Mail Call: Regnum, The Missing Ink

Checking some of my many email addresses yesterday I came across a message from NDG Studios, operators of Regnum Online (aka Champions of Regnum, formerly known as Realms Online, not to be confused with The Realm Online). Despite having one of the worst identity crises in MMOdom, Regnum (let's settle for that) seems to be doing rather well for a six-year old game that gets very little publicity.

I discovered it very late and first wrote about it just under a year ago. It seemed quiet then, although certainly not moribund but things may be looking up. I'd already noticed that each infrequent time I remembered to log in there seemed to be a patch, which I always take to be a healthy sign, and both the website and the launcher got makeovers which make them look very handsome, but the capper came in the mail: Regnum is now available through Steam.

Wanna race?

Being on Steam (provided your game actually works) can't but be a good thing. I don't know an awful lot about how Steam operates or how difficult it is for a game to gain access to the platform, but NDG were stoked about getting Regnum into the line-up, as well they might be. They were so stoked they thought they'd celebrate by sending me a Hyena.

They sent me a load of other stuff too - a lockbox, some elixirs, the usual festive package, but it was the Hyena that caught my attention. It's a limited-duration mount that lasts 30 days and it looks great. I had no plans at all to play Regnum this month but I'll be darned if my little fox-lemur is going to miss the opportunity to ride around on a mean-looking Hyena.

So, congratulations Regnum and thanks for the ride.

Not looking quite so bright, at least not yet, is the Kickstarter campaign for The Missing Ink. Pete at Dragonchasers has a piece up about Kickstarter that gives chapter and verse on some of the drawbacks. So far my hand hasn't entered my pocket for a Kickstarter campaign.

I've followed several and they've broadly broken into two camps: No Hopers and Dead Certs and

Adventure ahoy!

it seems pointless for me to contribute either way. In every case all I'm interested in is playing the game when it releases. I find most of the inducements and sweeteners are largely irrelevant and I don't suffer from the inexplicable desire many seem to have to "donate" to what are, after all, commercial businesses. About the only time I can imagine getting my credit card out would be near the end of a campaign where success looks touch and go and my contribution might have material significance.

The first tranche of MMOs I took an interest in on Kickstarter all failed hard, at least as far as their campaigns went. Storybricks carries on, in some mysterious way, behind closed doors. Dark Solstice also appears to have withdrawn behind a veil, leaving only this tantalizing glimpse of what may one day emerge in its place. Panzer Pets, it appears, took the Kickstarter hint and gave up. Their website remains but nothing has been updated since the campaign crashed and burned.

Glad you clarified that.

Red Bedlam and The Missing Ink start a long way ahead of any of those. They have a fully working and eminently playable beta up and running on the PC, which they are actively and effectively developing. The game is already fun and very well worth trying. The Kickstarter campaign is for additional funds to bring it cross-platform to iOS and Android (although the Kickstarter verbiage only mentions Android in the leader and then goes on and on about iPads...).

So far they have 29 backers and have made just over 10% of their very modest target. I foresee another limp failure. I hope I'm wrong, because not only do I like The Missing Ink very much, I'm pretty sure I'd like it even more on a Tablet. I just hope that if they do fail on Kickstarter it doesn't put paid to that prospect altogether.

Meanwhile the Old Big Beasts continue to maunder out of the primordial gaming swamps, drawing lost worshipers in hordes. For now, I'm happy to sit back and watch them fight it out.

One Step Forward...

It's the end of the year and everyone's cracking out the crystal ball or counting the cost. We never celebrated this particular holiday in our house when I was growing up and while I did my best to help drink in the New Year as a student and for a fair few years after, it must be getting on for two decades since I last made any special effort to mark the turning of the calendar's last page.

No predictions from me, then, and no looking back. Oh, well, maybe just a glance both ways as we cross the road into the future.

It's Behind You!

I want my beta hat back !

2012 was the year of Guild Wars 2. Beta weekends dominated the spring with the early ones marking particular high spots. I think the first two beta weekends still stand as my own personal high-water mark with the game. The overwhelming sense of a huge, unexplored world just over the horizon was at its peak then and my attempt to reach Lion's Arch on foot from Black Citadel lives on in my memory as vividly as my first attempt to reach Qeynos from Freeport a dozen years ago.

