The Sun Comes Up On Another Vision Of The Past

Stars Reach isn't the only game in alpha (Sorry... pre-alpha...) running lengthy testing sessions just now. Monsters & Memories is also ramping up towards reaching some kind of always-on state later in the year - or perhaps early next year - by keeping the servers up for longer and longer periods.

There's a "Community Alpha Test" on right now. It started on Sunday and it runs through this coming weekend. There's another one, even longer, due in November.

I like Monsters&Memories. I like their testing program, too, it seems. This is the ninth time I've posted about the game and eight of those posts are me talking about what I did during a test. 

It's a curious contrast with Stars Reach where, enthusiastic as I may have been at the beginning, that  enthusiasm has waned, along with my interest, until it feels like only a misplaced sense of duty and the hope of finding something to fill a blog post keeps me logging in at all. Conversely, while I probably don't have any more played hours in Monsters&Memories than in Stars Reach, whenever the opportunity arises to take another look at M&M, I find myself getting almost excited at the prospect.

Not that I've been taking huge advantage of the longer tests in either game. I couldn't manage even a full hour in Stars Reach the other day and I didn't time it but I think my Monsters&Memories session yesterday evening came up a little shy of two hours.I really enjoyed it, though, and I hope to get one or two more sessions in before the servers close down on Sunday. 

It definitely helped that after I'd downloaded the latest launcher and patched up the game to the current version, my character from last time was still there, waiting for me. As I was saying in the feedback I sent to Playable Worlds, even during a testing phase, some sort of continuity is vital to keep players engaged. Well, to keep me engaged, anyway.

Not that it would have made any material difference if I'd had to re-roll and start from scratch. My character from last time hadn't even finished Level One. All she'd done was wander around the overwhelmingly huge city, getting constantly and repeatedly lost, trying to find the two or three NPCs needed for the one or two quests she had, before taking equally long to find the city gates so she could go out into the newbie yard and get killed almost immediately by a large beetle.

That, with only a few small variations, describes all my experiences with Monsters&Memories in every test so far. I make a character or pick up where I left off with the last one. I jog endlessly through the streets, up the countless steps and stairways, in and out of the innumerable buildings. round and round and round, sometimes with no goal in mind at all, sometimes hoping I might somehow stumble across some specific named NPC. 

It's usually dark. There's never any kind of map. Even in the city there are things that want to kill you. Outside the gates, on the sands, if you ever find out how to get there, nothing awaits you but darkness and death.

And yet it's somehow quite compulsive. Partly, the game just looks so good. I've seen reviews that say otherwise and it's certainly a low-detail, low-texture environment but the highly stylized design is effective and the lighting is really excellent. Every time I find myself taking lots of screenshots, few of which do the visuals I'm seeing in the game justice. Atmospheric lighting effects are notoriously hard to capture in stills.

At Level  One, gameplay is literally identical to EverQuest circa the turn of the millennium, which is hardly surprising. As I say every time I write about M&M, it basically is Classic EverQuest. 

This time, though, I managed to get further with the questing than ever before and it occurred to me that the exact period it's re-creating has to be a little past "Classic". I'd peg it around the time low-level armor and weapon quests were added, a process that began in 2002. Before that you wore cloth drops from orc pawns and liked it.

The extent to which the whole things feels just like playing EQ back then is astonishing. The mobs are the same. The spells have the same names. Some even have the same visual effects. 

You have to collect your quest drops in a six-slot bag and "combine" them into a new, separate "bag" that's actually a quest item. Then you hand it in by picking it up on your mouse pointer and dropping it onto the receiving NPC.It doesn't get much more old school than that.

Whether anyone under 35 would ever want to do any of it seems both highly unlikely and also quite beside the point. This is an old game for old people. 

Or is it? I read something quite interesting during Blaugust, where someone was saying the decades-long fetish for ever-better graphics is now washing up against the rocks of a generation raised on the likes of Minecraft and Roblox, games where everything looks like its made out of a load of brightly-colored blocks and no-one cares. Not to mention Old School Runescape.

And what do I know about the quest methodologies in those games, assuming they even exist there? Maybe combining a bunch of scorched skeleton bones in a burlap sack by pressing a big button marked COMBINE feels perfectly normal to people under 20 now. 

I'd bet the rate of progress doesn't though. Boy, is it ever slow! 

Or is it? These assumptions need to be challenged!

It took a while but it did finally occur to me last night that maybe I might be leveling up faster if I spent more of my time actually killing things and less of it running around the city. In EverQuest in 2002 we didn't generally expect to get our XP from quests. We just ran out the city gates ten seconds after we were created and got straight down to killing rats, like any normal person would.

 I find these days - and indeed these last couple of decades - that just the existence of a linear questline is enough to make me forget everything I once knew. In game after game I step on that escalator the moment I see it and do my best to ride it to the top, all the while complaining about how on rails the whole experience has become. 

When I find myself in a game that doesn't bully, bribe or cajole me into questing for a living, which neither Monsters&Memories nor Stars Reach does, rather than congratulating the developers on their thoughtfulness and consideration in treating me with respect, as someone capable of setting my own goals and finding my own fun, what do I do? Complain the game is aimless or purposeless or not even a game at all and start bleating on about how there's no narrative structure, like some caricature of an actor asking "...but what's my motivation?"

Just fricking get out there, kill stuff and watch your numbers go up! What more motivation do you need? I tried a bit of that yesterday and it got me to Level Two. Well, that and the quest hand-in...

I don't know. It's been a long time, hasn't it? Is this what we want any more? Is it what I want?

I guess when Monsters&Memories goes live I'm going to find out. Pantheon didn't do it for me so this is probably the last hurrah of the Golden Age horde. 

It's looking promising so far.

Tip Your Guards, I'm Here All Weekend

I don't have a lot to say about Monsters & Memories that I haven't said before but I'm not going to let that stop me. The retro-MMORPG from Niche Worlds Cult is open to all for the weekend, an opportunity I strongly recommend taking advantage of, should you have any interest or curiosity in either the specific project itself or the general proposition of games that seek to go back to the supposed golden days of 1999-2004.

Just one warning: if you are thinking of taking a look, make sure you set aside plenty of time. This is not one of those games you can drop into for half an hour to get its measure. It's OG EverQuest with better graphics and it's making very few compromises towards modernity.

That makes it sound more trying than it is. It's both fun and compelling, provided you know what you're getting yourself into. If you missed out on the "classic" MMORPG experience the first time round and haven't already taken one of the many, many opportunities to see for yourself what all the fuss was about (Just how many attempts to re-invent the MMO wheel have there been, now?) then this is definitely your moment.

