Out But Not Down

I'm short of ideas for a proper post today, or at least ideas that won't take hours to put into words and pictures. Can't even come up with anything much that'd run to a few paragraphs and make up a Grab Bag. 

I do have a few little squibs to throw out, though. Let's see what comes of that.

Hmm. I wonder how many people reading this will know what a squib is and why someone would throw one?  I just googled it to see what would come up.  

Wikipedia has a whole piece on explosive devices as used by the military and in special effects for movies, which wasn't at all what I was thinking of. The folks at Oxford know what I'm talking about, though:

"1. a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding

2. a short piece of satirical writing." 

That's exactly what I had in mind. The first one, anyway, although the second is handily close, too. Not that there's going to be a lot of satire here but a short piece of writing was exactly what I was getting, although I was using the firework as a metaphor to get there, which seems a little tautological now I come to think about it. 

When I was a child, Fireworks Night, which was what we generally called it, rather than November 5th or Guy Fawkes, was a Big Deal. I could do a whole nostalgic number here on the ritual of buying the fireworks a couple of weeks in advance, bringing them home and lining them all up on top of the piano so I could look at the brightly-colored wrappers every day and imagine setting them off...

I'll save you all that self-indulgent claptrap. The point is, on the actual night, my extended family, including my cousins, would start the evening by standing in the dark in the crazy-paved courtyard, tossing lit squibs at each others' feet. I loved to make one of my cousins scamper! 

What? No, no-one got set on fire or even singed! Well, maybe a bit singed... It was, as they say, a different time...

Where was I? Oh, yes...

 

Outbound Isn't Inbound After All

Well, it is... It'll just be a bit late.  

Remember Outbound? It's the game where you drive around some very pretty scenery in a camper van, solving mysteries of an extremely cosy nature. I played the demo in Next Fest and reviewed it here. 

I liked it. What's more, I thought it had promise. In fact, I thought it had so much promise I chose it for my imaginary game publisher, Pretty Blue Fox Games, in Wilhelm's Fantasy Gaming League. Anyone want to chip in with why I called it that? Don't google it!

Crossover readers of both blogs may remember that I was the unlikely winner of the inaugural season back in 2025. I'd love to be able to tell you I was on track to repeat my success this year but in fact I have yet to see any game I've picked launch at all. 

Outbound was going to be the first with a release date of April 23rd but there was an announcement today that launch has been delayed almost a month to May 14th. The stated reason is the late identification of "an issue... that could negatively impact your enjoyment of the game." I suppose that's a good thing. Still annoying, though.

It means my first scheduled launch will now be Mixtape on May 7th. Assuming that doesn't get put back as well. At this rate we'll be half way through the season before I have a single game on the board. And looking at the rest of my slate, I might not have many more by the end. I might ought to rethink.

 

Why Does EverQuest Legends Even Need To Be An MMORPG?

Obviously the answer is "Because it's EverQuest, dumbass!" but that's a recursive argument, isn't it? Sure, it's EverQuest but it's an EverQuest you can solo. 

Not an EverQuest where you can solo. That would be a very different concept. Or rather a very familiar one. To me, at least.

You could solo in EverQuest very effectively and enjoyably in 1999. I did and so did thousands of others. After they added custom chat channels, I was in one for a while that was dedicated to soloists and it was very busy. Nearly everyone was a Necromancer but there were a few Bards and Druids and probably a Wizard or Magician or two in there, somewhere, all soloing away happily. Okay, not always happily....

No, EverQuest Legends is supposed to be a version of EQ you can solo as in Game Over. Every last mob, quest, dungeon and even raid you'll be able to complete without any help from anyone. Mostly in instances. Where there will be only you, if that's your preference.

So why does it need to be an MMORPG? Conceptually, I mean. 

I don't have any problem with it being one. Nothing wrong with a graphical chat channel where lots of people can play the same game alongside each other and shoot the breeze as they go. People have used MMOs like that as long as there have been MMOs. 

It seems, though, that EverQuest Legends could equally well be packaged and sold as a single-player, open world RPG. An offline RPG at that. It could have co-op for grouping. After all, group size is going to be just four people and raids are only eight. The whole "Massively Multiple" part seems like overkill.

I was thinking about all that partly because I'd been reading about the upcoming Closed Beta, to which I have not been invited (And for which I would now most probably not accept an invite anyway, since there's going to be a strict NDA...) but mostly because something very similar did just happen to another would-be MMORPG. 

 

Tiny Gets Tinier

Book of Travels was an MMORPG that I never understood. From memory - and this may not be entirely accurate - it was a Kickstarted game that promised to bring some very slow gameplay to a small population of pacifists. The term "Tiny MMO" got thrown around a lot although exactly what that was supposed to mean I didn't know then and don't know now.

Unlike some Kickstarters in the genre, Book of Travels did at least get as far as Early Access, where it drifted along for the best part of five years, never really going anywhere and making about as much impact as you'd expect of something so tiny. If you're interested in the details, MassivelyOP has a history primer on the game, complete with links. 

Probably to no-one's surprise, Might and Delight, the company behind BoT (Unfortunate acronym, there. Does no-one think of these things before the press releases go out?) has finally thrown in the towel, announcing the closure of the servers (Or probably server, singular, I imagine.) on July 31st.

What is a little more surprising is that Book of Travels won't disappear altogether when the servers go dark. It will convert into an offline game, presumably one no longer even Tinily Multiple and definitely not Online.

