New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

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

Calculation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem always is whether it will last. 

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

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

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

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.

Chimeraland: Still There, Still Weird

I saw a "Whatever Happened To...? post about Chimeraland on MassivelyOP yesterday and it made me wonder... whatever did happen to Chimeraland? 

I played it quite happily, even a little obsessively, for a while a couple of years ago, when it was only avialable on servers in South East Asia. I stopped for a bit and then after a while the game launched "globally" through Steam.

I ummed an aahed over whether to start afresh before deciding that yes, I would, because Steam is so convenient. I played my new character for a while but doing everything over again wasn't quite as compelling as doing it for the first time and I soon drifted away.

I dropped back in once or twice but mostly I forgot about the game. If I thought about it all, it was with a vague idea I might go back to the SEA server, where my character was a lot higher in level and I had a pretty nice house. Really, though, I had no particular plans to play again.

When I read the MOP piece, which all but says the game is in maintenance mode, I got a whiff of nostalgia that made me think I probably ought to stop by the old place one more time before it was too late. I didn't want to get the urge some day and find out I'd missed my chance. Been there, done that, got the emotional scar tissue to prove it.

This morning I jumped through the usual hoops (Resetting my password, patching the game, finding it still didn't work, uninstalling and re-installing, resetting my password a second time...) before I could log into the SEA servers. When I got there I was greeted with a very long message about a new version of the game, complete with extensive patch notes.

I wasn't entirely sure at first whether it was new information or legacy "news" from last year, when I knew there had been a major update that added a whole new continent. If the game was really in maintenance mode it wouldn't be surprising if no-one had bothered to change the login messages for twelve months.

As I scanned the details it became clear that no, this wasn't outdated information. There is a huge update coming and it arrives tomorrow! Here for your delight and approval are the full patch notes because I'm blowed if I can find them anywhere other than the in-game launcher.  The official website hasn't had an update since January and the Steam page hasn't been updated for nearly a year!

And that's where the notes end... right in the middle of a sentence. I'm guessing they were too massive for the buffer to handle. 

We'll get the rest of them tomorrow, when the update lands, no doubt. There's a downtime of just a couple of hous, after which you'll need to install the update to log in because "the old version will be discontinued".

The instructions only mention the iOS and Android versions but since the game is fully cross-play enabled and I just cut and pasted the notes from the Steam installation (That was fun, let me tell you...) I'm as confident as I can be that it will apply to the PC version as well.

I think it's safe to say that developer PixelSoft have not abandoned Chimeraland and that the game is not about to enter maintenance mode. As for whether anyone is still playing... as always with cross-platform games it's extremely hard to tell. 

There certainly aren't many people playing on Steam. Population has been in steady decline ever since the game arrived on the platform, with August seeing an average monthly population of around ninety. That sounds very small but the all-time high was only 2252. 

With a 30-day peak of 143, the game has lost about 93% of its audience, which honestly makes it much the same as New World, except that no-one's playing New World anywhere other than Steam, whereas you can play Chimerland on any number of devices.

With a big update coming, it would be a good time to return to Chimeraland. I might have done it myself if my characters had still been there. Unfortunately they're not.

I'm so used to MMORPGs never deleting characters that I never even thought to check what Chimeraland's policy on dormant accounts might be. You get three months' grace. If you don't log in after that, your characters are wiped. I hadn't logged into either Steam or my LevelInfinite account on the SEA cluster for a lot longer than three months so my characters on both platforms are long gone.

Surprisingly, I really don't mind. I had no plans to start playing again and I wasn't particularly attached to either of the characters I had. If I want to relive my adventures with them I can just read the many blog posts I wrote at the time. That will bring back fond memories far better than logging in to a game I no longer remember how to play.

What I might do is make a new character just to have a look at the two continents I've never seen. I'm more motivated by the thought of starting afresh than I would be to run an existing character around. 

Probably, though, I won't bother. Time moves on and I feel Chimeraland has had its turn. I have plenty of new games to tinker with. I'd rather go forwards than back.

Still, it's very good to see that the game hasn't been abandoned after all. It's a strange game. I've not played anything quite like it. It would be a shame to see it disappear. 

