Gamigo, Amazon Prime And Netflix Walk Into A Blog...

An odds and ends day today, I think. I can sense one or two larger topics looming out there in the mists but I can't quite make them out just yet, let alone line them up in my sights. I guess we'll just have to see what loose ideas I can find rolling around in the back of the land rover and make do with those.

How did I get into this metaphor and how do I make it stop?

Maybe it was listening to Gamigo's extremely bizarre opening pitch for their new MMO. Yes, apparently they're making one. Or someone is. I was under the impression Gamigo mostly bought the games other people had made, usually in some kind of fire sale. At least, that's how they got hold of Rift and ArcheAge and Trove. 

How's that going for them, then? Trove is probably doing quite nicely. It usually seems to be. Rift is languishing in the same maintenance limbo where it's been for about as long as I can remember. And ArcheAge has just been sold to Kakao.

Well, I say "sold". I can't actually see any figures in any of the press releases or news stories. They all say something like "Kakao Games will act as publisher for Korean developer XL Games!" or "Kakao Games is the New Publisher for ArcheAge" without explaining how that came about.

Given some of the harsh things I've read about Gamigo's custody of the Trion portfolio so far, I imagine a lot of ArcheAge players will be quite excited about the change of publisher but as an outside observer I'm more interested in some background about how and why it's happening. Did a contract expire? Was the game not making enough money to be worth continued investment? Was this an opportunity to resell at a profit? Was that the plan all along? Does it make it more likely Rift could be shunted off to yet another owner?

We rarely get to know the background to these moves. We just get to jump through a whole set of hoops when we transfer our accounts from one set of faceless landlords to the next. No word on that yet but I'm sure it's coming.

In the meantime, Gamigo just spat out the first gobbet of information about a new mmo they're going to be hosting. I say "mmo" rather than "mmorpg" for the simple reason that as yet we know almost nothing about it, not even what it's called.

It's a tried and trusted approach, the mysterious, staggered reveal. We've all seen it before. If you don't have a big IP to wave in everyone's face, it's a reliable way of building interest where none existed before. Gamigo look to be playing that card for everything it's worth and then some.

So far all we have is a video. A video that lasts six minutes and shows... absolutely nothing. The entire thing from start to finish consists of a single, static shot of a planet and a star. Over the course of the video the planet moves very slowly from right to left until by the end the star is occluded by maybe thirty per cent of the planetary mass.

That would be a meditative, calming, almost zen-like experience if it wasn't for the voiceover. As the planet crawls almost imperceptibly across the screen a really rather good actor reads a moderately well-written horror story in which a mother sacrifices her child in order to kill a demon. Or something.

It's a lot more nuanced than that. There are some odd, intriguing hints as to the setting and a discomfiting twist at the end. I am not going to attempt to summarize it. It's embedded above. No need to watch the screen while you listen.

And that's all we get, for now. Gamigo's Twitter feed promises more if people join in the fun: "Every 10 retweets will reveal more from this mystery." I'll wait for the summary, thanks.

If I had to guess, which I don't but I'm going to anyway, I'd say it's going to be a hack-and-slash horror-inflected gorefest themed around demon-hunting. If so, hard pass. The storytelling in the first teaser is good enough to make me withhold judgment until we find out more, though. One to keep an eye on, for now, at least.

What's that you say? It's not my show? Pardon me, but I think you'll find you're wrong.

The second season of Stargirl ended yesterday. Well, it did where I am. Probably already finished somewhere else. We tend to get most of the superhero TV shows late over here.

I really liked it although it was certainly less fluid and well-constructed than the first season, which was quite tightly structured by comparison. Season two also looked visibly cheaper than season one, which would be because less money was spent on it. I know, obvious. Doesn't always follow, though.

The show passed from the now-defunct DC Universe to the CW between seasons and you can tell. The CW never seems to have much of a budget for anything but in a way I think it helps. I like their take on fantasy and superhero storytelling in part because of the way they turn necessity into virtue. The lack of any budget for big, spectacular special effects and long drawn-out super-powered slugfests means they have to focus a lot harder on the characters and particularly their lives out of costume. That's always been the aspect of super-heroics that interests me the most.

The CW trades on teen soap operas with a superhero skin is what I'm saying. Most of their shows I've seen could be Beverly Hills 90210 with spandex and super-powers. Whether that works or not depends more on the strength of the acting and the script than who can punch who through a wall and mostly the both the scripts and the acting are of real comic-book quality.

That's a compliment, by the way. I'm a comic-book fan and a super-hero comic book fan at that. A mainstream super-hero comic book fan, even. I like cheesy dialog and plot twists that would never happen. I like logical inconsistencies and predictable outcomes. 

This is my anxious face. At least I think it is. Honestly, I'm better at the happy stuff.

I particularly like stylized characters who represent archetypes and Stargirl is chock-full of those. Some of the regular characters might struggle to show more than three emotions. Or as many as three for that matter.

That's what I'm looking for in something like this and Stargirl provides it reliably. The lead character (aka Courtney Whitmore, played by Brec Bassinger) is just ridiculously likeable, as is her stepfather, Pat Dugan (Luke Wilson), the ex-sidekick formerly and embarrassingly known as Stripesy. There are moments in Season Two where each of them is tasked with showing us their dark side and in both cases it's one of the least scary transformations I've ever seen.

