Names From The Past, Names For The Future

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, otherwise known as the 1980s, I used to write an opinion column for the comics fanzine I co-created and that column was called "Scattershot". It's mildly unsettling that my original opening line for this post was going to start with "A few scattershot topics I've been wondering about...".  Seems like some things haven't changed as much as I like to tell myself.

The thing is, though, "Scattershot" was always a good name for a column. Maybe I should start using it again. In fact, maybe I should start thinking more in terms of columns and features with names and set topics. It would add a much-needed sense of structure. Maybe I'll do that, although now I think about it I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about it in Blogger.

Blogger is pretty inflexible when it come to layout, or or so it's always seemed to me, but then that has a lot to do with the decision I made, not long after I started, to use a custom template that isn't officially supported. I don't dare change anything now in case it breaks the whole blog, which is the main reason everything here has stayed almost exactly the same, at least visually, for more than a decade. I imagine it's only because Google has pretty much forgotten Blogger exists that I've been able to get away with it this long.

Still, at least it's not WordPress, right? They break things all the time from what I hear. Wilhelm was complaining again the other day about something else WordPress had broken. 

I made accounts with both platforms before I decided to go with Blogger. The main reason I went that way was that Blogger seemed less technical. Now I wonder if it even that's really true. Wilhelm was describing how awkward it is to add urls in WP these days. Blogger has an HTML editor as standard. I toggle between the regular word-processor screen and the HTML window all the time to fiddle around with the code. Can you do that in WP now?

I am curious, I admit. It's a constant background worry that one day Google will remember they own a blogging platform and decide they don't want one. If that happens I might have to consider WP as an alternative so, since I already have an account there, I am toying with the idea of starting a WP blog just as an experiment. Maybe I should call that one Scattershot. It's a good name.

So much for the introduction. On to the topics.

Back To Camp

I became unreasonably excited last week, when I read a post at Kay Talks Games about how Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was coming back as an offline title. The online version shut down last year and even though it had been a long time since I'd played and I hadn't been thinking of starting again, I was somewhat miffed to know I wouldn't be able to go back and play some more if I happened to get the urge.

If we're honest about it, I imagine that's how most people feel when they hear that games they once played are closing down. It's not that anyone really wants to play them again, it's just that no-one likes being told they can't. 

A suggestion (Or demand...) that often comes up at such times is for the game to be somehow converted into an offline version, so people can at least go on playing on their own, but the response from developers is almost always that it would be too expensive or that technical reasons make it impossible.

Nintendo, though, will always be Nintendo. They do what they want not what other companies do and apparently what they want is an offline version of ACPC, so now there is one. 

It's very expensive for a mobile game. The full price will be $20 but for the rest of this month you can get it for just half that. Ten dollars is still a lot for a phone game, all the same.

And yet I am almost certainly going to buy it. ACPC is the mobile game I've played the most. I have a Label for it on the blog with eleven entries, many of which are full posts. I started playing in lockdown, when everyone else was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch and then I kept playing almost every day for months, long after people stopped gosh-wowing about New Horizons.

At the time, I played the game on my Kindle Fire but as it happens I have just bought a new phone. It's a budget phone but a good one. It's a Samsung Galaxy A16 and supposedly it can play Genshin Impact, albeit at low settings, although I haven't tried it yet and won't believe it until I do. If it can run GI, though, it certainly ought to be able to manage Pocket Camp. 

As well as Kay's post, I read a long and helpful review of the offline version at Eurogamer and just reading about it made me feel nostalgic for the many hours I wasted, talking to peculiar animals about their utterly pointless obsessions. 

I could do that again. I think I will. It'll be £10 well spent, I'm sure.

Free At Last?

On a thematically-related topic, there was a news item on MassivelyOP recently about another somewhat twee game I used to play and would quite like to play again: Free Realms. FR went under in the Great SOE Purge of 2014 but ever since there's been a bubbling, roiling, mumbling demand for some kind of return for the game that apparently everyone loved but no-one wanted to spend money on, something John "Smed" Smedley blamed on the players being mostly kids, although that never seemed to hold Runescape or Roblox back much.

For most of the last decade, the only runner in the Free Realms emulator race has been FR Sunrise, a project that began almost as soon as the game shut down and which has made many promises and released several videos but has so far produced nothing whatsoever of interest to anyone outside the walled garden in which it's supposedly growing.

Now, though, there's competition in the form of an open-source project described as "a reversed engineered walking emulator", meaning that so far all you can do is wander around an empty theme park, imagining the fun you'd have if the rides were switched on. 

I'm a little unclear on the exact timing behind this new initiative, which has been up and running for a good few months now, but the apparent lack of clarity over who actually owns the Free Realms IP these days might have something to do with it. That and the inability or unwillingness of the FRSunrise crew to get a functioning build to market, I guess.

The team behind the open-source project is looking for help to try to rebuild the content so feel free to pile on if you have the skills. I'll join you when there's a working game and I'll lay odds that will happen before we see any kind of publicly playable release from FRSunrise, whose beta sign-ups opened four years ago, which was when I signed up, but whose actual testing program, as far as I can tell, has yet to begin.

Metaversion

Here's a 21st century koan for you: if a virtual popstar performs in a virtual world, do they make a sound? Well, now's your chance to find out because Hatsune Miku is currently appearing in Fortnite Festival Season 7. She'll be there, for whatever value you care to assign to "be" and "there", until 8 April.

Three or four years ago, that news would have made me very excited. I'd have patched up Fortnite to log in and check it out and I'd have taken a bunch of screenshots and written a whole post about it. I will most likely get around to taking a look by way of Amazon Luna - I should really have done that before I wrote the post - but these vague, occluded hints of our true future no longer make my blood rush the way they once did.

