When Rights Go Wrong or Why Household Names Don't Always Sell Games

In the course of a post about Embracer Group and how its current financial difficulties might affect both Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online and Amazon Games' in-development title based on the works of JRR Tolkein, Wilhelm noted "there isn’t a track record of huge success for games based on the IP".

That tied into something I've been thinking about since I observed, in the thread on my own recent post about the move of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Broadsword Games, that "there's almost no synergy between huge, mainstream IPs and the mmorpg genre".

Has there ever been an mmorpg, based on a pre-existing IP not itself originating in gaming, which performed commercially to the same standard as other iterations on that same IP in other media? Or, if you'd like that in English, has any mmorpg based on a book or a movie ever been a runaway success?

I can't think of one. What's more, neither could Bard or ChatGPT. They were both bloody useless, frankly. Neither of them seemed capable of understanding what a "Non-gaming IP" might be, even when I gave them examples. 

For once, I won't derail  my own post by going on about AIs and their funny little ways. I didn't want to rely on my own dodgy memory, though, so without AI assistance I was thrown back on my own research skills, namely skimming through all sixty-six pages of the MMORPG.com list of games.

It wasn't much more help than the nonsense the AIs tried to fob me off with. The MMORPG.com list is stuffed with games that couldn't reasonably be described as MMORPGs even by the loosest of definitions. There were live games, dead games and games still in development that don't yet exist at all. I really need those AIs to get their act together so I don't have to keep trawling through this stuff. I have better things to do with my time. 

Oh, wait...

I did spot a handful of examples of games based on external IPs that I either didn't know about or had forgotten, so it wasn't a total bust. There were a couple of manga/anime inspired titles - Naruto Online ("an MMORPG turn-based browser-game that is set entirely in the NARUTO universe") and One Piece Online, which doesn't actually seem to be an MMORPG at all - but I don't feel qualified to comment on either so I'll pretend I didn't see them after all. 

I also probably ought to leave out the two Chinese titles I found on Wikipedia - Dragon Oath ("Based on the novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong) and Fantasy Westward Journey ("Inspired by Journey to the West" - not least because to include the latter would scupper my entire thesis, given its probably one of the most successful - and profitable - MMORPGs in the world, at least if those old SuperData reports were to be believed. 

Sticking - mostly - with games released in the western hemisphere and/or based on "western" IPs then, here's the list I ended up with:

• Age of Conan
• Conan Exiles 
• DC Universe Online
  
• Hello Kitty Online 
• Lord of the Rings Online 
• Marvel Heroes 
• Otherland 
• Star Trek Online 
• Star Wars Galaxies 
• Star Wars: The Old Republic 
• The Matrix Online

It's surprisingly short, isn't it? Anyone think of any more? No? Actually, I can. That Lego MMO, for a start. Maybe Toontown? And wasn't there a Transformers MMO, briefly? 

Tough. Didn't think of them at the time and now it's too late. Anyway, all of those just shore up my argument so I don't need to shoehorn them in after the edit.

Let's go through the ones I did remember, one by one. 

Age of Conan - Main IP: Books and Movies.

Still running but in maintenance mode. Sold a lot of boxes but famously couldn't hold an audience much beyond the bait&switch tutorial. Honestly, I feel Conan is barely a well-enough known property to support an MMORPG to begin with, so it's incomprehensible to me that we also have...

Conan Exiles -  See above.

Okay, it's not really an mmorpg. Is it even an MMO? When I got ChatGPT to put the list into alphabetical order for me (Nice to find something it's good for, at last.) it prissily warned me "Please note that "Conan Exiles" and "Dune Awakening" are not MMORPGs but are included in the list you provided." I took Dune Awakening out to discuss separately, later (Which, as you'll see, I signally forgot to do.) but since the Steam page says "Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer. (My emphasis.) I left it in. 

CE is doing okay. About 10k concurrent according to the Steam Charts, a population it's maintained remarkably consistently for several years now, putting it just barely in the Top 100. By no means a failure but also clearly no kind of mainstream breakout hit.

DCUO - Main IP: Comics and Movies.

