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Project Gorgon goes from craps tables to speed D&D gambling

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Watching Project Gorgon’s development is almost as fun as actually playing the game, and with the game’s next patch meant to feature gambling heavily, that’s very prominent with the latest story from the game on Twitter. The developers were working hard on implementing a craps table into the game to serve as one of the gambling centerpieces, but they ran into a problem when it turns out that craps is only fun in real life and doesn’t involve much skill. But they already had the dice-rolling NPCs! What do you do with this work?

If you said that you create a version of Dungeons & Dragons with gambling which should take about 1-2 minutes to play a session, that is absolutely insane and also exactly what happened. Monsters and Mantises places you in the role of a Mantis explorer fighting monsters, leveling up, and gambling for money while you strategize about your approach. It’s coming with the next patch, and it’s as much about skill as luck. It’s also a symptom of why Project Gorgon remains so wonderfully, wonderfully weird.

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Cliff Bleszinski promises to detail Boss Key’s demise in his upcoming autobiography

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For those of you who missed it over the past year or so, the path of Boss Key Productions was one of being founded by well-known talent, releasing LawBreakers with some buzz, then crashing and burning hard. Founder and face of the company Cliff Bleszinski promises that the circumstances around the studio will be one of the matters discussed in his upcoming autobiography, as he states that he has avoided interviews due to a need to tell this story in his own words and on his own terms.

Bleszinski has not yet shared any of the details about this section beyond the chapter introduction, which emphasizes the stress experienced working in the game industry. It’s unsure how much of it will involve information which was heretofore unavailable and how much will be Bleszinski’s personal reactions to the situation, but you’ll have to wait until more is shared about the book to find out.

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Archeage adds new content to its fresh start server

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How long is a fresh start server really about a fresh start? You could argue at this point that it’s more of a fresh continuation for ArcheAge players. But perhaps that’s picking unnecessary nits; it just seems relevant as new content arrives on the aforementioned fresh start server, and you probably aren’t going to be visiting Reedwind as the first thing you do when you make a new character. But it’s there now, definitely.

The addition of Reedwind also brings with it the Thunderwing Titan, who can be fought in both Normal and Hard variants depending on gear and skill levels. Delphinad Ghost Ships will also be showing up on the high seas, which give players a chance to earn some new rewards while at the same time pitting them against difficult new opponents. If you’ve been enjoying your time on the game’s fresh start server thus far, you’ve got a bit more content to explore now; if you haven’t started because you were waiting for these additions, well, now is the time.

Source: Official Site

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Star Trek Online encourages players to make Foundry missions for a free Tier 6 ship

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The Foundry in Star Trek Online allows you to make almost any sort of mission you can conceive of, but most of those missions have a pretty specific set of assumptions. After all, the players writing these tales are probably going to assume that the players are taking the role of a standard Starfleet captain rather than assuming that the mission will be experienced by a Jem’Hadar warrior. But why not flip that on its ear? And why not do so when being bribed by the promise of a free tier 6 ship?

Yes, the developers are teaming up with the Foundry Roundtable podcast, and for this month’s competition players are being tasked with making a mission based around either a Cardassian captain or a Jem’Hadar captain. The winner gets a free pick of several tier 6 ships, so there’s plenty of motivation to think about what it would be like to make an adventure just for these two races. And if you already play one of them, hey, there’s some extra reward in it for you.

Source: Official Site

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Mortgage company analyzes the price differences between video game housing, including Final Fantasy XIV

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How much is your house worth in The Sims 4? Obviously, the game attaches a value to it, but that’s just game terms and doesn’t really match what we think of as the value of these things. This is why the UK-based mortgage company L&C Mortgages looked at the housing market in eight separate games to compare the costs and availability of a house in all of them, including the exceedingly market-limited houses in Final Fantasy XIV.

The comparisons are not perfect, since games like Fallout 4 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are single-player titles without players competing for a house. Still, if you’d like to see how the cost of virtual real estate stacks up, it should be at least mildly amusing. And hey, it also means you can mention your home is worth millions of dollars before muttering that it only applies in Eorzea. (Or Othard, if you want to be really pedantic. At this point you might as well be.)

Source: L&C Mortgages

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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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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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Rumor: Players are losing their houses in Final Fantasy XIV in error

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Housing in Final Fantasy XIV has some issues with limited space, so almost no one who has a home in the game wants to lose it. So if you want to spread chaos in the game’s homeowner community, claiming that people are losing their houses without warning is a good way to do it. There are more reports than usual of players logging in to find their houses gone, while they claim they had been in there and active in time to reset the timer.

