Atlas Obscura

A couple of unrelated news items caught my attention at MassivelyOP yesterday. One was a report that Daybreak had laid off another sixty or seventy people. The other was the announcement of a major new MMO, launching before Christmas.

News of layoffs at any MMO studio isn't generally much of a surprise - worrying, maybe, but hardly unusual. I'm tempted to say the most surprising thing about this one was finding out Daybreak still had seventy people left to let go.

John Smedley flared up on Twitter with some choice quotes that look likely to come back to haunt him one day. I imagine he thought so too when he'd calmed down because they've both disappeared from his timeline, although you can read them in the linked M:OP post.

It's one thing to criticize the running of a studio and the care it takes of its employees but that criticism takes on an entirely different tone when it comes from the person directly responsible for arranging the transfer of said studio to its current owners in the first place.

The background to the story seems murky, as is usually the case in affairs of this kind. My dog in the fight is really the health and future fortunes of the current stable of games but as a longtime fan of SOE/DBG's style of MMORPG I'm also interested in what Daybreak might do next.

The good news, in so far as we know anything, is that the existing games seem to be unaffected by the latest round of redundancies. M:OP clarified the original report with some qualified reassurance: "It sounds as if the core MMORPGs are safe".

This opinion appears to have been derived by MassivelyOP directly from sources among the DBG staffers actually laid off, although the linked article from Variety does include a boilerplate quote from a DBG spokesperson: "we remain focused on supporting our existing games and development of our future titles.”.

Conversely, one of the most striking elements in the M:OP edit, the reference to "a secret game with a top IP", doesn't appear at all in the Variety story.  Indeed, on a first reading, the Variety piece appears to contradict M:OP's precis, with Variety reporting the DBG spokesperson as confirming

"“Our Austin office is not closing.""

while Massively:OP reframes that as:

"those laid off may have been working on a secret game with a top IP (at the Austin studio – now confirmed publicly by Variety)."

I guess both could be correct, if the layoffs are at Austin but Austin stays open with whoever's left still working on...whatever it is they do there... but it's a confusing picture to say the least.

What really struck me - other than the fact that Variety even knows DBG exists - is how little we know about anything major studios are up to behind the scenes. Given that MMOs take years to produce, and especially given the recent trends towards turning their development into some kind of reality show, I find it genuinely surprising to learn that there are still so many secret projects out there.

The other news story I mentioned is a case in point. ARK developers Wildcard are launching a brand-new MMO next week. Yes, next week!

If you get your MMO news from Massively:OP, as I do, you'd be forgiven for thinking the first anyone knew about this was when the trailer was shown at the Twitch Game Awards a couple of days ago. (I didn't even hear about the Twitch Game Awards until they were over, despite having a Twitch account, but leaving that aside...)

Checking YouTube, however, I see that there are several videos up for Atlas, which is what the pirate-themed survival MMO is called, going back at least four months. As my own channel has often demonstrated, if you want to hide something from the general public, you can't do better than post it on YouTube.

The Steam page for Atlas also contradicts the M:OP piece, which describes the game as "first person MMO", while the actual description on the page linked by M:OP clearly states that Atlas is

 "a massively multiplayer first-and-third-person fantasy pirate adventure" (my emphasis).

All sources agree that the game will offer a vast open world capable of holding up to forty thousand players at once, which is Massively Multiple by anyone's criteria, I'd say. Wildcard describe it as an MMO "on the grandest scale" and with claims like this, who can argue?

"Physically sail in real-time across the vast oceans with the proprietary server network technology. Explorers will voyage to over 700 unique landmasses across 45,000 square kilometers, with thousands of Discovery Zones, and ten distinct world regions..."

I'm not sure whether the part about sailing in real-time is a threat or a promise. I don't see much future in a game that requires two weeks of your life just to get from one landmass to another. I'm guessing they just mean no instant travel.

Although the game is described as a "a survival MMO", as you might expect from the makers of ARK, the Steam page makes it sound far more like a full-on sandbox. It will even have some theme-park content featuring "challenging main questlines".

If it all sounds too good to be true - and it does - then temper your excitement in the knowledge that next week's "launch" is in fact the start of a proposed two year period of Early Access. How much of the mind-boggling feature set will be in place by Christmas 2020 I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Wildcard does have an impressive record with ARK, though. I've never played it but I've read a ton about it and for all the teething troubles and complaints, most of what I read was people enjoying themselves. ARK's overall rating on Steam is "mixed" but its recent rating, from almost seven thousand votes, is "very positive", which to me suggests an Early Access project that produced a solid, successful game.

The official early-access release trailer is impressive even though you can see it's very much a work in progress. This article at PCGamer fleshes out a lot of detail about how the game might play. I'm not particularly a fan of pirate settings and I positively dislike ship-to-ship combat, but even so I'm very tempted. 

The 100GB download and the fact that my GPU might not quite meet the minimum spec is about all that's putting me off. Certainly the $30 price tag sounds reasonable and the option of playing on either PvE or PvP servers is perfect.

What I'm really left wondering, though, is what else might be out there? Who knows which studio is working on what project? We base our expectations for the genre on what we can see but so much is hidden.

We don't even know what that "top IP" Daybreak were working on was, let alone whether the layoffs mean it's been cancelled or just changed development phase. Was it an internal or an external IP? Did the last hope for EQ3 just die, or was that the rumored Planetside 3 that crashed and burned? Or was it an IP on license that we'd never even imagined DBG might be working on and so will never miss?

All we can say for sure is is there's a lot more going on than we ever know about. Until we do. And I like it that way. Long may it continue!
 

Everything You Thought You Knew About Columbus Nova And Daybreak Games Is Wrong!

Well this is intriguing. Massively OP reported today that

"On April 6th, the US Department of the Treasury targeted several Russian oligarchs and froze their assets due to "destabilizing activities" by these figures (including suspected interference in the 2016 U.S. election). One of the oligarchs so punished was  Viktor Vekselberg who owns the Renova Group conglomerate and its subsidiary, Columbus Nova".

Columbus Nova, of course, is the company that bought Daybreak Games from Sony Online Entertainment three years ago. Or so we thought.

MOP went on to speculate that the freezing of "...between $1.5 and $2 billion assets from Vekselberg" could have a real and dire impact on Daybreak Games Company". Well, you'd think so.

This unnerved me somewhat. I would very much like to carry on playing several DBG titles for a good while yet and anything that threatens their continued good health makes me twitchy.