Of all the games of its kind I've tried, I find M&M by some margin the most convincing. It doesn't try to fudge the deal with the kind of quality of life improvements pretty much every MMORPG since World of Warcraft have considered essential and yet it somehow still manages to be both accessible and less frustrating than its source material.

For example, there's no map. Not just no mini-map, a line plenty of would-be old school games choose not to cross; in Monsters & Memories, there's no map at all. There's not even a compass. If you want to know how to get from the harbor to the West Gate you either learn the route and remember the landmarks or you figure out where the sun is and orient yourself by that.

Pretty When You Die

I already knew the drill from my several previous visits and I'm pleased to say that I did at least spend considerably less time last night, wandering aimlessly around, hopelessly lost in the surprisingly large and complex starting city. That's not to say it didn't take me a good while, all the same. Or that I didn't end up swimming around the walls of the city from the docks because I couldn't find a route through the town that took me where I wanted to go.

Luckily for my character, she was in her underwear by then, so she didn't get her clothes wet. Everything she owned except her skivvies were still on her corpse, somewhere in the desert a few hundred yards outside the West Gate. I'd made the mistake of attacking a Fire Beetle. Not a good idea at Level One as it turns out.

I'd thought I might lose that fight but I wasn't that bothered because I could see the West Gate from where I was standing. I knew it would only take me a few moments to run back and reclaim my stuff. 

Except it turned out my character wasn't bound at the West Gate, even though I'm pretty sure that's where she spawned in. She was bound at the North Gate. It took me about twenty minutes to get back. After I realized I was looking for my corpse at the wrong gate, that is. Call it half an hour altogether.

By then I'd been playing for about ninety minutes. I spent a couple of hours in the game, including making a new character. There was no trace of any of my earlier ones, which was hardly a surprise, given the game still in fairly early testing.

You might not think it would take long to make a character, given how very few appearance options there are, but any time saved by not having to play around with sliders for eyebrow width or chin depth is easily lost as you read the details of numerous class and race options, pick your major and minor perks, adjust your stats and finally choose a deity. 

Not the god I chose.

That last part took longer than it might have because all the gods you can worship in the game are currently represented by what I assume is placeholder art - pictures of cats and dogs. If that's actually what they look like, it must be a very interesting pantheon...

In previous tests I went for an Elementalist, which is basically an EQ Magician, but this time I chose to be a Spellblade, a class I'm fairly sure doesn't have an exact analog in original EQ. I didn't exactly know what it was, if I'm honest. I just thought it sounded cool.

And I guess it might be if you get to play one past Level One. I couldn't tell you. I didn't get that far but as far as I did get, there certainly wasn't anything cool about mine.

Things started very well. Because I've played in previous tests but mostly because I still remember how we played EverQuest back in the day, I knew to open my inventory and read the note introducing me to my Guildmaster. Absolutely nothing in the game tells you to do that. Absolutely nothing in the game tells you to do anything. It expects you either to know or to figure it out for yourself.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. There is an option in the UI that sends you to a web-page with some advice for new players but I'm not sure that technically counts as "in-game" information.

As it happens, Spellblades share a Guildhouse with Elementalists and I remembered where that was. Also, it's a frickin' great tower you can see from all over the city, so it's hard to miss. I got there faster than usual and even more unexpectedly found my way almost immediately to the top, where my Guildmaster was waiting. It helped that there are teleports now and it helped even more that they look and work exactly like the ones in Erudin.

Jaffar's advice on where to find my trainer: "You probably passed him on the way up."

My Guildmaster was pleased to see me but he was far too important to do any more than wlecome me to the Guild and send me off to see someone else. That, right there, is emblematic of what to expect in the game. Imagine it from the perspective of a total newbie:

You log in with no idea where you are or what you're supposed to do. If, by blind luck or, more likely, by begging pathetically for help in General Chat, you find the note in your bag and figure out how to read it (Not by any means a given.) then you have to search the unfeasibly huge city for some NPC who turns out to be right at the very top of a tower, whose upper levels can only be accessed by teleporters with no obvious or intuitive means operation. And when you finally get to him, the bastard just nods at you and sends you off to see someone else!

Someone else who, I might add, was harder to find than the first guy. It took me ten minutes to work out where he was hiding and even then it was mostly luck. When I spoke to him he gave me a bag and told me to go fill it with bones from the undead that wander about just outside the gates. Six bones, please, no fewer. And don't bother bringing back any that aren't singed from the spell you're going to cast on your weapon. You know how to do that, right? No? Well, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

An hour later I had one bone and I was lucky to have that. It wasn't because the skeletons were too tough or because I couldn't find where they lurked or any of the usual reasons. It was because the average unlife expectancy of a rotting skeleton last night was about one and a half seconds. I saw quite a few but I only ever managed to get to one of them before someone else killed it.

See that Fire Beetle behind me? Bet I could take him!

I was on the US East Coast server and it was heaving. There were players everywhere and General chat scrolled endlessly, filled with the kind of questions and commentary that suggested everyone involved was a veteran of many similar experiences. Once in a while, someone would say something that marked them out as an initiate to the type of gameplay involved but almost everyone knew the ropes, They just wanted to query some specific detail of how this particular diku-mud variant differed from whichever  they were already familiar with.

Even though I must have done it before, it took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out how to scribe my special attack. I didn't have any trouble scribing my spell scrolls (Both of them.) so I was able to set my weapon on fire like a good Spellblade should and to cast a very small nuke about once every ten seconds. I also figured out, by opening the options and reading the keybinds, that "Q" turned on auto-attack. The scrolls in my pack for Taunt and whatever the attack was called, though? They were still there.

I didn't worry about it too much. Even without my special attack, how hard could it be to kill a bat? I couldn't find any undead so I thought I might as well kill something. 

Too hard for me, that's how hard it was. I couldn't put a dent in the flappy pest's health bar but he had no trouble chewing through mine at an alarming rate, so I ran. I tried running to the guards but they did nothing, which wasn't a surprise. People had been complaining about their fecklessness in chat all night.

I was faster than the bat, anyway, so I thought I'd just keep running until the creature leashed and left me alone. Only it seems M&M models itself on the era of EQ when mobs didn't leash. When they chased you to the zone line and stayed there, waiting, just in case you came back. 

It's that way, isn't it? I'm sure it's that way...

