Welcome To Our New Cash Grab... Shop! I Meant Cash Shop! No, Wait... Game! That's It! Welcome To Our New Game!

It would be disingenuous of me to claim that I was excited when I read yesterday that Blade & Soul NEO was about to launch on Steam, but I did feel a slight frisson of interest. I already have the revamped version of B&S installed via NCSoft's proprietary Purple launcher but I have now largely been assimilated into the Steam hive mind and, like all the other drones, I prefer to have all my logins in the same folder.

Of course, I haven't played any B&SNeo since the day I installed it around the end of February. That doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the game or lack thereof, more the plain fact that for the last three months almost the whole of my available free time has been spent on Suno. 

Making music with AI has effectively replaced playing games as my core leisure activity and seems likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm putting almost as much time into it now as I used to put into MMORPGs ten or fifteen years ago, although that's still nothing close to the time I would have spent in virtual worlds a decade before. 

But for that, I like to think I would at least have given B&SNEO a few sessions and written a few blog posts about it. I really like the original game, into which I must have put a few hundred hours over the years, and I was curious to see how the updated and supposedly improved version might stack up. Not curious enough to actually play it to find out, though, apparently.

It seemed at least a possibility that, if I had the thing on Steam, I might get around to playing it once in a while. I'm in my Steam library every day, looking for something or other, so anything that's there gets brought to my attention a lot more effectively than if it's sitting in the forest of icons on my desktop, especially if it's something I've played recently. There's a cruel synergy in the way Steam displays recently-played games that means the more I play something, the more likely it is to get played again, while the games I neglect slip further and further down the stack, probably never to be played again.

I didn't get around to doing anything about it yesterday, what with babysitting my Overseer missions in EverQuest II and spending eight hours working on one song on Suno (And still not getting a final version I was completely happy with...) but this morning almost the first thing I did was fire up Steam and go to the B&SNEO store page, where I was greeted with this:

I've highlighted the relevant line to make it stand out a bit more but it was already quite prominent enough to catch my eye the moment I saw the page: Mostly Negative. I don't generally treat the overall Steam review rating of any game as a flawless arbiter of quality or desirability but it is a useful indicator of general sentiment and a particularly good or bad rating will often send me to the individual reviews so I can get a reading of why people are choosing to rate it or slate it.

In the case of Blade & Soul NEO, the reason for the downvoting is very clear. People think it's a rip-off: 

Extreme Pay-to-Win: if you don’t swipe, you don’t play.

The cash shop’s so predatory it makes casino slot machines blush 

AVOID this clear cash grab and play something else

This game is the largest pay2win dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. 

Some of the reviewers get quite eloquent about the game's predatory tendencies:

Costs a paycheck to get enough gear for content that's 1 patch behind and a brand new car to almost do the current content

You can only like this game if you want to try fent4nyl, while being in an abusive relationship with someone that empties your credit cards, hits and mistreates you, giving you nothing back but misery

I hope you have a solid job and no family, no debt, no vacations planned so that this game can become your second, third, and fourth job. 

They're also very articulate in explaining exactly why. So much so, in fact, that in some cases the detailed analyses of just what NCSoft did wrong when they gutted the original to pump and dump NEO run to more than a thousand words. 

 Someone did a nice list though:

10 reasons to not play and quit Blade & Soul Neo

1) DDOS or just sh!t servers
2) Bots everywhere
3) P2W/Whales
4) Useless Devs (No real fixes or bans)
5) TP Cost/Channel Change Cost/Lack of Gold
6) Cheating (Xml modifications already available)
7) Boring & Repetitive (Same sh!t everyday)
8) Time consuming (Ritual/Boss Timer sucks)
9) RNG (Loot/Skillbooks/Fusion/Enhancing...)
10) No arenas No Costumes (too expensive) 

The tl:dr of all of them is 

this is a giant nostalgia bait cash grab, very heavily monetized and falsely advertised as a classic experience that plays nothing like the original release

and 

Everything in the game is RNG! Even RNG is RNG, so RNG is the game, and thats no joke. 

Now, to be very fair, the game has only just arrived on Steam and there are only about 160 reviews so far, but I've read over half of them and they all tell the same story: former B&S players came back to try the game out of very fond feelings for the original and found their beautiful old home burned to the ground with a gaudy, tasteless shopping mall and casino built on top of it. 

Even the "Mostly Negative" rating is doing game a favor. Several of the positive reviews are actually ironic negatives like this:

I love this game. Been playing everyday since the launch in february.
I also like being in an abusive relationship where my partner doesnt listen to anything I say and just takes my money so i can stay with my partner <3

Ah, where do I even begin? This game is truly something special! I’ve never felt so empowered by random chance before. The RNG system is a masterclass in how to keep things exciting - and by exciting, I mean completely out of your control. Every time I want to get a new skill, I love the suspense of knowing that my 20% chance is definitely going to work out. It really keeps you on the edge of your seat, and who doesn’t love a little uncertainty in their life?

Or they're from people so worn down by the process they can't even bring themselves to complain any more:

The negative reviews are valid. The game is a massive cash cow, but its NCSoft.. All NC games are cash cows, it's always been that way, always will be.

Remember that this is a Korean MMO. Its going to favor p2w heavily as well as have some rng systems added into it. I've seen this in most Korean MMOs.

I played the original Blade and Soul about 10 years ago. It was my formal intro to the most savage form of gacha p2w that I've ever seen.

Interestingly, that last one is from a player who makes a point that, I suspect, I might be making myself if I was actively playing and enjoying this new version of the game, namely that if you "Just play your game and have fun, leave the card in your wallet", you could probably do a lot worse than Blade & Soul NEO.

