Two Games I Won't Be Playing

Wow! It's December already! I really need to get going on Christmas stuff. I always start buying presents for Mrs Bhagpuss in October and November, get a bunch of those stashed away, then think I'm done. And then, when it's almost too late, I realize I haven't even thought about anyone else, or bought any cards, let alone written or posted them. 

Doing the Advent Calendar here doesn't help, either. All the work involved in getting that set up really makes me feel like I've done plenty so I must be pretty close to being finished.

Well, I'm not! So much more to do. 

I mention all of this only to explain, or apologize for, or attempt to excuse, in advance, the shoddy quality of posts likely to appear here over the next week or three. Like this one...

It doesn't help that this is, at least ostensibly, a gaming blog and I'm hardly playing any games right now. Not from lack of interest or desire. I have a pretty lengthy list of games I'd like to take a run at, many of which are on my Steam wishlist. It makes for a really useful aide memoir. A lot better than trying to hold the titles in my head.

That's something I'm not all that great at doing. For example, I saw something over at MassivelyOP the other day about a new MMORPG called Reign of Guilds leaving Early Access. It rang the very vaguest of bells but I couldn't bring anything about it to mind so I mentally filed it for later. And then, while I was looking for something completely unrelated in my back pages, I came across this from a couple of years ago.

It seems not only had I heard of RoG before, I'd briefly played it and written a whole post on my short time there. I can remember absolutely nothing about either of those events.

The even more worrying part is that I opened that post by saying I couldn't remember hearing about Reign of Guilds before, even though I thought I should have. Clearly I have some kind of mental block about the damn game.

Re-reading the post, it all comes back to me, which I guess is one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Without that written record I'd literally have no memory of ever having played the game at all. If anyone had asked me, I'd have said I never did. Not that anyone would be likely to ask...

Although I was very sure the game wasn't for me, I did have some positive things to say about it. I ended the post by claiming I'd be interested to see how well it did when it launched in 2024. This is the sort of thing I often say at the end of posts. I have to believe I mean it when I write it but it's self-evidently not true in any meaningful and lasting fashion. In most cases, I never mention the games again.

I certainly never gave another thought to Reign of Guilds, even though it did indeed become openly available in an Early Access build on Steam in April 2024. Early Access turned into full release last month and the game is now officially in Release 1.0 status. Reviews are Mixed but the numbers on Steam's chart, while small, are encouraging. 

Peak concurrency is only 300 but there was a huge spike when the game officially released on 26 November and so far those players haven't stopped logging in. Granted it's only been a week but I'm sure we all can all think of a few games that have lost almost everyone faster than that.

It makes for an interesting rebuttal to the widely-aired theory that you only get one chance at launch, that being the earliest moment you make your game publicly available. Early Access or Open Beta are often considered to be the de facto launch of a game, regardless of what the developers and the Marketing Dept. might say. Even more so if money changes hands.

Reign of Guilds is free to play so theoretically that last part doesn't apply, although of course there are optional "Bundles" you can buy if you're so inclined. There's something for all pockets. The cheap end begins at just £2.49. Top of the shop is £76.71.

I assume it's a less bizarre amount in U.S. Dollars but Steam is weirdly insistent on only showing you the currency for where your IP Address says you're based. If I still had a VPN I'd spoof it to find out the dollar price but I'm not re-subbing just for that. You'll have to use a currency converter or log in and check for yourself if you care.

Getting back to the point and disregarding the payment model for the moment, the Steam numbers strongly suggest that, for this game at least, Early Access did not wholly invalidate the official launch eighteen months later. 

When the game entered EA, concurrency peaked very briefly at just under 600 before falling rapidly to double figures, where it remained from July 2024 until November 2025. The week before the game left Early Access for fully Live status, concurrency was languishing at somewhere between twenty and thirty. That number increased tenfold the moment the game launched and so far it has stayed well above 250.

That may not be a whole lot of people, perhaps not enough to make for a viable game long-term, but it does suggest that you can have two bites at the cherry. Either people had a look at the EA launch, left, then half of them came back when EA ended, or launch brought in a whole new set of people, albeit only half as many. 

Would the net result have been better had there been no EA? Impossible to tell but opening the doors early and leaving them wide for a year and a half certainly didn't kill any future interest in the game.

