REVOKED!

So that was a bit of a surprise. Also very dramatic. I just logged in and BOOM! there it was. A big, black window all over everything. 

My immediate thought was that I'd been banned from something for some reason. Not that I could remember doing anything wrong but then I got suspended from Pinterest a few weeks ago for violating some term of service or other and I don't even use Pinterest. 

I mean, it had to be something bad, didn't it? All that black background. The heavy bronze framing. The stern, sans serif font. Put it all together and it spells "You're in trouble". 

The choice of verb strongly reinforces the messaging that the person receiving the notice must have done something wrong. A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you. It must be your fault! You ungrateful little wretch!

Am I being over-sensitive? Oh, no. No, I am not. 

I don't have many areas of expertise but I do know what subtext is. I didn't spend three years on what was, at the time, broadly acknowledged to be the best undergraduate course in English Literature in the world not to be able to read subtext. What do you think all those practical criticism tutorials were for? Just so we could all sit around drinking sherry and eating cake?!

But if you doubt it, here are the examples Miriam Webster chose to use to illustrate the usage of the word "revoke":

"Your driver's license could be revoked after about three convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol; some people's licenses are even revoked for life. You could get your passport revoked if a judge thought you had violated the terms of your bail and suspected you might skip the country. And if you're out of prison on probation and violate the terms of probation, it will probably be revoked and you'll end up back in the slammer. "

See? If you throw around words like "revoke", those are the kinds of mental images you want to put into someone's head. My head. 

Do I sound pissed? (American usage.) I am, a bit, but that doesn't have much to do with Valve's inability to draft a polite, friendly memo. Mostly it's because it's the hottest day of the year and my PC just broke again and this time I don't think I'm going to magically get it working. Luckily I have Ol' Faithful here, which I was able to bring back into service in literally three minutes, thanks to having done it once already, a month ago. I was going to buy a decent gaming desktop and a gaming laptop this year anyway with my inheritance, when I finally get it, and I'm good on security updates for Windows 10 until October so I'm going to manage as I am until then. I'll strip the failing PC for parts, probably. I can't be bothered to send it back.

That should have been a sidebar, shouldn't it? Oh well, opportunity lost.

I'm not really cross about the Steam notice but, as Mrs Bhagpuss is fed up of hearing me say, some people really need to run their stuff past a decent marketing department before they send it out to the public. Any half-competent marketing person could re-draft that notice in five minutes to make it sound helpful and informative instead of passively-aggressive and vaguely threatening, the way it most definitely does.

They might even be able to do something about the confusion it causes too, although I'm not sure that would be within their competence. The whole situation is inherently confusing to begin with. Look at these two screenshots from Steam for a start.  

Both of those are from my one and only Steam account, the one to which the REVOKED notice was sent. The first, with the 13 hour played time, appears in the Steam Library as "Stars Reach". The second, with just three hours played, is listed as "Stars Reach Playtest". 

Since Stars Reach is and has only ever been in pre-alpha testing, they're both playtests of some sort. The first, which I'm assuming is the one to which my Steam key activation has been REVOKED, is the one I used from when the game first went into testing, which I applied for in the old-fashioned way and for which received first an acceptance and soon after an invitation to the creator program. Those 13 hours represent the testing I did and the research that was needed for the several posts I wrote.

At some point I also backed the Kickstarter and got a key for that. I think I may have even received a third key from somewhere, although I never used it. Maybe that's the one that's been REVOKED? 

Later still, Playable Worlds farmed the awkward business of issuing keys and linking accounts to something called firstlook.GG. I got some confusing instructions about linking accounts and registering keys through them, which I did my best to follow, but I was never sure which account had been linked to what.

I always use a separate email account for anything on Kickstarter and never use that email address for anything else, which does cause problems but I thought I'd gotten those sorted out. Maybe that was too optimistic. I can't say for sure if the Kickstarter pledge I made ever got converted into Steam access, as it was supposed to, since I already had access to the testing anyway.

And I still do! The first thing I did after I learned my access had been REVOKED was to go and see if it was true. It was not. Although a key must have been, I guess.

The notice specifically says, down in the small print and in a much more reasonable tone, that a key has been REVOKED because the test has ended. Only half of that can be true, at most. Unless I've missed something, there's only ever been the one testing program and it's still running. I'm still none the wiser as to what's really going on.

The first account up there, the one that says "Purchase" instead of Play looks like it was still working earlier this year. It says "LAST PLAYED Mar 27." I haven't tried it since then, because the last couple of times I played I made new characters to test the new-new player experience and for that I wanted to use a new account. I had a spare so I used it.

And that one still works. As you can see, I logged it in today. Both my new experience characters were there and I briefly logged them in and ran them around. All the in-game screenshots in the post are from that short session.

What I hope is going on is that my Kickstarter pledge key is attached to the account that still works, my creator/tester key has been REVOKED and my mysterious third key has vanished into the void, never to be seen. (I nearly said "never to be seen again" but as far as I can tell, I never saw it in the first place.)

I don't suppose I'll know for sure until the game goes into Early Access, as it's supposed to this summer. We're in summer now, come to think of it... That will presumably require yet more bureaucratic process and maybe it'll all become clear then. Ha!

I was always expecting that to be a problem anyway. I bet I'll end up having to send someone my Kickstarter pledge details to get into EA without paying twice. Always assuming I can find them.

All this for a game I'm pretty much certain I'll never want to play. At this point, the most fun I get out Stars Reach is trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the admin.

Certainly nothing much seems to be going on in the game itself. Once again, when I got in to the game today, I appeared to be the only person there. I probably was. I just checked the Steam charts and there are two people online right now. The 24-hour peak was 18.

The UI looked a bit different and the whole thing felt tidier but that good impression was counteracted by the very awkward character animations and the inordinate time it took to zone through a space portal to a planet. I had time to read nearly a dozen of those not very helpful tips they put up to keep you from being bored while you wait.

Worst of all, when I did finally arrive planet-side, I zoned in dead. Nothing killed me. I was just dead. I re-lifed and reappeared about five meters away. No corpse to retrieve. No clue what had happened. Not the greatest first impression.

Assuming I still have a Steam key that hasn't been REVOKED, I'll take another look when Early Access arrives. It's going to be very interesting to see how many other people turn up. And how long they stay.

