Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For anyone?

First Impressions, Second Chances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We sure did! Quoted for irony. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Play For Housing.

It was inevitable that, having announced in public I had no intention of playing it again, I wouldn't be able to go more than a few days without logging into Elyon for another look. In my defence, I did at least have a reason, if not an excuse. 

Somewhere along the way I'd picked up on the fact that Elyon has housing and I hate to miss out on any chance to contrast and compare the housing offer in a new game with those I've already seen. Who knows, the rest of the game might be mediocre but it could still have the best housing ever. Not likely, I know, but not impossible.

Before I logged in to find out for myself I did a smidgeon of research. There wasn't a lot of information to be found but I read a couple of guides. This one explains the basics in plain, straightforward fashion, while the more informative of the two, (although definitely not the more aesthetically pleasing) goes into greater detail on how it all works.

The aspect that particularly intrigued me was the combination of both instanced and open world housing in the same game. The choice between the two has been a contentious one as far back at least as Star Wars Galaxies and quite possibly all the way back to Ultima Online.  

I think this has to be the first time I've ever seen cow parsley in an mmorpg.

Open world housing has two major drawbacks. If you allow people to plonk down their bricks anywhere they like and build whatever they want (SWG, Landmark) there's the ever-present risk of urban blight. Not everyone's an architect. If you restrict home ownership to neighborhoods (FFXIV, Vanguard) you keep everything looking neat and tidy at the expense of splitting your playerbase into homeowners and homeless, thereby fueling discontent and elitism.

Even Vanguard, hard though it may be to believe, now the historical narrative of failure has been written, went through a stage when there weren't enough housing plots to meet demand. New islands had to be created to handle the overspill and to this day Final Fantasy XIV carries its costly, restrictive housing offer as a badge of shame in many players eyes. 

Three hours online or three hours offline?
I guess it's too late to ask that now.

Instanced housing, on the other hand, runs the risk of taking players out of the world into their own private silos. Reading up on Elyon's housing system, it seems the developers have chosen to run the two negatives headlong into each other in the hope of generating a positive. 

They've opted to lean into the elitism of limited availablity open-world housing while simultaneously falling back on the egalitarian principles of instanced accomodation for all. Everyone gets a free, instanced "Common House", which isn't just a minimal single room option but an actual house with grounds that can be decorated and upgraded. "Luxury Houses", dotted around the open world, are in limited supply, cost money both to buy and maintain and are lost if payments are missed.

Naturally, Luxury houses also come with a whole raft of perks and benefits, most of which revolve around crafting and production, two activities that, in Elyon, appear to be tied solidly to property ownership. Common housing provides the same or similar facilities but to an inferior degree.

If I sound vague it's because I have, as yet, no personal experience of either type. Before you can move into your free instanced home you have to reach the dizzying heights of Level 36.

That's really why I logged in today, to do my levels. I didn't think it would take long. One thing I neglected to mention in my first impressions of the tutorial post was the incredible speed at which my character progressed. It took about three-quarters of an hour to get to Level 21, at which point I stopped.

I mistakenly assumed that pace would continue. Okay, I expected it to slow down a bit but I figured if it had taken under an hour to get to twenty it would probably take no more than a couple of hours at most to get thirty-six.

In retrospect that wasn't very smart thinking. I've played enough mmorpgs to know how front-loaded levelling can be. Even so, I found the degree to which progress slowed after I left the official Tutorial a little disconcerting. 

Keep reading. It'll all make sense later.

The whole time I was playing today there was a spirited debate in General chat concerning the difficulty or lack thereof in the game. A new player, who had clearly downloaded and installed the game specifically to have some fun trolling the regulars, provoked a flurry of defensive but quite informative responses as people went into some detail about the Tutorial itself, the unofficial extended tutorial that follows, the "soft" and "hard" level caps and the rate of progress that could be expected.

Based on what I heard, the Tutorial effectively boosts you to Level 20, potentially in about ten minutes if you click through all the story without reading it. After that xp slows down to a more normal level until around Level 38 as you work through what is effectively an extended tutorial covering all of the many sysytems and mechanics in the game.

Real levelling doesn't start until the mid-30s and carries on to the soft cap of fifty. At that point your level stops going up but your character is only just getting started on the myriad of upgrades an improvelments required to render them acceptable for endgame activity.

It's a familiar set-up and I should really have seen it coming. Expecting to get another sixteen levels done in a one-hour GeForce Now session was wildly optimistic.

You know I'm not listening to a word you're saying, right?

