Never Turn Your Back On Them Until You're Sure They're Down For Good

I spotted a news item at MassivelyOP the other day. #356 in a never-ending series: "MMORPGs you thought were gone forever but oh boy how wrong you were!" They should call it that. 

I honestly don't know any more why we think anything goes away. It always comes back. Unless you really, really want it to, of course. Then it doesn't.

Things you don't care about, though? Can't get rid of 'em no matter how you try. Just this morning I saw another report at MOP, this time about something called High  Energy Heroes which, according to the article, "looks basically like Tencent just reskinned the now-dead mobile version of Apex Legends". I never played Apex Legends so I can't say how accurate that assessment mught be but I'll take their word for it since it supports the case I'm making, which is that nothing ever really stops any more.

Except Zentia. Why won't someone bring that back? Also, The Regrettes. Why did they need to "break up"? Bands don't "break up" any more, do they? Not if they have "absolutely nothing but love in our hearts for each other", anyway. They just stop recording and touring and do other things and everyone just says they're "on hiatus". Why didn't they just do that? Why be so dramatic?

Sorry I got distracted. I really liked The Regrettes. Where was I?

Yes, it's always the ones you want that stay gone. The ones you never cared about keep coming back like damn daisies. Case in point, Aika. And possibly Rick Astley. Although I quite like Rick Astley...

I played Aika, briefly. I even wrote about it on the blog, even more briefly. Here's everything I ever said about it: "Typical Eastern MMO. Quite pleasant, passably translated. Got to about level eight or nine. It's still running." That was in February 2014 and it was, then. Still running, I mean. The rest of it too, probably.

I had mentioned it a couple of times before, in passing. The earliest mention on the blog comes from December 2011, by which time the game had already passed into that misty hinterland of "MMOs I am thinking about playing, but not thinking very hard". I'd be lying if I said I'd ever thought about it again, other than as an entry in a list of games I once played.

Do I remember anything about it? Not really. In one post I lumped it in with a couple of other Korean MMORPGs I'd played - Loong and Argo. I remember both of those far better. 

I remember that Loong was introduced to me by the much-missed blogger Kaozz of ECTMMO, who also got me started on Blade & Soul (Speaking of MMOs I'm thinking of playing...). I can visualize the central square of the starting city, still, although not a lot more. 

And there it is...

 

Argo I found all by myself, I think. I really liked Argo. I miss it, although not as much as I miss Zentia. Or NeoSteam, for that matter.

Argo has its own category here on Inventory Full, with no fewer than five entries. Then there's a second tag, Argo Online, that I made for the 2014 revival of the game, which had been dropped from its European publisher, Allaplaya, before being picked up by the very unfortunately-named UserGames. 

I always liked Argo, even though it was probably pretty ropey, looked at objectively. Something about it just felt comfortable - friendly, even. I don't mean socially - I'm not sure I ever met another player there and I certainly never spoke to anyone. No, it was more the look of the thing, with its fuzzy foliage and cartoonish wildlife.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to find meaningful information about older MMORPGs. If you google many of them you either get lots of links, which either suggest they're still up and running or go to dead pages when you click on them. MMORPG.com does usually have basic details that seem reasonably accurate, at least on whether a game is still available, but if you want to know the exact date it fell over or what led to its demise, you're going need to do some serious research.

Borrowed from myself but it's fine. No-one remembers.

I don't propose to do any of that about Loong (It's down now but it was still up in 2017 and that's as far as I'm going.) or Argo (The revival failed pretty fast as I recall. I don't think it's going to get a third chance.) and Zentia is gone for good, I'm sorry to say. Aika, though, is back, at least for now and I suppose I'm probably going to give it a try, just for old times' sake.

Even I'm not sure why I'd bother. It's not as though it's been gone that long. It closed down in 2021, at which point I hadn't touched it for a decade. I didn't notice it wasn't there any more so I'm not going to say I missed it. Still, it just seems rude not to at least take a look, now it's back.