Something very similar happened to Nightingale, a much more successful and popular game that still couldn't scratch up enough interest to justify the MMO tag. It makes me wonder how many of these MMORPG projects, Kickstarted, Indie or even occasionally with major studio backing, would have been better conceived as single-player or co-op RPGs in the first place. I mean, it's nice that they're getting a kind of after-market half-life when they fail but maybe we could have skipped the painful process of disappointment and decline and gone straight to the end result.

The odd side-effect of this particular development spiral is that, having not thought about the game for years and never having had the least interest in playing it with other people, I'm now feeling curious enough to give it a try. As an offline game it's going to retail for just $4.99 on Steam so it's hardly a big investment just to find out if there was ever anything there. 

Perhaps the really unusual decision the developers have made, though, is not only to allow modding of the game but to actively encourage it. That's starting even before the shutdown, too. I get it for the offline version but how you mod an active MMORPG beats me. Maybe it never really was an MMO to begin with?

And that's all I have. Managed to stretch it out quite nicely, I think. Just time for a closing song, as is the Grab Bag tradition. Hmm. I guess this was a Grab Bag after all...

What shall we have? Plenty of choice. This was nearly a music post, I have so many songs stored up. I thought I'd save that for Friday or Saturday, though. End the week with some bangers.

Now, when I say "bangers", does everyone know that's what we used to call these little fireworks we'd throw around, back in the day...

 I Know - Swapmeet

I literally just found that! It was in the recommends for the track I was going to use and I had a good feeling about the thumbnail. Boy, was I right!

If this was a music post I'd follow it with... 

 

idk idk idk idk idk idk idk idk - Jim Legxacy

And my work here is done! 

I swear I missed my vocation. I should have been a radio DJ. 

For Every Dawn, There's A Sunset

 

Here we are on Thursday with the sun shining brightly outside and the buds beginning to pop on the trees. What better time to say goodbye to an old favorite?

Well, an old favorite of mine, anyway. Not, I imagine, of anyone else. 

Who remembers Dawnlands? Hands up... 

No-one? Okay, then.

There are fifteen posts tagged "Dawnlands" here and most of them are all about my time with the game, which ranks sixth in my Steam library by hours played at 105. The last time I wrote about that was on April 29, 2024, when I made a brief visit in the wake of the close-down of another of my favorite games of recent years, Noah's Heart.  

Back then, as I wrote, "I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer." I was right about that, although in the event Dawnlands hung on a while longer than I expected. It's still up as I write this but the servers are due to go down for good on 27 March.

Not that you'd know unless you were paying very close attention indeed. I only found out because I happened to see a passing comment about the closure when I was looking for something entirely different. I didn't get an email or see a news item about it on Steam. There's been no word at all from Seasun Games on the platform since December 2023. I had to go to the official website and hunt around until finally I found this closure notice under the News tab.

There's no mention of the shut-down on the Steam Store page, where you can still download the game. Since it's free to play that's not such a problem as it might be but even so, you'd think they might want to warn potential new players of the extremely short time they'll have to enjoy that new game they just downloaded.

Except, of course, there aren't likely to be any new players. That's why the game is closing down. Lack of interest.

It's not that no-one's playing. Dawnlands isn't a dead game, or at least not for a couple of weeks or so yet. Steam records a fairly consistent population over the last year of between fifty and a hundred players, mostly hovering around eighty. There are plenty of games with a lot fewer people playing than that.

 

Still, it's obviously not a viable population for a commercial product, especially one that relies on micro-transactions to keep it going. Then again, Steam isn't the only way to play. Dawnlands is available on mobile devices via both Android and iOS and there's a stand-alone installer for Windows you can download directly from the publisher.

All of those platforms together must not add up to enough income to keep the servers running, or so I have to assume. It's always possible the company has just lost interest in maintaining it but I imagine if it wasn't costing them money they'd have just let it run silent as they have for the last two years.

All of which raises the question of why Dawnlands ever needed to be a live service game in the first place. As Tyler F. M. Edwards asked in his MassivelyOP piece on the about-to-launch horse mystery MMO Equinox Homecoming, "Why is this a multiplayer live service game?"

Dawnlands doesn't even have the excuse that it's trying to be an MMO. You can play up to four-person co-op or solo. There's absolutely no need for it to be a live service game at all, other than to support the business model. It's cartoon Valheim and Valheim has an offline mode. So could Dawnlands - if it was buy-to-play.

Here's the thing. All of these solo and co-op open-world survival-and-craft games, of which there must by now be hundreds, if not thousands, would work perfectly well, not to say better, as buy-to-play titles. It's perfectly possible to be successful using that model as we've seen with Enshrouded, which fully supports offline play.

It's also possible to retro-fit an offline version onto the business model if the live service route fails, as happened with Nightingale. The conversion was a bit clunky, sure, but it works. But Nightingale was also buy-to-play.

With a free-to-play model, though, there's very little incentive for a developer to offer any kind of local solution. Why would they? You get what you paid for and you paid for nothing which is exactly what you're left with when the servers go down. Seems fair.

All of which is a bit notional, if I'm honest. It makes little difference to me whether the games I play persist or don't any more. I rarely go back and never for long.

Still. the collector in me would love to have a copy of the game stored safely away and the nostalgist would like to be sure he could drop back in whenever he felt like taking another look around the old place. It's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have, as Don Covay used to say, even if by "need" you mean indulge the occasional whim.