I enjoyed reading the reviews this morning. I was saying to someone at work the other day that video games have an undeserved reputation for fostering illiteracy, just as comics did when I was growing up. Anyone who spends any time on the forums or message boards or comment threads or review pages for either medium will find themselves disabused of that notion very quickly indeed. 

Whether I'll take any notice of any of the complaints and accusations is another matter. In common with almost every online game I've played in the last decade and more, I'd be very surprised if any of the P2W or RNG or Gacha mechanics had much of an impact on my natural playstyle, just as very few of the issues that so concerned players back in the Golden Age of MMORPGs - camping, waiting hours in LFG, the endless grind - had much relevance for me. 

When it comes to F2P, if you aren't interested in endgame activities or competitive PVP or leaderboards, most of the levers devs like to pull to get you to give them money don't have anything like the power often assigned to them. Or, to put it another way, no-one baits a hook for bottom-feeders.

Even so, the time I spent reading the reviews made me think again about installing the game on Steam. There's no realistic chance I'm going to start over in B&SNEO yet again and level up yet another new character. If I want a nostalgia hit and a quick run-around in the truly gorgeous world, the old, non-NEO servers are still up and running and I have a character in the mid-40s and another in the 60s, both just waiting for a chance to grab another level or two.

Instead of adding another version of Blade and Soul to the two I already have, I patched up the old one and I'm logging in right now to take some screen shots for the post. Probably going to be the only time I log in for a while but nostalgia, like Stamina in B&SNEO, (From what I read, anyway.) takes a while to regenerate.

You're Not Making It Easy To Come Back, Blade & Soul.

It took the best part of two days but I did finally get Blade & Soul to run. I don't know what NCSoft did to make the new launcher so pernickety but I'd have to say I preferred the old one. It just worked. 

Anyway, after downloading something like 250GB of data to get a final install of 66GB I was eventually able to press play and actually have the game start but even then the wait wasn't over. Logging in seemed to take forever. It was probably only about five minutes but in the context of getting into an online game that is forever. 

Do you know how many things I can think of in five minutes that I need to do more than I need to play an old video game , NCSoft? You really don't want to give me that much time to reconsider my choices.

I stuck it out. I mean, I'd given the thing hours already. What's another five minutes? 

When I got in I did not find myself where I expected I'd be. Usually, when I log out of an MMORPG - or an RPG for that matter -  I try to leave the character I was playing in a comfortable spot. If they have a home, my first choice is to take them there. Otherwise I like to leave them in a town or city where they can carry on with normal life.

No room to claim this one.

If I have to leave them wherever they were adventuring, either because it would be too much trouble to get them back there next time or because I had to log out suddenly and unexpectedly, I at least try to leave them in a safe place that looks reasonably sheltered from inclement weather. It seems like the least I could do.

When I logged in Meldra Mye, my main character in Blade & Soul, she woke up in a bush. I couldn't even see her for leaves. I must have been in a real hurry when I logged out, however long ago that was.

I say "Main". I could almost say "only". I do have one other character but I only made her to try out a max-level buff I got for free. As you might expect, getting a max level character that way does not also instantly grant you the ability or knowledge to play one, something I remember people complaining about in EverQuest as far back as the turn of the millennium, when one of the worst insults you could hurl at someone was to accuse them of having bought their character on EBay.

Of course, after more than a year away, I have no idea how to play my regular character either, which was why, the moment I got into the game, I was pleased - and impressed -  to see a link to a New and Returning Player Guide.  Unfortunately, I was a lot less impressed after I'd finished reading it.

As a guide, I'd have to say it's both barebones and overly specific. It tells you a lot of things that are extremely obvious just by looking at your character, such as what "type" your equipment is. A "weapon" is a "weapon", you may be surprised to learn, while a ring or a necklace is an "accessory". 

I could probably have figured that out for myself, along with what kind of stats each slot supports, just by mousing over them and reading the tool-tips. Conversely, telling me a type of item "enhances the ability of certain skills" doesn't really tell me anything at all.

At the other extreme, the guide seems determined to portray the entire game as a series of instanced dungeons and raids, all of which it lists by name and required group size, along with a detailed account of what loot you can get there. I'm not saying that's not meaningful information but it's extremely reductive. Of all the time I've played Blade & Soul I doubt more than ten percent has been spent in dungeons. There's a huge, fascinating open world to explore. Why would I want to go inside?

There's a hugely more comprehensive and wide-ranging guide on the forums, written by a player called HungiBungi. It's fairly up-to-date, having been written at the end of last year, and yet the OP still needed to post a second guide six months later because there'd been a substantive change to the gear upgrade path. Such is the way of online games but at least the currency of the updates and commentary on them suggests a game that's still in active development, with an equally active playerbase.

In the moderately unlikley event I end up playing Blade & Soul "seriously" again (I use the word almost ironically - I have never played B&S in a way anyone in their right mind would call "serious". What I mean, I guess, is "regularly", although even that would be pushing it...) then I'll defnitely be referring to Hungi's guide. 

It's much more likely that I'll just log in a few times, claim all the stuff that's waiting for me (It's a lot!), try on any new clothes, summon any new pets, take some screenshots and call it a day for another few months. That tends to be the way it goes in just about every MMORPG I used to play, don't play any more but still haven't quite given up on.

In the case of Blade & Soul, though, there is a slightly enhanced possibility of my doing a little more than the bare minimum. The world, as I said earlier, is vast and quite beautiful. My character is full of personality and charm. There's a plot that I was quite enjoying back when I could remember what it was and the combat isn't bad for an action MMO. 

