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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, wait...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Age of Conan - Main IP: Books and Movies.

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

Conan Exiles -  See above.

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

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

DCUO - Main IP: Comics and Movies.

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

Hello Kitty Online - Main IP: Merchandising and cultural icon

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

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

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

Marvel Heroes - Main IP - Comics and Movies

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

Otherland - Main IP: Books

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

Star Trek Online - Main IP: TV and Movies

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

Star Wars Galaxies - Main IP - Movies

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

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

Star Wars: The Old Republic - See above.

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

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

The Matrix Online - Main IP: Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clothes, Friends, Photos: OWW, OLN

You know how it is. One day you're bemoaning the lack of non-combat MMOs then next thing two come along at once.

It would have been easy to miss them both. There's a lot going on this week. I'm struggling to stay on top of it all, EverQuest 2's Chaos Descending expansion and the big Rune and Sigil revamp in Guild Wars 2, which I still haven't had time to explore in any depth. I've already had to pass on Lord of the Rings Online's Legendary server. At least I don't have to worry about Fallout 76...

I'm even keeping a watchful eye on EverQuest for the pre-expansion "Fall Fun Bonuses". The first couple of weeks was double rare spawns and double faction bonuses. Pass. That round ended yesterday, though. As I write the next set hasn't been announced. If it's double xp then I'll have to make time somehow. Magician needs new shoes. Spells. Levels. All of that.

And then StikiPixels had to choose yesterday to commit. Art curation MMO Occupy White Walls has been hanging around outside Steam Early Access for weeks and now it's going in. I was more than willing to make time but as the screenshhot up top suggests, so was everyone else. So far I haven't managed to log in.

I only have myself to blame for getting caught in the stampede when the doors opened. I had a Steam Beta key for this one a weeks ago (alpha tester's privelige) but I couldn't work out how to redeem it.

Not that I tried all that hard. I already had my hands full of testing with the Unnamed Alpha. If that one was Live and had true persistence I'd be playing the skin off it right now. Anyway, I figured the open release for OWW would be just around the corner so I stood down from Early Acess to Early Access and here we are.

OWW is a very interesting MMO. I'm not sure whether it's an MMORPG. You certainly could use it as a venue or a vehicle for roleplaying. I'm sure many will. RP is entirely optional, though.

I'm not even sure it's a game. It didn't have many gamelike elements in alpha, not that I noticed. More a kind of mash-up of Landmark, Second Life and that one time my Director of Studies took us all round the Fitzwilliam Museum to explain how paintings work.

I think it has huge potential. As I said, only yesterday I was moaning about the lack of non-combat MMOs that don't revolve around farming and/or survival. Well, here's one. It has the look of something that could break out of its niche to find a larger audience, too. An audience composed at least in part of people who wouldn't self-identify as "gamers".

As a particularly brilliant comment on Steam put it, "If all those Lo-Fi Hip-Hop 24/7 Radios would be a game, this would be it". Yeah... no. Really.

If anyone's jonesing for Landmark I'd definitely recommend OWW as more than a palliative. I'd also draw the game to the attention of anyone who used to enjoy decorating in Rift or WildStar and is now, understandably or unavoidably, casting around for somewhere more stable.

Even if you don't feel you have the decorating chops, I'd still say give OWW a look. All you need is a passing interest in art and especially art history. It's accessible, involving, educational and slightly crazed.

I'd give it a few days, though. According to the forums "We're currently testing out a new patch to see if our fix works. But we are working hard on fixing it!" I've been trying to log in the whole time I've been writing this post and so far the only picture I've seen is the one on the loading screen. Which could be better, given it's an art game and all. That is theshop window, kinda. Or the lobby, at least. Just sayin'...

With some free time on my hands - time I would have spent on OWW - and with Steam already running, I thought I might as well take a quick glance at Otherland Next. That's how we're meant to call it now, the Tad Williams-inspired MMO that's spent much of its time on life support. Try to keep a straight face.

OLN, as I'm sure no-one is calling it, got a major patch - they're labelling it an expansion - this week and along with the new name comes a new game mode. It's described, enticingly, on the character creation screen as something suitable for people who like the social aspect of MMOs but who don't like the gameplay.

