What's Going On

Steam has several primary functions. It's a store-front, where you can buy games. It's a platform, from which you can access and launch them. It also acts as a kind of social network for players and it provides a virtual fairground for games companies and developers, with its endless parade of special interest events, such as next month's NextFest or next week's Open World Survival Crafting Fest.

All of which is very helpful and useful and so on but there's another aspect of Steam's service I'm only now beginning to appreciate. It's a great place to get gaming news.

You'd think there'd be enough of those around already but I've always found it unecessarily hard to find the kind of news I wanted, presented in the way I wanted to receive it. Many, maybe most, gaming sites seem to be more interested in being entertaining than informative.

I used to complain quite frequently that what I wanted from MMO news sites like MassivelyOP was a lot less editorial and opinion and a lot more straight news reporting. I fully appreciate that just recycling PR handouts doesn't bring the eyeballs and pay the bills like snark, sarcasm and clickbait headlines but it's a plain fact that the posts I read all the way through at MOP are the ones that stick most closely to the information handed them by games developers. 

I realize it's hypocritical of me to complain about other people doing exactly what I do here all the time, namely using publicity material as a springboard for a string of self-indulgent dad jokes. My justification is that this is a personal blog, not a professional website. My one and only brief is to keep myself amused. If in doing so I happen to amuse anyone else, that's gravy.

I hate gravy, by the way. Who wants wet food? How did that ever get to be the benchmark?

See? That's the sort of self-indulgence I'm talking about. And so is this. Do you really want that sort of nonsense in your news reporting? I don't, which is why I'm constantly on the verge of removing MOP from my news feeds. 

And yet somehow it never happens. The problem is, no-one else covers the industry segment that interests me as fully and accurately as they do. MassivelyOP doesn't catch every development in the genre but it nets more than anyone else I've found and frequently tells me things I didn't know about games I play or introduces me to games I hadn't heard of. I have other MMO news sites in my Feedly, notably MMOBomb, whose coverage tends to be a lot straighter than MOP, if still prone to the occasional, unsolicited opinion, but it's rare for any of them to scoop Bree and her team.

Still, what I would really like is a true news aggregator for the genre. Something that just collates and distributes the press releases sent out by gaming companies and links them, unedited and unfiltered, under simple, declarative headings. That would allow me to skim them, read the ones that interest me and then do my own research to see how accurate or otherwise I feel the information promulgated by the marketing departments might be. I do love to do my own research.

It's taken me a long time to realize it but in a way that's what I already have with Steam. 

I tend to use Steam mainly from the Library page. Along the top is a band called What's New. For a long time I ignored it completely. It was only when I started to notice that information about a game I thought was all but dead was appearing almost daily that I started to pay attention. 

Few people reading this probably remember Bless Unleashed. Even fewer care what happened to it. I imagine most people who recognize the name assume it either closed down or went into maintenance mode long ago.

That's about what I thought, too. I did have a vague recollection of some half-assed conversion to NFTs or blockchain, back when those were the scam-du-jour, but so many fading, failing games tried jumping that bandwagon, none of the details really stuck with me. 

I still don't really have any clue how Bless Unleashed is doing. I uninstalled it a while back to free up some hard drive space so I can't log in to check for myself. I can tell you that according to the Steam charts it has a 30-day average of just under 500 players, which isn't a lot, although it's better than many MMOs on Steam. Lord of the Rings Online, for example, only has about a hundred more Steam players than that. MMOs often have multiple points of access, so Steam charts don't tell the whole story.

As for Bless Unleashed drifting dead in the water, belly-up in the oil slick of maintenance mode, thanks to Steam's What's New strip rolling along the top of my screen, I can confidently say it's not. As I write, news of updates for Bless Unleashed takes up much of the row. The game patched twice on May 17 and again on May 22. It also required an Emergency Update on the 20th and on the 22nd. An activity called "Ordo Chess" was added, along with half a dozen quality-of-life adjustments and the inevitable cash shop offers.

It's nothing major in itself but having played many similar MMORPGs, where even minimal updates like these dried up completely with no word at all from the developers for months on end, it definitely shows the game remains a going concern for the publisher and that there's still someone being paid to work on it.

Steam's What's New is how I heard about the bizarre bee competition in Rift. Like Valofe, who publish Bless Unleashed these days, Gamigo pump out a stream of "updates" I only know about from the news squibs. Granted, almost all of them are re-runs of events Trion originated but even that shows a kind of active engagement missing from games in true maintenance mode.

