It's Life, Jim...

Chris Neal at MassivelyOP raised an interesting question ths weekend, when he asked whatever happened to Atlas, the piratical MMO that went into Early Access all the way back in 2018 and never came out the other side. I bought it shortly after it became available and posted some extensive First Impressions (1, 2, 3, and 4.) based on the week I spent there, after which I pretty much never set foot in the game again.

In fact, according to Steam, my total playtime in Atlas comes to less than seven hours. I currently don't even have it installed. I suppose I should probably be annoyed I ever bought it or even blame Wildcard, the developer, for not making good on the gameplay they promised, but I don't.

When I stopped playing after just a week I was optimistic:

"I'm still very happy to have bought and tried it. Atlas's journey has barely begun. It's going to be around for a long time.  If - when - things change, I'll be back to give it another look."

Things did change. A lot. From what I remember, Wildcard were everlastingly messing around with both the premise and the practicalities. But I still never came back.

There were a few reasons for that. For one thing, I'm never wholly comfortable playing pirates. Partly it's the way piracy has been gentrified from a bleak, brutal, amoral reality into a colorful, cheerful, child-friendly fantasy but honestly that happens to everything in MMORPGs, from bears to battles, so why pick on pirates? 

No, mostly it's that pirates are just boring.

I mean, look at them. What do they actually do in games? Sail around in big, wooden boats that are always really hard to steer. Wave cutlasses and fire flintlocks. Wander about the docks in floppy hats with feathers in, looking for work. 

On a good day they sometimes get to go Yar! and swig some rum. It doesn't really cut it in the adventure stakes, compared to flying over snow-capped mountains on a griffon or delving into the depths of a forgotten elven city, buried for aeons under the shifting sands, now does it?

They also seem to be everlastingly wandering along barren, empty beaches, looking for buried treasure that they rarely find. Or carrying crates they never get to open from one forlorn port authority shack to another. If they're lucky they sail across a millpond-flat sea without incident, which is about as exciting as it sounds. If not they have to fight with other pirates ships or naval vessels, which inevitably means going round and round in circles until one of them sinks. Or they have to run from storms, in which they're either shipwrecked or end up stuck in port trying to fix the damage.

Is that fun? I never thought so. I haven't bothered to re-read my First Impressions posts but as far as I recall, what I most liked about Atlas were the parts where you could just be on land doing regular MMORPG stuff, from which I'd have to conclude the pirate theme wasn't really adding much.

But believe it or not, I didn't begin this post intending to re-review Atlas or indulge in a rant about how boring pirates can be. I wanted to address something Chris said towards the end of his piece, namely that the game "looks to have been pushed to the furthest back burner possible". In other words, Atlas has entered maintenance mode.

This loops back around to the controversial topic of game preservation, a horse I am nowhere near done beating to death. Prefacing the previously quoted comment and referring to the people still playing Atlas, Chris says, with admirable nuance, "The fact that it’s still online is probably a benefit to those holdouts."

I do like that "probably". It's a short piece but he manages to make it perfectly clear that the possibility that what Atlas really needs is a decisive and merciful ending can't be ruled out. The game has been in Early Access for more than five years, during which time I seem to recall it being radically revamped and re-promoted at least once, possibly more, without ever arriving at a state anyone cared to call "done".

If it's true the game's owners and developers  have lost interest in it completely, in whose interest does it remain up and running? Does it need to sit there, indefinitely, in a playable condition, regardless of any commercial value, for as long as even one person who bought the imaginary box still retains a fitful interest in logging in?

Wilhelm took Ubisoft to task recently for the cavalier way that company chose to handle a similar issue with its racing game The Crew. Few rational people would defend Ubisoft for anything, and I certainly don't want to give the impression I approve of what they've done, are doing or most likely ever will do, so I have to tread carefully here, but as someone who once paid real money for the Crew I really couldn't care less if they switch the damn servers off. 

Of course, from a purely personal perspective, it's very much a moot point. I liked the Crew, what very little I ever saw of it, but it holds what I think may be a unique position among every game I have ever bought in that it's the only one where I literally and without any exaggeration could not get past the Tutorial.

