This Is Your Situation

Jack Emmert, CEO of Cryptic and one of the names behind a whole slew of MMORPGs you'll have heard of, if not played, including all his current studio's titles and also City of Heroes and DCUO, gave an interview to GamesIndustry recently that seemed to me to be at one and the same time both clear- and short-sighted. His thesis is that there's a pent-up demand for MMOs that's currently going unmet and his primary evidence for it is the number of people who bought New World, apparently estimated to be a staggering 10 million.

First, ten million? Really? The source quoted by GI is Video Game Insights, whose website comes under the umbrella of something called SensorTower. It seems to offer a service very similar to what SuperData used to trade on so give it whatever credibility you used to give them, I guess?

Ten million sounds like a lot of customers to give up on, though. Impressive chutzpah from Amazon, throwing that many under the bus. Jack's explanation for that is "I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it" although if Amazon don't have the infrastructure, who does? Still, even if it was actually "only" half of what VGI claim, jack's right. That's a lot of players willing to give an MMO a go.

But not to stick with one, obviously. Just like the millions who didn't stick with Lost Ark or any of the other big ticket launches of the last few years.

Jack also cites the continuing millions believed, if not proven, to be playing World of Warcraft and "the Daybreak games, or whatever" as proof the interest is still there. All of which is uncontroversial enough, I guess, although I'm not entirely convinced it means a huge pent-up demand so much as a lot of people stuck in games they used to love, now finding themselves unwilling to move on...

I'm more interested in his analysis of why the demand, if we accept it exists, isn't being met. Apparently it's because the new games are simultaneously empty of meaning even while being overfilled with content.:

 "These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

I think he's talking about what Wilhelm often complains about with games in development - that desire to be everything to everyone rather than sticking to what you're good at. "Feature creep" as it's sometimes called. Jack goes on to explain that when he was designing Neverwinter Online, he had a simple mission statement: "Kill shit and take their loot."

He doubles down: "That was it, over and over again.". Then he adds, almost as an after thought, "And make it fun." The fact that NWO is still running is cited as proof the concept worked. 

A lot of MMOs are still running, though. As has been noted many times, they're harder to kill than cockroaches. I could log into half a dozen I can think of immediately that have been up as long or longer than NWO and I'd lay good odds I'd be one of fewer than a dozen players online in any of them. Persistence is evidence of something but I'm not sure that something is demand.

My real problem with Jack's thesis, though, isn't the existence of a substantial demographic interested in massively multiple online games. Undeniably, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people playing MMOs of various kinds. 

If we assume Jack means the kinds of games he makes and that he's name-checking, though, all of which are MMORPGs, not just MMOs, I'll still allow it. Lots of people do play those, albeit nowhere near as many. And logic does suggest there are orders of magnitude more players, who used to play games like those but don't any more.

Where I diverge from his argument is that what the people, who currently aren't playing MMORPGs but might one day, are impatiently awaiting are games where they can

 "run the same goddamn dungeon a hundred times" 

so they can get better and better loot, progress their character and improve their playing skills, which is what Jack thinks is needed to bring those lost sheep thundering back into the fold.

"It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it. In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do."

I'm happy for Jack. He's like Mark E Smith from the Fall. Well, in one way. They both dig repetition. 

I do, too - in music. In games, not so much. I'm over here, in the camp Jack dismisses as irrelevant:

"But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'.

Oh, god yes. Try to make me do that and I will get bored. And leave. But appraently

"That misunderstands the point."

Sorry? What point was that, again? It was the lack of any need for variety or content in a new MMORPG.

"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't. Running the same dungeon multiple times is perfectly fine at the start, then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new… And once you do that, the players are sold."

Except that the evidence of numerous Steam Charts past is that by the time you get to that first, quarterly content drop, 90% of your players will have left. And few of them are going to come back to see what else is new three months later because by then your game is going to be just some old game they wish they hadn't wasted their money on. The demand may be there but the patience sure as hell is not. 

You may be able to frog-boil WoW vets into running the same content over and over and over at higher and higher difficulty forever and ever but that's a form of conditioning that takes years to induce. It's not going to bed down in a couple of weeks, which is, at the outside, about as long as you'll have before the players get bored and wander off to find  something less tedious.

