It's The End Of New World As We Knew It

I imagine everyone reading this has already heard the news about about New World. If not, brace yourselves.

The final curtain falls on 31 January 2027. At that point the servers will be closed, never to re-open. If you own the game, you're welcome to carry on playing until then. If you never got around to buying it, well you're too late now. It went off sale yesterday.

I'm not going to do an obituary post or any kind of elegy. There's still over twelve months left to go and it's very likely I'll play some more before then. Plenty of time to for a final tour and some screenshots to remember things by.

If you want a full and accurate rundown of how things got to this sorry pass, Wilhelm has an excellent overview. I'm just going to post a few pictures for now.

I'd have liked to post some older shots. Maybe even some of the ones I took in the first closed beta and was never allowed to share. I don't imagine anyone's going to be chasing me down for breaking that NDA now. Unfortunately, everything older than a couple of months is on one of the hard drives in my old computer so that will have to wait. 

For now, here are a few pictures of Aeternum as it is and will be for the rest of this year. And the beginning of the next. And then never again.

It took three of us to kite that giant turkey. I wonder if there will even be three people left by next Thanksgiving? 

One thing I do plan on doing before the final year is out is upgrading from a wolf to a lion. Or is it a tiger? Some kind of cat, anyway...

If there's one thing I won't miss about the game it's probably the clothes. I understand the aesthetic but I never liked it. 

The environments, though, and the countryside: those I will miss.

Of course, there's always the very slim chance Amazon might relent and sell the game to someone else. Unfortunately, they don't need the small change any of the likely buyers would be able to offer. Or, for that matter, the big bucks, were anyone to come with a real proposal. 

I strongly suspect they'd prefer the game to disappear altogether, not hang around like some kind of revenant, calling into question the company's poor decision-making and inability to come up with even a single, successful game.

For the same reason, they might not be quite as amenable to an emulator as many game developers. Still, a year is a long time to leave the game running. Plenty of time for people to data-mine everything necessary to clone it after it's gone.

My guess is that we won't see a working version after the official servers go dark but I'd be very happy to see myself proved wrong. New World was and still is a pretty good MMORPG. It deserved better. 

New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company at all. It never was. 

Who Will Look After The Mounts?

Yesterday brought some gaming news that should have been at least mildly upsetting but somehow felt more confusing than emotional. The game in question is Riders of Icarus, which I played for a good few months back in...

... hang on a moment. 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a technical announcement. It appears there's now some kind of limit to the number of Labels that Blogger can list at the foot of a post. 

For many years I've been used to skimming down the ever-growing list to find the Label I want. Until today that list has always gone all the way to the end of the alphabet. Now it only goes as far as "E". 

To ESO, to be precise. Then it just says "Analytics" and stops. I checked the maximum number of Labels per blog allowed by Blogger and it's 5,000. Even I'm nowhere near that. A quick check shows nothing has changed in the Layout and a google search doesn't find anyone else complaining about it so I have no idea what's happened. 

Whatever it is, I hope it sorts itself out soon because I use that function a lot to check how frequently topics have appeared here. I can still find out what I wrote by using the Search facility but I'm damned if I'm going to go through and count all the posts individually.

We'll have to take it on faith, then, that I did post about Riders of Icarus quite a few times. It was back around the time of the pandemic or maybe just before that I spent the most time with the game. I liked it and said so. I wouldn't claim it was a great MMORPG in any way but it was pretty to look at, fun to play and seemed particularly generous with its giveaways.

You'll remember the USP was flight. Unlike all those games that added flight as an afterthought or because everyone else was doing it, only to find it caused all kinds of problems, RoI was built around the idea that you'd be flying everywhere right from the start. Lots of locations were only accessible from the air and aerial combat was a big part of the gameplay.

There were plenty of flying mounts to collect, some of them quite spectacular. I had a skywhale with a gondola that I liked for posing, although for practical purposes I preferred my various birds or my flying inflatable dolphin. There were plenty of nice-looking ground mounts too. It was a very mount-oriented game.

Character design was solid and there were lots of cosmetic options you didn't need to pay real money for. I spent quite a while playing dress-up, which was more fun than the questing or the combat, at least for the most part. I have fond memories of the game, to which I returned several times for short runs but by the time I stopped playing I'd pretty much done as much as I wanted there.

