Wow! It's December already! I really need to get going on Christmas stuff. I always start buying presents for Mrs Bhagpuss in October and November, get a bunch of those stashed away, then think I'm done. And then, when it's almost too late, I realize I haven't even thought about anyone else, or bought any cards, let alone written or posted them.
Doing the Advent Calendar here doesn't help, either. All the work involved in getting that set up really makes me feel like I've done plenty so I must be pretty close to being finished.
Well, I'm not! So much more to do.
I mention all of this only to explain, or apologize for, or attempt to excuse, in advance, the shoddy quality of posts likely to appear here over the next week or three. Like this one...
It doesn't help that this is, at least ostensibly, a gaming blog and I'm hardly playing any games right now. Not from lack of interest or desire. I have a pretty lengthy list of games I'd like to take a run at, many of which are on my Steam wishlist. It makes for a really useful aide memoir. A lot better than trying to hold the titles in my head.
That's something I'm not all that great at doing. For example, I saw something over at MassivelyOP the other day about a new MMORPG called Reign of Guilds leaving Early Access. It rang the very vaguest of bells but I couldn't bring anything about it to mind so I mentally filed it for later. And then, while I was looking for something completely unrelated in my back pages, I came across this from a couple of years ago.
The even more worrying part is that I opened that post by saying I couldn't remember hearing about Reign of Guilds before, even though I thought I should have. Clearly I have some kind of mental block about the damn game.
Re-reading the post, it all comes back to me, which I guess is one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Without that written record I'd literally have no memory of ever having played the game at all. If anyone had asked me, I'd have said I never did. Not that anyone would be likely to ask...
Although I was very sure the game wasn't for me, I did have some positive things to say about it. I ended the post by claiming I'd be interested to see how well it did when it launched in 2024. This is the sort of thing I often say at the end of posts. I have to believe I mean it when I write it but it's self-evidently not true in any meaningful and lasting fashion. In most cases, I never mention the games again.
I certainly never gave another thought to Reign of Guilds, even though it did indeed become openly available in an Early Access build on Steam in April 2024. Early Access turned into full release last month and the game is now officially in Release 1.0 status. Reviews are Mixed but the numbers on Steam's chart, while small, are encouraging.
Peak concurrency is only 300 but there was a huge spike when the game officially released on 26 November and so far those players haven't stopped logging in. Granted it's only been a week but I'm sure we all can all think of a few games that have lost almost everyone faster than that.
It makes for an interesting rebuttal to the widely-aired theory that you only get one chance at launch, that being the earliest moment you make your game publicly available. Early Access or Open Beta are often considered to be the de facto launch of a game, regardless of what the developers and the Marketing Dept. might say. Even more so if money changes hands.
I assume it's a less bizarre amount in U.S. Dollars but Steam is weirdly insistent on only showing you the currency for where your IP Address says you're based. If I still had a VPN I'd spoof it to find out the dollar price but I'm not re-subbing just for that. You'll have to use a currency converter or log in and check for yourself if you care.
Getting back to the point and disregarding the payment model for the moment, the Steam numbers strongly suggest that, for this game at least, Early Access did not wholly invalidate the official launch eighteen months later.
When the game entered EA, concurrency peaked very briefly at just under 600 before falling rapidly to double figures, where it remained from July 2024 until November 2025. The week before the game left Early Access for fully Live status, concurrency was languishing at somewhere between twenty and thirty. That number increased tenfold the moment the game launched and so far it has stayed well above 250.
That may not be a whole lot of people, perhaps not enough to make for a viable game long-term, but it does suggest that you can have two bites at the cherry. Either people had a look at the EA launch, left, then half of them came back when EA ended, or launch brought in a whole new set of people, albeit only half as many.
Would the net result have been better had there been no EA? Impossible to tell but opening the doors early and leaving them wide for a year and a half certainly didn't kill any future interest in the game.
All of which is altogether more than I meant to say about Reign of Guilds today, or indeed ever. It does, however, feed into something I was planning on talking about, that being an excellent, highly informative post by Owls about Soulframe.
Soulframe is the fantasy MMORPG currently in development from Digital Extremes, makers of Warframe. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago that I was "mildly interested" in the "Preludes" version of the game, effectively a buy-in pre-Alpha, although not so interested I'd actually want to, y'know, buy into it.
DE has gone for an unusual and quite clever version of the "Founder Pack" deal based, I believe, on the way Warframe works. Each pack buys you a specific in-game class, meaning that if you want to try, say, an Archer and a Healer, you'll need to buy two separate packs. Currently there are only three classes. The ninety-nine dollar pack gives you all of them.
It sounds a little dubious at first but substantively, I suppose, it's not that much different to the Reign of Guilds approach, where differently priced packs give you varying numbers of character slots. You'd need multiple slots to play multiple classes, the important difference being that, unless you can't delete a character and re-roll, at least you could cycle through all the available options on one purchase. As I read it, in Soulframe you're stuck with whatever class you bought, much like you're limited to the ships you purchase in Star Citizen.
Although the easiest and quickest way to gain access to the game is to pay for it, it is possible to get into Preludes for free. There's some sort of lottery you can opt into on the website but there are invites, too. Owls got his initial access a while ago, courtesy of a code gifted him by Belghast and now Owls has some codes of his own to pay forward. The link is in his post if you're interested.
Having read his very helpful introduction to the game, I'll respectfully pass, even for free. The game very much sounds like something I would not like, involving as it does a lot of blocking and dodging and basically having to know what you're doing. Not really my scene.
At least gameplay doesn't revolve around FFA PVP, which puts it ahead of Reign of Guilds, but other than that it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. It also doesn't sound much like an MMORPG at its current state of development, although frankly it sounds more like one than RoG sounds like the games it claims to have modeled itself on, namely EverQuest and Ultima Online, neither of which it even remotely reminded me of back when I tried it.
Still, I'll say it yet again: I'll be interested to come back and take a look at Soulframe when the it launches. Or, indeed, as it goes through development, perhaps when it hits beta.
At least with this one, I think I'll still be able to remember what game it is when that happens.
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