Demos 'n Betas And Stuff

It seems like only a short time ago I was scratching around for new games to try. Not any more. They're coming in clumps now. Too many to keep up with. Just this last few days I've turned down two, tried and failed with another and spent an enjoyable hour in a fourth. And I'm positive there were a couple more I read about but didn't even get round to bookmarking. I'm finding it tough to keep up.

Beginning with one of the two I chose not to bother with, does anyone actually remember Infantry Online, because I certainly don't. I thought I at least knew the names of all the games in the Sony Online Entertainment portfolio back when EverQuest was the pack leader there - I even tried Tanarus once, I think - but I have absolutely no memory of this one at all.

Some people do. It's back on Steam with an even less evocative name, something I'd have would be next to impossible. It's called Freeinfantry, a name not made cooler or more edgy by running the two words together. Whatever it's called, though, there are people who just love it:

"Awesome game."

"My favorite game of all time."

"Best game ever made."

"Outshines games from the last two decades."

And there are plenty more superlatives where those came from, the Steam Store, where Freeinfantry currently enjoys a Very Positive rating from 92% of reviewers. 

As seems to be standard for the era, the game has a very convoluted history, which you can learn about on its Wikipedia page, like I just did. Then you can immediately forget it, like I'm about to. The part that interests me is the way even now, a quarter of a century later, no-one really seems to agree on what the historical facts mean.

Some longtime players think of it as an SOE title, others as an independent gobbled up by a corporate. Some hate SOE for ruining it, "milking" it and/or abandoning it, others are grateful to them for returning it to the players, even though it has apparently been running continuously in some kind of emulator mode since SOE shuttered it over a decade ago.

The MMOBomb report, which was where I heard about it in the first place, places the game squarely in the SOE/Daybreak timeline, while making it clear the current Steam version "operates under a license agreement similar to that of "Project 1999". Presumably DBG picked it up as part of the job lot when they bought SOE. 

It's worth noting the P99 agreement itself only happened after the buyout. Any credit Sony is getting for any of this would seem to be misplaced. The blame for exploiting it then cancelling it in the first place though? That's still theirs.

There's no chance whatsoever I'll ever play any version of Infantry Online. Neither the setting nor the gameplay have the slightest appeal for me. The same cannot be said for another game even more tangentially connected to SOE, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, the game once thought of as the spiritual successor to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, itself occasionally referred to informally as EverQuest 2.5.

Today, a few yeara afer the untimely death of its creative force, Brad McQuaid, the man with a vision™ that, arguably, should always have been prefaced by the word "tunnel", Pantheon is just another crowdfunded wannabe-retro MMORPG but I'd still like to give it a go. I just don't want to pay the required access fee, even though the cost has been somewhat reduced of late with the addition of the "one week every couple of months" option. 

I was, then, more than a little excited to read at MassivelyOP of an opportunity to piggyback into the game for a few days on the back of a code given out for watching streamer Cohhcarnage. I wasn't going to watch the stream, of course, but MOP were kind enough to publish the code so I gave it a try.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. It had already been cancelled by the time I got there and I was quite fast, too. Credit to the Visionary Realms PR department for closing the loophole so quickly, although obviously they must have been the ones who opened it in the first place.

My first visit to whatever the name of the world Pantheon takes place in ( I can never remember.) will have to wait. Fair enough. I've been waiting years already. I've gone right off the boil, anyway.

It is odd how these games bubble up and then just go on simmering, seemingly forever. I can't recall when I first read about the whimsically, if somewhat incoherently-named Swords 'n' Magic and Stuff (Why abbreviate one conjunction but not the other?) but it must have been a few years ago.

If I've thought about it at all since then, which I kind of doubt, it would have been to wonder when it might reach some kind of publicly accessible build. Apparently that happened a while back. As in five years ago. It's on Steam with a release date of 2020. Who knew? 

A lot of people, apparently, because like Freeinfantry, SNMAS (No, not gonna work.) has a Very Positive rating, only this one's from almost a thousand reviews as opposed to FI's 60 or so. It's still in Early Access but given a) that I definitely knew about it as a game in development and b) it's "a cozy, cooperative, open world RPG centered around the joy of discovery", a description which makes it sound almost tailor-made for me, I'm at a loss to explain why not only had I never realised it was available but also why there's not even a tag for it on the blog. Have I really never mentioned it at all?

I've played it now. There's a new demo that lets you go through the very early tutorial, up to the point where you jump off a cliff. I did that. I managed to get my glider working before I crashed to my death but as I landed on the beach next to the starting town, a big banner unfurled in front of me, thanking me for my interest and suggesting I should stop freeloading and get my wallet out.

And I might, too. The game is currently on half-price offer, making it quite an attractive purchase at £10.49. In fact, looking at it more closely, the offer ends in just over five hours as I write, meaning if you're reading this it's probably already ended. I guess I'd better make up my mind. Or wait for the inevitable next sale.

From what I saw, Swords, which is what I think I'm going to shorten it to (I toyed with SnM but, well, y'know...) is a jolly romp of a game with plenty of good ideas but perhaps still some work to do on some of the details. The look is Minecraft-meets-Lego-Minifigures, which I have to say is not one of my favorites, but they do more with it than you might expect. I found it pleasant enough to look at although I can't say any of the scenery made me giddy. Then again, it was only a tutorial.

There's a mildly unusual selection of races including fauns, dryads, orcs, elves and the ubiquitous humans. The potentially divisive and difficult gender issue is handled very simply by not having any. You are you and that's that. I picked a Faun for no reason - they all look much the same and the game doesn't give any indication of practical differences between them.

There are a few customization opportunities - skin tone, hairstyle, facial hair - but none seem very distinctive. They are at least charmingly described, particularly the Face options, which include a whole range of "Cute" looks, many of which come with freckles. It only took me a few minutes to settle on something I was happy with and then it was into the game, where I found myself in the virtual equivalent of an escape room. 

Although this isn't an especially egregious example of the species, I could happily never see another introduction like this. Locked in a cell with nothing but the clothes you stand up and a disturbing inability to remember anything about your circumstances, personal background or even how you got there, your one and only job is to get out.

Why we can't just start in the village or town, with full knowledge of who we are and where we live, beats me. Still, you play the hand you're dealt, so I spent much of the next hour trying to work my way through a series of cells, rooms, caves and caverns in search of natural daylight.

