All In A Good Cauzzzz...

I don't have time for a proper post today but I'd like to get something out there. So, who fancies a quiz about bees?

Gamigo, apparently. According to them, it's World Bee Day and in honor of the event there's a competition in Rift, for which you have to answer fourteen questions about bees!

Why fourteen? Don't ask me! 

What do bees have to do with Rift? Don't ask me that either!

Also, when I say "in Rift", what I really mean is in Microsoft Forms, which is where the link from the Steam page takes you. 

And when I say "answer", of course I mean "Highlight, right-click and select "Search Google", which is what everyone is going to do, although having done it myself, I have to say it doesn't one hundred per cent work for every question.

And finally, when I say "It's World Bee Day", what I mean is it was World Bee Day on Monday. I didn't notice the event was on until tonight.

If you want to try it for yourself you can find all the details including the link on the Rift Steam Community page, where you can win 3000 credits to spend in the Rift Cash Shop, always assuming you a) have a character in Rift and b) are one of the three lucky winners.

Or you can just do it all for fun right here!

1.How many different species of bees are there?

2.How much honey can a single honey bee make in its lifetime?

3.What do bees collect from flowers?

4.How many pairs of wings does a bee have?

5.What color can bees NOT see?

6.Which common insect eats bees?

7.How many eyes does a bee have?

8.How many honey bees can you find in a hive?

9.Who are the members of the honey bee colony?

10.Which of these foods are pollinated by bees?

11.What is the dance called that honeybees use as communication?

12.How wide is the largest bee’s wingpsan?

13.Which family is the honey bee a part of?

14.What is royal jelly?

The actual quiz is multiple choice but really, where's the skill in that? You're just going to Google the answers like I did, anyway. And you're going to have to because I'm not telling you!

At least now no-one can say Gamigo aren't doing their best to keep Rift buzzing!

You Can't Take It With You

Sorting my Steam games by time played today, I was surprised to find that at 78.8 hours, Nightingale still hasn't broken into the top five, although not as surprised as I was to see what it will have to pass to get there. Sitting just ahead at #5 on the list with 81.2 hours played comes Bless Unleashed. How did that happen?

It's always possible I left BU running while I was long-term AFK of course, something I have been prone to do with games on occasion, but it's probably just that compared to any other genre, MMORPGs take up a phenomanal amount of time to play in even the most casual fashion. The only reason there are any other kinds of games in the first couple of rows of my Steam list is that I hardly play any MMORPGs through Valve's supposedly universal platform.

Most people don't, I would guess. A lot of the biggest, best-known, most successful, long-running names in the genre predate Steam entirely. Their players, active or lapsed, already have standalone installations, accounts and launchers provided either directly from the games themselves or via bespoke portals mandated by the developer.

For a long time, even after Steam took over many PC gamers' hard drives, almost all new MMORPGs came with their own launchers. It's only in very recent years that MMO developers have chosen to offer their games primarily or exclusively on Steam.

It has become something of a routine for older games to add themselves belatedely, usually with a flourish of publicity, and it does sometimes result in a surge of interest, bringing in new players for a while. When you look at the numbers playing through the platform a little later, though, it doesn't always seem as though many of those new players stayed for long.

Even less likely is the prospect of a significant proportion of the installed base for an MMORPG moving to Steam. I could play a lot of my MMORPG rotation there - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 - but I don't. In some cases I'd have to begin again from scratch, an obvious non-starter, but even if the Steam version of the game can let me play my regular characters I'd still have to go through all the rigmarole of linking the accounts. Why would I bother?

Clearly most people don't. Taking the EQ titles as an example, Darkpaw would have been out of business years ago if the real average concurrency of the two games combined came to barely 350. LotRO on its own almost doubles that and GW2 makes it into the low thousands, which might just about be viable for a small indie developer but not for a sub-division of NCSoft with several hundred developers to pay.

Daybreak don't like to tell us exactly how many people play their games but you certainly don't need more than three dozen servers to accomodate three hundred and fifty people or even a couple of thousand, if we use the old 5x peak concurrency figure that used to be the top-end estimate for total participation in online games. The Steam numbers for all MMORPGs that aren't also Steam exclusives like New World and Lost Ark are more than just unrepresentative, they're downright misleading.

The disparity is so extreme it does make me wonder whether it's really worth an older MMORPG tooling itself up for Steam membership at all. Yes, there's that initial burst of interest and the concommitant flurry of new players but once the initial excitement fades you're left with a permanent red flag for anyone looking to answer that perennial gamer's question: "Is this game dead?"

If you looked at Steam for any of the titles I've mentioned, the answer would be "As a Dodo". GW2, sometimes reckoned to be one of the front-runners among Western MMORPGs, doesn't even appear on the list until you've clicked through ten screens of results. Then again, it could be worse. Rift, languishing at #1534 on the chart as I write, is so many clicks down in the hole I lost count. 

Rift, however, is the reason I was looking at my time played in Steam games in the first place. I'd seen the recent announcement about server merges and I thought I'd get ahead of the rush by moving my Faeblight characters before Gamigo put them wherever they were going to put them if I did nothing about it.

Given the lack of attention anyone - developers, publishers or even players - has shown Rift since even before Trion shut up shop more than five years ago, it's perhaps more of a surprise to learn the game still has enough servers to need merging rather than that it's actually happening. Server merges, in any case, are an inevitable phase of the life-cycle of any MMORPG and Rift was designed with an unusual degree of flexibility in that regard. Players have always been able to swap servers almost instantly with no charge. I've moved a few times already.

