Black Hole Star? Layoffs Hit Playable Worlds

As you may have seen, either on MassivelyOP or TAGN, Raph Koster's Playable Worlds team has just gotten a bit smaller. How much smaller we don't exactly know yet but presumably it's a significant number or they wouldn't have needed to issue a press release confirming the layoffs.

Playable Worlds is, of course, the studio behind Stars Reach. In fact, SR is the only game they have. 

Realistically, they don't really even have Stars Reach yet. It's still in pre-alpha, which sounds really weird now I say it out loud. I had to go check to make sure that was right. It felt like the game had to be at least in full alpha by now, but no, pre-alpha it is. 

Laying people off before you even get to an alpha build does seem like a worrying sign. Hard to spin that as anything other than a crisis. 

Maybe it's not that bad. I don't want to oversell it. It's difficult to know what to say about events like this other than to express sadness and/or concern and wish the departing devs well in their upcoming search for new roles elsewhere. However you rate it, though, it can't be good.

As I've said many times now, I don't think Stars Reach is likely to be a game I'll want to spend a lot of time with. It's just not my kind of thing. I thought for a while it might be but almost every new build made that feel less likely and now we have a fairly clear idea of what the finished game will look like, I'm as sure as I can be, at this very early stage, that I won't be playing any more, other than in a fit of passing curiosity.

Nevertheless, I do think it's one of the more convincing attempts to bring a completely new MMORPG to market we've seen for a while. The team seems to have a relatively well-defined goal and the leadership looks able to retain sufficient focus not to wander off and make something else entirely, something we've seen happen more than a few times in recent years. Just because I don't particularly want to play it myself doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it do well.

Looking a little further, beyond my own personal preferences and sympathies, there's also the potential impact a failure here could have on the overall market for new MMORPGs. That's always assuming there is a market, something I think could be up for dispute.

People do keep trying. There are a surprising number of MMORPGs in development still, some in Early Access, others in various types of closed testing. Only a tiny handful could make any kind of claim to having a presence outside their own, specific niche, though, and Stars Reach would certainly have aspired  to be one of that few. 

Whether it ever was is another question but the last thing likely to boost its profile in the wider gaming market is news that the development team is being slimmed down before the game even hits alpha. Following the high-profile implosion of Ashes of Creation, it sends the worst kind of signal about how the genre is coping with the broader issues afflicting the entire gaming sector.

Without wishing to sound like a doom-monger, this does strike me as yet more evidence that the MMORPG genre as a whole is in steep decline. I wouldn't say terminal decline because I believe there's a substantial core audience that still prefers the familiar gameplay we've grown used to over the last twenty-five years to the pared-down, sped-up alternatives. 

The problem for anyone hoping to enter the market with a new MMORPG is that the existing, core demographic is, for the most part, at least resigned, if not actively happy, sticking with the games they know. I suspect the more failures there are among the aspirants, the more strongly entrenched the incumbents will become.

 

None of which is to suggest Stars Reach won't be able to buck the trend. Raph is at pains to make it clear that development continues. He's also going to take a more direct role in that development, apparently. (See the two links above for all the relevant quotes - I won't pad things out by repeating them here.) That did surprise me a little. I presumed he was already calling  the shots.

He also talks about recent builds in the pre-alpha having been buggy of late but he doesn't explain how letting people go is likely to improve things. I'd have thought it would get harder to release better-tested, less buggy updates if there were fewer people on the team but what do I know? 

The team wasn't even all that big to begin with, it seems. Here's a quote Marketing Director Rick Reynolds gave to MassivelyOP last August:

"It’s not a big company. There are probably more people in chat right now than we have in the company, or it’s probably pretty close." 

How many devs can they afford to lose? A fair question, perhaps, but unfortunately the real one is how many they can afford to keep.

The reason behind the layoffs is obvious: lack of funds. Raph doesn't go into details but he does talk about a need to be "prudent" in what Playable Worlds spends on developing the game in future. In an ideal world, you'd like to think developers and their accounting departments would be prudent in all circumstances but in the current financial climate I guess it's more of a necessity than an aspiration.

He's bullish about the future of Stars Reach, as you'd expect and as he has to be. Development will continue and there will be no reduction in scope, although some things that have been talked about may take longer to arrive. 

And there's the real nub of the problem. MMORPGs already take a ludicrously long time to build. Stars Reach, as I said, is still in pre-alpha. Other games in the genre have taken five or even ten years to get from there even as far as Early Access, much less a genuine 1.0 launch. Anything that pushes those timescales towards the back end is very likely to see whatever interest there once was wane dramatically.

It is a bit of a Catch22. Pushing development faster costs money that may not be there. Slowing down risks potential customers walking away. Now the funding streams have largely dried up there's no easy way to find the necessary balance between financial security and getting the game finished in good time.

That said, it is possible. We have a shining example in front of us in the form of Project Gorgon. Somehow, a handful of developers and artists managed to steer that one through the rocks and rapids of lengthy development on a shoestring to the safe shore of a genuine Steam launch and a positive reception that saw the game land with a Very Positive rating and enough new players to require extra servers. And that after years in Early Access, too!

I hope Raph and his reduced team are able to pull off something of the kind. If they do, I probably still won't want to play the game but I'll be cheering it on from the sidelines.

Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

A while back, Tipa posted one of her occasional overviews of the State of the Genre as revealed by Google Trends, in which it becomes immediately obvious that the mmorpgs people are asking Google for information about tend to be... how to put it politely... really old. 

More recently, James Crosby, aka MMOFolklorist, attempted to explain the "MMO Hype Vacuum", the sense he has that no-one really gets revved up by the prospect of a new mmorpg the way they used to.  In another post, he observes that Tarisland,  Tencent's upcoming riposte to World of Warcraft's departure from the Chinese market, potentially one of the biggest global mmorpg launches of recent years, left him hovering "somewhere between apathy and despair".

In the same post, James gives his thoughts on the imminent closedown of Sword of Legend Online, an mmorpg that only launched a couple of years ago. He also mentions Elyon, which launched around the same time and has already drifted off into the sunset. He concludes that, while they "both looked pretty, and they played at least as solidly as any other medium-profile entry into the genre", that simply wasn't enough, the implication being that mmorpg gamers these days demand more of their games than competence, professionalism, sound gameplay and good graphics.

The implication is that every game should be not just good but great. Otherwise they're doomed to fail. 

This morning I read a post by Mailvatar that mentions in passing a sentiment I've heard numerous times, namely a sense of disappointment in what were probably the two most commercially sucessful mmorpg launches of recent times, New World and Lost Ark. Both games very definitely enjoyed a great deal of hype in the run-up to launch, being received almost ecstatically at first, before enthusiasm bled out just as quickly.

