First up and almost certainly furthest off is Light No Fire, the fantasy title announced by Hello Games, makers of No Man's Sky, back in 2023. LNF isn't specifically described as an MMO but it is multiplayer and these days there seems to be little agreement on how many simultaneous players a game needs to support before it qualifies as "massively multiple".
No Man's Sky caps out at thirty-two players per instance of the game. Light No Fire will probably be much the same. Hello Games deny either of them are MMOs but if it walks like an orc...
Whatever they end up tagging it, Light No Fire is going to appeal to MMO players in much the same way Valheim or Skyrim did and any innovations it brings will affect the wider fantasy genre like those games have. It will be all the more so because HG has a huge amount of credibility, almost all of it acquired the hard way.
NMS went through a classic redemption arc. Enormous promises were made in the promotional phase, broken in catastrophic fashion at launch, and restored over years of painstaking recovery. Hello Games took a reputational hit that would have sunk most companies and then went on to spend years making good on everything they originally said they'd do, winning back just about everyone they'd driven away.
They also did it all for free and with such humility and consistency that they almost certainly gained more credibility for making good their mistakes than they ever would have received if they'd gotten everything right to begin with. As a consequence, not only do players trust them to do their best, they feel safe that, even if it should all go wrong again, it will still come right in the end.
And since Light No Fire looks like it's going to be essentially the same game, reskinned, it feels reasonable to expect that, this time, the launch won't be such a disaster. If nothing else, Hello Games has demonstrated an admirable ability to learn from its mistakes. Maybe that'll be enough to stop them making so many this time.
All of which is fine as far as it goes. But what about the game itself? What, exactly, is it?
Blessed if I know. The website is minimalist in the extreme. All it says there is that it's
"a game about adventure, building, survival and exploration together. Set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, it brings the depth of a role playing game to the freedom of a survival sandbox."
There's a trailer, too. Just one after three years. It's a couple of minutes long and that's your lot.
I just watched it again. The graphics looks plasticky. All the visible activity looks like exploration and survival gameplay, except for one short sequence, the one in which a load of rabbit-people kneel as the player walks up to a giant seated on a throne. That, conceivably, could be RPG-related. Nothing else looks remotely like it is.
There's not a hint of combat or questing or dialog or plot or character development. I think No Man's Sky has at least a smattering of most of those, from what I've read. I haven't played the game but I've read a lot of blog posts by people who have. I wouldn't really call it an RPG although, as with MMO/MMORPG, the days when it was possible to state with unambiguous clarity just what an RPG was are long, long behind us. It does have some RPG elements, though, and no doubt those will carry over to LNF.
Whatever kind of game it turns out to be, Light No Fire has the chance to change the entire game-space. If Hello Games can make good on their promises this time, we'll have a fantasy-based game with almost unlimited potential to suck in players from existing games and genres, survival and MMO and RPG alike. It's going to be a true, virtual world. Perhaps the first.
With that promise, it doesn't need to be an MMO to put enormous pressure on the genre, not least because what it could conceivably represent is the final fulfilment of the original promise of the genre, the chance to live a complete life as a citizen of... somewhere else. Chris Roberts wants to do that for space even though arguably it's already been done, several times, not least by No Man's Sky. No-one has done it yet for fantasy. Light No Fires might.
I wishlisted the game when it appeared on Steam and I'll be buying and playing it when it appears, assuming I'm still physically and mentally capable of playing video games by then, which is a non-trivial concern. There's absolutely no indication whether it will come out this year, next year, the year after that... Hello Games have said pretty much nothing for three years other than "It'll be done when it's done".
That, at least, gives other players in the market a chance to make their own play for dominance before the rug gets pulled out from under them. Next in line with a big announcement comes ArenaNet.
Guild Wars 3 was officially announced back at the start of the summer. Everyone knew it was coming well before that because NCSoft let the news slip in their financials. Even so, it was still a surprise to find it was real.
Once again, whether it's actually an MMO is up for debate. The official description of the game calls it
"... an action-adventure MMORPG, a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection."
GW3 also has just the one trailer and it's even less indicative of gameplay than the Light No Fire one. It's mostly a lot of over-excitable, breathy voiceover work, some dodgy conceptual art and a few clips of of random exploration footage from the alpha that's running behind closed doors.
Unlike the NMF trailer, though, it doesn't look in the least bit plasticky. It looks gorgeous. If there's one thing you can never say about ANet games it's that they don't look good. Their art department is second to none. I'm sure GW3 will be worth playing, at least for a while, just for the visuals alone.
Unlike NMF, it has a declared development timeline. It will enter beta testing a year from now, in "Fall 2027". Based on how GW2 progressed, I'd expect launch in first quarter 2028, although I suppose they might get it out for Christmas '27.