Consequently, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I logged in last night to move my seven Faeblight characters to either Greybriar or Wolfsbane or possibly some to one and some to the other, since I already have characters on both and I'm not sure how the processes handles overspill when you hit your allowed character-per-server buffer. That potential snag I may have thought of; I had not, however, reckoned with another: the guild bank.

It seems that when Trion created the transfer system, they allowed for the smooth  movement of just about everything except the contents of the Guild Vault. I imagine that was intentional to avoid customer service issues when someone tried to jump ship and take the whole lot with them without telling anyone. Rift has one of those very annoying automated systems for handing Guild leadership to someone else if you don't log in often enough so I can see how it could happen.

Moving the guild itself is easy enough. The Guild Leader has to move first and tick a box to say they're taking the Guild with them. Then, whenever another member of the Guild moves across, they're automatically added back to the roster, albeit for some reason at entry-level, meaning everyone has to be re-promoted. A bit half-assed if you ask me but a minor inconvenience at most.

The contents of the Guild Vaults, however, aren't going anywhere. The Valuts have to be completely emptied or you can't move at all. And therein lies my problem.

As I'm sure will astonish no-one whose noticed the title of the blog they're currently reading, my Guild Vaults in Rift are completely rammed. So, for the most part, are the bags of all my characters, although I did take the trouble a while back to make sure the ones I log in now and again at least had one empty bag to collect the inevitable "Welcome Back" bribes.

I considered the possibility of distributing the Vault contents among all my characters but even then there's not enough space. I thought about making a bank mule just to carry the load but I'd have to buy a another Character Slot. It was while I was looking at how much that might cost when I had a small epiphany: this is fricken' Rift we're talking about!

How often do I play Rift? Am I ever going to play Rift again? Do I really care which server my characters are on in a game I don't play now and don't plan on playing in the future? 

More to the point, even if I could buy a character slot for Rift Store Cash or Credits or whatever they're called, of which I still have a ton from when the game converted to F2P, do I even want to spend the time it would take to get the move done? To make a character, run through that damn tutorial, make some bags, transfer them over, join the Guild, meet whatever criteria you need to be able to withdraw stuff from the Vault, take everything out and stash it in another bank...

No. No I do not want to waste hours of my life doing any of that. I wanted to press a couple of buttons and forget about it, not start some major project that would take up hours of my life just to get me back to where I began - not playing Rift. 

Except as the record shows, I do occasionally play Rift. It's my seventh most-played game on Steam. I've spent more hours playing Rift since it moved to Steam than I've given to Palworld, albeit over a much longer period. And one of the reasons I still play Rift now and again is because it's on Steam. I very much doubt I would bother if I had to find and update a standalone client but because the button is just sitting there, sometimes I give in to whim and log in for old time's sake.

It helps that Rift is one of the games where I can play all my old characters. I can't remember if I had to set that up or if it was done automatically when the game was added to the new platform but it definitely makes it more likely I'll keep coming back, if only very occasionally. I suspect that if older MMORPGs were able to achieve seamless integration with Steam at no effort for the players it might help at least a little with retention. Then again, it's not like I ever spend any money when I'm there so there's probably no value in it for the companies running the games, even if they can get a few old lags to look in once in a while.

Having considered the possibilities, I'm going to do nothing. Not yet. The Gamigo announcement acknowledges some players may just not bother to move their characters ahead of time:

"Further details will be provided for those who may not transfer to Greybriar, Wolfsbane, Deepwood, or Laethys in time, ensuring your transition is as smooth as possible."

I'll wait until I hear what those "further details" are. Last time something like this happened they just flagged the old servers as Inactive and when you logged in you were forced to move somewhere else. For me, that would probably be as good as anything. If I'm not playing my characters anyway, I can not play them just as easily on a closed server as an active one.

Until then, it's back to Nightingale to see if  I can't push past Bless Unleashed and maybe even Divinity: Original Sin 2 at 91.3 and Dawnlands at 103.4. Both of those seem possible. 

New World at 235.8 hours, though? That's not going to happen. And as for Valheim at 384.8? 

That's a record I doubt will ever be broken.

Take Me To The River

I seem to be starting a lot of posts I don't finish at the moment. Just did it again. I get a few hundred words in before I realise even I'm not interested in hearing what I have to say next. So I stop, send it to draft and start over. One day I'll be desperate enough for something to write about that even these turgid screeds will seem worth resurrecting. Fear that day!

Instead, here's something very weird I thought I'd share. I just spotted it on Steam and had to click through to find out if it was real.

Remember Rift? It was an MMORPG a lot of people had high hopes for, myself among them. I had a great time there for a few months and I still drop in now and then for a bit of a run around.

Long ago I linked my original account with Steam, so I get to see all the updates flagged along the top of the screen every time I log in. By far the most prolific sources of news on my Steam page are Bless Unleashed, New World, Valheim and Rift. New World and Valheim generally offer substantive information about significant changes to their games. Bless Unleashed and Rift... not so much.

Bless Unleashed seems to do a lot of "server maintenance" and "emergency updates", few of which contain new content. It actually works quite well as a form of subliminal advertising because I'm always thinking of re-installing and giving the game another try. I liked most things about it except for the combat.