All of that works in the game's favor. What works against it is the precipitous re-learning curve common to almost all MMORPGs but also the aforementioned lengthy log-in time, which does put me off firing the game up unless I'm also willing to put in a good session to make the effort worthwhile. 

And then there's the almost Norrathian time it takes to get from one place to another.

Blade & Soul does have some kind of instant travel, at least I seem to remember something to do with map-clicking, but how it works is something I need to re-learn. This time, when I found I didn't have enough bag space to claim most of the stuff that was waiting for me, I could neither remember where the nearest bank was not how to get there if I did.

No room for this pet, either.

If there's anything that acts as a bigger drag anchor on enthusiasm for returning to a former MMORPG than full bags you have no idea how to empty, I don't know what it is. Icons you no longer know the meaning of and combat skills you no longer remember how to use are bad, sure, but if I can't get my bags sorted I'm probably never going to get far enough to need to know how to hit anything anyway.

In this case, I'd only really come back to try on my new gear and take some pictures and I haven't even been able to do that yet. I managed to put on one new outfit, the one at the head of the post, but the rest I could only look at in the dressing-room.

I didn't help myself. I somehow managed to claim one complete outfit twice on the same character despite a clear warning about it requiring some currency I didn't recognize to transfer to other characters on the account. That was how I filled up most of my minimal free inventory slots. It's also why I wanted to find the bank so urgently.

When I work out where the bank is and how to get there (Always assuming Blade & Soul is a game that has a vault system. They don't all, you know.) and I've had time and opportunity to get myself sorted, perhaps I'll be in a position to post a proper fashion show. Until then, this is going to have to do.

Also maybe I'll finally write something about the actual game. I maintain Blade & Soul is a lot better than it ever seems to get credit for being and would almost certainly be more to the taste of many Western MMO gamers than the average import, if only anyone noticed it existed.

Then again, maybe it's just that I like having a giant cartoon cat that follows me about. I mean, it's living the dream, isn't it?

Updating Blade & Soul To UE4 And Other First-World Problems

 

This is going to be one of those "Isn't modern life wonderful?" posts, steeped, of course, in world-weary irony as such posts always are. I'm typing this in some discomfort, with the receiver of my seldom-used landline awkwardly clenched between my left ear and left shoulder as I listen to half a dozen bars of (admittedly rather pleasant) instrumental music, interspersed every few seconds with a recorded message.

I'm attempting to call my credit card company in response to a letter I just received so I can add an email address and mobile number to my account, at their... I want to say "request" but actually "command" is more like it. If I don't, I won't be able to use my credit card for online transactions any more.

My bank has already asked me to do this, twice. I've been ignoring them because I don't use my bank card to make online transactions. I use my credit card instead because it comes with much better statutory legal safeguards, dating back to the days when even owning a credit card was considered a big deal and people were deemed in need of protection not only from fraudsters and criminals but their own inevitable lack of self-control.

The letter I received only offers one means of adding these details: a phone call. That seems counter-intuitive. You'd have thought it would be available through the website at least as an option. When I called, I expected I'd be keying the details in somehow but apparently not. There was no sign of anything like that in the multiple choice menu so here I am, on hold (about twenty minutes so far, no information on how many ahead of me in the queue, could be here for hours...) 

Meanwhile, my PC is busy downloading almost 50GB of an mmorpg I already have installed. This week Blade and Soul upgraded to Unreal Engine 4 and if I ever... excuse me a sec...

... ah, that's the credit card details updated! Now all I have to do is remember to have my mobile with me when I use the card. And have it charged. And switched on. None of which I do by habit because I have a lifelong aversion to phones, probably due to having grown up in a home where we didn't have any kind of phone (and back then there really was only one kind) until I was in my late teens.

Then again, I did have a full-time job for several years that mostly consisted of talking to people on the telephone for eight hours a day, which is how I became fluent in the NATO alphabet, something I've since found useful only for answering questions on TV game shows (not me being on the shows, you understand, just watching them at home and shouting out the answers, as you do. Well, as I do.)

A seldom-observed fact about the NATO phonetic alphabet, by the way, is that half the words it uses are so unfamiliar to the ear that if you try to use them to people who haven't learned it it causes more confusion than it avoids. I generally revert to using common names like "Simon" or "Fred" rather than peculiar notions like "Sierra" or "Foxtrot".

Given that, and the fact that I'm really very good on the telephone (clear, confident, good telephone voice, all of which come with practice) I probably should have gotten over that aversion by now and I would have, if it wasn't that my actual aversion is not for the mechanics of the process but the "being available to anyone who wants me, whenever they want me" part. 

You might think cell-phone etiquette would suit me perfectly, what with the asynchronous nature of the communication now everyone uses text instead of speech but you still have to reply at some point. It's an obligation I prefer to avoid.

We seem to have wandered some distance from the point, or I have and you've followed along if you're still reading. I was talking about updating Blade and Soul, I think. Let's see how that's coming along. Ah, 45% done. Great. By the time I finish this post it might be almost ready for me to log in and see what havoc the upgrade has wrought, which was what I thought I was going to post about when I started this nonsense an hour ago.

Yes, that was my plan. I was wondering what I could post about today. I worked yesterday and I'm working tomorrow (an unusual circumstance now I'm down to two days a week) so both those days will be Pitchfork #25 posts and I wanted to get a regular post of some kind up inbetween. 