During my time in an orc dungeon (For that is where I found myself.) I learned that resources respawn infinitely, not just mining or logging nodes but obstacles you'd imagine were only meant to be removed once. I had recourse to double back on myself a couple of times (The route out is far from obvious.) and each time I had to break the same crates that I'd broken before to clear my passage. 

I also got loot each time, suggesting you could easily spend the rest of your life just looting the same chests if you were so inclined. They can drop different items as well, which is both exciting and disturbing. Imagine if you missed out on an ultra-rare and could never go back to the tutorial once you'd left.

Sorry. Just messing with you. I have no firm evidence the game has "ultra-rares", let alone that there are any in the tutorial. But there might be...

The writing is uniformly solid. Good sentence structure, grammatically correct, idomatic. I imagine the real quests, once you get to them, might be pretty good. There's also a light puzzle element to the gameplay, although not so light it didn't completely stump me at one point. I couldn't figure out how to open a door so I had to watch someone do it on YouTube, where I learned how important it is to look up now and again, even underground.

There's some fighting, mostly (Entirely?) against dim-witted orc trainees and their teachers. I had four weapons by the end of the tutorial - a limp stick, a two-handed branch, a bow and a magic staff. The bow never runs out of ammo for the basic atack but you can also find all kinds of special arrows that do different damage, like setting things on fire. The staff sets things on fire too, or heals people, depending which magic book you're holding in your other hand. It looks like an interesting combat system; clunky but fun.

Worthwhile, too. There's lots of loot. Really, a lot. Mobs drop stuff, there are chests, you can smash vases and crates... I imagine there's a limit to how much you can carry but I didn't hit it and I picked up everything.

Eventually I found my way up and out into daylight, where I was able to meet my friend Sen, who'd escaped before me. He promptly ran off, telling me to meet him in town, leaving me to kill more orcs and generally goof around until I met the guy with the glider who told me to jump off the cliff and here we are back where we began. 

I've been thinking about it as I write the post and I'm not going to buy the game just now. Not because it doesn't look good, just because I have other things to do and I probably wouldn't play it much. I will wishlist it, though, so I can reconsider next time it goes on sale. 

All things considered, it seems like a very nice game to potter around in, especially impressive given it's all the work of a single developer. Why it doesn't get more attention when so many similar titles get more than they deserve I have no clue but at least it's firmly on my radar now so I guess the demo did its job.

And finally, the other game I opted against downloading, a decision that isn't any kind of negative criticism of the game so much as an observation on just how cluttered the field for open-world, sandbox survival games feels at the moment. It's called Soulmask and it's available on Steam in open beta format right now. 

If you're interested, you have another four days to sign up and join in. There's also a demo that's been on Steam since the start of the year, so that may still be available after the beta, although the proposed release date for the game is Q2 2024, otherwise known as "now", so maybe not. 

The screenshots look very appealing. I'm getting a pre-Columbian, North American vibe although, possibly through someone having learned from Amazon's missteps with marketing New World, I don't think that's overtly mentioned. The detailed description on the Steam store page makes the game sound amazing, too, so if it lives up to its own hype I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more about it. 

As yet, there's not a single review, so either no-one's playing or there's some kind of block due to it being in beta. I'm not sure how that works on Steam. Either way, it doesn't entirely imbue me with confidence. There are still a few days left so maybe I will try the beta before it ends. I've kind of intrigued myself now just by writing about it.

Of course, before I get around to doing anything, some new game will probably have thrust itself into the spotlight, demanding my attention. There are altogether too many of these things to give every remotely interesting game a fair examination.

I guess it's better that way around than the reverse, although some days I do wish there was some sort of pre-registration process you could sign up for, where someone would winnow out the chaff for me and just leave the good stuff. 

Oh, wait, that would be what I'm doing now, wouldn't it...?

Use It Or Lose It

A mere three weeks ago, in one of my Friday Grab Bag posts, I issued a Public Service Announcement concerning the imminent Name Reclaim event for DC Universe Online. To recap, I quoted Dimensional Ink, the Daybreak subsidiary responsible for DCUO, as saying that "on or around May 12th" they would be reclaiming names from inactive accounts so as to free up those same names for active players who might want them.

I claimed in the post that I'd be "logging both my accounts in" to make sure all my characters kept the extremely imaginative, hand-crafted names I'd sweated hours over at character creation. Or something like that.

It won't surprise anyone, I'm sure, to learn that as soon as I'd committed myself in writing to that very definite course of action, I immediately forgot all about it. Luckily, I'd already secured the names of characters on my main account by logging it in on the day I wrote the post but if it hadn't been for a "serious bug" in the name re-allocation process, as reported today at Massively OP, I would have missed my chance to nail down the name of my original DCUO character, the one I made back at launch all those years ago.

Except, as I found when I did finally get around to logging him in today, I already had miss my chance. He used to be called Flying Fox, which isn't a bad name for a super-hero, but now he's called Flying Fox_PE_I which is a bit abstract, even for my tastes. I have to say it does not trip liltingly off the tongue. It appears I neglected to log him in last time there was a renaming event, which would be because I didn't know until last month that there'd even been one. 

I'm sorry to have lost the rights to call myself "Flying Fox". If all they'd done had been to stick an X on the end, as they've done in the past, that wouldn't have been so bad. Flying Foxx is a pretty good name, too. Someone must think so, anyway, because it's already taken. So, of course, is Flying Fox itself and also The Flying Fox. Or at least they won't go through the name-check verification. I tried them all.

I can't say I'm broken up about it. To be cruelly honest, if you'd asked me an hour ago for the name of my original character, the one I made when the game launched back in 2012, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. I certainly wouldn't have remembered he was an actual fox, that's for sure. I'd forgotten you could even make non-human characters in DCUO.

If you'd asked me to describe that first character, I'd probably have guessed it was a human female, most likely a melee fighter, using some kind of staff. In fact, that's the main character on my current account, insofar as I have a main character in DCUO. She's the one with the best-furnished lair, at least, which is as good a criterion for "main character" as any.

So why did I drop the fox and restart as a human, anyway? It's a long story.

In 2010, after consultation with the playerbase, Sony Online Entertainment launched a parallel service for EverQuest II under the name of EQ2X. This was SOE's toe in the water for the then-controversial shift taking place across the mmorpg genre, the movement to have some kind of free-to-play payment model replace the traditional, mandatory subscription.

