Ashes Of Creation: First Impressions

For once, I'm not going to try anything fancy. No bullet point lists or categories. No framing structure or cutesy faux-RP storytelling. I'm just going to say what I think of the game so far. How about that for an original idea?

First up, it was really easy to link the Intrepid and Steam accounts. Well, it was once I managed to catch the Ashes of Creation website up for five minutes. I had, of course, forgotten whatever password I created for it nearly a decade ago but that was soon remedied and after that it was very plain sailing. 

The client is huge, though. Almost 140GB. Surely that will have to come down if the game ever officially launches. Luckily for me, I have a totally unused 1TB HDD in this new PC. With great timing, we had to go sell the old car this morning, so before we left I set the download running. I came back two hours later to find it had finished downloading and was 99% validated too. Glad I didn't have to sit in and watch those progress bars...

I had lunch and then sat down to play. I wasn't wildly enthusiastic but I was curious to see what eight years wait had brought. 

No introductory movie for a start. Or any kind of introduction at all. Just the usual warning about flashing lights then straight into character creation. 

Well, I say "straight into..."  More like v e r y  s l o w l y into. I have never seen parts of a UI take so long to load. It was so slow I thought they must not have the models available for all the races or the icons for all the skills, presumably because the game is still in Alpha, even though it's also Early Access, somehow. 

But no. Not that.

 As I was already making my choices, sight unseen, icons and images finally started to load. In the end everything was there. Nine races and eight classes, I think, although some of the options are really two variants of  the same race.

I had already picked one (Niküa.) from the description before I found out what I was going to look like.

Moana, basically. Moana, after a giant must have stepped on her.

It wasn't remotely what I was expecting but I was pretty pleased with what I got. As I've said before, it makes a huge difference to me if I feel a connection with my character and this one clicked with me immediately.

There aren't all that many choices to make after you pick Race and Class. Hairstyles and colors, skin tone, height, eyes, nose, mouth... the usual. There's an option to morph your face, so I'm guessing you can make some extreme looks but I didn't bother with any of that. I wanted to get in and have a look around.

The Niküa get a choice of two starting locations, one in the hilly North and one in the flat South but the Northern one comes with a warning that the area isn't done yet so I picked the other. At some point, I forget exactly when, I also had to pick a server from a list of eight or so, either in the EU or East Coast USA. The ping to the East Coast was around 50-60ms, which is fine, so I went for one of those.

And then I was in. And everything was good. Very little lag. Movement felt reasonably smooth. No obvious hiccups or delays. 

The UI felt very intuitive. It would be very familiar and comfortable to anyone who played one of the big, Western theme park MMORPGs in the 2010s or teens. All the controls do what you'd think they'd do. There's a hotbar where you'd expect to find one. All of that.

I did what I always do at this point: opened Settings and turned off as much of the overhead clutter as I could without making the game unplayable. In some games that can be a long job. Not in this one. I had everything set up pretty much as I like it in minutes.

About the only thing I had to google was how to hide the UI for screenshots. It's the Page Down key, an unusual choice but perfectly acceptable, certainly a lot better than the Ctrl-Shift-Something you often get nowadays. Even autorun was on Num Lock and Interact on F, two things I regularly have to change. It was almost as if someone had been playing EverQuest and just copied the keybinds across.

All of that was a pleasant surprise. It put me in a good frame of mind to see what the actual game might be like. And guess what? That was a pleasant surprise, too.

Based on the starting area, if Ashes of Creation had come out when my Kickstarter pledge suggested it was going to, namely sometime in 2017 or 2018, it would have been pretty much what I was hoping for. A tab-target Western fantasy MMORPG with action bars. 

I'd forgotten that one of the primary reasons I was interested in it at the time was that it promised to use the standard (WoW-style.) set-up rather than what were calling "Action" controls back then. At the time I preferred to click icons on hotbars and Mrs Bhagpuss insisted on it. AoC was going to be the next big MMORPG we played together largely because of that. 

 Now, of course, I've played so many action-rpgs with so many control systems I barely even notice which it is any more. And Mrs. Bhagpuss has given up on MMORPGs altogether. 

This is a First Impressions piece, not any kind of review or analysis, but I will say that it very much looks as if AoC might be the right game for the wrong time. It's not 2018 any more. The pandemic changed a lot of things and I'm realizing now that one of the things it changed for me was my connection with MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, Valheim did. There's a post to be written about that but this isn't it. 

Anyway, I suspect the mainstream ship for games like this has long since sailed. A solid niche success though? That's still very much a port worth steering for.

Getting back to the First Impressions, they continued to be very favorable right until I had to log out to go and have tea. By then I'd been playing for almost three hours, which is a really long session by my current standards. I would happily have gone on for quite a while longer, too.

Visually, or graphically if you prefer, the game looks very attractive, as I think the screenshots show. I let the game audit my PC and set the optimum settings accordingly, which turned out to be "Medium" all the way. I'm very happy with that, given I deliberately chose a low-end system. If it looks this good and plays this smoothly on my machine, I imagine it must look and play much better on a proper gaming rig. Although in my experience that doesn't always necessarily follow...

By the time I logged out, I was Level 4. I'd done a lot of quests, all of them absolutely classic mainstream theme-park MMO fare. I started off killing goblins, then got sent from one outpost to another to introduce myself, before I was given a whole bunch of jobs for which I was barely qualified, everything from interrogating prisoners to breaking up a suspected demonic ritual. 

Eventually I graduated to raiding bandit camps for evidence of some kind of conspiracy. Every quest was verbose to a degree unusual even for the genre, which has always been very heavy on the word count. It was all quite well-written, in the typical RPG style. 

Each hand-in came with a fulsome recap of exactly what I'd just done, frequently with lots of extraneous, scene-setting detail that I would have better appreciated if it had come at the time I was actually doing whatever it was I was now being told I'd done. A lot of it came as news to me. 

Thinking about it makes me want to write a whole essay on MMORPG quest writing but I'll save that for another time. What I will say is that I'm not sure I have the patience for this sort of thing any more. It's a lot of reading. Some of it was quite enjoyable but it takes so long. Is this really the level of detail most players want for every little side-quest? It smacks of someone having had far too much time on their hands and not much to do with it, these last eight years.

Still, I did read most of it. And it was mostly quite engaging. So I'm not complaining as such. I'm just acutely aware that if I'd skipped all the jabber, like probably 90% of players would, I'd probably have been two levels higher when I logged out. It really did take that long.

One thing I liked much more than having to plow though all that verbiage was being given a horse almost at the start. I always think it's a good sign if the developers allow you to mount up from the beginning of the game rather than holding it back as some sort of reward you have to earn. 

In fact, most of the choices I was aware of the developers having made seemed very encouraging. I did get the feeling they wanted me to enjoy myself, which you'd think would be a given in a video game but I imagine we all know is very much not.

Take PvP, for example. I've read an awful lot of scare stories about non-consensual PvP and ganking in Ashes of Creation, which certainly does advertise itself as a PvP title, so I was both surprised and pleased to find that, at least in the starting areas, PvP is off by default. You have to switch it on if you want it. 

Or you can just attack someone, I think. That'll set you up for a good kicking, if not by the other player then by the guards. If someone attacks you and you decline to respond, the only flag that gets set is on the attacker. You can just stroll away and let the authorities deal with it.