Of course, I could just skip a day, but you know what it's like. Don't want to break a streak. I haven't checked back into July but this is my 41st consecutive day of posting since Blaugust began and I'm at the point where not posting feels weird. 

Probably ought to deliberately break that pattern, as Pete said he was going to do yesterday. Only I notice he has a post up today so it's not as easy as it seems, stopping cold turkey. (What's the vegetarian or vegan equivalent of cold turkey? And anyway, why is it even called "going cold turkey" in the first place? I think I know but if I'm right, why isn't it called "going cold goose"?)

Dragging this thing back to the supposed theme I began with, annoying modern world stuff, why, exactly, do I need to upgrade my installation of Blade and Soul to UE4 in the first place? I was playing B&S regularly before Bless Unleashed arrived and it both ran smoothly and looked great. I play plenty of mmorpgs and Blade and Soul looked as good as most of them and better than plenty. Is a UE4 upgrade supposed to get more people to play?

I wasn't complaining then but, look, here I am, complaining now, and I haven't even got in to find out how badly it runs now and how it looks no different, which I am betting is going to be what I'll find when the downloaad ends. Speaking of which, do we really need to re-downoad the entire game every time any mmorpg has a graphical update? Isn't there some way to patch just the bits that matter? I'm sure it worked that way, once.

Ah, but in those days most customers had very limited data plans with their ISPs and there would have been hell to pay if they'd all had to download another fifty gigs. Now it's assumed everyone can do it without blinking so it keeps happening. Like the confirmation numbers my credit card company plans on sending me to make sure it's really me using my card online, I'm pretty sure all these changes are for the convenience and security of the supplier not the consumer. 

I was fine with my card as it was and I was fine with my game as it was. None of this is being done to help me. It's all to help whoever's creaming off the profits. But then, that's late-period capitalism for you. I guess I should feel grateful they aren't asking me to pay for the changes, too.

At least the credit card update went through smoothly (He says with fingers crossed and hand pressed flat against a wooden table. I got this table as a wedding present from someone I never saw again after the wedding, by the way. I think it's one of only two wedding presents I still own. The wedding was in 1981. The divorce was in 1987. My ex-wife didn't want anything when we split up except her share when i sold the house. Even the lawyer said it was one of the most amicable divorces he'd ever handled. We still exchange Christmas cards thirty-five years later although I did stop sending her birthday presents just after the turn of the Millenium.)

Okay, I'm setting a high bar for digression here. Final attempt to get to the point. I did have one, once.

The UE4 update for B&S did not go through smoothly. Not at first. I began by just clicking the desktop icon to see if it would do everything for me. The launcher popped up, I logged in and the launcher immediately crashed with exception errors.

I tried that a couple more times. Same thing. Tried it with Admin priveliges. Same thing. Tried it from the executable instead of the shortcut. Same thing. 

I googled the error and didn't get much help. I did learn that the new UE4 version of Blade and Soul drops all controller support. Now you have to play the game with mouse and keyboard. People who've been playing it with controllers for six years are not happy about that. I certainly wouldn't be if it had happened the other way around.

One thing that I did pick up while reading was that there should be a new NCSoft launcher to access the download for the upgrade. You might have thought they'd automate that upgrade through the old launcher or at the very least pop up a notification telling you where to go get it. Nope. Neither of those.

I dug around on the NCSoft website and found these installation instructions, which include a link to the download of the new patcher. I downloaded it, made a new folder for the re-installation of the full game, which I knew was coming next, installed the patcher, ran it, successfully this time and here we are. 

Or here I am, waiting for it to finish. 65% done now.

I may or may not get around to a post about how different things are under the new regime. I'm hoping by then I'll have something better to write about. 

I bet you are, too.

Just Play That Music

For reasons that escape me, probably something to do with having once played Final Fantasy XIV, I get a never-ending stream of emails from Square Enix. They send me promos and special offers for everything in their seemingly bottomless slush-pile. It seems like I get something from them just about every day. How many games do they have, anyway? It seems like a lot.

Almost all of them are of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. Usually I don't even open the email and when I do I wish I hadn't bothered. Case in point, today's grab-bag of "Tips and tricks for the BALANWONDERWORLD DEMO" (Square Enix's caps). I opened that because... actually, I have no idea why I opened it. Probably because I saw the word "demo".  

Grey. Hmm. I see why you went there.

It came with a bunch of shills for Kingdom Hearts, Marvel Avengers and "5 of the best Square Enix Co-op games". Those turned out to be two of the same games they were already trying to sell me on plus three more at least as not interesting.

To be fair to SE, there was an outside chance I might have been interested in the Avengers game, if it hadn't been that every review and blog post I've read about it at very best damns it with faint praise. Most of them tear it to shreds. I wouldn't mind a good RPG based on the Avengers IP. Or any of the Marvel superheroes. Just doesn't seem like that'd be it.

The reason they caught me with the "demo" hook was that yesterday I did download and play a demo and it wasn't a total waste of my time. And although I downloaded it via Steam, it was for a game I'd first heard about when it was being pushed at me via email. Not by Squenix, for once. By NCSoft, who rarely bother me over anything other than Guild Wars 2.

The game in question is FUSER. I mentioned it in passing back in November, when I was talking about wishlists. It was on my Steam wishlist for a while, even though I had no intention of buying it at the eye-watering £55 full-price. Even at half-price it would be about twice what I'd pay, and since it wasn't likely to drop anything like that far in any sale this year, I took it off.

