Out But Not Down

I'm short of ideas for a proper post today, or at least ideas that won't take hours to put into words and pictures. Can't even come up with anything much that'd run to a few paragraphs and make up a Grab Bag. 

I do have a few little squibs to throw out, though. Let's see what comes of that.

Hmm. I wonder how many people reading this will know what a squib is and why someone would throw one?  I just googled it to see what would come up.  

Wikipedia has a whole piece on explosive devices as used by the military and in special effects for movies, which wasn't at all what I was thinking of. The folks at Oxford know what I'm talking about, though:

"1. a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding

2. a short piece of satirical writing." 

That's exactly what I had in mind. The first one, anyway, although the second is handily close, too. Not that there's going to be a lot of satire here but a short piece of writing was exactly what I was getting, although I was using the firework as a metaphor to get there, which seems a little tautological now I come to think about it. 

When I was a child, Fireworks Night, which was what we generally called it, rather than November 5th or Guy Fawkes, was a Big Deal. I could do a whole nostalgic number here on the ritual of buying the fireworks a couple of weeks in advance, bringing them home and lining them all up on top of the piano so I could look at the brightly-colored wrappers every day and imagine setting them off...

I'll save you all that self-indulgent claptrap. The point is, on the actual night, my extended family, including my cousins, would start the evening by standing in the dark in the crazy-paved courtyard, tossing lit squibs at each others' feet. I loved to make one of my cousins scamper! 

What? No, no-one got set on fire or even singed! Well, maybe a bit singed... It was, as they say, a different time...

Where was I? Oh, yes...

 

Outbound Isn't Inbound After All

Well, it is... It'll just be a bit late.  

Remember Outbound? It's the game where you drive around some very pretty scenery in a camper van, solving mysteries of an extremely cosy nature. I played the demo in Next Fest and reviewed it here. 

I liked it. What's more, I thought it had promise. In fact, I thought it had so much promise I chose it for my imaginary game publisher, Pretty Blue Fox Games, in Wilhelm's Fantasy Gaming League. Anyone want to chip in with why I called it that? Don't google it!

Crossover readers of both blogs may remember that I was the unlikely winner of the inaugural season back in 2025. I'd love to be able to tell you I was on track to repeat my success this year but in fact I have yet to see any game I've picked launch at all. 

Outbound was going to be the first with a release date of April 23rd but there was an announcement today that launch has been delayed almost a month to May 14th. The stated reason is the late identification of "an issue... that could negatively impact your enjoyment of the game." I suppose that's a good thing. Still annoying, though.

It means my first scheduled launch will now be Mixtape on May 7th. Assuming that doesn't get put back as well. At this rate we'll be half way through the season before I have a single game on the board. And looking at the rest of my slate, I might not have many more by the end. I might ought to rethink.

 

Why Does EverQuest Legends Even Need To Be An MMORPG?

Obviously the answer is "Because it's EverQuest, dumbass!" but that's a recursive argument, isn't it? Sure, it's EverQuest but it's an EverQuest you can solo. 

Not an EverQuest where you can solo. That would be a very different concept. Or rather a very familiar one. To me, at least.

You could solo in EverQuest very effectively and enjoyably in 1999. I did and so did thousands of others. After they added custom chat channels, I was in one for a while that was dedicated to soloists and it was very busy. Nearly everyone was a Necromancer but there were a few Bards and Druids and probably a Wizard or Magician or two in there, somewhere, all soloing away happily. Okay, not always happily....

No, EverQuest Legends is supposed to be a version of EQ you can solo as in Game Over. Every last mob, quest, dungeon and even raid you'll be able to complete without any help from anyone. Mostly in instances. Where there will be only you, if that's your preference.

So why does it need to be an MMORPG? Conceptually, I mean. 

I don't have any problem with it being one. Nothing wrong with a graphical chat channel where lots of people can play the same game alongside each other and shoot the breeze as they go. People have used MMOs like that as long as there have been MMOs. 

It seems, though, that EverQuest Legends could equally well be packaged and sold as a single-player, open world RPG. An offline RPG at that. It could have co-op for grouping. After all, group size is going to be just four people and raids are only eight. The whole "Massively Multiple" part seems like overkill.

I was thinking about all that partly because I'd been reading about the upcoming Closed Beta, to which I have not been invited (And for which I would now most probably not accept an invite anyway, since there's going to be a strict NDA...) but mostly because something very similar did just happen to another would-be MMORPG. 

 

Tiny Gets Tinier

Book of Travels was an MMORPG that I never understood. From memory - and this may not be entirely accurate - it was a Kickstarted game that promised to bring some very slow gameplay to a small population of pacifists. The term "Tiny MMO" got thrown around a lot although exactly what that was supposed to mean I didn't know then and don't know now.

Unlike some Kickstarters in the genre, Book of Travels did at least get as far as Early Access, where it drifted along for the best part of five years, never really going anywhere and making about as much impact as you'd expect of something so tiny. If you're interested in the details, MassivelyOP has a history primer on the game, complete with links. 

Probably to no-one's surprise, Might and Delight, the company behind BoT (Unfortunate acronym, there. Does no-one think of these things before the press releases go out?) has finally thrown in the towel, announcing the closure of the servers (Or probably server, singular, I imagine.) on July 31st.

What is a little more surprising is that Book of Travels won't disappear altogether when the servers go dark. It will convert into an offline game, presumably one no longer even Tinily Multiple and definitely not Online.

Something very similar happened to Nightingale, a much more successful and popular game that still couldn't scratch up enough interest to justify the MMO tag. It makes me wonder how many of these MMORPG projects, Kickstarted, Indie or even occasionally with major studio backing, would have been better conceived as single-player or co-op RPGs in the first place. I mean, it's nice that they're getting a kind of after-market half-life when they fail but maybe we could have skipped the painful process of disappointment and decline and gone straight to the end result.

The odd side-effect of this particular development spiral is that, having not thought about the game for years and never having had the least interest in playing it with other people, I'm now feeling curious enough to give it a try. As an offline game it's going to retail for just $4.99 on Steam so it's hardly a big investment just to find out if there was ever anything there. 

Perhaps the really unusual decision the developers have made, though, is not only to allow modding of the game but to actively encourage it. That's starting even before the shutdown, too. I get it for the offline version but how you mod an active MMORPG beats me. Maybe it never really was an MMO to begin with?

And that's all I have. Managed to stretch it out quite nicely, I think. Just time for a closing song, as is the Grab Bag tradition. Hmm. I guess this was a Grab Bag after all...

What shall we have? Plenty of choice. This was nearly a music post, I have so many songs stored up. I thought I'd save that for Friday or Saturday, though. End the week with some bangers.

Now, when I say "bangers", does everyone know that's what we used to call these little fireworks we'd throw around, back in the day...

 I Know - Swapmeet

I literally just found that! It was in the recommends for the track I was going to use and I had a good feeling about the thumbnail. Boy, was I right!

If this was a music post I'd follow it with... 

 

idk idk idk idk idk idk idk idk - Jim Legxacy

And my work here is done! 

I swear I missed my vocation. I should have been a radio DJ.