Silence And Shrinkage: A Tale Of Two Titles

A couple of apparently unrelated items I read, yesterday and today, got me thinking about how games can be all over the news for a while and then quietly disappear without anyone really noticing. Or mentioning it if they did.

The first was this from MassivelyOP about server merges in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. It took me somewhat by surprise, for several reasons. 

For one, I couldn't remember hearing anything about server merges in the game before, although the article is very much "Here's a thing we knew might happen and now it has". Pantheon is in that odd position for me of being a game I don't play but whose news I watch with interest so I was a little puzzled that I'd missed whatever had passed for a warning about the contraction. 

It seems MOP reported on the possibility back in March in a round-up of various topics concerning the game. I definitely never saw it because I'd have remembered Chris Neal's opening paragraph, one of the oddest I've seen anywhere for quite a while. It's worth following the link to check it out. It's like he's channeling Chris Morris from thirty years ago...

I imagine I missed it because I was deep in a hole of my own digging as described in yesterday's post but had I caught the news I'd have been surprised to learn Pantheon had enough servers to warrant a merger. In fact, had anyone asked me, which obviously no-one was going to, I'd have said I thought they probably had just one server for each ruleset. I wouldn't have thought they could need much more.

If I'd said that, I'd have been very wrong indeed. Yesterday's report names twenty servers! And that's just in the USA East and West regions, which seem to be the only ones affected by the merger. There are also servers in the EU and "OCE", an abbreviation for Oceania I hadn't happened upon before. Plus another two FFA PvP servers that have just been added. That's more than two dozen!

Things Are Happening!

 

It seems like one whole hell of a lot of servers to me. Way, way more than I imagined the game could possibly support at this stage, even though the take-up when it went into Early Access was a lot more enthusiastic than I'd expected.

The Steam charts show an all-time peak just below 7,000 concurrent players. Even using the most generous of multipliers, 5X, that puts the population around 35k. I just checked and as far as I can tell it is no longer possible to play the game any other way than through Steam unless you already have pre-existing alpha/beta access or a buddy code from someone who does, so it seems reasonable to assume Steam's population count represents the huge majority of the playerbase.

If so, that means each of those two dozen or more servers would have been unlikely to have held more than a couple of thousand people (Assuming a fairly even distribution.) and probably only half of those at most would have been online at the same time, even at peak. I know Pantheon is a retro game, aiming to bring back the glory days of EverQuest and all that but even at the turn of the millennium I seem to remember EQ servers could comfortably accommodate about five thousand players, with a couple of thousand of those online at the same time. It seems to be going beyond the call of authenticity to try and replicate the server technology from two decades ago as well as the gameplay.

In the course of my "research" I naturally ended up looking at the Steam Charts for Pantheon as they are now. It's not a disastrous picture but it's not as encouraging as it might be. 

The game has been in Early Access for around three months, putting it squarely in that ninety day zone identified by the developers of the Star Wars Galaxy emulator as the point when people begin to jump ship if no new content is forthcoming. 

You can have too many new ideas...

Pantheon, as I said, seeks to restore the kind of gameplay, and thereby the kind of retention and loyalty, that golden age MMORPGs such as EverQuest once enjoyed. Back then, players really did expect to play these games for many months at a stretch; often for several years. It wasn't until a decade or so later that the term "three-monther" appeared, referring to the then-new tendency of players to hop from one MMORPG to another, abandoning each after no more than three months.

That had a lot to do with the explosion of new MMORPGs, which made it possible to put one down and pick up another almost without interruption. Before then, there just weren't enough MMORPGs to make chasing FOMO a viable playstyle but many players had been quite happy to stick with one game because, in addition to all those legendary social ties and as I can affirm as someone who was playing at the time, successful MMOs pumped out a continual torrent of fresh content in a way that would seem hard to believe now.

It's not just rose-tinted nostalgia talking. It's a matter of record. You can go read the extensive patch note archive at Allakhazam's mothballed EverQuest site and see for yourself. Back then, when I was playing, the problem was trying to keep up with the new stuff, not scratching around trying to find something new to make it worth logging in.

As I've suggested before, to a degree Early Access games have an advantage over live ones in this regard. By definition, there's still a lot to add to an EA title, assuming the devs are doing their jobs. There really ought to be a steady flow of new content throughout the EA period, although not all of it is likely to be particularly exciting. There may still be a lot of tweaking of detail and systems work going on. Even so, there should always be something new happening.

For that reason and because of the type of game Pantheon promotes itself as being and the kind of audience it seeks to attract, I'd figured retention would be more robust than it appears to have been. I imagined quite a lot of Pantheon players would be in it for the long haul and would already have settled down in their "forever game", as people like to call it. They'd keep on playing, regardless of whether there was anything new to do because Pantheon would be home.

That's most likely true still for some but it looks as though there may also have been quite an intake of curiosity-seekers and tourists. Peak concurrency according to Steam has fallen from that all-time high of close to seven thousand back in January to just over half that in the last thirty days; less than a third in the last twenty-four hours. That leaves a couple of thousand at peak, which with that generous 5x multiplier might mean as many as ten thousand people still playing, still a decent number for an indie mmo. 

Not a disastrous decline, then, but a bigger slide than I would have predicted at this stage. Certainly a steep-enough drop to warrant those server merges, although given they cut the total of American  PvE servers from twenty to just four, it does suggest there were too many to begin with.

The "Latest" News as of 10 April 2025

 

The other news item I referred to back at the top of the post relates not to any kind of announcement giving cause for concern, more the exact opposite: total silence. Michael Byrne of MMOBomb is wondering if Tarisland is "unofficially dead" because he hasn't heard a peep out of it "in months".

