Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For anyone?

First Impressions, Second Chances

As I was reading back yesterday's Lost Ark post it occured to me that I often finish ""First Impressions" by making some bold statement about whether I'm likely to go on playing the game and if so for how long. I started to wonder just how accurate predictions like that tend to be and whether you can really tell from the first session whether you'll play a game for days, weeks, months or years.

Luckily, for once I don't have to guess. I can go back and check. That's one reason for having a blog.

I've been reporting my opinions on new mmorpgs since the blog started in 2011 but it appears I first started using the "First Impressions" tag about six years ago, when I posted about my experiences in Blade and Soul. I've used it for expansions and game updates as well as full games but for the purposes of this excercise I'm limiting my research to new mmorpgs (Or games that have been widely treated as though they were mmorpgs.). Most of the conclusions were drawn from release builds but there are a handful of betas and early access reviews in there as well.

I expect I missed one or two but I think this is most of them. Almost thirty titles. For most of those I seem to have restrained myself to a single first impressions post, which I've linked. Some, Star Wars: the Old Republic and Atlas, for example, I seem to have managed to turn into "first impressions: the mini-series". For those I've linked to the post from which I took the quote.

Here, then, in reverse chronological order, is what I concluded about the games, often with a promise or a prediction about how likely I was to go on playing them. I've followed that with a few words saying whether I actually did. I'm curious to know if it reveals anything that might make me consider how to approach these posts in the future. Let's find out.

Chimeraland - January 11 2022 - "I can guarantee this won't be the last post about Chimeraland. I don't imagine for a moment it's going to be something I play the hell out of for years but equally I can already see it's going to keep me amused for at least as long as it take me to figure out what the hell is going on, which could be a while. " 

I think we all know which way that went. For a few weeks immediately after that post, Inventory Full became the unofficial home of the Chimeraland Fan Club or it certainly felt that way. There are seventeen posts tagged "Chimeraland" here already and that count is going to keep on climbing. I may not play for years but I also have no plans to stop.

Elyon - November 5 2021 - "Whether I'll log in again remains to be seen. I wouldn't say, as I did with Tera, "Thirty minutes is more than enough." but I have too many other, more appealing options right now. Maybe one day."

I don't think I ever did log in again. I remembered absolutely nothing about the game until I looked at the screenshots in the post and even then I couldn't remember much, not even if I still had it installed.. Turns out I played it via GeForce Now, which does at least mean I could log in on a whim at any time. I have no plans to do that, though.

Bless Unleashed - August 11 2021 - "I like Bless Unleashed and that's my first impression. What my last impression will be, who can say? But no-one ever does Last Impressions posts, do they?"

No, they don't. Maybe I should start but if I do it won't be with Bless Unleashed because I'm not done with it yet. Last summer I played it most days for a few weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it. I logged in for the winter holiday event and I often think of dropping in again. If it had a control system I liked better, I'd still be playing it regularly but it's too far towards the "action" end of the action mmo spectrum for me ever to feel really comfortable.

New World (Second Open Beta) - July 21 2021 - "It does feel as though Amazon might have got this one right. I guess we'll know for sure come September."

We sure did! Quoted for irony. 

Swords of Legends Online - June 20 2021 - "Chances are I won't buy Swords of Legend Online right away but chances also are I will buy it, sometime."

Hmm. This one's interesting. To me, anyway. Until I re-read this, I'd actually forgotten how much I enjoyed the game when I played it. I did almost pay the full box price, too. The only reason I held back was that, as you can see from the cluster of "First Impressions" posts dated June and July, there was a lot of competition last summer. I really need to install this and try it again, now it's gone free to play. And I would, if only there wasn't still too much else going on.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Generation - June 12 2021 - "I can't imagine I'll be devoting much time to this one. I'll probably give it a couple more goes then put it quietly away. Don't let that put anyone else off, though. This is definitely the right game for someone. Just not for me".

And that's almost exactly what happened. It's a decent mmorpg but I don't like the controls and the exploration is too restricted. I gave it a fair shot but it didn't stick. I've uninstalled it now.

Crowfall (Open Beta) - June 4 2021 - "With the beta set to run for another couple of weeks it's quite likely I'll spend a fair few hours as a Crow. I wasn't anticipating that when I downloaded the game but I'm always happy to be pleasantly surprised by the confounding of my misapprehensions."

I played until I hit the level cap and posted about my experiences in the game several times. I was still playing, on and off, as long as the beta lasted but after I hit the cap there wasn't really much to do. I never saw anyone do any PvP the whole time I was there. I followed the desultory reports of its sputtering launch for a week or two and then forgot all about it.

Elteria Adventures -  June 2 2021 - "For an alpha this looks solid. I'll be more confident about that when I've seen more but it's a convincing start. "

I went back and played a few times but I ran out of new things to do and stopped. Development seems to have stalled. The Steam page says "There's no recent activity from the developers of this title..." I might look into that later.

Valheim - February 11 2021 - "I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again. It's going to be one of the two, I bet. I just can't tell which, yet."