 

Realistically, I would never have played the game in any meaningful fashion again even if the servers stayed up until doomsday. I last logged into Dawnlands on 27 September 2025, when all I did was wander about aimlessly for a few minutes, soaking up the ambience, before logging out and forgetting all about it. If the game wasn't about to close down, I certainly wouldn't be here writing about it now.

The same applies to any number of titles. Looking at my Steam library, it's unlikely I'll ever again spend a serious amount of time with any of the dozen most-played games I see there. I do, occasionally, log in to a few - Valheim, Nightingale, Once Human, Bless Unleashed, Rift, New World... but the only ones I might ever spend any significant time with again are the MMORPGs and then only if something new happens there.

MMORPGs do need to be both online and Live Service. They rely on lots of players sharing the same space and they stagnate without a continuing stream of new content. When either or, worse, both of those stop, there probably isn't much of an alternative to closing the whole thing down, at least as far as the official, money-making operation goes. They may live on in an emulated afterlife but in most cases only as museum pieces. 

For MMORPGs there's also no real prospect of any kind of offline port. It would be nice for nostalgia but without a population much of the content would be meaningless.

For most other genres, though, and particularly for single-player or co-op titles, there seems to be no good reason, other than money, why they ever needed an online connection or had to be played on someone else's hardware in the first place. I don't generally have a lot of sympathy with the Stop Killing Games initiative but the evidence against both the Live Service and the Online Connection Required models does seem to be piling up now. It's being applied indiscriminately and it doesn't suit many games at all.

I'm a long-time advocate of the better free-to-play payment models but I'd have to acknowledge that what you gain on the ease of access roundabout you often lose on the long-term stability swings. The F2P revolution has meant I've been able to play far more games than I otherwise would but also that many of them are no longer available to me now.

 

Which begs the question would I have wanted them to be? Would I even ever have played most of them at all? 

For example, had Dawnlands been a buy-to-play title retailing at $30, would I have bought it? Almost certainly not. There are dozens of better games at lower prices on my wishlist and I'm not ponying up for those.

There must be scores of games where I spent many entertaining sessions that I would never have played at all, had I had to pay at the door. It renders the question of how much longer those games would have lasted had they charged an entry fee entirely moot, at least for me.

On balance, I think I prefer to have more new games available at zero cost, even in the knowledge they may only hang around for a year or two. Why pay just for the security of knowing I could play them forever when I know I'd only play for a while and then never think of them again?

More to the point, how many would I buy anyway? Even the really good ones stay on the shelf. I still haven't bought Enshrouded, for example, even though I played and enjoyed the demo and keep reading about what a good game it is and how it's getting better all the time.

I guess the flip to that coin is that I can buy Enshrouded any time I feel flush. And having bought it, I can play it for as long as it interests me. It feels like a very theoretical advantage all the same. That's exactly what happened with Nightingale and am I ever going to play that again? I doubt it.

I don't have a good answer to this one. It seems like there are strong arguments on both sides. I guess the ideal would be for the games to be both free-to-play and offline but that's a pipe dream. No-one's making any money with that.

As for Dawnlands, I'll remember it fondly. I had some good times there. Like some holiday I took years ago, though, if I want to relive the experience I have my screenshots and the posts I wrote about it. I'm happy for it to remain a pleasant memory and I'm glad I had the chance to enjoy it while it lasted.

If anyone else had it in mind to get around to playing some day - tough. You missed your chance. 

The Gallery Is Closing. Please Take All Your Memories With You.

This is going to be a bit of a sad one. Also quite short, possibly, because I don't think I have whole lot to say about it. Sometimes you just have to make the effort, anyway.

So, I read yesterday that Occupy White Walls is closing down. For those who don't remember, which I'm going to guess is nearly everyone reading this, OWW was one of the oddest, most idiosyncratic of all MMORPGs. There was and still is nothing like it and most likely never will be, which may explain why it's going away.

The game, if we're going to call it that, which we probably shouldn't because if there was a game in there, I never found it, will shut down for good almost exactly a month from now, on 16 March. It hasn't had a bad run. It first became available to the public eight years ago although the exact date is a little hard to pin down. 

I can say when I started playing. I first downloaded the client in May of 2018, when it was in open alpha, although as I mentioned in the post I wrote about it at the time I'd seen the name floating around before then. 

OWW was all about art but one of the exciting features of the project was the way it claimed to use AI. Thatit was something everyone seemed both proud to be associated and excited to engage with then. How times have changed. 

Of course, AI back then didn't mean what it does now. The AI in OWW was called DAISY and all she wanted to do was learn what kind of art you liked and show you more of it. Who could be scared about that?

Well, maybe not scared but uneasy? Sure. 

I included a video, still available on YouTube, in which Fevir, the video-maker, describes the process of interacting with DAISY as "uncomfortable". He said it made him "uneasy" and put him "on edge". He specifically didn't like the way the machine not only seemed to learn about him but then was able to prove to him that it was possible to "like things you don't think you like". If only he'd know what was coming!

Forget about the AI, though, which in any case back in 2018 would have been a plain old algorithm given a cute name and gussied up to look smarter than it was. What was OWW like as an MMORPG?

As far as the RPG aspect went, it did have progression of a kind. There were no levels or skills per se but you could open up more features and extend the scope of your existing abilities by displaying more art and attracting more visitors. 

All your abilities related either to acquiring more pictures or expanding your building options. Both were essential. The be-all and end-all of the game was building art galleries and as MMO housing goes, OWW was right up there with the best.

As for the Massively Multiple part, I was never entirely sure how that fitted in. There was always the option to visit other players' galleries, but I can't recall there being any shared spaces where players actually met and hung out together. The visitors who came to look at the art in my gallery and paid me in-game currency for the experience were all NPCs. 

