Identity Crises

I've gotten into the habit of bookmarking anything I see that might be worth a paragraph or two in a portmanteau post. It's surprisingly organised for me and it might even be useful if I ever remembered to use any of it before it goes horribly out of date. 

In a vague attempt to salvage something before it all goes off and has to be junked unseen, I've slapped together a few thoughts on a couple of MMO-related news items I thought might make a post (Not a whole one, apparently.) plus something about a musical sub-genre that was already over by the time I heard about it. Do I really need to bring out that Ferris Bueller quote again?

I've even somehow managed to find a theme that links them all. Kinda. Close enough, anyway.

Entitled

Trove is a game I've never much liked. I tried it when it was in beta or when it first launched or something like that and never really made much progress or found anything there I'd call fun. It seems strange such an apparently gimmicky, throwaway game should have turned out to have broader appeal and more staying power than any of Trion's more serious MMORPGs.

It did, though. It's still here, people still play it and it still gets meaningful updates, which is more than can be said of either Rift or whatever that other Trion game was called. Hang on, I'll google it... Defiance! That was it. I never even got around to playing that one although I always meant to. Too late now. 

Last week, MMO Bomb reported the latest addition to things you can do in Trove. Now you can collect titles, apparently. They were kind of sniffy about it because some of the titles are only for sale in the cash shop and even then you have to buy loot boxes for a chance at getting the one you want. I guess that could be annoying although heaven knows we all ought to be used to it by now.

I was more surprised the game didn't have titles already. What MMORPG doesn't have titles? They've been around just about as long as the genre itself. Trove came out in 2015 ffs!

I used to be pretty sniffy about titles myself. Not because of the delivery method, which was usually some in-game activity. I just thought they were silly. And distracting. Of course, I was a po-faced killjoy back then. I'm waaay more chill now.

And I really like titles. I use them whenever I get the chance, the sillier the better. I got a couple of new ones for Mitsu in EverQuest II last night, while she was digging up graves for the Halloween event.  If you want to talk odd delivery methods, getting a title out of a present with your name on it that you dug out of an occupied grave beats lootboxes all ways up.

My favorite titles, though, are in Noah's Heart. I've been meaning to do a post on them forever. This isn't that post but it is an opportunity for me to show off a few of my favorites.

I particularly like Cute Boy for a female character, although of course you can gender-swap at will in Noah's Heart so maybe that's not its intended purpose. Also, who wouldn't want to run around in an MMORPG with a big sign saying "Residual Aroma" hanging over their head?

That's just a selection from the ones I own, though. Ones I don't yet have but would like include such gems as Aroma Wafting, Academic Rigor, Meticulosity, Brain of God, Not Greedy and Dark Night Crow, not to mention the unbeatable teen trio of Unruly Teenager, Mixed-Up Teenager and Teenage Fighter.

Y'know, I think I may have been paying too much atention to the outfits in this game. I need to be working on my titles. I think I'll start right now!

Jam Today

There's been something of a kerfuffle over the leaked/datamined and now officially confirmed news that Visionary Realms, the developer behind would-be unofficial EverQuest sequel Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, is working on a second game before getting to alpha with the first one. The new title, rather amusingly named 247, is going to be a "survival, arena match-up" or a "marriage between MMO and Extraction", whatever the hell that means.

This comes hard on the heels of a graphical revamp that radically alters the way the game looks, something that had already frightened some of the horses. For what it's worth, I think the new look is a huge improvement but not everyone agrees. More significantly, the combination of these two very significant developments so close together has prompted a lot of speculation that the developers must be running out of money and/or losing faith with Brad McQuaid's original vision™ for the game.

And that's probably not too far off the truth. Pantheon isn't Star Citizen. It can't generate hundreds of millions of dollars by selling virtual mounts. It doesn't even have a persistent, publicly available version that anyone can buy into and play, although supposedly one's not too far off.