After four months of intense Live play, that particular journey is about as exciting as going to the garage for a pint of milk but much, very much indeed, of the fascinating world of Tyria remains mysterious and unexplored. I still haven't passed 50% map completion on any of my eight characters and in my opinion the points of interest marked on most of the maps don't even send you to the most interesting places you could be exploring, let alone show you all of them.

I'm in a golem. I said I'M IN A GOLEM!

I expected to spend a lot of time exploring Tyria but I never expected largely to abandon my travels in favor of upholding the pride of the realm. Server! I mean Server! WvW has set a deep hook even to the point of creating a spurious sense of responsibility, so that when I'm not out there defending our keeps or pushing into enemy territory I feel a mild sense of unease, as though I'm not quite where I should be. I'm by no means sure this is a good thing, but the sense of camaraderie as I storm around the battlegrounds in the midst of a crowd of familiar names is undeniably addictive.

GW2 is very far from perfect and I have a post in mind about it's faults. For all that's wrong with it, however, It looks set to last me well into the coming year and probably far beyond that.

Yes it looks nice enough but think of the property values

It certainly pushed Rift out of the running. Despite owning Storm Legion and being paid up to play until next November I've barely set foot in Telara. I did get as far as re-doing my Soul Trees for the umpteenth time (that gets so old - if I have one wish for MMOs for the future it would be that they stop resetting talent trees. Seriously, it's now at the point where that alone is enough to make me stop playing a game I'd otherwise keep faith with). I liked what I saw of the new continents but obviously not enough to get me exploring them. As for gameplay, Rift seems really, really dry after GW2. Staid and ponderous in fact.

Is that sun rising or setting?

The other big success of the year, from my perspective if not from it's producer's, was The Secret World. Again, the beta weekends were first-rate and indeed they sold me on the game, which I hadn't really been following and wasn't expecting to buy. I did buy it and played it exclusively during that short window of opportunity before GW2 launched. Perhaps the launch was badly-timed, since many said they were using TSW as a stop-gap before GW2, but to be honest the relentless grimdark of The Secret World had about worn me down after a couple of months and I would have needed to take a break about then anyway.

It's all in the details

Enough has been said, not least by me, about the top-notch quality of the story, voice acting and writing in TSW. I also very much enjoyed both the combat and the skill system, which weren't as universally popular. The new buy-to-pay model is, I think, the right one and the one Funcom should have started with. Since I have already bought the game it's now just down to me to find time to play it.

And that's the perennial problem to which I have no solution. Too many very good MMOs, too little time: the theme of 2012 and set to continue. Much talk about MMO implosions and the retraction and retrenchment of the genre continues but interested as I am in those trends and speculations on an academic level it remains personally irrelevant when there are literally dozens of MMOs I want to play but don't have time for. A huge winnowing that reduced the number of existing MMOs to a tenth of it's current number would still leave me looking at a choice of far more than I could hope to experience in reasonable depth, so why should I worry? Clear out the deadwood and I'll climb the highest tree left in the forest and see what I can see from up there.

I liked the old sign

The other two games I played most in 2012 were EQ2, from which I am on hiatus but to which I intend to return, if briefly, this very weekend and City of Steam. For all my lauding of the beta experience in general and the new black of beta weekends in particular, CoS is the exception. Oi! You! Mechanist Games! Will you just get on and launch already? I want a permanent character! I want to just get on and play! Your game was more polished in Alpha than most MMOs are six months after launch. If you polish it any more you'll rub a hole in it.

Shapes Of Things To Come

Apart from City of Steam the MMO I'm most looking forward to in 2013 has to be Neverwinter. It takes place in a setting I know and like, it's traditional fantasy with which I am so not done yet and almost certainly never will be, and best of all it offers authorship options. That's the good part; the bad part is, no-one seems very confident about when it will actually appear.

Same story for WildStar, second on my list of anticipated releases. Lots of PR, little hard information. I wouldn't be that surprised to be sitting here this time next year with neither of these even in beta yet.

No such fears for FFXIV's relaunch, which has a very solid timetable for beta. I still would like to play this, although I can't imagine paying a subscription. I'll be signing up for the beta when they begin taking applications and at the very least there's a two-week open beta at the end of the process offering a guaranteed taster before any money changes hands. I'll be there for that.