FUSER describes itself as "a nonstop digital music festival where you and your friends control the music". It has some kind of multiplayer option where you can "partner with friends on epic collaborations, then share your mixes and headlining performances with the world". That makes it sounds like its some kind of cyberspace/social media platform centered on music and performance, which would be cool. When you read deeper, sadly, you discover it very much sells itself on being a game.

Please tell me you're not a real DJ.

Yeah, not interested in that, so much.

There's nothing about FUSER as a game that appeals to me. I don't want to "Complete challenges to unlock new skills and content in Campaign play" and I really don't want to "Collaborate or Compete in Multiplayer with players from around the world". I don't even want characters I can customize so I can see them dance on a festival stage or  DJ in front of an audience of NPCs as I play my mixes.

I just want to make those mixes. 

When I got the first email about FUSER last year it came with a link to a video (which I now can't find on YouTube so maybe that wasn't where I saw it). I watched it and thought "that looks like fun". Also "I could do that." 

The video was all about mixing songs. It had absolutely nothing to do with playing a game. I knew there was some attempt to sell it using game trappings and jargon but I thought that was just a way to market it to NCSoft's captive gamer audience. Under the hood I assumed FUSER would be a utility just pretending to be a game.

Having played the demo and read a bunch of highly enthusiastic reviews of the full game on Steam I'm fairly sure it's the other way around. The demo is highly focused on the game aspects. It starts with character creation. Only premade characters, sadly. They range the full gamut from incredibly bland and generic to seriously, you expect me to play that?

Once you've picked your look there's an excruciating conversation with a festival organizer that would patronize the audience of a kids' TV show. Or maybe that really is how kids talk these days. Yeah, no it's not.

I almost gave up at that point but somehow I managed to grit my teeth and carry on. And it was worth it. Well, in a way. 

It's worse when you can hear him say it. I know, hard to imagine, right?

 

The demo is really nothing more than a very basic tutorial. It runs you painstakingly through the basics of selecting and dropping the various tracks into the mix. You only have a choice of eight songs to dismember, each with four components, drums, bass, a lead instrument and vocals. 

The full product has a hundred songs with more coming on stream all the time, plus bells and whistles like audio filters and loops (and quite possibly actual bells and whistles, for all I know) but even with the extremely limited choices available in the demo I could feel the possibilities.

The demo handholds you through the mechanics adequately but it's equally interested in introducing  you to the game part, which mostly involves matching your actions to on-screen instructions to earn expreience points.

No part of that Rage Against The Machine track mixes well with anything else. Just sayin'.

 

I found the gamification irritating in the extreme. Not only did I not care about it in the first place, it also led nowhere. In the full game, as in any rpg, there's the prospect of levelling up and opening new content and abilities, in this case more songs and new ways to mix them, but in the demo all you get for following the instructions is distracted. It makes it all but impossible to concentrate on trying to create something that sounds good, which I naively thought would be the main reason for buying FUSER.

If the purpose of a demo is to let potential players decide whether to buy the game then, ironically, from my perspective I think I'd have to say it worked.  FUSER's demo successfully proved to me that I'd been right all along not to spend money on the full game. I'm not sure that's what NCSoft were hoping for, but if you show someone something and ask if they like it, you have to accept there's a chance they're going to say no, they don't.

That's what I've been saying all along!

What I did learn, though, was that I do still very much want what I thought FUSER was going to be, namely an extremely simple, dumbed-down, near-toy-level utility that will let me pretend I'm a DJ without having to go through the long and difficult process of learning how to do it properly. Preferably one which comes with a whole library of songs, a reasonable percentage of which I know and like. 

That's something I might even pay good money for. I just don't want to have jump through a whole load of gameplay hoops to get there.

Three's A Crowd : City of Heroes

I tried to log in to City of Heroes last night. The queue went 900 deep. Demand was so strong the volunteer team had added a second server so I thought I'd make a character there instead. It was quieter. Only 400 people waiting to get in.

The queue was dropping but slowly. It looked to be a good while before I got in. I decided to leave it. Playing U.K. hours on North American servers, weekend evenings are about the closest I ever come to U.S. Primetime. Not the cleverest time to taste the new hotness.

One of the main reasons I prefer playing on American servers, rather than European, is how it lets me manage population density. Evenings and weekends, any halfway-successful MMORPG feels comfortably busy,  not overcrowded. If I want the place to myself - enjoy rare spawns without competition, say - I just log in between breakfast and afternoon tea on weekdays.

I left CoH to settle. Today, when I tried after lunch, there were no queues at all. Probably helped that there were also two more servers online: four in total. From what I gathered from chat when I got into the game, so many people were trying to play on Sunday, even two servers weren't spreading the load enough. So they brought up two more.

OK, I want you to form an orderly line. There's room for everyone but you have to be patient!

This feels almost like an actual launch. A successful one, too. How long demand will last is uncertain but then isn't it always? Clearly there's a lot of pent-up desire being spent after six years of forced abstinence but against that you'd need to weigh the precarious legal position and the potentially ephemeral nature of any characters or progress being made.

With such an uncertain platform it's quite astonishing just how many players have come out in support. It has to be remembered that, unlike most shuttered MMORPGs, City of Heroes wasn't failing when it closed down. By most accounts it was running at a modest profit, albeit too modest for NCSoft's liking.

Given that CoH was always quite a singular proposition, it's hardly surprising that, in the six years since the sunset, no real alternative has arived to take its place. While tastes do change over time and lives move on, the seemingly perpetual appeal of very elderly MMORPGs like EverQuest, Ultima Online, Lineage, RuneScape and many others does tend to suggest that, if demand existed in 2012, it may very well continue to exist in 2019.