EverQuest Legends, Stars Reach And Valheim Battle It Out. GW3 Watches From The Sidelines.

There's been a flurry of announcements concerning Games Of Interest of late and I haven't found time to talk about most of them yet. Today's the day! Here's a Grab Bag of upcoming launches and what-not.

EverQuest Legends

Last to be announced, first to market. We're so used to hype cycles lasting years that a four-month arc from the opening announcement to the game going live seems almost indecent. 

To recap, this is the version of EverQuest you can solo. There's more to it but that's the USP. It was clearly inspired by the success of an unsanctioned, rogue EverQuest server by the name of The Heroes Journey whose USP was... ah, you guessed!

That one was so successful it made the mistake of making money so EG7/Daybreak took the developers to court, where a $3.5m settlement was agreed. The THJ devs toddled off to make their own game, Hollowed Oath, without the borrowed IP and assets and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, having pulled in $166k on a Kickstarter .

Meanwhile, Daybreak farmed the idea out to a company called Game Jawn, which I believe is run by some of the people behind the Officially Sanctioned, Not A Rogue Server At All legacy project, Quarm.  With the whole thing neatly formalized and codified under the catchy, if recycled, title EverQuest Legends, everyone who would have liked to play on The Heroes Journey but felt too uncomfortable about the dubious provenance can now feel happy they're giving their money to the right people. 

EQL, as I'm sure we'll end up calling it, is a bit more than just a retro server. Although it will start back in 1999, the devs, who are entirely different people from those currently running and writing for EQ itself, promise "it will evolve separately with its own lore and timeline...have its own spin on classic zones and will also add never-before-seen content.”

 The game will be on Steam and you can have it for an upfront payment of  $19.99, followed by $10 a month in subs. You do, of course, get the first month in that box fee but sadly, since Game Jawn is entirely separate from Daybreak, your All Access sub won't get you in. 

You can give Game Jawn your money right now, if you want. The game goes live on July 28 but you can pre-order. 

That gets you guaranteed access to the beta "on or about July 1", which puzzles me a little. The beta will close on July 21 so pre-ordering gives you just three weeks to try out the game, after which your character and all your progress will be wiped and you'll have to start over from scratch another week later. 

For regular MMORPGs, where there's some form of competitive raid structure, some people find this sort of thing an attractive prospect so they can learn the strats and get ahead of everyone else come launch day. For a game that's selling itself on its solo-friendliness, though, one where "even a solo player can build a character strong enough to take on the toughest challenges and acquire the most epic gear in the game", those three weeks seem like a bit of a waste of time and effort. 

I guess there will be achievements, maybe? World firsts and that sort of thing. Although it won't be very authentically old-school EQ if there are. Still, it's supposed to be a modern take on the old game...

I'm still undecided about whether to bother with EQL. I don't want to play it. I don't have time to play it. I've already seen just about all there is to see in the first half-dozen expansions so until they start adding new, original zones, there wouldn't be a lot of point. 

On the other hand, I feel I ought at least to check it out and so I can write about it a little. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Rather the opposite, in fact, for both the playing and the writing. If I do, it'll be more out of a sense of duty than with any enthusiasm, although duty to what or whom, I couldn't say. 

And I very definitely don't want to pay a sub for it, that's for damn sure. A one-off box price of $20 I can rationalize but an ongoing, monthly subscription? I think not. It'll be one month and out, if at all.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds' sandbox MMORPG set in space is coming to Early Access "this summer". A bit vague, I know, but at least they have a window. They also have a trailer. Want to see it?

It's... alright. Not terrible. The character animations look wonky but it's pretty enough. Doesn't make the game look very exciting, though, does it? Or interesting. Or new. 

It looks as though Early Access will be free to play although you can, of course, buy supporter packs. Or will be able to. Wilhelm has all the details. In fact, he has everything you need to know about the whole thing so I suggest you pop over to his place and get yourself up to speed there, if you need to.

All I'm going to do here is editorialize. I've played some Stars Reach. It's okay if you like that sort of thing although I'm pretty sure there are better options. No Man's Sky gets brought up a lot in conversations but I haven't played that so I can't comment on the similarities.  

What I can say is that Stars Reach is dull. It all works but none of it is much fun. "Worthy" is a word that keeps popping into my head when I try to write about it. "Bored" is the one that pops up when I play. 

There's not much of a game there, that's the biggest problem. It's a fairly pure sandbox so you need to make your own entertainment and the tools for that are limited. It could use some kind of spine like all the crafting/survival games have and it hasn't got one. Without one, it kind of flops around, limply. As it would.

There's been some speculation about why they're going public just now. Money drying up is one obvious possibility but my suspicion is that they just can't get enough people through the doors any other way to maintain a meaningful test population. 

That's not guesswork. HeartlessGamer said in the comments at TAGN that Playable Worlds has admitted as much on reddit. There's numerical evidence, too. The only way you can play the Stars Reach alpha has always been through Steam so we have exact numbers and concurrent population has been in single figures for months. 

The peak player count this year was 32. Average concurrency peaked at 7 in March and now it's less than half that. No-one wants to play any more. Actually, if you look back, hardly anyone ever did. The all-time peak was well below 200 players online at the same time.

I asked yesterday who Neverness To Everness was for. That game had thirty million pre-registrations. Stars Reach has one person online as I write and a 24-hour peak of four. 

Who is Stars Reach for? I guess we'll find out this summer.

Guild Wars 3

Here's an announcement I did find the time to cover. I'm not going over all that again but I will say something about how the news affects the other Guild Wars titles and particularly Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, like Daybreak, is in an interesting and somewhat fortunate position. They've been through this before. They've seen what happens to an existing playerbase when you launch a second title in direct competition with yourself. They each have that experience to draw on, now they come to launch a third. (Or in Daybreak's case a fourth. Never forget EQOA.)

First time around, the two companies took very different tacks. ANet mothballed Guild Wars the moment GW2 arrived. They shunted it straight to maintenance mode and stopped developing it at all. Daybreak (Or SOE as it was at the time, of course.) did the exact opposite, running EQ and EQII in tandem, continuing to develop them both pretty much equally.