Rather than sit around chewing my nails I went to Google to see what I could find. I read the details of an ongoing billion dollar lawsuit affecting Columbus Nova that has nothing to do with the current focus of the U.S. Government's concerns. That seemed like a potentially bad thing for DBG in its own right.

I also read some more details of the asset freezing. It seems that while Mr. Vekselberg is partly based in Switzerland as well as in Russia, Columbus Nova itself operates out of New York, under the stewardship of
 Mr Vekselberg's cousin, Andrew Intrater, who is a U.S. citizen.

So far so confusing. There's another arm or wing or something called Columbus Nova Technology Partners, also based in the U.S. With a name like that you might think they'd be the section housing DBG but I checked their portfolio and there was no sign of the owlbear's glaring eye.

Eventually, inevitably, I ended up at Wikipedia. The entry on Columbus Nova there is brief but it contains this surprising statement:  

"Former Senior Managing Partner Jason Epstein also owns Daybreak Game Company".

Wait, what? He owns it how? Privately? So I looked up Mr Epstein:

"Jason Epstein is an investor and business executive who is the primary owner and executive chairman of Daybreak Game Company, the online gaming company."

His LinkedIn entry agrees. At this point I was starting think that maybe "owner" is some kind of technical business term that actually means something other than what you'd think. So I googled that. It isn't.

About then some trouble blew up at Hills with Blackgate and I was defending camps and runing yaks for an hour. After that I went and had my tea.

By the time I got back Massively had updated their original piece a couple of times. The story had ceased to be about the imminent threat to DBG from Russian asset freezing. It had moved on to "who the heck owns this damn company anyway?"

DBG had given MOP a statement that basically confirms what I'd found out for myself but was having a hard time believing. Indeed, it went somewhat further into the Twilight Zone:

“Daybreak Game Company has no affiliation with Columbus Nova. Jason Epstein, former member of Columbus Nova, is and has always been the primary owner and executive chairman of Daybreak Game Company (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) which he acquired from Sony in February 2015.”

Not only does Columbus Nova not own DBG - it never did! Jason Epstein, private investor and "angel", owned it outright, all along.

As for the original press release and all the subsequent PR and general chit-chat that mention Columbus Nova in the context of either owning or operating Daybreak Games, to quote MOP quoting DBG, it was all "an error on the part of the company":

“It was current executive chairman Jason Epstein, former senior managing partner of Columbus Nova that acquired Daybreak, not Columbus Nova itself. That distinction was never corrected in the past, so we are correcting that now”

Well, good. I'm glad we got that sorted out...it's only been three years. Amazing no-one noticed before, really.

I suspect there may be more to this than we know so far but at the moment I'm mostly feeling relieved that the company is apparently in private ownership. Suddenly, an awful lot of the stuff that's happened - or hasn't - since the SOE sale makes a lot more sense.

As one of two businesses (Harmonix, the other, also being a Gaming company) owned by one rich guy, who may very likely be personally interested in gaming, DBG looks like a very nice asset indeed, whereas I always thought it sat extremely uncomfortably in the portfolio of a multinational investment group with billions of dollars in any number of non-gaming projects.

I'm also feeling quite pleased with myself for finding most of this out for myself before I read it on Massively, although I'm a bit miffed I didn't do it quickly enough to send them the tip and get the credit! Oh well, that's what I have a blog for.

Where we go from here could be interesting to say the least. Perhaps now this is all out in the open we might even get some statements about what course Mr Epstein plans on charting for the future of Daybreak Games. Seeing as how he owns it outright and all...

Then again, maybe not. Steady as she goes!

Familiarity Breeds Content : EQ2

As I may have mentioned once or twice, there's nothing I like better than a free lockbox. Whenever I see one I grab it gleefully, chortling as I rip the lid off. EQ2 has just added some real corkers with a new quest that strikes me as immensely - possibly insanely - generous. And if that's not enough it's also really good fun!

When Update 105 arrived a week or so ago I was so focused on the belated appearance of the new Planes of Prophecy Signature tradeskill questline that I barely registered another feature, Season 3 Familiars. Well, why would I? It was just some cash shop  fluff, wasn't it?

Familiars were added to the game in May 2017, since when they have bedded down nicely. They seem to be a fun addition, designed to appeal to Gotta Catch 'Em All collectors at one end of a peculiar spectrum that abuts the Min Max Bleeding Edge Elite at the other.

'Scuse me mister. Got any familiars you want findin'?

For everyone else Familiars are yet another of EQ2's vast range of optional extras. If they were easier to come by I might have paid them more attention but when they first appeared I observed that although the cages they come in were available as drops, quest rewards and cash shop purchases, the only way it looked like I was going to get one was to buy it. Which, out of curiosity, I did. 

In the months since then I've picked up a couple through gameplay but I haven't bought any more,
nor felt the need or desire to do so. Neither have I paid much attention to the system or how it might be developing, although I vaguely registered that new ones had started to hit the cash shop every so often in something called "Seasons".

For a few months things carried on like that; DBG turning coin off the usual suspects while the rest of the population got on with their own business. Then, along with the third batch of Familiars that landed in the cash shop this month, came a new development.

There's a very well established practice in many games whereby items can be upgraded by "feeding" them to each other. I think I first encountered it in City of Steam and I remember it being a big part of Blade and Soul when I was playing. Mrrx at To Game For Life is currently exploring such a system in great depth with his series of posts about Summoner's War.

As the update explains "In addition to familiar training potions, you will also be able to use new familiars to level your favorite familiar." You simply Examine (right-click) the familiar in your inventory and select the option to "consume" it, adding the xp generated to the familiar you currently have equipped.

So far, so familiar, so to speak. Except that it only works with the current Season's familiars - any you already have from previous Seasons aren't eligible. As the website says,  "Familiars earned through /claim, quests, and any other specialized way will not be able to be consumed for experience".

Boo! And Hiss! Right? More slippery cash shoppery practice! Well, no, not really.

EQ2 has a first class cash shop. As well as acting as a sales window for the excellent Player Studio it sells all kinds of good and useful things, most of them for very fair prices indeed. Yes, there are some of the dreaded loot crates, containing randomized Mercenaries and Familiars, but whatever you get out of them can be converted to the valued Status currency, something which no regular player can ever have enough of. There are people who buy the crates just for that.

I would wager that we get to visit this "Conservatory" at some point. Once it's in the lore it's only a matter of time before it's in the game.

