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

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

EverQuest Legends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stars Reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guild Wars 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valheim

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

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

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

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

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

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

For now. 

There's Something In The Water! There, In The Distance! I can Just Make It Out! It's... It's GW3!

There were other things I had in mind for today's post, things I'm a lot more interested in and that I'd certainly enjoy writing about a lot more, but I suppose I have to write about this now. ArenaNet officially announced Guild Wars 3 at this year's Summer Games Fest. There was a pre-event puff that told us they were going to announce something and some people thought that might be GW3. I was not one of those people. 

Then again, I was also not one of those people who cared all that much what they were going to announce. I was mildly curious but I assumed it would be some new thing for one of the two existing Guild Wars games, neither of which I play and neither of which I plan on playing, either now or in the near or distant future. 

I find myself in a very uncomfortable relationship with the Guild Wars franchise these days, particularly GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played both games together and had some good times over a number of years but, while I remember the original fondly enough, the sequel is problematic. 

We played the original Guild Wars for maybe less than two months, back when it was new. We started a few weeks after launch because at first, like a lot of people, we thought it was a pure PvP game. ArenaNet's soon to become familiar misleading marketing making its presence felt, probably, since that was how it was reported until it launched, when players found out there was a massive PvE component, too.

Six or eight weeks was long enough to complete the original campaign, after which there didn't seem much point staying so we left. I've returned to GW1 a few times since, finished another of the campaigns, seen something of the rest and generally disported myself in an increasingly desultory fashion until I finally lost interest altogether. Mrs Bhagpuss has never gone back.

When Guild Wars 2 was announced, name recognition was enough to have both of us sign up and participate in the beta weekends. The game turned out to be radically different from anything else around at the time and it suited us both very well. We ended up playing for about ten years without a break, from launch in 2012 until after the pandemic. It was Mrs. Bhagpuss's only MMORPG and my main one and it formed the bulk of the content here at Inventory Full for many years. There are more than seven hundred posts here labeled "GW2".

Until today, there was only one post labeled "GW3". Now, I suppose, there will be a lot more. And I'm not very happy about it.

 Mrs Bhagpuss stopped playing GW2 a few years a go. It was her last MMORPG. She still plays video games, just not that kind. I gave it a few more weeks but, as I suspected, the only reason I'd been playing GW2 at all by then was because she did. As a game, I'd been done with it for a while.

I come away from most MMORPGs I've played for any length of time with warm feelings and an occasional desire to pop back in, see my old characters and catch up with what's been happening in the game. Not so GW2. I'm not quite the cliche bitter burnout, who wants to badmouth the game they used to love at every opportunity. It's a good game and I had good times in it. I wish it well.

At least, that's my rational, objective reaction. Emotionally, if I think about my time in the game at all, which I rarely do unless prompted by something like yesterday's announcement, it's with the kind of feelings I imagine people who've escaped from cults experience. Relief at being out. Anger at all that time and emotion wasted. A sense of grievance at having been used. And a dread of being somehow sucked back in.

Okay, that's over-dramatizing it. A little. I feel a bit niggled at the way ArenaNet consistently faffed and fudged and promised far more than they could fulfill. The way for years there was always jam tomorrow but never jam today. The countless revamps and revisions to cadence. The endless promises made and broken. The history of the development of the game is a litany of lurches and swerves, a directionless leadership forever searching for a path that leads somewhere and rarely, if ever, finding one.

My biggest complaint is with the story. For a franchise that claims to be built on lore and narrative, the stories were always thin, sparse and fragmented. Delivery was unreliable and sporadic and when we did get something it was never anything much. Even at the time, because I played other MMORPGs, I knew how meager the pickings were but at the time I did at least believe there was some quality there. 

That was mostly ignorance. Being locked as I was inside the MMORPG ecosystem, all my judgments were necessarily relative. The writing in GW2 was pretty decent - for an MMORPG. Unfortunately, what I wasn't entirely aware of was how degraded the genre is compared to others when it comes to storytelling.

Shouldn't I have known? Well, maybe. The thing is, until around about the time of the pandemic or maybe a bit later, I actively disliked getting any story in my MMORPGs. My motivations for playing are very well described in this post of Yeebo's. Narrative is the least of my concerns. 

In fact, it's something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible. One of the early posts about GW2 here on this blog bemoans ANet's insistence of making everything about the story. Especially about my character's "Personal Story". I really didn't like that concept, not in GW2 or Star Wars: the Old Republic or in any MMORPG that tries it on. To this day, with thousands of hours played in GW2, I have only ever completed the Personal Story on one character and that only under duress. 