Three hundred and eighty-one hours played and counting. Mmmm! Delicious words. Eat them all up! The game I didn't want to play and didn't like much when I did turned out to be the thing that took up almost all my free time for a couple of months. I haven't played much since but the upcoming update looks interesting enough to get me back for a few sessions.

Genshin Impact - October 2 2020 -  "Since the game is free to play and genuinely so as far as I can tell, I can't see any reason not to give it a try."

Another one I really didn't expect to like but which grabbed me by the scruff and wouldn't let go. I gave it a good run at launch and I've been back a couple of times. I had screenshots from GI rotating as my desktop background all the way up to last week, when I swapped the folder for Chimeraland. I'm not done with Genshin Impact yet but as always it's finding the time.

New World (First Open Beta) - "I like New World a lot. At the risk of breaking that earlier NDA I'll confirm I always did. It doesn't do anything you won't have seen before but everything it does, it does well. It's solid, entertaining, accessible and polished. What more do you want?"

It's fascinating how most of my posts about New World's various betas emphasize how solid, stable and polished it is. I wasn't alone in thinking that at the time. What the hell happened? Despite all the bugs and breakdowns and foot-shootings I played for several hundred hours and I will certainly add to that over the next year or two, always provided Amazon don't throw in the towel.

Black Desert Mobile - December 16 2019 - "I may be back. I may not."

I was not.

WoW Classic - August 27 2019 - "When I finish this post I'm going to log in and carry on so I guess I must be enjoying myself. I might do my Guild Wars 2 dailies first, though. And log in to Riders of Icarus. Oh, and go do the first of the new Panda quests in EverQuest II. I don't think there's anything going on in WoW Classic that can't wait."

I found this very surprising on a re-read. I'd forgotten how lukewarm I was about the whole WoW Classic project. I only played at all because everyone else was writing about it and I wanted to get a few posts out of it too. Then I found myself completely drawn in and played almost nothing else for a couple of months. Never did get to sixty, though. I might go back for WotLK Classic, if it happens and if Blizzard looks like a tenable proposition to give money to by then. I still wouldn't play one of their games at the moment but the day is obviously getting closer.

Secondhand Lands - July 3 2019 -  "It is, after all, exactly the sort of quirky, original take on the established format that many lovers of the genre have been asking for for years, while roundly ignoring its existence. It would be shame, having found it at last, to let it slip through my fingers simply because of a lack of patience on my part."

Yes, it would, wouldn't it? Do I feel ashamed? Yes, I do a little. I have been back several times but I think I finally need to accept that things that were fun twenty years ago may not be fun forever. No fault of the game, just recognizing an uncomfortable reality.

Star Wars :the Old Republic - April 22 2019 - "I have already decided to subscribe to TOR for a single month to bump my account up to "Preferred" status."

I played the hell out of SW:tOR for a couple of months and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's WoW in space, what's not to like? I didn't mean to stop, either. Something else was happening and I put it aside for a moment and never went back. I often think about logging in again and carrying on from where I left off but - broken record time - there's just too much happening in the genre right now to look back.

Atlas - January 5 2019 -  "I've enjoyed learning what Atlas is trying to be, but as a PvE MMO, right now it's pretty much a bust. It's still a co-op survival game under the hood and that's a genre that's never appealed to me, no matter how fancy the paint job."

Astonishingly, to me anyway, Steam says I only played Atlas for six hours. I got a lot of posts out of that short time and in my memory it feels like it was a lot longer. For a long time I thought about trying again but last week I finally accepted it was never going to happen. Uninstalled.

Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse - December 16 2018 - "As a taster for the eventual MMORPG I'm not sure it really tells us much (it doesn't even feature the "hybrid" combat I wanted to see) but at least it doesn't raise any red flags...yet."

OMG! Remember this one? The standalone AoC spinoff Intrepid spun up out of nowhere in the heat of the Battle Royale craze. That got them yelled at. A lot. I quite liked it. I played it several times, more than I've played any other Battle Royale game, and I would have played it more if anyone else had. I remember logging in one weekend for some fragging fun and finding literally no-one else there to kill or be killed by. Then it closed down and we all pretended it had never happened. Still waiting for my Kickstarter-pledged beta access to Ashes itself, of course. How many years is it now?

Bless Online - August 21 2018 -  "Bless is in no way going to change anyone's mind about anything. If you didn't like previous Korean MMOs you're not going to like this one... If you're easily amused, like me, though, it's definitely worth giving Bless a go. I'm sure there are a good few more hours in it for me and the odd blog post, too."

There were. I played for a couple of weeks and got my character into the mid-teens. Then I lost interest and stopped. Then the game shut down. I did like Bless but I like Bless Unleashed a lot more. I hope it lasts a lot longer.

 Legends of Aria - July 13 2018 - "Let's give it the benefit of the doubt for now. Open beta is due sometime later this year. I might take another look then. Or I might just skip it. I don't think it's really my sort of thing. Might be someone's, though."

Completely forgot I ever played this. I did not try the beta. I did skip it. I can't remember what happened to the game after that... Ah, I just checked and it's on Steam, free to play, with a "Mixed" reviw rating. I'm happy with my decision to pass.

 Warframe - July 19 2018 - "I do quite like it so far..."

