DBG? No, DG, RPG, DIG?

Just going to put this up to mark the day everything changed and everything stayed the same. 
I'm sure everyone's already seen the announcement via whichever hyperactive MMO news site they use. Here's the straight, professional reportage minus the tedious snark. Oh, wait a moment... that was snark right there, wasn't it?

The gist is this: Daybreak Games is splitting into three new, quasi-independent Studios: Dimensional Ink Games, Darkpaw Games, and Rogue Planet Games. DCUO, which seems to have drawn the short straw where naming is concerned, goes to DIG; the fortuitously yet somehow wholly inappropriately acronymed RPG gets Planetside, while the innocuous DG becomes the new home for the EverQuest franchise.

Planetside is more than welcome to wander off and do its own thing as far as I'm concerned. I did try playing it once but I never really got on with it. I wish them well and wave them goodbye.

Jack Emmert, the erstwhile head of Daybreak (I think - it's so hard to keep track), takes control of the superhero success story. His team are also already working on a new "action MMO", title and subject unknown. I still play DCUO occasionally and would like to retain the option so I have a small dog in that fight.

My main interest lies inevitably with Darkpaw Games, headed up by the estimable Holly Longdale. Having lived through twenty years of highly variable management under numerous versions of Verant, Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak, I can safely say the last few seasons under her stewardship have been some of the most stable and satisfying I've enjoyed to date. I'm very happy to see her and her team given autonomy to carry the existing games and the franchise forward.

There's a Darkpaw Producer's Letter up already. It doesn't give an awful lot away, unless you're gagging for an EQ T-shirt.  It does, however, say very much what I'd want to hear, as this paragraph suggests:

"Immediately, and in practical terms, our focus is on the fans and investing in our current games and the business of starting new ones. We’re already executing on the plans we had for 2020, like expansions and events for EQ and EQ2."

I read that both as a promise of Business as Usual and confirmation that we will get the usual annual expansions at the end of the year and maybe even a new EQ title someday. That's as much as I'd hope for and more than I would have expected a couple of years ago.

The letter also assures us that

"Currently, nothing will change for your accounts and membership."

Note the leading adverb. Given the supposed independent nature of the three new studios I wouldn't give too much for the continued existence of the All Access Membership. Time will tell.

Anyway, I have Overseer Missions to organize so I'm going to leave it at that for now. I think this looks a positive move, especially for the EverQuest games. Only time will tell if my optimism is well-founded, but things certainly look more promising than they did a while ago.

Don't Fear The Reaper: EverQuest, EverQuest II

As I was sleeping the news broke about the latest round of layoffs at Daybreak, the fourth such retrenchement in two years. I was planning to write about something else this morning but as I was hammering out a comment on Wilhelm's short post about it I realized I had rather too much to say to fit into a thread.

The first thing I have to say is that I'm amazed Daybreak even had seventy employees in total, far less seventy they could "let go" and still retain enough people to keep the lights on. These companies seem to be like icebergs, mostly hidden out of sight.

I always thought ArenaNet, with their three-hundred-plus people working on Guild Wars 2 (before the big cull earlier this year) sounded like a mega-corp but given the sheer number of people DBG has cut in the last two years, they can't have been far off that themselves.

Game development (and its far less glamorous sibling, game maintenance) is a volatile enterprise. Job security is tenuous at best. It must be difficult for everyone to be cut loose and thrown back into the job market but for those developers who've worked for years on one particular game and may have a deep emotional attachment to it, it has to feel closer to a bereavement or the collapse of a relationship than just a change of employment.

Fortunately, of late the trend seems to be for up-and-coming studios with games in development to snap up ex-colleagues of the devs already working there as soon as they become available. I wouldn't be surprised to see some more ex-DBG names turning up at Intrepid, for example. Not to mention those new studios started by the likes of Raph Koster and Mike O'Brien.

While the layoffs were probably part of the ongoing restructuring at Daybereak, presumably the total lack of impact that Planetside Arena has had was also a factor. When your Steam figures show a 24-hour peak of fewer than a hundred and fifty people and an all-time high below fifteen hundred, in a genre where those figures for the competition are often orders of magnitude higher, you have to admit your game has tanked.

Planetside Arena always looked like something of a Hail Mary pass at best. Had it taken off I don't imagine the PS team would have been so badly impacted but now it looks like the last throw of the dice for that particular I.P. I imagine it will be maintenance mode for Planetside 2 from now on.



