Same Same But Different

I was going to take (another) day off from posting because I was out for much of the day and I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to talk about but then I was idly scrolling through all the Amazon Prime Gaming and Steam games I haven't played (or installed) yet and I happened to notice two or three occurrences that looked like they might tie together into a quick post. So here we are.

It's something of a follow-on, thematically at least, from the post I wrote on Monday about playing the gaming field and not staying loyal to a single game, a topic and a concept I'm still mulling. With Solasta out of the way, I've been in search of a game to fill that pause-friendly, tactics-heavy, somewhat cerebral slot and I was browsing the possibilities to see if I already had something that would fit the bill or whether I'd need to find something to buy.

To forestall the inevitable suggestion, obviously the best choice would be Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm definitely not spending that much money. I may see if I can get someone to give it me for my birthday or Christmas although if there's one major downside to  digital distribution it's that it renders video games entirely unsuitable as gift recommendations for aging relatives. Until then it'll have to be something on a budget or preferably free.

While I was dithering, I took a side-turn and started playing Crowns and Pawns, a classic point & click adventure I bought on sale earlier this year. It ticks the pause and brain boxes but as I discovered, after an hour of mostly enjoyable puzzle-solving, it does absolutely nothing to scratch that tactical itch. I'll definitely keep on with it because it seems like a really good game - just not the game I'm looking for right now.

I also tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall, a tactical rpg I picked up at 90% off recently, which ought to have been exactly what I was after but very much wasn't. While it absolutely nailed the tactical elements as well as being fully pausable, it failed to engage my interest in either the characters or the plot. The minute size of the characters and the lack of anything much in the way of visual effects had the unfortunate effect of making the combat seem perfunctory, even though it probably has at least as much going on as the games I'm comparing it with unfavorably. I might give it another go but I suspect I won't.

With nothing meeting my exacting standards, I found myself idly scanning the news along the top of the Steam screen, which was where I was reminded of a couple of items I'd read earlier, along with some new news I hadn't seen before. Two games I'm kinda-sorta still playing are on the cusp of turning themselves inside out in the hope of attracting interest and players and it occurred to me that, if I wanted to see how that went, I'd probably have to start both of them over from the beginning.

Starting over seems to be a recurring theme just now. I wrote recently that I'm on hiatus from Once Human because I haven't quite decided if I want to start afresh on a Seasonal server, either right now or as soon as a different scenario becomes available. Now it seems I can add both Nightingale and New World to that decision tree.

I hadn't really considered the quasi-relaunch of New World, under the New World: Aeternum brand to be something that would necessitate a clean start. I suppose it doesn't, per se, but having read Tyler Edwards' piece on his experience of the press version of the upcoming beta it seems fairly clear that there's at least an opportunity to begin again anew.

The Nightingale marketing department, meanwhile, is urgently attempting to explain to worried punters that that the upcoming Realms Rebuilt update, a rewrite so extensive I have seen it described as a relaunch, will allow players to clone their current online characters to the offline version of the game. 

This, apparently, will take place in something called Legacy Mode, the explanation for engaging with which requires a very complicated FAQ, which I have skimmed but don't yet fully understand. It appears that as of tomorrow, when I next log into Nightingale, all my character slots will be empty but somehow I will be able to recover my "old" characters and play them offline, even if I haven't done anything to prepare for the wipe.

I have to say all of this came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't even realise the update constituted a full character wipe. If I was currently playing Nightingale I might have been a tad miffed. Since I'm not, though, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity to start the game again from the beginning.

But is it an opportunity I want to take? I enjoyed both New World (Almost 250 hours played.) and Nightingale (Over 100.) but do I want to do it all over again, slightly differently? 

I certainly didn't get much value out of My Time At Sandrock, which I bought at a very early stage, while it was still in early development, then ended up hardly playing at all. I jumped on it because I'd really enjoyed My Time At Portia but it transpired that playing what turned out to be a very similar game (At least at that early stage of development.) didn't light the same fires.

Now I see that the My Time crew are trailing a Kickstarter for a third game in the series, My Time At Evershine and for no good reason whatsoever I find myself quite excited by the prospect all over again. I have at least learned my lesson. I won't be pledging or buying in to Early Access. Even so, when the game finally arrives in a full-featured, launch version, I wouldn't bet against me buying it anyway

A few years ago - okay quite a few years ago - starting over in games and playing through the same content only slightly differently was pretty much standard operating procedure for me. As my EQ25 series is more than amply demonstrating, I used to make a lot of characters in the same MMORPGs, especially when there were different starting areas.

Yeebo posted today about the attraction of all those very different class stories in Star Wars: the Old Republic. I commented to say that the sheer number of stories had actually put me off the game and it did to an extent but I'm sure it would have the opposite effect had the game been around back in my EverQuest days. I'd have taken it as an opportunity to play lots of characters without having to go through the exact same content every time.

The question I'm asking myself, as I look at the revamps of New World and Nightingale and the possibility of a third My Time game, is whether I still find the prospect of rolling a new character in the same game as appealing as it once was. It's a question that applies, not equally but to a significant degree, to my search for a suitable replacement for the turn-based, tactical combat titles I'm craving.

To some extent, every return to a familiar genre or style of game could be said to be tantamount to playing the same content with a different skin. It's just a matter of degree. There's a considerable appeal to the familiar and the more I think about starting over, the more I remember how much I used to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if any of that enjoyment is still there to be had. I could even give SW:tOR another run. 

Okay, let's not get carried away...

Talking Shop

Taking my own advice, for once, I'm going to chime in on a few topics I read in blog posts yesterday - always assuming I can remember what they were. I read them on my Kindle Fire just before I went to sleep, which really isn't the best preparation. 

One was definitely Redbeard at Parallel Context, who posted about the propensity for MMORPGs - and RPGs in general - to place the player in the role of Hero or Champion. Red makes an interesting comparison between professional sports and rpgs, saying 

"...what is frequently missed in the RPG/MMO power fantasy is what happens when your skills diminish over time. Or when you screw up and those adoring fans turn on you.... In an RPG/MMO, you know you're the hero, so even if there's a setback you know that in the end there's a redemption path for you."

This is undoubtedly true but I'm not sure I see an alternative, at least for an MMORPG. In a single-player or co-op RPG, with a beginning, a middle and an end, it's entirely possible to create a full rags-to-riches-to rags narrative arc or simply to follow a life to its conclusion, be that death, retirement or elevation to Godhood. In an MMORPG, which only ends when the money runs out, that's not really so much of an option.

I seem to remember it's been tried. I have a vague idea there have been MMORPGs proposed, where the player character ages and eventually dies, only to be succeeded by another character representing a child, heir or apprentice, who inherits some of the stats, status and chattels of their parent or mentor. I'm vague about it mostly because although I may well have read about such games, I've never played one. I'm not even sure any of them got made.

