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

Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

A while back, Tipa posted one of her occasional overviews of the State of the Genre as revealed by Google Trends, in which it becomes immediately obvious that the mmorpgs people are asking Google for information about tend to be... how to put it politely... really old. 

More recently, James Crosby, aka MMOFolklorist, attempted to explain the "MMO Hype Vacuum", the sense he has that no-one really gets revved up by the prospect of a new mmorpg the way they used to.  In another post, he observes that Tarisland,  Tencent's upcoming riposte to World of Warcraft's departure from the Chinese market, potentially one of the biggest global mmorpg launches of recent years, left him hovering "somewhere between apathy and despair".

In the same post, James gives his thoughts on the imminent closedown of Sword of Legend Online, an mmorpg that only launched a couple of years ago. He also mentions Elyon, which launched around the same time and has already drifted off into the sunset. He concludes that, while they "both looked pretty, and they played at least as solidly as any other medium-profile entry into the genre", that simply wasn't enough, the implication being that mmorpg gamers these days demand more of their games than competence, professionalism, sound gameplay and good graphics.

The implication is that every game should be not just good but great. Otherwise they're doomed to fail. 

This morning I read a post by Mailvatar that mentions in passing a sentiment I've heard numerous times, namely a sense of disappointment in what were probably the two most commercially sucessful mmorpg launches of recent times, New World and Lost Ark. Both games very definitely enjoyed a great deal of hype in the run-up to launch, being received almost ecstatically at first, before enthusiasm bled out just as quickly.

Unlike SOLO and Elyon, New World and Lost Ark carry on but with a tiny fraction of their original audience. According to the Steam Charts, in this case an atypically accurate measure, New World has lost 98% of the players it had at peak; Lost Ark has done a little better, only losing 97%.

In terms of news coverage, New World far outranks Lost Ark, about which I struggle to remember when I last heard anything. By contrast, New World continues to feature regularly in multiple news feeds I follow, including some that aren't primarlily gaming-focused. 

Tipa's tally puts both in the same Tier 3 bucket alongside Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Citizen, suggesting those games might also have audiences of similar size. As we know, guessing the population of almost all mmorpgs is a mug's game, so I'm not going to draw any hasty conclusions.

My concern here isn't, for once, the prospective health of the individual games or the genre as a whole as evidenced by the number of people who log in to play each day. It's more of an existential question: if games as relatively well-made and well-received as New World, Lost Ark, Sword of Legends Online or Elyon either aren't good enough to attract an audience to begin with, or to hold the attention of more than a tiny fraction of the audience that they do manage to find, just what is going to be enough to satisfy the current mmorpg player?

Tarisland, when it appears, which would seem to be likely to be sooner rather than later, may indeed turn out to be a complete flop in the West. Certainly, if the quality of the translation evident in the trailers is anything to go by, Tencent don't seem particularly bothered about spending much time or effort on localization. 

Would such a commercial failure tell us more about the cynical way the game might have been conceived and developed or would it just be more evidence to support something we may already suspect about the expectations of the audience, namely that nothing is ever going to be good enough?

As Tipa says about WoW, FFXIV and Old School Runescape, the top three mmorpgs on Google Trends by a very large margin, "These three MMOs are far and away the most popular MMOs in the USA, according to Google Trends, and they have been that way for years. Sometimes one is on top, sometimes another one is, but it’s always one of these three."

Stepping past the always-intriguing question of why this part of the blogosphere barely nods towards any version of Runescape, it's hard to argue against the idea that the mmorpg market, at least in the west, is all but impenetrable to new entrants. New World and Lost Ark have done very well to make it to Tier 3 alongside all those decade old games (And that decade-old alpha.). The massive hype they enjoyed in the build up to launch didn't boost them to glory but I guess we have to acknowledge that still being here two years later is some kind of success in itself.

As for games like Sword of Legends Online and Elyon, widely accepted at launch as being not at all bad and pretty solid for new releases, what chance did they have? I remember there was a glut of new releases around then, including Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Crowfall, Bless Unleashed and more. Just how many players for these types of games are there meant to be, anyway, that half a dozen or more can hope to release in close proximity and still prosper?

This summer doesn't appear to have anything like that crush of new launches but there are a bunch of big titles there or thereabouts on the horizon, from big hitters like Blue Protocol, Throne and Liberty and the aforementioned Tarisland to plucky indies like Palia and Wayfinder. I'm looking forward to trying all of them but do I honestly expect to settle down and play even one for any meanigful amount of time?

