Our Never-Ending Summer Of Fun

There's a lot going on in the MMORPG and MMORPG-Adjacent Genre right now, isn't there? I feel like I could knock out a post a day just retailing snippets about upcoming releases, betas, expansions and Early Access. It makes for a very easy blogging experience, although I'm not sure I want to turn Inventory Full into a half-assed, sloppily-researched repository for day-late, second-hand news.

Oh, wait...

On that note, here are a couple more stories that strike me as being at least worth a mention. The first is the game I said yesterday I was contractually obliged not to discuss: Wayfinder.

According to MassivelyOP, Wayfinder is going into Early Access next month. On the fifteenth to be specific. If you want to be there from the beginning, it's going to cost you a minimum of £13.99 for the Base Pack, which is at the cheaper end as these things go. That'll get you through the door and into the first Season, which they for some reason have decided to call a "Reward Tower" because language doesn't need to mean anything and it's boring when it does.

Your £13.99 doesn't get you a whole lot other than in. For that you'll need to dig deeper into your wallet. There are three more tiers, all with exotic and enticing names, designed to make you feel settling for the the lowly Base Pack would be an act of self-hatred. 

There's the Initiate Pack (£32.99) the Awakened Pack (£59.99) and the Exalted Pack (£98.99). If you want to know what's in each of them, there's a handy comparison table here. There's even a video. Go look at those. I'm sure as hell not typing it all out. 

Those are some big numbers but it's probably going to come as no surprise to anyone to hear that the finished game when it eventually launches, should that day ever come, will operate thenceforth on a Free To Play model. In this respect, Wayfinder is a shining example of the consensus reality in which we all now seem to live.

It's one where you can charge large sums of money for games that are acknowledged by all to be incomplete. It seems to me to be something that could almost only happen in the digital world. About the only physical analog I can think of would be living in the shell of a house while it's being built around you - or more likely renovated. It's a thing people do but it's considered somewhat outré. 

In the world of MMORPGs, of course, living in a virtual world while the developers build it around you has always been considered completely normal. No MMORPG is ever finished, as the truism has it. The difference is that in the beforetimes any developer wishing to expand the scope and scale of their creation was at least obligated to finish the foundations first. These days you can just stick a sign up on the empty lot and charge people to camp there while they hope something gets built one day.

I wish I could give my opinions on Wayfinder's prospects but thanks to the NDA I can't. I'm not absolutely sure I'm even alowed to say I was in the betas although, when I made that comment in response to a post by Heartless Gamer, he pointed out quite reasonably that anyone could tell who was in the beta just by checking their Steam profile, so I guess it must be ok.

What I can say is that not only will I not be rushing to hand over even £13.99 for the lowly Base Pack, I won't be bothering to download the game when it flips to Free To Play at the official launch, either. Not unless I hear there have been some truly radical changes made during Early Access, anyway. That may say more about my personal tastes than the merits of the game, of course.

Another MMORPG I most likely won't be bothering to download is Ethyrial: Days Of Yore. It's not just because of that bloody colon, either, although it certainly doesn't help. (Belated respect to the Wayfinder team for at least not appending an awkward and unecessary suffix to their already evocative single-word title.)

I played Ethyrial (See? Perfectly fine name on its own. Why mess it up with a colon?) during February's Next Fest and didn't hate it. It's one of those self-proclaimed "old school" games, inspired by the supposed Golden Age of the late '90s, something I guess that annoying post-colonic coda is intended to convey. It's travelled a very rocky road over the couple of years since it first appeared on the radar back in 2021 but it's post-launch trajectory has been more of a swerve over a cliff. 

Other than the demo, I have never once felt the desire to play it or indeed mention it, not least because until now I'd have had to pay $10 a month just to get a look at the thing. Given it's been sitting uncomfortably on a Steam rating of Mostly Negative, the only incentive to pay for access would seem to be to find out if it really is as bad as people think. 

It didn't seem anything like that terrible when I tried it but I only saw the starting area. It was certainly odd but that's not always a bad thing. I don't dispute that there was a time when I'd have considered "taking a look" to be a valid reason for spending ten dollars but not any longer. I've seen my share of weird, wobbly MMORPGs. I don't need to pay to see any more.

Except now I don't have to; not for Ethyrial, anyway. As MMOBomb reported this morning, as of today you can play the game for free. There are some behind the scenes difficulties that are likely to hold up development for the foreseeable future so the small-and-getting-smaller team behind the game have decided to leave it on Steam as-is for now only without the sub, so anyone who feels like trying it out can have a go for nothing.

So I'm downloading it as I type, right? Nah. I wasn't that interested before and I'm even less interested now. At the end of that First Impressions piece I summed my feelings up like this: "I played for a couple of hours but I could have gone all night. Or at least I could if it wasn't for the nagging feeling I'd done it all before." In other words, this might have been exhillarating in 1999 but right now it's just exhausting.