The news for the EverQuest I.P. is a lot more encouraging. It seems as though the faction within DBG that sees EQ as the core has won out, something we suspected was happening from things Holly Longdale has been hinting at over the last few months. The interview she gave to The EverQuest Show, which should be out very soon, is going to be very interesting indeed.

Maybe that will give us some hard data to work with. Holly has already made it quite plain that none of this is any kind of panic move or knee-jerk reaction. There's a medium-long term plan for the future of the company in play right now, something that's evidenced by the setting up of all those new trademarks and social media accounts.

Until we know more it's all down to wild speculation. If I had to guess, I'd bet against an outright sell-off at this time. I doubt the owners (whoever they are...) want a fire sale unless they're in a similar financial situation to Trion, which they shouldn't be. They would hope to sell the I.P. s and games on from a position of relative strength and these moves we're seeing may well be positioning for that to happen.

I think they are going to hunker down on the I.P.s they have (or rent, in the case of DCUO) while also working on something new that will be EQ-related. They would hope to consolidate the value they have and enhance it somewhat with hype about a new generation of EverQuest, something more realistically achievable than the smoke-and-mirrors fantasy of EverQuest Next.

As someone who has little or no interest in either Planetside or H1Z1, a consolidation to the original core I.P. doesn't worry me unduly. If anything, it's mildly reassuring. A few years ago it looked as if all SOE/DBG really cared about was following the fad of the moment and expanding onto consoles.

Stay down! He might not notice us!

It looked for a while as though no-one at the company had much interest in a couple of ancient, legacy titles, played by a boring bunch of old people. The only interest the management team at that time seemed to have in the franchise was in converting the value of the name into something tweens and teens might not find horribly embarrassing: hence EQ Next.

In the absence of real numbers, I'd guesstimate that EverQuest is most likely relatively commercially stable. If you watch the server status, those progression servers and a couple of the Live ones sit at "High" population most of the time. Several others float around "Medium".

EQII is another matter. It relies on a core audience of longish-term veterans and that audience is slowly bleeding out. Many of them haven't entirely accepted some of the systems changes that have been made over the past few years and decisions on gameplay variations that came with a series of expansions proved less than popular, particularly with the hardest-core raiders.

Some of that bad feeling has been rowed back over the last 12-18 months. The last expansion was relatively well-received and the updates have generally gone down fairly well, too.

The EQII team has also made great strides in changing the way it approaches conversations with the audience. There's an unfortunate history of confrontationalism on both sides but it's currently at a low ebb, thankfully. There seems to be a willingness on both sides to be constructive and build bridges, something that, I feel, has come directly out of the prevailing sense that even if the company as a whole doesn't much care about Norrath, the teams working on the titles themselves most definitely do.

Hi! Let me introduce myself. I'm Larry the Lion. Maybe you know my cousin, Tony the Tiger?

Unfortunately, EQII is curently undergoing some major technical issues that could undermine all that good work. It's something I haven't experienced as I happily solo away but apparently the raiding game has been suffering from apalling and so-far unexplained lag.

The devs have been attempting to isolate the cause so they can fix the problem but so far they haven't managed to pin it down. Worryingly, the steps they're now having to take are themselves disruptive to the extent that players are threatening to quit because of them.

Then again, threatening to quit is the first response of some EQII players to anything that alters the status quo. If there was an Oscar for throwing the most hissy-fits in MMORPGdom, EQII fans would at the very least be nominated every single year.

And so we carry on. We do, at least, seem to be closing in on some kind of end-game after many years of obfuscation, secrecy and weirdness. If nothing else, by the end of 2019 we ought to have a considerably clearer picture of what business Daybreak Games thinks it's runniing and where it hopes to be in a year or two's time.

If we get that it will be a lot more than we've had for many a year.

Business As Usual

While we wait for Daybreak to let the rest of us in on their corporate restructuring, life goes on for the games themselves. DCUO made the switch to The Switch, which certainly fits in with Smed's ambition to expand onto consoles. Shame he's not there to enjoy it.

There's activity over on Planetside 2 as well, with the New Soldier update finally making it to the PS4. In this corner of the blogosphere we tend to focus on the fantasy end of Daybreak's portfolio, often wondering how well ancient MMORPGs like EverQuest and EverQuest II can be doing and how much longer they can go on. We tend to forget that DCUO has been successful for many years on consoles and that Planetside 2 has a 9/10 Very Positive rating on Steam, based on over 45,000 reviews.