As a promotional tactic, it works. Better than you'd imagine. I still have Rift installed and I do occasionally log in as a result of reading something in that strip across the top of my screen. I did the quiz and I don't even want the prize. If I'd read about it in a quip-filled paragraph on a gaming website, I doubt I'd have bothered. 

I find  information presented this way, unmediated and without commentary, more engaging and involving than most of what I read after it's been filtered through the observations and interpretations of a third party and there's good reason for that. It's how I was brought up by print journalism.

Back in the day, when I got all my music news from the inkies, there was a very clear division between news and opinion. The first few pages were filled with news, which was presented entirely without comment, just the bald facts. Once past that, opinions ruled. Interviews, editorial, reviews, columns - it was a free-for-all filled with irony, ridicule, posturing, pretension and pontification and I loved it. 

Even now, most of the music websites I follow operate under roughly the same rule: news up front, no commentary; opinion in the back and give 'em hell! I'd love it if I could get my gaming news the same way but so far I've yet to find a site that covers the games that interest me in the way I'd like, which is why I'm so pleased to have identified a possible alternative.

The limiting factor for Steam's What's New, of course, is that it only feeds me information about games I have registered with the platform. And it seems as though only a subset of developers choose to send that information to the channel. 

I hear a lot about Bless Unleashed and Rift. I read plenty on AdventureQuest 3D (Did you know they're about to remove level scaling from the game almost completely? That's worth a post of its own.). Palworld, Nightingale, New World and Palia all keep me up to date with everything they're doing. I even hear from Legend of Edda occasionally, although that one sends me emails more often than it posts updates.

Other games on my roster remain silent, which might lead me to think they'd died, if it wasn't for another benefit of having them on Steam: the Community Hub. The hub is not, in my opinion, as good as the What's New feed for the simple reason I have to go looking for it. I have to think of the game, wonder what's going on with it, find it in my Library and click through to the Community page before I can see any news there might be.

I just did that with two MMORPGs I play - or at least used to play - through Steam. Both of them used to post regular updates in the news feed but neither of them has appeared there for a while. Having made the effort to catch up with them both, I can now tell you Dawnlands hasn't issued any kind of update or news since just before Christmas but Dragon Nest has been putting out a solid four notifications per month all year, none of which I have seen.

Why those have stopped appearing in my feed I have no clue but I wish they hadn't. I don't care that i'm not playing the game any more. I don't even care that I maybe can't play it, thanks to the endless fuck-ups with regionalization Dragon Nest has always been subject to. I would still like to read about what's going on there even if I can't join in.

I was a tardy and reluctant adopter when it came to Steam and since I caved and began using it I've treated it grudgingly and with bad grace. No more. I'm beginning to see more advantages than drawbacks in using the platform and I plan on making more of the opportunities it offers in future.

If I can't get what I want from the gaming press, perhaps I can get it from Valve. Or from Microsoft, if rumors are to be believed.

I didn't read that on Steam, though, and I doubt I ever will, at least until it's a done deal. 

I guess I won't be removing those gaming sites from my Feedly after all.

New World, Old World

It's been a good, long while since a news item on Massively:OP piqued my interest but the last twenty-four hours pinged a couple of blips on the radar. Blipped a couple of pings? Does radar even make a noise or do they just dub it in to make it more exciting in the movies?

First came a heads-up that Amazon had broken radio silence on New World. I haven't really thought about the game much since the alpha went offline back in May. I certainly haven't been following the Twitter feed so I was unaware that it had a) been inactive for months and b) had just come back to life.

This, of course, is why I still check M:OP every day, even though almost everything there, apart from the news itself, raises my blood pressure. There isn't any more comprehensive or timely coverage of the genre and I'm guessing there's not likely to be so I make the best of it.

When Amazon said they were taking New World back behind closed doors to "“design major new features” that were “large in scope and create changes to the world that could be disruptive.”", to quote Massively quoting Amazon, I saw no reason not to take them at their word. I was surprised (although I really shouldn't have been) to see M:OP taking a doom and gloom tack on the story back in May and even more suprised (again, why?) to see them still rowing that boat even now.

Amazon isn't some nebulous, sketchy indie, prone to making grand claims with no means of backing them up. It's one of the biggest companies in the world with a reach and scope that dwarfs even major game development houses. Why would they want to claim they were still working on a game when they actually weren't? True, they also have the resources to can a product in development if it doesn't seem to be going anywhere but, as we have already seen with Breakaway, if they're going to do that they won't be slow in telling us.

I have so many better screenshots of New World than the ones I can use here...

I always expected that New World would return, bigger and better than before (at least from its developers' perspective). It looks as though that day is coming. Possibly as soon as this Friday.

