Off The Charts

In a serendipitous sequel to yesterday's post on non-MMO gaming, this morning I clicked the link from Atherne's Adventures to nominations for 2017's Golden Joystick Awards. Most of them I'd never heard of, unsurprisingly, but a few names I recognized from brief flurries of attention they'd enjoyed on various blogs I'd read over the last year.

What did surprise me was how quickly and completely whatever attention those games received in this corner of the blogosphere had shriveled and died. It's not even as though people had reported on their endings or their play-time coming to a close.

Did anyone finish Horizon:Zero Dawn? I remember several people starting but that's about all. I know someone was posting about Final Fantasy XV because I recall being curious about the apparently contemporary setting. Never heard any more about that one.

I could kill for a rum punch.

Much was made of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with its open-world gameplay that was either compelling or purposeless depending who you were reading at the time. Several people seemed to have bought the Nintendo Switch just to play it but other than a couple of tales of buyer's remorse I never found out how all that ended.

Mass Effect: Andromeda might be the only exception. At least a couple of people blogged the whole of that journey, not just the amusing visual glitches and the bad launch horror stories. Other than that, the games that keep coming up, the ones I was reading about last year, read about this year and will almost certainly read about next year, are all MMOs.

Various kinds of MMOs, certainly not all of them MMORPGs, but the genre's a broad church, wide enough to embrace PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds at one end and FFXIV at the other. It's something even the creators of the Golden Joystick Awards recognize: in the "Still Playing" category, defined as "...your chance to celebrate the games that have held your attention for years or even decades after release" almost half the nominations are MMOs. More than half if you want to count Diablo III and Overwatch.

Is anyone there?

Of the two non-MMO games I bought this year, no-one else ever mentioned Tanzia and I'm pretty sure no-one wanted to hear me going on about it either. I was browsing the always-fascinating Steam Charts last night and I noticed that Tanzia's all-time peak concurrency on the platform was ten players.

That's ten. Not ten thousand. Just ten. Although right now I imagine ten players online at the same time would be living the dream for developers Arcanity Inc. since September's average concurrency was 0.07 of a player with a Peak of three. And as far as I can tell, Tanzia is only available via Steam.

Yonder, the other game I bought, did much better, with an all-time Steam Peak just shy of 1300 players and a September average of just over 45. You can also buy and play Yonder outside of Steam as well as on the PS4 so that's just a portion of the audience. Still, it hardly represents the break-out hit and potential phenomenon I thought it was going to be when I jumped the bandwagon back in July.

Every MMO has to have a zone called "Crossroads". It's the law. Only this isn't an MMO. It just wishes it was.

Contrast those numbers with 2017's genuinely unexpected breakout, PUBG. Featuring heavily in the Golden Joystick Awards as "one of the year's biggest success stories", the survival arena phenomenon currently tops the Steam chart with a staggering 2.39 million players all playing at the same time.

With room to improve, because that record was set yesterday and the numbers are still trending upwards. PUBG's concurrency has increased inexorably since it appeared seemingly out of nowhere in March, almost doubling month on month.

I haven't played, just like I haven't played the game that seems likely to have suffered the most from PUBG's meteoric rise, H1Z1. Arena survival is hardly my thing, although ironically I played three games of Southsun Survival for dailies in GW2 yesterday and, as someone said in chat during one of them, "ANet invented PUBG years ago".

Adorable the explorable.

Bad things happening to H1Z1 always worry me, not because I have any interest in or affection for the zombie slaughterfest but because I imagine it's the Catalonia to DBG's Spain, doing most of the hard lifting and paying most of the bills. Certainly that won't be Planetside2, currently languishing at #154 on the chart.

Although perhaps "languishing" isn't the right word. Not at all. That placing still represents four thousand players at Peak and nearly half that on average. And again, PS2 is available through other channels than just Steam.

H1Z1: King of the Kill (soon to be rebranded without the unfortunate, foreign revenue sapping corollary) is still in the Steam Top Ten. Just. Number nine and falling, with a September Peak of 105,000 players but a current 24-hour high of less than half that number.

I hate to be the one who has to break it to you but that really isn't an Ice Shard.

