Works In Progress

This morning I thought I might do a quick catch-up on the handful of obscure mmo-related games and projects I've been keeping tabs on for a while. Not the big ticket events like Ashes of Creation, Pantheon or Camelot Unchained, none of which ever seem any closer to a genuine public unveiling, nor even the more recent buzz titles like Nightingale or Palia, both of which I'm keen to get my hands on as soon as possible.

The titles and developers I have bookmarked are much lower-profile than any of those and there are only five of them that ever show any signs of life. They are, in alphabetical order...

• Antilia
• FHX Restoration
• FRSunrise
• Project: Return Home
• SmokymonkeyS

Antilia is an odd one. In a former life it was briefly an mmorpg that went into open alpha but it's currently being re-tooled as a "sandbox-style RPG" with "an open world, single and multiplayer modes". There's a fairly extensive entry about it on "WikiFur, the Furry Encyclopedia", but it's somewhat out of date.

From there, I learned that Antilia is pretty much the life's work of a single developer, Jeff Leigh, who's been at it in one form or another since 2002. The wiki mentions a second developer, a visual artist by the name of Kathryn Crownover, but the IndieDB entry for Right Brain Games, the company credited with developing both Antilia and the TOI game engine it uses, lists no employees other than Jeff.

I ge the feeling Jeff is always very busy on Antilia but of late he's also been very communicative. He's moved away from posting lengthy but sporadic videos on YouTube to giving weekly updates on the website. They're very specific, with a level of detail that would probably be of more interest to another developer than the ultimate intended audience of furry-friendly gamers. 

This week he's been telling us all about the "Network Refactor" he's been working on, which is something to do with the way players will eventually log in to the game. Probably of more interest to the prospective Antilia player is the section on World Building, in which he shows off "A variety of decorative temporary weapons." 

Combat is presumably a significant part of the game. I hope so, anyway, because there seems to be one heck of an armory: "So far I've added 18 bows, 40 swords, 17 axes, and some arrows. I have a variety of hammers and maces, polearms, shields, daggers, and staves currently in the works".

All of this and much, much more is leading up to an alpha at some unspecified date. I've been following development for several years now and it's always winter and never Christmas, as Mr Beaver might say. I'm pretty sure other games have gone into Early Access in a less-ready state but Jeff's clearly something of a perfectionist. I just hope he feels the world he's building is fit to accept visitors someday.

FHX Restoration is a very different story. This is the emulator project dedicated to bringing back a cadre of mmorpgs that even most dedicated fans of the genre probably never heard of, including a game I played in beta, when it was known as Ferentus. 

I last wrote about the project back in December 2020, when I played in several of the limited-duration test events. I bookmarked the game and promptly forgot about it for a quite a while, until one day I checked back to find a bold headline on the front page of the website claiming "We come here to announce that finally the world of FHX is going to open its doors for everyone".

Below there was a detailed table of exact opening times across the world including an early start for anyone who'd managed to get a character to level 35 during the test events. The full, global launch was scheduled for 28 January 2022.

I meant to log in for that but, discouragingly and predictably, I forgot about it all over again. Turns out I'm not quite so keen to go back the unrestructured pleasures of pre-WoW mmorpg gameplay as I used to think, especially when it comes in the wrapper of a minor also-ran.

Ever since then I've had the occasional urge to see how things are going but when it comes to doing anything about it I somehow think of other things I'd rather be doing instead. Until today, that is, when I thought I ought to do some due diligence for this post and check the game really is up and running. 

It's not. Well, it might be but as I write this the login screen shows a message reading "Log in is currently disabled". I tried it anyway and indeed it is. 

So, is the game running or isn't it? The website is contradictory, with the FAQ still referring to the January 2022 launch date as something yet to happen and the front page talking about the game "only being playable during recurring events", which is the text from before the launch was announced. The Reddit thread about the launch has precisely one reply but the Discord server is not only alive but very active, with much discussion of PvP tournaments and updates going right up to this morning.

I guess I just happened to try to log in at a time when the login server was down. Either that or there's some other portal these days. Whatever the reason, chances are I won't try again. I think I satiated my nostalgia last time around. Good luck and best wishes to all those enjoying the old game but I believe I may finally have moved on from hardcore diku-MUD gameplay...

... although not as far on as all that.

FRSunrise is the reason I started writing this post. I signed up for open beta, oh, must be about two years ago now but so far I've heard nothing. This is another emulator project and like just about all the ones I've seen, it has a website that pretty much never changes. 

All of the real activity happens on Discord servers these days, which is fine in theory but in practice that one extra step is enough to put me off. This morning, for some reason, I pushed through. I think I was just frustrated enough by the perpetual procrastination to want to find out what the heck was going on over there.