A more honest reading would be "I tried to like it..." Warframe is obviously an excellent mmo and several people whose opinions I respect absolutely love it. I just found it awkward and often annoying, plus the character models are absolutely hideous. I gave up after half a dozen sessions. I don't expect to play again.

 Auteria - April 16 2018 - "I may well be back..." 

I was but only a couple of times. I still check in on the website occasionally to see if anything new's happening. It never is. It's still running, though. And I still have it installed.

Stash - January 9 2018 - "I don't know whether I'm going to find the time to invest in this one that it certainly requires and possibly deserves but it's tempting. It may look funny but it's a proper, real MMORPG and that's not nothing, not nowadays."

Reading this again was surreal. I remember Stash by name but if you'd asked me what kind of a game it was I'd have said some kind of tile-based puzzle title. I'd forgotten it was any kind of mmorpg, let alone a "proper, real" one. It's vaguely coming back to me now. I did play a few more times but not for long. I seem to remember it being quite difficult. And slow. That would tie in with the old school mmo thing, I guess. Maybe I should take another look.

Secret World Legends - June 26 2017 -  "I don't like it. The overarching impression I was left with was one of disrespect. The Secret World was a unique and original creation: this is just another bash 'em slash 'em F2P MMO. What a shame."

I might not have liked it but that didn't stop me playing it. I've played SWL plenty of times since then. I got as far as Egypt, I think. Certainly well into Blue Mountain. I also ended up preferring both the slightly-easier combat and the somewhat simpler mechanics of SWL over those of The Secret World, although I can't really say I felt the diference was as great as all that. Still always on the table, both of them, although I don't suppose I'll ever do more in either than play the odd session and take some screenshots. Best costume designs in any mmorpg, ever. Worth logging in just to change outfits.

Shroud of the Avatar - May 13 2017 - "Even after nearly three years in Early Access this does feel like an alpha not a beta. Pre-alpha might be over-egging it but it definitely feels like there's a long way to go."

It was rough. I wonder what it's like now? Not planning on finding out.

Revelation Online (Closed Beta 3) - January 2 2017 - "It's a step up from Riders of Icarus, on a par with Blade and Soul, and definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing. If you don't like this sort of thing though I wouldn't bother. It's not going to change your mind"

What!? Have I been hacked? Revelation Online is better than Riders of Icarus and as good as Blade and Soul? Who says so? Me!? If so, why did I play both of those near-daily for months at a time but RO only for a handful of sessions when it launched? Okay, I can at least remember playing Revelation Online but I couldn't tell you anything about it, whereas I could chew your ear off with tales from RoI and B&S. 

Riders of Icarus - July 10 2016 - "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul."

Then again, this was 2016. It seems I've changed more in the last six years than I realised. These were my first impressions of Riders at launch and I didn't cotton much to it. When I came back for a second look a few years later I had a much better time. As I've said before, I might still be playing it now if it hadn't been for all that kerfuffle when the game changed hands and I got locked out for months. I am starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to go back for another look at all the mmorpgs I said I didn't like, first time around. Not that there are many of them. I do seem to be very easily pleased.

Black Desert Online - March 8 2016 - "The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying.... At this early stage it's impossible to judge the stickiness but I think I'll get the box price out of this one, at least".

I did. And then some. I've played a lot of Black Desert, on and off and I'm far from done with it yet. I often think of BD, when I'm playing other games that remind me of it and wonder why I'm not playing BD instead. Black Desert doesn't need my recommendation, though. It's done rather well for itself.

Blade and Soul - February 1 2016 - "I don't get the feeling this is an MMO I'll pursue for long but I've thought that about a few Eastern conversions and ended up pottering around in them for a good while so who knows?"

Not me, obviously. For a while, probably right after I said I wouldn't be playing it for long, became my main back-up game, the one I played when I wasn't playing Guild Wars 2. I still play, occasionally. I have a character I like, I'm slowly leveling her up and it's only because other games keep interrupting that I never get very far. I still think Blade and Soul is one of the best of the imports and I've never really understood why it isn't more popular in the West.

And there we have it. All the first impressions from the last six years. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn, other than if I say I don't much like a game it probably means I'll end up playing it for months. 

On that basis, I guess we should expect a lot more posts about Lost Ark.

Try To Keep Up!

Isn't there a lot of news around at the moment? Gaming news, I mean. Well, entertainment news generally but I already covered that or at least a bit of it. It doesn't stop, though, does it? And everything's getting muddled and mixed, like when they cross the streams in the first Ghostbusters movie, which is supposed to be bad. Crossing the streams, that is, not the movie, which is great. You knew that. (Although, does anything bad actually happen when they cross the streams? Oh, yeah, I guess that's not so good. Not if you had the appartment below the penthouse suite, anyway.)

What am I talking about? Well, we all know NFTs are bad, right? But now Kanye's on our team. Are we happy about that? I mean, judge a person by the company they keep, right? And Ye's only saying nay "for now". It's always good to keep your options open.

I know, I know. This has nothing to do with gaming. Okay, maybe not. But this does. "Of all the applications, gaming is a place that *players* can benefit a LOT from blockchain." So says Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, a band I have never willingly listened to although sometimes these things just happen. 