And on the face of it, that's not a bad idea. There's a sizeable demographic out there, people who use popular MMOs as a kind of glorified chatroom and if ever an I.P. was made for doing just that it has to be Otherland. That's literally why the characters in the original novel were online before things went horribly wrong and they found themselves "adventuring".

The problem Otherland has is this: if you want to socialize you need people to socialize with. Good luck finding them in OLN. I made a new character, took the Social option, spawned into Lambda Mall and spent fifteen minutes running around without seeing another player.

Which was probably just as well. The new mode skips the tutorial, and the tutorial is where you get your gear. I made a female character and when I logged her in she appeared in the middle of a shopping mall in her underwear. We've all had that dream, right?

I did check her inventory to see if she'd stashed a vest in there for emergencies. No luck. I decided I'd roleplay the whole thing as a tendency towarss exhuberant exhibitionism so she ran around taking selfies in front of suggestive signage for a while. You have to make your own entertainment when you're barred from questing and adventuring, especially when you're running around in your skimpies and there's not even anyone watching.

I may take my adventuring character (male, clothed) to look at the new content. We'll see. For now, though, I think it's back to the Elemental Planes.

Non-combat content's all very well but after a while you really feel like pulling the wings off a few mephins.

This Used To Be The Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remake, Remodel : Otherland

Was anyone waiting for another post about Otherland? Or expecting one? Safe bet no-one even wanted one. I know I didn't. All the same - incoming!

Last time I wrote about the ill-fated MMO based on Tad Williams' aging Science Fiction trilogy I thought it was Game Over - very nearly literally. By then Otherland had faltered and restarted several times already, lurching back to life each time like the serial killer in a straight-to-video slasher movie. It couldn't go on and even if it could, I couldn't.

When I said goodbye to my one and only character just over a year ago I left him stranded in Lambda Mall without a quest to his name. The main scenario had bugged out on me and I'd lost patience with the whole thing. The game was a laggy, bug-ridden shell that showed every sign of having been abandoned by its current owners.

Hey, barkeep!

It seemed inevitable the only news we'd hear after that would be when the thing finally went dark for good and that would be a mercy. My last words on the subject were: "Never say never. If I hear that anything's really changed - for the better - I'll always be open to taking another look but for now I think I'm done. On to the next world."

Well, I thought they were my last words. Guess what? Something did change and I heard about it.  I tried to ignore it but there the game was, still in my Steam Library (that's all of four games so hard not to notice one). What's more, not only was the game still up and running but it was getting patched. Regularly. Bugs were being stomped. Scraps of news filtered out. Some even suggested the game was improving.

I had a free afternoon. I was on Steam. My mouse pointer hovered. My finger clicked.

Gimme yer fastball. I'll knock the skin off it!

There was a 5GB patch but Steam is fast. In ten minutes I was looking at character select. It was blank. I logged out again.

If there's an MMO I've restarted from scratch more often than Otherland I don't want to remember what it might be. I played through the original tutorial at least twice, then a couple of times more through the revamped one. It was never a lot of fun and doing it over didn't make it any more so.

Still. Curiosity. I went to the forums and began flipping back through the update notes. There were a lot of them. Working my way back to the megapatch that landed in August, right after the game changed hands yet again, I read this:

Patch 5.6.49 introduces many changes to the current state of the game. Both the gameplay and class experience has been redesigned to provide a much more enjoyable experience.

Due to the number of changes implemented we had to remove all player characters.

Okay, so that's where my character went. What the heck, one more try for the gipper...

I have some cream that'll clear it right up.

Character creation seems to be one of the "many changes". I don't remember it being this detailed before and certainly not this slick. A better first impression, for sure.

The tutorial/introduction seems to be mostly the same as last time. It's changed a few times since I first played and the current iteration is linear but none the worse for that. It zips along nicely, explaining what it needs to explain.

There are now pop-up "Hints" that I think must be new but the thing that's really changed is that there aren't any bugs. Well, other than the ones in Bug World but they're meant to be there.