That's a bit of a reach as it turns out if you read the whole article because the "months" of supposed silence actually go back only as far as mid-February, which is more like "weeks" to my way of counting. Still, it's long enough to go without any type of PR puff from a major game to suggest something might be going on. Or not going on...

Tarisland is precisely one of those MMORPGs that dominated the news cycle for a while before slipping quietly back into the pack of live service games that no-one really follows or cares about other than the people still playing them. Lost Ark would be another example but the huge difference there is that I still see news items about Lost Ark all the time whereas I had to go look up what the last reports on Tarisland were before I wrote this post. I couldn't remember hearing about it for, yes, months.

We can't use Steam's charts to reveal anything meaningful about Tarisland because although it's on Valve's platform, pretty much no-one ever played it there in the first place. The all-time peak was 582 players! As MMOBomb suggests, most current Tarisland players will be going through the game's standalone launcher or playing it on mobile. It may still be booming for all any of us know.

Except if it was, I'm pretty sure Level Infinite and TenCent would be telling us about it. And pumping out plenty of content to make sure it stayed that way. As with EQ back in the day and as with Wuthering Waves now, just to name-check a game I play that pushes far more content at me than I can cope with (High quality content, too.) MMORPGs that are doing well don't tend to clam up and keep quiet about it.

In some ways, Pantheon and Tarisland sit almost at opposite ends of the MMORPG spectrum, even though in others they could be cousins. One is extremely indie and still in relatively early development, the other is as corporate as they come and went Live long ago. Then again, both are basically diku-mud variants that can trace a very direct lineage back to EverQuest, one directly, the other by way of World of Warcraft.

If I had to bet which would be with us longer I'd put my money on Pantheon. I wouldn't have said that before I read Micheal Byrne's speculations but I do find the developer's and publisher's lack of engagement with both the players and the media suggestive of a general lack of commitment to the game itself. Hardly surprising given the size and scope of the mega-corps involved, for whom Tarisland may well already have either met or missed its profitability targets, consigning it either way to the completed projects file.

Pantheon, conversely, is the one and only engine keeping the Visual Realms ship afloat. If that fails, the entire company sinks. Tarisland could probably have fifty times as many players and TenCent might still shut it down. VR won't give up until the bailiffs are banging on the door.

As a player, it does seem counterintuitive to imagine your characters would be safer in some niche game that may never even make it out of Early Access, rather than in one of the biggest MMORPGs of its day, but that might very well be how it goes.

Maps, Letters, Videos - It's A Friday Grab-Bag!

It's Friday. End of the working week. For some. Start of mine. Well, tomorrow is. Let's grab our bags and get started. No time to waste chatting.

It's Road Map Season!

Apparently. Everyone's doing them. Here's Pantheon's.

First impression? Ugly damn thing. It's only just beginning to occur to me that one of the reasons I've not gone with Pantheon the way I expected to is the aesthetic. I'm not talking about the once-controversial graphic makeover that removed the grit and replaced it with cute. That's fine. I mean the overall appearance, the scratchy, uncomfortable spreadsheet feel of the whole thing.

It's in full effect in this image. Everyone does Road Map graphics these days and lots of them are really pretty to look at. They make me think "Ooh! I might have to go play that again". This doesn't. It makes me go "Ow! My eyes!" 

Moving on from the look, there seems to be a lot going on this year but I notice none of it expands the world, other than downwards. There are new dungeons "throughout 2025" apparently but we'll have to wait for 2026 before we get "new zones". Well, you will, if you're playing. I don't think I'm likely to be directly involved. 

Given how few zones there are in the game now, 2026 seems a like a bit of a wait. Just about everything on the list falls under the heading of "ongoing development" rather than new content. There're a lot of "improvements" and "enhancements" and "upgrades" in that line-up, along with a few "systems" but precious little adventure. That's all kept for the grey banner along the top - dungeons, raids, boss encounters, POIs. Not sure of the marketing logic there.

I saw an interesting comment yesterday from one of the people behind the Star Wars Galaxies emu, to the effect that they discovered you can't just hang an mmorpg in a steady state and expect people to keep playing. You have to dump new content on them every ninety days or there's a huge drop-off in population. 

I mean, we all know it but it's surprising how many people, players and developers, try to put their fingers in their ears and deny it. In an odd kind of way, it might be easier for games in Early Access to hold attention. If things are going as they should, there'll be a constant drip of new content or at least disruption to what's there already, which is often just as effective. It's when the game is supposedly done that the real content treadmill starts up and with it the inevitable droughts.

By the look of this Road Map, Pantheon's a loooong way from having to worry about that. EA looks like it could take a while. And I didn't even mention the baffling current obsession going on over there with FFA open-world PvP. I do wonder what Brad McQuaid would have had to say about that...

You've Got Mail

Over at the home of the game Brad made when he was practicing, Jenn Chan, that most amiable and charming of Producers, has a couple of letters out. Producer's Letters are maybe one down from Road Maps - they don't have the graphics for a start - but they mostly perform the same function: letting players know what to expect next.

Neither of the letters, for EverQuest and EverQuest II, has anything very surprising to say. At this point Darkpaw could pretty much swap out the old SOE mission statement, "You're in Our World Now" for  "Business as Usual".

The only item of real interest in the EQII letter is the upcoming Game Update, Lure of Darkness. It brings back the Void, including a new Void Anchor in Sodden Archipelago. I bet we don't actually get one of the whirling vortexes reaching far into the sky, though. I bet it's just a portal somewhere.  

I had quite a lot of fun in Void instances for a while. There was one I used to run repeatedly for platinum, back before inflation made every in-game source of income other than selling on the Broker entirely irrelevant. 

