Legends Of The Fall... And Rise

When I started writing this post abut Legend of Edda: Pegasus, I found it surprisingly hard to come up with the usual, scene-setting background information I'd normally drop in to the opening paragraph, when writing about a game I didn't expect most people reading would know very well. It wasn't impossible. Just difficult. And certainly a lot more time-consuming than I'd expected.

To be honest, most of what I needed was in the same MassivelyOP news story that drew my attention to the game in the first place but you never want to rehash your primary source. That looks cheap. You need to show at least a little evidence of original research.

Of course, for the last decade or so "original research" has mostly meant skimming a Wikipedia page. Everybody does it but it's especially easy for anyone writing about the kind of things that get traction here. Even after all these years, Wikipedia is still overstocked with articles on popular culture. If you want to check every line-up change in an indie band that broke up fifteen years ago or get a timeline of every time a C-list superhero swapped their costume, Wikipedia most likely has you covered.

I've always found it a highly reliable source of information on MMORPGs, at least as far as launch dates, closures and changes of ownership are concerned, so it was a bit of a shock to find there's no Wikipedia page at all for Legends of Edda. Not so much as a stub.

Luckily, I know how to google. Here's a piece from Gamesindustry.biz that tells you more than you almost certainly want to know about the game as it was back in 2010, when it was just about to enter closed beta. It explains exactly why I never tried this free-to-play title when it launched later that same year:

"Legend of Edda is a hardcore PVP MMO, with a deceivingly cute interface. The game features fast-paced intense battle featuring a lot of very powerful PVP, and large scale RVR battles."

There you go. Hardcore PvP. That'll put you off every time. 

Too cute to kill. Oh, I meant the mobs but yes, I take your point!

And it would have put me off, I'm sure, if I'd ever known about it. In fact, I barely remembered LoE when I saw it in that MOP piece last week. It rang the vaguest of bells but I'd be lying if I claimed I recalled anything about the game, other than thinking I'd heard the name somewhere before.

I certainly didn't know it had closed down twice already, the first time just a year or so after it launched and then seemingly for good a couple of years after that. Apparently it was the subject of some concerted hacking and illegal RMT that publisher GameCampus (Probably best-known for the golf MMO Shot Online.) couldn't handle. 

Hacking and cheating in a hardcore PvP game. Who could possibly have predicted that?

The game stayed offline for years until the original Korean games developer EyaSoft inexplicably decided to relaunch it in July 2023, with the help of games publisher IndigoWare. EyaSoft is probably best-known, if it's known at all, for the very short-lived (2011-2012) "gypsy-themed" (?!) MMO Iris Online or the slightly longer-lived Luna Online (2009-2012), a game that sounds remarkably similar, apart from the Romany trappings. 

Then there was the even more obscure Titan Online, an mmorpg based on Chinese mythology that also launched in 2009 and presumably closed soon after, although no-one anywhere in the world seems to have cared enough to record the event. EyaSoft was really knocking those F2Ps out back then.

IndigoWare is a Brazilian company, which explains why the two languages available in Legend of Edda: Pegasus are English and Portuguese. The publisher seems to release games exclusively through Steam. Legend of Edda is its only MMORPG. 

Well, this looks nice...

Other than by the games its developed, I have no idea what kind of organisation EyaSoft is. The company's LinkedIn page doesn't seem to have been updated for well over a decade and I can't see much evidence of activity between the second closure of LoE and this sudden resurgence of interest. Maybe Titan Online is still operating in China or South Korea and they've been busy with that.

It seems they have - or possibly had - plans to bring back Iris Online too. There's a Steam page for a new version called Iris Online: The World. The game is listed there as "Coming Soon" although it's not available in an English translation so I imagine you'd need some Portuguese to play it. 

You'd also need a miracle because there's a big, orange warning:

Notice: Iris Online: The World is no longer available on the Steam store.

That's a shame. I was curious to try the "intricate Tarot Card system" that allows players "to have their Tarot Cards read by a fortune-telling NPC". You don't get that in World of Warcraft.

Until and unless that seemingly abandoned project resurfaces, I guess I'll just have to settle for Legends of Edda: Pegasus. I downloaded it on Steam yesterday, registered the required account with Eya Soft and logged in to make a character.

The game is exactly as I expected, given that at that point I hadn't yet realised I was letting myself in for a "Hardcore PvP" experience. I played for an hour last night and another hour this morning. I'm level six and there's been no sign of any PvP so far although I guess it's early days yet.

My very loose understanding is that the game is based around dungeons rather than outdoor zones and presumably the PvP happens indoors, although really who knows? There's a drop-down menu on the very good map that gives a long list of dungeons with their appropriate level ranges and possibly allows for instant movement between them, although I haven't tested it.

Excuse me Ma'am. I think you were expecting some pipes?

My gameplay so far has been absolutely identical to the opening levels of every South Korean anime-style F2P mmorpg I've ever played, which is quite a few. I've been running around town picking up simple quests from guards and shopkeepers, all of whom have either had tools or crafting materials stolen by monsters while they were out travelling or who have incompetent subordinates who need help keeping the city safe from those same tool-stealing monsters.

Almost inevitably, there was a quest chain involving the unrequited - and indeed unwanted - affection of one townsperson for another, in this case the local vault-keeper and a nearby shopkeep. She'd noticed him eying her up from a distance and understandably wanted him to stop, so naturally she asked the first passing stranger to find out what he was up to and put a stop to it. 

As always, that led to some to-and-fro in which I played the part of the young boy in the Go-Between. I'd love to be able to say Legends of Edda is a different country and they do things differently there but they really don't. I will say that it's surprising how the gift of fifteen raw, untreated skins, freshly flayed from the backs of a bunch of mad pigs, will turn a girl's head and quite possibly her heart. I'm not sure it would work that way on me.

Legends of Edda may not be very original but at least in the early stages it is extremely polished. It looks very good for its age, the animations are excellent, combat feels solid and satisfying and everything works as it should. 