Aika is going to have wait its turn, though. The open beta only runs for a week. It started last Thursday, I didn't hear about it until two days ago and it ends tomorrow. I'm already missing the start of Tarisland Closed Beta 2 as I write this and I'm certainly not going to skip any more of that just to make the final day of a beta for the revival of a game I played a few times a decade ago, just long enough to get to Level Eight.

I guess I'll wait for the full launch (No hint yet of when that might be.) or another beta, should there be one. We'll see if it spurs any memories when I get there. I'm guessing not but maybe it'll all come flooding back. 

Whatever "it" was.

East Goes West

If playing Bless last month had any impact on me at all, it was to make me feel nostalgic for other Eastern MMOs I've tried. Over the years I've played quite a few. Most of them I've enjoyed but none of them have I stuck with for more than a couple of months at most.

Let's see how many I can remember off the top of my head...

The first must have been Silk Road Online. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta and I remember being quite excited that we were seeing something we'd never seen before - an MMORPG made by and for people from a culture significantly different from our own. I wasn't all that struck with it but Mrs Bhagpuss liked it enough to mention it fondly for a few years afterwards, whenever the topic of imported MMOs came up.

I think Ferentus was the first game where I saw player-placed street vendors.

Then there was Ferentus, a beta for a long-forgotten MMO (also known in some territories as Xiones or Herrcot) that never went Live. Ferentus was the opposite of Silk Road in that it was almost indistinguishable from a Western MMO of the time. We both really liked it even though it was very rough and unpolished. Almost unbelievably, it still has an active Reddit ,where ex-players still hope for some kind of emulator, one day.

Runes of Magic, on which Wilhelm occasionally reports, was the first successful Eastern attempt to play the West at its own game. It was also one of the first generic WoW clones and the standard bearer for the Free to Play payment model. Once again, Mrs Bhagpuss and I beta-tested it and found it lacking, although a decade later I find I can remember it in surprising detail.

After that, the flood gates opened and playing imported MMOs became just something I did rather than something worthy of comment. Back then, I used to be in the habit of playing a number of MMOs super-casually, usually for an hour or so at the very end of the evening, right before going to bed.

That was in the days before I had a Tablet. These days I lie in bed watching American sitcoms or searching for ever more obscure bands on YouTube. I'm not convinced that's progress.

I did take some screenshots of NeoSteam but I have no idea what happened to them. I think I saw this thing once, though.

NeoSteam filled the late-night MMO slot for quite a while. I really liked that game. I was a seven foot tall tiger with a giant hammer - what's not to like? Neo-Steam was around for a good few years and had quite a following at one time. There were a lot of levels and zones but I never saw much more than the first few of either. I'd play it now if it was still running.

I also liked Argo, which arrived a few years later. That one came and went and came back and then vanished. Surprising how often that happens. Argo didn't have much to recommend it but it did have that indefinable vibe that made it feel like a place. Hard to describe but I always know it when I feel it.

Before that, there was the one whose name I always get muddled up with another, Western, title. Earth Eternal? No, it's no good, I'll have to google it...

And this is why we fact-check!  No, it wasn't Earth Eternal. Earth Eternal was the all-animal MMO originally produced by an American indie called Sparkplay Media. Mrs Bhagpuss and I betaed that one too and although we both liked it we found it a tad slow and repetitive.

After Earth Eternal failed in the West (twice) it had a run in Japan, where it was known as Ikimonogatari. According to wikipedia, no version ever made it further than Open Beta bit it still picked up a strong following.

I also have no screenshots of my time in Earth Eternal. Nor did I ever play a frog.

As if to prove that nothing on the internet ever goes away, I am astounded and delighted to discover that there is an Earth Eternal emulator! Now known as The Anubian War, it's even had an expansion, Valkal's Shadow, and the game is still up and running. I'm downloading it as I type!