I made it all the way from character creation to Lambda Mall, the game's hub zone, without encountering a single bug, major or minor. That was a first. A welcome first.

Paging Captain Obvious.

There was also barely a sign of lag, another big improvement. That said, there is a stickied post on the forum advising players on how to deal with lag so maybe I was just lucky.

Lambda Mall still looks great - just how a cybermall should look. Unlike last time I had no trouble at all continuing my quest. I got my uSpace apartment (amazing view) and did a couple more introductory tasks. This part of the tutorial has been heavily trimmed and it's all the better for it.

Then it was off to the first proper adventure zone, the starting area known as 5Isles. The mechanics for moving from zone to zone have been tidied up nicely. The portals throughout the tutorial are now very clear and easy to see, something they certainly haven't been in the past. There's a very user-friendly teleport gate in Lambda Mall with an immediately understandable drop-down menu. Much better all round.

My uSpace. I think Luc Besson used to live here.

The quests in the village where you first arrive didn't seem to have changed but everything seemed faster. Much faster. Combat has been tweaked to be a great deal less tedious. Otherland's combat isn't going to be winning any prizes for originality when it comes to mechanics but at least now it feels quick and crunchy.

Knocking down eight of this or fifteen of that took no time at all and the process was much enlivened by the new, flashy visual effects. Clouds of digital artifacts explode around every impact in a very 1990s style that feels quite appropriate if not exactly subtle.

I got as far as the Water City which, I seem to remember, is about as far as I've ever gotten in the game so far. Stopping to take stock I realized that nothing had gone wrong. Nothing at all. It's perhaps not much of a compliment to say that I didn't come across any bugs in the Tutorial or the first starter area but it's more of a compliment than I've been able to offer the game any other time I've posted about it.

And that's just auto-attack.

What the commercial future might be for an MMO based on a fairly obscure IP that's slipping further and further out of public consciousness, one that's been nigh on a decade in development without ever getting as far as an official launch date, I wouldn't like to say. I might be thinking something but I'll be polite and keep it to myself.

Be that as it may, for whatever reason - very, very much against the odds - this particular MMO is still plugging away. When you consider what's just happened to Marvel Heroes, which had both one of the entertainment industry's biggest IP's and the backing of one of it's largest companies behind it, you have to take off your hat to Poland's Drago Entertainment just for keeping on keeping on.

I'm not sure I'll be playing Otherland any more after this. There are a lot of MMOs and only so much time. On the other hand I'm definitely not saying I won't. I said that before and look where it got me.

Out Of Early Access, Into Early Exit : Otherland

To install and play AdventureQuest 3D on a PC requires Steam. I have a Steam account but I don't use it very often. Most of the time I forget it's there.

One of the few games on my Steam list is Otherland, an MMO with a very checkered past, about which I've written a handful of times. I'd vaguely registered a news squib a while back that claimed Otherland was now out of  "Early Access" and into commercial release.

With that move came a full wipe. and I didn't even have the game installed on my new PC but I thought I might as well patch it back up, start from scratch and see how things were going.

At first glance things everything seemed fine - better, even. There's a largely new tutorial, much tighter and more coherent than the rambling, confusing one I played through earlier this year. I breezed through that in an hour or so. It felt exactly like playing a single-player rpg and that's pretty much what Otherland seems to be right now because I didn't see one other player, even when I arrived at the main social hub, Lambda Mall.

It's still gorgeous to look at. The art design is fantastic. The art team has caught the look and feel of Tad Williams' novels, more so than perhaps I originally thought. It's worth downloading (it's F2P) just to run around and gawp.

As for it being an MMORPG, though...well, first you'd need some other players but it's not just that. It's more that if there's a world here I can't quite find it. The tutorial is linear as you'd expect but when it came to an abrupt halt I couldn't work out what to do or where to go next.

In the previous version the questline took you from Lambda Mall to the first adventure zone and things carried on from there. Based on what I read on the forum when I was trying to figure out what was going on, that should still be the case but it's  not, or not for me.