This one ought to offer me a chance to find out just how much more effective my Necromancer is in new content, when compared with my Berserker. He usually has to wait for GUs to recede into the past before he can make any progress with them. I'm optimistic she'll do better. The Lure of Darkness arrives on the 8th of April but I imagine I won't get around to it right away. I'll get to it before the next one arrives in the summer, though.

The EQ letter is more interesting in that Jenn reveals a few secrets concerning the thinking behind some of the choices the team makes when setting up new ruleset servers. There is, of course, yet another of those coming in June because new ruleset servers are the engine that drives EQ's longevity. To some extent they always have been. The concept goes back pretty much to the dawn of the game.

This one is an "experimental" TLP server. My impression is that Everquest players are more open to experimentation than EQII players, the younger game feeling oddly more old-fashioned now and certainly more conservative than the older. 

I don't get the feeling EQII's time-limited expansion server scene has ever been quite as essential or vibrant as EQ's but it's still clearly vital enough to the continuing health of the game for new editions to be rolled out at least annually. This summer we're getting a PvP Origins server, which I would have thought was limiting the appeal considerably but at least it should keep the ever-angry PvP lobby busy complaining about the ruleset for a while.

Last but very much not least in this round-up of points of interest from the two letters, I was much heartened to see the exact same degree of attention as usual being paid to this year's Pride celebrations, starting at the end of May and running on into June. Given the current unfortunate political climate it might not have been surprising to see some backsliding there but no, the two games remain exemplars of modernity, with Patches of Pride in EQII and Pride Month in EQ each being afforded the same level of attention as any of the many established dates in the packed Norrathian calendar.

That's a deal of game news. Shall we take a short break for some music? Yes, I think we shall.

That Difficult Second Album

Catch These Fists - Wet Leg

Having covered music here for quite a few years now, I find myself in the odd position of having artists and bands I "cover" in much the same way I "cover" games. There's no necessity for it in either case but if you keep up a blog for long enough, after a while you get a feel for what it's about. 

As well as the inevitable "anything that catches my interest", this blog mostly covers games I play, games I might play and games I used to play, along with music I listen to, TV I watch and of late developments in AI as they pertain to everything else I write about. 

As the years go by, there are certain games, shows, creators and performers that come up over and over and after a certain point I start to feel I "should" mention it, when I find something new involving any of them. That's why there's stuff in this post about Pantheon, EQ and EQII and it's also why there's a video of Wet Leg's first single from their upcoming sophomore album, Moisturizer.

Because I was an early adopter and because I went somewhat overboard about the first few singles, Wet Leg have become a band this blog pays attention to, even though I don't quite feel the same attachment to them I did a couple of years ago. I like Catch These Fists well enough but it isn't demanding the same level of attention from me that Chaise Longue, Wet Dream or Too Late Now did.

The band is currently out there, playing live and debuting a whole load of tracks from the new album. I watched audience videos of half a dozen of the new songs and they all sounded good but none of them really wowed me.  

Rhian Teasdale has a definite new look she's really working and the band have what keeps getting described as a punkier sound. It all looks and sounds like it would be a great time in a club or on a festival stage. As something to listen to at home, I'm not so sure. I await the album with interest to see what the songs sound like in their fully produced form. I will be buying it, anyway, or at least putting it on a list so someone else can buy it for me.

Horse Latitudes

Here's the oddest MMORPG story of the week by some margin. Have you ever thought that what the genre really needed was more horseback riding? Or more murder mysteries to solve? No? Well how about more mysteries to solve while you're out horseback riding?

It's a niche pitch, for sure, but it's happening. The game is called Equinox: Homecoming. Nothing like hanging your entire fortunes on a convoluted pun, is there? As if the concept wasn't high enough already.

It's in production from a company called Blue Scarab, the guiding force behind which is one Craig Morrison, a name that may be familiar from his time at both Blizzard and Funcom. The official website describes the game as a "multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, murder mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay!" 

There's a trailer, which looks a bit janky in the way of most early-development footage, but which also makes me think it might be something worth keeping an eye on. The pitch is for a “unique blend of cozy escapism and true-crime” but I'm getting some Secret World vibes, too.

Morrison goes on to say

"We're very excited to see what people make of Equinox. We’ve had faith throughout development that there is an audience out there for different and interesting experiences... there is definitely a risk, but we're in a position where we can take this shot and try to provide players with a truly unique world and story."

We do all keep saying we want developers to try new things, take some risks and stop copying whatever's just made money. It'll be very interesting to see if this one goes anywhere. NetEase is backing it so it probably will.

Take Me Home

A few months back, James Gunn gave us a first look at his new take on Superman in a short trailer that featured Krypto, the Dog of Steel. The NME keep reporting the reaction to it as "mixed" but I'm pretty sure just about every actual DC fan did that thing where you relax a whole lot of tension in your shoulders you didn't even notice you were carrying. The comment thread on YouTube is that, all through.

Now Gunn's put out an extended, five-minute version with a whole narrative section from the movie and it does not disappoint. For a Superman fan there are all kinds of oddnesses, like Krypto having long fur and the Superman robots not wearing costumes but instead of detracting from the lore those differences feel like an evolution of it.

Put simply, this is Superman, in a way almost no version of the icon since Christopher Reeve really has been. It's also very clearly the work of someone who understands not just the character but the backstory. Like, all of the backstory, not just that tedious bit on Krypton before it blew up, the part that's been done to death about a million times now.

I am more than optimistic about this one. Whether the movie can survive the current resistance to all things super-heroic evident in the wider cinema-going audience is another question but I'm confident the longtime comics fans in that audience are going to be well-served, in the best possible meaning of the phrase.

