It's Our Birthday - We Got You Something!

While we're on the subject of unexpected emails from game developers, I got a couple more this morning. To be fair, one wasn't entirely unexpected, at least not in content; I already knew we were getting a free dinosaur mount in celebration of EverQuest II's 18th Anniversary. The unexpected part was being told about it by electronic post.

I tend to to tick all the boxes that ask me whether I'd like to be kept informed of events, offers and promotions in the games I play. I've never been one of those people who object to being handed flyers in the street or receiving so-called junk mail through my letterbox and I'm equally open to getting random emails from people trying to sell me things. 

It's all potentially interesting information as far as I'm concerned. I give it a quick glance and if it looks like there might be something in it for me I read it more thoroughly. If not, into the recycling bin it goes. I can't really see why people get so het up about it. 

There is, of course, a good ecological argument for objecting to the environmental pressure applied by the uneccessary use of energy and the wasteful consumption of resources involved in the production of printed handouts few will read and even fewer appreciate but the grounds for similar objections to the electronic distribution of publicity and advertising seem shakier. If we're going to start worrying about the hidden costs of communicating via the internet, we probably have a lot more to feel uncomfortable about than an inbox full of press releases - especially as online gamers.

Whether I ever get to see the emails I've opted in to receive is another matter entirely. As I mentioned yesterday, I have a lot of email addresses. For a while I had a policy of creating a new, game-specific email for every mmorpg I signed up to play, a plan that worked well when new mmos were relatively unusual but which ceased to be practical after the unanticipated success of World of Warcraft led to a gold-rush (Followed, appropriately, by a virtual landscape filled with crumbling ghost towns, but that's an extended metaphor for another post.)

These days I tend to pull up one of my email addresses almost at random when signing up for an open beta or registering an account with the latest South Korean or Chinese developer to throw a hat into the global market ring. Most of those are email addresses I never look at so anything that goes there sits quietly, gathering virtual dust, unopened for eternity.

When I was setting up some of these emails, though, and when I remembered to do it, I would sometimes link to my main email account, the one I check multiple times every day. (Yes, I know I could have the emails pop and wave at me as they come in but I like to retain at least the illusion of agency.) Some of them shower me with offers and promises, while others raise a hand only occasionally, as if to say "Remember me? We were friends once. Weren't we?"

Unlike an actual friend from college turning up on the doorstep, overnight bag in hand, these are the kind of catch-up visits I welcome. It's nice to be reminded once in a while of games I forgot existed, let alone that I once enjoyed playing.

Clearly, that doesn't apply to EQII, a game I still manage at least to log into at least every week or so even in the times when I'm not actively playing it. At the moment we're in a fallow period of our relationship but even so I was there for a short session earlier this week, doing the latest Panda quests and checking the vendor for upgrades.

I'll also be logging in after I finish writing this so I can claim the Stomposaurus Thunderstrider mount and take some screenshots for the post. I'm not quite sure when I'm likely to use a gigantic brontosaur land mount but I'm damned if I'm going to miss out on the opportunity to add one to my stable.

That, though, wasn't the email that prompted me to write this post in the first place. What set me off was a newsletter from Artix Entertainment concerning AdventureQuest 3D, specifically the part that said "We love our 20th Anniversary maps so much that we just can’t stop adding to them."

Wait! What? 20th Anniversary? The game I first encountered when it went into open beta back in 2016? How does that work?

The answer is in the post I linked - which I wrote, of course, so I really ought to have remembered (/jk!) AQ3D, like EQII, is a spin-off from an older mmorpg, in this case AdventureWorld itself, which launched in 2002. The anniversary relates to Artix Entertainment itself, not their current flagship title, which, for the record, is still in open beta, six years on, although the definition is now so fuzzy it's functionally meaningless. 

These three emails - yesterday's concerning the strange half-life of Crowfall, then these two celebrating eighteen years of the never-that-successful EQII and the ever-under-the-radar two decades of the AdventureQuest franchise - handily point up one of the most mistifying peculiarities of the mmorpg genre: success is almost impossible to quantify.

Crowfall managed to attract enough attention and money through crowdfunding to get itself made, which in itself counts as an achievement. Once it flopped out the gate, however, all its impetus and energy seemed to have dissipated. 

The excitement, enthusiasm and headline-grabbing controversy that accompanied the Kickstarter campaign burned itself out over the endless years of development and testing until, by the time there was a nominally finished game ready to buy and play, few cared. Crowfall was in live service for little more than a year. It may return. I wouldn't count on it.

EQII was fortunate to begin before the open beta/crowdfunding/early access era, meaning its hype cycle was relatively compact. It also had a lot less competition (Ironically, as it turned out...), new AAA mmorpgs being something of an event in the pre-WoW world. 

Most importantly, EQII had the benefit of a safety-net in the form of a megacorp that appeared barely to know or care where the money was being spent. When the game failed to meet expectations, rather than shutting down it was slowly refurbished and refitted to make the best of a poor situation and thereby, over time, was able to build a solid, if relatively small, core audience, willing to stick with it for the long haul.

