Possession Is Nine-Tenths Of The Fun

In former days, I used to pontificate - not infrequently - on general topics and trends affecting the mmorpg genre. I guess we all did, even though, by the time I came to the table, many of those themes and arguments had already been reduced to the blandest of mush by repeated rehashing. Still, that never seemed to stop anyone coming back for yet another helping. All you had to do was refer to the dead, dry horsemeat you were chewing in an arch, ironic or just plain world-weary way, so as to let people know you knew how long past its use-by date it was and you were good for another mouthful.

These days I see very few posts like that. The veterans seem to have worn out the tread on those tires at last and the newcomers have entirely different interests and concerns. This part of the blogosphere, once a support system for people with a very similar, niche set of interests - mmorpgs, basically - some time ago morphed into something much broader and - if we're objective about it - more interesting.

For years there's been an increased focus on general gaming and wider entertainment concerns, with reviews and opinions of music, movies, books, sports and TV all increasingly finding their place. There's also been a great deal more openness, a greater willingness to share personal details on everything from from lifestyle and employment to mental and physical health. 

Back when I was only reading blogs, before I had one of my own, I'd have been very hard to put to tell you anything about most of the bloggers I followed beyond what mmorpgs they played and possibly their gender and approximate age. Now the whole weblog thing has turned full circle, it seems, bringing back the original idea of a personal journal everyone can read. 

It's hard to say if I prefer it that way or if I've just become used to it. I think the former. There's only so many times you can fulminate over the way instant travel or flying mounts ruin the whole concept of a virtual world or argue passionately in favor or against the importance of the leveling process. These and dozens more shibboleths that seemed like hills worth dying on a decade ago now barely register as speed bumps in the rush to get to the good stuff, whatever that might be.

All of which brings me nicely, if circuitously, to my topic for the day: getting to the good stuff. Anyone would think I planned it this way. I didn't, in case anyone was in any doubt. I just type and the magic happens.

By "Getting to the good stuff" in this case, I mean getting your hands on a playable game. At all. I was pushed down this line of thinking by a couple of things that came my way recently. One was this news item at MassivelyOP. In it, Marc Jacobs, CEO of City State, the company producing long-delayed RvR mmorpg Camelot Unchained, boldly states

 "...we are almost at where I wanted us to be by summer ... we’re ahead of schedule. I really couldn’t be happier about that if I tried."

I don't always see eye to eye with MOP's editorial policies but one thing I do have to give them credit for is the way they consistently hold statements like this up to scrutiny by simply appending a clear and evidenced timeline giving context and history to whatever's being claimed. As the list of links at the bottom of the short piece confirms, Camelot Unchained, which began as a Kickstarted project, has been in development for a decade now and in closed beta for five years. If that's "ahead of schedule" I think I need a new dictionary.

I didn't back CU, luckily for me but I did back another forever game (As in it's taking forever to get finished.) Ashes of Creation. I didn't just back it, I backed it twice; I bought in once for myself and once for Mrs. Bhagpuss. 

The Kickstarter for that one wasn't quite as long ago as the one for Camelot Unchained, just a mere five and a half years. AoC, however, doesn't even have the fig-leaf of a closed beta to hide behind. As the Release Schedule on the wiki says, that's still "To be announced".

Given that, when I signed up for this thing back in October 2017, the Kickstarter gave an "Estimated Delivery" date of December 2018, I think it's safe to say the studio behind the game, Intrepid, overshot the mark somewhat. Undershot. Whatever.

If there's one thing you can say for Intrepid, though, it's that they communicate. There's no hint or suggestion that work on the project isn't ongoing. I get constant emails about the progress they're making. It never seems to be much although you wouldn't know it from how enthusiastic they all sound..

The latest in an endless series of relentlessly upbeat messages, informing us all how well the game is doing behind those closed doors, bangs on at inordinate length about the wonders of the UI they're building. It's not the most glamorous of topics to begin with but as Heartless Gamer puts it on his newly-revitalized blog, 

"As with the recent class updates the UI update this month was a typical lackluster update.  A developer was brought on and talked about their team and their approach. Then some screenshots were shown of different UI components which were followed by yet more screenshots of sample user interface windows which were followed by... more screenshots.  !  I don't think once during the UI update we saw an actual functioning UI overlaying a game being played."

