Under The Radar: EQ2, DCUO

Syp is a great ambassador for the MMO genre. He's enthusiastic, curious and indefatigable. He's the most entertaining writer at MassivelyOP as well as, with his Game Archeologist series, the most informative.

When it comes to Daybreak Games, though, he does seem to have a bit of a blind spot. The introduction to a recent post on games we haven't heard much of for a while (the DBG title in question being Planetside2) reminded me of the kind of call you might get from your mother six weeks into the second year of college - "Are you okay? Are you sure you're okay? Is there something you're not telling us? You never write, you never call...we worry about you!"

It is true that DBG seems less interested these days in pushing new product to a new audience. The focus seems to be much more on dishing up a familiar diet to the customers they already have. It's interesting to learn that DBG's PR department "hardly ever (read: never) sends out notices these days"). Radio silence for the media, while, for those of us actually playing the games, there's a steady stream of information and new content.

This week brought a couple of new developments to DBG's portfolio, one a major and long-awaited revamp, the other a small tweak to a holiday event. Guess which impressed me most.

The big ticket event was the sweeping change to the way stats work in DCUO. I can't remember how long ago this was trailed; it seems like years ago. I remember I'd just made a fresh character on my new All Access account. I was enjoying leveling her up but as details about the extent of the revamp filtered out I decided to mothball her pending the patch.

By the time that patch finally arrived I'd forgotten so much about how the game worked that any subtleties buried in the new systems were utterly lost on me. I logged in, got lost in the JLA Watchtower as usual, then made a complete hash of choosing my new powers and abilities.

I ended up putting all my points into my travel options. Fortunately, in DCUO travel powers are also fighting powers, so I can still function. It's not the character I was planning on playing though. Lucky I finally found a mailbox to collect the free respec token granted to subscribers. I'm going to need it!

The game seemed busy, especially given most of the action takes place in instances so the huge majority of players are never visible. The Watchtower resounded with explosions as players dueled each other, or pretended to. The hallways of the Metropolis PD stations were alive with heroes zipping in and out. It's always hard to judge but DCUO seems healthy.

EQ2 may not be quite as insanely sprawling as EverQuest but as it approaches a decade and a half of continual growth the in-game real estate is far too large for anyone to assess the population at a glance. Periodically, certain events cause critical masses of players to coalesce; the launch of the Fallen Gate server was one such occasion and to a lesser extent so is every in-game Holiday.

Mid-summer means Tinkerfest, one of my favorite Norrathian holidays. I would have made time to log in for the gnomish festival even if nothing had changed since last year but as it happens there was a very big addition to the blueprint for 2017.

Public Quests got off to a shaky start in EQ2 but over the years they have become a core part of gameplay. "Any PQs up?" would probably head the list of "Things people ask in General Chat" these days, closely followed by "Can I get an invite?" as each zone hosting an active Public Quest fills to capacity.

I love PQs. In every MMO I play they are an absolute highlight: Dynamic Events and World Bosses in GW2 Invasions in WoW, Rifts in Rift, even FATES in FFXIV, it seems to me that this is the gameplay MMOs were invented to provide.

EQ2 doesn't have a huge number of PQs but they're being added all the time and they are getting better and better. The new one that came with Tinkerfest is top-notch.

It's called Hack & Slash and EQTraders has a great write-up. I won't go over that ground again. If you play EQ2 at all, log in and go do the PQ before it vanishes next week. If you don't, read Naimi Denmother's piece and wish you did.

I've said this before but it very much bears repeating. Whatever may be going on behind the scenes at DBG and however much certain customer-facing representatives may appear to lack any of the necessary skills for that role, when it comes to adding free, fun content that inspires me to want to log in and play, the EQ2 team has no competition at all.

Every holiday event they step up to the mark but this time they really hit the ball out of the park. It's not just the quality of the events and quests themselves, which is uniformly high, but it's the rewards. They are almost always truly desirable.

I can only dream that one day ANet might come up with a Living Story episode that includes a single item I actually want. It could happen. I guess. For Tinkerfest this year, for the most determined we have the big ticket reward from Hack & Slash, the Spidermech Defender familiar (which I can't link because no-one's made one yet).

For everyone else we have a slew of house items, cosmetic pets and plushies as well as the regular PQ armor drops and a new helmet. I got a house pet from the very first one I did and I was as excited as if I'd had an Ascended Weapon crate in GW2 - more excited!