Unlike SOLO and Elyon, New World and Lost Ark carry on but with a tiny fraction of their original audience. According to the Steam Charts, in this case an atypically accurate measure, New World has lost 98% of the players it had at peak; Lost Ark has done a little better, only losing 97%.

In terms of news coverage, New World far outranks Lost Ark, about which I struggle to remember when I last heard anything. By contrast, New World continues to feature regularly in multiple news feeds I follow, including some that aren't primarlily gaming-focused. 

Tipa's tally puts both in the same Tier 3 bucket alongside Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Citizen, suggesting those games might also have audiences of similar size. As we know, guessing the population of almost all mmorpgs is a mug's game, so I'm not going to draw any hasty conclusions.

My concern here isn't, for once, the prospective health of the individual games or the genre as a whole as evidenced by the number of people who log in to play each day. It's more of an existential question: if games as relatively well-made and well-received as New World, Lost Ark, Sword of Legends Online or Elyon either aren't good enough to attract an audience to begin with, or to hold the attention of more than a tiny fraction of the audience that they do manage to find, just what is going to be enough to satisfy the current mmorpg player?

Tarisland, when it appears, which would seem to be likely to be sooner rather than later, may indeed turn out to be a complete flop in the West. Certainly, if the quality of the translation evident in the trailers is anything to go by, Tencent don't seem particularly bothered about spending much time or effort on localization. 

Would such a commercial failure tell us more about the cynical way the game might have been conceived and developed or would it just be more evidence to support something we may already suspect about the expectations of the audience, namely that nothing is ever going to be good enough?

As Tipa says about WoW, FFXIV and Old School Runescape, the top three mmorpgs on Google Trends by a very large margin, "These three MMOs are far and away the most popular MMOs in the USA, according to Google Trends, and they have been that way for years. Sometimes one is on top, sometimes another one is, but it’s always one of these three."

Stepping past the always-intriguing question of why this part of the blogosphere barely nods towards any version of Runescape, it's hard to argue against the idea that the mmorpg market, at least in the west, is all but impenetrable to new entrants. New World and Lost Ark have done very well to make it to Tier 3 alongside all those decade old games (And that decade-old alpha.). The massive hype they enjoyed in the build up to launch didn't boost them to glory but I guess we have to acknowledge that still being here two years later is some kind of success in itself.

As for games like Sword of Legends Online and Elyon, widely accepted at launch as being not at all bad and pretty solid for new releases, what chance did they have? I remember there was a glut of new releases around then, including Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Crowfall, Bless Unleashed and more. Just how many players for these types of games are there meant to be, anyway, that half a dozen or more can hope to release in close proximity and still prosper?

This summer doesn't appear to have anything like that crush of new launches but there are a bunch of big titles there or thereabouts on the horizon, from big hitters like Blue Protocol, Throne and Liberty and the aforementioned Tarisland to plucky indies like Palia and Wayfinder. I'm looking forward to trying all of them but do I honestly expect to settle down and play even one for any meanigful amount of time?

In the post I linked earlier, Mailvatar talks very positively about Black Desert Online and Genshin Impact, two games I played and enjoyed when they came out and often think about playing again. They're both successful games by most metrics - they're still running, they get new content regularly, people still talk about them. 

When they were new, though, everyone was talking about them; everyone tried them. How many of those people are still, like Malvatar, playing and enjoying them? How many bloggers are writing about them?

More than play or write about Swords of Legend Online now, that's for sure. More than played or wrote about Elyon before it closed down. More than play or write about PSO2:NG (Although there are some very interesting developments there that deserve attention.)

I feel slightly uncomfortable about the fate of SOLO. The developers issued a very forthright statement outlining the reason the game failed, explaining almost wistfully "The MMO market is fiercely competitive, and despite our best efforts – including the release of the 2.0 update, making the game free to play, as well as further content patches along the way – we’ve found that the player numbers simply aren’t strong enough to sustain the game".

I liked the game quite a lot but I didn't manage to find time to play it even after it went free-to-play. I wanted to. I meant to. I just kept putting it off, thinking I'd get to it one day, when I had time. That day never came and now the game is going away. 

It's not a great loss. If I'd really wanted to play it,I'd have found the time. The thing that makes me uncomfortable isn't any sense of guilt over not supporting a decent mmorpg. It's the worry that no new mmorpg is ever going to be special enough to prise me away from the games I already know and love. Or, indeed, the ones I quite like and am used to.

Worse, I fear the same may be true for a lot more potential players than just myself. I wonder whether all these developers are fooling themselves, believing the audience they're hoping to attract even exists. With the exception of FFXIV, itself an aging game now, how many mmorpgs have successfully been able to poach players from existing titles in the last few years, let alone attract new players to the genre and keep them? ESO, maybe, but that game had a pre-existing single-player audience to draw on.

It would make me wonder why so many developers keep on making mmorpgs except I know why they do it: it's because mmorpgs take upwards of five years to develop and keep a lot of people in work. Provided you can keep raising the investment capital, making mmos is a sustainable business. Running mmorpgs as a live service for years after launch? That's a much bigger gamble.

Nosy Gamer, in his recent review of the Uprising expansion for EVE Online, rates it a success, since it at least stemmed the flow of players leaving the twenty year-old game, but concludes by saying "at the beginning of EVE Online's third decade of operation, staunching the bleeding is not enough. CCP needs to build on the success of Uprising and attempt to grow the game once again". Is this a reasonable - or even a rational - expectation?

Maybe. Although most indicators would seem to suggest the best an mmorpg can hope for is a long, slow decline, populations do ebb and flow. Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars 2 reported spurts of growth recently and Runescape in its various iterations seems to operate entirely by rules of its own, so it's not impossible to imagine player numbers going up in any established title - for a while.

To expect any of them to stay up or even to keep adding new players at a sufficient rate to replace attrition seems a big ask, all the same. And if they were able to manage it, what would it say for the prospects of all those new games coming down the assembly line? While it's not a zero sum game, neither is there an unlimited pool of mmorpg players out there, ready and willing to populate the starting, mid-level and end game zones of every half-decent mmo willing to accomodate them.

As the SOLO devs said, "The MMO market is fiercely competitive". Too competetive for most. What they didn't say but probably were thinking is that the MMO player is too fussy, too fickle and just plain too hard to please. Also spoiled for choice and pampered like some indigent, overgrown princeling, surrounded by barely-touched delicacies and still calling for more.

