You Can't Take It With You

Sorting my Steam games by time played today, I was surprised to find that at 78.8 hours, Nightingale still hasn't broken into the top five, although not as surprised as I was to see what it will have to pass to get there. Sitting just ahead at #5 on the list with 81.2 hours played comes Bless Unleashed. How did that happen?

It's always possible I left BU running while I was long-term AFK of course, something I have been prone to do with games on occasion, but it's probably just that compared to any other genre, MMORPGs take up a phenomanal amount of time to play in even the most casual fashion. The only reason there are any other kinds of games in the first couple of rows of my Steam list is that I hardly play any MMORPGs through Valve's supposedly universal platform.

Most people don't, I would guess. A lot of the biggest, best-known, most successful, long-running names in the genre predate Steam entirely. Their players, active or lapsed, already have standalone installations, accounts and launchers provided either directly from the games themselves or via bespoke portals mandated by the developer.

For a long time, even after Steam took over many PC gamers' hard drives, almost all new MMORPGs came with their own launchers. It's only in very recent years that MMO developers have chosen to offer their games primarily or exclusively on Steam.

It has become something of a routine for older games to add themselves belatedely, usually with a flourish of publicity, and it does sometimes result in a surge of interest, bringing in new players for a while. When you look at the numbers playing through the platform a little later, though, it doesn't always seem as though many of those new players stayed for long.

Even less likely is the prospect of a significant proportion of the installed base for an MMORPG moving to Steam. I could play a lot of my MMORPG rotation there - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 - but I don't. In some cases I'd have to begin again from scratch, an obvious non-starter, but even if the Steam version of the game can let me play my regular characters I'd still have to go through all the rigmarole of linking the accounts. Why would I bother?

Clearly most people don't. Taking the EQ titles as an example, Darkpaw would have been out of business years ago if the real average concurrency of the two games combined came to barely 350. LotRO on its own almost doubles that and GW2 makes it into the low thousands, which might just about be viable for a small indie developer but not for a sub-division of NCSoft with several hundred developers to pay.

Daybreak don't like to tell us exactly how many people play their games but you certainly don't need more than three dozen servers to accomodate three hundred and fifty people or even a couple of thousand, if we use the old 5x peak concurrency figure that used to be the top-end estimate for total participation in online games. The Steam numbers for all MMORPGs that aren't also Steam exclusives like New World and Lost Ark are more than just unrepresentative, they're downright misleading.

The disparity is so extreme it does make me wonder whether it's really worth an older MMORPG tooling itself up for Steam membership at all. Yes, there's that initial burst of interest and the concommitant flurry of new players but once the initial excitement fades you're left with a permanent red flag for anyone looking to answer that perennial gamer's question: "Is this game dead?"

If you looked at Steam for any of the titles I've mentioned, the answer would be "As a Dodo". GW2, sometimes reckoned to be one of the front-runners among Western MMORPGs, doesn't even appear on the list until you've clicked through ten screens of results. Then again, it could be worse. Rift, languishing at #1534 on the chart as I write, is so many clicks down in the hole I lost count. 

Rift, however, is the reason I was looking at my time played in Steam games in the first place. I'd seen the recent announcement about server merges and I thought I'd get ahead of the rush by moving my Faeblight characters before Gamigo put them wherever they were going to put them if I did nothing about it.

Given the lack of attention anyone - developers, publishers or even players - has shown Rift since even before Trion shut up shop more than five years ago, it's perhaps more of a surprise to learn the game still has enough servers to need merging rather than that it's actually happening. Server merges, in any case, are an inevitable phase of the life-cycle of any MMORPG and Rift was designed with an unusual degree of flexibility in that regard. Players have always been able to swap servers almost instantly with no charge. I've moved a few times already.

Consequently, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I logged in last night to move my seven Faeblight characters to either Greybriar or Wolfsbane or possibly some to one and some to the other, since I already have characters on both and I'm not sure how the processes handles overspill when you hit your allowed character-per-server buffer. That potential snag I may have thought of; I had not, however, reckoned with another: the guild bank.