Demand is one thing but, sidestepping the issue of NCSoft's giant cartoon foot, there's also the question of supply. How much does it cost to maintain and operate four servers? And who's paying?

Don't you just hate in-game advertizing?

When you log into the game the very first thing that confronts you is a pop-up window telling you that the server team does not accept donations. I imagine the idea of accepting payment is a very touchy one right now, even if it is entirely and solely for the purpose of defraying expenses.

When I ended my previous post on City of Heroes wondering what the unexpected revenant's impact would have on the multifarious successor projects, Wilhelm suggested in the comments I should have frontloaded that question. I'm sure the teams behind Valiance, Ship of Heroes and City of Titans would agree.

Problem is, I really don't know enough about any of them to hazard a guess at the answer. I played Valiance's tech demo, which I quite liked, but that was more than three years ago. There was a public pre-alpha, which I may have tried (I think I did but I'm not sure). The game is currently back in closed pre-alpha with buy-in access for a minimum of $25. A public alpha will follow "sometime soon depending on how this phase goes".

Ship of Heroes responded to the news of the ghost server with a robust assertion that "Ship of Heroes is developing full-steam, and that we will launch as planned on the schedule we have announced". Prior to the recent revelations the team had already posted a detailed roadmap and confirmed that they were "on track for a solid Beta launch of Ship of Heroes at the end of 2019". So far, so bullish. Don't think anything's been added now the popularity of the revival is in the public domain.

When I said I'd sell my soul for a spot in pre-alpha I didn't mean it literally!

 As for City of Titans,  there's an announcement on its landing page asking backers to check and confirm their email addresses in preparation for the "staged rollout of pre-Alpha", which, I assume, is imminent. I couldn't see any dates.

From the outside it's impossible to tell how far down the track any of these projects has travelled. In my experience, pre-alphas (and even alphas) really don't give away all that much in terms of meaningful insight into either timescales or finished product, fun though they often are to play. If SoH really does make it into "solid beta" by the end of the year then it will be on the home straight, but few are the betas that hit the dates they announce a year in advance.

How things might play out between now and whenever these games come to market is anyone's guess. It's entirely possible that, by the time the first of them hits Open Beta or Early Access, there won't be any competition in the form of  CoH servers, official or otherwise. Or there could be a stable, trusted, NCSoft-sanctioned (or tacitly ignored) permanent City of Heroes server online 24/7, which would certainly obviate the desire of many of the potential audience to up sticks and move again.

The way I see it you're either on the bus or you're not. Or the monorail.

It was always going to be a rough ride for the trio, even without the current local turbulence. Three very similar independent MMORPGs, racing to open their doors to the exact same crowd at there or thereabouts the same time. But none of them could have anticipated having to compete directly with the very game whose absence brought them into being.

There is another possibility. One or more of the trio could turn out to be really good. City of Heroes, for all the affection and esteem in which it's held, is far from perfect. Graphically it's antedeluvian by modern standards and the gameplay loop is not to everyone's taste.

And, as Avengers: Endgame so forcefully demonstrated this weekend, Superheroes hold the core of the culture right now. If the market can sustain dozens, even hundreds of fantasy-themed MMOs, who's to say it can't support multiple capes-and-tights titles?

Before we can find out just what the demand is, though, someone has to make a game. For all their promise and potential, neither Valiance, Ship of Heroes nor City of Titans looks anywhere close to being ready to play.

As I write this, City of Heroes, somewhat astonishingly, is. What's more, for all its grey-market status, it's inarguably the real thing.

Authenticity and availability count for an awful lot.

If You Squint It Looks The Same

This week's top MMORPG news story was undoubtedly the revelation that a City of Heroes emulator has been running in secret for six years. The story first surfaced on YouTube, when a renegade invitee to the elite club, estimated to comprise around three thousand players, broke ranks to confirm the truth of what had long thought to be no more than a tin-foil hat conspiracy.

PCGamer has an overview of the story, crediting Massively OP for much of the subsequent  investigative work that teased out the detail. MOP itself has been on fire with extended commenary all week, although the frenzy there pales in comparison to the firestorm raging on Reddit.

In the aftermath of the reveal the source code to the game was released, a publicly available server came online then vanished, following supposed legal threats that turned out to be figmentary. Death threats and worse (!) were issued. Meanwhile negotiations apparently continue with NCSoft in the hope of bringing some degree of legality - and sanity - to the situation.

A story that got far less attention was the progress update on the project to bring back Free Realms, SOE's MMORPG for kids, which closed just over five years ago. I was mildly peeved when I spotted the Massively OP post, not because I'm wasn't delighted to see progress being made but because I was in hospital at the time and couldn't respond.

I've been following the Free Realms Sunrise project for a long time. On a scale between the black ops, NDA-protected secrecy of the COH server and the open access, everyone welcome approach of the team behind the magnificent Vanguard Emulator, FRS sits somewhere in the middle.

It's a very professional-looking project. There's a slick website but core communication happens on Discord. Access to the alpha, when it was running, was by invitation only although active participation on the forums allowed sufficiently motivated applicants a way in.

The alpha has now ended but, as the ever-cagey devs explain, "this doesn't mean we're entering beta". Instead they plan to carry on working on bringing the game back to life, while "posting update videos to our YouTube channel on either a weekly or bi-weekly basis".

Based on the one video we've seen so far, huge progress has been made. The game they're showing looks more sophisticated than I remember the real Free Realms ever being. I certainly don't recall seeing any juggling octopuses on any of my sporadic visits.