According to the information that came out of the EG7 acquisition of Daybreak Games, quite a consistent performer. It makes money. People play it. For an IP that includes household names like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, all of whom can and have been able to stand up multiple TV and movie series for decades, however, it can't be considered more than a modest success, if that.

Hello Kitty Online - Main IP: Merchandising and cultural icon

This one deserves a post of its own. It appears to have been either abandoned or possibly even forgotten by its owners, Sanria. The game was last known to be playable over a decade ago but the website, which hasn't been updated since 2012, is still up. A sad and mystifying fate for such a global icon.

Lord of the Rings Online - Main IP: Books and Movies.

I think we all know about this one. Doing just about okay for an aging mmorpg but certainly no more than that. Signally failed to capitalize on the massive global interest in Tolkein following the Peter Jackson movies and the recent Amazon Prime series barely moved the dial, despite the hype. I suspect that, much though the fans still worship the man and all his myriad works, the general audience has had about as much Tolkein as it stand for now, which may not bode well for either Embracer Group or Amazon Games.

Marvel Heroes - Main IP - Comics and Movies

Seemed to be doing reasonably well, perhaps on a par with "rival" DCUO until it suddenly and unexpectedly closed down. Even at its peak, though, it could scarcely have been said to have done justice to what was, at the time, one of the best-known and most commercially successful IPs in the entire world. If you can't bring the punters in by the millions with Spider-Man and The Avengers, really, what do you think you're doing?

Otherland - Main IP: Books

This one's just weird. It was a left-field choice for an IP to begin with, being a fairly obscure SciFi trilogy by an author better-known for his fantasy novels. No-one's bothered to make a movie or a TV show out of anything Tad Williams ever wrote, so why anyone thought a game would sell is a mystery. The game never really got finished, never attracted an audience, changed hands a couple of times and finally closed down without anyone noticing. It wasn't a bad game, as far as it went, but the IP did it no favors at all.

Star Trek Online - Main IP: TV and Movies

I called this "The game time (And the world.) forgot" in a comment on the post I linked earlier. It's a Cryptic production, which means it's solid enough but a bit dull, making it, some might say, an ideal fit for the IP. I always feel that Star Trek somehow manages to be well-known by the mainstream yet still entirely niche. This is one game on the list that may even have done about as well as the IP deserved. At least it's still running and people play it. Or I guess they do...

Star Wars Galaxies - Main IP - Movies

This, on the other hand, is a truly world-class IP. One of the very biggest. As Raph Koster is always keen to point out, the game he made using the Star Wars setting and characters was a success - just not a big enough one to satisfy the IP's owners. It's worth reading that piece for Raph's observations on the core topic of this post, the value of a non-gaming IP to an MMORPG - or to any other video game genre, for that matter. 

Raph puts it like this: "if you look at the power of licensed IP game genres outside of sports, it’s really not very clear that a license can or will imply a massive increase in game trials or purchases."  That's really the crux of the problem except that, in the case of an IP like Star Wars, the expectations are also hyped to the skies. It's a recipe for failure because even success on the scale of SWG (Raph claims it was weight-for-weight more successful than EverQuest, the market leader at the time.) doesn't count as success in the eyes of either the fans or the investors.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - See above.

And that, of course, is why SWG is only available on emulator and private servers these days. Along came the second MMORPG based on the IP and even though they weren't making Highlander Online, there could only be one. Sony Online Entertainment bowed to the inevitable and cancelled SWG so SW:TOR could have a clear run... and BioWare fumbled the pass.

Once again, the game itself was fine and sales were good enough for the genre. Just not good enogh for the IP. With the endless publicity pumped out by Disney since then, along with the ongoing global success of many, if not all, of the movies and now TV shows, a middle-ranking MMORPG just doesn't cut it. If it was an original IP, it would be deemed a major success - it's not like we have a lot of SciFi PvE MMORPGs to choose from - but it's Star Wars so it was widely seen as a failure even before the move to the Broadsword Home for Elderly MMOs.

The Matrix Online - Main IP: Movies

Oh, boy! I guess at the time The Matrix was reckoned a pretty big thing? It also has something to do with virtual worlds, I think, so I suppose there was some synergy there? I don't know. I'm vague on the details because I've never seen the movies. 