Looking ahead, Forbes has an astonishingly positive take on DCUO's future on The Switch. In an article entitled "How DC Universe Online is The Perfect MMO for The Nintendo Switch", David Jagneaux says

"Even though DCUO originally came out over eight years ago, it feels more modern than that when playing on Switch. The UI still looks good, triggering abilities is simple, combat is fluid and not like most traditional MMOs. The zones are massive and fun to explore whether it be by flight, super speed, or bounding around like a super-powered acrobat. And the character creation system is just out of this world."

H1Z1 had a good run before PUBG and Fortnite stole its lunch money. SOE/Daybreak's record on consoles is really pretty good. In fact, it's good to the point that you could begin to wonder whether they'll bother to develop anything for the PC again.

Future unclear.

But that would be to forget the huge legacy audience for the EverQuest franchise, most of which is locked into PC gaming. EQ vets are about as likely to welcome a mobile or a console version of EverQuest as Blizzard fans were to be faced with Diablo Immortal at last year's Blizzcon.

Speaking of Blizzard, it can't be co-incidence that the next EQII update arrives on August 27th, the very day that World of Warcraft Classic launches. While Yun Zi, the panda with no sense of proportion (or irony), has popped up in August these last couple of years, he's usually arrived a week or two earlier and as for major summer Game Updates, last year's "Return to Guk" came on the 31st July.

Whatever the reason, it looks like a tasty update. Kael Drakel, the Giants' fortress home in Velious, is gettigng the Fabled treatment. I like Fabled dungeons a lot, for the rewards and for the challenge, which, at least for the last few, has been pitched squarely in my comfort zone. I also don't know Kael that well so it will be quite fresh for me.

As for Days of Summer, it's a nostalgic trundle round some old haunts for a bucketful of upgrades. What's not to like?

Let's give a big hand for Fabled Guk!

I'm planning to resub to WoW for Classic, mostly so I can enjoy the chaos and get a few blog posts. I don't imagine I'll be there for the second month. Given the general disdain expressed for WoW in EQ and EQ2 chat channels even now I find it quite hard to imagine it will have any significant, lasting impact on the Everquest games. The people still playing them made that choice long ago.

It's probably time I gave some thought to what race and class I might play in WoW Classic. Joking! I'm joking! It's going to be a Dwarf Hunter because what else woudl it be? Gnome Warlock, I guess. Those two. There won't be any goblins or worgen so there's no other choice.

Meantime, maybe I should get back to EQII. I seem to have let it slip even though I had a ton of ongoing projects running.

So many games, so little much time!

This Used To Be The Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off The Record : Daybreak Games

MassivelyOP has news of a rumor of a leak from an unnamed source about things Daybreak may or may not be working on, which might happen sometime... or never. I wasn't going to respond but then Wilhelm wrote a neat, coherent summary with commentary and when I began replying in his comment thread I quickly realized I was going to end up writing the equivalent of a full-length post.

So I thought I might as well write a full-length post.

The leak

The history of this kind of insider leak is pretty good, I think. Most of the ones I can remember ended up having  quite a grounding in fact. Still doesn't mean all - or any - of it will happen, of course. Even if 100% accurate, it's just a snapshot of the current situation and, as we have seen countless times, these things often change a lot before anything ever gets as far as a public release.

Everquest and EQ2 will have one last expansion each. 

I would guess that whether this year's EQ and EQ2 expansions really are the last will depend on how well they sell and how much money they make. I suspect the well is about drained dry by now and DBG are looking at this as one last trip, but if either of them were to do significantly better business than expected, who knows? It will be a great shame not to get any more EQ2 expansions because the quality has been high and I have enjoyed all of them.  I haven't bought an EQ expansion for a good few years though.

What happens after the last expansions is the more important question. There's a wide range of options, from complete maintenance mode a la GW1 to a full, continuing program of ongoing live content, new holiday stuff and special events. Again, I'm sure that will depend on how many people keep playing and how much money they spend.

Eventually the games will close but I hope and believe that's still a few years off.

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

This is the most bizarre item on the list and the hardest to take at face value. What does make some kind of sense is that it would be fairly crazy to try and run three Everquest-themed MMOs in full development simultaneously so if there's an intent to build a new one it might be a good idea to scale down one or both of the old games.

On the other hand, where's the market? EQNext got traction outside of the core playerbase (and not much within it) because it was a wish-fulfilment fantasy full of impossible dreams, promising far more than it ever had a hope of delivering. Which is why it also got cancelled.

The reference to Pantheon is instructive, though. Brad McQuaid's project does seem to have gone from something of an industry joke to a potentially serious contender. It's a good while since I've seen any pieces poking fun at either the game or Brad himself and the word of mouth on it seems to be holding up rather well.