Time to panic? Maybe not. That shiny “rumor” tag is there for a reason, chiefly the fact that at this point there’s no real confirmed reports of this happening to people. Reddit users have taken the opportunity to keep tabs on the house watchers on Balmung, and as of yet nothing has surfaced as abnormal there. (Balmung is one of the game’s largest servers and the unofficial RP server, which means housing is closely watched.) If there is a bug, it appears to be highly limited, but it’s still disconcerting to think about.

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Albion Online makes trade mission bundles much heavier

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A little change can make a big difference in terms of balance. It’s what Albion Online did with its latest patch; all that’s really been changed is that trade mission packages have had their weight increased by around 400 kg. The thing is that a heavier package means using different pack animals to transport it, which in turn means not being able to rely upon using mounts with more survivability… and, in turn, it means that these trade missions become a lot riskier. See? Balance from a little change!

The patch also contains some other balance tweaks for faction leaders, as well as updating the marketplace UI with several quality-of-life features and fixing several bugs along the way. But the biggest change for the patch is, well, a little change that should make things harder for a lot of players who will rely on more vulnerable mounts now, which encourages more back-and-forth warfare, which is exactly the point.

Source: Official Site

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Warframe adds a new Platinum pack for Twitch Prime subscribers

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Have you taken advantage of Warframe’s free giveaways for Twitch Prime subscribers yet? No? Then what are you even doing with your time? Do you need to get more stuff before you’ll take notice? Because the developers are going to give you more stuff. Seriously, the game just added a new pack for Twitch Prime subscribers adding in 50 Platinum along with a 7-day Affinity booster and a 7-day Resource booster.

This free pack will be available until September 14th and is free for everyone who is signed up for Twitch Prime; you’ll need to link that with your Warframe account, but that is not difficult. It’s also worth nothing that the Trinity Prime bundle is still available as well, and if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber you already qualify for these free goodies. Just take the time to grab them and they’re yours forever.

Source: Official Site; thanks to Sophiskiai for the tip!

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Fans deploy a mod to fix Monster Hunter World’s alt-tab errors on PC

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There are some bugs in Monster Hunter World on PC, if you haven’t noticed. A lot of them have been addressed, but one of the more egregious ones remains and tends to crash the game when you alt-tab out of the title… which is a problem, since everyone in the world does that. Fortunately fan-made mods are here to save the day, fixing the issue with alt-tabbing by correcting an error in the engine that handles fullscreen mode incorrectly.

The mod also adds in higher-resolution graphic support, the ability to hide the interface for screenshot purposes, and a few more technical additions like tricking the game into ignoring certain CPU cores for performance issues. Of course, given that the game is meant to be played online there’s a limit to how much can actually be modded, but it’s nice to see that the issue is being fixed… by an unpaid modder rather than the company releasing the game, but still.

Source: Steam via PC Gamer and VG24/7

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First impressions of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, part 1: Mechanics

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Hey, there’s a new World of Warcraft expansion, right? When did that happen?

There’s a bit of snark there, but perhaps less than you might think. The weird thing is that Battle for Azeroth kind of does feel as if it just dropped without warning; it was outside of the usual release schedule for expansions, with a long lead-in, as if the final product just showed up on our collective doorsteps one day. Assuming you were already logged on and had your pre-orders set, you could just jump right in and start the expansion, which hearkened back to the days of midnight releases after a fashion.

Needless to say, there’s a lot to talk about with the expansion so far. Now that it’s actually live we can see the mechanics and the story with all the polish that’s intended, with nothing left behind a curtain (other than Warfronts, anyhow). Coming off the well-received Legion, this expansion has some pretty big foot gear to fill, and it’s fair to wonder if any expansion wouldn’t feel like a bit of a downturn… but let’s not start there. Let’s just start in on one aspect of the game and go from there.

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TERA takes to the air with the Guardians of the Sky update

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Being on the ground is boring when you could instead be in the air, so it’s a good thing that TERA’s latest update lets you do exactly that. The Guardians of the Sky update adds in new airborne Guardian Legion missions, so if you want to soar through the air whilst taking on challenges, you’ll have the option! There are also new cash shop mounts on the way if you feel the need to ride more dragons, to boot; each one offers some form of regeneration as you ride about.

The Demon’s Wheel is also arriving on August 16th and sticking around each week for Thursday through Tuesday subsequently. It’s a challenge dungeon with a chance to gamble with the demonic Demoros for astonishing loot, but losing the gamble means certain death. Of course, since any decent player knows that death is just a minor setback, why not gamble away? You could get masks with stats on them.

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