And even if I'm not playing any more I hope someone's enjoying it. I mean, where else can you play an adolescent jellyfish with legs, grafted onto the back end of a giraffe?

The Faults In Our Stars : GW2

Guild Wars 2 has the honor of being the first MMORPG I have played where I actually groan when I hear there's going to be new content. Specifically, new Living World content.

There was a time when I looked forward to the story moving forward. As I've said all too often, we never knew how well off we were when we had Scarlet to entertain and infuriate us. Even in recent times there have been some moments. That trailer...

Mostly, though, things have become teeth-grindingly formulaic. It's been getting harder and harder to summon up any enthusiasm let alone excitement. Today I hit an all-time low. Flatlined.

There's a new trailer for Season 4 Episode 4, which goes by the name "A Star to Guide Us". It appears to have been designed to send us to sleep. I don't believe I have ever seen a promotional puff with less, um... puff.

Composed almost entirely of flashbacks, with one of those voice-over narrations directors like to use when they aren't confident anyone will know what's going on otherwise, the compilation of clips centers on the young dragon, Aurene.

Aurene is a cipher at the best of times and her character model gives her the unfortunate appearance of a badly-maintained carnival float. I have always struggled to take her seriously, although she did a pretty good job of changing that at the end of the last episode when she... but, no. Spoilers!

Yes, some people still haven't played through Episode 3. I know this to be a fact because one of them is Mrs Bhagpuss. She lost interest in the plot years ago and since she also detests the boss fights she tends to put off doing the instances until the last minute. In the case of Episode 3 the last minute has yet to arrive.

I did finish it. It wasn't as bad as some. I thought at the time, though, that I'd had about enough of riding on this roundabout. I no longer have much interest in even exploring the new maps, far less farming them. I think the last one I spent any significant time in was... no, it's gone.

Looking on the bright side, there seems to be remarkably little combat in the new trailer. Actually, none at all. I suppose it would be too much to hope for an entire non-combat Episode? That certainly would break the mould.

As for the rest of the update, it looks staggeringly uninteresting. There's aforementioned story and map, as per usual. Minus points for making the map Branded - the ugliest visual theme in the game. Then there's a raid. Never going to see that. Don't care. And a new Legendary weapon. Ditto. Oh, and let's not forget a Mastery for Mounts. Or rather, let's. I hate mounts.

So far so meh. There are two properly new things but I don't like the look of either of them. What's more, I don't trust them, either.

One is an "Upgradable Armor Set". As someone asks at the start of the forum thread on it, "What does this even mean?" I don't know but I'm guessing it's a) grinding and farming and b) wriggle room for ANet over the "no more gear tiers - ever!" promise. If you can't go high, go wide.

The other innovation also threatens to scratch an itch, which sounds fine until you remember that scratching just makes you sore and irritated. Sun's Refuge is an "upgradeable instance" modelled on the one in the Nightfall expansion for the original Guild Wars. I didn't like the concept then and I doubt I'm going to like it any better now. It's an annoying, cheap and deeply unsatisfying way to imply the game has housing without actually putting any housing in the game. Much like the existing "personal Instance". Only worse.

What with all this "upgrading", the recent revamp of the ArenaNet website and even the World Boss widget in the Gem Shop, I strongly suspect we are being softened up for something. Possibly an expansion announcement, possibly a new game in the franchise (a mobile game, undoubtedly), possibly some kind of app.

I could do without all of it. I'm reaching the stage with GW2 where I'm beginning to wonder if I wouldn't actively prefer "maintenance mode". After all, WvW has been in effective stasis for years now and I still play it pretty much every day. If anything, it's most likely going to be the major revamp that finally gets me to stop.

And I do my dailies every. single. day. without fail, even though they're the always the same and have been for years. Not just on one account but three! And I do World Bosses regularly even though most of them haven't varied in style or substance for longer than Scarlet's been dead.

GW2 has an infinitude of repeatable content already. Some of it competitive, some of it co-operative, some of it solo. Sometimes you have to  wonder if we really need any more. The same could be said of many MMORPGs.