Eventually I gave in to the inevitable and turned to fight. It seemed like letting it kill me was the only way I was going to get the damn thing off my back. I was at about 10% health and flat out of mana, with the bat still very much fighting fit, when a passing player spotted I was in some difficulty and casually swatted the bat out of the sky as he passed. I thanked him and sat down to get my health back.

By then I was far into the city and lost all over again, which is how I ended up going out of the West Gate. It just happened to be nearest, although at the time I thought it was the one I'd come in through, which it wasn't. Probably. Honestly, who knows? The damn city's a maze and who can keep track when they're being chased by a rabid bat?

Since fighting with just one spell and auto-attack was clearly untenable, I sat down to read through some of the New Player advice on the website, which was how I finally figured out how to scribe the combat scrolls, which needed to go into a different page of my book to the spells. I thought I'd already tried that and it hadn't worked. Maybe I had. There was some lag around. I might well have given up, thinking nothing was happening, while the server was still struggling to do what I'd asked.

I thought I'd  give Spellblading another try, with a proper attack and all my mana, which is how I came to attack that Fire Beetle. To my credit, I did get the creature to about half health but once again there was no possible way I was going to win. Still, as I said earlier, I could see the gate from where I was, so it seemed like a good idea just to let the thing kill me, then run back for my stuff.

Well, we already know how that turned out. When it first happens to you, be aware there's no marker on the map to show you where to go, for the very good reason that, as mentioned earlier, there's no map. You need to note some landmark or other when you die or you'll be a long time looking. I imagine there are ways and means to locate a corpse but none that a level One character has access to, I think.

I did eventually find my corpse but I was dehydrated and starving by then because eating and drinking is a thing in the game and when you die everything stays on your corpse including all your food and drink. And your clothes. And your weapons. 

Sun's coming up so that must be East.

On the bright side, at the moment at least, being parched and hungry doesn't seem to impact gameplay much, if at all. I couldn't see any difference. It certainly didn't affect my stamina for swimming half way round the bay.

After I got my stuff back, I worked out where the skeletons spawned and managed to kill one before I got chased back to the gates by an angry gnoll. The guard actually dealt with that one, leading me to suspect that, as in some cities in EQ, guards only attack mobs that are innately aggressive, leaving you to deal with any wildlife you unwisely provoke.

I would have gone back to try for another skeleton but by then the lag was really kicking in and I got disconnected so I decided to call it a night. At no point was I not having fun, even when i was searching for my corpse. Even though in two hours I got pretty much nothing done and hadn't even made it to halfway through Level One, I felt I'd had a pretty good time.

Compare that with my brief exposure to Pantheon, in which I played for about as long and was bored almost the whole time. On paper, they're nearly the same game but in practice Monsters & Memories is a sunny afternoon messing around with your pals down the rec, while Pantheon is compulsory games at school under a grey sky with rain threatening. Probably not fair to Pantheon but definitely the impression I've been left with after trying the pair of them.

The last thing to mention is how unreasonably lovely Monster & Memories looks. The graphics are very simple and old-fashioned but they just glow with love and attention. Everything looks right, somehow and much more attractive than it should. I think the really excellent lighting has a lot to do with it. The sky-box is extremely impressive, day and night, as many people kept pointing out in chat.

The open test is on all weekend. I'll be going back for more. I'm hoping some people will have leveled up a bit and moved out of the starting area so I can get the five bones I need. 

I hope it's 100% drop rate...

Money On The Table - The Stars Reach Kickstarter So Far

I still have one more demo from the now-ended Next Fest to cover but I think I'll save that for another day. Time to catch up with what else has been happening.

How about that Stars Reach Kickstarter campaign then, eh? Have you been following that? I have, even if I haven't posted about it since it went live or logged in to any of the many playtests, at least a couple of which seem to happen every other day now.

As I write this, the total raised stands at just over half a million dollars. That's two-and-a-half times the ask with three weeks still to go. It sounds very impressive but I'm not wholly on board with all the back-slapping and high-fiving that's been going on. 

Obviously it's far, far better to have smashed the target so quickly than to have failed to meet it by the end of the campaign but I suspect any marketing expert would be quick to point out the sheer speed at which it fell just means they didn't ask for enough. I'm not sure the big banner at the top of the page screaming "FUNDED IN LESS THAN 1 HOUR" is quite the brag they think it is.

I was certainly surprised by how low the target was. I was expecting a minimum seven figures. It's hard to see how $200k could either convince investors of pent-up demand or pay for a significant amount of further development.

But then, I'm just a player and a customer. All I know of development costs are the huge numbers I see quoted for the cost of bringing other, similar games to market. Tens, even hundreds of millions. This seems like pin money by comparison but I guess Raph and his team have been in the business long enough to know what they need. I hope so, anyway.

An interesting point of reference here might be Monsters & Memories, the indie game hoping, as so many have done before, to re-create the supposed glories of the Golden Age of MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, to remake EverQuest, which is very clearly what they're doing, even if they don't come right out and say so. It's even more Everquesty than the (Surprisingly successful.) Pantheon. 

Niche Worlds Cult (Great name!) issues regular, incredibly detailed updates on how the game is progressing. I'm signed up and I got a press release just yesterday telling me, among many, many other things, that since work on the game began in 2020 they've spent $104,725 on development. Last year they spent  $37,217.10.

NWC hopes to be "one of the most transparent companies in the industry" and they have a whole page on their website dedicated to laying out the exact costs in considerable detail. It makes for interesting reading, especially the part where they explain that the whole thing is being funded out of the pockets of the founders, that they have all the resources they need to finish it, and that therefore they don't need to raise any more from outside investors. 

They do hope to make their money back one day but they seem sanguine even about that. M&M will eventually be a traditional subscription-based MMORPG and they say even "a small subscription base" will be sufficient to keep development rolling after launch. 

Having played the game briefly during a few of the frequent open events, another of which is coming in April, I am astonished by just how much they've done for so little. Of all the retro-MMOs I've seen, quite a few now, this is the one I feel is the most likely to achieve its goals, both successfully re-creating that authentic early-MMORPG feel and also maintaining the necessary stability to keep it going.

M&M and that other stalwart of the retro scene, Project Gorgon, demonstrate that a few truly dedicated individuals really can make these kinds of pipe-dreams come true. More importantly, they prove it doesn't take millions, let alone the near-bankrupting of a whole state; it just takes a very clear game-plan, some realistic goals and the ability to focus on what can be done, not what would look oh so cool if only it could be done.

Where Stars Reach stands on the spectrum that stretches from the gritty, unspectacular sustainability of M&M and P:G at one end to the crash-and-burn object lesson of Curt Schilling and 38 Studios at the other remains to be seen. Right now, it feels as though there's a pretty solid base for a game in place but what's there still doesn't look all that much like the game that's being hyped - and boy, is it being hyped!