The Personal Story wasn't the only core aspect of GW2 that meant nothing to me. The whole Legendary system was something I always loathed, too as was 100% map completion. 

In fact, there were probably more things about GW2 that I disliked than that I liked for the whole time I was there. It's a fiddly, nitpicking, pettifogging, mean-spirited game in so many ways, with check-lists that do their damnedest to bleed all the spontaneity out of exploring and systems cynically designed around making things just awkward enough that players will pay for convenience but not quite so irritating that they'll stop playing altogether.

Many people who've bounced off the game make these kinds of accusations. It has a reputation in that regard. But it has always been able to get by on the things it does well; a huge, exciting, vibrant open world that demands and rewards exploration; superb art direction; free and flowing movement in three dimensions; best-in-genre hot-join group combat... 

Things like that make it an exceptionally easy and rewarding game for in-the-moment play. If you go with the flow and don't let the game dictate to you, you can log in and find yourself effortlessly entertained for hours. It's only when you start to look for direction that it all falls apart. GW2 has some of them most unappealing, linear progression I've trudged through and much of that is down to the turgid, tedious story and the way what little of interest there is in it has to be stretched to make it last as long as possible by way of an interminable series of pointless set-piece fights.

Several years of modern, open-world games with all of GW2's benefits and few if any of its disadvantages, boss fights that last a fun couple of minutes instead of a miserable half an hour chief among them, have painfully demonstrated to me just how limited my horizons were while I was playing ANet's game all those years. I neither deny nor regret the many good times I had there, particularly in World Vs World, an area of the game gloriously free of all narrative structure, but the payoff for the effort involved seems poor.

And so to Guild Wars 3, which is coming in about eighteen months. Or rather the beta is. You can sign up for it now. I have, of course. 

That it's beta they're trumpeting and a long time from now is interesting in itself. No pre-alpha sign-ups. No alpha. And, I'll bet, no Early Access, either. Just a good old-fashioned beta, followed, if precedent serves, by a few open beta weekends and then launch. That'll be refreshing, at least. You can wishlist it on Steam, too, which I've also done because if it's on Steam from the get-go, that's where I'm going to play it. 

And yes I suppose I will play it although I'm very far from keen. It would seem churlish not to at least take a look. I'd say unprofessional only no-one's paying me. 

Since it's coming, like it or not, at this point I could go on to talk about the game itself, speculate what it might be like, start that conversation. But I won't, for a couple of reasons.

The first is we don't actually know anything yet. There's one video and some screenshots, all taken from that same video, which is apparently shot using the engine on which the game will run. There's also an extremely generic mission statement that makes it sound like they're making GW2 again only with modern action combat and a bit of parkour movement thrown in. 

This they call "a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." It sounds like the gacha games we're playing now, to me. 

How fresh that'll seem in 2028, probably the earliest GW3 will go live, remains to be seen. It will probably be a shock to many MMORPG players, those who've stayed inside the stockade these last few years, just like GW2 was a shock back in 2012. That game genuinely did feel so different back then that Anet had to jump in quick to fix it up to feel more familiar for the many curious WoW players that were bouncing off it within minutes of poking their heads in to see what this strange new MMO was all about.

The real reason I'm not going to go into speculation mode, though (You can probably sense me trying to stop myself doing it right now.) is that we've got a sodding year and a half of this ahead of us and I don't want to contribute to the feeding frenzy. All that arguing over things no-one knows. All the fantasies and wishes that turn into promises that were broken before they were even made. It's going to be exhausting.

And I'll be very nearly seventy when the damn game comes out! What if it turns out to be good? What If I end up playing it for as long as I played GW2 and then I find out it really wasn't all that good all along but I just didn't realize because playing it blurred my perspective? Then I'd be eighty and I'd have wasted another decade on a game that was pretty good at times but often not very good at all. 

That doesn't sound like the best use of whatever time I have left, now, does it? Do I really want GW3 to be my last chance at a good MMORPG? If so, the omens aren't good. Just look at the record.

But then, I don't imagine ANet is making games with the gray gaming market in mind. Millennials and GenZ are the target, I'd imagine, since GenAlpha famously doesn't play traditional video games at all. Grab your share of the shrinking market while it's there. It's never going to get any bigger.

And now I need to stop because I'm already slipping into the swamp of speculation. There's going to be a Guild Wars 3 but it's not until next Fall so let's all agree to forget about it until then.

Promise? 

Disconnected

It's a bit of a funny time for me in MMOland right now. Since I got back from my trip to Andalusia I haven't been playing as much as usual and when I do play, as I suggested a couple of days ago, I'm spending most of my time in a game I can't even name, let alone write about. I'm also diligently logging in to do my dailies on all three Guild Wars 2 accounts but of late that's about all I'm doing there.

