Back To The Future

After the flurry of recent name-drops, on the blog and in comments elsewhere, I'm sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I am, once again, playing Star Wars: the Old Republic. Although, as yet, I have to use the term "playing" advisedly. I haven't actually done anything that felt like play so far.

It didn't take a huge push to get me interested again. Since I stopped, several years ago now, I've thought surprisingly often about giving the game another go. There always seemed to be other things to do, though, and besides it seemed like too much trouble to get it all set up. (Ironic foreshadowing ftw!)

The trigger for me to actually do something about it at last was pulled by Yeebo's post on the game but also by Shintar's reply to my comment, in which she reminded me that I did actually seem to quite enjoy myself when I was last there, something I was aware of in a general fashion even though I'd struggle to bring any specifics in mind. I was almost there and then the final shove came from a post at AI MMORPG News that I read this morning.

AI MMORPG News was one of the two highly controversial AI-generated blogs that participated in Blaugust this year. I can't actually remember what the other one was. I know I never even saw it, much less read anything that got posted there. The AI news blog, though, I read every day. I'm sure it will annoy some readers to hear that I found the posts generally quite a good read and also reasonably informative, which is why I added it to my blog roll when Blaugust came to an end. 

Can anyone smell sulfur?

One of my main complaints about most pro/semi-pro MMORPG coverage of recent times has been how snarky and cynical it often is. I know that's rich coming from someone who sometimes satirises company press releases and official statements for the purpose of so-called humor but I hold personal blogs to a very different standard than supposedly professional news sites and I like my gaming news as straight and un-quirky as it comes.

AI-generated text has a tendency to be far too gosh-wow and gee willikers for any rational human being to feel entirely comfortable reading it but after years of trying to extract a few facts from what too-often appears to be someone's attempt to hone their routine for Friday's open mic night, I'd take sickeningly sweet over solipsistically sneery any day. If nothing else, I find saccharine praise far easier to filter out and ignore.

The AI blog posts every day with no particular agenda that I can ascertain and I always read it with interest. Today it came up with one of those listicles much favored by sites seeking to harvest clicks: The Top MMORPGs on Steam. 

For some reason it decided to stop at seven, which I very much doubt any human intern given the thankless task would have done. Star Wars: the Old Republic was not one of the picks, which I found strange. World of Warcraft was, though, which I found even stranger. Had I missed a major development or was it just one of those infamous AI hallucinations?

Neither, as it turns out. Blizzard have not yet become so desperate as to share some of their enormous yet possibly dwindling revenue stream with Valve but of course you can link your Battle.Net account with Steam and set WoW as an external game to be played through the platform. It bends the definition of "on Steam" a little but I don't think it breaks it.

Who said the graphics were old-fashioned? This looks just like The 5th Element!

Final Fantasy XIV, however, which is also on the AI's list, is fully playable on Steam, something I either never knew or had forgotten. So is Elder Scolls Online, ditto and ditto. I found that out when I fact-checked the whole list and it made me think. In some cases, like Guild Wars 2, playing through Steam means starting afresh; in others, like ESO, you can link the accounts and (I'm guessing...) carry on playing your existing characters.

Given that I was only yesterday musing about the possibility of starting over in games I used to play, either option sounded valid. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how convenient it would be to have most, if not all, my MMORPGs on one platform. The me of even five years ago would be outraged but I'm not that guy any more. 

As I said, I was somewhat surprised not to see SW:tOR on the AI's list. I'd had it in my head that the game had long been available through Steam and it would certainly seem to be one of the better-known games in the genre. I checked and yes, it very definitely is available on the platform, where it enjoys a Very Positive rating. 

I couldn't remember whether I'd played the game through Steam myself or whether I'd used a standalone client so checked that too. It seemed I hadn't played on Steam because there was no sign of the game in my library. 

Then again, there was no sign of it anywhere else, either. I couldn't find a client on any of my hard drives or an icon on my desktop so I have to assume I uninstalled it in one of my Marie Kondo moments.

Do I know you? Nope, don't believe I do.

All the more reason, then to re-install it through Steam. Or install it, I guess. Whatever. 

But first I had to check whether that would mean starting over from scratch or whether I could link my EA account and pick up from where I left off. I did remember that EA handed the game on to Broadsword a while back  - I even wrote a post about it, in which I speculated about coming back to try the game under its new management - but I figured the account I had would still be with EA. 

It was not. As it happens, my EA account is already linked with Steam for some reason but there's no sign there that I ever played SW:tOR at all. Fortunately, Broadsword have all my details safely in hand. I don't remember doing anything to pass the details across so presumably the transfer went through on the nod.