Still, it's a lot of people. I knew H1Z1 was popular but I hadn't quite realized just how successful it was and still is.

DBG's current re-focus, both the upcoming rebranding, the significant changes now on the Test server and the re-invigoration of H1Z1:KOTK's thought-to-be dead in the water prototype, H1Z1: Just Survive, suggest a clear understanding that the entire playing field has shifted with the arrival of PUBG. (As an aside, DBG's evident current revitalization, the new decisiveness and increased intensity across all projects, is a topic for another post. Something's going on, I'm sure of it, and I'd be all over it... if only I knew for certain what that something was.)

Back to PUBG, success that fast and on that scale changes everything. Amazon's Breakout won't be the only project going on hiatus or worse, I'll wager, as executives around the world try to figure out how to get some of that sweet PUBG action. Brace yourselves for another half-decade of WoW-killer hype, only with "WoW" airbrushed out and "PUBG" scribbled in.

One day this will all be yours. Oh, wait, it already is.

The perhaps ironic upshot of all this is that I might, finally, get around to downloading the original H1Z1. The re-purposed Just Survive is beginning to look quite interesting. As for the many nominees for the Golden Joystick Awards, though, I'll probably pass.

Except, maybe, for a couple of the Indies. The annoyingly-named Everything looks intriguing. Thimbleweed Park, with its curious USP of "Monkey Island meets Twin Peaks" could be worth a try. In fact, I could imagine playing and enjoying any of the ten entries in the Best Indie list, which is not something I could say with a straight face about many of the various AAA nominees.

Aywren offered an early entry in the inevitable swarm of "what I'm looking forward to in 2018" posts but right now the only game on my radar that's guaranteed to launch next year is We Happy Few. I was fairly sure I'd get that but Compulsion Games' decision to go full AAA with a launch price of $60 has made me think twice. I'm not really price-sensitive when it comes to video games but bearing in mind what I said yesterday about Tanzia and Yonder it does seem like a good way to throw money down a hole.

Nope, I think I'll stick to my MMOs for now, and my old MMOs at that. I played a lot of EQ2 yesterday and it made me want to play a lot more. I know I don't need any new games but right now I'm not even sure I want any.

Maybe we already have enough games. Anyone ever think of that?

The Right Prescription

Every single post on Inventory Full, well over a thousand now, carries the tag "MMO". When I started writing here, back in 2011, almost every blog I read was much the same - all MMOs, all the time.

Over the years that's changed a lot. Glancing at my blogroll, there's almost no-one left who writes only about MMOs. There's Telwyn, whose "Categories" list includes nothing but MMOs (except "Uncategorized" but now we're getting meta). I think Shintar may only write about SW:tOR, which would make hers the only single-MMO blog I follow. And there's Bhelgast, who writes about a lot of non-gaming stuff but only MMOs as far as gaming goes...

A lot of bloggers still write more about MMOs than any other kind of game - Syp, Wilhelm, Isey, UltrViolet... too many to list, really - but mostly these days it's a mixed diet of MMOs, co-ops and single player stuff. Which is fine. My interest lies more in the quality of the writing than the topic anyway - I enjoyed Tipa's blogging on bridges as much as her MMO coverage, for example, but then I'd just be happy to see Tipa back blogging about anything.

If I was going to start blogging about anything other than MMOs I would move away from gaming completely. Most likely to music (which would give me a chance to enthuse openly instead of just dropping allusions no-one will ever get into blog titles) or books (since I get to read a wealth of wonderful stuff six months to a year before it's published) or even movies (although for that I'd have to start going to the cinema again, I guess...).

When it does come to gaming, though, even I stray from the true path sometimes. I bought two single-player games this year: Tanzia and Yonder. They both play like MMORPGs, which is what drew me to them and was how I justified hanging an "MMO" tag on the posts I wrote about them.

I enjoyed them both, for a while. A short while. I don't have buyer's regret because they were cheap and I got my money's worth, but although I enjoyed the gameplay in both I found it utterly impossible to maintain my interest, knowing I was playing alone.

It's hard to explain. Many have tried. In these days of solo MMOs, which is pretty much all of them if that's how you choose to play it, there's little logic to why doing exactly the same things has such a different emotional heft, but it does.

