Ashes To Ashes

A very unexpected development in the MMORPG sphere yesterday was the news that Steven Sharif, founder and CEO of Intrepid Games, developers of Ashes of Creation, had resigned from his own company. He issued a statement on Discord to say that "control of the company had shifted away" from him and "the Board began directing actions" he "could not ethically agree with or carry out", which seemed to mean making mass lay-offs to his team of two-hundred plus, with some reports suggesting every single employee had been let-go, meaning the company was done.

This generated a lengthy comment thread on MassivelyOP that made much of previous statements from Sharif in which he seemed to be saying he had no Board and answered to no-one but himself. A number of supposedly informed people attempted to clarify that with various legal and administrative interpretations but the general consensus seemed to be that whatever the official set-up, the people pulling the strings must be investors to whom substantial ownership of the company would have devolved in previous funding rounds.

I guess the exact definition doesn't make an awful lot of difference. The point is, Steven Sharif, who began the whole Ashes of Creation project and at least partially funded it out of his own pocket, has now had enough. His vision has not been realized and he no longer has the capacity to veto changes in direction he disapproves of, so he's walking away. 

He isn't taking his ball with him, though. Everyone seems to be treating this as the end for Ashes of Creation but there hasn't, as yet, been a closure announcement, let alone a sunset date. The game is up and running as I type this, with over three thousand people playing. I guess if they have really sacked the entire workforce, the servers won't be up for long...

Three thousand players is three times as many as there are playing Project: Gorgon, which we're all looking at as a success. The big difference, of course, is that Steven Sharif had a couple of hundred people on staff before the layoffs while P:G's Eric Heimburg had maybe a couple of people helping him, part-time. 

The two games, together with other recent, high-profile examples like New World and Ship of Heroes, suggest a few minimum requirements for a new MMORPG, such as don't spend more money than you have and make a game that works. New World spent a lot of Amazon's money and took a very long time to get it working, by when it was too deep in the red and far too late. Ship of Heroes seems to have at least tried to live within its means but at the all-important expense of making a game that worked, let alone one anyone wanted to play.

Ashes of Creation kind of worked although not at anything like the level it was always supposed to. At a nuts-and-bolts level it functioned well enough but many of the tent-pole systems on which the game was sold weren't even in the build that went into Early Access on Steam. Crucially, to get it even that far took a very large crew. The possibility of getting it the rest of way appears not to have been considered financially sustainable by the people who'd have been spending the money.

Project: Gorgon, on the other hand, began with a playable build and kept a very enjoyably-playable version of the game up and running for the entirety of the development process. Only the minimum number of people were ever employed to keep development going and only small amounts of money were ever raised and then only for specific, hypothecated purposes. 

As a result of the way development was handled, those thousand concurrent players may well represent a sufficient number to keep the game running and to allow development to continue, as it always must in a live MMORPG. Paying more than a couple of hundred people every month to do the same for Ashes of Creation never seemed like it was going to work.

What does all of this say about the MMORPG genre as a whole? 

Throw in a couple of other examples like Pantheon and Monsters and Memories, too, and what it looks like to me is that, as far as traditional, Western MMORPGs are concerned, the days of glory are long, long gone. Success now has to be judged by how well a  team can define a project and then pitch it to a very specific audience. The idea that you can build it and they will come, a philosophy that saw the creation of a whole slew of games in the post World of Warcraft era, has no tenancy any more, if indeed it ever did.

It's hard to claim interest in MMORPGs has dissipated entirely. Lots of very successful, mass-market games either claim to be - or do their best to pretend not to be - part of the genre. There's a huge difference, though, between what currently passes for an MMORPG and what any of the games I've named in this post so far are - or were - trying to do.

One of the biggest problems for all MMORPGs and especially for those whose funding is not as reliable as it could be is the extraordinary length of time it takes to get from the first excitable announcements to something that passes for a finished game. Development time is a problem throughout the Western gaming industry, not just for MMORPGs, with numerous single-player sequels occupying the time and resources of whole studios for five, six, seven or even more years but MMORPGs somehow manage to double even that. In either case, if the game that comes out flops, that's usually it for the studio. 

Ashes of Creation, often described as a Western version of Black Desert Online or ArcheAge, has been in development for a decade. Back in 2016, BDO was just a year old and AA only a couple of years older. A home-grown take on those then-popular games, made more culturally appealing to a Western audience, must have seemed like a decent bet. One that might have paid off had the game released in 2017 or 2018.

Unfortunately, AoC didn't even go into Early Access until a few weeks ago, by which time ArcheAge had completed its entire life-cycle and closed down. BDO is still up and running with over twenty thousand players logged in through Steam as I write but no-one is talking about it any more, let alone suggesting it should be the model for a new game. It's joined the great parade of legacy MMORPGs that trundle on, unnoticed, played by their hardcore fans and no-one else.

What happens to most would-be new MMORPGs is that they take so long to develop, by the time they're ready to play they already look long out of date. If you're making a retro game that's supposed to look old-fashioned, like Pantheon or M&M, that's fine, so long as you make a good job of it and market effectively to the right niche audience, but if you're trying to push your way to the top table and claim your hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players, you'd better have something that doesn't look (Or play.) like it should have come out ten or twenty years ago.

And even then it almost certainly won't work. New World looked fresh and had the buzz to pull in millions and it still failed. Partly that was because the team behind it kept making mistakes but in my opinion it was mostly because traditional MMORPGs have outlived their time. I suspect even a really good one would fail to hold the kind of audience the first two waves managed with ease. The gameplay just isn't fun any more for most players.

The genre was infamously built on the psychology of the Skinner Box and dopamine hits. One of EverQuest's nicknames was EverCrack. There were countless jokes and insults built around the addictiveness of the games and serious concern expressed by health-care professionals and even governments about the deleterious effect playing MMORPGs was having on the health of young people.

No-one talks about that any more. MMO addiction seems to be a thing of the past, at least as far as the media is concerned. And gamers have entirely different ways of getting their thrills in this era of action gaming and Souls-Likes. What gamers, these days, are devoting tens of thousands of hours to the same game just to get those increasingly infrequent dings and drops? 

Probably only a small subset of the same demographic that was obsessively doing it fifteen to twenty-five years ago, I'd guess. They and very few others. To be successful these days, MMORPGs have to cater for bite-size sessions and casual involvement. Players today think a hundred hours is a huge investment of time. In an MMORPG, a hundred hours is nothing!