The UI is pleasing to look at and intuitive to use. The English translation is solid if unspectacular. Quests are easy to follow and pleasnat to complete. None of them take very long or require a great deal of travel. 

The map, which as I said earlier is excellent, shows everything you need with exemplary clarity. What's more, you can click on both the full and mini maps and have your character trot to the spot you've marked. This is arguably even better than full auto-questing in the way it effectively removes the tedium of finding your way from place to place while still allowing you to feel like it's you doing most of the intellectual heavy-lifting.

Everything happens at a brisk pace except for the actual running, which is oddly sedate. Every mob you need to kill is present in numbers although near-instant respawns mean you can almost stand still and kill what might as well be the same monster over and over to make your quota. Quest drops are guaranteed and time-to-kill is measured in seconds so what seem at first like daunting numbers - twelve, fifteen - take no time at all to knock off. 

Every mob drops loot. Sometimes it's just gold but often it's health and mana potions or wearable armor and wieldable weapons. There are crafting mats and other utilities too but no trash loot. It's very satisfying. When I got an upgrade to my basic bronze sword and wooden shield, I felt positively cheery.

The whole thing just jogs along. I had a great time. If I hadn't played a dozen games like this before I might even have felt a little excited about my future prospects. There are some solid-looking progression mechanics involving skills and abilities, you can upgrade your armor, there's crafting and pets and mounts. That's all the good stuff you want in an MMORPG, right there.

It's interesting to play these old games, the ones that failed at launch but come back a decade later, ready to go again. Especially when you compare them with the numerous modern equivalents going through alpha and beta and Early Access. I played Rose Online around this time last year and very much enjoyed it. I can easily see myself putting a similar fifteen or twenty hours into Legends of Edda before drifting away.

Aww, come on! I just want your skin!

By contrast, I rarely manage more than two or three sessions in any of the would-be successors of these games. I consider myself more than averagely tolerant of unfinished games, works in progress and even bug-ridden messes but the more I revisit some of these older titles, the more I notice just how polished they are. They have bugs, sure, but they're rare. Much more importantly, they have systems that work and content that's complete. They also know what they want to be and don't try to do too much or be everything to everyone.

When considering why they failed or just faded I have to suspect a large part of the problem was just that there were so many of them. There must be scores if not hundreds of competent, formulaic MMORPGs in which everything pretty much works but nothing very much stands out. 

It's strange how many keep coming back, although Legends of Edda is unusual in that the reported reasons for its closure were external. Not many MMORPGs close down because the developers can't handle the riotous attentions of their players. Mostly they shut because they don't have any players so they aren't making any money.

I hope Legends of Edda: Pegasus fares better than its predecessor. I suspect a more likely fate than a hyperactive and delinquent playerbase is going to be very little interest at all, something that's just about guaranteed to sink a game that relies on the kind of player interaction necessary to keep a PvP title, hardcore or otherwise, in business. 

For now, though, if you're looking for a light-hearted, relaxing, semi-old school MMORPG experience, you could do worse. Until the PvP kicks in, anyway.

If it ever does.

The Main Idea

A few seemingly random ideas, floating around the blogosphere of late, coalesced into a mini-epiphany for me this morning: How We Play Now. Or how I play now, anyway. 

First there was MassivelyOP, asking how good a fit alts are for the genre these days. Then there was Shintar, talking about the appeal, or lack therof in Star Wars: the Old Republic's new combat styles. Redbeard was musing at length about the joys of old-school class quests in World of Warcraft and Yeebo was enjoying the parts of EverQuest II that time seems barely to have touched.

Meanwhile, I was sailing happily through Guild Wars 2's latest expansion, End of Dragons, following the story and ticking off boxes. Story's a big thing in mmorpgs nowadays. Given Final Fantasy XIV's surge it could well become bigger still. Kaylriene's surely not the only one wondering if narrative spines with the heft of movies are where the future lies. Maybe BioWare were right all along.

I did take a brief sidetrip to Norrath to check out EQII's latest dungeon but other than that all the mmorpgs I'd happily been playing this year are back on the virtual shelf. By now my house in Chimeraland must be thick with moss and I can't even remember what I was doing in Lost Ark. I know I was well past the flooded dungeon Wilhelm enjoyed so much but there's still a fair old way to go before I can join in the latest bizarre event, for which you need to be a minimum of Level 50.

Cast adrift behind me as I navigate these choppy seas are the abandoned hulls of countless mmorpgs, some of them rotting hulks, barely breaking the waterline as they sink into oblivion, others calmly adrift, so many Marie Celestes, just waiting for the crew to return. It's a very different picture from the way things looked a decade ago, let alone back at the beginning, when the century was just about to turn.

The Friendly Necromancer, aka Stingite, has just started playing New World. He's not bothered that he's arriving in Aeternum just as everyone has left. Nor should he be. It's a great game for at least fifty levels. After that... well, I wouldn't know. 

As I said in a comment on his post "I got well over a couple of hundred hours out of it before I drifted away. If that was a single-player title I think we'd all agree it was value for money. Why mmorpgs are supposed to provide endless entertainment for the same box price is unclear."

It's a question that was a lot easier to answer back when nearly all mmorpgs came with a monthly subscription. They were supposed to provide endless entertainment because we were endlessly paying for them. Now they're mostly either free or the same single purchase cost as any other video game, that doesn't really wash.

Even if we were content to take our forty or sixty or a hundred hours of value and move on, mmorpg developers can't afford to let us leave satisfied. They need to keep us around so we'll spend money in the cash shop or pay the premium that stands in for an optional sub. Preferably both.

A chunk of cash from the box sale is a nice bonus but as many developers have found to their cost, even a one-off charge can dampen interest to the point where it's deemed to have damaged the game's long-term prospects. If you have to give the game away free, focus moves to keeping players logging in long enough to spend money, which is why we end up with both huge swathes of Free Stuff! just for turning up and insanely long, drawn-out or difficult grinds to get anything worth having.

