PUBG’s new scooters are freakin’ adorable and I want one

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The FIX PUBG campaign, or the start of it, is materializing today, as the latest update to hit the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds test servers tackles some of Bluehole’s to-do list, adding a new weapon, scooter, camera settings, reporting system tweaks, changes for custom matches, and bugxies. Cutest scooters ever. As for the Tukshai,

“The Tukshai is an upcoming Sanhok exclusive three-wheeled vehicle which we’d originally planned to release in the month after Sanhok came to live servers. Due to higher priority development tasks and the extra fine tuning required to make driving experience of the three-wheeled Tukshai feel just right, it will now be released in September.”

Meanwhile, the game’s mobile edition reached a new milestone this week: It’s been downloaded over 100 million times with 14 million daily players, and it’s only been running for four months. More impressively, those figures don’t count China, Japan, or Korea. It’ll be interesting to see how the game continues to perform, with its biggest competitor, Fortnite, recently hitting Android itself.

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Behaviour’s DEATHGARDEN survival shooter hits early access, is free-to-play right now

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What’s Behaviour Interactive been up to since taking Eternal Crusade free-to-play, pondering a battle royale mode, and being sued by Bethsoft? Getting its caps lock button stuck, for one, or so it appears from the title of its next big thing, DEATHGARDEN, which soft-launched into early access on Steam this week. It’s basically an asymmetric first-person multiplayer shooter/battle royale hybrid, with Absolver-like stylings and a Most Dangerous Game/Hunger Games flair.

“Set in the near future, DEATHGARDEN revolves around a spectacular real blood sport that became the most popular entertainment on the planet. Players choose to team up as one of the five agile Runners or to embody the Hunter, a heavily armed competitor whose mission is to kill the Runners, preventing them from escaping The Garden. Deathgarden pits individual cunning against strategy and teamwork–a lone but lethal Hunter against a team of dextrous Runners. Both sides must prove their skills and take control of the procedurally-generated Garden.”

The game is set to hit PS4 and Xbox One early next year; in the meantime, PC players can check it out for free on Steam through August 21st.

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Aion details all of its upcoming gear exchange rates for a big equipment overhaul

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The progression of equipment and power level in Aion may be a bit overly ornate at the moment, which is why the game’s next major patch for the NA version is overhauling the whole experience. Of course, the flip side to that task is that it also means a whole lot of changes to gear, and that means there’s a whole list of how your current gear can be exchanged for new gear when the update goes live. It’s large enough that it requires a separate spreadsheet, even.

To assuage one major fear, the game’s community team has reminded players that this is not an automatic replacement but an additional compensation; players will still have their old gear, they’ll just receive new pieces. Of course, the debate is running about the forums over whether or not the exchanges are fair or balanced for the community, which is always going to be a problem with this degree of gear change.

Source: Official Site

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Rend’s Jeremy Wood on how Frostkeep borrows from Blizzard, Dark Age of Camelot, and PlanetSide

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GameDaily has an interview with Rend’s Jeremy Wood this week that covers a bunch of meta topics of interest to MMO players and watchers of this oddball hybrid title. While Rend has no plans to suddenly become a battle royale title, Frostkeep is very much watching what the MMO subgenres and companies are up to in order to “fill the same psychological needs that are being filled by those games in [Rend].” Specifically, Wood says his team learned a lot from Blizzard and the MMO genre.

“Our biggest takeaway from our Blizzard experience is you can make a fantastically unique product without really inventing anything new,” Wood explained. “Blizzard got where they are by taking inspiration from all sorts of different great pieces of games in different genres.”

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Sea of Thieves extends the Cursed Sails campaign another week, teases open-world skeleton ships

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This week’s Sea of Thieves patch is… well, it’s kinda more of the same, as Rare has extended the Cursed Sails run another week, meaning you have more time to grind skelly ships for loot and commendations. (Reddit complaining ensues.)

In its dev update, Rare says it’s patched in new cannonball effects for the baddies, new event timers, and new sensitivity values. Oh yeah, and the kraken is still down for the count, though Rare promises it’s working to bring him back.

Going forward, the Sea of Thieves devs say they’re busy porting the skeleton ships into the “real” world, beyond the campaign itself, a bit like the megaladons work now. Cursed cannonballs will also be adding more exploration and strategy to the gameworld. Expect more Forsaken Shores details from Gamescom later this month.

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Elite Dangerous’ Beyond Chapter Three launches on August 28, players take on massive effort to salute community helpers

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The next phase of Elite Dangerous is en route – specifically, that’s chapter three of the Beyond rollout. In a brief tweet this afternoon, Frontier put a date on it – August 28 – and dropped a cryptic teaser video to boot.

Based on the game’s roadmap, we’re… actually still not entirely sure what’s in this episode because of how thin the copy is. Right now, new ships, missions, and scenarios are all that’s listed, as this is not expected to be a major update and Reddit seems anything but in hype mode.

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Hi-Rez’s Realm Royale playerbase and reviews are way down on Steam

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Yikes – Realm Royale is apparently struggling, proving once again just how hard it is to break into one of these new runaway subgenres. GitHyp (via GIbiz) has a report this week on the size of Hi-Rez’s battle royale playerbase after just two months of life.

“At the time, we thought Realm Royale could be PUBG‘s first serious competition on Steam with no other recent battle royale game coming close to 100k players,” GitHyp writes. But since then, the game’s activity level has apparently sunk to around 7000 concurrent players, which as the analytics firm notes is a loss of 93%. Streaming of the title is down too, aside from the ongoing $100K weekly tournaments. GitHyp attributes the downslide to Steam’s mixed reviews, which focus primarily on balance concerns.