If you can't get the players, you can't carry on with the game. With a staff of more than two hundred to support, how many players would Ashes of Creation have needed to continue? I have no idea but I'd bet it would be more than the tens of thousands they had. A lot more. Estimates for WoW's team generally run at around five hundred. WoW may not have as many players as it once had but it's safe to say it still has millions. It can afford that level of investment in people. AoC could not.

Steven Sharif may not like it but Intrepid was clearly living beyond its means. The chances of development continuing at the required level to make the game he imagined a decade ago a reality must have looked very slim indeed by the end. And even if it had been possible, would it ever have attracted enough people not just to try it out of curiosity but to stick with it for years?

It looks as if we'll never know for sure. All the news items I've seen assume the servers will now close although, as I said earlier, they're still up today. 

To take a more optimistic view, Ashes of Creation does at least exist in a playable form. It would certainly take a lot fewer developers to keep it running and gradually add to it over time. It won't be the game it was meant to be but it would be a game and it might even be a game some people would want to play. 

Maybe it does have some kind of future. Just not the one we were promised. 

Cool Kids Club

Anyone remember when it felt really exciting to get into a beta for an MMORPG? When you had to fill out all kinds of application forms and promise to be a good tester and then you waited and hoped you'd get picked but you knew you probably wouldn't?

I think the first one I ever signed up for must have been Anarchy Online. It was so long ago I had to apply by post. My application was accepted but there was no instant access to testing. They had to mail me the client on CD. I guess I must still have it lying around somewhere, although I haven't seen it for years. No, make that decades.

It was a thrill to make the cut but unfortunately the beta itself was all but unplayable. Then the game launched and I bought it and it was still unplayable. 

It was an infamously bad launch. For a long while, it was the benchmark for how not to launch an MMO but there have been some real stinkers since then so it's probably been forgotten now, if not forgiven.

I was thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. Ashes of Creation and Stars Reach both recently sent me questionnaires to fill out. Short ones mostly asking what I thought of the way the game was going and whether I'd recommend it to friends.

My answers to both were broadly similar, something along the lines of "I think your game is fine. It's just not for me."  The main difference between the two responses was mostly that I told Intrepid Ashes would definitely have been a game I would have played and enjoyed, had it come out seven or eight years ago, when it was supposed to, whereas I told Playable Worlds Stars Reach was most likely never going to be the kind of game I was likely to want to play, or at least not for long.

My motivations for signing up for the two testing programs were very different. I pledged AoC in the Kickstarter because I did want to play it and I picked beta as the earliest affordable entry point. It was going to be the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. 

It took so long to arrive, even in a half-finished form, that by the time they opened the doors, neither of us was interested any more. When I was given entry in Early Access, I played it a bit and quite enjoyed it but I couldn't see much point carrying on. So many other games suit my tastes better these days. I haven't really thought about it since.

For Stars Reach, on the other hand, I only applied to join the alpha because I wanted to write some blog posts about it. I got in. I wrote some posts. It was fun for a short while, as a novelty, but it quickly became repetitive to play and I ran out of things I wanted to say about it. If there was any disappointment involved, it was that I didn't find it as blogworthy as I'd expected.

In both cases I didn't - and don't - feel any motivation to keep logging in to see how things might be developing. I wasn't all that interested and neither, it seemed, were many people who follow this blog. It seemed a bit pointless to keep logging in just to write much the same posts that wouldn't be of any great interest to anybody.

Neither do I feel any obligation to keep on testing. In both cases I paid for access through a Kickstarter so there's not even a moral lien on my time. It's true that I did get into the Stars Reach alpha by application and subsequently got added to the Creator program but I did a reasonable amount of testing and reporting in the closed phase, so I feel like I've done my bit.

As for the cachet of getting into a testing phase for an MMORPG, that whole concept feels very dated now. True, there are hot new games in closed testing that a lot of people would love to have access to but anything really special always has an NDA so you can't - or shouldn't - tell anyone you're in, which makes it hard to bask in the reflected glory. 

Stars Reach had a whiff of that but only a whiff. The circle of people who cared was so small it would have been a very humble brag indeed to boast about getting in. 

The last testing program I remember getting into that felt like something genuinely special, something people would be envious of if they knew about it, was the first round of alpha testing for New World. Unfortunately there was a very strict NDA so I couldn't say anything, not even to let anyone know I was in. Technically, I probably still can't.

I found that exhilarating but also very frustrating. The game itself was like nothing I'd played before (And nothing like the game that eventually launched, for that matter.) and I would have loved to blog about it. By the time I was able to talk about it openly, everyone else was playing it too.

If the allure of testing unreleased games has faded, though, and gaining access has become almost trivial, there are exceptions. It's sod's law that when there's a test I'd really like to get into, for a game I'm very excited about, that's the one that won't have me.

I've applied to every round of testing for Neverness To Everness with no success so far. I strongly suspect the reason is my age. I've filled out each of the lengthy application forms with scrupulous accuracy but when I enter my age the form questions it. 

"You have entered your age as 67. Are you sure that's correct?"

The highest age on the drop-down menu is, if I remember correctly, forty. I am very clearly not the target market for the game and I imagine Hotta isn't all that interested in the opinions of pensioners on how their anime-influenced supernatural urban open-world RPG is coming along.

Ah, well. Never mind. They can't stop me playing it when it comes out. And I bet it'll be finished well before either Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach anyway. 

A Few Games I'm Not Playing And A Couple I Am

Just a quick update on the games I'm playing today, I think. And I am playing games. After several weeks, or possibly months, of droning on about how I don't seem to have the time and/or inclination these days, the interest, at least, has returned in full force, as I suspected it would. The necessary time hasn't come along with it, unfortunately, or not yet, but maybe once the holiday season is out of the way...

I also seem to be running through games at a heck of a pace, just like the old days. By which I don't mean I'm finishing them or even making steady progress, sadly. No, the familiar pattern I appear to have fallen back into is starting new games, or returning to old ones, then posting here about how much fun they are and how much I'm enjoying myself, before dropping whatever it was I was so happy with just a moment ago in favor of something else.

Wuthering Waves is the prime example. I love Wuthering Waves! I think it's a great game. I haven't played it for months. It's now reached the point where I haven't played it for so long I find it difficult to imagine starting again. I'm so far behind. It took me forever to catch up the last two times and I can't see myself doing it again.