And I haven't forgotten about The Missing Ink.  I'm just hoping RedBedlam make good on their promise to bring it to Android. It would be just perfect on a tablet.

My MMO Resolution 

Get more variety into my MMO diet. Play more titles, play shorter sessions, spread myself about. I'm happier overall when I'm spending no more than two-thirds of my time in one MMO, making meaningful progress in three or four others and footling around in five or ten more around the edges. Gives me a lot more to write about, too.

My MMO Predictions for 2013

Yes, yes. You're going to live on a farm. A lovely farm! All of you...

• Buy-to Play will become the new Free-To-Play but F2P itself is here to stay. Oh, and Subs aren't dead. Think that about covers it...
• Real MMOs will begin to appear, or at least be announced, for the Tablet market. Arcane Heroes was a good start but much more can and will be done.
• There will be retrenchment in the PC MMO market and some well-known titles will disappear. Not any really well-known ones, though. The strong will get stronger as the herd is culled.
• No matter what happens it will be reported as the End of Days and after the dust settles we will all carry on as if nothing had happened. Like we always do.

Adventurer For Hire. Will Quest For Food

Does anyone really like quests? I only ask because I'm starting to get the feeling MMO developers don't much anymore. We may just be on a supertanker turn back to where we began.

My first MMO was the ironically-named Everquest. I found some quests there, eventually. Hours passed happily as I wandered round Qeynos /hailing every idling armor salesman and strolling guard on the off-chance a small package might need delivering to a guy standing ten yards away or I might get offered a few silver to murder someone in cold blood.

Wolf? Kill? Pelt? Just tell me!

Back then there was often no way of telling who might have a quest, what you'd have to do once you found one, how long it would take, where you'd have to go or what you'd get when you'd done it. Not until you discovered Allakhazam, anyway.

Everquest's key-word matching was probably familiar to everyone playing back in 1999. It was largely the same system text adventures had been using for a decade and more. There are MMOs using it still, but as the genre struggled towards the mainstream many of the traits inherited from its primitive ancestors began to breed out.

Calm down! I saw the feather!

I can't recall when or where glowing question marks first appeared over the heads of NPCs as a sign they were hiring. I do recall being taken aback when Anarchy Online, which launched with a resounding clang in the late summer of 2001, used Mission Terminals to dispense information about what to do and where to do it. It seemed almost like cheating, it was so easy.

Innovations came thick and fast. Tasks, Missions, Journals, Breadcrumb Trails, Counters, Map Markers... Questing ceased to be about wandering a world, meeting people, getting drawn into their intrigues, troubles and dramas. Instead it came more and more to feel like being the intern whose job it is to go round the office asking everyone what sandwiches they want for lunch then going out and getting them.

Eventually we hit a point where the entire questing process seemed to have been subcontracted out. There are MMOs where all you have to do to quest is hit a marker on your map to autorun to the guy who wants something then another to run to what he wants. Not that that isn't fun in its own way, but where's the mystery? Where's the romance?

It looks as though that trend may just have stretched about as far as it can. The elastic's starting to snap back. Poster child for New Generation questing is Guild Wars 2, of course. Public events that fire on a proximity fuse and spin off who knows where, Hearts that fill whether you knew you were filling them or not, NPCs who don't wait for you to notice them but run up to you waving their arms and yelling "Haaaalp" like Penelope Pitstop. GW2 is determined you'll have plenty to do without needing to ask.

The Secret World has a more traditional delivery system but Funcom look to be out to break both the quest hub and text-skipping. No clicking through a clutch of question marks and loading up. Your journal has room for only a handful of Missions. Try to take a new one and an old one drops out. You have to focus, talk to people and listen to what they tell you. I know. Unheard of.

How's he keeping that thing up there?

What started me on this train of thought wasn't either of those. It was a recent comment by Scott Hartsman (which annoyingly I now can't find) relating to Rift's upcoming Storm Legion expansion. The gist was "show don't tell", which is pretty much the way Rift's Instant Adventures work as you tear around Telara in a schoolyard gang with quest objectives autopopulating your journal almost too fast to follow.

TMI - strictly roots

Which brings me to WildStar and Twitterquesting. If you can't tell me in 140 characters don't tell me at all. Possibly not the strongest new card in the pack but they may be onto something.