And that's a good thing. It means that, just as I predicted, the real metaverse is already building itself around us as we ignore it. All the lunatic, self-serving, self-aggrandizing claims of the money-is-all cult have predictably come to nothing, while the infrastructure seeds and replicates with no external plan or purpose. 

The downside, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness has found to her irritation, is that early adopters attracted to the quirkiness and unpredictability of the tools now find themselves bored and uninterested by the much more consistent and reliable output of their successors. I find myself, as she says, "uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing", which is why you may have noticed a lot less discussion about it here of late. 

What applies to GenAI applies equally to the metaverse. Still, I do like Hatsune Miku and I do find the idea of her "performing" inside a video game attractively irreal. We are slowly getting to where I want us to go even if we don't always notice it's happening.

Get Weird On Me, Baby

Since I've mentioned AIWeirdness and video games in the same paragraph, I ought to link to Janelle's latest post, especially since I'm about to cannibalize it for my own purposes. She rarely finds anything weird enough to comment on these days but she made an exception for a "generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else."

Never having played Minecraft, it's not something I feel I need to see for myself, which is just as well because it doesn't want to run on my laptop.  If you'd like to take a look, here's the link. It's called Oasis, it only runs in Chrome, and it's supposedly "the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model". 

As Janelle suggests, it's also ultimately pointless. As it stands it's a curiosity precisely because of how little it reassembles an actual, functioning game but if it ever manages to become one, "this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run." Now, if they could get generative AI to replicate Free Realms, then we'd be getting somewhere...

And that'll do for now. There's more but when isn't there? You have to stop somewhere.

I guess we'll end with a song because that's traditional around here. So, what d'you reckon the chances are of there being a song called "Scattershot"? And if there is, of it being any good?

I'll take it.

 

Notes on AI used in this post. 

Ironically, having gone on about not bothering much with AI any more, I immediately realized AI would be ideal for the header image. It's a great example of how un-weird the apps have become and thereby how useful but also not really worth talking about any more.

I wanted a picture of Hatsune Miku in Pocket Camp so I just typed in "Hatsune Miko in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp" and that's what I got. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?

The model I used was Flux Schnell at NightCafe.

Sunrise (Always Comes Around)

Among my ridiculously long list of Firefox bookmarks, to which I continually add things but almost never take anything away, I maintain a small, roped-off area for games and gaming projects in devolpment that I'm monitoring. This doesn't include the various major titles for which I've already signed up and in some cases paid for, the likes of Ashes of Creation, New World or Pantheon, from all of whom I receive regular email updates. Nor have I bookmarked all the games I can count on reading about on Massively:OP or other blogs I follow.

The six sites I currently have listed are:

Antilia

Auteria

FHX Restoration

SmokymonkeyS

Project: Return Home

FR Sunrise

Most, if not all, of them have tags here if anyone's interested in what I've had to say about them in the past. I don't mention any of them very often because month to month, and in some cases year to year, not much changes.

I'm fairly well in the habit now of checking all of the bookmarks at least two or three times a week. I've missed a couple of alpha tests through not keeping up to date and it can be quite annoying to check how something's coming along only to find not only has it indeed come but also very much gone.

Until today, for some reason, I didn't have the bookmark for the Free Realms emulator, Free Realms Sunrise in the designated area. I'd left it languishing somewhere down below, deep in the forest of forgotten links.

That wasn't because I'd lost interest. Far from it. No, it was because I was under the impression the team had moved all their operations to Discord and were no longer updating the website. And, interested as I may be, there's very little I'm so interested in that I'd open Discord to hear about it.

 

I'm not sure why but this morning, as I was going through the others, I remembered I hadn't checked on the Free Realms project for quite a while. I found the errant bookmark and clicked on it. Just in time! I wonder if I might be a precog? Perhaps this is a Philip K Dick novel I'm living in. Certainly feels like one, sometimes.

No? No. Just lucky co-incidence I guess. And I suppose getting a hunch about something that happened almost a week ago doesn't really count as pre-cognition anyway. Is there such a thing as postcognition? 

Whatever you call it, turns out the Sunrise team is planning an open beta and they're taking sign-ups. So I signed up. 

You might wonder why you'd need to register for an open beta. I did. They do explain it. It's because they expect to have limited server capacity and your beta application date will be used to control the queuing system if they need to use one.

There's certainly a good deal of interest in the project. Free Realms was famously highly successful in terms of attracting players and much-loved by many. It didn't close down because of lack of interest or low population. It closed because, as John "Smed" Smedly later explained, kids don't spend money.

Which, when you come to think of it, is a pretty spurious argument. KingsIsle seem to do alright. So does Roblox. I strongly suspect the problem had more to do with SOE's inability to manage income streams, something their insistence on running disastrous triple Station Cash sales and then letting you use the imaginary money to buy expansions amply demonstrated at the time.

Whatever the reason, a lot of people were unhappy when Free Realms shut down and plenty of them would like to see it come back. The team behind the project seem to be very efficient and organized. There seems no reason to suspect the open beta won't be very well attended.

Oh, except for one thing. As the extensive and informative FAQ explains, you're going to need a copy of the original client.

And you're going to have to find it for yourself.

Hmm. That could be a problem. I had a bit of a rummage down the back of the internet this morning and I couldn't come up with anything. There are a few websites that claim to have downloads but the links just go to a bootstrap that refers back to SOE's original Free Realms website. Which doesn't exist.