I've also never played a roguelike, a genre I understand to be quite popular and successful but which I've always thought sounded... kinda dumb. Even though learning by attrition isn't my thing, though, I can see the intellectual appeal, within a single-player format. In a persistent world shared with thousands of other players, though? 

Most people find it hard enough keeping track of their friends' and guild-mates alts. Imagine having to keep re-introducing your new Main: "Hi! I'm Arven the Green. I'm Bronwyn Rockshaper's daughter. Can you invite me to guild, please? You remember Bronwyn, right? Her father was Walking Tree. Nothing? Really? Look, I'm carrying Bronwyn's staff. She left it to me when she died. It's actually a branch from Walking Tree himself. What d'you mean, I look nothing like her? Okay, yes, she was a dwarf and I'm an elf. Walking Tree was a walking tree ffs! This is his fricken' arm I'm holding! I'm gonna hit you in the head with it in minute, too, if you don't add me to the guild!"

And that's just the role-players, who'd almost certainly be the only ones likely even to try. For everyone else it would just be another clunky progression mechanic to be finessed in the most advantageous way possible, almost certainly by following an online guide. I don't think it would get us much further ahead and I can see why no well-known, successful game has tried it. (Go on, tell me that's exactly how it works in Lineage II or Age of Conan or some other game I've heard of but never played....) 

That said, I do believe it's quite feasible to design an MMORPG in which the player characters don't get more and more powerful until kings and queens defer to them and demi-gods treat them as equals. I also think that it's possible to change the narrative as the game ages and have the player character's situation change with it, which brings me to another post, this time at TAGN.

Writing about the "Level Squish" applied by Blizzard to World of Warcraft a few years back, Wilhelm laid out his reasons why he didn't think it had gone well. Among other things, he described it as "convoluted" and "overly complex". Having spent some time trying to come to grips with the changes back when they were new, I'd say that was being polite.

A big part of the problem is that MMORPGs don't conveniently stand still, making many once-necessary innovations seem like awkward legacy mechanics  just a few years later. It happens a lot in one of the games I know best, EverQuest II, where numerous systems creak and groan under the weight of their accrued cruft until they're quietly shunted to the sidelines. 

Most of those systems worked just fine when they were introduced. Almost all were accepted. Some were even popular. For a while. Inevitably, though, after three or four more expansions, all with their own new mechanics and systems, the friction between all those moving parts causes bits to break off, leaving jagged edges that catch the unwary. 

I've long had a potential solution for this ongoing problem, something that once seemed radical but now doesn't appear quite so crazy as it did. What if every expansion was a standalone game? After all, isn't that almost where Blizzard looked to be going with Classic Era? Didn't a lot of people hope they'd extend the same courtesy to Wrath Classic? (We won't mention Burning Crusade. No-one wanted that.)

What if, instead of getting everyone to come back once a year and start the whole sequence over again, the way Daybreak has tried to make into a way of life, why not design each expansion as a separate entity from the start? If the goal is to get everyone into the same content together, having a complete reset each time, where all characters begin on a level footing, with a fresh economy, would surely make the whole thing more appealing both to returnees and to the highly competitive hardcore, who always enjoy racing each other to the top.

It would also make it very much easier to keep a whole series of Era servers running for those who'd found their sweet spot in a certain expansion. No need to spend time and effort revamping the code. Just use the same basic engine with modulated mechanics each time. No struggling to rebalance old content so it plays nicely with the new systems. There'd be no cross-expansion content at all. 

All you'd need for continuity would be player and guild names. Gear would be a full reset and everyone could be alloccated whatever level and stats seemed appropriate to handle the new entry-level content. 

As for incidentals like race, class and gender, those have no lasting value in modern MMORPGs, most of which offer ways to change all of them at will. In fact, I realise I may just have argued myself out of my own objection to adding roguelike mechanics to the genre. That's what happens when you start thinking about MMORPGs too logically; you soon realise nothing much ever made sense anyway, so you may as well do what you damn well please!

Finally in this blog bounce bonanza, we come to Shintar's post about whether Star Wars: The Old Republic is unusually "bottom heavy". As someone who used to be strongly biased in favor of low-level content in MMORPGs, I have to say Shintar makes a good case for SW:tOR. You can argue about whether tying so much of the game's fortunes to multiple, heavily-scripted, fully voice-acted narratives was commercially or creatively appropriate but it's difficult to deny that bolting eight fully-realised single-player RPGs onto the front end of an MMO does give a lot of bottom end.

It's not the only game to have tried something like that. Guild Wars 2 had the Personal Story with its many branches, although the variations there do all feed into a single narrative relatively quickly and ArenaNet never made much of an attempt to separate them out afterwards. In retrospect, though, that always felt more like an experiment that didn't pan out, whereas SW:tOR's class storylines have generally been regarded as one of the game's big wins.

More significant than the relative success of the implementations, I feel, is the similar age of those two games. They came out within about a year of each other, well over a decade ago. Back then, it was largely expected that ambitious MMORPGs would launch with multiple, fully-realised starting areas and distinctive, different levelling paths. 

Leveling was seen as more important back then. Level boosts and skips weren't common. I'm not sure, without doing more fact-checking than I want to commit to right now, which game was the first to add them or when, but I do know they were very controversial for quite a while. Most MMORPG developers still promoted leveling as a key part of the experience; GW2 was a real outlier with its promise never to add to the initial 80 levels but even as a would-be mould-breaker, ANet wasn't ready to do away with leveling altogether.

Partly that would have been because, in those days, allowing players to create and level multiple characters was seen as a clear route to account retention. The F2P model hadn't entirely taken over and there needed to be reasons to keep people playing and therefore paying.

The increasing success of F2P titles, which by and large didn't offer nearly as many discrete starting areas or levelling paths, along with the general contraction of the market for MMORPGs following the sequential failure of a number of high-profile launches, must have made it a lot more attractive for developers to streamline the whole process. 

I also have to wonder about the impact of the solid success and atypical continued post-launch growth of Final Fantasy XIV (ARR version, of course.). It's a game with a single, unavoidable, linear narrative; alts aren't just uneccessary but positively ill-advised. It does seem more than possible that its rise to a pre-eminent postion in the genre may have contributed to the impression that an MMORPG doesn't need more than - at  most - a handful of starting areas and leveling paths to feel complete. 

Shintar's observations on SW:tOR cast both light and doubt on those assumptions. While it's true that the biggest games in the genre currently rely heavily on endgame and do all they can to step players over legacy leveling content to get them there, personal experience and anecdotal evidence suggest plenty of players prefer to potter around in the low-mid levels, making alt after alt, just hanging out in content they know and enjoy.

