It's Begining To Feel A Lot Like... Anything But Christmas!

I guess it's probably time I posted something other than Christmas songs and first impressions of Once Human. Good thing it's Friday, eh? Where shall we begin... oh, I know...

Reign of Guilds Extended Playtest.

As I write this, I'm downloading the 43gb client for "classic MMORPG" Reign of Guilds. I'd heard of this one before but for some reason I don't seem to have paid any attention to it whatsoever until today, when I saw on MMO Bomb that there was an open playtest on Steam. 

All you have to do is click the button asking for access and you're in. I've done that and I soon will be, only I have to take Beryl for her walk first, so I won't be able to try the game out until we get back. I'm writing this in the expectation I'll be able to plump it up with a couple of screenshots and a few observations later on.

From what I can see on the Steam store page, it doesn't look quite as "classic" as all that. It looks like a first-person, action MMO with a gritty, grimy, medieval - not to say feudal - vibe. It also seems to have a realm vs realm aspect that makes me think the classic mmorpg they have in mind might be Dark Ages of Camelot.

All of that will no doubt come into better focus when I get in and make a character. What's really puzzling me and the reason I'm writing about it now rather than waiting until I have hands-on experience, is that I can't quite figure out why I haven't mentioned it on the blog before.

It's been in development a while. This isn't even the first open playtest. There was one in September and a bunch of closed tests before that. I had heard of it but I don't seem ever to have paid any attention to what it was or what it was doing. A search of the blog doesn't find a single mention and I can't even recall hearing anyone else say anything about it.

It does seem to me sometimes that, whereas a few years ago we seemed to be concerned that the MMORPG was in steep decline, with no-one wanting to make those kinds of games any more, or at least to admit the games they were making were part of the same genre, now we seem to be back in surfeit. There are so many in development or early access or in some kind of beta, not to mention the ones that have launched in the last twelve months or so, mostly unsuccessfully, it no longer seems feasible to keep up with all of them. 

As Yeebo said in a comment on Tipa's excellent post on Pantheon's current round of closed alpha testing, "whatever audience they are aiming for seems unlikely to materialize in financially viable numbers". I think that applies to a lot of these games, maybe most of them. It's almost like the old WoW clone era, except on a very much tighter budget.

Anyway, Reign of Guilds shows a very imminent Q1 2024 launch date on Steam and does appear to be in the final stages of testing, so I guess we'll find out how much interest there is in this particular entry to the canon soon enough.

[SPOILER - I won't be there for the launch. I've played for three-quarters of an hour now. I completed the tutorial, saw a little of the starter island and I already feel like I've seen enough. I'll likely get one post out of the experience, if I find time to write it, then I'll be uninstalling the game. I know, if I don't, I'll probably end up playing it some more and I really don't want to. I'm aware of the insidious nature of the systems it employs and I'd rather not let them get their hooks into me, not when there are other games, using much the same methods, that appeal to me a lot more.]

Revelation Offline

When I saw the news at MassivelyOP that Revelation Online was going to close its doors in March of next year, my first thought was "Oh, that's a shame. Didn't I used to play that?", closely followed by "Hang on, what game was it, exactly?", then "Do I still have it installed?" and "Should I play it again before it disappears?"

The answers to those questions, in order, are "Yes", "I don't really remember", "No" and "Definitely not." I certainly did play RO for a brief while - it has a tag here and there are eight posts either about it or which refer to it. The last was over six years ago, in April 2017, when I included it in a round-up of my gaming habits of the time, under the sub-heading "What I thought I'd be playing". 

I summed the game up then as "Similar to Aion although I thought it had a quirkier style and certainly better looks. Not a game I need to play in any way whatsoever but one that could always fill an idle moment." It appears, when I referred earlier to a time of glut for the mmorpg genre, I was probably talking about 2017 because I went on to say "I expected to get a few weeks out of it, like I did with ArcheAge, Black Desert and Blade and Soul." 

Looking back at my posts about the game, what it mostly makes me realise is that if I didn't have a blog I'd have no memory of most of my gaming history at all. Well, I'd vaguely recall the names of games I played, as I did with this one, but that would be as far as it would go. I wouldn't have been able to pick Revelation Online out of a line-up of imported MMORPGs unless it was by a process of elimination and I wouldn't give very good odds even on that.

Looking at the screenshots in those posts, though, a couple of which I've re-used here (Because, seriously, who's going to remember having seen them before?) a little does come back to me, albeit faintly, through a haze. I certainly don't remember RO nearly as well as, say, Bless, a much-vilified game that I rather enjoyed in at least two of its many incarnations, let alone Blade & Soul, to which Revelation Online was frequently and always unfavorably compared. 

Of the many MMORPGs imported to the West by hopeful developers in South East Asia back before the pandemic, very few established any kind of hold. The most successful was probably Black Desert, which seems still to be performing reasonably well, while my own personal favorite would certanly be Blade & Soul, a game I frequently think about playing again and do occasionally log into, before feeling overwhelmed and logging out to play something I don't have to relearn from scratch.