Why gamers should listen to what musicians think about gaming I have no idea although, like every driver's a potential pedestrian, when they're not driving, I guess every musician's a potential gamer, when they're not playing. Playing an instrument, that is. Not a game. Just go with it, aright?

Wilhelm has a really solid, in-depth post up about why Mike Shinoda is, shall we say, mistaken, although the post is technically about the metaverse, not NFTs - but who can tell the difference these days? Certainly not the people throwing money. 

As Wilhelm says, in repy to my comment querying why gamers are getting dragged into this thing in the first place, "As for “why gamers?” I think that is just the easy, lazy answer to the question based on who is already interested in virtual worlds." 

One of these days I'm going to have to do that post about what I think the metaverse is or will be. Is, really. It's at least halfway here already, by my definition. That day is not going to be today.

No, today I'm here to talk about a couple of much more specifically mmorpg-related news stories. The one that's getting all the traction is Blizzard's unexpected announcement, rolling over on decades of tradition and lore to prop up falling populations on World of Warcraft servers make everyone's lives just that little bit better. (Does anyone click through all these links, by the way? I seem to be hyperlinking like it's 1999 today.)

The reaction across the blogosphere is just starting to roll but what I've read so far has been a little mixed. There's a bit of "about time" and a lot of "it's a start" and some "why now?" I expect to see a lot more opinions in the next day or two but I don't really have a dog in this fight. (And isn't that an archaic expression?)

No, well, okay, maybe I do. Not as far as WoW itself, since I'm not playing and was never invested even in the slightest in the bipartite struggle between... what is it, anyway? Good vs evil? Order vs chaos? Smart vs casual? 

I do, however, have some pretty hardline views on the general concept of opposed factions in mmorpgs, which is that if you're going to have them they should be immutable and unchanging. Pick a side and damn well stick with it and that applies to devs as well as players. 

If you want to service a clientele that considers "playing with friends" an important selling point, then don't make people choose sides in the first place. Conversely, if you're constructing a narrative based around opposing forces and building mechanisms into your game to enforce compliance, accept that you're going to exclude a lot of more casual, social gamers and get ready to cater to extremists.

Either way works. Just don't cross the streams. Oh, I did that one already... make it "change horses". At least you can't say Blizzard bent with the wind at the first light breeze. It took a hurricane of bad news to shake that sour fruit loose.

Interesting though that news was, like the report of Sony swallowing up the Destiny and Halo studio for a mere $3.6 billion, I don't feel I should say too much about it. As for Sony's spending spree, the deal involves games I don't play made by people I don't pay. It would be rude of me to comment.

Another mmorpg developer I haven't given any money to is Gameforge. At least I don't think I have. I might need to fact-check that. There are various theories going around about why Sony might want Bungie on board but there's no question as to why Gameforge have decided to switch Swords of Legend Online to Free to Play: it's because no-one is. Playing Swords of Legend, I mean.

I quite enjoyed SoLO when I tried it in open beta last year. It's been on my Steam watchlist ever since and I nearly bought it when it briefly appeared in a couple of sales. I'm glad I didn't, now!

As the press release notes, the box price of the Buy-to-Play game has been "a limiting factor for a lot of people." Curiously, if you have more money than you know what to do with, the option to give some of it to Gameforge still exists, for the moment at least. The cheapest option is the Standard Edition at £35.99 but you can go as high as £89.99 if you want.

Maybe the Deluxe and Collector's editions still have some value but since, according to the FAQ, "The full game experience will be available to everyone for free. This includes all old, new and future content, like the new classes and zones", it's probably a better idea to wait until the 24th of February, when you can have it all for nothing.

Despite my previous enthusiasm, I probably won't bother. As I may have mentioned, there's a lot going on just around then, what with the Guild Wars 2 expansion, the new EverQuest II server, my infatuation with Chimeraland, New World doing whatever it's doing to make solo play more appealing and who knows what-all else. 

Don't you wish these people would get together and arrange their releases so they don't all overlap like this? I mean, they're going to have to get it together when they all sign off on the deals that allow us to take out NFT swords from one game to the next. They might as well get started on those non-competetive, non-commercial contracts right now!

It Might Not Now But It Will Be Later: Second Impressions: Swords Of Legends Online

The unheralded demo for Swords of Legend Online that Gameforge dropped on the Steam Next Fest this weekend comes to a jarring halt at Level 15. I'd just zoned into my first instanced "dungeon" as per the tutorial instructions and spoken to the NPC I'd been sent to meet there when I dinged and was instantly ported out again.

It was a bit of a surprise to say the least. A window opened, thanking me for trying the game and suggesting if I'd enjoyed my time there I might want to think about pre-ordering. I politely declined and tried to zone back into the instance to finish my quest but the portal remained resolutely closed.

The game hadn't actually kicked me back to character select let alone desktop so I thought I'd be okay to have a wander around, explore a little, maybe see some new places even if I couldn't gain any more experience. 

I went to summon my current mount, a white tiger I'd rescued as a cub and who, I'd been told, was so attached to me he pined when I was away. Well, he's going to have to get used it. A disembodied voice told me the option was unavailable. No more riding the tiger for me.