Or I thought they were. Honestly, I'm not sure how I would have known. Players and NPCs used the same abstract avatars. It was all a bit confusing... 

I didn't want to interact with others, anyway. I spent almost all my time building my one gallery and I was pretty happy with both the process and the result. As in all games with building systems, though, anything I was ever going to build was always going to look primitive compared to what others were able to put together. 

It was possible even in alpha to make some very impressive structures and spaces and after the game went into Early Access those options expanded enormously. People were able to replicate real-world galleries with considerable precision as well as to create their own spectacular display spaces that breached the laws of physics.

I did not do any of that. I went for a clean, minimalist look that felt fresh and open. I enjoyed being in that space a lot.

Even so, I didn't really spend that much time in the game. Steam tells me I racked up just short of eighteen hours, which would be a very decent run for a single-player game but wouldn't normally be enough to get you out of the starter zone in an old school MMORPG. And the last time I played was June 2022.

There were two reasons I stopped. The first was that I'd finished my gallery and although by then they'd added the option of building others, I didn't want to start a new one. As I said, I was satisfied with what I'd made. It felt finished.

The second and more significant reason I lost interest was the shift in emphasis by the developers from promoting what felt like an educational tool for discovering and learning abut fine art to creating a free-for-all in which nothing had cultural weight or value. I did not like the new direction.

The closure notice sums up the change of philosophy well, when it describes DAISY as "the AI that treats everyone's taste as equally valid" and talks about "connecting artists with audiences" and making art "accessible, democratic and personal". All very laudable ambitions, I'm sure, but the effect was to turn a guided tour through the history of art into a chaotic jumble of unfiltered images of indeterminate interest, quality or technique.

As the scope of the project expanded, I found it harder and harder to get DAISY to show me anything I wanted to see. Whereas at the beginning it had felt like being given a personalized lecture on great art, now it felt like being button-holed at a convention by a bunch of would-be artists, all intent on showing you their portfolios. 

That very much seems to have been the intention. OWW may be closing down but the company behind it, StikiPixels, is very keen to assure everyone the project will continue. At some point in the life of the MMORPG they span DAISY off into a side-project called Kultura, which gives you much the same experience, only on a website instead of in a game. Kultura carries on undaunted after OWW ends.

I'm guessing it must be a lot cheaper to keep a website up than to host an MMORPG because cost is the sole reason OWW is going away. The game has always been truly free-to-play, bringing in no income at all. Keeping the servers up costs $3,000 a month and the developers have been funding the servers out of their own pockets since 2022. Unsurprisingly, they've decided they just can't afford it any longer. (And if you look at the Steam Charts it's hard to see why they've kept going this long...)

It's a shame because, as I said, they had a great building game going there for a while. I imagine that was the aspect that interested them the least but leaning into it harder might have been the only way they'd ever have made some money.

They aren't giving up on the idea of melding art with gaming entirely, all the same. They say the original motivation to make OWW was a realization that there were no video games about art (Not true at all but it's what they said...) and eight years later "the idea that started all this hasn't stopped being exciting to us."

They're not promising anything but they might be back, one day. I hope so. Whatever OWW might not have been, it was original, ambitious and for nearly eighteen hours of my life, fun. They say, "if it happens, it might be a very long time from now, and it might look nothing like what you remember" and that's as it should be. Let's not go back over the same old ground for once.

In that spirit, I won't be revisiting my gallery to, as they suggest, "Take screenshots. Record videos. Stream it. Capture the spaces you built". I'd have to re-install the client for one thing and anyway I have plenty of screenshots and several blog posts to remember my gallery by already. 

And I know from experience that all those videos I take when a game is about to sunset just sit there, taking up hard drive space and gathering virtual dust. What's lost when an MMORPG sunsets can't be regained by watching a moving image. You have to be there.

I'm glad I was. 

It's The End Of New World As We Knew It

I imagine everyone reading this has already heard the news about about New World. If not, brace yourselves.

The final curtain falls on 31 January 2027. At that point the servers will be closed, never to re-open. If you own the game, you're welcome to carry on playing until then. If you never got around to buying it, well you're too late now. It went off sale yesterday.

I'm not going to do an obituary post or any kind of elegy. There's still over twelve months left to go and it's very likely I'll play some more before then. Plenty of time to for a final tour and some screenshots to remember things by.

If you want a full and accurate rundown of how things got to this sorry pass, Wilhelm has an excellent overview. I'm just going to post a few pictures for now.

I'd have liked to post some older shots. Maybe even some of the ones I took in the first closed beta and was never allowed to share. I don't imagine anyone's going to be chasing me down for breaking that NDA now. Unfortunately, everything older than a couple of months is on one of the hard drives in my old computer so that will have to wait. 

For now, here are a few pictures of Aeternum as it is and will be for the rest of this year. And the beginning of the next. And then never again.

It took three of us to kite that giant turkey. I wonder if there will even be three people left by next Thanksgiving? 

One thing I do plan on doing before the final year is out is upgrading from a wolf to a lion. Or is it a tiger? Some kind of cat, anyway...

If there's one thing I won't miss about the game it's probably the clothes. I understand the aesthetic but I never liked it. 

The environments, though, and the countryside: those I will miss.

Of course, there's always the very slim chance Amazon might relent and sell the game to someone else. Unfortunately, they don't need the small change any of the likely buyers would be able to offer. Or, for that matter, the big bucks, were anyone to come with a real proposal. 