Getting back to the topic at hand, the Eastern MMO I was thinking of was Eden Eternal. A natural mistake, even more so when you consider that in EE I played a mouse. A large mouse, I'll grant you, but a mouse all the same.

Eden Eternal was probably the first Eastern anime-influenced MMO I tried. It's bright and bouncy and not at all serious, which should please Wolfy and Jeromai. It was also, I think, the first time I came across the wonderful auto-quest feature, something I wish all MMOs would adopt.

Eden Eternal is still up and running. It even has a Back to School event on right now, which tells you something about the demographic that plays there. I don't think I'm going to download it again but it's an Aeria game and I have their launcher on my desktop...more on which later.

Blurry when stretched. Then again, aren't we all?

Then came Zentia, probably the best Eastern MMORPG I ever played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I downloaded the beta one Saturday on a whim and neither of us played anything else all weekend. The game had a unique style - cheerful, whimsical, lighthearted - that was exemplified by the giant dragon mount that players could hop on as it passed by, like boarding a bus. You could even do trivia quizzes in the central square of the main town.

The whole gameworld had an upbeat, happy atmosphere that was mood-elevating just to be around but it was also a very solid MMORPG, with traditional questing and combat that felt solid and satisfying. It's a game that deserves to be revived but sadly no-one seems to have bothered.

I think most of those games pre-date this blog, although I did write about Argo back in 2012. I also played, and briefly wrote about the oddly (and inaccurately, given how little time I spent there) named Loong, one of many games tipped by Kaozz of ECTmmo. She finds and plays even more obscure MMOS than I do, although currently she's with the crowd in WoW.

Almost the definition of Generic Eastern Import, Loong appears still to be available from Gamigo under the name of Loong Dragonblood

Since Inventory Full arrived, most of the Eastern imports have been relatively big news. In no particular order (least of all chronological) there's been Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online, Revelation Online, Aion, Riders of somewhere-or-other, that one about Dragons that SOE licensed and of course Final Fantasy XIV, which is a whole different story.

Bless Online is the latest and it's... okay. I wouldn't put it much more strongly than that. As I said at the beginning of the post, Bless's main impact on me has been to remind me of other imported and translated MMOs I like more. Two in particular: Dragon Nest and Twin Saga.

Not that Bless is anything like either of those. It's just that I remembered, while playing Bless and reading about how badly translated it was supposed to be, that there's a particular style of translated quest text that I love. Twin Saga is dripping with it and so is Dragon Nest.

It appears we've crossed out last bridge in Dragomon Hunter.

It's as though they'd found a really articulate, bi-lingual seven-year old, with a vivid imagination, and given them a completely free hand to translate the original quests - without worrying too much about whether the finished version made much (or any) sense. It's almost like naive art.

I tried to find my old installation of Twin Saga yesterday but after booting up several Hard Drives without success I gave up and re-installed it via Steam. As it was downloading I thought to google "Twin Saga", which I probably should have done at the start.

Turns out it's also published by Aeria Games, for whom, as I mentioned above, I have a generic launcher on my desktop. They also published Dragomon Hunter, another quirky import I liked a lot, which has sadly closed. The launcher itself is also dead. You have to download and update directly from the website now - or use Steam.

Following that discovery I was able to find the original installation buried in the Aeria Games folder on my C Drive so now I have the blasted thing twice! I linked my Aeria account to Steam and now I'm up and running with my old character, who turns out to be level 50! Proof that I really did like Twin Saga when I last played.

Best name prefix ever!

Dragon Nest is more problematic. It has a convoluted history of versions and territories. Last time I tried to play I couldn't get it to run. I'm running short of drive space right now so I don't think I'll download it again just yet but I guess I shouldn't wait too long. Grab 'em while they're still alive seems to be the motto for some of the less-celebrated imports.

Anyway, that wasn't the post I sat down to write. I was going to muse over returning to MMOs and how it can vary from impossible to ecstatic. That'll have to wait for another day. This has run far too long and there's double XP in Norrath that won't last forever!

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.