ANet now seem to believe that was the better choice, although Colin Johansen inexplicably spins the idea that they're going to support new and old titles as "not the norm" whereas I'd say deciding not to was the exception.They've already begun to take GW1 out of mothballs and they're promising development will continue on GW2 as before. They know they need to get out there and assure the people paying their bills right now that it's worth carrying on for the next couple of years because a lot of them, like Azuriel, will be questioning whether it's likely to be worth it. 

Colin Johanson is suggesting it's just a blip. There'll be a short hiatus in new content as they go back and tidy up all the bugs, then everything will get back to normal, with annual  expansions and whatever else it is they've been doing since I last played a few years ago.

I am, to be polite, skeptical. In the decade I played GW2, one of ANet's defining features was a complete inability to establish either a cadence or a pipeline for supplying content. They kept chopping and changing. They rarely stuck to any of their plans long enough to see if they worked although in most cases it was blindingly obvious they weren't going to, so I suppose they should actually get some credit for dropping them as fast as they did. Just none for coming up with them in the first place.

They frequently floated grandiose frameworks for large-scale changes to the game, changes they then discussed literally for years without implementing any of them, during which time most of the key individuals would move departments or leave the company. If and when any of these plans did finally make it to the game, they'd look nothing like the promises and they'd often wither away and be forgotten almost immediately. World vs World suffered particularly badly in this respect but it hit all parts of the game at times.

And yet, somehow, the game muddled along. It rarely prospered but it didn't fail. GW2 players became inured to frequent content droughts combined with constant churn in all kinds of systems and mechanics and learned to put up with it, albeit very grudgingly. Either that or they left. 

If that's what Colin Johanson means by business as usual (Not the phrase he used but it's the implication.) then I'm willing to believe him. The game was always a shambles when I played. I'm sure it can carry on being a shambles for a bit longer.

The idea that the company that struggled so hard to maintain a steady content flow for a single game will somehow now be able to manage it smoothly and efficiently or three titles is fantasy, though. Unless, I guess, they're planing on hugely expanding the workforce. Are they doing that? And even then, I very much doubt it would help. It'd just be more daft ideas and discussion document than ever.

We'll see how it all pans out in a couple of years time, I guess. My feeling is that if GW3 is a success, GW2 will end up being like GW1 is now, a comfortable niche title that people like enough to feel nostalgic about but mostly don't play. It could still get more content but it might not even need it. GW1 pottered along for a decade and more without any and a few people still played it.

If GW3 bombs or just under-performs, though, we might end up with an EQ/EQII scenario, where the older game holds most of its current audience, while the new one fails to attract another. At that point, I suspect ANet's promises of triple-game development might fall apart quite quickly. 

By then, though, I'll be too old to care. 

Valheim

Valheim is my most-played game on Steam at 385 hours but the last time I logged in was over two years ago. When the game finally leaves Early Access on September 9, will I return? Doubtful.

The further we get from the pandemic, the more certain I am that this was one of the artifacts of that strange time. We all had more hours in the day than we knew what to do with and we weren't always even allowed out of the house. Valheim filled a need.

It also introduced me - and many others, I'm sure - to a whole new genre, the crafting/survival game. I've played a few since and most of them have been better in objective terms than Valheim, which is kind of barebones when you look at it hard.

It was my first, though, and you're always still a little bit in love with your first, aren't you? I'd like to get to the end of Valheim but the the last two biomes were so radically un-enjoyable I don't have much hope for the last one, the Deep North. I imagine it'll be a miserable experience for anyone other than gaming masochists.

At most, I might set all the controls to as easy as possible and have a quick tour around the end zone like I did with the Ashlands. At the moment, though, I can't say I'm even motivated to do that. Valheim was a game of its time and that time has gone.

And that's my bag filled for the day, I think. I have a feeling there may have been some other announcements I was going to attend to (Edit: Like this one.) but I can't remember what they were and I didn't bookmark anything so I think we're done. 

For now. 

Ashes Of Creation: First Impressions

For once, I'm not going to try anything fancy. No bullet point lists or categories. No framing structure or cutesy faux-RP storytelling. I'm just going to say what I think of the game so far. How about that for an original idea?

First up, it was really easy to link the Intrepid and Steam accounts. Well, it was once I managed to catch the Ashes of Creation website up for five minutes. I had, of course, forgotten whatever password I created for it nearly a decade ago but that was soon remedied and after that it was very plain sailing. 

The client is huge, though. Almost 140GB. Surely that will have to come down if the game ever officially launches. Luckily for me, I have a totally unused 1TB HDD in this new PC. With great timing, we had to go sell the old car this morning, so before we left I set the download running. I came back two hours later to find it had finished downloading and was 99% validated too. Glad I didn't have to sit in and watch those progress bars...

I had lunch and then sat down to play. I wasn't wildly enthusiastic but I was curious to see what eight years wait had brought. 

No introductory movie for a start. Or any kind of introduction at all. Just the usual warning about flashing lights then straight into character creation. 

Well, I say "straight into..."  More like v e r y  s l o w l y into. I have never seen parts of a UI take so long to load. It was so slow I thought they must not have the models available for all the races or the icons for all the skills, presumably because the game is still in Alpha, even though it's also Early Access, somehow. 

But no. Not that.

 As I was already making my choices, sight unseen, icons and images finally started to load. In the end everything was there. Nine races and eight classes, I think, although some of the options are really two variants of  the same race.

I had already picked one (Niküa.) from the description before I found out what I was going to look like.

Moana, basically. Moana, after a giant must have stepped on her.

It wasn't remotely what I was expecting but I was pretty pleased with what I got. As I've said before, it makes a huge difference to me if I feel a connection with my character and this one clicked with me immediately.

There aren't all that many choices to make after you pick Race and Class. Hairstyles and colors, skin tone, height, eyes, nose, mouth... the usual. There's an option to morph your face, so I'm guessing you can make some extreme looks but I didn't bother with any of that. I wanted to get in and have a look around.

The Niküa get a choice of two starting locations, one in the hilly North and one in the flat South but the Northern one comes with a warning that the area isn't done yet so I picked the other. At some point, I forget exactly when, I also had to pick a server from a list of eight or so, either in the EU or East Coast USA. The ping to the East Coast was around 50-60ms, which is fine, so I went for one of those.