I wish now I'd played more Swords of Legend Online but, with the best will in the world, I can't play them all. No-one can. And if you're talking about playing them meaningfully, no-one can play more than a handful.  

These days, competition isn't even limited to other mmorpgs, either. Belghast, describing what he calls the "live service dystopia", suggests "a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.". It used to be commonly believed that playing an mmorpg meant you'd not have time for other mmorpgs but now it looks like playing any online game means you won't have time for any other online game, not when those games all have Battle Passes and Seasons and DLC and Expansions that require your full attention, all year round.

None of which is going to stop people making new mmorpgs, if only for the reason that investors and players still seem more than happy to keep throwing money at them - until they actually launch. It's only when the time comes to play the damn things that everyone suddenly loses interest. 

Designing and developing mmorpgs may very well be a sustainable business model. Star Citizen, Ashes of Creation, Pantheon or Camelot Unchained would certainly seem to support that thesis. Maintaining, running, even playing mmorpgs, though? Is there a future in any of that? 

For anyone?

Possession Is Nine-Tenths Of The Fun

In former days, I used to pontificate - not infrequently - on general topics and trends affecting the mmorpg genre. I guess we all did, even though, by the time I came to the table, many of those themes and arguments had already been reduced to the blandest of mush by repeated rehashing. Still, that never seemed to stop anyone coming back for yet another helping. All you had to do was refer to the dead, dry horsemeat you were chewing in an arch, ironic or just plain world-weary way, so as to let people know you knew how long past its use-by date it was and you were good for another mouthful.

These days I see very few posts like that. The veterans seem to have worn out the tread on those tires at last and the newcomers have entirely different interests and concerns. This part of the blogosphere, once a support system for people with a very similar, niche set of interests - mmorpgs, basically - some time ago morphed into something much broader and - if we're objective about it - more interesting.

For years there's been an increased focus on general gaming and wider entertainment concerns, with reviews and opinions of music, movies, books, sports and TV all increasingly finding their place. There's also been a great deal more openness, a greater willingness to share personal details on everything from from lifestyle and employment to mental and physical health. 

Back when I was only reading blogs, before I had one of my own, I'd have been very hard to put to tell you anything about most of the bloggers I followed beyond what mmorpgs they played and possibly their gender and approximate age. Now the whole weblog thing has turned full circle, it seems, bringing back the original idea of a personal journal everyone can read. 

It's hard to say if I prefer it that way or if I've just become used to it. I think the former. There's only so many times you can fulminate over the way instant travel or flying mounts ruin the whole concept of a virtual world or argue passionately in favor or against the importance of the leveling process. These and dozens more shibboleths that seemed like hills worth dying on a decade ago now barely register as speed bumps in the rush to get to the good stuff, whatever that might be.

All of which brings me nicely, if circuitously, to my topic for the day: getting to the good stuff. Anyone would think I planned it this way. I didn't, in case anyone was in any doubt. I just type and the magic happens.

By "Getting to the good stuff" in this case, I mean getting your hands on a playable game. At all. I was pushed down this line of thinking by a couple of things that came my way recently. One was this news item at MassivelyOP. In it, Marc Jacobs, CEO of City State, the company producing long-delayed RvR mmorpg Camelot Unchained, boldly states

 "...we are almost at where I wanted us to be by summer ... we’re ahead of schedule. I really couldn’t be happier about that if I tried."

I don't always see eye to eye with MOP's editorial policies but one thing I do have to give them credit for is the way they consistently hold statements like this up to scrutiny by simply appending a clear and evidenced timeline giving context and history to whatever's being claimed. As the list of links at the bottom of the short piece confirms, Camelot Unchained, which began as a Kickstarted project, has been in development for a decade now and in closed beta for five years. If that's "ahead of schedule" I think I need a new dictionary.

I didn't back CU, luckily for me but I did back another forever game (As in it's taking forever to get finished.) Ashes of Creation. I didn't just back it, I backed it twice; I bought in once for myself and once for Mrs. Bhagpuss. 

The Kickstarter for that one wasn't quite as long ago as the one for Camelot Unchained, just a mere five and a half years. AoC, however, doesn't even have the fig-leaf of a closed beta to hide behind. As the Release Schedule on the wiki says, that's still "To be announced".

Given that, when I signed up for this thing back in October 2017, the Kickstarter gave an "Estimated Delivery" date of December 2018, I think it's safe to say the studio behind the game, Intrepid, overshot the mark somewhat. Undershot. Whatever.

If there's one thing you can say for Intrepid, though, it's that they communicate. There's no hint or suggestion that work on the project isn't ongoing. I get constant emails about the progress they're making. It never seems to be much although you wouldn't know it from how enthusiastic they all sound..

The latest in an endless series of relentlessly upbeat messages, informing us all how well the game is doing behind those closed doors, bangs on at inordinate length about the wonders of the UI they're building. It's not the most glamorous of topics to begin with but as Heartless Gamer puts it on his newly-revitalized blog, 

"As with the recent class updates the UI update this month was a typical lackluster update.  A developer was brought on and talked about their team and their approach. Then some screenshots were shown of different UI components which were followed by yet more screenshots of sample user interface windows which were followed by... more screenshots.  !  I don't think once during the UI update we saw an actual functioning UI overlaying a game being played."

It's too true. I barely scan AoC updates any more because they go on forever and tell us nothing. By comparison, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, for example, is an open book. They post massively long updates, too, but in them you can watch people playing the game for hours at a stretch and even at the pre-alpha stage it very much looks like a bunch of people in an mmorpg having a great time.

From watching a handful of Pantheon videos I know it's definitely a game I want to play. From watching the dozens of videos Intrepid have sent me, I still can't say with any confidence what sort of a game it even is! And that's a major problem.

I signed up for the AoC Kickstarter for two reasons: firstly, it was being made by a team filled with people who'd worked on other mmorpgs I'd enjoyed and secondly because the game was supposedly due out in a year or so. Not being completely naive, I never expected a finished game by Christmas but I did think I might get one inside three years, given that would be triple the time they said it would take.

Obviously, I know better now. Pretty much no Kickstarted mmorpg comes out within hailing distance of its estimated delivery date and plenty of them either never arrive at all or limp out the gate in such a spavined, emaciated form they're dead on their feet in a couple of months and just plain dead soon after.

If it was just a matter of patience, that would be problem enough but these kinds of timescales have much deeper implications than mere fractiousness over not getting something you've paid for when someone said you'd get it. Lead times spiraling from years into decades inevitably run up against two much less transient issues: growth and mortality.