For about eighteen months or so, SOE ran the two models side-by-side. Mrs Bhagpuss and I continued to pay our All Access subs but we started new characters on the EQ2X server, which quickly became our new home.

I'm betting Nini Mo and Cassie Praxis would be safe anyway but maybe not the others.

I don't recall whether it was technically possible to play on EQ2X using an All Access account back then (The wiki entry on the topic is less than helpful on the precise details of how it all worked.) but I seem to remember it wasn't. Whether we needed to or not, we chose to make brand-new accounts for the adventure, probably because we only intended to try the new gimmick out, not to leave for good. 

Once we we'd made the move, though, we never came back. EQ2X felt like a much cheerier place than regular EQ2; the people seemed friendlier and everyone took themselves less seriously. Bitter vets were dead set against the whole thing so they kept to their side of the fence and I, for one, was happy to leave them there. 

In another of the peculiar convolutions that have dogged the history of our SOE and later Daybreak accounts, we ended up paying two subscriptions for accounts we weren't using, even as we played full-time under the F2P ruleset. It wasn't ideal by any means but then, when has it ever been? The entire history of our time with SOE/Daybreak could be summed up by that classic piece of advice "Well, I wouldn't have started from here..."

Eventually the situation resolved itself, with Mrs Bhagpuss leaving EQ2 for good in favor of Guild Wars 2 and me dropping the subscription on the account I wasn't using and taking one out on the one I was instead. Even so, there were quite a few years when Mrs Bhagpuss was paying for an account she didn't use at all (On the grounds she might return at any moment, something she has never done to this day.) while I was playing only sporadically and only then on the account I wasn't paying for. Daybreak's accounts department must have loved us.

The Feat for completing the Tutorial. It shows - approximately - when I made the character.

But all that came later. Back in December 2011, the experiment had obviously been deemed a stormimg success becasue SOE moved to a F2P model for all its games, with an optional subscription that provided enhanced benefits, as was to become the industry norm. The EQ2X server was renamed "Freeport" and it effectively became my long-term home in the game, although it's long been merged into other servers. The Freeport name continues only as a heritage title. Some of my characters proudly display it even now, to remind everyone of where they started.

What does all this ancient history have to do with DCUO? I'm getting there. Just hold your water!

DCUO launched in January 2011 with a mandatory subscription. I'd played in the beta a few months prior and knew I wanted to play the game when it went live, although even then I didn't think I'd be playing it for long. I certainly didn't plan on playing DCUO instead of my other mmorpgs. It was always just going to be a side-game, a role to which I've found it very well-suited ever since.

Fortunately, DCUO was included in SOE's All Access subscription package, so I didn't need to pay a separate sub. For that reason, even though I was mostly using my EQ2X account then, I made my first character on the older account, the one I was paying for. 

I have two of these. Now I just need a name.

As it turned out, I only lasted a few weeks. DCUO at launch was a somewhat awkward experience. It
wasn't buggy as such but there were a lot of rough edges. I was also on a PvP server and even though I enjoyed the rough and tumble of hero versus villain, it did make levelling a bit of a challenge.

By the time SOE added DCUO to their roster of free to play titles in December 2011, I was already long gone. Whenever I came back, as I did ocasionally, it was only briefly. When housing was added in 2013 I might have stuck around a while, only my choice of PvP server came back to bite me. As I said at the time "... much though I enjoyed the mayhem while I was playing regularly, for infrequent pleasure trips I really would like to be able to fly around gawping at Metropolis without three or four level 30 muscleboys introducing my face to the sidewalk every five minutes."

That's presumably why, when Daybreak finally made housing available to non-subscribers in 2015, I restarted on a PvE server using the account on which I was then playing EQII, namely the one that had originally been created for EQ2X. That account is now the one I pay for, although just to make things difficult, on the increasingly rare occasions I go back to original EverQuest, I play on the old one.

Confused? How d'you think I feel!

I do have quite a lot of SOE-now-Daybreak accounts, of course. Half a dozen or so, not counting Mrs Bhagpuss's, to which I have access. As far as I know, there aren't any DCUO characters on any of them but even if there were, I'd be happy to release any names there to anyone who might want to use them. I won't be playing any of them again.

Just as a final FYI, Dimensional Ink say they "now expect to perform the Name Reclaim on or before our next Game Update, which is currently scheduled for June 1" and they'll "confirm the new date as soon as possible". I'd suggest logging in pronto in case of "or before" but until there's a firm date I wouldn't go booking any days off work in the hope of camping the login servers to beat everyone else to the names you want.

Actually, don't do that anyway. It's not a good look.

Still, I might just log in quickly, when it happens, to see if I can nab "Flying Fox" again. Then I can sit on it for the next five years until we do this all over again.

Kael Drakkel: A Legend Is Born.

It was only when Wilhelm posted to say the new EverQuest II Lore and Legend server, Kael Drakkel, was up and running that I remembered yesterday was the day it was due to go live. There was a short beta that I never even considered but it had been my intention to make a new character when the real thing arrived, just to see if I could work out what the deal was with this new and - to me, at least - somewhat unintuitive ruleset.

Experimental servers employing idiosyncratic rulesets are nothing new to Norrath, of course. Very much the opposite. I think that having EverQuest as your discovery mmorpg sets you up with different expectations for the genre in a number of ways and one of those is the idea that servers exist to have different modes of gameplay.

When I logged into EQ for the first time in late 1999, I was already looking at a choice of several rulesets. As well as the regular PvE servers there were three PvP servers, Rallos Zek, Vallon Zek and Tallon Zek, each with slightly different rules. The PvP three became four with the addition of Sullon Zek and finally, briefly, five, when Sony Online Entertainment added the first limited duration "event" server, Discord.

Over the course of a few years, servers appeared offering a variety of different play experiences from "roleplay" on Firiona Vie to the high-maintenance Stormhammer, where a subscription cost several times the going rate. When Fippy Darkpaw, the first Progression server, arrived in 2011 the floodgates crashed open and since then virtually every server that's opened, progression or not, has had a ruleset at least slightly different from what came before.

EverQuest II hasn't had quite so many flavors but it still has far more than most mmorpgs. I'm so used to different rulesets from decades of SOE and Daybreak games, I find it strange that other companies seem so set in their ways. If you have the infrastructure to provide that kind of variety for your customers, why wouldn't you?