It seems I'm not the only one. The Discord itself is still up and running but in a move eerily reminiscent of the Great EverQuest Forum Disaster I was reminiscing about the other day, the FRSunrise team have had to pull the plug on most of the public discussion channels due to bad behavior by the increasingly unruly crowd on the other side of the velvet rope.

In a lengthy statement the team explains the scope and necessity of their action: "the public discussion channels (#free-realms-sunrise, #lore-discussion, #off-topic, and #art) have been temporarily closed. This decision was made last night by the Enforcement Team as a whole following an influx of disruptive and blatantly disrespectful behavior." 

They go on to make a number of observations about "entitlement" and to emphasize the community-led, voluntary nature of the project, including the somewhat ominous statement "This project is a not a company. We are not asking anyone to pay for a product or service and we gain nothing from providing FRS to the community."

I'm sure the FRSunrise team fully intend to open their servers to the public eventually but they are under no obligation to do so. It wouldn't be the first emulator to end up running as a walled garden with entry by invitation only. I just hope it doesn't come to that.

On the positive side, everything that's been released so far to show how the project is going suggests a technical triumph. I'm in no doubt the observable quality of the experience is fueling frustration at the ongoing lack of access and, as with Antilia, I do worry that the pursuit of excellence may be getting in the way of the achievement of the perfectly acceptable.

I await my beta invite with entirely unjustified impatience.

Project: Return Home is one I probably ought to admit I'm never going to play. It's the emulator for the much-missed PS2 version of Norrath, EverQuest Online Adventures, more widely known as EQOA. Given that the download instructions on the website include a requirement for an EverQuest Online Adventures: Frontiers disk to create an ISO file and an original PlayStation 2 from which to copy the bios I can't see it ever happening. It would just be too much effort.

I guess I could probably get both those down some internet back alley but even that requires more commitment than I'm likely to make these days. I'm loathe to admit it but even the lure of EverQuest variants I've never experienced doesn't have the draw it once did. 

I think I finally maxed out on EQ nostalgia when I bought and read almost all the tabletop RPG books for both EQ and EQII a few years back. I wouldn't mind playing in a virtual campaign using those, if anyone's thinking of running one...

As usual, the Project: Return Home website is ever-unchanging but the Discord confirms work on the project is ongoing. Not only that but you could, theoretically, play right now: "Returnhome isn't private, it's an open source server where in theory anyone can throw up their own server based on it in time." Theory isn't practice, though: "We just don't have a public, connectable server we host based off of our open source, public code, as we don't feel like it is ready quite yet."

If they ever get a public server up and running I'll reconsider whether I want to try and find the files to play. Until then I don't think I'll worry about it all that much.

And finally SmokymonkeyS.  They're the developers who made 9lives, a wonderfully bleak, elegaic mmorpg I played and wrote about quite a while ago. All development stopped in 2016 but the server remains up even now, as though it was some kind of art installation, something it very easily could be, such is the aesthetic quality. 

It works, too. I just re-installed it, which took less time than it took me to write the last paragraph. I found my old login details and they work. My character was waiting patiently, where I left her a few years back.

I'm not really surprised. If there's one thing you can say about SmokymonkeyS it's that they're loyal to their old work. I long ago abandoned any hope of the game returning to development. The team has moved on. only what they've moved on to seem to be games even older than 9lives.

They have two live games, Triglav and Garage. 

Triglav celebrated it's 20th anniversary last June. It was available to play on PC but that version is either now closed or just about to be, following the final expiration of Microsoft's Internet Explorer on which it ran. It's still going strong on iOS and Android.

Garage aka Garage: Bad Dream Adventure is available both on mobile platforms and via Steam. It's a remake of a game originally released for PC in 1999 in which "the player character enters his inner world through a psychotherapeutic machine".

I might be mildly interested in either of those but the real reason I had SmokymonkeyS bookmarked  was the new project they said they were going to work on after 9Lives. The screenshots looked stunning and after 9Lives I was excited for anything they might want to show us...

... and then they went quiet about it. The last mention seems to have been in 2018. Since then the studio appears to have been concentrating on their mobile titles, both of which are conversions of elderly PC games. It seems like an odd choice to me but clearly these games are making money and they do look gorgeous so I'm sure their creators are finding that work both financially and creatively satisfying.

I'm still hoping maybe one day they'll either get back to the "not a train game" (An image from it is in the header for website.) or announce something new for PC. I'll keep checking back every month or two.

And that's really all I can do. Alerts and sign-ups never seem to bring much information my way. It's a curious situation where the customer has to chase the supplier just for the chance to consume but that's what I get for following such niche developers. There's certainly no such obscurantism when it comes to the would-be major players, some of whom send me far more updates on what they're doing than I can find the time to read - or care about.