It's entirely conceivable that DBG do genuinely see Pantheon as a serious competitor, likely to leech a significant amount of their market share if and when it launches. It's quite easy to imagine a successful launch for Pantheon drawing players in numbers from both EQ titles, particularly EverQuest.
 

That would make the winding-down of the two older versions of Norrath in favor of consolidating effort and interest in one new EQ game- EQ3 - seem almost logical. One of the many problems EQ2 had at launch was its failure to migrate existing customers from EQ. This plan could mitigate that issue to some degree.

It doesn't explain the surreal reference to "battle royal PvP", though. What that has to do with competing with Pantheon or the EQ franchise boggles the mind. Of course, MMOs can contain multitudes and it's totally believable that EQ3, were it to happen, could include a battle royale zone or mode.

So long as it was kept to one side, in the manner of PvP Battlegrounds or Arenas in other MMOs, that shouldn't be a problem. The idea that EQ3 would "put an emphasis" on it, however, suggests a lot more than an instanced PvP zone in a PvE game. You'd like to think there were lessons to be drawn from H1Z1 here about over-extending your resources and diluting your core offer but when did MMO devs ever learn from experience?

My takeaway from this is that I'm more than ever becoming committed to betting on Pantheon becoming my last-ever long-term diku-MUD style home. As for EQ3, if it happens, as I said about EQNext, I'll play it because it's Norrath but I don't expect to like it. I don't believe they're making it for me.

It looks like a sunset is most likely for Just Survive.

Still haven't gotten around to playing H1Z1 in any of its formats and I don't imagine I'm likely to now. I'm never happy to see an MMO close down but I can't say this has any resonance for me personally.

Planetside 3 is in early development. This will be a team based battle royal game.

And yet Planetside 2 is continuing, apparently, with new character models and animations coming this month and a new map later in the year. Perhaps the theory is that, unlike the EQ games, the two PS2's will either appeal to different market segments or that they will be complementary and capable of being played by the same people at the same time (not literally, I'm guessing, although you never know...).

I have played PS2, briefly, but it's not my sort of thing. It's slightly concerning to read that "other teams will be siphoned into this project next year" because, given the announcement about the end of expansions for the Norrath games, that could well mean devs currently working on EQ and EQ2.

The focus on Battle Royale modes in general seems misplaced. Development cadences for MMOs are so long that it seems like a very bad idea to tie this type of game to what may - most likely will - turn out to be a cultural moment that will have passed well before any likely launch date. Battle Royale is a pretty robust game mode that will be around forever but it's not going to hold the zeitgeist indefinitely - nothing does.

If nothing else I've found this last week a useful exercise in managing expectations. I have long held the belief that, at 60 as I will be this year, the Everquest games will probably see me out. I may have to learn to do without that particular comfort blanket.

We do have to face the fact that no MMO will last forever, although I am willing to bet that some form of EQ server - official or otherwise - will be publicly available longer than I'm around to play on it. EQ2, probably not., which is a shame for me because of the two I'd probably miss EQ2 the most.

Still, no need to panic just yet, I think. Even if everything in the reddit post turns out to be true I would guess we have a few more years to go before the final curtain comes down. Unless you're planning on playing Just Survive of course, in which case I'd get a move on if I were you.

Putting Out Fire With Gasoline: Daybreak Games

There's only been one MMO story this week - the fiasco surrounding who owns Daybreak Games. Wilhelm has the best summary of the position so far. Massively OP is also worth checking for the ongoing updates to the increasingly convoluted drama.

The one piece of information that hasn't been widely linked is this analysis of the original problem by ShadowInsignus on the Planetside2 reddit. Written by someone who seems to know how these things work it appears to explain that the sanctions in question were unlikely ever to have impacted DBG specifically, regardless of the ownership issue. Even if they do turn out to be among the targeted entities, there should still be options available to apply for exemption or for a license to continue trading.

If true, that makes Daybreak's bizarre behavior all the more difficult to comprehend. The most obvious and simple response to the initial flurry of interest and concern would seem to have been to issue a straightforward PR statement of the kind frequently used to pour sand on a fire. Something along the lines of "We don't believe the impending sanctions will affect the running of our games in any way but if we discover anything to the contrary we'll be sure to inform our customers right away".

That would have dampened interest to nothing more than the familiar mumblings of the usual haters. The troll army would have moved on, looking for new witches to burn. Instead, someone at DBG chose to behave like a clown in a rake factory, running full pelt in random directions, stamping on anything that might fly up and hit them in the face.

Who's driving the boat?