Well, for several reasons, I guess, not least the danger of splitting an existing audience into smaller and smaller groups. If new servers with new rulesets bring back lapsed players or better yet attract new ones, that's great; if the main result is disruption and turmoil among the players you already have, that's not such a favorable outcome. 

Presumably every new server and each new ruleset comes with development costs, although given that no new developers ever seem to be needed and most of the hardware is almost certainly repurposed from what's already there, perhaps those costs are more manageable than you might imagine. Similarly, so long as existing customers don't actually leave the game it probably doesn't matter, commercially, if they jump around from server to server like sheep seeking greener pastures. It annoys guild leaders but then what doesn't?

Disruptions aside, all new rulesets are not created equal. Some are successful, pulling in the crowds and keeping the numbers up for months or years. Others enjoy a brief flurry of attention before withering away, usually without controversy or complaint. EQ players from both games are more than used to servers that don't last and rulesets that don't take by now. It's no big deal if one fails, just a shrug and on to the next.

So, what exactly is the supposed unique selling point of Kael Drakkel and its "Lore and Legend" ruleset? The F.A.Q. (Which, I'm curious to note, has for once been correctly punctuated.) explains everything in some detail but the elevator pitch appears to be an easy-mode, casual-friendly, server where most of the barriers that prevent former players from coming back or new players from getting started have been swept away.

Clearly, that's a potentially commercial proposition. All aging mmorpgs struggle with the problem of too much content and too many levels blocking the path to the current endgame. Some, like Elder Scrolls Online, have simply done away with the leveling process altogether, opting for a flat playing ground, where everyone is the same level all the time. Others, like World of Warcraft, have opted for an increasingly convoluted and arcane series of workarounds, squishing levels, adding leveling tracks and generally making sure no-one really knows where they are or what they're doing.

Kael Drakkel has a relatively simple premise: no leveling at all and only content from a much simpler era of game design. EQII took a right-angled turn about a decade ago, changing not just leveling and experience but progression as a whole in a number of significant ways. 

In my estimation, that change didn't really take hold until 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra, so Darkpaw have given themselves some room to expand should they need it, with another three potential expansions they could probably bring online without too much trouble. I suspect they stopped where they did because immediately after Velious we all went to the ethereal plans and the haunts of the dead, which is a bit of a metaphysical and thematic leap from the first nine very physical locations. 

It also marks the point at which the kind of nostalgia they're presumably hoping to play into begins to dissipate. You'd pretty much have to be a current, Live player to have much nostalgic feeling for anything after Velious.

I always planned on giving the server a try, although I definitely don't have either the time or the inclination to start over yet again just now. But of course the whole point of the Lore and Legend ruleset is that you don't have to "start over". 

You begin at Level 90 and that's where you stay. There is no leveling, not even for AAs, You start with everything.  You even get your choice of tradeskill boosted to ninety. You're given a full set of gear and a flying mount. You even come into the world fully buffed and with all the spells you're likely to need right away slotted onto your hotbars for you.

Every zone is the same level - your level. And since you also have to be a member to play, you automatically have access to the Instant Travel system. You can go wherever you want and wherever you go will be right for you to start playing immediately.

It does sound appealing. That much freedom could be overwhelming but nowhere near as intimidating as the usual late-mmo deluge of content. Looked at a certain way, it's like they turned the entire game into a starting zone.

After I read Wilhelm's post, I logged in straight away to make a character and see what all that freedom felt like. I didn't have any free character slots but I had a pile of DBG cash so I bought another. Nice to have something to spend it on.

I have a whole different post to write about making characters in EQII so I'll save most of what happened next for another time. Suffice it to say, I ended up making a human necromancer. Then I logged her in and got myself settled.

The onboarding process for Kael Drakkel is very good. Darkpaw appear to have learned lessons from earlier iterations, where you begin at high level. I've done it plenty of times and this was by far the neatest, tidiest, quickest and easiest version I've seen.

My bags, all six twenty-four slotters, were completely empty. No cruft whatsoever. That in itself deserves to win someone a bonus. I chose to import the UI settings from one of my previous necros and set up all the hot keys just as I like them but had I wanted to start adventuring right away, I could have been killing mobs just seconds after the new character loaded in.

The immediacy of the new ruleset was hard to miss. When I decided I wanted to test out the auto-mentoring that underpins the whole thing, there was no checking zone levels or travel routes. I just opened the Instant Travel map, clicked on Commonlands, pointed my winged horse at the sky and swooped down on the nearest overland Named. 

I may go into the whole gear upgrade process that's central to Kael Drakkel's ruleset in some future post. It's all set out fairly clearly in the F.A.Q. linked above, if anyone's itching to know right now how it works. The gist is that all mobs still drop whatever it was they used to drop but named mobs also drop a guaranteed "Lore and Legend Gear Crate" containing something you can use. 

I found it familiar in an unexpected way. It reminded me of the early iterations of "Fabled" creatures in EverQuest, seasonally up-leveled versions of Named bosses that drop items suitable for much higher level characters. I always liked that system, until the bosses that were being upgraded for the event started to be the same ones I couldn't solo even in their regular editions.

It also helps that EQII has a lot of overland Names. And I do mean a lot. There must be a couple of dozen or more just in Commonlands alone. And most of them seemed to be up. There were a couple of other people around and one or two Nameds weren't where they usually would be but as I flew around I was able to pick off several in a few minutes.

The difficulty seemed better tuned than regular mentoring but not by all that much so I thought I'd give it a proper test. There's an open-world raid target in Commonlands, a drake by the name of Ladon. Mentored down from 90 on a live server, Ladon would be an easy solo for a necromancer. On Kael Drakkel the "fight" lasted about two seconds. 

Ladon didn't quite one-shot me. He took two bites to kill my pet and one to finish me off. Point taken. No soloing raids here.

That was my first death in the Commonlands. My second came when I took on one of the named orc Generals and his entourage, a Heroic encounter originally intended for groups, although not a particularly tough one. 

The orcs didn't kill me. It was reasonably challenging fight but my necro was never in much danger. What killed her was picking up the loot. 

EQII has a trap mechanic on all dropped chests. There's a skill you can raise to counter it and certain
classes have innate abilities to deal with the traps. There was a time when getting poisoned or blown up as you opened the box was a regular occurence but it's been utterly trivial for every character I play for so long I'd forgotten all about it.