I've also never played the game which, given that it was published by SOE and included in the All Access sub I was paying at the time, ought to tell you everything you need to know about the appeal of the IP outside its dedicated fanbase. I mean, back then I was at least trying out just about every MMORPG on the market and I still didn't make the time to take a look at TMO. 

I can't even say if it was reckoned a good game or a good version of the IP. I don't even recall reading much about it. I'd guess most Matrix fans  probably didn't even know it existed and most MMORPG players didn't care.

TMO is like the poster child for why hanging an MMORPG off an external IP is a bad idea. It sums up the innate and seemingly insurmountable problem that comes from draping your MMORPG over the scaffolding of an IP that's been successful in another medium: chances are really, really high that most of that pre-existing audience doesn't even know what an MMORPG is, far less want to play one, while at the same time you're limiting your MMORPG audience to a subset that finds the particular IP appealing.

And it gets worse. There may be a very large and well-established market for video games that reference already-familiar properties but those games generally don't require the kind of time commitment and long-term dedication of an MMORPG. It's one thing to buy a Batman game, play it, finish it and put it away; entirely another to commit to raiding Arkham Asylum from 9pm to 1am every Thursday, Friday and Saturday for perpetuity.

And still worse yet. Even if you successfully tap into the loyalty and affection of your chosen IP's dedicated fanbase, the people eager and willing to consume, own and live inside every possible aspect of their beloved obsession, you're going to be opening yourself to disappointment, disgruntlement and maybe even DDOSing and death threats from those same superfans, many of whom will inevitably see your interpretation of their dreams as an embarrassment, a disaster or a betrayal.

Finally and perhaps worst of all, as the IP's licensee, you'll have to pay for the privilege of piggybacking on someone else's success, likely handsomely, on the basis that the rights owner is doing you a favor by letting you hitch a ride on the back of their money-wagon. You'll just have to pray that, when they've taken their cut for doing nothing at all and you've paid all the development and running costs, there's enough left to make the whole thing feel like it hasn't been a complete waste of your time.

Almost all the big, successful western MMORPGs are based on IPs created and owned by the companies that developed and operate them. With barely a couple of exceptions, even the ones we call successful aren't much more than a few big fish in a fairly small pond. World of Warcraft had its cultural moment but, unlike Star Wars or Marvel Comics, it couldn't hold on to it. The Warcraft movie is evidence enough. 

MMORPGs are a niche genre. Expensive mainstream IPs are a terrible fit. If picking a strong IP and slapping an MMORPG back end on it was a guaranteed - or even a likely - way to make a fortune, we'd have massively multiple versions of every TV show, movie franchise and best-selling book series of the last fifty years. Just like we do with the TV shows, movies and books themselves. But we don't because MMORPGs are a niche market and even the successful ones don't make a ripple in the mainstream.

I wish it was otherwise. I could list, right off the top of my head, a couple of dozen IPs I'd love to see turned into MMORPGs - and I might, in another post. It's never going to happen because IP-led MMORPGs don't work unless, like WoW or Pokemon Go or Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, the IP itself comes from another game.

So, if you're waiting, like me, for Scooby Doo Online, where we all get to ride around in the Mystery Machine, solving mysteries and catching bad guys in a lighter, funnier version of The Secret World, then you're going to have a very long wait indeed.

Don't Go, Kitty, Kitty

The PC Gamer post-WoW roll-call of births and deaths I was discussing yesterday includes eleven MMORPGs I could reasonably claim to have played plus one that no-one ever did. They break down into three categories: games I took seriously, games I dabbled with and games I merely glanced at.

Of the twelve, there are two that shouldn't even be on the list in the first place: EQNext and City of Heroes. I'll get to EQN later. First, let's think about City of Heroes.

Did no-one fact-check the copy? The title of the piece is "25 MMOS that lived and died since World of Warcraft launched" but the North American launch of CoH pre-dates WoW's by a full six months. It says so right there in the article! I believe I may have played it in beta as early as late 2003.

