Never Forever

Yesterday it was a music Grab Bag, today it's games. Once again, I don't have anything particularly substantial to offer but you do the best you can with what you have. 

How Long Is Forever, Anyway? 

I'll start with the news everyone already knows, which is that Fortnite isn't all it used to be. Given that it used to be pretty much everything, that still leaves a lot of territory to cover so let's not go writing the game off just yet but maybe the writing is on the wall.

Fortnite isn't a game so much as a phenomenon. Lots of games blow up out of nowhere to dominate the sales charts and the gaming news cycle for a while but few hold that kind of attention for more than a few months. Fads happen and keep on happening and will always happen.

More rarely, a game will break out of the gaming silo to make an impact in the mainstream media. Animal Crossing: New Horizons did it a few years back and World of Warcraft a long time before that. The number of games that establish a seemingly permanent foothold in the wider culture, though? Still very small.

Fortnite was one of those. Still is, I guess, although it's probably more a part of the infrastructure now, like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or FIFA. Games that get referenced a lot when journalists write color pieces about what sporting heroes or pop stars do in their time off. Not a lot different to playing golf, really. Just indoors.

Fortnite, though, like Second Life before it, made it out of the lifestyle pages into what passes for cultural analysis in the popular press. I read a number of articles about how Fortnite was changing the way a generation thought and behaved, how it was replacing the village pump, the water-cooler or the Junior Common Room. There was a school of thought that believed nothing would ever be the same again, now the kids had a virtual clubhouse the adults couldn't chaperone.

Epic Games believed it and still does, apparently. I was pretty sold on it, too. I wrote some posts about it during the pandemic, when it did seem like meeting up and going to gigs in a video game might be the future. Still did, too, not so long ago. Like a lot of people, I'm too easily swayed by the science fiction I've read, although most days now it does seem disturbingly likely we'll all get to live in Phil Dick's world if we live long enough. Mercer help us. 

It wasn't just excitable journalists and eager bloggers who got swept up in the Fortnite feeding frenzy. As GamesIndustry reports, as with WoW before it, a swathe of the gaming industry did, too. Just as we had a decade of companies making WoW-Killers that went on to fail in the marketplace, so Fortnite has left behind it a comet-trail of burned out Forever Games. We have Fortnite to thank for the largely failed or failing Live Service model, at least in part.

With hindsight, it seems obvious. Not so much the grandiose claims of Fortnite-as-Metaverse, which turned out to be fairly accurate at least in a technical sense. More the idea that people en masse would want to keep logging in to the same virtual space "forever".

People, by and large, just aren't that interested in going to the same places over and over again. They lose their mystique, their thrill, their attraction. For everything there is a season, as Roger McGuinn liked to say. (Alright! It was Pete Seeger! No-one likes a smart alec.) 

More prosaically, look at your local high street or shopping mall. That's if you even still have one. Not only have most of the names over the stores changed since you first went there but these days even the idea of going to one place to find everything feels out of fashion.

And with games, particularly zeitgeisty ones like Fortnite that spring up out of nowhere overnight, there's always the Older Sibling Problem. Everyone knows most kids over the age of eight or nine think pretty much everything their parents like is either incomprehensible or embarrassing but there's a similar vibe to the media most loved by older brothers and sisters, except the younger kids do understand it and want no part of it.

Fortnite has been around for a decade now. A decade is literally a lifetime for a ten year-old. Is it surprising there's some resistance creeping in? Fortnite might be too new to feel retro but it's also too old to feel fresh. 

It's not like the game is going away, of course. It's robust. It works. It has many, many millions of ex-players. But is it ever going to be cool again? Magic 8-Ball says Very Doubtful.

I guess the upside is that now game developers are going to have to find a new high to chase. The downside is it'll probably be something a lot less interesting than Fortnite looked for a while as if it might be.

Never Is Closer Than Ever

Less than a month! Neverness to Everness, the game I'm most looking forward to this year (Sorry, EverQuest Legends.) has a launch date. It's April 29th.

You can pre-register now. It takes about five seconds - an email address and a couple of clicks. If you do, you'll be joining more than thirty million people so far. The current target is 35 million although I imagine if they hit it the ticker will move along to reveal the 40 million milestone. 

So far, pre-registrants get 30,000 Beetle Coins, 20 Elite Hunter Guides, 5 Fabricated Dice and A character called Haniel. What any of that actually means I have absolutely no idea but I'm sure it's something very important.

The reward for getting to 35 million pre-registrants seems a bit lame. It's just another 15 Fabricated Dice. But then, maybe Fabricated Dice are a big deal in Hetherau. I wouldn't know because they never let me into the beta. Not that I'm bitter... 

There's also a Social Media target. That's a lot lower at just five million Official Account Followers and so far the game hasn't managed it, which is probably a data point that means something. If that many people sign up before launch they get a Whisker Glider Skin. Or maybe we all do. It's unclear.

I just subscribed to the official YouTube channel so I guess that means I'll get the glider either way, so long as 4,999,999 other people sign up as well. I actually thought I was already subbed to that channel. Maybe it was on my other YouTube account. If it was, would that count twice? 

I don't have any qualms about the quality of NTE. I'm certain it'll be as good as it looks. What I'm a lot less sure about is whether I’ll make time to play it, no matter how good it is. By all accounts, Wuthering Waves continues to be every bit as good as I kept saying it was, which was very good indeed. 

And yet I haven't played WW for months, not least because it got to be too good. I seem to have developed a quality ceiling for video games beyond which I find it ever harder to rise. Somewhere in my psyche, a fail-safe is tripping, preventing me from becoming too engaged. If it feels as immersive a movie, it gets treated like a movie and movies require a level of commitment at least an order of magnitude higher than games. 

It's a weird Catch 22. Don't get too good or I won't be able to play you. And I fear Neverness to Everness might just be too good.

Sunnydale Forever, Doubters Never!

I meant to mention the bad news that the Buffy revival has been canceled before it even got started but I never found a spot to fit it in and it turns out I'm glad I didn't because now there's this to talk about as well. I heard about it from NME, my ever-unlikely source of gaming news that doesn't get covered in the general gaming media.

There is - because of course there is - a campaign to reverse the decision or to reboot the reboot or to free the rights so someone else can take a run at it or something. I haven't virtually signed it or indeed read it. My feeling is that the Buffy IP is so strong, someone will do something with it it eventually but it won't be because Buffy fans ask nicely. It'll be because someone thinks they've figured out how to make money off it.

Meanwhile, as well as all the original seven seasons, the comics, the novelizations and the spin-offs (I'm halfway through Season Two of Angel now and boy does that take a left turn...) we now have a game. It's called Welcome To New Sunnydale. It's text-only. It plays in a Browser. And it was made by a fan.

And it looks interesting. I've only played around with it so far. I haven't played it. It isn't really my sort of thing or not any more although there was a time when it might have been. I don't have the patience for these kinds of textual puzzles any more. 

I know a few other bloggers around these parts do, though, and a lot of people like a bit of Buffy, so I offer the link above as something of a public service. I very much doubt the game will do anything to change the minds of anyone that matters but it's nice that people are trying.

And that's all I've got. I suppose I'd better find an actual topic for tomorrow's post. My Grab Bag pile's empty.