I found the car so impossible to control I couldn't pass the game's very lenient safety check to be allowed to drive freely on the open road. All I ever saw of the world was the introduction and the first few cut scenes. I suppose it's possible I might feel more miffed about the news that I won't be able to play the game I bought in the future if I'd actually ever been able to play it in the past.

On balance, though, I think I had my chance. I bought the Crew nine years ago. I posted about it once. That I wasn't good enough at driving games to get any more use out of it is on me but even if I'd been a first-rate imaginary racer, I can't but feel nine years free access would have allowed me to get my money's worth. 

If we accept for the moment, nonetheless, that the general feeling is that online games should have persistence beyond their natural, commercial life, it does raise a very curious conundrum concerning what quality of life we consider worthwhile. Might there be some conflict between the concerns expressed whenever an online game becomes wholly unavailable and the somewhat similar expressions of dismay that greet a game going into maintenance mode?

Getting back to Atlas, if, as Chris's article suggests, some current players are quite satisfied with how much there is to do in the game right now, why is it a problem if Wildcard stops updating it? True, in this particular instance there is that pesky "Early Access" tag but if we accept, as I believe we should, that any game that's started charging money is de facto "Live", then what we have here is nothing more than a game that has aged out to the point where it no longer justifies further development.

It seems to me that the issues are very different. There's a strong argument towards putting online games into a similar bracket as DVDs or books, where an initial purchase entitles you to indefinite use. The only substantive difference is that online games require someone else to host them for you and in that respect it may be that developers hold some moral responsibility to ensure continuity or provide a local alternative.

But no-one is suggesting that, when you buy a book, the author or publisher has an obligation to keep adding new chapters so you don't have read the same ones over and over. If games are going to be "preserved", either for current users or future generations, it's going to be in an as-is format, most likely based on a snapshot of the game at the time it ceased development. No-one, surely, is suggesting they also need to receive updates, complete with new content, deep into the future?

On that logic, there shouldn't be a problem with games entering "maintenance mode". Effectively, that is game preservation, isn't it? We ought to be delighted when we hear an MMORPG has gone into maintenance. It means the game has reached its final, finished, fixed state and can safely be archived for the pleasure of generations yet to come. 

And yet, for some reason, usually we're not. The mere hint that a game might be ceasing to add new content always indicates the end. It leads to an exodus of current players and an embargo on newcomers. No-one wants to play a dead game.

I don't know. I just feel there's some sort of logical inconsistency here, if not an outright paradox. Maybe someone can explain in the comments why Game Preservation is good but Maintenance Mode is bad. 

In the specific case of Atlas, when I read the speculation that development on the game might have ground to a permanent halt, I did actually find myself thinking, perversely, that now might be the time to go back and have another look. After all, if anything, it was the knowledge that Wildcard were likely to keep fiddling with the thing that put me off playing much in the first place. 

There's a lot to be said for the quiet life. In games, too.

The Crew's All Here : The Crew

So, I got a late Christmas present today. The Crew. According to the box it's "the first MMO driving game" which I'm sure would come as a surprise to Need For Speed World.

I have zero interest in cars or car culture and I'm unbelievably bad at driving games but I love driving in real life. When I first heard about The Crew and it's open world implementation of the U.S.A. I thought it might be something I'd like to try.

How it was supposed to work as an MMO I had no idea but I didn't really care all that much. I just liked the idea of driving around a semi-convincing recreation of a real-world space alongside other imaginary real drivers.

Installing the thing from DVDs was clunky. The first disc was fine but the second disc kept hanging and it wouldn't let me do anything else on the PC in the meanwhile. It's an MMO, though, right? And it's been out for a while so it's going to need to patch anyway, so I had the bright idea of just starting it up (the launcher had installed and seemed to work) and letting it download the rest of the game.

I had to register an account with Ubisoft's Uplay, which was painless and quick. Took about two minutes, 90 seconds of which was thinking of a username and password. That done, the patcher connected and immediately began a 25GB download.

It was downloading at a good speed but clearly that was going to take a while...except it only needed to get 5GB in place to make the game playable. By the time I'd made a coffee and toasted a cinnamon bagel it was ready to roll.