The two genres that have been eating MMORPGs lunch for half a decade now are Survival-Crafting and Open World RPG Gacha. One of those does indeed exemplify Jack's wish to "focus on economical use of assets and environments" and reliance on repetition, although the repetition in question is rarely if ever multiple dungeon runs. The repetition has more to do with creativity than compliance.

As for the other, it's the total antithesis. Pure entertainment. Also a six-weekly content cadence that leaves players struggling to keep up rather than lost for new things to do. 

What neither of them rely on is running the same goddam dungeon over and over and over until your eyes bleed, just so you can add 0.1% to your Critical Chance stat, if you're lucky. There are people who like doing that, true, but I suspect very, very few of them are actively looking for a new game that will allow them to do it. They're being very well-served already in a number of games that were last truly popular at least a decade and a half ago and most of them are not going to be moving unless that game actually shuts down.

None of which is to say Jack doesn't have a good business plan. He has. It's very realistic. A lot of developers would do well to follow it.

"I'm a niche developer in the grand scheme of things, because I identify... something with a passionate fan base, and then I try my best to create an authentic experience."

There's the future of the genre in a nutshell for you: niche product serving a pre-existing fanbase. I'm not going to argue against it. It'll work and if someone cares to apply the method to an IP I care about, I'll play it, too.

I'm just not sold on the idea that there's some larger, untapped, unsatisfied audience out there, desperately waiting for someone to make an MMORPG that will let them run the same dungeon over and over and over... 

Or maybe I just hope there isn't. God! that would be depressing...

Christmas, Cryptic, Coke, Charli XCX And All The Rest

I didn't post yesterday, even though I could have. It felt like skipping school, by which I don't mean it felt fun. I was never one of those kids who enjoyed an unjustified day off. I could never quite forget I ought to be somewhere else. This was a little bit like that. Especially since I knew I had a busy few days coming up, what with work and other things, so I legitimately wouldn't be posting then. 

Also, there's the post count to think about. I hit the big three hundred in 2024 and it's on the cards for 2025. I need another 48 posts in thirty-three days. With the Advent Calendar to come it's doable. But only if I don't keep bunking off...

Speaking of which, let's start there.

The Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 

2022 was the first year I did one. I went with stock images and a single tune, all of which I sourced myself. It was hella fun so I did it again in 2023.

That was the year I tried to get the LLMs to find me some obscure Christmas songs, a job they signally sucked at, choosing instead to just make stuff up. AIs were still cute and funny then, like puppies. 

Not that everyone agreed. I had more success using AI image generators for the pictures but it lost me at least two readers, who made a point of letting me know they were going in the comments. I imagine quite a few more just stumped off in silence.

It didn't stop me calling on AI for help the following year but I did at least make some allowance for reader sensitivity. In 2024 I had the brilliant idea of doubling up with two tunes for each day, one Naughty, one Nice. I picked all the songs myself but for the images I used my own photos for the nice numbers and had AI do the nasty ones. That way, people could opt out of AI and still get to open a door every day.

It was a lot of work, not just the double-posting but because I also decided not to look at any pre-existing lists of Christmas songs. Too much work, in fact, which is why this year it's back to one window a day, although some days, when you open the flaps, you may find more than one song. 

This year, too, in keeping with my mild disillusionment with the way AI is going, there will be no AI involvement at all. The pictures will all be Public Domain images sourced from art galleries, museums and any other archives I can find. 

That has turned out to be a lot more work than you'd think. I can see why people use AI. It saves so much time. I'm already thinking that next year I might start with an AI image and then distress it, the way I do the non-AI pictures I use for music posts. That feels like it would be both faster and more fun and also legitimately involve at least some degree of human creativity.

As for the songs, I learned from last year's experience. Trying to find a couple of dozen unusual or obscure Christmas songs without looking at any lists or collections or playlists of unusual or obscure Christmas songs anyone else has done is a) really hard work and b) exhausting. 

This time I haven't even attempted to be original. I looked through a lot of other people's Christmas lists and cherry-picked. That led to me finding other songs that weren't on the lists,   so at least some of it is my own work. It sure went a lot faster this time, anyway, and I felt a lot less burned out by the end.

