Be Cautious of Wild West Online

If you've seen or heard of Wild West Online you might be rather excited as the trailer looks interesting and the idea of the game is promising. That being said, be very cautious of this particular game as there's a certain history behind it that one should take into consideration before even thinking about this game. I'd like to start off by saying that I don't really aim to condemn any particular games as I like to keep an open mind, but there's a very bad setting around this one. The first thing to note is where this game comes from, it's being developed on the Nightshade Engine and being licensed out by Free Reign Entertainment, a group notorious for cash grab type games.

These types cash in on certain popular genres and provide a buggy; broken, full of cheaters and always abandoned game. The man behind previous works is Sergey Titov and while it's been mentioned by Wild West Online's developers that he doesn't have direct development on the game it's unsure whether or not that he's behind the scenes on this project. The past games that he has worked on and have been run on Nightshade include; WarZ (now Infestation: Survivor Stories), Shattered Skies, Last Man Standing and Romero's Aftermath. If you're not familiar or have long lasting scars from playing these games just take a look at their Steam user reviews or a simple search to see just what sort of games these are. That of course being buggy, broken cash grabs with pay to win systems that often are abandoned entirely.


Now, Wild West Online might not follow the same route as these though at a glance it does seem to have all the same markings. Like WarZ it's got a trailer that will catch people's attention while promising a great deal. I personally didn't think it looked all that great, but it's here to cash in on Red Dead Redemption 2 which will have a lot of hype towards its 2018 release. If you head into the forums for this game there's been some heavy discussion on who's involved with a number of comments being removed.On the Youtube trailer it's a similar story where comments/upvote & donvotes are disabled entirely (red flag). Neither of these are a good sign when it comes to releasing a game since discussion is important and it makes me feel like they're trying to hide something.

The past games, aside from being a cash grab are also heavily influenced by pay to win tactics and abandoned quickly. I remember doing the press type stuff for Shattered Skies being promised all sorts of interesting aspects (new content, DLC, expansions) and while promising this initially it's dead now. That's to say I basically fell for it and I want everyone to be cautious about Wild West Online, we all love these types of games as they're huge on Steam though think about it before diving in. It just seems a tad strange that this new company came out of nowhere developing a large open world game. They're promising similar things to the other mentioned titles while using the same engine and some in-game assets. It feels like they're using the same tactics here and while I won't say by all accounts ignore this, make sure you're following development and don't get sucked into the same system the group continues to exploit.

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Some Sources: Wild West Online Trailer
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