The first few minutes were confusing. I just wanted to make a character (or choose a car) then head out on the open road. Cruise around, see what the world looked like. The game had other ideas. Like a compulsory tutorial. With a plot.

The controls were simple enough, especially once I'd swapped the arrow keys to WASD, but there was no character to create - apparently I'm Alex taylor, a 20something guy who looks quite disturbingly like I might have done if I'd been insane enough to grow a beard and wear heavy black plastic spectacles when I was rising 30.

I careened and crashed my way through several tutorial Missions and watched a few not-bad cut scenes until the first genuinely MMO-like event occured: I leveled up. After a while and a very unexpected plot development that I won't spoil just in case anyone reading this ever plays the game I did get to choose a car.

As I said, I know nothing about cars and care less. Just so they don't break down is the limit of my interest and involvement. Since cars in The Crew appear to be indestructible that's not an issue. I picked a Ford Mustang and had it done over in blue with a kind of lizard-scale finish. Looks okay but my copy of the game came with a Mini Cooper option that I can't access until I leave the tutorial so I'll probably end up using that. I'd prefer a smaller vehicle.

The visuals are great. I can already tell the most frustrating thing is going to be not being able to get out of the car and walk around. Until I can beat my handler, Zoe, (don't ask, it's too ridiculous to explain) in a race I won't be going anywhere of my own volition anyway.

A couple of hours in it feels like this is a toy I might play with quite a bit, on and off. Can't imagine getting into the "game" part but that's not why I wanted it.

Maybe I should put one of those driving wheel accessories on my Amazon wishlist...

What Shall We Play Next?

It's shaping up to be a very busy Spring and early Summer in MMOland. No, strike that - a busy year. Leaving aside the plethora of Kickstarters and indies we have The Elder Scrolls Online debuting in just over two weeks time on April 4th, followed by WildStar two months later on the third of June.  

EQN Landmark hasn't announced an official launch date but it goes into closed beta next Wednesday. One would imagine that open beta, which will to all intents and purposes be the launch, should come no more than two or three months after that.

No-one seems to have made a firm booking for midsummer yet but there are  couple of heavyweights eyeing the sand and flapping their towels meaningfully. There's UbiSoft's The Crew, originally scheduled for the Spring  but put back until "Summer 2014" with no exact date, while Funcom's Lego Minifigures Online is flagged "coming Summer 2014".

As the nights start to draw in Bungie have early Autumn covered with a September 9th launch pegged for their is-it-or-isn't-it MMOlike Destiny. Blizzard haven't nailed down an exact date (and Warlords of Draenor is "only" an expansion not a brand-new MMO) but they're taking pre-orders for "Fall 2014".

Finally, at least in this shortlist of MMOs I'm vaguely paying attention to, Trion promise that by the end of 2014 we'll get our hands on the year-before-last's Next Big Thing - ArcheAge. And that's just takes us up to Christmas. Let's not even think about Star Citizen and EQNext waiting in the wings.

So, with all this multiplicity of choice and glistening newness to slaver over, which MMO have I found myself most excited by these last few days? Everquest, of course. A fifteen-year old MMO that doesn't even have a new expansion out right now. Turns out all they needed to do was dangle the carrot of a free high-level character (not even max level you notice) and there I am, pushing my head back through the harness and taking up the strain.

Most of yesterday was spent getting to grips with my newly-85 Magician. Getting the hang of the spells (Not difficult. Mostly "Burn it! Blast it! Burn them! Burn them some more!") and the AAs (going to need a free afternoon and a manual for those). Re-learning old skills (Pulling. Crowd-control. Handling adds. Finding my corpse).

To get back into the swing of things first we went somewhere familiar. I say we: three of us - Magician, Mercenary and Pet. Dragonscale Hills didn't require the Merc but she came in handy when I stopped to read the map after a long run and the half-dozen clockwork beetles that had been chasing us caught up. Paying attention to your surroundings as you travel - there's another rusty skill I need to buff...

...something I hadn't managed to do by the time we moved up a notch to Loping Plains.  The four zombies I tagged while taking an ill-advised short-cut to the bottom of the long ramp down gave us a good work-out but standing on the grizzly bear conveyor belt outside Bloodmoon Keep proved to be too much. Talk about Bears! Bears! Bears!

