Don't Give Up

Earlier this week, over at Massively OP, Eliot Lefebvre posted a deeply nihilistic piece on the mortality of MMOs. The truism that "every... MMO is going to shut down" doesn't get us very much further than "everyone living is going to die" or "the sun is going to burn out"so I'm not sure quite what demons he was trying to exorcise but he sure sounded angry about something.

Yes, nothing lasts forever. We get that. The world will burn. What we want to know, we never can - until it happens: when?

There's an obvious flaw in the argument that says because "no MMOs...last forever" we must compose ourselves immediately for the inevitable day when the last server closes. The flaw in that line of thinking is that, while our favorite MMO will indeed not last forever, it may very well last longer than we do.

If we revert to observable fact rather than emotional grandstanding, the history of the genre to date suggests that MMOs, by and large, are rarely in imminent danger of closure. Meridian 59 is already in its third decade.  Ultima Online and Lineage will soon follow it, with EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot and the rest of the pack not far behind.

Without question, all of those games have outlived many who once played them. More than fifteen years ago I met people in both EQ and DAOC who were then in their sixties. They may still be playing now, in their seventies and eighties. I know I hope I will be. Whether they, or I, make it that far, it's a certainty not everyone will.

When it comes to fears of mortality it seems to me that a more appropriate concern isn't whether what you love will last long enough for you to enjoy it to the full but at what point you may have to concede that it has more fullness than you'll ever get to experience. You will end, it will go on. You'll never know what happens next.

I had a conversation with someone I work with yesterday about Dr. Who. I'm not a Whovian but I have watched the show for almost all my life. I was five years old when it began and I'm told I saw the first show when it was broadcast in 1963 although I can't remember it.

Dr. Who was cancelled, apparently for good, in 1989, by which time I had been following it, on and off, mostly on, for more than a quarter of a century. At that point I thought, if I thought about it at all, that I'd had all the Dr. Who I was going to get.

I was, of course, entirely mistaken. First there were the legacies. Old shows existed, in fragmented part, on video. There had been novels, audiobooks, movies: fragments a devoted follower might shore against their ruin.

More than a past, though, the show had a present. The rights owners may have deemed it unprofitable or, more likely, a poor fit for their current portfolio, but there were still creatives who felt it could be a good vehicle for their talents and there was, always, an audience willing to encourage them to prove it.

In the decade and a half between the last transmission of the original run and the first episode of the reboot there was a perpetual stream of new content, everything from radio shows to comics. Interest never abated. Eventually the series returned to television, where it has prospered for almost as long as it was absent and shows every sign of continuing to do so.

As Conan Doyle discovered to his irritation, popular creations are hard to kill. What's more, despite the best efforts of lawyers, intellectual property cannot readily be ring-fenced. If a creation is popular enough it will outlive not only its creator but the statute of limitations on its exclusivity.

Many of the great successes of the 18th and 19th Century, all now in the public domain, continue to live a vibrant afterlife, often one more vivid and certainly more varied than they enjoyed while their creators survived. Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Mr Darcy,  Dorian Grey, they all stride confidently onward into the 21st century.

Video-gaming is a younger medium than the novel, movies or even comic books but I see absolutely no reason to believe it won't follow exactly the same trajectory. There will be reboots and remakes and re-imaginings as each generation seeks to rediscover, revisit or re-invent its own past.

The process is self-reflexive, self-perpetuating. Millennials who grew up watching Next Generation or Deep Space 9 take the torch from the Late-Boomers/GenXers who grew up with original Trek. Once momentum builds the train is hard to stop.

Video games in general and MMOs in particular tend to identify less with characters, more with settings or styles. There are relatively few Marios or Lara Crofts and fewer of those seem to make the transition across the generations that we see so often in older media.

When it comes to franchises, though, there seems to be no such reluctance. Eliot chides "Do you like Final Fantasy XIV? It’s going to shut down" but I notice he doesn't make any such claims for the Final Fantasy franchise itself, even though its ultimate demise is as assured as that of all things.

There was much wailing and rending of garments when Daybreak Games cut the rope on EQNext but it would be a brave and most likely foolish commentator who'd take that commercial decision to signal the end of EverQuest as a commercial entity. Franchises measure their lifespans not in decades but in centuries; myths in millennia.

Commerciality is anyway only a part of it. Yes, when MMOs cease to make money for their owners they will be ended. As NCSoft so inelegantly demonstrated with City of Heroes, even making a profit isn't always enough to keep the lights on.

Life isn't all about making money, though, and neither is running an MMO. Sometimes MMOs carry on even though you can't imagine how they could. Alganon is still running. So is The Hammers End. Sometimes they become community projects and grow.

Even if there's no official afterlife, when the money stops coming in it doesn't mean the games just disappear. Leaving aside the ever-growing hinterland of Let's Plays and other love-letters from the past to the future, from the sanctioned to the forbidden to the apparently overlooked there's a whole shadow world out there, where lost MMOs live on in more than just memory.

It may be orders of magnitude more difficult to create fan-made MMOs than fan fiction but it's not so hard there aren't people doing it. And just as tribute bands can not only pull a crowd but eventually become legitimized by osmosis so the emulator may eventually become the new original.

It's true, as Eliot says, that "your favorite MMO is going to die". It dies every day. The World of Warcraft you play tonight isn't the WoW you played last month, last year, last decade. If what you seek is stasis then you're ever out of luck and, really, what were you doing looking here in the first place?

It's also very sadly true that not all MMOs attain the critical mass required to sustain a life beyond their immediate commercial end... or so I was about to suggest.

I lack faith. The universe chides me.

Searching my memory for a long-forgotten MMO to use as an example I hit on Crowns of Power. I googled it to be sure I'd remembered the name correctly. I had. Almost unbelievably it's back.

Read the MMORPG.com story explaining how this supposedly unloved, unlamented, scarcely noticed MMO failed to go quietly into the night. It exemplifies everything I've been struggling to express. I thought I had more to say but after that I don't think there's anything I can add.

You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.