It's still quite annoying not to talk about the songs as I post them but I think that would kind of defeat the point of an Advent Calendar. The last couple of years, Redbeard has been kind enough to leave a comment on each day's entry, which gave me the chance to monologue about them in reply. If no-one comments this year, which is more than likely, I'll just have to do a separate post at the end. Don't think I won't!

Next up...

Oh, this is a Grab-Bag post, by the way. Did I not mention that?

Good News/Bad News

 

Which is it? Hell if I know. When I read that Embracer was selling Arc Games and Cryptic and that it was a management buyout, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was "I guess that's good news for Cryptic" and the second "Who is Arc Games?"  

Generally speaking, I'd say that if you're playing an MMORPG and the company that owns it sells it to someone else, you'd probably prefer it went to the people already making the content for it. Always assuming you're enjoying the game, that is. It seems like the safest option, aesthetically and emotionally, although possibly not financially.

Also, if your game was currently owned by Embracer, I guess you'd be forgiven for thinking anyone else would be an improvement. Then I read the article about the buyout on MassivelyOP, which clarified some things and confused others. 

Arc Games is what Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) turned into. It looks like it's some of Arc's management team that's mostly involved in the buyout, funded by Chinese company XD. As MOP points out, though, Embracer had already gutted Cryptic and handed the remnants over to one of Embracer's own divisions, DECA, while apparently Arc Games remained responsible for publishing Neverwinter, Champions and Star Trek Online. So that's as clear as concrete.

I haven't played any of Cryptic's games in years but I have at some point played them all. Champions I just didn't get on with. STO, I thought, was a decent enough game but I have very little affection for the Star Trek IP and I think you'd need quite a bit to want to keep playing for long.

Neverwinter, though, I did like. I played it a fair bit, on and off, although in common with most of the literally hundreds of MMOs I've dabbled with over the years, I never got all that far. There are a couple of dozen posts about it here, though, and of the three, it's the only one I occasionally think of going back to visit.

Whether this latest development makes that more or less likely is hard to predict. If it's just a case of changing the names on the board-room door then no, I guess it doesn't. If it actually leads to a material difference in the way the game is developed, then yes, maybe.

The real question, as always, is who is playing any of these games now anyway? I guess someone must be because the buyer, fancifully named Project Golden Arc, paid  Embracer $30m, which seems at the same time a lot and not much. Thirty million for three established and operating MMOs sounds pretty cheap when you consider EG7 paid ten times that for Daybreak just five years ago. On the other hand, I repeat, who plays Cryptic MMOs in 2025? Looked at that way, it sounds like a lot of money after all.

I'm guessing this will be an ongoing story. I look forward to further developments.

Oh God, Not More AI Nonsense...

I could probably do two or three posts a week just on news items about AI that turn up in my feeds. Most of them I read and forget about but a few really demand some kind of comment or examination. Especially the ones about music. Here's an example.

Right after I published yesterday's post, I got the news that Warner had done a deal with Suno. This follows a deal Udio signed with UMG last month. Udio and Suno are the two leading generative AIs involved in creating music, Suno being by far the superior of the pair, in my opinion.

Until very recently, both were facing lawsuits from the three giants of the record industry, two of which are Warner and UMG. As far as I can tell, Warner is still suing Udio and UMG is still suing Suno. The third, Sony, is suing both of them. I guess the music stopped when it came to Sony and the parcel was already all unwrapped. Pity there wasn't a third AI in there, then they could all have gone home with prizes.

This is exactly what we should have expected, anyway. The way the whole AI scene is going now feels like a mirror of what happened to all the previous technical innovations that threatened the huge media conglomerates. First they try to close them down and then they buy them out. After that it's either close them down themselves or assimilate the technology and use it for their own purposes. 

It's great for the sell-outs, who get a big payday and don't have to go to jail, but it's rarely - probably never - good news for either the current users or the artists trying to protect themselves from their predations. Arguably, it may be good news for all the hundreds of millions of people who didn't even know the tech existed until the majors repackaged it and sold it to them. That's how we got Spotify, after all. Then again, look how well that turned out...

Immediately I read the news, I went straight to Suno to see how they were spinning it. I was not impressed.  They claim "You’ll still be able to create original songs the way you love today." but I very much doubt that will last long. They've already announced changes, coming "soon", meaning "a paid Suno account will be required to download songs from the product, with each paid tier enabling a specific number of downloads each month."