If I play much more on Kael Drakkel, I'm going to have to re-learn some old habits, it seems, not to mention some old skills. When I went to open the chest it exploded and killed me faster than Ladon had. Whether that's intentional or whether someone just missed chests in the scaling calculations I can't say for certain. That is how it used to work, though, so it could go either way. 

Up until then it had just been my necro and her pet but Mercenaries are, somewhat contentiously, available on Kael Drakkel, despite not having been added to the game until a few expansions later. Before I left the area I decided to pop into the East Freeport inn and hire good old Stamper Jeralf, the ratonga Inquisitor. He's not as powerful or reliable as later mercs but he gets the job done.

With Stamper in tow I felt a little more confident. At least he'd rez me if I blew myself up again. Off we went to test the scaling by zone rather than by mob tier. 

We tried Steamfont first, where we killed a few solo Nameds that would, on a Live server, be in the thirties and forties. The fights varied in difficulty but they seemed pretty well-balanced. Nothing fell over in a light breeze but I finished everything I started comfortably enough.

From there it was on to Loping Plains, a zone where I've always found the hunting good. That was where my first session on Kael Drakkel came to an end. It's a level sixty zone on Live, with a mixed ecology of solo and heroic content. I was planing on starting on the solo bosses and moving up to some Heroics but it didn't pan out that way. 

I did kill several solo Nameds but the fights were noticeably tougher than in Steamfont. Finally, I pulled a Named from an awkward position, got several adds along with him, somehow contrived to lose line of sight with both my pet and my merc, didn't notice they were both having a poor time of it and ended up face down in the dirt with no-one left to pick me up. 

All of that was entirely avoidable if I'd been paying the kind of attention a solo player ought to be paying, when attempting an at-level boss in an at-level zone. It was getting late when I revived in Somborne Cemetery so I called it for the night. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd say Darkpaw have got the scaling just about right.

They've probably also got the fun roughly where it needs to be, too. I was thinking about it a lot as I was playing. I was very curious to find out what the game would feel like with the leveling process completely stripped out, especially since I'm a leveler by preference rather than necessity. 

I'm going to need to play a few more sessions to get a real feel for whether or not I think this is a ruleset I could enjoy as anything more than a novelty. I can see there are still a number of progression ladders - spell and combat art quality tiers and gear tiers, for a start, not to mention the eighteen hundred new Achievements that come with their own leaderboard - but at the moment I'm not quite clear on what good getting more powerful actually does you. 

Rather than jump the gun and speculate, I might need to play until I see the effect of upgrading in action. At the moment, with two new mmorpgs on my slate and an expansion for a third dropping in less than a week, I can't see me finding the time to give Kael Drakkel the attention it deserves.

It won't be going anywhere for a while, though. I'm sure I'll find time to get back to it eventually. On the face of it, it looks like an interesting ruleset and a solid implementation. I just hope there are enough people around with fewer gaming commitments than I have to make the most of it.

Job Well Done

As Wilhelm reported , EG7 recently put out a video for their first quarter 2021 report. It appeared on a YouTube channel belonging to Direkt Studios. According to Google Translate's version of the Swedish, "Direkt Studios is the channel for you who need the latest information from the financial market." Among other activities, they "upload educational clips, CEO interviews and company-specific features daily with the financial market as a common denominator."

They also act as a platform for paid promotions: "Film clips that are financed by the companies themselves, so-called commissioned films, appear on the channel. Always read disclaimer!" The EG7 video is one of those: "Direkt Studios handles technical production and distribution of this broadcast on behalf of EG7. The content of the broadcast is put together by the company in cooperation with Wildeco and is not part of Nyhetsbyrån Direkt's editorial activities."

I'm not even going try to find out who or what Wildeco might be. All of this is very not interesting indeed, except as it contrasts with what went before. 

For the longest time there was SOE, veering wildly between coming across like a well-meaning, out-of-touch uncle or a passive-aggressive partner. There was always a scent of anarchy around SOE. You often felt something bad was going to happen but no matter the current crisis, you never worried too much. You always knew there was a megacorp standing in the shadows, ready to swoop in and pay the bond when the team woke up in jail.

Towards the end, though, it began to feel like the grown-ups had gone on vacation and left the kids in charge. Next thing you knew there was a wild party going on and things had gotten completely out of hand. 

 

People were coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas they couldn't wait to tell the world about, even though it was plain no-one really had a clue how to make them happen. Livestreams would turn into long, rambling conversations between people clearly not used to talking to camera while shorter PR pieces devolved into what felt like try-outs for a career in stand-up. An unsuccessful career.

I'd link a couple of those but I can't seem to find any. Mercifully they don't seem to have survived. The internet's supposedly infallible ability to record all human digital history is often overstated.

When Sony corporate finally came to check on how things were going on and found out what had happened while they were away, party time was over. It wasn't just a case of putting things back in order and re-establishing some ground rules. Sony sold the house and moved out of town.

Honestly, as a longtime customer, it felt like a relief. The sale was a worrying time but things had gotten so bad I didn't see how it could get much worse. And it didn't. It got better.

It got better but it didn't get any simpler, that's for sure. If there was one overiding feature of what we can now call the Daybreak Years it has to be the sheer obscurity of it all. We never knew who owned what, who was paying, who was in charge, what the plan was, anything. "Follow the money", the saying goes. Well, we tried that but we couldn't find it. Someone hid it too well.

It was a thrill ride and kind of fun in a scary way. Great for conspiracy theories and wondering if the games were still going to be there when you woke up next morning. It might have been wishful thinking but even in the weirdest moments I never felt quite as unsettled by any of it as I was during several periods under SOE - the massive data breach, for example, or, worst of all, the PSS1 debacle.

Even so, comparatively comfortable as I was with Daybreak, I wasn't sorry when whoever it was that actually owned the company decided they'd gotten whatever it was they'd wanted from it. I don't imagine any of us will ever know who or what that was.

The new owners seem... reassuring. Reassuringly professional. Reassuringly clear. Reassuringly boring. From what we've seen so far, EG7 have managed to come across as enthusiastic and interested but also staid and stable. It's a good trick if you can pull it off.

The Q1 video is pitched squarely at investors but with an astute awareness that gamers will watch and comment on it anyway. I'm not going to do that. Wilhelm summarizes it excellently and it's a short and painless watch if you want all the details. 

The one aspect that catches the gamer's attention has to be confirmation that there's another AAA mmo in development. It's somehow related to “one of the greatest brands in the world”. Initially I took that to be hype for EverQuest, since EG7 have been bigging up EQ's significance as a brand ever since they bought it. 