Then there's Crystal of Atlan. It's no Wuthering Waves, that's for sure, but it's a fun game all the same and I was planning on getting to the end of the storyline, at least. And then I stopped logging in for no particular reason and I haven't started again. I did move Atlan from one drive to another yesterday, to make room on the SSD for Ashes of Creation, which I wouldn't have done if I wasn't intending to get back to it some day. When that day might come is anyone's guess.

I'll come to AoC in a bit but before then there's New World to consider. After Amazon mothballed it, all the publicity about the game dying counter-intuitively made me want to play it again, so I did. And it was as good as I remembered, if not better. I was happily working my way towards the level cap and learning to ride around Aeternum on wolf-back. I had clear and definite goals I wanted to achieve.

So am I still playing New World? I am not. I mean, I will be playing again. And soon. Probably. Just not right now.

I suppose I could say the same about Once Human. I went back to that one with considerable enthusiasm just a few weeks ago. Or was it months? There were all kinds of interesting things going on. I wanted to see them and do them and post about them. 

I didn't, though. I logged in a few times, wandered about aimlessly, then drifted away again. It wasn't through lack of interest. It just happens. 

Here's the problem. All of the games I've mentioned demand a very significant time commitment. Or they do if you want to get anywhere with them. And yet, thanks to the way the online gaming market has evolved, you can still enjoy them without putting in the hours. Or indeed the effort. 

Almost all modern games "respect the player's time", by which they mostly mean you can log in for half an hour, every day or a few times a week or whenever you get a spare half-hour, and get something done. Then you log out, satisfied, and forget all about the game until the next time, whenever that happens to be.

I was doing that in all the above games for most of the Autumn and it was a little bit annoying, if I'm honest. That's why I keep low-key complaining about it. 

It's great that you no longer need to dedicate an entire weekend to getting half a level but in a way it was the knowledge that, if you didn't do it, you wouldn't get anywhere at all that kept you playing. Until you burned out, deleted all your characters, uninstalled the game and spent the next five years bad-mouthing it every chance you had...

So it's swings and roundabouts, I guess.

Anyway, where I've ended up right now is with two games on the go, the aforementioned Ashes of Creation and good old EverQuest II. Only one of those is almost certainly not going to make it into the New Year. Can you guess which?

Yep. Ashes of Creation. Not because it's a bad game. Or a bad start to a game. It's not finished yet, of course, not even close. Even so, it's very playable. Feels as finished (At low levels.) as many MMORPGS I've played. 

It also feels exactly like many MMORPGs I've played. Boy, does it ever! 

I'm well aware that it won't always bee that way. It's going to be Fantasy Eve Online Not In Space, with everything all about alliances and holding or taking territory and all that political stuff. And for all I know it may be a bit like that already, somewhere. Just not in the part of the game I'm seeing.

I'm still effectively in the tutorial although, officially, there doesn't seem to be one. NPCs keep lecturing me, at very great length, on where to go and what to do. One of them took a while teaching me how to craft a backpack yesterday (And the day before. It took a while.) which was useful. (Storage is weird in AoC because crafting mats take up a specific and variable amount of space but other items don't.)

I got sent to a farm to help out and somehow that turned into doing an endless sequence of repeatable missions. I did a lot of those as I inched my way through Level 4. That fast xp I was talking about last time sure dried up fast. 

The whole thing reminds me of Vanguard, in a weird kind of way. The landscape is similar, the NPCs are similar, the crafting stations are similar, the mission boards are similar, the pace is similar... At one point yesterday I literally found myself thinking about logging out and going over to the Vanguard emulator instead because if I was going to be playing Vanguard, I might as well actually play Vanguard.

Except in Vanguard no-one kills you and takes your stuff. Not that anyone's done that to me in AoC. Yet. But all that ponies and princesses stuff I gave out in my First Impressions post about how the PvP isn't as non-consensual as the rumors have it and how your PvP flag is off unless you turn it on? Well, it's true and it's not.

Here's how it actually works. You have a PvP flag, yes. It's off by default, yes. Does it stop people ganking you? No. All it does is give them a penalty for killing someone who wasn't flagged for PvP. You're still going to be dead afterwards. And as far as I can read it, they'll still have your stuff, or some of it.

Which still doesn't put me off playing. I've got nearly six hours in AoC now and I haven't seen any PvP whatsoever. Very much the reverse, in fact. There are people everywhere but they're all minding their own business, the exceptions being a couple of times when I was very low health in a fight with a tough bandit or a bunch of goblins and someone threw me a couple of drive-by heals. Oh, and someone accidentally trained a bear onto me but stopped to help kill it and heal me up after.

People around have been very friendly in action if not in words. No-one's actually spoken to me. I said "Thank you" for the heals but they were gone by then. Global chat, though, that's a different story. 

The good news is the gold spam seems to have vanished completely. Didn't see a single spammer yesterday, whereas the day before it was never-ending. The bad news is that without all that spam filling the chat window I can hear what the real players are saying.

It's nothing terrible but it's quite disheartening. It's what you get in every MMORPG that sets out a stall to be the Next Big Thing or, even worse, the Next Old Thing. Everyone's been there and done that and wants you to know about it.

There was one of those moments that happen in every MMORPG, quite often, when everyone in chat starts telling you how long they've been playing and how old they are. And old is the word, alright. Someone summed it up when they chipped in with "I'm 38 and you guys are making me feel young." 

Things have changed some, though. In the same five minutes, I heard one person come out with the traditional "Why don't you go back to WoW?" in response to some trivial suggestion that AoC might be a tad slow, only to be followed a few minutes later by someone else proclaiming, in an unrelated conversation about how much fun they were having, "This is the first good new MMO that's come out since WoW!" 

I don't really know how to parse that. I do know, though, that I won't be going hard on AoC for a few reasons, not least of which is the terrible trouble I have logging in to the damn game. Once I get in, it plays smoothly enough but it just hangs on a black screen for five or even ten minutes before I get there. 

Whether that has anything to do with the number of people playing or the DDOS attacks Intrepid say there have been, I don't know. If it's player numbers, there's no queue and all the servers are showing as Low, though, so I doubt it's that.

Anyway, I'll be giving Ashes a few more sessions, I expect. I like what I've seen and if I was in the market for a serious, old-school MMORPG that I could devote many, many hours of my life to, it would certainly be high on the list. But I'm not and it's silly to pretend I am.

All of which brings me to the game I almost certainly will be playing into the New Year and beyond, just like I do every year: EQII. I'm ticking along very nicely there with both the Adventure and Tradeskill questlines and having a really good time. 

