All This Can Be Yours - For A Price

This weekend, the Playable Worlds team finally came up with some hard details on the upcoming Stars Reach Kickstarter campaign. Not the target itself, nor the inevitable Stretch Goals, details of which we'll have to wait until tomorrow to learn, but we do now have chapter and verse on the Pledge Tiers, their pricing and what your money will get you.

I'll probably have more to say on that after the campaign officially begins tomorrow. For now, if you want the full details, such as they are, Wilhelm has you covered.  

What I will say is that the pledge tiers, as revealed in this weekend's fireside chat, are both better and worse than I expected.  

The first two tiers pretty much say "I have no interest in your game but I would like to express my support anyway". We might as well forget them, except to say it'll be interesting to watch just how much take-up they get. The third tier I'm going to come to in a moment. 

As for the rest, I didn't find anything appealing in any of them. Beyond a certain point it's whales all the way down. Before that, it's quite hard to see the attraction at all. There are some intriguing mentions of spaceships and spacesuits that made me wonder if there was going to be a Star Citizenesque market in imaginary hulls at some point in the future but it's far too early to tell what value something like that might have when the game goes live.

Not, of course, that there was any chance of me spending more than maybe, at the very outside, a hundred dollars. I did spend that much on Landmark and never regretted it so it wasn't completely out of the question that Playable Worlds might come up with something I thought was worth paying that much for. 

They didn't but luckily for me, the only thing I was really interested in - continued, guaranteed access to the testing program - is included in every pledge from Tier Three. That entry level offer is pegged at just $30. So that's what I'll be pledging. It's a bargain. I was expecting to be asked at least $50.

It's one-and-done, too. Pledging gets you into all the tests that are planned up to Live. The rough idea  seems to be to carry on with testing much as it is now until the summer, by when there should be something closer to an actual game, as opposed to a lot of unconnected bits of one. Testing would then move to a beta phase by the end of the year and transition into Early Access sometime in 2026. 

How long the EA phase might last hasn't been mentioned but I don't remember an awful lot of games staying in Early Access for less than a few months. A few years seems more like the norm.

There have also been precious few instances of MMORPGs taking less time to hit their initial development targets than originally suggested. It's hard to think of any that even made the dates they said they would. By far the most common outcome is that everything takes longer than expected - often much, much longer.

That suggests $30 now will probably buy you at least the best part of two years playing the game before it finally declares itself ready and launches. At which point you can just carry on because it's going to be Free To Play... for a very specific definition of "Free".

Here's where things get a little peculiar. Raph and the Playable Worlds team seem to be very concerned not to frighten the horses by using the "S" word, so they're doing everything they can not to suggest the game will require any sort of subscription. 

That's hardly surprising. Subscriptions are still widely considered the kiss of death for a new MMORPG, although I would have to say the demographic likely to be most interested in Stars Reach is probably also the one least likely to have problems with a monthly access fee, if only because they'd like to believe it would keep out the riff-raff and minimize the impact of the cash shop.

It's a difficult balance to strike. Raph has said he doesn't see Stars Reach as a bijou, niche project for nostalgists only. It's meant to be a game with at least a shot at mass-market appeal. That does seem to rule out an old-school, Buy-to-Play plus Monthly Subscription model, even though I'm sure a significant proportion of the current testing phase would love that. Or at least would say they did.

That would also be the power-block least likely to accept a true F2P offer and when the game does eventually go Live they aren't going to get one. The payment model, as I understand it, will be F2P with a Cash Shop, but also with a monthly game pass that quite a few people are going to see as all but mandatory. 

So far, so ordinary. Lots of games have a free tier and an optional paid tier that gives all kinds of perks. Some people always think the game is unplayable without those passes.

Where Stars Reach differs is in the very specific nature of the perks, one of which is so clearly the focus it lends itself to the name of the pass itself. It's called the Property Pass and if you want a house, you have to have one.

Yes, if you want somewhere to live in Stars Reach you're going to have to pay rent. Not in space dollars. In real money. Without this month's Property Pass you don't get to build or live in your own home. Whether or not you can still own a whole planet, just not any of the buildings on it, is unclear.

It's a strange move. In one way it seems like a draconian choice, fencing off a major part of the game  behind a pay-wall. In another, it risks being all but meaningless as an income-driver. A lot of people who play MMORPGs love their houses but I'd bet a lot more really don't care much about housing one way or the other.

What we don't know at this stage, of course, is just how key to the rest of the gameplay housing will be. Thinking of every game I've ever played with some kind of housing, even those with the best versions and the smartest integration with other aspects of play, I couldn't claim that not having a house in any of them would have made all that much difference to anything else I wanted to do.

Short of requiring access to a house to reach other content, housing is always going to sit off to the side of everything else. If you only care about adventuring or combat or exploring, you can pretty much forget about staying at home or even coming back there now and again. As for crafting and the various social activities, the way things have been explained so far, it seems likely you'll need access to someone's home but it isn't necessarily going to need to be yours.