That's another skill to be re-learned, right there - choose your ground for a fight carefully, don't just stand somewhere random and start killing. That kind of slack behavior might cut it in Tyria or Azeroth but this is Norrath.

So, the pet died valiantly while the other two bravely ran away and the mage gated and back we all were (well, two of us and a new Kabobn) in the Guild Lobby, ready to go again. Boy, was the Guild Lobby busy, too. And Plane of Knowledge. And Hills of Shade, where we went to try and finish Franklin Teek's Hot Zone task. Everquest is heaving right now.

At last we all felt confident and practiced enough to try somewhere our own level, so off we toddled to try Feerrott: The Dream. Over the past few years SOE have saved themselves a lot of trouble and kept a lot of long-time players reasonably happy by re-skinning existing zones as new, high-level content. They leave the old zones as they were and add timeslipped or dreamtouched versions alongside. It works really well and presumably saves a ton of design time. Oh look - isn't that Blizzard over there, taking notes?

I haven't been keeping up with Everquest lore (when did I ever) so I don't know whose Dream we're in but Kaozz mentioned a quest just for Heroic 85s there so off we went. It was fun. It was profitable. It was quite hard. We all died. Twice.

The first time I just paid the 500 plat to the NPC gouger  Disciple in the Guild Lobby, gave the stone to the Priest, had her summon my corpse and let the Merc rez. The second time I was too mean to pay again plus I was confident I could get back to my body safely, not least because I'd spotted that Magicians get an AA for permanent unbreakable invisibility these days (okay, I hadn't spotted it so much as SOE had kindly slotted it onto the "Would like us to hold your hand for a bit?" hot bar they thoughtfully provide along with your free levels. I think they know what you're going to be using it for, too).

Well, I couldn't find my corpse. Being a tiny gnome dressed entirely in green in an all-green swamp that maunders in perpetual twilight might have had something to do with it. That and forgetting you should always take a /loc when you die. I went and bought a Chipped Bone Rod in Plane of Knowledge but three charges of Find Corpse weren't sufficient to triangulate, at least not once I'd finished running from the Lizardman shaman who'd though to buff himself with See Invisible.

I've always enjoyed a good corpse run but after about an hour the novelty was beginning to wear off. Luckily I had a bright idea. For the only other Heroic 85 I'd managed to make (just one of our several Silver accounts turned out to be valid, for reasons still unclear) I'd chosen Necromancer, a class I've always wanted to have at high level but somehow never did.

Necros have always been able to track corpses and summon them and in this modern Norrath they no longer even need to go to the right zone or buy a coffin. Logged him in, grouped them up, summoned the corpse, Merc rezzed and the money-grubbing Priest and her creepy little disciple got nothing! Soooo satisfying.

Back we went to The Dream. I considered towing the Necro but in the end I couldn't be doing with all the zoning and re-applying /follow so we left him standing in the Guild Lobby in case he was needed. He wasn't. Lessons had at last been learned. With more thoughtful pulling, standing and traveling the Mage and her little crew finished off the quest and received the flag for the Journeyman 5 Mercenary that I'll probably be too penny-pinching to pay for but at least we have the option now.

The quest itself was pretty good. Simple to follow, sharply and amusingly written with good  characterization in the expected tradition of Norrathian stereotypes (devious magic users, dimwitted-but-loveable ogres, tightfisted dwarves with dodgy Scot-ish accents...). The tasks required snapped along nicely, travel between points required your attention not your time, the final fight was big, loud and scary - and we won. What more could you ask for an afternoon's entertainment?

So, it seems I'm back in Norrath, at least for part of the time. I never really leave, I just take extended holidays. It even turns out that the guild my mage joined way back in the dim, forgotten past (about 2007 I'd guess) is still up and running all these years later and although there's no-one left I recognize they seem a very friendly bunch. God forbid I might even end up doing some group content...

Either way, I'm guessing that I won't be spending Spring or Summer in Tamriel or Nexus. It'll be anything up to three flavors of Norrath. And Tyria, too. The Living Story may be on hiatus but there's The Tourney to come at the end of March and that crazy Feature Patch in April (of which more here in due course as more is revealed. I just can't wait to find out what "Friendly Play" is and why it takes three separate announcements to explain it...). GW2 is a mere snapper compared to Everquest or even EQ2 but it's coming along, coming along.

