Mail Call: Regnum, The Missing Ink

Checking some of my many email addresses yesterday I came across a message from NDG Studios, operators of Regnum Online (aka Champions of Regnum, formerly known as Realms Online, not to be confused with The Realm Online). Despite having one of the worst identity crises in MMOdom, Regnum (let's settle for that) seems to be doing rather well for a six-year old game that gets very little publicity.

I discovered it very late and first wrote about it just under a year ago. It seemed quiet then, although certainly not moribund but things may be looking up. I'd already noticed that each infrequent time I remembered to log in there seemed to be a patch, which I always take to be a healthy sign, and both the website and the launcher got makeovers which make them look very handsome, but the capper came in the mail: Regnum is now available through Steam.

Wanna race?

Being on Steam (provided your game actually works) can't but be a good thing. I don't know an awful lot about how Steam operates or how difficult it is for a game to gain access to the platform, but NDG were stoked about getting Regnum into the line-up, as well they might be. They were so stoked they thought they'd celebrate by sending me a Hyena.

They sent me a load of other stuff too - a lockbox, some elixirs, the usual festive package, but it was the Hyena that caught my attention. It's a limited-duration mount that lasts 30 days and it looks great. I had no plans at all to play Regnum this month but I'll be darned if my little fox-lemur is going to miss the opportunity to ride around on a mean-looking Hyena.

So, congratulations Regnum and thanks for the ride.

Not looking quite so bright, at least not yet, is the Kickstarter campaign for The Missing Ink. Pete at Dragonchasers has a piece up about Kickstarter that gives chapter and verse on some of the drawbacks. So far my hand hasn't entered my pocket for a Kickstarter campaign.

I've followed several and they've broadly broken into two camps: No Hopers and Dead Certs and

Adventure ahoy!

it seems pointless for me to contribute either way. In every case all I'm interested in is playing the game when it releases. I find most of the inducements and sweeteners are largely irrelevant and I don't suffer from the inexplicable desire many seem to have to "donate" to what are, after all, commercial businesses. About the only time I can imagine getting my credit card out would be near the end of a campaign where success looks touch and go and my contribution might have material significance.

The first tranche of MMOs I took an interest in on Kickstarter all failed hard, at least as far as their campaigns went. Storybricks carries on, in some mysterious way, behind closed doors. Dark Solstice also appears to have withdrawn behind a veil, leaving only this tantalizing glimpse of what may one day emerge in its place. Panzer Pets, it appears, took the Kickstarter hint and gave up. Their website remains but nothing has been updated since the campaign crashed and burned.

Glad you clarified that.

Red Bedlam and The Missing Ink start a long way ahead of any of those. They have a fully working and eminently playable beta up and running on the PC, which they are actively and effectively developing. The game is already fun and very well worth trying. The Kickstarter campaign is for additional funds to bring it cross-platform to iOS and Android (although the Kickstarter verbiage only mentions Android in the leader and then goes on and on about iPads...).

So far they have 29 backers and have made just over 10% of their very modest target. I foresee another limp failure. I hope I'm wrong, because not only do I like The Missing Ink very much, I'm pretty sure I'd like it even more on a Tablet. I just hope that if they do fail on Kickstarter it doesn't put paid to that prospect altogether.

Meanwhile the Old Big Beasts continue to maunder out of the primordial gaming swamps, drawing lost worshipers in hordes. For now, I'm happy to sit back and watch them fight it out.

Another Bite Of The Apple : Regnum Online

With so much attention focused on GW2 it's easy to forget that other worlds have their Halloweens too. Hardly surprising, what with it being the only major holiday for the undead, I guess.

Oh but wait! It's not, is it? There's Dia de las Muertas, which  conveniently falls the following day on November first. And since Regnum Online is a Latin American MMO, that's the one they choose to celebrate.

I'd forgotten about RO after my brief flirtation back in May this year but they sent me an email reminding me not to miss the celebrations so I popped in for a minute or twenty.

But they looked so red and juicy!

I love the clean, stylized look of RO. I doubt there's much depth there but the surface is lovely. Look at those crisp, clean shadows and that cool blue snow.

As usual in a game I've not visited for a while I ran around aimlessly, gawping. Since I was there looking for spooky holiday fun I was lucky to bump into a cauldron full of apples all ready for a bobbing.  

One was enough, though. What would an MMO holiday be without costumes and illusions? Rubbish, that's what, so it's just as well these apples turned out to be magic! One bite and presto! Quilted legless dwarf!