That's not to say levelling speed slows to a crawl once you land on Spiketurtle Coast, the open world starting zone. In just under an hour of questing and killing I went from twenty-one to twenty-six. A level every ten minutes or so is hardly slow. It was just too slow to get a house in time to play around with it before I wrote this post.

I could have shelved the whole thing until I actually had some practical experience of how Elyon's housing works but where would be the fun in that? This way I get to stretch the topic into two posts. I'm going to call that a win.

I also get to make a few observations on Elyon's very low-level gameplay outside the tutorial itself, observations that might have been harsher had it not been for that chat troll and his mean-spirited sniping. Yes, as he was jeering, combat in the twenties is mindless. Yes, there is almost no possibility your character will get into any kind of difficulty, let alone die. I still have no idea what the death and revival mechanics in Elyon might be. I haven't died yet.

And yes, as the troll venomously put it, Elyon at these levels does feel like a walking and talking sim. Just about all I've done in the nearly two hours I've played so far, other than backpedal or circle-strafe while hammering left mouse, is trot from one NPC to another to listen to them talk.

As the higher-level players tried (Some patiently, some angrily, all pointlessly.) to explain to the troll, what do you expect from a tutorial? Do you want to die while you're being taught how the game works? Do you want to struggle before you even know what to do? Is that likely to make anyone want to carry on to see if it gets better?

According to those veterans, the game does become more challenging after the mid-30s and much more so after the soft cap at fifty. Once again, I doubt I'm going to get far enough to to test the truth of those assertions.

This is not my house. I wish it was. I love those windows.

I do want to get my house, though, because I like checking out all the various takes on mmorpg housing. Some of the most unlikely games - Twin Saga leaps immediately to mind - have really interesting houses.

I only need another ten levels. If the current levelling pace remains reasonably consistent I should be able to do it in a couple more sessions. And it's not as if the game is unpleasant to play. Unoriginal, uninspired, uninvolving, sure, but also comfortable, cosy and quite good fun.

There are some interim incentives on the way to home ownership, if I can only figure out what to do with them. So far I've been handed a glider (A wingsuit, technically.) a pet and a mount. None of them came with instructions.

I figured out how to glide but the pet, a cat (A cat character with a cat for a pet...that has potential.) only lasts a few hours and I'm not sure what it does so I don't know when to use it. I haven'y yet worked out how to equip or use the mount, some kind of hoverboard. Maybe there should be some kind of tutorial for the tutorial...

The main story quest trundles unimaginatively on. I was thinking as I played that someone has to write this stuff and someone has to translate it and someone has to do the voices. There are plenty of worse ways to make a living, I guess. It's a funny old world.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't following the plot, all the same. It may be the same plot as half a dozen other mmorpgs I've played but it has the advantage of being linear, comprehensible and rendered in good, clear English, three things you can't say about the narrative in every mmorpg.

If that's the official Quest Clerk uniform I'm tearing up my application.

The quests are perfunctory in the extreme, something that's made even harder to ignore by the employment of NPCs called "Quest Clerks" who act as aggregators for all the other local NPCs when they want something done. Instead of a forest of exclamation marks around each hub you just need to find the one person with a small green square hanging over their head.

At this point you might wonder what the difference would be between the Clerk and a simple noticeboard as seen in countless games, not least New World, which makes extensive use of such things. The answer, I think, is that Quest Clerks offer the same contextual background to every quest that a questgiver would, notionally provided in the form of an actual letter from the NPC in question. Noticeboards generally just give the basic task requirements. Also, the Clerks themselves have an contextual backstory of their own that explains their role.

Once again, someone had to write this stuff. It's a lot of work for a mechanic that I'm sure most players simply click through as fast as humanly possible without reading a single word. Or maybe I'm being too cynical. I mean, I read every quest I took, which was every quest there was. I skim-read them, sure, but I got the gist, at least, and I appreciated that someone had made the effort.

There was no practical need to pay attention to any of it, of course. Pretty much every quest could have been summarised as "There's an army of monsters ten meters past the edge of town. Mow them all down and if they drop anything, run over it." The mobs for the quests have green markers but since they're all crowded together with ones that don't and the ones that did but don't any more because you killed your ten already, there's not much point trying to discriminate. Just kill them all and let the Quest Clerk sort it out.

They even have the classic mission board in the game and they still don't use it!

Not that you have to go back for a hand-in. It all happens in situ as soon as you complete the requirements. There's even an auto-run function that takes you straight to the quest area but since, as I said, the quest area is everywhere that isn't the quest hub I didn't see much point in using it.

All of which makes it sound like a fairly dispiriting experience and I imagine it would be if it went on indefinitely. As I said, however, this is still the tutorial to all intents. I've certainly seen these things done better but I've also seen them done worse. 