There's no clear agreement about the solution but there appears to be some consensus around the problem: NPCs that deliver lengthy instructions in text or voiceover that we passively receive, record and carry out like obedient droids have had their day. We're back out in the open world, getting caught up in stuff as it happens because we were poking our noses in without asking first.

Where does that leave highly directed fourth-pillar storygaming? Washed up and wiped out or just surfing a different wave? Time will tell. There's probably room for both. I'm just glad to see an orthodoxy that was ossifying begin to crumble.

You're A Card And No Mistake! : The Missing Ink

MMO development costs are a bit of a hot button issue right now, what with the 38Studios train wreck, SWTOR layoffs, Dominus shutdown and all. It's the voiceovers, isn't it? Can't make an MMO without voiceovers. Or the story. Just GOT to have a story. Then there's the art assets, they must cost millions. And the animations, don't get me started on the animations.

Actors, artists, animators, writers - they all want paying! Then someone has to ride herd on the lot of 'em and that means management and you know how much managers are worth... And that's before you even get to the folks who actually code the thing. No wonder everyone's coming cap-in-hand to us, the players, to put our hands in our pockets and get the projects kickstarted.

Someone's mower's got a wonky wheel

If only you could make an MMO with cardboard cut-outs. Think how much money you'd save. Couldn't happen, could it? That's got to be about as likely as your in-game character looking back out the screen at you and matching your movements like a Marx Brothers routine.

Your Author, Gentle Reader

Well, there's a theory that goes "if it can be done it will be done" and now someone did. Yesterday I signed up for The Missing Ink alpha and that's my character over there >>>

Not only is he a cardboard cut-out, he hasn't even been cut out very well! You can still see quite a lot of his white background where someone's just gone round him really lazily with a pair of those blunt child-friendly scissors. They probably don't allow them anything sharp where these developers are.

Where is that, by the way. It's Brighton? Ohhhh! Now I get it!

For those not in the know, over the last couple of decades Brighton's made a fair run at becoming Britain's San Francisco. Without the sunshine, obviously. Or the scenery. If something sounds too off the wall to be happening, chances are it's happening in Brighton.

Build or Bash? The eternal quandary

These wacky guys and their hipster cool, hey? This is going to be Glitch all over again I bet. Except it isn't. Not hardly. (I should clarify at this point that I can't stick Glitch. I tried it and it made my skin crawl). The Missing Ink is not Glitch.


So what is it? Let's hear it from the horse's mouth: "The Missing Ink, when fully launched will 'probably' be the world's first MMORPG with a fully integrated sandbox 3D virtual world for every player". I like that "probably". It indicates the kind of groundedness this project is going to need. And then some.

Don't hit me, I'm a dentist!

So, I'm winding up to slam this crazy cardboard cut-out hipster nonsense, right? That's where all this going. Nope. Not even close. I loved it. It's a demented take on the traditional MMO done with wit and style. I only meant to take a quick a look but I ended up playing for a couple of hours and getting to level 4, which took a satisfyingly long time.

The Missing Ink is another alpha  that feels like a beta to me. It's an open alpha so you can register and play in a couple of minutes. It will play in a browser but the window is pretty small. There's the option of a downloadable client as well and if you take the few minutes it takes to get that and install it you can play The Missing Ink full-screen. Do that. It looks wonderful.

Anytown, MMO

Your character is a flat, two-dimensional cut-out but he (she? it?) lives in a fully-realised 3D world. That was a surprise and a charming one. The hills roll, the sea shimmers, the paths wind. It's an MMO landscape you'll recognize, with scattered villages peopled by knights, blacksmiths and peasants. Flat ones. Some of them have books floating over their heads. Guess what they are.

Kill or Cure? Kill and Cure!

Quests, check. Combat, check. Drops, check. They should have gotten Prince to do the music 'cos it feels like it's 1999, but I'm glad they didn't because, well, those costs... and whoever did the music did a great job, as did whoever put all the bird sounds in.

It's one of those MMOs where I felt drawn in immediately. I have a good deal more to say on it but I want to dig in a bit deeper first. I didn't find the plot yet (apparently there is one) and I don't understand how to use the sandbox tools. I'll get back to you but in the meantime go take a look. There's something in this one, I'm sure of it.