Artix, meanwhile, like the co-incidentally assonant Jagex, chose to focus on an audience and a platform that time has shown to be both much larger and more robust than the flashier choices of the big-name game houses. 2D and later 3D browser-based games, aimed squarely at middle-school kids, may not get the same attention as supposedly mould-breaking "serious" mmos but it seems they can attract and hold an audience for decades.

It could also be that both EQII and AQ3D are just better games than Crowfall, of course, which they absolutely are, at least in my experience and opinion. Then again, EQII's had eighteen years to polish itself up and AQ3D is still in fricken' open beta! Maybe if Crowfall had been able to hang on that long it might have built a reputation as an overlooked gem, too. I kind of doubt it but it could have happened. I guess, if it ever comes back, it still could.

Until that mythical day, let's raise a virtual glass to the games that keep on punching and don't just throw in the towel when they're on the ropes. Here's wishing EverQuest II a happy 18th and the AdventureQuest franchise a happy 20th. Long may they both run.

Upcycling Crowfall

I had an email yesterday from "The Crowfall Team". I was thrown for a minute. I'd forgotten I'd ever given them my email address. Well, one of my email addresses. Last time I counted I had a couple of dozen. It'll be more now.

After some thought, I realised I'd had to provide an email address when I signed up for the open beta. That was back in 2021. It seems a lot longer. 

The beta itself was an odd experience. Crowfall is a PvP game but for the beta I remember levelling to the cap in PvE, then not being able to find anyone doing PvP at all. I posted about the game a few times, first during that beta and then when it launched; after that I mostly forgot about it.

The name has cropped up now and then in news reports. I remember the developers, Artcraft, sold it on to another company, Monument, which I seem to remember was owned by one of the original investors, although I may be making that part up. There were a few rumblings about the sellout but nothing that sticks in the memory. After that, nothing.

Until this:

The email also contains a whole load of detailed information about the shutdown process, all of which I'll spare you. It's not really meaningful or relevant to anyone not playing the game right now, which I'm guessing won't be anyone reading this.

It's an interesting email as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does. I'm curious about the whole taking the game offline for "development", for a start. I suppose that's by no means unprecedented, dramatic though it sounds; Final Fantasy XIV would be the poster child for the concept but it also happened to Fallen Earth.

Both of those games came back to life, FFXIV famously as a vastly improved and ultimately far more successful product, Fallen Earth as something much the same as before. There's a much longer list of games that closed down then started up again but those are the only two I can think of right now that went dark specifically so they could receive further development before returning.

Usually, even with failing games, the developers try to cobble something together without switching the servers off. Presumably some income is better than none at all, provided it's greater than the running costs. It would obviously be more convenient to change mechanics and systems without having to work around those pesky players as they try to get their dailies done and the savings in customer service alone must be huge but it's still not an option many developers choose.

That makes the statement outlining Monument's vision for the future of Crowfall even odder: they don't appear to have one. It looks as if what they're planning amounts to the creation of an entirely new game even if, as yet, they haven't decided what game it's going to be. 

It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus; if you replace every part of an mmorpg, is it still the same game?

To be fair, the email doesn't say every aspect of Crowfall will be replaced; it says every part will be rethought. Some of that that rethinking might, I suppose, amount to "leave it as it is". When the parts you're talking about "rethinking" include "core technology... tools... art, design, and gameplay", though, the implication is that what's left isn't going to be easily recognizeable as what you started with.

Had this all happened a few months ago, I imagine there'd be a widespread assumption that whatever
zombie game lurched back online some months from now would be riddled with NFTs, blockchain and play-to-earn mechanics. Square Enix aside, that gum seems to have lost its flavor for most developers. At this point I'd probably more surprised if things did go that way for Crowfall than if they didn't.

What might emerge from the mist is a lot harder to predict. If I had to put money on it, which fortunately I don't, I'd bet on "Nothing". Redeveloping, rewriting, redesigning and relaunching a minor league game like Crowfall seems like a great way to throw good money after bad. 

That said, there seems to be no shortage of investors, both individual and collective, ready to throw millions at projects like this when they're based on nothing more solid than wishes, hopes and promises. At the very least, in this case, there is a functioning game with an established market presence from which to build. 

I'd say it's going to be interesting to watch but the depressing fact is mmo development takes so long its all but impossible to maintain any real interest over the length of a project. About as much as I can manage is a flurry of interest when I first hear about something and a glimmer any time some playable demo or test build appears.

What I imagine will happen is I'll once again forget all about Crowfall until it either emerges from its coccoon of silence, bright, shiny and new, or the final post-mortem arrives to confirm it's never coming back at all. 

I hope its the former. Crowfall wasn't a terrible game, just bland, unexceptional and radically over-extended. In an age where asset re-use is positively welcome on ecological grounds, it would be a shame to waste all the work that went into it. I look forward to hearing the outcome of all that rethinking and if there's ever another beta... Monument already have my email.

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.

A Monumental Change For Crowfall

Earlier this year I spent several hours in the open beta version of Kickstarter success story Crowfall. That the game can be considered any kind of success tells a different kind of story.

The bar for mmorpgs on the crowdfunding platform, which recently kickstarted its own controversy involving industry hot-button fix-all, blockchain , is set astonishingly low.  All a game has to do to qualify is come to market.