As both Wilhelm points out, though, one of the assets EG7 acquired through the purchase of Daybreak's portfolio appears to have been a license to produce a game featuring some subset of the Marvel Universe. Now that really is a world-ranking brand.

It's also been let slip that sub-studio Dimensional Ink, the one that runs DCUO, is working on a new game. It wouldn't take Thor's hammer to knock two and two into four there. Except that it really would be weird to have the same studio operating and promoting mmos for both DC and Marvel at the same time. Imagine the cross-promotional opportunities!

What started me thinking about all of this wasn't the video. That's old news. If I'd wanted to talk about that I'd have done it a few days ago. No, it was some other, even older news, something that has passed me by altogether.

When I logged into EverQuest II this morning I was greeted with a flurry of pop-ups telling me a whole bunch of the infusers I had in my bags had been made obsolete and replaced. I turned to the forums to see if I could find out why. There was a short downtime yesterday, unusual on a Thursday, and a small patch when I logged in so I thought there might be some clarification in the patch notes.

There wasn't. I still have no idea what was wrong with the old infusers or why I need new ones. While I was on the forums, however, I noticed some unwelcome news. 

Dreamweaver, Community Manager for both the EverQuest titles, is leaving. Actually, he's already left. He posted his goodbye notice a couple of weeks ago but I only saw it this morning.

I read through the whole thread, all seven pages of it, and it's astonishingly positive. Well, other than the two pages wasted on bickering between several forum regulars. I also went to the EQ Forums to see what people there had to say and it was much the same story, minus the childishness.

Both games have a long and extremely checkered history when it comes to Community Managers. There have been some absolute shockers over the years, quite a few forgettable non-entities and very few universally appreciated and respected professionals. Judging by the stream of accolades, Dreamweaver was definitely one of the good guys:

"You were a great community manager"

"You were the best mod we ever had in EQ2"

"You will be missed as you went to bat for the community on many occasions and have left mighty big shoes for your replacement to fill."

"You were the BEST!"

And plenty more along those lines. I always found Dreamweaver affable and noticeably non-confrontational, two things I absolutely would not have said about many of his predecessors. That said, as with all people doing their job well, I didn't really notice him at all most of the time.

If it hadn't been for the Kander's Candor podcast series I probably would have struggled to remember his name but listening to him on those fixed his cheerful voice in my head. He always seemed both interested and amused by everything he had to talk about and most importantly he always sounded genuine. I wonder if the podcasts will carry on or whether they were something that will disappear along with Dreamweaver.

Other than to record his passing (Let me make it quite clear. He hasn't died. He just got a better job. Which no doubt we'll eventually hear about eventually.) I wanted to comment on a surprising missed opportunity. Pretty much no-one used the thread to make portentous comments about how the Community Manager signalled the end of the known universe!

No-one got up on their soapbox and made a speech about how EG7 were going to fire everyone and all the games were headed for maintenance mode, if we were lucky. No-one took it as the first shot in a flame war (well, except those few kids at the back, fighting among themselves). Everyone just popped in, dropped a compliment for a job well done and moved on.

Okay, a couple of people made passing mention of rats and sinking ships and one person made a crack about Dreamweaver being the only person left working there that any other company would want to hire but by the standards of the EQII forums it was a remarkable show of positivity.

Whether the future under the new owners will be bright or blighted is something we'll only find out as that future turns into the present but I think I'd already be prepared to go as far as "We're no worse off than we were", though, and that's not nothing. Maybe I'm not the obnly one who feels hopeful, for once.

I'd like to wish Dreamweaver well in whatever endeavor he's begun, not that he'll ever read this (although you never know... it is on the internet, after all). And best of luck to whoever takes over the CM role. It's going to be a hard act to follow.

Although it could be worse. Just imagine what the job's going to be like if that new triple-A game does turn out to be set in Norrath.

Rusty Time Machine

As I was logging in to EverQuest II this morning I spotted something strange in the launcher. It said on the news feed that Destiny of Velious is scheduled to arrive next week on the time-limited expansion server, Kaladim. 

That didn't sound right. In my mind, DoV is a fairly recent expansion and although I don't play on Kaladim all that often, I was under the impression it was still lagging well behind Velious.

But what do I know? Not much, it seems. Granted, the headline is misleading but not nearly as misleading as my memory.

To make it clear, Destiny of Velious does not go live on Kaladim on May 11th, even though the forum thread linked on the launcher clearly says it does. If you call a thread "Destiny of Velious Opens on May 11th!" what else are people going to think?

The truth of the matter is, as you find when you read past the title, it's the beta for DoV that begins on the eleventh. The beta is set to run for four weeks, so a more infornmative headline might read "Destiny of Velious Opens on or around June 8th, after four-week beta." Not so eyecatching but a lot more accurate.

Moving on to the substantive issue of whether or not Destiny of Velious is, as I thought, a fairly recent expansion, I'd like to hedge a little and bring out the old relativism argument. It depends on what you mean by "recent", doesn't it?

 

Yeah, I'd like to do that but it's not going to fly this time. EQII has had seventeen expansions so far. DoV was the seventh. It came out in 2011. Ten years ago. That's not recent in gaming terms. Not even for an mmorpg.

And yet it feels very recent to me. Even though it happened four years before Sony Online Entertainment gave way to Daybreak, who themselves have now given way to EG7. Feels more like three or four years ago than a decade.

I think I know why. Destiny of Velious was the last EQII expansion before the launch of Guild Wars 2. That means it was the last one I played with Mrs. Bhagpuss and the last while our guild was active and busy with anything up to a dozen members popping in and out. It was the last EQII expansion I played with people I knew and because of that it has become fixed in my mind as a separate thing from all the expansions I've played since, on my own.

Except even that isn't entirely accurate. Destiny of Velious wasn't the final EQII expansion we bought and played together, just the last normal one. In December 2011, just nine months after DoV, we got the highly controversial Age of Discovery. Instead of the usual overland zones, dungeons and new features that made up a traditional EQII expansion, AoD only had features. 

It had mercenaries, the Dungeon Maker, the Beastlord class, reforging and tradeskill assistants. Maybe some other stuff. You could buy the lot as an "expansion" or the individual items piecemeal in the cash shop. Also, just to confuse matters, at the same time the whole game went free-to-play.