In the end it's the illusion of change that we chase, anyway. About the only MMO that genuinely rips up the playbook every couple of years is World of Warcraft and the rumbles of discontent over that are growing ever louder. And someone may be listening, because isn't Battle for Azeroth the most "more of the same" expansion yet?

Of course, all ANet have to do is release a blisteringly good episode with a fantastically satisfying implementation of all those new ideas, a thrilling narrative, a stunning new map and some amazing gameplay and I'll have to come back next week and eat crow. (Not that I'd ever eat a crow. I love crows).

Here's hoping.

Blue Sky Thinking : EQ2, GW2

I was hoping that the latest GW2 update would drop early today. I wanted to take a quick look and put together some sort of "first impressions" before it was time to go to bed. Well, it did arrive at a reasonable time for me - 5pm in fact - but  unfortunately it also came with a bug that causes disconnection from the server every few seconds

As I write this, nearly two and a half hours later, there's no fix in sight and the increasingly angry thread on the forum has reached six pages. First impressions are on hold until tomorrow. If I get in tonight I'm doing my dailies.

While I wait for my fix, I thought I might pop up a quick post featuring some screenshots I took last night in EQ2's Plane of Magic. Like pretty much every zone added to the game in the last five years or so it's very pretty.

It's no wonder Daybreak are so keen to shepherd newcomers into the newer zones at the earliest possible opportunity. Everything before Chains of Eternity, which arrived in 2012, looks dated but from that point on someone worked out how to use a combination of deep, rich colors and monumental scale to give zone design a facelift.

You still wouldn't mistake the results for modern-day graphics but there's a deliciously overblown, decadent feel to them, layered as they are with fin de siecle filigree and flounce. Everything tends to drip with lace or drift in haze, like a fever-dream or an opium-eater's vision.

That approach works especially well for somewhere like the Plane of Magic. It's a little more out of place, perhaps, in Brokenskull Bay, the byzantine, baroque lair of that drunken ne'er-do-well gang, the Brokenskull Pirates, but I'm prepared to make allowances for the sake of an aesthetic I enjoy.

I recently took my Sage through the crafting line to get him maxed so he can start making spell upgrades for himself, my Inquisitor (already at the cap) and my new Wizard. I was expecting to hit 110 well before the end of the questline but I was surprised when it happened even before the halfway mark. 

As a result, he's benched for now, although he needs to finish the full tradeskill sequence for the excellent rewards. I thought about having him put his pointy Warlock hat on and taking him through the adventure line (and eventually I will) but I was curious to see how well the Wizard performed using only the gear and spells gifted her by the latest free level 100 boost.

Very well indeed is the answer. Especially considering I have no better idea how to play a Wizard in EQ2 than to hit everything that isn't on cooldown until the mob dies or I do. Under the circumstances  it's going exceptionally well although I imagine I'll need to work out what my spells do eventually.

I always thought cloth casters were supposed to be fragile at high levels but apparently that's your grandma's gameplay. I started off using roots and snares or sending the Mercenary to tank (she's an Inquisitor so I didn't expect her to do a great job holding aggro) but it became apparent pretty quickly that such a cautious approach was entirely unnecessary. 

At level 100, every mob in Plane of Magic cons yellow and is at least six levels higher than the Wiz, but with a snare on, most of them die before they even get into melee range. Even so, I don't even bother snaring them any more. Even if they do hit her, she doesn't seem to take any damage.

What with her seemingly inexhaustible mana pool and her 11 million hitpoints, not to mention her own personal healer on tap, it seems she's perfectly capable of face-tanking any solo mob needed for the outdoor quests. To put that in perspective, when when my Berserker did Level 100 on the same mobs, wearing the free starting gear given out with the expansion itself, I believe he had somewhere around 2.5m hit points. He had a much slower time of it until he hit 101.

The Wizard is working on the third of the Plane of Magic factions so most of the content I'm seeing is new to me. It's very similar - kill ten of these, gather ten of those, oh my friend got lost down a hole can you get her out? and so on but at least the dialog is different. 

I need to max all three factions anyway. There's a very good reward for doing so plus an Achievement which flags your account to allow you to spend a currency at vendors who sell gear that's a direct upgrade to the stuff you get from the solo questline and dungeons.