Crowfall managed that much, after which it all but vanished. In the months that followed I happened on almost no commentary at all about the game. No one I followed was playing it. No-one was writing about it. The only news stories I saw revolved around rumor and speculation over whether it was about to close down for good.

Compared to the years of angst-ridden hand-wringing that prefaced Wildstar's eventual demise, interest in even Crowfall's ultimate failure seemed desultory. It appeared anyone who remembered the game at all was only waiting for final confirmation they could finally forget about it.

It's all a far cry from the brash, bold claims made by the developers all those years ago, when I described the PR blitz as "arrogant and aggressive". Back then, Artcraft laid out a pitch that suggested much was wrong with the genre but they knew how to fix it.  

Most of the things they claimed were holding the genre back most likely weren't but that's arguably a matter of opinion. That the solutions they came up with fixed nothing is a matter of record. Crowfall failed to find much of an audience and couldn't keep most of what it found. By the few accounts there were, the game was spiralling down to disaster.

And then someone grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and hauled it back. Crowfall has been bought, outright by a company that supposedly wants to patch it up and run it on. 

The purchaser isn't one of the usual suspects, the game aggregators, who hoover up functional but unpopular properties and package them for a different market. It's a small company out of Austin, Texas that publishes mobile games.

The name of the company in question is Monumental and their flagship title is Mythgard, "a fantasy cyberpunk CCG of heroes, gods, and mythical beasts" currently enjoying a twenty-four hour peak population on Steam of twenty-two players. Its all-time peak is less than five hundred.

You might wonder why such a company would want to buy a PC-based mmorpg, although with stats like those it is possible that even Crowfall's level of "success" looks juicy. The press release and some subsequent conversation around the purchase presents an appealing tale of a long-term Crowfall superfan who found himself in the happy position of being able to take control of the game he loves and plays but it also includes a less-cuddly proposition:

"Monumental sees this as more than a unique and compelling game; it’s an online platform designed around player interaction and a perfect platform for experimentation"

That jumped out at me from the MassivelyOP report. You don't often see companies admit they've bought an IP or a game for the express purpose of twisting it into something else. Usually there's a lot of fine talk about how nothing much will change except your login details and the name of the currency in the cash shop. 

 

Much of the speculation about what this might mean revolves around the conversion of the Crowfall IP for mobile, which makes sense given Monumental's current portfolio. It could equally be read, however, as an opportunity for the purchaser to get a foot in the door of PC gaming, using Crowfall's name as a calling card and its infrastructure as a key. It's certainly true that Crowfall's cartoony, attractive artstyle would adapt very well to other, perhaps less PvP-oriented, options.

Whether it will lead to significant changes to Crowfall itself very much remains to be seen. Monty Kerr, CEO of Monumental and the aforementioned superfan, certainly has aspirations in that direction:

"I’ll also be the first to admit that I couldn’t have built Crowfall. But I can finish it, expand it, and make sure this unique and amazing game has found its forever home."

J. Todd Coleman, chief architect and former owner, goes further:

"[Kerr] wanted his company to buy Crowfall, hire the team, and take the game back into development. Go back to working on the promise of Crowfall: a dynamic online world with real conflict, where players decide the fate of the world."

Apparently, Monumental has financial resources Artcraft doesn't that make all this a possibility. What they are I have yet to hear anyone explain. Given the length of time and amount of money it has already taken to get Crowfall into the barely adequate state it exists in right now, those resources would need to be substantial.

It's going to be interesting to watch how this one plays out. More interesting, I fear, than playing the game has been, at least so far.

Counting Crows

 

I'd forgotten Crowfall was due to launch today. MassivelyOP's announcement this morning came as something of a surprise. Bree, author of the post, and a few readers who dropped comments on the brief thread that followed, seemed more impressed a Kickstarter mmorpg had managed to launch at all than by any possibility it could be any good.

"Yes, a crowdfunded MMO with a real launch!" 

"Big grats to the team for getting the game fully released"

"Congrats on them for crossing that finish line"

The MOP piece linked to a reddit thread called "Estimated Population?" in which the OP expressed some concern over how many people would be playing. So far the thread has drawn comments from around thirty people, the majority of whom don't appear to hold very high hopes for the future of the game. 

On a more positive note, there were reports of ten or fifteen thousand viewers on Twitch and a couple of people who'd bought the Buy to Play title took a moment out from their first day frenzy to pop into the thread and offer anecdotal evidence:

"There are at least 100+ players in the starting area on US West"

 "Game was freaking popping at launch..."

I took a look at the official forums. They were very quiet but as we all know forums aren't the hot ticket they once were. There was some mention of Discord being the place where Crows might be found but I wasn't quite interested enough to join yet another Discord channel just to find out if that was true.

After a while it occured to me to check just how many people had backed the game during its Kickstarter campaign way back in 2015. It was 16,936. Someone on the reddit thread claims that in the five years since then the number "who own the game from backing the game" has ballooned to 300,000 but they don't show their workings so I have no idea whether that's true or not.

 

MassivelyOP also published a much longer and more detailed "Launch Impressions" post, authored by Andrew Ross. I was hoping for some hard data but although it's an interesting read it's more of a review of the game itself than any kind of account of how the launch is going.