The issue almost instantly ceased to be about whether U.S. Government sanctions over Russia would have an impact on the EverQuest franchise, the H1Z1 PS4 launch, the renewal of the DCUO license or the health of Planetside2. If all that was at stake was the future of those IPs the story would have remained a very local one. While that would have been an impressive line-up of MMOs a few years ago, these days, no-one outside a sliver of the MMO community cares about any of them.

Instead, someone at DBG decided to go full George Orwell on the problem. They tried to rewrite the internet, thereby ensuring that people with no interest in MMOs whatsoever began to sit up and take notice.

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of this whole weird tale is that it's beginning to look as though the current, rewritten narrative could turn out to be the "true" one. Rohan from Blessing of Kings  makes a convincing case in the comments to the TAGN post that the way the sale was handled, as it's now being described, wouldn't even be all that unusual.

The Ars Technica piece is more revealing still and adds further clarification that suggests there may be many more layers to this supposedly done deal yet to be uncovered. A lot seems to rest on the somewhat nebulous term "owner", which, as I originally suspected, does not necessarily mean what a lay person would take it to mean.

I can affirm this from my own tangential experience. In the business where I work, both internal and external PR has referred for years to a specific individual as being "the owner". Recently, when the business was put up for sale, the names of other institutions and entities, none of which most of us working there had ever heard of, began to appear in  ownership roles. This stuff is complicated and frequently obscure, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Nibiru is coming!

Then, as if the ownership issues and wikipedia scandals weren't enough, we had the layoffs. Layoffs, like server merges, are never good news but, frankly, the thing that surprised me most was learning that DBG still had 70 people left to let go.

It seems likely that, rather than being a consequence of - or even a reaction to - the impending sanctions, these layoffs relate more to the collapse of H1Z1 as a profit-driver. That game, which played a John the Baptist role for PUBG and latterly Fortnite, had a good run while it lasted but it appears everyone agrees it's over. It's a shame the zombie depocalypse also had to damage the fortunes of the rest of the portfolio but if it results in a tighter focus on the core franchises it may not be all bad.

In normal circumstances (that's to say when the company appeared to be in the hands of responsible adults rather than teenagers trying to cover up the evidence after a wild party), I wouldn't feel especially concerned by either the layoffs or the ownership confusion. Apart from commiserating with the individuals involved and offering my genuine best wishes for their future careers, there wouldn't be any particular need to get involved even to the point of writing blog posts about it. I may have my preferences and my favorites but game ownership and personnel change all the time. We just smile or frown and log in as usual.

All I really care about is that someone is there, paying the bills and keeping the lights on, so I can log in when the fancy takes me and walk my countless characters around until I get bored. If there's enough money and enough people to bring some new content once in a while then that's a bonus. Even in the depths of the PSS1 debacle, the absolute nadir of the SOE administration, I never threatened to quit.

Portrait of The Owner.

It's when my access to the games themselves feel under threat I get anxious. Over the years I've seen a number of MMOs I felt an emotional connection with go dark: NeoSteam, Rubies of Eventide, City of Steam, Free Realms and, by far the most difficult to accept, Vanguard. None of those would or could have the impact that the simultaneous disappearance of both EverQuest and EQ2 would have. I might never recover.

Consequently the outcome of the current crisis is paramount. I want the games to continue and my characters to persist. If that means a sale to yet another owner (there are rumors) then so be it. I don't want them to change hands because, unlike most of the angry brigade that dominates the discussion, I am on record as believing that the games themselves have been better run, more stable and more fun to play since the sale than throughout most of the time they were owned and operated by Verant and/or SOE. If it's a choice between sunset and a new owner, however, then it's no choice at all.

For those without a wolf in the fight, it must make for a fascinating soap opera. I would absolutely love to know who panicked this week and why. When the easiest thing to do was to do nothing, why did someone instead choose to try to do the impossible?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I'd also like to know why John Smedley is keeping his counsel. It's not like him to stay out of any argument where his input could make things even worse. To be fair, the feisty Smed of a few years back has been conspicuous by his absence since the hacker wars and the demise of Hero's Song. Maybe he's just a changed man. On the other hand, maybe he knows more than he wants to tell.

There may be further revelations and surprises. Regardless of what else does or doesn't come to light, we will all know on June 5th whether the games will continue. With astonishingly bad timing that is also the day I fly to Spain. I'll be gone for almost two weeks and I would normally intend to avoid all gaming news while I'm away. I might have to make an exception this time but I'm keeping my fingers crossed the outcome doesn't spoil my holiday along with everything else.