In-game goals that take forever or have you doing the same thing over and over again are, of course, intrinsic to the genre anyway. Free to Play didn't invent this stuff. Remember one of EverQuest's many snide nicknames - Evercamp? 

The whole genre has always revolved around extremely time-consuming content, frequently highly repetitive, often not all that entertaining, if looked at objectively. Over time those unappealing yet compulsive concepts have been refined and concentrated until they're about as potent as they can be. They've also largely been shifted away from the begining of the games so as not to frighten away nervous customers.

There's always been a high reported rate of attrition in the early stages of all games but at least, when you were making people pay an up-front fee, there was a fighting chance sunk cost woud keep them around, at least for the time they'd paid for. Investment in a free to play mmorpg is more fragile; no more than the few minutes it took to download.

That's why all F2P mmorpgs start off easy, something that's pretty much the diametric opposite of the introduction subscription games used to offer. If your first experience of a new free mmorpg consisted of falling off the starting platform and not being able to find the way back up, forcing you to re-roll, or having the first questgiver you spoke to punch you to death, chances are you'd uninstall.

It's also why story feels so important now. Levelling doesn't matter any more and no-one really cares about gear or skills until the cap. There has to be something to attach yourself to, something to keep you playing until you get to the endgame. Why not "What happens next?"

There's not much that's inherently bad about any of this. It's not like the old ways of playing were flawless fun. What's ironic is the way some of the changes seem to work in direct opposition to the supposed goals.

Let's go back to that question about alts and whether playing multiple characters in the same game works any more. Why did people do it in the first place? I can't speak for players in general but I know why I did: to have new experiences.

In the older mmorpgs, starting a new character usually meant playing through new content. Most games had multiple starting areas, usually based around race. Dwarves generally did not live with Elves nor Orcs with Humans. There would be a new town to visit and a different newbie zone or two at the very least. Sometimes the hunting zones wouldn't converge until you'd been playing a character for days or even weeks.

In those days, classes often tended to be race-locked, too. There's a controversy today concerning gender-locking that derives from a desire to see real-world identity accurately represented in the gameworld but locking race to class is purely a gameplay issue. If you start from the premise, as most high fantasy games do, that in-game races have hardcoded belief systems, meaning you have to roll an evil race to play a Shadowknight but a good race to play a Paladin, any player who wants to find out which class suits them better is going to have to make at least one alt.

Many of us ended up making alt after alt not because we wanted to play those characters at endgame but because we wanted to see the places where they lived and try out the classes they could become. There aren't many old school mmorpgs I've ever played where I haven't left half a dozen characters behind. In some it's double figures and in one or two it's more than a score.

As I played those characters, some of them grew on me while others didn't. I never knew which would click until I tried so I kept trying. There are mmorpgs I ended up playing for twice as long as I expected because an alt caught my attention and carried on well past the point where I was back playing the same game I'd already played as someone else.

Having new things to see, fresh creatures to kill and different stories to follow extended the life of the games and kept me logging in. I was never a player who aimed for the endgame. If I got there at all I usually saw it as the perfect opportunity to roll another character and go back to the beginning - a new start.

All of that would seem on the surface to be an ideal fit with the supposed desires of free to play developers; keep the punters playing and maybe we can sell them stuff. Of course, it's not quite that simple.

One of the more expensive aspects of running a live service mmorpg has to be content creation. Five genuinely different races with five genuinely different starting areas is five times the work for artists, animators and writers. Okay, maybe not five times; there are probably some synergies. It's more work, though, for sure, and work costs money.

As well as the cost of creating all that extra content there's the non-trivial risk of splitting the playerbase. Free to play games rely on looking Busy! and Popular! to new players. When you make your first character and log in to a new mmorpg, you want to be sure you're making the right choice. There are so many to choose from nowadays. You wouldn't want to pick one no-one else plays.

If you have five starting areas, even if they're all equally popular, which they won't be, each of them is going to be eighty per cent emptier than if you funnelled everyone into the same one. Apart from the first few days or, if your game is exceptionally successful, weeks, pretty much anywhere outside The Bubble is going to feel empty enough, without having people starting on different continents.

Once you've made everyone start in the same place, you might as well make them all look the same, too. It certainly saves on animators and it's well-known that most players want to play pretty people who look like idealised versions of themselves. The whole Dungeons and Dragons derived notion of racial advantages and disadvantages got thrown under a bus years ago so racial choices are purely cosmetic. They have to be or they get metagamed and no-one rolls the bad ones.

There's a trend at work here, even if it didn't start with F2P and it's far from universal or consistent. Every developer has some idiosyncratic ideas that don't fit the mold, whether it's Chimeraland with its dozens of wildly varying racial appearances, all entirely irrelvant to gameplay, or New World with its multiple starting areas, where every new player arrives with the identical back story.

The trend is convergence. Whatever variety the games once had it's less now. Sometimes that's managed with the player's convenience in mind, others very much the reverse.

Shintar's post, linked above, discusses the recent change to SW:tOR that allows players to try out different combat styles without having to re-roll as the classes to which they have hitherto been locked. As Shintar acknowledges there are pros and cons, but from an outsider's perspective it does at least look like a well-intentioned addition to the game.

The revelation that ArenaNet have chosen to lock every new End of Dragons Elite Specialization behind story completion looks, by contrast, very much like a cynical attempt to compel players to spend a lot longer replaying the same content than they might otherwise have done. As Eliot at MOP archly observes, it does make you wonder whether some of these people even play their own game.

It's not hard to see where this is all going. FFXIV, arguably the current market leader in the West, is pretty much there already. With every class and job being available to a single character and every racial appearance just a glamor away, there was never much incentive to roll alts there. Some people, inevitably, did it anyway. but as the Main Story Quest grows to the length of several movie box sets, the number of players who are likely to try seems vanishingly small. 

Which brings me back to where I started, namely my own mini-epiphany. I used to have a clear view of my identity as an mmorpg player; when it came to alts, I wasn't just an altaholic, I was a player who simply did not have either "alts" or "mains". I just had characters, some of which I played more than others.