Early in the piece, Andrew goes off on quite a digression about Istaria, the player-owned mmorpg that started out as Horizons a very, very long time ago. It's an unexpected comparison for Crowfall but I can see what he's getting at. 

I played Horizons in beta and for a short while after launch and I've played Istaria a few times since and written about it here on occasion. Both games have a supposedly deep crafting system with considerable inter-reliance in common. They also both feature several unusual non-human player races. 

It had completely slipped my mind, if indeed I ever knew, that Horizons was originally planned as a PvP title. It was pure PvE by the time I got into beta and as far as I know it's been PvE evers since. The comparison does raise the question, re-iterated by a number of commenters in various threads I've seen, of whether deep crafting systems and a PvP focus really go together or not.

The relative success of games like EVE and Albion Online prove the wolves and the sheep can co-exist but two titles in twenty years isn't all that much of an evidence base. Maybe there are more but those are the two people always seem to quote.

From the thirty levels of tutorial I saw in beta I find it difficult to imagine Crowfall attracting a similar audience. There are a lot of PvE mmorpgs that offer a great deal more to players who aren't interested in PvP and the crafting, while it might be quite involved compared to the genre standard, still didn't seem all that original or exciting to me.  

The options for PvP players are a lot more limited but whether there's enough interest to feed the non-stop conflict the game promises very much remains to be seen. There certainly haven't yet been any of the traditional news stories about launch day queues or servers crashing under load that mmo launches often spit up, although I guess we haven't hit North American prime time yet as I write this so it could still happen.

 

One thing that struck me as I read through the various threads were the number of references to the upcoming open beta for Amazon's New World. Even though I played in both the first closed beta and last year's short open test phase and have the game on pre-order, I'd forgotten it was quite this close to launch.

Most of the people who mention New World suggest that Crowfall has, at most, until that open beta begins to attract and lock down an audience. The sentiment appears to be much stronger in favor of Amazon's game, which feels like it's turned a corner in PR terms over the last year or so. 

Where much of what was being said about the game up until last summer's open testing was cynical and dismissive, what people saw there seems to have changed a lot of minds. The directional shift from open PvP to PvE with optional PvP may have angered a section of the original audience but it seems to have had much the effect Amazon presumably hoped for on the wider marketplace. Amazon have also run a strong publicty campaign in the lead-up to launch, which is something no-one could claim on behalf of Crowfall.

The closely-spaced launch of the two mmorpgs reminds me a little of the summer of 2012, when Funcom opened the doors to The Secret World just weeks before the arrival of Guild Wars 2. I remember a lot of people back then saying they were giving TSW that window to prove itself before they made the switch. The winner of that contest was plain before the year was out.

There are also, of course, several other mmorpgs due to launch in the same summer window this year. Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis is already here, Swords of Legend Online is due later this month and Bless Unleashed follows in August. None of those is likely to trouble either Crowfall or New World and I suspect Crowfall itself will have no more of an impact on New World than the rest, either.

Unless we hear something entirely unexpected, it looks like this summer's Battle of the Mmorpgs is Amazon's to lose.

Always Nothing Much To Say

For once this really might end up being one of those "short" posts I'm always promising. I don't have anything much I want to talk about but I didn't want to miss another day after I took Monday and Tuesday off while we took our first mini-holiday of the year. 

With the pandemic making proper travel far too unpredictable we're opting instead for random day trips with the odd overnight stay here and there thrown in as the mood takes us. On Monday we drove down to the south coast for a very enjoyable seaside break. The weather was positively Mediterranean, which made it very easy to imagine we'd gone somewhere more exotic.

It really was a short break although we packed so much in it felt a lot longer. We timed it all so neatly I  managed not to miss any of my dailies in Guild Wars 2. I did one lot around breakfast before we left and another just before bed when we got back. I suppose I could even have played an mmorpg while I was away - I have two or three installed on my Kindle Fire - but I didn't need much more entertainment than the sunset from our balcony.

Speaking of my Kindle Fire, it's starting to give me some concern. For the moment it will still take a charge, with a bit of fiddling about, but it likes to sit there bleating like a distressed sheep while it's doing it, something I find unreasonably disturbing. 

 

I tried several different chargers, one of which almost fried the whole thing, but eventually I discovered it's most likely the charging port beginning to fail, a very common design fault with Kindles. 

It's particularly annoying since I bought a Kindle quite specifically for the build quality, which I thought would be good. Certainly better than the several previous tablets I've had, some of which have developed faults on their own and the rest of which I've managed to break.

If I have to replace this one, I think the average lifetime of a tablet owned by me will dip below twelve months. I have a box of the things now. Some of them kind of work, in a way. Some are completely inert and I should throw them away. A couple could, theoretically, be repaired but since that would cost almost as much as the price of a new one it seems somewhat pointless.

It's getting to the stage where I do wonder if maybe I should just buy an iPad. The ridiculous upfront cost has always stopped me even considering it in the past but if I'd bought one as my first tablet it would probably still be working now. My iPod Touch is and that has to be at least ten years old. 