My virus software sent another possible source straight to quarantine when I tried it but I don't think it was even pointing to the same game. Having the word "free" in your game's name is a dubious advantage. A lot of the results I got on a search were for free downloads of other games with "Realms" in the title. There are quite a few.

If the web can't provide a client and the new operators won't I'm guessing it's going to put quite a crimp in the numbers. Free Realms didn't exactly attract a tech-savvy clientele, what with being aimed squarely at ten-year olds and it closed down almost seven years ago (thanks, Wilhelm!). I don't imagine too many people still have a copy of the client just sitting around.

Although I might. I have a lot of old hard drives going back a lot longer than seven years. A few of them are even still in PCs that kind of work. Unfortunately not all of the drives can say the same and even the ones that still spin up aren't cataloged in any way. I'd have to go through them all to see if I left a copy of Free Realms installed anywhere.

On the positive side, I only ever delete game files if I'm desperate for space so there's a chance. I might have a dig through sometime. It's not like I don't have the opportunity, what with six weeks of lockdown ahead, at the bare minimum. 

Also, I imagine that when the open beta actually begins some kind soul will make their copy of the client available on some sharing site or other. Always a thrill ride, visiting those. I'm fairly confident I'll get to play the game again somehow.

I hope the Sunrise guys can land their project and make it stick. Free Realms was a very good game. It's a shame it shut down. As for its prospects if it does make it back, well late-era SOE and subsequently Daybreak always seemed relatively chill about emulators. P99 is the benchmark for co-operation between official and unofficial servers and that's an emulator for a game that's still in commercial production. 

I wonder what EG7 think about it, though? And I wonder who owns the rights to the closed games?

Step Into A New World

Last week's reveal of an approximate launch date for Amazon's New World (now confirmed as May 26 2020) got me thinking about the future as it relates to MMORPGs. Specifically, the games I'm vaguely looking forward to playing sometime, if and when they ever get their act together.

I'm going to do this from memory, without a lot of preparatory research, in the hope of clarifying what I'm actually interested in, rather than what I could all too easily make myself get over-excited about if I worked at it. That said, I'm fairly hopeless at remembering stuff like this so I'll probably miss some things I'll end up jumping all over when they appear.

Let's start with New World. Without a doubt this is now at the top of my wants list, moving above Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen by dint of having an imminent release date.  It's also backed by one of the biggest companies in the world so I have no worries over whether it will actually happen.

Of course, I'm still vastly more interested in Brad McQuaid's legacy MMORPG as a game that might become a long-term home for both me and Mrs Bhagpuss. It's as close to the model I prefer as I'm likely to get. I'm just not expecting to get it any time soon, although a beta buy-in for $100 or so wuld be more than tempting.

On paper, New World doesn't look like something I'd enjoy but personal experience trumps speculation. Like a lot of people, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the alpha. It wasn't a particularly exclusive event. I did, however, get in right at the start, which meant I saw the way the game changed and developed over many months.

The New World Alpha Test has a fairly strict NDA (albeit nothing on the scale of the one Belghast recalls from Guild Wars 2's testing process) and as far as I know it's still in force. That means I can't really say much about either the game or the testing process.

I will say that it was a real alpha, in which systems and gameplay elements were frequently changed with the specific intent of seeing how various approaches worked. This was done with great communication from the developers, including reasons and expectations for the changes.

My experiences in the Alpha made me a lot less surprised than some comentators when I read about the changes the game has apparently undergone since it was taken back behind closed doors. An increased focus on the fantastical elements of the setting and on player versus environment content is nothing more than I would have expected.

What I wasn't expecting was a move towards what looks as though it could be fully optional PvP. Game Director Scott Lane is quoted at Massively:OP, saying of the PvP aspect "“If you don’t care about this stuff as a player, you can have a huge, massive experience without any of it.”" There's a lot of meat missing from the bones of this statement, like how that will actually work, but even if it ends up being a hybrid PvPvE system such as those we're familiar with from Allods, ArcheAge, Black Desert and many others, that's fine with me.

What did surprise me was the mention of personal housing outside guild-based territorial warfare. I didn't see that coming and it adds a huge potential value to the game for me. If I can potter around in safety in low/mid level areas, gathering materials and crafting stuff to build my own little wilderness home, that will suit me very well. It's a lot like what I was hoping for from Atlas and didn't get.

About the only thing I don't much look forward to is the "focus and very skill based ... moment to moment game play". I'm too old for that kind of thing. That said, PvE combat in the alpha was fine. Not my favorite kind of fighting but perfectly manageable for an incompetent button-masher. And I only played a melee character. I'm guessing ranged will be easier on the hands.

I'm not convinced New World will be something I'd recognize as an MMORPG but it doesn't claim to be one so that's not a problem. I am expecting a gorgeous, rich and fascinating world with immense exploration potential and that's more than enough. I pre-ordered the game today, which gives me guaranteed access to the Closed Beta, whenever that starts. I imagine it will also have a strict NDA. Looking forward to dropping a lot of veiled hints when the time comes.

Camelot Unchained does claim to be an MMORPG; the spiritual successor to Dark Age Of Camelot, no less. We've been waiting a long time for CU. The Kickstarter was getting on for seven years ago. The first phase of beta, expected in 2015, arrived three years later and that's the phase we're still in.

As Wilhelm observed "It is starting to make Star Citizen look positively progressive in getting test content to users". I've played Star Citizen on "Free Roam" and I'm not any kind of backer. I'd love the option to do that with Camelot Unchained, a game I'm far more interested in, but as far as I can tell it's still a $60 buy-in to get Beta 1 access.