And On That Blondshell

Much of what I said above about Wet Leg applies here, too, except for the implied part about the dangers of over-exposure. This is the third single from Sabrina Teitelbaum's second album, "If You Asked For A Picture" and once again I'd say it's good but not great, which is pretty much how I felt about the other two as well. I do think this one might be a grower, though. That chorus is sticking.

Where Blondshell differs from Wet Leg in this respect, at least for me, is that Sabrina's sound is a lot more amenable to repeated listening. Wet Leg have the immediacy of a great singles band. A lot of their songs sound like they were made to be heard coming out of car windows or transistor radios. Blondshell is more the sort of thing you play at home on the stereo on a Sunday morning.

For that reason alone I'd bet that, even if the two albums are equally far behind their immediate predecessors in essentiality, it'll be Blondshell's that gets listened to the most in this house and by a margin. That's already the case with their debuts, although I've probably watched the Wet Leg videos more than the Blondshell ones.

Speaking of videos, although I've embedded both of them here, I don't very much like either. The Wet Leg one is okay but feels a bit like they might be trying just a tad too hard for the wacky funster vibe they nailed so effortlessly last time around. 

The Blondshell video, on the other hand, goes right to the opposite extreme. It looks like a bunch of pals goofing around but doing it with a degree of self-consciousness that makes it slightly uncomfortable to watch. Also, they clearly bought the absolute cheapest strollers they could find, just for the purposes of the video, and they bought them as a job lot. It just looks false.

As for the song itself, I love the chorus and the overall Blondshell sound. The words are typically elliptical in that way I love about her writing but the subject matter is a little disturbing. It reminds uncomfortably of "Too Much, Too Young" by the Specials, an unnecessarily harsh and judgmental song I always disliked.

Fortunately, these days you rarely get a new song without a gloss on it from the songwriter and what Sabrina says about the lyrics makes me happier. As per Stereogum  

“The song is partially about being in your twenties and feeling like you’re supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!) yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,” 

That's a much warmer vibe than the words feel like they support. I find this a lot with Blondshell's lyrics. Possibly because they're so pared-down, they often feel harsher than Sabrina's explanation of them suggests they were meant to. It's the good, old intentional fallacy at play again, I guess, although here it's working in my favor.

Anyway, I like "23's A Baby" best of the three singles to date. Looking forward to the album in May.

And with that, I'm off to make some music of my own. There may not be another post here until Wednesday, what with me working and also having something to do on Monday but we'll see.

These Fragments...

I have absolutely nothing to write about today because I've been spending every waking minute fiddling around with old cassette tapes and turning the songs I've been hearing inside my head for the last forty or fifty years into ones I can hear outside my head as well. Obviously that's more fun than just about anything but even so I don't want to drop cadence here, so I'd better come up with something.

I was going to do a few hundred words on the Steam Spring Sale and Blizzard's latest press release on how WoW Housing is going to work. Only a couple of problems with that plan, the first of which being I haven't actually looked at the sale yet. The only reason I even know it's on is because I have Pantheon on my wishlist so I got an email telling me it's 20% off right now.

And that is tempting. I'm still curious enough to want to have a poke about and I doubt there'll be any bigger discounts for a while. The whole Early Access thing seems to be working quite well for them. They don't need to give away the farm just yet.

At 20% off the game is £26.80, which isn't nothing but also isn't much of anything, either. I'd pay it. As usual, the main issue for me isn't "Is it worth it?" but "Will I play it?" Realistically, the answer to that is, "Probably not" so I'm holding off for now. The sale has almost a week to go so I don't have to decide right away.

As for the housing in World of Warcraft, the problem there is that I can't really say much about it  because I haven't even watched the video. There is a video, isn't there? Erm... no, not really. I just checked and there are a bunch of video examples in the PR piece but no actual video as such.

What the piece does have is a lot of detail on things like how you can push a chair through a wall and if you put a cup on a table you can pick them both up and move them about together. Too much detail, really. I'm more interested in how you get a house, how much choice there is and whether I'll be able to have one on the Endless Free Trial.

Maybe that's in the press release too. I probably should have read the whole thing before I started this.

Anyway, those were the only two things I had in mind to write about today and clearly I wasn't in much of a position to do either of them justice. Then, right before I was going to do it anyway, Wilhelm put up a Friday Bullet Point post in which he talked about both, so it seemed a bit redundant for me to start going on about them too, especially since, as I said, I haven't even done the reading.

Still, I got eight paragraphs out of it anyway. Can't complain.

Instead, I'm going to rip through this month's Prime Gaming offers. And by "rip" I really mean rip off. I read them at the start of the month and didn't think they were worth mentioning but I lookedagain a few days ago and thought maybe they were, after all. Now I don't have anything better to write about, I'm sure of it!

The full list - and there's a lot - is on the Prime Gaming Blog as usual. I'm just going to mention a few that caught my eye.

Syberia: The World Before - I think this might be the last, remaining Syberia game Prime haven't already given us. I claimed all the others but I only played the first. I found it very heavy going. The series has a strong reputation in the Point & Click genre but it seemed to be right at the ponderous, do everything the hard way for the sake of it end of the spectrum to me. Maybe this one will be a bit more... dare I say fun? I'm taking it, anyway. May as well collect the set.

Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master - I really enjoyed the original game. And the DLC. I'd love another, full campaign. Unfortunately, this is one of those sims where you play the baddie trying to kill the adventurers with your fiendish traps and hordes of minions. I was about to say that thoses aren't really my cup of tea but then it occured to me I've never actually played one. Who knows? I might enjoy it. I'll be taking that one, too and I'll almost certainly play it, although not just yet.