It seems that when Trion created the transfer system, they allowed for the smooth  movement of just about everything except the contents of the Guild Vault. I imagine that was intentional to avoid customer service issues when someone tried to jump ship and take the whole lot with them without telling anyone. Rift has one of those very annoying automated systems for handing Guild leadership to someone else if you don't log in often enough so I can see how it could happen.

Moving the guild itself is easy enough. The Guild Leader has to move first and tick a box to say they're taking the Guild with them. Then, whenever another member of the Guild moves across, they're automatically added back to the roster, albeit for some reason at entry-level, meaning everyone has to be re-promoted. A bit half-assed if you ask me but a minor inconvenience at most.

The contents of the Guild Vaults, however, aren't going anywhere. The Valuts have to be completely emptied or you can't move at all. And therein lies my problem.

As I'm sure will astonish no-one whose noticed the title of the blog they're currently reading, my Guild Vaults in Rift are completely rammed. So, for the most part, are the bags of all my characters, although I did take the trouble a while back to make sure the ones I log in now and again at least had one empty bag to collect the inevitable "Welcome Back" bribes.

I considered the possibility of distributing the Vault contents among all my characters but even then there's not enough space. I thought about making a bank mule just to carry the load but I'd have to buy a another Character Slot. It was while I was looking at how much that might cost when I had a small epiphany: this is fricken' Rift we're talking about!

How often do I play Rift? Am I ever going to play Rift again? Do I really care which server my characters are on in a game I don't play now and don't plan on playing in the future? 

More to the point, even if I could buy a character slot for Rift Store Cash or Credits or whatever they're called, of which I still have a ton from when the game converted to F2P, do I even want to spend the time it would take to get the move done? To make a character, run through that damn tutorial, make some bags, transfer them over, join the Guild, meet whatever criteria you need to be able to withdraw stuff from the Vault, take everything out and stash it in another bank...

No. No I do not want to waste hours of my life doing any of that. I wanted to press a couple of buttons and forget about it, not start some major project that would take up hours of my life just to get me back to where I began - not playing Rift. 

Except as the record shows, I do occasionally play Rift. It's my seventh most-played game on Steam. I've spent more hours playing Rift since it moved to Steam than I've given to Palworld, albeit over a much longer period. And one of the reasons I still play Rift now and again is because it's on Steam. I very much doubt I would bother if I had to find and update a standalone client but because the button is just sitting there, sometimes I give in to whim and log in for old time's sake.

It helps that Rift is one of the games where I can play all my old characters. I can't remember if I had to set that up or if it was done automatically when the game was added to the new platform but it definitely makes it more likely I'll keep coming back, if only very occasionally. I suspect that if older MMORPGs were able to achieve seamless integration with Steam at no effort for the players it might help at least a little with retention. Then again, it's not like I ever spend any money when I'm there so there's probably no value in it for the companies running the games, even if they can get a few old lags to look in once in a while.

Having considered the possibilities, I'm going to do nothing. Not yet. The Gamigo announcement acknowledges some players may just not bother to move their characters ahead of time:

"Further details will be provided for those who may not transfer to Greybriar, Wolfsbane, Deepwood, or Laethys in time, ensuring your transition is as smooth as possible."

I'll wait until I hear what those "further details" are. Last time something like this happened they just flagged the old servers as Inactive and when you logged in you were forced to move somewhere else. For me, that would probably be as good as anything. If I'm not playing my characters anyway, I can not play them just as easily on a closed server as an active one.

Until then, it's back to Nightingale to see if  I can't push past Bless Unleashed and maybe even Divinity: Original Sin 2 at 91.3 and Dawnlands at 103.4. Both of those seem possible. 

New World at 235.8 hours, though? That's not going to happen. And as for Valheim at 384.8? 

That's a record I doubt will ever be broken.

Better The Devil You Don't Know

Last week's big news was the entirely unheralded acquisition of Trion Games by Gamigo. Following the recent equally unanticipated takeover of CCP by Pearl Abyss, this would appear to mark the beginning of a period of consolidation in the MMO market. Syl thinks so.

There have always been mergers and buyouts, of course. The ownership of both IPs and studios changes hands all the time. Sometimes it goes so smoothly and unobtrusively that years later most people can barely remember it even happened.