Which is absolutely perfect. The two of them are the living embodiment of that version of the American super hero that has no dark side. No amount of provocation can bring to the surface something that isn't there to begin with. It does rip giant holes in the plot but who cares? It's what those kind of comics were always meant to be about and it's super-refreshing to see that inner light shine instead of the darkness at the heart of the rotten souls festering inside as exemplified by the likes of the Titans.

The real darkness, both metaphorical and... well, I guess also metaphorical albeit an entirely different metaphor, rests in the unlikely hands of a child and a very old man. Both Milo Stein, as the eight-year old avatar of big bad Eclipso and Jonathan Cake, as immortal not-so-black-as-he's-charcoalled villain the Shade, steal every scene they're in. 

Scariest thing in the whole show. Trust me.

Stein is either a superb actor for his age or someone is a magnificent director of children. He puts more nuance into a single line than most of the supporting actors manage in their entire character arc. Cake, meanwhile, plays the Shade with such arch camp as to appear to have arrived in Blue Valley not from another country or another dimension (both of which he has, in fact, done) but another production entirely, possibly a revival of Blithe Spirit.

Usually, when a season of a show I like comes to an end the first thing I do after the credits roll on the final episode is google whether there's going to be another season. I'm exceptionally happy to report that this time I didn't need to do that. The show ended with a caption announcing a third season entitled "Frenemies".

Since they'd spent the lengthy coda firmly establishing that just about everyone, including all the villains except Sinestro (Who, SPOILER ALERT! finishes the final episode as a piece of half-burnt toast. Yes, really.) were not only hanging around Stargirl's home town but setting up home right next to (or in one case inside) her house, it did seem the stage was being set for the next chapter. I'm just very glad that, for once, those scenes were written with the contracts already in place.

One thing that might be hard to explain to an audience brought up with the MCU or even the Batman and Spiderman movies that preceded the superheroification of cinema is the sheer joy of seeing characters from the comics brought to life on screen. It's something I grew up imagining would never happen. To a disturbing degree it doesn't even matter how well it's done. It's the old dog walking on its hind legs trick. Just to see it done at all is something.

I'm guessing the Dallas has to take whatever movies it can get.

Stargirl, which I guess is at least a peripheral part of what's awkwardly known as the Arrowverse, is almost profligate in the way it throws its references around. Drawing on the decades-long history of the Justice Society of America, there's no shortage of names to drop and characters to introduce but it's weirdly thrilling to be able to watch not just the new, teenage wearers of the Dr. Midnite goggles and the Wildcat claws but their older, timeworn forebears as well. And as for what's playing at the Blue Valley movie theater, well, I'd have to call it fan service - if I thought Prince Ra Man had any fans left. Or had ever had any to begin with.

Stargirl shows on Amazon Prime over here and as we all know Amazon is making strides towards becoming a force in gaming. Competing streaming platform Netflix appears to be harboring ambitions in that direction, too. This week they took their first steps with the release of five games for the platform. I knew it was coming but I got the news by way of what's becoming one of my more reliable news sources for game-related developments - the New Musical Express.

Okay, it's been just NME for a while now. I imagine plenty of people with the website in their feed don't even know or care what the letters stand for any more. It would be passing hard to guess, too, given almost half the items seem to relate to things other than music, especially video games.

As the article says, the initial tranche of games (Five in all.) includes two Stranger Things titles. I was a late-comer to Stranger Things but when I finally found it I was mightily impressed, particularly with the riveting third season. The thought of a game set in that milieu was more than a little intriguing, certainly interesting enough to get me to the Google Play store to check it out.

Funny. I must have missed the episode with all the gnomes.

Unfortunately, having looked as closely at the two titles as it's possible to do without going so far as to download and install them, I decided they weren't for me. They also don't appear to be new games, although I admit to finding the whole thing totally confusing on that score. There are YouTube walkthroughs for Stranger Things: 1984 from as long ago as 2017 and even the current Netflix version was apparently available in Poland back in August, while according to IMDB, Stranger Things 3: The Game came out in 2019.

I'm not quite sure why we should be expected to get excited about Netflix making some old mobile games available on its platform. I was expecting something a bit more impressive. I suppose if they'd been games I'd wanted to play it might have made a difference but even with the Stranger Things connection I do not want to go back to the kind of graphics and gameplay that I suffered through in the period the show depicts. There are quite a few things I miss about the '80s but eighties video games are not one of them.

I didn't look at the other three games, all of which look even less like anything I'd ever care about. I'll wait until Netflix offers up something more suited to my tastes, which I fully expect to be never.

And that'll do for now, I guess. Probably better think of something for tomorrow where I can use some genuine screenshots I took myself. I don't think screen grabs from TV shows count for IntPiPoMo even if I did take longer choosing and editing them than it took me to write the while damn post...

Thirty-Six Hours

Thirty-six hours. That's how long Steam tells me I've spent playing Bless Unleashed so far. Three dozen hours gets you a level 22 and a bank mule. That's what it got me, anyway.