It'll be a bug. The game is still riddled with them. I had to relog twice just to clear glitches in the tutorial and the recent Steam reviews and forum posts all confirm that Otherland remains as buggy and unpolished in every respect other than the visuals as it always was.

It's a shame because as many people point out it's just about the perfect IP for an MMO, not least because Tad Williams probably retro-fitted a lot of the underlying concepts from the genre in the first place. The potential is almost certainly going to go to waste, sadly, since it seems that there's neither the interest from the public nor the authority from the developers to do it justice.

Even if I had been able to leave Lambda Mall it seems my options would have narrowed. Back then I remember doing a fair amount of open world questing, meeting various NPCs and helping them with their usual range of problems, just like any MMO but reading the forums it seems that even those limited MMORPG aspects that the game had to show when I last played have faded away. Side quests and crafting have apparently failed to make the move to Early Access leaving what amounts to a single, linear main storyline that eventually peters out (although not where mine did right at the beginning...).

This is hearsay and maybe someone reading this, who's managed to push further into the game, will be able to put the record straight. Only I doubt anyone reading has played further or, indeed, as far. And I'm not going to, either.

Sometimes you reach the point where you realize you've given an MMO just about as much time as it deserves. You're playing away and you find yourself thinking of all the other things you could be doing instead. I think I reached that point with Otherland about an hour ago.

Never say never. If I hear that anything's really changed - for the better - I'll always be open to taking another look but for now I think I'm done. On to the next world.

The Hard Road To Lambda Mall : Otherland

2016 has taken a somewhat surprising turn as far as MMOs go. Looking ahead from the dying days of the old year, once again there didn't seem to be anything very much to look forward to beyond more of the same.

Heart of Thorns was solidly in place. Expansions for every other MMO I play or might consider playing were either not announced yet or drifting far off beyond a haze, release date unknown. Daily news reports for the genre seemed mostly to feature minor updates and tweaks to established favorites and the incremental, glacial progress of a plethora of crowd-funded hopefuls that may or may not eventually reach some state we could generously describe as "done".

Then, out of the blue, one of my favorite bolt-holes received a death sentence. I didn't expect to spend most of a week and a half in January playing City of Steam, that's for sure. For every door that closes, though, as they say...

Blade and Soul is a title that some people have been watching for years but it had passed me by almost entirely. I knew the name, I had the very vaguest understanding that it had released in some other territory and done not terribly well - that was about it. Something about martial arts? Oh and it was an ARPG.

Now I'm playing it and enjoying it. Not sure how that happened.

Otherland, on the other hand, is a project I've been following, in desultory fashion, since the day it was announced. There have been various points at which I could have played some testbed version but didn't. For the last few months it's been in Early Access yet, although I thought about buying in, I never did.

Now I'm playing it and...am I enjoying it? That's hard to say.

There's been a roiling torrent of discussion over the merits and drawbacks of Early Access as the concept has bedded in and taken hold over the last two or three years. I was an early adopter with Landmark, a purchase I have never for a moment regretted, but until now that remained my own venture into the minefield of half-released half-games.

Otherland offers a prime example of why the buyer should beware. It is, to put it politely, buggy as hell. There are even bugs in the tutorial for which the developers' advice on the official forum is to delete your character and roll again. This is at the same time that PR puffs are being sent out promoting the addition of four new zones.

You might, rightly, think that before you start adding more to your game you might consider getting the parts you already have into working order but no, that is not the Way of Early Access, so it seems. One of the most successful of all Early Access titles, ARK, has almost made adding new content while disregarding shortcomings a defining feature and people seem to be fine with that.

There's something of the tottering run of a toddler about all this. To stay on their feet these Early Access titles have to keep running regardless. If they paused for just a second to look around them and consider their position they'd fall in a heap.

Not for them the painstaking iterative processes of a five-year development plan, nor the slow, steady, incremental climb of a traditional alpha/beta/launch development arc. No, just get the damn thing out there, start taking the money, bosh it up as we go and keep adding bells and whistles to bring in more punters all the while.

The people behind the current version of Otherland, Drago Entertainment, do get something of a pass on this. After all, the game was dead in the water before they stepped in. If they weren't around then presumably we wouldn't have the chance to play the game at all in any form.