I'm not the same person I was five years ago, when I put my money down for a new mmorpg called Ashes of Creation. No-one is. Back then, I was still excited by the genre, keen to see every new thing as soon as I could get my foot on the bandwagon. Now? Not so much. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, for whom I bought a copy and with whom I was planning on playing, has moved on from the hobby altogether. She prefers crafting in real life to crafting in virtual worlds now and she currently plays no mmorpgs. She says she'll pick it up again some day but even if she does I'm fairly sure Ashes of Creation won't be the game to bring her back. To different degrees, we've both aged past the window of opportunity that Kickstarter appeared to open.

And we're still ageing. I'll be 65 this year. At the glacial rate of development Intrepid are employing I will certainly be retired by the time the game comes out (Assuming it ever does). Even trusting in continued health sufficient to allow me to play it when and if that happens, at current rates of progress I could quite possibly be in my seventies. Am I still going to be interested then?

And it's not just because I'm old. If games take a decade to arrive, people who were interested in them in their teens, twenties or thirties are even more likely to have moved on from the hobbies of their youth by the time they get that once-coveted invite to closed beta. At least I have the advantage of being set in my ways!

It seems to me that the lead times for mmorpgs have spiraled out of all reason. Star Citizen sucks all the air out of the room in any discussion of delayed development but it's only the most outrageous example of a development trend that's now so entrenched people don't even bother to complain about it all that much any more. It's no wonder so many games go into Early Access or eternal beta while unfinished but approximately playable. Just look at the alternative.

In the end, the question isn't why so many developers start taking money for games that are clearly still under development. So long as it's done in good faith, with the team continuing to work on bringing the title up to code, I don't have an issue with that. It's really no different from back when mmorpgs would launch with a nominally playable base game and charge a subscription to play it while all the polish and most of the content got added in patches, month after month after month.

No, my complaint is with the companies who keep their doors firmly bolted shut after taking money up front, issuing endless, relentlessly cheery progress bulletins but never actually coming up with anything anyone can damn well play. As far as AoC goes, in all honesty I'd almost rather they'd kept the Battle Royale spin-off they were so criticized for wasting time on and junked the mmo. At least I got to play that.

It's not even a matter of a refund. After five years it's a sunk cost I don't care about getting back. Even if it was an option, I couldn't be bothered to do the paperwork. The point is, when and if the game ever does reach second closed beta or whatever my designated opt-in point might be, I can pretty much guarantee I won't care enough to do more than make a character, write a post or two and forget about it again. Always assuming I'm still capable of using a mouse and keyboard by then.

After years of this kind of thing, which seemed so exciting once upon a time, I find I hugely prefer games that just appear out of nowhere, arriving in a flurry of publicity around a launch that's only weeks away. That does seem to be an incipient trend of its own now. I can only hope it continues and grows. 

The two new mmorpgs I've most enjoyed in the last year - Chimeraland and Noah's Heart - fit that bill. I was playing both a matter of months after I first learned of their existence. They may not be as ambitious or full-featured as Camelot Unchained and Ashes of Creation but they're here and they work. I'll take that over any number of unfulfilled promises any day.

Upcycling Crowfall

I had an email yesterday from "The Crowfall Team". I was thrown for a minute. I'd forgotten I'd ever given them my email address. Well, one of my email addresses. Last time I counted I had a couple of dozen. It'll be more now.

After some thought, I realised I'd had to provide an email address when I signed up for the open beta. That was back in 2021. It seems a lot longer. 

The beta itself was an odd experience. Crowfall is a PvP game but for the beta I remember levelling to the cap in PvE, then not being able to find anyone doing PvP at all. I posted about the game a few times, first during that beta and then when it launched; after that I mostly forgot about it.

The name has cropped up now and then in news reports. I remember the developers, Artcraft, sold it on to another company, Monument, which I seem to remember was owned by one of the original investors, although I may be making that part up. There were a few rumblings about the sellout but nothing that sticks in the memory. After that, nothing.

Until this:

The email also contains a whole load of detailed information about the shutdown process, all of which I'll spare you. It's not really meaningful or relevant to anyone not playing the game right now, which I'm guessing won't be anyone reading this.

It's an interesting email as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does. I'm curious about the whole taking the game offline for "development", for a start. I suppose that's by no means unprecedented, dramatic though it sounds; Final Fantasy XIV would be the poster child for the concept but it also happened to Fallen Earth.

Both of those games came back to life, FFXIV famously as a vastly improved and ultimately far more successful product, Fallen Earth as something much the same as before. There's a much longer list of games that closed down then started up again but those are the only two I can think of right now that went dark specifically so they could receive further development before returning.

Usually, even with failing games, the developers try to cobble something together without switching the servers off. Presumably some income is better than none at all, provided it's greater than the running costs. It would obviously be more convenient to change mechanics and systems without having to work around those pesky players as they try to get their dailies done and the savings in customer service alone must be huge but it's still not an option many developers choose.

That makes the statement outlining Monument's vision for the future of Crowfall even odder: they don't appear to have one. It looks as if what they're planning amounts to the creation of an entirely new game even if, as yet, they haven't decided what game it's going to be. 

It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus; if you replace every part of an mmorpg, is it still the same game?

To be fair, the email doesn't say every aspect of Crowfall will be replaced; it says every part will be rethought. Some of that that rethinking might, I suppose, amount to "leave it as it is". When the parts you're talking about "rethinking" include "core technology... tools... art, design, and gameplay", though, the implication is that what's left isn't going to be easily recognizeable as what you started with.

Had this all happened a few months ago, I imagine there'd be a widespread assumption that whatever
zombie game lurched back online some months from now would be riddled with NFTs, blockchain and play-to-earn mechanics. Square Enix aside, that gum seems to have lost its flavor for most developers. At this point I'd probably more surprised if things did go that way for Crowfall than if they didn't.

What might emerge from the mist is a lot harder to predict. If I had to put money on it, which fortunately I don't, I'd bet on "Nothing". Redeveloping, rewriting, redesigning and relaunching a minor league game like Crowfall seems like a great way to throw good money after bad. 

That said, there seems to be no shortage of investors, both individual and collective, ready to throw millions at projects like this when they're based on nothing more solid than wishes, hopes and promises. At the very least, in this case, there is a functioning game with an established market presence from which to build. 

I'd say it's going to be interesting to watch but the depressing fact is mmo development takes so long its all but impossible to maintain any real interest over the length of a project. About as much as I can manage is a flurry of interest when I first hear about something and a glimmer any time some playable demo or test build appears.