Rift, under its current Gamigo ownership, does a lot of "events". Nearly all of these are rehashes of things that happened before Gamigo took over. MassivelyOP likes to report them while making ironic comments, most of which seem well deserved for once.

I rarely even think about joining in to try and get some bizarre mount or other, which is usually the reward. It was rainbow-colored unicorns last time, presumably because Gamigo's target market for the game is six year-old girls.

There's often speculation among the few who still care about just what Gamigo think they're doing with the game they bought in Trion's fire sale half a decade ago. I offer this as evidence that whatever it is, it's too weird to second-guess.

I don't know if that link works but it goes to a World Rivers Day quiz. Did you know it was World Rivers Day? I didn't but Gamigo did and they want to celebrate.

Given you can just Google all the answers, I think it's more of a lottery than a quiz. Then again, you're probably not going to need Google's help with the likes of questions like these:

Which of these famous tourist attractions was not created by a river?

• The Grand Canyon
• The Nile Delta
• Niagara Falls
• The Louvre

Or 

Rivers can carry rocks and mud called sediment for many miles. Sediment is often droppen when the river reaches the sea where it forms what feature?

• Alpha
• Beta
• Delta
• Archipelago

If you're interested, there's a whole week left to work on your answers. The top three highest scorers, drawn out of a hat because that'll be everyone, win 3,000 Credits. Not much use unless you play Rift. Also not much use to me since I have about 20,000 left from when they converted to F2P a decade ago. Never found any reason to spend those so I don't really need more.

As for what this tells us about Gamigo's long term plans for the game, maybe they could make that into an essay question. It'd be a lot harder to answer than anything in the quiz, that's for sure.

Steam And Glyph, Sitting In A Tree

That Frankenstein's Monster of a mash-up above is what happens when you go to play Rift through Steam these days. It's what happened to me, anyway. You may be luckier.

I often think of dipping back into Rift, when I see the name in my Steam library. Once in a while I take the plunge and when I do I usually potter around for a while, knocking out a level or two on one of my many characters, which is how I come to have more than sixty hours played.

Of course, I've actually played Rift for far, far longer than that. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it pretty much exclusively for six months from launch back in 2011, when we were in the habit of racking up a good thirty hours, even in a slow week. We both had multiple max level characters by the time we finally moved on, back to EverQuest II then The Secret World and finally Guild Wars 2.

In fact, I was still playing Rift as my main mmorpg when I started this blog. The very first post, My Bag, was about inventory management in the game. I was taking the name of the blog very literally back then. 

In that post, I was pontificating about an incoming "quality of life" change that would make managing inventory easier. I was against it. "This is the kind of service I try my hardest to avoid", I said, as I compared it to valet parking  - as though I'd ever been offered valet parking by anyone, anywhere - "I like my bags being a mess... I'll thank you to keep your hands out". 

The whole post is emblematic of how I thought back then. I really set out my stall. A dozen years on, the irony is intense. If there's one single factor that prevents me from returning to characters I used to play, in any number of old mmorpgs, it's the terrifying sight that greets me the moment I open my inventory.

I had exactly that problem today when I finally got into Rift although I had plenty of trouble even before that. The main reason I was trying to log in at all was that I'd seen a couple of news items about the game, one of which told me I could have Premium access for a couple of weeks for nothing and the other that if I didn't link my Steam account with the Glyph launcher Gamigo acquired when they bought Rift from Trion I could forget about playing for good.

I had a notion I'd already linked the two platforms at some time in the not-so-recent past so I just hit Play from my Steam library and waited to see what would happen. And waited. And waited.

After what felt like several minutes of nothing happening at all I lost patience and pressed Stop. A warning of some kind came up but I overrode it, telling the damn game to get on with it and shut down. Nothing happened. Again.

After several more subjective minutes I got really fed up and tried to close Steam, which disappeared but then reappeared instantly when I tried to re-open it, as it very well might, seeing it had only pretended to close in the first place. I tried to close it again by selecting "Close Window" from the icon in the task bar but all I got was a mesage telling me to chill while Steam closed Glyph or opened it or asked it out for coffee. The two of them were doing something together, that's all I know.

Around about then Glyph opened and Steam closed. Or vice versa. Either way I got control of my PC back so I started over. I closed both of them and restarted Steam. This time I let Steam take as long as it wanted, which was a good old while (I timed it- it was three minutes) and finally Glyph reappeared. I pressed "Play" again - on Glyph this time - and Rift finally opened for me.

I have to say this does not immediately strike me as an improvement over either the old system, where I just fired up Steam, Play in Steam and a few seconds later I was in the game, or the older old system, where I just fired up Glyph, pressed Play and a few seconds later I was in the game or the oldest old system, where I just clicked on a desktop shortcut to the executable in the Rift folder and a few seconds later... you get the idea.

I also have to say I can't see the point of having Rift installed in Steam any more, if all Steam does is open Glyph. I might just as well go straight to Glyph and cut out the middle man. And I would, if I knew where it was. Only I can't find it because the Search function in my installation of Windows 10 is broken, but that's another story altogether. 

It's just as well I don't really want to play Rift, I guess. Or rather, having played it for about an hour, I'm good for another few months. By then, maybe Steam and Glyph will have gotten their act together.

I did have fun while I was playing, though, as I think the screenshots confirm. There's a good game there, still, somewhere, if you can just find the bloody thing.

Gamigo, Amazon Prime And Netflix Walk Into A Blog...