And that would be a shame because Otherland has...something. Not the vast, sprawling, overwhelming something-everything of Tad Williams' monstrously huge trilogy on which it's based, but at least a clear and present ambiance that reflects some of the strangeness of that setting.

So far I've made it only as far as Lambda Mall, the central facilities hub in both the game and the books. The real (or unreal) world lies outside. To get even that far has been a struggle.

Not because the gameplay is hard. So far it seems to consist of the regular MMO cycle: talk to NPC, kill enemy, interact with object, talk to NPC again. Combat is simple to the point of being simplistic.

No, the difficulty stands in bugs that block progression completely. In order to arrive at Lambda Mall it's first necessary to negotiate the basic tutorial, then a zone known as "Limbo" and finally a third zone, in which your character and his or her helpers are held prisoner in cages.

I managed to avoid the gamebreaking bug in the tutorial itself but I hit one in Limbo. The portal to the next area would not permit any interaction from my character. He was left to stand in frustration as a stream of NPCs he'd saved plunged through the tesseract to freedom, stranding him in Limbo all alone.

That one I "fixed" by dropping and retaking the quest half a dozen times over three separate sessions until, for no apparent reason, it just worked. There followed a rather impressive cut scene that, in the way of these things, wiped away any lingering frustration and freshened me up to carry on.

Until the next bug. This time it was a crate that wouldn't open. Inside were my weapons, taken from me by the finger-wagging gang leader at the top of the post and without which my character would be spending the rest of his dismal imaginary virtual life in a 12x12 boxroom underground.

Again repetition won through. Take quest, try quest, fail quest, delete quest. Close game. Relog. Take quest, try quest, fail quest... I think it took about half a dozen tries before, once again, it just worked.

This is all so familiar. Back in the days of real betas and playing on Test servers I treated this kind of thing as routine. It was part of the deal - players volunteered to test stuff for free on the understanding that they got to see new games and new content before anyone else. Even then some people grumbled about companies getting their QA work done for nothing and companies occasionally felt badly enough about that to hand out rewards to testers just for showing up.

Now here we are, not only testing the games in our own time for no reward but paying for the privilege. This is what's called "progress". Or possibly irony. Or being played for a sucker. One of the above.

In the end, though, you have to face the fact that no-one is making any of us do any of this. I downloaded Otherland because I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. I stubborned my way through the bugs and glitches because I really wanted to see Lambda Mall, a place I remembered both from the novels and the original promos for the game.

Along the way there was something of a plot that seemed mildly intriguing and my character began to acquire a marginal personality that started some vestigial attachment process going. When, due to the inept response feedback of the inadequate selection UI in the makeover store, my character received an unintentional gender re-assignment and emerged as a woman (with the wrong facial features and the wrong haircut to boot) I actually felt more attached to her still.

I've always enjoyed buggy MMOs. I don't like game-breaking bugs. How could anyone? I would prefer not to have to do quests five times just to get them to work once. But glitches and strangeness have a charm all their own.

No, if I end up not playing Otherland all that much it won't be because of the ropy, unstable, unfinished nature of the product. It will be because it's wearing. The data-cluster textures, the harsh neon, the strip mall styling, the Blade Runner on a Budget chic...it just wears me down.

After an hour my eyes hurt and my soul feels abraded. It's not a world I can relax in and that's a problem not just with Otherland but with all hard-SF settings. Sharp edges, harsh color palettes, hard surfaces, ugly fonts, clinical UIs, they all make for a tiring place to spend an evening. I love reading SF but I've never been as keen on watching it and I certainly don't have a hankering to live the life vicariously.

Of course, one of the key aspects of Tad Williams trilogy is that Otherland can, quite literally, be anywhere, anything you want it to be. So it may be that, once I step through a portal at Lambda Mall and emerge in Four Square or Water Isle it won't feel that way at all.

We'll see, because I am, at least, interested enough to go and look. Otherland does have something. Whether it has enough of whatever it is to make a mark in the current climate I doubt but it's here now and while the opportunity to explore it exists it would be foolish not to take it. Bugs permitting, naturally.