I was going to write a few paragraphs about that, too, but this post is plenty long enough already so I'll save it for another time. After all, the game isn't going anywhere. And neither am I. 

Ashes Of Creation: First Impressions

For once, I'm not going to try anything fancy. No bullet point lists or categories. No framing structure or cutesy faux-RP storytelling. I'm just going to say what I think of the game so far. How about that for an original idea?

First up, it was really easy to link the Intrepid and Steam accounts. Well, it was once I managed to catch the Ashes of Creation website up for five minutes. I had, of course, forgotten whatever password I created for it nearly a decade ago but that was soon remedied and after that it was very plain sailing. 

The client is huge, though. Almost 140GB. Surely that will have to come down if the game ever officially launches. Luckily for me, I have a totally unused 1TB HDD in this new PC. With great timing, we had to go sell the old car this morning, so before we left I set the download running. I came back two hours later to find it had finished downloading and was 99% validated too. Glad I didn't have to sit in and watch those progress bars...

I had lunch and then sat down to play. I wasn't wildly enthusiastic but I was curious to see what eight years wait had brought. 

No introductory movie for a start. Or any kind of introduction at all. Just the usual warning about flashing lights then straight into character creation. 

Well, I say "straight into..."  More like v e r y  s l o w l y into. I have never seen parts of a UI take so long to load. It was so slow I thought they must not have the models available for all the races or the icons for all the skills, presumably because the game is still in Alpha, even though it's also Early Access, somehow. 

But no. Not that.

 As I was already making my choices, sight unseen, icons and images finally started to load. In the end everything was there. Nine races and eight classes, I think, although some of the options are really two variants of  the same race.

I had already picked one (Niküa.) from the description before I found out what I was going to look like.

Moana, basically. Moana, after a giant must have stepped on her.

It wasn't remotely what I was expecting but I was pretty pleased with what I got. As I've said before, it makes a huge difference to me if I feel a connection with my character and this one clicked with me immediately.

There aren't all that many choices to make after you pick Race and Class. Hairstyles and colors, skin tone, height, eyes, nose, mouth... the usual. There's an option to morph your face, so I'm guessing you can make some extreme looks but I didn't bother with any of that. I wanted to get in and have a look around.

The Niküa get a choice of two starting locations, one in the hilly North and one in the flat South but the Northern one comes with a warning that the area isn't done yet so I picked the other. At some point, I forget exactly when, I also had to pick a server from a list of eight or so, either in the EU or East Coast USA. The ping to the East Coast was around 50-60ms, which is fine, so I went for one of those.

And then I was in. And everything was good. Very little lag. Movement felt reasonably smooth. No obvious hiccups or delays. 

The UI felt very intuitive. It would be very familiar and comfortable to anyone who played one of the big, Western theme park MMORPGs in the 2010s or teens. All the controls do what you'd think they'd do. There's a hotbar where you'd expect to find one. All of that.

I did what I always do at this point: opened Settings and turned off as much of the overhead clutter as I could without making the game unplayable. In some games that can be a long job. Not in this one. I had everything set up pretty much as I like it in minutes.

About the only thing I had to google was how to hide the UI for screenshots. It's the Page Down key, an unusual choice but perfectly acceptable, certainly a lot better than the Ctrl-Shift-Something you often get nowadays. Even autorun was on Num Lock and Interact on F, two things I regularly have to change. It was almost as if someone had been playing EverQuest and just copied the keybinds across.

All of that was a pleasant surprise. It put me in a good frame of mind to see what the actual game might be like. And guess what? That was a pleasant surprise, too.

Based on the starting area, if Ashes of Creation had come out when my Kickstarter pledge suggested it was going to, namely sometime in 2017 or 2018, it would have been pretty much what I was hoping for. A tab-target Western fantasy MMORPG with action bars. 

I'd forgotten that one of the primary reasons I was interested in it at the time was that it promised to use the standard (WoW-style.) set-up rather than what were calling "Action" controls back then. At the time I preferred to click icons on hotbars and Mrs Bhagpuss insisted on it. AoC was going to be the next big MMORPG we played together largely because of that. 

 Now, of course, I've played so many action-rpgs with so many control systems I barely even notice which it is any more. And Mrs. Bhagpuss has given up on MMORPGs altogether. 

This is a First Impressions piece, not any kind of review or analysis, but I will say that it very much looks as if AoC might be the right game for the wrong time. It's not 2018 any more. The pandemic changed a lot of things and I'm realizing now that one of the things it changed for me was my connection with MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, Valheim did. There's a post to be written about that but this isn't it. 

Anyway, I suspect the mainstream ship for games like this has long since sailed. A solid niche success though? That's still very much a port worth steering for.

Getting back to the First Impressions, they continued to be very favorable right until I had to log out to go and have tea. By then I'd been playing for almost three hours, which is a really long session by my current standards. I would happily have gone on for quite a while longer, too.

Visually, or graphically if you prefer, the game looks very attractive, as I think the screenshots show. I let the game audit my PC and set the optimum settings accordingly, which turned out to be "Medium" all the way. I'm very happy with that, given I deliberately chose a low-end system. If it looks this good and plays this smoothly on my machine, I imagine it must look and play much better on a proper gaming rig. Although in my experience that doesn't always necessarily follow...

By the time I logged out, I was Level 4. I'd done a lot of quests, all of them absolutely classic mainstream theme-park MMO fare. I started off killing goblins, then got sent from one outpost to another to introduce myself, before I was given a whole bunch of jobs for which I was barely qualified, everything from interrogating prisoners to breaking up a suspected demonic ritual. 

Eventually I graduated to raiding bandit camps for evidence of some kind of conspiracy. Every quest was verbose to a degree unusual even for the genre, which has always been very heavy on the word count. It was all quite well-written, in the typical RPG style. 

Each hand-in came with a fulsome recap of exactly what I'd just done, frequently with lots of extraneous, scene-setting detail that I would have better appreciated if it had come at the time I was actually doing whatever it was I was now being told I'd done. A lot of it came as news to me. 

Thinking about it makes me want to write a whole essay on MMORPG quest writing but I'll save that for another time. What I will say is that I'm not sure I have the patience for this sort of thing any more. It's a lot of reading. Some of it was quite enjoyable but it takes so long. Is this really the level of detail most players want for every little side-quest? It smacks of someone having had far too much time on their hands and not much to do with it, these last eight years.