Grinding xp or farming mats in a single player feels...well, let's be quite brutal...it feels idiotic. Tanzia and Yonder both feature those mechanics, which I enjoy in MMOs, but I had to stop playing because I began to feel that what I was doing had no function, purpose or meaning. After a few sessions I felt I would quite literally be better off spending my time staring out of the window, let alone getting up and going and doing something useful.

To do exactly the same thing in an MMO feels completely different. Even in an MMO where no-one else appears to be playing, one where I know not a single person, where I'm in no guild or group, where the chat channels are silent for hours on end so it feels as though I might be the last person left playing.

Indeed, I sometimes feel it literally would not matter if I was the only person left playing. I know that someone else could be playing and that's all that's needed to make it a social experience not a solitary one.

So, after a couple of noble but failed experiments, I'm trying not to buy any non-MMOs, even if bloggers I read are singing their praises and they do sound like something I'd enjoy. But, what if the game in question happened to be free? And what if it only took twenty minutes to play?

Last night I read a typically entertaining post at The Forbidden Codex of The Pink Beyond. Xyzzysqrl covers such an infinitude of games so amusingly and authoritatively that I mostly feel no need to try them for myself but this one was a little different, because all Gordy was prepared to say about it was this:

"I cannot tell you anything about this game, as it would ruin the experience, and in fact the mere knowledge that I cannot tell you anything about this game is already ruining a small part of the experience for you, for which I apologize profusely"

The game in question is called  "Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist". It's available as a free download (donations accepted) direct from creators Crows Crows Crows  or you can get it free without guilt from Steam.

I played it last night. It took me more like half an hour than twenty minutes. I played it again this morning and it took me more like forty minutes than half an hour. It is linear but stands repeating at least once - possibly more than once.

More than that I shan't say. I don't think it is particularly the kind of game that would be ruined if you knew in advance what it was about but on the other hand, it takes twenty minutes to play (if you crack on) so if you want to know then you might as well just play it. Like I did.

I think even I could manage a few bite-sized games like this without the scaffolding of an imagined social structure to hold up my interest. I'll keep an eye out for a few more.

If you do play, one tip (not, I think, a spoiler): don't miss the tape-recorder. I didn't even see it first time round.

Looks Like A Duck: Tanzia

For as long as there have been MMORPGs there have been players who preferred to solo. Over the years I've listened to and joined in with countless discussions, debates and arguments on the merits or otherwise of playing alone in a genre supposedly built around partnership.

There's a belief that MMOs prosper when they encourage the creation and maintenance of social bonds. We play because our friends play. It's a stance that Bartle Socializers fall into easily. Achievers follow along in search of approval and Killers have to have their prey.

Explorers, though, well sometimes they can seem less convinced by the need to share. You can see the view so much better when there's no-one standing in your way, after all.

Dude, where's my board?

The nuanced positions of individual, group and community in gaming would make a better subject for a doctoral thesis than a blog post but one thing I just want to put out there is this: there's more to an MMO than the people who play it.

Classic MMOs use specific mechanics that, in and of themselves, provide sufficient traction to grasp and hold a player's interest. Other people can be either the sugar on top or the sand in the gears but for some of us, when it comes to gameplay, it's the way MMOs set themselves up for business that compels us to keep playing them. In other words, there are people who play MMOs because of what they do there, not who they meet.

This seems to be the thinking behind Tanzia, a self-described "old-style RPG made with modern tech" that "combines elements of favorite classic action-adventure RPGs in an open 3D world". There has to be more to it than that, though, because, were it nothing but another retro-RPG, I wouldn't be writing about it here.

I'm getting deja vu again.

What's more, I certainly wouldn't have paid £10.99 for an Early Access copy on Steam, as I did last night. I was always going to buy the game, I just wasn't planning to buy it yet. I was going to wait until the full launch, supposed to be happening in just a few weeks. I don't really have time to play another game right now, MMO or otherwise, not on top of the ever-lengthening list of titles I'm failing to do justice to already.