I strongly suspect they'd prefer the game to disappear altogether, not hang around like some kind of revenant, calling into question the company's poor decision-making and inability to come up with even a single, successful game.

For the same reason, they might not be quite as amenable to an emulator as many game developers. Still, a year is a long time to leave the game running. Plenty of time for people to data-mine everything necessary to clone it after it's gone.

My guess is that we won't see a working version after the official servers go dark but I'd be very happy to see myself proved wrong. New World was and still is a pretty good MMORPG. It deserved better. 

New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company at all. It never was. 

Who Will Look After The Mounts?

Yesterday brought some gaming news that should have been at least mildly upsetting but somehow felt more confusing than emotional. The game in question is Riders of Icarus, which I played for a good few months back in...

... hang on a moment. 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a technical announcement. It appears there's now some kind of limit to the number of Labels that Blogger can list at the foot of a post. 

For many years I've been used to skimming down the ever-growing list to find the Label I want. Until today that list has always gone all the way to the end of the alphabet. Now it only goes as far as "E". 

To ESO, to be precise. Then it just says "Analytics" and stops. I checked the maximum number of Labels per blog allowed by Blogger and it's 5,000. Even I'm nowhere near that. A quick check shows nothing has changed in the Layout and a google search doesn't find anyone else complaining about it so I have no idea what's happened. 

Whatever it is, I hope it sorts itself out soon because I use that function a lot to check how frequently topics have appeared here. I can still find out what I wrote by using the Search facility but I'm damned if I'm going to go through and count all the posts individually.

We'll have to take it on faith, then, that I did post about Riders of Icarus quite a few times. It was back around the time of the pandemic or maybe just before that I spent the most time with the game. I liked it and said so. I wouldn't claim it was a great MMORPG in any way but it was pretty to look at, fun to play and seemed particularly generous with its giveaways.

You'll remember the USP was flight. Unlike all those games that added flight as an afterthought or because everyone else was doing it, only to find it caused all kinds of problems, RoI was built around the idea that you'd be flying everywhere right from the start. Lots of locations were only accessible from the air and aerial combat was a big part of the gameplay.

There were plenty of flying mounts to collect, some of them quite spectacular. I had a skywhale with a gondola that I liked for posing, although for practical purposes I preferred my various birds or my flying inflatable dolphin. There were plenty of nice-looking ground mounts too. It was a very mount-oriented game.

Character design was solid and there were lots of cosmetic options you didn't need to pay real money for. I spent quite a while playing dress-up, which was more fun than the questing or the combat, at least for the most part. I have fond memories of the game, to which I returned several times for short runs but by the time I stopped playing I'd pretty much done as much as I wanted there.

The game had a very checkered development and ownership history. I remember losing access to it completely for several months when it changed hands although I did eventually get my account back. There was some nonsense abut it becoming a "Pay-to-Earn" title with some crypto-blockchain baggage attached but by that time I wasn't really paying close attention any more. 

A week or two back, I read that there were going to be server merges, then that those had been cancelled. Now the sad news is that the game will sunset on 15 May. 

I say "sad" and I'm sure it will be for the relatively small number of people still playing (Around a hundred at peak on Steam these days but I'm not at all sure most players would be going through Steam. I wasn't.) but I can't say it's making me feel anything stronger than mild disappointment.

Puzzled, too. MMOBomb reports that at almost the same time Valofe were announcing the end of the game they were also sending out press releases and trailers for new content. That seems about par for the course with this game, whose messaging has been chaotic for several years.

I have no idea whether Riders of Icarus has the kind of fans who would be likely to respond to this kind of existential threat by setting up some kind of emulator or private server but I do think the game deserves it. It's exactly the sort of MMORPG that could potentially improve under collective administration by people who play it. It would certainly be hard for a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to be worse custodians than the professionals who ran it into the ground.

It's not that unlikely an outcome, either. The game had over a million players once. That's easily a big enough pool of former players to justify and support an afterlife in the grey space of the emulation world. Twin Saga managed it so I see no reason why RoI shouldn't.

Even if it happens, it's still unlikely I'd play again. Or, I should say, it's unlikely I'd play in any way that could be called "serious", even in the context of casual gameplay. I have plenty of better games I'm not playing seriously before I'd get to this one.

It is, however, entirely possible - likely, even - that I might make the effort to re-install the game and give it a final fly-by before the servers shut down for good. There are a few farewell events scheduled. Those might be fun.

It would depend on whether I could get my old characters back. As I said, I never played through Steam. I imagine I have my old login details somewhere but I've uninstalled the original client. It is still downloadable from the website but who knows how long that will last? If I'm going to bother, I guess I should get on with it.

The thing is, whereas once the news of a game I once enjoyed closing down would have disturbed me more than somewhat, these days I barely feel a frisson of anxiety. I think it's experience rather than ennui. This sort of thing has happened a lot in the quarter of a century I've been playing MMORPGs. It doesn't feel shocking any more. It barely feels worrisome at all.

I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a single game that I'd be truly upset over not being able to play any more. Not in the way I was disturbed by the disappearance of Vanguard or City of Steam or Rubies of Eventide, all games I still sometimes miss even now. 

Partly it's because experience suggests almost every MMORPG above a certain size (And a fair few a lot smaller, too.) will still be playable in some form long after the legal owners shut them down. There are exceptions, like Wildstar, but nearly every game you can remember closing probably has an emulator running somewhere.