CoH looked, on paper, like something I'd really enjoy. I've been a superhero fan since before I learned to read. My mother, in her late eighties, still occasionally complains about how she had to read those speech bubbles out loud to me when I was four years old. At the time the game was announced I was deep into EverQuest and the MMORPG genre - it looked as though it could have been made for me.

It wasn't. Not even close. What always appealed to me most about superhero comics, even as a child, was the soap opera. The fighting? Not so much. CoH, in beta at least, seemed to be nothing but an endless conveyor belt of  meaningless battles, most of them in featureless offices and warehouses or bland city lots.

I played the beta in a desultory fashion for a few weeks, on and off. It was deeply disappointing. When the game launched I didn't buy it and during its eight year run I never once considered giving it a go. For my money there has never been a good superhero MMO. DCUO is the best I've played but that's more for the glorious movement controls, the well-realised cityscapes and the housing than anything to do with the combat or the story.

When City of Heroes miraculously re-appeared earlier this year (in true superhero "I was never really dead" style, I might add) I gave it a try and enjoyed it a lot more than I had back in 2003/4. Just not enough to keep logging in after the initial rush.

Moving on from the game that shouldn't be on the list at all, we come to the ones I tried just to say I had. Chief among those is Hello Kitty Online. I played HKO maybe two or three times. I downloaded it because people insisted on using it as a pejorative in general chat in MMORPGs I did play and that irritated me.

What's not to love?

My feeling was that none of the people using the fashion-challenged feline as a stick to beat their supposed inferiors with would actually have played the game. If I wanted to be able to call them out on that I had to have some basic experience myself.

Also, I do like Hello Kitty, with whom I have a little history. I remember the first time I happened upon a display of HK merchandize in real life, in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona sometime in the early '90s. I was so amazed I bought a couple of items, one of which I later gave to someone I worked with as a leaving present, when they went back to the U.S.

I can remember all of that but almost nothing about Hello Kitty Online, except that it was a lot less casual than I'd imagined. I know I used that as a deflating counter-argument in chat battles a few times, although finding Hello Kitty Online more challenging than I expected was perhaps not exactly the argument-clincher I was looking for.

Speaking of memory and its failings, this is where I offer a practical dmonstration. I thought I'd played Mythos, which is why it's in this section instead of in yesterday's post, where it should have been. Turns out, on fuirther investigation, I never played it at all.

There was a brief period when a clutch of online games using Greek and Roman mythology as a backdrop appeared at around the same time. I played at least two of them and I thought Mythos was one of those but, looking at some reviews and screenshots, it clearly wasn't.

The game I was thinking of, which I remember playing quite a few times, was Mytheon not Mythos. It's still running. You can get it on Steam. Looking at the screenshots, Mythos looks like a more interesting title. I kind of wish I'd played that instead.

Moving swiftly on, we come to games I played a fair bit, on and off, but which never made it into the majors. Minions of Mirth is almost the poster child for my personal minor leagues. (Way to go there, Bhagpuss! A mixed metaphor combining two cultural touchstones, neither of which form any part of your own immediate culture. Some kind of a record, I think. Plus now you're talking about yourself in the second person...)

Someone exploring much further into Minions of Mirth than I ever managed.

MoM was unusual in that it could be played either as a full MMORPG or as a single-player game. That seemed like a great idea back in 2005 and it still seems like one now. Wouldn't it solve all kinds of problems? And if an obscure indie like Prairie Games could do it, what's stopping the big guns?

Minions of Mirth was an EQ-inspired game with graphics that looked more dated than EQ's even in 2005. I must have played through the starting area four or five times over the years but I never really got much farther than the equivalent of Qeynos Hills. The MMORPG closed its gates a couple of years back but the single-player version is still available. I even have it installed although I doubt I'll ever play it again.

Marvel Heroes is an odd one. I played it quite a few times and read about it a lot more because several bloggers I followed seemed to be very into it indeed. For me, the game doubled down on two things I really don't like at all: the Diablo-style lootfest and the aforementioned superhero action mode.

I grew up with the Marvel characters, although I was (and remain) a DC fan at heart. Marvel Heroes seemed to me to strip away virtually everything that had made Marvel the most successful comics publisher of the late twentieth century and which went on to make it one of the most profitable and worshipped global brands of the early twenty-first.

