Musings On A Wet Monday Morning

A little while ago Azuriel posted some thought-provoking observations on the inherent structural problems facing the MMORPG genre. These boil down to the slipperiness of definitions and the willingness of the audience to be satisfied.

That post, which I found myself mulling over yesterday, after the sad and arguably unnecessary demise of City of Steam, was prompted by another from SynCaine, that infamous pillar of the Axis of Blogging Evil.  The Evil One was bouncing off yet another post, this time from Wilhelm at TAGN, which itself derived from what was probably no more than a routine space-filler for a slow starting year at PCGamer.

So the circle turns. Often lambasted for negativity, SynCaine is more an agent provocateur, a satirist even. Like Keen, who professed rather bizarrely only yesterday that "there’s nothing out right now except for EverQuest that comes even close to satisfying a TRUE MMORPG experience", the register is often closer to disappointment than contempt.

Theirs are the voices of gamers who are not easily satisfied. As Azuriel explains, that makes them a bad fit for MMORPGs in the first place: "I’d wager that most people that stick with the MMO genre long-term generally find one game and settle in. And why wouldn’t you?"

Sometimes you just have to find a new home.

SynCaine, in common with many other long-time bloggers and commenters and countless millions of players who choose not to share their opinions with the world, has drifted away from the genre altogether. Keen, after many, many attempts to find a home elsewhere, has ended up back where he began, or as close as he can get.

It seems most long-time MMO fans don't do that. They settle in. They settle down. They never leave.

The frenzied years of WoW tourism left us with a different impression: MMO players as a vast swarm, filling the virtual skies, whirring and scrabbling as it descends on each new, bright hope, stripping it clean and wheeling away, leaving the bones to bleach and crumble.

It happened. It still happens. Look at Blade and Soul. Game developers even expect and plan for it. People do like a new shiny. But when the swarm moves on do those bones really lie still and forgotten?

Another road to take.

It seems not. Mostly those MMOs pick themselves up and go on. Remember the hype trains of the last half-decade and change? Allods, Aion, Rift, SW:ToR, ESO, just to name a handful. All still with us. MMOs are very hard to kill (although Trion seems always to be working on new ways to test the boundaries of extinction).

Those that drop seem often to have been culled rather than to have met a natural end. Rubies of Eventide sits in someone's wardrobe, a ball taken home. Tabula Rasa and Helgate:London lost their nerve. Star Wars Galaxies didn't fit the portfolio. City of Heroes was making good money, well-populated and popular, just not enough for corporate targets. City of Steam was scuppered by technology and poor decisions.

WildStar may be the next big beast to fall. It probably won't make it, so everyone says. Missed its market, misjudged its targets, mismanaged its way to the cliff's edge. Take your pick. It's not gone yet, though. Nor is Firefall, another of those MMOs you wonder just who plays and which underwent many of the same trials and still does.

I played it for a while. I might again. I never gave Red 5 any money, though, because I am the problem not the solution. I pay money every month to Daybreak Games, whose games I don't play all that often because I'm busy playing every MMO that catches my attention for free. That great long list of installed MMOs I have, growing week by week, earns no-one anything much. I'm not a rational consumer. Don't survey me.

It's no good looking back.

And yet someone must be paying, somewhere. As I was thinking about this yesterday I remembered a few MMOs I played long ago. With sunsets in mind I thought perhaps I ought to revisit a few before the chance was past. Perhaps the chance was already past. That's happened to me before.

Not this time. Anyone remember Eden Eternal? I doubt it. I mostly remember it because it let me play a giant cartoon mouse. Well, it's still there if I feel like doing that again. It's only five years old though, a mere stripling. What about Regnum? Once also known as Realms Online and now known as Champions of Regnum but still the same game. I had a short and happy frolic there and look, here it is. Next year it will have been running for a decade. It's even on Steam.

Ah yes, Steam. There, perhaps, is a partial explanation for this fountain of youth the genre seems to have found. Only partial, of course. The core reason for the insane longevity of even the most apparently unappealing MMOs is surely, as Azuriel says, that some people never leave. Even so, attrition must wear them all down over time. An infusion of new blood is necessary if the corpse is to keep on shambling.

Even when it seems you're all alone.

I'm new to Steam but I'm fast beginning to see its attractions, both to players and producers alike. My Library, which stood at no games at all for years, then one for twelve months, now has three. Thanks to SynCaine (him again) I downloaded Sunless Sea, which is not an MMO, even by the broadest definition. Its predecessor, Echo Bazaar (later known as Fallen London), which I played for a while and for which I made my Twitter account, something then required, arguably was. Is. It, of course, is also still running.

I played 19 minutes. By the time I got around to playing again my free weekend pass had expired. I'm not sure I'll play Sunless Sea again - it's a bit more of a "game" than interests me and a bit less of a story - but I'm sold on the ease of access.

One of the annoying things about trying new MMOs is all the form filling, the registering, the passwords and so forth. Steam circumvents much of that and if for no other reason I will likely end up using it as a portal for MMOs that use it. Like, perhaps, Knight Online, a game I have never before considered trying, a game that launched in the same year as WoW but which has only arrived on Steam in 2016, a dozen years later.

And your past glories mean nothing.

This isn't going anywhere in particular. I'm just talking out loud, working things through. We'll come back to this, over and again, I'm sure.

There are all these MMOs, you see. Some people start playing them and never stop so the games keep rolling along and as they go they pick up more players as others drop off. Meanwhile game companies look at them, see them there, keeping on going, and think "we'd like some of that" and make more. And people start playing those and some of them keep playing...

There are a lot of people in the world. The internet is endlessly accommodating. There is no clear reason why any of this would stop unless the critical mass of people interested in playing this type of game falls below a viable threshold and who knows what that threshold might be? It's clearly not very large if Istaria and Ryzom can survive and even prosper.