No more air-surfing on the blade of my sword, either. Oh, did I not mention that? It happens very early on. There's a quest that gives you a sword about eight feet long that acts as a flying mount. 

Mounts are quite a big thing in SOLO as far as I can tell. Lots of things are. I lost count of all the collectibles, upgradeables, progressables, selectables and sundry other character development mechanics. 

 

Off the top of my head I can remember:

1. Mounts (Self-explanatory.)
   
2. Pets (Not my class pet. Floaty things everyone can have.)
   
3. Avatars (Backgrounds for your character icon)
   
4. Essences (A big constellation thing. Not sure what it does.)
   
5. Achievements (We all know what those are.)
   
6. Biographies (I found those in a menu - there was no explanation in the tutorial)
   

I'm sure there were a few more I've forgotten and I'm also sure there are more that don't turn up in the first fifteen levels. There were quite a few menu options for things I never saw or used, including the entire crafting system, which never even got a mention. 

One thing I can say about SOLO with a fair degree of confidence is that the average player is not going to be short of things to do there. I can't speak to the "content" as in the dungeons, raids and so forth; unsurprisngly you don't get much of a sense of those in the tutorial. but when it comes to working on your character, filling out skill trees and completing collections, SOLO comes out of the blocks at a dead sprint.

I couldn't ride but I could still run. I opened my map to see where there was to go and that voice piped up again, telling me the service wasn't available. Only it was. Whoever had the job of locking the map when the demo ended had been slacking. It still worked.

The map, by the way, is excellent. Maps are a given in mmorpgs these days but they vary hugely in both style and usefulness. Someone ought to write a blog post about it. Only recently I had cause to be scathing about Crowfall's terrible cartography. This, I'm happy to report, is much closer to the other end of the spectrum.

 

When you hit "M" there's a nice, momentary animation as your character opens a map. It's about a second long so it doesn't wear out its welcome the way, say, Lord of the Rings Online's whistle-for-your-pony gimmick does but it's enough to root your action in the world. The map is attractive to look at, clear to read and you can add your own markers. 

I mention it as just one example of the game's overall attention to detail. SOLO isn't some hastily thrown together cash grab; it's a well-crafted, artfully designed, finished product. Well, it seems to be from the fifteen levels. I suppose I can't say more than that. Given that it's been out for several years in its country of origin, China, however, it seems reasonable to assume there's a whole game on the far side of that level fifteen wall.

The completed demo may have allowed me to open the map but that didn't mean it was going to let me go anywhere or do anything. I could run around the zone I was in but that was all. I tried using my recall skill (the name of which escapes me) but it had been powered down. Questgivers wouldn't talk to me. Portals wouldn't open. I could still kill mobs but since I couldn't gain any more xp and mobs don't drop any loot there didn't seem much point.

One thing I could still do was take screenshots. SOLO has perhaps the best in-game camera set-up I've seen. Black Desert Online's might run it close but I don't remember it having quite as many options. 

If I'd left it to the tutorial I would never have known the game even had a dedicated camera option. The tutorial is relentless and lengthy but it isn't all that comprehensive. Or possibly the demo doesn't even cover the whole of the tutorial. I think it's probably that. I have a suspicion the whole of the first thirty or so levels are pretty much all a kind of tutorial because you don't get to stop calling yourself a Novice or a Beginner until then.

 

I only discovered the camera because I was going around the UI pressing every last button and taking every last menu option just to see what they did. There are a lot of them, too. The sixth of seven icons at the bottom of the minimap is a picture of a camera and that's where you open the extensive suite of filters, focuses, frames and speeds.

I spent a while fiddling about with those, taking test shots and posing. The results were wildly variable. It's a complex range of variables that would take some practice to learn but it would be well worth the time. From the look of it, it's also yet another of the character (or account) development features; a lot of the options were greyed out, suggesting they can be acquired as you progress.

A versatile camera is only an asset if you have something worth photographing. That's not going to be a problem in SOLO. The game is gorgeous. I'm not convinced it's any more gorgeous than quite a few other mmorpgs but I'll admit I may be slightly biased against it because the particular aesthetic it relies on isn't one of my personal favorites. Even so, I found myself stopping over and over again to take a selfie against the beautiful backdrops.

The whole world looked a lot better when I'd worked out how to switch off overhead names. In common with most mmorpgs almost everything is on by default when you first log in and in combination with the many pop-up tips and warnings that come with all tutorials it makes for an incoherent, overwhelming and arguably even an unpleasant visual introduction. 

 

I've seen this over and over again in similar situations. I have to assume that either other people really do play with all this crap on all the time and don't even notice what it looks like any more or that developers have found new players are so innately helpless they have to have every conceivable prompt pushed right in their faces or they'll just curl up in a corner and cry.

What with the visual and the aural clutter, I think it says quite a lot for the game that I wasn't put off and that I did carry on playing after the initial assault. Compared to a few mmorpgs I've demoed or trialed recently - Crowfall, Bless Unleashed, Elteria Adventures and PSO2:NG - I think SOLO is the most offputting in this respect. It's largely the fault of the clashing voiceovers and incomplete translations. That's the one real weak point I saw in the whole seven and a half hours I played. If they get that sorted out for launch then I think the game - or at least the new player experience - should be in a very good place.