For a long time that was objectively true. I had lower level characters in some games with more played hours than higher ones. I logged in characters according to mood and whim every bit as much as what I was meant to be working on right then. I would play healers or tanks or crowd control or dps to fit in with other people or just because that's what I wanted to play, forget about whether it fitted anyone else's agenda at all.

It's been a while since almost any of that was true. I just hadn't noticed until now. About the last new mmorpg I played where I followed that pattern has to be Guild Wars 2 and that's a decade old this summer. 

I certainly followed my pattern there at first, buying three accounts and making more than twenty characters. It's been a long time, though, since I can truly say I play more than a handful of them and I can't deny any longer that I clearly have a Main, my original Asura Elementalist. 

Until End of Dragons I had a "Story Main", too; my Asura Druid, who I'd played through both previous expansion storylines and every Living Story episode as well. This time around he stayed on the bench as I took my Ele through the story instead. It seems I really am down to just the one Main.

If I look at all the recent mmorpgs I've played and written about here recently - Lost Ark, Chimeraland, New World, Bless Unleashed - or the mmo-adjacent Valheim and Genshin Impact - I have just one character in all of them. 

Going back a little, I only made single characters in Blade and Soul, Riders of Icarus, SW:tOR, Elder Scrolls Online, Secret World Legends, ArcheAge... Even in mmorpgs where I did roll more than one character, Black Desert for example, it was only because I came back and started over from scratch.

Some of it - a lot of it - comes down to the kinds of content compaction I've been describing but I think I also need to accept that, after more than twenty years of doing this, the allure of starting over in the same game doesn't have the magnetic pull it once did. Time was, I just couldn't stop myself. Now I find it all too easy to say no.

Once again, I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I'm going to have to think about it. It may be that, now I've drawn my own attention to what's been happening, I'll begin behaving differently. Sometimes all it takes is an awareness for perceptions to shift. 

Or maybe I'll just settle into it, get comfortable, learn to enjoy playing the way other people have always played. After all, it looks as though I've been playing that way for a while without even realising. Maybe I like it better and just don't know, yet.

However it pans out, one thing I can say for certain sure is that I will not be playing through the entirety of the End of Dragons story nine more times. Not even if it's the last expansion GW2 ever gets. 

It was good but it wasn't that good. ANet need to get over themselves.

Try To Keep Up!

Isn't there a lot of news around at the moment? Gaming news, I mean. Well, entertainment news generally but I already covered that or at least a bit of it. It doesn't stop, though, does it? And everything's getting muddled and mixed, like when they cross the streams in the first Ghostbusters movie, which is supposed to be bad. Crossing the streams, that is, not the movie, which is great. You knew that. (Although, does anything bad actually happen when they cross the streams? Oh, yeah, I guess that's not so good. Not if you had the appartment below the penthouse suite, anyway.)

What am I talking about? Well, we all know NFTs are bad, right? But now Kanye's on our team. Are we happy about that? I mean, judge a person by the company they keep, right? And Ye's only saying nay "for now". It's always good to keep your options open.

I know, I know. This has nothing to do with gaming. Okay, maybe not. But this does. "Of all the applications, gaming is a place that *players* can benefit a LOT from blockchain." So says Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, a band I have never willingly listened to although sometimes these things just happen. 

Why gamers should listen to what musicians think about gaming I have no idea although, like every driver's a potential pedestrian, when they're not driving, I guess every musician's a potential gamer, when they're not playing. Playing an instrument, that is. Not a game. Just go with it, aright?

Wilhelm has a really solid, in-depth post up about why Mike Shinoda is, shall we say, mistaken, although the post is technically about the metaverse, not NFTs - but who can tell the difference these days? Certainly not the people throwing money. 

As Wilhelm says, in repy to my comment querying why gamers are getting dragged into this thing in the first place, "As for “why gamers?” I think that is just the easy, lazy answer to the question based on who is already interested in virtual worlds." 

One of these days I'm going to have to do that post about what I think the metaverse is or will be. Is, really. It's at least halfway here already, by my definition. That day is not going to be today.

No, today I'm here to talk about a couple of much more specifically mmorpg-related news stories. The one that's getting all the traction is Blizzard's unexpected announcement, rolling over on decades of tradition and lore to prop up falling populations on World of Warcraft servers make everyone's lives just that little bit better. (Does anyone click through all these links, by the way? I seem to be hyperlinking like it's 1999 today.)

The reaction across the blogosphere is just starting to roll but what I've read so far has been a little mixed. There's a bit of "about time" and a lot of "it's a start" and some "why now?" I expect to see a lot more opinions in the next day or two but I don't really have a dog in this fight. (And isn't that an archaic expression?)

No, well, okay, maybe I do. Not as far as WoW itself, since I'm not playing and was never invested even in the slightest in the bipartite struggle between... what is it, anyway? Good vs evil? Order vs chaos? Smart vs casual? 

I do, however, have some pretty hardline views on the general concept of opposed factions in mmorpgs, which is that if you're going to have them they should be immutable and unchanging. Pick a side and damn well stick with it and that applies to devs as well as players. 

If you want to service a clientele that considers "playing with friends" an important selling point, then don't make people choose sides in the first place. Conversely, if you're constructing a narrative based around opposing forces and building mechanisms into your game to enforce compliance, accept that you're going to exclude a lot of more casual, social gamers and get ready to cater to extremists.

Either way works. Just don't cross the streams. Oh, I did that one already... make it "change horses". At least you can't say Blizzard bent with the wind at the first light breeze. It took a hurricane of bad news to shake that sour fruit loose.

Interesting though that news was, like the report of Sony swallowing up the Destiny and Halo studio for a mere $3.6 billion, I don't feel I should say too much about it. As for Sony's spending spree, the deal involves games I don't play made by people I don't pay. It would be rude of me to comment.