There's always a new dawn just over that hill.

The whole thing clearly isn't going to come to an end just because a lot of people lose interest, get bored or disenchanted and wander off. There are, after all, as noted, a lot of people in the world, more every day, and most of them haven't even had the chance yet to be bored by an MMO. They still have that life-experience ahead of them.

So, yes, some MMOs will go under. As the years wear on more ghosts will walk. Changes in fashion, taste, technology and definition may slow the flow of newcomers from production and consumption both but will the stream be dammed entire? I wouldn't bet on that.

I'm thinking the trick is to attach to the genre and not become overly infatuated with the individual games but that, of course, is impossible. It's always going to hurt when one you love falls. It's comforting to know there are so many but there's always that one, isn't there?  Not to love isn't a response.

The more I consider this the less I understand. It's magic, after all. One morning I'll wake and like fairy gold it will all be gone. Until then, we're rich. Let's enjoy it.

Life In The Old Dog Yet: WildStar

Tobold wrote a squib recently, entitled "Anyone Remember Aion?", in which he observed that Aion "is now making 7 times as much money for NCSoft than the subscription game Wildstar". He was making a point about payment models but the more interesting part to me is the subtext, which is this: there are a lot of MMOs out there and the great majority of them just keep on going even though none of us here is paying them much, or any, attention.

Azuriel, whose original post inspired Tobold's, went on to make the point overtly: "MMOs shutting down is more rare than you think.". It really is. What's more, new ones start up all the time. It's true that there's a subculture of relatively short-lived pure F2P titles from the East (although even there we're still talking about games that hang around for several years)  but for every one that disappears another seems to pop up to take its place, and when it comes to games from developers based in North America and Europe, the odds seem to favor longevity.

MassivelyOP was buzzing with news stories along these lines all week. Age of Conan, the very example Azuriel gives of an MMO that no-one ever even mentions any more, crops up with a story about a new raid.  Tera developer Bluehole posted pictures from a secret project that may or may not be a new MMO. (Pro Tip - if you want to keep your project secret, don't send out press releases about it) Trion have something going on that they really are trying to keep to themselves but the dataminers and patent-watchers ferreted it out.

On and on it goes; the ever turning MMO wheel. Reports of the genre's death seem much exaggerated as do speculations over the supposedly inevitable demise of WildStar. The top story this week was undoubtedly Carbine's (or most likely NCSoft's) decision to make WildStar Free to Play. You could say it's the move we've all been expecting but actually I think a lot of people, myself included, were banking on Buy to Play, which is something significantly different.

Of course there are always nuances. Although Carbine are making a big deal of the "Really Free" aspect, their payment model would more properly be called a Hybrid. The full F2P model necessarily relies on cash shop sales alone but Carbine have concocted a convoluted version that includes both Loyalty points and a quasi-subscription "Signature program", whose perks look decidedly underwhelming to me. 

I was reluctant even to bother with the beta for WildStar but to my surprise when I gave it a go just before launch I found I rather liked it. Obviously not enough to pay to play it or, well, I'd be playing it, but it seemed to be something I'd most likely enjoy dabbling with here and there, now and again.

That's almost certainly what will happen this autumn when the pay wall comes down. We're off on holiday next week but when we come back I think I'll buy two copies, just in case Mrs Bhagpuss wants to take a look as well, mostly to have access to 12 character slots instead of just two. Am I likely to make a dozen characters in WildStar, ever? I doubt it but I like owning MMO boxes; they look good on my bookshelves, so why not? Hey, shopping and gaming - it's a thing, right? And it's cheap on Amazon right now. We'll see how long that lasts.

Another MMO I like and don't play (okay, that's a long list...) is Ryzom and that turned up in the news this week as well. It's a game that's had a turbulent history. It was one of the earlier entries in the genre, beginning development more than a decade and a half ago and passing through the hands of three owners in three different countries (France, Germany and Cyprus) before eventually going Open Source in 2010.

Since then it's been one of the myriad of forgotten MMORPGs that chug along in the background, played and loved by, at most, a few thousand players. I played the original beta long, long ago and I've been back a few times. It's a very interesting MMO with an unusual setting, stylish and stylized graphics that have stood up well over time and gameplay that can be compelling. It's also fiendish hard in some ways, at least by modern standards.

It's not a game you expect to see pop up in news reports so it came as a complete surprise to read this MassivelyOP piece saying Ryzom was up for a Steam Greenlight. Had, in fact, already been approved. That's probably not going to get me to play again, although it's a game I feel I could always go back to at some point. All the same, it's great to see one of these older games not only still plugging along but potentially even growing and finding a new audience.

One more MMORPG that's had a checkered history without ever even coming to market is Otherland, a property based on the series of Tad Williams novels. MassivelyOP (Yes, them again. What would we do without them?) reports that development is still ongoing under the new owners.

The game's in some kind of closed beta, for which I believe I signed up, only I have no idea what email address I used. Obviously not one I check very often. I should do something about that. It would be good to get a hands-on some time. I really enjoyed the source material and I've been following development, if fitfully, ever since the game was announced. Whether it will ever see the light of day I wouldn't like to bet but at least something's still happening.

I could go on. I could mention Wander, the non-combat, exploration MMO. That looks intriguing. It's inconveniently launching on the very day we go away, though, so perhaps I'll leave it until we get back. Or perhaps Dragon Nest II which very confusingly appears to be four different games. I'd better save that for after I'm done with Dragon Nest: Oracle, which isn't going to be any time soon, or at least it won't be if they'd be so good as to fix the darn portal bug! Ahem.

There's even a rumor the GW2 expansion might come out this side of Christmas although I'm taking that one with a large pinch of salt. And to think, some people said it was going to be a quiet year!