Still, there were murmurings about the new leveling route for Familiars taking this particular curve. And then this happened. A new quest that rewards a Season 3 Familiar Crate.

I spent two hours doing the new quest, Familiars Wild, last night and when I finish this post I'm going to spend a couple more doing it on another account. I found it to be both entertaining and rewarding. Especially rewarding.

The EQ2Traders link above gives the full walkthrough but in brief it goes like this:

• Find a bunch of new NPCs hanging around outside the bank in either South Freeport or South Qeynos.
• Chat with them for a bit.
• Read the book they give you (actually that bit's optional but reading books is good).
• Chat to them again.
• Go find the type of "familiar" they ask you to look for.
• Catch the required number with the cage they gave you.
• Open the reward and get a free Season 3 familiar.

You can then add the familiar to your collection or use it to upgrade a familiar you already have.

I first did this with my Berserker which was, let me tell you, a barrel of laughs, oh yes... Did you know a Berserker has no zero-damage attacks? I've been playing one for years and I never noticed. I killed an awful lot of insects before I finally got eleven live ones in that cage. When the very least damage you can possibly do is about half a million hit points it's hard to be gentle.

Hard to say who looks the most ridiculous..

I was very pleased with the Legendary Familiar I got. I had a look at him. He wasn't pretty but he was amusing. The familiars follow you like pets and have full animations. You can hide them if you want but where's the fun in that?

It was only about half an hour later that a thought struck me. The Familiar I received was flagged No Trade. If this quest was per account, wouldn't it need to be Heirloom? I was on another account (a free to play one) by then so I went and did it with my Necromancer. Then I did it again with my Guardian. Then with every character on the account. I found it very moreish indeed and if it hadn't gotten so late I might have logged in more accounts just so I could go on doing it.

So, the quest is per character and according to Niami Denmother, who knows, it's intended to be a Daily. The NPC certainly invites you to "come back tomorrow" although at the  moment he won't give you a repeat. That's supposedly a bug, to be fixed in the next patch, which should be Tuesday.

This one licks the top of his own head. And you really don't want to see what's going on down below...

After that you should be able to complete the quest for a current season familiar every day, on every character on every account you have including F2P. As I said at the top, that seems to me to be immensely generous.

I'm one hundred percent happy with the way Daybreak post-SOE manages this kind of thing. It seems to me that they bend over backwards to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake, whether they pay or freeload, whether they eat, sleep and live EQ2 or just drop in once in a blue moon out of curiosity. There's always a wealth of things to do, usually something new, and as a semi-regular, rather casual player I always feel fully included.

This quest is a fine example of that philosophy. I just hope they don't go and nerf it tomorrow and leave me eating crow. It does seem extraordinarily generous...

Can I Click It? : Ashes of Creation

When Intrepid Studios released their latest video this week I didn't take much notice. Yes, I backed the successful Ashes of Creation Kickstarter but my attitude to crowdfunded projects tends towards fire and forget, with the emphasis on forget.

I probably should be paying more attention. After all, I didn't just back AoC once, I backed it twice - firstly in my name and then again on behalf of Mrs Bhagpuss. She didn't ask me to do that, it just looked to be one of the only two possible post-GW2 MMOs we might end up playing together (the other being Pantheon).

I thought I might as well get both our names down early in case the beta turned out to be fun. The last time we tested something together was probably Landmark and that worked out pretty well - for a while.

There is a connection between Landmark and Ashes of Creation, of course. The "Companies our team has worked with previously" section on the Intrepid website has Daybreak's glaring eye front and center. Even more tellingly, of the nine listed titles members of the team worked on before joining Intrepid no fewer than seven are SOE/DBG MMOs. Landmark doesn't get a mention but EQNext does. Is that a healthy MMO lineage or does it suggest a worrying degree of inbreeding?

Mrs Bhagpuss was never sold on the voxel aspect of Landmark and I became quickly and increasingly skeptical about almost everything planned for EQNext. Whether either of us  would want to see any of those ideas carried on by a new studio is uncertain.

Nice dungeon.

While Landmark ended up being a fun toy that I would have gone on fiddling around with for years, I can't say I suffered even the slightest pang of sadness or loss when DBG shut it down. It was a directionless mess that never came close even to working out what it wanted to be, far less being that thing.

As for EQNext, what began as an exciting new direction fast turned into a vanity project that looked set to rival Star Citizen for hubris. I was positively relieved when someone at Columbus Nova finally had the gumption to pull the plug.

Looking at the design brief and some of the concept art for Ashes of Creation, I can't help but think that there's some carry-over from the doomed Landmark/EQN project. That might be concerning but the proposal for Ashes of Creation does look less insane overwrought. It still strikes me as over-ambitious in some respects but then so do the feature lists of almost all in-development MMOs. At least this time the suspicion is only that some features may have to be cut rather than that the entire underpinnings of the project are so far beyond the technical grasp of the people involved that the game will never even manifest a working prototype.

Obviously I think Ashes of Creation has potential as an MMO I'd one day enjoy. If not I wouldn't have backed it. Even so, I don't spend much time speculating about how it may turn out. I don't expect to be using my guaranteed beta invite until 2020 or so. These things always take much longer than the promises and pledges would have you believe.

Nice woodland.

Consequently I have barely been skimming the odd flecks of PR that drift into view. I took a very quick glance at the recent video when Massively OP featured it but I saw nothing to comment on and I'd already blanked it from my thoughts - until I read UltrViolet's brief observation:

My first draft of this post had a whole lot more negative words here, but I’m editing it way down to just this: I didn’t think the game looked very good, and I’m shocked that they released that video.

 Was it really that bad? What did I miss?

So I took another look at it. I still skimmed, but this time I dipped in and out of the whole thing, watching thirty seconds here, thirty seconds there.

And it looks pretty good to me. In fact, it looks remarkably similar to the footage from that other would-be MMO on my watch-list, Pantheon. Two upcoming MMOs, each heavily influenced by the design ethos of SOE/DBG, looking not unlike each other. Who'd have thought it?

Mouse pointer clearly in shot there - appeared to be used to target.

The characters look like fantasy rpg types. The world looks like a fantasy rpg world (western variant). The spell effects look like spell effects and the combat looks like combat. There's a lot of running around, the animation looks decent, movement seems smooth, even the cloaks ripple in the breeze. No-one gets stuck on scenery or falls through the world - at least in the bits I watched.