And then I was in. And everything was good. Very little lag. Movement felt reasonably smooth. No obvious hiccups or delays. 

The UI felt very intuitive. It would be very familiar and comfortable to anyone who played one of the big, Western theme park MMORPGs in the 2010s or teens. All the controls do what you'd think they'd do. There's a hotbar where you'd expect to find one. All of that.

I did what I always do at this point: opened Settings and turned off as much of the overhead clutter as I could without making the game unplayable. In some games that can be a long job. Not in this one. I had everything set up pretty much as I like it in minutes.

About the only thing I had to google was how to hide the UI for screenshots. It's the Page Down key, an unusual choice but perfectly acceptable, certainly a lot better than the Ctrl-Shift-Something you often get nowadays. Even autorun was on Num Lock and Interact on F, two things I regularly have to change. It was almost as if someone had been playing EverQuest and just copied the keybinds across.

All of that was a pleasant surprise. It put me in a good frame of mind to see what the actual game might be like. And guess what? That was a pleasant surprise, too.

Based on the starting area, if Ashes of Creation had come out when my Kickstarter pledge suggested it was going to, namely sometime in 2017 or 2018, it would have been pretty much what I was hoping for. A tab-target Western fantasy MMORPG with action bars. 

I'd forgotten that one of the primary reasons I was interested in it at the time was that it promised to use the standard (WoW-style.) set-up rather than what were calling "Action" controls back then. At the time I preferred to click icons on hotbars and Mrs Bhagpuss insisted on it. AoC was going to be the next big MMORPG we played together largely because of that. 

 Now, of course, I've played so many action-rpgs with so many control systems I barely even notice which it is any more. And Mrs. Bhagpuss has given up on MMORPGs altogether. 

This is a First Impressions piece, not any kind of review or analysis, but I will say that it very much looks as if AoC might be the right game for the wrong time. It's not 2018 any more. The pandemic changed a lot of things and I'm realizing now that one of the things it changed for me was my connection with MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, Valheim did. There's a post to be written about that but this isn't it. 

Anyway, I suspect the mainstream ship for games like this has long since sailed. A solid niche success though? That's still very much a port worth steering for.

Getting back to the First Impressions, they continued to be very favorable right until I had to log out to go and have tea. By then I'd been playing for almost three hours, which is a really long session by my current standards. I would happily have gone on for quite a while longer, too.

Visually, or graphically if you prefer, the game looks very attractive, as I think the screenshots show. I let the game audit my PC and set the optimum settings accordingly, which turned out to be "Medium" all the way. I'm very happy with that, given I deliberately chose a low-end system. If it looks this good and plays this smoothly on my machine, I imagine it must look and play much better on a proper gaming rig. Although in my experience that doesn't always necessarily follow...

By the time I logged out, I was Level 4. I'd done a lot of quests, all of them absolutely classic mainstream theme-park MMO fare. I started off killing goblins, then got sent from one outpost to another to introduce myself, before I was given a whole bunch of jobs for which I was barely qualified, everything from interrogating prisoners to breaking up a suspected demonic ritual. 

Eventually I graduated to raiding bandit camps for evidence of some kind of conspiracy. Every quest was verbose to a degree unusual even for the genre, which has always been very heavy on the word count. It was all quite well-written, in the typical RPG style. 

Each hand-in came with a fulsome recap of exactly what I'd just done, frequently with lots of extraneous, scene-setting detail that I would have better appreciated if it had come at the time I was actually doing whatever it was I was now being told I'd done. A lot of it came as news to me. 

Thinking about it makes me want to write a whole essay on MMORPG quest writing but I'll save that for another time. What I will say is that I'm not sure I have the patience for this sort of thing any more. It's a lot of reading. Some of it was quite enjoyable but it takes so long. Is this really the level of detail most players want for every little side-quest? It smacks of someone having had far too much time on their hands and not much to do with it, these last eight years.

Still, I did read most of it. And it was mostly quite engaging. So I'm not complaining as such. I'm just acutely aware that if I'd skipped all the jabber, like probably 90% of players would, I'd probably have been two levels higher when I logged out. It really did take that long.

One thing I liked much more than having to plow though all that verbiage was being given a horse almost at the start. I always think it's a good sign if the developers allow you to mount up from the beginning of the game rather than holding it back as some sort of reward you have to earn. 

In fact, most of the choices I was aware of the developers having made seemed very encouraging. I did get the feeling they wanted me to enjoy myself, which you'd think would be a given in a video game but I imagine we all know is very much not.

Take PvP, for example. I've read an awful lot of scare stories about non-consensual PvP and ganking in Ashes of Creation, which certainly does advertise itself as a PvP title, so I was both surprised and pleased to find that, at least in the starting areas, PvP is off by default. You have to switch it on if you want it. 

Or you can just attack someone, I think. That'll set you up for a good kicking, if not by the other player then by the guards. If someone attacks you and you decline to respond, the only flag that gets set is on the attacker. You can just stroll away and let the authorities deal with it.

At least, I think that's how it works. I didn't see a single example of anyone fighting anyone else in the few hours I was there. I imagine there's plenty of that later but if anyone's worried about getting repeatedly ganked at spawn before they even load into the game, I can re-assure you it's not going to happen. 

What you are going to see, almost as unwelcome as a gank squad barrelling towards you, is endless gold spam in General Chat. I haven't seen this much for years. In one way, it's the sign of success. No-one wastes time trying to sell gold in a game that no-one plays.

You'd think no-one would bother in game that's still in Alpha, either, but that just tells you these labels mean nothing any more. Intrepid can call this "Alpha" and "Early Access" all they want but when the doors are open to all, they're taking money and there are tens of thousands of people playing, we all know that means Ashes of Creation has launched. It may not be anywhere even close to being done but so what? It's an MMORPG. A finished game has never been a requirement.

Am I bothered? Surprisingly not. To my considerable surprise, it looks as though the game I signed up for might be the game I got. I mean, I'd rather have had it six or seven years ago, when they told me I would and when I'd really have appreciated it, but I wasn't expecting it to be this close to what I imagined it would be, all those years ago. Now I've seen it, I'm a lot happier with what's there than I thought I would be.