I did a bit of research on what I needed to do to link the accounts. The advice I found was less than clear but the gist seemed to be that just adding the game to my library and installing it through Steam ought to take me to a Broadsword login the first time I pressed Play. From there, I'd be able to sign in using my old account details to complete the handshake.

It kind of worked. Eventually. After a lot more messing around, googling, reading Reddit threads, cutting and pasting some code into the Steam folder... the usual sort of thing that anyone wanting to go back to play an aging game they stopped playing years ago is going to be perfectly happy to do. It took me about forty-five minutes altogether. It really didn't help that one of the authorisation screens uses borderless black tick boxes on a black background - just sorting that out took at least half the time.

Oh, so that's who I am!

Finally, I was able to log in. And there were my characters. Two of them. Neither of whom I remembered at all. 

It is very unusual indeed for me to come back to an MMORPG I played for months and not even being able to remember the name of my character when I see it. It may even be unique to SW:tOR. Apparently I did fifty-nine levels on someone called Fentara Michington, which doesn't even sound like a name I would make up, and thirty-nine on someone by the name of Coyenne, which sounds only slightly more plausible. 

I said in reply to Shintar yesterday that "I can remember precisely nothing about any of the story in SW:tOR from when I played" but even when I wrote it I was thinking "but I imagine it might come back to me if I started playing again.". Well, it hasn't. Nothing much about how to play the game has come back to me either. 

Steam tells me I've played for 68 minutes and as I said earlier about 45 of those were spent trying to link the accounts and log in. The rest were taken up with staring at the UI then going through all the menus and pressing buttons to see what they did. Without a great deal of success.

I wonder what this button does?

I began by trying to find some way off whatever space station I'd found Fentara on. I had three tracked quests on screen so I thought I'd go do one of those but I couldn't work out how to get off the damn orbital. I tried the map but it just made things even more confusing. 

That was about the one thing I did remember from before - I never could work out how to get from one place to another without it taking forever. I'm so used to being able to just open a map and click on something to be ported there instantly or at the very least to be ported to somewhere I can get a ride to where I want to go that having to pass through the places inbetween on the way seems positively archaic.

By dint of pressing everything in every drop-down menu I did manage to find my way back to my apartment, which seemed barely furnished and not at all like anywhere someone might be living. Great views though. I also managed to get myself thrown out of the game altogether onto some selection screen that threatened to take me into one of the expansions instead. I chose to log out and back in again rather than end up somewehere I couldn't get back from.

After much trial and error I finally worked out where the elevators were on the map and by a process of elimination found my way to the spaceport on whatever planet the station was orbiting. Or at least I think that's where I went.

What I actually did was click on the door of the only ship that had one that did anything, then tried both options until I got to some place that looked like it might be somewhere I could get to somewhere else from. 

Left hand down a bit...

I looked at the map and spotted some docking areas labelled with Class names, Smuggler being one of them. I had the vaguest idea that might have been the class I originally chose, although when I checked against Fentara's name it said Scoundrel. Rude!

I had a dim inkling Scoundrel might have been a sub-class choice at some point so I made my way to the Smuggler bay, which is not a thing you'd imagine would be advertised as clearly as that, if at all, and when I got there I repeated my previous tactic of finding the only ship with an interactable door and hammering on it.

It was my ship. I got lost in there, too. I met a Wookie who wanted to talk to me. I couldn't remember where I'd met him or why he was on my ship but I talked to him anyway. Apparently, I said something he disapproved of but my standing with him went up anyway. Must be a Wookie thing.

There was a robot hanging around, too - a droid in the jargon, I guess - just standing in a corridor. He didn't have anything to say so I just left him there. Didn't rememeber him either.

After a few minutes aimlessly wandering the halls I somehow managed to find what I took to be the Bridge or the Cockpit or the Flight Deck or whatever it's called. There were no obvious controls but there were three chairs so I tried sitting in all of them and, like Goldilocks, I didn't find the one that was just right until the end.

From the command chair I managed to find the planet I had a mission for on the map  The mission step I was on actually said "Fly your ship to..." whatever the planet was called. I've already forgotten. It began with O, I know that much. 

Ah, it's called Oricon. I just read the description. Looks like we're in for some "fun" there.

So I did that and got out of the ship. Or, rather, I watched a cut scene where my character told the ship's onboard computer to set her down and pick her up later. By that point I would have been fine with everything being handled in a cut scene. I didn't feel I was in much control of the situation anyway.