What more do you want from a "pre-alpha"? Performance-wise, in my testing days that would have exceeded the brief for what we called mid-beta. I think Pantheon looks the better of the two on all counts so far but I'd happily play either of them right now on the evidence I've seen.

Most importantly to me I spotted something in the recent AoC video that I've looked for in earlier footage and failed to see - evidence that the game uses standard MMORPG controls. I hadn't until now been able to ascertain for certain whether the game was going to go with old school, tab-targeting and hotbars or the supposedly more widely accepted ARPG route.

While I can and do play MMOs that hide the cursor and lock the mouse for combat only, it's very much not my preference. I find it awkward and cumbersome even when, as in DCUO or Black Desert, it's done well. Mrs Bhagpuss, who can also use that system if she has to, dislikes it more than I do. She would have to be incredibly interested in a particular game to make the necessary effort.

Watching the developers playing their own game this time there were plenty of moments where I could clearly see the mouse cursor moving purposefully across the screen while the characters were traveling. Several times I thought I saw someone select an enemy with the mouse pointer and that enemy's nameplate window appear on screen as a result.

I don't think you can see the pointer in this shot but he did just use it to target that flower.

That was reassuring indeed but the best part was a moment late in the video when I clearly saw the mouse pointer move to one of the icons on the hotbar and click it to fire off an attack. It had long been my hope that the visual presence of the hotbar indicated it had a use in combat but naturally no developer is going to be a clicker like me. Except this one time, so thanks for that, GM Steven!

Of course, it may be that there's an invisible GM/Dev overlay in use - it looks that way quite often in the video. Also this is pre-alpha - anything can change and most things probably will. Nothing is proven until I can actually play it myself.

In an attempt to nail this one down I went and did a bit of research. Unsurprisingly at this stage everything is still somewhat vague. There's also a good deal of the familiar hand-waving you always get in conversations with developers of MMOs that almost no player can actually play yet, wherein everything is going to be amazing and all the systems will be innovative and nothing like anything you may ever have played before.

With those caveats, the basic plan appears to be a form of tab-targeting with control of the mouse left open. There will be telegraphs and dodging and it all sounds a lot like GW2, which would be wonderful.

We'll see. Eventually. I remain hopeful that Ashes of Creation might end up an MMORPG in the grand tradition, not just yet another ARPG with pretensions. I hope so, anyway.

And with that I think I'll forget about it for another year or two.

Oh, Calamity! : EQ2

Yesterday marked the official pre-launch of EQ2's fourteenth expansion, Planes of Prophecy. The actual launch doesn't come until the end of November, the 28th to be precise, but if you can't wait you can pre-order now and get instant access to the beta.

I happened to be at home when the livestream began and I didn't seem to have anything better to do than watch it. I went to Twitch first, assuming that's where it would be, but apparently Twitch is so last year now. Facebook Live is the place to go.

That made it a first for me. I don't have a Facebook account but apparently that doesn't matter. And I have to say that it was a cleaner interface and a less fussy experience all round than Twitch.

I don't know if you can still view the presentation - I couldn't find it this morning but I didn't look very hard. I wouldn't bother trying to find it anyway, unless you want to gaze in wonder on the metal god that is Kyle "Kander" Vallee, who looks exactly as I imagine all the CCP devs must look like but probably none of them do...

Ship ahoy!

The forty-five minute promo was MC'd by the somewhat nervous Community Co-ordinator Roxxlyy, who looked, in the words of Ed Reardon, about twelve years old. As reported by the late EQ2Wire, she was an intern until very recently but SOE and DBG have a long history of battlefield promotions so that's not too surprising.

Roxxlyy, Kander, Gninja and someone I forget ran through various highlights of the expansion, including the Prestige home, the Planes of Innovation and Magic (the latter being the expansion's open-world zone), a raid dungeon and the new Crossbow weapon, usable by all classes, which levels up using xp. Plus another ten levels of course.

There wasn't a huge amount of hard information but there was more than enough to convince me - not that I needed any convincing. The full details of the three versions (Standard, Collectors and Premium) are laid out here. I have never bought anything but the basic model of any EQ or EQ2 expansion yet and this is no exception. I have, however, already pre-ordered the Standard one. With the 10% Members' discount it was less than £25, which I think is very good value indeed.

I make it 18.30 hours precisely by my chronometer. (Actually this is the /salute animation - very Roman!)

The only bonus you get with the Standard is the Clockwork Calamity illusion but it's a very nice perk indeed. In keeping with the strongly nostalgic - not to say retro - theme of the expansion, this is modeled on the classic EverQuest clockwork model, complete with key in the back.

Star animator Ttobey has hooked it up with fifteen emote animations plus the usual idling suite and you can ride and fly all mounts with the illusion displaying. Well, no, actually. They said you could but you can't. Not if, like me, you have wings. You just hang in the air, apparently unsupported, because while the various "wing" mounts go in your Mount slot they actually display from the Cloak slot - I think.

Anyway, a levitating clockwork looks pretty good, although they maybe should switch off the clanking "running" sounds. The animations are fantastic. So good I took the trouble to make a short video to show off a few of them.

The Clockwork isn't just about looks. It's also a buff and a substantial one. Every recent expansion has come with a buff like this attached but I always forget to use them. So much so that, when I checked this morning, I found the last two still unclaimed.

Given that I regularly complain about how slow the xp is in each expansion, especially when new levels are involved, it seems counter-intuitive (or possibly idiotic) that I don't take advantage of the buffs designed to alleviate that, not least the 10% direct buff to xp gain.

Have you really got nothing better to do than just hang about?

The problem has always been that the buffs come from an item that you place in your house and go visit and I just never get around to doing it. Also, they have always been one per account, meaning every character has to go to the same house to get the buff.

This time is different: the buff is an illusion cast on yourself from your spellbook and every character gets their own. No excuse not to use it this time. Plus, if I recall correctly from the presentation, the buff stacks with previous buffs from the house items. So I suppose I'll have to place those after all.

There's no NDA on the beta so no doubt lots more hard information will come out over the next few weeks. Also, I'm sure, a huge amount of complaints because if there's one thing EQ2 players know how to do it's complain.

I think EQ2 is now the best value MMORPG available. Were you to start now as a brand new player. for the extremely reasonable price of the Standard expansion you'd get all thirteen previous expansions. And the base game, of course, is free. That's a lot of content and it's top quality, too.