ANet appear to be following almost exactly the same marketing strategy they used for GW2, namely to drip-feed lots of relatively detailed information about the game for 12-18 months before allowing people a hands-on with it. That approach worked very well for them back in 2010-2012, building up a huge head of steam for the game. There were open beta weekends towards the end of the process and the game really caught the attention of the MMORPG-playing public.
It was only after launch that things started to fall apart. It doesn't always seem to be remembered or acknowledged now but, despite the lengthy build-up and the solid testing program, the game was buggy throughout and barely playable in the higher level maps for months. And even with all the explanations and interviews ahead of time, a very significant proportion of the audience seemed confused by the paradigm-changing nature of the gameplay, which (As with Rift before it.) had to be quickly adapted to something much more familiar to meet player demands.
I'm in a difficult position when it comes to reporting on Guild Wars 3. I played GW2 solidly for a decade and by the end of that time my love-hate relationship with the game had shifted noticeably away from love. I never lost my affection for the world or the world-building but actually playing the game stopped being much fun for me several years before I finally walked away.
GW2 is an exceptionally repetitive, formulaic game, even by MMO standards. While you're inside the ecosystem, it's all too easy to ignore the way you're doing the same things over and over again to no real purpose. Because there's little or no vertical progression, horizontal progression is stretched out to an insane length. Everything takes forever and requires vast quantities of whatever you need to increment the counter. Some people find that entertaining but I'm not one of them.
Consequently, having escaped the gravitational pull of the game, I feel extremely reluctant to allow myself to be drawn back into its orbit even by proxy. I haven't read anything about GW3 beyond the initial announcement. I've been actively avoiding it. Everything I know about it, which is almost nothing, has come from a few unintended glances at news items as I flip through my feeds or from occasional blog posts by others a lot more interested in the game than I am.
I know it's set in the past, before either Guild Wars or GW2, thereby avoiding new players feeling they ought to know the other two games first. I know it's an "action MMO". whatever that means these days. And I know one more thing...
In Guild Wars 3 you will only be able to take part in the "action" part of the MMO with a maximum of nineteen other players at any time. The tech will somehow limit combat and similar events to twenty players, while allowing a much larger number to see each other passing by in the open world or in cities.
This sounds a lot more like Guild Wars than GW2 and there has always been a heated debate over whether Guild Wars is a true MMO. I remember it from forums all the way back when the game began and at that time it was my feeling that it wasn't.
Since then, as I've already observed, the definitions have blurred. More than blurred. They've almost rubbed away. Games that are clearly MMOs go out of their way to claim they're not because admitting your game's an MMO is seen as commercial suicide. Meanwhile, games that add four-player co-op as an afterthought blithely market themselves as "multiplayer" because it affords credibility, somehow.
Where GW3 is going to fit into the fractured mosaic is going to be hard to know until beta and most likely it won't be all that clear even then. ANet doesn't have the greatest record on judging what players want or expect. Guild Wars was intended to be a PvP game until they found, after launch, they'd somehow landed an audience that was more interested in PvE. GW2 was meant to break the mold until it became obvious many of the people who'd bought the game preferred to do things the way they'd always done them.
Unlike Hello Games, ArenaNet does not have a reputation for learning from their mistakes or for correcting them. In the decade I played GW2, as I reported in many of the seven hundred plus posts here about the game, ANet repeatedly tried to come up with solutions to problems of their own making and frequently their fixes only made things worse. GW2 is and has always been a game that succeeds despite the best efforts of its developers, not because of them.
For this reason alone, I don't expect great things of GW3. I do expect it to get a lot of attention within the genre and because it's launching on Steam and on PlayStation 5, it ought to get some traction beyond the niche the two existing Guild Wars titles have carved out.
Once again, it's going to feel silly not to give it a go. I've wishlisted it on Steam. If it turns out to be good, it might be the game I play all through my seventies, which I'm sure is exactly the target audience they're aiming for...
And so to the present. The third elephant has long been rumored but its existence was only confirmed officially a few days ago. Launching almost as you read this (Okay, November, but that's only a few weeks away.), leaping ahead of the rivals I'm sure it hasn't even thought about comes World of Warcraft Forever:
"...an iconic world reimagined with new and expanded zones, new gameplay enhancements, upgraded graphics, and more."
Of course there's a trailer. It's a much better advert for the game than either of the others. That dwarf hunter and his bear could front a cartoon show of their own.
It'd be hard not to know about Forever. I've already read more about this one in three days than GW3 in three months or Light No Fire in three years. Everyone's talking about it. WoW is still, after more than twenty years, the MMORPG market leader, quite possibly the only game in the genre to have any kind of genuine recognition factor among the general public. A new World of Warcraft game isn't just news; it's an event.
And this is a new World of Warcraft game, not some kind of remake. We were expecting Classic Plus, if we were expecting anything. What we got was closer to WoW2.
