It Seems I Wore My Roblox Legs Today
Also: is it so Joever for Concord?
It takes very little time on any platform or online game to realize it is mostly geared at maximizing the average user's engagement and not helping you take care of your kid who it may or may not be actively trying to solicit to join its "community," which can vary from cutesy Squid Games variant to metaverse sweat shop. It's not intentional harm, just indifference. So when reading Bloomberg's report on Roblox's fight against child groomers by Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio, what struck me most was how oblivious the game company's representatives seem to be about what they are doing and why it's perceived with such cynicism by so many people.
Imagine dropping your five-year old kid off at Chuck E. Cheese's and leaving. It's free to hang out there but all the cool stuff kids are doing costs money. There are a bunch of adults running around talking to one another but also maybe some of them are chatting with the kids. Everyone has masks on, you see. They start offering them extra money and pizza to play games together. And maybe there are some cool toys outside in their car. And the people who all work at Chuck E. Cheese's aren't actually there in person.
They are in a room somewhere else monitoring what's happening via a chat log transcribed in real-time, but there are so many conversations happening constantly they rely on algorithms to flag anything going on that shouldn't be. And then when you come to pick your kid up and they aren't there the person on the Chuck E. Cheese's helpline says that none of this is their problem. Every part of this would be insane, including the idea that Chuck E. Cheese's is such an invaluable resource for social connection and play that any accidental child predation facilitated by its core business proposition is a worthwhile and necessary tradeoff.
In a blog post that coincided with Bloomberg's story, Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman cited its last annual transparency report that "only" 12,831,544 pieces of content were flagged as inappropriate during a three month period. Only! And these are only the pieces flagged by Roblox's systems, not any violations its tools were unable to capture. Not great but not terrible. Elsewhere Kaufman notes that Roblox employs "10% of our full-time employees and thousands of contractors who focus exclusively on trust and safety" tasked with monitoring 60 million violations a year from over 78 million active users. The company says this already costs hundreds of millions a year. Maybe that’s a sign there’s a fundamental problem with the entire enterprise.
Live service interrupted
No Man's Sky players are pressing F to pay respects to the once beautiful planets where they made their bases that have since been transformed into eye-sores by the game's otherwise much-praised Worlds Part 1 visual overhaul. "What have they done to my boy," wrote DefinatelyNotACunt on the subreddit alongside pics of a once bucolic paradise turned into a trippy sci-fi desert. "This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me," wrote Plus-Hair-8619 showing once purple fields turned into a puke covered bog. Not everyone’s home planet got ruined. Mostly players are still discovering wild things and creating incredible stuff.
Not on Xbox, however, at least not yet. Microsoft's platform still hasn't received the update and some fans are pissed. No Man's Sky is part of Game Pass on both console and PC, but subscribers still don't have access to the new content update. A blog post promoting it on Xbox Wire simply said it's coming "soon." Players on Nintendo Switch have also been left out so far, though they're not holding their breath the update looks anywhere near as good on the seven-year old console as it does on PS5 and PC.
Helldivers 2 is getting its biggest update since launch on August 6 adding an even tougher difficulty mode, a fresh mission type, new enemies, and more. It will mark the game's six month anniversary and is exactly what I've been waiting for to come back. Despite shedding most of its concurrent players on Steam, Helldivers 2 was still the fifth-most played game on the platform earlier this month ranked by people who played at least once, according to market research firm Circana.
One of the big issues Arrowhead is looking to tackle in the update is grief kicking. Instead of players getting removed from a mission right before they can earn anything because people are being dicks, the session will be duplicated and they'll have a chance to earn all the same rewards as the players who gave them the boot. "This will make kicking easier in a good way," noted one player. "Now, hosts can kick without feeling like the kicked player loses out on any contribution they did."
Apex Legends has launched a Void Reckoning Event at the worst possible time. It has been 15 days since EA announced an overhaul of the battle pass system to jack up prices and take away the ability to pay for them with currency earned in-game and so far the company hasn't acknowledged a widespread player backlash that's included over 70,000 negative reviews on Steam.
The new event features the free-to-play battle royale's first-ever 12v12 Deathmatch mode called BIG TDM, the announcement of which was just full of players raging about the current state of the game. There are complaints about the maps and brief match lengths, as well as the loot packs for collecting all of the new skins. That's on top of an apparent spike in the lag players are experiencing. Fans are flaming the event as a money grab.
Fallout 76 is sorta broken (again) after its latest update. It was a small patch aimed mostly at bug fixes and glitched quests that seems to have accidentally messed up the UI and some other stuff. Teammates and their games are invisible, the map keeps defaulting to the top left corner, quest markers are disappearing, and Pip-Boys are locking up during combat. Bethesda is investigating the issues, but one player had the misfortune of trying to launch a nuke during the fritz.