That seems weird to me. I guess it depends how many downloads you get. If it exactly matches the maximum number of songs you can make under a given payment plan, then it's a non-issue. If it's fewer, though, then it makes very little sense. Why let anyone download a percentage of the songs you allow them to make? Unless, I suppose, you intend to charge them extra for the rest. Double-dipping, I think they call it...

We'll see the details soon enough but it's not going to affect me directly. I have already downloaded all my finished songs as MP3s and burned most of them onto CD so they can't do much about that. I have a few days left before my current Pro subscription runs out and I'm currently downloading everything again, this time in .wav format, along with a bunch of the also-rans, too. 

I'm sure as hell not going to download everything I've made. There are several thousand versions of songs of mine on Suno now because you literally cannot delete anything you ever make. Most of them I never want to hear again, so I won't be wasting hard drive space on them. I still own the copyrights under Suno's own agreement anyway, so they can just sit there forever as far as I'm concerned.

I will not be renewing my subscription when it ends, either. Unless, of course, they offer me another huge discount. Then I might. I also might come back for another go when all those Warner artists, who must be just so excited so be signing away their rights so we can all start remixing their work, which looks like being the game plan. That sounds like a fun toy. I have a whole post on that but it's still brewing.

You Don't Have To Be An AI To Deepfake

Is deepfake a verb? It is now. 

This made me smile. We hear so much about AI copies of famous people, both their images and their voices, it was oddly refreshing to read about such an old-school, analog way of doing much the same thing. 

Johnny Cash's estate is suing Coca Cola over a commercial Coke has been running for a few months, in which - allegedly - a Johnny Cash tribute singer was hired to sing in the lamented country star's signature style. For about five seconds, while some guy (If we're supposed to know who he is, I don't..) wanders through a crowd of sports fans. 

It hardly seems worth complaining about, let alone paying lawyers, but I guess if you have a brand you have to protect it somehow. Shame to think of Johnny Cash as a brand but that's the 21st Century for you.

Some TV Talking 

I had plans today to review the second season of Man on the Inside, along with a quick sidebar on the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 5 but a full review is a post of its own so I'll just say of MotI I liked it but not as much as the first season. Not sure the format can stand a third. It already seems to have turned into more of a family dramedy than a comedy crime show. A full review may or may not follow.

ST 5.1 was a trip, though. I was genuinely taken aback by just how big a deal it felt, especially given I came late to the party. If this was the old days of broadcast television it would have been one of those water-cooler moments, I guess.

Netflix has taken the Wednesday option and pumped it up, dropping the season in three parts, with the final episode also being screened in 350 movie theaters across the USA. It is the streamer's most successful series ever, so I guess they want to make the most of this last hurrah.

The first tranche is four episodes and I did consider watching all of them back-to-back. They're all somewhere around 70-80 minutes long so it's an afternoon, not a whole day. 

In the end I opted to stick to my established practice and just watch one every evening. I watched the first last night. It started slow and ended fast. I was gripped from the intro to the credits and I am not going to say anything about it other than that. I'm doing my absolute best to avoid all spoilers, including what anyone else thinks about it, which believe me has not been easy, so I won't contribute to anyone else's problems if they haven't already seen it.

Always Leave 'Em Singing

Yes, the obligatory musical ending. I have so many songs bookmarked now. Any opportunity to shed one gratefully taken.

House - Charli XCX (Feat. John Cale)

From the soundtrack of Emerald Fennel's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, already controversial before it's even been released. My first and so far only experience of Emerald Fennel's work was her novel Monsters, which at the time I thought was the most amoral Young Adult book I'd ever read. 

It still is and I still do. Only now she's famous so we have it faced out with a Recommends card. Which I did not write. But I would have, if anyone had asked me.

John Cale, of course, among his many, many accolades, is the man I saw perform at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, only a handful of years after the crimes in question, wearing a copy of the signature mask used by the infamous Cambridge Rapist. Even in a hall full of worshipers and admirers, it caused something of a stir. 

Among this company, Charli looks like the nice, polite, well-behaved one...