All of which is altogether more than I meant to say about Reign of Guilds today, or indeed ever. It does, however, feed into something I was planning on talking about, that being an excellent, highly informative post by Owls about Soulframe. 

Soulframe is the fantasy MMORPG currently in development from Digital Extremes, makers of Warframe. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago that I was "mildly interested" in the "Preludes" version of the game, effectively a buy-in pre-Alpha, although not so interested I'd actually want to, y'know, buy into it. 

At the time I wrote that post, the price of the Founders Packs hadn't been announced but they're available now and they start at £24.99 ( $29.99.) Top whack goes for £84.99 ($99.99.)

DE has gone for an unusual and quite clever version of the "Founder Pack" deal based, I believe, on the way Warframe works. Each pack buys you a specific in-game class, meaning that if you want to try, say, an Archer and a Healer, you'll need to buy two separate packs. Currently there are only three classes. The ninety-nine dollar pack gives you all of them.

It sounds a little dubious at first but substantively, I suppose, it's not that much different to the Reign of Guilds approach, where differently priced packs give you varying numbers of character slots. You'd need multiple slots to play multiple classes, the important difference being that, unless you can't delete a character and re-roll, at least you could cycle through all the available options on one purchase. As I read it, in Soulframe you're stuck with whatever class you bought, much like you're limited to the ships you purchase in Star Citizen.

Although the easiest and quickest way to gain access to the game is to pay for it, it is possible to get into Preludes for free. There's some sort of lottery you can opt into on the website but there are invites, too. Owls got his initial access a while ago, courtesy of a code gifted him by Belghast and now Owls has some codes of his own to pay forward. The link is in his post if you're interested.

Having read his very helpful introduction to the game, I'll respectfully pass, even for free. The game very much sounds like something I would not like, involving as it does a lot of blocking and dodging and basically having to know what you're doing. Not really my scene.

At least gameplay doesn't revolve around FFA PVP, which puts it ahead of Reign of Guilds, but other than that it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. It also doesn't sound much like an MMORPG at its current state of development, although frankly it sounds more like one than RoG sounds like the games it claims to have modeled itself on, namely EverQuest and Ultima Online, neither of which it even remotely reminded me of back when I tried it.

Still, I'll say it yet again: I'll be interested to come back and take a look at Soulframe when the it launches. Or, indeed, as it goes through development, perhaps when it hits beta. 

At least with this one, I think I'll still be able to remember what game it is when that happens.

All The News That's Fit To Steal: EQII Rage Of Cthurath, Soulframe Preludes and Guild Wars Reforged

This isn't a news blog. Is there any such thing? Still, sometimes a bunch of stories turn up in the news cycle all at once with at least some relevance to what I do here. And sometimes they turn up when I'm short of time and happy to link a few press releases and embed a few promos and call it a post. 

Am I selling this? Yeah, maybe not...

So, anyway, let's start with the most relevant piece of news, which is that we have a date for the new EverQuest II expansion Rage of Cthurath. It's December 10, 2025. 

Obviously it's 2025. A bit pedantic of them even to mention it, isn't it? I mean, it really would be news if it was December 10, 2026, I guess. It's not like Darkpaw is Rockstar or something. (I've never actually played a Grand Theft Auto game, by the way. Maybe I should do something about that sometime...)

As part of the promotional push for the expansion. Darkpaw did a Livestream on their YouTube channel yesterday. It's pretty long. Nearly two and a half hours. Does anyone have time for that? If so, knock yourselves out. Here it is.

I certainly don't. I watched about fifteen minutes at the start, where they're flying through the new zones (Which look gorgeous, by the way.) until the swooping camera started to make me motion-sick. After that I skipped through to see what else was in there and didn't find much of interest. I guess I watched maybe half an hour altogether.

There's a full transcript on YouTube that I also flicked through. As far as I could see they don't really go into anything that affects me - a lot of stuff about group and raid dungeons and the new Public Quests, for example. I won't be doing the first two and PQs I always figure out as I get to them.

Other than that, mostly just confirmation that the outdoor zones are big and have record amounts of verticality. That makes sense when you consider the creatures that live there can all fly. Of course, we won't be able to fly, not until we've explored the whole place on foot, but I'm sure we're all used to that by now.