Dog Shelter Simulator - This one jumped out as something I might like to play. Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch our share of dog rescue vodcasts. Then I read the description, which makes it sound more like work than a game. I think that about most simulations but in this case, what with the stress of all those dogs you can't find homes for, it doesn't just sound like work but anxiety-inducing, distressing work at that. Pass.

Endling: Extinction Is Forever - Then again, running an imaginary dog shelter would be a delight compared to this nightmare. "Experience what life would be like in a world ravaged by mankind through the eyes of the last fox on Earth... defend your cubs, three tiny and defenseless fur balls... plan your next movement carefully since it could be the last for you and your pups." It also goes on about how you can get to know their personalities before the inevitable strikes, which reminded me of that old T-shirt that said "Join the Army. Meet interesting people. Then kill them." It's a bit annoying, how bleak it sounds. The graphics are gorgeous. It would make a great cozy adventure game but instead it looks more like a nihilistic horrorshow. Who enjoys this kind of existential torture? The Countryside Alliance, I assume. Fun for people who hate foxes, I guess. My grandmother would have loved it. She really hated foxes.

Saints Row: Remastered -  I quite fancy having a go at this. I've read enough about it over the years. I think it would be good for doing that thing I liked so much in Once Human, namely driving about aimlessly while listening to the radio. Pretty sure that's a thing you can do in Saints Row. Not sure about the rest of it but that alonw makes it worth grabbing.

There were also a couple of Old West/Wild West titles. I'm usually up for anything with that setting so I was briefly excited, until I took a closer look. 

El Hijo - Looks great but turns out to be "a non-violent stealth game". And the protagonist is a child. Doesn't exactly scream "Classic Western", does it?

Colt Canyon - Thematically far more in line with expectations but it's "a 2D pixel art shooter" and the screenshots make it look almost abstract. I might give it a try - it's available for another twelve days - but I honestly can't see myself playing it so I suppose I ought to be sensible and leave it on the shelf.

And that's about it. Thin fare, I know, by which I mean this post, not Prime's March slate, which isn't at all bad. Normal service will be resumed when I've exhausted my pop star fantasies, something that isn't likely to happen for a while yet.

Pictures And Words

Stars Reach is using every means possible to draw attention to itself. As well as the pre-alpha, which began with only a partial NDA and then dropped it entirely shortly after, there have been numerous interviews, livestreams and press releases.

If you have any interest in the game at all, it's likely you've seen some of the activity but one thing you might have missed if you're not actively signed up to the news feeds is Clere's Story.

Clere is the one person out of billions chosen to be Earth's emissary to an unidentified alien entity, for which she has to travel to Enceladus, one of Saturn's least-celebrated moons, leaving behind her daughter, Sofia, currently frozen in cryosleep to forestall an otherwise inevitable death from an ice-age disease released by climate change.

This fascinating backdrop to the in-development MMO comes in the form of two (So far.) chapters on the Stars Reach website. The story is very well-written. In parts it could be said to owe something of a debt to certain scenes in Kubrick's 2001 but I'd happily read it if it were a short story in a published collection.

I find it odd, then, that having taken the trouble to create the story, Playable Worlds is doing so little to publicize it. I only happened upon it by chance, when I was looking for something else on the game's Steam page. The first episode appeared there on 13 December, two days after it arrived on the official Stars Reach website.

The Steam version ends with the immortal tagline "To Be Continued" but for Steam users it hasn't been, even though Clere's Story Pt. 2 came out on the website just a week later, on 18 December. I haven't received any emails about the story and I can't find any mention of it on Discord either, although it needs to be said that I can't even find my own name on Discord, even when I get emails telling me someone's been talking about me there.

I don't imagine this lack of visibility for Clere's Story is doing Stars Reach any harm. This kind of world-building by way of long-form prose most likely only appeals to the already-committed. 

It's rather sweet, when you stop and think about it. That companies bother with this kind of promotion at all, I mean. I guess they all have plenty of writers and would-be writers on tap, who'd be only too happy to spend a couple of hours knocking out a few hundred words of what might uncharitably be described as Authorized Fanfic. 

They all do it, though, or a lot of them, anyway. Over at DCUO they've just begun a story featuring Batman (It's always Batman...), the first chapter of which is pedestrianly entitled "A Deadly New Mystery". I read it this morning and enjoyed it for what it is but it's not a patch on Clere's Story, which is both much better-written and has considerable emotional heft.

The DCUO tale, however, has the benefit of a much higher publicity profile. I head about it in a news story on MassivlyOP but if you google "DCUO "A Deadly New Mystery"" you'll get hits all the way across social media, from all of DCUO and Daybreak's accounts on YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook and more, along with news stories from the likes of MMORPG.com. They even put it on Threads ffs!

It's not a fair comparison, of course. DCUO is a successful, established, long-running game and "A Deadly New Mystery" isn't just a one-off lore dump but the first entry in what they're calling a "Story Blog", part of the new content delivery system being rolled out for 2025. Still, the difference is striking.

Which got me wondering just how much Star Reach has penetrated the public consciousness or even that part of it that has any interest in online gaming. So I had a little look.

On Steam, the game has just over three and a half thousand "followers". It was news to me you could follow a game on Steam, which shows how observant I am. There's a button for it right there on the game's Store page. Stars Reach has one more follower now so we'll see if that gets me any notifications about new chapters in the story.

Wishlisting is something games always seem keen on so I checked that next. According to SteamDB, Stars Reach is #1099 of their 3,352 "Most Wishlisted" games. It doesn't give actual numbers but according to an anonymous survey of 125 game developers back in 2023, as reported by GameWorldObserver, it generally runs to a median average of twelve times the number of followers, meaning Stars Reach might feature on around forty thousand wishlists. Seems like a lot but who knows?