 

We carried on playing for another six months and then first The Secret World and after that Guild Wars 2 took over. The next EQII expansion I bought was 2014's Altar of Malice. In time I played through the ones I'd missed and I've paid for every one that's come along since but Mrs. Bhagpuss hasn't set foot in Norrath since 2012 and the last member of our guild logged out for the final time only weeks before I returned. It's been just me for the last seven years.

I guess that's why Destiny of Velious seems like it wasn't all that long ago. Particularly when you look at the expansions that came immediately after, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan. Those two are EQII's Shadowlands. 

They're set in the realm of the dead, or at least one of them, the Ethernere. They have a very different, floatier feel than the solidity of both frozen Velious and  subterranean Thalumbra which bookend them. Even though I did eventually finish both their signature questlines it was with overleveled characters who'd already outgrown them and they remain insubstantial in my memory.

It's not until Altar of Malice, whose re-introduction of the Isle of Refuge and masterful playing of the nostalgia card finally lured me back from Tyria, that expansions begin to feel like somewhere I once lived rather than somewhere I spent a couple of weeks on holiday. Given that history, it begins to make sense, the way Destiny of Velious seems to have landed so much more recently than a decade ago.

But of course our memories are always unreliable. We forget so much and what we think we remember is so often wrong. Which is why facts always need to be checked.

For reasons only they could explain, Daybreak maintains a complete archive on the official EQII website of every news item they've ever published there. It starts all the way back in April 2004, well before even the first closed beta, with a somewhat bathetic entry that reads (in full) "Introducing EQ2.Graffe.com. Once concerned with wizard-only EQ II information, EQ2.Graffe now offers info from the perspective of all EverQuest II classes."

 

In common with most of the websites linked in subsequent press releases (and there are many of them), EQ2.Graffe is no more. The news items are peppered with links, almost all of which are dead, not least because so many of them go to SOE forums or pages that vanished when the company was sold.

Some of the articles, interviews and videos can be found elsewhere with a google search but for many there's nothing but dead air, particularly when the entire piece only ever consisted of a hyper-linked headline. Others survive as stubs and some are still there in all their original arcane and archaic glory. There's some very peculiar and fascinating reading to be had and some unexpected things to be discovered or, as I have to keep reminding myself, re-discovered.

For example, I always knew EverQuest II was popular enough in Japan for there to have been a Japanese localized server. It was called Sebilis and it survived until 2016, when it was finally merged into Antonia Bayle. 

What I had forgotten, if indeed I ever knew it, was that for the first couple of years, including the release of Desert of Flames, the first expansion, EQII was published in Japan by Square Enix. EQII was once a Square Enix game! That boggles the mind, particularly when you consider that SOE was a division of Japanese megacorp, Sony. Why did they even need a Japanese publisher?

As I dug through the archive I came across plenty of things that didn't seem to make sense or more likely didn't match my memories of them. The servers at launch, for example, don't include Steamfont, where we made our first characters and which was our home until it was eventually merged with Oasis, a server which was there at launch. 

EQII launched on November 9 2004 with a dozen servers including three in Europe. Steamfont wasn't even in the first wave of extra servers added to absorb the influx of players keen to play the game the press had been hailing as the first true second-gen mmo. It didn't come online until 11 November 2004, two days after the date usually quoted as the official launch, when demand was so high another ten servers had to be added. 

I don't have an explanation for why we might have waited two days before making our first characters. Wikipedia quotes separate launch dates for the US and EU, with the EU launch date not coming until November 11 so maybe there was some delay. If so, it's not recorded in SOE's breathless commentary and I certainly don't remember it, although I do remember that we had intended to play on the Test server but had to change those plans because it wasn't until December 1st we even had confirmation there was going to be one. 

History is so hard to parse. Even relatively recent history. Fragmentary notes like these help a lot to build a picture but occasionally the fractured pieces just won't line up. Still, it's wonderful to have evidence of some things I've always believed but couldn't prove, such as the attritionally slow levelling speed.

 

Imagine an mmorpg launching today in which the level cap was fifty and you didn't even get to choose your class until twenty. And then imagine the fastest players in the entire world taking two or three days to get there. To level twenty, that is! 

Three days grind before you even got to play the class you've chosen would be enough to sink most launches nowadays but back then it would have been a pace most EQII players could only gaze at in envy and disbelief. I think it took me about two weeks to get my first character to twenty. Or maybe it was a month...

I'll probably never know for sure. Add it to the list. Of course, if I'd had a blog, I could just go and look it up. 

If I'd given the post about it a helpful headline, that is. Something like "Ding! Level 20 in EQII at last!". Maybe I should think about future me when I'm patting myself on the back for being so clever with these post titles. 

Yeah, and maybe someone at Daybreak should do something about all those broken links. They did archive all those SOE pages when they took over, didn't they? Didn't they??

We all have a responsibility to history, after all.

Otha Fish or You Can't Get (All Your) Blood From A (Standing) Stone

When the news about EG7's acquisition of Daybreak Games broke last week I wasn't in a position to say much about it . Now that I have the time, the moment has passed. But maybe I can find a different angle.

There's been a wealth of discussion and debate, first about the sale itself and then over the astonishing flood of detailed information concerning the population, popularity and profitability of the games themselves. Wilhelm covered most of what I would have written about and linked to everyone talking about the revelations and the implications. By and large, I feel sanguine about the change of ownership but I wouldn't say there were no warning flags at all.

In contrast to many commentators, I've been happy with Daybreak's stewardship of the portfolio they assumed from Sony Online Entertainment almost six years ago. It's only through the thick glass of a robust pair of rose-tinted spectacles that anyone could regard the later years of SOE's tenure as some kind of pre-lapsarian Golden Age. Daybreak may have had its issues, not least over who the hell was driving the bus, but so did every incarnation of ownership before them, from Verant Interactive and 989 Studios onward.

Rather than objections grounded in anything in particular, much of the criticism of DBG felt more like the generic, endemic contempt of mmorpg players for the companies that run the games they play, a tedious pose that acts as an enervating drag anchor on every discussion of custodianship across the genre. By contrast, during what I tend to characterize as SOE's decline into late-period decadence, there were much more substantive concerns as hubris, arrogance and barely-concealed personal agendas drove the ship onto a seemingly endless series of sandbanks.

From the selfish cynicism of the PSS1 debacle (yeah, I'm never gonna let it go - it's like my personal NGE) to the inglorious self-aggrandizement of the EQNext pipe dream, it seemed there was no limit to SOE's capacity to disappoint. And yet, through the worst of it, SOE remained my favorite MMO studio, albeit mostly by default. 