The underlying concept of CU still appeals to me. Realm vs Realm is the best kind of PvP I've played - when it works. It often doesn't. This would be the first game to make it the be-all and end-all and I'm interested to see how that pans out. Also, Mrs Bhagpuss loves RvR so she'd almost certainly be on board.

How long does anyone want to wait to play a video game, though? CU has been "in development" since 2013 and it's only in the first stage of beta with a "lengthy" second phase planned. At this rate it's not going to go Live this side of 2021-2022. Does any game really need that long in the oven?

While we've been waiting for Mark Jacobs to get CU out the door, Broadsword have taken almost as long to get around to making DAOC free to play. They did finally manage it a little while ago and I've been meaning to download the game and revisit my old stamping grounds in Midgard and Albion.

So far I haven't been able to make the time but it's a virtual certainty that I'll be re-playing DAOC long before I ever set foot in its sequel. That's a straw in the wind for something that's becoming an increasing theme of MMORPG hobbyism for many: the past is more inviting than the future.

2019 saw two huge MMORPG news stories involving games coming back from the dead: WoW Classic and City of Heroes. In both cases, games long since abandoned or dismantled by their creators came back to an astonishing response.

Games developers as a species are never slow to jump a passing bandwagon, provided it passes by with all the alarms blaring and lights blazing, but they're ridiculously late on any trend that doesn't fit their ironclad pre-conceptions. If they'd had an ear to the ground they'd have heard the rumble that's been building for many years.

In the blogosphere, we've often talked about the dearth of new titles and reminisced about the good old days. It should surprise no-one that a good old 'un beats a lackluster newbie every time and yet it seems to have taken the industry a long time to cotton on.

The cumulative success of projects like Classic, Homecoming, Old School Runescape and P99 make it very hard to ignore the untapped demand for games that have supposedly run their course. The uncomfortable fact that for some of the mainstays of the industry it's five or ten year old games that still feed the bottom line is belatedly being re-shaped into a narrative the suits can understand.

The latest buzzword is "ongoing games", now an Award category in its own right. We're already moving past "games as a service" into the sunny uplands of forever gaming. Why make and market expensive new products when you can just re-furbish old ones? Getting new players has always been a gamble - why bother, when you can just hang on to the ones you've got?

On the back of that, some of my most eagerly-anticipated "new" games aren't anything of the kind. They're emulated versions of old games I either played and miss or missed playing when they were around.

Even I'm surprised by how many emulator projects I now have bookmarked. There's the Vanguard Emulator, obviously. I log into that every month or two and post about it occasionally. There are several more I'm looking forward to more than I'm looking forward to most official product.

Top of the list is Project: Return Home. It's a bold attempt not only to bring back a much-missed MMORPG but to port it to a new platform. If it comes off I'll be able to realize a long-held dream, one which I thought would have to remain a fantasy: I'll be able to play the EQ game I missed out on because I didn't own a PS2.

Return Home plans to make EverQuest Online Adventures available for the PC. If the team behind the project manage to pull it off there's a good chance I might have found a new home for months. Short of an actual new EverQuest game from Daybreak (and where's that "big news" that was coming in November, Holly?) Return Home might be the last "new" game set in Norrath I ever play.

Then there's Free Realms: Sunrise, about which I have written a few times. The folks behind that don't seem to be in much of a hurry so I'm not holding my breath. I'd still bet on getting an open beta before Camelot Unchained goes live.

A real left-field entry to my watchlist is FHX Restoration, a project aiming to bring back a barely-remembered MMORPG that operated under several names in various territories. It's the game known to some as Hercot or Xiones. I knew it as Ferentus.

When I played, Ferentus was in beta. I don't recall it ever going Live in this territory. I only ever saw the first zone or two and I can't really say why it's stuck in my mind the way it has but I've never forgotten it. Apparently there was a whole game there at one time, one which people paid for, played and enjoyed. I'd be very happy to take a look at what was on the menu after the taster I tried all those years ago.

As with most emulator projects, details on progress are hard to come by but there have been two brief opportunities to step into the world and see what's been achieved so far. Both of which I missed, because I only found about the project after they'd happened.

The first was a single day over a year ago. The second was two days in August. I'm keeping an eye open for the next. Maybe that'll be a whole three-dayer!

Games I was looking forward to, now not so much, include Ashes of Creation and Crowfall. Both of them have passed that point where they've been in development so long that all my intitial enthusiasm has burned away.

I was never all that keen on Crowfall to begin with. The early PR releases got my back up with all their talk about how they were going to save the genre. I didn't (and still don't) think it needs saving. As time went on, though, I began to think ArtCraft had some neat ideas on how to solve some longstanding issues, including payment models and PvP vs PvE.

Sadly, whatever it looked like they might do has become moot due to the length of time they've taken doing it. A lot of the things that seemed like problems then don't seem to be all that pressing now and I wonder if anyone really cares any more.  I know I don't,, although no doubt I'll give Crowfall a look - if it ever makes it out of buy-in testing.

I was a lot more invested in Ashes of Creation to the point that I pledged for both myself and Mrs Bhagpuss during the Kickstarter. If the game ever happens we'll get copies and I'll definitely play it and write about it here.

When they put up the first version of the Battle Royale spin-off, Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse, I enjoyed it well enough, considering what it was, but by the time they got to the latest version I couldn't be bothered. And neither could anyone else. The current Steam Chart stats show the average number of players online in the last thirty days was 8.5. Good luck getting a Battle Royale going, guys. Maybe you could invite the three people still playing Planetside:Arena.

And that's about it. I'm sure there are plenty of upcoming MMORPGs I'd be curious to try should I happen to come across them but I can't bring any to mind. I'd welcome any suggestions!