Another mmorpg developer I haven't given any money to is Gameforge. At least I don't think I have. I might need to fact-check that. There are various theories going around about why Sony might want Bungie on board but there's no question as to why Gameforge have decided to switch Swords of Legend Online to Free to Play: it's because no-one is. Playing Swords of Legend, I mean.

I quite enjoyed SoLO when I tried it in open beta last year. It's been on my Steam watchlist ever since and I nearly bought it when it briefly appeared in a couple of sales. I'm glad I didn't, now!

As the press release notes, the box price of the Buy-to-Play game has been "a limiting factor for a lot of people." Curiously, if you have more money than you know what to do with, the option to give some of it to Gameforge still exists, for the moment at least. The cheapest option is the Standard Edition at £35.99 but you can go as high as £89.99 if you want.

Maybe the Deluxe and Collector's editions still have some value but since, according to the FAQ, "The full game experience will be available to everyone for free. This includes all old, new and future content, like the new classes and zones", it's probably a better idea to wait until the 24th of February, when you can have it all for nothing.

Despite my previous enthusiasm, I probably won't bother. As I may have mentioned, there's a lot going on just around then, what with the Guild Wars 2 expansion, the new EverQuest II server, my infatuation with Chimeraland, New World doing whatever it's doing to make solo play more appealing and who knows what-all else. 

Don't you wish these people would get together and arrange their releases so they don't all overlap like this? I mean, they're going to have to get it together when they all sign off on the deals that allow us to take out NFT swords from one game to the next. They might as well get started on those non-competetive, non-commercial contracts right now!

Cake/NotCake : LotRO

There's a promotion running in Lord of the Rings Online whereby all quested content for which you would normally have to pay is temporarily available, for free, to everyone. Standing Stone Games just announced an extension of the offer until the end of August.

They've also said that they're going to send out a "Coupon Code" in the next few days that will permanently enable all currently-available quest packs on your account. You have to use the code before August 31, after which, presumably, everything reverts to the status quo ante.

Here's my dilemma:

I love getting free stuff in games. I log into games I don't play just to grab things I'll never use. I've written about that quite a few times. This is a really big, really generous offer. Something no-one who dabbles even occasionally in LotRO would want to miss.

But... and here's the thing... I really don't like the questing in LotRO, something else I've written about a few times. How much more I've found myself enjoying the game when it wasn't shoving quests in my face every five seconds. Tedious, repetitive quests, written in a turgid style, presented in a jarring, jagged format, using an ugly, hard-to-read font.

When SSG began the current promotion I gave it a go and I did not have fun. Plugging away at some of the now-available quests, I found the xp "terrible" and the gameplay "teeth-grindingly tedious". Admittedly I wasn't in the ideal area and I was playing a Guardian, quite possibly the dullest class I've ever encountered in any MMORPG, but I had a much better time with the same character in the same place last time, when he couldn't get any quests at all.

What to do? Miss out on a very generous and ostensibly desirable freebie, something that goes entirely against my natural inclinations? Or take it and risk tainting forever what had been a charmingly pure and unsullied experience?

Of course I could take the offer and then never use it. Just because a bunch of NPCs suddenly decide they're willing to let me run errands for them doesn't mean I have to do exactly what they want, does it? But that would require self-restraint and frankly, if I had that kind of inner resource, I wouldn't be piling up presents I've no use for in games I don't play in the first place, now would I?

And there's the crux of it. I don't, in fact, "play" Lord of the Rings Online. I played it once, for about three or four months, I think it was, about ten years ago. After that it became one of the scores of games I keep on my hard drive, update occasionally, log into sporadically, either on a whim or when something like this happens.

If I'm being honest about it, more often than not, when I fire up any old MMORPG, ex-favorite or passing fancy, my primary motivation is to get a blog post out of it. I rarely even have the excuse of nostalgia. The main game I've been playing for about two or three years now is "blogging" and I suspect that will continue until someone actually makes and releases a new MMORPG worth thirty hours a week of my time.

Let's not despair. I have a plan. A way to have my cake, not have my cake and not leave my cake on the plate, either, all at the same time.

I have more than one LotRO account because of course I do. I have my regular account, the one I bought, paid for and subbed years ago, before there was any other way of doing it. That's the one I still play. But there was a time when you had to have a different account for the free trial, back before it all went free-to-play... or maybe it was when the ownership changed and you needed one to play on American servers instead of European ones or... I don't know. Or something. Reasons!

Anyway, I made another account and played on that for a while. I have characters on there. Not seen them for a few years. Can't remember their names. Or their classes. Or their levels. But they exist.

Here's what I could do. Use the Coupon on the account I usually play, thereby satisfying my urge to Get Stuff For Free. I could even log in Mrs. Bhagpuss's old account and flag that for a coupon too. That should satisfy my FOMO and sheer, pointless greed.

Then all I have to do is make sure not to log in the other account before September 1st. Shouldn't be difficult - I haven't logged it in for years. Then again, try not thinking of a purple elephant...

That way, on the rare occasions when I get the urge to log in and potter around in Middle Earth, I can choose between the productive-but-enervating quest version or the meandering-but-immersive alternative. It almost makes sense! (Not really...).

Even then, it's going to be tough. Standing Stone seem determined to get everyone questing, one way or another. Once the offer expires they'll be offering all "expansion pack quest content" in the store for a dollar each or 99 LotRO points, which you can fairly easily earn in-game.

If I'm reading the announcements and clarifications correctly, something I'm not convinced is the case, it's going to lead to a confusing situation from September onwards. We'll have subscribers with access to everything, legacy F2P players, who used the coupon, with all the non-expansion quests but nothing from the paid DLC, new F2P players with no quests other than the starting zones and a la carte F2Pers with whatever subset they've ponied up for at the time.

Just as well no-one really pugs quested content.

Whose Game Is It Anyway?

Topauz said something in a comment on a recent post here that started me thinking. I'd written that I felt that players and developers were talking past each other on certain topics and Topauz said "I do not believe that they are missing those points but the devs just think they know better."