Rather than read yet another puff piece in the fan press or another of the gosh-wow press releases I receive pretty much daily now, yesterday I took a look at the latest version of Stars Reach's proposed development timeline on the Kickstarter page. It's very near the end of the long campaign statement so you may well have missed it. I had.

The timescales are even shorter than I realized. I already didn't see how they were going to hit their dates and that was when I believed there were still a couple of years to go before full launch. Instead, the campaign predicts Early Access by the summer, while the game is still in alpha. Beta would then follow before the end of the year and the full launch "in the first half of next year". 

Does that sound realistic? I guess you'd have to be at Playable Worlds to answer that. As a tester, I'd say the current pre-alpha build is fun and it makes a good shop-window for the campaign but it bears little resemblance to the game as described in the Kickstarter. 

Last time I played, there were just four planets. The full game is supposed include "thousands", but they are going to be procedurally generated so I suppose that's just a scaled-up version of what's there already. That doesn't apply to the political system or the economy, though or, crucially, spaceships, none of which are in the test build as yet. I'm not sure there's even a way to talk to other players in-game yet. There wasn't a couple of weeks ago.

The spaceships are the bridge too far for me just now. That sounds like a huge jump from anything that's in the game. They'll apparently be flyable either solo or with a crew and there will be "massive fleet battles". Until I read that yesterday, I wasn't aware the scope of Stars Reach was going to intrude upon the territory of EVE Online or Star Citizen. Seems I was wrong, although I guess it all depends on what they mean by "massive" and, for that matter, "crew".

However you look at it, it does seem like a heck of a lot to add in just nine months, by when the game ought to be in Beta and therefore "feature complete". On the positive side, and referring back to the very low target asked by the Kickstarter, maybe these aren't the kinds of problems you solve by throwing money at them anyway. I'm not sure having several million more dollars by the end of this month is going to make those massive fleet battles happen any faster. 

It might even make things worse, if previous hugely successful campaigns are any guide. Feature creep and over-enthusiasm have killed plenty of similar projects or at least made them take a lot longer than they might have done had they had less money to throw around. At least the Stars Reach stretch goals don't look like they'll cause any unnecessary problems - so far they seem to be re-skins of existing assets or things that would have needed to be done anyway.

If all that sounds negative, I should mention that I threw in my $30 dollars on day one. I am a backer, or a "Reacher" if you prefer, since that's the title my $30 bought me.

It seems like a very low risk investment in a game I'm more and more convinced I'll never want to play much anyway. Even if Playable Worlds do somehow manage to hit all their marks (And the Kickstarter does end with the traditional caveat that "feature delivery may miss target dates."), I suspect I'll have already seen more than enough of Stars Reach by then.

I don't imagine I'll want to spend a huge amount of time playing Monsters & Memories, either. The further I get from 1999, the less I want to go back. Or 2003, either. 

I would say, though, that there's a greater chance of me stumping up for a subscription to play a game that reminds me of EverQuest than there is of my buying a Property Pass to own a house in the heir apparent to Star Wars Galaxies, a game I never wanted to play to begin with.

Whether I want to play either game or not is irrelevant, anyway. I'd like to see both succeed, if only because a lot of people would clearly have a great time with them if they do. I just don't think I'm likely to be one of them.

I do enjoy writing about them, though. And I'm always happy to be proved wrong, if being wrong means I get to have a better time than I would have done had I been right.

Early Access Isn't Just For Christmas

I was just reading the combined September and October update for Monsters & Memories. I probably should say I was skim-reading because there's a lot of detail in there, everything from minor tweaks for individual classes to the re-writing of entire back-end systems.

As I was reading, I couldn't help making a few mental comparisons with a couple of other in-development MMORPGs seeking to bring back the experiences of the past. One of them went into Early Access years ago and is still there now. The other enters EA next month. M&M is proposing to join them in 2026.

I think it has an excellent chance of emulating the slow-burning, aesthetic success of the former, something I am not anywhere near as convinced will be the latter's fate, not after years of jumping around all over the place and not really seeming to know what it is or who it's being made for.

The longstanding Early Access game is, of course, the well-respected Project Gorgon, first mentioned here in December 2013 although, as Wilhelm pointed out in the comments, I'd left a comment of my own on his post about the same game over a year earlier. Technically, I've been writing about PG for a dozen years now.

The game about to enter Early Access is Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which made its first appearance on the blog just two months after Project Gorgon, in January 2014. I find it astonishing - scary, even - to see these dates put down in print like this. 

I was still in my early-to-mid 'fifties when these two games entered the public discourse. I'll have hit state retirment age before Pantheon makes it to Early Access and it's likely I'll be in my seventies by the time either of them meets an official launch date. If that doesn't tell you how ludicrously overcooked game development has become...

The huge difference between the two games is that for the whole of the last twelve years I've been able to play Project Gorgon as much as I liked. Even before it went into Early Access, there was an open alpha/beta client available to anyone who cared to download it. In the end, it turned out I didn't want to play it as much as all that but it was still great to have the option.

If nothing else, it gave me a great deal of confidence in the game and its development team. The game may not be "finished" in the eyes of the devs but it's as playable (And as feature-complete, most likely.) as many supposedly launched MMORPGs and I can say that with the experience of having spent many hours there.

Pantheon, despite being the same age, give or take, remains largely a mystery. It spent a decade in closed development, tucked away out of sight behind the money-wall of some hugely expensive buy-in options and even those for only limited test windows. The portcullis has been raised occasionally to allow the curious a peep inside and in the last year or two there have been some cheaper, limited passes available but the upcoming EA launch marks the first time the game will have been widely available to anyone who cares to give it a try at (What we assume will be...) a reasonable price.

Monsters & Memories sits somewhere between the two extremes but considerably closer to Project Gorgon's ready accessibilty than Pantheon's gated privacy. There have been numerous open tests, some lasting several days, with many more promised as the team behind the game readies it for it's EA launch on Steam the year after next.

They seem to have a very clear idea of what they want to achieve and a very realistic timetable in which to achieve it. I've played the game in open testing several times and it already does a surprisingly good job of recreating the era it seeks to emulate. So does Project Gorgon, coming from a slightly different perspective.

Pantheon, by contrast, on the one occasion I was able to play it, felt weird. It didn't look right and it didn't feel right, something the other two easily manage without seeming to try. I also found it quite astonishingly dull, even for the hour or two I spent with it, which was absolutely not the case with either of the others and not at all what I expected.