Take Five

Five years ago I posted a list entitled "All The MMOs I Have Ever Played (And Then Some) Pt 1". Running alphabetically from Aika to Guild Wars 2, it covered forty-five titles. At the time that represented considerably less than half of all the MMORPGs I'd played in the fifteen years since I bought EverQuest in 1999.

I was planning on a a Pt. 2 and very possibly a Pt. 3. As I remember it, there were more than a hundred and twenty titles on the full list. I can't be sure exactly how many because the file seems to have gone missing. If I did a recount now, going up to the present day, I'm sure it would pass a hundred and fifty.

The reason I'm mentioning it today is that I never did get around to the second, let alone the third and final instalment, a failing I don't intend to repeat with my gloss on PC Gamer's list of twenty-five dead post-WoW titles. Parts One and Two are done. Now for Part Three. (Incidentally, I just noticed that link, which I filched from Paeroka's post, where I originally learned about the piece, goes to the Australian edition of PC Gamer. Curious...).

Telon always looks lived-in. Even untidy.

So, without further padding, let's get to it: the Final Five aka The Ones I Really Played.

 Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Depending on my mood, this is either my first, second or third favorite MMORPG of all time. The top three hasn't changed in a decade - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Vanguard. The order changes all the time.

The recent sad and unexpected death of Brad McQuaid reminded me yet again how invaluable his contribution to the genre has been. I have a rule of thumb for collective enterprises like gaming, music and film: if I like a whole lot of things and there's a common factor, it's probably not a co-incidence. I may never know exactly what it was that Brad did but whatever it was it worked for me.

Is there any more inspiring sight in MMORPGs than your very own ship?

A vast amount has been written about Vanguard, no little of it by me, so I won't re-hash the details. I'll just say that the first year after launch was one of the best times I've had in MMORPGs and there have been plenty more good times since.

Thanks to the emulator project, which I can't plug too often, those good times didn't end when Smed pulled the plug. I don't blame him or SOE for that; as an obscure division of a less-than mindful multicorp they'd been able to pull off more than their fair share of pro-bono archival preservation but it couldn't go on forever. I have other axes to grind with Smed without blaming him for killing Vanguard.

Having given Brad credit for the worldmaking I should add a caveat, one that may (or, now that he's gone, may not) speak to Pantheon. Vanguard was a somewhat unforgivingly group-based game in the early days, as Pantheon proposes to be. It was only after he'd left, when SOE were trying to remake and remodel the game to fit their portfolio and regain an audience that it began to offer some of the best solo and, especially, duo gameplay in the genre.

Or better yet, two of them. A bug in Vanguard? Surely not!

Although I always loved Vanguard, starting with the open beta, the first time I had a PC capable of playing it, it was that long period in the middle, after the difficulty was toned down and before it was tweaked back up, when it really hit my sweet spot. That was the time when my Disciple felt immortal and we all had a reindeer that flew. I loved it.

Even if the emulator project ever completes and the full game comes back, those golden days are gone forever. Every MMORPG is a river. We have to accept it and move on.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

What is it with the colons? No-one ever calls these games by their full names. Why even bother with the subtitle? Presumably, in this case, just so they could use the acronym WAR.

My experience with Warhammer is a curious tale. It has close similarities to my relationship with World of Warcraft, which is both ironic and appropriate given the two games' quantum entanglement.

My second-favorite MMO class of all time (so far). Vanguard's Disciple is #1.

When WoW was generating the biggest buzz the genre ever knew, I barely noticed. From what I've read, excitement over Warhammer fueled a boom in MMO blogging the like of which we can now only dream. I missed that entirely, too.

I was barely aware Warhammer was a thing until long after it wasn't any more. I'm too old to have grown up with Games Workshop although I did run a Warhammer RPG tabletop campaign in the 1980s. It was a good system, if a little over-complicated.

That didn't generate enough affection for the I.P. to grab my attention when the MMORPG was announced. I also can't recall noticing that Mark Jacobs, the driving force behind Dark Age of Camelot, a game with which I have considerable history, not all of it good, was involved. I never even saw the infamous "Bears Bears Bears" video until many years later.

Warhammer was one of the games Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried in our wilderness years, when we'd run out of steam in the old games and there weren't any new ones on the horizon. We ran through a bunch of also-rans and rejects we'd not paid much attention to until we got desperate. WoW was one (actually, the last one, I think. We were that wary of it). Warhammer was another.

These shots are from the emulator. I seem to have lost all my originals.

I'm not sure how long we played Warhammer. My memory wants to say three or four months but I've found that, when I can find actual supporting evidence for this kind of thing, my memory usually underestimates so it was probably more like half a year.

I know we did an awful lot of Battlegrounds, or whatever they were called in WAR. I always found it felt like eating a bag of boiled sweets: delicious at first but eat too many and you end up with a sore mouth and a sick, empty feeling. I found battlegrounds enervating. I always ended up playing too many matches and it made me wrung out and nervy. And yet the next day I'd do it again.

Partly it was because WAR had one of my favorite classes in the entire genre, the Squig Herder. I played mine in Battlegrounds, specifically for the opportunity to blast people off of walls. Sometimes I'd go a whole session without getting a victim lined up just right. That was frustrating. But when it worked it was just about the funnest thing ever. I positively hooted.

The PvE game I liked. It had some depth and the world-making was excellent. The classes and races were varied - so much so I hardly scratched the surface of what was available. I loved the Greenskins. Mostly I played Orcs and Goblins.

Wot? Me, Sarge?

The capital cities, notoriously culled from six to two before launch, were awful, though. Some of the worst I've seen. So was the dismal crafting. The UI wasn't up to much, either and the textures were weirdly gritty. I used to finish a session of Warhammer feeling as though I needed a shower.