The game had a very checkered development and ownership history. I remember losing access to it completely for several months when it changed hands although I did eventually get my account back. There was some nonsense abut it becoming a "Pay-to-Earn" title with some crypto-blockchain baggage attached but by that time I wasn't really paying close attention any more. 

A week or two back, I read that there were going to be server merges, then that those had been cancelled. Now the sad news is that the game will sunset on 15 May. 

I say "sad" and I'm sure it will be for the relatively small number of people still playing (Around a hundred at peak on Steam these days but I'm not at all sure most players would be going through Steam. I wasn't.) but I can't say it's making me feel anything stronger than mild disappointment.

Puzzled, too. MMOBomb reports that at almost the same time Valofe were announcing the end of the game they were also sending out press releases and trailers for new content. That seems about par for the course with this game, whose messaging has been chaotic for several years.

I have no idea whether Riders of Icarus has the kind of fans who would be likely to respond to this kind of existential threat by setting up some kind of emulator or private server but I do think the game deserves it. It's exactly the sort of MMORPG that could potentially improve under collective administration by people who play it. It would certainly be hard for a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to be worse custodians than the professionals who ran it into the ground.

It's not that unlikely an outcome, either. The game had over a million players once. That's easily a big enough pool of former players to justify and support an afterlife in the grey space of the emulation world. Twin Saga managed it so I see no reason why RoI shouldn't.

Even if it happens, it's still unlikely I'd play again. Or, I should say, it's unlikely I'd play in any way that could be called "serious", even in the context of casual gameplay. I have plenty of better games I'm not playing seriously before I'd get to this one.

It is, however, entirely possible - likely, even - that I might make the effort to re-install the game and give it a final fly-by before the servers shut down for good. There are a few farewell events scheduled. Those might be fun.

It would depend on whether I could get my old characters back. As I said, I never played through Steam. I imagine I have my old login details somewhere but I've uninstalled the original client. It is still downloadable from the website but who knows how long that will last? If I'm going to bother, I guess I should get on with it.

The thing is, whereas once the news of a game I once enjoyed closing down would have disturbed me more than somewhat, these days I barely feel a frisson of anxiety. I think it's experience rather than ennui. This sort of thing has happened a lot in the quarter of a century I've been playing MMORPGs. It doesn't feel shocking any more. It barely feels worrisome at all.

I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a single game that I'd be truly upset over not being able to play any more. Not in the way I was disturbed by the disappearance of Vanguard or City of Steam or Rubies of Eventide, all games I still sometimes miss even now. 

Partly it's because experience suggests almost every MMORPG above a certain size (And a fair few a lot smaller, too.) will still be playable in some form long after the legal owners shut them down. There are exceptions, like Wildstar, but nearly every game you can remember closing probably has an emulator running somewhere.

Mostly, though, it's that I don't play MMORPGs in the serially-obsessive way I used to. My days are no longer structured around those sessions. If I couldn't play any of them, I'd find other things to do.

Mostly, I'd miss my characters. I would have some issues if I couldn't drop in on them and see how they're getting along, whenever the mood takes me. 

Even there, though, it's something I think about doing far more often than actually doing it. I have all those characters in Guild Wars 2 that I lived with daily for a decade and I haven't popped by to check on a single one of them since I dropped the game three years ago.

I'd have to say I think it's a healthier outlook. I can remember that feeling, when you learn a game you love is going to close down. It's disproportionately unpleasant when considered objectively. Playing games shouldn't be that important, should it? Especially not playing specific games.

We'll see how sanguine I am about it when EG7 goes down the pan and all the Daybreak titles close down overnight. That'll be a test of emotional separation, alright.

Until then, I'm sorry to see Riders of Icarus go. The game deserved better than Valofe gave it. They weren't good custodians. Maybe something better lies ahead for the game in someone else's care. Let's hope so.

Going Gently Into The Good Night

It's Easter weekend. The sun is shining. The trees are coming into leaf. It's the time when everything springs back into life after the long, hard winter.

Or not.

Noah's Heart is set to sunset next month.