At least, I think that's how it works. I didn't see a single example of anyone fighting anyone else in the few hours I was there. I imagine there's plenty of that later but if anyone's worried about getting repeatedly ganked at spawn before they even load into the game, I can re-assure you it's not going to happen. 

What you are going to see, almost as unwelcome as a gank squad barrelling towards you, is endless gold spam in General Chat. I haven't seen this much for years. In one way, it's the sign of success. No-one wastes time trying to sell gold in a game that no-one plays.

You'd think no-one would bother in game that's still in Alpha, either, but that just tells you these labels mean nothing any more. Intrepid can call this "Alpha" and "Early Access" all they want but when the doors are open to all, they're taking money and there are tens of thousands of people playing, we all know that means Ashes of Creation has launched. It may not be anywhere even close to being done but so what? It's an MMORPG. A finished game has never been a requirement.

Am I bothered? Surprisingly not. To my considerable surprise, it looks as though the game I signed up for might be the game I got. I mean, I'd rather have had it six or seven years ago, when they told me I would and when I'd really have appreciated it, but I wasn't expecting it to be this close to what I imagined it would be, all those years ago. Now I've seen it, I'm a lot happier with what's there than I thought I would be.

How long that will last is another question. I'm only Level 4. A lot of games are fun in the early levels. For a First Impression, though, I'd have to say this has been pretty solid. I'm keen to wrap this up and get back for some more. After that, maybe I'll be back with some rather more critical comments.

Or maybe I'll still be having an unexpectedly good time. I do hope so. We could all do with a decent, new traditional MMORPG.

Intrepid And Steam, Sitting In A Tree...

So, here's a thing. I was wondering a while back whether my moldering Kickstarter pledge for Ashes of Creation would get me into the upcoming Early Access release, which is scheduled to start tomorrow. After a bit of digging I found it probably would, even though it was originally only meant to open the doors for Beta Phase 2.

At the time I wrote the post, it seemed as though Intrepid was suggesting the Steam release would be a walled garden, only for new purchases made through Steam. Existing active accounts and incoming Beta Kickstarter pledges would have to download the client from the game's website and presumably play on separate servers.

I read some reddit and forum threads about it but it wasn't all that obvious how it would work. I was pretty sure I'd be able to play during Early Access, somehow and somewhere. What wasn't clear was the where and the how.

All that's been sorted out now. It's in the recently-revised FAQ. I'd quote the appropriate sections only 

Somewhat inconvenient when I'm trying to write a post about it but I'll persevere. 

Whatever the old plan was, Intrepid has now done a one-eighty and ruled that from the start of EA Ashes will only be playable on Steam. To that effect, I received an email today marked "Action Needed" telling me I ought to link my Intrepid Account to my Steam Account.

It was news to me that I had an Intrepid Account. I guess I knew at some level I must have something registered with them or they wouldn't have been able to send me all these emails for years but if I ever thought about it at all, which I don't think I did, I would have assumed it was all being generated from my Kickstarter details. It does all come through the email address I use exclusively for Kickstarting.

Apparently it "only takes a moment" to link the accounts so I clicked on the link provided to see what would happen. Not much did. The website was "undergoing scheduled maintenance". 

Can't really blame Intrepid or their Marketing Dept. for that. The reminder email arrived around two in the morning. I just didn't get around to reading it until nearly tea-time.

Since I was there anyway, though, I thought I'd take a look at the "Support Channel" to see if I could find out any more details.

 The buttons work. Er... that's about it.

"News" button takes you straight back to the Scheduled Maintenance notice. "FAQ" appears to go to the old version, not the new one with information relating to EA and Steam. "Status Updates" takes you to the Sinkhole Formerly Known As Twitter, at which point I gave up, turned round and came straight out again.

There's another button at the bottom for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse. That puzzled me. Didn't they officially and finally terminate that misguided project years ago? (Looking into it, apparently it  was never officially cancelled. They just closed it down, stopped working on it, promoting it or talking about it. They basically ghosted their own spin-off. Is that any better?)

I clicked on the button out of curiosity. This is what I saw.

The most recent entry on there is five years old. Is any of the information remotely relevant any more? Doesn't look like it.

The FAQ is much the same, though. Full of answers to questions that relate to things that happened years ago. It's as though once the information's been posted it just sits there forever. Forgotten. 

I can't say any of this inspires much confidence.

If it looks like I'm spinning this out to get a cheap post, well, yes, I am. But I was also hoping that by the time I ran out of things to say, the maintenance would have ended and I could have added some practical advice on the actual linking process, not to mention confirming whether I do really have an account and if I do, whether it is really set to go with tomorrow's soft launch.

Except I've had my tea now and watched Monday's Only Connect quarter final and it's gone six o'clock and the maintenance is still going on, so that's not happening. I'm going to leave it at that for now and come back later, or more likely tomorrow, to see if I have better luck.

If I do, I imagine there'll be a First Impressions post at some point. I do, for once, have a couple of days with not much planned so the timing isn't too bad. [Edit - Oops! Forgot Rage of Cthurath launches today! So maybe not such great timing after all.)

Let's hope the game isn't, either.  

Two Games I Won't Be Playing

Wow! It's December already! I really need to get going on Christmas stuff. I always start buying presents for Mrs Bhagpuss in October and November, get a bunch of those stashed away, then think I'm done. And then, when it's almost too late, I realize I haven't even thought about anyone else, or bought any cards, let alone written or posted them. 

Doing the Advent Calendar here doesn't help, either. All the work involved in getting that set up really makes me feel like I've done plenty so I must be pretty close to being finished.

Well, I'm not! So much more to do. 

I mention all of this only to explain, or apologize for, or attempt to excuse, in advance, the shoddy quality of posts likely to appear here over the next week or three. Like this one...

It doesn't help that this is, at least ostensibly, a gaming blog and I'm hardly playing any games right now. Not from lack of interest or desire. I have a pretty lengthy list of games I'd like to take a run at, many of which are on my Steam wishlist. It makes for a really useful aide memoir. A lot better than trying to hold the titles in my head.

That's something I'm not all that great at doing. For example, I saw something over at MassivelyOP the other day about a new MMORPG called Reign of Guilds leaving Early Access. It rang the very vaguest of bells but I couldn't bring anything about it to mind so I mentally filed it for later. And then, while I was looking for something completely unrelated in my back pages, I came across this from a couple of years ago.

It seems not only had I heard of RoG before, I'd briefly played it and written a whole post on my short time there. I can remember absolutely nothing about either of those events.

The even more worrying part is that I opened that post by saying I couldn't remember hearing about Reign of Guilds before, even though I thought I should have. Clearly I have some kind of mental block about the damn game.

Re-reading the post, it all comes back to me, which I guess is one of the main reasons for keeping a blog. Without that written record I'd literally have no memory of ever having played the game at all. If anyone had asked me, I'd have said I never did. Not that anyone would be likely to ask...

Although I was very sure the game wasn't for me, I did have some positive things to say about it. I ended the post by claiming I'd be interested to see how well it did when it launched in 2024. This is the sort of thing I often say at the end of posts. I have to believe I mean it when I write it but it's self-evidently not true in any meaningful and lasting fashion. In most cases, I never mention the games again.