For the time being, though, none of us need to worry about any of that. It will, no doubt, all become clear nearer the time. For now, the Property Pass is just a dot on the horizon. There's no hint or suggestion that Playable Worlds will try, as others have, to charge a fee for access during testing - other than that initial $30 buy-in, that is. Unless I'm missing something, as long as the game is in some form of alpha, beta or Early Access, you'll be able to build your house and live in it for free.

From my perspective, that will most likely be longer than I'll ever want to play anyway. Even on the optimistic timescales given, it looks as though launch is a couple of years away. If I'm realistic, it's been many years since I played any game for that long. A lot happens in two years and games I was excited by a couple of years ago are usually fast vanishing into the rose-tinted distance by then.

The final thing that ought to be said is that, should you be interested in getting a close look at the game as it develops, there's not even any absolute requirement to pledge the Kickstarter at all. Although all but the lowest couple of tiers entitle you to "Priority access" to testing, that in itself more than implies there will also be non-priority access as well. If you're just patient you'll probably get a go. Same as every testing program, really.

Things do change somewhat once the game goes into Early Access. Your Kickstarter pledge will get you in, no questions asked, but if you didn't back the campaign, you'll have to buy a Pass. 

What sort of pass and for how much is unknown as yet although it doesn't look like it'll be a Property Pass. Those only start to feature in the explanatory notes when when the game goes Live. That's why I'm assuming my $30 will get me property rights from now until launch.

As for the EA passes, whether they'll turn out to be more expensive than the $30 pledge remains to be seen but it seems unlikely. It would feel a bit strange if they were cheaper. Then again, you'd have had all that time in testing for the extra money so you probably shouldn't complain.

That's the thing about games in development. The speculation never ends. Until the final launch packages and pricing are announced, anything and everything can change. 

Based on what we know so far, though, $30 seems like a bargain. If you're at all interested, I'd say take it while it's on offer. This kind of access probably won't come as cheaply again. 

Why I'm Not Playing WoW Right Now (Like I Thought I Would Be)

For all my enthusiasm over World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix, I haven't gone ahead and re-upped my sub. I keep thinking about it but then I remember I'm paying for EverQuest II and not playing that either. It's not like I begrudge the money but there does come a point when you have to ask yourself if spending more is really the smart thing to do.

I'm not going to rehash all the familiar arguments for and against various payment models, nor even remark once again on the ever-growing realization that, as consumers, we're screwed if we pay, screwed if we don't. If anyone needs a final confirmation that no-one owns anything any more, even when they've paid for it and taken it home in a box, look no further than Spotify's short-lived entry into the hardware market, the Must Have Been Named By A Teletubby Car Thing. 

I am not a Spotify user. The service they provide doesn't fit well with the way I listen to music so I've never even considered subscribing. Until fairly recently, I didn't have much of an opinion about the company either way. I don't tend to waste a lot of time pondering the worth of services I don't use or plan on using. 

All the same, it's hard to avoid hearing plenty about the Swedish company. I read a lot of music news and the name comes up over and over again. Of late, that reporting has skewed hard towards the negative.

 Q1 revenue this year was up 20%, immediately following a cull of 17% of its workforce in December. That sort of thing always goes down well with shareholders. Everyone else? Not so much.

Since making money is the primary purpose of business, there are always plan to increase the yield.  In Spotify's case, there was talk of a "Supremium" level of service, intended to raise subscription rates even further, but apparently that was torpedoed by consumer resistance. It seems there is a temperature at which the frogs start to jump out of the pot after all.

Until yesterday, by far the most controversial of Spotify's recent business moves was the decision to stop paying royalties on any track listed on the platform if it receives fewer than a thousand plays per year. This has been widely reported as an attack on independent music-makers although, as Spotify points out, seemingly without either irony or self-awareness, a thousand streams earns you less than $3.

Bad though that looks, yesterday's news that the company is about to brick its own, dedicated, in-car device, the Car Thing, beats it hands-down for self-inflicted bad PR. It's almost up there with Apple's disastrous piano-crushing commercial.

At least Apple's PR department had the sense to walk that one back once they saw the reaction it got. There's been no indication of Spotify enjoying even that degraded sense of self-preservation. 

Not only will the devices they sold, apparently for $50-$100 dollars a time, cease to work entirely just before the end of this year, there will be no refunds and no alternatives. Spotify helpfully suggests you recycle yours because of course they care about stuff like that...

You might argue that, for a piece of consumer electronics that was only available for around five months a couple of years ago, that's not a wholly untenable position. Nothing last forever, after all, The U.S. Federal Trade Commission might not agree. They seem to think that if you sell someone a thing it ought to last more than five minutes. Luddites!

Inevitably, a class action suit has already been raised. Whether or not that gains legal traction, brand damage has already been done. Not that Spotify probably cares. This is clearly one more tone-deaf marketing decision from a company that doesn't seem to hold much concern for what its customers or anyone else thinks about it. 