Not a ringing endorsement, I realize, and if it weren't for the lure of housing I probably wouldn't be going back. Or maybe I would. Hard to say. It's a change of pace if nothing else. If I had to rate it, I'd say Elyon is solidly at the bottom of the list of new mmorpgs I've played this year, a long way behind New World, Bless Unleashed, Swords of Legends Online and Phantasy Star Online 2. It's still not bad, though.

I'm easily pleased, it seems. Better that than the other way around, I guess.

Next time I write about Elyon it should be to show off my new house. We'll see how long that takes. As for whether it will be the last time I write about the game, place your bets now. There's obviously no point asking me.

Elyon - If I ever Get Out Of The Tutorial, I'll Tell You What I Think Of The Game

In times of mmorpg famine, such as we've experienced in times not too long past, I would have expected a flurry of blog posts about Elyon, the recently-released free-to-play title from Bluehole, the developer best known for Tera. These, however, are times of feast for the genre, verging on glut. To date I have seen not a single post on the game in this corner of the blogosphere. I suppose I'd better do one, then.

Arriving, as it did, shortly after Phantasy Star Online 2, Swords of Legends Online and Bless Unleashed and almost concurrently with New World, just to name a few of the summer's highlights, Elyon was always going to struggle to make an impact. Still, the total radio silence still surprises me a little. Although I loathed Tera, which I still rate as one of the top five worst mmorpgs I've ever played, even though I only "played" it for thirty minutes, I have to acknowledge the game has its supporters, particularly for the way it pioneered "action combat" in a genre where it had previously been all but unknown.

In its bid for attention, Elyon has the advantage of being published by Kakao, a known quantity in the West for previously having published Black Desert Online, not to mention, as I did yesterday, making news for having acquired the rights to ArcheAge from Gamigo. It's also not only available but featured on both Steam and GeForce Now. Even though I've made not the least effort to remember the game exists I've been unavoidably reminded of it's existence literally every day since it launched.

In the end it was GeForce Now that tipped me over the edge. When I've gone to log in to New World the icon sitting right beside it has, more often than not, been Elyon's. I've hovered the mouse pointer hesitantly over it a number of times but managed, heroically I think, to resist. Today my resolve finally crumbled.

A major factor in my loss of resolution was the knowledge that by playing Elyon through GeForce Now I wouldn't have to install the blasted thing. That's another not insignificant reason to favor cloud gaming over home hosting. Games these days are big. They take up a lot of space on hard drives and although they're orders of magnitude faster to download than they used to be, it can still take a good while.

Choosing to play a new game that's already installed on someone else's server comes closer to being an impulse action. In theory I ought to have been making my first character in Elyon this morning within a minute of deciding to give the game a go.

Yes, in theory. In practice, surprise surprise, it took a little longer. Everything went swimmingly until I reached the point where the game was about to start and then up popped a window asking me to enter my Kakao account details so it could be linked to my Steam account. 

That was a problem. I didn't know if I had a Kakao account or not. I thought I might. I'd played Black Desert when they published it. I looked for the details but I couldn't find them so I had to make a new account. I appreciate these things are necessary but sometimes just the thought of having to come up with a new account name and password is too high a barrier.

Not this time, though. I gritted my teeth and powered through. Go me!

Was it worth it? Nope. Not really. I didn't instantly detest Elyon the way five minutes in Tera made my skin crawl but it was a bit of a slog. If I had absolutely nothing new to entertain me right now I'd probably carry on for a while but as things are I suspect all I'm going to see of the game for the foreseeable future is the tutorial.

It's a long one. On the free version of GeForce Now, my maximum play session lasts an hour, after which I have to log out and back in again if I want to keep on playing. Character creation and the basic tutorial took me fifty-nine minutes and forty-six seconds.

To be clear, a good portion of that was taken up by fiddling around with the shape and color of my character's eyeballs. One of the reasons I finally cracked and gave Elyon a try was the option to play a small, furry animal. I'd noticed in the promotional shots that one of the races was some kind of rabbit or cat and I've been playing human so much in New World (and Fallen Earth) lately I just couldn't resist the fur and whiskers.

Elyon has perhaps the most original take on an anthropomorphic animal race since the Gibberlings in Allods Online (If you remember, Gibberlings as player characters come in packs of three, like an always-on Triplicate Girl.) I doubt any mmorpg race is ever going to beat the Gibberlings for originality but the Ein certainly stake their case, being a collective appellation for a number of different, unrelated small, furry creatures.

In practical terms, what that means is you get to choose between playing a domestic cat, a rabbit or another animal that's either a dog or a sheep. I couldn't quite tell. I went with the cat. 