As for the lay offs, I have yet to see a comprehensive list of the individuals who have left the company or what roles they vacated. Without that it's hard to estimate the impact on specific titles. If the sanction problem goes away, will we still get the promised expansions for EQ and EQ2 later in the year? At this point I'd consider that a luxury but who knows? Maybe Norrath will start to look more important to whatever version of the company remains, once the appeal of all things zombie fades away.

For now, all we can do is wait and watch. It will all be alright in the end or it won't. Either way, it's a salutory reminder of the impermanence of all things and the uncertainty of most.

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Well, not to ruin my own carefully crafted, elegaic coda but after I posted the above I had my tea and then I logged into EverQuest. The news section on the launcher pointed me to "A Note from the EQ Producer Mooncast" which states, among other things, "Though we’re not ready to announce too much yet, both game teams are still gearing up for this year’s expansions, and EverQuest 2’s Game Update #106 is just around the corner with loads of new in-game content ... (stay tuned for news on that very soon!). Plus, on top of all that, we’re already entering the planning stages to make sure that EverQuest’s 20th Anniversary will be an event to remember!"

Onwards and upwards!

The Mask Slips

J3w3l posted some thoughts on the mortality of MMOs prompted by an AMA on Reddit given by Daybreak's new "Executive Creative Director", Jens "Spytle" Andersen. Until his recent promotion, Jens was Senior Creative Director for DCUO, by most accounts one of DBG's more successful properties.

Since the AMA takes place in the Planetside2 subreddit, most of the questions naturally focus on that game, so a lot of it may not be all that interesting or relevant to anyone who isn't currently playing PS2. If the headline quote pulled by MassivelyOP and echoed by Healing The Masses is to be believed, that means almost everyone.

While it's extremely unusual to hear a senior executive comment so freely and frankly on the poor health of an MMO under his authority, it was another of Jens' open, honest and revealing replies that really caught my attention. In answer to a question asking whether one response to the dearth of PS2 players might be to improve Membership benefits, Jens had this to say:

You know what is funny? No matter how many things we heap into membership on all of our games, it makes no difference in the appeal of membership to non members. This is something we saw on DCUO for sure. The amount of benefits to DCUO membership is staggering, but people don't take advantage of it. It's just not a really good strategy for us to keep trying to lead horses to water that do not want to drink. And the fact is, current members already get huge benefits from the monthly fee they already pay.

That really gets to the nub of the F2P versus Subscription issue in my opinion. There is a fundamental divide between those players who are willing to pay a regular, ongoing fee to access an online video game and those who aren't. Whether it's down to age or disposable income or available leisure time is unclear but somewhere along the line there is a clear split between the committed and the uncommitted that is not directly influenced by value alone.

Tobold was speculating yesterday about an old idea: the premium subscription. He found himself paying $10 a day to play League of Angels, a game I'd never heard of and which, from a quick glance at the website, appears to be the kind of competetive PvP affair I'd have expected Tobold to avoid like the plague. The experience led him to wonder whether there might be a market for "luxury niche MMORPGs with a $300 a month subscription fee".

Jens Andersen's insight suggests not, as does a much older experiment from the company formerly known as SOE. Way back in 2002, when EverQuest was the big dog of western MMOs, John "Smed" Smedly imagined a Velvet Rope experience might bring in even more cash. He was wrong.

The Legends server was launched with a flurry of hype that makes for hubristic reading more than a decade on. As far as I recall Smed's ambitious claims that Legends would provide "a tabletop RPG experience" in which players would "feel like they are part of a world that's changing at a much more rapid pace" came to nothing. If anyone on Legends ever did get a sword named after them that went on to become a drop on regular EQ servers then they kept pretty quiet about it, even if, as this thread suggests, it happened all the time on the Stormhammer server itself.

Although plenty of nostalgists in that thread confirm the $40 a month was money well spent, they also tell a tale of ever-declining numbers. There never was a second Legends server and by 2006 there weren't enough high-rollers left to keep the lights on any more. The experiment has not been repeated.

Here's the problem: an online game has to provide a minimum level of content and service to function at all. Getting that up and running and keeping it that way is the baseline without which you just don't have a game that anyone much is going to play, even for free. But simply by reaching that level of competence you have already satisfied the needs of most of your potential audience. If you're lucky you might sell them a few trinkets and toys before they wander off to the next game down the line.

Tobold (yes, him again) opined today that rather than being addicted to MMOs most of us are merely fascinated by them, and that it's a fascination that can easily be broken or redirected elsewhere. I don't wholly go along with the premise but it certainly applies to the wider mass market for online entertainment. When so much is available for free, and mostly at a relatively high level of quality, who would pay just to have access to one particular example among many and how much better than the competition would that example need to be?