How long that will last is another question. I'm only Level 4. A lot of games are fun in the early levels. For a First Impression, though, I'd have to say this has been pretty solid. I'm keen to wrap this up and get back for some more. After that, maybe I'll be back with some rather more critical comments.

Or maybe I'll still be having an unexpectedly good time. I do hope so. We could all do with a decent, new traditional MMORPG.

Intrepid And Steam, Sitting In A Tree...

So, here's a thing. I was wondering a while back whether my moldering Kickstarter pledge for Ashes of Creation would get me into the upcoming Early Access release, which is scheduled to start tomorrow. After a bit of digging I found it probably would, even though it was originally only meant to open the doors for Beta Phase 2.

At the time I wrote the post, it seemed as though Intrepid was suggesting the Steam release would be a walled garden, only for new purchases made through Steam. Existing active accounts and incoming Beta Kickstarter pledges would have to download the client from the game's website and presumably play on separate servers.

I read some reddit and forum threads about it but it wasn't all that obvious how it would work. I was pretty sure I'd be able to play during Early Access, somehow and somewhere. What wasn't clear was the where and the how.

All that's been sorted out now. It's in the recently-revised FAQ. I'd quote the appropriate sections only 

Somewhat inconvenient when I'm trying to write a post about it but I'll persevere. 

Whatever the old plan was, Intrepid has now done a one-eighty and ruled that from the start of EA Ashes will only be playable on Steam. To that effect, I received an email today marked "Action Needed" telling me I ought to link my Intrepid Account to my Steam Account.

It was news to me that I had an Intrepid Account. I guess I knew at some level I must have something registered with them or they wouldn't have been able to send me all these emails for years but if I ever thought about it at all, which I don't think I did, I would have assumed it was all being generated from my Kickstarter details. It does all come through the email address I use exclusively for Kickstarting.

Apparently it "only takes a moment" to link the accounts so I clicked on the link provided to see what would happen. Not much did. The website was "undergoing scheduled maintenance". 

Can't really blame Intrepid or their Marketing Dept. for that. The reminder email arrived around two in the morning. I just didn't get around to reading it until nearly tea-time.

Since I was there anyway, though, I thought I'd take a look at the "Support Channel" to see if I could find out any more details.

 The buttons work. Er... that's about it.

"News" button takes you straight back to the Scheduled Maintenance notice. "FAQ" appears to go to the old version, not the new one with information relating to EA and Steam. "Status Updates" takes you to the Sinkhole Formerly Known As Twitter, at which point I gave up, turned round and came straight out again.

There's another button at the bottom for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse. That puzzled me. Didn't they officially and finally terminate that misguided project years ago? (Looking into it, apparently it  was never officially cancelled. They just closed it down, stopped working on it, promoting it or talking about it. They basically ghosted their own spin-off. Is that any better?)

I clicked on the button out of curiosity. This is what I saw.

The most recent entry on there is five years old. Is any of the information remotely relevant any more? Doesn't look like it.

The FAQ is much the same, though. Full of answers to questions that relate to things that happened years ago. It's as though once the information's been posted it just sits there forever. Forgotten. 

I can't say any of this inspires much confidence.

If it looks like I'm spinning this out to get a cheap post, well, yes, I am. But I was also hoping that by the time I ran out of things to say, the maintenance would have ended and I could have added some practical advice on the actual linking process, not to mention confirming whether I do really have an account and if I do, whether it is really set to go with tomorrow's soft launch.

Except I've had my tea now and watched Monday's Only Connect quarter final and it's gone six o'clock and the maintenance is still going on, so that's not happening. I'm going to leave it at that for now and come back later, or more likely tomorrow, to see if I have better luck.

If I do, I imagine there'll be a First Impressions post at some point. I do, for once, have a couple of days with not much planned so the timing isn't too bad. [Edit - Oops! Forgot Rage of Cthurath launches today! So maybe not such great timing after all.)

Let's hope the game isn't, either.  

Two Games I Won't Be Playing

Wow! It's December already! I really need to get going on Christmas stuff. I always start buying presents for Mrs Bhagpuss in October and November, get a bunch of those stashed away, then think I'm done. And then, when it's almost too late, I realize I haven't even thought about anyone else, or bought any cards, let alone written or posted them. 

Doing the Advent Calendar here doesn't help, either. All the work involved in getting that set up really makes me feel like I've done plenty so I must be pretty close to being finished.

Well, I'm not! So much more to do. 

I mention all of this only to explain, or apologize for, or attempt to excuse, in advance, the shoddy quality of posts likely to appear here over the next week or three. Like this one...

It doesn't help that this is, at least ostensibly, a gaming blog and I'm hardly playing any games right now. Not from lack of interest or desire. I have a pretty lengthy list of games I'd like to take a run at, many of which are on my Steam wishlist. It makes for a really useful aide memoir. A lot better than trying to hold the titles in my head.

That's something I'm not all that great at doing. For example, I saw something over at MassivelyOP the other day about a new MMORPG called Reign of Guilds leaving Early Access. It rang the very vaguest of bells but I couldn't bring anything about it to mind so I mentally filed it for later. And then, while I was looking for something completely unrelated in my back pages, I came across this from a couple of years ago.

It seems not only had I heard of RoG before, I'd briefly played it and written a whole post on my short time there. I can remember absolutely nothing about either of those events.

The even more worrying part is that I opened that post by saying I couldn't remember hearing about Reign of Guilds before, even though I thought I should have. Clearly I have some kind of mental block about the damn game.

Re-reading the post, it all comes back to me, which I guess is one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Without that written record I'd literally have no memory of ever having played the game at all. If anyone had asked me, I'd have said I never did. Not that anyone would be likely to ask...

Although I was very sure the game wasn't for me, I did have some positive things to say about it. I ended the post by claiming I'd be interested to see how well it did when it launched in 2024. This is the sort of thing I often say at the end of posts. I have to believe I mean it when I write it but it's self-evidently not true in any meaningful and lasting fashion. In most cases, I never mention the games again.

I certainly never gave another thought to Reign of Guilds, even though it did indeed become openly available in an Early Access build on Steam in April 2024. Early Access turned into full release last month and the game is now officially in Release 1.0 status. Reviews are Mixed but the numbers on Steam's chart, while small, are encouraging. 

