Out But Not Down

I'm short of ideas for a proper post today, or at least ideas that won't take hours to put into words and pictures. Can't even come up with anything much that'd run to a few paragraphs and make up a Grab Bag. 

I do have a few little squibs to throw out, though. Let's see what comes of that.

Hmm. I wonder how many people reading this will know what a squib is and why someone would throw one?  I just googled it to see what would come up.  

Wikipedia has a whole piece on explosive devices as used by the military and in special effects for movies, which wasn't at all what I was thinking of. The folks at Oxford know what I'm talking about, though:

"1. a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding

2. a short piece of satirical writing." 

That's exactly what I had in mind. The first one, anyway, although the second is handily close, too. Not that there's going to be a lot of satire here but a short piece of writing was exactly what I was getting, although I was using the firework as a metaphor to get there, which seems a little tautological now I come to think about it. 

When I was a child, Fireworks Night, which was what we generally called it, rather than November 5th or Guy Fawkes, was a Big Deal. I could do a whole nostalgic number here on the ritual of buying the fireworks a couple of weeks in advance, bringing them home and lining them all up on top of the piano so I could look at the brightly-colored wrappers every day and imagine setting them off...

I'll save you all that self-indulgent claptrap. The point is, on the actual night, my extended family, including my cousins, would start the evening by standing in the dark in the crazy-paved courtyard, tossing lit squibs at each others' feet. I loved to make one of my cousins scamper! 

What? No, no-one got set on fire or even singed! Well, maybe a bit singed... It was, as they say, a different time...

Where was I? Oh, yes...

 

Outbound Isn't Inbound After All

Well, it is... It'll just be a bit late.  

Remember Outbound? It's the game where you drive around some very pretty scenery in a camper van, solving mysteries of an extremely cosy nature. I played the demo in Next Fest and reviewed it here. 

I liked it. What's more, I thought it had promise. In fact, I thought it had so much promise I chose it for my imaginary game publisher, Pretty Blue Fox Games, in Wilhelm's Fantasy Gaming League. Anyone want to chip in with why I called it that? Don't google it!

Crossover readers of both blogs may remember that I was the unlikely winner of the inaugural season back in 2025. I'd love to be able to tell you I was on track to repeat my success this year but in fact I have yet to see any game I've picked launch at all. 

Outbound was going to be the first with a release date of April 23rd but there was an announcement today that launch has been delayed almost a month to May 14th. The stated reason is the late identification of "an issue... that could negatively impact your enjoyment of the game." I suppose that's a good thing. Still annoying, though.

It means my first scheduled launch will now be Mixtape on May 7th. Assuming that doesn't get put back as well. At this rate we'll be half way through the season before I have a single game on the board. And looking at the rest of my slate, I might not have many more by the end. I might ought to rethink.

 

Why Does EverQuest Legends Even Need To Be An MMORPG?

Obviously the answer is "Because it's EverQuest, dumbass!" but that's a recursive argument, isn't it? Sure, it's EverQuest but it's an EverQuest you can solo. 

Not an EverQuest where you can solo. That would be a very different concept. Or rather a very familiar one. To me, at least.

You could solo in EverQuest very effectively and enjoyably in 1999. I did and so did thousands of others. After they added custom chat channels, I was in one for a while that was dedicated to soloists and it was very busy. Nearly everyone was a Necromancer but there were a few Bards and Druids and probably a Wizard or Magician or two in there, somewhere, all soloing away happily. Okay, not always happily....

No, EverQuest Legends is supposed to be a version of EQ you can solo as in Game Over. Every last mob, quest, dungeon and even raid you'll be able to complete without any help from anyone. Mostly in instances. Where there will be only you, if that's your preference.

So why does it need to be an MMORPG? Conceptually, I mean. 

I don't have any problem with it being one. Nothing wrong with a graphical chat channel where lots of people can play the same game alongside each other and shoot the breeze as they go. People have used MMOs like that as long as there have been MMOs. 