I liked Free Realms a lot. When it launched in 2009 it marked the start of Sony Online Entertainment's flirtation with the Free to Play business model, a flirtation that went on to become a full-blown love affair.

It was a popular game. In just a year over ten million players had registered to play. By the time John Smedley gave an interview to GamesIndustry.biz in 2011 that number had risen to 17 million. The game had just transferred to the PS3 and Smed was bullish about the prospects for Free Realms future: "I don't see any reason why it can't go to 100 million", he said.

When Free Realms sunsetted four years later it wasn't due to lack of interest; it was, as John Smedley said, because kids don't have money and cost a lot to manage: "Kids don't spend well and it's very difficult to run a kids game. Turns out kids do mean stuff to each other a lot.

City of Heroes famously also didn't go under due to lack of players. When NCSoft decided to pull the plug, COH was making money. Just not enough. The subsequent strange, long death of WildStar suggests that NCSoft felt the PR burn from that cold, financial calculation. Whether the scars still tingle enough to keep them from slamming any would-be COH Emulator with a Cease and Desist order remains to be seen.

The recent farrago over secret servers and entitled elites has knocked a huge hole in the City of Heroes Community Boat. Long touted as one of the cuddliest collectives in MMOdom, the shock of what many have been labeling betrayal has started a civil war uglier than anything seen between Heroes and Villians in the game itself.

People do get emotionally distraught over access to MMORPGs they love. Or loved. I'm not at all sure it happens in other gaming genres. It's not rational but love never is.

When an MMORPG closes it can feel as though someone dropped a bomb on your home. That's traumatic enough but imagine learning, years later, the bomb was mostly noise and smoke. Your home is still standing after all, only someone stole your keys and has been living there ever since.

Emulators have existed almost as long as MMORPGs themselves. Given that gamers and the IT community have a huge overlap that's hardly surprising. The will and the skill combine to make bringing dead games a calling for some, a hobby for others and a lifeboat for the rest of us.

As time passes the focus has shifted perceptibibly from "should we?" to "can we?". Emulators operate in a legal shadowland where nothing is certain until tested by the courts. Euphemistically-named "Private Servers" for MMORPGs still running commercially are clearly dancing on a knife-edge, especially if their operators are foolish and greedy enough to try to charge for access. Community projects that seek only to replicate a game deemed too old, unpopular or uncommercial to bother with by its legal owners are on significantly more solid ground.

Not only is there doubt which way a court might lean, there's also the not-insignificant calculation of relative damage to the brand. Is it going to cost more to protect assets that are never going to be used than would be lost by looking the other way and pretending nothing was happening?

Every time an MMORPG sunsets the brand of the company behind the decision takes a hit. In time that wound heals and most people forget. Why remind them by slamming down the oar on the fingers of the few poor saps still clinging to the wreckage? Is "Corporate Bully" really the look you want?

Daybreak, who inherited the blame for any number of SOE's Public Relations disasters from the botched handling of Star Wars Galaxies' NGE onwards, made a brave stab at turning it all around with one, stellar commercial decision early on. Their handling of the popular and successful Classic EverQuest emulator, Project1999 remains a shining beacon guiding other developers along the tricky path to redemption.

Daybreak didn't just turn a blind eye to P99, they actively engaged with the team behind it, arriving at a mutually acceptable solution which benefitted both parties. It is possible. It can be done.

Whether NCSoft will ever come to such an arrangement with the City of Heroes community remains to be seen. I wouldn't bet on it. I would hope, at least, though, that they have better things to do with their vast resources than pick off minnows in a jar.

I have no particular feeling for City of Heroes, myself. I played it in Beta and found it dull and repetetive. My beta experience convinced me not to buy it when it launched and I pretty much never thought of it again until it closed down.

By most accounts I missed out on a very good MMORPG. It must have changed a lot. Maybe CoH was the exception that proves my "better in beta" rule. If there ever is a stable, reliable emulator, maybe I'll give it a try.

In the meanwhile I'll keep on logging in to the Vanguard Emulator - five years old, developing slowly, utterly wonderful. And waiting on Free Realms Sunrise which will, I predict, be big news when it comes.

We need emulators. The drama, that we can do without.

What A Difference A Day Makes : GW2

It's not been the greatest twenty-four hours. I had some bad news about my health yesterday that's going to have a significant impact on my life over the next few months, at least. Before my hospital appointment I spent the morning playing EverQuest 2, which kept my mind off the prospect of a procedure I wasn't much looking forward to.

When I got back from the hospital, having received the news I was hoping to avoid, I settled into doing my dailies in Guild Wars 2 and then spent the rest of the evening in World vs World. It very much helped to settle my mood. Generally I don't play MMOs to escape problems in real life but I have to say that, when such problems occur, those virtual worlds do offer an attractive alternative.

This morning I woke up feeling fairly sanguine. I hope to be reasonably pragmatic about health problems and while I'd rather not have any to worry about, if I do then I'm all in favor of having  something done about them as soon as possible. Now I just have to wait for that to happen.

In that mood I sat down to read Feedly, where I found this bombshell waiting for me. The headline reads

"Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet is suffering heavy layoffs, but the game will continue".

Well, that's surprising, disturbing and incredibly unreassuring...

There's a good amount of detail in the MassivelyOP report and also in this GamesIndustryBiz piece. The gist is this:

• ArenaNet is not performing well enough commercially for NCSoft's liking.
• The underlying reason is a combination of decreasing income from aging franchises and insufficient progress on expensive new projects.
• There will be a round of significant lay-offs.
• Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 will continue on their present course. 

Songyee Yoon, CEO of NCSoft, summed up the problem:

"Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased. Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success."