Mostly, though, it's that I don't play MMORPGs in the serially-obsessive way I used to. My days are no longer structured around those sessions. If I couldn't play any of them, I'd find other things to do.

Mostly, I'd miss my characters. I would have some issues if I couldn't drop in on them and see how they're getting along, whenever the mood takes me. 

Even there, though, it's something I think about doing far more often than actually doing it. I have all those characters in Guild Wars 2 that I lived with daily for a decade and I haven't popped by to check on a single one of them since I dropped the game three years ago.

I'd have to say I think it's a healthier outlook. I can remember that feeling, when you learn a game you love is going to close down. It's disproportionately unpleasant when considered objectively. Playing games shouldn't be that important, should it? Especially not playing specific games.

We'll see how sanguine I am about it when EG7 goes down the pan and all the Daybreak titles close down overnight. That'll be a test of emotional separation, alright.

Until then, I'm sorry to see Riders of Icarus go. The game deserved better than Valofe gave it. They weren't good custodians. Maybe something better lies ahead for the game in someone else's care. Let's hope so.

Going Gently Into The Good Night

It's Easter weekend. The sun is shining. The trees are coming into leaf. It's the time when everything springs back into life after the long, hard winter.

Or not.

Noah's Heart is set to sunset next month.

On the 29th of April, to be precise. It launched on 28 July 2022 so that's not even two years. I really liked Noah's Heart but honestly I'm surprised it even lasted that long.

As the MassivelyOP report notes, Archosaur, the game's publisher, never really did much - or anything - to promote the title. I can't remember seeing anything about it post-launch. Certainly nothing at all in the last twelve months.

Of course, it's a cross-platform title, playable on Android and iOS as well as PC, so I was never sure whether the complete lack of promotion for the version I was playing also applied to the mobile versions. I've played quite a few such titles and it often seems that it's the mobile players who are keeping the games afloat, with PC players something of an after-thought.

Not so well. The world is ending, in case you hadn't heard.

In this case, though, it does seem to be quite the extreme version of that benign neglect. MOP point out that news of updates has "been kept largely to the client and its existing players" but when I logged in last night to have a look I couldn't see any mention of the closure in the game itself. 

Even the link in the MOP article that goes to the official announcement doesn't take you to the website's front page. It goes to the "News" section, which is only available from a small button in the header. 

As you can see from the screenshot below, taken the day after the closure was announced, the landing page still shows the game as up and running with a massive "Available Now" banner right across the middle. 

And I guess it is. For one more month.

Redbeard asked in the comments to yesterday's post for my thoughts on the closure, given my heavy coverage of the game in the past. There are fifty-nine posts here with the Noah's Heart tag, after all. You might well expect I'd be sad. Or upset. Or pissed.

I'm not any of those things, not really. Mildly disappointed, sure, but not surprised, let alone shocked. As I said, I've been expecting it for a while. And of course, I stopped playing a few months ago. It's not like I'm in the middle of anything

It's an odd thing to say about an MMORPG that lasted less than two years but I think it had a pretty good run. Or maybe I should say I had a pretty good run with Noah's Heart. While my early posts tell some adventure stories, most of the later ones focus on housing and fashion. I played close on every day for more than a year and a lot of that time was spent working on furnishing my house and making my character look good.

I did do other stuff. I liked exploring and the asynchronous PvP was fun. There were some good stories, too, at least for a while. The game does have some kind of through-line narrative. It might even be interesting if you could follow it. It's certainly quirky and amusing in places and even thrilling on occasion. Unfortunately, much of it is so badly translated as to be almost incomprehensible, especially in the later stages.

It may as well be both of us. I mean, what's the point now? It's all over.

I finished all the "Season" stories until they stopped coming but I never finished that main storyline although, even with the problems with translation, it wasn't because I lost interest. It was because it got too hard. 

As with Genshin Impact, I gave up on the main quest because I couldn't win the battles any more. Either I'm not good enough at action-combat or I'm not prepared to pay money to engage with the gacha mechanics to upgrade my characters sufficiently to compete. It's both, actually.

Luckily for me, unlike Genshin Impact, which quickly lost my interest when I couldn't win my fights, I had no trouble finding plenty to do in Noah's Heart without needing to do any combat at all. Mostly I did the extensive selection of dailies and worked on gaining affection with various Phantoms so they'd give me the recipes to craft the nifty-looking clothes they were wearing. 

The main reason I stopped playing towards the back end of last year was that I'd BFF'd all the Phantoms who had anything I wanted. I spent a good while going through all the rest of them in detail and there wasn't a single item of clothing left I could imagine my character wearing so I felt I was done.

Why? It's not like there's anywhere to run.

I could have carried on working on my house but again, I was happy enough with the way I had it set up. It didn't feel like it would be worth the effort required to upgrade it any further so once again, I felt I'd done all I wanted to.

If Archosaur had still been adding content to the game that might all have changed but they weren't. For the first six months there was a torrent of new content, much of it very entertaining. That slowed down to a trickle and eventually stopped altogether. 

Sometimes when that happens, live service games enter a kind of unnanounced maintenance mode and just carry on indefinitely. I could name a good few like that. Sometimes, though, they just close down. 

I used to dread games I played closing down. I even dreaded the end of games I once played but wasn't playing any longer. Now, it doesn't really affect me all that much. If it's a game I'm playing it's a bit annoying. If it's a game I've stopped playing, it's fine.

Everything has its time. For some online games that time seems to be measured in decades. For others it's months. And anyway, as we all are starting to realize, the end doesn't have to mean The End. Games come back, legally or illegally. They're about as hard to kill as super-heroes.