On the other hand, although the iPod hardware lasts forever, it's been a long time since anything much would run on it. The most recent version of iOS my Touch can use is so out of date there's barely an app left that will accept it.

 

But enough of my problems. Let's talk about Crowfall's. And Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis's. 

I imagine I'll have something more to say when Crowfall launches three weeks from now but for the time being I'm done with it. I found it a very strange experience indeed. As I wrote, I kind of enjoyed myself even as I was thinking what I was doing was utterly pointless. And quite possibly stupid.

The extended tutorial takes you all the way to the soft cap at Level 30. I believe you can do five more levels after that but to do so involves a bizarre necromantic practice by which you dig up body parts to upgrade your "Vessel", the disposable entity you've probably been thinking of as "my character". That's a habit you're going to have to break.

With increasing effort I pushed through to thirty. The entirely linear questline takes you just about that far although I did have to kill a few extra mobs along the way to fill out a few small gaps. It was fairly painless. Xp for mob-killing is decent and the sacrifice mechanic, where you throw items you've looted from mobs into a fire, gives significant bonuses.

At thirty the game sends you to the zones that used to be a separate world called the Infected, a tripartite Realm vs Realm set-up similar to so many others. As many people have observed, good luck finding anything to do there. I ran around for an hour or so and saw one other player. And he was on my team.

When I went to Reddit to see if other people were finding the whole thing as weird and ill-judged as I was (they were) I found many cynics recommending ignoring the quest line completely and just grinding mobs from the get-go. 

 

Apart from one or two obvious white knights, the near-universal opinion seems to be that the New Player Experience is about as useless as it could possibly be. It determinedly trains players to expect an on-rails PvE questing experience and then throws them into a game with literally no quests of any kind, where almost the entire gameplay consists of fighting other players. It would be disorienting enough if there were any other players to fight. It's completely mystifying when there are none.

The general theory appears to bethat the dev team, having given up any hope of making the game they were originally planning, settled for bolting something they could manage on the front and leaving it at that. I have no idea where the truth lies but I'm going to say right now that I can't see how this game is going to find any kind of audience after launch, much less make any money.

PSO2:NG is having very much the opposite problem. As MassivelyOP put it today, when they reported on the apologies and compensation coming to players very soon, "having so many players that it’s hard to play isn’t a bad problem to have". 

The lag that's had Sega handing out the goodie bags hasn't affected me at all. I'm not sure I noticed it even once. I was playing in EU hours on the east coast NA server but even so there were loads of people around and everything was silky-smooth all the time. 

I haven't played much since the last time I posted but I do keep thinking about it. I was trying to work out how I could have wrung the small amount of pleasure out of Crowfall that I did and it came to me that I just want a good, old-fashioned mmorpg leveling experience right now. It seems like a while since I last had a new character I cared about in a new game I didn't already know pretty well.

For the reasons I gave in the first impressions posts, PSO2:NG isn't going to be a game I devote a lot of time to but it might just have to stand in for that game until a more suitable one comes along. That might be Bless Unleashed, which I find myself almost pining for after my brief beta exposure, or I guess it could be New World.

Amazon are really priming the pre-launch pump right now, with press releases and lore and gameplay videos aplenty. It's all having an odd effect on me. I find myself less and less excited at the prospect of playing, not least because the game seems to be lining itself up to be the next Elder Scrolls Online, a game I never really got on with all that well.

I have an uncomfortable feeling New World is going to end up being one of those games I'll harp on about having been "so much better in beta". Not because it was better, of course, but because it was smaller, more manageable and less overwhelming. 

Really, all I liked doing there was exploring, gathering and fighting zombies. It was extremely atmospheric and very relaxing. I can't say the prospect of a full-on quest-hub exprience with instanced dungeons was what I imagined I'd be getting when I pre-ordered. 

Still, I'd sooner have that than what the poor sods who pre-ordered Crowfall are going to get, that's for sure!

Bullet Time

There was no post here yesterday because I had to take my mother to the eye hospital to have a cataract removed. That went well but I didn't get home until just before dark so I thought I'd skip a day. 

It's only the sixth I've missed this year. Probably some kind of record. I'm not really sure. I find I'm less and less interested in statistics where the blog's concerned. In the early years I used to pore over them obsessively but as time went on my interest waned, partly because I felt they were becoming less and less reliable but mostly because I realized I just didn't care much any more.

That drift has started to accelerate recently to the extent that I began googling for ways to turn google analytics off. Oh, the irony! Didn't find any, either. 

I could just not look at them, of course. I was down to no more than a five minute glance at the monthly report but then Google started sending me emails. Quite snippy, they are, telling me things are wrong with my blog and I damn well ought to do something about them  because I'm letting the side down. At least that's how I take them. It might just be me.

At first I tried to comply with their peremptory demands but after a while I got irritated and looked into what might happen if I didn't. Apparently my rankings would slip and the blog might not show up in searches any more.

So be it. I think it's probably too late to worry about that now. If my intent had ever been to attract random page views I pretty much scuppered any hope when I started to insist on using incomprehensible and utterly irrelevant titles for almost every post. I even dropped the little coda I used to use saying which game a post was about because I felt it detracted from my obscurantist aesthetic.