In the post I linked earlier, Mailvatar talks very positively about Black Desert Online and Genshin Impact, two games I played and enjoyed when they came out and often think about playing again. They're both successful games by most metrics - they're still running, they get new content regularly, people still talk about them. 

When they were new, though, everyone was talking about them; everyone tried them. How many of those people are still, like Malvatar, playing and enjoying them? How many bloggers are writing about them?

More than play or write about Swords of Legend Online now, that's for sure. More than played or wrote about Elyon before it closed down. More than play or write about PSO2:NG (Although there are some very interesting developments there that deserve attention.)

I feel slightly uncomfortable about the fate of SOLO. The developers issued a very forthright statement outlining the reason the game failed, explaining almost wistfully "The MMO market is fiercely competitive, and despite our best efforts – including the release of the 2.0 update, making the game free to play, as well as further content patches along the way – we’ve found that the player numbers simply aren’t strong enough to sustain the game".

I liked the game quite a lot but I didn't manage to find time to play it even after it went free-to-play. I wanted to. I meant to. I just kept putting it off, thinking I'd get to it one day, when I had time. That day never came and now the game is going away. 

It's not a great loss. If I'd really wanted to play it,I'd have found the time. The thing that makes me uncomfortable isn't any sense of guilt over not supporting a decent mmorpg. It's the worry that no new mmorpg is ever going to be special enough to prise me away from the games I already know and love. Or, indeed, the ones I quite like and am used to.

Worse, I fear the same may be true for a lot more potential players than just myself. I wonder whether all these developers are fooling themselves, believing the audience they're hoping to attract even exists. With the exception of FFXIV, itself an aging game now, how many mmorpgs have successfully been able to poach players from existing titles in the last few years, let alone attract new players to the genre and keep them? ESO, maybe, but that game had a pre-existing single-player audience to draw on.

It would make me wonder why so many developers keep on making mmorpgs except I know why they do it: it's because mmorpgs take upwards of five years to develop and keep a lot of people in work. Provided you can keep raising the investment capital, making mmos is a sustainable business. Running mmorpgs as a live service for years after launch? That's a much bigger gamble.

Nosy Gamer, in his recent review of the Uprising expansion for EVE Online, rates it a success, since it at least stemmed the flow of players leaving the twenty year-old game, but concludes by saying "at the beginning of EVE Online's third decade of operation, staunching the bleeding is not enough. CCP needs to build on the success of Uprising and attempt to grow the game once again". Is this a reasonable - or even a rational - expectation?

Maybe. Although most indicators would seem to suggest the best an mmorpg can hope for is a long, slow decline, populations do ebb and flow. Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars 2 reported spurts of growth recently and Runescape in its various iterations seems to operate entirely by rules of its own, so it's not impossible to imagine player numbers going up in any established title - for a while.

To expect any of them to stay up or even to keep adding new players at a sufficient rate to replace attrition seems a big ask, all the same. And if they were able to manage it, what would it say for the prospects of all those new games coming down the assembly line? While it's not a zero sum game, neither is there an unlimited pool of mmorpg players out there, ready and willing to populate the starting, mid-level and end game zones of every half-decent mmo willing to accomodate them.

As the SOLO devs said, "The MMO market is fiercely competitive". Too competetive for most. What they didn't say but probably were thinking is that the MMO player is too fussy, too fickle and just plain too hard to please. Also spoiled for choice and pampered like some indigent, overgrown princeling, surrounded by barely-touched delicacies and still calling for more.

I wish now I'd played more Swords of Legend Online but, with the best will in the world, I can't play them all. No-one can. And if you're talking about playing them meaningfully, no-one can play more than a handful.  

These days, competition isn't even limited to other mmorpgs, either. Belghast, describing what he calls the "live service dystopia", suggests "a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.". It used to be commonly believed that playing an mmorpg meant you'd not have time for other mmorpgs but now it looks like playing any online game means you won't have time for any other online game, not when those games all have Battle Passes and Seasons and DLC and Expansions that require your full attention, all year round.

None of which is going to stop people making new mmorpgs, if only for the reason that investors and players still seem more than happy to keep throwing money at them - until they actually launch. It's only when the time comes to play the damn things that everyone suddenly loses interest. 

Designing and developing mmorpgs may very well be a sustainable business model. Star Citizen, Ashes of Creation, Pantheon or Camelot Unchained would certainly seem to support that thesis. Maintaining, running, even playing mmorpgs, though? Is there a future in any of that? 

