Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 31-03-2020
Online Games Bay
After months and years of neglecting and mistreating the players on Steam Steel Ocean closes in early May 2020.
Steel Ocean, Chinese game similar to World of Warships, announced that the only server available for non-Chinese users via Steam will be closing in early May 2020.
This news is hardly surprising taking under consideration that for months and years the game was not updated, upgraded nor even looked after. Meeting 20 players at the same time on the US server was a small miracle, yet the game kept its original matchmaking engine that often did not worked well, f.e. out of 8 available players of same tier it was choosing only 6 and put battleship and 2 destroyers against cruiser and two submarines...
Despite being constantly neglected the game have built small community of players that did not enjoyed World of Warships and preferred the options available in Steel Ocean (like submarines, manual anti-aircraft and secondary guns, night battles), even though the creators clearly never really cared about non-Chinese users. Let me put it this way - the US server undertook biweekly maintenance breaks and from time to time... it looks like someone was forgetting to switch the server back on leaving users disgruntled and hungry for answers.
Now officially the game closes on Steam in early May 2020, the client will be available on some Chinese game systems, but as usual the players have to rely on gossips rather than creators. And the saddest thing is Steel Ocean was really a good game that needed some tender loving care to blossom (despite being constantly bombarded by WOWS spammers) and it seems that the users were more concerned about the game than the creators.
21-12-2021
As they say "blink and you will miss it". But don’t worry, you will not miss Wargaming’s apology for recent sh*tstorm, because they, of course, do not plan to apologize for anything.
Is Wargaming collapsing? Unfortunately no, but the situation in the company might not be as great as they want you to believe.
Recent developments in several titles made me think that gamers are truly weird, weird creatures that should be studied by science, because it’s not how human kind should work. Or is it?
No, it’s not gonna be another "World of Warships is dead" or "WOWS is dying" article. Unfortunately, this completely broken game is alive, and it looks like with the community they have, it will be alive for a long, long time. But it is a final chapter - I’m done.
New online basketball manager game FUEL Basketball just reached the 1.0 status, which means that in 6 months the game moved from early alpha to a completely playable title. Take notes CD Projekt RED, take notes...
GSC Game World presented a brand new Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl trailer, which introduced us to... dozens of shades of darkness. Literally. And that’s about it.
Unity Technologies, a company behind very popular Unity game engine, hit the news again, but not for reasons you might expect. Yup, it looks like they became the new evil corporation on the horizon.
One of my favourite quotes from Mystery Science Theater 3000 is "he came, he changed nobody’s life and then he left", which pretty much describes what happened to Cyberpunk 2077. Again.