I don't play SW:tOR. I did, briefly and I may again but right now I don't and I can't claim to know much about it. Similarly, I've only dabbled in Lord of the Rings Online and Elder Scrolls Online, two othere games about which I regularly read bloggers' accounts of starting alts and replaying old content. 

I do play a lot of EverQuest II, though, and I have in the past played a lot of GW2 and EverQuest. All these games have a couple of things in common: they've been running for many years and they all have plenty of options for making new characters, who then aren't all forced to repeat the exact same leveling process as the rest.

I wonder how significant that is for longevity and player loyalty? And how more recent games that eschew such variety will fare in the longer run?

When Rights Go Wrong or Why Household Names Don't Always Sell Games

In the course of a post about Embracer Group and how its current financial difficulties might affect both Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online and Amazon Games' in-development title based on the works of JRR Tolkein, Wilhelm noted "there isn’t a track record of huge success for games based on the IP".

That tied into something I've been thinking about since I observed, in the thread on my own recent post about the move of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Broadsword Games, that "there's almost no synergy between huge, mainstream IPs and the mmorpg genre".

Has there ever been an mmorpg, based on a pre-existing IP not itself originating in gaming, which performed commercially to the same standard as other iterations on that same IP in other media? Or, if you'd like that in English, has any mmorpg based on a book or a movie ever been a runaway success?

I can't think of one. What's more, neither could Bard or ChatGPT. They were both bloody useless, frankly. Neither of them seemed capable of understanding what a "Non-gaming IP" might be, even when I gave them examples. 

For once, I won't derail  my own post by going on about AIs and their funny little ways. I didn't want to rely on my own dodgy memory, though, so without AI assistance I was thrown back on my own research skills, namely skimming through all sixty-six pages of the MMORPG.com list of games.

It wasn't much more help than the nonsense the AIs tried to fob me off with. The MMORPG.com list is stuffed with games that couldn't reasonably be described as MMORPGs even by the loosest of definitions. There were live games, dead games and games still in development that don't yet exist at all. I really need those AIs to get their act together so I don't have to keep trawling through this stuff. I have better things to do with my time. 

Oh, wait...

I did spot a handful of examples of games based on external IPs that I either didn't know about or had forgotten, so it wasn't a total bust. There were a couple of manga/anime inspired titles - Naruto Online ("an MMORPG turn-based browser-game that is set entirely in the NARUTO universe") and One Piece Online, which doesn't actually seem to be an MMORPG at all - but I don't feel qualified to comment on either so I'll pretend I didn't see them after all. 

I also probably ought to leave out the two Chinese titles I found on Wikipedia - Dragon Oath ("Based on the novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong) and Fantasy Westward Journey ("Inspired by Journey to the West" - not least because to include the latter would scupper my entire thesis, given its probably one of the most successful - and profitable - MMORPGs in the world, at least if those old SuperData reports were to be believed. 

Sticking - mostly - with games released in the western hemisphere and/or based on "western" IPs then, here's the list I ended up with:

• Age of Conan
• Conan Exiles 
• DC Universe Online
  
• Hello Kitty Online 
• Lord of the Rings Online 
• Marvel Heroes 
• Otherland 
• Star Trek Online 
• Star Wars Galaxies 
• Star Wars: The Old Republic 
• The Matrix Online

It's surprisingly short, isn't it? Anyone think of any more? No? Actually, I can. That Lego MMO, for a start. Maybe Toontown? And wasn't there a Transformers MMO, briefly? 

Tough. Didn't think of them at the time and now it's too late. Anyway, all of those just shore up my argument so I don't need to shoehorn them in after the edit.

Let's go through the ones I did remember, one by one. 

Age of Conan - Main IP: Books and Movies.

Still running but in maintenance mode. Sold a lot of boxes but famously couldn't hold an audience much beyond the bait&switch tutorial. Honestly, I feel Conan is barely a well-enough known property to support an MMORPG to begin with, so it's incomprehensible to me that we also have...

Conan Exiles -  See above.

Okay, it's not really an mmorpg. Is it even an MMO? When I got ChatGPT to put the list into alphabetical order for me (Nice to find something it's good for, at last.) it prissily warned me "Please note that "Conan Exiles" and "Dune Awakening" are not MMORPGs but are included in the list you provided." I took Dune Awakening out to discuss separately, later (Which, as you'll see, I signally forgot to do.) but since the Steam page says "Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer. (My emphasis.) I left it in. 

CE is doing okay. About 10k concurrent according to the Steam Charts, a population it's maintained remarkably consistently for several years now, putting it just barely in the Top 100. By no means a failure but also clearly no kind of mainstream breakout hit.

DCUO - Main IP: Comics and Movies.

According to the information that came out of the EG7 acquisition of Daybreak Games, quite a consistent performer. It makes money. People play it. For an IP that includes household names like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, all of whom can and have been able to stand up multiple TV and movie series for decades, however, it can't be considered more than a modest success, if that.

Hello Kitty Online - Main IP: Merchandising and cultural icon

This one deserves a post of its own. It appears to have been either abandoned or possibly even forgotten by its owners, Sanria. The game was last known to be playable over a decade ago but the website, which hasn't been updated since 2012, is still up. A sad and mystifying fate for such a global icon.

Lord of the Rings Online - Main IP: Books and Movies.

I think we all know about this one. Doing just about okay for an aging mmorpg but certainly no more than that. Signally failed to capitalize on the massive global interest in Tolkein following the Peter Jackson movies and the recent Amazon Prime series barely moved the dial, despite the hype. I suspect that, much though the fans still worship the man and all his myriad works, the general audience has had about as much Tolkein as it stand for now, which may not bode well for either Embracer Group or Amazon Games.

Marvel Heroes - Main IP - Comics and Movies

Seemed to be doing reasonably well, perhaps on a par with "rival" DCUO until it suddenly and unexpectedly closed down. Even at its peak, though, it could scarcely have been said to have done justice to what was, at the time, one of the best-known and most commercially successful IPs in the entire world. If you can't bring the punters in by the millions with Spider-Man and The Avengers, really, what do you think you're doing?

Otherland - Main IP: Books

This one's just weird. It was a left-field choice for an IP to begin with, being a fairly obscure SciFi trilogy by an author better-known for his fantasy novels. No-one's bothered to make a movie or a TV show out of anything Tad Williams ever wrote, so why anyone thought a game would sell is a mystery. The game never really got finished, never attracted an audience, changed hands a couple of times and finally closed down without anyone noticing. It wasn't a bad game, as far as it went, but the IP did it no favors at all.