You also have to choose a side from two opposing factions, something that, were you planning on taking the game seriously, would require some thought. In this respect, Elyon is identical to Rift as it was at launch. No, not identical, even more restrictive. In Rift you couldn't play characters of opposing faction on the same server; in Elyon you can't play them on the same account.

Makes New World's restrictions seem positively liberal, doesn't it? I cannot for the life of me see what the point of it could be for the simple reason that Elyon is a free to play game. If I want to play both sides on the same server I can just make another free Kakao account. It takes, as I just said, a matter of moments. If I was going to hang around I'd be annoyed but I'll leave that to someone who has a reason to care.

The options at character create weren't extensive by the very high standards of Korean F2P games but there were enough sliders to keep me occupied for ten minutes or so. There was also a very impressive range of costumes, although I think they were just for show, to let you know what you're character could look like at some point.

Once I'd made my cat there was a short introductory cut scene with a narrative set-up that felt almost dizzyingly familiar and it was straight into non-stop action for the next three-quarters of an hour. The tutorial also felt incredibly similar to many, many others, not least the one I just played through in Fallen Earth.

Oddly, while I found the FE tutorial gave quite a good introduction to the game, the Elyon one struck me as doing just the opposite. The main reason for that is partially the pacing, which is relentless, but mostly the sheer volume of disposable enemies you're required to mow down at almost every stage. They die very fast but having to kill four, then eight, then fifteen before a quick conversation and starting on the next batch is not a great way to get to grips with the UI and the controls, particularly once you work out that just hammering LMB kills everything long before you take any major damage.

The dialogs with NPCs, of which there are many, are partially voiced, something that also happens in New World and which I find considerably more irritating than having them either fully-voiced or silent. Having someone speak the first sentence out loud then go silent while you read the rest of the paragraph is awkward and annoying and I wish developers would stop doing it. I assume it's done to save money. Well, save yourself some more and just stick with the text.

Graphically, I found Elyon unpleasant. It reminds me of Phantasy Star Online 2 among others in that all the textures seem gritty, somehow. It's a very particular look that I see in a significant minority of free-to-play games and I find it off-putting, although not a deal-breaker. If other aspects of the game are appealing I can overlook the way everything seems like it needs a good hose down and a scrub, but if the game's not setting any other hooks then the way it looks is always going to have a disproportionate impact.

Counter to that, the cut scenes were rather good. There weren't many but they were enjoyable to watch. I particularly enjoyed seeing my cat character standing there, looking blank. He, she or they are (No gender of any kind is offered for Ein characters as far as I could see.) has an almost expressionless face and looks like a Louis Wain kitten wearing clothes. I imagine the effect of the cut scenes when seen with a human, elf or orc character is intended to be heroic and dramatic but with an Ein it's just "aww - cute!" verging on ridiculous.

The tutorial went on too long and it was all set in the usual corridors and plazas. I was itching for it to be over so I could take a look at the actual world my character would be spending time exploring. Eventually the final tutorial boss arrived and everything was going well. I had him at around twenty per cent when one of those typical tutorial deus ex machina endings kicked in. A cut scene triggered, the boss turned from a punching bag into an unstoppable force of destruction, all the NPCs died and my character was blasted into space like a meteorite.

I think that happened in PSO2, didn't it? I'm sure I saw it recently. Or maybe it's just that the tropical beach where my character crash-landed looks extremely similar to the one in PSO2. Also every other mmorpg beachside fishing village ever.

I'd tell you more about it but by the time I got there (and killed yet more grunts before the MSQ questgiver would talk to me) I had less than a minute to go on my GeForce Now session. I logged out and rather than starting another I decided to write this. 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.

By the way, in an odd piece of synchronicity, re-reading my old post I've just realized the only reason I ever played Tera was because the publisher at launch, En Masse, ran a streaming demo through a service offered by Gaikai, which must have been the forerunner of what we now know as "cloud gaming".

At the time I was quite impressed. I said "Gaikai's technology works. It takes about two or three minutes to load up on their servers and then the window appears and you're in. Everything was eminently stable while I was playing. I didn't notice any lag or hitching whatsoever. The demo runs either in a window or full screen and feels just like playing any MMO from your own machine." 

I don't recall ever hearing of Gaikai or their remote-gaming service again but a quick search reveals the company was bought almost immediately after that Tera demo by Sony Interactive Entertainment for $380 million. Sony appear to have then stripped out the tech as the basis for PlayStation Now and Remote Play.

Seems like cloud gaming may have been the future, after all and Tera is still running successfuly today, too. I suspect ten years from now no-one will be saying either of those things about Elyon.