If you're a returning player who may have fallen out of range of the current end-game, note that you get a Level 100 boost with all versions of Planes of Prophecy. As for gear, which was a problem for some at the beginning of the last expansion, well, if Yun Zi's gear wasn't enough, there's a Quartermaster in Plane of Magic who will give (not sell) you a complete set of armor that's a slight upgrade from the Panda's set.

I don't plan to do anything in the beta even though there are some good rewards for doing so. It's only a month or so until the real thing. I can wait. I might pop in to take a screenshot or two, though, and the beta forums are open to all to read, so I'm not going to try and keep my launchday experience entirely pristine. I'm sure there'll be plenty to discover even so.

The inevitable doomsayers are already talking about this being the last expansion EQ2 will ever get and crowing about the imminent demise of the game itself. On what evidence I'm not sure, other than that no MMO can go on forever and EQ2 has been around for a while now.

If longevity was based on quality rather than fashion, though, EQ2 would be safe for the rest of the century. Long may it continue!

Currently Residing In The "Where Are They Now?" File...

As MassivelyOP's annual trawl and Wilhelm's drill-down on Blizzard suggested, 2017 was hardly a vintage year for April Fools' jokes. Maybe in a world soaked with fake news, where every day something real happens that we only wish was someone's crazy fantasy, we're all happier humming along with Morrissey. (And you can find that video clip in the dictionary under "Irony").

I've never liked April Fool's Day - well, not since I was seven years old - so I'm more than happy to see it fade away. Even in MMOs it's never been a holiday I look forward to with any enthusiasm. At best it's a lackluster celebration and at worst it can be intensely irritating.

I do like free stuff, though, and I do like short, easy quests that reward house pets and mounts and tokens to spend at vendors who stock things I actually want to buy. All of which is pretty much the house style in EQ2 these days.

As I was pottering through this year's new quest for Bristlebane Day (a holiday that actually lasts almost two weeks, although there are even more high jinks on the High Silly Day itself) I started thinking about how well SOE, and now DBG, does these kind of events. That, naturally, put me in mind of Emily "Domino" Taylor, who did so much to foster that reputation.

It occurred to me that, after all the commentary about her decision to return to Canada for what turned out to be as much political reasons as anything else, we didn't seem to have heard much about what she might have ended up doing there. The last I'd seen was a post on her own seldom-updated blog.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to fly down here?

So I set about stalking her doing a little research, which pretty much consisted of checking her Twitter feed and LinkedIn. Anyone can be Bob Woodward nowadays.

It turns out that Domino is now a Producer at Smoking Gun Interactive. No, me neither. They seem to have a close relationship with Microsoft, for whom they currently provide Age of Empires: Castle Siege, the "#1 grossing game on Windows Store" as well as some titles for XBox and Kinect. They also worked with NASA on a Mars Rover game.

I'd tell you more about the company itself but the "About" page plays music you can't turn off and I literally couldn't concentrate to read. It was like a time-trip to the late '90s and not at all in a good way. Give it a go - it's like an April Fool experience you can have all year round!

Anyway, that's where Domino is now. The focus of SGI appears to be mobile and small-scale. Also retro - their last project was a revamp of the "classic" Microsoft Solitaire Collection for Android and iOS. Whether there's anything MMO in the works I would somewhat doubt.

If there's not then that would be a shame.  I'm sure Domino's an excellent hire to produce any genre of video game but she's an MMORPG creator par excellence and MMOs need people who think the way she does about content and immersion and inclusion.

All of which makes a little something I noticed about her LinkedIn profile particularly intriguing. Now, I'm not on LinkedIn, not being self-employed and anyway already having this platform right here to promote my all-round magnificence, so I am not entirely up to speed on how it works.

Looking positively palatial. Who'd believe these tiles only cost one gold a pop?

I may be reading something into this that isn't there. It may simply be a function of how LinkedIn entries are structured or a reflection of contract expiration dates or just a plain oversight. With those caveats, Domino's current entry does say this:

Producer
Smoking Gun Interactive Inc.
March 2017 – Present (2 months)Vancouver, Canada Area

Lead Game Designer
Daybreak Game Company LLC
March 2016 – Present (1 year 2 months)

She was "contributing to prototyping of an unannounced title" at DBG so maybe she's still doing consultancy on it. Of course, these days, even MMO developers aren't interested in making MMOs anymore, so maybe it doesn't matter much anyway.

Good luck in Vancouver, Domino. I hope your cat settles in soon. Put some butter on her paws, that's what my Grandma would have done. Then again, she told me if I swallowed chewing gum it would wind around my heart and I'd die so maybe not...

It's Not Easy Being DBG : Landmark, EQNext

In a move that surely surprised no-one Daybreak Games yesterday announced the intent to sunset Landmark on February 21 2017. Why this particular date, who knows? It's a Tuesday, which is DBG's regular patch day, so I guess it's just convenient. Everything has to end sometime. Why not then?

The announcement has stirred up the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark or indeed any other SOE or DBG game. Not, at least, in the last decade or so. Tyler F.M. Edwards at Superior Realities has the best take on the hand-wringing, fist-shaking echo chamber that passes for a community in some quarters these days:

"To be blunt, I think the blame for Landmark’s end rests squarely on the shoulders of the MMO community. When EverQuest Next was cancelled, the community turned on Daybreak, apparently not understanding that sometimes new concepts simply do not work...the community, however, chose to demonize Daybreak as some sort of ogre. They took EverQuest Next’s cancellation personally. And a lot of that hate spilled over to Landmark.

People hated Landmark because it wasn’t Next. People hated Landmark just because it was made by Daybreak. People hated it because they had misinformed or unrealistic expectations of what it was supposed to be".

Read the whole of Tyler's post. It catches the tone exactly, how Landmark meant a lot to those who loved it, how much it will be missed, and how galling it is for anyone who actually spent real time in Landmark to see the almost self-congratulatory bloodletting unleashed by those who never did.

An even more instructive read is Feldon's excellent post-hoc analysis at EQ2Wire. Feldon, as always, knows more than he's able to articulate openly but here you scarcely even need to read between the lines. The numerous quotes from ex-SOE devs, who worked on Landmark and EQNext during what must have been some very miserable and disturbing times in the dying days of the ancien régime, are devestating.

These are just a few of the highlights:

"…the decision to publish Landmark was not driven to sell something to players. It was done to show that SOE had a pipeline of products so it would be more attractive to prospective buyers"

"Landmark was a disaster. It should have remained a toolset for building EQN and nothing more."