Peak concurrency is only 300 but there was a huge spike when the game officially released on 26 November and so far those players haven't stopped logging in. Granted it's only been a week but I'm sure we all can all think of a few games that have lost almost everyone faster than that.

It makes for an interesting rebuttal to the widely-aired theory that you only get one chance at launch, that being the earliest moment you make your game publicly available. Early Access or Open Beta are often considered to be the de facto launch of a game, regardless of what the developers and the Marketing Dept. might say. Even more so if money changes hands.

Reign of Guilds is free to play so theoretically that last part doesn't apply, although of course there are optional "Bundles" you can buy if you're so inclined. There's something for all pockets. The cheap end begins at just £2.49. Top of the shop is £76.71.

I assume it's a less bizarre amount in U.S. Dollars but Steam is weirdly insistent on only showing you the currency for where your IP Address says you're based. If I still had a VPN I'd spoof it to find out the dollar price but I'm not re-subbing just for that. You'll have to use a currency converter or log in and check for yourself if you care.

Getting back to the point and disregarding the payment model for the moment, the Steam numbers strongly suggest that, for this game at least, Early Access did not wholly invalidate the official launch eighteen months later. 

When the game entered EA, concurrency peaked very briefly at just under 600 before falling rapidly to double figures, where it remained from July 2024 until November 2025. The week before the game left Early Access for fully Live status, concurrency was languishing at somewhere between twenty and thirty. That number increased tenfold the moment the game launched and so far it has stayed well above 250.

That may not be a whole lot of people, perhaps not enough to make for a viable game long-term, but it does suggest that you can have two bites at the cherry. Either people had a look at the EA launch, left, then half of them came back when EA ended, or launch brought in a whole new set of people, albeit only half as many. 

Would the net result have been better had there been no EA? Impossible to tell but opening the doors early and leaving them wide for a year and a half certainly didn't kill any future interest in the game.

All of which is altogether more than I meant to say about Reign of Guilds today, or indeed ever. It does, however, feed into something I was planning on talking about, that being an excellent, highly informative post by Owls about Soulframe. 

Soulframe is the fantasy MMORPG currently in development from Digital Extremes, makers of Warframe. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago that I was "mildly interested" in the "Preludes" version of the game, effectively a buy-in pre-Alpha, although not so interested I'd actually want to, y'know, buy into it. 

At the time I wrote that post, the price of the Founders Packs hadn't been announced but they're available now and they start at £24.99 ( $29.99.) Top whack goes for £84.99 ($99.99.)

DE has gone for an unusual and quite clever version of the "Founder Pack" deal based, I believe, on the way Warframe works. Each pack buys you a specific in-game class, meaning that if you want to try, say, an Archer and a Healer, you'll need to buy two separate packs. Currently there are only three classes. The ninety-nine dollar pack gives you all of them.

It sounds a little dubious at first but substantively, I suppose, it's not that much different to the Reign of Guilds approach, where differently priced packs give you varying numbers of character slots. You'd need multiple slots to play multiple classes, the important difference being that, unless you can't delete a character and re-roll, at least you could cycle through all the available options on one purchase. As I read it, in Soulframe you're stuck with whatever class you bought, much like you're limited to the ships you purchase in Star Citizen.

Although the easiest and quickest way to gain access to the game is to pay for it, it is possible to get into Preludes for free. There's some sort of lottery you can opt into on the website but there are invites, too. Owls got his initial access a while ago, courtesy of a code gifted him by Belghast and now Owls has some codes of his own to pay forward. The link is in his post if you're interested.

Having read his very helpful introduction to the game, I'll respectfully pass, even for free. The game very much sounds like something I would not like, involving as it does a lot of blocking and dodging and basically having to know what you're doing. Not really my scene.

At least gameplay doesn't revolve around FFA PVP, which puts it ahead of Reign of Guilds, but other than that it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. It also doesn't sound much like an MMORPG at its current state of development, although frankly it sounds more like one than RoG sounds like the games it claims to have modeled itself on, namely EverQuest and Ultima Online, neither of which it even remotely reminded me of back when I tried it.

Still, I'll say it yet again: I'll be interested to come back and take a look at Soulframe when the it launches. Or, indeed, as it goes through development, perhaps when it hits beta. 

At least with this one, I think I'll still be able to remember what game it is when that happens.

Alpha, Beta, Early Access, It's All The Same To Me: Ashes of Creation

There are eighteen posts here on Inventory Full with the "Ashes of Creation" label attached. The earliest is from the end of April 2017, just before the Kickstarter, when it seems my main interest in the proposed MMORPG was how good the housing was going to be. It seems an odd feature to focus on in a game that, at the time, I was repeatedly calling "Fantasy EVE",  but housing appears to have been my Big Thing back then.

Skimming those posts, it seems I was never all that keen on the project, not even when it was all new and shiny. In 2017, eight years ago, I described the promotional material for Ashes of Creation as giving the impression of "an MMO that would have looked about par for the course four or five years ago", the final big push for Western Mass Market MMOs. I seemed to think it would have fitted right in with the wave that gave us Guild Wars 2, Wildstar and The Secret World.

Even less enthusiastically, I was musing on whether or not to pledge, noting that "after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was."

Somehow, I must have managed to overcome my reservations because a week later, on the day the Kickstarter went live, I was watching the numbers tick relentlessly upwards: "the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter had been live for a quarter of an hour.  In that time there was already $161,872 pledged of the $750,000 goal. Not bad for the first fifteen minutes." 

I was pondering on whether it might be worth ponying up $80 to get into the first closed beta, which at the time was predicted for December that year. Closed Beta 2, access to which cost half as much, was due by the following Spring.

I didn't even especially want to play the game. I just wanted to get in early so I could blog about it. $80 sounded a lot for that, though, so I was inclining against it. I thought $40 sounded more reasonable.

And then, just a day later, I was back to say that I had, after all, stumped up my $80, only it wasn't on a pledge that would get me into the earliest closed beta. I'd bought two $40 tickets to Closed Beta 2, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss, who was at least theoretically interested, again mostly for the housing.

Fast forward eight years and Ashes of Creation is still in Alpha. Eight. Years. Later. Just think about that for a moment. Eight years and still in Alpha, when pledges were sold on the basis that Beta would start... eight years ago.  