Lest there be any lingering, residual doubt in anyone's mind about just how far removed Spotify corporate is from anywhere that could even remotely be described as "in touch with popular opinion", let me just quote the stated reason they've given as to why they very briefly entered, then just as quickly exited, the arena of automotive audio products in the first place:

“The goal of our ‘Car Thing’ exploration in the US was to learn more about how people listen in the car.”

So it was all for science. An experiment, carried out using other people's money. And, presumably, their data, although I imagine all rights to that are waived in the EULA when you sign up for a Spotify account.

Not that any of us own anything any more. Certainly we don't own our games. Not if they require an internet connection to play and not even if they don't, according to Valve. You may be able to play Nightingale offline now but don't let that give you any funny ideas about who owns the game you paid for. I'll give you a clue: it's not you.

It can't be, can it? If it was, you'd be able to bequeath your Steam games to your heirs. Yeah, that's not happening. As the NME helpfully points out, there are ways around the problem, such as taping your password to your PC before you gasp your last. That way your games can be handed down the generations like the family heirlooms they will literally have become. As the article blithely puts it, "Steam can’t prove a bunch of 135-year-olds aren’t still playing games."

I suppose one thing you can say about the good old MMORPG subscription model is that at least it's clear. We grizzled vets may have shelves of cardboard boxes and stacks of shiny discs to prove we went to the store around the turn of the millennium to buy EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or Final Fantasy XI but we all knew those were nothing more than souvenirs. We owned the boxes but we never owned the games. Those we just rented at $14.99 a month.

The Free to Play revolution muddied the waters but even with the entry fee removed, no-one was fooled into thinking we owned anything more than we ever had. If the company chooses to shut the servers down the result is the same whether you were paying to play on them or not. 

All of that has something to do with why I haven't ponied up for a WoW sub, even though I was quite enjoying myself on my return but other factors are having considerably more impact on that decision. It's true I'm in a bit of a lull with MMORPGs just now but that's not going to last. I'm somewhat wary of subbing to WoW and then almost immediately finding I have other, more pressing gaming concerns to occupy my time.

The new EverQuest II Origins server opens next month, most likely just after Steam's Next Fest, and now Tencent have revealed the official launch date for Tarisland to be June 21st. As I mentioned yesterday, Once Human could go live as early as August and this morning I got an email from the people behind Genshin Impact, telling me their new title, an "Urban Fantasy ARPG" by the name of  Zenless Zone Zero is set to relaease globally on 4 July.

That's pretty much got the whole summer covered and all of those I can either play for free or via a subscription I've already paid. Sure, I'd like to play WoW but would I want to play it more than all of those? It seems unlikely.

In the end, it probably doesn't matter all that much whether the games I play really belong to me, whether I'm just renting them or whether I'm getting them for free. What counts is whether I'm going to play them or not. And it looks like I'm not going to be playing WoW after all.

Resurrection Shuffle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monsters & Memories Early Access 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games For Sale

I logged into EverQuest II for the first time in... well, I can't exactly remember how long. Before I started playing Palworld, that's for sure, so about a month? It wasn't that I even wanted to play the game today, not especially, although I'm pretty much always up for an EQII session. It was more that I felt that, since I paid for an annual subscription last September and the recent expansion two months later, I probably ought at least to make an effort to get some of my money's worth.

And that, right there, is the problem with traditional subscription and buy-to-play payment models. I can't help thinking the best reason I could have for wanting to log in to a game would be a strong desire to play it right now, not because I'm worrying about money I spent on it months ago.

The conter-argument would be that I'd paid for everything up-front so I could enjoy the game and the expansion at my leisure. And anyway, I'd made the decision to spend some time with the game today and I was expecting to enjoy myself. Only I didn't even manage to clock up five minutes in Norrath before I found myself back here, writing about it instead. 

To some degree, that's reflective of where the pendulum is on my gaming arc. I tend to vary between wanting to play games more than write about them and the reverse. Currently I'm in an authorial phase. The pendulum will swing back. It always does.

Mostly, though, my failure to stick with what I'd planned for more than five minutes comes down to what I saw in the launcher as the game was updating, plus some things I've read about EG7 in recent days. Straws are flying in the wind and they're getting hard to ignore.

Wilhelm posted a thoughtful examination of the prospects for the company, under pressure from investors to maximize the profit potential of a portfolio that includes not just the two EverQuest titles but DCUO and - at a slight and somewhat nebulous remove - Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Magic: the Gathering - as well as the ever-promising but rarely delivering H1Z1 and the largely ignored and forgotten Planetside 2. 

Except, on that last one... does the EG7 portfolio still include PS2?

It seems not. Not any more. Word is that Planetside 2 has been sold to... someone. To whom is less clear.

The Enad Global 7 Q4 Interim Report published this week simply states "Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million." As far as I can tell, neither EG7 nor Rogue Planet Studios (The game's nominal developer.) nor DBG has made any public statement about who the new owner might be but it seems certain the title to all Planetside properties has been transferred to a shell company going by the name of Bay Tree Tower Ltd, about whom absolutely nothing of substance is known.