For anyone?

Nothing Lasts Forever

Yesterday Wilhelm at TAGN posted an excellent examination and analysis of the difficulty of launching successful, new mmorpgs in the face of the sheer longevity and resilience of the games already running. As he observed 

"Fans of the genre tend to bemoan its stagnation and blame WoW or free to play or whatever for the fact that things can seem stale.  But the real problem is that old games don’t go away".

And I chipped in with this comment:

"People will insist on banging on about the mmorpgs that close down without ever recognizing the vastly larger pool of games that just keep on going."

I stand by that statement. It's just a shame I chose to make it on the day Gamigo decided to clean house.

In what seems like a particularly insensitive cascade of press releases, the company widely known for acquiring and aggregating mmorpgs announced the closure of four of them. Well, four so far. I imagine players of the remaining dozen or so left in the stable must be chewing their nails.

I can't pretend that the closures affect me deeply, either emotionally or practically. Two of the games, Defiance and Defiance 2050, I've never played. I've thought about playing them, a few times, but never with enough enthusiasm to do anything about it.

 

The latest to be axed, Eden Eternal, I have played. I've mentioned it here a few times. It even has a tag although I've never done a whole post about it.

I think of it as "the mouse game" because when I played my character looked like a giant cartoon mouse. I can't really remember much about the gameplay. I have a feeling it might have been the first mmorpg I ever played that used the "autorun to quest target" option, something that seemed almost magical at the time and which I still appreciate in every game that offers it.

Eden Eternal won't be missed by many in this quadrant of the blogosphere, I suspect. I know Telwyn of Gaming SF played and wrote about it now and again. Maybe a few others might have given it a look once, out of curiosity.

Of course, if it was one of those games that bloggers write about often that would at least suggest there might be enough interest to keep the servers running. When no-one even name-checks your game in passing it's never a good sign.

 

The fourth and thus far final game to be shuttered by Gamigo is the one I'll miss most: Twin Saga. I really liked Twin Saga. It not only gets a tag here but there are two posts dedicated to it specifically, both from 2017, when I played the game for several weeks and got a character to something like level fifty.

It had a gorgeous, vivid cartoon look and a bizarre, surreal, frequently disturbing prose style, whose sheer peculiarity could not be entirely explained away by the usual translation issues.

The thing I'll remember most about Twin Saga, though, is the housing. My character lived in a terracottage, a virtual mansion, complete with conservatory and roof garden, sitting atop a giant tortoise. You can travel the world in your house. And I did. For a while.

Not for long, though, because the other thing I'll remember about Twin Saga is how hard it got. I didn't stop because I was bored with it. I stopped because I hit a wall in the levelling game and couldn't get past it. I returned several times to see if it had gotten any easier but it never had. Now it never will.

 

All the games Gamigo are sending into the ultimate east close their doors for the final time on the same day, April 29th. That gives current players a couple of months to get their affairs in order, say their tearful goodbyes and work out what to do with themselves when the games they loved no longer exist.

Presumably there aren't going to be all that many people in that unfortunate situation. Gamigo's given reasons for the cull are purely commercial. Apparently the games cannot sustain themselves, which presumably means they cost more to run than the cash shops bring in.

I wonder how strictly true that is? Obviously those four games won't be making much of a profit because if they were you can absolutely guarantee they'd still be up and running. On the other hand, Gamigo has been on a buying spree these last couple of years. They've snapped up Trion, Aeria Games and most recently Kingsisle.

That's given them a much bigger protfolio than they ever had before. It's a lot of mmorpgs under one roof. And some of the recent acquisitions, particularly ArcheAge, Trove and Wizard 101, have hugely more traction in the marketplace than the likes of Eden Eternal or Twin Saga. It's not unrealistic to imagine there's a need for clarity in the offer as much as there is a desire that each and every game should be self-sustaining.

 

One of the pillars of Wilhelm's argument concerning the drag factor of elderly games on the development of new ones is the near-obsessive commitment of fans. Not just the continued desire to keep playing the same old games but the will and ability to make that possible even if the companies that nominally own the games aren't interested any more.

It's true. The emulator and private server scene is huge. There are grey market versions of games it's hard to imagine anyone cared about enough to recover from the void. But players do care. 

I've written a few times about the ongoing project to revive the game I knew as Ferentus. I only ever played that game, briefly, in beta. And yet I've never forgotten it. As with a number of more than half-forgotten titles I occasionally google it and a while back when I did that I ended up on a website telling me it was coming back. 