I know this moment. This is where I start to feel I might be hanging around for a while. I almost never do.

A few mmorpgs from the top of my mind where that happened, in no order:

• Twin Saga
  
• Black Desert Online 
• Archeage
• Riders of Icarus
• Blade and Soul
  

All games I wrote about in a tone and with an enthusiasm that suggested I was digging in. All of them faded, all for different reasons. 

Twin Saga got too hard. That was a surprise. I played one character into the fifties. Experience began to crawl. I had quests I couldn't do. I died too much. It got tough. It stopped being fun. I walked away. I came back occasionaly to see if anything had gotten easier. It hadn't. Then the game closed down.

Black Desert Online began in a rush, turned into a game where it took too long to get nothing done. I got into the thirties on one character, had a couple of other characters in single figures, stopped. I came back when the Shai arrived, got into the twenties, stopped again.  Playing properly was a full-time job, playing casually was a riding sim. Even at the start the complexity was numbing and I could feel it getting bigger and deeper around me. I go back now and again but only as a tourist.

ArcheAge was strange. A very straightforward theme-park mmorpg if you played it a certain way, the way I played it. It was before all the shenanigans that damaged its rep. I was making good progress on a single character. I forget how far I got. The twenties at least, maybe thirties. I was having fun, nothing was wrong, then one day I wasn't playing any more. I forget why. It wasn't a decision. I imagine something happened, a holiday, another game, something broke my routine was all it took. All it ever takes, really. I thought about trying again, several times, but the moment has passed.

 

Riders of Icarus I enjoyed for a summer. It was familiar and a little unusual, too. There was a lot of fighting in the air on flying mounts, which took some getting used to but was at least semi-original. And they gave you stuff just for logging in that was actually good - better than stuff I've gotten for playing other games properly. I had (have) one character, I think in the twenties now. I didn't mean to stop playing but the company changed hands and they fluffed the transition and I couldn't log in for months. I can now but I don't, mostly.

Blade and Soul, more of a success story. I think I've only ever had one character. She's I don't know what level, mid-something. Half way to whatever it is. I want to say forties? I drove through the story at the start, got invested, then began to find the gameplay a little challenging. Too much finger-twiddling. Mine, not the character's. I drifted away but when I came back I found it easier, somehow. Recently I was playing most days until Bless Unleashed appeared.

That's just a smattering of similar, familiar stories. I play a lot of mmorpgs. I like most of them. I never met an mmorpg I didn't like, that's the saying, isn't it? Not entirely true but close. 

They take a long time, though, and they go on. They keep going on. It's not like the games you download from Steam, with a beginning and an end and if you're lucky something inbetween. Much as I'd like to keep playing all these good, great and just perfectly fine mmorpgs it's not remotely possible. 

I often used to say I preferred the low levels to the high, the levelling process to the end game. Sometimes I wonder if it's true or whether it's post hoc rationalization justifying extant reality. I have to like the starting game to the mid-levels because it's all I ever see.

Not strictly true, of course. There are games that stick, where I hit the cap and don't stop. EverQuest, EverQuest II, Rift, Vanguard, Guild Wars 2. Probably a few more. Others where I might not have capped but got close, maybe with several characters. Close enough to see the finish line and know what comes after. Dark Age of Camelot, Wizard 101, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World, World of Warcraft.

 

But mostly, with all but four or five in twenty years, I bailed at the top. Not for me, I could see that. With exceptions, sure, but on the whole that expressed preference for the early/mid game holds up.

So, Bless Unleashed. Where does the future lie? Almost certainly with all the other games I left behind even while I was supposedly invested and involved. I get so far and then I stop and sometimes I couldn't even tell you why. 

All of which is a lead-up to explain why I think it is I might be feeling the need to keep justifying my time spent playing, to qualify my enthusiasm, to make it clear that, yes, I'm having a lot of fun (really a lot) but that's not any kind of endorsement or recommendation because tomorrow or next week I might drop Bless Unleahed and not mention it again for a year.

It's a heavy responsibilty, having a blog. No, it's not. Of course it's not. But it could be if you let it get to you that way. 

In the particular case of Bless Unleashed, though, there is something else going on. The game has a history that means it has more to prove than most. I forget the unhappy details but the original Bless crashed and burned in some fashion still remembered with anger and resentment by people with better memories than mine.

Other mmorpgs have had to re-launch or reinvent themselves, most famously Final Fantasy XIV  but also the aforementioned ArcheAge. It can go either way. 

 

The connection between Bless and Bless Unleashed is something I have not researched and don't intend to but I've picked up a little. It's the same setting, I think. Looking at my posts from the first game I'd say it uses some of the same art assets. It might have the same lore. I can't remember anything about the story in the old version so I wouldn't know.

Other than that it seems like a completely different game. The controls are different, the systems and mechanics are new, the zones, the cities, the world - nothing about any of it rings any bells with me. It's also heaving with players in a way I definitely don't remember about the original. Everywhere feels bustling, busy, alive.

Or does it? At twenty-two I'm just about in the bubble, I think, albeit bumping along. Most of the people I see around me are in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties and there are plenty of them. 

