Train Keeps On Rolling

Is it any wonder the games industry as whole is having problems selling new games, when you consider the efforts that have been made over the last couple of decades and more to persuade people to keep playing the ones they already have? MMORPGs were just the advance guard for the self-destructive process, which can also be seen in television, movies, books and just about every form of popular entertainment there is.

The shift to a "Live Service" model for what sometimes feels like every game of the last five (Or is it ten?) years is starting to feel like one of those Roadrunner cartoons - Wile E Coyote frenziedly rolling a huge boulder up a hill in furtherance of some clever plan that hindsight will tell him was always destined to fail, just not in time to prevent it rolling back down and crushing him flat.

I was thinking about this this morning when I found myself spending nearly two hours "playing" EverQuest II, a twenty year-old game I bought when it came out and have never uninstalled. And that a day after I spent a similar amount of time "playing" EverQuest Online Adventures, a game that might be new to me but came out even before EQII.

It's not just live games that go on forever. The other day was I writing about all those Prime Gaming giveaways I was going to claim, all of them games that have been around for years. Further evidence that nothing ever goes away any more, especially since half of them have to be claimed through Good Old Games, a service whose raison d'etre is to stop old games from ever going out of circulation.

EQOA is a prime example of the depth of the problem. It's a live service game that's not even live. The genuine, live version did manage to do the near-impossible and close down for good a decade ago, thereby theoretically creating an opportunity for another game to pick up its dispossessed players - and what happened? A bunch of those same players went and rebuilt the damn thing so they didn't have to stop!

It's sometimes said that irony died the day Henry Kissinger collected the Nobel Peace Prize but irony dies every day now. This month, a new MMORPG by the name of Ship of Heroes will launch. It's been slightly delayed because Steam wasn't ready, but it's coming. Too late, most likely, but it's coming al, the same.

Ship of Heroes was conceived as a lifeboat for City of Heroes players after that game closed down. CoH was so beloved, apparently, that its demise triggered the creation of several would-be successors, all racing to be the Hero of Heroes. 

Unfortunately for all of them, and in no small part because it seems to take figuratively forever to make an MMO these days, at least outside of China or South Korea, long before any of the new games were ready, the old one popped back up like
the baddie in a slasher flick. Not dead after all, just stunned!

With the old City of Heroes not just back in emulator form but officially endorsed by the rights-holder and therefore stable enough for even the most risk-averse ex-player, there didn't seem to be much point in the others carrying. One of them, inevitably my favorite of the three, Valiance, gave up the chase. 

The other two did not. City of Titans continues in development and Ship of Heroes is almost ready to set sail, most likely straight into the sunset if some of the speculation I've read comes true. No-one seems to give the game much of a chance. It's hard enough, competing with still-running games from years ago let alone zombie games that won't stay dead.

None of which is new, of course, but as the years roll on, the cumulative pressure from more and more of the games we used to play, and to a great extent still do, builds and builds. It's a phenomenon that's starting to be talked about and not always positively. There was a time when anniversaries with zeroes on the end generated a spontaneous round of respectful applause but there's such a thing as outstaying your welcome and signs of impatience are starting to show in some of the responses.

As I said earlier, it's not just games, either. Following music news these days can be a mildly surreal experience. When I began to get back into the swing of things in the early twenty-teens after a decade or so away (Playing games. Mostly the same ones I'm still playing.) the trend was all about bands getting back together. It started in the nineties and kept gathering speed until now they're no more likely to stay disbanded after a split than super-villains are to stay dead.

Of late, though, it's not enough for the stars of yesteryear to reform for a quick comeback and maybe a nostalgia tour or a Vegas residency. They will insist on writing and recording new material. It's an ongoing project. The bands come back and carry on like they'd never been away. 

And since it generally turns out that their aging fans aren't all that fussed about the new songs, the current fashion for a while has been to celebrate the anniversaries of the records the fans do want to hear - the old ones. Every day it seems like I'm reading about some band re-issuing an album on the tenth or twentieth or fortieth anniversary of its original release or playing a special gig at some prestigious venue, where they'll perform the thing in full. Some even go so far as to do whole tours just playing the one album with all the tracks in the right order. It's all eras now.

I guess the gaming equivalent would be all these "classic" servers, many of which seem to do extremely well. World of Warcraft Classic, by some estimates, eclipses the current "Retail" version. As for Runescape, a game sometimes said to be played by even more people than WoW, I don't know the exact numbers but from the way it's reported, it almost feels like Old School Runescape is the main version.

When I said at the top that all of this started whirling around inside my brain as I was playing EQII, you might have wondered why I put quotation marks around "playing". It's because I'm not at all convinced that's what I was doing or that it's what any of us are doing in MMORPGs any more. The whole genre was always somewhat antithetic to the concept of play but what I did this morning had nothing playful about it whatsoever.

At best, I was preparing to play. That's often the way and I know it's not just me because I keep reading blog posts where someone goes into detail about all the things they've had to do to get ready to tackle some content or other - a raid or an expansion or a quest or whatever - and how long it's taking and how much work it is.

I've spent most of this year trying to get my Necromancer in EQII ready to take the lead in this year's expansion when it lands and she's not there yet. This morning I checked all her spells, decided I could improve on nearly all of them, got my Warlock out, who's also my Sage and therefore my spell-crafter, had him make a bunch of upgrades, swapped them over to the Necro by way of the shared bank, scribed them all and then took her out to test them on some current-content solo mobs to see how much of a difference it had made.

That took me a couple of hours and the verdict was "not enough". So now I'm going to have to test the same content with my Berserker to see how far behind him the Necro is so I can judge how much more work I need to do to catch her up. 

I don't think that describes "playing a game". In the most positive light, it sounds more like a hobby such as gardening, where you have to prepare the ground and plant the seeds so you can potentially enjoy the results months later.  As for the dailies we all religiously do so as not to waste whatever rewards they offer, those are much closer to doing regular household chores than "playing". 

And yet we all go on doing it. In those games we've had installed for years. And when we've had enough for a while and search around for something else as a change of pace, chances are we end up in another game we used to play or maybe one we haven't tried yet but that's been around for just as long or even longer.

It's not to suggest we don't also buy and try new games. We definitely do because novelty is its own reward. But how many of those games do we then stick with for any length of time? 

The old-fashioned ones with a beginning a middle and most importantly an end, yes, those we buy, play and finish. But not so many of them as we used to because why would we need to? Three games on my Steam Wishlist are on deep discount this week and I got as far as putting them all in my basket before I realized I wouldn't have the time to play any of them because I already don't have time to play the old, online games I'm maintaining and the old, free games I'm claiming. So I put them back.

There are all these old games still there and running and getting new content and demanding all that time and investment because the older they get the more complicated it becomes to play them and no-one dares stop because if you fall off the bus you'll have one hell of a job climbing back on.

And anyway, why would you buy a new game when so many developers are so keen to give you some for free? Probably they're old games you enjoyed years ago but that won't run on your PC any more except look! Now they do! Wouldn't you rather play one of those again than something new you might not even enjoy?

Anyway, you get the point, I'm sure. Is it any wonder developers are finding it hard to get traction with their new games? Is it any wonder they're desperate to cut costs or to keep people playing the games they already made, if those games have somehow managed to pick up an audience? No wonder the finance guys want to farm it all out to AI. Closest thing they can get to getting out of gaming altogether, which I bet would be their first choice.

There was a grebo band in the eighties by the name of Pop Will Eat Itself. They saw the future coming, obviously. They split up in 1996 but it goes without saying that they're back together now.