Othertimes, the journey is crepuscular and labrynthine, as in the history of the company currently known as Daybreak, which began life as a segment of Sony's 989 Studios, later becoming Verant Interactive then Sony Online Entertainment, eventually being sold to... someone... before arriving at its current resting point, which is... well, who really knows?

In both those cases, standing as they do at opposite extremes of the hysteria scale, the games go on. Cryptic are still knocking out content for Star Trek Online seven years later and people still play it. Daybreak did clear some dead wood but the core titles are all up and running with new content still coming down the pipe - for now, at least.

Reactions to the sale of Trion have been surprising. Well, they surprised me. I had been under the impression that Trion's reputation was so abysmal that almost any change of ownership would be greeted, if not with fireworks and street parties, then at least with a grunt of cautious approval.

Wasn't Trion the company that generated negative headline after negative headline for its chaotic mishandling of ArcheAge and its increasingly predatory cash shop practices? Didn't we all bemoan its precipitous decline from nice guy up-and-comer to punch-drunk schlub?

The worst thing anyone seemed to have to say about Gamigo, on the other hand - in fact pretty much the only thing anyone - apart from Wilhelm - had to say about them - was "who?" As a publisher with more than two dozen MMOs in its stable (twenty five, in fact, not counting the four (Atlas Reactor isn't an MMO) just acquired from Trion) I'd say Gamigo must have been doing a pretty good job to have stayed under the radar this long.

Nosy Gamer, always diligent in his research, uncovered the still little-reported fact that Trion wasn't merely strapped for cash; it was on the verge of bankruptcy. As he explained, the unfamiliar term "Assignment for the Benefit of the Creditors", which appears in the small print required by EU law, is the California State version of the more familiar Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Nosy also discovered that the price Gamigo paid for Trion Worlds and all its games and IPs was "in the low USD two-digit million" range: under $15m, then, probably closer to $10m. By contrast, CCP fetched $225m up front with another $200m to come if it hits performance targets. Trion's was a fire sale by comparison.

I've played a few of Gamigo's MMOs. They publish Eden Eternal, a jolly romp with mice that I've enjoyed once in a while and Twin Saga, a game I played for more than fifty levels and write about occasionally.

Gamigo acquired Twin Saga when they bought Aeria Games, who appear to retain some kind of individuality. Twin Saga itself seems to be suffering from population issues since the English Language server was recently merged with the German/French one to form a single  Global Server, but the game persists and the Producer's Letter from August promises " ...a more populated server together with more and more content. Oh yes, Twin Saga is on the road!"

I don't really play any of Trion's MMOs any more. I dip into Rift once in a while and sometimes think of having another bash at ArcheAge but realistically I am not going to play either of them again in any meaningful way. I can't claim to have any lingering emotional attachment to either of them. I also never played Defiance and didn't like Trove.

It's easy for me to look at the sale in a detached, emotionless way and say that I imagine it will be at worst neutral and most likely good for the games. They appeared to be in a hole, operated by a company that now looks like it may have been in freefall. From the outside, this looks more like a fingertip save than a looming disaster.

That doesn't seem to be the general reaction. Massively OP's comments were predictably filled with doom and gloom but I've been more surprised to see bloggers, whose opinions I value more than random MOPpets, posting to say they're quitting Trion games as a direct result of the change - or at least seriously considering doing so.

I align myself more with Kaozz, who said 

"This isn't like Wildstar where the studio is closing down. While they'are reports of a massive layoff, who didn't see that coming with the state of Rift in the last year or so. Not surprising at all. The game has focused on all the wrong things, like the Prime server, leaving the normal servers to flounder and stagnate for far too long. I'm very sad a lot of people lost their jobs, I hope the staff cut from Trion find jobs swiftly and wish them all the best. As a customer I saw a bleak future, this is something better than closure, it's a possible future for these games."

 As always, in the end only time will tell. My guess is that none of Trion's MMOs will close but neither will they get much in the way of new content. They will settle into something more than Maintenance Mode but less than Full Development, a relatively happy medium where they will live out a quiet, unspectacular life for many years to come.