They lounge around the soul fires, soaking up the health-restoring heat, snarfing down the shared food. They cluster around the marketplace and the warehouse so thickly it's hard to see the NPCs. Every quest I take ends up with me fighting mobs with other people doing the same, a very good thing for all of us.

 

It gives the strong impression of a vibrant, successful game and by the standards of most mmorpg launches I think it probably is, but...

Yesterday I had cause to go back to the first, big city and quest hub, Navarra. When I was last there you could barely get through the streets for people. Now it's empty. The wide boulevards and plazas bake in the sun but no-one's there to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city. Only the ever-present NPCs.

Okay, there were a few people on the streets. Half a dozen, maybe. It was nice, actually. Quiet. I could get to things without having to push. It does suggest the influx of new players has slowed to a trickle, though, if that. When I log in, instead of Crowded it says Average.

It's too soon for most players to be making alts, other than the necessary bank mules, I guess, and levelling content doesn't scale the way it does in some mmorpgs, so once you're through a region, you're done. There's rep, of course, and it's tied cleverly to appearance gear among other things, so there are reasons to come back around but it's early days for that for most people. 

There is another factor that could keep the lower-level regions in play. Bless Unleashed, like many imported mmorpgs that start out looking like PvE themeparks, turns into a PvP game later on. I'd say exactly when only there seems to be some confusion on the precise moment. I've read twenty and I've read thirty.

 

At twenty you can certainly opt in to killing other players. I got the pop up. I've been seeing characters with blood-red names all around me for a good while now. What I'm less clear on is when those of us who choose not to attack others become fair game to be attacked ourselves, regardless. 

All I can say with certainty is that so far no-one's attacked me and I haven't seen anyone else fighting each other either. I've been in a couple of contested zones but they both had mobs in the thirties so I came out again pretty quickly. Based on all that I'm going to say I think it's probably at thirty when I'll need to start watching my back. At the speed I'm levelling that's still a while off.

I could keep playing and avoid PvP altogether. In the uncontested areas it's not permitted. That leaves a fairly extensive sweep of country to explore and things like the rep vendors and a number of resources found there mean a peacable player could likely find satisfaction for quite a while, either playing alts or just mooching around gathering, fishing, killing world bosses.

For now, though, it feels as though all the interest for most players lies in the path ahead. I'm with them. I'm finding the storyline unexpectedly involving and the main quest does a great job of nudging me ever onwards. I've been meaning to post about the quality of the writing in Bless Unleashed for a while now. Maybe one of these days I'll finally get to it.

 

Or perhaps I'll wake up one day and I won't be playing any more. That's the thing. Based on what's become long experience I really couldn't say. Bless Unleashed might be the game to nudge GW2 off the rotation. It's already pushed EQII out of the daily queue. I haven't seen Norrath for a week, the first time that's happened this year.

If I was to make a prediction, though, it wouldn't be that. I'd put my money on BU dropping back into the pack of favored also-rans, the games I really like but never quite find the time or inclination to commit to playing beyond a certain level. The games where I drop in every few months in a flurry of enthusiasm, stay for a week or two then disappear again.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's an honorable position in my personal gaming pantheon. Minor deities and demi-gods with a statue in an alcove somewhere, the flowers on the last garland fading but not yet dead, to be refreshed one day when interest blooms anew.

I'll get back to it then, shall I? The levelling, the story, the entertainment. It's pretty good as these things go, I'll vouchsafe that much. Next time I talk about it I might even try to explain why.

Don't count on it, though.

Something To Do

Just a very quick post to mention a couple or three things going on right now that won't be around forever. I already alluded to the Beast'r holiday in EverQuest II, which only lasts for a few days. It also includes a new Overseer mission that begins in Darklight Woods.

I ran it last night and today. Well, I went there and got it, after which it's just a case of remembering to collect the rewards for each stage and trigger the next. You can do that from anywhere, on any character.

The rewards for completing the sequence of missions, apart from the regular Overseer chests, are a new agent with the verdurous talent, the Dendro Defender prefix title and a choice of really lovely butterfly plushies. Okay, flutterwasps. Same difference.

Beast'r is only with us until Tuesday so there's no time to waste if you want any of those. After that we'll be pulling on our chaps and saddling up our ponies for a Showdown at the Diaku Corral. That one comes with a lot of content and some really rather enticing freebies, as Telwyn has already noticed.

More about that here when it happens, I'm sure.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, there's another ongoing promotion in EQII right now, adding time-limited mercenary reduction potions to final boss crates in Blood of Luclin instances. If you play EQII you should know what that means and if you don't, well you really don't need to, do you?

Worth noting is that those potions also drop from the crates you get for doing the gathering quests in Recuso Tor and Sanctus Seru. Or they probably do. Last week's promo was mount reduction potions and I got two of them that way.

Over in the senior EverQuest, a game I now seem to be playing again, thanks to the Overseer feature, there's another 50% xp bonus over Easter. Always welcome, particularly now I actually have a way of levelling up my higher level characters that doesn't take forever.

Also, the evocatively named Stomples Day is happening over there. Evocative of what, though, well that's quite a question, isn't it? It's similar to Beast'r if I remember correctly. I know I did it when it was new but that was a long time ago. In the unlikely event I do it again this year I'll try and post something about it.