One thing's for sure. We're none of us going to have an excuse for being bored this year. If there's really nothing to take your fancy among that lot it might just be time to start thinking about a new hobby altogether. 

New MMOs for 2014: There Are Some

J3w3l has some trailers for forthcoming attractions up, along with her second take on WildStar. That, along with both her and Keen's enthusiastic responses to the latest EQ Landmark promo (may as well embed it - everyone else has...) got me thinking about what we have to look forward to for 2014 in MMO Land.


Off the top of my head I could think of WildStar, EQLandmark, The Elder Scrolls Online and... well that was it, really. Come on, there must be more than that. Maybe it's my memory failing. That age thing again.

Remembering stuff, though, that's so 20th Century. We have machines to do that for us now. So I googled "mmo 2014 releases".

Top Free MMORPG.net offers Star Citizen (don't care, won't play, won't be out in 2014 anyway), EQNext (care so much it hurts, will play unless dead, don't believe it will be out until the very end of 2014 at the earliest), Titan (yeah, right), PK Project (um, excuse me?), Lineage Eternal:Twilight Resistance (not quite clear what this is but I've successfully managed to avoid the Lineage franchise for the last decade and a half...) and World of Darkness (now you're just being silly).

I won't go through all the rest of their, um, idiosyncratic list, although it did remind me that The Crew, despite being delayed, is due out next summer. Not all that interested in the gameplay on that one but the prospect of being able to take a virtual road trip across the continental United States has a certain appeal. 

Games Radar has a very slick slideshow that includes the usual suspects but throws in some marginally interesting possibilities like the two hyper-realistic South Korean offerings, Bless and Blade and Soul, neither of which appears to have any kind of Western release scheduled.

They also name-check Black Desert, which I was interested in briefly but am no longer and Otherland, in which I was very interested indeed but which I was sure had been cancelled. On checking it appears that, weirdly, the Gamigo website is still up although the latest news refers to the closed beta from over a year ago. I'm pretty sure it's dead.

Other than that the Games Radar list offers a smattering of funded Kickstarter projects like Embers of Caerus, Pathfinder and City of Titans, all of which are nominally interesting but won't see daylight in 2014.

Ten Ton Hammer includes both EQNext and Pathfinder in its Top Six Sandbox MMOs To Watch In 2014, a list which intriguingly includes TESO, which I hadn't realized was supposed to be a sandbox, along with a previous hot tip now fading fast, ArcheAge. Mention of that one reminded me of Trion's other iron in the fire for next year, Trove. They're both games I'm moderately interested to take a look at but I can't say either is stoking any great fires.


Massively has a round-robin of staff picks for next year that doesn't really shed much light on anything other than the predilections of the individuals involved but the paucity of suggestions on offer does serve to back up my own feeling that 2014 is going to be a really thin year for MMOs. Not having played Halo and not having much interest in space-based games, Destiny, one of the few MMOs the Massively crew add to the pile, doesn't press any of my buttons. Neither doesTUG, yet another of the seemingly endless spawn of Kickstarter-funded sandbox titles.

 So back we come around to where we started. I'll try most any MMO for flavor and in our brave new world of open betas, free to play and try-before-you-buy there's no reason not to give any or all of them a run. Curiosity and the potential for getting a blog post out of the experience almost ensures I'll try all of them at some point but I'm not actually looking forward to playing any of them.

I don't even have the same sense of excitement and expectation for EQ Landmark that I had for, say, GW2 or The Secret World back in 2012. I'm interested in in it, sure, but I can't help thinking it looks like work. No, it's EQNext I really want to play.

And that, I think, is the heart of the problem. Everything else is just marking time until EQNext, which probably won't be out until 2015. Next year is looking like another year of more of the same - GW2, EQ2, all the old favorites - unless, as I very much wish it might, one or more of the MMOs on these lacklustre lists manages to pounce on me and sink its fangs in deep.

Failing that, anyone have any other good tips for 2014?