Okay, that's not entirely true. Most days I end up answering some emergency call-out in World vs World. Last night, for example, I spent almost an hour and a half in a thrilling but ultimately doomed defence of our home garrison. Our superstar commander seems to have taken up PvE raiding again, though, so the Big Fun of a few weeks back has dissipated somewhat.

Halloween goes on, of course. Some days I run Mad King's Labyrinth, one of the best sources of gold in the game - if you can stand it. I do enjoy it but it sends me to sleep. Quite literally. If I join a squad and do circuits following the Commander, after about an hour the repetition does something to my brain waves and I pass into a kind of fugue state, at which point I either slump sideways against the wall and start to drool or I have to get up and go for a brisk walk to wake myself up.

Waiting on the wall for the Veteran Warg to spawn for the daily. Ten minutes of my life I'll never get back.

In any event, the attraction of farming the Lab took a very severe hit when I realized I could just use my vast store of Potions of WvW Rewards (I have over 2000 stashed in various banks) to burn through the WvW Halloween Reward track, earning as many stacks of Trick or Treat bags in five minutes as I'd hope to get from two or three hours in the Lab itself.

As for the rest of Halloween, I can't summon up much enthusiasm. It's much the same as every year. There's a new race that everyone hates: I got the achievement for that on my second attempt and haven't been back since. There's the return of a PvP instance from 2012, which I have yet to try. I'll have to see that at least once before it vanishes, maybe for another six years. The rest I can't be bothered with.

Other than that there doesn't seem to be much going on in GW2 right now. Syp has a post up speculating on whether ArenaNet are secretly working on a Guild Wars 3. I believe they may well be. My reasons are outlined in a (lengthy) comment on the thread, which I'd link to, only apparently you can't link to individual comments at Bio Break.

Only need silver for the AP. Gold can go stuff itself!

It's not that there aren't things I could be doing in Tyria. I have unfinished business in Jahai Bluffs, a map I really like. I also have something like 300 Ornate Rusted Keys banked that would take me a whole day to use on the Krait chests I need for my bubble hat. And then, I have half a dozen or more Ascended weapon collects languishing unfinished. The list of unfinished projects is long.

I just don't really feel like finishing any of them. All you get in the end is another appearance item, and let's be honest, I never change the appearance of most of my characters from one year's end to the next. I find the lack of meaningful, vertical progression in the game acts as a drag anchor to any desire to "progress". I'm coming to the conclusion I'm not much of a horizontal person.

EverQuest 2, in contrast, is vertiginous in the extreme in its verticality. As I reported, I had a couple of deeply satisfying post-holiday sessions, where I bumped up my numbers beyond any previous expectations. There's a lot more of that I could do but the expansion is due in less than a month and there's every chance that the regular rewards from that will outweigh any efforts I make now, so I'm slacking off until then.

If you're going to dig up a graveyard it's best go by night, I always find.

Halloween is all over Norrath too, naturally. I did do some of it this year. I dug up the new collection and got a bagful of house pets and furniture along the way. That was fun. I also revisited one of EQ2's several haunted houses. I feel I've done my tricking and treating for the year.

One thing I could do - should do - in EQ2 before Chaos Descending arrives is finish the Planes of Prophecy faction grind on my Berserker so he can buy all the items he needs from the vendor. The problem there is that I've already done all three questlines right to the end on three different characters in the mistaken belief that the whole account would get credit.

Not so. It's per character and I don't have the willpower to go through them again this soon. Although come to think about it, somehow my Berserker is credited as having completed two lines as far as the vendor knows - not sure how that happened. As I type this I realize that probably means I need to go read the whole thing up all over again...I've probably misunderstood some crucial aspect.

Just try not to make so much noise you wake the dead. Oh. Too late...

But I'm not going to. Or not right this minute. I just don't feel like doing it. And it's not like I don't have other options.

I have the icons for no fewer than eighteen MMORPGs on my desktop, not counting the ones I've mentioned, all just waiting to be clicked. Plus there are probably almost as many again on the two hard drives sitting in enclosures next to my desk. Somehow none of them is calling my name right now.

Although... hmmm... I just spotted the Aion icon among the desktop forest. I seem to recall reading about something major happening over there. Perhaps I'll take a look. And I finally got Dragon Nest Mobile installed and running - I wanted to do a post about that sometime...

Okay, that was useful. I seem to have typed my way into a couple of ideas at least. Maybe I'll even get around to writing them up one day.

But first, I think I'll just take another poke around in that game I can't name. Only for an hour or two. Or three...