At least when I check on things I've bookmarked I want to find out what's happened since I last looked. Or I pretend I do. I probably ought to admit it to myself when I've lost interest but checking in on these games has become something of a ritual, now. 

I'll probably just keep on clicking until the links die. Or I do.

My Emptiness

It's the penultimate day of Blaugust and I am the most pushed for time I've been in the whole thirty days so far. Ironically, the moment the event ends I have four straight days of freedom so I will most likely carry on daily posting, making it five full weeks since I skipped a day.

Tonight, though, I got nothing! So have some pretty pictures.

Injury to eye motif. Dr Wertham should hear about this.

I'm even happier I made the effort to get this kite now we have Novelty Slots.

Why are we hiding in the jumping puzzle? Who cares? It's so blue!

Apparently you can tame and ride dragons in Bless - providing you don't mind looking like The Tick.

In Twin Saga you can ride a guinea pig. Is that cooler than a dragon?

Okay. I really need to play Twin Saga again.

I mean, my friends must miss me, don't they?

You got that right!

It's Not Called Ninelives For Nothing

I was browsing my blog roll after work last night when I came across this post from Chestnut at Gamer Girl Confessions. What a nice surprise, particularly since IntPiPoMo is my favorite of all the annual blogging events.

It's always nice to win something although in this case I can hardly claim I made a special effort. I probably post ninety screenshots most months, which is a fairly small fraction of the number I actually take.

Don't look at me like that. I don't have the key!

One of the great things about IntPiPoMo is that it gives me an excuse to run a few of the shots that I otherwise might not find a good reason to post. Not that I should need an excuse, I guess. Kaozz , who really should enter IntPiPoMo next time, makes a habit of all-picture posts and MassivelyOP has a weekly screenshot feature called One Shots.

Somehow, though, even if I start out meaning to post nothing but pictures I always end up writing a whole bunch of words. Case in point.

Re the recent discussion in the comments here: NineLives has fully functioning underwater environments.

I'm going to use this opportunity as a peg to hang a few pictures I took last week in a game that I've mentioned a few times in the past but which can be a tad hard to justify including on this supposedly MMOcentric blog. It's not an MMO and it's no longer in active development.

It is, however, one of the most aesthetically satisfying, visually subtle and deliciously appealing virtual worlds I have ever encountered and it deserves far more attention than it is ever likely to get. The game in question is Ninelives.

As far as I can tell, if you can see it, you can get to it. I saw that house and I got to it. Died a few times doing it, too.

Why the Smokymonkeys team decided to shelve this wonderful project is puzzling. I think they may just be obsessional perfectionists for whom nothing is ever quite good enough. For whatever reason, they announced the suspension of development over a year ago. As the website states, in terms idiosyncratically translated from the original Japanese, "Currently this game is suspended and has no plan to resuming."

It's still up and running though and occasionally some small update or improvement drifts in. Every so often I check just to see if it's still alive and last week I saw it twitch:

 "We decided to publish remain areas that under development. There are no creatures, no items, and no quests. It's like a walking simulator. There are only terrains and great music. Nothing to get valuable items or so on them. Even we believe it has some impression or some value for some people. It will not intrupt your normal game play. You need to fill some conditions to open the games to reach new areas."

Well, it certainly had some impression or some value for me! The game required a new download and installation, which took just a couple of minutes, then there I was, back in the gorgeous, unnamed world of Ninelives again.

Here I am, half way up the winding path, already into the cloud layer.

According to the update notes the pre-requisite for access to the new zones comes in the form of a quest to "get two climber's medals from the quests at Imera Climbing Cluba in Continental Highlands".  Easier said than done in a game that has so few players, no official support and struggles to populate even a basic wiki.

All of which is part of the appeal. As I was roaming around Continental Highlands, a map I thought I'd opened but actually had barely started exploring, I found myself thinking that I was quite glad Ninelives never followed its original dream to become an MMORPG.

And here's the house, accessed by a very scary almost invisible magic platform.

A significant part of the appeal is the loneliness. It's one of the most bittersweet, elegiac environments I've found in decades of gaming. It's more of an art installation than a game. It definitely wouldn't have the same bleak grandeur if it was filled with other players darting hither and yon, slaughtering the wildlife and complaining in chat about being bored.

I'm very keen to make my way into the new explorable areas because I think that having "no creatures, no items, and no quests" may even enhance the experience. The quests are nothing special and the awkward translations sometimes take you out of the moment rather than drawing you in. Progression is slow and there's a fairly steep curve, which makes exploring beyond the areas you're meant to be leveling in a dangerous affair.

It's so cosy inside! Who else would live here but an elven wizard. Look, he has the ears and the staff and everything!
And, naturally, he's got a quest.