I'm beginning to feel my days of trying out would-be "old school MMORPGs" are coming to an end. I stopped getting excited about them a while ago but I retained an annoying sense of duty to the form that meant I felt obliged at least to take a quick look at any I didn't have to pay for. I don't quite feel that way any more. I count a couple of reasons for the change of heart. 

Firstly and most importantly there's been an absolute glut of the things. Someone (Not me!) ought to make a list but it feels like I've read dozens of press releases over the last few years in which everyone from single developers working from home in their spare time to substantial teams, sitting in offices filled with Big Name Devs, enjoying funding in the millions, have claimed to be working on the spiritual successor to Ultima Online or EverQuest or Asheron's Call or some other ancient game that no-one under forty knows or cares about.

Some of those games look like they might be pretty good, if they ever come to anything at all. I have a handful on my Will Play If It Ever Comes Out list. Most of them, though, will either languish in underfunded development hell until the last of the money runs out or limp out of the gate in whatever condition someone can claim is "playable", most likely with a sticker marked "Early Access - Give Us Your Money!" attached, all in the hope of keeping the tawdry dream alive for just a little while longer.

It was quite exciting when it started but now it's just a familiar and somewhat depressing trope. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy kicking the tires of the donkey-cart once in a while. There's always the chance one of these things will turn out to be halfway decent. A few already have. 

The thing is, there are so many now, even I'm feeling the need to apply a little quality control in the selection process and I have a history of being notoriously indescriminating about this sort of thing. Ethyrial doesn't make the cut for me and I very much doubt it will for many others, either.

Secondly (Remember "Firstly"? It was four paragraphs back.) I'm starting to realise that a great deal of the kind of experience I used to enjoy back in the days games like Ethyrial are hoping to bring back are better replicated not by MMORPGs but by the newish hybrids, the survival-MMOs. That ill-defined sub-genre, with its focus on resource gathering and exploration, captures more of the old virtual world feeling than slavish attemps to turn back the clock.

It's also been my experience so far that the core elements of the survival genre tend to be better implemented than the comparable structural pillars of traditional MMORPGs. It seems that developers find it easier to create and implement systems for gathering, crafting and even building than they do for combat. It's usually the fighting that fails to convince, along with the supporting mechanics for vertical progression, whereas the running around chopping down trees parts seem relatively robust.

As an Explorer Archetype, the combat always seemed like a means to an end anyway. You had to fight mobs because they wouldn't let you get to the next hill to see what was over it. Trees and rocks tend not to hit back so that's one less roadblock in your path as you set out to see the world.

And that's probably about all I have to say on either Wayfinder or Ethyrial. I have no plans to investigate either of them further. Then again, plans are made to be changed, so I'm making no promises.

If anyone else feels like giving either a try and reporting back, I'll be very interested to hear how it goes. It'll give us something new to talk about during Blaugust, if nothing else. 

If that happens, I'm willing to bet that it'll be Wayfinder that gets whatever attention there is to be had. Even if, as I suspect, it does end up being the new Crowfall. As for Ethyrial, I doubt we'll hear much mention of it ever again.

Next Fest : MMORPG Edition

As I was saying only yesterday, my selection from the current Steam Next Fest bucket of demos includes a couple of mmorpgs. Until then, I'd never heard of either of them and nothing I read in the descriptions led me to believe I'd missed all that much.

Of the pair, the one I felt looked marginally more interesting was Grace Online, "a 3D fantasy MMORPG featuring an immersive experience that allows the players to forge their own paths through exploration and discovery". A bit vague but might be worth a look...

Outside of the demo, the game is currently in semi-closed testing, with access being available on request "when the developer is ready for more participants". Early Access is imminent, scheduled for next month. The EA phase, described quite pragmatically, even off-puttingly, on the Steam Store page, is estimated to last a year or two, although "...given that it's a one person team this time is subject to change". When people talk about soloing mmos, that's not usually what they mean, is it?

Still, respect for trying. And the screenshots make the game look not unattractive. I was curious to find out how it might play. 

I still am. I can't get it to run.

It downloaded without problems and it fires up when I hit play but every time I get to Server Select, I get this:

I checked my antivirus wasn't blocking it. It wasn't. I googled. Nothing. I joined the game's Discord to see if anyone was complaining there. 

At first I couldn't find any mention of anyone else having issues getting into the game. On the contrary, there were plenty of ongoing discussions suggesting people were indeed playing. 

Eventually I came across the following exchange:

It seems the demo is just too popular for its own good. Nice problem to have, although since the OP talks about "getting continuous "cannot connect" " and I've had the same message half a dozen times over two days, I'm not wholly convinced that the "29 minutes" overload is the whole story.

I'll try again at what might be a less congested time, maybe tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll get lucky. If not, there's always Early Access in March.

Since I couldn't try a demo I wasn't sure I wanted to try anyway, I decided to double down and try one I was pretty sure I didn't. In for a penny...

 Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore describes itself as "a hardcore, old-school MMORPG for players not afraid of challenge, risk, and adventure." I guess one out of three will have to do. I do like an adventure.