Less magic was my internet connection which chose exactly that moment to fritz out on me and when I got back the Cauldron had vanished. I traveled a lot further than I've ever been before and found some interesting and attractive mountain towns, but I never found another. Spooky holiday fun, there was none.


RO appears to have had some updates since I last was there and the website looks splendid. According to the Roadmap the dev team is hard at work on both new features and content. The Auction House they mention there as scheduled for September-December is already in which bodes well for that third expansion! I saw quite a few people running around even though I must have been miles form the center of the action. It seems like a fine game and it's nice to see it thriving. I'd be very happy to give it more time if only I had more time to give.

Over Here! I Think You Missed One! : Realms Online

In that way things have of coming together sometimes, Zubon at Kill Ten Rats posted something recently about Salem, an MMO known in so far is it is known at all for its aspiration to permadeath. He came to hear of the game via Heartless, who had posted about it along with two other in-development MMOs, Otherlands and Dominus. Heartless headed his piece "The 3 MMOs you ARE NOT paying attention to but should be", somewhat ironically since one of the three, Dominus, had gone dark only a day or two earlier.

Zubon not only hadn't been paying attention to these titles but as he clarified he'd "stopped actively paying attention to game development years ago". Meanwhile, SynCaine had a busy discussion popping under the post he'd evocatively and provocatively titled "I Miss Massively". In the course of that thread Saucelah observed of Massively that " most of their stories are just write-ups of PR releases", an inarguable truism about which I observed that it was precisely as an aggregator of press releases that I found Massively most useful.

I do like to know what's going on. Even if I have no plans ever to play a particular MMO I still like to keep an eye on its progress. For heaven's sake, I still drop in and lurk on the Alganon forums once in a while! Massively's feed sits in my blog reader and I scan the headlines daily. If I spot an MMO that I don't recognize I'll click through and read the whole article. I'd been vaguely following the development of Dominus, Salem and Otherlands that way for months.

I have (had in the case of the now-defunct Dominus) no great interest in the first two but Otherlands is an MMO I mean to play so I sat up when they recently invited applications to alpha-test. I'm broadly in favor of beta-testing MMOs but I'm more ambivalent about alphas. I'm interested in giving feedback on gameplay but not so much in doing unpaid work to ensure the server architecture is solid and the game engine functions.

There are exceptions. I am quite hyped for the upcoming City of Steam alpha, scheduled to begin sometime in July. I'm hoping for an invite to that one not only because I very much like what I've seen of the game so far but also because Mechanist Games' idea of an alpha test looks rather like some other developers' picture of a game that's fit to launch.

There's been much discussion of late on the pros and cons of paying to beta-test. Gamigo, producers of Otherlands, aren't asking for your money yet but they've found another way to twist your arm. They've combined the publicity hype over winning a place in their alpha with an application process that makes it clear that all you'll win is the opportunity to do some serious work for no pay. I read the application form and decided to pass on their generous offer. I'll wait til open beta or launch, thanks all the same.

So I knew about these MMOs and many more from scanning the headlines, which is how I ran across Realms Online. Or Regnum. Same game, two names. When I noticed this news release a couple of weeks back it piqued my interest. Mrs Bhagpuss had been asking if there were any MMOs we hadn't played that have animal races and I hadn't been able to find any. Then up pop these Lamai, looking something like bushbabies waving swords.

Off I went to the website to look at this new MMO. Only it isn't. New, that is. Realms Online is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary in less than three weeks' time. So much for me having my finger on the pulse of MMO development. Or indeed my eye on the ball.

More surprising than my ignorance (pretty much anything would be) Realms Online appears to be something a lot of people seem to have been asking for - a Dark Age of Camelot clone. Out for five years, servers on three continents, known under two names, filling a gaping three-way RVR market hole, how did I miss it? Was it just me? Did you all play it years ago and now you've all moved on, leaving me to step out of character creation into the snow just as the servers merge? For the love of Mike, it's Argentina's most successful MMO! Oh, wait a moment...

Anyway, I've found it now. It's downloaded and I've played it and so far I like it. It's very old-school, feels like an MMO from quite a while before WoW and I very much doubt I shall ever give it a shake you'd call fair. Too many MMOs, too little time. Especially if new old ones keep creeping out of the undergrowth to ambush me like this.

Still, whenever I feel the urge to be a viking bushbaby with a sword, Realms Online will be my go-to game. And who among us can honestly say that's an urge they'll never have?