Visionary Realms released a newsletter a few days ago to say there's been a big uptick in people interested in playing, that the current round of testing has been extended to the end of the month and that there is now a European server. It also warns us all that the Pledge packages will cease to be available on December 1st.

What it does not say is how much EA access will cost, so it remains impossible to judge whether it would be better to buy the cheapest Pledge now (It costs $50.) or wait for the EA package itself. It's very hard to imagine any basic EA access costing more than $50 though, and the fifty dollar pledge now comes with a "Buddy Code", meaning if there are two of you it's effectively $25 each.

Although I think Mrs Bhagpuss's MMORPG days are probably over, this was one of the few new games she was interested in, once. I wouldn't mind having that Buddy Code just in case she fancies giving it a go sometime. On the other hand, if EA turns out to cost $25, as I suspect it might, it makes more sense to wait for that and then just buy a second copy if and when she does express an interest.

In practice, though, I wouldn't mind betting she'd get more enjoyment out of Monsters & Memories, which, in my brief exposure so far, feels closer to the original EverQuest experience and not that disimilar to Vanguard, the game I think Mrs Bhagpuss and I both hoped Pantheon would ressemble a lot more than it appears to at the moment.

I'll have to make an effort to play more during the next Monsters & Memories test. See if I can get a bit further than the starting city. I hope there's a test soon, preferably before Pantheon opens the doors, just so I can get some data for a comparison. If M&M would only go the full Project Gorgon route and have a client up for testing all the time I think I could strike Pantheon off my wishlist altogether.

One Day I'll Leave This City

This weekend saw another open playtest for the retro MMORPG Monsters & Memories. The servers opened on Friday afternoon and stayed up until midnight on Sunday. The developers, the appropriately and amusingly named Niche World Cult, were clearly expecting increased interest. They not only added several servers but also cloned all the characters from the earlier Stress Test to a server of their own to avoid crowding.

I didn't make a character for that test a month ago and I missed the previous opportunity altogether. My only hands-on time with the game was back in May last year, when I called the build I saw "a hugely impressive achievement". 

After another couple of hours with the game, that remains my impression although I have to temper it  by saying I did pretty much the exact same thing this time I did a year ago, so any changes or improvements made since then were probably lost on me. 

One of the most instructive things about having a blog is that I get to see just how very predictable I can be. In May 2023 I made a Human Elementalist and spent most of my time trying to find the Guildmaster so I could hand in my note and join the guild. This time I did almost exactly the same and it wasn't until I was in the middle of doing it that I realised I'd done it all before.

Anyone got a box I can stand on?

In fact, pretty much the only thing I did differently this time was to go Gnome instead of Human. I even made the exact same mistake when I spawned into the world, heading off in the direction I was facing, instead of just turning around and going through the gate behind me. That meant I had to go all the way around the city walls on the outside, until I find a way in, which also meant swimming across the harbor, just like last year.

At least this time I had the sense to cling to the wall so I only had to swim the very last part. It was a interesting journey, with ramps to climb and ships to hop on and off. Aso a lot shorter than I remember, although only because I resisted the temptation to go exploring and stuck the the task in hand instead.

This time, I also took the trouble to read the note carefully, which was just as well as it contained the only directions I was likely to get. Monsters & Memories is seeking to be so authentically old school there's no in-game map. Not just no mini-map - no map at all. 

The note helpfully tells you which directions the sun rises and sets and, crucially, that the sea is to the south. It also tells you the name of the guild you're looking for - The School of the Fourfold Path - and a couple of salient points about its location. It's in the harbor district, directly south of a named park. 

Step One: Find the harbor. Check!

Observant readers may notice that I haven't provided a screenshot of the note. That's because I neglected to take one. I also haven't checked online to see if anyone else did and I haven't looked any of this up on any kind of wiki or guide. It's all straight out of my memory, which I find kind of remarkable. I can almost remember the name of that park, too...

I think this says something about why some veteran  MMORPG players feel so strongly about restricting or even excluding elements that, objectively, would seem to be nothing more than straightforward quality of life improvements. The kind of supposedly uncontroversial additions to the genre made over the years. I mean, who wouldn't want a map? It's one of the very first omissions that gets a third party solution if the developer is slacking, isn't it?

If I'd had a map, though, would I have remembered all of those details? Or any of them? Wouldn't I have been more likely only to remember that I opened the map and used it to find my way to where I wanted to go? And if I'd had a directional marker on the map or a text prompt or even one of those sparkly wisp-trails that act as stand-in for GPS in fantasy games, would I remember anything about the note at all? Would the note even have told me anything more than "Give this note to the Elemental Guildmaster"?

Well, maybe. There is such a thing as flavor text, although whether anyone reads it is another matter. And I do look around me while I run, most of the time. I imagine I'd still have noticed how mind-bendingly huge the starting city in this game is, for a start. It is - and I rarely use this word because it's so ridiculous but this one time it feels right - humungous! 

Clothwalking. It's a Gnome innate. What? Yes it is!

It feels as though it has to be one of the largest MMORPG cities I've seen. Maybe it isn't really that vast but it feels as though it is, partly because you can see lots of it from everywhere so it always seems as though there's city all around you.

Many cities in games feel quite constricted if you traverse them at ground level. You can see the streets you're in but not much else. This one is very three-dimensional, full of ramps and stairs and parapets and towers. And the streets are a maze. Combined with movement that feels relatively slow, it always seems as though you can see your destination but it's not getting any closer. 

Why the city needs to be so big is another question. It certainly makes it feel convincingly city-like in stature, if that's the intention. One of the big drawbacks of MMORPG cities used to be that they felt more like villages or outposts. If the idea here is to make players feel an appropriate sense of scale then goal accomplished. Since most of the buildings are empty, though, there's not really any greater sense of realism or authenticity than if the city was a tenth the size but every building had a clear and obvious purpose.

The game is still a year and a half out even from Early Access so it's more than possible all that space will have been furnished and populated by then. If so, that's going to make the city even more convincing but also even more intimidating. It's bad enough having to navigate a warren of empty streets and untenanted buildings but at least you know there's nothing there you're missing. Imagine if you needed to check them all and speak to every NPC, just in case they had a quest to offer.

Hey! You're the guy from the note!

And you would have to speak to them all because, naturally, no-one in Monsters & memories is going to wear a punctuation mark for a hat. You have to go up to them and /hail to get them to speak to you. Or I guess you do. I haven't actually found any quests yet, other than the one the guildmaster gave me when I handed in the note. 