What lies ahead for the rest of this year I wouldn't presume to say. I have no plans at all, for example, to try Black Desert, which launches in March, but I would have said the same about Blade and Soul.  

Dragon Nest:Oracle, another game that, like City of Steam, I've let slide, has just had a massive technical failure, on the back of which I've re-downloaded and installed it via Steam because my local client no longer works.

WvW, which had seemed moribund to the point of collapse has suddenly revived to the extent that last night there were fifty people in the queue for Eternal Battlegrounds and big fights on the other maps at the same time.

There's really no second-guessing all this stuff. My big plan for 2016 is not to have a plan. I'll just take it as it comes.

The Other Side Of Steam : Otherland

Well it finally happened. I bought a game on Steam. I blame it on City of Steam and City of Steampuff. The rule of threes and all that.

I've had a Steam account for a long time. Years. I believe I used it to get a second pre-order  for an MMO once, when the provider I was using refused to accept more than a single purchase for the bizarre reason that no-one could possibly use two copies of an MMO.

Other than that the only time I used it was to authorize my physical copy of Broken Sword V, which I was given as a Christmas present last year and still haven't gotten around to playing. Occasionally I browse the Steam store in an idle moment but until now I've never seen anything that I both wanted to buy and couldn't get more easily and conveniently elsewhere (usually from Amazon).

Otherland is an MMO I've always kept an eye on. I read and enjoyed the Tad Williams novels that inspired it and I always meant to give it a try when it launched. Only it never did launch.

I even signed up for a beta at one point. Not sure what happened with that. I know I never played. Then the company making it went bust or gave up on it and that seemed to be that.

Except, of course, MMOs have more lives than a basket of cats. Otherland resurfaced in the hands of  Drago Entertainment, a Polish outfit, who proceeded to sand off the rough edges and polish the rusting hulk up a little until they had something presentable enough to commit to the the ever-open arms of Steam's Early Access section.

I'd been meaning to stump up the very reasonable $20 or so they were asking since I heard the news but it's one of those things you never quite seem to get around to doing. Finally Massively reported that the game was on a 75% off sale and that did it.

It's not that I bought it because it was super-cheap. I am not very price-sensitive. It was more that I knew I was definitely going to buy it at some point so the sale just acted as the final poke I needed to go through the unpleasant chore of filling out the forms. Also, since it was such a bargain, I bought the Deluxe edition, mainly for the extra character slot in case it turns out I like it.

And so far I do like it. Not that you can read much into an hour before bed hastily rushing through the tutorial and the first, post-tutorial but pre-real-game babies map.

It has the annoying center-screen cursor and mouse-button combat of supposed "action" MMOs but it falls solidly on the side of playable, giving me fair control over the mouse cursor when I need it and not demanding I play Finger-Twister every time I want to open my inventory.



The visuals are not bad. Hard to tell in the early stages, where we're supposed to be in areas of a graphical simulation that's breaking down, but I thought it felt promising. The quest text was moderately amusing in spots and at least it was all written in good, clear, grammatical English.

The problem for now is going to be finding time to play. All my bonus playtime after GW2 this week has to go to City of Steam, where I'm racing to get to level 40 and open The Gardenworks zone before the server shuts down. 38.3 as of this writing. Should make it, I hope.

Last night I stayed up later than I should have playing Otherland, though, and I'm keen to get back and see more, so that's an encouraging sign. Don't imagine for a second I'll stick around for any kind of long haul or serious progression but it looks ripe for some exploration and screenshotting at least.

More later. Maybe.

The News From Otherland

Tonight I was going to write about EQ2's new pre-Campaign quest "Malice in the Woods" (or "Malice in the Grove" if you're one of those goody-goody Qeynosian types). It took me about an hour to run through it including time out for screenshots and cheating research. Then, just after I finished, I took quick glance at Feedly and saw this on MassivelyOP. Quest reports will just have to wait until tomorrow.