It seemed to me like a game designed by people whose only knowledge of the characters came from a short conversation with a six-year old child. Costumes? Check! Powers? Check! Personality, motivation, backstory, depth? I dunno what those things are, mister. It was the MMORPG equivalent of smashing action figures together and shouting "Bam!", something I didn't even do when I was six years old.

The most interesting thing about Marvel Heroes for me was the bizarre way it ended. Made no sense at all. Just like the game.

Stolen from my own blog.

But then, what happened to Marvel Heroes at the end happened to Firefall time and time again, while it was still running. Was there ever a game that changed direction so many times? Or suffered so many public disputes among its developers?

I played it in a couple of its variants. It wasn't the sort of game that seemed likely to appeal to me - I'm not mad keen on shooters and I don't have a lot of time or affection for mech-suits - but a couple of bloggers kept writing interesting stories about it so I thought I'd give it a try.

I enjoyed it much more than I expected, even though I was absolutely terrible at playing it. I liked the environments and the jetpack movement. It also looked great in screenshots, which always helps, particularly since, by this time, I had a blog to put them in.

The thing about opinions on Firefall is this: they depends entirely which version the opinion-holder played. Each major revision was so radical Red5 might as well have re-marketed them as new games. I liked the version with the public quests based around thumping. That one would have made for a solid MMORPG experience, I think. When they took that out I liked it a lot less. It felt more like a single-player game the last time I logged in.

That's the last of the also-rans. looks like this is shaping up to be to be a trilogy. Part three will get to the games I played for long enough to have something of substance to say about them. Or so we may hope.

Except there's one anomaly to dispose of first. The game I mentioned at the top of the post. The one that really has no reason being on PC Gamer's list at all. Not because someone can't read a calendar but because someone apparently can't read reality.

Much though some would like to believe otherwise, EQNext never existed. There was no game, ever. All there was were some videos, a lot of concept art and a few minutes of faked gameplay put together for a convention.

Blurry and out of focus. How appropriate.

It's quite hard to dig that little fact out of the welter of "Oh noes! My beloved EQNext is no more!" eulogies that clog the filters of a google search but as Feldon explains in an incendiary demolition of the entire EQNext debacle at EQ2Wire, "The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

It wasn't just the demo; the entire EQNext project was smoke and mirrors. There was no game. There never had been a game. There never would be a game. It has no place on a list of MMORPGs that lived and died because it never did either of those things. I'd say good riddance to it but even that gives its existence more credence than it deserves.

Landmark definitely did exist, though, and I'll get to it next time, along with Vanguard, Warhammer, Free Realms and Wildstar. I'll even bring my own screenshots!

This Used To Be The Future

I was looking through my back pages the other day, searching for anything I might already have said about Pirate 101, when I found something interesting. My first attempt, I think, to list all the upcoming MMORPGs and/or Expansions I was looking forward to playing in the near future.

For a long time posts like that were ten a penny in this corner of the blogosphere. There seemed to be more MMOs in development than most of us were ever likely to have time to play. Which to grab, which to dodge?

The post in question dates from October 2012. The games and expansions I was considering - all of which were yet to launch at the time of writing - were these:

• Pirate 101
• Marvel Heroes
• City of Steam
• FFXIV: A Realm Reborn
• Rift: Storm Legion
• EQ2: Chains of Eternity
• Otherland
• Neverwinter
• Planetside 2

It's an interesting list in and of itself, if only because everything on there did, in fact, launch. I have other, later posts of this nature where that is very much not the case.

In 2012, F2P was still bedding in. The era of Early Access, Kickstarter and pay-to-play Alpha lay ahead of us. By and large, we still expected our MMOs to come from mainstream developers or at least indies with funding already secured. If a game was announced we expected it to launch - probably a little late but certainly not never.

Reading through my brief notes on what I was expecting back then, it's clear I never doubted that all these games would go Live. If I was posting something similar now - assuming I could even come up with nine titles I wanted to play - that certainly wouldn't be the case any more.