How robust the gameplay will be beyond the tutorial and the NPE is a lot harder to say. I haven't even been following the game until recently and I have no clear idea of what it's intended to be at higher levels. Is it one of those games that starts out with a linear quest-driven narrative before switching into mandatory open-world PvP? Does it have an endgame focused on raiding? Is there housing and crafting worth the name?

 

If I'm going to plunk down £36 in a few weeks I guess I'd better find out. I certainly didn't get any clues from the demo. What I did get was a clear indication that this is a game with a linear narrative on which a lot of resources have been expended. The sheer amount of dialog and description is almost too much to take in at times.

It also takes up a lot of playtime. When I wanted a picture of the map for this post I quickly made a new character and ran her through the opening stages to get her into the first open zone. I skipped all of the cut scenes and clicked through all the dialog without reading any of it. By the time I got to where I needed to be the character was level three. It took me maybe ten or fifteen minutes. When I played my first character I watched and read and listened to everything and getting to the same point took me closer to a couple of hours.

For that kind of commitment either the story, the writing or the acting needs to be pretty good. As is often the case with translated imports I get the sense that in the original it quite likely might be. It is based on a very successful TV series, after all (which was based on the original single-player video game 古劍奇譚 琴心劍魄今何在, which Google Translate weirdly renders as "Gu Jian Qi Tan, where is the heart of the piano and the soul of the sword?" but Wikipedia translates as "The tale of ancient swords: the story of a guqin and an ancient sword".)

 

In this version, however, as I said yesterday, none of those elements really merits the attention they demand. I'd be very surprised if many people end up playing SOLO for the story. That said, it isn't all bad. There were quests and conversations I enjoyed, particularly the section where my character died and had to find her way back from the afterlife. Or something. I think that's what was going on. I know there were a lot of red flowers and some greedy ghosts and I could see through her head. And I took a lot of great photos.

I don't know about you but I really don't play mmorpgs for the story. I like to feel there's some good, solid lore for a foundation and some sort of over-arcing concept for a framework but other than that I just want to get on with killing my ten foozles and handing in my foozle fangs for coin. It's not really the quality of SOLO's story I might have problems with - it's the quantity.

Before I wrap this up I probably ought to say a word or two about gear. I've complimented the number and diversity of character development paths but other than raw levels, mmorpg vertical progression stands or falls on the way it hands out gear. Once again, it's dangerous to extrapolate a whole game from the tutorial but here's what I saw.

My gear came from three sources: quests, NPC vendors and boss chests in instances. Oh, and I think there was one log-in freebie at the start. 

The quest gear was absolutely typical for low levels. Basic items were replaced by slightly less basic items at a steady pace. All I had to do was follow the linear questline, something the game really gave me no other option but to do. The items that displayed all looked good within the aesthetic. No clown costumes here.

 

Since the fights weren't giving me any problems I never went looking for gear but I happened to notice some vendors in one village so I took a look at what they were selling out of curiosity. I was surprised to find they had full sets of visible armor with very much better stats than mine and that it was going for prices I could afford from just the money I'd picked up while questing.

I replaced my weapon and a couple of pieces of armor that way and I would have bought more as soon as I'd made a bit more coin only I happened to end up doing the wrong instance twice over, trying to find the right one for the questline. In doing that I killed six instance bosses and they all dropped chests and all the chests had armor for my class and every piece was a huge upgrade even to the shop-bought pieces that had been a huge upgrade to the quest stuff.

The upshot of all that is that I don't really know what's happening with gear. Regular mobs drop nothing at all so my favorite upgrade path, randomly killing mobs in the hope they're wearing a pair of pants that fit me, isn't available. I did get a stack of mats to upgrade weapons so I know that's another option. I didn't see anything similar for armor but I'd bet there's something.

The bane of imported mmorpgs for many people are the merciless grinds for mats to upgrade gear. The sheer offputting nature of the gameplay required to feed the endless synthesis or transmutation is designed to drive people into the cash shop to pay for ways to make it go faster. I'm hoping that, as a Buy-to-Play title, SOLO will avoid the worst excesses of that cynical methodology. I imagine there will be some level of grind involved, though. There almost always is.

 

It doesn't much bother me one way or the other. I rarely stick around long enough for it to affect me and even if I do I rarely reach the levels where it makes much difference. It certainly wouldn't put me off playing if it turned out to be the case here. If you're the kind of player for whom that sort of thing matters it would probably be wise to do a bit of research before jumping in.

Nothing I've seen so far would put me off buying this game. More positively, I've seen enough to be reasonably sure I'll get my £36 worth if I do decide to buy. The only thing making me think twice is whether I'd find the time to play right now. 

If we were in an mmorpg lull I'd have pre-ordered yesterday but we're not. Very much the opposite. Let alone the titles coming later this summer, I already have a perfectly acceptable new mmorpg right in front of me in the form of PSO2:NG. It seems somehow reckless to pay for something I may not even get around to playing for a few months.

But... and it is, as the joke goes, a big but... 