As the world adjusts to the unending tsunami of free entertainment let loose by the transition to digital media and the growth of uninterrupted, immediate global online accessibility, "content providers" have to learn how to swim in these treacherous waters. Some are managing to keep their heads above the water; some are drowning. 

This, very clearly, is where current marketing strategies like those being developed by DBG and ArenaNet come into play. DBG, unlike SOE in the years before the sell-off, have finally noted the disproportionate importance of the comparatively small audience that has already chosen to play and to keep playing DBG's MMOs rather than someone else's. Instead of casting their net as far and wide as possible they are increasingly choosing to bait a hook with flavors many already playing find almost impossible to resist - nostalgia and character progression.

ANet, on the other hand, have sidestepped in the other direction. In a neat body-swerve they've opened the doors to let the F2P world inside, only to jink back, moving almost the entirety of the company's onward development focus to the commercial higher ground, locked behind the paywall of a Heart of Thorns purchase. You can play a GW2 for free; just not the GW2.

I logged into WildStar:Reloaded for the first time last night and spent an hour sorting out the perks and freebies from my single month of membership that came with the box. Then I spent a while browsing the cash shop on which the game's future in great part rests. I couldn't find anything to buy and I couldn't find much enthusiasm to play either. Whether Carbine will sink or swim is too early to tell but they must be eyeing FunCom's predicament with grim foreboding.

Sadly, while in this new, digital world nothing is ever truly gone, plenty falls out of reach. MMORPGs, with their infrastructure and population density requirements, are especially vulnerable. J3w3l, fearing for the future of Tera, wonders about the wisdom of putting "time and effort into and mmo that won’t last too long. Or that my friends won’t play much either". It's a conundrum alright.

As Telwyn from GamingSF observes, this is a problem almost unique to online entertainment. Stick to the offline world or better yet the printed word and your sense of security increases a hundredfold. Wilhelm just received his fresh Kickstarted copy of Tunnels and Trolls. Now he can "read through it and imagine all the great campaigns one could run without ever actually playing" just like I could do with my favorite forgotten system, Swordbearer, whose three Denis Loubet illustrated volumes sit on a shelf behind me as I write.

In the end though, unlike those free to play hordes who can't be led to the subscription waters they have no interest in drinking, we come to online entertainment willingly, because the range of choice is vast, the ease of access unparalleled. If the price is impermanence then it's a price we will just have to go on paying. As the Legends experiment proved, we only rent our time in these worlds. Open your wallet wide as you will, more money won't buy security of tenure.
 

Look! Over There! They're Coming Right At Us!

There's an awful lot going on in the MMO world this year and like an ill-chosen pair of hipster slacks there's some bunching up around the back end. Mainly to keep it straight in my own mind, here's what I can remember of the soon-comes on my maybe list.

Pirate 101
Almost upon us! Goes live on October 15th. Wizard 101 was a favorite Chez Bhagpuss for a while. Pirates is a theme that doesn't do an awful lot for me, but the KingsIsle style and try-before-you-buy model makes this a definite, although I'll probably have to wait for a more favorable tide before setting sail.

Marvel Heroes
Closed Beta just started. I was going to wait for launch but I cracked while getting the link for this post and signed up!  As a lifelong reader of superhero comics I really would like a super-hero MMO in my rotation but COH and Champions never really did it for me and while I like DCUO a lot, I did feel I'd been there and done that after a couple of months. Maybe this is the one.

City of Steam 
 Beta in November. No invite yet. I played Sneak Peak and Alpha so I'm hoping to get in. Absolutely love this game. If I'm in I'll be playing and writing about it. Wish it would hurry up and go Live but can't fault the team behind it for wanting to get it right - it's clearly a real labor of love and we need more of those in the genre, or at least we do if they're done as well as this.

FFXIV A Realm Reborn  
FFXIV closes its servers in early November then re-opens them shortly after to beta this reboot. Release date for take two is still "2012" although that seems to be optimistic. After my experiences in FFXIV beta I haven't bothered to apply this time round. It's a beautiful world and the atmosphere is like nothing anywhere else. Haven't seen the payment model details yet but it's bound to be some form of subscription. If I don't also have to buy a new client I'll probably at least try it. Not this year, though.

Rift: Storm Legion
November 13th for this. A huge addition to a game I already know I like a lot, with what looks to be an interesting take on housing to say the least. No question that both Mrs Bhagpuss and I will get this but again mid-November is probably too soon and I really don't feel that nag to be there day one for expansions the way I do for new games. If Rift was F2P I'd buy an expansion immediately, of course, even if I didn't yet have time to play it. With a subscription it'll have to wait until I have a good month clear, bare minimum. Again, not this year, I think. 