Star Trek Online - Main IP: TV and Movies

I called this "The game time (And the world.) forgot" in a comment on the post I linked earlier. It's a Cryptic production, which means it's solid enough but a bit dull, making it, some might say, an ideal fit for the IP. I always feel that Star Trek somehow manages to be well-known by the mainstream yet still entirely niche. This is one game on the list that may even have done about as well as the IP deserved. At least it's still running and people play it. Or I guess they do...

Star Wars Galaxies - Main IP - Movies

This, on the other hand, is a truly world-class IP. One of the very biggest. As Raph Koster is always keen to point out, the game he made using the Star Wars setting and characters was a success - just not a big enough one to satisfy the IP's owners. It's worth reading that piece for Raph's observations on the core topic of this post, the value of a non-gaming IP to an MMORPG - or to any other video game genre, for that matter. 

Raph puts it like this: "if you look at the power of licensed IP game genres outside of sports, it’s really not very clear that a license can or will imply a massive increase in game trials or purchases."  That's really the crux of the problem except that, in the case of an IP like Star Wars, the expectations are also hyped to the skies. It's a recipe for failure because even success on the scale of SWG (Raph claims it was weight-for-weight more successful than EverQuest, the market leader at the time.) doesn't count as success in the eyes of either the fans or the investors.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - See above.

And that, of course, is why SWG is only available on emulator and private servers these days. Along came the second MMORPG based on the IP and even though they weren't making Highlander Online, there could only be one. Sony Online Entertainment bowed to the inevitable and cancelled SWG so SW:TOR could have a clear run... and BioWare fumbled the pass.

Once again, the game itself was fine and sales were good enough for the genre. Just not good enogh for the IP. With the endless publicity pumped out by Disney since then, along with the ongoing global success of many, if not all, of the movies and now TV shows, a middle-ranking MMORPG just doesn't cut it. If it was an original IP, it would be deemed a major success - it's not like we have a lot of SciFi PvE MMORPGs to choose from - but it's Star Wars so it was widely seen as a failure even before the move to the Broadsword Home for Elderly MMOs.

The Matrix Online - Main IP: Movies

Oh, boy! I guess at the time The Matrix was reckoned a pretty big thing? It also has something to do with virtual worlds, I think, so I suppose there was some synergy there? I don't know. I'm vague on the details because I've never seen the movies. 

I've also never played the game which, given that it was published by SOE and included in the All Access sub I was paying at the time, ought to tell you everything you need to know about the appeal of the IP outside its dedicated fanbase. I mean, back then I was at least trying out just about every MMORPG on the market and I still didn't make the time to take a look at TMO. 

I can't even say if it was reckoned a good game or a good version of the IP. I don't even recall reading much about it. I'd guess most Matrix fans  probably didn't even know it existed and most MMORPG players didn't care.

TMO is like the poster child for why hanging an MMORPG off an external IP is a bad idea. It sums up the innate and seemingly insurmountable problem that comes from draping your MMORPG over the scaffolding of an IP that's been successful in another medium: chances are really, really high that most of that pre-existing audience doesn't even know what an MMORPG is, far less want to play one, while at the same time you're limiting your MMORPG audience to a subset that finds the particular IP appealing.

And it gets worse. There may be a very large and well-established market for video games that reference already-familiar properties but those games generally don't require the kind of time commitment and long-term dedication of an MMORPG. It's one thing to buy a Batman game, play it, finish it and put it away; entirely another to commit to raiding Arkham Asylum from 9pm to 1am every Thursday, Friday and Saturday for perpetuity.

And still worse yet. Even if you successfully tap into the loyalty and affection of your chosen IP's dedicated fanbase, the people eager and willing to consume, own and live inside every possible aspect of their beloved obsession, you're going to be opening yourself to disappointment, disgruntlement and maybe even DDOSing and death threats from those same superfans, many of whom will inevitably see your interpretation of their dreams as an embarrassment, a disaster or a betrayal.

Finally and perhaps worst of all, as the IP's licensee, you'll have to pay for the privilege of piggybacking on someone else's success, likely handsomely, on the basis that the rights owner is doing you a favor by letting you hitch a ride on the back of their money-wagon. You'll just have to pray that, when they've taken their cut for doing nothing at all and you've paid all the development and running costs, there's enough left to make the whole thing feel like it hasn't been a complete waste of your time.

Almost all the big, successful western MMORPGs are based on IPs created and owned by the companies that developed and operate them. With barely a couple of exceptions, even the ones we call successful aren't much more than a few big fish in a fairly small pond. World of Warcraft had its cultural moment but, unlike Star Wars or Marvel Comics, it couldn't hold on to it. The Warcraft movie is evidence enough. 

MMORPGs are a niche genre. Expensive mainstream IPs are a terrible fit. If picking a strong IP and slapping an MMORPG back end on it was a guaranteed - or even a likely - way to make a fortune, we'd have massively multiple versions of every TV show, movie franchise and best-selling book series of the last fifty years. Just like we do with the TV shows, movies and books themselves. But we don't because MMORPGs are a niche market and even the successful ones don't make a ripple in the mainstream.

I wish it was otherwise. I could list, right off the top of my head, a couple of dozen IPs I'd love to see turned into MMORPGs - and I might, in another post. It's never going to happen because IP-led MMORPGs don't work unless, like WoW or Pokemon Go or Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, the IP itself comes from another game.

So, if you're waiting, like me, for Scooby Doo Online, where we all get to ride around in the Mystery Machine, solving mysteries and catching bad guys in a lighter, funnier version of The Secret World, then you're going to have a very long wait indeed.

The Broadsword Retirement Home For Old MMORPGs Is Pleased To Welcome A New Resident: SW:tOR

Without a doubt, the mmorpg-specific news of the week has to be the shock announcement that BioWare is handing Star Wars : the Old Republic off to Broadsword, the independent (Or is it?) studio tasked with caretaking the elderly Dark Age of Camelot and ancient Ultima Online, titles the conglomerate acquired when it subsumed first Origin in 1992 and later Mythic Entertainnment in 2006. The story has been very widely reported but this summary at Gameworld Observer is one of the clearest I've seen.

I first read the news at MassivelyOP, where the reaction in the comment thread was both less astonished and more positive than I'd have expected. It probably says as much about how badly BioWare has been judged to have handled the game over the years as it says anything good about Broadsword, although, as I commented in response to Shintar's concerned post on the news, MOP commenters do seem to have a particular blind spot when it comes to certain aging titles, Star Wars Galaxies being the most obvious, with DAOC and UO coming up strongly behind.

It seems unlikely that many of those commenters have actually played a title curated by Broadsword in recent years. Or ever. I'm not sure what the current populations of DAOC and UO look like but I think it's fair to say they'll be small and composed almost entirely of a veteran hardcore who don't get out much - to visit other mmorpgs, I mean.

