Out Of The Ashes Rises...A Lame Duck: Ashes of Creation

I said I wanted to do more short posts. Here's a really short one.

Ashes of Creation, the increasingly controversial would-be AAA MMORPG, which I kickstarted both for myself and for Mrs Bhagpuss in some barely-remembered epoch of geological time, just launched its Battle Royale spin-off/combat test bed on Steam. It's called called, not inappropriately as it turns out, "Ashes of Creation Apocalypse".

Developers Intrepid already tested the BR mode a while back, of course. I played and wrote about it almost exactly a year ago. Back then it was an invitation only stress test but it made a reappearance earlier this year as a limited-time open beta. Now it's listed as F2P Early Access and looks to be hanging around semi-permanently.

I thought it would be easy enough to jump in, play a couple of rounds, take some screenshots and bang together a post about it and so it seemed it wouldbe...for about ten minutes. The download went quickly and smoothly as did the installation. I had my AoC login details to hand and they worked. Well, they worked to log into my account on the website. For the game, not so much. The login screen for the game itself just made a pffffttt noise when I entered the password and then sat there, looking at me blankly.

I'm fairly sure I know why this is. When I was installing the thing, which is published in Europe by MY.com, my firewall popped up two warnings. I chose not to override them. Not that I don't trust MY.com, who also publish Allods, which I've played via their portal many times but...

If I was more interested in the AoC BR (it's all abbreviations this morning, isn't it?) I'd fiddle about with permissions and settings and such until I got it to work. Apparently gettng in to the thing is quite a common problem. Well, so I read on someone's blog that I now can't find. I thought it was at Kabalyero's but that's just talking about how badly the game runs when you do get it to run.

Steam reviews are a bombsite right now although there are fewer than two hundred so far. Not unexpectedly, most are peeved that Intrepid are wasting time on a Battle Royale spin-off at all, rather than focusing on the long-overdue MMORPG they paid for, which, according to the official release schedule, is stil in "alpha-0", whatever that means.

The other big complaint is that this Early Access fragment of a game not only has a fully-functioning cash shop but that it's a highly aggressive one at that:

I don't have much - or really any - interest in playing a Battle Royale right now, let alone in jumping through hoops to get an unfinished one to run. I have enough to be going on with trying to get Riders of Icarus to patch. (Still not working after a month).

I've also all but lost interest in Ashes of Creation as an MMORPG. If Intrepid ever do get as far as beta, for which my Kickstarter qualifies me, no doubt I'll try it but it looks increasingly like a half-assed hybrid of Black Desert Online and EQNext, which really wouldn't be anything I'd be looking for even if they could pull it off.

WoW Classic has pretty much convinced me that what I do want is a new, old-school, diku-MUD inspired MMORPG. About the only one out there is Pantheon and the way things are going I'd bet on Brad's team to hit some kind of buy-in closed beta before my AoC account gets flagged for anything similar.

And I'd happily pay Brad a hundred dollars or so for access to a working, persistent beta. At least I'd know I was getting some kind of game access for my money that way, not just throwing it down a hole or paying for some entirely different kind of game, one I never wanted.