Let's look at each in turn, what I said I was going to do, what I actually did and how the game got along, with or without me:

Pirate 101 - " ...the KingsIsle style and try-before-you-buy model makes this a definite"

No, it doesn't. I played the Sneak Peak for about an hour and then waited six years to play the game proper. Turns out it was pretty good after all. It's still running successfully and likely to carry on doing so for a good while longer.

Marvel Heroes - "I really would like a super-hero MMO in my rotation... maybe this is the one."

It wasn't. After taking the trouble to sign up for beta and getting in I played Marvel heroes maybe four or five times. I didn't like it much. The character models were too small to see properly, the gameplay was repetitive and it didn't feel anything like a super-hero game.

MH trucked along very successfully for several years before crashing and burning in spectacular style for reasons that are still somewhat unexplained. An odd and unexpected ending. When it went I sort of wished I'd given it a better run but in the end it probably just wasn't my kind of thing.

City of Steam - "Absolutely love this game... I'll be playing and writing about it."

I did love it. I still do. I played and wrote about it plenty but still not enough. One of my favorite MMORPGs and definintely one that failed to live up to its full potential.

The original vision for the game was, as I wrote, "a real labor of love" but financial issues led to a very poor publishing deal from which the game never fully recovered. Now, sadly, sunset, although the possibility of some kind of revival or revisiting of the IP remains a tantalizing possibility.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - "I'll probably at least try it"

I did. For a month. When the came time to subscribe, I declined.

I had - still have - very mixed feelings about FFXIV. I like the world, the races, the classes, the look and feel. I even like the combat. Most of the gameplay, however, I despise. I find it coercive, restrictive and above all paternalistic. Pottering around at low levels is wonderful but any serious attempt at character progression leads immediately to boredom, swiftly followed by anger.

FFXIV is by far the closest anyone's come to remaking World of Warcraft but in doing so it seems to me to have doubled down on all the worst aspects of that game. Despite  - or more likely because of - that it's been a major success story for the genre, coming at a time when one was badly needed.

Rift: Storm Legion: "I will get this but again mid-November is probably too soon".

Yes I did and yes it was but Trion offered a very enticing 12 month sub with pre-purchase and I fell for it. Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent a desultory week there before returning to GW2. I hated Storm Legion itself; Mrs Bhagpuss barely even set foot in it. A few months later, Trion unexpectedly took Rift F2P, thereby overturning a number of Scott Hartsman's earlier statements and rendering most of our twelve-month sub worthless. We got a "refund" in Rift Funny Money and Mrs Bhagpuss came back long enough to spend it all on decorating Dimensions, after which we left for good.

Since then Rift has limped along, finally resorting this year to a rushed and misfiring attempt to farm a crop of nostalgia that seems barely to have had time to ripen. Storm Legion remains generally unpopular as far as I can tell while Trion itself has made a habit of annoying its own customers. I was merely an early adopter. I suspect Trove, the weird cartoon blockbuilding game, pays most of the bills these days.

EQ2: Chains of Eternity - "...it's unthinkable that we won't eventually get this".

What do you mean, "we", Kemo Sabe? I don't believe Mrs Bhagpuss has set foot in EQ2 since GW2 launched. I do now own Chains of Eternity, mainly because it came free with a later expansion. I did eventually play all the way through the Signature quest line. It was okay but the more recent expansions have been better.

EQ2, like Rift, limps on, surviving but having seen better days. After the sale to...erm...I'll get back to you on that one... and the recent layoffs, I'm mostly just glad to see the servers are still up.

Otherland: "The IP has superb potential... going to give it a try. It's F2P so why wouldn't I?"

Why indeed? Perhaps because it was a buggy, unfinished mess that didn't so much fulfil that superb potential as trample it into the mud and jump up and down on it. And yet...I keep going back. I haven't not had a few good sessions there. I did get some blog posts out of it. The potential, trampled underfoot  as it may be, is still there, somewhere.

By far the most amazing thing about Otherland is that it's still up and running. It's been so close to being dead so many times and yet it plugs on. It's even getting new content in significant amounts and as a game it's far more stable and playable than it once was. Don't count it out just yet...