On the 29th of April, to be precise. It launched on 28 July 2022 so that's not even two years. I really liked Noah's Heart but honestly I'm surprised it even lasted that long.

As the MassivelyOP report notes, Archosaur, the game's publisher, never really did much - or anything - to promote the title. I can't remember seeing anything about it post-launch. Certainly nothing at all in the last twelve months.

Of course, it's a cross-platform title, playable on Android and iOS as well as PC, so I was never sure whether the complete lack of promotion for the version I was playing also applied to the mobile versions. I've played quite a few such titles and it often seems that it's the mobile players who are keeping the games afloat, with PC players something of an after-thought.

Not so well. The world is ending, in case you hadn't heard.

In this case, though, it does seem to be quite the extreme version of that benign neglect. MOP point out that news of updates has "been kept largely to the client and its existing players" but when I logged in last night to have a look I couldn't see any mention of the closure in the game itself. 

Even the link in the MOP article that goes to the official announcement doesn't take you to the website's front page. It goes to the "News" section, which is only available from a small button in the header. 

As you can see from the screenshot below, taken the day after the closure was announced, the landing page still shows the game as up and running with a massive "Available Now" banner right across the middle. 

And I guess it is. For one more month.

Redbeard asked in the comments to yesterday's post for my thoughts on the closure, given my heavy coverage of the game in the past. There are fifty-nine posts here with the Noah's Heart tag, after all. You might well expect I'd be sad. Or upset. Or pissed.

I'm not any of those things, not really. Mildly disappointed, sure, but not surprised, let alone shocked. As I said, I've been expecting it for a while. And of course, I stopped playing a few months ago. It's not like I'm in the middle of anything

It's an odd thing to say about an MMORPG that lasted less than two years but I think it had a pretty good run. Or maybe I should say I had a pretty good run with Noah's Heart. While my early posts tell some adventure stories, most of the later ones focus on housing and fashion. I played close on every day for more than a year and a lot of that time was spent working on furnishing my house and making my character look good.

I did do other stuff. I liked exploring and the asynchronous PvP was fun. There were some good stories, too, at least for a while. The game does have some kind of through-line narrative. It might even be interesting if you could follow it. It's certainly quirky and amusing in places and even thrilling on occasion. Unfortunately, much of it is so badly translated as to be almost incomprehensible, especially in the later stages.

It may as well be both of us. I mean, what's the point now? It's all over.

I finished all the "Season" stories until they stopped coming but I never finished that main storyline although, even with the problems with translation, it wasn't because I lost interest. It was because it got too hard. 

As with Genshin Impact, I gave up on the main quest because I couldn't win the battles any more. Either I'm not good enough at action-combat or I'm not prepared to pay money to engage with the gacha mechanics to upgrade my characters sufficiently to compete. It's both, actually.

Luckily for me, unlike Genshin Impact, which quickly lost my interest when I couldn't win my fights, I had no trouble finding plenty to do in Noah's Heart without needing to do any combat at all. Mostly I did the extensive selection of dailies and worked on gaining affection with various Phantoms so they'd give me the recipes to craft the nifty-looking clothes they were wearing. 

The main reason I stopped playing towards the back end of last year was that I'd BFF'd all the Phantoms who had anything I wanted. I spent a good while going through all the rest of them in detail and there wasn't a single item of clothing left I could imagine my character wearing so I felt I was done.

Why? It's not like there's anywhere to run.

I could have carried on working on my house but again, I was happy enough with the way I had it set up. It didn't feel like it would be worth the effort required to upgrade it any further so once again, I felt I'd done all I wanted to.

If Archosaur had still been adding content to the game that might all have changed but they weren't. For the first six months there was a torrent of new content, much of it very entertaining. That slowed down to a trickle and eventually stopped altogether. 

Sometimes when that happens, live service games enter a kind of unnanounced maintenance mode and just carry on indefinitely. I could name a good few like that. Sometimes, though, they just close down. 

I used to dread games I played closing down. I even dreaded the end of games I once played but wasn't playing any longer. Now, it doesn't really affect me all that much. If it's a game I'm playing it's a bit annoying. If it's a game I've stopped playing, it's fine.