I certainly never gave another thought to Reign of Guilds, even though it did indeed become openly available in an Early Access build on Steam in April 2024. Early Access turned into full release last month and the game is now officially in Release 1.0 status. Reviews are Mixed but the numbers on Steam's chart, while small, are encouraging. 

Peak concurrency is only 300 but there was a huge spike when the game officially released on 26 November and so far those players haven't stopped logging in. Granted it's only been a week but I'm sure we all can all think of a few games that have lost almost everyone faster than that.

It makes for an interesting rebuttal to the widely-aired theory that you only get one chance at launch, that being the earliest moment you make your game publicly available. Early Access or Open Beta are often considered to be the de facto launch of a game, regardless of what the developers and the Marketing Dept. might say. Even more so if money changes hands.

Reign of Guilds is free to play so theoretically that last part doesn't apply, although of course there are optional "Bundles" you can buy if you're so inclined. There's something for all pockets. The cheap end begins at just £2.49. Top of the shop is £76.71.

I assume it's a less bizarre amount in U.S. Dollars but Steam is weirdly insistent on only showing you the currency for where your IP Address says you're based. If I still had a VPN I'd spoof it to find out the dollar price but I'm not re-subbing just for that. You'll have to use a currency converter or log in and check for yourself if you care.

Getting back to the point and disregarding the payment model for the moment, the Steam numbers strongly suggest that, for this game at least, Early Access did not wholly invalidate the official launch eighteen months later. 

When the game entered EA, concurrency peaked very briefly at just under 600 before falling rapidly to double figures, where it remained from July 2024 until November 2025. The week before the game left Early Access for fully Live status, concurrency was languishing at somewhere between twenty and thirty. That number increased tenfold the moment the game launched and so far it has stayed well above 250.

That may not be a whole lot of people, perhaps not enough to make for a viable game long-term, but it does suggest that you can have two bites at the cherry. Either people had a look at the EA launch, left, then half of them came back when EA ended, or launch brought in a whole new set of people, albeit only half as many. 

Would the net result have been better had there been no EA? Impossible to tell but opening the doors early and leaving them wide for a year and a half certainly didn't kill any future interest in the game.

All of which is altogether more than I meant to say about Reign of Guilds today, or indeed ever. It does, however, feed into something I was planning on talking about, that being an excellent, highly informative post by Owls about Soulframe. 

Soulframe is the fantasy MMORPG currently in development from Digital Extremes, makers of Warframe. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago that I was "mildly interested" in the "Preludes" version of the game, effectively a buy-in pre-Alpha, although not so interested I'd actually want to, y'know, buy into it. 

At the time I wrote that post, the price of the Founders Packs hadn't been announced but they're available now and they start at £24.99 ( $29.99.) Top whack goes for £84.99 ($99.99.)

DE has gone for an unusual and quite clever version of the "Founder Pack" deal based, I believe, on the way Warframe works. Each pack buys you a specific in-game class, meaning that if you want to try, say, an Archer and a Healer, you'll need to buy two separate packs. Currently there are only three classes. The ninety-nine dollar pack gives you all of them.

It sounds a little dubious at first but substantively, I suppose, it's not that much different to the Reign of Guilds approach, where differently priced packs give you varying numbers of character slots. You'd need multiple slots to play multiple classes, the important difference being that, unless you can't delete a character and re-roll, at least you could cycle through all the available options on one purchase. As I read it, in Soulframe you're stuck with whatever class you bought, much like you're limited to the ships you purchase in Star Citizen.

Although the easiest and quickest way to gain access to the game is to pay for it, it is possible to get into Preludes for free. There's some sort of lottery you can opt into on the website but there are invites, too. Owls got his initial access a while ago, courtesy of a code gifted him by Belghast and now Owls has some codes of his own to pay forward. The link is in his post if you're interested.

Having read his very helpful introduction to the game, I'll respectfully pass, even for free. The game very much sounds like something I would not like, involving as it does a lot of blocking and dodging and basically having to know what you're doing. Not really my scene.

At least gameplay doesn't revolve around FFA PVP, which puts it ahead of Reign of Guilds, but other than that it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. It also doesn't sound much like an MMORPG at its current state of development, although frankly it sounds more like one than RoG sounds like the games it claims to have modeled itself on, namely EverQuest and Ultima Online, neither of which it even remotely reminded me of back when I tried it.

Still, I'll say it yet again: I'll be interested to come back and take a look at Soulframe when the it launches. Or, indeed, as it goes through development, perhaps when it hits beta. 

At least with this one, I think I'll still be able to remember what game it is when that happens.

Alpha, Beta, Early Access, It's All The Same To Me: Ashes of Creation

There are eighteen posts here on Inventory Full with the "Ashes of Creation" label attached. The earliest is from the end of April 2017, just before the Kickstarter, when it seems my main interest in the proposed MMORPG was how good the housing was going to be. It seems an odd feature to focus on in a game that, at the time, I was repeatedly calling "Fantasy EVE",  but housing appears to have been my Big Thing back then.

Skimming those posts, it seems I was never all that keen on the project, not even when it was all new and shiny. In 2017, eight years ago, I described the promotional material for Ashes of Creation as giving the impression of "an MMO that would have looked about par for the course four or five years ago", the final big push for Western Mass Market MMOs. I seemed to think it would have fitted right in with the wave that gave us Guild Wars 2, Wildstar and The Secret World.

Even less enthusiastically, I was musing on whether or not to pledge, noting that "after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was."

Somehow, I must have managed to overcome my reservations because a week later, on the day the Kickstarter went live, I was watching the numbers tick relentlessly upwards: "the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter had been live for a quarter of an hour.  In that time there was already $161,872 pledged of the $750,000 goal. Not bad for the first fifteen minutes." 

I was pondering on whether it might be worth ponying up $80 to get into the first closed beta, which at the time was predicted for December that year. Closed Beta 2, access to which cost half as much, was due by the following Spring.

I didn't even especially want to play the game. I just wanted to get in early so I could blog about it. $80 sounded a lot for that, though, so I was inclining against it. I thought $40 sounded more reasonable.

And then, just a day later, I was back to say that I had, after all, stumped up my $80, only it wasn't on a pledge that would get me into the earliest closed beta. I'd bought two $40 tickets to Closed Beta 2, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss, who was at least theoretically interested, again mostly for the housing.

Fast forward eight years and Ashes of Creation is still in Alpha. Eight. Years. Later. Just think about that for a moment. Eight years and still in Alpha, when pledges were sold on the basis that Beta would start... eight years ago.  

The Kickstarter, famously, went extremely well, bringing in over $3m on an ask of just $750k. Three million dollars, though, doesn't take you far with an AAA MMORPG. I haven't been paying enough attention over the near-decade the project has been running to be able to say where the rest of the funding has been coming from, but it appears the well has finally dried up because as of 11 December, Ashes of Creation is going into Early Access on Steam.

The stated reason is to "expand the audience" but the sentiment among redditors is more along the lines of cash grab or just plain Hail Mary pass. 

Intrepid may be short of money and desperate but I don't think anyone could reasonably call it a scam. The game has actually been in non-NDA Alpha for about a year now, and the build that will come to Steam is going to be much the same, so it's not hard to find out what you'll be getting for your fifty dollars.