I am planning on adjusting some of that attitude later this year. Indeed, I've already started, although more informative titles are about as far as I'm likely to take it. I am not going to be digging into the html code Blogger generates to correct the perceived anomalies that unsettle Google's crawlers. I would suggest that since Google owns both of them they might want to do it themselves if they're that bothered.

And with that passive-aggressive opening (alright, just aggressive) it's on to the meat of the post. Except there isn't any meat to speak of. More like a few table scraps. I have a few teeny-tiny topics that barely merit a paragraph, let alone a post. Time to break out the bullet points.

 

• Welcome to the neighborhood.
  

The EverQuest franchise has a new Community Manager. Since I thought it was worth a mention when the old one left I guess I ought to extend the same courtesy to the new one now he's here. His name is Accendo and yes, he is a he. Someone asked and he said so. 

Both the threads (old game and new) pour yet more praise on the departed Dreamweaver while putting pressure on the new guy to step up and follow his lead. Based solely on the answers Accendo gives I suspect that pressure will be resisted but we'll see.

• Oops! I missed one.
  

There was (at least) one obvious name missing from my recent list of mmorpgs to look out for this summer: Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. Really trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Then again, probably better than Phantasy Star Online 2.5, which is what it seems to be.

I really wasn't interested at all in PSO2 (much neater) when it finally made its long-overdue debut in the West last year. Belghast wrote about it several times and it neither sounded nor looked like anything I'd want to play so I didn't bother. The revamped version looks considerably more interesting. It's been given a complete graphical revamp and from screenshots it looks orders of magnitude better. The old quests and combat have been completely replaced and the game now has a proper open world. I'm still not sure it's for me but at least now it looks interesting enough that I want to find out for sure.

It's available on Steam, although it's a huge download, just shy of 100GB. I have it all set up and ready to go so expect an ignorant, uninformed and highly inaccurate first impressions piece any day now.

 

• Dust on the lens.
  

Shintar queried in the comments whether I had my graphics settings for Crowfall turned down to the minimum. I said I'd check next time I logged in so I did and I had. 

Not my choice. I usually allow a new game to choose its own settings but if things look odd I go in and fiddle about. Crowfall didn't look odd, just bland. When I checked, though, I'd been assigned the lower of two settings: Basic. That didn't sound good. The only other option was Medium, which didn't sound much better. 

I swapped to Medium and it made a surprising amount of difference. There was nothing the higher definition could do about the exceptionally bland and undetailed design but it did do plenty for the lighting and the textures as should be evident from the screenshots. I'm guessing there are settings above Medium. There'd have to be, wouldn't there, or else you couldn't really call it "Medium". I assume the game has checked my aging hardware and decided anything higher would be a fire hazard. Probably best to bear that in mind whenever I say anything uncomplimentary about Crowfall's graphics from now on.

• How much?!

I took the hint and thought about upgrades. I forget how long ago I bought this PC but it could have been five years. It might even be more than that. And it was low mid-range then. Given the kind of games I play, though, it's very much more than adequate and I haven't seen much reason to change anything.

Until now. It's not so much that time's catching up with me. It's more that there are finally some new games I'd like to play coming on stream and they have recommended specs significantly higher than anything I can match. I probably should do something about it before I can't even meet the minimum specs.

With that in mind I went to look at new CPUs and graphics cards. I specifically bought a PC that's easy to upgrade with the intention of doing just that rather than replacing the entire thing. What I wasn't expecting was that I'd be able to replace the entire rig for scarcely more than the cost of the two key components. I'm not sure how that works but it makes me think I might as well soldier on as I am until the time comes to scrap the whole thing and start over.

And maybe Crowfall's an exception, anyway. New World's coming later in the summer. I never had any problems with that in the betas. It ran smoothly and looked amazing. If the release build does the same I think I'm fine for now. If not, I guess I'm going to have to spend some serious money.

 

• Garbage In, Garbage Out

In common with many of us, the Nosy Gamer has been wondering whether Final Fantasy XIV on its  way up might have passed World of Warcraft on its way down. As part of the evidence he referenced a website I hadn't heard of before: MMO Populations. 

I've always been interested in specifics on how many people play certain games but the methodology employed didn't inspire confidence: "By combining online social activity, sentiment tracking, public statistics, rankings and more MMO Populations estimates the total subscribers, players and active daily players for the top MMOs". Still, I thought it was worth a look.

I didn't spend very long on it. By the time I'd scanned through the "big list" of more than a hundred mmorpgs I'd seen as much as I wanted. 

The list includes several of my all-time favorites, including Vanguard, City of Steam and Fallen Earth as well as some I wish I'd been able to play, like EverQuest Online Adventures and others I yet hope to play, like Pantheon and Ashes of Creation. You'll notice all of those either closed down years ago or haven't yet been made available for general play.

According to the list Vanguard "is estimated to have 42,600 total players or subscribers". The detail does say that this month's estimate for daily players is zero but if you mouse over the graph on the same page, for June 2021 the figure is 1209. Even if they were polling the emulator, the most people I've ever seen logged on at once didn't hit double digits.

As for City of Steam ("estimated to have 4,865 total players or subscribers") 462 people supposedly logged in this week. Logged in to what is the question. As far as I know there isn't even a private server for City of Steam and believe me I've looked. I'd be playing on it if there was.