Still, I did read most of it. And it was mostly quite engaging. So I'm not complaining as such. I'm just acutely aware that if I'd skipped all the jabber, like probably 90% of players would, I'd probably have been two levels higher when I logged out. It really did take that long.

One thing I liked much more than having to plow though all that verbiage was being given a horse almost at the start. I always think it's a good sign if the developers allow you to mount up from the beginning of the game rather than holding it back as some sort of reward you have to earn. 

In fact, most of the choices I was aware of the developers having made seemed very encouraging. I did get the feeling they wanted me to enjoy myself, which you'd think would be a given in a video game but I imagine we all know is very much not.

Take PvP, for example. I've read an awful lot of scare stories about non-consensual PvP and ganking in Ashes of Creation, which certainly does advertise itself as a PvP title, so I was both surprised and pleased to find that, at least in the starting areas, PvP is off by default. You have to switch it on if you want it. 

Or you can just attack someone, I think. That'll set you up for a good kicking, if not by the other player then by the guards. If someone attacks you and you decline to respond, the only flag that gets set is on the attacker. You can just stroll away and let the authorities deal with it.

At least, I think that's how it works. I didn't see a single example of anyone fighting anyone else in the few hours I was there. I imagine there's plenty of that later but if anyone's worried about getting repeatedly ganked at spawn before they even load into the game, I can re-assure you it's not going to happen. 

What you are going to see, almost as unwelcome as a gank squad barrelling towards you, is endless gold spam in General Chat. I haven't seen this much for years. In one way, it's the sign of success. No-one wastes time trying to sell gold in a game that no-one plays.

You'd think no-one would bother in game that's still in Alpha, either, but that just tells you these labels mean nothing any more. Intrepid can call this "Alpha" and "Early Access" all they want but when the doors are open to all, they're taking money and there are tens of thousands of people playing, we all know that means Ashes of Creation has launched. It may not be anywhere even close to being done but so what? It's an MMORPG. A finished game has never been a requirement.

Am I bothered? Surprisingly not. To my considerable surprise, it looks as though the game I signed up for might be the game I got. I mean, I'd rather have had it six or seven years ago, when they told me I would and when I'd really have appreciated it, but I wasn't expecting it to be this close to what I imagined it would be, all those years ago. Now I've seen it, I'm a lot happier with what's there than I thought I would be.

How long that will last is another question. I'm only Level 4. A lot of games are fun in the early levels. For a First Impression, though, I'd have to say this has been pretty solid. I'm keen to wrap this up and get back for some more. After that, maybe I'll be back with some rather more critical comments.

Or maybe I'll still be having an unexpectedly good time. I do hope so. We could all do with a decent, new traditional MMORPG.

Intrepid And Steam, Sitting In A Tree...

So, here's a thing. I was wondering a while back whether my moldering Kickstarter pledge for Ashes of Creation would get me into the upcoming Early Access release, which is scheduled to start tomorrow. After a bit of digging I found it probably would, even though it was originally only meant to open the doors for Beta Phase 2.

At the time I wrote the post, it seemed as though Intrepid was suggesting the Steam release would be a walled garden, only for new purchases made through Steam. Existing active accounts and incoming Beta Kickstarter pledges would have to download the client from the game's website and presumably play on separate servers.

I read some reddit and forum threads about it but it wasn't all that obvious how it would work. I was pretty sure I'd be able to play during Early Access, somehow and somewhere. What wasn't clear was the where and the how.

All that's been sorted out now. It's in the recently-revised FAQ. I'd quote the appropriate sections only 

Somewhat inconvenient when I'm trying to write a post about it but I'll persevere. 

Whatever the old plan was, Intrepid has now done a one-eighty and ruled that from the start of EA Ashes will only be playable on Steam. To that effect, I received an email today marked "Action Needed" telling me I ought to link my Intrepid Account to my Steam Account.

It was news to me that I had an Intrepid Account. I guess I knew at some level I must have something registered with them or they wouldn't have been able to send me all these emails for years but if I ever thought about it at all, which I don't think I did, I would have assumed it was all being generated from my Kickstarter details. It does all come through the email address I use exclusively for Kickstarting.

Apparently it "only takes a moment" to link the accounts so I clicked on the link provided to see what would happen. Not much did. The website was "undergoing scheduled maintenance". 

Can't really blame Intrepid or their Marketing Dept. for that. The reminder email arrived around two in the morning. I just didn't get around to reading it until nearly tea-time.

Since I was there anyway, though, I thought I'd take a look at the "Support Channel" to see if I could find out any more details.

 The buttons work. Er... that's about it.

"News" button takes you straight back to the Scheduled Maintenance notice. "FAQ" appears to go to the old version, not the new one with information relating to EA and Steam. "Status Updates" takes you to the Sinkhole Formerly Known As Twitter, at which point I gave up, turned round and came straight out again.

There's another button at the bottom for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse. That puzzled me. Didn't they officially and finally terminate that misguided project years ago? (Looking into it, apparently it  was never officially cancelled. They just closed it down, stopped working on it, promoting it or talking about it. They basically ghosted their own spin-off. Is that any better?)

I clicked on the button out of curiosity. This is what I saw.

The most recent entry on there is five years old. Is any of the information remotely relevant any more? Doesn't look like it.

The FAQ is much the same, though. Full of answers to questions that relate to things that happened years ago. It's as though once the information's been posted it just sits there forever. Forgotten. 

I can't say any of this inspires much confidence.

If it looks like I'm spinning this out to get a cheap post, well, yes, I am. But I was also hoping that by the time I ran out of things to say, the maintenance would have ended and I could have added some practical advice on the actual linking process, not to mention confirming whether I do really have an account and if I do, whether it is really set to go with tomorrow's soft launch.

Except I've had my tea now and watched Monday's Only Connect quarter final and it's gone six o'clock and the maintenance is still going on, so that's not happening. I'm going to leave it at that for now and come back later, or more likely tomorrow, to see if I have better luck.

If I do, I imagine there'll be a First Impressions post at some point. I do, for once, have a couple of days with not much planned so the timing isn't too bad. [Edit - Oops! Forgot Rage of Cthurath launches today! So maybe not such great timing after all.)

Let's hope the game isn't, either.  

Alpha, Beta, Early Access, It's All The Same To Me: Ashes of Creation

There are eighteen posts here on Inventory Full with the "Ashes of Creation" label attached. The earliest is from the end of April 2017, just before the Kickstarter, when it seems my main interest in the proposed MMORPG was how good the housing was going to be. It seems an odd feature to focus on in a game that, at the time, I was repeatedly calling "Fantasy EVE",  but housing appears to have been my Big Thing back then.