Not hard, but you will have to look. The thing is... no-one outside the bubble has really been talking about it. Literally the only blogger or professional gaming website of the 200+ in my Feedly that's done more than post the odd Press Release this year is Heartless Gamer and he hasn't been all that impressed.  

Still, the game going into Early Access is a big deal, especially on Steam. Bree at MasivelyOP, in that post I linked above, re-iterated the point made by numerous commenters on reddit that AoC is "one of the few major Western MMORPGs currently in development." That could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You might think it means a whole lot of pressure to perform for Intrepid Studios. Or you might, as I'm starting to believe, begin to wonder if it means the day of the Western AAA MMORPG is over.

I played New World Aeternum for a couple of hours yesterday. I had a good time. I did all five of the first set of time trials in the Mount quest-line. The game ran well, the scenery was glorious, chat was busy and there were players everywhere. All of this in a game that's not only in maintenance mode but which has been mostly seen as a failure since a few weeks after launch. You wouldn't really know New World was a failure. But it is.

New World was first revealed to the public as a game in development in 2016, about a year before the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter. It launched as a fully live game in September 2021, re-launched on Console as Aeternum three years later and went into maintenance mode a couple of weeks ago. 

The game, which as far as I can recall is the only AAA Western MMORPG to have launched this decade, has completed its full development cycle in significantly less time than it's taken Ashes of Creation to reach Early Access. Or get out of Alpha, for that matter.  Even though New World sold over four million copies on PC at launch and is also available on console, and allowing that it may have been a recent victim of larger restructuring at Amazon, it has not been widely regarded as a success.

It's not for want of trying. New World is an excellent MMORPG and for most of its lifetime it's had the resources of a huge, wealthy parent company propping it up. Millions of players gave it a chance, enough, it's said, to have recouped its development cost in its first month of operation. 

And yet it still could not hold an audience. It seems not to have remained profitable for long, either. Many older players and veteran developers remain convinced there's an untapped mass market for fairly traditional Western MMORPGs but the evidence to support that belief seems harder to find. 

Players flock to new games in the genre but they very rarely stay for long. Whatever it is they're looking for, they just can't seem to find it. Maybe Ashes of Creation really is the last hurrah for big budget Western MMORPGs. If so, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for the genre after that.

Back when I was pledging to the AoC Kickstarter, I was also interested in another would-be new entrant to the genre - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. That game, which has been in development for about as long, preceded AoC into Early Access. It's done quite well there, attracting a peak concurrent player-base of around 7,000, very similar to AoC's reported peak alpha concurrency of about 8,000. 

These are solid figures for a niche game in closed testing or Early Access but they're not mainstream AAA game numbers. Not by a couple of orders of magnitude. All the big Eastern MMOs of the past few years have attracted millions of players. New World, as I said, sold four and a half million boxes in its first month. Concurrency on Steam peaked at more than 900,000. 

New World was considered a huge success. For a while. And then it wasn't. Build it and they will come. And then they will leave.

I'm coming around to the opinion that there will be no more long-running, mainstream MMORPGs produced in the West. There will be plenty of small, niche successes. There are lots of players out there, ready to pick a horse and sit on it as it plods along. But not that many. Success for those games is going to mean a loyal following in the low tens of thousands. At best.

And maybe that will be enough for Ashes of Creation. It is supposed to be the Fantasy EVE after all and EVE's concurrency is usually quoted somewhere between 20-35k. EVE is a long running, successful MMORPG, no question. But t's nowhere even close to being a mainstream game. 

All of this talk of populations and break-even points for commercial success and what it might mean for future game development in the genre is speculation, though. What we soon won't need to speculate about is whether Ashes of Creation is any good. 

Does it run well or is it a buggy mess? Does it look amazing or like the decade-old game it is? Is the gameplay fun or frustrating? Is the PvP balanced or is it a gankbox? And is that housing anything you'd want to live in?

All of that is already open knowledge, of course, or should be, since there's been no NDA for a year, but in a few weeks anyone who cares will be able to put down $50 and find out for themselves. 

I will not be paying another $50 on top of the $80 I already gave Intrepid eight years ago. Luckily, I won't have to. 

I was initially irked at the thought that the game I backed so long, long ago was going into Early Access with an Alpha build, apparently leaving me still waiting for the second round of Beta before I could join in. I figured that had to be what was going to happen. They'd have sent me an email if my pledge qualified me for EA access, surely. Wouldn't they? They send me plenty of PR emails, after all. It's  not like they don't know where to find me.

Still, I thought before I started complaining I probably ought to check. And guess what? On the Ashes Moments Substack (Whatever that is...) it says "all Beta-1 and Beta-2 key holders will also be granted access to the Early Access launch on December 11th". That's my ticket in.

Actually, my two tickets because Mrs Bhagpuss has long since moved on and won't be playing this or any other MMORPG. I'll have her account to play with as well. Not that I want two of them.

It looks as though I won't be playing on Steam, though. Current testers and anyone invited in on later pledges when the game hits Early Access will reportedly have to use Intrepid's own launcher. If they want to play on Steam, they'll have to buy a $50 Steam Key like anyone else. I'm unclear as to whether we'll all end up on the same servers after that. 

I guess I'll find out come December. It'll give me something new to write about for a while, at least. 

Which is really all I paid for in the first place. Eight long years ago. 

Horse Latitudes

I had a great plan for today's post.... okay, a good plan... well, a plan, anyway. I was going to stump up my $25 (£20.99) for the weird horse-mystery MMORPG Equinox: Homecoming. It's going into Early Access on Steam today. Then I was going to play it for a couple of hours and write a First Impressions piece. Those are always fun and easy to do.

It seemed like a good idea to buy the thing anyway, not only because of the blogging opportunities it offers, always a major consideration these days, when I'm writing about games a lot more than I really play them, (And just how long can that go on, eh? Eh??) but because of that too-good-to-be true "Lifetime Subscription With Every Early Access Purchase" offer. 

As a blogger, even if the game tanks, $25 would be a fair price to pay, just to there for the drama. Lots to write about in a crash-and-burn. And if it turns into a success, $25 for permanent subscription-level perks is an insane bargain. Anything in-between would just be par for the course for an EA buy-in so it seemed like a no-lose scenario.

I was all set to Add To Cart when something caught my eye:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
Processor: i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8 Core
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce RTX 2070
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 20 GB available space

Wait? What? i9?

This is going to sound very strange to a lot of people reading this, I know, but I can't recall ever even seeing a spec for a game I've been interested in that had an i9 requirement as a minimum. In fact, and you'll laugh when you hear this, I wasn't aware there was an i9.

I think the highest I've noticed before was i7. My PC runs on an i5. 

I have been looking at upgrades, although only because my desktop, which is nine (!) years old, isn't eligible for Windows 11 so I'm going to have to make some kind of decision about what that means in a few months, when Microsoft switch off support for Windows 10. All I need to do to make it acceptable, though, is to enable Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 in the BIOS, which I could do quite easily, and swap the CPU for one on MS's approved list.

The thing is, it's not the i-number that's the issue there. My laptop, which is already running W11, has an i5. In fact, Windows 11 runs on an i3. There are plenty of them on the Approved list. So, when I've been looking at possible processor upgrades, I haven't been thinking about how much more powerful they are, or how much newer; only how cheap. And there are plenty of relatively cheap CPUs that Windows 11 approves of.