Outside, the planet I'd arrived on appeared to be on fire. Maybe it was Hell. It felt like it could be. It was also time for me to go and start making lunch so I decided to quit while I was, if not exactly ahead, at least slightly ahead of where I had been when I started.

As a returning player, I have had a lot better welcomes back than that. Unless I missed something, the game made absolutely no reference to the fact that it had been several years since my last login. In a way it fitted in nicely with what I have to say is now the extremely old-school feel of the game. 

These days, almost every other MMORPG I can think of, even the old ones, takes its cues from the F2P imports, gach agames and mobile titles that do everything but kill an actual fatted calf whenever you come back after more than a day or two away. SW:tOR clearly does not care one whit whether you play the game or not. In a weird way it's quite refreshing to be taken so utterly for granted but I'm not sure how wise a choice it is, commercially.

I will persist, despite the lack of bunting and presents. Having made it to the right planet I feel I ought at least to try to carry out the mission I went there to do. Whatever it is. I have no idea. Probably going to involve murdering someone, I imagine. Usually does.

I just hope I can remember which way round to hold the gun.

The Broadsword Retirement Home For Old MMORPGs Is Pleased To Welcome A New Resident: SW:tOR

Without a doubt, the mmorpg-specific news of the week has to be the shock announcement that BioWare is handing Star Wars : the Old Republic off to Broadsword, the independent (Or is it?) studio tasked with caretaking the elderly Dark Age of Camelot and ancient Ultima Online, titles the conglomerate acquired when it subsumed first Origin in 1992 and later Mythic Entertainnment in 2006. The story has been very widely reported but this summary at Gameworld Observer is one of the clearest I've seen.

I first read the news at MassivelyOP, where the reaction in the comment thread was both less astonished and more positive than I'd have expected. It probably says as much about how badly BioWare has been judged to have handled the game over the years as it says anything good about Broadsword, although, as I commented in response to Shintar's concerned post on the news, MOP commenters do seem to have a particular blind spot when it comes to certain aging titles, Star Wars Galaxies being the most obvious, with DAOC and UO coming up strongly behind.

It seems unlikely that many of those commenters have actually played a title curated by Broadsword in recent years. Or ever. I'm not sure what the current populations of DAOC and UO look like but I think it's fair to say they'll be small and composed almost entirely of a veteran hardcore who don't get out much - to visit other mmorpgs, I mean.

Someone who has played one of the games extensively is Yeebo, creator of Yeebo's DAOC Guides, who dropped into Shintar's comment thread to share his experiences. No doubt he'll post on the topic himself at some point so I won't pre-empt his analysis of the situation, other than to say the evidence he's already presented looks pretty damning.

I already had my own, largely uninformed, opinions on the efficacy of Broadsword's tenure as a curator of slumbering giants but Shintar's reply to my comment added some much-needed texture to the conversation from an SW:tOR-specific perspective. Even though I've played the game and follow several bloggers who've written quite extensively about it over the years, I wasn't aware quite how "severely unloved" some of the devs working on it had been feeling. 

I knew that the game had been under-resourced and under-developed for years. I've commented more than once on the irony of a TripleA+ global IP like Star Wars having nothing more on its mmorpg record than two under-performers like the cancelled SWG and the commercially-disappointing SW:tOR but I was under the impression the latter was at least rubbing along, doing alright in a not quite top flight sort of way. It's in Tipa's Tier 3 of Google Trends MMOs alongside Guild Wars 2, after all, and I keep reading about how well GW2 is doing these days.

According to both Shintar and Pallais, a regular commenter at Going Commando and a regular SW:tOR player, too, the revenue SW:tOR generates has been used  "to pay the bills so the "main" development team could faff around for years not shipping anything.", making SW:tOR BioWare's "milk cow". On this basis, it's easy to see why the 40+ developers making the cut to move across to Broadsword might see the change as both an improvement and an opportunity.

It's a very curious situation all round. By most counts I've seen, the current Broadsword set-up has around a dozen developers in total to cover both existing titles. The arrival, whether physically if they're asked to re-locate or more likely virtually, if they stay where they are, of another 40+ employees is bound to have a seismic effect not just on the activities and status of the company but also on its culture.

It reminds me weirdly of the recent events involving EG7 and Daybreak Games, where the newly-acquired properties and personnel in short order seemed to consume their host and set about remaking the business in their own image. I'm not saying we're going to turn round in few months and find the CEO of Broadsword is someone from the SW:tOR dev team but I do think that, unless the properties are kept wholly inside their respective silos, there's almost bound to be some bleed-over.