All things taken in to consideration, it may well be that Ninelives will be best appreciated as a walking simulator with great music. But first I have to find the Imera Climbing Club. Easier read than done.

I opened all of the West side of Continental Highlands on the map in a thoroughly enjoyable session the other night. I died a few times doing it and every death costs me gold to respawn. I'm not sure what happens if I run out of money.

I didn't kill them! They were dead when I got here - honest!

I found a load of fascinating and beautiful locations and acquired a bookful of quests I'm not powerful enough to complete but I never found the Climbing Club. I hope it's somewhere in the still-fogged East. If not then I'm stumped.

In any case, I probably should go back to the start of the zone and level up a bit. I don't suppose those climbers are going to hand out their medals for nothing. I'll probably have to kill something at some point, even if it's only to get to the right area.

This is some kind of "research facility". Hence the white leather lab coat and the face mask. Not sinister at all...especially with that motivational poster...

It would be such a shame if NineLives just faded away out of some misguided sense of perfectionism amongst its creators. As someone pointed out on the forum, when  it was suggested the game should go to Steam, "even incomplete as it is, it's much better than most of the games there!" . Which may be true although I haven't exactly played enough Steam games to judge.

For now, though, it's freely available and as I've said before I recommend trying it while you still can. It's not going to set anyone's pulse racing with its gameplay but the visuals, the music and the ambience are superb.

Last time I wrote about Nine Lives I think the only person who mentioned trying it was Syp and he didn't like it much. He would have liked it even less if he'd made it to the Highlands and met this Elf Child.

When I get my medals and climb the wall I'll be back with another report. I'll be sure and take plenty of pictures.

Small Is Beautiful : Developer Appreciation Week

It's Developer Appreciation Week, hosted once again by Ravalation, who explains the history and purpose of the event here.

Rav makes the very pertinent point that DAW is all about being positive so I'll resist making the very obvious comment about which MMO developer probably won't be feeling the love right now. If you can't say something nice best not to say anything at all.

I'd like to take this opportunity to extend my heartfelt appreciation, admiration and thanks to the Daybreak Team. Being a fan of Sony Online Entertainment all these long years has been difficult enough but saying you think things have actually improved under the new management is tantamount to seeking your own committal hearing.

Nevertheless, that is what I do think. The SOE team under John "Smed" Smedly either made or was very heavily involved in nearly all my very top favorite MMORPGs - EverQuest, EQ2 and Vanguard foremost among them.

In latter years, particularly once overall reporting passed from Sony Pictures to the Playstation Division, choices and decisions were made that even the most rabidly loyal fan would have had difficulty endorsing. Not to mention all the out-and-out crazy projects that flared and fizzled and vanished.

Since the transition to DBG under Columbus Nova the ship has steadied. When the Daybreak PR department offers up something new I no longer feel equal portions of dread and awe at the scale and hubris of what's being planned. Mostly I find myself thinking "oh, that sounds like a good idea".

The mysterious overlords of Columbus Nova keep their commercial cards close to their chests. What their long-term plans are, who can say? Information that came out following the axing of EQNext revealed it to be at best a self-indulgent vanity project. If it was, as was once rumored, the reason CN bought the company in the first place then the decision to stop throwing money on the fire was brave as well as sensible.

Fortunately for the future of the newly-minted DBG, against all reason and good sense H1Z1 continues to prosper. I've still never played H1Z1. I must get around to that some time this millennium.

Meanwhile the ever-shrinking Team Norrath continue to plump up the cushions on the comfortable old sofas that are EverQuest One and Two. Both games are regularly updated with entertaining content and despite limited resources the two teams somehow manage to pump out an expansion every year, the way they always have.

Moreover, EQ2 in particular looks better than it ever did. The updating of in-house development tools a few years back has paid dividends and every new zone and dungeon seems more gorgeous than the last. Whoever's doing the music is on the absolute top of their game, too.

It's very sad to see a developer of Domino's caliber lost to Norrath by dint of factors utterly outside the control of Daybreak or Columbus Nova but as she herself said "Daybreak is very lucky to have so many long-term veterans who are so passionate about the games they work on that they can't imagine wanting to work anywhere else".

A big thanks to all of those "veterans". Long may they stay and deep may be their influence on those who come to join them.

Of course, in typical Inventory Full fashion, this wasn't supposed to be a post about Daybreak Games at all. I spent an hour before I began, taking screenshots and a video, so I could write a piece in appreciation of a much smaller and less controversial team of devs: SmokymonkeyS.

The oddly capitalized SmokyMonkeyS are two Japanese guys. That's it. That's the team. Their biog on the website sets new standards for self-effacement:

SmokymonkeyS is a team consisting of two Japanese guys, one a programmer and the other a graphic designer, formed for the purpose of creating games. We are not professional game creators. We don't belong to any business company and have nothing to back us up. This game is created by only using tools available to everyone.