Then there's the question of functionality, aka "if it ain't broke...". The reason my PC is nine years old, by far the longest I've ever gone without buying a new box, is that it runs everything I'm interested in without any noticeable problems. 

I have upgraded it a few times. Most recently, I doubled the Ram a  few years back. Still only 16GB, which I realize is nothing these days, but more than adequate for anything I'm asking it to do. 

I also bought a decent video card (GeForce RTX4070) in the summer of 2023, which made a big difference to my gaming then, although I'm so used to it now I don't think about it any more. I've been doing a lot of video editing recently and that's been painless and comfortable. I haven't run into any games I wanted to play but couldn't up to now. Other than the W11 issue, there hasn't seemed  to be any point thinking about further upgrades, let alone replacing the whole machine.

I'm still not sure there is but even if I did decide to swap out the CPU, I'd only be looking at going up to an i7 because my motherboard, a Gigabyte z170 Gaming K3, can't accept anything higher. The incentive to upgrade isn't really there, either. I've looked into it before and the difference between my i5, which has always bench-marked as faster than expected, and the i7s I've considered isn't all that great. If you can't see the difference, what's the point?

If I did decide to go further than that, it would mean changing the motherboard and while I'm okay with a certain amount of fiddling about inside the case that's where I draw the line, so it would mean a new PC. And I am not about to buy a new PC just so I can play an Early Access game where I ride around on horseback solving mysteries.

I could just buy the game and try it to see if it runs anyway. It might. I've played a few games before, where my PC didn't meet minimum spec and they've worked fine. I've never refunded a Steam game but I believe you get a couple of hours grace. Plenty of time to see if it would run acceptably. Or at all.

So, I suppose I might do that. At the moment, though, I'm kind of disposed not to bother. It'd be nice to be in at the beginning but I'll lay odds Equinox:Homecoming will be in Early Access for a year or two so there's no hurry. Also, give it a few months and we'll all have a better idea of whether it's going to be worth our time or not.

Right now, I'm thinking more along the lines of whether I might want to replace my PC later in the year after all. Maybe the i9 minimum for the horse game is a straw in the wind. After all, that processor generation, for all that I didn't even know it existed, is itself about five years old now. If I'm going to carry on playing new games into my retirement, I guess I'll have to get a new machine eventually. Maybe now's the time.

No rush. No need for snap decisions. I might start looking, though. See what's around. Given the volatile nature of both the global economy right now and of computer hardware in general, it's always hard to know when is or isn't a good time to buy. It's always fun window-shopping though.

Finally, dragging my thoughts away from the personal, what does this i9 minimum spec mean for the game itself? According to Games Radar, Colin Cragg, CEO of Blue Scarab, the developer behind Equinox:Homecoming, is aiming for an audience of "horse girls", described evocatively by Ashley Bardhan, who wrote the piece, as

 "Graceless, American; rough hands, and breath that smells of apple pie – the stereotypical female horse enthusiast, or horse girl".

Cragg used to be CEO of Star Stable, the well-established long-running horse-based MMO (What? You didn't know there were more?). It's a successful game: "$35 million of recurring revenue every year". 

Star Stable, though, has much lower minimum specs than Equinox: Homecoming. My nine-year old PC would have no problems running it. In fact, even my laptop meets the requirements, integrated graphics and all. 

The interview and especially Ashley's commentary is full of entirely appropriate and very welcome observations about the need to address the "52% of the world population" currently being ignored by conventional AAA game design, while at the same time making them feel like they're being "catered to" and not infantalized: 

"characters say "fuck" like the teenagers they're meant to be, rather than speak in My Little Pony talking points about friendship and magic"

I'm not entirely sure all these points connect, exactly. I'm not a major My Little Pony fan but I never really thought of it as an IP that appealed much to teenagers in the first place, sweary or otherwise. And I don't believe either friendship or magic come pre-gendered. 

More importantly, I wonder how many Star Stable players have hardware capable of running Equinox:Homecoming? I don't and my ageing set-up generally falls around average in those Steam surveys, which I'm guessing are already somewhat biased towards both males and hobbyists.

I wish I could run it, though. The more I hear about the game, the more interesting it sounds. I look forward to reading someone else's First Impressions. Sadly, my own will have to wait, for now.

Rule Of Three - or - Measure Once, Cut Thrice

 

The Stars Reach Kickstarter kicks off for real next week. I know this because I'm being deluged with emails from Playable Worlds about it. 

It's not the fault of PW's marketing department. It's a problem all of my own making. It goes back to the multiple times I signed up for the pre-alpha and/or followed the Kickstarter.

That makes it sound as if I was trying to leverage access to the testing program or something shady along those lines but it's the exact opposite. I was just trying to make sure I had one application that met all the criteria. I would love to have just one email account linked to the whole project so I'd get just one email every time. It would strip away at least one layer of confusion in what I've found to be quite a confusing process altogether.

At this stage, I'm not even clear myself how I came to be signed up for testing three times, if I even am. I'm not even sure about that. I have multiple email addresses that forward all their mail to a master address and every time the PW marketing department sneezes, all three of my addresses say "Bless You!". 

Or I thought that was what was happening. Until I took a close look at the send/receive details today.

I certainly am getting those three identical emails every time. I'd been assuming they were going to three different addresses, all of which I presumably gave PW at some point in the process. When I examine them closely, though, it's not as plain as all that what's going on.

Two of the emails are coming directly to my main email address but one has a note appended by googlemail that reads "Yes, this is you."Apparently this is something Google adds if the email used by the sender has some punctuation or variation added that doesn't materially alter the address, like extra dots.  I can't see anything like that in the address that's been used, though. It looks identical.

What  the implications of that might be I have no idea but even if I am only signed up twice as myself it doesn't help much because the testing program requires a Steam account and my Steam account isn't liniked to that email. When I joined Steam I specifically didn't want people to be able to find "Bhagpuss" there, so I am not "Bhagpuss" on Steam and never have been.

Awkwardly, though, I am Bhagpuss on Discord and a Discord account is also required for the testing program. When I was first filling out all the forms, I made a new Discord account under my Steam identity for consistency. Which would have been fine had I not then gotten an invite as myself under the Creators program...

All of that then repeated itself when I needed to "Follow" the Kickstarter launch page . At this stage, about all I can really say is that I am in the testing program as someone but even I'm not sure who I am there.

That is all going to change soon, I think, as Stars Reach transitions from pre-alpha to alpha. Or maybe not. Honestly, I'm not at all clear on what's going on. The emails I'm getting at the moment aren't clarifying anything because either they're still too wooly or I am. It's probably me. 

I got one that made me uncertain whether I was still in the test or not but then I got another with some dates so it seems I am. It didn't help that I also got additional invites off the back of Following the Kickstarter, one of which I foolishly accepted. I was really very muddled about what I was doing at that point. 

I still am but I'm hoping all will be magically revealed when the Kickstarter opens and we get to see the pledges and rewards. 

We're very close now. This morning I woke up to another clutch of emails that had some actual detail on the Kickstarter offers. It's vague but it's something and I'll share it with you now.

There are going to be four tiers, called Citizen, Scout, Reacher and Titan. I could paste the whole lot in but I'll just summarize for brevity. And make comments as I go, of course.