"Landmark was Dave’s (Georgeson's) obsession, and there simply was no way to convince him otherwise about it being a game. I believe this ultimately killed EQN."

"Dave approached the project with the wrong assumptions and when the market pushed back he doubled down on his mistakes. EQN was his responsibility and he blew it, and Smed should have removed him sooner when it became clear what was happening."

 All from people who worked on the project. And there's a lot more. Go read it if you haven't already.

Feldon himself has some choice observations, the headline among which is probably this one:

"The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

 This one won't surprise anyone who plays EQ or EQ2:

"Feedback from the existing EverQuest and EverQuest II teams was largely ignored. Instead, credence was primarily given to outside feedback from recently laid off 38 Studios staff and other outsiders in the industry."

And, perhaps most tellingly of all:

"Sony Online Entertainment took a $62 million writeoff in 2013 for development costs associated with EverQuest Next and H1Z1". 

I hold my hand up. Dave Georgeson, John Smedley and the rest of that whole, sorry crew fooled me the way they fooled the industry, the media and the rest of the fans. I wrote pieces in praise of EQNext even as I understood it would be an MMO that wasn't being made for me or for the millions of former and current EQ and EQ2 players but for a whole, new, much larger audience. I understood the compromises that would require and I knew and wrote that the game would not, in all likelihood, be one I'd enjoy very much, yet I wished it well and hoped it would succeed.

What I didn't realize was that there would be no game, no matter how long we waited, because no-one who was making it had any idea how it could be made. I didn't realize the Smed and Smokejumper dog and pony show was just that - a carnival huckster operation linked to some of the widest-eyed, most naive wishful-thinking ever seen outside a pre-school playground.

The very first comment on the EQ2Wire piece sums it up nicely:

"I am just speechless as how much Georgeson fucked over this franchise."

Aren't we all?  And yet I don't "hate" him for it. I don't believe anyone in this whole unholy mess was acting maliciously. Like so many other games development stories it's a tale of people who think they know more than they know, who think they can do more than they can do, and above all, who believe if they say something often enough and loud enough it will become true by the sheer force of their wishing it so.

Well it doesn't. It won't. It can't. EQNext always sounded too good be true and it was. Or rather it wasn't and never will be.

As for Landmark, far from being the full-fledged MMO Dave Georgeson claimed, promised and finger-crossed it would be, it never even managed to be the toolset it should have been. As Feldon's investigations plainly discover, even the tools didn't work and when they did no-one knew how or why.

And yet for all that we had fun. I had fun.  Aywren had fun. Tyler had fun. Even Wilhelm, who's keeping a list, had a few moments. Hundreds, thousands of amazing structures were built, projects started, memories made. I had good times in Landmark, some of which I've written about here. I spent many happy hours noodling around there and if I regret anything it's only that I spent too much time.

Far from feeling ripped off for paying some $150 for two alpha packages I feel I got my money's worth and then some. Between us Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent hundreds of hours in Landmark and almost all of those were good hours.

So, will I miss Landmark? No, not really. I'm glad to have experienced it but if I'm honest I was done with it a while ago. All my houses eventually fell down, including the final one I built after the game officially went Live. The main he reason was I couldn't ever remember to log in often enough to keep them standing. When you have to remind yourself to log in you can hardly claim you'll miss it when it stops.

And in the end, what was Landmark? It wasn't quite a game and it certainly wasn't a virtual world. It was supposed to be those things and a toolset too but the best description I can come up with is that Landmark was a toy.

Like a toy, I played with it now and again, when the mood took me, but as soon as I put it down I forgot all about it. If I miss it, ever, it will be the way I miss my old Hot Wheels set, vaguely and with a mild, warm nostalgia. I wouldn't go out and buy another.

I understand that's not how many will be feeling right now, although you'd need to define "many" rather specifically, since these days peak population across the entire game falls short of a couple of hundred people. The builders and creators, working on some of those stunning projects or just puttering around, like my old gaming friend who was busy building his own take on The Shire with some guildmates from LoTRO, those folks will be angry, upset, hurt, bereft.

Some will feel tricked. Some will feel betrayed. They will curl in or lash out. Inevitably, the blank slate of Daybreak Games and the faceless corporate monolith that is Columbus Nova will take a splattering of paint while the real perpetrators of this outrage not only escape condemnation but even reap the deeply undeserved rewards of misplaced sympathy: Dave Georgeson, who appears to have left the industry and Smed, who the industry appears to be leaving behind, not to mention the ever-anonymous Russell Shanks, who presided over DBG while more poor decisions continued to be made, as well as the rest who slipped away quietly while the sign-painters were changing the names on the doors.

Yes, Columbus Nova and the current Daybreak management could have finessed the end of both EQNext and Landmark with a softer touch. It was foolish to claim EQNext was being canned because "it wasn't fun". They should have said "because it won't run and never will". Because "we bit off more than we could chew, we had dreams bigger than our ability to realize them, because we made promises we couldn't keep".

They might have adopted a warmer, more empathic tone. They might even have resisted slamming the door on any remaining hope quite so fiercely, although that in itself might merely have compounded earlier errors of judgment.

They should have said sorry and meant it but by the time there was no putting off the inevitable any longer all the people from whom an apology would have meant anything were nowhere to be seen. I imagine the main thing Columbus Nova is sorry about is that they ever got involved in this farrago in the first place. Like the rest of us I imagine they were mesmerized by smoke and mirrors and sold a handful of beans. When they rubbed the fairy dust from their eyes the carnival was gone.

I'd love - I'd love -  for the closure of Landmark to draw a line under this whole sorry episode. I'd love for late-period SOE to slip away into the history books taking its ill-conceived, ill-fated, ill-humored EQNext project with it, never to be mentioned again. I'd love for the current management team at Daybreak to be allowed to get on with day to day operations and business as usual.

Yes, I'd love that but this is the internet. This is gaming. No grudge is ever forgotten. No wound is ever allowed to heal. The very best those of us who love the franchise can hope is that Daybreak under Columbus Nova finally becomes so boring that no-one remembers it's there.

Fat chance. Next up, some necessary but controversial decision involving LotRO or DDO. Or an announcement of some new game that everyone can project their fantasies and fears onto without ever needing to see let alone play. The caravan rolls on.