Having the games on the log-in portal of a new Publisher, where they will almost certainly come to the attention of many players who will never even have heard of Rift or Trove, will most likely bring in enough curious newbies to more than replace the exiting bitter vets. How many of those incomers will hang around is another story.

The bare fact is, though, that without this sale or another like it, these games would have closed. Trion was out of luck and out of road. Had Gamigo not come along with a handful of cash the only (legal) hope left for anyone wishing to play these games would have been the newly-announced Video Game Museum.

And that's something that deserves a post of its own.

Lost Time Is Not Found Again: Rift Prime

Rift Prime launched last Wednesday, with the traditional log-in queues and lag. Or so I read. I wasn't there. I'd forgotten all about it.

It wasn't until Wilhelm posted the day after that I remembered one of the things I was supposed to do on my week off work was decide whether or not to give Prime a try. I was leaning very strongly towards not bothering until he pointed out that the required Patron status is purchasable with Trion's funny money rather than real cash.

Like Wilhelm, I'm still sitting on a huge pile of credits from the F2P conversion years ago. In what was the most ill-judged purchase of my MMO carreer, I pre-purchased the first Rift expansion, Storm Legion, in the version that came with a full year's subscription. When Trion later decided to drop the sub they gave refunds...in cash shop credits.

That wasn't the ony reason I felt I'd made such a bad decision. There was some odd background to it that I'd like to record here for posterity.

The Background Story

Mrs Bhagpuss and I played Rift for around six months from launch in 2011. We had a good time for a while but only a year later we were already playing GW2.

Although we took to GW2 immediately, at the time the first Rift expansion was announced, GW2 was having huge - really, really huge - problems with bots. Just a couple of months after launch those issues were so pervasive and unavoidable that we discussed our options and decided that, if ArenaNet couldn't get things under control, we'd quit and go play the Rift expansion instead.

So I bought two 12 month packages, which seemed like the best deal. Then we went on holiday to Spain for a week. When we came back ArenaNet had cleaned house. The bots were gone. All of them. It was like magic.

I never heard exactly how ANet did it but overnight they either removed the entire population of bots or made it so we never saw them. In a matter of weeks it went from being the number one issue that threatened to destroy the entire game to something no-one even mentioned. Now the whole episode is utterly forgotten.

So there we were, with a year-long sub to a game with a new expansion and no real desire to play it. When it launched we didn't even log in. We probably never would have, only a friend, who was also in both our GW2 guild and our old Rift guild, left GW2 for Rift so she could build houses with the new Dimensions feature.

Her positive feedback eventually convinced Mrs Bhagpuss to go take a look at the housing there, which happened to co-incide with the F2P conversion in 2013. I went along to try Storm Legion. It was dour and dull. I lasted less than two weeks. Mrs Bhagpuss spent all her free cash shop credits on fixings and furniture, stayed for about a month , then left, never to return.

Since then I have dipped in and out, now and again, on a new F2P account and on my old one with all the perks. I never spent any of my store credits, all 19,290 of them. On Saturday, I logged in and blew a couple of thousand on the shortest period of Patron Status available, two weeks.

Two hours would have been plenty. One, if I could have skipped the tutorial.

The "Review"

Rift always had a terrible problem with its opening act. The tutorial is numbingly tedious, full of technobabble and lore twaddle that makes no sense, plus a lot of shouting and yelling and explosions. It's supposed to create a sense of excitement and urgency but it just makes for an extremely annoying roadblock to the game you came to play.

A few years in Trion added an option to skip the Tutorial but that seems to have been removed for Prime. Unless I missed it. Anyway, I slogged through the tutorial for the umpteenth time, rolling my eyes. I think they might have shortened it a bit. It only took me half an hour.

All the time I was "entertained" by a perpetual stream of moaning, complaining, swearing, boasting and arguing in the default chat channel, which seemed to be set to Level 1-29. To call it disheartening would be a major understatement. It was grim.