The Kickstarter, famously, went extremely well, bringing in over $3m on an ask of just $750k. Three million dollars, though, doesn't take you far with an AAA MMORPG. I haven't been paying enough attention over the near-decade the project has been running to be able to say where the rest of the funding has been coming from, but it appears the well has finally dried up because as of 11 December, Ashes of Creation is going into Early Access on Steam.

The stated reason is to "expand the audience" but the sentiment among redditors is more along the lines of cash grab or just plain Hail Mary pass. 

Intrepid may be short of money and desperate but I don't think anyone could reasonably call it a scam. The game has actually been in non-NDA Alpha for about a year now, and the build that will come to Steam is going to be much the same, so it's not hard to find out what you'll be getting for your fifty dollars.

Not hard, but you will have to look. The thing is... no-one outside the bubble has really been talking about it. Literally the only blogger or professional gaming website of the 200+ in my Feedly that's done more than post the odd Press Release this year is Heartless Gamer and he hasn't been all that impressed.  

Still, the game going into Early Access is a big deal, especially on Steam. Bree at MasivelyOP, in that post I linked above, re-iterated the point made by numerous commenters on reddit that AoC is "one of the few major Western MMORPGs currently in development." That could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You might think it means a whole lot of pressure to perform for Intrepid Studios. Or you might, as I'm starting to believe, begin to wonder if it means the day of the Western AAA MMORPG is over.

I played New World Aeternum for a couple of hours yesterday. I had a good time. I did all five of the first set of time trials in the Mount quest-line. The game ran well, the scenery was glorious, chat was busy and there were players everywhere. All of this in a game that's not only in maintenance mode but which has been mostly seen as a failure since a few weeks after launch. You wouldn't really know New World was a failure. But it is.

New World was first revealed to the public as a game in development in 2016, about a year before the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter. It launched as a fully live game in September 2021, re-launched on Console as Aeternum three years later and went into maintenance mode a couple of weeks ago. 

The game, which as far as I can recall is the only AAA Western MMORPG to have launched this decade, has completed its full development cycle in significantly less time than it's taken Ashes of Creation to reach Early Access. Or get out of Alpha, for that matter.  Even though New World sold over four million copies on PC at launch and is also available on console, and allowing that it may have been a recent victim of larger restructuring at Amazon, it has not been widely regarded as a success.

It's not for want of trying. New World is an excellent MMORPG and for most of its lifetime it's had the resources of a huge, wealthy parent company propping it up. Millions of players gave it a chance, enough, it's said, to have recouped its development cost in its first month of operation. 

And yet it still could not hold an audience. It seems not to have remained profitable for long, either. Many older players and veteran developers remain convinced there's an untapped mass market for fairly traditional Western MMORPGs but the evidence to support that belief seems harder to find. 

Players flock to new games in the genre but they very rarely stay for long. Whatever it is they're looking for, they just can't seem to find it. Maybe Ashes of Creation really is the last hurrah for big budget Western MMORPGs. If so, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for the genre after that.

Back when I was pledging to the AoC Kickstarter, I was also interested in another would-be new entrant to the genre - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. That game, which has been in development for about as long, preceded AoC into Early Access. It's done quite well there, attracting a peak concurrent player-base of around 7,000, very similar to AoC's reported peak alpha concurrency of about 8,000. 

These are solid figures for a niche game in closed testing or Early Access but they're not mainstream AAA game numbers. Not by a couple of orders of magnitude. All the big Eastern MMOs of the past few years have attracted millions of players. New World, as I said, sold four and a half million boxes in its first month. Concurrency on Steam peaked at more than 900,000. 

New World was considered a huge success. For a while. And then it wasn't. Build it and they will come. And then they will leave.

I'm coming around to the opinion that there will be no more long-running, mainstream MMORPGs produced in the West. There will be plenty of small, niche successes. There are lots of players out there, ready to pick a horse and sit on it as it plods along. But not that many. Success for those games is going to mean a loyal following in the low tens of thousands. At best.

And maybe that will be enough for Ashes of Creation. It is supposed to be the Fantasy EVE after all and EVE's concurrency is usually quoted somewhere between 20-35k. EVE is a long running, successful MMORPG, no question. But t's nowhere even close to being a mainstream game. 

All of this talk of populations and break-even points for commercial success and what it might mean for future game development in the genre is speculation, though. What we soon won't need to speculate about is whether Ashes of Creation is any good. 

Does it run well or is it a buggy mess? Does it look amazing or like the decade-old game it is? Is the gameplay fun or frustrating? Is the PvP balanced or is it a gankbox? And is that housing anything you'd want to live in?

All of that is already open knowledge, of course, or should be, since there's been no NDA for a year, but in a few weeks anyone who cares will be able to put down $50 and find out for themselves. 

I will not be paying another $50 on top of the $80 I already gave Intrepid eight years ago. Luckily, I won't have to. 

I was initially irked at the thought that the game I backed so long, long ago was going into Early Access with an Alpha build, apparently leaving me still waiting for the second round of Beta before I could join in. I figured that had to be what was going to happen. They'd have sent me an email if my pledge qualified me for EA access, surely. Wouldn't they? They send me plenty of PR emails, after all. It's  not like they don't know where to find me.

Still, I thought before I started complaining I probably ought to check. And guess what? On the Ashes Moments Substack (Whatever that is...) it says "all Beta-1 and Beta-2 key holders will also be granted access to the Early Access launch on December 11th". That's my ticket in.

Actually, my two tickets because Mrs Bhagpuss has long since moved on and won't be playing this or any other MMORPG. I'll have her account to play with as well. Not that I want two of them.

It looks as though I won't be playing on Steam, though. Current testers and anyone invited in on later pledges when the game hits Early Access will reportedly have to use Intrepid's own launcher. If they want to play on Steam, they'll have to buy a $50 Steam Key like anyone else. I'm unclear as to whether we'll all end up on the same servers after that. 

I guess I'll find out come December. It'll give me something new to write about for a while, at least. 

Which is really all I paid for in the first place. Eight long years ago. 