That's specifically Steam, though. How about a more general awareness? Google Trends is always good for that. 

To give a little spurious perspective I added comparisons to a couple of vaguely relevant titles, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and Solasta 2. They don't really have anything to do with Stars Reach but they might appeal to a similar demographic and one has just entered Early Access, while development the other has only just been announced.

It's an interesting chart. It shows that in the last 90 days interest in Pantheon bubbled along quite consistently until the EA release on 13 December, when it sky-rocketed. Perhaps more significantly, interest has remained around the same level since and is even trending upwards. More evidence there that Visionary Realms' strategy is paying off.

Solasta was nowhere until, entirely coincidentally on the same day Pantheon went into Early Access, the public announcement was made about the game being in development. That drove it briefly above Pantheon in Google search but interest quickly fell back to a low mumble as fresh news died away.

That still puts it above Stars Reach which, other than a brief, unexplained blip on 3 November, doesn't even register in the comparison at all until 21 December, the day after the NDA was lifted in full. There is a blue line for a little while before that but on mouseover it comes up as zero.

All of which is, as they say in the gameshows, just a bit of fun. I have no meaningful understanding of how Google Trends operates so all I'm doing is looking at the pictures.

They do say a picture is worth a thousand words but in this case I'd say Clere's Story is worth a lot more to me than Google's charts. If it's any indication of the quality of the lore we're going to be able to enjoy in Stars Reach one day, I'll be a happy little space explorer. 

It's just a shame such quality work isn't a little more prominent in the PR cycle right now.

An Extravagant Journey To Nowhere?

If you'd asked me this time last year if I was interested in paying $40 for a couple of years unrestricted access to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, I'd have answered "Hell, yeah!". I've said a number of times in various comments here and there over the decade or so since the game was first announced that I'd be willing to pay the same for access to the test builds as I paid for Landmark and that cost me a lot more than forty dollars

I bought in to Landmark at the earliest opportunity, the paid alpha that started at the beginning of February, nearly eleven years ago. From memory, I think it cost around a hundred dollars for the Founder's Pack. I bought one for me and another for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present; a couple of hundred dollars in total. 

As I said in that very first post after the NDA dropped, something that happened almost immediately, presumably because SOE didn't fancy trying to police the whole thing for a moment longer than they had to, "That officially makes my Founder's Pack purchase worthwhile right there."

I was referring to the blogging possibilities but in the end, I very much felt I got my money's worth out of Landmark from the gameplay as well as a source of material for posts. I spent a great number of happy hours there over the three years the game lasted.

Two of those years were in testing; just one as a live game. As a commercial product, Landmark was an abject failure, surviving barely a year after its launch in 2016. I'm sure there were multiple reasons why the game closed down but the main one was because no-one was playing it.

In common with most games developed by Sony Online Entertainment, Landmark had an in-game chat command that let you see how many other people were playing. I was in the habit of checking it every time I played. How many were online when I was? Almost literally no-one. Every time.

These days, there's a positively nauseating amount of faux nostalgia for the game with people praising it to the skies for all kinds of things it never was. If those people loved it so much, I have to wonder, why were none of them playing it at the end? Or pretty much the entire time the game was "live"?

The most irritating part of the whole self-serving love-fest is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Back in 2017, when the closure date was announced, the infinitesimally small part of the internet that gave a damn at all was outraged! Not because of the closure per se but for Landmark's supposed role in the already-announced abandonment of the shibboleth,that was EQNext.

I was no more convinced by that anger then than I am by the suppposed affection now. I spent much of the post I wrote about it at the time railing at "the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark", all of whom were falling over themselves to pour vitriol on Daybreak, whose only real error had been to let the game struggle on as long as it did.

I quoted Tyler F. M. Edwards extensively, along with Feldon at EQ2Wire, as they ripped into both the MMO community and the former SOE management for the endless self-delusion and gaslighting that led to such over-inflated, unachievable expectations in the first place. It's curious that both those links still work. Gaming blogs lasting longer than the games they cover - who'd have imagined?

Landmark, of course, was supposed to be the creative pipeline for John Smedley and Dave Georgeson's surreal and wholly unconvincing EQNext project, a bizarre and from this distant perspective positively deranged plan to have players build the infrastructure of one game while playing another while getting paid for doing it, presumably at pennies on the dollar compared to what it would cost to employ professional artists. 

Thinking about it now, it's like some weird, twisted pre-echo of the crypto/NFT Pay2Earn model, where somehow playing a game earns you money while you have fun, a virtuous circle of back-scratchers, all sitting on each others' laps and taking in each others' washing so no-one needs to buy chairs or do their own laundry ever again. Or something like that.

EQNext, lest we forget, was the pipe-dream successor to EverQuest although, awkwardly, EverQuest already had a successor, EverQuest II, something no-one seemed willing to acknowledge back then. Or now, for that matter.

Even more awkwardly, EQ had already received a much more convincing sequel in the form of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, a game which, for all its well-remarked and rehearsed flaws, very clearly iterated and expanded on the original EverQuest formula, something it was well-placed to do, considering it had at its head the prime visionary responsible for the franchise itself, Brad McQuaid.

For a short while Vanguard fared rather better, commercially, than Landmark but also suffered badly from being pressed upon an eager and receptive public in a painfully unfinished and, for some, wholly unplayable state. As happened with Landmark to a lesser degree, most of those shortcomings were addressed and overcome in live development but by then the damage had been done. There was no-one left to see how much better the games were becoming.

Once again, I bought into Vanguard at my earliest opportunity. I applied for testing and got in a few months before launch, when I found the game would barely run on my PC, something that happened to many testers and later to paying customers. Instead of giving up on the whole thing I did some research on what was needed to get the game to run comfortably. Buy a new PC was the solution.