"The damn map to launch has zero landmarks and objects on it so I’m lost," wrote Mamagueboo. "Decide to launch it at the bog purely guessing where it can spawn the queen event. I FUCKING MISS BY A LITTLE 😫 probably more than an hour of work for nothing. It doesn’t even show the area of the nuke in my map lmao." Other players are used to this sort of thing by now. "Yes, it’s update day," wrote IronMonopoly elsewhere on the subreddit. "The game always breaks unplayably on update day, and stays that way for about a week until the inevitable hot fix."
Concord is in trouble and it's not even out yet. Sony's PVP mashup of Destiny and Overwatch did not set the Steam concurrent numbers on fire in its second, free beta weekend. Steam concurrents aren't everything, but it certainly reinforced many people's anecdotal feeling that no one was really talking about the game. It's fine, even fun, but hasn't yet showcased any hooks that can set it apart from every other similar deathmatch mode shooter on the market, especially for $40. It's giving Foamstars all over again.
It's premature to count Concord out, and I'd love to have a Guardians of the Galaxy-style PVP game that feels good and pulls me in for a match or two every other night. But everything is shouting "yikes!" right now, from the incredibly negative trailer reception to the fact that it comes out on August 23, wedged in-between Black Myth: Wukong and Star Wars Outlaws, followed by an onslaught of late summer and fall releases. The community is already in shambles comparing it to Marvel Rivals' open beta with threads like "Concord is missing the COOL," "Concord cannot launch like this," and "I Think A Delay May Be The Best Way Forward."
The First Descendant digest
Some are calling it sexy Destiny. Others are saying it's Warframe for (straight) gooners. The First Descendant is a free-to-play sci-fi loot shooter where you can spend a lot of money dressing up characters butts and a lot of time (200 hours) grinding for your next dopamine hit. After striking many as a derivative copycat, and then quite literally stealing, and later apologizing for stealing, artwork from Destiny 2, the Nexon-made also-ran has racked up 10 million players despite its hollow story, repetitive missions, and "mixed" reviews on Steam. Something about The First Descendant has resonated with players.
It's certainly not the tutorial robot that talks so fast players can't learn how to play the game, or the microtransactions that charge players for each use of a shader. Maybe it's the accidental loot cave the developers created and are now leaving in the game in order to "be adored by our players for a long time." You know an online game has legs when fans start feuding over etiquette. After Nexon added the ability to report players for going AFK while others around them did the hard work, players ended up getting reported anytime they stopped moving, even when it was to quickly change out their equipment.
Patch notes
Pacific Drive's summer content update adds a photo mode and a jetpack for your jalopy.
Multiversus season 2 will cut the price of the Joker in half and is rewarding more offensive play with changes like, "Fighters now maintain their ground momentum into a ground jump even if it exceeds their maximum air speed."
The Sims 4's latest update adds "romantic boundaries" that let players toggle what makes their Sims jealous. Also, "Sims who are not part of the Date interrupt conversations less often."
Tekken 8 patch 1.06.01 makes Lidia Sobieska available and improves the volleyball mini-game by adding a practice mode in-between matches and fixing how the ball reacts to item techniques.
Ready or Not's home invasion update has the most unsettling change log I've read in a while. "Suspects should be better about not fake surrendering or exiting their surrendered state if multiple SWAT are watching them."
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess' first title update lowered the controller volume on PS5 which was out of the control.
Manor Lords' next update will add fishing ponds which will eventually be accessible all-year round, including in the winter for ice fishing.
Halo Infinite is getting the fan-favorite VIP mode last seen in Halo 3.
Another Crab's Treasure's minor patch v1.0.103.8, "fixed a BUNCH of missing NPCs that were supposed to be in the game!!!"
What they’re saying
“With Sony, there was an increasing motive to make more highly budgeted games, and it wanted to go that way with the Japan Studio brand…My motive was always to create original games. I feel I can do this without a massive budget." – Silent Hill and Gravity Rush designer Keiichiro Toyama
"We still have award shows that we're going to. Because they're important, and we really appreciate it" but it "would be cool if everybody could agree to do it all at the same time…it is surprisingly draining on the soul…we've all been more emotional because we can't get closure. And you want to have closure at the end of a project." – Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke
“Isn’t that a shame when you put so many years of your life into iterating on those systems or building technology or building the start of a community, and because the operating costs are high, you get terrified when you see the numbers drop and you leave. We’ve seen this with amazing releases that I think have massive potential, and I think they eject too soon.” – Warframe maker Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair
"Creators have the duty to create sequels fans are wanting to see. Although I sound all high and mighty, it's been a while since I've moved on from Okami. But I still feel like I haven't fulfilled my duty. So Capcom-san, please, let's do it together…Same sentiments for Viewtiful Joe 3. I'd be more than happy." – former Capcom director and Bayonetta designer Hideki Kamiya