Even so, the six years under Daybreak has felt like calm sailing in comparison, with most of the drama confined to confused and confusing claims and denials concerning ownership along with a peculiar predilection for moving and renaming the furniture. That's been more of an entertaining sideshow than an existential threat, although the month or so when it looked as though the Russian connection might see the games banned in the U.S.A. had its moments.

As for the games themselves, after a shaky bedding-in period, they settled into a comfortable rut. For a genre that relies almost entirely on predictable, repetitive content, that was close to ideal. And for all the negative news stories about cutbacks, for all the developers "let go" and for all the evident strains imposed by reduced circumstances and resources, the whole ramshackle edifice still felt far more stable than it had in the last years of SOE, when all the stories revolved either around sunsets and closures or grandiose projects that hinted of mania.

If life under Daybreak has been dull but good, then looking into the intentions and ambitions of EG7 suggests it could get better yet and more exciting, too. There seems very little doubt that the new German owners have purchased a portfolio of games with the firm intent not only of continuing to run them but of building on the platform they provide, as this paragraph from the press release amply demonstrates:

"The acquisition of Daybreak will further strengthen and add diversification to EG7’s IP portfolio through acquisition of best-in-class original and third-party IPs (EverQuest, The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, DC Universe Online). Daybreak will also add a strong team of both operationally and strategically capable individuals. The Transaction will increase size and profitability of the Company through stable cash flows from free-to-play model with loyal communities for existing IPs. Furthermore, the Daybreak platform offers future upside through upcoming content releases for e.g. DC Universe Online and The Lord of the Rings Online, potential synergies across the group, and strengthened team to identify and execute further M&A".

Whereas theories about the motivations behind the Columbus Nova buyout (CN being the original purchaser of SOE, later morphing into DBG, in case anyone forgets) ranged from the illegal to the exploitative, EG7 clearly seems just to want to become a global player in the online gaming marketplace. As the plethora of financial and demographic information released to consolidate the fiduciary wisdom of the acquisition suggests, the whole point of buying the games is to make money from operating them.

And there's the red flag. It's a small one and it's waving somewhere towards the back but it's definitely there. I spotted it even before I read Yeebo's excellent post on the monetization of the two Standing Stone games, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, both of which we now belatedly understand to have been owned by Daybreak all along.

As Yeebo explains, "DDO has the highest monthly average revenue per-paying-player of any game in the Daybreak portfolio.  In other words, the income of DDO is disproportionately dependent on whales". This stood out for me, too, when I read the recently-released details we'd previously guessed at but couldn't know for certain. 

What really surprised me, though, was the information relating to EverQuest II. Anyone not in denial must long ago have realized that EQII never really managed to step out of the shadow of its progenitor. EverQuest has been running for longer, has more servers and I believe it also has more developers assigned to it. There's been a widespread belief for the last few years that it also has more players and brings in more money, both of which we now know to be true.

 

It's not quite as straightforward as that, though. The figures we've seen are snapshots. We don't have a longitudinal analysis. Anecdotally, EQII has been hemorrhaging players for several years. Perhaps it once did compete on equal terms with EQ. There was certainly a time when it felt that way. 

Why has EQII lost so many players, if indeed the rumors are true? Almost certainly because of the increasing use of the kind of practices Yeebo ascribes to DDO. The mechanics may differ but the intent and the result is the same. 

EQII has frequently been described as "pay to win" by disgruntled ex-players but what it really is is "pay to play". I'm not talking about the subscription, which is good value but by no means necessary for a casual player. I'm referring to the ever-increasing raft of purchaseable consumables that service the myriad progression systems within the game.

Just off the top of my head, these include familiars, mercenaries, mounts and by far the most controversial, spells. All of these are far more than cosmetic or flavor choices, although most of them are that as well. They all add power and at the top end the game is tuned to expect players to have it.

Over time, all of these systems and almost certainly more that I'm forgetting have been expanded and tuned so as to allow a never-ending spiral of upgrades. If you play casually, as I do, you'll get all the upgrades you need for free just by playing but if you want to move into Heroic dungeon content or, most certainly, raiding you'd better be ready to pull out your credit card.

There's always been a little of that, or at least since the cash shop was added more than a decade ago, but under Daybreak the system has been pushed to breaking point. Probably the most common complaints I read on the forums (and there are a lot of complaints because EQII players are and have always been quick to reach for the tar and feathers) revolve around having to buy consumables to accelerate the many time-gated upgrade processes. 

It's also the reason most commonly cited for players leaving the game and, even more importantly, not feeling able to return. No wonder the time-limited expansion server, Kaladim, is so popular. As yet progress there hasn't caught up with the expansions that introduced these systems.

Where the whaling in DDO and the consumable racket in EQII strike sparks with the EG7 acquisition is in this slide from the Investor Presentation:

Terms like "Industry leading monetization" and "Deep monetization model" may excite investors but are unlikely to settle a nervous player's concern. And not without reason. As you can see, EQII is second only to DDO in ARPPU or average revenue per paying user. The two smallest games in the portfolio by "bookings" (I think that means how many people actually play) bring in the most money per player.

It's a red flag but as I said it's a small one. There's plenty in the presentation emphasizing the benefits of player loyalty, game stability and the strength of the I.P.s and the breakdown of where revenues come from is balanced: "Mainly monetize via in-game purchase, membership subscription and DLC / expansion pack." 

It must be of some concern to the new owners, though, that the games with the highest MAUs stand in reverse order to those with the biggest income. It wouldn't be all that surprising if they wanted to do something about that. Let's just hope that in seeking to do so they don't kill off the goose that lays the silver eggs. (I mean, c'mon, these numbers are maybe better than we expected but they're hardly golden are they?).

As I said, I remain sanguine. In the short term I'd expect little to change and I'm happy with the status quo. Once the new owners get their feet under the old DBG boardroom table (presumably it's somewhere in Jason Epstein's garage right now) I imagine there will be some changes but so long as they stick to the "Evergreen live service game portfolio" (translation - keep the servers up) and go on pumping out the expansions, I'll be happy.

And maybe they'll even tweak the parameters a little so as to realize that "potential to leverage for marketing and reactivation". Win some of those 178m "registered users" back. They might not all be whales but some of them could still be worth fishing for.