It's all very well thought out. If I was playing EQ2 as my main MMORPG, as I did for a long time, this structure would give me things to do that I would consider worthwhile for a good part of the year. Comparing it to the soul-crushing "end game" of GW2, it's hugely more acessible, manageable and relatable. I'm not a great fan of incremental upgrade mechanics but you have to have some sort of progression to take you from one expansion to the next and EQ2's is sound.

As I play less and less GW2 - or rather as I play GW2 for fewer and fewer hours each week - I'm dotting around between a number of other games. I haven't settled on anything as a "primary secondary" but EQ2 gets a good deal of the available attention.


I already have two max level adventurers and two max level crafters. Given the likely arrival of the next (final?) expansion in November it seems not unlikely that by then I will have four adventure classes at the cap - Bereserker, Inquisitor, Wizard and Warlock. I don't believe that has happened since Guild Wars 2 launched six years ago.

There are three very specific reasons why this is happening now. Firstly, the free Level 100 boosts have jumped several characters directly into starting position. Secondly the ten extra levels that come with the current expansion are much, much easier - and faster - to complete than the previous decile from 90 to 100. Thirdly, the Plane of Magic content has more variety, and therefore replayability for second or third characters, than any expansion for a long time.

Returning to that second point, DBG seems quietly to have dropped SOE's utterly ridiculous practice of splitting levels into fifths by the use of  "Prestige Points". That nasty little ruse effectively turned every 20% into something that took at least as long as a full level to complete. If thay'd used levels in the normal fashion through that period we'd all probably be Level 150 by now.

The takeaway is that EQ2 feels to me to be in a very good place right now when it comes to balance and progression. Plenty of players would disagree I'm sure (it wouldn't be EQ2 if they didn't) but both in game and on the forums the general vibe in this expansion cycle has been noticeably less harsh and hostile than in other years.

It's ironic that the team seems at last to have found some solid ground on which to build at precisely the time the game is most likely entering its final stage. At least it will make maintenance mode as solid and replayable as it can be, if and when it comes.

Along with the similarly robust state of current EverQuest, it also bodes well for whatever new version of Norrath they're working on under wraps. If any. The Smed-led outfit may have had more strut and bluster but this bunch might just actually be able to come up with a finished product that works.

We'll see. Or we won't. If there really is an EQ3 in the works I just hope to live long enough to play it.

Long Distance Runaround : Guild Wars

As far as I know, "Maintenance Mode" for MMORPGs is a relatively recent innovation. While any number of MMOs may have slipped into de facto maintenance-through-neglect over the years, the first time I heard of one being officially mothballed was when ANet decided to "automate" the original Guild Wars in 2013, following the successful launch of the sequel, GW2.

Square Enix followed suit, pulling the plug on further development for FFXI a couple of years later. It was a decision driven primarily by the increasing difficulty of keeping the game running on ancient consoles, although, like ANet, Square no doubt also hoped to avoid splitting the audience after the eventual, successful resurrection of FFXIV.

Not a huge difference between this...

That turned out to be a famously ironic decision.  There was no maintenance mode for the PS2 or  XBox 360 players. Their versions simply stopped. For the PC players, however, things carried on almost as normal. Three years after development supposedly ceased, FFXI still receives more updates in "Maintenance" than many MMOs get in their prime.

It's a telling example of how "maintenance" can mean very different things to different developers. SmokyMonkeyS began by abandoning their intent to create a fully-blown MMORPG with Ninelives before going on to give up on the single-player version too. The game went into what they called "temporary suspension" but it remains up and running and it's even received a couple of significant updates since development came to a halt. Funcom's The Secret World, on the other hand, seems to have dropped off the radar entirely since it was replaced by Secret World Legends.

...and this.

ANet have left Guild Wars assiduously alone since they announced the end of active development. Their version of maintenance included the full automation of repeatable events like holidays, aniversaries and special bonus weekends. The idea was that the game would remain up indefinitely for those who still wanted to play but it wouldn't require - or receive - any input or resources to keep it running.