Here's Where The Story Ends

Yesterday brought the somewhat sad news that Cryptic is shuttering its player-made content platform, The Foundry. Both Neverwinter and Star Trek Online used the engine to allow players to design, build and populate instances for other players to explore and enjoy.

I never tried the STO version but I did spend some time running Tipa's re-creations of classic EverQuest zones in NWO. My review of those experiences, particularly Tipa's "Newfallen" dungeon, positively gushes:

"It was great! At the end, when you get the chance to review and rate the Foundry you've just completed, I gave it five stars. For an old-time EQ player the nostalgia factor is through the roof. The physical reconstruction of Befallen is exemplary"

Tipa herself used regularly to review Neverwinter Foundries on her own, much-missed blog, West Karana. I loved reading those. Probably more than I would have loved playing them. The standard, as you'd imagine, was variable but there were gems to be discovered.

I'm a lot more familiar with EverQuest II's simplified take on the idea. There are nine posts tagged "Dungeon Maker" on this blog, dating back to when it was introduced as part of the controversial "features expansion, Age of Discovery.

I really liked the Dungeon Maker. I used it a lot when it was new and for quite a while afterwards. I made three full dungeons, all of which were quite silly and rather jolly. They were fun to make and  run.

They didn't take long to put together. I don't think any of them took me much longer than a Sunday afternoon. They were quick to run, too. I published them all in-game and they got some play but most people had their mind on something more than cute dialog and silliness when they opened that Dungeon Maker window.

As Telwyn put it in a post about the closure of The Foundry:

"Sadly MMO players being what they so often are, min-maxers to the extreme, exploits were found and the system was heavily nerfed reward-wise... Players also made pits full of monsters that you could easily slaughter with ranged attacks from safety above as a way to speed farm experience."

Almost exactly what happened in EQII. From my own post on the latter days of the Dungeon Maker:

"The dungeons gave no loot per se, only a special currency, but the mobs you killed inside them did give xp. Very good xp. At least, it turned out it was very good if the dungeon-maker stuffed a few rooms with high-value, weak mobs, all piled up to be AE'd.

The most efficient mob slaughterhouses quickly rose to the top of the Dungeon Creator rankings and for the longest time almost all you could hear in /lfg was people forming groups to speed-run them. They had no story, no dialog, no script, no entertainment value of any kind. They were the definition of repetitive tedium but they were efficient so people did them. Over and over and over again."

It may not have mattered all that much when all games were offline and single player. If you want to cheat yourself, go ahead, knock yourself out. Who cares? In the context of a persistent shared space, though, where, whether you like it or not, elements of competetive play exist, such behaviors have an impact that can't be ignored.

In every case I've seen, developers, who one might, at best, call naive or optimistic, introduce systems and mechanics that experience and history should tell them will be exploited. And they are. Abusively, repeatedly and shamelessly.

Over time, if left unattended, these systems become a running sore. Some players gleefully indulge but far more grimly accept. When the widely-accepted understanding is that efficiency comes from doing something dull, repetitive and meaningless, that becomes the meta.

The demographic that enjoys and employs the tools in the way the developers intended - the creatives who put their own time and energy into making what they believe to be entertaining content and the explorers who consume it - find themselves heavily outnumbered by the achievers, who simply want to find the shortest route to the biggest reward.

At its worst, as happened in EQII, the exploits threaten to become a black hole that sucks the life out of the entire game. At which point the nerfs begin.

The developers always try to save their babies and they always fail. A succession of revisions incrementally reduce the attractiveness of the game mode, irritating both those exploiting it and those who want to see it gone, alike. Ever-resourceful, players find a way around the roadblocks. The nerfs intensify. Eventually the entire mechanic is reduced to a rewardless shell. That solves the problem: no-one makes any more content, no-one consumes any. Game over.

In EQII, I can confirm the Dungeon Maker died long ago, at least as a practical source of experience or reward. Holly Windstalker's Producer's Letter from December 2014 gives chapter and verse.  It's still there, should you want to see it. I ran one of my dungeons just now and it still works. You just don't get anything for doing it except the pleasure of my so-called jokes. Other than that, the Dungeon Maker's  mostly used for storage these days. You can stash a lot of house items in a Dungeon Maker dungeon.