Neverwinter: "I'll be there day one when it goes Live, that's for sure."

I was but I didn't hang around long. Looking back at this list, it's my enthusiasm for Neverwinter that surprises me the most. I don't remember being so fired up for it. I think I must have imagined it as an updated version of NWN2 because I was clearly planning on writing scenarios for it. I never did. I never even opened the scenario tools.

Neverwinter doesn't seem to get a huge amount of press attention any more but as far as I know it remains a successful, well-populated MMORPG. It's certainly been well-reviewed and favorably written up by a number of bloggers I follow. I've dipped in a few times and I might take another look one day. No hurry. I imagine it'll be around for a good while longer.

Planetside 2 : "I've been in beta for a while but I haven't played much...I can use my existing SOE account so it's going to happen".

No it's not. I played maybe three or four short sessions in beta. I had next to no idea what I was doing and I didn't enjoy it much. I might have logged in once or twice since PS2 went Live but if so it would only have been to get a blog out of it.

As for how it's doing, messages seem to be mixed. It certainly has a following and I've read a few blogs and comments that suggest it can be good fun. Whether it makes any money for DBG, who knows? It's still there, though, which counts for something.

So there we have it. Nine hotly-anticipated slices of video game entertainment and I ended up enjoying precisely none of them with the intensity or investment I predicted. As I said, at least they all did materialize, most of them approximately when they were expected, but all of them either turned out to be somewhat underwhelming or just not for me.

Of the nine, the one I'd most like to play right now and the one I'd say I got the most pleasure from over the longest time was City of Steam. Sod's law that's one of the two that's already gone.

At least I've rediscovered Pirate 101 in time to give it a fair shake. Looking good so far...

Back In The Groove

Hasn't it been quiet around here? We had a lovely holiday, thanks for asking. I did consider posting from my Tablet but it never quite happened. Didn't even manage to keep up with my Feedly feed. Or, in fact, look at it at all. Going to consign last week to an alternate history and start again from here.

A quick flip through the MMO news shows a deal of activity. I see that Marvel Heroes is now live. I was in the beta for that one for several months but it had such odd and restrictive hours that I hardly ever managed to log in. I liked what little I had a chance to see. It looks like a fun diversion.

City of Steam is up to Elves and as it's the only MMO that has Elves I'm willing to play, I'll probably be starting one soon. I'm still keeping my powder dry for the coming of the Greenskins really though.

I see from TAGN that Wilhelm and Potshot dipped their toes in the Neverwinter stream with Wilhelm feeling much the same about it as I did. It looks great, it's a lot of fun while you're playing it but once you stop you kind of forget about it altogether. There's a supposedly epochal, game-changing patch dropping soon I hear so maybe it'll be time to take another look once that's landed.

Dragon's Prophet is already in open beta in the EU. I can't work out which version I'm in. I think it's the US one since our SOE accounts are, well, SOE accounts not PSS1s. Keeping an eye on that, since it wins the award as Most Improved MMO In Beta (albeit from a very low base).

GW2 rumbles on sending odd boulders of content tumbling while underneath the gameplay landmass creeps forward at glacial speed. As soon as I finish this I'll be off to see the Karka Queen. I look forward to the vague but interesting-sounding WvW changes at some unspecified date in the future.

While on Holiday Mrs Bhagpuss expressed a desire to get back to designing and building houses. With WildStar still some months off and FFXIV supposedly launching in August sans its extensive housing system, due to form the main part of that game's first major content update, this may mean the soon-to-be F2P Rift's Dimensions or a return to EQ2. I'm about ready to buy the Chains of Eternity expansion and get back to some Ratonga leveling action meself, so that's on the cards for the summer.

And against all odds I'm still playing DinoStorm. Well, I'm logging in daily. I got my bandana just before we went away. Go me!

All in all, as usual, far more on the plate than will fit in the stomach. Or something. Anyway, I have a Karka Queen to kill so I'm off to do that first. We'll see where we go from there.

Look! Over There! They're Coming Right At Us!

There's an awful lot going on in the MMO world this year and like an ill-chosen pair of hipster slacks there's some bunching up around the back end. Mainly to keep it straight in my own mind, here's what I can remember of the soon-comes on my maybe list.