This raises interesting questions about who owns the games we play. I don't mean the kind of concerns expressed by post-structuralist academics on the fundamental ownership of meaning, nor the legal issues relating to virtual property. And I'm definitely not thinking about the grey market of modding and private servers.

What I'm talking about is who gets to decide the direction an online game takes in this age of "games as a service". It seems to me there are three possibilities, all of them subject to almost infinite nuance:

• We made this game so we own it.
• We play this game so we own it.
• We're all in this together so we'd better work something out.

When I first started playing MMORPGs there was no doubt at all who owned the games we played. The developers did. It was right there in the tagline: "You're in our world now".

The developers behind those games tended to come from a background of MUDs or tabletop RPGs. In tabletop gaming, as is well known, the Gamesmaster calls the shots. For MUDs you'd need to ask someone who was there - Wilhelm or Jeromai perhaps - but as I understand it there was always a clear hierarchy of ownership and control.

The people who crerated the early mmorpgs brought those top-down structures with them and that's what prevailed for a long time. In most of the ways that matter it still does; de facto control always rests with the developers. Even so, there has always been a tussle for the controls.

In almost all the MMORPGs I've played, the official and unofficial forums seethe with discontent. Players constantly debate the direction of the games, a "debate" that ranges from helpful suggestions and wistful wishlists to angry harangues and threats of violence.

Developers have to manage expectations. Sometimes - often - they end up revising or even reversing decisions they've made. In the end, though, players pretty much have to accept what they're given or walk away.

Although there would have been some wide variations across different games and companies, that broadly remained the status quo for a decade or more, until the arrival of two new concepts to the genre: Free to Play and Early Access. The arrival of these two paradoxical ideas shifted the balance of power in unpredictable ways.

Prior to the F2P revolution, players tended to play one or two MMORPGs only and to stick with them for a long time. Most games both required a subscription and also an up-front payment for the game itself. Coupled with the much slower levelling curves of the time, the inertia of an installed MMORPG was immense.

F2P gave players much greater freedom of movement. It became much easier to hop from game to game to see if the grass really was greener. At the same time, developers needed to try and hold onto those who came within their reach, making shortcuts to the meat of the game and rewards for sticking around the norm.

It was very much a player's market, at least in comparison to what had come before. John "Smed" Smedley encapsulated the change in attitude with a new tagline for Sony Online Entertainment. No longer were we in their world. Now it was "Free to Play - Your Way".

Alongside growing player power through the removal of paywalls and the concomitant increase in volatility and churn came a genuine opportunity to change the rules of the games themselves. For whatever reasons - cost, greed, a genuine wish to collaborate - developers of every size, from tiny indies to industry giants, began to lift the shutters on what had previously been a mysterious process, revealed only to a select few.

Games that would previously have been developed behind closed doors and NDAs, not seeing the light of day until a short open beta right before launch, if even then, began inviting players to join in, sometimes before there was even a game to play. There had always been alpha and beta tests, where a select cadre of players had the opportunity to give feedback and maybe influence the direction of a game in development, but with Early Access everyone was encouraged to put in their two cents - providing they were happy to stump up fifty dollars or so for the privilige. It's an amusing irony that the genre now follows a model whereby finished games are given away free but players have to pay to play the ones that don't work properly yet.

The supposed principle behind Early Access, if not always its reality, was a kind of social contract: we make the game, you play it but we all have interests in common so let's work together. These days, most MMORPGs try at least to pay lip service to the concept, regardless of whether they're in early access or not, a detail many also fudge for as long as they can get away with it.

In recent times, with the door open to collaboration, a third faction has appeared, eager to shoulder its way to power. Driven by a sense of ownership borne out of years, decades, of play, "veterans", long one of the loudest and most influential voices in any game debate, began to flex some newly-acquired muscles.

In English Law there's a concept known as "Squatter's Rights". As the official advice given by the U.K. government has it "A long-term squatter can become the registered owner of property or land they’ve occupied without the owner’s permission." Veteran players may not have the backing of law but many feel the same moral vindication, especially when dealing with new developers, who think they know best. We've been here longer than you have, the vets point out. It might be your job but it's our home.

We see this most obviously in the increasingly recalcitrant populations of aging MMORPGs, where all change is treated with deep suspicion and the old ways are always the best. It's a very happy synchronicity, then, that some of those are the very same players who react most positively to the introduction of Classic, retro or progression servers.

A kind of devil's bargain has been agreed with developers, who understand with but don't necessarily share the veterans' nostalgia and fear of change. The deal the developers offer is simple: we'll set you up in a nice, familiar place and do what we can to make the present go away. You stay there quietly and don't bother us while we see if we can't do something for all the people you lot drove away in the first place.

In an odd way, that puts the players - or some of them - in firmer control than they've ever been while at the same time freeing developers to follow their own path. Blizzard as a company plainly had no interest in reliving past glories until relentless player and commercial pressure dragged them to it. Now they're stuck with Classic but they also have much more freedom to make radical design choices in the Retail game.

The same applies to Darkpaw. Topauz is right to say that solo play has been prioritized over grouping in the past few years, at least by comparison to how it used to be, but according to a number of recent statements by various developers, steering the game in that direction has resulted in a sustained uptick of interest.

By maintaining multiple rulesets, some of which favor experimentation, others which act more as fan service for veteran players, companies hope to please, if not everyone, at least more customers than the one-size-fits-all approach was able to reach. Of course, the demographic that falls through the cracks now is the one which favors the same old mechanics but applied to brand-new content. It's those leftover veterans, the ones who haven't taken up the offer of a ticket to the past, whose complaints which now fill the forums.

I don't think there's much chance of an equitable solution for this, or not one that will suit everyone. All developers spend most of their careers tacking from windward to lee, hoping that, when they look back, they'll have steered a straightish course. A snapshot taken at any given moment, though, shows the game yawing wildly, half the players nauseous, some of them being thrown into the ocean.