Well, geez Louise! If it's that easy, let's all go out and do it, why don't we?

Seriously, this is perhaps the most visually delicious, aurally sumptuous, subtle, delicate, enigmatic video game I have ever played. If it even is a game, because the game part is the least of it.

Ninelives is a work of art. That's all. You don't need to play it you just need to experience it. Perhaps it should have been an installation in a gallery somewhere not a free download on a gaming page but the art world's loss is very much gaming's gain.

A few months ago it looked as though time was up for Ninelives. In an ominously downbeat, almost depressive post on the game's website, SmokymonkeyS announced they were suspending development of their project because "the game couldn't gain enough support from players, we don't have enough funds to continue operating and developing the game and we couldn't maintain the motivation to continue the development."

When you think of all the games that do gain support it makes you want to weep. The one glimmer of hope in the darkness is that development has only been "suspended", not cancelled. The game is still up and running. You can download it here and you should.

What's more, there are still flickers of life showing. There's a new version of the client (I just updated this morning) and someone has finished translating the whole game into French!

The reduced teams at one-time major DBG and the tiny indie duo at SmokymonkeyS demonstrate that you really don't have to have a roster of three hundred to create and maintain something very special. You just need to want to do it enough. And have someone pay the bills that keep the lights on, of course.

When the time for Developer Appreciation Week comes around again next year it's entirely possible neither of these developers will still be around. I'd take a bet on Daybreak surviving but nothing's certain. SmokymonkeyS might run out of road tomorrow.

So don't sit back and let the days roll by, while you mean to take a look at this or go and try that or come back to the other for a visit, while never quite getting around to doing any of it. And don't wait a whole year to speak out about what you like about these games we play and these worlds we travel.

They may not be there tomorrow and neither may the people who made them. There are too many games to play them all but by golly we can play the ones we care about and let the people who work on them know their efforts are appreciated.

After all, you never know when the opportunity might end or if the chance will ever come again.

Moving Away From The Pulsebeat : Tanzia, Antilia, Ninelives

Like most of the quondam MMO blogs in my Feedly, Massively OP, whose very raison d'étre used to be MMOs, has diversified somewhat as the genre has drifted from the spotlight. Consequently it didn't come as much of a surprise this morning when I saw yet another post covering something that professedly isn't an MMO.

It was more unusual to find the game in question - Tanzia - isn't even going to be online when it launches, supposedly later this year. Of course, the question of what is or isn't "online" is hard to parse these days. Tanzia is already on Steam, which, for my definitional purposes at least, makes it an online game even if it has an offline mode too.

Leaving nit-picking definitions over distribution platforms aside, what really interests me here are  the possibilities for massively multiple online gaming with the massive, the multiple and the online all taken out. On the face of it that's reductio ad absurdam. An MMORPG without the MMO is just an RPG, isn't it?

Except it isn't. I've tried to play a few RPGs over the last decade and a half and more since I first caught the taint. In the early years, coming down off RPGs like Return to Krondor and Might and Magic VII, I managed a couple more before the MMO train picked up speed. Baldur's Gate 2 was the last one I finished. That was sixteen years ago.

Somehow I just haven't been able to settle into any offline RPG since I discovered EverQuest. They seem flat and empty and pointless somehow. You'd think that would be the futility of solitude. Only I'm not sure that's true.

Increasingly over the years my MMO play, like most peoples', probably, has been self-focused. Even when we play with others nowadays it's often not in the way it once would have been. For a decade and more almost all the direction of developmental travel for the genre has aimed towards self-sufficiency. Short of whatever passes for an end-game, at least.

Outside of raiding, which has always been considered a minority interest within the hobby, the entire thrust of MMO gameplay has passed from group to individual. Questing is largely a solo activity these days as is leveling. Crafting interactions are generally limited to transactions through an NPC moderated brokerage.

Even supposedly group-oriented activities like running dungeons or taking down overland Boss Monsters get handed on to automated group-finders, leaving players to run in packs, sharing buffs and heals and bouncing aggro without the time-drag of having to organize or even speak to each other. The UI and the matchmaking algorithms handle everything so much more efficiently, after all.

Given the way we play now - the way I play now - what should I be missing in an offline rpg? Why do they feel so off-kilter, so skittery-wrong? It could be the lack of conversation, perhaps. For all the supposed solipsism and insularity fostered by modern MMO mechanics I, for one, talk as much in game as I ever did, which is a lot.

I was one of the people making Lake of Ill Omen /ooc infamous back at the turn of the century. Not, I hasten to add, for any trolling or filter-testing profanity but for yakking incessantly about in-game stuff as if everyone cared what I thought about every little last thing. I've rowed back some over the years but I still would as soon jump into a debate as tab out.