Citizen: Introductory level to let everyone feel involved. Rewards along the lines of titles and wallpapers. Out-of-game stuff or very minor cosmetics, basically. Does not get you into testing.

Scout: For people who want to play. Rewards of some practical, in-game use, such as emotes, outfits and starter gear. Does get you into testing.

Reacher: Tempted to call this the first pay-to-win Tier although that's probably unfair. Most Kickstarters offer stuff like this. You get better tools, "special pets" and a Grav Mesh so you can start flying from the moment you log in. You also get four passes to invite other players to join you (Which you can also trade to other players if you prefer.). It's unclear to me what you'll be inviting them to join you in, though. The testing phase? The live game? Obviously, this tier also gets you into the test program.

Titan: aka "Whale": the usual stuff every mmorpg kickstarter puts in to try to hook a big one. Party with the devs, get your own planet (Phrased somewhat incomprehensibly as "direction on your very own planet", which could mean anything from advice on how to set it up to co-ordinates on where to find it.). There's even the bait of a "1:1 with Raph Koster himself", which could sound more like a threat than a reward.

As is standard with these things, each tier gets you all the stuff in the tiers below.

It's still very loose although it does appear to answer the question of whether pledges will include anything as concrete as a copy of the game or subscription time. And that answer would be "No."

I don't have much else to say about any of it at this point, other than that I think "Reacher" is a really bad name for a tier, since it so strongly implies failure. Someone who's reaching is generally considered to be out of their depth or even trying to be more than they are. If I was till wearing my marketing hat from long ago, I'd have thrown that one out at the spitballing stage. 

If they really wanted to link the tier with the name of the game - not a bad idea - why not go with "Star"? Citizen, Scout, Star, Titan. Doesn't that sound better?

The main things that remain to be revealed, apart from the granular detail of the specific pledges within each tier, are the grand total the Kickstarter is looking to raise and the price points of the pledges. 

I'm going to guess the Citizen tier will be the traditional $5-$10 dollar "Thanks for your support, here's a badge". Never really sure why anyone bothers with those.

The interesting one to me is Scout. I plan on backing the project but I'm not looking to invest in it. A buy-in around $20-$30 would suit me. If it goes to $50 I might opt out. I'd pay that sort of money if it equated to a pre-order with a box price thrown in but nothing like that seems to be on the table. I don't think we even know what the payment model for the live game is going to be yet.

Then there's the question of access to the test program. Here, once again, I find myself both conflicted and confused. The paragraph describing what you get for Scout includes this sentence: "...we're going to let as many people in from the pre-Alpha signups as possible, but after the Kickstarter finishes, we're limiting testing to folks that have contributed at the Scout Tier and above." (Their emphasis.)

I think that means they'll clear the testing program completely at the end of the Kickstarter, including everyone who got in by Following the Kickstarter but also anyone who was in the Friends and Family pre-alpha, even before the Kickstarter was announced. The testing program will then begin anew with only people who pledged at Scout or above invited. 

At least, that's how I read it. I'm ambivalent about being in the tests anyway, mostly because I can barely manage to get any time in any of them. In a practical sense, it wouldn't be that big a deal for me if I was dropped because mostly I'm asleep when the tests are on in any case. For example, I got an email this morning with this week's schedule and both tests run from 11pm or midnight to three or four in the morning. I go to bed at 9.30pm these days so that's a non-starter.

If I pledge at Scout, though, I'll stay in the program and hopefully the hours will extend so I can actually get in for long enough to do something. And for all I know I might still be in the testing anyway, as part of the Creator program, even if I don't pledge Scout. It's all so fuzzy still.

I wonder just how much of an incentive access to the alpha is going to be, anyway. If the game really is going to go into Early Access this year, it probably isn't going to make a lot of difference for anyone who's not already pretty much obsessed with the idea, like the individuals and premades planning on carving out a space empire. 

They're going to want to get in as soon as possible so they can learn all the exploits for when the time comes but it would really make more sense for anyone who's only casually interested to sit it out until EA arrives. Unless you really can't wait because you have the patience of a five year-old or you have a genuine desire to see the development process up close (Or a blog that consumes content like a coked-up wolverine), the quasi-persistence of Early Acess would seem like a more attractive prospect. And it's only going to be a few months according to Raph.

Whatever your plans, the indicators are looking favorable, at least. The Kickstarter currently has just over 5,000 followers, which seems like a good number. Plenty of projects fund with far fewer pledges than that. It all depends how much they plan on asking for, I suppose. 

And that's something we'll find out next week. It's going to be interesting to watch. I'd start popping your corn now.

Can I Kick It? Yes You Can!

On Friday I got an email from Playable Worlds. It was brief and enigmatic. "We’ve got some announcements to share", it said. "Join us tomorrow for our Fireside Chat".

These chats are a regular event in which Raph Koster talks about the game, how it's progressing and what's being planned for the future. So far I haven't felt the need to attend. Anything I need to know will come out in a more concise form soon afterwards and I've always found listening to people talk a less efficient way to learn things than reading. That's why I stopped going to lectures halfway through my first term at university.

Sometimes, though, you just want to hear about stuff as it happens, not read about it later. And I was curious, especially when  a second email arrived the next day, announcing a new build and a four-hour test and reminding us all of an "important announcement during the Fireside" That's Playable Worlds' bold type there, not mine.

Obviously, something was up, not least because the email went on to suggest "we expect a lively conversation and plenty of questions." "Lively" in this context is usually code for angry or upset so it seemed likely whatever was going to be announced could be controversial. I had a few ideas what that might be. None of them correct, as it turned out.

There's no point my building this up to some kind of big reveal because obviously anyone who's interested in Stars Reach will already know what the big announcement was. MassivelyOP had a news item up about it almost before Raph finished talking. I'd have loved to be able to be that quick with my response but the Fireside didn't start until 10.30pm for me and I was working all day Sunday, so this is the first chance I've had to get to it.

Just in case anyone reading this really doesn't know what happened, let me tell you now. There's going to be a Kickstarter for Stars Reach. 

Is that big news? Is it a big deal? Depends on where you stand, I guess. In the MOP piece Bree points out that Raph said only last June that there were "no plans" to do a Kickstarter. If you were of a mind to be upset about it you might work that up into something but anyone who has even a basic understanding of  interview technique would know that "having no plans" at best means "we might" but more likely "we will but we're not quite there yet".

The actual campaign doesn't begin until February but there's a landing page up already. It's worth a read. It lays out what the game is aiming to be in clearer terms than I remember seeing before. 

As one of the "hundreds of players who have been playing for six months", I can't say I recognize everything in the lengthy description of  howStars Reach is supposedly going to look when it's done but most of what I have seen for myself in the pre-alpha is fairly represented. There are a few things I'd quibble with but on balance it seems like a pretty straightforward pitch.

And it needs to be. One of the things Raph came back to repeatedly in the Fireside was the degree of suspicion in which many gamers and especially MMO players hold Kickstarter projects these days. He used the word "burned" several times when talking about gamers' previous experiences with the funding platform and the first person from the audience to raise a question after Raph finished mentioned Star Citizen as an example.

It's true the shadow of huge, over-ambitious projects like Star Citizen, Ashes of Creation or Camelot Unchained looms menacingly over any would-be MMO developer who dares to ask for money for a game as yet unmade. These are games that promised to be done in a year or two but which are still deep in early development, often behind firmly-closed doors, years going on decades later.