Open world RvR, the game's supposed U.S.P., was great when it happened. By the time we played that wasn't very often. Just like in DAOC, I spent a lot more time running around looking for action than I ever did having any.

We never fell out of like with Warhammer. We just ran out of steam and moved on. There's an emulator that's supposed to be fairly well-regarded. I tried it but the spark didn't flare. I'm happy to leave WAR in the past.

Free Realms

Free Realms was always an odd duck. Made at the peak (well, one of the peaks) of SOE's hubris, it was extraordinarily heavily hyped. I remember a series of post-launch press releases lauding ever-increasing take-up figures to confirm the game's runaway success.

Most of my Free Realms shots seem to be M.I.A. too. Not sure how these survived.

It was the first of SOE's free-to-play titles, hence the name, and it heralded the company's transition to a new business model for the entire portfolio. Ironically, despite its undeniable popularity, Free Realms eventually closed because "Kids don’t spend money" (a quote from a Smed interview I am no longer able to find online, although it's referenced in both an MMOGames piece and a reddit thread).

I liked Free Realms. I played a fair bit of it although I don't appear to have posted about it here. I had a character around Level 20 as I recall. I did some crafting, trained a pet, quested quite a bit, explored the world. Played it like a regular MMORPG, really.

The people who really loved Free Realms, though, were the intended age group. I think it's called Middle School in the U.S.  For them it was social media before that became something everyone did. It was the virtual equivalent of the treehouse in the woods, a telephone made out of two tin cans and a length of string. Smed's twelve-year old daughter played it twenty hours a week.

Not a great subject. Some barrels that sparkle. But you should see the ones I didn't use. Or not. Yes, let's not.

You can see the impact it had on peoples' lives from comments on the forums at the emulator website (because of course there's an emulator. There's always an emulator). Or you could, when the forums existed.

The Free Realms emulator project, Free Realms Sunrise, is as odd a duck as the game it plans to revive. The developers run a tighter ship than many official alphas. Access is strictly controlled and they must have a very effective NDA because information never leaks. When they do post progress it's impressive but updates are few and far between. The most recent was back in April.

If the emulator ever comes online for anyone to play I'll definitely dabble. It was never going to be a game I played extensively but it was fun while it lasted. I'd be happy to go round again.

Wildstar

Wildstar is perhaps the classic example of an MMORPG that was less than the sum of its parts. I was reasonably pumped for it during the lead-up to launch. Carbine released some very strong videos and much that I read about the game sounded appealing.

Wildstar looks utterly stunning in screenshots. In game, not so much, I found.

There were warning flags - the ludicrous "twitter" questing and the gleeful focus on hardcore mechanics -  but I took all that with a pinch of salt. When the game finally appeared, though, I wasn't sufficiently interested to buy a copy.

I can't recall why, exactly. Fortunately, by the time WildStar came along in June 2014 I had a blog so I don't have to rely on memory. It seems I was away on holiday for the actual launch. When I came back I found my feed full of posts about the new hotness.

From my post I see I played the beta (don't remember that at all) but I didn't "have time to play another MMO, at least not enough to make the box+sub cost worthwhile". I concluded the post with a cynical throwaway line that would prove prophetic: "Maybe I'll get a second bite at that cherry with the F2P conversion".

I take a lot of shots with my character as far from the camera as possible. Wildstar loves that.

That conversion came just over a year later on 29 September 2015, by which time I was deep in the Heart of Thorns. I was playing Wildstar in mid-October, but not with much conviction. The Halloween event was on but I wasn't committed: "Shade's Eve will have to fall in line behind Norrath's Nights of the Dead and Tyria's Shadow of the Mad King on my personal holiday calendar."

And that was pretty much where Wildstar always stood for me - behind a whole bunch of games that did much the same thing but quite a lot better. Combat in Wildstar was on the taxing-yet-tedious end of the spectrum, with a lengthy time to kill and a lot of makework jumping about (which I completely ignored, probably extending my TTK even further). Questing was lacklustre. I think there may have been some kind of overarching narrative but if so I forget what it was.

Syp was always a big fan of the housing but I felt that was only because he's never really appreciated the options available in EQII, of which WS's housing always felt like a mediocre copy. At least when Rift copied EQII's housing offer, Trion did a good job of it, in everything other than the monetization, that is. That was outrageous.

Grass you could cut yourself on.

My real problem with Wildstar, though, was something quite unexpected. I found the textures and the soundscape unbearable for more than a short session. It's one of the few games that both made my eyes hurt and left me with a ringing in my ears. Okay, not literally but metaphysically. I found the color palette and the ambient sounds teeth-grittingly jarring after an hour or so. It's strange, because the game looks fantastic in screenshots but as a real-time environment it was painful.

There's an emulator project in the works called NexusForever. I know nothing about it but this video was posted on YouTube just a couple of months ago. Could be awhile before we get to play it, I'm guessing. That's okay. I can wait. Forever, if necessary.

Landmark

And so we come to the end. Landmark. Aka EQNext/Landmark. If Free Realms was an odd duck, what do we call this one? Howard?

I wish I could say I built that tower but it was a pre-made, something SOE added late on.

As with Vanguard, I've written plenty about Landmark already. The short version is this: I bought the $99.99 Trailblazer Pack for Mrs Bhagpuss's birthday and the $59.99 Explorer version for myself. She really enjoyed playing for a couple of months, which made the purchase considerably better value than some birthday presents I've come up with. Then she stopped and I carried on, after a fashion, until the game finally closed down in 2017.