And chat channels in MMOs are as buzzing as ever they were. In GW2 map and EQ2 general the stream of consciousness never stops. It's like radio for the eyes.

So maybe that's why offline rpgs don't work for me? Well, I thought that too, until I played Ninelives. Ninelives was going to be an MMO before developers Smokymonkeys found they'd bitten off more than they could chew and turned it into an "open world online RPG".

That history resulted in a game that looks, feels and plays exactly like an MMO with the two Ms dropped. Unlike Syp, who didn't take to it when he visited, I found myself instantly at home there. Partly that was the wonderful, bleak, elegaic feel to the world but a lot of it was the very familiar mechanics and structure.

As Syp observed, "It’s an MMO in feel but completely devoid of a mark of any other player" but for once I never felt that lack for a moment. It didn't matter that there were no other player characters running past me on the roads or pushing in front of me at the bank. I never even noticed the absence of chatter. I was too busy exploring, questing, gearing up, sorting my bags...

Too busy playing my own, personal MMO. In the end is that it? Does it come down to the mechanics? Is that why this genre has the hold over me that it does?

It's a given of any discussion of why people go on playing MMOs for so much longer than they play other video games, why they play them long after they even claim to be enjoying themselves, that it's all abut the community. Supposedly it's the relationships you form inside the games, the friends you make, your guilds and your buddy list and the times you shared. All about that.

Well, some of it's about that, sure. Mrs Bhagpuss and I sometimes reminisce about people we grouped with back in 2004 in just the same way we remember people we used to go drinking or partying with back then. But we don't see those people any more and yet we still play the games. I, in particular, even still play the very same MMOs, even though not a single person I knew back then plays any of them now.

So, what I'm wondering is this: has playing MMOs, for me, always been more about the mechanics than the people? And if so, and assuming I'm far from alone in feeling that way, even though it may not be socially or culturally acceptable, yet, to admit it, then why have MMO developers been so reluctant to cash in? Why are there no offline spin-offs from WoW or EQ or Runescape or Lineage or the rest of the long-running titles with tens or hundreds of millions of current and former players?

What's more, when each ex-successful MMO sunsets, as the Asherons Calls did this month, instead of taking a PR hit for doing nothing, instead of letting private servers and emulators soak up the disenfranchised, why not package up some existing assets, throw an offline version together and sell it for those tear-stained nostalgia dollars?

How hard can it be? I mean, you already have all the art assets and game systems. Psychochild points out some technical difficulties in his comment to TAGN but how many of those problems would be intractable with a non-networked offer?

That's a tangent though. Emulators will serve the needs of the nostalgia market well enough for any MMO large enough to have a commercial market in its afterlife. My real interest is in the prospects for offline, single player MMOs as a self-sustaining sub-genre.

The outcomes that I'm aware of so far haven't been great. Smokymonkeys, which is basically two guys in Japan plus a musician and some community help with the translations, threw in the towel a while back. The game is still up for now but development is suspended. It may remain playable as-is but as a game running on someone else's servers, not your own PC, any progress you might make or attachment you might feel is unbearably fragile. I could wake up any day and find it all gone which puts me off trying.

Another game I've had my eye on - Antilia - is nowhere even that close to being a permanent presence in anyone's life. This one seems to be a single-developer project. It was going to be an MMO but that proved too much to handle so now it's aiming to become a "sandbox-style RPG, featuring both single and multi-player game modes".

I hope it makes it because it looks very much like a game I'd want to play. More so, really, than the brasher, brighter, flashier, faster Tanzia. Tanzia, though, looks like it might actually happen and happen this year, at that.

If it does I'll be giving it a go. I'd like to find out once and for all whether an internet connection really is essential to play the only kind of game I've wanted to play these last seventeen years.

Making Games Is Hard, Yo! : AQ3D, 9Lives

AdventureQuest 3D went into Open Beta while we were away. I popped in for just a few minutes last night to take a look. I found it quite different to how I'd left it.

My character was still there (no wipe) but she was back at the very beginning of the game. There was a new "tutorial", hosted by Zorbak, a sarcastic little...something, who self-identifies as "evil". He might be a rabbit. It's hard to tell.

He also claims to be AQ3D's "mascot". One thing that's immediately apparent in this new version that's been opened to the public is that this is going to be a much more self-consciously arch, even camp, MMO than I was expecting from my limited experiences in closed beta.

There's a post-modern, meta vibe hanging over the whole thing that I swear wasn't there before. NPCs openly discuss being in a game, often. A grandfather and his granddaughter raised a cheer when they saw me coming and then lost hope when they saw I was "very low level" and this while they were cowering in fear of their lives from a bunch of skeleton invaders.