There are lots more fascinating facts where those came from. I'm sure I feel far more confident about Pantheon's prospects, for example, now I know that "12,484 people play per day, with a total player base of 1,314,070." Go have a dig for yourself. It's very entertaining.

 

And that will have to do for now. I have a feeling there were other burning issues of the day I was going to be flippant about but I can't remember what they were and anyway I want to go try Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. Or PSO:NG as I'm happy to call it. It's  nice to say out loud, too, so long as you sound the "P". Otherwise you're just saying "song" and that's very weird.

Next week and the week after that I'm officially on holiday, although since I'm still furloughed the only material difference from every other week this year will be twenty per cent more in my pay packet. We've abandoned any plans for foreign travel in 2021 but I will be taking a day or two out of my busy schedule of staying home playing video games to go visit some interest spots a little farther afield than normal. 

We might even stay overnight. If so, that will almost certainly mean a few more missed posts, although maybe "missed" isn't exactly the right word. I'm fairly confident it'll take more than a few days of me not posting for anyone to start "missing" anything.

Why Am I Here?

Since I downloaded it a few days ago, the mmorpg I've found myself wanting to play more than any other has been Crowfall. It's very hard to say why. I've been thinking about that a lot as I've been playing.

I can tell you what it's not: the compelling gameplay. I haven't seen any, not yet. Up to level twenty-three, at least, Crowfall could hardly be more pedestrian or predictable.

I've made it as far as what would in most mmorpgs be thought of as the third zone. Maybe even the fourth, if you count the Eternal Kingdom.

The Eternal Kingdom probably isn't intended as part of the progression as such but I did do a couple of levels there just on harvesting and basic tutorial quests. After that it was on to God's Reach and the threeTemples, first Earth, then Sun and finally Moon. 

Despite the misleading names they're all extensive, open, outdoor areas. Each ends with a challenging boss fight and a transition through a portal. Yep, they're different zones alright.

They're also still the tutorial. All of them. I strongly suspect the next three zones after the temples are also going to be part of the seemingly endless instructional seminar that makes up the first thirty or so levels of the game. 

Yeah, yeah, your guardian died, the Hunger is here, let's move it along.

 

The three zones that follow the temples used to make up a separate World known as "The Infected". They were rolled into God's Reach just recently to make the levelling process smoother and less confusing for new players. I dread to imagine what it was like before.

It's not that Crowfall is any more confusing than the average mmorpg, at least I don't think it's that. It's more that someone seems determined to explain the entire game before you actually get a chance to play it. There's a peculiar paradox going on where the tutorial is at one and the same time far too long for an introduction and yet much too short for the amount of information it tries to cram in.

Much of the substance involves crafting and gathering. Those are supposed to be the core gameplay drivers in Crowfall. You'd think it was fighting other players and it is that, too, but the stated intent is to have resource shortages drive player competition. Because of that, there's a focus on crafting and gathering you don't generally see in tutorials except in those few games like Vanguard where crafting is a bona fide full career from the start.

For resource shortages to work things have to break and by golly, don't they just! Basic tools barely last long enough to harvest a couple of nodes. Weapons and armor wear out before you've managed to find replacements. 

In most games that would be an anoyance and an expense. You'd have to visit an NPC to get them repaired or maybe learn the skills to repair them yourself. Not in Crowfall. Once something breaks it's broken for good. There is no repair.

As you get better gear it lasts longer. I already have tools that last a good portion of a session before
they fall apart. I imagine eventually things will last, oh, days! Of course, by then you'll be out in the really dangerous places, where death means dropping all your stuff, so there's that. I think you get to keep what you have equipped but if you were carrying spares you can forget about them.

The theory is that having everyone constantly in need of replacement tools, weapons, armor, accessories, consumables and every other damn thing will make for a vibrant, buzzing economy. All those crafters will be churning out goods and all those pvpers will be hoovering them up with the cash they made selling the mats they harvested in the dangerous places back to the crafters. And while they're out searching for the resources to sell to make the money to buy the tools they need they'll end up kicking the crap out of each other and there's your gameplay loop. Or something.

It would probably work, too, given a critical mass of players and a suffficiently well-distributed balance of preferred playstyles. It will be interesting to watch how it turns out. And for once, although we won't be able to tell at a glance who's doing what, unless something changes at launch we will know how many people are playing.

Crowfall is one of those very rare games that tells you precisely how many people are logged in at any given moment. At the time I'd call a peak, if not the peak, for most mmorpgs, Sunday evening, there were around two-hundred and fifty people in God's Reach on the EU server. It was much the same on the North American East Coast shard, where it would have been about mid-afternoon. 

During the week, when I played in the daytime, the count was fourteen people on the NAEC server, maybe fifty on EU. The capacity of those Worlds is 1225.There was next to nobody in the higher Worlds. Fewer than twenty. Maybe everyone was chilling in their personal fiefdoms back in the Eternal Kingdom. That's the one set of numbers you can't see.

At this stage though, any economic concerns are purely notional. No-one's selling or buying anything. Or killing anyone, much, either. It's late beta, there are only a couple of weeks left before everyone gets wiped. Why would you bother?