ArenaNet themselves issued this bland statement on the forums:

"We know you have a lot of questions about the future of Guild Wars 2. We want to share with you what to expect moving forward for the game. First and foremost, we are still fully committed to all of our players and ongoing support of the game. We will be moving directly from Living World Season 4 into Season 5 as promised, and we plan to continue a regular cadence of updates and releases.

We know Guild Wars 2 is important to you, and as our players, you are important to us. Rest assured that we are still working to add great new content to the game. We are deeply grateful to all of you for your support during this difficult time."

Reaction on the official forums is, as yet, muted. There's a fairly short thread filled with some astonishingly smug, uninformed or plain self-deceiving comments, largely from people who seem to know little or nothing about NCSoft or its relationship to ArenaNet. Or about reality, for that matter.

Taken together with the recent layoffs at Blizzard and the speculation that kicked off about the future of World of Warcraft,  it's clear that neither size nor market presence gives much of an indicator towards stability or longevity. WoW is the biggest MMORPG of all and GW2 would probably have featured in many people's top ten most-successful current MMORPGs in the west; maybe top five.

I'll get to GW2 in a moment, but in more general terms I think what underpins both Blizzard and NCSoft's actions has more to do with the impending and inevitable decline of the PC gaming market than a decline in interest in the MMO(RPG) genre itself.  For a long time, MMOs were intrinsically bound up with the platform upon which they ran and that platform was almost exclusively the desktop computer. A handful of games were devised for consoles and there have been mobile MMOs as long as we've had smartphones, but until recently almost everything of significance in the MMORPG field came to us via the PC.

That's no longer true. We read all the time about MMOs being converted for consoles. It's pretty much expected now. Some are created for consoles first then ported to PC.

Mobile is booming. The quantity and quality of MMORPGs available for handheld devices increases every day. And, of course, mobile gaming is becoming not just more profitable than any other platform but vastly so.

At sixty years of age, and particularly with reminders of my own mortality fresh in my mind, I'm starting to feel hesitant about the sweeping statements I've been prone to make in the past about this or that MMORPG outliving me. That's beginning to look like an increasingly weak assurance either for me or the games.

If I stick to straight numbers, though, I'm beginning to question how long the ordinary person will be able to buy a new desktop personal computer. Ten years? Probably. Twenty years? Not sure about that. Thirty? I really doubt it. When the home desktop PC becomes a curiosity of the past, where will that leave the MMORPG?

While I do believe that some MMORPGs, as we now know them, will continue to be available virtually indefinitely, what devices they'll be developed to run on is a lot harder to predict. Trying to see things from the point of view of major games developers, planning for the next five years, it's getting ever harder to imagine major resources being directed towards the combination of a genre and a platform both in evident decline.

Getting back to Guild Wars 2, information coming out as a result of yesterday's news confirms an awful lot of things some of us had been speculating about for a year or two. It's been extremely hard to explain how a company with around 400 employees could be so unproductive, so unresponsive and just so all-round slow.

If most of those people had been working on Guild Wars 2 then you'd have been well within your rights as a customer to ask what the heck they were all doing. The explanation, as many long suspected, is that a lot of them weren't working on either of ANet's Live games at all.

Jessica Price, the GW2 writer who was sacked last year after a very public row, confirmed that while she was still with the company ANet were working on "two major projects", one of which was "indefinitely suspended" even before she was fired.

She also made a very telling statement about what was going on at GW2 while she was still working there:

"For those of us working on GW2, our mandate was essentially to make it look like there was the same level of resources devoted to GW2, when they were actually steadily moving people off of it onto the other projects."

Smoke and mirrors, as many of us suspected. So, where does all this leave Guild Wars 2 players?  That's quite hard to say.

The real concern for anyone hoping to go on playing GW2 for years to come is NCSoft. If ArenaNet was an independent company that had made some poor decisions on future projects and been forced to retrench, we could expect a renewed focus on the one game that does make money. We could expect, as many in the forum thread seem to do, that some of the resources diverted to unnanounced projects would be returned to the core game.

In that scenario, we might even see an improvement in the GW2 experience. Faster response times, shorter content droughts, more attention on meeting cutomer expectations. We might even get an expansion this side of forever.

And, if ANet was an independent company, should things get truly bad we could look forward to an eventual transfer of assets. The Guild Wars franchise might change ownership in a merger or even in some end-of-life fire sale, as we have seen happen to so many other familiar names in recent times. That would ensure at least a few more years.

With ANet being a wholly-owned subsidiary of NCSoft, however, you can forget all of that. The sad fates of both City of Heroes and WildStar tell us that NCSoft has no interest in selling IPs to other potential competitors. If they close ANet, that will be the end of the Guild Wars franchise.

In the short term I'm sure GW2 will persist. NCSoft has culled everything at ArenaNet that doesn't directly support the two Guild Wars titles. The recent, utterly unexpected re-launch of the support website for the original Guild Wars suggests there may even be plans to monetize the older game again.

There are firm statements that planned content will roll out, so I would expect to see Living Story Season Five conclude. That should keep the lights on for the rest of this year. After that, if nothing else has changed, I would expect a final throw of the dice with the announcement of a third expansion.

Looking any further ahead seems futile. At that point it would depend on unknown and unknowable factors including the commercial success or otherwise of that expansion, the health of the PC-based MMORPG market in general and how well NCSoft is doing overall.

GW2 will turn eight years old this summer. Right now, I wouldn't count on GW2 being around for its tenth anniversary. This time yesterday I wouldn't have said that. A lot can change in a day.