It was something of a surprise, then, to read last week that the game was getting a graphics overhaul. It's certainly true that many MMOs start to show their age in the visuals long before the gameplay dates. As the genre ages some developers have been puzzled, even dismayed, to find a significant number of their customers sticking with old favorites for far longer than expected, which has led a number of of them to attempt to give their fading stars a facelift  - with varying degrees of success.

More noticeable here.

That makes sense if the old game is still the one bringing in most of the revenue. Moreover, if a developer is entertaining even the smallest hope, however misguided, of attracting new players, it's true that 2005 graphics don't make for much of a shop window.

Guild Wars doesn't seem to be actively promoted any more, although you can still buy it from the website, so why bother tuning the graphics? Turns out it was one of those "passion projects" we often hear about, most of which turn out to be something else entirely.

Not this time. This one was genuine.  According to Eurogamer, a power surge at ANet's European data center led indirectly to a couple of developers using their off-hours to tweak the old Guild Wars engine to add a whole slew of new options inluding "windowed fullscreen support, a new 8X MSAA anti-aliasing option, 16x Anisotropic filtering support for the existing "use best texture filtering" option".

The new version looks sharper, something that was even more apparent in-game.

They also fiddled with the draw distance and the LODs and added a toggle to maximize both. In my experience, changes to draw distance can be one of the most revelatory changes a developer can make to a game. When SOE pushed EverQuest's draw distance out to the horizon it changed the game overnight. Huge areas that had been shorouded in thick fog for the years I'd been playing suddenly came into view. It was awesome.

The changes to Guild Wars aren't on that scale of magnitude for the simple reason that Guild Wars zones tend to be designed rather cleverly to give an illusion of space while actually being quite constricted. Unlike EQ, where the plains of West Karana stretch into the middle distance, regions like Deldrimor Font or Borlis Pass are full of twists and turns that restrict the line of sight. Even the mountains that form the backdrop are scarcely a jog-trot away.

If the differences between the first two pairs were subtle, here they are unmistakeable.

 Or perhaps I just went to the wrong zones to test the changes. Maybe I should have tried the snowfields of  the Far Shiverpeaks or the savannah of Elona. Instead I went to revisit Yaks Bend, one of my favorite spots in Tyria and also somewhere I can remember very clearly. I figured it might give me a better chance of appreciating the changes.

The difference is quite subtle but noticeable and certainly worthwhile. I think it's fairly easy to spot the Before and After in the screenshots. The new version removes a deal of the "fog" from the zone walls, bringing the mountains into sharper relief. It also reveals details like smoke from the fires and the occasional previously unseen peak. In one shot there's even a mysterious light in the sky that might be either a graphical glitch or an astronomical object.

Not only do the hills and far trees come into focus but smoke can be seen where there was none before.

There's nothing here that's going to pull in new customers but for anyone still playing or returning for a nostalgic visit it should come as a very welcome sign that someone's still paying attention. Stephen Clarke-Willson, one of the developers who did the voluntary work to make these changes happen, along with less-visible but equally welcome fixes for the tools used to report bots and RMT trades, is quoted as saying he'd "like this game to run for many years".

Let's hope he gets his wish.

The Last Days Are Taking Forever : The Secret World

So, Funcom are getting out of the MMO business. They must be exhausted. Nothing ever really went their way, right from the start.

It must have been sixteen years ago that a beta CD for Anarchy Online dropped through my letterbox. I never did get it to run but I bought the game anyway. That barely worked, either.

AO was the genre's first MMORPG with a science fiction setting or so its wikipedia entry alleges. Despite a first  few weeks so terrible the experience would stand as the benchmark for MMO launch disasters for a decade and more, the game must have done well enough in the end. Funcom went on to develop another, this time using a major fantasy IP.

Age of Conan launched in 2008, leaping onto the MMO stage in a blaze of glory that exploded into accusations and acrimony once players leveled past the extended tutorial. It was a turbulent but not unsuccessful time for the company and clearly MMOs were still where Funcom wanted to be.