This, naturally, has lead to all kinds of speculation, from the game being shut down as a tax write-off at one extreme to the new owner being Amazon Games who, under John Smedley's auspices, will go on to make Planetside 3 at the other. Someone on Reddit even claims to have found proof on the dark web that the real owners of Bay Tree Tower are Tencent. Feel free to go look that one up for yourselves.

I have no interest in Planetside 2. I'm always a little surprised it's still going, let alone that it seems to be quite popular in certain circles. I have played it and while it seemed fine, it really wasn't my kind of thing. Seeing a whole game removed from the DBG roster and handed off to person or persons unknown, however, is a little... disturbing.

If I was going to speculate, which clearly I am or I wouldn't have started this paragraph by suggesting it, I'd guess PS2 won't resurface as part of the portfolio of another games aggregator like Gamigo or Valofe, for the simple reason that companies like that are usually all too happy to let everyone know when they grab a new moneymaker. 

The use of a shell company suggests something someone doesn't want anyone to know about, which given Daybreak's record, would be business as usual. They seem to specialize in obfuscatory smokescreens, frequently for reasons that never do come fully to light, suggesting they not only do it, they're quite good at doing it. It wouldn't even surprise me if turns out they've sold the game to themselves, somehow, especially since it appears that although the IP rights have moved, publishing remains with DBG. Again, it probably wouldn't be the first time...

In other words, whoever owns PS2, it'll be business as normal for players until further notice, which I guess is something. Meanwhile, the other stand-out item in that quarterly statement was this: 

EG7 has initiated several new growth Initiatives, including... EG7’s own release of a new H1Z1 game.... Currently in concept exploration phase with pre-production phase coming up next.

Daybreak is aiming to enter the production phase for the title on the second half of 2024.

It's ironic that H1Z1 features zombies. It's the franchise that just won't die. I did kinda-sorta know there was some idea of a new take on H1Z1 but I figured it would be another revamp of the existing property or a rerun of one of the old versions. I hadn't realized it was going to be a whole new game...

I'm not going to run through the full report. I'll leave that to Wilhelm, who I'm sure will do a far better job of it than I would. I'll just mention that overall, EG7 seems to be doing about as well as can be expected in what has been a brutal period for game development. The biggest hit to profitabilty seems to have been the inevitable bursting of the My Singing Monsters bubble; that and not managing to get DCUO onto the latest console generation in time for Christmas.

The latter is due to be corrected in the first quarter of this year although there has to be some concern over the letting-go of a number of people from Dimensional Ink, the subdivision responsible for DCUO. You might think they'd need everyone if the game is going to move forward this year.

All of that stands as background to what I saw when I logged in to EQII this morning, which was something much more immediately relevant to playing the game itself. As of now, if you'd like a leg-up doing that, Darkpaw would be more than happy to oblige.

To that end, they've added a couple of packs to the Cash Shop: the Darkpaw Hero Bundle and the Darkpaw Heroic Boost Bundle. The only difference between the two is that one comes with a boost to Level 125 and the other doesn't. Well, that and 3,500  DBC. 

Both versions contain a whole load of currencies and tokens intended both to let you skip a large amount of grind and instantly acquire very powerful spells and abilities. Level boosts are no longer controversial. The rest of it could be.

Since there's no limit on how many of these packs you can buy, there's also no real counter to the accusation that this is pay-to-win, pure and simple (Other than to point out that the very concept of "Pay to Win" in a game that, by definition, cannot be won, having no win condition, is meaningless, of course.) In theory, since each pack comes with your choice of a Grandmaster spell, you could potentially grandmaster all your spells for a thousand dollars or so. And who's to say someone hasn't already?

At the very least it represents a way of spending money to skip content and thereby progress much faster than those who choose not to purchase the packs or just can't afford them. And they aren't cheap. DBG conveniently sell their funny money at a thousand DBC for ten dollars, making conversion easy, although inevitably there are value deals for higher amounts to confuse things. For all intents and purposes, though, it's $40 for the Hero Bundle and $75 for the one with the boost.

And that might not be so bad if it was the end of the story but of course many, probably most, EQII players have multiple max-level characters. Even though some of the items in the pack are Heirloom and therefore tradeable within the purchasing account, a determined (Or should that be demented?) player might feel they needed dozens of these packs to get all their characters up to their full potential.

Instead of logging in, I clicked through the link in the launcher to read the forum thread on the announcement. It's three pages long and surprisingly evenly balanced between those who approve of the new bundles and those who object to them. 

Even then, the disapproval seems muted compared to what I would have expected a while back. Granted,  the rather good, newish Senior Community Manager, Angeliana, moderates the thread fairly strictly but I don't see much evidence of multiple posts being suppressed. Just the odd hothead, who can't tell the difference between forceful criticism and personal abuse.

There is an inevitable appearance of the old "I know five people who cancelled their subscriptions because of this" anecdote, of course. I think the first time I saw that on the forums must have been sometime in 2005 and it's been a constant, comforting presence ever since. 