When it comes down to it, I haven't really done much. I'd have liked to but I haven't been able to find the time. Unfortunately, NWC (Niche World Cult. Remember?), like many developers, prefer to run their tests at the weekends, which is the worst possible time for me. I work every Sunday and every other Saturday. Also, weekends are when everything interesting tends to happen, so there's plenty of competition. 

This weekend just gone saw the Glastonbury Festival happening, just down the road from me. While I have no affection for festivals in general and a particular dislike of Glastonbury in particular, having been there just once, on the wettest of the wet years, an experience I have yet to wipe from my memory almost forty years later, I do like to watch the excellent BBC coverage, at least when they show one of the few bands playing that I actually like. Consequently, when I got home from work this weekend, I placed a higher priority on watching the likes of Blondshell and Fontaines DC than on a playtest for a game still nearly two years away from becoming a real thing.

Even so, I managed to fit a few minutes in between sets and what I saw remains an impressive achievement. Whose achievement is a moot point. As I suggested in those previous posts, Monsters & Memories isn't so much inspired by EverQuest as it is a remake. So many facets and features are all but identical, from the way the spellbook looks and functions to the names and appearance of the mobs.

Is this what they call an homage?

Of course, many of the mobs are drawn from life so no-one can claim to have invented them. (Except God, if you feel that way inclined. Or named them, for that matter. Except Adam, ditto.) Brad McQuaid neither invented nor named fire beetles and dune scarabs. They're actual, living creatures. Even so, having them wandering around outside the gates of starting cities in both games isn't something that happened by chance.

This time, I even got to kill a few. Well, a few snakes and rotting skeletons, at least. Last year I'm not sure I ever got as far as hunting mobs for xp. This weekend I managed to find a moment to venture outside the Western Gates and try out my one damage spell and my feeble dagger on the local wildlife. I even managed to do it without dying although I did have to run to the guards every time I got an add.

Combat, if you can even call it that at Level One, seemed pretty solid. My Flameburst cast fast and knocked a chunk off the mob's health. Mana dropped about as quickly as you'd expect and I was soon out of spell juice. One resist and I had to finish the creature off with my dagger. At least I didn't have to sit and med for as long as the fight before I got going again but I imagine that joy will come soon enough.

Although maybe not that soon because half a dozen snakes and skeletons barely moved the dial on the xp I needed to get to Level Two. Not that there was a dial, just an undifferentiated block of yellow whose incremental progress was hard to estimate. The whole thing felt unnervingly authentic, if the authenticity you're after is the outmoded gameplay of the late twentieth century.

Even the fricken' spell effects are the same...

And, curiously, I suppose it might be, at that. Having just bounced quite hard off both the 2006 stylings of Anashti Sul and the all mod cons convenience of Tarisland, once again I found Monsters & Memories relentlessly retrograde take on the MMORPG experience disturbingly addictive. That Skinner Box gameplay loop hasn't lost any of its efficacy in a quarter of a century.

It certainly helps that, visually, the game has the same low rent luster that served Valheim so well. The graphics may be simple but they're elegant and easy on the eye. I thought at first there must have been a polish pass since last time I played because everything really did look better than I remembered but looking at the screenshots I took last May it may be my memory that needs polishing. They look very much the same.

One thing that was different was the sandstorm. It began while I was looking for the Guild and never let up until I logged out. I'm not absolutely sure a sandstorm is a positive addition to gameplay per se but if there are going to be weather effects, this is a good way to do them. The sand stormed convincingly around the streets, reducing visibility but not so much I couldn't still enjoy the view, while the wind wuthered atmospherically in the background. 

It's possible that at some point in development weather effects like this will acquire stat penalties or other negative properties, although perhaps not. That certainly wouldn't be true to the status quo ante M&M seeks to restore. When it rains in Norrath, no-one gets wet. 

Pretty sure the city's over there, somewhere.

I wonder at what point the line between authentically nostalgic inconvenience and modern-day quasi-realism will be drawn? There's certainly a masochistic demographic that would like to go back to the way things were, only worse.

I suspect Niche World Cult will avoid traps like that. As I said before, of all the teams working on projects like this, so far they seem like the one that has both the clearest idea of what they want to achieve and the best shot at achieving it.

Once again, I wish them all the luck with the game and I hope there'll be plenty more opportunities to test it for free before the paywall comes down in 2026. Next time I might even remember to try a different class and see a little of the world beyond the starting area. Always assuming I can find a zone wall to hug, that is.

We can do that, right? If not I don't imagine I'll be traveling very far. Not alive, anywa

Mish-Mash Or Mosh?

Mish-mash today, music tomorrow. That's the plan. Might be more mish-mash, though. Or musical mish-mash. Yep, probably that.

But that's a day away. Now, there's this:

EverQuest II - A Difficult Experience

Or rather a difficulty with experience. I continue to trundle oh-so-slowly through the levels on my never-ending journey to the cap. Seriously, it is so slow now. I know it was crazy fast before but this is ridiculous. 

When I finished the Signature Questline I was about half-way through Level 128. After a bunch of post-credits quests, of which there are an unusually large amount, including an entire instance which also counted for a weekly or a daily or something, I have made it all the way to two-thirds of the way through the same level. Nearly.

I checked the xp every time I did a hand-in and it was running somewhere between 1.5%-2% per quest. The instance might have been as much as 4%. At this rate I will run out of all the regular quests before I hit 129. There are loads of dropped quests, where you get the starter from mobs, but even if I was willing to do all of them and able to get the drops, I'm still not sure it would get me to the cap.

I googled it, thinking there would be no end of complaints and plenty of advice but there's nothing much. No-one seems to be having an issue with it, which makes me think I must be doing something wrong.

I did find this extremely detailed guide on how to set yourself up to solo Ballads of Zimara in the most efficient manner but although it contains some useful information on gear and particularly on what adornments to slot, it says absolutely nothing about XP. and how to maximize it. The assumption seems to be that you might have trouble with the content, which has not been the case for me at all.

It's nice that someone went to the trouble of putting all that information together but as a couple of people point out in the comments, BoZ is one of the most welcoming expansions in years for new-and-returning players. You can just play through it with the gear you get at the start and the NPC who gives it to you even tells you how to set everything up for best effect. It's the precise reverse of recent expansions in that the fights are easy but the XP comes slowly. Min-maxing your gear does nothing to help with that.