An odds and ends day today, I think. I can sense one or two larger topics looming out there in the mists but I can't quite make them out just yet, let alone line them up in my sights. I guess we'll just have to see what loose ideas I can find rolling around in the back of the land rover and make do with those.

How did I get into this metaphor and how do I make it stop?

Maybe it was listening to Gamigo's extremely bizarre opening pitch for their new MMO. Yes, apparently they're making one. Or someone is. I was under the impression Gamigo mostly bought the games other people had made, usually in some kind of fire sale. At least, that's how they got hold of Rift and ArcheAge and Trove. 

How's that going for them, then? Trove is probably doing quite nicely. It usually seems to be. Rift is languishing in the same maintenance limbo where it's been for about as long as I can remember. And ArcheAge has just been sold to Kakao.

Well, I say "sold". I can't actually see any figures in any of the press releases or news stories. They all say something like "Kakao Games will act as publisher for Korean developer XL Games!" or "Kakao Games is the New Publisher for ArcheAge" without explaining how that came about.

Given some of the harsh things I've read about Gamigo's custody of the Trion portfolio so far, I imagine a lot of ArcheAge players will be quite excited about the change of publisher but as an outside observer I'm more interested in some background about how and why it's happening. Did a contract expire? Was the game not making enough money to be worth continued investment? Was this an opportunity to resell at a profit? Was that the plan all along? Does it make it more likely Rift could be shunted off to yet another owner?

We rarely get to know the background to these moves. We just get to jump through a whole set of hoops when we transfer our accounts from one set of faceless landlords to the next. No word on that yet but I'm sure it's coming.

In the meantime, Gamigo just spat out the first gobbet of information about a new mmo they're going to be hosting. I say "mmo" rather than "mmorpg" for the simple reason that as yet we know almost nothing about it, not even what it's called.

It's a tried and trusted approach, the mysterious, staggered reveal. We've all seen it before. If you don't have a big IP to wave in everyone's face, it's a reliable way of building interest where none existed before. Gamigo look to be playing that card for everything it's worth and then some.

So far all we have is a video. A video that lasts six minutes and shows... absolutely nothing. The entire thing from start to finish consists of a single, static shot of a planet and a star. Over the course of the video the planet moves very slowly from right to left until by the end the star is occluded by maybe thirty per cent of the planetary mass.

That would be a meditative, calming, almost zen-like experience if it wasn't for the voiceover. As the planet crawls almost imperceptibly across the screen a really rather good actor reads a moderately well-written horror story in which a mother sacrifices her child in order to kill a demon. Or something.

It's a lot more nuanced than that. There are some odd, intriguing hints as to the setting and a discomfiting twist at the end. I am not going to attempt to summarize it. It's embedded above. No need to watch the screen while you listen.

And that's all we get, for now. Gamigo's Twitter feed promises more if people join in the fun: "Every 10 retweets will reveal more from this mystery." I'll wait for the summary, thanks.

If I had to guess, which I don't but I'm going to anyway, I'd say it's going to be a hack-and-slash horror-inflected gorefest themed around demon-hunting. If so, hard pass. The storytelling in the first teaser is good enough to make me withhold judgment until we find out more, though. One to keep an eye on, for now, at least.

What's that you say? It's not my show? Pardon me, but I think you'll find you're wrong.

The second season of Stargirl ended yesterday. Well, it did where I am. Probably already finished somewhere else. We tend to get most of the superhero TV shows late over here.

I really liked it although it was certainly less fluid and well-constructed than the first season, which was quite tightly structured by comparison. Season two also looked visibly cheaper than season one, which would be because less money was spent on it. I know, obvious. Doesn't always follow, though.

The show passed from the now-defunct DC Universe to the CW between seasons and you can tell. The CW never seems to have much of a budget for anything but in a way I think it helps. I like their take on fantasy and superhero storytelling in part because of the way they turn necessity into virtue. The lack of any budget for big, spectacular special effects and long drawn-out super-powered slugfests means they have to focus a lot harder on the characters and particularly their lives out of costume. That's always been the aspect of super-heroics that interests me the most.

The CW trades on teen soap operas with a superhero skin is what I'm saying. Most of their shows I've seen could be Beverly Hills 90210 with spandex and super-powers. Whether that works or not depends more on the strength of the acting and the script than who can punch who through a wall and mostly the both the scripts and the acting are of real comic-book quality.

That's a compliment, by the way. I'm a comic-book fan and a super-hero comic book fan at that. A mainstream super-hero comic book fan, even. I like cheesy dialog and plot twists that would never happen. I like logical inconsistencies and predictable outcomes. 

This is my anxious face. At least I think it is. Honestly, I'm better at the happy stuff.

I particularly like stylized characters who represent archetypes and Stargirl is chock-full of those. Some of the regular characters might struggle to show more than three emotions. Or as many as three for that matter.

That's what I'm looking for in something like this and Stargirl provides it reliably. The lead character (aka Courtney Whitmore, played by Brec Bassinger) is just ridiculously likeable, as is her stepfather, Pat Dugan (Luke Wilson), the ex-sidekick formerly and embarrassingly known as Stripesy. There are moments in Season Two where each of them is tasked with showing us their dark side and in both cases it's one of the least scary transformations I've ever seen.