Everything has its time. For some online games that time seems to be measured in decades. For others it's months. And anyway, as we all are starting to realize, the end doesn't have to mean The End. Games come back, legally or illegally. They're about as hard to kill as super-heroes.

I can see the end approaching.

Noah's Heart won't come back. No-one is going to emulate it. No-one is going to buy it. It's dead, or it will be by the end of April. That's a shame. It was a good game in its way and I'm sure it was someone's favorite and they'll be distraught. Unfortunately, it was never going to be enough players' favorite game. It's a crowded marketplace and there's too much choice.

I've had my Noah's Heart screenshot folder set as my desktop background source for more than a year now. The image changes every ten minutes and there are enough screenshots in there that I don't see the same ones that often. 

Because of that, although I'd stopped playing, I've still been looking at my character every day. But even before the closure news broke, I'd been thinking it was probably about time for a change.

I have my screenshots all backed up. I have the posts I wrote. I can go back and relive the things I did in Noah's Heart any time I want. The best ones, anyway. 

That's what matters. The memories. 

Being able to play the game really isn't all that important. 

Not any more.

Comings And Goings

It's Friday! I have a bunch of things bookmarked that won't make posts of their own. Guess what that means!

Oh, and when I said "It's Friday!" I meant it was Friday when I wrote this. I imagine it's Saturday now, if you're reading it the day I published it. Or if not, well, it could be any day. Even Friday. Just... a different Friday.

Anyway, now we've gotten that all cleared up...

A Little Bit Country...

Let's start with Lana. And Beyoncé. Always the bridesmaids, never the brides, eh? Well, apparently. I keep reading about how both of them are being perpetually snubbed by the Grammys, although with thirty-two wins out of eighty-eight nominations, you could hardly say Beyoncé has been ignored. She just has never won the Big One, Album of the Year. 

Lana, on the other hand, has only been nominated eleven times, out of which she's won precisely no Grammys. I think we have a clear winner! Or maybe I mean loser.

Anyway, that's not the connection between the two icons, idols and (super)stars I came here to talk about. No, it's something a lot odder than that. According to various sources, they both plan on going Country for their next album. 

Lana, it's definite. She said so herself. The album even has a name: Lasso. You can't get more country than that. And it's not even all that surprising. She's guested with country singers, covered country songs and according to Lana even her breakout hit, Video Games, was "kind of country". 

I think Lana's definition of "country" might just shade over into Americana, though. Lana is definitely Americana in spirit even though rarely if ever in sound.

Beyoncé, however, is not an artist I've ever associated with any stripe of country music - country&western, country rock, alt-country, Americana, whatever. That said, as I have repeatedly apologized, I am nowhere near as familiar with her work as I ought to be. 

It does seem she has more form in the field than I would have guessed; she submitted a song - Daddy Lessons from  Lemonade - for consideration in the "Country" category. It was not accepted but I'm listening to it now and it sure sounds country to me.

The main reason people are saying her next album will be all country, all the way though, seems to be that she wore a cowboy hat to this year's award ceremony. I'm not sure headgear is always a solid indication of musical direction although it does hold true for Tom Waits. And Noddy Holder, for that matter. 

I kinda hope it's true in this case, though. Maybe that'll be my way in.

Going, Going...

Some video-game-sad news that's barely been reported: one of the weirdest, wildest, least-easily-pigeon-holed games of the last few years, Chimeraland, is about to close its few remaining Western servers at the end of March. Apparently there are Chinese servers that will carry on but as far as I can tell, both the Steam version of the game and the earlier SEA version with servers based (I believe.) in Singapore, will go down. They might be one and the same for all I know.

As anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will remember, I was big into Chimeraland for a while. There are more than thirty posts with the Chimeraland tag here but the last time I logged in was six months ago and that was only for a look-see. 

Knowing the game wouldn't be around much longer, I thought I should probably take one last chance to say goodbye to my characters and take a few final photos of my houses for keepsakes. Unfortunately, I'd already left it too late.

Oh, the servers are still up. I was able to log into the SEA version just fine. Only I'd forgotten that my original character there had already been deleted. As I wrote in that post last September, if you stop playing the game for too long, you can wave your characters goodbye: "You get three months' grace. If you don't log in after that, your characters are wiped." 