Someone who has played one of the games extensively is Yeebo, creator of Yeebo's DAOC Guides, who dropped into Shintar's comment thread to share his experiences. No doubt he'll post on the topic himself at some point so I won't pre-empt his analysis of the situation, other than to say the evidence he's already presented looks pretty damning.

I already had my own, largely uninformed, opinions on the efficacy of Broadsword's tenure as a curator of slumbering giants but Shintar's reply to my comment added some much-needed texture to the conversation from an SW:tOR-specific perspective. Even though I've played the game and follow several bloggers who've written quite extensively about it over the years, I wasn't aware quite how "severely unloved" some of the devs working on it had been feeling. 

I knew that the game had been under-resourced and under-developed for years. I've commented more than once on the irony of a TripleA+ global IP like Star Wars having nothing more on its mmorpg record than two under-performers like the cancelled SWG and the commercially-disappointing SW:tOR but I was under the impression the latter was at least rubbing along, doing alright in a not quite top flight sort of way. It's in Tipa's Tier 3 of Google Trends MMOs alongside Guild Wars 2, after all, and I keep reading about how well GW2 is doing these days.

According to both Shintar and Pallais, a regular commenter at Going Commando and a regular SW:tOR player, too, the revenue SW:tOR generates has been used  "to pay the bills so the "main" development team could faff around for years not shipping anything.", making SW:tOR BioWare's "milk cow". On this basis, it's easy to see why the 40+ developers making the cut to move across to Broadsword might see the change as both an improvement and an opportunity.

It's a very curious situation all round. By most counts I've seen, the current Broadsword set-up has around a dozen developers in total to cover both existing titles. The arrival, whether physically if they're asked to re-locate or more likely virtually, if they stay where they are, of another 40+ employees is bound to have a seismic effect not just on the activities and status of the company but also on its culture.

It reminds me weirdly of the recent events involving EG7 and Daybreak Games, where the newly-acquired properties and personnel in short order seemed to consume their host and set about remaking the business in their own image. I'm not saying we're going to turn round in few months and find the CEO of Broadsword is someone from the SW:tOR dev team but I do think that, unless the properties are kept wholly inside their respective silos, there's almost bound to be some bleed-over.

My immediate reaction was that it couldn't rationally be regarded as a positive development for the game, its players or the developers currently working on it. Broadsword is nominally a private company but the entirety of its business would seem to be maintaining two (Now three.) mmorpgs owned by EA, in which the gaming giant has long lost interest. 

I'm finding it a little tricky to figure out exactly what Broadsword's status is. Some sources describe it as a "private company" but LinkedIn lists it as "public". I asked Bard, who told me "Broadsword Online Games is not independently owned. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Electronic Arts (EA)."  Bing agreed that Broadsword "is not independently owned", describing it instead as "a third-party studio".

Whatever the corporate structure, it's pretty clear that Broadsword is an mmorpg retirement home. It's also one evidently dependent on a single client - EA - for games to look after. If it's not part of EA, it might as well be.

Clearly it's better for SW:tOR to be sent into retirement than into the sunset but I'm not sure the game's players were expecting either just now. That many of them seem to be unfazed by or even quite pleased with the idea suggests just how far expectations must have fallen. As for the developers, it does appear that those who don't get the boot themselves will probably just be glad to have BioWare's boot off their neck.

As a player of very old, niche and/or underpopulated mmorpgs, I can attest that maintenance mode isn't always a bad deal. If a game already has plenty of content, all it really needs is someone to keep the lights on and change the fuses when they blow. The hardcore players who stick with the games they love long after everyone else has moved on are usually quite capable of making their own entertainment.

Games like that usually have a skeleton crew operating them, like the half-dozen each at DAOC or UO. A team of forty may be half what SW:tOR used to have but if those forty are freed from the fetters of an actively-hostile management, it's not unrealistic to imagine them becoming more productive overall. It might be an unpopular opinion but I'd say that, from a player's perspective, something of the kind did happen to the two EverQuest games under Darkpaw, when it was siloed from Daybreak - and things had already improved there under DBG compared to late SOE.

Thoughts like these may make the prospects seem cheerier but there's a big difference between SW:tOR and either the games Broadsword already runs or the Daybreak stable. In fact, there's an instructive comparison to be drawn between EQII specifically and SW:tOR.

One of the largely-forgotten selling points of EQII when it originally launched back in 2004 was that it claimed to be the first fully-voiced MMORPG. That record is "officially" held by SW:tOR, as verified by the self-regulating Guiness Book of Records but other equally authorative sources with longer memories remember it diferently. Much of the hype of the time revolved around the large number of voice actors employed, the hours of dialog they'd recorded and the big names (Christopher Lee and Helen Slater) SOE had hired to voice the two opposing faction leaders.

After EQII failed to emulate its predecessor's impressive sales curve, one of the first things to be dropped was all that expensive voice acting. For most of the life of the game we've gotten by with some voiced set-pieces in major storylines and a lot of reading. 

And it's been great. Better, in fact, than the original plan which, if I'm honest, I found pretty irritating even when it was a novelty. I don't really like voice acting in mmorpgs all that much. It slows things down and it's often distracting. I hardly ever turn off the music or the sound in games but I often turn off the voices.

I suspect SW:tOR players take the voice-acting in their game a bit more seriously. They also expect a lot of story, that being the fourth pillar on which the game was so famously built. How Broadsword will manage those expectations with their reduced team and without the safety-net of a giant corporation behind them might be interesting to watch. From the outside.

Will SW:tOR begin to bloom again and go on to flourish under the gentler guiding hand and more supportive environment at Broadsword? Or will financial concerns and restraints replace the cultural chill that supposedly froze out innovation and creativity under BioWare, leaving the game no better off and perhaps even worse than before?

Will the devs who move across even stay with SW:tOR? I wonder if there's anything about that in the agreement? Will Broadsword be constrained to maintain their new ward with exact same level of resources they were handed or will they be free to re-assign some to the other games under their control? Could SW:tOR's losses become DAOC and UOs gains?

Well, don't look at me. I don't know. I'm going to be sitting over here in the cheap seats, munching on my popcorn. This one's going to run and run, I'll bet.

One thing I will say about it is that it's revived my own interest in giving the game another run. I think I'll wait until the ink's dry on the deal, then I might either wake up my old character or start a new one. I won't be staying long, I'm sure, but it seems like it would be a good time to pay a visit and take a look around the game's new home.

Whether looky-loos like me, coming in, will balance out disgruntled vets heading out the door the other way remains to be seen.

Plus Support

Shintar has a post up under the declarative title SWTOR's Endgame Is Alts, Not Gear. I haven't played Star Wars: the Old Republic for a long while but the post immediately started me thinking about the way my own gaming habits have changed. I left a lengthy comment but as I was typing I realized I had more to say, hence this post.