It all looks very impressive, visually. Solo content sounds solid. There are three overland zones and the Signature questline wraps up at the end of the second, leaving the third, I'm betting, for sopping up enough extra xp to hit the cap. If it's anything like the last two expansions, leveling will be slow going. I'm looking forward to it, although I'm not promising I'll get all that far this side of the New Year. Bad timing for me, these December releases.

Next up, something that got a mention in the comments of Tuesday's post, namely Soulframe. In case you either didn't know or had forgotten, which would be easy to do since it barely seems to get a mention in anything I read, Soulframe is the in-development MMORPG from Digital Extremes, makers of the very sucessful and also rarely mentioned around here Warframe.

Warframe is SciFi. Soulframe is fantasy. I tried Warframe a few years back, didn't hate it but didn't much like it either. It was the setting as much as anything that put me off. The gameplay seemed okay. 

On that basis, I'm mildly interested to see what the same game looks like with a fantasy skin and I'll be able to satisfy that curiosity very soon because in just five days DE is going to start selling "Founders Packs" giving access to what they're calling "Preludes".

Preludes is DE's name for pre-alpha so this is a buy-in pre-alpha. Are we really desperate enough for those now? Ohh, yes!

How it works is a bit confusing but there's a video. It's only about seven minutes long. I watched it and didn't learn much. Here, you try.

There's also an hour-long livestream video that I haven't watched. Maybe that tells you more. I wouldn't know. I got all I needed from the FAQ,which I read in about a minute. That seemed way more efficient.

I am definitely not interested enough in Soulframe to buy into a pre-alpha. I mean, not unless it costs, like, five dollars or something. I don't think they've announced the pricing structure yet but I'm sure it won't be that.

And finally, something for free! Always my favorite price point.

Of course, it's only free for people who already own the base product, which in this case is the original Guild Wars. They are lowering the box price for those who don't, though. 

I do own Guild Wars, as it happens. All of it. The game plus all the expansions/DLC/whatever they're called.

This is relevant to the blog in a couple of ways, the first being that it's a game I have played and written about before but second and more important because Guild Wars has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade and look! People still play it! It still gets good service from the developers. You might almost say it has a future.

When Maintenance Mode gets mentioned, I can immediately think of two games that have been almost thriving under the regime: Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI. What they have in common is that they're both under the protection of game developers who genuinely care about them, even though they each have newer, much more successful MMORPGs on their books.

New World (That's where I'm going with this but I'm sure you were ahead of me.) had a development team that cared for and valued it but I don't think many people believe it was beloved of the company that owned it. Maybe the comparison isn't valid. Or perhaps, since ArenaNet is a part of the much bigger and generally hard-hearted NCSoft, it might be.

I can think of another example, too: Rift. Rift also wasn't well looked after by the company that owned it, or at least not in the end. Trion sold Rift to Gamigo, who gave it a bit of attention for a while and then effectively put it out to pasture. 

No-one generally has a good word to say about either NCSoft or Gamigo but in a face-off with Amazon, I suspect both would coming out looking like the good guys by default. At least they've kept the servers up and even Gamigo manages to keep some events recycling in Rift to give the illusion someone cares. The game is currently experiencing a bit of a dead cat bounce thanks to a player-led initiative. It's not a lot but it does at least show that maintenance mode doesn't mean the end.

For Guild Wars, Reforging might even be the end of maintenance mode. There's yet another video. It's thirty seconds long. It went up on YouTube two days ago and it has nearly two hundred thousand views already. 

For comparison, the EQII video I linked has a tad under two thousand views. The Soulframe one has eight thousand. A lot of people are interested in a version of classic Guild Wars with updated graphics and Steam Deck compatibility, apparently.

Given a response like that, it's hardly surprising ArenaNet are hinting there could be new content, too. We'll see, I guess. I haven't played through all the old content yet. I was planning on it either but if there's a shiny, new version I'm going to get for nothing, I might change my plans.

At the moment, though, I'm enjoying New World. It's a really good game. I always knew it was, seeing as how it's my second most-played game on Steam at over 250 hours. And counting.

I just hope someone at Amazon notices what other companies do with their old MMOs and at least doesn't want to make things look even worse than they already do by closing the whole thing down at the earliest opportunity. I'm not counting on it, though. I doubt we'll ever get to see New World Reforged.