It is, though, isn't it? I mean, what else would you call a game that stems from the old one but intends to add new content, incrementally, "forever"? It looks like an attempt to have cake and eat cake while also selling slices of that same cake, with no suggestion that the cake will ever run out.
Commercialism seems to be at the forefront, here. The game doesn't require a separate subscription (Like EverQuest Legends.) and there's no box to buy (Like EverQuest Legends.) but if you want the new race and its starting zone it's going to cost you $30. That sets the frame. There will be continuous updates, sure, but you will be paying for at least some of them. Oh, I'm sure there will be free content additions all the time too, but as an ever-evolving world, New Old Azeroth (That's what I'm calling it.) is infinitely amenable to monetization.
They'll be able to sell you new zones, new races, new classes, new features. They'll be able to sell them a lot more often than the 24-30 month expansion cycle Retail WoW is stuck in, too. Although where Retail WoW (I think they're calling it Modern WoW now?) will be in a year or two if WoW Forever takes off is anyone's guess. Will there even be any more expansions?
It's a gamble but it looks like a solid bet. Blizzard started out with one MMORPG and that worked just fine for a decade and a half. Then they toed the water with a nostalgia-driven recreation of their own storied past and that could hardly have gone better.
WoW Forever brings them up to three. Or more, depending how you count them. There's Classic, Modern and Forever but Classic comes in so many different flavors now I've lost count. Blizzard only needs one of those to succeed and they're back where they were before they got into all of this. From their point of view, I guess it doesn't much matter which one it is. I doubt Jagex are bothered that the runaway success of Old School Runescape comes at the expense of Runescape itself. Or their accountants won't be, anyway.
If I was going to bet, I'd bet on Forever. They didn't come up with that name by chance. It's the follow-up MMORPG they've been threatening to make for a long time and they've finally come up with a way to make it without cannibalizing their own sales-base. Classic was a dry run for this. If it goes well, they'll invest in it heavily.
The chances look good. It's a new start in the old world, which we all know and love, but with an endlessly expanding frontier. They've also fixed the population problem by grading players by playstyle rather than server. An always-busy MMORPG is good for publicity and avoids all those difficult dead server stories.
How many times can they can peel the onion? Based on her experience with the EverQuest franchise, I imagine Holly Longdale thinks there are plenty more layers to go still. But Forever is the one that has the chance to turn into a whole new crop.
I'm still thinking about it but there's a very strong chance I'll resubscribe in November and buy the new race for the full experience. Like Classic back in 2019, it looks like one of those moments in MMORPG history you wouldn't want to miss out on, even if you're not the greatest WoW fan.
Whether I'll still be playing it by Christmas, let alone "forever", though, is another question entirely.
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I am curious where the 32 player instance limit number for No Man's Sky came from. I hadn't seen that before.
ReplyDeleteI don't doubt that it is true, I have just never stopped and tried to count the number of people I can see in the one common shared location, the anomaly.
The thing is, NMS can barely handle 32 people. The game does not behave well when the anomaly has a lot of people and ships are coming and going and everybody has a custom built corvette on a landing pad that needs to be rendered. (Plus the comedy of there not being enough landing pads, so they clip them together on pads, so you can be in your ship and get yoinked into space when the ship you're co-habitating with undocks.)
However, you can see the lasting effects of everybody in the universe. If you fly to a system and somebody discovered it, you see their name and how long ago they first arrived. You can see other bases, you get messages about people landing or departing the planet you're on, you see their beacons and landmarks. When something like an expedition is going on, which concentrates the community into a smaller slice of space it can be crazy... and a completely different experience than the individual exploration vibe the game has when you start out.
I know Raph did not like my comparing NMS to SR at one point, but it feels like NMS has a lot of what SR is trying to create, but at a different scale. NMS doesn't track the change of every square millimeter of soil on a planet, just the bits where players have put a base or left a vehicle. NMS hasn't tried to force community or cooperation. In fact, you can turn off multiplayer and never see anybody else in game. But you're still in the same universe and see their stuff.
We'll see what No Man's Fire... erm, Light No Fire... ends up being, whenever that happens. I'd be fine with it supporting a dozen players tops on a private server.
I really should document my sources better. I'm already in a mildly bad habit of stopping as I write posts to ask direct questions in Google Search, reading the AI reply and then paraphrasing it, which is going to come back and bite me if I slip any further into believing whatever it tells me. I used always to check the source the AI gives and also run a second query and cross-reference if there was any doubt but I'm getting lazy.
DeleteIn this case, though, Gemini took the 32 player limit directly from the NMS wiki entry on Multiplayer, where it says "The game can currently be played by multiple people together online in parties of 2 to 4 players. Up to 32 players can be in the same instance of a star system, depending on platform"
Even as I was writing this post I was thinking "Aren't Hello Games already doing most of the things Raph has being saying MMOs ought to do?" Except, of course, they aren't MMOs in the sense he means. But do we really care about that? I'm not sure I do any more.