Shintar contends that "SWTOR is and has always been a game about alts." She's referring mainly to the (in)famous "Fourth Pillar" on which Bioware rested all their hopes for the game: story. As Shintar says, the game "launched with eight unique class stories, and you better believe that the devs didn't intend for you to only play one of them!"

In the early years of the mmorpg genre, story was nowhere near as central to the experience as it's become. I have very mixed feelings about the whole concept of narrative storytelling in live service games I don't believe it's a good fit at all for a number of reasons.

For one thing, every long-running game with an ongoing storyline featuring recurring characters risks turning into a bad soap opera. The longer the game lasts, the more convoluted, contrived and contradictory the backstories of the major players become. Every time I read another blogger bemoaning the sorry state of World of Warcraft's storyline I'm reminded of the decades when I followed the soaps and how in the end I had to stop because, while I could remember the past, the characters clearly couldn't.

Even in the rare games where the writers manage to maintain a degree of consistency, there's the Everything Everywhere All At Once issue. Since players react negatively to having any content taken away, even if it's content they'll never use again, every storyline has to remain in the game and playable, leading to a broken reality. 

Most devs just ignore it, which is probably for the best. ArenaNet eventually came out and stated that each map in Guild Wars 2 exists in some kind of temporal stasis, a snapshot of frozen time, a solution I find as inelegant as the problem it purports to resolve. Blizzard have tried a number of fixes, from the deeply unpopular revisionism of the Cataclysm expansion, through heavy-handed use of phasing to the recent introduction of Chromie Time. None of it really helps all that much.

SW:tOR probably made more problems for itself than most by leaning so heavily on the concept of multiple storylines. GW2 had already gone some of the way down the same road with the Personal Story, a narrative that had the odd characteristic of branching inward, starting out like a delta, streams flowing not just from each race but from a number of choices made at character creation, before all the streams joined together into one not-really-all-that-mighty river, sweeping every player over the same final cataract.

Shintar is clearly correct when she suggests Bioware didn't do all that work for nothing. If you go to the trouble of commissioning eight separate narratives to take players from creation to cap you certainly don't do it for redundancy. Had the game been as commercially successful as they hoped, perhaps all those narratives would have continued to expand indefinitely. Then there would have been less need to find alternative ways of keeping the hardcore happy.

Story, though, may be something of a distraction if we're talking about the choice between alts and
endgame. In the years when few mmorpgs even pretended to have anything you could call a narrative arc, many devs still seemed to expect players to create and level multiple characters. If not, why put so much time and effort into designing multiple starting areas and levelling paths? 

In part it has to be because leveling was originally seen almost as much as a goal as it was a means to an end(game). For many years, while I was playing anything up to forty hours a week, I wasn't leveling characters to get to anything or anywhere. I was leveling them because leveling was the game.

At the very beginning, mmorpgs didn't really come with much in the way of pre-designed endgame content, anyway. The levelling process itself took so long that many players would spend their entire time in a given game without ever reaching the level cap, let alone settling down there. It would have been seen as a poor use of resources to create content few players could access.

As the months and years passed and the games carried on, finding things to do for the increasing number of players who'd reached the cap became much more of a priority. That was how we got endgame zones, raiding and gear grinds. I doubt any of it was planned. It certainly didn't seem like it at the time. 

Once the pattern was set, though, it was set in stone. As Shintar says, there is a widespread belief among many mmorpg players that "engaging with an MMO in-depth must mean focusing on a single character, doing some sort of max-level grind, and expecting a steady stream of more of the same so that your single character's progression rarely comes to a halt."

My anecdotal experience is somewhat at variance with that reading. It probably goes without saying to any long-time readers of this blog that getting a single character endgame-ready never formed much of a part of my plans. I've played a lot of mmorpgs over the last near-quarter century but in very few of them have I even reached the level cap, let alone stayed there long enough to gear up.

Back when I was more sociable than I am now, though, I was often a fairly active member of a guild. Over the course of five or six years, I was in half a dozen or more small to medium size guilds on different servers in EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and EverQuest II, as well as a couple of fairly large ones, in which I was less obviously active.

Only in the large guilds did I see a significant number of players focusing their efforts on endgame activities. In the rest, even when there were forty or fifty members playing fairly frequently, most of them were leveling and not just the one character, either. 

Plenty of people never even got a single character to the cap before they drifted away and disappeared for good, sometimes with a goodbye, more often not. Not infrequently, people would play several characters to the mid-levels before settling on one to "work on". 

With the the leveling pace so much slower back then, even people who played most evenings and every weekend took months to get anywhere close to the cap, a target that was in any case always moving, thanks to the annual or even semi-annual expansion cadence that was the norm at the time. 

One of the reasons so many people kept rolling alts was the differential in advancement between low, mid and high level characters. When you found yourself looking at ten, fifteen even twenty hours to earn a single level, the lure of a level you could knock out in an hour or two, as things went back at the beginning of the game, could be too much to resist.

Then there was the appeal of variety. As I mentioned earlier, mmorpgs used to come with multiple starting areas and a wide choice of low and mid-level zones. In some games it was quite possible to level several characters to the higher end of the game without duplicating any content at all. Even when you did retread the same ground, the differences between classes and even races was much more significant than it was later to become.

It's no great exageration to say that playing different classes or races could feel like playing a different game altogether. In Vanguard, for example, there were three very different continents, each of which was probably as large as the full landmass of a latterday mmorpg. Raising a character in the deserts of Qalia felt existentially different to raising one in the forests of Thestra or the jungles of Kojan and even playing a different race on the same continent could make you feel as lost as if you'd never been there before.

Many mmorpgs were like that, then. As Shintar says about SW:tOR, for many players, playing multiple characters wasn't "some kind of side activity that you engage in when you've hit a bit of a lull with the "main" game - it is the game!" Not for everyone, of course; possibly not even for the majority, but for a very substantial minority, those people who either never aspired to reach the endgame or realised it was going to elude them if they tried.

In all the games I've mentioned and plenty more, I have multiple characters, usually a handful, occasionally a dozen or more. In one or two the count passes a score. In newer mmorpgs, ones I've started in the last decade or so, those figures fall away alarmingly. I'm not sure I've played a stable of characters in a single game since GW2 launched in 2012.

I hadn't really thought about that until I read Shintar's post this morning. My first reaction was to blame ennui or over-familiarity. I've been playing these games a long time, now. The appeal of starting over and over again must have palled.

Thinking about it for a little longer, I realized that's not really the case. Yes, there is a little of the "been there, done that" mentality creeping in around the edges these days but it must be evident in the enthusiasm with which I regularly write about new mmorogs I've played that I'm far from done with the genre yet.