Earlier this week, Hi-Rez reorganized into into three core studios, one apiece for SMITE, Paladins, and Realm Royale, as if to emphasize GitHyp’s assertion that the game isn’t dead yet and the company’s not giving up on it any time soon; it’s still in alpha on PC, and it has yet to launch on console.

Source: GitHyp via GIbiz

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Pre-alpha colony sim MMO Seed will grant players the tools to fight toxicity

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Seed resurfaced this summer after intensive work by studio Klang Games building out the colony simulation MMO (plus a big influx of investor money), and this month, it’s put together a handy Q&A featuring questions from its community and fresh answers from the devs.

Notably, Klang says that players will be able to password-protect their colonies to invite friends as well as join colonies with open borders; there will be a whole-planet view; and your bank account will move with you if you move colonies (though objects need to move physically). The studio is also working with a Harvard law professor on government structures available to players, with the intent that players “be able to implement laws to fight against toxic behavior.”

“To make this game genuinely scalable, we have to give virtuous players just as many gameplay tools as delinquent players,” the studio explains.

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EverQuest II is merging one of its progression servers into a regular server

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The residents of two of EverQuest II’s servers are about to get really chummy with each other.

Daybreak announced this week that on September 4th, it is going to merge the population of Stormhold with Antonia Bayle. This means that Antonia Bayle is going to see an influx of refugees while Stormhold will be shut down for good. This will be slightly tricky due to the fact that Stormhold was a time-locked expansion server, but that will come to an end as Antonia Bayle is a normal server ruleset.

There’s a lot of details that Daybreak covers concerning potential name conflicts and the transfer of mail and housing, so read up on the FAQ if this server merge affects you.

Source: EverQuest II

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Tamriel Infinium: Three key takeaways from the Elder Scrolls Online Murkmire teaser

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Hopefully, everyone saw the Elder Scrolls Online presentation at Quakecon. If not, I’ll have that whole video just past the break. Game Director Matt Firor and Community Manager Gina Bruno stood on stage to give an overview of what ESO has in store for the rest of the year. Of course, Wolfhunter launched a couple of days ago, but I was definitely more interested in the Murkmire presentation.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I believe that Black Marsh is the area of Tamriel that ESO will ultimately be known for, and that’s because no other game in the Elder Scrolls series has touched that area of Tamriel with any significance. Firor explained what we would discover in Murkmire, but I believe his last line explained it best: “Along the way you’re going to get a really deep dive into Argonian culture, philosophy, and religion — really, what drives them, and what makes them so weird.”

During the presentation, Firor and Bruno gave us our first look at the Murkmire DLC in game. During this one-minute clip, we didn’t see much, but I’ve pulled it apart. And I’m going to hopefully reveal some things that you didn’t notice.

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Stardew Valley mod sends a multiplayer farm owner into a coma for true MMO action

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The multiplayer mode in Stardew Valley is a pretty standard multiplayer arrangement with one player serving as the host and everyone else serving as guests or indentured servants. This is not exactly unusual. But what if you could put the host to sleep forever and let everyone run around with abandon with no masters? Behold the latest mod to the game, which allows the host to basically become completely inert while others continue to play in the game world to great effect.

Of course, there are downsides to this, chief among them the fact that the actual host will need to leave the computer hosting the game powered on 24/7. (You know, like an actual server.) It also means that the host can’t actually participate while the game is frozen, which is fine for short jaunts away but can cause unwanted effects in the longer term. Still, it’s a step toward turning the game into your very own farmland MMO… with an absentee leader imprisoned in a void of darkness. That seems fine.

Source: Nexus Mods via Rock Paper Shotgun

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First impressions of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, part 2: Content

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The first part of this first impressions series yesterday was all about the mechanical changes made for this expansion. This time, I don’t want to talk about the mechanics of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth; I want to talk about the actual content. Not the narrative text, but just the actual moment-to-moment stuff you’re doing in the game. Which, I think, is what this expansion is going to be judged on at this stage by a lot of people.

Put simply, the game could have the best combat it has ever had with the best gear enhancement system conceivable, but if the actual things you had to fight were a boring slog, no one would like it anyway. Solid content covers a multitude of sins.

There are several people who would likely argue that Legion had some of the best content we’ve ever seen in WoW, and while there’s room to debate that, I think it’s definitely worth considering. So BfA started off on something of the back foot, and that was exacerbated by the fact that it has not one but two continents to fill out almost entirely separate.

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Check out some of the new dwarven zones coming in Lord of the Rings Online’s Update 23

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At GenCon earlier this month, Lord of the Rings Online studio Standing Stone dished on some of the goodies coming to the game in Update 23, dubbed the Grey Mountains update. As we discussed on the podcast, that means good stuff for fans of the dwarves – maybe even lady dorfs too, though that’s apparently still up in the air.

What’s definite, though, is the regions appearing (and reappearing) in the update, as LOTRO Players lays out in a trio of videos today. First up is a trip through the Grey Mountains – aka Ered Mithrin – themselves, encrusted with dwarven ruins, mines, and dragon bones but also a glacier biome and a unique forest too. The second video covers the Iron Hills, with more Easterling towns and functioning dwarven mines and fortresses, but YouTuber Andang notes that the zone is mostly empty right now. Finally, the Lonely Mountain of Erebor is getting some love!

We’re still running our regular LOTRO Legendarium column here at Massively OP; most recently, columnist Justin Olivetti pondered just how well the game is aging.

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