At the same time there's a whole, traditional MMORPG plot going on, with the whole world being invaded by Dark Forces and you being the Last Hope. It's all a bit of a puzzle.

There are also a slew of new cut-scenes that work rather well. Quests offer a lot of dialog but no actual choice, which leads one NPC to wonder whether you can actually read or whether you might just be clicking, blindly, trying to get to the end. As I said, very, very meta...

Coming to the gameplay,  at first I thought the danger rating of the mobs had been toned down several notches; then I realized I was still Level 3 in a Level 1 area and I still had all my old Closed Beta gear. No wonder everything was dropping in a few hits.

I got as far as the first (only?) town, Battleon, where I camped for the night. Overall I thought the very early stages gave a much better impression than in Closed Beta. We will see if that continues.

One thing you can't help but notice and admire about AQ3D is the immense enthusiasm and energy of its developers. They all seem to love what they're doing and feel very proud of it. There was a choice of ten or so servers at log in although only two were open. They are clearly planning for success.

Sadly, the same can't be said of another game I've had my eye on, Ninelives. It appeared to be trundling ahead steadily if unspectacularly, adding new content and polishing up old, although things had gone rather quiet over the summer. Then I checked the website last night and found this:

After careful consideration, we SmokymonkeyS have decided to temporarily suspend the operation and development of Ninelives.

The main reasons are because since the game couldn't gain enough support from players, we don't have enough funds to continue operating and developing the game and we couldn't maintain the motivation to continue the development. 

 That's a terrible shame. Ninelives was shaping up to be a minor work of art. It's hard to understand why someone would put so much work into creating something so rich and strange only to abandon it out of ennui.

For now the server is still up. SmokeymonkeyS promise that they'll "... keep operating the game server of Ninelives as long as possible". If anyone reading this had vaguely meant to check it out one day but hadn't gotten around to it yet, well, now would be the time.

My feeling is that, as a poster on the forum suggests, the game could be packaged for offline play and either given away or sold for a nominal fee. I'd certainly pay $10 for an offline version as it stands right now. Or they could open source it, but obviously that's more problematical.

One in, one out. The dance goes on.

Short Attention Span

So, what have I been playing? Reading through my back pages it would appear that I've turned into some kind of Jekyll and Hyde character, at least when it comes to MMOs.

Most of the time I'm a mild-mannered GW2 steadfast. I play GW2 every day. Literally every day. There can't have been many days since the game launched back in 2012, other than when we've been away on holiday, that I haven't at the very least logged in and done my dailies.

What's more, I do my dailies on all three accounts. Every day. Never missed one. I have it down to a fine art now. The dailies pull from a random pool and I know just which ones I can knock off in a few minutes.

Reently I've tended to have late starts at work so I've been doing two accounts before breakfast and the main account in the evening. On a good day I can do all three in twenty minutes.

I have no reason to be doing the dailies other than I like doing the dailies. All the stuff I get for doing them just goes in the bank or the currency tab. Little ever gets used.

Everyone expects the Asuran Inquest.

Other than that I've been doing all the new, short LS3 lead-in events as they've been added. Those have been a lot of fun. Really looking forward to LS3 now, as well as the reveal for the setting and theme of the next expansion. Surely that has to happen soon? I hope we go to Crystal Desert to see to Kralkatorrik, which seems to be the way things are pointing after our recent outing to Blazeridge Steppes.

These new big, open world events gave me a nostalgia for the good old days that I didn't think were all that good back when they were just the days. I've been picking away at the final couple of Achievements for Triple Trouble and I've been seen (and heard in map chat) at Teq and The Shatterer.

Most of my GW2 time isn't spent in PvE at all. I spend countless hours in WvW, partly because Mrs Bhagpuss lives there pretty much full time and partly because it remains one of the best log in, have fun options in MMOs.

They should totally put me in charge...

Anet's ongoing attempt at revitalizing the format and balancing the matchplay remains a work in progress at best. Tier 1 was averagely awful for a few weeks after the Great Linking but things have settled down a lot and now it mostly feels like any other rather lopsided match of the last three years, of which there have been all too many.

I doubt whether any of the levers ANet can pull will turn WvW into anything more than an echo of what it once was and a shadow of what it could have been. My feeling is that the game mode as it stands is irreparably broken and they'd need to change so much to fix it that they would be better off just scrapping the whole thing and starting over.

That said, if huge fights featuring hundreds of characters flinging massive AEs in all directions and lots of scrambling around battlements as you heroically fail to defend structures against overwhelming odds is the kind of thing you enjoy then WvW will give you that with admirable reliability. That does indeed happen to be the kind of thing I like so it's working for me.