Pirate 101
Almost upon us! Goes live on October 15th. Wizard 101 was a favorite Chez Bhagpuss for a while. Pirates is a theme that doesn't do an awful lot for me, but the KingsIsle style and try-before-you-buy model makes this a definite, although I'll probably have to wait for a more favorable tide before setting sail.

Marvel Heroes
Closed Beta just started. I was going to wait for launch but I cracked while getting the link for this post and signed up!  As a lifelong reader of superhero comics I really would like a super-hero MMO in my rotation but COH and Champions never really did it for me and while I like DCUO a lot, I did feel I'd been there and done that after a couple of months. Maybe this is the one.

City of Steam 
 Beta in November. No invite yet. I played Sneak Peak and Alpha so I'm hoping to get in. Absolutely love this game. If I'm in I'll be playing and writing about it. Wish it would hurry up and go Live but can't fault the team behind it for wanting to get it right - it's clearly a real labor of love and we need more of those in the genre, or at least we do if they're done as well as this.

FFXIV A Realm Reborn  
FFXIV closes its servers in early November then re-opens them shortly after to beta this reboot. Release date for take two is still "2012" although that seems to be optimistic. After my experiences in FFXIV beta I haven't bothered to apply this time round. It's a beautiful world and the atmosphere is like nothing anywhere else. Haven't seen the payment model details yet but it's bound to be some form of subscription. If I don't also have to buy a new client I'll probably at least try it. Not this year, though.

Rift: Storm Legion
November 13th for this. A huge addition to a game I already know I like a lot, with what looks to be an interesting take on housing to say the least. No question that both Mrs Bhagpuss and I will get this but again mid-November is probably too soon and I really don't feel that nag to be there day one for expansions the way I do for new games. If Rift was F2P I'd buy an expansion immediately, of course, even if I didn't yet have time to play it. With a subscription it'll have to wait until I have a good month clear, bare minimum. Again, not this year, I think. 

EQ2: Chains of Eternity 
There isn't even an official SOE page for this, and yet apparently it's due in November. Possibly. Firm information seems astonishingly hard to come by if that's true. We're a bit soured on EQ2 at the moment because of the PSS1 thing but we are still subbed and it's unthinkable that we won't eventually get this. Don't feel any need to rush, though. 

Otherland
"Q4 2012" release, according to the FAQ. I think they've had one beta weekend so far, to which I did get an invite, but which clashed with something else so I didn't even log in. I'd be surprised if this does launch this year. The IP has superb potential but I'm less interested than I was now it has "Action" attached to the "MMO". Still going to give it a try. It's F2P so why wouldn't I?

Neverwinter
And another for Q4 2012. I just wrote about this. Resisted signing up for beta so far because I don't want to end up spending hours creating scenarios that will vanish into the aether when beta ends. How long my willpower will hold up I wouldn't like to say but even if I'm able to resist the siren call of beta I'll be there day one when it goes Live, that's for sure. 

Planetside2
Some sources had this as a 2012 release but I note that the FAQ now only says "We will have more information on this in the months ahead". Beta is up and running and there's a buy-in pack, though so it's as good as out already. I've been in beta for a while but I haven't played much. I'm all patched up but the several times I've tried to log in lately the servers have been down - just bad luck. FPS is so not my genre but again, F2P and I can use my existing SOE account so it's going to happen.

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Other big releases that aren't on my personal radar would include Panda Panda, Who's Got The Panda? (which I admit sounds quite fun according to quite a few bloggers whose opinions I respect) and LotRO: Riders of Rohan. I still have LotRO installed. I still log in once in a while. My highest character is in the 40s. There's the math, you do it. And of course we have GW2 which is going to see out this year for me and next and the one after that no doubt, and The Secret World, to which I will most definitely return once the pay barrier drops. Oh and Free Realms added a new zone. I do like Free Realms, when I remember it exists. And that's just new stuff this year. All the old favorites still deserve attention, too.

So much. So too, too much. Roll around in it like Scrooge McDuck. Let's not even think about WildStar, ArchAge, EQNext...


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