Which is absolutely perfect. The two of them are the living embodiment of that version of the American super hero that has no dark side. No amount of provocation can bring to the surface something that isn't there to begin with. It does rip giant holes in the plot but who cares? It's what those kind of comics were always meant to be about and it's super-refreshing to see that inner light shine instead of the darkness at the heart of the rotten souls festering inside as exemplified by the likes of the Titans.

The real darkness, both metaphorical and... well, I guess also metaphorical albeit an entirely different metaphor, rests in the unlikely hands of a child and a very old man. Both Milo Stein, as the eight-year old avatar of big bad Eclipso and Jonathan Cake, as immortal not-so-black-as-he's-charcoalled villain the Shade, steal every scene they're in. 

Scariest thing in the whole show. Trust me.

Stein is either a superb actor for his age or someone is a magnificent director of children. He puts more nuance into a single line than most of the supporting actors manage in their entire character arc. Cake, meanwhile, plays the Shade with such arch camp as to appear to have arrived in Blue Valley not from another country or another dimension (both of which he has, in fact, done) but another production entirely, possibly a revival of Blithe Spirit.

Usually, when a season of a show I like comes to an end the first thing I do after the credits roll on the final episode is google whether there's going to be another season. I'm exceptionally happy to report that this time I didn't need to do that. The show ended with a caption announcing a third season entitled "Frenemies".

Since they'd spent the lengthy coda firmly establishing that just about everyone, including all the villains except Sinestro (Who, SPOILER ALERT! finishes the final episode as a piece of half-burnt toast. Yes, really.) were not only hanging around Stargirl's home town but setting up home right next to (or in one case inside) her house, it did seem the stage was being set for the next chapter. I'm just very glad that, for once, those scenes were written with the contracts already in place.

One thing that might be hard to explain to an audience brought up with the MCU or even the Batman and Spiderman movies that preceded the superheroification of cinema is the sheer joy of seeing characters from the comics brought to life on screen. It's something I grew up imagining would never happen. To a disturbing degree it doesn't even matter how well it's done. It's the old dog walking on its hind legs trick. Just to see it done at all is something.

I'm guessing the Dallas has to take whatever movies it can get.

Stargirl, which I guess is at least a peripheral part of what's awkwardly known as the Arrowverse, is almost profligate in the way it throws its references around. Drawing on the decades-long history of the Justice Society of America, there's no shortage of names to drop and characters to introduce but it's weirdly thrilling to be able to watch not just the new, teenage wearers of the Dr. Midnite goggles and the Wildcat claws but their older, timeworn forebears as well. And as for what's playing at the Blue Valley movie theater, well, I'd have to call it fan service - if I thought Prince Ra Man had any fans left. Or had ever had any to begin with.

Stargirl shows on Amazon Prime over here and as we all know Amazon is making strides towards becoming a force in gaming. Competing streaming platform Netflix appears to be harboring ambitions in that direction, too. This week they took their first steps with the release of five games for the platform. I knew it was coming but I got the news by way of what's becoming one of my more reliable news sources for game-related developments - the New Musical Express.

Okay, it's been just NME for a while now. I imagine plenty of people with the website in their feed don't even know or care what the letters stand for any more. It would be passing hard to guess, too, given almost half the items seem to relate to things other than music, especially video games.

As the article says, the initial tranche of games (Five in all.) includes two Stranger Things titles. I was a late-comer to Stranger Things but when I finally found it I was mightily impressed, particularly with the riveting third season. The thought of a game set in that milieu was more than a little intriguing, certainly interesting enough to get me to the Google Play store to check it out.

Funny. I must have missed the episode with all the gnomes.

Unfortunately, having looked as closely at the two titles as it's possible to do without going so far as to download and install them, I decided they weren't for me. They also don't appear to be new games, although I admit to finding the whole thing totally confusing on that score. There are YouTube walkthroughs for Stranger Things: 1984 from as long ago as 2017 and even the current Netflix version was apparently available in Poland back in August, while according to IMDB, Stranger Things 3: The Game came out in 2019.

I'm not quite sure why we should be expected to get excited about Netflix making some old mobile games available on its platform. I was expecting something a bit more impressive. I suppose if they'd been games I'd wanted to play it might have made a difference but even with the Stranger Things connection I do not want to go back to the kind of graphics and gameplay that I suffered through in the period the show depicts. There are quite a few things I miss about the '80s but eighties video games are not one of them.

I didn't look at the other three games, all of which look even less like anything I'd ever care about. I'll wait until Netflix offers up something more suited to my tastes, which I fully expect to be never.

And that'll do for now, I guess. Probably better think of something for tomorrow where I can use some genuine screenshots I took myself. I don't think screen grabs from TV shows count for IntPiPoMo even if I did take longer choosing and editing them than it took me to write the while damn post...

Nothing Lasts Forever

Yesterday Wilhelm at TAGN posted an excellent examination and analysis of the difficulty of launching successful, new mmorpgs in the face of the sheer longevity and resilience of the games already running. As he observed 

"Fans of the genre tend to bemoan its stagnation and blame WoW or free to play or whatever for the fact that things can seem stale.  But the real problem is that old games don’t go away".

And I chipped in with this comment:

"People will insist on banging on about the mmorpgs that close down without ever recognizing the vastly larger pool of games that just keep on going."

I stand by that statement. It's just a shame I chose to make it on the day Gamigo decided to clean house.

In what seems like a particularly insensitive cascade of press releases, the company widely known for acquiring and aggregating mmorpgs announced the closure of four of them. Well, four so far. I imagine players of the remaining dozen or so left in the stable must be chewing their nails.