More interesting than repeating holiday content is the #EverQuest Together promotion which began yesterday and runs all the way until the second week of May. It's mostly a bunch of cash shop offers but it also opens all of EQ's Time Limited Progression Servers up to everyone for a month. Well, all the ones that aren't just about to be merged, at least.

Normally an All Access account (aka a subscription) is required to play on these but now any freeloading casual can join in. Why they'd want to is another matter but the option is there if anyone wants to grab it.

I might. I was thinking only yesterday that I miss levelling up from scratch. I was pondering starting in some other MMORPG (ArcheAge Unchained, which Mailvaltar often suggests as a good option, is also allowing anyone to play, no sub required, although only for the weekend). Maybe I'll make yet another EQ character, get to level ten and never play them again.

That's about all I wanted to mention but there seem to be MMORPG promotions and freebies flying in all directions just now. You don't pay your money and you take your choice, I guess.

And finally, in completely unrelated news I'm just so thrilled about I have to mention it, even though it is utterly and completely irrelevant to anything I've just written, Lana del Rey has just released the title and artwork for her upcoming spoken word album: It's called Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass and you know what it looks like because it's up there at the top of the post.

I want it now!

Better The Devil You Don't Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I align myself more with Kaozz, who said 

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

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

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

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

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

Keep A-Knockin' And You Might Get In : Rift, ArcheAge

Well, that was unexpected.

Almost five years ago, when this blog began, Rift was my primary MMO. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta weekends, liked the game a lot, bought it at launch and played for a little over six months before we ran out of enthusiasm. By then I already had my sights set on GW2.

Rift turned out to be one of those MMOs whose luster dimmed with familiarity, something not helped by Trion's increasingly nervous attempts to hold on to a declining audience. There were gameplay and ruleset changes that made the game feel less and less unusual. The USP of huge PvE zergs fighting sky-ripping rifts or massive inter-planar invasions became diluted and diffuse.

Eventually there were server merges and that largely put the tin hat on things. I've found over the years that, when push comes to shove over making the hard decision to move on from an MMO, a server merge is usually enough to tip the balance. I suspect that's one reason developers now seem so determined to find any solution short of outright server merges when trying to manage a declining population.

Knee pads for dogs. It's the latest thing, don't you know?

Even on leaving we anticipated that, as has happened so many times before, we'd return for another run. We both pre-ordered the Storm Legion expansion in that belief but it turned out to be an expensive mistake. Storm Legion was so dull I barely lasted a week. Mrs Bhagpuss returned long enough to spend through the currency gifted her by the conversion to F2P but she spent her entire second run in Rift building houses behind the gates of her private Dimensions. Then she was gone, back to GW2.

For a while afterwards I kept the game on my hard drive and the icon on my desktop. I logged in very occasionally to look at something or other Trion had added. Finally the day came when I needed to make a little room for something new and, as I looked down the list of installed MMOs for the ones I felt I was least likely to play, Rift's name floated to the top.

Nothing, as they say, is forever. In recent weeks I've read some blogs and seen some screenshots that brought Rift back into the realms of possibility. I began to feel that annoying little itch. The final straw was Bhelgast, apologizing in advance because he thought he was going to start posting regularly about the game. If I'm going to keep reading about it I might as well at least have it installed. Or so I thought.

ArcheAge has the best maps.

So, I spent some considerable time yesterday, with no success whatsoever, attempting to re-install Glyph and get it to patch Rift. Glyph is a completely unnecessary, annoying front end that Trion insists its customers use to access any of its games. Games like Rift, ArcheAge and Trove, all of which I used to have installed and immediately accessible via their own desktop icons.

I have used Glyph before and it worked but now it doesn't. Not, at least, for Rift. Every attempt to run Rift brings up the 1012 error, for which extensive googling cannot provide a solution that works. I tried most of the possible fixes without success, including multiple uninstalls and re-installs, changes to processes and the sacrifice of a number of small woodland animals. Nothing worked.

In the end, in the interest of science, I thought I'd try installing one of Trion's other games, to see if the problem was generic to Glyph or specific to Rift. Which is how I found myself back in ArcheAge again for the first time since I stopped playing, suddenly, abruptly and unintentionally, over eighteen months ago.

Now, see, this is how direct action gets started.

The story of how I abandoned ArcheAge is the mirror image of what happened with Rift. There was no long, slow decline of interest; no hand-wringing or fraught, emotional leave-taking. Quite literally, one day I was playing and the next I wasn't.

The only explanation I can give is that I finished a session with my Labor Points pool filled for the first time ever. I had never actually used Labor Points for anything but I had been aware that they were a limited resource and apparently my subconscious mind translated that into a "win" condition. Yes, I know it makes no sense. I never claimed to be a rational decision-maker.

Anyway, it seems Glyph is perfectly happy to let me play ArcheAge, something I had absolutely no plans on doing, or at least not right now. ArcheAge itself seems equally confused by the turn events have taken.