I can see the end approaching.

Noah's Heart won't come back. No-one is going to emulate it. No-one is going to buy it. It's dead, or it will be by the end of April. That's a shame. It was a good game in its way and I'm sure it was someone's favorite and they'll be distraught. Unfortunately, it was never going to be enough players' favorite game. It's a crowded marketplace and there's too much choice.

I've had my Noah's Heart screenshot folder set as my desktop background source for more than a year now. The image changes every ten minutes and there are enough screenshots in there that I don't see the same ones that often. 

Because of that, although I'd stopped playing, I've still been looking at my character every day. But even before the closure news broke, I'd been thinking it was probably about time for a change.

I have my screenshots all backed up. I have the posts I wrote. I can go back and relive the things I did in Noah's Heart any time I want. The best ones, anyway. 

That's what matters. The memories. 

Being able to play the game really isn't all that important. 

Not any more.

Comings And Goings

It's Friday! I have a bunch of things bookmarked that won't make posts of their own. Guess what that means!

Oh, and when I said "It's Friday!" I meant it was Friday when I wrote this. I imagine it's Saturday now, if you're reading it the day I published it. Or if not, well, it could be any day. Even Friday. Just... a different Friday.

Anyway, now we've gotten that all cleared up...

A Little Bit Country...

Let's start with Lana. And Beyoncé. Always the bridesmaids, never the brides, eh? Well, apparently. I keep reading about how both of them are being perpetually snubbed by the Grammys, although with thirty-two wins out of eighty-eight nominations, you could hardly say Beyoncé has been ignored. She just has never won the Big One, Album of the Year. 

Lana, on the other hand, has only been nominated eleven times, out of which she's won precisely no Grammys. I think we have a clear winner! Or maybe I mean loser.

Anyway, that's not the connection between the two icons, idols and (super)stars I came here to talk about. No, it's something a lot odder than that. According to various sources, they both plan on going Country for their next album. 

Lana, it's definite. She said so herself. The album even has a name: Lasso. You can't get more country than that. And it's not even all that surprising. She's guested with country singers, covered country songs and according to Lana even her breakout hit, Video Games, was "kind of country". 

I think Lana's definition of "country" might just shade over into Americana, though. Lana is definitely Americana in spirit even though rarely if ever in sound.

Beyoncé, however, is not an artist I've ever associated with any stripe of country music - country&western, country rock, alt-country, Americana, whatever. That said, as I have repeatedly apologized, I am nowhere near as familiar with her work as I ought to be. 

It does seem she has more form in the field than I would have guessed; she submitted a song - Daddy Lessons from  Lemonade - for consideration in the "Country" category. It was not accepted but I'm listening to it now and it sure sounds country to me.

The main reason people are saying her next album will be all country, all the way though, seems to be that she wore a cowboy hat to this year's award ceremony. I'm not sure headgear is always a solid indication of musical direction although it does hold true for Tom Waits. And Noddy Holder, for that matter. 

I kinda hope it's true in this case, though. Maybe that'll be my way in.

Going, Going...

Some video-game-sad news that's barely been reported: one of the weirdest, wildest, least-easily-pigeon-holed games of the last few years, Chimeraland, is about to close its few remaining Western servers at the end of March. Apparently there are Chinese servers that will carry on but as far as I can tell, both the Steam version of the game and the earlier SEA version with servers based (I believe.) in Singapore, will go down. They might be one and the same for all I know.

As anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will remember, I was big into Chimeraland for a while. There are more than thirty posts with the Chimeraland tag here but the last time I logged in was six months ago and that was only for a look-see. 

Knowing the game wouldn't be around much longer, I thought I should probably take one last chance to say goodbye to my characters and take a few final photos of my houses for keepsakes. Unfortunately, I'd already left it too late.

Oh, the servers are still up. I was able to log into the SEA version just fine. Only I'd forgotten that my original character there had already been deleted. As I wrote in that post last September, if you stop playing the game for too long, you can wave your characters goodbye: "You get three months' grace. If you don't log in after that, your characters are wiped." 

Or they were. Mine was. The one I played for several months, when the game first went Live. The Level 2 I made at the time of that post five months ago, though, she's still there. I guess there's no point clearing space for people to make new characters any more.

As for my Steam, it wanted to download a 4GB update, which seemed weird under the circumstances. I let it go ahead but the update stalled after a few minutes and rather than fiddle around with it, I uninstalled the game instead.

I found it all very instructive. A few years back, even the thought of certain MMORPGs shutting down literally brought me out in a cold sweat. When Vanguard shuttered I thought I might need therapy, until the emulator project came along to throw out a lifeline. 

Now, though, I'm not sure I care all that much. I really liked Chimeraland but I still hadn't played it for a long time. If finding out the game was about to sunset wasn't even enough to remind me I'd already lost everything on my original account, I think it would be a little ridiculous to pretend I'm heartbroken.

The slightly uncomfortable fact is that I don't play any MMORPG "seriously" any more. There isn't a single one that currently acts as a tent-pole for my entertainment life, much less the rest of my life, the way half a dozen or more games did in the past. Right now, I think maybe the only potential sunset that would affect me emotionally would be EverQuest II and even there I'd have to factor in the ease with which I get distracted from what I'm doing there, the sporadic way I choose to log in to pursue any goals I do have and the knowledge I already have the icon for an emulator client on my desktop. 