It seems, though, that EverQuest Legends could equally well be packaged and sold as a single-player, open world RPG. An offline RPG at that. It could have co-op for grouping. After all, group size is going to be just four people and raids are only eight. The whole "Massively Multiple" part seems like overkill.

I was thinking about all that partly because I'd been reading about the upcoming Closed Beta, to which I have not been invited (And for which I would now most probably not accept an invite anyway, since there's going to be a strict NDA...) but mostly because something very similar did just happen to another would-be MMORPG. 

 

Tiny Gets Tinier

Book of Travels was an MMORPG that I never understood. From memory - and this may not be entirely accurate - it was a Kickstarted game that promised to bring some very slow gameplay to a small population of pacifists. The term "Tiny MMO" got thrown around a lot although exactly what that was supposed to mean I didn't know then and don't know now.

Unlike some Kickstarters in the genre, Book of Travels did at least get as far as Early Access, where it drifted along for the best part of five years, never really going anywhere and making about as much impact as you'd expect of something so tiny. If you're interested in the details, MassivelyOP has a history primer on the game, complete with links. 

Probably to no-one's surprise, Might and Delight, the company behind BoT (Unfortunate acronym, there. Does no-one think of these things before the press releases go out?) has finally thrown in the towel, announcing the closure of the servers (Or probably server, singular, I imagine.) on July 31st.

What is a little more surprising is that Book of Travels won't disappear altogether when the servers go dark. It will convert into an offline game, presumably one no longer even Tinily Multiple and definitely not Online.

Something very similar happened to Nightingale, a much more successful and popular game that still couldn't scratch up enough interest to justify the MMO tag. It makes me wonder how many of these MMORPG projects, Kickstarted, Indie or even occasionally with major studio backing, would have been better conceived as single-player or co-op RPGs in the first place. I mean, it's nice that they're getting a kind of after-market half-life when they fail but maybe we could have skipped the painful process of disappointment and decline and gone straight to the end result.

The odd side-effect of this particular development spiral is that, having not thought about the game for years and never having had the least interest in playing it with other people, I'm now feeling curious enough to give it a try. As an offline game it's going to retail for just $4.99 on Steam so it's hardly a big investment just to find out if there was ever anything there. 

Perhaps the really unusual decision the developers have made, though, is not only to allow modding of the game but to actively encourage it. That's starting even before the shutdown, too. I get it for the offline version but how you mod an active MMORPG beats me. Maybe it never really was an MMO to begin with?

And that's all I have. Managed to stretch it out quite nicely, I think. Just time for a closing song, as is the Grab Bag tradition. Hmm. I guess this was a Grab Bag after all...

What shall we have? Plenty of choice. This was nearly a music post, I have so many songs stored up. I thought I'd save that for Friday or Saturday, though. End the week with some bangers.

Now, when I say "bangers", does everyone know that's what we used to call these little fireworks we'd throw around, back in the day...

 I Know - Swapmeet

I literally just found that! It was in the recommends for the track I was going to use and I had a good feeling about the thumbnail. Boy, was I right!

If this was a music post I'd follow it with... 

 

idk idk idk idk idk idk idk idk - Jim Legxacy

And my work here is done! 

I swear I missed my vocation. I should have been a radio DJ. 

We're On A Road Trip To Nowhere

Given my current circumstances, I've had to abandon my usual plan to play and review half a dozen demos from the current Next Fest. Instead, I'm limiting myself to a more achievable two or three. I already had a couple of definites in mind, one of which was Outbound.

The game's Steam Store page describes it as "a cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future". I spent a few minutes yesterday, skimming the list of demos on offer and the first thing I noticed was just how many games like this there are now. I started at the top of the "Browse All Titles" list and worked my way down and eight of the top ten were some kind of survival sim. 

Of course, that's a list tailored to what Steam believes is likely to interest me. If I look at the options without being logged in, I get a much broader selection of genres. Even so, I notice I'm getting no point-and-click demos and very few tactical rpgs, both of which I play more than survival games. That's because there are far fewer of them, I'm betting.