On the whole, though, people seem either glumly resigned to yet another development confirming their bleak view that EQII now exists only as a miserable means of extracting money from fools and cheats or that being able to pay money to progress in a video game is a human right to be celebrated and anyone who says otherwise is just, like, so out of touch. 

I suspect that anyone who's genuinely unwilling to accept offers like these in the Cash Shop gave up playing the game long ago. Probably every game, since all of them do it. Anyone who's still here either does it themselves or has to play with those who do so it's pretty much a given of the game by now.

The more interesting question for me is whether something like this really works as a money-generating technique. It's really hard to tell from my perspective. As I've often said, most years I can barely get through the basic content included in the annual expansion before the next one arrives. The idea of paying to progress faster seems irrational. 

I kind of hope it does work. As someone on the thread points out, they need to monetize the game somehow. And it's not like they don't also sell a ton of cosmetic items that no-one could claim were Pay to Win. I'm fairly sure if those were doing the job we wouldn't be in this situation.

I have to assume DBG know their customers, who are almost all veterans of many years. Equally, those players must know what the game is, now. The entire end-game has been slowly shifted to an endless, incremental grind for various currencies and tokens, while the vast, submerged, iceberg-like bulk of everything else that's been added to the game over the preceding twenty years drifts along beneath, free and fair for anyone who cares to enjoy it. Not that many do.

As with every aging MMORPG, it's current content or bust. And that applies just as much to "Classsic" or "Progression" servers as it does to the "Live" game. Even the old has to be endlessly new or at least sold as such. It's a false dichotomy to pretend, as some do, that the TLE servers, with their throwback gameplay, are in some way more authentic than the rest. They demand their share of anything new that can be shoe-horned in to their rulesets just as vehemently as anyone on Live.

That, or some of it, is what I found myself thinking about when I went to log in this morning, with the result that instead of playing through the next instance in the Ballads of Zimara Signature Questline, I logged straight out again and came here to write this post. Maybe that's what I pay my subscription for - content for the blog.

Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess. I mean, I have literally scores of games installed I could be playing for free. Sometimes I wonder why I still subscribe. Sometimes I wonder why anyone pays for anything. 

I guess it's just as well someone does or this whole house of cards would come tumbling down. 

And then we'd all be sorry. 

Wouldn't we?

It's Back To The Overrealm With EverQuest II's New Expansion, Ballads Of Zimara

Of course, the minute I finished yesterday's post, whining about how I had nothing to write about, Daybreak Games decided to open up pre-orders for this year's EverQuest II expansion, which we now know is going to be called Ballads of Zimara. I found that out by way of my own blog roll, when I went to read over what I'd just written for the final time and saw that The EverQuest Show had just relayed the news.

From there it was a quick click to the official announcement on the EQII website, which I have to say is immensely impressive. One of the most noticeable improvements at Darkpaw in recent times has been the professionalism and slickness of the website itself. I don't know if it stems from Jenn Chan taking over the reins from Holly "Windstalker" Longdale or whether it was already in progress before that but either way it's a very welcome change.

I imagine it's also commercially effective. EQII is an aging game, fast approaching its twentieth anniversary, so having a portal for new and returning players that doesn't creak and groan in the winds of time has to be a good thing. It's one thing to be old, quite another to look and feel old.

The commercial aspect of the enterprise is front and center when you land on the website. The first thing you see is a gorgeous, screen-wide illustration, richly-hued in purple tones, complete with a host of intriguing characters, bobbing in the air, brightly-colored spells fizzing at their finger-tips. The whole effect is compelling, with the positioning of the central characters drawing the eye to the name of the game and the expansion at the top and the all important "Pre-Order" button at the bottom.

It's really very smart. The immediate reaction is to click on that big button, taking you straight to the place where you part with your money. But we'll get to that later. 

If you resist the temptation to click and scroll down instead, you'll be treated to a sumptuous display of what to expect from the expansion. First comes a video, lovingly framed as if it were a painting, something that's sadly not replicated in the YouTube version you're about to watch.

As a promo for a vintage MMORPG, that's not at all bad. Granted, it's mostly scenery, but it looks pretty and not all that dated. It's also edited quite effectively, the soundtrack and images syncing perfectly, which creates a definite and reassuring impression of competence and attention to detail.  

I wouldn't draw attention to it if it wasn't that so many MMORPGs, and not just the older ones, either, have an unfortunate tendency to release videos that makes the games look worse than they are. This one, if anything, does the opposite.

Not that I'm suggesting it's in any way misleading. I would like, once again, to point out for the many, many people who probably haven't stepped inside an EQII zone since Rise of Kunark (2007) that most of the game looks way better than it did fifteen years ago, thanks to a new set of development tools that have only been applied going forward. The older zones still look like something only a nostalgist could love but the new stuff, which really means the last decade or so, looks pretty spiffy.