I can't pretend that the closures affect me deeply, either emotionally or practically. Two of the games, Defiance and Defiance 2050, I've never played. I've thought about playing them, a few times, but never with enough enthusiasm to do anything about it.

 

The latest to be axed, Eden Eternal, I have played. I've mentioned it here a few times. It even has a tag although I've never done a whole post about it.

I think of it as "the mouse game" because when I played my character looked like a giant cartoon mouse. I can't really remember much about the gameplay. I have a feeling it might have been the first mmorpg I ever played that used the "autorun to quest target" option, something that seemed almost magical at the time and which I still appreciate in every game that offers it.

Eden Eternal won't be missed by many in this quadrant of the blogosphere, I suspect. I know Telwyn of Gaming SF played and wrote about it now and again. Maybe a few others might have given it a look once, out of curiosity.

Of course, if it was one of those games that bloggers write about often that would at least suggest there might be enough interest to keep the servers running. When no-one even name-checks your game in passing it's never a good sign.

 

The fourth and thus far final game to be shuttered by Gamigo is the one I'll miss most: Twin Saga. I really liked Twin Saga. It not only gets a tag here but there are two posts dedicated to it specifically, both from 2017, when I played the game for several weeks and got a character to something like level fifty.

It had a gorgeous, vivid cartoon look and a bizarre, surreal, frequently disturbing prose style, whose sheer peculiarity could not be entirely explained away by the usual translation issues.

The thing I'll remember most about Twin Saga, though, is the housing. My character lived in a terracottage, a virtual mansion, complete with conservatory and roof garden, sitting atop a giant tortoise. You can travel the world in your house. And I did. For a while.

Not for long, though, because the other thing I'll remember about Twin Saga is how hard it got. I didn't stop because I was bored with it. I stopped because I hit a wall in the levelling game and couldn't get past it. I returned several times to see if it had gotten any easier but it never had. Now it never will.

 

All the games Gamigo are sending into the ultimate east close their doors for the final time on the same day, April 29th. That gives current players a couple of months to get their affairs in order, say their tearful goodbyes and work out what to do with themselves when the games they loved no longer exist.

Presumably there aren't going to be all that many people in that unfortunate situation. Gamigo's given reasons for the cull are purely commercial. Apparently the games cannot sustain themselves, which presumably means they cost more to run than the cash shops bring in.

I wonder how strictly true that is? Obviously those four games won't be making much of a profit because if they were you can absolutely guarantee they'd still be up and running. On the other hand, Gamigo has been on a buying spree these last couple of years. They've snapped up Trion, Aeria Games and most recently Kingsisle.

That's given them a much bigger protfolio than they ever had before. It's a lot of mmorpgs under one roof. And some of the recent acquisitions, particularly ArcheAge, Trove and Wizard 101, have hugely more traction in the marketplace than the likes of Eden Eternal or Twin Saga. It's not unrealistic to imagine there's a need for clarity in the offer as much as there is a desire that each and every game should be self-sustaining.

 

One of the pillars of Wilhelm's argument concerning the drag factor of elderly games on the development of new ones is the near-obsessive commitment of fans. Not just the continued desire to keep playing the same old games but the will and ability to make that possible even if the companies that nominally own the games aren't interested any more.

It's true. The emulator and private server scene is huge. There are grey market versions of games it's hard to imagine anyone cared about enough to recover from the void. But players do care. 

I've written a few times about the ongoing project to revive the game I knew as Ferentus. I only ever played that game, briefly, in beta. And yet I've never forgotten it. As with a number of more than half-forgotten titles I occasionally google it and a while back when I did that I ended up on a website telling me it was coming back. 

Since then I've played it a couple of times on open beta weekends. And it's as much fun as I remembered. I wouldn't spend my free time helping to bring it back but I'm very grateful someone has. 

 

Will someone do the same for the Gamigo Four? We'll see. I'd put the odds pretty low for Eden Eternal and Twin Saga but I suspect Defiance may have had the kind of audience that will see keeping it alive as a challenge. I hope so. 

For all that the persistence of old mmoprgs acts a drag anchor on the development of new ones, I hate to see any of them die. They will, though. As time goes on the seeming invulnerability to time that's been a hallmark of the genre will inevitably erode. 

More and more games will disappear for good. It's a shame but I don't think we can complain too much. After all, they've already lasted far, far longer than either their players or their developers imagined they could.

The only question left for me now is whether to use these last couple of months to revisit old haunts for a final time, maybe set foot in some new ones, while the opportunity still exists. 

I'm not sure I will. It's probably best just to let them slip quietly away.

Better The Devil You Don't Know

Last week's big news was the entirely unheralded acquisition of Trion Games by Gamigo. Following the recent equally unanticipated takeover of CCP by Pearl Abyss, this would appear to mark the beginning of a period of consolidation in the MMO market. Syl thinks so.

There have always been mergers and buyouts, of course. The ownership of both IPs and studios changes hands all the time. Sometimes it goes so smoothly and unobtrusively that years later most people can barely remember it even happened.

Othertimes, the journey is crepuscular and labrynthine, as in the history of the company currently known as Daybreak, which began life as a segment of Sony's 989 Studios, later becoming Verant Interactive then Sony Online Entertainment, eventually being sold to... someone... before arriving at its current resting point, which is... well, who really knows?