Knowing a game is going to go dark forever (Although "forever" in this context frequently turns out to mean something considerably less final than you'd think, given the genre's penchant for revivals and emulators.) I confess that ,even as I write this, I'm contemplating re-istalling Revelation Online for "just one last look". 

It could go in the hard drive space Reign of Guilds won't be using. It's not like it would need to be there for long...

There's More To Life Than Video Games

Music, for a start. And TV shows. And the inexorable march ot technology. I have plenty of ideas for posts about all of them, just waiting to be written.

The TV shows very definitely need to get a post and sooner rather than later. It's disturbing how quickly media-driven enthusiasm shifts from "This is the best show I've ever seen! I have to tell everyone about it!" to "I guess I ought to put something together about that show before I forget everything about it. What was it called, again...?"

On the other hand, leaving a good long gap between watching a show and writing about it does sort those with lasting value from the regular, hi-impact, sugar-rush of the new thrill. What does tend to go out of my mind for all shows, though, regardless of any other factor, are the names of the characters. I have to look those up even for shows I'm in the middle of watching.

For example, I can remember plenty about Beastars, which I finished watching weeks ago. I could write my long-promised post about it right now without having to go look up anything at all - except it would be full of sentences beginning "The little rabbit-girl who..." and "The big fox guy that..." - and those are two of the leads!

You know who used to have this problem? Andy Warhol, that's who. Lou Reed and John Cale wrote a song about it after he died. It's on Songs for Drella, which is a great album, just in case you haven't heard it. 

 

 "Drella" was a nickname Warhol Superstar Ondine invented for the great pop artist, film director and all-round genius; a contraction of Dracula and Cinderella, whose twin characteristics the actor felt Warhol embodied. I knew that without having to look it up, although I'm not claiming I remembered it was specifically Ondine who came up with it. 

The lyric refers to Warhol's self-professed difficulty in remembering either faces or names:

"Faces and names, I wish they were the same
Faces and names only cause trouble for me"

Yeah, no it doesn't. I could go on pretending it did and I might get away with it but I can find no evidence he suffered from either prosopagnosia (AKA "face blindness") or nominal aphasia. As far as I can tell, the song is about Andy's issues with fame and narcissism, not his non-existent inability to recall the name of some actor in some show he watched, once.

I wonder if there's a name for the psychological condition that has you going off the point all the time because I certainly seem to have that one. What I was going to say in this section was that, thanks to posting a song every day for Advent, I now have a large backlog of new tunes for the What I've Been Listening To Lately feature (Although if I'm honest, most of what I've been listening to lately has been Christmas songs...) and a bunch of ideas for posts on AI.

The trouble is, I don't really feel I can do a full music post, not while I'm also posting a tune a day, and I also haven't found the right moment to gush and gabble about yet more developments in AI, given I'm already posting a daily AI-generated image and I've had complaints about that. I know it's my blog and I can write about what I like here but I am at least somewhat sensitive to the knowledge that I have readers and at least a few of them actively dislike either music or AI or both being featured here so regularly. Also I've lost about 3% of my Feedly followers in the last month and I can take a hint.

Anyway, just take this as a warning. There will be some kind of public self-review process about how the Advent Calendar went and it will include both the musical choices and the imagery, as well as what part AI played in the whole thing and how useful I found it - or otherwise. And there will certainly be at least one catch-up, non-Christmas, music post as well. Plus AI isn't going away any time soon and nor is my interest in it. 

I might think about using header categories again - I did that for years so it wouldn't be anything new for the blog. At least then people can skip the ones they don't want to read like I do with anything Tobold posts that's not about games.

There's something to look forward to. Or not. Oh, and I will get that blasted anime/TV post done if it fricken' kills me. I guess that can stand as a New Year's resolution! Is it too early for those?

New Year? What About Last Year?

I got my Steam stats. They were really uninteresting. 

Above are all the games I played on Steam in 2023. Below is how much I used Steam each month.

The smaller Spring and Autumn spikes are NextFests. The huge pink pillars in August and September are all Dawnlands. 

 

Other than that, I didn't really use Steam even as much as I would have guessed. This month, until I downloaded Reign of Guilds this morning, it looks as though I haven't logged into Steam at all. 

I guess that might change next year, at least for the early months. There are quite a few titles on my wishlist with steep discounts in the Winter Sale. I'm almost bound to pick up at least a couple of them. Of course, then I'd have to find time to play them... 

Maybe the Once Human beta will be over by then.

And Finally - A Song

Because it's tradition. Also one less I'll have to have to consider for the next real music post...

We Kick Around - Princess Chelsea

They have some really good T-shirts in the store. Just sayin'.

A note about AI used in this post.

Just the spot illo. It was generated by DALL-E 3 via Microsoft's Image Creator from the prompt "Someone who really doesn't enjoy reading about AI, reading about AI. Cartoon." I haven't figured out if you can see the exact weights and so on using that portal, yet.