Or they were. Mine was. The one I played for several months, when the game first went Live. The Level 2 I made at the time of that post five months ago, though, she's still there. I guess there's no point clearing space for people to make new characters any more.

As for my Steam, it wanted to download a 4GB update, which seemed weird under the circumstances. I let it go ahead but the update stalled after a few minutes and rather than fiddle around with it, I uninstalled the game instead.

I found it all very instructive. A few years back, even the thought of certain MMORPGs shutting down literally brought me out in a cold sweat. When Vanguard shuttered I thought I might need therapy, until the emulator project came along to throw out a lifeline. 

Now, though, I'm not sure I care all that much. I really liked Chimeraland but I still hadn't played it for a long time. If finding out the game was about to sunset wasn't even enough to remind me I'd already lost everything on my original account, I think it would be a little ridiculous to pretend I'm heartbroken.

The slightly uncomfortable fact is that I don't play any MMORPG "seriously" any more. There isn't a single one that currently acts as a tent-pole for my entertainment life, much less the rest of my life, the way half a dozen or more games did in the past. Right now, I think maybe the only potential sunset that would affect me emotionally would be EverQuest II and even there I'd have to factor in the ease with which I get distracted from what I'm doing there, the sporadic way I choose to log in to pursue any goals I do have and the knowledge I already have the icon for an emulator client on my desktop. 

The ever-increasing prevalence of emulators and fan projects for what feels like the majority of supposedly obsolete MMORPGs certainly means an official notice of closure doesn't hold the horror it once did. The ironic comments I used to make about certain games probably outliving me seems less like irony and more like a simple statement of fact with every day that passes.

It's a great shame Chimeraland won't be around for much longer but not because it means I won't be able to play it any more. It's a shame because it was a really good MMORPG with a lot more going for it than many that have lasted much longer. It was fun, original and entertaining but none of those things has ever been enough. So much comes down to luck, timing and marketing. In another reality, Chimeraland could easily have been Palworld, a game it resembles in a number of key ways. If only the developers had thought to make their monsters cuter and give them funnier names...

Gone.

While I was attempting to update Chimeraland, I noticed there was also an update pending for the Once Human closed beta. That seemed odd. I thought the test ended back in January.

I really like Once Human. I stopped playing the beta not because I'd had enough of it but because I was sure I'd be buying it at launch and I didn't want to burn out before then. I thought I'd miss it but as it happened, Palworld came along almost immediately to scratch my survival itch, so I barely even noticed I wasn't playing Once Human any more.

I was curious as to why there might still be a humongous patch waiting to download. I thought maybe they might have extended the beta or even started a new one. I hadn't heard anything but then there seems to be very little coverage of the game anyhere. It wouldn't surprise me if any change of plans had gone unreported.

I downloaded the 5GB patch and logged in. My login still worked. The Enter button was there. There just weren't any servers to log in to.

After some checking, I was able to establish a few things for certain. The beta has ended. No new beta has begun. None has been announced. There is still no launch date.

It is unusual for a closed beta client to keep working after the beta has ended but maybe there are plans to re-use it in the future. Or maybe they just forgot to take it down. Either way, I'm leaving mine where it is... just in case.

Also Gone But Not For Long

I also still have the Nightingale Stress Test client installed. I'm hoping it will be re-useable - with an update, of course - for the upcoming Early Access launch in less than two weeks. Anything to avoid another hefty download. I've searched for information on that but so far I haven't been able to find anything. 

I have, however, seen Inflexion Games' debrief on how the stress test went. It raises a couple of concerns.

Firstly, they seem pleased to have had just under fifty thousand players (Or "unique users" as they put it.) in the test. It even seems that was more people than they expected. Given that Palworld sold millions of copies on the first day and currently has more than nineteen million players, fifty thousand seems either incredibly unambitious or incredibly unlikely to provide adequate testing for launch day. 

It's not just Palworld, either. Enshrouded hit a million players in the first four days and reportedly continues to grow. Palworld and Enshrouded are in the exact, same genre as Nightingale and Nightingale has probably enjoyed considerably more press attention and hype than either. It's going to be very interesting to see whether it can match their sales. Not that anyone's expecting another Palworld but if they don't even manage to match Enshrouded's success, questions will be asked.