Raph took trouble to emphasize the reasons Stars Reach is not one of those kinds of projects and he makes a convincing case. The game has been in development for five years already, something I'm not sure was widely known and which does explain a lot about how "quickly" the current, quite playable build appeared. 

More importantly, it is playable and people are playing it. And enjoying it. Without an NDA, I might add, all of which significantly increases confidence.

He also says it's "5/6 of the way through development", by which I have to assume he means by some specific, technical measure. I can't see how the game as we know it now has 5/6 of the content, or even the systems, described in the pitch.

Undoubtedly, though, there is a real game there already. It's in pre-alpha right now but Raph says alpha is very close and Early Access ought to come within the year. Based on other games I've played that label themselves "alpha" or "Early Access" that seems entirely plausible. 

The main thing that's missing would seem to be scale. The current game has four planets whereas the pitch promises "a galaxy". That is disturbingly similar to Star Citizen, which proposed to have a hundred star systems but after ten years has only managed two.

Nevertheless, I think a much more apposite comparison and one that reflects much more favorably on Playable Worlds would be Project: Gorgon. That game also had a very playable micro-version available well before it started asking anyone for money and, although it famously failed to fund on the first two attempts, once the threshold was reached on the third Kickstarter, most that was promised quite quickly came to pass.

People who pledged Project: Gorgon seem to have been satisfied with what they got, by and large, so there's proof it is possible to run a Kickstarter for an MMORPG and not leave everyone feeling let down or lied to. That said, it doesn't happen as often as it should. 

Mostly, the history of kickstarted MMOs is a trail of unfinished or abandoned projects, scarred by a handful of outright scams. I'm sure that the huge majority of failures come down to a combination of wildly over-optimistic expectations and very poor estimates of the costs and challenges involved. In this regard, Playable Worlds has a considerable advantage. Of all the big names in his corner of the field, Raph has a deserved reputation for being the least hyperbolic and the most realistic. Then again, Dave Georgeson is on the team...

There were several intriguing revelations during Raph's Fireside talk on Saturday, among them the confirmation that "hundreds" were in the testing program but that "tens of thousands" had signed up. The disparity, it was explained, was because Playable Worlds couldn't provide the server capacity for the numbers of people who wanted to join the tests and even if they could it would have meant effectively running the equivalent of a live MMO.

I have pondered here before about the potential popularity of Stars Reach and this casts considerable light on the reality. "Tens of thousands" sounds like a lot but it needs to be contrasted with numerous reported pre-testing sign-ups for MMOs like Once Human or Tarisland or Lost Ark, which regularly run an order of magnitude larger and not infrequently two orders.

For all its ambition, Stars Reach is a small project with a small audience. It seems from what Raph says that the numbers it has already could provide a sustainable income for the eventual live game but even so one of the main reasons for the Kickstarter is to draw eyes. Indeed, I suspect publicity is the main reason.

Raph was very clear about the difficulty of finding funding in the current climate. He confirmed  that being able to show evidence of player interest by way of metrics like Steam wishlists and now Kickstarter followers is going to be instrumental in securing further funding from outside investors. The pledge money we provide is not going to pay the bills.

Or that's how it sounded. Of course, as yet we don't know how much Raph is going to ask for. Again, he was very clear in his talk about the dangers of setting the funding bar too high and, by failing to reach it, ending up with nothing at all.

We'll find out next month how well he's judged it. I am already decided on pledging although it will be at a fairly nominal level, more to show support than in expectation of any eventual reward. I will also almost certainly buy in to Early Access, when it arrives, which I hope will indeed be later this year, always provided pricing is reasonable.

I'm still broadly in favor of Early Access, despite it's many well-known problems. When it comes to MMORPGs, I like to get in as early as possible, partly for the blogging opportunities but also because, in my estimation, the majority provide less fun the more "developed" they become. There are exceptions but it's been my experience more often than not.

Raph didn't mention anything about the future of the current round of testing or how that might change as the game transitions into alpha. So long as I have access, I intend to carry on testing and writing about what I see and do in the game, although while the testing schedule remains as it has been, my opportunities to engage with it will continue to be limited. I couldn't find time to take even a short look at the new build that dropped on Saturday, for example, and I would have liked to because there were reportedly some substantial changes.

Overall, I feel Stars Reach is coming along nicely, even if I still have my doubts whether, as a Live game, it will look anything much like the rosy picture Raph paints. I suspect there will be a lot more mayhem, anarchy and chaos than he's suggesting. As a big fan of emergent gameplay, however, I doubt that will bother him all that much and it will certainly give me something to blog about so I'm fine with it, too.

Until we can all get in and play under some form of expanded testing or Early Access, Raph and the team would very much like everyone who's even a little bit interested to go sign up at Kickstarter to make that interest public and thereby convince some people with real money to send some of it his way.

I'm going to go and add my name to the list. I would have done it already but it turned out I was on the wrong email account or something. So far, only 1,163 people have signed up but it was 1,139 when I started this post so at least it's going in the right direction.

Next step - the Kickstarter itself. I'm curious to see both the pledges and the target. Meet back here when we find out.

An Extravagant Journey To Nowhere?

If you'd asked me this time last year if I was interested in paying $40 for a couple of years unrestricted access to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, I'd have answered "Hell, yeah!". I've said a number of times in various comments here and there over the decade or so since the game was first announced that I'd be willing to pay the same for access to the test builds as I paid for Landmark and that cost me a lot more than forty dollars

I bought in to Landmark at the earliest opportunity, the paid alpha that started at the beginning of February, nearly eleven years ago. From memory, I think it cost around a hundred dollars for the Founder's Pack. I bought one for me and another for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present; a couple of hundred dollars in total. 

As I said in that very first post after the NDA dropped, something that happened almost immediately, presumably because SOE didn't fancy trying to police the whole thing for a moment longer than they had to, "That officially makes my Founder's Pack purchase worthwhile right there."

I was referring to the blogging possibilities but in the end, I very much felt I got my money's worth out of Landmark from the gameplay as well as a source of material for posts. I spent a great number of happy hours there over the three years the game lasted.

Two of those years were in testing; just one as a live game. As a commercial product, Landmark was an abject failure, surviving barely a year after its launch in 2016. I'm sure there were multiple reasons why the game closed down but the main one was because no-one was playing it.

In common with most games developed by Sony Online Entertainment, Landmark had an in-game chat command that let you see how many other people were playing. I was in the habit of checking it every time I played. How many were online when I was? Almost literally no-one. Every time.

These days, there's a positively nauseating amount of faux nostalgia for the game with people praising it to the skies for all kinds of things it never was. If those people loved it so much, I have to wonder, why were none of them playing it at the end? Or pretty much the entire time the game was "live"?

The most irritating part of the whole self-serving love-fest is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Back in 2017, when the closure date was announced, the infinitesimally small part of the internet that gave a damn at all was outraged! Not because of the closure per se but for Landmark's supposed role in the already-announced abandonment of the shibboleth,that was EQNext.

I was no more convinced by that anger then than I am by the suppposed affection now. I spent much of the post I wrote about it at the time railing at "the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark", all of whom were falling over themselves to pour vitriol on Daybreak, whose only real error had been to let the game struggle on as long as it did.