After the video comes a lengthy screed giving the backstory to the expansion. I'm tempted to reproduce it here in full so I can give it the full practical criticism workover my Cambridge supervisor would have demanded. Certainly there's enough in the two paragraphs to support a short essay. 

Whoever wrote the prose clearly intended it to stand as a call-to-arms, not just for the characters who will live through the events inside the game but also for the players standing behind them. The forceful use of the vocative in the second sentence, for example; the sudden switch to the second person plural at the start of the torrent of rhetorical questions at the end; it all seems designed to foster a sense both of urgency and inclusion. It's we, the players, who need to do something about this crisis and all those exlamation points suggest we need to do it now!

It's effective. I was fired up. Granted, the fusillade of unfamiliar proper names could prove off-putting to strangers to the game but this isn't aimed at anyone who isn't either already playing EQII or just about to come back from a time away. Expansions for twenty-year old games don't need to worry whether customers will understand the jargon. 

No, all they need to do is press the right buttons and Ballad of Zimara looks like it knows exactly where they are. Once again, we're headed back to places we know and probably love, in this case not only the Overrealm, setting for the game's second expansion, Kingdom of Sky but also to the homelands of the Djinn, who featured heavily in EQII's first expansion, Desert of Flames.

KoS was, as far as I recall, a popular expansion. Desert of Flames definitely was. I've spent a great deal of time in both over the years and I'm very happy to add to it. Even better, we won't just be retracing our flight-paths across the familiar skyscapes, we'll be alighting in four new, previously unseen regions: Splendor Sky Aerie, Zimara Breadth, the Aether Wroughtlands and Vaashkaani, Alcazar of Zimara. 

Both the Djinn homelands and the Overrealm are part of the now-deteriorating Plane of Sky, something that seems obvious when you read it but which hadn't previously occured to me. This is the level of detail that acts as a deterrent to newcomers but almost as an aphrodisiac to seasoned veterans. At this stage of an MMORPG's lifespan it's almost impossible to play the nostalgia card too hard.

Going back to the website and the way the information is presented, take another gold star for design. If you click the big picture beneath the "New Lands To Discover" banner, it opens onto a slideshow of screenshots from all the new zones. They're all appealing but a couple are spectacular. Again, it's all slick, professional and very alluring.

With appetites whetted and nostalgia primed, it's time to get down to practicalities. What, exactly, are we getting for our money?

Exactly what we expected, of course: new dungeons, new raids, new adventure and tradeskill quests and five more levels. Once again, the installed base knows exactly what it wants and that's more of the same. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't be installed, now would they?

I confess I'd forgotten it was a level-increase year. Level increases have been bi-annual for quite a while now and if I'd been more engaged with Renewal of Ro I'd have recalled it didn't come with a change of number next to my character's name.

It's good timing for me. There's certainly an argument for not going all-out during the off-expansions if you're a casual player. Every xpack is a soft reset but when it comes to those where the level cap goes up, the reset's not as soft as all that. If you're not playing flat-out all the time, it makes sense to save some energy for when it matters most.

As always, the expansion comes with some new features and as usual they're hard to parse from the brief description they get in the press release. See what you make of these:

• Expand your arsenal interactively with Advanced Research
• Re-challenge your favorite encounters in Chrono Dungeons

I could guess but I won't. No doubt more will be revealed as we approach release. If not, I'll find out when I get there.

And that concludes the excellent presentation. Darkpaw's, that is, not mine. All that's left is to take a look at the various Pre-Orders and Packs.Yet again, I'd like to compliment both the devs and the website designers on the excellence of their work; the comparison chart is very clear and easy to understand and every in-game item in all the packs is clearly displayed on a click-through - they all look great!

Once again, there are no real surprises. The expansion comes in four sizes, the traditional Standard, Collector's and Premium, plus the now-expected Family & Friends. Pricing ranges from $34.99 for the base model to what I'm contractually obliged to describe as an "eye-watering" $249.99 for the F&F  edition.

This year, I am very seriously considering buying the Collector's Edition, which retails at $69.99 (£50.39.) In two decades, I've never bought anything other than the basic version of an EQII expansion for the simple reason that all I've ever really needed was access to the content. I was never remotely swayed by the plethora of cosmetics and frippery that filled the more expensive packages.

As time goes on and game design changes, though, the practical appeal of the upper tiers becomes more obvious. EQII isn't pay-to-win per se, for the simple reason that everything you can buy is also readily available in-game but I wouldn't argue that it hasn't very much become pay-for-convenience. 

For example, I need a better mercenary quite urgently now. I could get one for myself by playing the game but that would require either buying from another player at what have become extortionately inflated prices or running instanced content for drops. 

Both of  those are clearly normal, intended forms of gameplay but I'm too lazy either to make the necessary in-game money through trading or to grind solo instances until I get the drop I need. If I buy the Collector's Edition I'll get a Legendary Mercenary, a healer, which is what I need. I'll also get a Legendary Familiar and Mount, both of which will substantially increase my character's effectiveness since each provides a huge boost to combat stats.