The ever-increasing prevalence of emulators and fan projects for what feels like the majority of supposedly obsolete MMORPGs certainly means an official notice of closure doesn't hold the horror it once did. The ironic comments I used to make about certain games probably outliving me seems less like irony and more like a simple statement of fact with every day that passes.

It's a great shame Chimeraland won't be around for much longer but not because it means I won't be able to play it any more. It's a shame because it was a really good MMORPG with a lot more going for it than many that have lasted much longer. It was fun, original and entertaining but none of those things has ever been enough. So much comes down to luck, timing and marketing. In another reality, Chimeraland could easily have been Palworld, a game it resembles in a number of key ways. If only the developers had thought to make their monsters cuter and give them funnier names...

Gone.

While I was attempting to update Chimeraland, I noticed there was also an update pending for the Once Human closed beta. That seemed odd. I thought the test ended back in January.

I really like Once Human. I stopped playing the beta not because I'd had enough of it but because I was sure I'd be buying it at launch and I didn't want to burn out before then. I thought I'd miss it but as it happened, Palworld came along almost immediately to scratch my survival itch, so I barely even noticed I wasn't playing Once Human any more.

I was curious as to why there might still be a humongous patch waiting to download. I thought maybe they might have extended the beta or even started a new one. I hadn't heard anything but then there seems to be very little coverage of the game anyhere. It wouldn't surprise me if any change of plans had gone unreported.

I downloaded the 5GB patch and logged in. My login still worked. The Enter button was there. There just weren't any servers to log in to.

After some checking, I was able to establish a few things for certain. The beta has ended. No new beta has begun. None has been announced. There is still no launch date.

It is unusual for a closed beta client to keep working after the beta has ended but maybe there are plans to re-use it in the future. Or maybe they just forgot to take it down. Either way, I'm leaving mine where it is... just in case.

Also Gone But Not For Long

I also still have the Nightingale Stress Test client installed. I'm hoping it will be re-useable - with an update, of course - for the upcoming Early Access launch in less than two weeks. Anything to avoid another hefty download. I've searched for information on that but so far I haven't been able to find anything. 

I have, however, seen Inflexion Games' debrief on how the stress test went. It raises a couple of concerns.

Firstly, they seem pleased to have had just under fifty thousand players (Or "unique users" as they put it.) in the test. It even seems that was more people than they expected. Given that Palworld sold millions of copies on the first day and currently has more than nineteen million players, fifty thousand seems either incredibly unambitious or incredibly unlikely to provide adequate testing for launch day. 

It's not just Palworld, either. Enshrouded hit a million players in the first four days and reportedly continues to grow. Palworld and Enshrouded are in the exact, same genre as Nightingale and Nightingale has probably enjoyed considerably more press attention and hype than either. It's going to be very interesting to see whether it can match their sales. Not that anyone's expecting another Palworld but if they don't even manage to match Enshrouded's success, questions will be asked.

The other, mildly concerning statistic from the long list provided is the number of traditional fantasy MMORPG wild animals killed by those fifty thousand players. Nearly three hundred thousand boars and more than a quarter of a million wolves. That's six boars and five wolves for every single player!

To that you can add almost half a million "Bound", which I think were the zombie-like creatures I mentioned in my post. I made a snarky comment at the time about how I might as well have been playing WoW. I think these numbers make that point for me.

I'm sure a lot of it is just a side-effect of dumping everyone in the middle of some woodland filled with bears, wolves and zombies. The actual game is going to be waaaay more original than that. Right?

I guess we'll all find out in a week or so. I know I will. Boars or no boars, I'll be there.

Is This Good News?

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is moving to a six-weekly, seasonal testing schedule. According to the report on MassivelyOP, this means new content every six weeks. 

So far, so ho-hum. The big change, though, isn't the cadence of the updates but who gets to test them. Or play them, if we're going to be honest about it. 

Until now, only the very highest-tier backers have had regular access to the testing process, something that meant an investment in the long-overdue game in the order of a thousand dollars. From the next update, which arrives in barely over a week, on February 17, all backers will get a chance to test each season. Big investors get to play the full six weeks, middling backers get two weeks and bottom-feeders with just a fifty dollar stake get a single week.

I did say, a long time ago, that if they ever started selling access to the game for $50, I'd be in. That, though, was years ago, when Pantheon looked like the most exciting prospect among a clutch of would-be retro-MMORPGs. It was also when Brad McQuaid was still alive to dictate the direction of travel.

I am still interested and fifty dollars for what would, if they stick to their word, be at least two months Pantheon-time per year, doesn't seem like a terrible deal. I would certainly want to be sure there was no NDA because if I can't blog about it I'm not interested. Given that, though...

I still probably won't go for it... yet. Pantheon is interesting, yes, but as this post makes clear, there's a lot going on in the field right now. I'm already going to have to juggle Palworld and Nightingale from the middle of this month and  Once Human and Tarisland are both likely to arrive sooner rather than later. I'm already having trouble fitting the games I have into anything like a schedule. Having to drop everything for a week of Pantheon every other month could be more of an imposition than an opportunity, right now.

Pantheon is, however, quite possibly the only new game Mrs Bhagpuss might want to play. She does occasionally express a mild interest in playing another MMORPG and she has always been curious about this one. Maybe I'll talk to her about it...

And Finally...

It's traditional to end these posts with a song, although we did have one earlier.

Oh, hell. Who am I to break with tradition?

You may remember the last music post ended with me having to choose between Blu DeTiger and Bratty and I chose Blu DeTiger. 

Bratty - you're up!

La Última Vez - Bratty