Since then I've played it a couple of times on open beta weekends. And it's as much fun as I remembered. I wouldn't spend my free time helping to bring it back but I'm very grateful someone has. 

 

Will someone do the same for the Gamigo Four? We'll see. I'd put the odds pretty low for Eden Eternal and Twin Saga but I suspect Defiance may have had the kind of audience that will see keeping it alive as a challenge. I hope so. 

For all that the persistence of old mmoprgs acts a drag anchor on the development of new ones, I hate to see any of them die. They will, though. As time goes on the seeming invulnerability to time that's been a hallmark of the genre will inevitably erode. 

More and more games will disappear for good. It's a shame but I don't think we can complain too much. After all, they've already lasted far, far longer than either their players or their developers imagined they could.

The only question left for me now is whether to use these last couple of months to revisit old haunts for a final time, maybe set foot in some new ones, while the opportunity still exists. 

I'm not sure I will. It's probably best just to let them slip quietly away.

Don't Go, Kitty, Kitty

The PC Gamer post-WoW roll-call of births and deaths I was discussing yesterday includes eleven MMORPGs I could reasonably claim to have played plus one that no-one ever did. They break down into three categories: games I took seriously, games I dabbled with and games I merely glanced at.

Of the twelve, there are two that shouldn't even be on the list in the first place: EQNext and City of Heroes. I'll get to EQN later. First, let's think about City of Heroes.

Did no-one fact-check the copy? The title of the piece is "25 MMOS that lived and died since World of Warcraft launched" but the North American launch of CoH pre-dates WoW's by a full six months. It says so right there in the article! I believe I may have played it in beta as early as late 2003.

CoH looked, on paper, like something I'd really enjoy. I've been a superhero fan since before I learned to read. My mother, in her late eighties, still occasionally complains about how she had to read those speech bubbles out loud to me when I was four years old. At the time the game was announced I was deep into EverQuest and the MMORPG genre - it looked as though it could have been made for me.

It wasn't. Not even close. What always appealed to me most about superhero comics, even as a child, was the soap opera. The fighting? Not so much. CoH, in beta at least, seemed to be nothing but an endless conveyor belt of  meaningless battles, most of them in featureless offices and warehouses or bland city lots.

I played the beta in a desultory fashion for a few weeks, on and off. It was deeply disappointing. When the game launched I didn't buy it and during its eight year run I never once considered giving it a go. For my money there has never been a good superhero MMO. DCUO is the best I've played but that's more for the glorious movement controls, the well-realised cityscapes and the housing than anything to do with the combat or the story.

When City of Heroes miraculously re-appeared earlier this year (in true superhero "I was never really dead" style, I might add) I gave it a try and enjoyed it a lot more than I had back in 2003/4. Just not enough to keep logging in after the initial rush.

Moving on from the game that shouldn't be on the list at all, we come to the ones I tried just to say I had. Chief among those is Hello Kitty Online. I played HKO maybe two or three times. I downloaded it because people insisted on using it as a pejorative in general chat in MMORPGs I did play and that irritated me.

What's not to love?

My feeling was that none of the people using the fashion-challenged feline as a stick to beat their supposed inferiors with would actually have played the game. If I wanted to be able to call them out on that I had to have some basic experience myself.

Also, I do like Hello Kitty, with whom I have a little history. I remember the first time I happened upon a display of HK merchandize in real life, in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona sometime in the early '90s. I was so amazed I bought a couple of items, one of which I later gave to someone I worked with as a leaving present, when they went back to the U.S.

I can remember all of that but almost nothing about Hello Kitty Online, except that it was a lot less casual than I'd imagined. I know I used that as a deflating counter-argument in chat battles a few times, although finding Hello Kitty Online more challenging than I expected was perhaps not exactly the argument-clincher I was looking for.

Speaking of memory and its failings, this is where I offer a practical dmonstration. I thought I'd played Mythos, which is why it's in this section instead of in yesterday's post, where it should have been. Turns out, on fuirther investigation, I never played it at all.

There was a brief period when a clutch of online games using Greek and Roman mythology as a backdrop appeared at around the same time. I played at least two of them and I thought Mythos was one of those but, looking at some reviews and screenshots, it clearly wasn't.

The game I was thinking of, which I remember playing quite a few times, was Mytheon not Mythos. It's still running. You can get it on Steam. Looking at the screenshots, Mythos looks like a more interesting title. I kind of wish I'd played that instead.