Four years later they were back for a third bite of the MMO pie, this time with another self-developed project: The Secret World. TSW took the proposition that Everything Is True and ran with it, offering Lovecraftian horror and conspiracy theories in a contemporary setting, together with some of the best writing and voice acting the genre had seen.

With three AAA games on the slate and their expertise and confidence evidently improving, Funcom was indisputably a major player, a pillar of the industry. Yet none of the three MMOS they created and curated had really set a fire. As a developer, Funcom somehow always seemed to be somewhere off to the side of the real action.

Anarchy Online, which had limped so badly out the gate , trundled on mostly forgotten. Age of Conan, which had burned brightly for such a short time, faded into the background hum, one of those many MMOs that keep on going though no-one ever talks about them. The Secret World, smaller, more focused, more finished, very much a niche product in a market that wanted to be mainstream, never really found its place or its pace.

Funcom's third entry in the field in just over a decade had started well enough. Take-up was strong, reviews were favorable, word of mouth was positive. The thing they didn't have was luck. Or timing. Only two months after TSW arrived Guild Wars 2 opened its doors and suddenly no-one was talking about The Secret World much any more.

That sort of thing happened a lot back then. Still does. It was the age of MMO tourism and the Three-Monther. Players swarmed like bees to every new flower in the field but few settled. Now Funcom had three low-key MMOs, each with a dedicated but ever-shrinking audience. Having "MMO" attached to your product was fast becoming a liability not an asset.

2012 was the highwater mark of World of Warcraft's tide, the one that was supposed to lift all MMO boats but mostly saw them flounder and sink. At that time everything had to be an MMO. Just the acronym printed money or so everyone seemed to think. Except it didn't. Turned out no-one could bottle lightning twice. 

Around then a lot of MMO developers were seeking salvation in the accounts department. Funcom had been one of the very first Western developers to adopt a Free to Play business model. Anarchy Online went F2P as early as 2004, supported perhaps uniquely by a system of in-game advertising placed on virtual billboards that integrated surprisingly well with the futuristic setting.

It wasn't long before all Funcom games ran under one form of F2P hybrid or another. Over the succeeding years the company experienced a number of financial problems but somehow weathered them all, arriving in 2017 with its trio of MMOs all up and running. Just about.

Interest and commitment to the genre Funcom helped found seems to have been waning for a while now, at corporate level as well as among the diminishing playerbase. In the last eighteen months most of what the company produced hasn't been directly in the MMO sphere at all.

First there were two standalone spin-offs from The Secret World, "The Park" and "Hide and Shriek". Both were successful. At time of writing The Park rates three and a half stars and "Mostly Positive" on Steam while Hide and Shriek does even better, with a Very Positive rating and four and a half stars.

That must have set minds working at the studio. Updates for the MMOs dried up but new, non-MMO projects continued to appear. In January of 2017, somewhat later than expected, Conan Exiles, the first Age of Conan spin-off entered Early Access.

A much larger project than either The Park or H&S, Exiles joined the ever-growing army of "open world survival games", a strange phenomenon, in which it seems neither polish nor content are required to print money the way MMOs were once said to do.

With the new direction clearly paying off, the writing was on the wall for Funcom's MMOs. A press release a month ago announced that Anarchy Online and Age of Conan were both entering "maintenance mode", meaning the servers stay up but no new content will be created for either game.

For a month it looked as if The Secret World would escape a trip to the stasis pod. More than that, a whole "relaunch" was promised for the five year old game. And then, a couple of days ago, we got the details.

When Funcom said "relaunch" they meant exactly that: a whole, new game. Secret World: Legends is no revamp of the existing MMORPG. Indeed, it isn't an MMO at all. Funcom describe it as "a shared-world action RPG" because, presumably, the MMO tag is seen as the kiss of death these days.

What differences there are between a persistent, online open world that allows people to share the same virtual gamespace while pursuing solo and group activities and "an MMO" I guess we will just have to wait and see. From what little I can glean so far all it seems to mean is a central hub (a revamped Agartha) and fewer people to compete with over quest mobs.

However SWL turns out, the one thing it will most definitely be - may already have been - is the death of The Secret World. The existing version will remain playable but will never see another update. I've seen it claimed that it will also be impossible to create new accounts for the old game but I can't find anything from Funcom to confirm as much, neither in the SWL FAQ nor any press release or interview so far.