I have always considered it money very well spent. I never really understood the criticism in terms of value. A lot of people felt burned because they thought they were buying access to EQNext, apparently, to which I can only wonder whether they actually bothered to read what they were signing up for.

As this PC Gamer article clearly explains, and as all the promotional literature I ever saw made very clear, EQNext and Landmark were separate enterprises. Yes, there was that whole thing about stuff you built in Landmark potentially making it into the landscape of EQN, but that was something you did in Landmark. It didn't mean you got to play EQN right away!

Water was wonderful in Landmark. Even in stills you can see the roiling motion of those waves.

I spent an inordinate amount of time building my clifftop Thomas Crowne Affair spy hideaway. Much of that time was spent mining rocks, chopping trees and learning how to use the unintuitive UI and the incalcitrant building tools. It was clear to me from an early stage that even the developers could barely control the tools. The only useful guides I ever read were written by players, some of whom clearly worked in the industry and had more skills than the people being paid to make the game.

As is clear from many of my posts here, I liked Landmark a lot. It was a toy, not a game and it should have stayed that way. It could have been a very good toy indeed.

Unfortunately, Landmark arrived at the zenith (pr should that be nadir?) of SOE's hubristic period. Astonishing, sweeping claims were made, by people who showed little evidence of being able to turn those pipe-dreams into reality. Landmark was going to be a fully-fledged MMO in its own right, we were told. A huge amount of effort was wasted trying to make that happen. It never even came close to succeeding.

Did Landmark really need combat? If it did, it definitely didn't need the kind of combat it got.

When Landmark closed just three years after that hundred dollar pre-alpha buy-in I did feel it was a shame. The "game" was never going to get much further but it was still a lot of fun for what it was. The fact, though, was that almost no-one was interested any more.

For all the outpourings of anger when it ended, the servers had been all but empty for a long time. The map was littered with abandoned building projects, many of them quite astounding in scale, detail and brio. It is a minor tragedy that all that work was lost but that's what happens when you build castles in the sand.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the talents and skill sets of many of its players, there's no Landmark emulator. There doesn't really need to be one. There are plenty of building apps and games, after all, and it was probably always easier to teach yourself 3D modelling from scratch than to learn to use Landmark's tools.

Anyway, I'm very happy with my memories, my posts and my screenshots. I don't need to spend any more evenings trying to line up bricks -just- so. I appreciate having my life back.

I guess I could draw a comparison there with the whole MMORPG genre. Best not go there...

If You Squint It Looks The Same

This week's top MMORPG news story was undoubtedly the revelation that a City of Heroes emulator has been running in secret for six years. The story first surfaced on YouTube, when a renegade invitee to the elite club, estimated to comprise around three thousand players, broke ranks to confirm the truth of what had long thought to be no more than a tin-foil hat conspiracy.

PCGamer has an overview of the story, crediting Massively OP for much of the subsequent  investigative work that teased out the detail. MOP itself has been on fire with extended commenary all week, although the frenzy there pales in comparison to the firestorm raging on Reddit.

In the aftermath of the reveal the source code to the game was released, a publicly available server came online then vanished, following supposed legal threats that turned out to be figmentary. Death threats and worse (!) were issued. Meanwhile negotiations apparently continue with NCSoft in the hope of bringing some degree of legality - and sanity - to the situation.

A story that got far less attention was the progress update on the project to bring back Free Realms, SOE's MMORPG for kids, which closed just over five years ago. I was mildly peeved when I spotted the Massively OP post, not because I'm wasn't delighted to see progress being made but because I was in hospital at the time and couldn't respond.

I've been following the Free Realms Sunrise project for a long time. On a scale between the black ops, NDA-protected secrecy of the COH server and the open access, everyone welcome approach of the team behind the magnificent Vanguard Emulator, FRS sits somewhere in the middle.

It's a very professional-looking project. There's a slick website but core communication happens on Discord. Access to the alpha, when it was running, was by invitation only although active participation on the forums allowed sufficiently motivated applicants a way in.

The alpha has now ended but, as the ever-cagey devs explain, "this doesn't mean we're entering beta". Instead they plan to carry on working on bringing the game back to life, while "posting update videos to our YouTube channel on either a weekly or bi-weekly basis".

Based on the one video we've seen so far, huge progress has been made. The game they're showing looks more sophisticated than I remember the real Free Realms ever being. I certainly don't recall seeing any juggling octopuses on any of my sporadic visits.

I liked Free Realms a lot. When it launched in 2009 it marked the start of Sony Online Entertainment's flirtation with the Free to Play business model, a flirtation that went on to become a full-blown love affair.

It was a popular game. In just a year over ten million players had registered to play. By the time John Smedley gave an interview to GamesIndustry.biz in 2011 that number had risen to 17 million. The game had just transferred to the PS3 and Smed was bullish about the prospects for Free Realms future: "I don't see any reason why it can't go to 100 million", he said.

When Free Realms sunsetted four years later it wasn't due to lack of interest; it was, as John Smedley said, because kids don't have money and cost a lot to manage: "Kids don't spend well and it's very difficult to run a kids game. Turns out kids do mean stuff to each other a lot.

City of Heroes famously also didn't go under due to lack of players. When NCSoft decided to pull the plug, COH was making money. Just not enough. The subsequent strange, long death of WildStar suggests that NCSoft felt the PR burn from that cold, financial calculation. Whether the scars still tingle enough to keep them from slamming any would-be COH Emulator with a Cease and Desist order remains to be seen.

The recent farrago over secret servers and entitled elites has knocked a huge hole in the City of Heroes Community Boat. Long touted as one of the cuddliest collectives in MMOdom, the shock of what many have been labeling betrayal has started a civil war uglier than anything seen between Heroes and Villians in the game itself.