 

And anyway, everyone just seems to be in the tutorial, which goes on for about as long as most people play most mmorpgs. Longer, in fact. At the pace I'm going, which I don't think is all that slow, it'll probably take me fifteen or twenty hours to hit level thirty. Maybe more if it slows down after the Temples, which I suspect it might. That's quite a while to play a tutorial before the real game starts.

So why am I doing it? I don't know! It's certainly not because of the gorgeous graphics. There are none. It's bland. I've seen three zones and they all look the same. There's no detail in any of them, no sign that an artist put their personal touch into anything. 

It's quite pretty, even so. The flowers are nice. I've played many mmorpgs where the environments had far more character but were a lot less pleasant to spend time in. There's just not much to look at. 

That picture up at the top of the post, the one with the half-buried statue with the hand sticking out of the ground? That's the most interesting thing I've seen so far. And it's a cliche.

At this point I should probably mention something. All the screenshots I've used in this post and the last look much more vibrant than anything you're going to see in game. I blasted the saturation and sharpened the focus to make them pop. I thought about it a while but I don't see why I should make my blog look as washed-out and bleh as the game itself.

The inside of a church. Compare that to the inside of any church you ever saw in any mmorpg, ever. Impressed? I thought not.

If it's not the gameplay or the graphics, maybe it's the story that keeps me coming back for more? Nope. As far as I can tell there isn't one. 

There's lots of lore. Usually I like that but not here, where it's ladled out in dollop after dollop of indigestible infodump. I stopped trying to take it in long ago.

There are lots of little vignettes, all of them, without exception, utterly souless and generic. Things happen that ought have emotions attached but they don't. They just... happen. 

Same thing with the jokes. There aren't many of those but that's okay because the few there are aren't funny. Well, they might be, if they were delivered differently, but everything is delivered in exactly the same flat tone. 

Remember when WildStar was going to make all of its quests no longer than tweets? This is like that, only you get a series of tweets, one after the other. It adds up to the same amount of text as any other mmorpgs' quests but there's a lot more clicking.

Actually, no there isn't. In most mmorpgs you have to click on a response to indicate your character's reply. None of that here. All you ever do is listen. 

I think that's a joke. It's so hard to tell.

 

So, it's not the compelling gameplay, the gorgeous graphics, the fascinating story, the witty dialog... what the hell is it?

It's not the combat, that's for sure. Maybe it will be, when it comes time to fight other players, but tactics in my first twenty-three levels have consisted mostly of standing still, holding down LMB and tapping first 2, then 2 and 4, and finally 2,4, 5 and occasionally 6, as they come off cooldown.

For quite a few levels I also strafed, dodged, sneaked and generally tried to use all the tools in my toolbox but after a while I realized that just made fights take longer. Except for those end of zone bosses, most fights go much more smoothly if I just face tank.

And to be fair that is a fighting style I like. So I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's not like, oh, Wizard 101, for example, where the big draw for the first few weeks I played was the fun of choosing the cards. It's just basic shoot 'em in the face stuff.

It could be the crafting, I guess. That's definitely not basic. Only I'm not really doing much crafting. Gathering mats takes ages and making stuff uses a lot of mats and making anything good takes mats I don't have (which is the point). I can see how the crafting would be compelling but it isn't yet.

 

At this point I'm going to shoehorn in something about the map. I know no-one ever did keep logging into an mmorpg because the map was so good they just had to look at it one more time but boy, Crowfall's map is bad. 

It's one of those three-dimensional affairs. In my experience those never work but this one doesn't work even more than most. It makes the one in Shroud of the Avatar look like cartographical perfection and that one is flat-out weird.

Seriously, what is wrong with a plain, old two-dimensional map? Why even bother with anything more fancy? And how about a mini-map while you're at it?  

I guess the theory is that when every single quest comes with a directional indicator and a distance counter in the HUD you don't really need a map. Yeah, except when you want to go anywhere that isn't part of a quest! Like the bank.

Can't you just tell me?

 

While we're on the subject of those quest markers I wonder if there's ever been an mmoprg that needed them more? There's hardly an NPC who can just give a quest. They all send you to someone else who gives you the quest. If you're lucky! 

One guy this afternoon sent me to another guy, who sent me to another guy, who sent me to another guy, who finally asked me to kill five boars. I'd love to say that was an exceptional case but it really wasn't.

So, why is it that when I finish this post I'm going to fire up Crowfall again and get another hour or two in before bed? I wish I knew. But that's what I'm going to do.

In the end I think it's because the God's Reach content seems so familiar. It's incredibly restful, comforting even. It's like eating a plain donut. There's not really much flavor but it still tastes... good.

I haven't played a new mmorpg that felt this old-fashioned for years. It's almost like making a character in WoW Classic or an EverQuest progression server and going through the old starting zones for the umpteenth time. Except it's like a small child's sketch of that, with all the detail left out and everything colored in in crayon.

In the end I think it's that the core loop of the genre is so strong, so well-established, all that's needed is the bare bones. Get those in place and habit does the rest. I'm having a good time because my brain recognizes the patterns.

It's not going to last but why fight it while it does?