What I imagine will happen is I'll once again forget all about Crowfall until it either emerges from its coccoon of silence, bright, shiny and new, or the final post-mortem arrives to confirm it's never coming back at all. 

I hope its the former. Crowfall wasn't a terrible game, just bland, unexceptional and radically over-extended. In an age where asset re-use is positively welcome on ecological grounds, it would be a shame to waste all the work that went into it. I look forward to hearing the outcome of all that rethinking and if there's ever another beta... Monument already have my email.

Around And Around

The reveal of Blizzard's plans for a sequel of sorts to Overwatch clarified some thoughts I've been having of late concerning the direction in which MMORPGs appear to be headed. Indeed, given that Overwatch isn't even an MMO as such, perhaps it's a vector that applies to gaming in general.

Once upon a time video games were standalone entities. They came in boxes that you went to a store to buy. You played them, you finished them (or gave up trying) then you put them on the shelf (or sold them) and moved on to the next.

If a company managed to come up with a hit, the usual way to double down on that success was to produce a sequel. There would usually be some thematic continuity but the new game would once again stand or fall on its own merits.

The lines began to blur when sequels started to allow the importing of saved data from their predecessors. I'm no video-gaming historian but even I have vague memories of being offered the option to transfer some aspect of my previous incarnation into a new game.

When games began to make their slow and tentative move online those hard demarcations began to blur still further. EverQuest only ran for a year as a pure core game before receiving its first "expansion". From then on I came to expect that any online game I played would grow like an unruly building, adding new rooms and wings to the original structure at regular intervals until its sprawl rivalled Gormenghast.

After a while, though, it seemed that game developers weren't satisfied with just expanding their virtual worlds and their profit margins along with them. They wanted to clone their successes just like their predecessors had done in the good old pre-internet days, something their offline competitors had never stopped doing.

Things didn't go entirely to plan. Some proposed sequels to MMORPGs were cancelled before they saw the shelves of any store and the ones that did make it struggled to match, far less eclipse their progenitors.

A few - a very few - managed to establish a separate identity and truck along profitably if unspectacularly. Lineage 2 and EverQuest II spring to mind. Even the "success" stories, though, were limited in what they were able to achieve. EverQuest is very likely still more profitable than EQII and Lineage is well ahead of its first sequel, albeit not the mobile version.

Whatever appetite developers might have had for creating entirely separate sequels seems to have dissipated in the face of these diminishing returns. That's perhaps surprising in that the last two attempts, ArenaNet with Guild Wars 2 and Square Enix with Final Fantasy XIV, have been relatively successful.

Even so, Square had to scrap and remake their follow-up to Final Fantasy XI before they could begin to recoup the cost of development, something almost no other developer would have done. Guild Wars 2, meanwhile, despite its initial success, has been drifting slowly downwards ever since. The linked NCSoft sales chart above has GW2 running barely ahead of Aion and well behind Blade and Soul. Not a strong predictor of long term success for anyone considering making a sequel to an MMORPG.

Significantly, both Square and ANet chose to mothball their first generation MMOs when they put their weight behind sequels. They recognized the potential split in their own customer base should active development continue on the older titles so they chose to close that door lest it slam in their faces, leaving the new baby locked out in the cold.

There has been talk of a World of Warcraft 2 for years but never the least hint that Blizzard considered it worth the time and effort of discussing, let alone developing. Even when they were working behind the scenes on a second MMORPG, Titan, it was something entirely separate to WoW.

That project, repurposed, became Overwatch, which now, ironically is getting a sequel. Of a sort. Those lines are blurring once again.

Blizzard have become experts at that. World of Warcraft, a game once derided for its cartoonish graphics, is now releasing promotional shots of its upcoming expansion that receive fulsome compliments. Hardly surprising since they've been upgrading and updating the game's graphics continually throughout its fifteen years.

Blizzard also, famously or infamously, re-writes the entire gameplay of WoW with every expansion. Rather than launch WoW 2 and split the audience they re-invent WoW every couple of years instead. How ironic, then, that they should find themsleves curating WoW Classic, thereby placing WoW Retail in the invidious position of being the sequel to a retroactively revived original. No wonder they resisted it for so long but in the end it's always the money that talks.

Meanwhile, with varying degrees of success, major players like ArenaNet and Zenimax/Bethesda find ways to reinvent their own MMORPGs so as to keep them relevant and fresh to both old and new players alike. Why go to the trouble of starting over when you can roll along with a never-ending sequence of micro-starts instead?

Or at least that seems to be the theory. It's a messy one at best. MMORPGs these days are a rat's nest of free updates, chargeable DLC, cash shop content and full expansions. Even the word "expansion" has morphed into meaninglessness, with some games using the term for every monthly update regardless of its gravitas or impact.

The picture becomes even less clear when you factor in those developers who choose neither to create a sequel nor to expand and update the games they already have, but to split titles like sickly amoebae, spawning imperfect copies of themselves. Funcom probably started the trend with Secret World Legends.

Gamigo, having picked up ArcheAge in Trion's fire sale, followed suit with ArcheAge Unchained. This is clever marketing. Why make a whole new game when you can just re-jig and remarket an old one and sell it to the same people all over again?  Where Blizzard would make these changes in the primary property, the new idea is to keep that running as-is and put your revamped version up for sale as-new.

It's genius, really. Especially when, like Gamigo, you can convince people to pay either a box price or
a subscription for a re-tooled version of something they used to be able to get for free. It also saves you the trouble of going back later to come up with a "Classic" version to feed that particular niche. All development goes on permanent hiatus in the original so there it sits, waiting to be re-promoted as "Classic" at some future date, should market indicators suggest doing so might turn a profit.

Overwatch 2 looks very interesting. I've never played the competetive PvP version but I've read a fair amount about it and, like many, I've thought it would have made for a fun MMO. The proposed sequel isn't that but it adds all the narrative and PvE content the original eschewed.

That will bring in a whole new audience from Blizzard's PvE-centric playerbase but the real brilliance of the scheme is the way the two games handshake. Overwatch 2 plans on "carrying forward all of the original game’s heroes, maps, and modes—as well as existing Overwatch players’ accomplishments and loot collections". Meanwhile, the new game will enjoy "character progression ... only for the PvE side" while "PvP players will have a level playing field without any of these potentially match-breaking abilities."

Is that a sequel, an expansion or something strange and new altogether? I guess we'll just have to wait and see but if it works count on seeing other developers tagging along behind. It's certainly a step up from all those Battle Royale spin-offs, at least.

Everwake is optimistic about the idea of so-called "Live Services", saying "A low monthly fee that acts as a content discovery vehicle is something that works for me." He's still a little wary of the implications, though, and so should we all be.