There appeared to be a very large number of players with nothing better to do than talk incessantly about what a bad time they were having, how Trion could have done it better or what great things they would do when they got past all the annoying leveling stuff to the Raids they came for. That stream of collective consciousness continued unabated for the entire two hours I played. If anyone who was actually between levels 1 and 29 ever spoke about the content in those zones I must have lost it in the static.

Rift's scene-setting problems don't end when you get out of the tutorial. The game dumps you at the wrong end of the starter zone and throws a whole lot more lore nonsense at you before offering you the first of what will be a seemingly endless series of the most mundane, trivial quests ever seen in a major MMO.

At root, Rift is a very old-school quest-hub theme park MMORPG, extremely closely modeled on WoW but with absolutely none of WoW's elan or imagination. I honestly think I have never seen so many lacklustre quests in one game. Even the dullest of imported F2Ps has more to offer in terms of wit or imagination than this.

That doesn't matter as much as it should because no-one comes to Rift for the questing or the lore or the story. These days they might come for the Raids, I guess, or the Dimensions. Back at launch everyone came for two things: the Rifts and Invasions and the flexible, innovative"Soul" class system.

It always took too long before you found your first Rift or got run over by your first invasion. This time I almost logged off in frustration before - almost an hour and three-quarters after I left character creation - I heard the familiar blast of brass that signals a major invasion.

I'd found a couple of Rifts by then. They were disappointing. I did one with two other people and one in a duo. Both failed. There were scores of players all around but no-one seemed interested. Rifts, apparently, were giving really terrible xp when Prime launched and everyone had immediately learned to avoid them. Trion buffed that xp but from what I was getting it was still very poor.

The invasion, when it came, was better. People did join in to do that and I got a very brief and faint reminder of how exciting it used to be. Even so, there was none of the genuine thrill we used to feel, no hint of players co-ordinating defence or working towards a common end. There were no call-outs in chat, no-one organizing groups, none of the desperate racing from Rift to Rift to close them down before the event failed.

By the time the Invasion ended I was just shy of Level 8. I finished a couple of quests to ding just out of a sense of tidiness. Then I logged out. I haven't logged in again.

For me, the lure of Rift in those first few months was always the Rifts and Invasions. For as long as the community was focused on those, taking them seriously and responding to them enthusiastically, I remained involved and committed.

As the months passed, Trion made numerous changes to both Invasions and Rifts that made them less appealing, less exciting, less essential. By the time we had Raids and Crafting Rifts and PvP Rifts and Lures the whole point of the exercise had been lost, for me anyway.

ArenaNet took the concept that Trion had borrowed and expanded from Public Quests in Warhammer Online and blew it up into an entire gaming eco-system with GW2. Going back to Rift now, even a highly populated Rift Prime with actual Rifts and Invasions is like going back to watching television on a 12" B&W portable when you're used to a 48" plasma screen.

I still would play Rift again, if the game could guarantee a steady stream of those zone-wide Invasions along with a population of players ready and willing to do battle with them. And that might happen - for a while - in the mid/end-game zones, Iron Pine Peaks, Shimmersands and Stillmoor. I'd love to see that but I'm not going to grind through forty levels of brain-sappingly boring quests to get there.

Whether Rift Prime will be a commercial success for Trion the way Progression servers have been for SOE/DBG I very much doubt. Rift simply doesn't have the depth or breadth of content of either of the EverQuest games, nor the nostalgia factor. Trion, as Brasse's comment on this Massively OP thread confirms, are well aware that interest in Prime may not be sustained.

Mine certainly wasn't. I might log in again before my two weeks Patron access expires. I won't be buying any more. Not even with credits.

P.S. For a much more detailed and considered review, try this at Endgame Viable. It wasn't up when I wrote my post or I'd have worked it in!

Build Your Own MMO : Landmark, Trove

So. Trove. What the heck is that all about?

Is Trion setting out to steal a march on EQNext Landmark ? Did they look at what SOE were doing and think "Hey! They missed a trick there - it doesn't look enough like Minecraft" ? Maybe someone just saw GW2's Super Adventure Box side-project-that-grew and thought "I could do better than that".

However the seed got planted something weird is growing. It seems the whole MMO genre is melting before our eyes right now. Someone crossed the streams and we're all caught in the feedback.