In a crowded marketplace, most of the survival games make some vague attempt at grabbing attention with a trope or quirk that supposedly makes them special. Scanning down the list again I see, in order from the top, pirates, creature-collecting, medievalism, Old West, space, ranching and, after an unscheduled interruption from something that's not a survival game at all, Outbound, whose USP is that you drive a camper van.

I've often fantasized about buying a camper van and heading off into the unknown, just driving around, stopping anywhere that seemed interesting and staying as long as it stayed that way. That was what attracted me to outbound the first time I heard about it.

I have to say my fantasies of a life on the open road have never included making tools, on a workbench in the back of the camper, out of scrap metal and bits of wood picked up from the side of the road so I can repair broken barriers, clear fallen trees or rebuild collapsed bridges. Nor did I imagine I'd be living on berries scrounged up from the undergrowth or fueling my van with fallen tree branches I'd have to feed into some weird device in the engine compartment.

For that matter, I hadn't envisaged the van itself turning into some kind of Wacky Races house on wheels. One of the goals of the game appears to be to turn your compact camper into a traveling farmhouse-cum-luxury-apartment. Like this:

Who would live in a house like this? Professor Pat Pending, perhaps?

That monstrosity isn't my van. I doubt you can build anything like it in the demo. It is the ambition you're expected to have for your vehicle, though. I took the picture from the Steam Store page, where it's presumably supposed to trigger desire rather than, as it does in me, disbelief. 

After 78 minutes, my camper was much more modest. I hadn't built anything outside the van at all, just a couple of utilities inside, neither of them anything I would have envisaged needing on a road trip. Would you expect to build a trash compactor and a sawmill inside your camper van?

It's obvious Outbound has no interest in simulating an actual road trip, at least not in the demo, and since the demo is basically the first of the four biomes scheduled for launch, I guess the same will apply to the finished game. There's nothing particularly unusual about a lack of realism in a survival/crafting game but what did surprise me a little was the complete absence of any kind of plot or narrative.

I think all the games in this genre I've played have had some kind of story. It's not always very deep or convincing but there's at least a nominal reason for you to be pushing forwards, beyond a simple drive for self-improvement and desire to see what's over the next hill. In Outbound, as far as I can see, that's all there is.

Well, perhaps not exactly all. There may not be a narrative but that doesn't mean there's no structure. There are lots of short and medium term goals, called Objectives and Side Tasks, respectively. Objectives are things like "Build a Recycler on a Counter". Side Tasks are cumulative actions, such as "Light four campfires". 

The game constantly prompts you to make the next tool or utility and you really have no choice when you find an obstruction blocking the road. That happened to me three times in the first hour I played, meaning I had to make myself a wrench, an axe and ten planks before I could carry on driving.

As well as tasking you with removing obstacles, the game also asks you to visit specific locations, not all of which are close at hand. In other games, this would be part of a storyline but in Outbound there's no ostensible reason to go to any of them other than that the game is telling you that's what you need to do. Chances are you'd have gone there anyway, out of curiosity, though, so it doesn't feel as directive as it might.

When you get to the location, you may find something of practical interest. The Firewatch Tower had a blueprint terminal, for example. Blueprints are needed to make new tools and utilities and, well, anything, really. To download each blueprint you need a token. You get tokens by picking up litter and feeding it into your trash compactor. I guess they did say it was the near future.

There are Download Towers along the road and as far as I can tell, each tower offers specific items. I needed to make planks, for which I needed a Sawmill, but I couldn't find the blueprint until I went a long way up a side road to a tower I wouldn't have otherwise have passed. 

The rooftop patio of the surprisingly well-appointed Firewatch Tower, where I found two of three items I needed.

I'm not sure if the placement of blueprints is randomized or not. When I couldn't find the one I needed, I watched a YouTube video of someone else lookingg for one and they found theirs in the Firewatch Tower. When I was there, all I got was a blueprint for a food mixer. Of course, the game is still in development so maybe they just changed the locations.

The terminals in the regular towers are immediately accessible but the one in the Firewatch Tower required me to find three items first before I could switch it on. That was about the only puzzle I came across, if you can call a scavenger hunt a puzzle. Maybe there's more of that sort of "content" later but so far it's been the exception.