Fortunately, the gameplay is fun in and of itself so I'm relatively content to keep picking away at it but I have to say that playing for an hour and a half and only getting about 10% of a level is a nostalgia trip I wasn't expecting when I bought the expansion. I'd say I hope they tweak it a bit for the next one but I suspect most players are pretty happy with it as it is so I'm not expecting any U-turns come the end of the year.

More M&Ms, Anyone?

Then again, it's all relative. I'm sure my current leveling speed in EQII will look like hyperdrive compared to what Monsters & Memories players will have to endure. Or enjoy. I mean, it is a self-selecting pool of masochists whose eyes light up at the sight of another opportunity to grind all weekend to get a couple of levels in a game that's not even in Early Access yet.

I feel entitled to snark because I may well be splashing around in that pool myself come June, when M&M stages an "Open Playtest". No information on start and finish dates other than it'll be late in the month but presumably it will be on for at least a few days. There's also likely to be a Stress test before then, if you really can't wait.

I missed the last opportunity to trudge uphill in the sandstorms both ways but I'm going to do my best to give it a try this time. I played it once and liked it and I keep hearing good things about the game. 

Since they'll both be available to play at around the same time. at least for a while, it'll be interesting to compare M&M's merciless recreation of the genre's deep past with the Anashti Sul server's attempt to replicate the way things had progressed about half a decade later. I suspect the slow leveling I'm whining about in BoZ will look like fast-forward in comparison to either of them. Maybe that'll encourage me to get my head down and cap out there. I kinda doubt that'll be how it works but let's hope.

Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?

I was very much more than a little surprised to read today that Peter Jackson is going to make "a new batch" of Lord Of The Rings films. Seriously? Hasn't he had enough yet?

I don't know how many films make a batch but the first is going to  be arriving in 2026. It's called Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, presumably because they're not confident cinemagoers will remember who Gollum is without a nudge. Andy Serkis is going to star. He's clearly not worried about being typecast as a speciality act. I think I saw him in something recently where he wasn't wearing prosthetics or a motion-capture bodysuit. Can't remember what it was though.

This news does not excite me at all. I saw the first three Lord of the Rings movies on release and I own them on DVD but I've never felt the need to watch them a second time. I also own the Hobbit trilogy and I haven't even watched that once. Plus I managed just one episode of the Amazon series and that was one too many. Are they making any more of those? I hope not.

I imagine another "batch" of movies is going to bring on the old "tide that floats all boats" effect for Lord of the Rings Online, which in turn might mean some bonus income and attention for EG7. Maybe as an EQ/EQII/DCUO player I'll benefit in some abstruse way form the trickle-down effect there - because we all know that's a real thing...

And Finally...

I know I said it was a music post tomorrow but I always like to end these things with a song. Let's see if there's anything appropriate in the slush pile. 

Ah, yes! From the post about Aussie thick-neck rockers I never got around to compiling. It'd be a shame not to share this one.

My Name Is Jim - The Smashed Avocados

Just be glad it's the only one you're getting. For now, anyway.

Resurrection Shuffle

Happy Easter! Have you noticed how people seem to celebrate it like it's a bona fide holiday, now? With cards and everything. Until about ten years ago, I never knew anyone to send a card for Easter unless they were Roman Catholic. If you weren't full-bore Christian, Easter was chocolate eggs and that was it. 

Now we have as many Easter cards at work as we do for Mother's Day, which in the UK was less than a month ago. Remember a decade or so ago, when we were all expecting physical greeting cards to wither away and die? With everyone online and carrying smart phones, who'd be uncool enough to send cardboard through the mail?

Yeah, well, that didn't happen. Greetings cards are a growth area right now. People quite literally buy them by the handful. We can't keep the shelves stocked. 

Anyhoo... I didn't come here to talk shop. I'm not really supposed to do that anyway, at least not while I'm still working, so I'll leave that until I retire, at which time I might just have some stories to tell, although not as many as Wilhelm, that's for sure.

Retirement could be this year, too. I'll be entitled. More likely, it'll be the next or even the one after that because I quite like my job, especially now I only have to do it two days a week. It gives me plenty of exercise and almost all of my face-to-face socializing so I'm not quite as keen to give it up at the first opportunity, like I always thought I would be. It'll be nice to have the option, though.

So, anyway, what was it I was going to talk about if it wasn't work? Oh, yes, I remember. I originally meant to include this next part in yesterday's post. I had some loose framework for stitching the two together somehow. Then my thoughts on the Noah's Heart sunset ran a little longer and more philosophical than I was expecting and I decided to include the other news would unbalance things so I cut it.

Oh, wait, I haven't said what it is yet, have I? Listen to me, rambling on...

Monsters & Memories Early Access 

There! Nothing like a sub-heading to bring things to clarity.

So, I was reading my news feeds a couple of days ago and this popped up. Monsters & Memories, in case you haven't been taking notes, is yet another of the would-be "spiritual successors" to EverQuest and/or your Golden Age MMORPG of choice. Mostly EverQuest, though, and especially this one. 

Tipa, who's been paying close attention, pointed out the tight correlation between the games in a post archly entitled "Monsters and Memories is not EverQuest", while my own snarky comment, after I tried the game out in a stress test last year, was "It's like EQ and Vanguard had a (Very inbred.) baby".

Both of us had a pretty good time with the game in those tests but in my case whatever fun I had there clearly left no lasting impression. By the time I read Tipa's post about another stress test, which took place months after the one I took part in, I'd completely forgotten I'd ever played the game. 

It's hardly surprising. I wasn't planning on pursuing the project further. As Tipa said, the game "takes twenty five years of MMO advances and tosses them in the bin" and I'm not particularly looking for that kind of experience. EQ was amazing for its day but unlike a lot of people, apparently, I can very clearly remember the endless, unceasing demands from many of those who were playing it back when it was the market leader, asking for all the kinds of quality of life changes and gameplay tweaks the current wave of retro-developers seem determined to roll back.

Okay, maybe some of those "improvements" did go a little too far but most of them, had they been offered back in 1999-2004, would have been wildly popular. That's not speculation on my part. It's just World of Warcraft. 

As I suspect we can all now see, if not openly agree, Blizzard pretty much got the balance right, about a year or so from launch. That snapshot iteration of WoW, sold back to us a few years ago, rebranded as Classic, sands off all the right rough edges from the EQ template, while leaving the basic structure untouched. It's just gritty enough to give traction without being so rough as to feel abrasive.

Of course, even WoW took a while to get there. The problem was, when it did, it didn't stop; it just kept right on going until the wheels fell off. The various owners of EQ have been more cautious and circumspect in their modifications of the chassis, meaning the game still feels more like its old self after twenty-five years than Retail WoW feels like Classic after twenty. 