My immediate reaction was that it couldn't rationally be regarded as a positive development for the game, its players or the developers currently working on it. Broadsword is nominally a private company but the entirety of its business would seem to be maintaining two (Now three.) mmorpgs owned by EA, in which the gaming giant has long lost interest. 

I'm finding it a little tricky to figure out exactly what Broadsword's status is. Some sources describe it as a "private company" but LinkedIn lists it as "public". I asked Bard, who told me "Broadsword Online Games is not independently owned. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Electronic Arts (EA)."  Bing agreed that Broadsword "is not independently owned", describing it instead as "a third-party studio".

Whatever the corporate structure, it's pretty clear that Broadsword is an mmorpg retirement home. It's also one evidently dependent on a single client - EA - for games to look after. If it's not part of EA, it might as well be.

Clearly it's better for SW:tOR to be sent into retirement than into the sunset but I'm not sure the game's players were expecting either just now. That many of them seem to be unfazed by or even quite pleased with the idea suggests just how far expectations must have fallen. As for the developers, it does appear that those who don't get the boot themselves will probably just be glad to have BioWare's boot off their neck.

As a player of very old, niche and/or underpopulated mmorpgs, I can attest that maintenance mode isn't always a bad deal. If a game already has plenty of content, all it really needs is someone to keep the lights on and change the fuses when they blow. The hardcore players who stick with the games they love long after everyone else has moved on are usually quite capable of making their own entertainment.

Games like that usually have a skeleton crew operating them, like the half-dozen each at DAOC or UO. A team of forty may be half what SW:tOR used to have but if those forty are freed from the fetters of an actively-hostile management, it's not unrealistic to imagine them becoming more productive overall. It might be an unpopular opinion but I'd say that, from a player's perspective, something of the kind did happen to the two EverQuest games under Darkpaw, when it was siloed from Daybreak - and things had already improved there under DBG compared to late SOE.

Thoughts like these may make the prospects seem cheerier but there's a big difference between SW:tOR and either the games Broadsword already runs or the Daybreak stable. In fact, there's an instructive comparison to be drawn between EQII specifically and SW:tOR.

One of the largely-forgotten selling points of EQII when it originally launched back in 2004 was that it claimed to be the first fully-voiced MMORPG. That record is "officially" held by SW:tOR, as verified by the self-regulating Guiness Book of Records but other equally authorative sources with longer memories remember it diferently. Much of the hype of the time revolved around the large number of voice actors employed, the hours of dialog they'd recorded and the big names (Christopher Lee and Helen Slater) SOE had hired to voice the two opposing faction leaders.

After EQII failed to emulate its predecessor's impressive sales curve, one of the first things to be dropped was all that expensive voice acting. For most of the life of the game we've gotten by with some voiced set-pieces in major storylines and a lot of reading. 

And it's been great. Better, in fact, than the original plan which, if I'm honest, I found pretty irritating even when it was a novelty. I don't really like voice acting in mmorpgs all that much. It slows things down and it's often distracting. I hardly ever turn off the music or the sound in games but I often turn off the voices.

I suspect SW:tOR players take the voice-acting in their game a bit more seriously. They also expect a lot of story, that being the fourth pillar on which the game was so famously built. How Broadsword will manage those expectations with their reduced team and without the safety-net of a giant corporation behind them might be interesting to watch. From the outside.

Will SW:tOR begin to bloom again and go on to flourish under the gentler guiding hand and more supportive environment at Broadsword? Or will financial concerns and restraints replace the cultural chill that supposedly froze out innovation and creativity under BioWare, leaving the game no better off and perhaps even worse than before?

Will the devs who move across even stay with SW:tOR? I wonder if there's anything about that in the agreement? Will Broadsword be constrained to maintain their new ward with exact same level of resources they were handed or will they be free to re-assign some to the other games under their control? Could SW:tOR's losses become DAOC and UOs gains?

Well, don't look at me. I don't know. I'm going to be sitting over here in the cheap seats, munching on my popcorn. This one's going to run and run, I'll bet.

One thing I will say about it is that it's revived my own interest in giving the game another run. I think I'll wait until the ink's dry on the deal, then I might either wake up my old character or start a new one. I won't be staying long, I'm sure, but it seems like it would be a good time to pay a visit and take a look around the game's new home.

Whether looky-loos like me, coming in, will balance out disgruntled vets heading out the door the other way remains to be seen.