The other, mildly concerning statistic from the long list provided is the number of traditional fantasy MMORPG wild animals killed by those fifty thousand players. Nearly three hundred thousand boars and more than a quarter of a million wolves. That's six boars and five wolves for every single player!

To that you can add almost half a million "Bound", which I think were the zombie-like creatures I mentioned in my post. I made a snarky comment at the time about how I might as well have been playing WoW. I think these numbers make that point for me.

I'm sure a lot of it is just a side-effect of dumping everyone in the middle of some woodland filled with bears, wolves and zombies. The actual game is going to be waaaay more original than that. Right?

I guess we'll all find out in a week or so. I know I will. Boars or no boars, I'll be there.

Is This Good News?

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is moving to a six-weekly, seasonal testing schedule. According to the report on MassivelyOP, this means new content every six weeks. 

So far, so ho-hum. The big change, though, isn't the cadence of the updates but who gets to test them. Or play them, if we're going to be honest about it. 

Until now, only the very highest-tier backers have had regular access to the testing process, something that meant an investment in the long-overdue game in the order of a thousand dollars. From the next update, which arrives in barely over a week, on February 17, all backers will get a chance to test each season. Big investors get to play the full six weeks, middling backers get two weeks and bottom-feeders with just a fifty dollar stake get a single week.

I did say, a long time ago, that if they ever started selling access to the game for $50, I'd be in. That, though, was years ago, when Pantheon looked like the most exciting prospect among a clutch of would-be retro-MMORPGs. It was also when Brad McQuaid was still alive to dictate the direction of travel.

I am still interested and fifty dollars for what would, if they stick to their word, be at least two months Pantheon-time per year, doesn't seem like a terrible deal. I would certainly want to be sure there was no NDA because if I can't blog about it I'm not interested. Given that, though...

I still probably won't go for it... yet. Pantheon is interesting, yes, but as this post makes clear, there's a lot going on in the field right now. I'm already going to have to juggle Palworld and Nightingale from the middle of this month and  Once Human and Tarisland are both likely to arrive sooner rather than later. I'm already having trouble fitting the games I have into anything like a schedule. Having to drop everything for a week of Pantheon every other month could be more of an imposition than an opportunity, right now.

Pantheon is, however, quite possibly the only new game Mrs Bhagpuss might want to play. She does occasionally express a mild interest in playing another MMORPG and she has always been curious about this one. Maybe I'll talk to her about it...

And Finally...

It's traditional to end these posts with a song, although we did have one earlier.

Oh, hell. Who am I to break with tradition?

You may remember the last music post ended with me having to choose between Blu DeTiger and Bratty and I chose Blu DeTiger. 

Bratty - you're up!

La Última Vez - Bratty

Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For anyone?

Nothing Lasts Forever

Yesterday Wilhelm at TAGN posted an excellent examination and analysis of the difficulty of launching successful, new mmorpgs in the face of the sheer longevity and resilience of the games already running. As he observed 

"Fans of the genre tend to bemoan its stagnation and blame WoW or free to play or whatever for the fact that things can seem stale.  But the real problem is that old games don’t go away".

And I chipped in with this comment:

"People will insist on banging on about the mmorpgs that close down without ever recognizing the vastly larger pool of games that just keep on going."

I stand by that statement. It's just a shame I chose to make it on the day Gamigo decided to clean house.

In what seems like a particularly insensitive cascade of press releases, the company widely known for acquiring and aggregating mmorpgs announced the closure of four of them. Well, four so far. I imagine players of the remaining dozen or so left in the stable must be chewing their nails.

I can't pretend that the closures affect me deeply, either emotionally or practically. Two of the games, Defiance and Defiance 2050, I've never played. I've thought about playing them, a few times, but never with enough enthusiasm to do anything about it.

 

The latest to be axed, Eden Eternal, I have played. I've mentioned it here a few times. It even has a tag although I've never done a whole post about it.