I'd also get a Prestige house, a furniture item that's also a teleport to the new expansion zones, some crafting recipes and a very nice painting to hang on the walls of my new home. That's the sugar on top of the actual cake.

I thought about going Collector last year and decided against it but I'm feeling this maybe the year I choose to ride business instead of coach. Forget about first class, though. The ticket gets you a Celestial upgrade to those Legendaries but I think that's a luxury I can easily forego.

There's plenty of time to think about it. There's no official release date, just the usual "expansion available before December 31". So long as I "Pre-order" before the expansion arrives I'll get all the goodies. 

Beta is already open. I have no plans on spoiling my own fun with that but I look forward to the usual trickle of detail all the same. I'm sure everyone will be complaining bitterly as usual. Me, I'm just happy the game's still getting an expansion every year. It's not that long ago we were all wondering if the next one would be the last...

Just Browsing

One thing I rarely cover in any real detail when posting about the many Free To Play titles I enjoy is the monetization that keeps them going. Not that they get any money from me. I am the absolute definition of a leech when it comes to these things. 

Developers must hate me. I've enjoyed many hundreds of hours of absolutely free entertainment at their expense. I don't believe I've ever spent a single penny on a fully F2P title. In almost all cases I've never even been tempted. It hardly ever feels like anything I'd want, let alone need, to do.

Very occasionally I toy with the idea of spending a small amount of money - five or ten dollars perhaps - almost as much to show willing as for any practical purpose. In every case, though, the feeling swiftly passes and I keep my credit card in my wallet.

The thing that really surprises me about all these games is that they can make money using these methods at all. It seems to me that F2P titles are, almost by definition, likely to attract people who either don't have the disposable income to buy higher-quality titles or who are, like me, simply too mean to spend money when they don't have to.

I'm aware there are those individuals we sometimes call "whales" who, either because they literally have more money than they know what to do with or because they have psychological issues that mitigate against self-control, are willing to spend extremely large amounts of money to get what they want, even when most of that money, thanks to the various lockbox and gacha mechanics the games employ, goes to waste.

I'm also aware there are people who budget their expenditure in video games in the same way they budget for eating out or going to the movies; people for whom spending ten or twenty dollars a week on a game they enjoy is a rational and reasonable expense. 

All of this I understand intellectually but emotionally it makes no sense to me. My experience of every F2P game I've found worth playing for any significant amount of time has always been that I get more free stuff given me than I'm able to use and that everything I need to fully enjoy my time is available purely by playing the game. 

When I look at the cash shops in most games, F2P or otherwise, I do wonder occasionally what it is that other people are seeing that I'm not. I played Guild Wars 2 for a decade and one of my constant complaints was that there was pretty much nothing in the cash shop I wanted. It's full of ugly outfits I wouldn't wear on a bet and utilities that offer no real convenience. I am very clearly not the target market for whoever designs these things.

Even when the cash shop is pretty good, which is the case with EverQuest II, I still find it hard to spend much money there. Experience tells me that when I do buy things like the Prestige Homes I never use them, so why bother? I'd have to decorate them and then live in them and I already have two huge homes I can barely keep in order, as it is.

A few years ago there seemed to be something of a convention among F2P titles to make at least some of their money by selling not just convenient shortcuts or fancy clothes but the bare necessities required to play the game at all. Allods Online, an excellent game in many ways and one of the early WoW clones deemed most likely to succeed, famously scuppered its considerable chances by employing a punishing death mechanic that required cash shop items to mitigate.

Allods also played the inconvenience card hard with some of the meagrest inventory allocation I've ever seen. Making players get their wallets out to solve the ever-annoying problem of running out of storage space has been a classic money-spinner for a long time and not just in F2P titles either, but it finally seems to be going out of fashion.

It's been a good while since I've found myself struggling to manage my inventory in a F2P game. The last three titles I've spent a lot of time playing - Chimeraland, Noah's Heart and now Dawnlands - all offer far more storage for free than I'm ever likely to use. Neither do any of them restrict instant travel or put up annoying barriers that need real cash payments to remove.

They don't use lockboxes, either. It's a while since I've seen one of those drop in any game I play. They're still very prevalent in older titles but the newer ones don't seem to bother with them at all.  

The current fashion seems to be for Gacha mechanics that are supposedly tied directly to progression. It's a mechanic that most Western players probably knew little about a few years ago but with which, thanks to global success of titles like Genshin Impact, we're all now quite familiar.

When I first encountered the draw mechanic I found it quite exciting, although never so much so that I wanted to pay for the thrill. Still, making my free rolls, watching the explosive animations and finding out what I'd won kept me happily entertained until the novelty wore off. 

The problem with a system that relies on building teams of characters and powering them up, at least from my point of view, is that I hugely prefer to stick with one set of characters that I know. I strongly dislike swapping characters in a team in and out as though they were weapons - I don't even much like swapping actual weapons ffs.