People do get emotionally distraught over access to MMORPGs they love. Or loved. I'm not at all sure it happens in other gaming genres. It's not rational but love never is.

When an MMORPG closes it can feel as though someone dropped a bomb on your home. That's traumatic enough but imagine learning, years later, the bomb was mostly noise and smoke. Your home is still standing after all, only someone stole your keys and has been living there ever since.

Emulators have existed almost as long as MMORPGs themselves. Given that gamers and the IT community have a huge overlap that's hardly surprising. The will and the skill combine to make bringing dead games a calling for some, a hobby for others and a lifeboat for the rest of us.

As time passes the focus has shifted perceptibibly from "should we?" to "can we?". Emulators operate in a legal shadowland where nothing is certain until tested by the courts. Euphemistically-named "Private Servers" for MMORPGs still running commercially are clearly dancing on a knife-edge, especially if their operators are foolish and greedy enough to try to charge for access. Community projects that seek only to replicate a game deemed too old, unpopular or uncommercial to bother with by its legal owners are on significantly more solid ground.

Not only is there doubt which way a court might lean, there's also the not-insignificant calculation of relative damage to the brand. Is it going to cost more to protect assets that are never going to be used than would be lost by looking the other way and pretending nothing was happening?

Every time an MMORPG sunsets the brand of the company behind the decision takes a hit. In time that wound heals and most people forget. Why remind them by slamming down the oar on the fingers of the few poor saps still clinging to the wreckage? Is "Corporate Bully" really the look you want?

Daybreak, who inherited the blame for any number of SOE's Public Relations disasters from the botched handling of Star Wars Galaxies' NGE onwards, made a brave stab at turning it all around with one, stellar commercial decision early on. Their handling of the popular and successful Classic EverQuest emulator, Project1999 remains a shining beacon guiding other developers along the tricky path to redemption.

Daybreak didn't just turn a blind eye to P99, they actively engaged with the team behind it, arriving at a mutually acceptable solution which benefitted both parties. It is possible. It can be done.

Whether NCSoft will ever come to such an arrangement with the City of Heroes community remains to be seen. I wouldn't bet on it. I would hope, at least, though, that they have better things to do with their vast resources than pick off minnows in a jar.

I have no particular feeling for City of Heroes, myself. I played it in Beta and found it dull and repetetive. My beta experience convinced me not to buy it when it launched and I pretty much never thought of it again until it closed down.

By most accounts I missed out on a very good MMORPG. It must have changed a lot. Maybe CoH was the exception that proves my "better in beta" rule. If there ever is a stable, reliable emulator, maybe I'll give it a try.

In the meanwhile I'll keep on logging in to the Vanguard Emulator - five years old, developing slowly, utterly wonderful. And waiting on Free Realms Sunrise which will, I predict, be big news when it comes.

We need emulators. The drama, that we can do without.

The Sun Also Rises: The Unlikely Return Of Free Realms

On March 30th, as TAGN duly noted, Club Penguin closed its doors for the final time. Wilhelm chose to lead his brief eulogy with a quote from John "Smed" Smedly, who said somewhat wearily during a Reddit AMA that "Kids don’t spend well and it’s very difficult to run a kids game".

Smed was speaking off the back of the sunsetting (aka closedown) of the MMO he had once held out as the future for Sony Online Entertainment - well, one of its futures anyway. Free Realms was the game that marked SOE's first step towards what would eventually become the company's mantra - "Free To Play - Your Way".

Moving away from a strict subscription model may or may not have worked for the company - and the industry - as a whole but it didn't appear to work for Free Realms. Designed as a full feature MMORPG for younger players the game never received anything like the development that was promised.

Unlike other SOE MMOs of its day, Free Realms didn't get an expansion every year or a series of ever-updating holiday events or any of the other bells and whistles you might have expected. There were a few updates along the way but the game that ended on March 31st 2014 was pretty much the same game that had opened just under five years earlier on April 28 2009.

And that you might very well think would be that. A kids' MMO that never really took off ran for a few years and then closed down. Find another game to play. End of story.

Only MMOs aren't like other video games. They're hard to kill. Just unplugging the server at the wall isn't always enough.

Just as the last Penguin waddled dismally out of the Club, turning off the lights as he gently closed the door, this thread was posted on the forums of Free Realms Sunrise. The opening of the alpha was clearly timed to match the sunset three years ago to the day but the synchronicity was impeccable.

These days we almost expect to see emulator projects grow out of the ashes of a popular MMO's pyre but who would have bet three years ago on Free Realms making it back? Although, when Sony traded SOE to Columbus Nova for a pocketful of gold, there were murmurings...

...like this odd, unsourced news squib on the Zam network's Free Realms page (and who knew there was one?) claiming that "Daybreak Games has announced that Free Realms is coming back in the Fall of 2016." That didn't happen and I can't find any sign of who said it would.

But we don't have to rely on the kindness of venture capitalists, thankfully. Not when we have the wisdom of crowds and the fervor of fans.

I liked Free Realms a lot. I played it quite a bit although not as much as I wished I had when I found it was closing. Sacred Grove was a characterful, colorful, fun place to spend a few hours. Maybe I never wanted to live there but I'd like to go back and visit.

And now, if all goes well, maybe one day I'll be able to do just that. Congratulations to the Sunrise team on getting to Alpha and here's hoping they make it all the way.

And that Daybreak and their lawyers cut them the same slack Smed cut Project 99. Come on DBG. Do it for the kids. You know they weren't going to spend any money with you anyway.