On first log in all the introductory cut scenes played, which is par for the course on a fresh install for any MMO. My stalled level 28 character was safe at character select so I logged in expecting to find her wherever I'd left her, somewhere level appropriate, but no, nothing so obvious.

I don't remember tree houses...I want one.

Instead I found her at the very start of the game, facing the NPC who begins the main questline. Which he proceeded to do. Confused, I completed the first couple of "go see this guy up the road, he has a job for you" quests before deja vu took hold.

A quick check of my quest journal showed that I had indeed completed these quests already. Taking inventory of my...well, of my Inventory...I found all my quest rewards and other gear from the last 28 levels present and correct. I had my horse and my two dogs and a full set of blue armor.

So I hit the road. By the time I logged out I'd ridden as far as Crescent Throne. I didn't pass many player characters along the way. I overtook one wagon and found disturbing evidence the lack of animal health and welfare regulations in the village of Wardton but apart from that I might have been in a single-player game.

Log in to take a screenshot, it's midnight. Is there some kind of law?

I don't imagine I'll be playing ArcheAge much but then I didn't imagine I'd be playing it at all so who knows? It might be interesting to see how it compares with Black Desert, another one I'm not playing. ArcheAge is certainly much more of a traditional tab target, hotbar MMO under the thin sandbox skin, which is probably a better fit for me, but Black Desert is quirkier, weirder and more intriguing. Plus, Black Desert horses handle like ferraris, while AA nags corner like milk floats. That's a factor.

As I type this, though, I am back where I intended to be all along - in Rift. This morning I fired up Steam and installed it that way.

It still didn't go smoothly. I got another error, a different one, and at one point my entire monitor went completely black and I couldn't do anything at all. I thought I'd have to switch the PC off at the wall but first I tried hitting all the keys I could think of and after I pounded on Escape a few times the original cinematic played so I let it run and sat and watched. Apparently that was the logjam because after that everything worked.

Telara here I come!

Seasons Come, Seasons Go

As the days drift into summer and I prepare to go back to work after a longish break it occurs to me to take stock of what I'm currently doing and what I might do in the months to come, at least when it comes to playing MMORPGs. For an uncomfortably long time it felt as though just about all I played was GW2 and, while I still play far more of that than anything else, at least it seems now that other games and projects are beginning to push their way in, at last.

GW2

GW2 is still dominant. I have a fanciful idea that if Mrs Bhagpuss wasn't so keen on it I might play less but the fact is I still play a lot of it when I'm home alone and she's out at work. It remains one of the best pick-up-and-play MMOs I've ever enjoyed. There's always something to do or somewhere to go and very little ever gets in the way of going there and doing it.

I think very much of the game's success rests on that incredible ease of access. I've never known any MMO with such an ever-open, revolving door, through which old faces re-appear without fanfare day after week after month after year. I wonder whether the upcoming major revamp of the trait and skill system will affect that negatively? I know that having to redo all my choices after a similar event has all but killed my interest in other games.

As we all twiddle our thumbs as we wait for Heart of Thorns the focus in our house is very much on the War in the Mists. Since Yaks Bend won the third WvW tournament last autumn and rose to the ranks of Tier Two we've been locked in a never-ending grudge match with Fort Aspenwood.

It's important to treat your enemy with respect.

Apparently there were some kind of shenanigans last week while we were away on holiday and this week there is a war of retaliation going on. We woke up on Saturday morning to find that YB had taken control of the whole of FA's borderland and waypointed all their keeps, which is the WvW equivalent of slapping someone in the face with a leather gauntlet. Our crazed and glorious leader, who almost literally never sleeps, then proceeded to stay awake for more than 48 hours making sure we held the lot.

Since then it's been a series of huge battles that never seems to end. All weekend I kept meaning to log out and do something else but there was always an emergency somewhere. As I write this we are still just short of 7k ahead, down from a high of 22k and I'm itching to log in and see what the maps look like.

Enter the Mesmer. Take 2.

I did find time to make my second mesmer, something I've been meaning to do for a while. As we approach HoT I'm trying to consolidate onto a single account for expansion purposes and my only mesmer is on the wrong one. The gold-to-gems exchange rate was as good as I've seen it for a while at the weekend so I dug into my warchest and bought another character slot.

The natural inclination was to go for yet another Asura although my first Mesmer is a human for some reason I forget. Mrs Bhagpuss has a Charr mesmer that she says is very funny to play. In the end though I decided to go for a Sylvari, just because there's an outside chance that race might have some special role in the expansion content and I currently don't have one on the right account.

The next question is whether to level the mesmer normally or boost her with xp and leveling scrolls. Since I like leveling so much chances are it will be the former although I did use one of the Advance Directly To Level 20 scrolls just to get a bit of a running start.

GW2 probably takes up two-thirds to three-quarters of my playtime each day. The rest is split between Everquest, EQ2, Dragon Nest and now Villagers and Heroes.

No Officer, I wasn't begging. My feet were just tired. Yes, I'll move along now.

 

Everquest

EQ at the moment seems to mean Ragefire. My necro dinged nine at the weekend. He's still trudging to Blackburrow and back every session, combining leveling with faction-raising. It sure takes a lot of gnoll teeth to convince that Captain Tillin a gnome's not up to no good.