As a long-term player, all I can really hope for is to enjoy the trip whenever the ship is sailing in the direction I want to go and hope that, when it swings back the other way, it won't be for too long. Even if "the players" en masse have one hand on the tiller, any individual player must always feel as powerless as ever.

In a massively multiplayer game that's never going to change.

Stuck Like A Cowboy : EQII

As Kander and Dreamweaver revealed in the recent Kander's Candor podcast, the big spring update for EverQuest II this year has a cowboy theme. And a cowboy theme tune. Several, in fact, some of them sung by cacti.

The singing succulents (that's what they're called) are in the new instance, which comes in Solo, Heroic and Challenge flavors. Don't ask me what "Challenge" dungeons are. I can't keep up with the jargon even though I'm playing every day.

I'll bet they're hard, though. I'm sure I won't be seeing many of them (for "many" read "any").  I've already tried the Solo instance and that's hard enough for me.

In fact, it's exactly hard enough, as in just right.  It's what I guess you'd call "end game Solo", if such a thing exists (and it does in EQII) because you can't even get the quest for it unless you've finished the Blood of Luclin solo adventure signature line.

I have six max level 120 adventurers but only one of them has actually bothered to complete the sig so it was had to be my Berserker who hitched up his chaps and moseyed on down to the Diaku Corral.

The questgiver is a gnome in the small camp just at the top of the hill leading from The Grey to Scarlet Desert. Yet another gnome has gone missing, something of a theme in the current expansion (okay, all expansions...) and it's your job to go look for him. Isn't it always?

It took me a little while to work out where to go although the instructions are clear enough. There's a big island out in the bay and a pier at the foot of the headland where the very scary Diaku ogres live. Once you've had a poke around there and gone back to speak to the questgiver again, you can click a rowboat next to the pier to let it take you to the new instance, out on the island.

Zoning in was a little scary. All the mobs are three-up-arrow orange-con heroics. Level 126s. A lot of them. It looks like solo suicide but the way the game works now is to use the Heroic instances as a baseline and buff solo characters up to match. My Berserker, who normally has around 130m hit points, found himself beefed up to not far short of half a billion. It's a big numbers game, alright, but that's how most EQII players seem to like it.

The ogres hit hard but die fast. Berserkers are happy to fight crowds so all the adds just made things go faster still. As per the current convention the mobs didn't really drop anything and naturally there's no xp to be had at max level but I've long since adjusted to that new normal, so I didn't get that old-fashioned "why am I doing this again?" feeling.

The ogres, all wearing chaps, ten-gallon hats and leather waistcoats, did drop one thing: single-shot crossbows. All of them. And the bows were stackable items, not equippable weapons. There's a hint. I made a hot key for them and tried shooting ogres in the hope there might be some kind of one-shot gimmick. There was. Kind of.

Shoot an ogre with one of those mini-crossbows and his hat flies off! I wish I could have got a screenshot but it happened too fast. I guess I could fire up FRAPS and video it. Or, come to think of it, doesn't EQII have built-in video?

I could go back in and do it now if it wasn't for one thing. I'm stuck.

Little did I know at the time that the key to my progress
(and the gate) lay in my hands...

Stuck as in I've killed all the available ogres and now I'm outside the locked gates of their hilltop fort and I can't get in. I've already re-started the instance and killed them all a second time in case I missed something but if I did I missed it that time, too.

I must either have missed something (Spoiler! And False Edit! Yes I had!) or I'm bugged because I know other people have finished the instance. I'd happily refer to a walkthrough only there isnt one yet.   

Darkpaw Games recently moved to a peculiar cadence of updates where the Test server gets some updates after Live. That does seem to defeat the object of having a Test server. Certainly the very disgruntled Test community thinks so. And since they are, by and large, the people who write all the walkthroughs for the wiki, when they suffer, we all suffer.

I already know how easy it is to miss stuff in the new instance because I missed the mechanic on the one one named ogre I found on on the way up to the summit. He had clear emotes and the mechanic turned out to be obvious but I still had to reset the instance and give him a second go before I tumbled it.

Based on that mistake, I hung around for a long time trying to figure out how to get the gates open. I killed everything I could find, including all the rattlesnakes. I tried interacting with the cacti. (Another Fake Edit: You didn't try hard enough, pal!). I checked the maps for alternate routes and found a possible way in underwater.

That got me two discovery points and one death by shark but it didn't get me anywhere I wanted to go. I've run out of ideas, which is why I stopped and came to write this post. My choices now are a) ask in General chat if anyone knows how to get the gate open or b) wait until a walkthrough appears on the wiki. (Yet Another Fake Edit: or c) read the forum thread properly instead of just skimming it, you muppet! Not to mention d) watch one of the playthroughs already up on YouTube). I guess it depends which is stronger, my pride or my patience.

From what I've seen so far it's an excellent update. I like the instance a lot. I got an upgrade off the named ogre, too, so it could be profitable as well as fun. (And still with the Fake Edits: all the drops so far seem to be at least 165 resolve which makes it a great choice for gearing up after the Sig line).

There's also a major upgrade to the Overseer system, which now has both levels and seasons as well as some very welcome quality of life changes. I'll probably cover all that in more detail when I've levelled it up a bit. Far enough to start the new Desert of Flames themed missions that come with Season Two. That requires your Overseer to be level eleven. Fortunately, leveling the feature seems to go quite quickly. I'd guess I'd be there sometime next week.

The update also comes with some exceptionally
good freebies. There's a very attractive mount with decent stats, a legendary quality familiar and a 66-slot bag (which can also be displayed as a really nice appearance item in the back slot) plus some item unattuners and time-reducing potions. That's a good package deal by just about anyone's standards.

It's one per account but, amazingly, every account gets one. Yes, that means free accounts as well. I logged in my old main account, currently unsubbed, to check and it's true. I'll be logging in all my f2p accounts and Mrs Bhagpuss's too. It would be rude to shun such generosity.