I was already struggling to understand Landmark although the recent hour-long Livestream did clarify some things. Off-puttingly, unfortunately. Only one race and it's Human? Bleh. Hunting creatures for resources not in until after launch? Pshaw! Most of my questions remain unanswered but still, Landmark starts to look almost conventional compared to Trove, a game which I am not even going to attempt to parse at this stage.

There's clearly a trend developing and I'm not at all clear on how I feel about it. For years  big and small game developers alike churned out quest-driven theme-park WoW clones seemingly by the dozen. There followed a brief and heady rush of games supposedly driven by Dynamic Events. It was frustrating at times, exciting at others but I always felt I at least knew where I was. Seemingly overnight that's all changed.

When a snowball rolls dowhill...

The biggest and almost certainly the most far-reaching development is the sudden willingness of games companies of all sizes to go full-bore into Build Mode. If that just meant a corporate landgrab for the huge audience of would-be world-builders that Notch uncovered that would be one thing; a sideways slide from Theme Park to Sandbox is never more than a swing of the pendulum away for the genre in any case.

It's not just about the building you do inside the MMO, though. The current wave of MMO developers all seem to have undergone some kind of mass conversion to collectivism. Having decided their customers would all rather be building castles than delving in dungeons they've extrapolated from the micro to the macro and decided to contract out the entire job to us. Don't just build stuff in the MMO. Build the whole damn thing!

At one point in the Trove video a Trion dev says "We have no ego". They'll take ideas from anyone. They're not proud. Scott Hartsman pops up to tell us about the "magic" that happens "when developers and players are interacting". Like Terry Michaels and Dave Georgeson over at Sony Towers the Trion Team believes it's never too early to get players involved. Your Game Developer Needs You! Go sign up right now. Oh, if only those ancient Greeks had come up with a letter before Alpha we could get in there even sooner!

So square it's hip

Before the majors jumped this train it was already steaming down the track that Kickstarter built. Let's just hope there's no washed-out bridge waiting somewhere down the line. Ah, but those arguments over the whole crowdfunding concept are well-rehearsed. We're all just waiting now to see how things turn out.

There's a huge difference, though, between pulling out your credit card to chip in on the development costs of an MMO you fancy playing some day and what SOE, Trion and to a lesser extent Perfect World/Cryptic are hoping to persuade you to do for them. When you break it down, a Kickstarter project isn't much more than a gussied-up pre-order. Mark Jacobs isn't asking you pay him a few hundred dollars so you can spend a few hundred hours building art assets for Camelot Unchained in your free time. (Although there were so many options on the proposal I might have missed that tier...)

And this is where we get to the crux of it, for me at least: time.

It's true I'm not sold on the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing. Like Wilhelm I find Dave Georgeson's acknowledgement that "Sometimes we ask questions that we know can only go one way." reassuring. Maybe it's the Everquest in me; I prefer my developers to have Vision, with or without the trademark. It's also true that I'm aware of the potential issues with fair reward and exploitation that could arise from some of these crowd-sourcing systems.

Those aren't the aspects of the current direction of travel that are making me feel increasingly wary and uncertain. No, it's more that I'm by no means sure that where we're heading is somewhere I want to go. A decade and a half back I came on board for an experience that amounted to a fantasy roleplaying game equivalent of Nathan Detroit's oldest established permanent floating crap game. The venue and the house rules might change but somewhere, day or night, you could be sure there'd always be a party LF1M.

Now, I purely love housing in MMOs. I think some form of housing should be in every game. There's little I like better than ending a session by putting down a few trophies, /sitting by a cosy hearth and logging out. I like crafting things for my house, farming mats, being given furniture by grateful NPCs for whom I've done some small service. Carrying a dining table out of a forest may not be high adventure but it certainly is roleplay, and I do still believe these are at heart roleplaying games.

Looking for work? Well, not really...

I'm not even entirely averse to a little tinkering around behind the scenes. I enjoyed EQ2's Dungeon Maker for what it was, which wasn't all that much in the end, and for a while I entertained fantasies of telling a few tales with Neverwinter's Foundry. The reason those fantasies never took form is because of a little epiphany I had a while back: I want to play MMOs not make them.