The first mention of Otherland on this blog was in October 2012 as part of a portmanteau post about nine upcoming MMOs and expansions. In the intervening three years all of the other eight launched successfully. To no-one's surprise the Tad Williams inspired and endorsed project did not.

It failed to make its optimistic "Quarter 4 2012" release date (still bizarrely shown on Gamigo's web-page for the game - are Gamigo even still involved?) and from then on it was downhill all the way to oblivion. Or so we thought.

In an April 2013 post I described Otherland as "on the verge of extinction" as massive lay-offs hit developer RealU. Nothing was heard after that for more than a year and I'd both written the game off and forgotten about it until October 2014, when Massively chimed in with unexpected news of a last-minute reprieve.

The white knight riding to the rescue (or salvage crew picking up the pieces if you prefer) was hitherto unheard-of Polish MMO developer Drago-Entertainment. Progress since then has hardly been high-profile. A trickle of reports dribbled out, a closed beta test here, a new feature added there, but had the MassivelyOP crew not pulled off their own back-from-the-grave act it's doubtful we'd have heard anything about even those few tidbits.

It comes as a very pleasant surprise, then, to be able to report that as of the end of this month we will be able to log into Otherland and find out whether all the fuss, or lack of it, was worth it. In what is now a traditional move for smaller developers looking to keep the lights on while still working on getting something playable out the door, Otherland is offering Early Access from August 26 and through Steam, no less.

Steam Early Access might not carry the imprimatur of quality it once did (it did have authority once upon a time, didn't it? Or am I imagining that?) but it certainly means access to a significant audience. Including me. I have a Steam account although I rarely find any cause to use it. Well, this is one such cause.

Tad Williams is an author whose work I've enjoyed for many years (although his current dirty angel series is unreadable). The Shadowmarch saga is top-class genre fantasy and although I devoured the huge, sprawling, self-indulgent and highly entertaining Otherland trilogy maybe a decade ago I can still remember great chunks of it.

The whole enterprise rested on a rendition of virtual reality that almost begged to be translated into an MMORPG. The narrative takes place in what is effectively a series of instances accessed via a lobby and the setting gives carte blanch to cater for any and all tastes from fantasy and SF to historical re-enactment or abstract psychedelia.

In what looks to be a measured and unambitious way that's just the tack Drago-Entertainment has taken. The very professional and articulate prospectus on the Steam Early Access page lays out the limits plainly and realistically. I was particularly taken with the pragmatic nature of statements like these:

"...as a small developer there is only so much we can do. This means that you will certainly encounter previously unknown bugs and that we still need to adjust the balancing."

"After several CBTs we decided against doing a traditional OBT outside of Steam. Though this would have likely brought a huge user peak in the beginning, the feedback would not have been meaningful".

"...the revenues from Early Access purchases will be reinvested into additional development resources and more servers, providing an overall superior final product.”

The feature set is similarly restrained. Although the PR team unleash their lexicon of promises and lures in the About The Game section on Steam, which closely mirrors the website itself, the actual scope looks much less exaggerated. Half a dozen zones including an arena and a lobby area, four classes, the Unreal engine - no reinventing the wheel or throwing in everything and hoping some of it sticks.

Gameplay offers PvE, trailing the prospect of "new worlds with hundreds of new quests" by the time the game launches for real but a close reading reveals a game solidly focused on PvP. In a highly unusual move the player housing (yes, it has player housing) is vulnerable to attack by other players even when you aren't there to defend it.

"Set in Lambda Mall, each player is given their own virtual home called USpace, which can be decorated and customized. USpaces are used to grow Soma, the game’s main resource, and can be attacked by other players, leading to PVP encounters. Afraid to go on vacation? Collect eDNA from creatures and clone them to protect the USpace in your absence".

Even Crowfall doesn't go that far.

With the heavy focus on PvP and the "action-based combat with direct controls" it's hardly my idea of a relaxing MMMORPG but it's still likely to be my first Steam Easy Access purchase if for no better reason than I've been following its limping, halting progress for years now and I want to see it up close and in person. Virtual person.

Chances of playing Otherland long-term? Minimal. Chances of getting my money's worth? I'll tell you when I can find a price on Steam.