A Very Merry Frostfell To You : EQ2

As is generally the way of things when news editors are involved, the only headlines DBG saw yesterday concerned a couple of bugs in the latest update. I'm sure the disappearance of the Signature Questline reward set a few pulses racing but it was swiftly addressed - no rollback necessary.

Far more worthy of comment in my opinion is the ongoing effort DBG's EQ2 team consistently maintains in order not only to keep the game ticking along but to make sure it's continually growing. We've just had what I consider to be an excellent expansion and yet, before the paint is dry, here comes Frostfell.

Of course, every MMO - quite possibly literally every MMO -  will be putting up some sort of mid-winter festival this month. I happened upon a swarm of Grimps over in Qeynos Hills when I popped into the original EverQuest to take a few screenshots and Tyria will begin the Wintersday celebrations next week. It's a racing certainty that everyone reading this will see some kind of snow-related event in his or her MMO of choice within a matter of days.

Frostfell remains my favorite nonetheless. I can vividly remember the excitement when the Frostfell Wonderland Village first opened its wardrobe doors way back in 2006. The times we spent there, fighting over present spawns or running the Icy Keep instance over and over and over for Eci tokens. The Christmases we spent running through half-finished quest chains on Test. The goblins, the gifts, the bad puns. Happy days!

Year in, year out Santa Glug's Goblin Helpers SOE developers and designers went above and beyond the call of duty, adding new quests, new presents, new crafting recipes, new house items and new gear every year without fail. In 2013 the zone got a complete makeover and it looks fantastic.

The transition to DBG may have reduced the budget but the Frostfell Spirit remains undimmed. This year, yet again, we got a full, new quest in addition to three new books of recipes, seven new gifts, and more besides. Playing GW2 as I have been these past four years, where ANet profess to make an actual virtue out of leaving holiday events unchanged, (if, that is, they don't remove them entirely), I am acutely aware of the exceptional efforts of Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's small but dedicated crew.

The new quest, which I completed last night, is excellent. A fun romp through a repurposed Sleeper's Tomb involving plenty of snowballs, it's straightforward enough that I was able to complete it without reference to the wiki. Just as well, since when I checked afterwards to see if I'd missed anything I found no-one had written it up yet.

The rewards are excellent - if you like housing as much as Syp or I do. I was spoilt for choice between the two icy gargoyle models but in the end I chose the one that didn't look like it was about to bite my head off.

With that it was off to my Maj'Dul mansion to find somewhere to put it, along with the rat in a snowglobe given to me by Santa Glug. My ratonga's is house is now so full of junk treasures that it takes up to thirty seconds to load every time I zone in.

I really should think about using one of the  several Prestige houses I've acquired over the years to take some of the overspill but somehow that  place is home. It was a lot of hard work getting the faction to buy it and I can't really imagine living anywhere else.

The other big Frostfell news is that the festival is coming to the TLE Stormhold server for the first time. That is very definitely enough to get me to log my SK there in and spend some time in the Village.

I also took advantage of the free transfer token offered to everyone on the now-redundant Race to Trakanon server, which closes in the New Year, that race having been won by...someone. I moved my mid-teens Bruiser to Skyfire and he may be the one to get the benefit of the Level 100 Boost that came with Kunark Ascending. I did play a max-level Bruiser regularly back when the cap was 90 so I feel reasonably confident I'd get the hang of it again. He deserves some Frostfell fun too.

In the old days, when EQ2 was my main game, I'd have seen so much of Frostfell by the end of December I'd be almost as keen to see it go as I was to see it arrive. These days my concern is more over how I'm going to fit in all the things I want to do over the holidays in both Tyria and Norrath.

I guess I'd better get on with it instead of sitting here chatting!


Addendum:

And look what Santa Glug had for me today! This fantastic "Alabaster Pekin" house pet! Just what I wanted!

The Broken Mirror - Now Available For Bottle Caps : EverQuest

I was just logging in to EverQuest this morning, planning on letting my Magician soak up some MGBs in the background while I worked on a blog post, when I spotted the above. On click-through the detail is precise.

As Wilhelm has chronicled over the years, SOE's poor decision-making over what to offer for funny money at times came close to giving away the farm but  selling expansions for SC/DBC seems to straddle the common-sense fence.

Expansions are a big earning opportunity for any MMO company so allowing customers to claim them by cashing in credit seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, there are supposedly some difficult accounting issues wrapped up in all that unspent Daybreak Cash - and there's got to be a lot of it out there. I have over 30,000DBC accrued across various accounts, for example. Almost enough to buy ten copies of The Broken Mirror (Standard Edition of course).

I doubt I'll be be taking DBG up on their generous offer all the same.

With my highest character still trudging towards 92, more than a dozen levels shy of the cap, there's not much appeal right now in seven zones where I wouldn't even dare to set foot. If they scaled, the way the Raids in TBM scale, now that would be a major selling point, but they don't. And the single quality of life sweetener, a "keyring" to store Illusions, is something I might pay 500DBC for at most.

I am curious as to what the target market for this change might be. It's obviously not meant for potterers like myself. It was only yesterday that I took my first, nervous steps into The Underfoot, EQ's sixteenth expansion, released in 2009.

Welcome to The Underfoot

Although I have already visited a couple of later expansions, House of Thule and Veil of Alaris, that was no more than a quick shuffle round the opening zone of HoT and a shopping trip to the safe city in VoA. There are three expansions between those and The Broken Mirror that I have never even looked at - Rein of Fear, Call of the Forsaken and The Darkened Sea.

Who, I wonder, has characters capable of progressing through the max-level content of last November's expansion and yet hasn't yet bothered to buy it? That sounds like a very specific demographic - people with a lot of time to play, plenty of friends to group with, but insufficient disposable income to come up with a spare $30 over six  months.

Under the prevailing plan, each new expansion lifts the velvet rope on the expansion two boxes back, so The Broken Mirror won't join the F2P offer until the release of the 2017 expansion - assuming there is one. At current rate of play I would expect to begin to get interested in TBM somewhere around 2021.

I think I'll be keeping my DBC in my wallet for this one. All the same, it's nice to have the option and I suppose I'll have to spend it sometime, on something...

Addendum: This just in from EQ2 Wire. I do thoroughly recommend Terrors of Thalumbra for anyone with an interest in playing EQ2 at the top end. I thought the solo content was worth the admission price and it will be even more so for some old Station/Daybreak Cash you might have lying around.

Here's hoping this is in preparation for an announcement of details of this year's expansions for both games.