There was a lot of helpful information on the beta forums concerning which graphics cards and CPUs handled the game most effectively, so before the game launched, I had new PCs built for myself and Mrs Bhagpuss, using components chosen specifically with the aim of running Vanguard reliably. This they did extremely well, meaning that while other players were raging and rage-quitting over the inability of their state-of-the-art rigs to run the game at all, we were both playing quite happily on mid-range PCs with as much facility as we'd ever played any other MMORPG.

I point all of this out to mark the contrast between what I was willing to do ten or fifteen years ago in order to play an MMORPG that really appealed to me and what I'm willing to do today. Back then, not only was I ready to pay a couple of hundred dollars just to get into an alpha, I was willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars buying new PCs to play a new game.

Today it appears I won't even stump up $40 for a game I've been waiting to play for almost a decade. So what changed?

A few things. I'm not going to claim that, like Wilhelm, I've fallen off the MMO path, but I am certainly no longer pounding down that trail, ignoring every turning. I still enjoy MMORPGs. I still play them. But nowadays I play a lot of other games as well and I enjoy them just as much. Maybe more.

At the moment, though, I'm not spending all that much time playing video games at all. Maybe a couple of hours, most days. Often not even that. Sometimes I go a whole day without logging into any games at all! I'm not making any grand claims about being over gaming or anything silly like that. It's just that I seem to have a lot of demands on my time just now and something has to give. Games are an easy place to make the cull.

Still, I absolutely will make time for something that interests or intrigues me. Play-testing Stars Reach, for example, has been quite awkward but I've made the effort and intend to continue. 

Tellingly, in some ways Stars Reach, whose development team includes one Dave Georgeson, is very much the spiritual successor to the game EQNext was supposed to be, only this time it's being developed without most of the hubris and bluster with a far more grounded idea of the time and effort involved. And, of course, with the benefit of another decade of technological development, which I suspect is where the magic sauce that seems to be making the whole thing work this time has come from.

Pantheon Early Access, being available 24/7, is immeasurably more convenient for me to play than Stars Reach with its two-hour tests so, especially given I've been itching to play it for years, what's holding me back? Surely it can't just be that $40 tag? It is a bit steep for an EA game, true, but given that VR, until very recently, was planning not only on charging for the game itself but also piling a monthly subscription on top, $40 for at least two years play seems like a decent deal.

(The subscription, by the way, is no longer a certainty. The notes on the EA launch on the game's Steam page include the following fudge: "originally, we contemplated on following a sub model, but are still evaluating our options and will be using the Early Access phase to open that dialogue with players."  The ground is clearly being softened for a more accessible payment model.)

No, it's neither lack of time nor lack of money that's keeping me from playing Pantheon right away. It's experience. Personal experience. Granted, there was only about an hour of it but it was more than enough. 

I was very eager to get a hands-on with the game when Visionary Realms somewhat unexpectedly opened the doors briefly for any interested parties to wander in and take a look. There was - and presumably still is - an NDA on that, so I'm not going into any detail, but I don't think any NDA can reasonably prevent me saying how I felt while I was playing . I can sum it up in a word: bored.

I can forgive games in development a great deal. They can be buggy, glitched, laggy and nowhere even close to being finished and I'll still happily spend time with them and give them good word of mouth, so long as I'm engaged, interested, amused or entertained. Boring me, though? That's unforgivable.

And I'm quite hard to bore. I'm very easily pleased. I can and do play through the starting areas of countless MMORPGs with pleasure, even when I have no intention of carrying on. I love early-game play and I particularly love diku-MUD-inspired leveling. For a game with that heritage to fail to grip me even for as long as it takes to get out of the starting zone is almost unheard of but Pantheon managed it.

Obviously, without being able to discuss the reasons for that in any shape or form, my boredom stands entirely as a description of my state of mind. It tells you nothing about the game itself, other than that I didn't manage to become engaged, let alone enthralled by it.

I didn't, for whatever reason, which is why I'm loathe to drop forty dollars to see if it gets better, later. Maybe it does. It would certainly need to.

It would also seem that I'm no longer willing to spend real-life money just to have something new to write about. For that, I don't even need to enjoy the game. Negatively critical posts are often easier to write than positive ones and they can be more entertaining to read, too, provided you get the tone right. The problem is, I'd still have find something to do in the game that wasn't as boring to read about as it was to do and I'm not sure what that might be.

For the time being, then, a combination of factors prevents me from adding Pantheon to my Steam account. It's a bit pricey for what they're offering and I find it hard to imagine wanting to play it or write about it rather than any of my many other options. I mean, it's hard enough right now to get myself to log into games I like. Honestly, if I can't persuade myself to spend time with games I'm enjoying, what chance is there for a game that makes me feel bored just thinking about it?

And yet, for all of that, I almost certainly will buy into Pantheon's Early Access, eventually. Probably sooner rather than later, too. The New Year should see a substantial drop in demands on my time and very likely there'll also be a significant deterioration in the weather, both of which should mean more time to play video games. I don't expect to be able to resist the temptation to "just take a look" for too much longer.

If and when I do, you can be sure I'll give some account of what I find. There's no NDA on Early Access, although I'm sure someone will try it one day. Let's just hope I can summon up enough enthusiasm to get out of the starting area next time.

Early Access Isn't Just For Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kickstarters, Early Access, Free Stuff And Existential Despair.

Last Friday I sat down to do a grab-bag post, then ended up writing about some TV shows I'd been watching instead. I guess that means that, at the time, I must have had several things I wanted to talk about but now, just a few days later, I have no idea what they might have been. 