And that's OK. The game bills itself as "cozy" and describes the setting as "utopian". Threat of any kind doesn't enter into it and I very much doubt challenge does, either. You're on an extended vacation in some beautiful scenery, living off the land, which is exceptionally hospitable, providing everything you need. 

If that's not enough to keep you entertained, you probably need to look for another survival/crafting/exploration game. The good news there is you won't have to look far!

I really enjoyed the Outbound demo. Not that I've finished it. The map looks huge. It feels like I've hardly started to explore it. 

And exploring it is a pleasure. The landscape is very pretty, with a simple, attractive aesthetic that employs a lot of flat surfaces and plenty of saturated color. Sunrise and sunset are particularly delightful and night is a gorgeous, rich, velvety blue-black that feels oddly safe.

But then, the whole game feels safe. Not only are there no enemies, in nearly eighty minutes I didn't see another human being at all. Not one NPC. Very little wildlife, either. I think I saw a rabbit, once.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there are no other vehicles. I had the road to myself.

Just as well. I was driving in the middle of it half the time. Controlling the van isn't difficult but it's not particularly smooth or intuitive. There may have been some lurching. I might have hit a few rocks. 

Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to damage the camper. Or to hurt yourself. If this is a survival game at all it's very much survival-lite. 

In true survival-sim style, though, there are a couple of meters that have to be kept topped-up. One for you and one for the van. Your meter measures how hungry you are and so, I suppose does the van's. It tells you when you're running out of fuel. What happens if either hits zero I can't say because I didn't let it happen but I doubt it's anything very bad.

The absence of anyone at all to communicate with does give the demo a somewhat lonesome feel. The game is co-op four up to four people, though, and in the full version of the game you get a dog to accompany you on your travels, so the final version ought to be a lot more social. (There's an apology at the start of the demo for the dog not being available yet.)

Leave the door open all night if you want. It's not like anyone's going to steal anything.

I really enjoyed Outbound. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting but I liked what I got. I didn't run into any bugs or glitches although my overall impression was that there might need to be some optimization before launch. The controls and movement felt a little off at times although not in a way I could really put my finger on.

I have some minor concerns about the complete absence of any kind of narrative structure, too. Not that the game necessarily needs one if it's supposed to be a building/crafting/survival sim. No, it's the use of the term "road trip" to describe the gameplay that worries me. I can't imagine how you can have a road trip without a goal or a destination or a purpose. Road trips always tell a story.

Without a story, it's not a trip, just an existence. And that's probably how the game should be framed; as a life-sim. You're not really going anywhere, just driving aimlessly around some beautiful countryside, enjoying your freedom. Honestly, who needs anything more?

I already had Outbound wishlisted. There's a decent chance I might even buy it, one day. If I do I'll definitely wait until I can have a dog to share my adventures.

Coming In In All Directions...

Considering how badly most new MMORPGs seem to do when they hit Early Access or even launch, it's surprising how many keep getting made. Sometimes it feels like there are more of the things coming out now than back in the heat of the boom after World of Warcraft changed the rules. Or, rather, after a lot of people mistakenly believed it had.

For a long time, I made it my business at least to take a look at every new entry to the genre I heard about. I was willing - happy, even - to go to a good deal of trouble just to get my hands on any new MMORPG. I'd apply for testing, fill out applications, make accounts, download launchers and generally do whatever was necessary to get onto the servers. I even paid money, sometimes.

That behavior pre-dated my entry into into blogging by some years so I couldn't even claim, as I went on to say many times later on, that my real motivation was to have something new to write about. No, I just wanted to try out every possible variation on the already well-established format, not so much in the hope of finding something different as in getting another fix of the familiar.

I'm not sure when that urge started to fade but it's been quite a while since I felt the need to grab onto any and every proto-MMORPG that stumbles into open alpha, as if to miss even one would be some kind of sin of omission. I think my first sign of recovery was an increasing reluctance to fill out any more damn forms or make any more accounts.