Skimming those posts, it seems I was never all that keen on the project, not even when it was all new and shiny. In 2017, eight years ago, I described the promotional material for Ashes of Creation as giving the impression of "an MMO that would have looked about par for the course four or five years ago", the final big push for Western Mass Market MMOs. I seemed to think it would have fitted right in with the wave that gave us Guild Wars 2, Wildstar and The Secret World.

Even less enthusiastically, I was musing on whether or not to pledge, noting that "after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was."

Somehow, I must have managed to overcome my reservations because a week later, on the day the Kickstarter went live, I was watching the numbers tick relentlessly upwards: "the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter had been live for a quarter of an hour.  In that time there was already $161,872 pledged of the $750,000 goal. Not bad for the first fifteen minutes." 

I was pondering on whether it might be worth ponying up $80 to get into the first closed beta, which at the time was predicted for December that year. Closed Beta 2, access to which cost half as much, was due by the following Spring.

I didn't even especially want to play the game. I just wanted to get in early so I could blog about it. $80 sounded a lot for that, though, so I was inclining against it. I thought $40 sounded more reasonable.

And then, just a day later, I was back to say that I had, after all, stumped up my $80, only it wasn't on a pledge that would get me into the earliest closed beta. I'd bought two $40 tickets to Closed Beta 2, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss, who was at least theoretically interested, again mostly for the housing.

Fast forward eight years and Ashes of Creation is still in Alpha. Eight. Years. Later. Just think about that for a moment. Eight years and still in Alpha, when pledges were sold on the basis that Beta would start... eight years ago.  

The Kickstarter, famously, went extremely well, bringing in over $3m on an ask of just $750k. Three million dollars, though, doesn't take you far with an AAA MMORPG. I haven't been paying enough attention over the near-decade the project has been running to be able to say where the rest of the funding has been coming from, but it appears the well has finally dried up because as of 11 December, Ashes of Creation is going into Early Access on Steam.

The stated reason is to "expand the audience" but the sentiment among redditors is more along the lines of cash grab or just plain Hail Mary pass. 

Intrepid may be short of money and desperate but I don't think anyone could reasonably call it a scam. The game has actually been in non-NDA Alpha for about a year now, and the build that will come to Steam is going to be much the same, so it's not hard to find out what you'll be getting for your fifty dollars.

Not hard, but you will have to look. The thing is... no-one outside the bubble has really been talking about it. Literally the only blogger or professional gaming website of the 200+ in my Feedly that's done more than post the odd Press Release this year is Heartless Gamer and he hasn't been all that impressed.  

Still, the game going into Early Access is a big deal, especially on Steam. Bree at MasivelyOP, in that post I linked above, re-iterated the point made by numerous commenters on reddit that AoC is "one of the few major Western MMORPGs currently in development." That could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You might think it means a whole lot of pressure to perform for Intrepid Studios. Or you might, as I'm starting to believe, begin to wonder if it means the day of the Western AAA MMORPG is over.

I played New World Aeternum for a couple of hours yesterday. I had a good time. I did all five of the first set of time trials in the Mount quest-line. The game ran well, the scenery was glorious, chat was busy and there were players everywhere. All of this in a game that's not only in maintenance mode but which has been mostly seen as a failure since a few weeks after launch. You wouldn't really know New World was a failure. But it is.

New World was first revealed to the public as a game in development in 2016, about a year before the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter. It launched as a fully live game in September 2021, re-launched on Console as Aeternum three years later and went into maintenance mode a couple of weeks ago. 

The game, which as far as I can recall is the only AAA Western MMORPG to have launched this decade, has completed its full development cycle in significantly less time than it's taken Ashes of Creation to reach Early Access. Or get out of Alpha, for that matter.  Even though New World sold over four million copies on PC at launch and is also available on console, and allowing that it may have been a recent victim of larger restructuring at Amazon, it has not been widely regarded as a success.

It's not for want of trying. New World is an excellent MMORPG and for most of its lifetime it's had the resources of a huge, wealthy parent company propping it up. Millions of players gave it a chance, enough, it's said, to have recouped its development cost in its first month of operation. 

And yet it still could not hold an audience. It seems not to have remained profitable for long, either. Many older players and veteran developers remain convinced there's an untapped mass market for fairly traditional Western MMORPGs but the evidence to support that belief seems harder to find. 

Players flock to new games in the genre but they very rarely stay for long. Whatever it is they're looking for, they just can't seem to find it. Maybe Ashes of Creation really is the last hurrah for big budget Western MMORPGs. If so, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for the genre after that.

Back when I was pledging to the AoC Kickstarter, I was also interested in another would-be new entrant to the genre - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. That game, which has been in development for about as long, preceded AoC into Early Access. It's done quite well there, attracting a peak concurrent player-base of around 7,000, very similar to AoC's reported peak alpha concurrency of about 8,000. 

These are solid figures for a niche game in closed testing or Early Access but they're not mainstream AAA game numbers. Not by a couple of orders of magnitude. All the big Eastern MMOs of the past few years have attracted millions of players. New World, as I said, sold four and a half million boxes in its first month. Concurrency on Steam peaked at more than 900,000. 

New World was considered a huge success. For a while. And then it wasn't. Build it and they will come. And then they will leave.

I'm coming around to the opinion that there will be no more long-running, mainstream MMORPGs produced in the West. There will be plenty of small, niche successes. There are lots of players out there, ready to pick a horse and sit on it as it plods along. But not that many. Success for those games is going to mean a loyal following in the low tens of thousands. At best.

And maybe that will be enough for Ashes of Creation. It is supposed to be the Fantasy EVE after all and EVE's concurrency is usually quoted somewhere between 20-35k. EVE is a long running, successful MMORPG, no question. But t's nowhere even close to being a mainstream game. 

All of this talk of populations and break-even points for commercial success and what it might mean for future game development in the genre is speculation, though. What we soon won't need to speculate about is whether Ashes of Creation is any good. 

Does it run well or is it a buggy mess? Does it look amazing or like the decade-old game it is? Is the gameplay fun or frustrating? Is the PvP balanced or is it a gankbox? And is that housing anything you'd want to live in?

All of that is already open knowledge, of course, or should be, since there's been no NDA for a year, but in a few weeks anyone who cares will be able to put down $50 and find out for themselves. 