I am very much a set-and-forget player. I like to put in quite a lot of effort to get my character or team just right and then leave them to get on with their job, preferably for the entire time I play the game from then on. If I want to try another character I would much prefer to roll another character and start over. I'm on board with the old adage that you shouldn't change horses in the middle of a stream.

That makes me a particularly bad bet for making money out of when you rely on gacha mechanics, although as I think I've made clear, I'm a pretty bad bet in most other respects as well. If you want my money as a game developer you're most likely going to need to make me pay for content, which these days seems to be the one thing all developers are happiest to hand out for free.

All of this makes it very hard for me to understand when game games like Dawnlands receive such virulent criticism for employing monetization practices derived from the mobile market, where selling overpriced cosmetics, inconvenience and power have long been considered normal. It always seems to me that even if such practices have been imported to the PC versions of the games, PC gamers ought to be able just to ignore them.

It's something I find very easy to do for reasons other than my personal preferences. For the most part, the promotions are sequestered in separate segments of the UI. If you aren't interested then it's quite simple not to click on the icons. It's like walking through a market; you're not obligated to stop and buy something every time a stallholder catches your eye. You can just walk on.

Of course, if you do have the willpower to resist completely, you'll miss out on a bunch of freebies. Most of the many events designed to separate you from your savings come with some kind of sweetener to get your attention. Increasingly, I'm finding that they also offer considerable opportunities to indulge while spending only in-game coin, too.

That's obviously intended as a lead-in to spending real money but in-game coin is where I stop. I spent much of the last twelve months doing all kinds of events in Noah's Heart, most of which could have led me on to buying premium currency so I could carry on, except of course I didn't. I just stopped when it wasn't free any more. 

It was noticeable that after a few months most of the free events in that game converted to payment-only, a move that merely highlighted what dull events they were and emphasized what a bad idea it would be to spend money on any of them. At the same time, my stash of unused Gacha cards for summoning Phantoms grew and grew. By the time I drifted away from the game I had more than seven hundred unused pulls. 

One thing all the newer games do is tell you the odds. No-one can claim they didn't know their chances of getting the exact thing they wanted were slim. Dawnlands has a very elegant and detailed breakdown of the exact percentages involved. As is common with these systems, it also tells you just how many times you have to fail before the game takes pity on you and throws you a bone.

Where the game differs from most is that the range of highly desirable items on offer is both very limited and worth having, although I realize the latter is a  matter of taste and opinion. This is probably a function of the age of the game. It's very new. Even so, a cash shop with only two outfits seems extremely restrained. 

Yesterday we got a new Event, the third since launch. The first event, which is still running, involves making a video about the game and publishing it on YouTube although, as I found out a couple of days ago, you get fifty Diamonds just for clicking through to the web page that tells you how it works.

The second event, also still running, features a friendly creature called Carromu who, as the event title tells you, is always hungry. Carromu doesn't like to eat Diamonds (Who does?) so he's happy to swap his for all kinds of stuff you probably already have lying about. He just turns up in your camp one day and sits there, waiting for you to feed him. If there's any way for that event to generate income for the developer I can't see what it is. I think it's just a clean, fun event.

The new event is the game's first try at persuading you to part with some cash. It's a Gacha sale. 

As a survival/crafting game with no PvP or PvE ladder competitions, Dawnlands doesn't really have the kind of structure that supports the gacha mechanics I've seen elsewhere. On the basis of the first event, it looks like the solution is to randomize access to the kinds of things that would otherwise be straightforward premium purchases in the cash shop.

It doesn't really feel like a Gacha mechanic so much as a lockbox with out the box. It even has a fricken key as the Gacha item! You can buy the keys with Diamonds, which are an in-game currency, so I bought one to try it out. Having read the odds, I wasn't expecting much and not much is what I got.

Protected by my psychology as already described, I will not be bankrupting myself trying to win any of the admittedly rather spiffy prizes. Not even the really rather fetching bunny costume, complete with carrot holster and carrots. Nor Dodo, the cute-looking, catlike Follower, who is, apparently, "a great helper when exploring unknown lands"

Those two plus a very fancy piece of furniture are the big ticket items, although I'd be pretty pissed off if I made the required 2% roll and got a glorified garden bench. Someone obviously believes home-makers are a major demographic in the game because the second tier (10% chance.) is all furniture too, as is more than half of the bottom tier (88%. Oh, you figured that out already...)

As with everything in Dawnlands, the whole event is beautifully presented. The game has a consistently delightful aesthetic. It makes browsing the menu a pleasure in itself even when you know you're not going to sit down for the meal.

I might indulge in the occasional snack, all the same but it won't be often with keys costing 80 Diamonds a time. That feels quite steep, even with the 10% discount you get on your first ten puchases. As for paying real money, forget it.

As an indication of the way monetization in the game is headed, though, I find it perfectly acceptable. I'm enjoying just looking at the items and admiring the designs and the images. In real life, I can usually get at least as much satisfaction from window shopping as from buying the stuff. In games I'm equally happy just to look.

God, those devs must really hate players like me...