Second Addendum: Now they're all at it! FFXIV? You're up next. Anyone would think there was a WoW expansion about to appear or something...

End Of A Legend

The news that Daybreak Games is to sunset the Legends of Norrath collectable card game didn't come as much of a surprise when it was announced yesterday. Despite Massively OP's yellow journalism (to which, once again, I decline to link) I don't read anything into the choice of Friday for the announcement. We're all on a seven day, twenty-four hour news cycle now. The days of burying bad news before the start of the weekend died with print media.

Anyway, the straws were in the wind a while back, when the client for the game was decoupled from EverQuest and EQ2. It's hardly the most upsetting of sunsets, given that in the many years the game has been available to play I've never done more than run through the tutorial and open my free packs.

All the same, I do feel mildly miffed. I will miss opening those imaginary packs of imaginary cards once a month, hoping for a loot card to drop. Over the years it has become something of a ritual. One more small death along the way to the big one, I guess.

There's still time for a couple more rounds. The final date for clearing the decks is Aug‌ust 1‌7, 20‌16 at no‌on pacific. The final round of free cards under All Access membership will arrive by Ju‌ly 1‌8, 20‌16 at 10‌AM paci‌fic, which is also the last opportunity you have to buy packs, assuming anyone ever does any more.

The very exact and precise notification of the timing DBG have announced seems unusual. Presumably they are aiming to avoid any messy in-fighting or even spurious threats of legal action over supposed virtual assets and obligations. Not that any amount of detailed information before the fact will prevent that. There will be plenty of people who go to log in and claim their dues after the cut off date having heard nothing about the game ending. There always are.

I logged into the standalone client to see how many packs I had left to open and to start thinking about claiming all the Loot that I've left sitting in LoN over the years rather than bothering even to move it to the Claim section of the games themselves. I probably don't need to explain that my /claim is stuffed to bursting with freebies I've never gotten around to using...

I was surprised to see, since I was, for once, paying attention to what was on the screen instead of
ritualistically clicking through check boxes, that to date I have accumulated almost 5,000 different cards on my longest-standing All Access account. I am also Level 9 in LoN just from opening packs.

For a few seconds I considered screen-shotting the lot. There's some lovely artwork in there. Then sanity prevailed. I'm sure someone, somewhere, is archiving them as I type. They will live on the internet forever. And if they don't, well, we'll muddle through somehow, I'm sure.

It did make me consider just how much work has gone into this small, uncelebrated game over the years. And how much "art" is produced commercially to no real end, day after day, year after year. It's no wonder Keen can't find anyone with the time to make him a Twitch logo.

The ratio of Loot cards to regular game cards has always seemed quite generous to me. It seems to run at less than one Loot card per five packs but better than one per ten. I am in the habit of holding a safety margin of 20-25 packs unopened in reserve, so each month when I get my five freebies I open them until either I get a Loot card or I've opened ten packs. I rarely have to open all ten.

Today, though, I had a bad run. Because the game is closing soon there's no reason to hang onto the packs, which was just as well because I opened fifteen without a Loot card popping. The LoN client was also lagging very badly, possibly because lots of people are trying to clear their backlogs like me. More likely, DBG is under yet another DDoS lockdown as it has been all week. H1Z1 at the root of that, as usual.

Because I've played a lot more EQ2 than EQ since the free monthly packs were added to All Access, I've mostly chosen to allocate any Loot cards to the newer game. You have always had to specify, at the point of opening the pack, which game you are pointing it at.

Today, partly because I've just recently gotten EQ re-installed on my new PC and I'm back playing there again, partly just because of the bad run, I switched the target to EverQuest. That really changed my luck!

In three packs I got two Loot cards. One was an ornamentation for a dagger, which I will never use, but the second was a mount! Mounts are a big deal in EverQuest and my magician has been riding the raptor that comes with the Heroic Level 85 boost for what seems like forever. That mount puts her at a ridiculous angle, staring at the sky, and it marks her out as a Heroic upgrade, so it's great to have a low-slung lizard to ride instead.

Mostly what I've received over the years have been pictures. There are a lot of those. Some of them are very nice but they tend to have ludicrously ornate frames that overwhelm the illustrations so most of mine are still in the "box". I've had some exciting drops, though. I got a house once.

There is a very useful page on the official LoN website that allows you to see every Loot card for both games in detail, along with which packs to open to try to get them. I have used it to go for specific items but not with much success. There are sixteen packs to choose from and usually I just pick from the list at random.


I also have a Choose Your Loot card that I haven't used yet. That allows me pick any Loot card from any pack there's ever been. I've been saving it because, the way my mind works, until I use it I own ALL the things. Yes, I am Schrodinger's cat. I'll have to collapse the wave function before August 17 though. I'll probably go for the Ice Cream Cart. Always wanted one.

I only have about thirty unopened packs left but Mrs Bhagpuss, who hasn't played EQ2 or over three years and EQ for a lot longer than that, has 120. They aren't going to go into the void. If she doesn't want to open them then I'll do it. Could take a while.

The end of LoN, along with Planetside, a game I never even downloaded in all the years I had the option, probably signifies something both about the future of Daybreak Games and of the EverQuest franchise but I have no clear idea what that might be. It's apparent that DBG is clearing out what someone in charge sees as the deadwood but to what end is impossible to say.

They could simply be reducing costs to increase profitability (or mitigate losses). They might be cleaning up the business to make it more attractive for sale. They might simply be removing older properties that are not well-used and which are increasingly time-consuming to maintain - housekeeping in other words.

The acquisition of SOE by Columbus Nova has been a strange and mysterious event in gaming. Unlike other takeovers or sales, where one gaming company has assimilated another, the purpose and intent is hard to fathom. I find it hard to imagine an investment company choosing to run a portfolio of low-impact MMOs long term, but equally it's hard to imagine them buffing the current roster of games to a shine that makes a profitable resale likely.

As all MMO sunsets do, it makes me aware of the fragility, the evanescence, innate in the genre. It's really not a hobby for anyone who deals badly with loss. The thought of all my EverQuest and EQ2 characters slipping into darkness disturbs me more than it probably ought. The knowledge that, as  Vanguard and Warhammer attest, games can get a rez is a considerable comfort but still I'd hate to lose my little people and their homes. So much time and love has gone into all of that.

But that's life. Everything is mutable. Doesn't do to dwell on it.

For now the servers are up (hackers permitting) and the worlds live on. Let's enjoy it while we can. And don't forget to grab your Loot!