Since then I've done the PQ twice more and received a plushie and an excellent furniture item with a revolving turret. This is what I want!

What's more, the event itself is an absolute hoot. PQs in EQ2 are very hard to screenshot because they are, without exception, a chaotic jumble of players, mobs and explosions. My personal heaven in  other words. I would absolutely do this particular PQ multiple times even if there were no rewards I wanted because it's thrilling, exhilarating and hilarious.

Returning to where we began, it's also very busy. I have no idea how many people are playing EQ2 these days and even less can I estimate whether however many it might be is sufficient to keep the game profitable. What I can say is that, from the perspective of a player, the game feels vibrant, bustling and very much alive.

I do wonder sometimes why I play anything else.

An Expansion By Any Other Name : EQ2

There seems to have been some very mild controversy over Daybreak Games' decision to tuck some of the recent Game Update 100 content behind the paywall of All Access membership. In a feature post I found confused and unconvincing, Massively OP's regular EQ2 correspondent MJ Guthrie described it as a "gaffe".

The gist of the argument against appears to be that since the new Scourge of Zek addition to the game is big enough to be an expansion it should therefore be sold as an expansion. Well, there's some merit in that, although, as we all should know from a million genre fantasy plotlines, the proper naming of things matters.

There's certainly no doubt it's large enough and sufficiently feature-complete to merit a box fee. If they'd chosen to launch it as a $30 expansion pack I'd have bought it, happily. On the other hand, I'm fully on board with the idea that it would have been more elegant to package up all the features, both severally and together, and sell them directly to non-subscribers through the Cash Shop but that's a road that SOE was always somewhat unwilling to go down and it doesn't appear that DBG is any keener to break that ground.

I think the best take on selling both content and subscriptions that I have seen is the way KingsIsle do it in Wizard 101. There they offer a range of options that include buying access to specific zones individually, then keeping that access in perpetuity, or paying a subscription that allows access to any zone at any time but only so long as you keep paying the subscription. LotRO works in much the same way.

While I would agree that a more flexible payment plan along those lines would be preferable, I don't think there's very much wrong with having content that is only available to subscribers. If you turn the current EQ2 issue on its head, rather than a slap in the face for the Free to Play crowd you might just as easily see GU100 as a hugely generous perk for subscribers. I'm a subscriber and that's definitely how I think of it.

All Access members, such as I, who were already paying our subs, had no particular right to think that we'd be getting a massive content drop like this midway between annual expansions. I certainly wasn't expecting one. This time last year DBG was trying to sell us the much smaller Rum Cellar "adventure pack" for $14.99. That didn't go down at all well so it seems a bit rich to start complaining now, when something several times larger (and better) is being handed out to subscribers for free.

The underlying issue here is not so much whether there was a better way to handle the release - there's always a better way. No, it's more a question of the underlying direction of travel. After five years and more of maneuvering and experimenting, few MMO companies have yet settled on a final strategy where payment models are concerned, but the idea of charging some kind of recurring access fee, something that, for a while, looked to be gone for good, is coming back into vogue.

Of course, there's a natural inclination to try to keep all the income streams flowing at once. Just because a game has a subscription doesn't mean it can't also have an aggressive cash shop as well. Similarly, why give up the potential advantages and synergies of combining business models? No-one wants to shut out potential customers completely, especially when they could be milling around the common areas, making the place look busy and spending some money in the cash shop while they're at it.

The drift appears to be back towards something that looks very much like the old-style subscription model, only this time front-ended by various flavors of extended, open-ended free trials - always backed up with an extensive cash shop. I really don't think any MMO from a major commercial developer is going to eschew direct sale in-game cash shops ever again. Why would you?

The water is inevitably muddied with the various "pay your sub with in-game coin" schemes like PLEX, REX, CRED, WoW Tokens or EQ2's own Krono. Who knows how people are using these, how they fund them, or even how the traded items enter the game? Yesterday when I was questing in Zek someone in the trade channel was looking to buy thousands of Kronos. It might have been tens of thousands. I forget exactly how many he wanted but he claimed to have many millions of plat ready to meet whatever offers came in.

With a plethora of purchasing plans like these I really can't see too much of a problem with gating specific content behind a subscription, not even when that content comes down to something as fundamental as access to zones or dungeons. After all, in the "good old days", if you didn't pay your sub you couldn't log in at all.