EQ2: Chains of Eternity 
There isn't even an official SOE page for this, and yet apparently it's due in November. Possibly. Firm information seems astonishingly hard to come by if that's true. We're a bit soured on EQ2 at the moment because of the PSS1 thing but we are still subbed and it's unthinkable that we won't eventually get this. Don't feel any need to rush, though. 

Otherland
"Q4 2012" release, according to the FAQ. I think they've had one beta weekend so far, to which I did get an invite, but which clashed with something else so I didn't even log in. I'd be surprised if this does launch this year. The IP has superb potential but I'm less interested than I was now it has "Action" attached to the "MMO". Still going to give it a try. It's F2P so why wouldn't I?

Neverwinter
And another for Q4 2012. I just wrote about this. Resisted signing up for beta so far because I don't want to end up spending hours creating scenarios that will vanish into the aether when beta ends. How long my willpower will hold up I wouldn't like to say but even if I'm able to resist the siren call of beta I'll be there day one when it goes Live, that's for sure. 

Planetside2
Some sources had this as a 2012 release but I note that the FAQ now only says "We will have more information on this in the months ahead". Beta is up and running and there's a buy-in pack, though so it's as good as out already. I've been in beta for a while but I haven't played much. I'm all patched up but the several times I've tried to log in lately the servers have been down - just bad luck. FPS is so not my genre but again, F2P and I can use my existing SOE account so it's going to happen.

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Other big releases that aren't on my personal radar would include Panda Panda, Who's Got The Panda? (which I admit sounds quite fun according to quite a few bloggers whose opinions I respect) and LotRO: Riders of Rohan. I still have LotRO installed. I still log in once in a while. My highest character is in the 40s. There's the math, you do it. And of course we have GW2 which is going to see out this year for me and next and the one after that no doubt, and The Secret World, to which I will most definitely return once the pay barrier drops. Oh and Free Realms added a new zone. I do like Free Realms, when I remember it exists. And that's just new stuff this year. All the old favorites still deserve attention, too.

So much. So too, too much. Roll around in it like Scrooge McDuck. Let's not even think about WildStar, ArchAge, EQNext...


All images copyright relevant owners. If it's yours and you want it gone, it's gone.
  

Transferrable Skills: Marv Wolfman on Planetside 2

Marv Wolfman seems to have been around forever. I interviewed him over a quarter of a century ago. I vaguely recall asking him a lot of overly-detailed questions about the Teen Titans, which he answered patiently and with good humor, even when I gave him a hard time over the death of Terra. I think he was hearing a lot of that at the time...

He had a reputation as a steady, professional comics writer. A very safe pair of hands. I lost track of his career trajectory sometime in the early 90s, when I stopped buying comics for the final time. Well, it's been final so far...

Yes my mentor is Ambush Bug. What exactly are you trying to imply?

If I'd thought about him at all since then, which I haven't, I'd have guessed he would have left comics by now, possibly retired. I certainly wouldn't have expected him to turn up working  on MMOs, much less for SoE, but there does seem to be a bit of  genre bleed going on, what with Todd McFarlane over at 38 Studios and Michael Bendis on the Marvel  MMO so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. 


I knew he'd done something on DCUO but I was never entirely sure what it was. I played DCUO quite a lot and still do on occasion and it certainly has a very 70s-80s take on the DC Universe, which I appreciate. It does feel a little like being inside a Marv Wolfman title from that era, although perhaps a Gerry Conway fill-in would be nearer the mark. Maybe the DC universe hasn't changed all that much. I don't know. As I said, I'm not keeping up like I used to.

Bats is out of town, okay? You got me. Stop laughing at the back!

 Marv must have done a pretty good job doing whatever it was that he did, though, because he's back at SoE again, working on the backstory for Planetside II. Is that a plum job? I wouldn't have thought so. Not for a writer, anyway. Hard to see how much backstory a 24/7 running firefight needs. I don't think there's all that much congruity between comics and MMOs anyway. Not in the writing department. But then, a good pro can turn his hand to anything.


Oddly, given that SoE is my preferred MMO development house, I never played Planetside. I often meant to but somehow I just never got round to it. I mean to rectify that with Planetside II. I'd be doing that anyway, but knowing Marv's on board gives me just that little bit more confidence. I don't expect to notice what he's done, but his influence will be there, solid and stable. He's such a pro, after all.