As we should already have known and as we've been most rudely reminded by the recent Blizzard brouhaha, big companies are not our friends. None of the changes and developments they make are designed to make things easier or more convenient for us - they are wholly and solely intended to increase revenue.

If game companies can successfully lock you into their ecosystem and then repackage and re-sell you the same game over and over and over again, don't think they won't. After all, it's only the same system all the other media empires have been perfecting for years.

Month One: WoW Classic

It's been almost exactly a month since the launch of WoW Classic so I thought it might be time for a recap. I only thought of doing this half an hour ago, while I was closing in on Level 20 with my Warlock, so don't look for any detailed analyses or amazing insights!

When Classic was announced it barely registered. I was five years late to the WoW party. I have a Vanilla nostalgia rating of zero. As the months passed, people with a closer attachement to Azeroth than mine became increasingly excited and even impatient for the thing to arrive. My own interest grew somewhat.

Obviously it was going to be a Major Genre Event and you never like to miss out on one of those. Also I was pretty sure I could mine Classic for a few blog posts. Always an incentive. And it would be a (weak) chance to experience somethinng (not much) like the original launch frenzy. Maybe.

My expectation, which I expressed freely and often in comments all over the place, was that I'd play for a week or two, write a bunch of posts about it, then move on (or more likely back) to something more to my taste. I was all but certain I wouldn't be renewing my subscription when the first month ran out.

Well, I renewed my sub a few days ago. If I ran one of those activity monitors that a few bloggers swear by it would probably show the huge majority of my PC time these last few weeks was taken up either by Classic or by Blogger, where 60% of all my posts since August 27th have been about the game. For the last month I've either been playing Classic or writing about it.

I've also played it for more hours and with greater intensity than any MMORPG since the launch of Guild Wars 2 seven years ago. I wasn't expecting to get bitten this hard again until and unless Brad ever gets Pantheon out the door.

I've thought long and hard about why this is. I've written a bunch of lengthy posts about it and left comments almost as long on the threads of other bloggers, many of whom have been wrestling with the same concerns. I wouldn't claim I've gotten to the bottom of the mystery but I have come to one important conclusion: Classic works becasue it has the kind of consistent, considered, coherent design that we haven't seen in a very long time.

This, I think, accounts for more of the reasons why the game clicks with me than any other single explanation. Classic runs like finely-tuned clockwork. Every piece meshes seamlessly with every other and together they drive the machine forward.

The effect Classic has on some players.

By comparison, other MMORPGs are a hotch-potch of mismatched parts, many of which don't fit together and some of which actively grind against each other. Take Guild Wars 2, for example. I've played it for seven years so it clearly has a lot going for it but with the best will in the world no-one could say it has ever been either coherent or finely-tuned.

Take the languishing, desperate World Vs World as a prime example. It's a walking disaster now (even though I still enjoy it, on occasion) but when was it ever anything else? I wrote a post in October 2012, just a couple of months after launch, which I titled "What's Wrong With WvW".

Back then I outlined four problems:

1. Free Server Transfers
2. Orb Bonus For World That Needs It Least
3. Ladder-Style Server Matching System 
4. Night Capping (not as much fun as it sounds) 

Of those, the only one that's been fixed in seven years is #2, for which ANet's nuanced response was to remove the entire Orb mechanic and replace it with... nothing. The Ladder has been tweaked and fiddled with and as a result is now even worse than it was. Free Server Transfers, now Paid Server Transfers, remain one of the most contentious issues as does night-capping, now expanded to include all "off-hours" play.

ArenaNet launched a major MMORPG with three disparate game modes, none of which had any synergy at all. All of those modes were compromised, flawed and poorly implemented at launch (sPvP crashed and burned as an eSport, a huge number of PvE events were bugged for months - some for much longer than that). In the succeeeding years Anet showed little sign of understanding how to fix any of their mistakes, nor in knowing what a fully-integrated, holistic MMORPG ought to look like.

Based on what I see and experience in Classic, the Blizzard team of the Classic era suffered few doubts, either over what their game should be or how to make it function exactly the way they wanted it to. Everything seems to have been designed to within an inch of its life and yet nothing feels stilted or formal or forced.

The much-discussed "difficulty" of Classic consists almost entirely of two things: patience and forethought. The developers evidently expected their players would be willing to stop and think before they acted. They trusted players to read quest text and NPC dialog, understand it and act on it.

Finally getting Unending Breath was one of the highlights of the last month's play for me.

They had no intention of facilitating any kind of "action" gaming as we understand it now, even though, in comparison to the MMORPGs the designers themselves played and loved, they were providing a smoother, faster (yes, faster) and easier overall experience.

When WoW launched in 2004 I chose not to play it for two reasons. Firstly, after three months of beta and two weeks of Live, I was already committed to EverQuest II and, secondly, everyone I knew in-game at that point was of the same opinion of World of Warcraft; it was a kiddie MMO.

I'm glad I didn't play it back then. I think I would indeed have found it "too easy" and "for kids". Five years later, when my views on many things, not least MMORPGS, had mellowed, I came to WoW and found it surprisingly good fun. A decade on from then I find I've changed enough that the recreation of the original game suits me almost perfectly.

Classic has most of the elements I love in games of the era that preceded it; a plethora of complex, interwoven systems that reward patience and close attention; combat that relies on the brain more than the fingers; pacing that allows plenty of time for thought.

I find that pacing almost ideal. Much though I love EverQuest, these days the pace of progress I enjoyed in the early years of the 21st century is just too glacial. I've proved that to my own satisfaction when playing on Progression servers over the years.

Unlike Isey, I don't see myself ever finding my happy place on P1999, even with that new server smell. Very much to my own surprise it's the accelerated pace and increased convenience of Classic that hits the sweet spot.

Amusing myself by making my Voidwalker run through the water while I stay on the shore. Serves him right for moaning all the time.

Which is ironic considering just how much the pacing and satisfaction of Classic's gameplay is built on inconvenience and what seem to many to be some very rough edges indeed. I guess it depends where you're making your comparisons.

Those "rough edges" are, of course, nothing of the kind. Almost without exception they are well-thought-out design choices, intended to structure and direct gameplay. All the running, all the fetch and carry quests, all the side-trips and searching and unexpected discoveries, the wandering vendors and elusive trainers are there to ground you in the world.

If you don't like that then, in 2004/5 at least, you really didn't like MMORPGs. That's what the genre was at the time and Blizzard, doing what they were known for, took what others had created and polished it until it glowed.