Moving swiftly on, we come to games I played a fair bit, on and off, but which never made it into the majors. Minions of Mirth is almost the poster child for my personal minor leagues. (Way to go there, Bhagpuss! A mixed metaphor combining two cultural touchstones, neither of which form any part of your own immediate culture. Some kind of a record, I think. Plus now you're talking about yourself in the second person...)

Someone exploring much further into Minions of Mirth than I ever managed.

MoM was unusual in that it could be played either as a full MMORPG or as a single-player game. That seemed like a great idea back in 2005 and it still seems like one now. Wouldn't it solve all kinds of problems? And if an obscure indie like Prairie Games could do it, what's stopping the big guns?

Minions of Mirth was an EQ-inspired game with graphics that looked more dated than EQ's even in 2005. I must have played through the starting area four or five times over the years but I never really got much farther than the equivalent of Qeynos Hills. The MMORPG closed its gates a couple of years back but the single-player version is still available. I even have it installed although I doubt I'll ever play it again.

Marvel Heroes is an odd one. I played it quite a few times and read about it a lot more because several bloggers I followed seemed to be very into it indeed. For me, the game doubled down on two things I really don't like at all: the Diablo-style lootfest and the aforementioned superhero action mode.

I grew up with the Marvel characters, although I was (and remain) a DC fan at heart. Marvel Heroes seemed to me to strip away virtually everything that had made Marvel the most successful comics publisher of the late twentieth century and which went on to make it one of the most profitable and worshipped global brands of the early twenty-first.

It seemed to me like a game designed by people whose only knowledge of the characters came from a short conversation with a six-year old child. Costumes? Check! Powers? Check! Personality, motivation, backstory, depth? I dunno what those things are, mister. It was the MMORPG equivalent of smashing action figures together and shouting "Bam!", something I didn't even do when I was six years old.

The most interesting thing about Marvel Heroes for me was the bizarre way it ended. Made no sense at all. Just like the game.

Stolen from my own blog.

But then, what happened to Marvel Heroes at the end happened to Firefall time and time again, while it was still running. Was there ever a game that changed direction so many times? Or suffered so many public disputes among its developers?

I played it in a couple of its variants. It wasn't the sort of game that seemed likely to appeal to me - I'm not mad keen on shooters and I don't have a lot of time or affection for mech-suits - but a couple of bloggers kept writing interesting stories about it so I thought I'd give it a try.

I enjoyed it much more than I expected, even though I was absolutely terrible at playing it. I liked the environments and the jetpack movement. It also looked great in screenshots, which always helps, particularly since, by this time, I had a blog to put them in.

The thing about opinions on Firefall is this: they depends entirely which version the opinion-holder played. Each major revision was so radical Red5 might as well have re-marketed them as new games. I liked the version with the public quests based around thumping. That one would have made for a solid MMORPG experience, I think. When they took that out I liked it a lot less. It felt more like a single-player game the last time I logged in.

That's the last of the also-rans. looks like this is shaping up to be to be a trilogy. Part three will get to the games I played for long enough to have something of substance to say about them. Or so we may hope.

Except there's one anomaly to dispose of first. The game I mentioned at the top of the post. The one that really has no reason being on PC Gamer's list at all. Not because someone can't read a calendar but because someone apparently can't read reality.

Much though some would like to believe otherwise, EQNext never existed. There was no game, ever. All there was were some videos, a lot of concept art and a few minutes of faked gameplay put together for a convention.

Blurry and out of focus. How appropriate.

It's quite hard to dig that little fact out of the welter of "Oh noes! My beloved EQNext is no more!" eulogies that clog the filters of a google search but as Feldon explains in an incendiary demolition of the entire EQNext debacle at EQ2Wire, "The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

It wasn't just the demo; the entire EQNext project was smoke and mirrors. There was no game. There never had been a game. There never would be a game. It has no place on a list of MMORPGs that lived and died because it never did either of those things. I'd say good riddance to it but even that gives its existence more credence than it deserves.

Landmark definitely did exist, though, and I'll get to it next time, along with Vanguard, Warhammer, Free Realms and Wildstar. I'll even bring my own screenshots!

No I Never

PC Gamer published a list of dead MMORPGs recently under the headline "25 MMOs that lived and died since World of Warcraft launched". I first heard about it by way of Paeroka at Nerdy Bookahs and there have been follow-ups by Rakuno, Nogamara and Everwake, so far.

The list includes a round dozen that I actually played at least once. Then there are ten more that I know of but never tried. Either I wasn't interested, they weren't accessible in my region or I meant to but somehow never got around to it.