That's my Dr Jekyll day face. Late at night and on days when I'm home and Mrs Bhagpuss is out at work, I turn into Mr Hyde.

Okay, no I don't. I play EQ2 and Dragomon Hunter. In one I'm a three foot tall rat dressed like Steve Martin in Three Amigos and in the other I appear to be a twelve year old girl with a rabbit, riding an otter. It's hardly the dark side, is it?

Not so fast El Guapo!

So, yes, I am still playing Dragomon Hunter. Who'd have thought? I could be playing Black Desert. I could be playing Blade and Soul - I certainly gushed about both of them enough earlier in the year, but I'm not. As has been the way of it for longer than I like to remember, my enthusiasms for these bright, new MMO worlds has failed to sustain itself long term. Instead I'm playing this quirky little F2P because I happened to read about it on Noizy's blog.

So far I'm level 19 and doing fine. Last night I started to get to grips with crafting. I upgraded my armor and weapon. DH has a gear system far less arcane and abstruse than Blade and Soul. It reminds me of the later version that City of Steam used, which I liked a lot, once I understood it.

I don't get on well with the combat controls. A hotbar clicker that insists you right-click is just wrong. Nevertheless, I'm able to use them well enough that last night I went into the Level 18 Main Quest instance, which was flagged "Hard" for me at a level below the optimum, and beat it without dying once. Levelled up twice doing it and came out overlevelled! Hell of a fight it was, too.

Game hopping to the newest shiny while still carrying on with my old favorites has really been a trope of this blog since it began. It's not pretty but it's been going on long enough that I can no longer deny the evidence of my own authorship.

Did we do that, Pollock?

I've written prolifically and enthusiastically, in bursts, about The Secret World, ArcheAge, Villagers and Heroes, FFXIV and more. For a while every other post - sometimes every post - is about whichever latest craze I'm on. And then it all somehow drifts back to GW2 and EQ2. Those are the mainstays.

Yet I never really abandon any MMO if I ever enjoyed it. I always mean to go back and often I do. Right now I'm on the verge of playing Blade and Soul again. After a flurry of recent blog posts mentioning it, I'm even reconsidering Rift, the MMO I considered my "main" back when this blog began.

Honestly, I could play almost any MMO. I'm not proud and I'm not fussy. I am still minded to buy Legion and give WoW another go. Gnome hunter! (That's a Gnome with a pet, not someone who hunts gnomes. Sorry to disappoint.)

I'm also still playing Celtic Heroes on my tablet. It's very good. Better than I expected even and I already thought it was pretty good. I'm level 19 there as well. I tend to play it in bed for half an hour if I'm not in the mood to watch YouTube.

We get housing, right? This is my house? Oh come on!

Why it's had so little publicity even when people have been complaining about the lack of good mobile MMOs for so long beats me. It's been around for years and it's a complete, full-function, classic MMO. I imagine it waving and jumping up and down, yelling "Hey! Over Here!" while everyone just goes on talking as if it wasn't there.

The other "MMO" I've been playing a little is, of course, Landmark. According to Massively OP, which seems to be fast turning into the "We're so bored with MMOs we wish they'd all just die already so we can write about something cool again" site, Landmark bombed on Steam and has a peak concurrency of 125 people. I'd link to the story but I don't want to encourage the negativity.

Certainly DBG seem to have no interest whatsoever in selling it. Even the in-game cash shop wasn't working last time I logged in. That's a first. I managed to have a lot of fun all the same, and for once I wasn't finessing one of my truly awful builds.

Continuity! I think we have a problem!

A trip to one of the underground caverns found me staring at a really impressive Science Fictional structure teeming with Novatech heavies. I spent the best part of half an hour fighting them and it was very surprisingly enjoyable. 

Despite the limited combat options I found myself using some old school EQ tactics, pulling mobs using line of sight around structures to break up groups, as well as as some very non-EQ tricks like grappling to a vantage point and hanging off a high ledge to pick off mobs from above. They used to call that "perching" back in the day and you could get banned for it. Here I think its legit. And if it isn't, I don't think anyone cares.

I also reinstalled and patched up NineLives. I might get back to that soon. When I finish this post and have a coffee I intend to install EverQuest and The Secret World on my new PC. EQ I am very long overdue to go back to and The Secret World has the museum coming soon. That sounds like a really excellent reason to check in with The Templars again. I wonder if I have back pay due?

Have you taken your Joy today?

There's even an outside chance I might play a couple of non-MMOs. No Man's Sky is an option and Keen inadvertently alerted me to what looks like one of the more interesting takes on the Survival genre in We Happy Few.

I've never played a survival game. Maybe I'll start there. Early Access comes to Steam in July. If I go for it expect a slew of gosh-wow blog posts and then radio silence.

Followed, inevitably, by more posts about GW2.