And that's why we have so much controversy over whether Classic is immersive or tedious, addictive or alienatiing. In the decade and a half since WoW launched, the entire genre it bootstrapped into the mainstream has fractured, split and changed out of all recognition.

We live in a world where PokemonGo and Dark Age of Camelot are supposedly both part of the same family. Where Black Desert Online can offer combat that largely consists of hammering one mouse button while EverQuest II can accomodate six hot bars of skills, most of which you might use in a single fight.

It's no surprise to me that players are deeply split over Classic and Retail. They're different games that appeal to different audiences. It's not aboout whether one is "better" than the other; it's about which one you want.

It seems I want Classic. No-one could be more surprised than me.

How We Live Now: GW2

Unlike most MMO developers, GW2 doesn't do Producer Letters. (Edit: Oh, wait, now they do!) Officially, that is. There is, nevertheless, someone in charge, an individual who sets the tone and announces the direction for the game.

For a long while that was Colin Johanson. He fell on his sword after Heart of Thorns failed to perform as well as expected. His replacement, who was supposed to be taking on the role only for as long as it took to find someone to do it permanently, was Colin's "boss" Mike O'Brien, one of the three people who created ArenaNet back in 2000 and the only co-founder still working there.

As each episode of The Living World arrives, ANet host an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. Since Mike's been in charge he's tended to open the proceedings with a statement that can be read as his Producer's Letter.

They don't tend to be very revealing or even interesting, unlike some of Colin's more explosive statements. The current one from a day ago doesn't divulge a whole lot of facts or plans but tonally it says a lot about where the game is now and where it's likely to go in the next year or two.

I found it to be both a reassuring and a depressing read. Also annoying and frustrating. There's an unmistakable tone of satisfaction that borders on smugness. Here are some quotes that should give an idea of what I mean:

"I want to take a moment to celebrate the journey we’ve been on together this year.

I think with Season 3 we’ve hit a really good balance.

I think and hope that this year’s releases have been the best work we’ve ever done.

I think we’re finishing this year in a good position."

From that I take it that Mike has the business in the shape he wants it and we are likely to see things carry on much as they have been for the foreseeable future. That's good to hear, in terms of the health and longevity of the game, but somewhat unnerving if, like me, you feel GW2 has largely been spinning its wheels since Colin left.

Not that you'd know it from this AMA. For all Reddit's reputation as a bear pit, it's obvious why ANet prefer to host discussions there rather than on the forums. The AMA is stuffed with easy set-ups, soft questions and fawning. To read it you'd think the game had nothing but happy, docile fans.

The official forums tell a very different story. Comments on the feedback thread for the current LS episode are more nuanced. Many people are happy but by no means all of them. The praises and pans run about 50-50, with the negative comments mostly focusing on the gameplay and the narrative:

"Probably the weakest episode to date, in fact of all the Seasons.

I’m sorry, but if I had wanted to play a puzzle game, I would have bought a puzzle game instead of this game.

Surprisingly disappointing. I feel like the trailer tricked me.  

This episode left me saying why? why? why? Do you switch writers literally every episode? I felt like none of them made a coherent story and that reveal was not shocking but left a feeling of " this was dumb waste of time"

The real problem for me, though, comes not from Mike's - arguably complacent - satisfaction in a job well done or his understandable preference for chatting with a friendly audience rather than taking on a hostile one. No, it's some of the structural changes that have been made under his watch that concern me:

"We’ve always been good at shipping things, but with our renewed focus on quality above everything, we’ve had to get better at not shipping things. We now develop new content and features with a default assumption that they won’t ship, and then if they turn out great, we proactively decide to ship them".

Pre-launch, the mantra was Iteration. Everything had to be done and done again until it was done right. That ran completely counter to what has become the prevailing mode of the industry, the "bash it out now and tart it up later" ethos of Early Access and it inevitably slowed the whole process to a crawl.

If Iteration seemed to take forever, imagine how much more delay "not shipping" must add. GW2 already feels like one of the slowest-to-react MMOs I've played and it's infamously one of the most tight-lipped. Now we can just imagine them all, hunched over keyboards in their double-locked security cells, working on projects we'll never see, while problems in the game that have persisted for months and years go unaddressed.

Not an encouraging picture and one with which I have little affinity. I hugely prefer to get my hands on something rough but functional now, the chance to play around with it while it gets smoothed and polished, rather than wait months and months to get something that's supposedly "the best work we’ve ever done" and yet which turns out to be, as one comment in the official thread ironically puts it, "a solid 3/10".

When it comes to World vs World, considered by most aficionados to have been in free-fall for at least a couple of years, the following assertion raises a very hollow laugh:

"With PvP and WvW...the community owns the game modes and chooses what we work on...our goal this year was to develop more incrementally, test with the community on Live, and take feedback every step of the way". 

I can't speak for PvP players but WvW regulars, as they express their feelings on the forum and in the various chat channels in game, mostly feel ignored, not listened to and sometimes actively trolled by the developers. It would probably be not too far from the truth to say that WvW fans play the game mode despite the development attention it gets not because of it.

For all that, GW2 is clearly a stable, successful MMO. It's about to launch its second expansion and we'd better hope its a good one because the guy who's been in charge of development there, Mike Zadorojny, is about to take over the direction of the core game. If, reading between the lines, the new Xpack doesn't do a HoT:

"You’ll see a lot of him in the lead-up to the expansion, and then he’ll join the Live side too, and I expect he’ll eventually take these reins". 

At this stage I'm sanguine both about where things are and where they're headed. This is not the GW2 we were promised before launch, nothing like it. The Manifesto was torn up and burned long ago. This isn't even the GW2 of Living Story 1, an era when, as Mike O'Brien now claims to regret,

"Guild Wars 2’s content model [was] all about exciting events happening in the world" and "we went for the literal version, constantly shipping changes to the existing world".

Yes, we complained about it then but be careful what you wish for, as they say. Instead of something approximating a "Living World" we got a series of Unliving Tableaux, each "a slice in time" in which every map is zip-locked, a museum exhibit that never changes and never will change.

The original GW2 project was to create an ever-changing world, a dynamic environment in which no two players would have the same experience and no two sessions would play the same way. The current orthodoxy is

"It’s a game, after all...a game that doesn’t need reinvention but mostly needs a steady stream of great content, so we can focus on delivering great content."

I get it. It's just a game. I won't take it any more seriously than it deserves.

Now entertain me.