A more likely explanation might be the way mmorpg design has changed over the years. For sound commercial reasons, few games these days launch with multiple starting areas or leveling paths. Developers like to keep players together as much as possible to enhance the impression that a lot of people play their game and anyway, leveling itself is out of fashion; it's all about the endgame and how fast you can get there.

Even so, only the most linear design supporting the most meager content lets you see everything on one trip through the levels. In most modern mmorpgs there still some juice to be squeezed from playing different classes or races or from making different choices at various decision points. And yet these days I rarely bother.

The real reason, I believe, lies not with my level of interest nor with game designers' methods but in a change of payment models. It's no co-incidence that I seem to have begun to find rolling multiple characters in the same game less appealing at around the same time the Free to Play revolution kicked in.

The choice used to be between carrying on playing the same character or rolling another in the same game and starting over. Games cost money then and mmorpgs also required a subscription. Re-rolling made sound economic sense, a way of both extracting extra value from an existing purchase and feeling like you were getting something new at the same time.

Once developers began to give their games away for nothing and stopped charging a monthly fee to play them it began to be both practical and attractive not just to start over in the same game but to start over in a new game altogether. That whole "three-monther" thing, which eventually slimmed down into a single month, when players would game-hop almost continually, ostensibly searching for the next forever game, might perhaps be more realistically interpreted as a more intense, more exciting way to re-roll. Instead of rolling a new character we began rolling a new game.

Well, I did. I still do. Having the blog allows me to paint my serial re-rolling as research rather than
self-indulgence but I very much doubt I'd be behaving any differently if I didn't have a blog to post my experiences and opinions of every new tutorial and starting zone. If you're the kind of player who rarely settles down to play a single character in a single game anyway, the kind who always wanted to see all the starting zones and play all the classes and races, it's quite unlikely you'll be able to resist the lure of so many new experiences that cost you nothing at all.

Nothing, of course, other than any final sense of accomplishment, except perhaps for the broadening of your understanding of the hobby itself. After ten years of game-hopping, I feel I know a lot about mmorpgs as a genre but not all that much about any one of them in particular.

Which is fine. It's pretty much how I felt about all those games where I played a lot of characters. I always felt I knew a good deal more about EQ or Vanguard as whole than many of the people I played with, even though I would freely acknowledge many of them knew a good deal more than I did about specific aspects. 

Playing a lot of characters gives you a good overview. It gives you perspective. Playing one character exclusively gives you depth of experience and thorough understanding of the detail. The really dedicated players end up acquiring both but most of us have to settle for one or the other.

I've always preferred to contextualize. I like to feel I have some perspective. If that means missing out on the fine detail, I can accept that. For now, that perspective and context applies mostly to the genre rather than to any specific game. The time will come, I hope and trust, when the pendulum will swing again and I'll find myself re-rolling and starting over in the same game just to see more of what I'm already playing.

Window Of Opportunity

I spent very nearly the whole day playing Guild Wars 2 today. I'd guess I've played more GW2 since End of Dragons than the rest of the year put together. 

It's not just the expansion, either, although I have spent a great deal of time in Cantha, mostly doing map completion, which I've found to be far more enjoyable and compelling than usual thanks to the extreme verticality of all the maps and the strong element of puzzling involved this time around. I know from map chat that some people absolutely loathe it for the exact same reasons but they had boring old Path of Fire - now it's my turn!

I also did the hyper-controversial new endgame meta again today, just because I happened to be in the map, the appropriately-named Dragon's End, when it started. It was my second run and it finished the same way the first did, with the dragon stil about 25% health when the timer ran out. 

It was a full map, give or take, and we had maximum NPC support and an experienced, if not very successful commander. He said he'd had about forty tries so far and won thee of them. Far from reducing anyone's confidence in his ability to lead us to victory, the general sentiment seemd to be that, with a seven and a half per cent success rate, he was doing better than most. 

The whole mood of the map stayed cheerful throughout, even when it became obvious we were going to lose. People did start to bail towards the end but with no complaints that I heard, only a few rueful comments along the lines of "We'll get it next time". 

I haven't read up on the tactics and the entire event from start to finish is so mind- boggling chaotic I had very little idea what was happening, let alone what I was supposed to be doing. As with Dragon's Stand, the Heart of Thorns meta it's modelled on, there are three lanes, all of which have to progress down the map, beating various bosses and completing diverse tasks before everyone comes together on a platform for a gigantic death match with the dragon. 

Both times I've done it I've taken the center lane, so I now have a rough idea of the nodal points of that one but I still have no real clue what the mechanics are. At any point where I was supposed to be doing anything other than killing mobs what I was actually doing was watching other people to see what they were doing. Didn't help much. Most of them had no idea, either.

Dragon's Stand was just the same when it started. It took me half a dozen runs to get the hang of it and maybe a dozen more before I got to be competent. After that, I was the one yelling in map chat about what we ought to be doing. I never could keep my trap shut. 

The reason I did Dragon's Stand that many times wasn't because I was desperate for the rewards.  It was because it was a whole lot of fun, particularly on a wet Sunday afternoon, which seemed to be when I usually found myself there.

Someone piped up in map chat today to say Dragon's End was the best meta the game's had since Dragon's Stand and several people chimed in to agree. I certainly think it has that potential, once ANet tune it a little and a critical mass of players understand the rules. I'll certainly be going back for another try, anyway.

The meta took about forty five minutes, with a two-hour lead-in but that was nothing compared to the time I spent reorganizing my banks. That's GW2's real end game. 

I've been at it for days now. I started with the guild banks, all three of them, then I moved on to my main account bank.

I long ago expanded my storage to the maximum number of vaults. I'd very happily give ANet (imaginary) money for more but they won't take it so I had to get creative. I considered buying a new characeter slot to make a dedicated bank mule but then I realised I had the ideal candidate already.

When HoT added a new character class, the Revenant, and gave us a new character slot to play one, I felt honor-bound to give it a go. I made the class and tried to play it but I couldn't get on with it at all. 

Revenants have turned out to be quite popular but mine has been standing on a patch of grass in Lion's Arch next to the NPC who ports you to the daily Activity for years. I only ever do that daily if it's the best of a bad bunch or if Sanctum Sprint is up. I like Sanctum Sprint. 

It occurred to me that if he was just going to stand there, he could mind everyone's stuff while he did it. I converted some of my vast pile of gold to Gems and bought him a couple of extra bag slots, then I gave him some twenty-slot Halloween Pails to put in them, plus a few more to replace the smaller bags he was using. 

That reminded me my Elementalist is also a tailor and she can make bags up to the largest size GW2 allows, thirty-two slots. They cost a fortune to craft, though, so in the end I made a twenty-eight slotter, which itself cost almost as much as the Gems I'd bought. And then I decided the Ele would get more use out of it than the bank mule, so I swapped it for one of her twenty-slots and gave him that instead.