In both those cases, standing as they do at opposite extremes of the hysteria scale, the games go on. Cryptic are still knocking out content for Star Trek Online seven years later and people still play it. Daybreak did clear some dead wood but the core titles are all up and running with new content still coming down the pipe - for now, at least.

Reactions to the sale of Trion have been surprising. Well, they surprised me. I had been under the impression that Trion's reputation was so abysmal that almost any change of ownership would be greeted, if not with fireworks and street parties, then at least with a grunt of cautious approval.

Wasn't Trion the company that generated negative headline after negative headline for its chaotic mishandling of ArcheAge and its increasingly predatory cash shop practices? Didn't we all bemoan its precipitous decline from nice guy up-and-comer to punch-drunk schlub?

The worst thing anyone seemed to have to say about Gamigo, on the other hand - in fact pretty much the only thing anyone - apart from Wilhelm - had to say about them - was "who?" As a publisher with more than two dozen MMOs in its stable (twenty five, in fact, not counting the four (Atlas Reactor isn't an MMO) just acquired from Trion) I'd say Gamigo must have been doing a pretty good job to have stayed under the radar this long.

Nosy Gamer, always diligent in his research, uncovered the still little-reported fact that Trion wasn't merely strapped for cash; it was on the verge of bankruptcy. As he explained, the unfamiliar term "Assignment for the Benefit of the Creditors", which appears in the small print required by EU law, is the California State version of the more familiar Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Nosy also discovered that the price Gamigo paid for Trion Worlds and all its games and IPs was "in the low USD two-digit million" range: under $15m, then, probably closer to $10m. By contrast, CCP fetched $225m up front with another $200m to come if it hits performance targets. Trion's was a fire sale by comparison.

I've played a few of Gamigo's MMOs. They publish Eden Eternal, a jolly romp with mice that I've enjoyed once in a while and Twin Saga, a game I played for more than fifty levels and write about occasionally.

Gamigo acquired Twin Saga when they bought Aeria Games, who appear to retain some kind of individuality. Twin Saga itself seems to be suffering from population issues since the English Language server was recently merged with the German/French one to form a single  Global Server, but the game persists and the Producer's Letter from August promises " ...a more populated server together with more and more content. Oh yes, Twin Saga is on the road!"

I don't really play any of Trion's MMOs any more. I dip into Rift once in a while and sometimes think of having another bash at ArcheAge but realistically I am not going to play either of them again in any meaningful way. I can't claim to have any lingering emotional attachment to either of them. I also never played Defiance and didn't like Trove.

It's easy for me to look at the sale in a detached, emotionless way and say that I imagine it will be at worst neutral and most likely good for the games. They appeared to be in a hole, operated by a company that now looks like it may have been in freefall. From the outside, this looks more like a fingertip save than a looming disaster.

That doesn't seem to be the general reaction. Massively OP's comments were predictably filled with doom and gloom but I've been more surprised to see bloggers, whose opinions I value more than random MOPpets, posting to say they're quitting Trion games as a direct result of the change - or at least seriously considering doing so.

I align myself more with Kaozz, who said 

"This isn't like Wildstar where the studio is closing down. While they'are reports of a massive layoff, who didn't see that coming with the state of Rift in the last year or so. Not surprising at all. The game has focused on all the wrong things, like the Prime server, leaving the normal servers to flounder and stagnate for far too long. I'm very sad a lot of people lost their jobs, I hope the staff cut from Trion find jobs swiftly and wish them all the best. As a customer I saw a bleak future, this is something better than closure, it's a possible future for these games."

 As always, in the end only time will tell. My guess is that none of Trion's MMOs will close but neither will they get much in the way of new content. They will settle into something more than Maintenance Mode but less than Full Development, a relatively happy medium where they will live out a quiet, unspectacular life for many years to come.

Having the games on the log-in portal of a new Publisher, where they will almost certainly come to the attention of many players who will never even have heard of Rift or Trove, will most likely bring in enough curious newbies to more than replace the exiting bitter vets. How many of those incomers will hang around is another story.

The bare fact is, though, that without this sale or another like it, these games would have closed. Trion was out of luck and out of road. Had Gamigo not come along with a handful of cash the only (legal) hope left for anyone wishing to play these games would have been the newly-announced Video Game Museum.

And that's something that deserves a post of its own.

Taking The Loong View

What a lot of MMOs there are. I downloaded yet another one yesterday. Kaozz's fault. She mentioned that she was playing something called Loong Online. "Smooth as butter and polished", she said. I'd never heard of it, which was provocation enough without the praise on top.

I googled and found it on the Gamigo portal where I had a choice: sign up for Loong alone or make a Gamigo account to play any of their games. They host a lot of MMOs including a few I'd heard of. Fiesta, which certainly gets a lot of advertising, none of which has ever made me consider trying it, King of Kings, which I did once play for about half an hour and Black Prophecy, which crops up on Massively now and again largely to my complete lack of interest. They have several more and others in development. They even have a Golf MMO, and they're welcome to it. Obviously no real point starting a Gamigo account, then.

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

Having made my Gamigo account, when I came to add Loong to my list of games I planned to play on it I noticed a familiar name: Otherland. Otherland is the MMO based on Tad Williams' sprawling, disturbing cyberpunk/fantasy noir. It's an MMO I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, looking forward to giving it a run whenever it appears. Haven't heard much about it for a while, although there was a video recently. I had no idea Gamigo were involved but now I'm signed up. Pre-ordered, I suppose you could say, if you can pre-order a game you don't have to order in the first place. Ah, sweet serendipity.