I'm acutely aware I ought to get some grouping in just for the fun of it but I can't see it happening this side of Kunark. I'd love to do the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen again. Maybe I should start a druid in preparation. Still, I've already played more than I expected and I think there are a few more sessions left in me before I wander off.

When Ragefire peters out I'd like to get back to my Magician who's currently a smidge away from dinging 90. It would be lovely to have a max level character in EQ again but the level cap is now 105 and those 15 levels, solo, even for a mage, the most capable of all solo classes in modern Norrath, would take me a year of Lessons at least.

Remember me? No, apparently not.

 

EQ2

The channeler I started in EQ2 seems to have gone dormant. When I do log in it's mainly to do the Phantom and Tranquil Sea weeklies for the tokens and armor. My Berserker is slowly kitting himself out to a very good standard for a solo character. I skipped the recent Rum Cellar DLC, which seemed mainly suitable for groups, but I will certainly be buying the autumn "Campansion", assuming it has the regulation amount of solo content.

The recently-announced server merges are unlikely to affect my regular characters, all of whom are on Freeport, the second most populated server behind Antonia Bayle. Server merges can spell bad things for an MMO but in this case its something people have been asking for for a long time so its probably good news on balance.

I seem to have gone all pastel crayonny.

 

Wind-Down Games

Dragon Nest has gone unplayed since I got back from Spain last week but only because of lack of time, not interest. There is a risk it might conflict directly with the new shiny, Villagers and Heroes, for the same end-of-day wind-down slot, though.

They aren't really anything at all alike, DN being fast, action-oriented and badly translated while V&H is stately, steady and beautifully written, but somehow they have a similar, light-hearted, ironic humor and a bright, cheerful surface that makes them both ideal to play just before bed. I hope I'll find time to keep playing both, unlike previous candidates like Eldevin or Istaria which seem to have slipped off the table entirely.

 

TSW

The changes to overland solo content difficulty in TSW didn't do much to hold me after I popped in to check it out. They're good changes but, honestly, I never really had much trouble with that part of the game. I soloed all the way to the end of Carpathian Teeth on my original run. It's the instances that I always had trouble with.

I would love to finish the main sequence quest from the original TSW sometime but I am stuck on a fight about three chapters or so from the end (I think) and I can't face doing it again. I'd need to do whatever it takes to overgear myself because it seems to be a DPS issue (as well as an incompetence one, but my experience in MMOs is that you can almost always upgrade your character to compensate for your inability as a player if only you wait long enough). Even the addition of mounts hasn't been enough to lure me to log back in.

He said wait right here, I'll be back soon. But that was months ago!

 

ESO and ArcheAge

ESO and ArcheAge both ended extremely abruptly for me. I was enjoying both of them, playing and blogging, and then I just seemed to hit a complete full stop.

In ArcheAge it was the moment I filled up my work point bar or whatever it's called. It felt like that was what I'd been aiming to do and now I'd done it and I literally never logged in again. Crazy.

In ESO it was the change to F2P. My free 30 days finished, there was a short gap before it went free and that small hiatus was enough to derail me. Again, haven't logged in since.

WildStar

I'd like to get back to both of those sometime but then there are other MMORPGs to consider. Not least WildStar. I looked at the box on Amazon yesterday. I was about to put it in my basket when I noticed the game is Region Locked, something I'd completely forgotten. I really dislike playing on European servers so now I have to think about whether to buy a box from Amazon.com (they will ship them, I checked) so as to get a US server code.

Or maybe when the game goes F2P it won't be region-locked any more. If so, I should maybe just wait. A region-locked F2P would seem very weird unless it was franchised to different companies across the world, which I don't believe WildStar is.

 

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Then there's SW:ToR. It's not a game I ever had any interest in playing but the current change in development direction makes me wonder if the original MMO-proper part of the game will be around for much longer. The upcoming Knights of the Fallen Empire that everyone's making such a big hoo-hah about doesn't sound so much like an expansion to me as a completely different game.

A game that I wouldn't call an MMO at all. With the months of 12X xp leading up to launch and the xpack coming with a free level 60 anyway it looks very much as though BioWare is going out of the MMO business and retrenching back to the single-player/co-op story model on which they built their latter-day reputation.

If that's the plan then SW:ToR would become an instanced lobby game not a real MMORPG. Maybe between now and the coming of KotFE will be the last chance to play the game as a proper MMO. If so I would want at least to give it a look before it goes away because for sure there will be no Original SW:tOR Emulator Project coming along later to satisfy anyone's historical curiosity.

So there's all that, plus a gazillion other possibles like Project: Gorgon and the Pathfinder free trial and Trove and who knows what else. I haven't even finished the main storyline in City of Steam, something I thought I'd have been done with a couple of years ago.

Ah well. To every thing there is a season as they say. Or, in the case of MMOs, a session, at least.

Workers' Compensation : EQ2

Yesterday I spotted a news item at EQ2Wire that got me all excited. Feldon had received an email suggesting that "everyone" would be getting bumped up to All Access for the run-up to Altar of Malice launch-day on the eleventh of November. Along with the temporary lifting of the velvet rope came some always-desirable long duration double xp potions.