I will not be paying another $50 on top of the $80 I already gave Intrepid eight years ago. Luckily, I won't have to. 

I was initially irked at the thought that the game I backed so long, long ago was going into Early Access with an Alpha build, apparently leaving me still waiting for the second round of Beta before I could join in. I figured that had to be what was going to happen. They'd have sent me an email if my pledge qualified me for EA access, surely. Wouldn't they? They send me plenty of PR emails, after all. It's  not like they don't know where to find me.

Still, I thought before I started complaining I probably ought to check. And guess what? On the Ashes Moments Substack (Whatever that is...) it says "all Beta-1 and Beta-2 key holders will also be granted access to the Early Access launch on December 11th". That's my ticket in.

Actually, my two tickets because Mrs Bhagpuss has long since moved on and won't be playing this or any other MMORPG. I'll have her account to play with as well. Not that I want two of them.

It looks as though I won't be playing on Steam, though. Current testers and anyone invited in on later pledges when the game hits Early Access will reportedly have to use Intrepid's own launcher. If they want to play on Steam, they'll have to buy a $50 Steam Key like anyone else. I'm unclear as to whether we'll all end up on the same servers after that. 

I guess I'll find out come December. It'll give me something new to write about for a while, at least. 

Which is really all I paid for in the first place. Eight long years ago. 

You Do Realise You Could Have Gotten A Full Week Of Posts Out Of This Little Lot, Right?

Friday Grab-Bag for real this time. No one story hijacking the post and running away with it like last week. Probably. I have eight or nine possibles bookmarked. Let's see how many I can get through before the whole thing collapses under its own weight. I'm going to take them in the order I found them so don't expect any kind of coherent through-line.

Also, anyone liking the introductory paragraph above the first illustration here? I think it works quite well for a portmanteau post. I have kinda spoilt the effect with this second para though...

Oops! I Clicked On One Of Those Side-Loading Ads On MassivelyOP And Look What Happened!

Seriously, what even are those? They're so annoying! I get that websites depend on advertising to exist and ad blockers screw that up but the reason people use ad blockers in the first place is because of how infuriating the ads are. Making them even more intrusive so they can circumvent the blocks isn't going to get anyone to click on them!

So, anyway, I clicked on this ad...

It was for a game called NIKKE. All caps, which should have warned me. The full name is actually NIKKE: GODDESS OF VICTORY, still all caps only the second part in smaller caps. Like that, sort of. 

The game describes itself as an "Immersive Sci-Fi RPG Shooter With Adorable NIKKES". Again with all caps all the way but enough of that. And what the heck are NIKKES? Is that a thing? Google doesn't think so. Not outside the game anyway. 

Inside the game? Well apparently that's a subject of some debate...

I lasted about ten minutes before quitting and uninstalling. From the website, I thought I was going to get a cut-price Hoyoverse knock-off  but what I actually got was an indescribable hotch-potch of hyper-sexualized robots with gameplay that ressembled duck shooting at the county fair, all set to a crashing soundtrack that had me turning my speakers down in the first five seconds because I couldn't wait long enough to find the in-game audio controls.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, MOP has you covered, although I note that although they promote it, they don't write about it. I wonder why that might be?

Do The Ostrich

Somewhere downstairs in one of my boxes of vinyl 45s I have a couple of singles I bought in the 1970s or maybe the 1980s, each of which features a couple of songs written by Lou Reed before he was famous. From memory, one of those is Do The Ostrich, in which Lou exhorts us all to do the ostrich as he attempts to kick-start a new dance craze. I haven't heard it for about forty years but I can still remember exactly how it goes, which isn't all that surprising when you consider the entire lyrics consist of "Do the Ostrich", repeated endlessly.

I can't remember who that one is credited to (It's by The Primitives.) but I can remember one of the others is "You're Driving Me Insane" by The Beachnuts. Or maybe they did "Little Cycle Annie". (They did. I just checked. It was The Roughnecks that did Driving Me Insane.) 

I can still sing the choruses of both of those after all these years, too, which suggests that Lou's early sixties stint as an in-house songwriter for schlock pop music factory Pickwick wasn't the misfire you might imagine. The guy had a knack with a chorus, for sure.

If you, like me, would love to hear all the songs he wrote for them then I'm very happy to tell you your dreams are about to come true. All twenty-five of them (!!) are due to be released in a compilation called "Why Don't You Smile Now?" - which now I hear it I realise is yet another one I already own.

I'll be getting a copy. Who'd want to miss Spongy and the Dolls doing “Really - Really - Really - Really - Really - Really Love” ? Not me!

Ashes Of Credibility

Back around the time the saber-tooths died out, just before the discovery of bronze, I pledged a kickstarter for a game called Ashes of Creation. Because all I really wanted was the base game and a quick look at it before it started but mostly because I'm cheap, I only pledged one of the lowest tiers. 

From memory, it gave me access to Beta 2. Might possibly have been Beta 1. I imagine there's some account I could log into to check but if I had the details I lost them long ago. I'm still going to get the game eventually, though, because developers Intrepid send me monthly emails about it so they must  have my details even if I don't. 

At the time, I was sufficiently enthused to take a second pledge for Mrs Bhagpuss as well, so we're going to get two of the damn things some day. The chances of me playing it for more than a session or two are slim. The chances of Mrs Bhagpuss even logging in are none.

I wrote the cost off as lost long ago but even so I found it more than a tad itrritating to hear Intrepid crowing about a new, year-long "Alpha Two", starting in October, that you can buy into for an extortionate amount. 

Initially, your hundred dollars was going to get you alpha 2 access and that was all because everything Intrepid have ever said about the game and everything they ever send me suggests they have a hyper-inflated sense of their own importance and we should all feel eternally grateful they even deign to let us kneel and touch the hem of their garment...

Ahem. Anyway, the reaction to that idea was... not favorable and now they've extended the offer to include Beta 1 and 2 and a month's subscription at launch. It's somewhat galling to realize that if I'd kept my credit card in my wallet way back when, for the price of those two $50 pledges I could have bought one $100 package now and been playing next May, which is likely still at least a couple of years before whatever passes for launch.

Not that I want to play the damn game any more. I wonder if it's too late to get my $100 back? The weirdest thing about the whole affair, though, is that the first two phases of Alpha Two won't have an NDA but the final one will. What's that about?

Robrat Summer

Back in the lockdown years I was quite excited for the future of the metaverse as I understood it, which was mostly as a way of watching live events in a three-dimensional virtual environment. There was a lot of that going on back then and I made an effort to join in where I could.

