It's Our Birthday - We Got You Something!

While we're on the subject of unexpected emails from game developers, I got a couple more this morning. To be fair, one wasn't entirely unexpected, at least not in content; I already knew we were getting a free dinosaur mount in celebration of EverQuest II's 18th Anniversary. The unexpected part was being told about it by electronic post.

I tend to to tick all the boxes that ask me whether I'd like to be kept informed of events, offers and promotions in the games I play. I've never been one of those people who object to being handed flyers in the street or receiving so-called junk mail through my letterbox and I'm equally open to getting random emails from people trying to sell me things. 

It's all potentially interesting information as far as I'm concerned. I give it a quick glance and if it looks like there might be something in it for me I read it more thoroughly. If not, into the recycling bin it goes. I can't really see why people get so het up about it. 

There is, of course, a good ecological argument for objecting to the environmental pressure applied by the uneccessary use of energy and the wasteful consumption of resources involved in the production of printed handouts few will read and even fewer appreciate but the grounds for similar objections to the electronic distribution of publicity and advertising seem shakier. If we're going to start worrying about the hidden costs of communicating via the internet, we probably have a lot more to feel uncomfortable about than an inbox full of press releases - especially as online gamers.

Whether I ever get to see the emails I've opted in to receive is another matter entirely. As I mentioned yesterday, I have a lot of email addresses. For a while I had a policy of creating a new, game-specific email for every mmorpg I signed up to play, a plan that worked well when new mmos were relatively unusual but which ceased to be practical after the unanticipated success of World of Warcraft led to a gold-rush (Followed, appropriately, by a virtual landscape filled with crumbling ghost towns, but that's an extended metaphor for another post.)

These days I tend to pull up one of my email addresses almost at random when signing up for an open beta or registering an account with the latest South Korean or Chinese developer to throw a hat into the global market ring. Most of those are email addresses I never look at so anything that goes there sits quietly, gathering virtual dust, unopened for eternity.

When I was setting up some of these emails, though, and when I remembered to do it, I would sometimes link to my main email account, the one I check multiple times every day. (Yes, I know I could have the emails pop and wave at me as they come in but I like to retain at least the illusion of agency.) Some of them shower me with offers and promises, while others raise a hand only occasionally, as if to say "Remember me? We were friends once. Weren't we?"

Unlike an actual friend from college turning up on the doorstep, overnight bag in hand, these are the kind of catch-up visits I welcome. It's nice to be reminded once in a while of games I forgot existed, let alone that I once enjoyed playing.

Clearly, that doesn't apply to EQII, a game I still manage at least to log into at least every week or so even in the times when I'm not actively playing it. At the moment we're in a fallow period of our relationship but even so I was there for a short session earlier this week, doing the latest Panda quests and checking the vendor for upgrades.

I'll also be logging in after I finish writing this so I can claim the Stomposaurus Thunderstrider mount and take some screenshots for the post. I'm not quite sure when I'm likely to use a gigantic brontosaur land mount but I'm damned if I'm going to miss out on the opportunity to add one to my stable.

That, though, wasn't the email that prompted me to write this post in the first place. What set me off was a newsletter from Artix Entertainment concerning AdventureQuest 3D, specifically the part that said "We love our 20th Anniversary maps so much that we just can’t stop adding to them."

Wait! What? 20th Anniversary? The game I first encountered when it went into open beta back in 2016? How does that work?

The answer is in the post I linked - which I wrote, of course, so I really ought to have remembered (/jk!) AQ3D, like EQII, is a spin-off from an older mmorpg, in this case AdventureWorld itself, which launched in 2002. The anniversary relates to Artix Entertainment itself, not their current flagship title, which, for the record, is still in open beta, six years on, although the definition is now so fuzzy it's functionally meaningless. 

These three emails - yesterday's concerning the strange half-life of Crowfall, then these two celebrating eighteen years of the never-that-successful EQII and the ever-under-the-radar two decades of the AdventureQuest franchise - handily point up one of the most mistifying peculiarities of the mmorpg genre: success is almost impossible to quantify.

Crowfall managed to attract enough attention and money through crowdfunding to get itself made, which in itself counts as an achievement. Once it flopped out the gate, however, all its impetus and energy seemed to have dissipated. 

The excitement, enthusiasm and headline-grabbing controversy that accompanied the Kickstarter campaign burned itself out over the endless years of development and testing until, by the time there was a nominally finished game ready to buy and play, few cared. Crowfall was in live service for little more than a year. It may return. I wouldn't count on it.

EQII was fortunate to begin before the open beta/crowdfunding/early access era, meaning its hype cycle was relatively compact. It also had a lot less competition (Ironically, as it turned out...), new AAA mmorpgs being something of an event in the pre-WoW world. 

Most importantly, EQII had the benefit of a safety-net in the form of a megacorp that appeared barely to know or care where the money was being spent. When the game failed to meet expectations, rather than shutting down it was slowly refurbished and refitted to make the best of a poor situation and thereby, over time, was able to build a solid, if relatively small, core audience, willing to stick with it for the long haul.

Artix, meanwhile, like the co-incidentally assonant Jagex, chose to focus on an audience and a platform that time has shown to be both much larger and more robust than the flashier choices of the big-name game houses. 2D and later 3D browser-based games, aimed squarely at middle-school kids, may not get the same attention as supposedly mould-breaking "serious" mmos but it seems they can attract and hold an audience for decades.

It could also be that both EQII and AQ3D are just better games than Crowfall, of course, which they absolutely are, at least in my experience and opinion. Then again, EQII's had eighteen years to polish itself up and AQ3D is still in fricken' open beta! Maybe if Crowfall had been able to hang on that long it might have built a reputation as an overlooked gem, too. I kind of doubt it but it could have happened. I guess, if it ever comes back, it still could.

Until that mythical day, let's raise a virtual glass to the games that keep on punching and don't just throw in the towel when they're on the ropes. Here's wishing EverQuest II a happy 18th and the AdventureQuest franchise a happy 20th. Long may they both run.