As far as I know, the NDA for New World's alpha is still in force. It was a pretty strict one, too. Still, I've always held the belief that very few developers worry about positive leaks. I really liked New World and I wasn't expecting to. The world was gorgeous, exploration was compulsive, the survival gameplay was accessible and satisfying and the lore was intriguing.

Combat was fine - reminded me a little of Black Desert - and in the time I spent there I saw no indication that the game was or would become a "survival gankbox", which seems to be the current buzzword among M:OP commenters. I realize alpha populations often don't represent post-launch behaviors but in the time I spent in alpha I think I got into a fight with another player precisely once. Most of the time, when players would pass each other, there'd be a wave and that was all.

Anyway, I'm excited to see what Amazon have to tell us about where New World goes next. It would be nice to see it return with more directed, narrative content, something its fascinating setting looks admirably well set to support.

Looks a bit like my Mara Estate in EQII.

The second news item at M:OP that caught my attention really couldn't be further apart and still be on the same spectrum. It relates to an upcoming MMORPG that had previously escaped my notice, although Massively had already mentioned it in despatches a while back.

The game in question is called Inferna and it was due to go into Early Access via Steam four days ago. That never happened. But it's still on, apparently.

The new "launch" date is December 20. The game has been held back "to firm things up" as M:OP put it, a process that involves "updates and new features", details unknown.

I watched the embedded gameplay video and found myself... intrigued? Puzzled, too. It looks for all the world like a trailer for an MMORPG from before the days of World of Warcraft. It actually reminded me of one of my favorite "lost" MMORPGs, Ferentus, a game I thought never made it out of beta (although maybe it did) but which apparently has - almost unbelievably - an active emulator project.

Horse Power!

Always up for another old-school, tab-target, hotbar MMORPG, I clicked through to the official website. It has to be the least-informative I have ever seen, particularly for a game that was meant to have entered Early Access last week.

The very, very few claims the website make are... vague. "Incredible Atmosphere", "Catchy Battles", "Get Awards". And... that's it. Doesn't even tell you the Classes or Races.

There are links to a slew of social media feeds - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - and a Discord server. I thought the missing detail might be over there, somewhere, so I took the trouble to look. And... I'm really none the wiser. I even joined the Discord, but all I found under "Game News" was the new EA date and this:

"In the game you can slip into the role of a hero, who you can choose from 4 character classes. At the beginning you have to decide whether you want to start as a magician, warrior, assassin or semi-demon and within the class you can still choose your fighting style."

Well, it's more than I got from the website. It's also the first paragraph of the entry on the Steam page. Steam seems to have received the bulk of what little detail there is, i.e. not very much at all. We do at least find out the name of the world - Pangaeu. Also that "...the glory days of security and unity are over". Aren't they always? Why is it we never get to explore these empires at the height of their powers, only in decline or crisis?

There are two starting cities, Caratas or Jerro, from where you can set out to explore "numerous maps", something you'll want to do because "Various runs and dungeons await you". There are also quests "throughout the game" that will "give you an insight into the past, present and future of Pangaeu".

I surmise Inferna is going to be a pretty traditional, quest-driven MMORPG. More than that, who knows? About the only unusual aspect I can see is the checkbox on Steam for supported languages. There are a dozen and they all include "full audio". That would be impressive indeed, only nothing actually states outright that the game even has voice acting. There's none in the videos.

Two hobbits, three lizardmen and a snake. Think I bought a 12" by them back in the '90s.

I can't even tell if Inferna is primarily oriented towards PvE or PvP. It has an "online PvP" tag on Steam and there's mention of protecting the kingdom of your choice "against the darkness and the enemy realm" but other than that I see no reference to fighting other players.

Indeed, what little detail there is suggests a PvE orientated experience: "You will fight your way through hordes of monsters alone or in a team... We currently have a functional base game with the most important features ready (combat, party system for playing with your friends, various item upgrade mechanics, trading, multiple maps, quests and more)."

Another thing I can't seem to find is any indication of pricing. The game itself, when it finally launches, is going to be Free to Play. It says so in big letters at the top of the main page on the website. But, as we all know, F2P at launch doesn't preclude paid-for Early Access packs and/or a functioning pre-launch cash shop.

For now, though, Inferna has nothing like that. Maybe it really is free. I guess we'll find out for sure when it goes live on Steam in just over a week.

I do like the general, old-fashioned look of the game. If it turns out you can play at no cost I'll definitely take a look. I'm minded to give it a try even if there's a small entry fee. I might use my $15 Grand Prize from IntPiPoMo. If that doesn't cover the door charge, though, I'll probably pass.