neowiz revamped how rhythmic combat works, giving players a choice of skills to make up their combo rotation. Generally, combat will be more action-oriented and become “more difficult.”

Other adjustments include restructuring how skill acquisition and leveling works, adding more ways to obtain skill-leveling gems, choosing party benefit buffs to incentivize grouping, adding newbie friendly tutorials, giving monsters special skills, and improving the content pacing.

Source: Bless Online. Thanks Brother Maynard!

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Black Desert Online makes amends for ‘disorderly’ patch and plots out a better path forward

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Black Desert Online players who were taken aback at some recent and rather sudden changes to the game have the full apology of Executive Producer Jae-hee Kim to console them.

Kim wrote a letter to the playerbase in which he outlines the vision of the game, promising that the developers are taking action to “improve the fundamentals” of Black Desert’s structure to shore up the title.

“If you have to define Black Desert Online into four keywords, it would have to be MMORPG, combat, life content, and open world gameplay. In retrospect, it is true that we were afraid of making radical changes instead of improving and highlighting upon these four key themes,” he said.

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The Daily Grind: How much MMO game info should be hidden from the players?

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A blog post on The Psychology of Video Games blog a few weeks ago seems relevant to our interests: It explores the “pleasure paradox,” which basically suggests that humans crave certainty, but once we get it, we’re bored. Experiments showed that subjects “said they would prefer to be less uncertain, but the results show that their happiness would have been diminished” if they actually were. We like a good mystery!

Consequently, author Jamie Madigan argues, games should take advantage of this human quirk – say, by rewarding us based on some hidden modifier but not telling us what we did to earn it.

In a weird way, that’s something ancient MMORPGs did by accident: Information was so obfuscated that playing was as much trial and error as anything, and game mechanics were an unintentional mystery. And something like, oh, websites publishing every single mage spell combo in Asheron’s Call? It killed the magic. So does every elitist in your group spamming DPS meters in chat in the modern era.

How much MMO game info should be hidden from the players? And is the “pleasure paradox” the reason?

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