I quoted Tyler F. M. Edwards extensively, along with Feldon at EQ2Wire, as they ripped into both the MMO community and the former SOE management for the endless self-delusion and gaslighting that led to such over-inflated, unachievable expectations in the first place. It's curious that both those links still work. Gaming blogs lasting longer than the games they cover - who'd have imagined?

Landmark, of course, was supposed to be the creative pipeline for John Smedley and Dave Georgeson's surreal and wholly unconvincing EQNext project, a bizarre and from this distant perspective positively deranged plan to have players build the infrastructure of one game while playing another while getting paid for doing it, presumably at pennies on the dollar compared to what it would cost to employ professional artists. 

Thinking about it now, it's like some weird, twisted pre-echo of the crypto/NFT Pay2Earn model, where somehow playing a game earns you money while you have fun, a virtuous circle of back-scratchers, all sitting on each others' laps and taking in each others' washing so no-one needs to buy chairs or do their own laundry ever again. Or something like that.

EQNext, lest we forget, was the pipe-dream successor to EverQuest although, awkwardly, EverQuest already had a successor, EverQuest II, something no-one seemed willing to acknowledge back then. Or now, for that matter.

Even more awkwardly, EQ had already received a much more convincing sequel in the form of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, a game which, for all its well-remarked and rehearsed flaws, very clearly iterated and expanded on the original EverQuest formula, something it was well-placed to do, considering it had at its head the prime visionary responsible for the franchise itself, Brad McQuaid.

For a short while Vanguard fared rather better, commercially, than Landmark but also suffered badly from being pressed upon an eager and receptive public in a painfully unfinished and, for some, wholly unplayable state. As happened with Landmark to a lesser degree, most of those shortcomings were addressed and overcome in live development but by then the damage had been done. There was no-one left to see how much better the games were becoming.

Once again, I bought into Vanguard at my earliest opportunity. I applied for testing and got in a few months before launch, when I found the game would barely run on my PC, something that happened to many testers and later to paying customers. Instead of giving up on the whole thing I did some research on what was needed to get the game to run comfortably. Buy a new PC was the solution.

There was a lot of helpful information on the beta forums concerning which graphics cards and CPUs handled the game most effectively, so before the game launched, I had new PCs built for myself and Mrs Bhagpuss, using components chosen specifically with the aim of running Vanguard reliably. This they did extremely well, meaning that while other players were raging and rage-quitting over the inability of their state-of-the-art rigs to run the game at all, we were both playing quite happily on mid-range PCs with as much facility as we'd ever played any other MMORPG.

I point all of this out to mark the contrast between what I was willing to do ten or fifteen years ago in order to play an MMORPG that really appealed to me and what I'm willing to do today. Back then, not only was I ready to pay a couple of hundred dollars just to get into an alpha, I was willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars buying new PCs to play a new game.

Today it appears I won't even stump up $40 for a game I've been waiting to play for almost a decade. So what changed?

A few things. I'm not going to claim that, like Wilhelm, I've fallen off the MMO path, but I am certainly no longer pounding down that trail, ignoring every turning. I still enjoy MMORPGs. I still play them. But nowadays I play a lot of other games as well and I enjoy them just as much. Maybe more.

At the moment, though, I'm not spending all that much time playing video games at all. Maybe a couple of hours, most days. Often not even that. Sometimes I go a whole day without logging into any games at all! I'm not making any grand claims about being over gaming or anything silly like that. It's just that I seem to have a lot of demands on my time just now and something has to give. Games are an easy place to make the cull.

Still, I absolutely will make time for something that interests or intrigues me. Play-testing Stars Reach, for example, has been quite awkward but I've made the effort and intend to continue. 

Tellingly, in some ways Stars Reach, whose development team includes one Dave Georgeson, is very much the spiritual successor to the game EQNext was supposed to be, only this time it's being developed without most of the hubris and bluster with a far more grounded idea of the time and effort involved. And, of course, with the benefit of another decade of technological development, which I suspect is where the magic sauce that seems to be making the whole thing work this time has come from.

Pantheon Early Access, being available 24/7, is immeasurably more convenient for me to play than Stars Reach with its two-hour tests so, especially given I've been itching to play it for years, what's holding me back? Surely it can't just be that $40 tag? It is a bit steep for an EA game, true, but given that VR, until very recently, was planning not only on charging for the game itself but also piling a monthly subscription on top, $40 for at least two years play seems like a decent deal.

(The subscription, by the way, is no longer a certainty. The notes on the EA launch on the game's Steam page include the following fudge: "originally, we contemplated on following a sub model, but are still evaluating our options and will be using the Early Access phase to open that dialogue with players."  The ground is clearly being softened for a more accessible payment model.)

No, it's neither lack of time nor lack of money that's keeping me from playing Pantheon right away. It's experience. Personal experience. Granted, there was only about an hour of it but it was more than enough. 

I was very eager to get a hands-on with the game when Visionary Realms somewhat unexpectedly opened the doors briefly for any interested parties to wander in and take a look. There was - and presumably still is - an NDA on that, so I'm not going into any detail, but I don't think any NDA can reasonably prevent me saying how I felt while I was playing . I can sum it up in a word: bored.

I can forgive games in development a great deal. They can be buggy, glitched, laggy and nowhere even close to being finished and I'll still happily spend time with them and give them good word of mouth, so long as I'm engaged, interested, amused or entertained. Boring me, though? That's unforgivable.

And I'm quite hard to bore. I'm very easily pleased. I can and do play through the starting areas of countless MMORPGs with pleasure, even when I have no intention of carrying on. I love early-game play and I particularly love diku-MUD-inspired leveling. For a game with that heritage to fail to grip me even for as long as it takes to get out of the starting zone is almost unheard of but Pantheon managed it.

Obviously, without being able to discuss the reasons for that in any shape or form, my boredom stands entirely as a description of my state of mind. It tells you nothing about the game itself, other than that I didn't manage to become engaged, let alone enthralled by it.

I didn't, for whatever reason, which is why I'm loathe to drop forty dollars to see if it gets better, later. Maybe it does. It would certainly need to.

It would also seem that I'm no longer willing to spend real-life money just to have something new to write about. For that, I don't even need to enjoy the game. Negatively critical posts are often easier to write than positive ones and they can be more entertaining to read, too, provided you get the tone right. The problem is, I'd still have find something to do in the game that wasn't as boring to read about as it was to do and I'm not sure what that might be.

For the time being, then, a combination of factors prevents me from adding Pantheon to my Steam account. It's a bit pricey for what they're offering and I find it hard to imagine wanting to play it or write about it rather than any of my many other options. I mean, it's hard enough right now to get myself to log into games I like. Honestly, if I can't persuade myself to spend time with games I'm enjoying, what chance is there for a game that makes me feel bored just thinking about it?

And yet, for all of that, I almost certainly will buy into Pantheon's Early Access, eventually. Probably sooner rather than later, too. The New Year should see a substantial drop in demands on my time and very likely there'll also be a significant deterioration in the weather, both of which should mean more time to play video games. I don't expect to be able to resist the temptation to "just take a look" for too much longer.

If and when I do, you can be sure I'll give some account of what I find. There's no NDA on Early Access, although I'm sure someone will try it one day. Let's just hope I can summon up enough enthusiasm to get out of the starting area next time.