Even so, I've been keeping tabs on Tanzia's progress since it went into EA a couple of weeks back and yesterday I took a look at the reviews on Steam. There aren't many as yet, too few to allow for an official rating, but the half-dozen people who'd taken the time to review it so far were all very positive:

"It's fun to play, and feels satisfying..."

"...really enjoying the game so far"

"The art is beautiful and the game play is smooth and reasonably polished."

Why's he casting a fireball then?

But here's the key comment, the one that had me reaching for my wallet:

"Fun little game. Reminds me of the older mmos"

Why wait when I could be having not just fun but that specific kind of fun? And now I've had a couple of hours to try it out for myself I'd have to say it was a good decision.

Parody. It's parody, okay? Oh c'mon, there's no need to call Legal!

Tanzia really does have that older MMO vibe but it's no co-incidence. The developer is Arcanity Inc. "...an American independent game studio ... founded in 2015 by former inXile, Obsidian and Sigil Games Online employees". A strong RPG pedigree but the part that really got my attention was the name-check for Sigil, along with the inclusion of both EverQuest and Vanguard in the list of games the team has worked on before.

Now it's a team but in the beginning Tanzia was primarily the work of a single developer, Jason Jacobitz. He seems to be more elusive than the average game-maker but I managed to find a revealing interview at an unlikely source, a Nintendo blog called MikeTendo64.

I told you...now you just feel stupid, right?

It's a good read throughout but the most intriguing part comes towards the end, when Jason speculates about where things might go from here, should Tanzia prove as successful as he and the team hope:

"After Tanzia, I’m not sure if we’ll do something else or jump right into a Tanzia 2...We also want our 2nd game to have a strong multiplayer aspect.”

So maybe Tanzia could become an MMO after all. I hope so because if anyone knows what the genre is all about it's a guy who can say this:

"When you’re heading into a new area, I want you to feel the excitement of exploration. You should be thinking, ‘This looks awesome. I want to see more. Is this dangerous? Maybe I’d better stay clear of that thing just in case. OMG a new village! OMG they have new equipment! OMG this equipment rocks and I can almost afford it!"

But hitting people with sticks is such fun!

That's as good a definition of the true MMO experience, as seen from the perspective of the Explorer, as I've ever heard. After playing for a couple of hours last night, I'm very happy to confirm it's also an accurate description of  what it feels like to play Tanzia.

All of which does absolutely nothing to explain why I'd still rather not be playing it alone. I'll ponder on that. If I ever figure it out I'll get back to you.

Irons In The Fire

At the very end of my "What I'm Playing" post the other day I threw in a line about how I wasn't even mentioning the mobile and non-mmo stuff. And, in doing so, mentioned it. So, here it is.

There isn't a lot because, well, I don't really play any video games that aren't MMOs, not for a long while now, but I do have three non-MMOs bookmarked so I can keep track of them in a desultorily obsessive fashion. None of them is officially released yet although two are getting close.

Furthest along by far is We Happy Few, which also happens to be the least MMOish of the three. I came across this one when Keen's jaw dropped at the E3 reveal. "WTF…Creepy. Skipping.!" was all he had to say but it was enough to make me go check out the trailer and I've been following it ever since.

WHF went into Early Access via Steam in July last year. I briefly considered buying in then but equally swiftly decided that would be a bad idea. While I can very much understand the attraction of watching an MMO grow up around me as I play it, it would make very little sense to do the same with a game built on narrative.

It's only now, pushing towards a year later, that Compulsion Games are getting around to patching in the 1.0 version of the full story. This does seem to be a case where Early Access has worked very well both for company and players. We Happy Few currently has a Very Positive Steam rating and when they say "very positive" they really mean it: 83% all time, rising to 90% over the last month.

Running your narrative-driven game successfully for nine months without actually having the narrative in place is quite a feat in itself but such acceptance comes at a risk. Compulsion Games are well aware of this and they're understandably nervous about the big switch. "It seems like a lot of people who haven’t played the game think our game is just a sandbox survival game with zero story", they say in the latest of their admirably frequent and detailed progress reports.