That leaves three whose names were new to me: Dynasty Warriors Online, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine and Starquest Online.

The first two were Japanese releases that also had English language servers for the North American region, according to PC Gamer. Whether the "NA" servers were also open to other regions I have no idea. It seems a bit late now to go find out, although DWO is apparently still running in Japan.

The third, described witheringly by PC Gamer as an "unconventional, and ugly, sci-fi MMO" looks to have been a cut-price and even less casual-friendly version of EVE Online, at least if its badly edited wikipedia entry is to be belived: "The game itself is an online persistent sandbox where there anything can happen at any time. A hostile player ship can sneak up on another player and attack at any time, in any solar system."

Starquest's developers seem to have been determined to put as many obstacles in the way of commercial success as possible: "Starships require several players to function...and cannot be used at all without at least one of the players present who serves as a senior officer in the game...When the player logs off... ships will still fly towards a destination while offline, and players can still be attacked if their ship is moving." Plus there was a $9.99 monthly subscription.

Can't say I'm sorry to have missed any of those three. On to the ones I have at least heard of...

I never had any intention of playing Phantasy Star Online, a spin-off of an offline series I also never played. I don't believe it was ever available outside of Japan, anyway, so I couldn't have played it even if I wanted to. Fantasy Year Zero, also a Japanese title, apparently did have North American servers. I must have missed the memo.

Battlestar Galactica Online rings a vague bell. I might have thought about trying it once. I have some limited affection for the I.P., having watched the original series back in the 1970s. The game is (loosely) based on the noughties reboot, which I haven't seen, despite having it strongly recommended to me more than once by a close friend, back when it was on tv. It's currently available on Amazon Prime so I might get around to it one day. As for the MMORPG, that (space)ship has sailed.

Tabula Rasa I made a conscious choice to avoid but I can't now remember why. I vaguely remember thinking it looked silly but that hardly seems a valid reason in light of some of the games I have played. I kind of wish I'd at least tried it because it seems to have been historically significant in the development of what came to be known as "dynamic events" and "public quests",

I am very sorry I never got around to playing The Matrix Online. The screenshots make it look like something I'd have enjoyed. I have absolutely no rational explanation as to why I didn't at least give it a go. It was included in the SOE All Access subscription that I was paying for, for heaven's sake! All I had to do was download it. I even remember reading up on it to see what the gameplay was like but somehow I never took that final step. I've also never seen the movie(s) even though I've owned the first one on DVD for at least a decade. I must have some kind of mental block about trenchcoats.

I did play the original Myst. Didn't like it much. It seemed a bit...pointless. And dull. There's a nagging sense at the back of my mind that I might have tried the online version but I think that's a false memory. I can't see why I'd have wanted to - I didn't have a blog back then to make playing  games I know I'm not going to like seem like a good idea.

Club Penguin was out of my age range. That seems a bit rich, considering I played a considerable amount of both Free Realms and Wizard 101, not to mention Toontown back in the day, but there always seemed to be something about Club Penguin that made me feel I wouldn't be welcome there. Possibly because it had the word "Club" in the title. Wilhelm used to write about it occasionally, though, so, like EVE and TorilMUD, I feel as though I've played it vicariously.

Dark and Light I remember being quite interested in at one point. I think the reviews put me off. It was a fanmous stinker. I was also quite keen on the reboot until I found out it wasn't a proper MMORPG.

Darkfall is listed, somewhat pedantically, by PC Gamer as "Darkfall Unholy Wars", presumably to differentiate it from the two versions currently running, Darkfall Rise of Agon and Darkfall New Dawn. Or possibly they just have journalistic standards. I guess that was its proper name, even though everyone just called it "Darkfall".

I did consider playing it but I read so much about it, mostly on SynCaine's blog, that there hardly seemed to be much point. I was pretty sure I'd never have as much fun in the game itself as I'd have reading stories about it. Much the same reason I've never bothered to play EVE, even though you can do it without paying these days.

Pirates of the Carribean, though, I was never going to play. I've neither seen the movies nor wish to and I struggle with piracy as a theme and setting. I'm fine with the clothes and the dialect but naval battles bore me to distraction and piratical sword-fighting is tedious beyond belief. Also all that dithering with treasure maps. Nope. Not for me.

And that's all the ones I didn't play. I've managed to get a whole blog post out of rambling on about games I never played. Imagine how long I could bang on about the ones I did...

Guess what's coming next.