The Long Lost Shores: GW2

In a comment to a recent post by Syp at Bio Break, Telwyn said

"Guild Wars 2 makes me sad, it’s a game I loved for a year or so after launch and played with close friends and family. As you said in your post, I didn’t feel like the game was catering to my sort of player anymore, especially with Living Story season 2. I doubt they’ll come back to what the game was at launch, why would they? But that’s the game I wanted to play."

This is a sentiment often expressed, both by ex-players and some who still play. I've said much the same myself, often. I wonder, though, how true is it, really?

For quite a while, years, the infamous Manifesto would get dragged out and waved about like a torn and bloodied flag. That happens less now, although it's been linked and excerpted several times on this very blog, mostly when I wanted to rail against some betrayal of faith or hold some errant dev to account.

If the brave claims and promises of that proud document were ever enacted in the game itself, though, it was only briefly. People talk about the second Living Story marking a step-change for the game, the moment when most of the lore action moved to instances that could be packaged for cash shop sale, but the first and so far only expansion, Heart of Thorns, seems to be the tipping point most commonly defined.

My contention has always been that if GW2 did lose its way, the turn from the righteous path was taken long, long before any of that. The only version of GW2 that resembled the vision so energetically promoted in dev blogs and PR promos throughout the long march to launch was the one we saw in the six beta weekends and in the game's first three months. Everything since then has been ANet's New Game Experience.

Forever Ascalon

GW2's short-lived Golden Age ended with the catastrophic release of the game's first major live event, The Lost Shores, on November 16th 2012. With a prescience they could hardly have predicted, the ANet PR department trailed the update with the tagline "a massive one-time world event that will change Tyria forever!"

And it did. Player feedback was so virulent, so corrosive, the entire direction of the game changed as a result. The fundamental conception of the GW2 project, that there would be a dynamic, unpredictable, ever-changing world that players could affect and be affected by, was abandoned almost overnight.

From then until now the direction of development has been focused on making as certain as possible that no-one can say they didn't have at least a fair chance to do everything. If it isn't exactly "all must win prizes" it's certainly "all must have an equal opportunity to win prizes". And, failing that, buy them.

Maybe I did buy my hat in the Gem Shop. What's it to you, pal?

The result has been a relentless slide towards predictability. Everything happens on a schedule. There is always a tick list. Some things have a limited duration, it's true, but the limit is measured in weeks. Any sense of event or surprise is meticulously excised. There must never be any suggestion that anyone might miss out on anything.

It took a long time and many of ANet's famous iterations before these processes were sufficiently codified, tested and confirmed. The first season of the Living Story failed to take replayable accessibility into account, an error that means it cannot now, years later, be offered to those who missed it, tied up in neat Gem Shop bundles the way Seasons Two and Three have been. There are still plaintive posts about that on the forums now and again.

Once the revisionist steamroller began to pick up pace, though, it flattened everything. Megaserver tech removed variations between worlds, annihilating server cultures and collapsing alternate timelines. No more guesting to find a version of Tyria where the battle against Zhaitan's Risen was succeeding when it had failed in your own.

Even in the days of the Megaserver a very late map can give you that 3-man Maw experience you crave.

World bosses lost their power to surprise, weak as it was. Instead of a somewhat randomized "window" in which they might appear they were all issued with a strict schedule. Every quarter of an hour, to the second, a specific major threat would step out from behind the curtain, make a short speech and wait to die. There's a timetable.. More than that, there's a train.

I could go on. For four and a half years, beginning immediately after the perceived failure of the Karka Invasion of Lion's Arch, GW2 has stumbled towards order. The game that exists now, the game many ex-players dislike and avoid, is merely the later stage of the process that has been with us almost from the start.

Like the apocryphal frog who never notices the warming water it may be that those of us who stayed don't realize the trouble we're in. That's not quite how I see it. More likely, I think, the changes most widely reported and condemned seem more onerous, more divisive, less optional, when seen from the outside, than they really are.

Yes, I heard you the last seven hundred times.

Raids, for example, are entirely ignorable in exactly the same way raids have been entirely ignorable in every MMO I have ever played. No-one needs to raid. Most MMO players never raid. Raids stand to core GW2 play as sPvP used to and still does stand. If you played GW2 in 2012 and never felt like you "had" to do sPvP then you can equally play GW2 in 2017 and never feel like you "have" to raid.

Fractals, that infinite hamster wheel of achievement, are equally avoidable. What happens in Fractals stays in Fractals. Don't do them and you will never need to do them.

Ascended armor, the once controversial extra gear tier ANet either said they'd never add or always said they'd add depending who you believe, is a useful but absolutely optional addition. If you do choose to raid you'll need it because raiding is about marginal efficiency. If you WvW it's better to have it than not but only if you WvW seriously, with the whole VOIP and guild-build nine yards.

If you're raiding or WvWing in that manner then getting good is part of the deal you accepted. Everyone else - just chill! There is nothing anywhere else in the game you can't do in Exotics. Frankly, I doubt there's much you can't do in Rares. And you absolutely can WvW in Rares - I have characters doing it all the time - when there's a map call and I'm at the bank in Citadel I go with whoever I happen to be. You don't have to wear pink to fire an Arrow Cart or fix a gate.

Map calls know no color.

Heart of Thorns is an issue. Not having that flag on your account is a limiter, there's no denying. There's still a lot you can do without HoT but ANet's clear intent is to tie most new content to ownership of the expansion even when the content doesn't happen there.

After nearly five years, though, it hardly seems unreasonable to ask people who want to do anything more than dabble in the game to pony up just once more. Or, indeed, just once if it really is the first time.

And contrary to what you may have heard, Heart of Thorns is good. It's beautiful, it's content rich, it's varied and above all it's fun. It never was anywhere even close to being as "challenging" as the reviews suggested but what little added difficulty it ever offered has long since been nerfed into history.

I've been wearing this outfit since 2012 and I see no reason to change.

Masteries are mostly soloable and enjoyable to collect. The big events mostly run regularly and successfully even now, something that still surprises me. If you prefer to potter and wander and explore, though, then the Heart of Maguuma is your playground. And gliding in Verdant Brink is worth the price of entry on its own.

So, the game absolutely isn't what it was, or what they promised it would be, but then, when was it? That time was so short it seems like a dream. If I hadn't recorded how it was back then I'd scarcely believe it ever happened.

All MMOs change, at least while they live. GW2 has changed, for the worse and for the better. Whether it's shifted further, either way, than any other MMO I've played I somewhat doubt, although, maybe, it stumbled and lurched a little more along the way, trying to get there. I'm pretty sure it did that.

I wouldn't let what it's become stop me enjoying what remains of what it used to be, though. There's plenty left. And more besides.