Horse Latitudes

I had a great plan for today's post.... okay, a good plan... well, a plan, anyway. I was going to stump up my $25 (£20.99) for the weird horse-mystery MMORPG Equinox: Homecoming. It's going into Early Access on Steam today. Then I was going to play it for a couple of hours and write a First Impressions piece. Those are always fun and easy to do.

It seemed like a good idea to buy the thing anyway, not only because of the blogging opportunities it offers, always a major consideration these days, when I'm writing about games a lot more than I really play them, (And just how long can that go on, eh? Eh??) but because of that too-good-to-be true "Lifetime Subscription With Every Early Access Purchase" offer. 

As a blogger, even if the game tanks, $25 would be a fair price to pay, just to there for the drama. Lots to write about in a crash-and-burn. And if it turns into a success, $25 for permanent subscription-level perks is an insane bargain. Anything in-between would just be par for the course for an EA buy-in so it seemed like a no-lose scenario.

I was all set to Add To Cart when something caught my eye:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
Processor: i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8 Core
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce RTX 2070
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 20 GB available space

Wait? What? i9?

This is going to sound very strange to a lot of people reading this, I know, but I can't recall ever even seeing a spec for a game I've been interested in that had an i9 requirement as a minimum. In fact, and you'll laugh when you hear this, I wasn't aware there was an i9.

I think the highest I've noticed before was i7. My PC runs on an i5. 

I have been looking at upgrades, although only because my desktop, which is nine (!) years old, isn't eligible for Windows 11 so I'm going to have to make some kind of decision about what that means in a few months, when Microsoft switch off support for Windows 10. All I need to do to make it acceptable, though, is to enable Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 in the BIOS, which I could do quite easily, and swap the CPU for one on MS's approved list.

The thing is, it's not the i-number that's the issue there. My laptop, which is already running W11, has an i5. In fact, Windows 11 runs on an i3. There are plenty of them on the Approved list. So, when I've been looking at possible processor upgrades, I haven't been thinking about how much more powerful they are, or how much newer; only how cheap. And there are plenty of relatively cheap CPUs that Windows 11 approves of.

Then there's the question of functionality, aka "if it ain't broke...". The reason my PC is nine years old, by far the longest I've ever gone without buying a new box, is that it runs everything I'm interested in without any noticeable problems. 

I have upgraded it a few times. Most recently, I doubled the Ram a  few years back. Still only 16GB, which I realize is nothing these days, but more than adequate for anything I'm asking it to do. 

I also bought a decent video card (GeForce RTX4070) in the summer of 2023, which made a big difference to my gaming then, although I'm so used to it now I don't think about it any more. I've been doing a lot of video editing recently and that's been painless and comfortable. I haven't run into any games I wanted to play but couldn't up to now. Other than the W11 issue, there hasn't seemed  to be any point thinking about further upgrades, let alone replacing the whole machine.

I'm still not sure there is but even if I did decide to swap out the CPU, I'd only be looking at going up to an i7 because my motherboard, a Gigabyte z170 Gaming K3, can't accept anything higher. The incentive to upgrade isn't really there, either. I've looked into it before and the difference between my i5, which has always bench-marked as faster than expected, and the i7s I've considered isn't all that great. If you can't see the difference, what's the point?

If I did decide to go further than that, it would mean changing the motherboard and while I'm okay with a certain amount of fiddling about inside the case that's where I draw the line, so it would mean a new PC. And I am not about to buy a new PC just so I can play an Early Access game where I ride around on horseback solving mysteries.

I could just buy the game and try it to see if it runs anyway. It might. I've played a few games before, where my PC didn't meet minimum spec and they've worked fine. I've never refunded a Steam game but I believe you get a couple of hours grace. Plenty of time to see if it would run acceptably. Or at all.

So, I suppose I might do that. At the moment, though, I'm kind of disposed not to bother. It'd be nice to be in at the beginning but I'll lay odds Equinox:Homecoming will be in Early Access for a year or two so there's no hurry. Also, give it a few months and we'll all have a better idea of whether it's going to be worth our time or not.

Right now, I'm thinking more along the lines of whether I might want to replace my PC later in the year after all. Maybe the i9 minimum for the horse game is a straw in the wind. After all, that processor generation, for all that I didn't even know it existed, is itself about five years old now. If I'm going to carry on playing new games into my retirement, I guess I'll have to get a new machine eventually. Maybe now's the time.

No rush. No need for snap decisions. I might start looking, though. See what's around. Given the volatile nature of both the global economy right now and of computer hardware in general, it's always hard to know when is or isn't a good time to buy. It's always fun window-shopping though.

Finally, dragging my thoughts away from the personal, what does this i9 minimum spec mean for the game itself? According to Games Radar, Colin Cragg, CEO of Blue Scarab, the developer behind Equinox:Homecoming, is aiming for an audience of "horse girls", described evocatively by Ashley Bardhan, who wrote the piece, as

 "Graceless, American; rough hands, and breath that smells of apple pie – the stereotypical female horse enthusiast, or horse girl".

Cragg used to be CEO of Star Stable, the well-established long-running horse-based MMO (What? You didn't know there were more?). It's a successful game: "$35 million of recurring revenue every year". 

Star Stable, though, has much lower minimum specs than Equinox: Homecoming. My nine-year old PC would have no problems running it. In fact, even my laptop meets the requirements, integrated graphics and all. 

The interview and especially Ashley's commentary is full of entirely appropriate and very welcome observations about the need to address the "52% of the world population" currently being ignored by conventional AAA game design, while at the same time making them feel like they're being "catered to" and not infantalized: 

"characters say "fuck" like the teenagers they're meant to be, rather than speak in My Little Pony talking points about friendship and magic"

I'm not entirely sure all these points connect, exactly. I'm not a major My Little Pony fan but I never really thought of it as an IP that appealed much to teenagers in the first place, sweary or otherwise. And I don't believe either friendship or magic come pre-gendered. 

More importantly, I wonder how many Star Stable players have hardware capable of running Equinox:Homecoming? I don't and my ageing set-up generally falls around average in those Steam surveys, which I'm guessing are already somewhat biased towards both males and hobbyists.

I wish I could run it, though. The more I hear about the game, the more interesting it sounds. I look forward to reading someone else's First Impressions. Sadly, my own will have to wait, for now.