As the MassivelyOP article linked above points out, trying to fund an in-development MMORPG by using the same assets to spin up a much less ambitious game in another genre has been tried before and so far it hasn't worked. Experience suggests it's more likely to be a distraction than a lifeline for a struggling studio.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's not going to be of any interest at all. I played Apocalypse, the Battle Royale version of Ashes of Creation, and enjoyed it somewhat. It was quite good fun but far more importantly for me, it offered a very limited peek at the game I'd Kickstarted about a year and a half before. I was mildly to see anything of the game at all.

Of course, what I didn't know at the time (December 2018) was that five years later I'd still be waiting for my first real look at the actual MMORPG. Sure, I get detailed newsletters every month or so, most of which try to sell me something, but what I actually signed up and paid money for was access to the Phase 2 Closed Beta, which was estimated to open in... December 2018. 

Pantheon and AoC are almost exact contemporaries. The posts I was writing about Ashes back in 2017 and 2018 all also mention Pantheon. At the time I was seeing the two as direct competitors for the position of My Next Forever Game. 

Five years later, neither looks remotely close to any kind of openly available build, not even Early Access. I don't honestly care. I'm no longer looking for that next big game. I'm happy to play a bit of this, a bit of that, and not get too heavily involved in any of them. 

The way I see it, I had a punt on a Kickstarter or two and that was quite exciting at the time. I feel I got my money's worth just by being part of something new and zeitgeisty. Making those memories is worth a few dollars. It's just as well I feel that way because all the signs are that crowdfunded MMORPGs either never launch at all or, if they do, they end up looking, feeling and playing almost nothing like their backers imagined they would.

For that reason, I'm kind of pleased to hear about 247, the Pantheon spin-off. I'm not interested in the extraction gameplay but I am interested in a chance to explore the world and goof around there for a while, especially if it doesn't cost me anything. And I strongly suspect it could be the only chance I get. 

I can see why Pantheon loyalists are pissed off right now, though. It's becoming clear the game they signed up for probably died along with its creator.

Shouldn't It Be Janecore? Or Is That The Joke?

Names are important, as any hedgewitch will tell you. If you want my clickthrough you really don't want to be calling your band... well, obviously I can't give an example. If I could, it wouldn't be much of an example, now would it?

An interesting exercise might be to try to quantify just what sort of name does pique my curiosity. Well, it would be interesting to me, anyway. Maybe I'll do something about that sometime but, again, it won't be today.

I just wanted to open this section with a brief note on how I came to be listening to something that already doesn't exist any more, even though by most rational definitions its pretty much brand new. What happened was, I clicked through a link to a song called Census Designated purely on the basis that it was by Jane Remover, which I thought was an intriguing thing to call either a band or a person.

 I guess it could be someone's actual birth name. Not likely, though.

It turned out to be a bit of a fuzzed-up, post-grunge epic. I liked it enough to see what else she'd done. Among many other things it seems she started, then ended, something called Dariacore, now a footnote in hyperpop history. I may have mentioned Dariacore here before. I've certainly heard of it but if I ever knew Jane invented it, that I'd forgotten.

Of course, when she invented Dariacore she was going by the name Leroy, which certainly wouldn't have inspired me to click through. Neither would her other identities, C0ncernn, or dltzk, both of which are admitetedly less inert than plain Leroy but also kind of uninviting. To me, that is. Which is probably as it should be. I'm really not the target audience here.

The start of Dariacore was in 2021 and the end was the following summer, with the release of Dariacore 3​.​.​. At least I think that’s what it’s called?. Yes, that's the title. All of it. 

I'd go into it in more detail but I can't because I'm old. You need to be either under twenty-five or some kind of internet archeologist to unpick these things, let alone understand the sequencing. 

Fortunately, you can be any age and still enjoy listening to them, which is what I've been doing while I've been writing this. Just as I've arrived, Jane herself has moved on, from both the more sombre, moody digicore of her lauded debut album, Frailty and from the ultra-glitchy Dariacore, which she claims to have invented as something of a lark. She's also retired her several previous names along with their associated internet identities, all of which now go to dead links. 

Her new album, also called Census Designated, is available from Bandcamp , along with a selecttion of her previous work. I suspect we may be hearing more of her but then I suspect that about a lot of people and I'm often wrong.

Breakthrough or not, I kind of hope she sticks with Jane Remover for a while. It's a good name.