The update also gives some hefty boosts to some of the mage classes, particularly Warlocks and Summoners. They're calling it "Class Balance" but it seems more like a straight catch-up for some classes that were supposed to be upper tier DPS but who've slipped. I already found my mages to be plenty powerful enough in solo content but I won't complain if they become even more powerful still.

Now, if someone would just be kind enough to get started on a walkthrough, I've got cowboys to kill! (Final Fake Edit: as you were guys. I've got this!).

Girl On A Motorcycle

A while back I wrote a post on how I don't have backlogs of games and don't entirely understand what they are. As usual, that turned out to be mostly a semantic problem. Almost everything is.

I may not have a backlog but increasingly I do have more and more games installed on my hard drive. There's a very straightforward reason for that: people keep giving them to me.

When I say "people", of course, I really mean "game companies". When I got into gaming, back in the 1980s, no-one ever gave games away. Oh, you could get "free" games with magazines. I got a ton of those. But you had to buy the magazine. And that cost about the same as buying a game.

As time went on, the price of games went up and up. Way beyond the price of magazines. Beyond even the annual subscription to a magazine. And the games I liked, MMORPGs, made you pay an up-front fee and a subscription. Keeping your hard drive clear wasn't a problem.

Then we had the Free to Play revolution and everything went the other way for a while. Instead of having to choose you could play all the things. So I did. My hard drives filled up with 30gb, 40gb, 60gb installs of games I'd play for a few weeks and then forget all about. Most of them are still there. I just bought more hard drives.

I'm watching Doom Patrol at the moment, the sweariest show I have ever seen. Swearing seems really funny all of a sudden.

Until recently, they were all MMORPGs. I didn't do single player. But at some point I was persuaded to sign up for Steam and at some later point I began to use it.

Once I had Steam, I was able to start trying things other bloggers recommended. Increasingly people I followed were drifting away from MMORPGs and writing about all kinds of games. I tried Dr. Langeskov and Doki Doki Literature Club on recommendations and liked what I found. Can you say "gateway drug"?

Somewhere along the line I installed Twitch. I think it was to watch a livestream, quite possibly one of the early hypefests for EQNext. Twitch began giving games away because now everyone was giving games away. It was some cross promotion with Amazon Prime because Amazon owned Twitch somehow and I had Prime, because it was free for three months and I got used to using it, (Can you say "the first hit is free"?) so I started downloading those too because why not?

Note to self: play more games.

Now I had games coming at me from all over. Endless free trials and free to play games from the MMORPG developers, monthly free single-player titles from Amazon/Twitch, free games from Steam...

And still they came. I installed Nox so I could play Android games on my desktop and that opened up a whole new free game ecology. I keep reading about free deals from Epic and EA and XBox Live on PC and who knows what-all else. So far I've resisted those but I'm sitting here and I might be sitting here for who knows how long - a month? Two? - and my resolve is weakening.

Not that I had much resolve to begin with. I mean. it's free stuff, right? And it comes to my house. I don't have to go and get it or speak to anyone or really do anything other than click a mouse a few times. Why would you not?

I remembered yesterday that it was a few days past the begining of the month so I went to see what Twitch had for me. An exit strategy, that's what. Now that Amazon Games is about to become a thing Amazon is distancing itself from Twitch. I don't know how social they're being about it.

Where do I start?

Amazon asked me if I'd like to deal direct and now I have a new folder on my third drive called Amazon Games. They offered me a choice of five titles for April and I picked two: Earthlock and Kathy Rain.

I tried Earthlock this morning. I lasted about fifteen minutes. The game itself seemed okay. It looks pretty enough. The plot, the tiny fragment I saw of it, might have been cribbed from the pilot of an uncomissioned Saturday morning cartoon from the late 1980s but there's nothing much wrong with that. The characters and the dialog wouldn't have challenged a seven year old but they had a certain naive charm. The combat, while pedestrian, was not without amusement.

The problem was the camera. It didn't have one. Rather, it did but I wasn't allowed to use it. You get to see what the game shows and that's that. In a 2D game, not a problem. In three dimensions with WASD controls, no. Just no.

Why do they have four beds in a room for two?

Kathy Rain is much, much better. I haven't played for long, maybe forty-five minutes, but I can say already that I'll be playing this until I get to the end. It will have an end because it's a point and click adventure mystery and they have to.

I was pretty much sold in the first thirty seconds. It has one of the most in medias res openings I've ever seen. No introduction, no tutorial, nothing. It loads, you see a room with someone at a desk, the door opens, Kathy walks in, hurls herself on the bed and starts to talk about how the room is spinning and she's about to throw up.

Her roommate, acting like this happens all the time and isn't worthy of notice, drops a revelation that instantly sobers Kathy up and next thing you know you're watching her take a motorbike ride to her estranged grandfather's funeral.

Go make it happen

Kathy wears black leather, rides a motorcycle and drinks to excess. In her backpack (it's an adventure game - of course she has a backpack) she has a journal, a taser and a pack of cigarettes. I have buttons. Go ahead, push them.

I'm not quite so sold on the retro 90s pixel art. As I've said before, I was glad to see the back of that look when technology killed it. I have no nostalgia for bad graphics. I spent a while trying to get it to look crisper but no dice. I'm getting used to it. It's starting to look good. (Can you say "habituation"?).

I also assumed, wrongly, that this was a game that actually came from the period it depicts. Not so. It was in fact released in 2016. It was a critical hit, won a bunch of awards and it currently has a "very positive" rating and four and a half stars out of five on Steam, where you can buy it for £10.99, if you like paying for things you could have for free.

I'm getting Morninglight vibes.

Everyone reading this probably played the game years ago, although I can't recall anyone mentioning it. Not going to stop me posting about it, anyway. If I do I'll try and avoid spoilers. It's just about conceivable someone is even further behind the curve than me.

So there we have it. Free games. You get a lot more than what you pay for. And literally in the time I was posting this I've acquired another. Paeroka flagged up something called Regions of Ruin, free on Steam as I write. It looked interesting so I downloaded it.

Seems I am building a backlog after all. (Can you say "addicted"?)