It sounded too good an offer to miss but sadly instead it turned out to be too good to be true. The item was soon amended to confirm that the offer applies not to "everyone" but to "inactive accounts". Still not to be sniffed at and we do have three or four SOE accounts that haven't been logged in for a while so I came home from work eager to see if they qualified.

The first thing was to find EQ2. Hmmm. No icon on the desktop. No folder on either of the hard drives. No results on a windows search. Oh dear. Must have been on the drive that died. Never mind. Could do with a nice, clean install. Let's just download it again.

That went amazingly smoothly. For once SOE seem to have all their goblins in a line. Going from no EQ2 on my system to in game and ready to play took maybe two or three minutes. The streaming download is a real godsend in situations like this. Of course, since I'd also lost all my client-side preference and character files and settings, if I actually wanted to go out and kill anything I'd need another half-hour to set up eight or ten hot bars but at least I'd be in game, in character doing it.

Fortunately I have copies of all those files elsewhere when I can be bothered to copy and paste them. For now I just needed to be able to check my mail and /claim to see if any of the accounts qualified as "inactive".

And not before time!

Which they don't. I don't know how long it takes for an account to drop off SOE's radar but it must be more than a year because it was back in October 2013 that I last logged most of these in, hoping to get a free level 85. There was a lot of confusion over that at the time. Some of the accounts were able to make a Heroic character and some weren't. There was some discussion of it at the time, particularly over at TAGN, but I'm not sure anyone ever figured out exactly what criteria were or weren't being met.

So, no free All Access and no bonus xp potions for me. Sad face. Except wait...what's that clangorous, echoing chime? Why. it's none other than the sound of the three F2P accounts that refused to allow level 85s a year ago deciding that they might have been acting outside their authority. Ding!

On balance I think I came out ahead. Certainly would have taken a lot more than a couple of two-hour xp potions to get those characters to 85. Of course, it's a moot point since I'll almost certainly never play them but hey, free level 85s!

The nudge to log back in to EQ2 was timely because these days you only get your 500SC and your five bonus Legends of Norrath packs that come with All Access if you make the effort to turn up in game and claim them. Since I've been playing either EQ2 or Everquest fairly consistent as my minor MMOs for the past year I'd been managing that pretty seamlessly until ArcheAge and our holiday arrived together and knocked me off my stride. I think I may have missed the September stipend but I got October's with just a day or two to spare. Won't be making that mistake again. I hope.


As for ArcheAge, something odd has happened there. I was trucking along happily on an hour or so a night, knocking off my quests and slowly drifting up the levels. Then I ht the 2000 Labor Point cap for F2P and since then I haven't wanted to log in at all.

I don't want to bother with Labor Points and all the stuff that comes with them yet. I just want to quest and roam around. Unfortunately I find it hard to enjoy doing that when I can feel five LP disappearing into the void as every fifth minute ticks around. I gave myself a little breathing space by salvaging all my old armor but the points-meter soon filled up again. Until I come up with a plan to drain it ArcheAge may be off the menu.

Just as well, really, with the next installment of GW2's Living Story arriving next week and  Altar of Malice the week after that. Probably don't have time for much ArcheAge right now anyway.

Too many MMOs. Too much fun. Nice problem to have.

Don't Eat It All At Once : ArcheAge

Ravious at Kill Ten Rats has a good overview of the Halloween celebrations in GW2 this year. They're the same as last year's only with new rewards and additional Daily Achievements. Since the update dropped on Tuesday Tyrian Trick or Treating has been occupying a couple of hours of my gaming time every evening, a trend likely to continue for a couple of weeks.

I haven't yet logged into EQ2 for the seasonal celebrations but I know that if and when I do  could spend many hours happily chipping away at the candy mountain of quests that have built up over the years. Even little Dino Storm has "numerous quests" to offer - or will have, when they begin on the pedantically accurate thirty-first of October.

ArcheAge's Hallowtide has some very large pumpkins. I sat down in front of one to take a selfie and a dashing chap with a red name photobombed me. I guess I should be grateful that's all he did.

Red names make me so nervous I sat on the wrong side of the Pumpkin.

 
There's also a quest. Just the one. I did it right before I wrote this. It took me a couple of minutes. I would have gotten it finished in thirty seconds but it was the first time I'd used the auctioneer. He was friendly enough. If a Skritt and a Merloc had a baby (okay, biologically unlikely, I grant you) this is what you'd get.

At this point you could go to your farm or a public farm if you're a dirty F2Per like me, plant some pumpkin seeds, water them, wait a while, harvest your pumpkins and come back (I'm guessing here. I have yet to investigate the agricultural aspect of ArcheAge. I imagine it's something along those lines...). You could do that.

Or you could just buy the Pumpkins from the frogman who just asked you for them, walk five steps to the mailbox, collect the pumpkins, carry them five steps back and give them to the manfrog who just sold them to you. Done and done.

You wouldn't expect much of a reward for that and you wouldn't be disappointed. He gives out sweets, which is traditional, if nothing else.

Whoever wrote the item description seems to have been enjoying himself rather too much.

Oddly, so did I. Sometimes less really is more.