One of the more memorable meta-events I attended was PinkPantheress in Roblox. It was fun in a "This is New!" kind of way although in retrospect PinkPantheress's gentle, introverted re-interpolation of 90s drum'n'bass scarcely seems like the most obvious choice for the platform. Charli XCX seems like a much better fit, which makes it a shame the current Brat-themed Dress To Impress offer in Roblox is just some clothes and emotes not a virtual stage appearance by one of the acts of the summer.

Absent the novelty factor, it seems as though there's as much or more value in just watching events livestreaming in flat 2D or even in plain old sound-only. I've been listening to the recording of a French radio live broadcast of Lana del Rey's set at Rock en Seine in Paris last night for the whole time I've been writing this post and even faux-live and without visuals it does a pretty fair job of making me feel I was there.

The tech for immersive performance doesn't quite seem to be there yet. I still think it's the real USP VR has been searching for - I know I'd buy a headset tomorrow if it meant I could "attend" live performances all over the world from the comfort of my sofa - but apparently that's just me.

And So It Begins

Next month sees the debut of SM Entertainment's newest would-be KPop Idol, nævis . Not something I'd normally bother to mention only there's something a little different about nævis and it's not just that she spells her name all in lower case with a really annoying dipthong, either.

I'd forgotten until I started writing this section but we've met nævis here on the blog before. Back in 2023 I explained she was merely "a fictional AI who "connects" a real band [Aespa] to that band's virtual doppelgangers". Now it seems she's done with facilitating the success of others. She's out to become an Idol in her own right as an "AI-generated singer".

I'm not entirely sure how one of those differs from an already well-established virtual star like Hatsune Miko, other than that the vocaloid tech that underwrites Hatsune was specifically developed using vocal samples from a single, specific human performer, voice actor Saki Fujita., rather than whatever gestalt is likely to lie behind nævis. The NME article where I first read about her says "the virtual K-pop idol was created using computer graphics and AI voicing technologies, while her upcoming content will be produced using generative AI" but it seems a fine distinction.

Honestly, I don't really care about the exact methodology behind the project. I just love the whole idea. The metafictionality is dizzying. About the only thing I don't like about it are all those bloody dipthongs that make the names so damn hard to type. 

I'm going to namecheck Carole and Tuesday again, as you'd expect. We'll be in their world faster than you can imagine. We're halfway there already.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction (All I get Is Early Access, Baby!)

Nah, I'm happy enough. I just thought of the line and couldn't resist. If you can't make self-indulgent in-jokes and drop references no-one is going to get in your own blog then what's the point of having one?

I really enjoyed my hundred or so hours with Nightingale. I was looking forward to it and it did not disappoint. If it had been a single-player, offline title then the time I've spent with the game would have been a very solid return on the £22.49 I paid for it. Better yet, it had a linear storyline that made me feel I'd "finished" it, which is probably why I've barely touched the game since.

Or perhaps I should say I thought it had a linear storyline. It seems not everyone agrees. The upcoming Realms Rebuilt update doesn't just add new mechanics and content, it also includes a revamped central storyline:

"While the fundamental premise of the story remains the same (Earth has fallen, the Portal network collapsed, and what remains of humanity is adrift looking for Nightingale), in Realms Rebuilt the player journey has been…well….rebuilt!"

I have very mixed feelings about this. For one thing, I was more than fine with the story and progression as it was. It made sense, it was logical for the most part and I found it interesting but not so interesting that I want to see the extended Director's Cut. Especially not if, as I suspect, that would involve making a new character and going through it all from scratch. 

This is what you get with Early Access titles these days, though. It's not just that you come in at a relatively early development stage and accept there's content missing, which I think used to be generally thought of as the deal. EA is starting to feel much more like a beta or sometimes even an alpha, where everything is mutable right down to the fundemental premise of the game. 

I think that's why I'm starting to think of Early Access titles, even for games that strive to be Live Service titles or MMOs, as more like finite, buy-and-play-once games. Valheim is a great example. It was an amazing game when I got it and I put in over three hundred and fifty hours, almost all of which was in that initial run. 

I find now I don't much care that Iron Crown is still working on it. I finished the version of Valheim I bought. Whatever they're doing to it now might as well be a sequel or an expansion to a game I no longer play and I think I might feel much the same about Nightingale and quite probably every other Early Access title I'll buy in the future. 

It's fine. I just need to re-align my expectations.

(Also, I notice MassivelyOP is now using the form "Tencent's Inflexion Games", just like they're calling Funcom "Tencent-Owned Funcom". Not sure exactly what's going on there but I have my suspicions.)

Extinction Level Event Detected

And now some sad news: Nintendo finally noticed they've been giving something away for free so they're going to put a stop to it.  

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, the free-to-play mobile Animal Crossing game that's been running since 2017 and which I played, wrote about and very much enjoyed during the pandemic, when everyone who wasn't playing Valheim was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch, is sunsetting on 28 November.

I haven't played it in a long while. It was fun for a good few months but it gets repetitive eventually, like most games. Still, I wouldn't have said I was totally done with it so it's a bit annoying to hear that I won't be able to visit my characters any more.

Except, hey, guess what? I will! If I pay a ransom. 

After Animal Crossing Pocket Camp the free version ends it will be replaced (Possibly immediately, possibly a little later, it's not clear yet.) by a Premium, paid edition. How much that will cost and what, if any, will be the difference in gameplay remains to be seen but it is confirmed that you will be able to transfer your F2P characters into the new game.

Gee, thanks. I suppose it would be worse if the game was just closing down altogether and your characters would be lost forever but still, it feels like a really tacky move. I don't imagine I'll bother transferring mine but I have a couple of months to think about it. 

I might, if the new game is on Google Play Games, currently still in beta. Do they have paid games on there? Maybe I should look into it.

End With A Big Number

 

OMG! I have so many tunes backed up, waiting to their chance to shine in one of my famous music posts! Did you know my most-viewed post of all time is a music post? It's this one from March of this year and according to Blogger's own stats it has been viewed 188,531 times! And they say blogging is dead! 

If you want to know why I don't believe any of my stats, there's your answer. 

So, the question is, which of the hundred or so "possibles" do I choose for this single slot? I suppose I could let the dice decide...

Nah. I'm gonna go with something I think a few people might actually want to watch for once. I think it might be an idea to end these portmanteau posts with a cover. Let's start the tradition right here.

Don't go chasing any rabbits now.