I don't know if The Foundries in the two Cryptic games reached that nadir of decline before Cryptic pulled the plug. I don't play either game often and on the odd occasion I do I certainly don't visit the leaderboards to see if anyone's made any new dungeons lately.

The reason Cryptic give for closing The Foundry doesn't have anything to do with misuse or exploits, anyway. All that was dealt with long ago. It's merely that there's no longer anyone left working for the company who knows how the thing works. I imagine very few players are using it any more, either to entertain themselves or others. If it was still popular it would be worth training someone to keep it going.

Player-created content is an excellent idea in theory. It gives everyone more to do and it costs the company less. Unfortunately, players are, as always, their own worst enemies. There's no hope whatsoever that a substantial number won't ruin things for themselves and everyone else if they get the chance.

All of which sugests to me that game developers should think harder before introducing these systems and take much greater care to close all the loopholes beforehand. Yes, I know players will always find exploits no-one thought of but in most cases they're finding ones that anyone could have thought of. And should have.

Gaming has an incredible wealth and depth of talent just waiting to be tapped. No need to outsource or pay - all the resources you need are already there, playing the games, and they'll work for free. In fact, they'll probably pay you.

SOE/DBG's Player Studio shows how a more successful iteration can work. It, too, has had its problems, especially in recent times but it's still there, hanging on, and now Daybreak seem to be ready to blow some of the dust off and hang out a fresh shingle.

Maybe the Dungeon Maker will never make a comeback. Maybe submissions to Player Studio will continue to pile up and process slowly. It's still a better outlook than The Foundry's going to see, more's the pity.

As Wilhelm points out in the comments at TAGN, maintaining legacy systems can be a trial and an expense. On the other hand, closing them down can make you look a little desparate. Here's hoping Cryptic's parsimony doesn't signal the beginning of a trend.

Neverwinter Spring

This weekend saw the first of three short betas for Cryptic's upcoming D&D flavored MMO, Neverwinter. Massively have been giving the game extensive coverage but Tipa at West Karana has by far the best write-up I've seen.

Last November I mentioned my interest but it had faded somewhat . Most of the information that trickled out didn't sound all that inspiring. I didn't even bother signing up for the beta, far less lay out $60 for the "Founder's Pack" so I could play three weekends then have my characters deleted. Oh, and then another three days with my real character before the game launches completely free-to-play. Yes, I know there's a mount and a companion and some other odds and ends but, really... $60 for three beta weekends a month or two before a full F2P launch?

This seems to be a thing, though. City of Steam did it too and I guess if you know you are going to play the game and you know you are going to spend that much in the cash shop anyway, it does no harm to pony up in advance and have the benefit of beta. I can't pretend I won't be doing it for EQNext if the opportunity arises.

Neverwinter, though, I am not that stoked for, but Tipa's piece and some of the comments on it have rekindled my interest, as have some of the videos and screenshots. It's still the Forge content creation system that I most want to get my hands on, but the game itself looks like it could turn out to be fun.

I played Dungeons and Dragons Online for a fair while, first in beta, when it was rubbish (and that's being generous) and later when it had been tarted up into something that could pass for a real MMO in a dim light. By then it had become sort of fun, but the reliance on repeating story-driven dungeons on increasing levels of difficulty struck me as ludicrous after a short while, so my stay was short.

Another point against DDO was the Eberron milieu. It was unfamiliar and I can't say it grew on me much in the time I spent there. I'm no big-time D&D fan but I do know and like the Forgotten Realms setting and that alone makes me considerably more interested in Neverwinter.

I also like what I've seen so far of Cryptic's MMOs. While neither Champions Online nor STO grabbed me, that had more to do with the genres they inhabited than anything about the way they were made. I found both of them clean in design, straightforward and pleasant to play. I have reasonable confidence that the House that made those could make a fantasy MMO that I would enjoy.

There's still the action-MMO aspect to get past, but I found Shawn Schuster's negative impressions of Neverwinter's combat strangely encouraging. The very things he rails against, the hand-holding, the clunky, static movement, the lack of strafing, lead me to hope that there might not be all that much "action" after all.

Anyway, not long to wait. Neverwinter should be out in a couple or three months. I'm quite looking forward to it.