It's so good to play a new, AAA mmorpg with the controls I prefer. Honestly, I like the aesthetics and the settings of both Bless Unleashed and New World quite a lot more than I like SOLO's but neither of them is tab target and tab target is what I like. 

I'm going to think on it some more. Chances are I won't buy Swords of Legend Online right away but chances also are I will buy it, sometime. For now, I might just keep it in my pocket for when I need it. That feels about right.

Ridin' SOLO - First Impressions: Swords Of Legends Online

I had a rough plan for this weekend. It involved scanning through the demos in Steam's Next Fest, downloading the ones that looked interesting, playing as many as I could cope with, then putting together a blog post or two about the whole affair. 

I was just about to fire up Steam to get started when I ran into this news item on MassivelyOP. That changed everything. Of all the new mmorpgs due to land this summer, Swords of Legends Online stands out as the only one with a true old-school control system. That alone would make it a must-play for me if it wasn't for the fact that it's also buy-to-play. 

SOLO (a potentially misleading acronym) is already on my wishlist but I really wanted the chance to check it out before deciding whether it merited the £36 asking price. The demo is limited to the first fifteen levels but that ought to be enough to get the measure of things.

 

Yeah, you'd think. After two sessions, four and a half hours and ten levels I'm still not sure. Luckily the demo has another three days to go. Maybe I'll have a final answer by then. 

Meanwhile, let's review the situation so far. 

I guess these days when I look at any new game the first question has to be can my aging PC run it? And if it can, how well?  I'm very pleased to say that so far all the upcoming mmorpgs I've had the opportunity to trial or test have performed reasonably well on my machine. SOLO is no exception. 

I'm learning to check the default settings before I begin playing these days. Every game seems to underestimate the capacities of my hardware so I can't just trust the algorithms. SOLO has a choice of seven graphics settings, a few of which have somewhat idiosyncratic names:

My default was "Normal". Fair enough. As Jeanette Winterson's mother always used to tell her, "Why be happy when you could be normal?" 

I left it at like until I'd made it into the game and had a bit of a run around. Everything seemed, well, normal, so I bumped it up to "High". That felt normal too, only prettier. I've been playing on High ever since with no problems at all. I'll have to try "Ultra" before the demo ends, just to see how it goes, but I think that might be pushing my luck.

Before I could log into the game itself, of course, I had to make a character. That took a while. Choosing a race was easy - there is only one: Human. I was curious to see how the developers had approached the current gender debate but the answer appears to be they haven't noticed there is one. You get to pick either "Man" or "Woman", which somehow seems even more retrograde than male or female.

I picked "Woman" because I always do when I play human or human-looking. Maybe one day I might come up with a post to try and explain why but this isn't that post. Also I'm not sure I know. I probably need to think about that.

 

There are a lot of options and most of the options have a lot of sliders. You could spend a long time in character creation and if you did you might even end up with the exact character you wanted. I didn't. I ended up with one I was happy enough to play for the length of a demo but I'd have to work a bit harder on getting everything just so if I was going to live with my choices for longer than a few days.

The real sticking point was the limited choice of hair and eye color, especially hair. Henry Ford would have loved it; you can have any hair color you like, so long as it's black. As someone who almost always plays redheads (Hi Syp and no, that's not the reason. Well, not the only reason.) I think this may be the first game I've ever played where that wasn't even an option.

Sufice to say, character creation is well up to par. It makes a strong first impression and that baton is taken and carried by the introductory movie, which features a big dragon and a lot of action. What it was about I have no idea but it made a lot of noise and got me all fired up for...

 

...the Tutorial. Oh ye gods, here we go again.

Actually, I should probably save the tutorial, qua tutorial, for a post of its own. I'm guessing it lasts for the entire demo. No doubt that's why they picked Level 15 as the cutoff in the first place. All I'll say for now is that as the first thing you experience it doesn't really give the game the best push it could. Things get better and better as you go along but the first few levels are visually cluttered and quite confusing.

And, honestly, the game's already confusing enough. It's rooted in Xianxia mythology, about which I know absolutely nothing. That would change pretty quickly if I stuck around, I'm sure. Here's one thing anyone hoping to play SOLO really ought to know: you're going to have to do a lot of reading. Or listening. Or both. This is a very lore-heavy game. 

I'm level ten now and it's no exaggeration to say I've spent the majority of my time either reading quest dialog or watching cut scenes in which voice actors read quest dialog out loud. (More on that later). As well as that I've been handed a number of books, all of which can be both collected and read. And they're quite long as in-game books go.

Even travelling between quest locations doesn't exempt you from reading and listening. Many NPCs talk out loud and pop up speech bubbles at the same time. I'm a big fan of speech bubbles but these are really quite jarring, with their thick green borders and the way they often overlap. 

The voicework also overlaps, a particular pet hate of mine. At one point, handing in a quest, there were three voices speaking simultaneously: the questgiver, a nearby NPC and the fragment of a soulsword my character had swallowed (Don't ask). 

Unsurprisingly, I couldn't hear what any of them was saying, even though for once all three of them were speaking in English. Translation is very clearly a work in progress in Swords of Legends Online. I hope they'll be done with it by the time the game launches because the way things are now is utterly chaotic.