After that it was on to the hard part - sorting through seventeen thirty-slot tabs of largely unrecognizeable icons, trying to decide what to stash on the mule, what to sell, what to use and what to leave in the bank. I even did my best to organize all seventeen tabs into some kind of coherent pattern.

I was doing it in the Citadel in World vs World, which is where I do everything practical in the game other than craft. I was about half way through when some gang of thugs from another server decided to take our Garrison. I was so wrapped up in my bank sorting I didn't even notice until the battle had been raging for about twenty minutes but as soon as I realised what was going on I left off what I was doing and legged it to the keep to help.

The battle went on for nearly as long as the Dragon's Stand meta. There were about double the number of the enemy as there were of us but we kept harrrying them and kiting them and chipping away like an annoying cloud of gnats until finally there were only about even numbers left, at which point they gave up and ran away. 

It was a famous victory! And then, about five minutes after I got back to my bank-work, the whole thing kicked off again at our keep in Eternal Battlegrounds, so I got to do it all over again. We won that too!

Put all that together and I think I've been playing GW2 for about seven hours today, at least. I only really stopped because I wanted to get a post done. I haven't finished sorting the bank, either. I'll have to do more on that tomorrow.

Yeebo has a very good post about how expansions in mmorpgs don't mean what they used to and both he and Tyler F.M. Edwards, who has a post over at MassivelyOP on much the same subject, pick out the recent Star Wars: the Old Republic expansion, Legacy of the Sith, as a prime example. 

Yeebo makes the point that some mmorpg companies seem to have figured out they can get away with taking money for stuff they used to give away for free but also that the promise of a good expansion brings people back to the game. If the expansion lives up to that promise, those players don't just whip through it and leave, they remember why they liked the game in the first place and stick around for a while. 

That's exactly what End of Dragons has done for me. Okay, I hadn't technically left GW2 but I had checked out emotionally. Now I feel re-invigorated and ready to carry on and find out where the game goes next. If EoD had disappointed the way the SW:tOR expansion apparently has, it might easily have been the final straw, not just for me but for many.

Luckily for me that isn't how it turned out. Like Belghast, who seems to have had a kind of damascene conversion to the game, I'm having a lot of fun in GW2 right now and for once I can imagine it continuing for a while. 

Having put that in writing, I imagine next week I'll be here pounding out two thousand words about some other game I've magically started playing but until then expect a few more postcards from Cantha. I have to do something with these hundreds of screenshots I've taken.

Again Again Again

Today's Promptapalooza starter is

Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

Talk about shooting a barrel full of fish through an open goal while riding a very high hobby horse. I could bore for my country on this one.

But  I won't. I'll just state my case, of which I'm certain: doing something only once is tantamount to never having done it at all. Going back to that earlier prompt, the one about favorite quotes, I could so easily have gone with Mark E. Smith's "We dig repetition". It could be the motto of this blog. Maybe it is!

But I've said all this before, haven't I? I'll leave it at that. Wouldn't want to repeat myself.

Instead, since this used to be an MMORPG blog, maybe I'll list some of the games I've stopped playing but might get back to, some day. It's not like I've done that before...

Blade and Soul - This has been on my mind recently. Not sure why. I don't think I've returned to it once since my first run ended, back in 2016. Which is surprising, because at the time, I seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit:

"I've played Blade and Soul almost every day for a month now. My Summoner is level 30 so I'm averaging about a level a day. It's just a fun MMO. It isn't very deep or complex or  sophisticated or subtle - it's just fun to play".

Probably worth another shot, I'd say.

Star Wars: the Old Republic - I was enjoying  this one enough to sub for a while. After a month or so I'd put in "around a hundred hours so far, taking one character to Level 57 and another to 35".

The main problem I had was the incessant voice acting. It was okay in the spring but when we got to the summer and I wanted to have the cricket on in the background I had to mute the voiceovers, which kind of seemed to be missing the point a tad. Then I went on holiday and it just felt like a good time to take a break.

I was always planning to come back but as yet it hasn't happened. And it's cricket season again now, so it won't be happening for a while. Maybe in the autumn.

Twin Saga - I have actually been back to this one several times. I really like it a lot. The problem is... it's too hard.

Seriously, I stopped because I got stuck. Couldn't progress. Was dying too often. I waited a few months, then a couple of years but each time I went back it hadn't gotten any easier. Quite ironic, given my initial assessment:

"Twin Saga is a very comfortable game to settle into, with a very shallow, gentle learning curve."

Yeah, I think they call that "bait and switch".

Lord of the Rings Online - I took the trouble to log in and claim my compensation. Only fair for the extreme inconvenience I suffered, being locked out of a game I wasn't playing. Shame I wasn't on the server that had the huge rollback - I might have gotten recompensed for losing the progress I hadn't made as well. I'm sure I would have deserved it.

Now that the mysterious and elusive Standing Stone Games have decided to give just about the whole of the game away for free (and yes, I logged in that other time too, to claim my permanent free quests. Of course I did.), I sort of want to give Middle Earth another run. I think playing a Guardian might be the drag anchor that stops me ever getting very far. Perhaps I should try another class. They can't all be that dull, can they?

Also I guess I need to decide over the next week or so whether to buy any of the expansions on sale for 99 LotRO points. I probably have enough left for two or three. I should at least check that before the offer finishes at the end of August.

Final Fantasy XIV - And while we're on the subject of improved free trials...

Elder Scrolls Online - Hang on, wasn't I playing this one, like, a few weeks ago? I thought so! Talking about its prospects of staying on my "Currently Playing" list (it's notional - don't look down the side of the  page for it) I did say "I can't see ESO hanging on for long." I wasn't wrong.

I'm going to stop now because the ESO thing reminds me it's less than two months since the last time I did this. For years I've been making a practice of putting up posts where I tell myself which MMORPGs I might be playing, should be playing, could be playing but currently amn't.

Sidebar - I've always wondered why "amn't" isn't the commonly-used abbreviation for "am not". It turns up in the odd high-Edwardian novel, now and again but mostly everyone just jumps to "aren't", which is just plain wrong, now ain't it?.

Hmm. Now that's what I call a sidebar. A good editor would blue-pencil that entire paragraph. Shame I don't  have one. A blue pencil or an editor. Nor any shred of self-restraint, apparently.

Ahem.

I like writing posts like this because a) they do quite often nudge me into patching up and  logging into at least one of the games in question. Last time it was ESO. This time I'm really hoping it's going to be Blade & Soul. (Spoiler: downloading it as I type...)

And b) they're ridiculously quick and easy to write.

Also, as I believe I implied at the top, in answer to the prompt, yes I do come back to the same things again and again and again...

This post is the proof of that.