To that end there's going to be a series of videos (starting with this one) explaining what current players can expect the game to become, while encouraging people who don't start salivating when they hear the words "survival sandbox" not to pass by on the other side. The video features Alex Epstein, the game's narrative director, who has an interesting blog of his own, which you can find in the blog roll to the right. I was tipped to it by Tyler Sanchez in the comments last time I mentioned the game and I've been following it ever since.

We Happy Few looks set to be a success. Whether Early Access really does a game like this any favors is less certain. At current pace of development I'd guess the full launch won't come this year and by the time it does this kind of publicity may be hard to find. Then again, you can't time every game launch to coincide precisely with a once-in-a-lifetime lurch in the zeitgeist.

Next up on the assembly line is Tanzia. This colorful online RPG has been in closed testing for a long time. It missed its intended late 2016 EA launch date but not by too much. A few days ago developers Arcanity Inc. finally announced a firm date for Early Access via Steam: April 27th.

There are a couple of reasons I've been paying attention to Tanzia, which I first heard of through a brief piece on Massively OP.  Justin "Syp" Olivetti who wrote that squib caught my interest with the tagline: "Tanzia gives you the MMO experience without the ‘MMO’. I've long believed that it's as much the actual mechanics of MMORPGs that bind me to the genre as it is any of the multiplayer or social aspects, something that certainly seemed to hold true when I played Ninelives.

Ninelives is a moody, surreal work of art whereas Tanzia looks to be more of a sugar-overload romp but it's the gameplay rather than the graphics that intrigue me. Official descriptions make repeated references to the importance of kiting, which is something I don't think I have ever seen bigged up as a PR win before. I purely love kiting so it's a hook for me.

The other reason I'm paying attention to Tanzia is the pedigree of the team behind the game. The full skinny includes a whole load of prestigious studios and games but my eye was immediately caught by mention of SOE, Vanguard, EverQuest and Free Realms.

Whether Tanzia can live up to the rep of the games that underpin its design brief remains to be seen but this time I'll most likely buy in to Early Access, depending on the cost, which I don't believe has yet been confirmed. If there are packages announced already I couldn't find them.

On the other hand, Early Access for Tanzia is slated to last for just eight weeks. If they're going to hit full launch two months after EA then maybe I'll just wait. It sounds optimistic!

Bringing up the rear, a very long way behind both in familiarity and progress, but right at the front when it comes to MMO credentials, comes Antilia. Antilia was going to be an MMO but that turned out to be too much for the developer, Right Brain Games. There was a failed Kickstarter for the MMO version back in 2014 and since then the focus has been on making something smaller.

RBG describes itself as "a small team of developers dedicated to creating unique video games for the online game market" but as far as I can tell they haven't released any games. They have made a number of tools designed to aid in the creation of games but they aren't currently licensing or selling any of those for commercial use either.

What they do have is a website with some very nice screenshots and concept art and a trickle of detail about a virtual world that I find rather appealing. The game, if it ever appears, is set to be "a sandbox-style fantasy RPG, featuring a dynamic world simulation and anthropomorphic characters", which is pretty much a nailed-on "I'd play that" as far as I'm concerned.

First I have to live long enough. Whoever is behind Right Brain Games certainly isn't in a hurry. Last year the website was barely updated at all but this year has seen a relative flurry of activity with three posts so far.

The year began with an outline of project goals for 2017. The approach is very open and honest, full of self-deprecating statements and explanations:

"Progress in 2016 was very limited. This is just something that needs to be acknowledged. There wasn't really much in the way of 'secret progress' that I'm not showing. For most of the year my time on Antilia was limited to a few evenings and maybe one day each weekend...Let's face it, the development team behind Antilia is very small. While I am grateful that a good many people have expressed interest in helping the project in any way they can, these offers are from enthusiastic gamers and community members rather than seasoned game developers. Including more people on the project means more communication and coordination, as well as an investment of my time getting people set up and training them in our development tools. Doing this one-on-one has not led to much success."

It might not be what anyone wants to hear but at least they're telling it like it is!

Those are the only three non-MMO projects I'm keeping an eye on right now. Naturally the one I'm most interested in playing is the one I seem destined least likely ever to get my hands on. And I still didn't get round to mobile games. Maybe another time.

Moving Away From The Pulsebeat : Tanzia, Antilia, Ninelives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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