I think of it as "the mouse game" because when I played my character looked like a giant cartoon mouse. I can't really remember much about the gameplay. I have a feeling it might have been the first mmorpg I ever played that used the "autorun to quest target" option, something that seemed almost magical at the time and which I still appreciate in every game that offers it.

Eden Eternal won't be missed by many in this quadrant of the blogosphere, I suspect. I know Telwyn of Gaming SF played and wrote about it now and again. Maybe a few others might have given it a look once, out of curiosity.

Of course, if it was one of those games that bloggers write about often that would at least suggest there might be enough interest to keep the servers running. When no-one even name-checks your game in passing it's never a good sign.

 

The fourth and thus far final game to be shuttered by Gamigo is the one I'll miss most: Twin Saga. I really liked Twin Saga. It not only gets a tag here but there are two posts dedicated to it specifically, both from 2017, when I played the game for several weeks and got a character to something like level fifty.

It had a gorgeous, vivid cartoon look and a bizarre, surreal, frequently disturbing prose style, whose sheer peculiarity could not be entirely explained away by the usual translation issues.

The thing I'll remember most about Twin Saga, though, is the housing. My character lived in a terracottage, a virtual mansion, complete with conservatory and roof garden, sitting atop a giant tortoise. You can travel the world in your house. And I did. For a while.

Not for long, though, because the other thing I'll remember about Twin Saga is how hard it got. I didn't stop because I was bored with it. I stopped because I hit a wall in the levelling game and couldn't get past it. I returned several times to see if it had gotten any easier but it never had. Now it never will.

 

All the games Gamigo are sending into the ultimate east close their doors for the final time on the same day, April 29th. That gives current players a couple of months to get their affairs in order, say their tearful goodbyes and work out what to do with themselves when the games they loved no longer exist.

Presumably there aren't going to be all that many people in that unfortunate situation. Gamigo's given reasons for the cull are purely commercial. Apparently the games cannot sustain themselves, which presumably means they cost more to run than the cash shops bring in.

I wonder how strictly true that is? Obviously those four games won't be making much of a profit because if they were you can absolutely guarantee they'd still be up and running. On the other hand, Gamigo has been on a buying spree these last couple of years. They've snapped up Trion, Aeria Games and most recently Kingsisle.

That's given them a much bigger protfolio than they ever had before. It's a lot of mmorpgs under one roof. And some of the recent acquisitions, particularly ArcheAge, Trove and Wizard 101, have hugely more traction in the marketplace than the likes of Eden Eternal or Twin Saga. It's not unrealistic to imagine there's a need for clarity in the offer as much as there is a desire that each and every game should be self-sustaining.

 

One of the pillars of Wilhelm's argument concerning the drag factor of elderly games on the development of new ones is the near-obsessive commitment of fans. Not just the continued desire to keep playing the same old games but the will and ability to make that possible even if the companies that nominally own the games aren't interested any more.

It's true. The emulator and private server scene is huge. There are grey market versions of games it's hard to imagine anyone cared about enough to recover from the void. But players do care. 

I've written a few times about the ongoing project to revive the game I knew as Ferentus. I only ever played that game, briefly, in beta. And yet I've never forgotten it. As with a number of more than half-forgotten titles I occasionally google it and a while back when I did that I ended up on a website telling me it was coming back. 

Since then I've played it a couple of times on open beta weekends. And it's as much fun as I remembered. I wouldn't spend my free time helping to bring it back but I'm very grateful someone has. 

 

Will someone do the same for the Gamigo Four? We'll see. I'd put the odds pretty low for Eden Eternal and Twin Saga but I suspect Defiance may have had the kind of audience that will see keeping it alive as a challenge. I hope so. 

For all that the persistence of old mmoprgs acts a drag anchor on the development of new ones, I hate to see any of them die. They will, though. As time goes on the seeming invulnerability to time that's been a hallmark of the genre will inevitably erode. 

More and more games will disappear for good. It's a shame but I don't think we can complain too much. After all, they've already lasted far, far longer than either their players or their developers imagined they could.

The only question left for me now is whether to use these last couple of months to revisit old haunts for a final time, maybe set foot in some new ones, while the opportunity still exists. 

I'm not sure I will. It's probably best just to let them slip quietly away.