It's not as though some characters speak in Chinese and others in English. Or that certain areas or parts of the game have been translated while others haven't. If only!

It feels almost aggressively random. It's not at all unusual for the same character to say one line in Chinese then swap to English for the rest of a cut scene, or for two characters in a scene to talk to each other in different languages.

Written text is much more consistent. Almost everything has been translated - quests, UI, tutorial, books, all of that. About the only exception I noticed was when a signifcant character was introduced. They all get a caption, presumably their name, but it's in ideographs. 

It wouldn't help all that much if those had been westernized, the way all names have been in the quest dialog, because the relentless flood of unfamiliar names made it impossible for me to remember who anyone was. I found the plot comparatively easy to follow so I generally knew what was being done but I was never very sure who was doing it.

 

The voice acting didn't help. Just about everything is voiced although I'd be curious to know just where they found the actors. The general effect is uncannily similar to hearing the sixth-form English class at a minor public school read set texts from the A-Level syllabus out loud. The line readings aren't incorrect and the inflections aren't wrong, most of the time, but there's the sense that it's all a bit uncomfortable and unfamiliar and everyone will be glad when they get to the end of their bit and it's someone else's turn.

On the positive side, the voiceovers frequently diverge from the written text and the spoken versions are almost invariably more idiomatically acceptable and naturalstic, plus the flow is usually better. It sounds as though the actors have been allowed to improvise a little and it helps. 

The text is odd in other ways. For reasons I couldn't begin to understand, lots of words are in different colors. It probably means something to someone but not to me. After a while I just stopped noticing so I guess it doesn't matter much. I do wonder if it will be like this at launch, though.

 

The translations may need more time but one thing that's working exactly as advertized is the switchable control system. As soon as my character loaded into the game I was offered the choice of either "Classic RPG Mode" or "Action Mode". I picked Classic and for the rest of my time I was able to play just as if I was in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft. You can switch from one to the other at any time but I don't imagine I will. If Ashes of Creation follows this model I'll be very happy.

Interaction with objects and NPCs is supposed to be done by pressing "F" but I discovered quickly that a right-mouse-click also does the job. Or at least it does most of the time. I did run into one or two quest NPCs that couldn't be targetted, which meant they couldn't be right-clicked either. Again, whether this is intentional or an oversight I have no idea.

Even though there's the option to use the Classic mode all the time it may indeed, as the rubric suggests, be more appropriate to swap to Action for combat, at least in these early stages. That's because you can get by with just two attacks if you're lazy. For the class I picked, Summoner, LMB is a small attack that also refreshes the resource and the cooldown of the large attack on RMB. I could kill pretty much everything with a simple rotation of left-left-right or in my case Q-Q-E.

 

How long that will go on for I wouldn't like to say. Not much longer I imagine because there's an extensive skill tree with numerous subsections. I'm not sure how all those are going to fit onto two mouse buttons. I suspect there may be complicated combos. I'll stick with hotbars and my trusty mouse pointer, I think.

However you choose to control it, combat at these early levels is inconsequential to say the least. I have no idea what the death mechanic is because I never came anywhere close to dying. I'm not sure I lost health, which was just as well because I also never found any way to heal myself. Come to think of it I never actually noticed where my health bar was. Maybe I don't have one.

No, I must have because my class has "magical healing abilities [that] can often prove to be the difference between life and death". If I'm going to be refilling health bars there have to be health bars to refill. 

I didn't pick the Summoner for the healing anyway. I chose it because it gets a very cute-looking pet. As is typical with these things, though, you don't actually get the pet for what seems like a very long time. 

 

I first encountered the creature that would become my close companion during a quest sequence I picked up around level eight or nine. It's a quest I suspect wouldn't have made it past alpha in a Western mmorpg, given the negative feedback it would rightly have received for its casual animal cruelty. At least I know how far I can throw my pet by the ears now. Always useful information to have. 

As usual, this "first impressions" piece has run long and I've barely touched on much of what I had to say. (I made notes!)  I think I'll wrap it up for now. Next time I'll likely have hit the demo cap at fifteen and I'll be able to come to some kind of constructive conclusion. 

What I can say from what I've seen so far is that Swords of Legends Online is a proper mmorpg with all the parts in place and working well, translation issues notwithstanding. The visuals, which I haven't really talked about much, are sumptuous and subtle and the whole game looks gorgeous. The story so far is interesting enough by the standards of the genre and the low-level gameplay feels exactly like low-level gameplay in any other similar game you care to name.

 

I'm enjoying it so far but I probably wouldn't be thinking of paying £36 for the box were it not for one thing: the Classic RPG controls. I really don't get offered that option so often these days that I can afford to ignore it when it comes. 

On that basis alone I'm leaning towards buying the thing. If it wasn't for the timing, so many other games about to launch in some fashion or other, I'd most likely have hit the Pre-Purchase button already. As it is, I might just leave it on the wishlist and wait. Maybe it'll go on sale or maybe a time will come when I'll be glad of a new mmorpg. Right now there are just too many to choose from.

We'll see how I feel by the time the demo ends on Tuesday.