I realize there's a demographic for whom the words "hardcore" and "old-school" sound a dog whistle but for me they ring an alarm bell. The phrase "too old for all that" comes to mind, along with "got more sense" and "life's too short". When you factor in come-ons like "Teamwork is a must", "Death is not an inconvenience" and "High risk gameplay" they might just as wel have put up a big sign saying "Not for Bhagpuss".

It's just a demo, though, I can put up with a little hardcore, ffa, full loot ganking in the name of getting a post out, surely? I mean, it's all about the stories, right?

So I logged in. Smooth as butter. No problems at all. Then I made a character. Ditto. Well, if you don't count what the character I made looks like.

Character creation is slick, detailed and entertaining. The design is solid, the illustration rich and bold, the writing lucid. The whole things oozes professionalism. Given the strength of the ancillary elements  the character models themselves come as quite a shock. They seem almost nominal, placeholders, perhaps, for finished artwork to come later.

I spent a while reading through the numerous classes and specializations, a somewhat fatuous enterprise seeing there was literally no possibility of my ever needing to specialize during the demo the demo. I'm not saying it's not possible. I have no idea whether it is or not. I'm just saying it was never going to be possible for me, especially given all the other demos I have to get through before Monday.

All the classes looked interesting but in the end I plumped for the Fighter because fighters are generally the easiest to start with in any game. Why make things harder than they have to be? I mean, it's not like the game won't do that for me, is it?

Except that's not what happened. Very much the opposite, in fact. I had a jolly good time playing Ethyrial for nearly two hours, until I had to drag myself away to take Beryl for her evening walk. By then, I'd learned two things: 1) No-one ganks you in the Tutorial or the starting city and 2) That old mmorpg magic still just works, somehow.

The first thing to say about Ethyrial is the graphics are W.E.I.R.D. Seriously, they are very, very strange. The whole thing takes place in a kind of top-down, over the shoulder 3D that I found utterly disorientating at first but surprisingly comfortable later. 

The buildings all do that cutaway thing, where you can see inside them from the outside. Every mob and NPC has a massive nameplate like a signboard. Conversations type themselves out word by word in what looks like a cross between a speech bubble and a printed flyer. If an NPC walks away while you're talking to them, as several did, the speech bubble slides along at a slant and changes perspective, almost as if its actually supposed to be a physical presence in the world. Also you have to either type in your side of the conversation or trigger keywords, which is truly old school, but that's another topic altogether.

It's hard to see much detail, using the default settings but I did eventually figure out how rotate the camera and zoom in and out. Neither option uses what I would consider traditional controls. You have to right-click the hotbars rather than left-click, too, which is back-assward to my way of thinking. And I had to invert the camera controls to get them to feel comfortable. 

When you can eventually move and see properly, the aesthetic is convincing, within the parameters of the graphics, which are otherwise not the most sophistiated or up-to-date you're going to find. It certainly doesn't help that the entire Tutorial takes place both at night and in heavy rain. Since the clock never moved, I assume this is a narrative choice not just my unfortunate timing. When I finally made it to the world proper and the clock began to tick again, it was still night and it was still raining but at least the sun did come up eventually.

The storyline, what very little I saw of it, and especially the quests, definitely qualify as "old school". No-one asked me to kill ten rats, although I killed several on my own recognizance, but I had to carry  things from one townsperson to another, rescue pets for children and turn ore into metal bars, just as I've done countless times before.

And it was fun. That's the oddest thing about it. 

I got jumped by ruffians in an alleyway, killed them, got complimented by the Guard and deputized to go kill the dead men's boss, just as would surely happen in real life, if real life was a fever dream. I got chased into a house by poisonous spiders and bitten to death and the last thing I saw as I was dying was the spiders turning on the houseowner, who'd been standing in his living room, minding his own business. I climbed a ladder into an attic and took an old man's leather pants and put them on, with his blessing. I found a cluster of mushrooms growing on a wall and picked them all, then ate them, and it  didn't kill me but made me feel much better.

Just normal, old school stuff like that, all wrapped up with some moderately witty, always grammatically correct dialog. I played for a couple of hours but I could have gone all night. Or at least I could if it wasn't for the nagging feeling I'd done it all before. 

And of course, I have. That's the problem. Even leaving aside the post-Tutorial, post-demo room-hogging elephant that is ffa, full-loot PvP, why would I want to do it again? I wouldn't. At least, I don't think I would.

For anyone that does still hanker after the old days, though, the level of quality present here bodes well. I've played a few of these things and most of them don't have this amount of heft. Didn't run into any bugs, either. Well, unless you count the spiders.

On the other hand, few modern games have such awkward graphics, controls and movement. Yes, I got used to all of it quickly enough but a moment's consideration could hardly fail to bring up unfortunate comparisons with just about any other modern mmorpg you care to name. A potent cocktail of novelty and familiarity carried me through but I fear it wouldn't carry me far.

That said, Ethyrial is definitely now on my radar. I'd say that means the demo did its job.