Gamigo is a German F2P gaming network.  Seems to be the week for those, what with the PSS1 thing and all. There's an awful lot of MMO activity in Germany, now I come to think of it. Bigpoint are another. They host Drakensang and Nadirim, both of which I've tried, and Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't, it being a shooter. Germany is a big, rich country and one where MMOs seem to be very firmly established. Once you factor out the "sold like chattels" part of the PSS1/Sony deal the whole thing begins to look a little less disturbing. If they can get the IP block sorted out and restore freedom of choice, who knows? Maybe something good could come out of the wreckage.

Slot in top of head is not for litter

Leaving that aside for now, pending the supposed SoE/Allaplaya statements due later today, what is Loong like? Well, I only played for an hour or so but it was a good hour. It certainly looks fine. The world is lush and detailed, the views are stunning, the creatures are quirky and that's just in the starting areas.The interface is a bit too gritty for my taste and I can't say I'm keen on the fonts but the functionality is all there. Compared to, say, Eden Eternal, a game I like a lot, Loong appears to be several notches higher in quality. Gameplay, at the starter level, is identical.

Will I play it much? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? There are just so many MMOs. It's all very well downloading them and trying them out, but how often do I get much further than the starting area? Is looking great and playing smoothly enough? Well, no it's not. Even really top-notch gameplay doesn't set the hook deep enough. Zentia, for example, is a first-class game in just about every respect. Gameplay there is as good as any MMO I've played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were on it all weekend when we first found it and we played sporadically for a fair while after that, but in the end we drifted away.

I told you once. Shoo!.

I think, for me at least, it comes down mostly to character. In Loong I can be a good-looking young man or a good-looking young woman and that seems to be about it. It's not like being a giant tiger in NeoSteam, is it? Or even a mouse in Eden Eternal. I just don't find playing good-looking young people very involving. If I can't be an animal, at least let me be a dwarf or a gnome, something with a big, bushy beard. Zentia let me play a fat old man, which may be why I lasted a few weeks there rather than a few hours.

Do my feet even touch the ground?

It's not just how the characters look, either. It's also how they move. My Loong character travels in sudden, fluid leaps and bounds, so slick and fast that he's sometimes on the far side of where I want him to be before I can make him stop. Rift has a very dull selection of races but movement there is stolid, steady, firm. I can feel every footfall and that really does matter. The more solid the character feels, the better I am able to associate.

I'll plug on with Loong for a bit. On and off. Here and there. Now and again. The world very much looks worth exploring. I'll be surprised if I become more than an occasional visitor, but that's fine. There are so many MMOs after all.

Where's My Tiger? : Neo Steam

In theory I play a lot of MMOs. I have nearly two dozen on my desktop and a few more tucked away out of sight. I say in theory because as you may have noticed there are only so many hours in the day and much though I'd like to spend all of those hours playing games there's working and sleeping and eating and what-all to fit in somewhere.

I have my focus games, usually just two or three at most. Currently that would be EQ2X, Rift and Allods. Then I have my background games, where I have characters I'm still interested in developing. LotRO, Fallen Earth, Everquest, Vanguard or Ryzom all fit in there. I try to pop in every few days for at least a short session here or there just to keep the plates spinning.

No boars? That can't be right.

Beyond that comes a whole raft of titles that I'm either pretty much done with, never really got started on or just haven't gotten around to yet. And right at the end of the list is a small group of MMOs that I only ever play last thing at night, when I finish a session on my focus game but don't quite feel ready to stop altogether.

Eden Eternal and Dragon Nest are my current go-to late-nighters but last night I got the urge to pop into NeoSteam, a game I've played on and off for years. Apparently it's been quite a while since I last got the urge because it turns out NeoSteam isn't there any more. The server closed down last May. I don't remember reading anything about that on Massively.

It was the third time it's happened to me. Two other MMOs I played sporadically decided to shut their doors while I had my back turned: Rubies of Eventide and Ferentus. They and NeoSteam were all MMOs I had a great deal of time for. Metaphorically. Unfortunately.

Small dwarf, big world

Rubies is the one I miss the most. It was a  first-class MMO with tons of potential and I did put in quite a few hours there over the years. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it regularly for a while. I'd play it still if I could. We both played Ferentus for quite a time too and although it never came out of beta it was more finished than a lot of games I've payed to play.

NeoSteam was the oddest of the three. It was nominally Steampunk in setting but it seemed more like a dreamscape. My character was a giant tiger who carried a hammer bigger than he was. Something that looked like a flying turnip used to follow him around offering advice. I never saw much of the world. Mostly I ran around enjoying the music and marveling at all the bizarre creatures. I think I only got to level 10 but I wasn't finished yet, dammit!.

I knew I shouldn't have kicked that puffball

The most galling thing of all is that NeoSteam is still online in the U.S.A. where by all accounts it has been much better managed and developed by Atlus. The rights for Europe including the U.K. went to Gamigo, who never seemed to do anything with it at all. I can't remember ever having to patch when I logged in and nothing ever seemed to change.

So, NeoSteam joins the list of lost MMOs. It also joins the shorter but infinitely more annoying list of MMOs lost specifically to me due to I.P. blocking or regionalization. EQOA keeps it company there. Will I learn the lesson this time and remember to log into the games I like more often? Probably not.