It's too true. I barely scan AoC updates any more because they go on forever and tell us nothing. By comparison, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, for example, is an open book. They post massively long updates, too, but in them you can watch people playing the game for hours at a stretch and even at the pre-alpha stage it very much looks like a bunch of people in an mmorpg having a great time.

From watching a handful of Pantheon videos I know it's definitely a game I want to play. From watching the dozens of videos Intrepid have sent me, I still can't say with any confidence what sort of a game it even is! And that's a major problem.

I signed up for the AoC Kickstarter for two reasons: firstly, it was being made by a team filled with people who'd worked on other mmorpgs I'd enjoyed and secondly because the game was supposedly due out in a year or so. Not being completely naive, I never expected a finished game by Christmas but I did think I might get one inside three years, given that would be triple the time they said it would take.

Obviously, I know better now. Pretty much no Kickstarted mmorpg comes out within hailing distance of its estimated delivery date and plenty of them either never arrive at all or limp out the gate in such a spavined, emaciated form they're dead on their feet in a couple of months and just plain dead soon after.

If it was just a matter of patience, that would be problem enough but these kinds of timescales have much deeper implications than mere fractiousness over not getting something you've paid for when someone said you'd get it. Lead times spiraling from years into decades inevitably run up against two much less transient issues: growth and mortality.

I'm not the same person I was five years ago, when I put my money down for a new mmorpg called Ashes of Creation. No-one is. Back then, I was still excited by the genre, keen to see every new thing as soon as I could get my foot on the bandwagon. Now? Not so much. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, for whom I bought a copy and with whom I was planning on playing, has moved on from the hobby altogether. She prefers crafting in real life to crafting in virtual worlds now and she currently plays no mmorpgs. She says she'll pick it up again some day but even if she does I'm fairly sure Ashes of Creation won't be the game to bring her back. To different degrees, we've both aged past the window of opportunity that Kickstarter appeared to open.

And we're still ageing. I'll be 65 this year. At the glacial rate of development Intrepid are employing I will certainly be retired by the time the game comes out (Assuming it ever does). Even trusting in continued health sufficient to allow me to play it when and if that happens, at current rates of progress I could quite possibly be in my seventies. Am I still going to be interested then?

And it's not just because I'm old. If games take a decade to arrive, people who were interested in them in their teens, twenties or thirties are even more likely to have moved on from the hobbies of their youth by the time they get that once-coveted invite to closed beta. At least I have the advantage of being set in my ways!

It seems to me that the lead times for mmorpgs have spiraled out of all reason. Star Citizen sucks all the air out of the room in any discussion of delayed development but it's only the most outrageous example of a development trend that's now so entrenched people don't even bother to complain about it all that much any more. It's no wonder so many games go into Early Access or eternal beta while unfinished but approximately playable. Just look at the alternative.

In the end, the question isn't why so many developers start taking money for games that are clearly still under development. So long as it's done in good faith, with the team continuing to work on bringing the title up to code, I don't have an issue with that. It's really no different from back when mmorpgs would launch with a nominally playable base game and charge a subscription to play it while all the polish and most of the content got added in patches, month after month after month.

No, my complaint is with the companies who keep their doors firmly bolted shut after taking money up front, issuing endless, relentlessly cheery progress bulletins but never actually coming up with anything anyone can damn well play. As far as AoC goes, in all honesty I'd almost rather they'd kept the Battle Royale spin-off they were so criticized for wasting time on and junked the mmo. At least I got to play that.

It's not even a matter of a refund. After five years it's a sunk cost I don't care about getting back. Even if it was an option, I couldn't be bothered to do the paperwork. The point is, when and if the game ever does reach second closed beta or whatever my designated opt-in point might be, I can pretty much guarantee I won't care enough to do more than make a character, write a post or two and forget about it again. Always assuming I'm still capable of using a mouse and keyboard by then.

After years of this kind of thing, which seemed so exciting once upon a time, I find I hugely prefer games that just appear out of nowhere, arriving in a flurry of publicity around a launch that's only weeks away. That does seem to be an incipient trend of its own now. I can only hope it continues and grows. 

The two new mmorpgs I've most enjoyed in the last year - Chimeraland and Noah's Heart - fit that bill. I was playing both a matter of months after I first learned of their existence. They may not be as ambitious or full-featured as Camelot Unchained and Ashes of Creation but they're here and they work. I'll take that over any number of unfulfilled promises any day.