Even if it is technically possible to make a new TSW account, though, no-one will. Why would you? Daed gaem...

Reaction to all this has been surprisingly mixed, polarized even. Longtime players with deep commitment to the game in both time and emotion are devastated. Tyler F.M. Edwards puts it best and Sylow, in the comments there and elsewhere, exemplifies how difficult a transition this is going to be for many. The official forums are running very heavy in negativity, as you would expect.

On the other side of the argument are many people who would have liked to like TSW but somehow never quite could. People who couldn't get on with the combat or those like Isey, who thought the game should never have been an MMO in the first place.

One thing that isn't in doubt is the degree of risk involved in Funcom's decision. The inevitable comparisons have been made both to Star Wars Galaxies NGE and the FFXIV reboot: this is different from both. Funcom isn't sitting atop of a stack of much more successful, profitable games like SOE and SquareEnix were back then. Nor do they have a powerful outside partner giving them orders or a totally disastrous error to make good to give them a pass on bringing down the world to make it anew.

No, this is an act of desperation, a wet-palmed roll of the dice in the casino of last resort. Or it is as far as Funcom's future as a developer of MMOs goes, at least. If they pull this off then Funcom becomes  a game developer with several successful non-MMO properties and three dead MMOs gathering dust on life support. If not, that smoke you smell is all of Funcom's bridges burning at once.

And where do I stand on all this? On the sidelines, I guess. I like The Secret World a lot but I hardly ever play it and when I did I almost always played it on my own. Mrs Bhagpuss, whose idea it was to buy it in the first place, bailed after a month or so, finding it too unrelentingly depressing. Plus she was one of the ones who hated the combat.

I carried on until GW2 launched and played it sporadically thereafter but I haven't logged in for a year or so. I got stuck about 85% of the way into the main story and lost heart. I found it too hard to be fun and, yes, it was the combat again.

As long as a server stays up, TSW will be as available to me as it ever was. I probably still won't log in often and when I do I'll probably just wander around taking screenshots. I love my character but I feel she's mostly at the end of her journey. So long as I can visit with her on a whim I'll be fine with that.

As for the new version, of course I'll try it. But, like MassivelyOP's M.J., I don't enjoy reticule-based, mouse-locked action combat. This may be a fix to the combat issues of the original for some people but for me it smacks of frying pans and fires.

Then there's the starting over. That's not a turn-off. I enjoy beginning again in MMOs I already play and in TSW, as is so often the case, some of the strongest writing and most fully-realized gameplay is in the opening zones. As a DIKU fan I also welcome the moves towards clear progression based on levels and gear. Not to mention that having a fresh, clean inventory will be a pleasure in itself.

It's almost certainly too late, though. I may play out of curiosity but even if the solo-friendly gameplay is significantly easier I very much doubt I'll be working my way all through that long, complex storyline to get back to the part where I got stuck, just so I can find out whether I'll get stuck in the same place again.

The Secret World had its chance to hook me five years ago. It gave it its best shot but it didn't land the punch. In taking such a drastic move towards slash and burn Funcom are gambling there are a lot more people out there who would love TSW if only it wasn't an MMO than there are people who did love TSW while it still was one.

I think its a five year old game with a reputation for being weird and awkward and strange and difficult and a re-badging isn't likely to change much about the way people think of it. The move has, however, gained Funcom great deal of media attention, something they have been consistently good at acquiring over the years, if less effective at converting into profit.

There's a strict NDA on the beta, for which I haven't bothered and don't intend to sign up, so we will know nothing other than what Funcom choose to tell us until it soft launches. Supposedly that will be sooner rather than later.

I'll reserve further opinions until I get a hands-on that I can talk about. Until then, my commiserations to the people who loved this unusual and enigmatic MMO. I hope things turn out better than it looks as though they will.

There may still be hope. After all, FFXI gets more updates in "maintenance mode" than TSW was getting in full development and although everyone can't be Square Enix, Funcom have shown an admirable loyalty to their aging MMOs thus far.

This story may not be over quite yet.