In the same way that MMORPGs are always works in progress, operating in an eternal quasi-beta state where nothing is ever final, so it seems the way we access and pay for them will go on changing. We can complain about it all we like - and we do - but in the end it's simple enough: do you want what they're selling and do you think it's worth what they're asking?

Answer "yes" to both of those questions and you're in. Answer "No" to either and you're out. As far as EQ2, GU100 and The Scourge of Zek are concerned - I'm in. For now.

Over Here! I Think You Missed One! : Realms Online

In that way things have of coming together sometimes, Zubon at Kill Ten Rats posted something recently about Salem, an MMO known in so far is it is known at all for its aspiration to permadeath. He came to hear of the game via Heartless, who had posted about it along with two other in-development MMOs, Otherlands and Dominus. Heartless headed his piece "The 3 MMOs you ARE NOT paying attention to but should be", somewhat ironically since one of the three, Dominus, had gone dark only a day or two earlier.

Zubon not only hadn't been paying attention to these titles but as he clarified he'd "stopped actively paying attention to game development years ago". Meanwhile, SynCaine had a busy discussion popping under the post he'd evocatively and provocatively titled "I Miss Massively". In the course of that thread Saucelah observed of Massively that " most of their stories are just write-ups of PR releases", an inarguable truism about which I observed that it was precisely as an aggregator of press releases that I found Massively most useful.

I do like to know what's going on. Even if I have no plans ever to play a particular MMO I still like to keep an eye on its progress. For heaven's sake, I still drop in and lurk on the Alganon forums once in a while! Massively's feed sits in my blog reader and I scan the headlines daily. If I spot an MMO that I don't recognize I'll click through and read the whole article. I'd been vaguely following the development of Dominus, Salem and Otherlands that way for months.

I have (had in the case of the now-defunct Dominus) no great interest in the first two but Otherlands is an MMO I mean to play so I sat up when they recently invited applications to alpha-test. I'm broadly in favor of beta-testing MMOs but I'm more ambivalent about alphas. I'm interested in giving feedback on gameplay but not so much in doing unpaid work to ensure the server architecture is solid and the game engine functions.

There are exceptions. I am quite hyped for the upcoming City of Steam alpha, scheduled to begin sometime in July. I'm hoping for an invite to that one not only because I very much like what I've seen of the game so far but also because Mechanist Games' idea of an alpha test looks rather like some other developers' picture of a game that's fit to launch.

There's been much discussion of late on the pros and cons of paying to beta-test. Gamigo, producers of Otherlands, aren't asking for your money yet but they've found another way to twist your arm. They've combined the publicity hype over winning a place in their alpha with an application process that makes it clear that all you'll win is the opportunity to do some serious work for no pay. I read the application form and decided to pass on their generous offer. I'll wait til open beta or launch, thanks all the same.

So I knew about these MMOs and many more from scanning the headlines, which is how I ran across Realms Online. Or Regnum. Same game, two names. When I noticed this news release a couple of weeks back it piqued my interest. Mrs Bhagpuss had been asking if there were any MMOs we hadn't played that have animal races and I hadn't been able to find any. Then up pop these Lamai, looking something like bushbabies waving swords.

Off I went to the website to look at this new MMO. Only it isn't. New, that is. Realms Online is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary in less than three weeks' time. So much for me having my finger on the pulse of MMO development. Or indeed my eye on the ball.

More surprising than my ignorance (pretty much anything would be) Realms Online appears to be something a lot of people seem to have been asking for - a Dark Age of Camelot clone. Out for five years, servers on three continents, known under two names, filling a gaping three-way RVR market hole, how did I miss it? Was it just me? Did you all play it years ago and now you've all moved on, leaving me to step out of character creation into the snow just as the servers merge? For the love of Mike, it's Argentina's most successful MMO! Oh, wait a moment...

Anyway, I've found it now. It's downloaded and I've played it and so far I like it. It's very old-school, feels like an MMO from quite a while before WoW and I very much doubt I shall ever give it a shake you'd call fair. Too many MMOs, too little time. Especially if new old ones keep creeping out of the undergrowth to ambush me like this.

Still, whenever I feel the urge to be a viking bushbaby with a sword, Realms Online will be my go-to game. And who among us can honestly say that's an urge they'll never have?