Building art assets, constructing scenery, writing and plotting scenarios - even with the whizziest, most user-friendly, intuitive tool-set imaginable it takes time. A lot of time. It took me many weeks working many hours a day to complete one Neverwinter Nights scenario. Back in the 1980s it took me almost as long to finish a text adventure using The Quill. These projects were highly engaging, deeply involving and ultimately very satisfying but they were also exhausting and incredibly time-consuming.

The more I think about it, the less I want to repeat that process. I'm in my mid-50s. I no longer see an endless corridor of years receding away from me to an invisible vanishing point. The prospect of spending hundreds of hours working on virtual vanity projects no longer appeals the way it once did. As for being paid for my efforts, as the Player Studio offers to do, a model which, if successful, will no doubt be emulated widely, well I already have one badly-paying job; I don't need another.

None of which is meant to suggest that I'm not interested in dabbling in such things, in short bursts, now and again, as long as it's amusing. I get creative urges. Often. The thing is, I already have an outlet for those: this blog, which eats up enough and sometimes too much of my play time already.

So it's fair to say that I'm wary of the way things seem to be going. There's a push towards open-ended, user-generated content and collaborative development from one side and signs of a pulling away from directed, level-based content on the other. And yes, the recent flurry of schemes to skip over levels to get to the end game is another part of the ongoing dismantlement of the traditional MMO.

Meanwhile, I signed up for the Trove alpha. If you can't beat 'em...

Like Buses: EQNext, ArcheAge

News isn't my thing here but sometimes the news fish just slaps you in the face so hard you can't help but yell.

Yesterday's announcement that Scott Hartsman was leaving for unspecified pastures new would have fulfilled most quotas for Trion Story Of The Week, but it wilts in the heat of today's press release quoted in full over at Massively: Trion is going to publish ArcheAge in the West, handily definied for us as "North America, Europe, Turkey, Australia and New Zealand".

When they will publish it they aren't saying, yet, but ArcheAge launched in South Korea just last week after a much-hyped six-year development cycle and what seems like several lifetimes in beta. I haven't mentioned it much here because there was no obvious prospect of being able to play it any time in the foreseeable future. Now there is.

A stream of stunning videos released over the last year or two (all available to watch on YouTube, I'm sure, if anyone hasn't already drooled over them) show a graphically beautiful game that also appears to have the potential for deep, complex sandbox-style gameplay. In common with most sandboxes there is a strong PvP element but as far as I can gather much of this is optional, in that there are several very large continents and some of them are "safe", or at least as safe as monster-ridden wildernesses can be. They'll still kill you but at least they won't dance on your corpse and steal all your stuff. Probably.

Anyway, so that could be the true AAA quality sandbox/sandpark that will give our lives the true meaning they so surely and sorely lack. But wait, what's this? Can it be?

Yes it can. Riding into view on his unfeasibly articulated, slack-backed catamount it's none other than John "Smed" Smedley, fresh from his Damascene conversion to player-driven-content with a bombshell he'd like to drop. In an otherwise unexceptional interview with Gamasutra, talking about EQNext he throws this in right at the end:

"Players will get their hands on an actual release version of what we're doing late [this] year - and I don't mean a beta".

Pardon me? EQNext, you say? In my hands? THIS YEAR??? That'll be the game that, as I said recently, I am most excited about and which I wasn't expecting to see even in beta until late 2014 at the very earliest and realistically a lot later than that.

It's an odd phrasing, though, isn't it? What's with that indefinite article? Is there going to be more than one "actual release version"? Is this some kind of Kingdoms of Amalur/Copernicus deal? Oh, who cares? Whatever the heck it means, it sounds like my Christmas present's sorted.

So, two supposed AAA sandbox/sandpark MMOs could launch in the same year, although we have no idea how long it will take Trion to translate, localize and launch ArcheAge and we don't even know what EQNext actually is. Green Armadillo could still be on safe ground with his prediction that "we're likely to get at least 8-9 months into 2013 without a major event launch" but prospects for the year as a whole just got a lot more interesting.