I haven't thought of anything new worth posting about since then, either. I've got nothing. Still, that never stopped me before. 

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is barely a month away from going into Early Access. Visionary Realms released a forty-seven minute Q&A video that's literally a black screen with a woman in the bottom left corner and a man's head floating over her right shoulder like some kind of ghost-balloon.

I have not watched this video. It is not a thing you watch. 

I did try listening to it instead, leaving it on in the background while I did other things, but I found it impossible to remember anything either of them said even thirty seconds after they'd said it so I gave up. Here it is if you want to try.

Fortunately, some unfortunate staffer at MMOBomb somehow managed to get through the whole thing to pick out the salient points for the uncommitted. They are few. Perhaps the only really interesting note is that there will be an announcement about a Steam version of the game sometime next week, which is now this week, so I look forward to that.

I was very unimpressed by the little I saw of the game in the open weekend a while back but even so I'm still willing to pay a small sum for what will most likely end up being a couple of years of non-subscription access during the EA period. I'm waiting for details of the specific EA packages and confirmation of the cost involved, something I would like to know before the current Pledges go away.

As it stands, you can still pledge, which automatically gets you full EA access. The lowest cost Pledge is $50. It's hard to imagine the basic EA access will be more than that but it could be less. Also, if there are going to be separate clients/logins for the Visionary Realms client and the Steam client, I would probably want to play through Steam so I'm doing nothing until I hear more about how that's going to work. 

Noiramore Academy's Kickstarter has reached 50% funding with ten days still to go. Developer Ink Rose was kind enough to leave a comment here a few days ago, the second time a dev has dropped by to comment on a Next Fest post this time around, the other being Mendoka, creator of Spire Horizon Online. And they say no-one reads blogs any more!

If anyone's on the fence about whether to give Noiramore Academy a look, something I highly recommend because it's a very classy piece of work indeed, the demo is still available. Spire Horizon Online's isn't but the MMORPG is set to release in early December and the single-player version is out already.

Ink Rose also has a series of devlogs on YouTube, detailing the ups and downs of game development along with a lot of technical info about the making of Noiramore Academy itself. I think these would be of interest to anyone who finds the process of game development intriguing, mysterious or both. She certainly has a better idea how to make a video enjoyable to watch than Visionary Realms, that's for sure. 

Once Human, like a lot of free-to-play games, gives out quite a few codes for free stuff. Starry, the developer, already throws a ton of freebies my way through the in-game mail but while I was looking something up the other day, I happened upon this website, which handily collates the out-of-game codes in a simple and straightforward table with expiry dates.

I cut&pasted the October codes into the relevant field in the UI last night and they all worked pefectly so I pass this on to anyone playing the game as a public service. There are some useful consumbales to be had but mostly what I wanted were the Butterfly's Emissary Crates, aka lockboxes.

As I've said many times, I freakin' love lockboxes, provided I don't have to pay for them. The codes got me four and I already had a couple from inside the game and last night I opened them all, which was great fun. 

It would not have been such great fun if I'd had to pay for them. I did get that excellent pair of sunglasses from one of the in-game crates, which is why it counts as a drop in my vocabulary, but the rest of them were total duds. I do not consider one grenade or one molotov cocktail to be much of a prize. Or indeed any kind of prize, unless it was booby. 

You can buy these crates for in-game currency too and you'd think if I like them so much I'd be doing that but the chances of getting something good (The odds are visible if you care to look for them.) aren't good enough to make me want to spend even my imaginary money on them. Then again, I haven't spent it on anything else either so maybe I should just get some crates and have a little crate-opening party. That's always a fun session.

In other Once Human news, I dinged 30 today so now the hunt for T4 mats begins in earnest. In the last Season I found a few really excellent, safe scavenging spots that let me gear up into T5 pretty much without having to fight anything but in this season, the extreme heat in the third Map, where all the mats I need are hiding, is such that I can't stay there long enough to get much foraging done. 

I looked it up and apparently I need to go slaughter some alligators in the Wish Land zoo to make gear with bonuses to heat resistance. And right after I spent a whole session finding and culling seals to make the best cold resistance kit, too. Reminds me of the old days, when you needed two backpacks just carry all your resist gear.

Scary Bear Soundtrack is a Canadian indie-pop band, originally out of Nunavut and now based in Ottowa. I first came across them maybe a decade ago and I check in on them periodically to see a) if they're still going and b) if they've put out anything new.

They are and they have. A little while ago they released what Bandcamp calls a "Digital Album" but which I would call an E.P. (It has four tracks.). It's called Everything Is Falling Apart, which seems to be a common sentiment these days, albeit not one I necessarily share. 

They seem to have gone a bit prog, not necessarily a bad thing. I may well include a track from that in a future music post but for now I want to point up something I found quite curious about one of their earlier releases, the 2019 album Boomerang Kids.

There's a track on it called Investment Plan, which I just found out is an evolution of a 2013 demo called We Had A Plan. I heard the demo first and even though it's rough as all get-out and sounds like it was recorded through a sock from the house next door, I prefer it. I mean, I like Investment Plan a lot, but We Had A Plan has a bleak, heartfelt feel to it that the relatively slick studio take can't quite match. 

It reminds me of the "Better in Beta" mantra. I do think it also applies to demos, at least sometimes.

Here they both are. Decide for yourself. 

Also have a read of the lyrics, which are reproduced in full in the YouTube description. They're very good, if deeply depressing. I have a thing about songs like this, of which there are quite a few. Both the way it's structured and what it's about. It reminds me quite strongly of Lloyd Cole's harrowing Hey Rusty, one of my favorite songs of all time. Then again, he's never happy.

That's it. I'm done.