This Used To Be The Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storm On The Horizon: Rift

So we bought Storm Legion, the Storm Chaser deal that comes with that 12 months game-time that isn't a subscription (see below). We have a friend from EQ2/GW2 joining us and between us we have about eight level 50s so we are probably, maybe, sort of ready to Rift.

We all logged in the other night for a merry round of Guild invites, server transfers and general housekeeping. Meridian and Sanctum appear to be under perpetual attack by extremely large and very noisy invaders from the Plane of Air, something very familiar to me from the countless happy hours I spent repelling their advances on the Chancel of Labors in Iron Pine Peak back in the day ("the day" in this instance being "last year").

Makes it very hard to concentrate on sorting out your bank, but boy, does the gold, xp and planarite blow in on those icy winds! Join the Instant Adventure and you'll soon be a wealthy man. Dwarf. Whatever.

Just as disruptive but a lot less welcome was the following message, a variation of which greeted each character as I logged them all in one by one:

Are there any souls or roles that didn't require a full refit? If there were, I didn't have any of them. I have very little patience for, or indeed interest in, Talent Trees to begin with and I reckon I've had to re-do some of these three or four times already. It really isn't fun any more, if it ever was.

Luckily, Trion seem to have picked up on this little drawback and what was once supposed to be one of the jewels in their crown, the infinitely flexible Soul System, now comes front-ended by what looks to me remarkably like a list of fixed classes. Optional, sure, but classes all the same, and very welcome they are, too.

For the time being I'm just picking one role per character. Time to get fancy when I can actually remember what the icons mean and where the controls are.

I suppose we should be taking advantage of the pre-expansion Bonus Bonanza, especially to start leveling up our Guild, which I believe we only created just before we left and which still has the cellophane on.

 I think we get all that, even though the Storm Chaser FAQ clearly states:

The Storm Chaser edition includes one year of game time and is not a subscription.

The Veteran Reward Fairy certainly thinks we're entitled:

All my mailboxes were bursting with goodies and the changes to item stacking means I even have space to accept them this time.

And so here we are, back in Telara once more. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing these supposedly vast new zones - Rift's zone design has always been superlative. Ten more levels is something to look forward to as well - I do love me a level cap rise. And then there's the little piece of Telara to call my own.

All I have to do is drag myself away from GW2 for few hours once in a while. That shouldn't so hard? Should it?

Lost Shores - Be There or Be Square: GW2

Probably as a result of the furor that followed the Mad King's controversial one-time literal pop-up event in Lion's Arch, ArenaNet decided to post a schedule for the upcoming Lost Shores extravaganza. It comes in three Acts, beginning on Friday November 16th and running through Saturday and Sunday with a special event each day at Noon PST.

The press release is fascinating, showing, I think, just how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be to balance a genuinely "dynamic" virtual world with customer expectations of a commercial product. Taking ANet's description of the event at face value, there's an intrinsic and apparently insoluble problem and in just three-paragraphs they hammer home relentlessly precisely what it is :

"we want to make sure that you are not missing out"

"an Event in Lion’s Arch that you don’t want to miss"

"make sure you will not miss it"

"this will only run once, so make sure you will be there!"

C'mon bird! You must have seen something!

Whether the event will live up to the hype, whether it will be truly world-changing, that doesn't matter. What does matter is the insistence that this is something all Guild Wars 2 players must not miss. That raises expectations that simply cannot be met in full. A lot of people aren't going to be there, no matter how much they'd like to be. The balancing act between building excitement and fostering resentment is a high wire to walk, that's for sure, and the fall is steep on either side.

The timing of the events is intriguing in itself. The opening Act falls on a Friday which is, as far as I can tell, a normal workday in the United States. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management Schedule of Public Holidays for 2012 has nothing listed for November 16th, anyway.  The first event that we don't want to miss kicks off at midday Pacific Standard Time, which is three in the afternoon on the East Coast and eight in the evening GMT.

An elephant? No, wait, is it two camels playing Twister?

Well, it works for me. I'll be comfortably home from work when it all gets going. Much of America, however, will still either be at work or at school. Just as well they "will be able to enjoy additional content afterwards even if [they] cannot make the kick-off time" then, although whether that will make up for missing the unmissable special event (albeit an event not as special or unmissable as Sunday's "big Finale") I beg to doubt.

The same timings repeat on Saturday and Sunday for the following acts. Less problematic, obviously, on a weekend, but again I'd say it strongly favors players in GMT timezones and using the exact same times does risk locking out the same people from each phase. The timing seems especially odd when you consider that GW2 has separate European servers, but as other MMOs have discovered, letting half your customers in on a secret before the rest get to find out what it is never plays well.

Ships they come, ships they go...

All in all, what I conclude from this and from my time in Rift is that truly dynamic events are hard to bring off without riling up a sizable portion of your player-base, and that's without even considering what events different players would recognize as "dynamic" in the first place. Trion made a lot of tweaks to the way they did theirs, with the result that, in my opinion at least, they bled virtually all of the dynamism out.

ArenaNet seem much more determined to match the addition of ongoing, universally available content ("There will be plenty of content available to enjoy that will remain permanently in the world as a result of the outcome of this event") with genuine Saint Crispin's Day moments. So far, at least. Going to be very interesting see how the policy plays out over time.

One thing's for sure - my much-anticipated first weekend of Storm Legion is now holed below the water-line!

Just Popped In For A Pumpkin: Rift

Finding it hard to peel myself away from GW2 at the moment, not to mention that I'll have less time than usual to play over the next two or three weeks. Frustrating in a way because there's just so much going on. Feast is better than famine though, so let's hear no complaints.

On the subject of feasts, there's some kind of Harvest Festival going on in Telara right now. Thanks to the excellent RiftLite I was able to drop in and say hello to my old pal Atrophinius. He's an odd duck and his Plane of Life is an odd pond. We never seem to be quite as "at war" with the Plane of Life as we are with the others, what with druids having Fairy pets and old Atrophinius here turning up every so often with a few barrels of mead.

This time he had me grabbing pumpkins to decorate his little patch of Faeland. I found mine in a Water rift. Hydroponics reaches Telara.


On the far side of Silverwood, which always seems like it half belongs in the Plane of Life anyway, I found the way into what I took to be a Sliver. Can't say for sure - never been in one before. Lots of vendors setting up in there, plenty of things to do, pests to kill and so forth. If only I had time to help out, over there's just some of what I could have won. >>>

On the way I bumped in some treants. It's been a while, but I don't remember them looking quite like this. Their new model or my poor memory? Both, most likely.

I'm always surprised by how gorgeous Telara looks. It stacks up well even against GW2. The gritty, digital feel is quite pleasantly abrasive after the painterly washes of Tyria. I'm very curious to see what the new continents look like.

There's a great offer coming up - unrestricted free access to Rift for four days from November 7th to 11th for anyone who ever had a subscription. Better still, it ties in with the big Storm Legion lead-up event. Definitely going to clear time in my busy MMO calendar for that.

Whether I can hold out until the New Year before buying the expansion we shall see. I wouldn't go betting the farm. Not even the Panda Farm. Especially not after this...