These days, if getting a look at a new game requires anything more from me than an email address, chances are I'm going to pass. It has to be something I'm really excited about (Looking at you, Neverness to Everness. Not that you ever look back at me...) to make me start handing out personal details and completing questionnaires.

There's certainly no shortage of options, though. I must have skipped a dozen new MMORPGs in the last year alone. It's like a cult. Who are they all supposed to be for? Why do developers insist on making them? 

 

I can't answer that but I can say that the ones that stand out are the handful of exceptions, the oddities aimed at a very specific audience rather than some notional, generic-fantasy-loving demographic that never seems to turn up when the doors open. Even more common but significantly more likely to be successful are the MMO-adjacent survival or creature-catcher knock-offs that never seem to stop coming. 

There's another of those on the way that I'll get to, briefly, later on. First, though, something genuinely original, although not necessarily any more likely to find an audience of any significant size.  

I posted about the "horse mystery" game, Equinox Homecoming, back in May of last year, when it was just going into Early Access on Steam. It ticked all the boxes necessary to make me think it might be worth a look. 

The game has a very unusual and original, not to say bizarre, premise: you ride around the countryside on horseback, solving mysteries like you're in some YA novel from the 1970s. And when you're done you go back to the stable and tend to your horse.

Looking back at that post, apparently I was willing to spend $25 for the privilege of playing a buggy, content-lite version of a game clearly not meant for me. The only thing that stopped me were the minimum specs, which looked like they were out of my reach.

Luckily for me, I've upgraded my PC since then and now there's a demo, which I'm downloading as I type, which means I can take a look for free. The demo's been released as part of the Steam Horse Fest, which is running from now right through until Next Fest takes over on the 23rd.

Did you know there was a Steam Horse Fest? I bet you didn't. (Unless your name is Aywren, in which case you're most probably putting a post together about it right now.) Steam runs an almost never-ending series of events promoting various genres and types of games, almost none of which ever seem to get a mention on any of the gaming sites I follow. Next Fest is very much the exception.

Speaking of Next Fest, it looks as if the upcoming Winter edition (It is Winter, isn't it? They're not going to pretend February is Spring, are they?) looks like it's going to be a good one for MMO fans. I've already spotted a few new-to-me MMORPGs, or games that might at least be genre-adjacent, that either have demos available or will, when the festival begins.

Probably the most interesting is Outbound, a multiplayer "cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future" in which you roam around in what looks suspiciously like a VW Microbus, solving mysteries and exposing fake ghosts scavenging materials to pimp your retro ride. I'd like me some of that action.

Less interesting to me but maybe of interest to someone reading this is the creature-catching survival game Guardians of the Wild Sky. It looks slick, I'll say that for it. I'll probably skip that one, just like I already skipped the solo (Not solo player - solo developer.) Faehnor Online. 

I took a look at that last one after I read about it on MassivelyOP today. Well, I took a look at the screenshots on the Steam Store page, anyway. 

A few years ago I'd have downloaded it without a second thought but this time I read the reviews and decided life's too short, especially at my age. It doesn't look at all bad for a game in early development with just one person working on it but what would be the point? I'm never going to play it and it's not going to be anything I haven't seen before.

Then again, it is in French, which is new. It also has some form of PvP that's not explained on the Store page. I can read French well enough but I don't fancy my chances of following French voice acting, which apparently the game has, particularly when someone is trying to hack my head off. (Edit - Apparently there is  now also a PVE server...)

How it can be fully voiced with just one developer is a curious question, too. Does he do all the voices himself? That would actually make me a bit more interested. But no. I'll still pass.

As for Next Fest, I'm really looking forward to It. I always enjoy it but this time I'm really in the mood for some video-game tapas. Should make for a nice palate-cleanser after my heavy diet of BG3. I will try the MMORPGs I've mentioned but MMO demos always take far longer than any other genre so if any more  turn up I might have to pass. 

Or I might not be able to resist. It's a one day at a time recovery I'm enjoying, not a full cure. A relapse is always on the cards.