Even so, modern EverQuest is still way, way more forgiving than the game I played a quarter of a century ago. If you doubt it, once again I'm not speculating based off a few frayed memories. Something virtually identical to the original EQ is available, right now, for free, over at Project 99. And EQ is free-to-play, too. Go check them both out for yourself and see how much more relaxed the official version feels.

P99 isn't some under-the-counter, grey market renegade, either. As the official announcement back in 2015 explained, the team behind the emulator have a written agreement with Daybreak Games allowing them to run it legally. As with the now legally sanctioned City of Heroes emulator, it does make me wonder why anyone who wants to play these old games "like they were meant to be played" doesn't just go and play those exact, actual games.

We're still supposedly getting several "spiritual successors" to CoH, even though the game itself is back in business, and apparently we also need a number of "New EverQuests", too, even though both the original and a Classic version are up and running still. The team behind Monsters & Memories seems to be banking on there being a niche audience out there who want something almost exactly the same as EQ that just isn't called EQ. 

In doing so, they're looking to please that demographic who never wanted the games to get any easier in the first place or - more likely, in my opinion - no longer remember how much they once wanted precisely that more than anything. If those people actually played the games that are still available, they might remember why they stopped. Much safer to pin their hopes on something as yet untried. 

Also better graphics, of course. Never forget the "We just want EQ but with better graphics" crowd.

It's understandable. There's evidence that we tend to remember good experiences for longer than we remember bad ones (Although for the sake of balance I should point out there's evidence for the opposite, too...), which may explain why so many people seem to think they had a much better time playing MMORPGs when it was uphill in the snow both ways. 

I try to keep it in perspective but now that I'm able to look at it from a more nuanced position, that kind of gameplay, often described at the time as "addictive", doesn't look healthy. A lot of incidents that get reported, anecdotally, as "satisfying" or "memorable" seem to relate more closely to that rush of endorphins that comes with relief at the resolution of a really bad experience. All those late night corpse recoveries, raid wipes and the times you *almost* rage-quit, until finally it all turned around, leaving you drained but elated. Sure. I remember those. I could write a list.

There's no arguing. Those kinds of experiences do make memories. Only yesterday I was saying it was the memories that matter. Would I want to do all that again to make more, though? Nope. I would not. To burn memories as deep as that risks leaving a scar.

And I value my time more now than perhaps I did then. As I've said about my recent stint with Nightingale, these days I find myself more concerned than delighted when a game grabs me and won't let go. Twenty years ago I was defensively dismissive of those clickbait game addiction headlines. Now, I'm not so sure there wasn't something more to them than I was ready to acknowledge. 

Those games had exceptional access to the part of the brain that likes to be stroked. I've read so much about Skinner Boxes and dopamine hits and training by reward that I could write a blog post about it. 

I'm not going to because I'd just be telling you something you know already. What I don't know and I suspect no-one else does, either, is whether those same autonomic responses can or will be triggered by an obvious copy, when applied to an audience that's deeply familiar with the process and has experienced those same stimuli many times before. 

Even if it works, will that audience pay to keep stroking those neurons - and keep on paying? Experience suggests the effect wears off, sometimes leaving a residue of anger, betrayal and self-loathing. Can that burn-out be avoided or managed effectively to maintain a stable player-base in the absence of a continual inflow of new blood? 

I guess we'll find out, if and when one of these games finally launches. And now we have something like a date for that.

Here's the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place. I quite liked what I saw of Monsters & Memories. I'd definitely have paid the usual $30 for the "box", with free access thereafter in the familiar Buy-to-Play model most such games have gone with in recent times. Unfortunately for me, that's not what's on offer.

Instead, the developers, who go by the extremely appropriate, if presumably also ironic name of Niche Worlds Cult, have opted for giving the game away free, then charging a monthly fee of $15 to play it. 

That's not news. They've always said it would be a subscription title.

What is new, as far as I can remember, is that the sub cuts in the moment the game goes to Early Access. Then, it'll cost $180 to play M&M for a year (There's actually a reduced rate for six or twelve months up front but I haven't been able to find an exact figure for that.) 

It's a good deal cheaper than Pantheon's convoluted Pledge/Season system, which in any case is for a game still in alpha and not even close to "Early Access".  It also has the merit of being much more straightforward but it's still a very bold ask for an unfinished game being developed by an unpaid team of volunteers.

At least, given the recent firestorm over Singularity 6's obfuscatory take on what does or does not constitute Open Beta, there's a very refreshing openness about the whole procedure. The game's website and FAQ are unequivocal about both the methodology and the reasons behind it. Early Access, according to NWC, is not a time for testing. 

"... we aim to have all core gameplay systems complete and tested prior to Early Access... Our goal of Early Access is to expand our game world and its content, not to use the time as an extended testing phase."

That does make it clear that EA is a launch, not a test. It's a distinction we don't always see made when developers start asking for money. Perhaps it's because M&M is being developed not by a for-profit company but a volunteer team that they're able to be so open about the reasons for taking the route they've chosen:

"We have a volunteer team working on Monsters & Memories. MMOs are large, expensive, and difficult to make. By supporting us through Early Access, the hope is we can scale our art and environment production capability, allowing us to accelerate development to where we can have a more fully fleshed out game world. As our subscriber base grows, we can also begin to pay some of our team members."

I applaud their forthrightness but I fear won't be paying $15 a month for the pleasure of losing my corpse in the desert, although I'm not ruling out the occasional, one-off down-payment to satisfy my curiosity. I'm not too proud to buy a few posts for the blog now and again, especially if the game has a bit of a buzz going.

I won't have to think about it for a while, though, because none of this is happening for a couple of years. The proposed EA launch isn't scheduled until January 2026, which is certainly giving plenty of notice.

 Until then there will be more opportunities to kick the tires. As the website says

 "We will continue to run Free Playtests & Stress Tests prior to going Live with our Early Access Launch, to ensure the game runs and plays as well as possible. This will also allow anyone the chance to try the game before paying any subscription fees." 

I'll see if I can't remember to give some of those a try but I would lay odds that almost no matter how well or badly the game fares after it starts charging an entry fee, there will eventually be some form of free trial as well. I'm not sure I know of a single subscription MMORPG that doesn't have one now, including several that didn't have one when they began.

What I would say, from the little personal experience I have with the game and from what others with more have written, is that this seems like one of the more organized, focused and realistic teams currently at work on a project like this. I'd give them more of a chance of bringing it home than
many.

I guess we'll find out how well they've done come January 2026. Mark your calendars now.