Another Part Of The Forest

There are plenty of MMORPGs sitting at the back of my hard drive, gathering virtual dust. Every so often I get the urge to pull a few out and take a look.

It's an urge I generally find quite easy to shrug off. The last time I made the effort to do something about it was in January last year, when I shifted a whole bunch of games from portable drives to my newishly installed third HDD. That was also just about the last time I played any of them.

One title I'm always thinking of revisiting is Elder Scrolls Online. I never really got on with it. Like many people I don't like the combat but unlike most I'm not sold on the graphics either. Throw in the dull, overwritten quests and the flat voice acting and it's a wonder I have any interest in returning at all.

I wouldn't, only I'm acutely aware I've barely seen anything of the wider game, having spent all my time with a single race in a single region. With the entire world having been rendered accessible from the get go, I feel I really should give it another try. I know it won't come to anything but at least I'd get a post or two out of the experience.

That could be the post I'm writing now if it wasn't for one thing: ESO is still patching. It's been at it for about two hours and I've gone right off the boil. You have to catch these impulses at the flood or they fade away.

Instead I'm going to say something about an MMORPG I've mentioned a few times in the past, one that absolutely no-one I have ever heard or read about plays. It's The Hammers End and I first wrote about it in June 2013, when my main interest was the extraordinary payment scheme. You could download the game for nothing, then you got a free hour's play before you had to pay a monthly sub of $14.95 if you wanted to carry on.

I played my hour and passed on the sub. A year later they'd extended the free trial to a more rational fourteen days and I tried again. I didn't have much to say about it but I took some pictures, which I used to illustrate a post on ArcheAge for some inexplicable reason.

By the time I mentioned The Hammer's End again it was 2019 and the game was apparently using "a straightforward F2P/Premium system". The more surprising fact was probably that it was still up and running but perhaps not as surprising as what I found when I clicked on the icon today.

I got a pop-up telling me my install was out of date and I needed to re-download the game. I followed the link to the website, which has been revamped once again but still retains its enviable simplicity, a single page with only the most essential information to get you in and playing.

In amusing contrast to my experience with ESO, it took me no more than a couple of minutes to download and re-install the entire game. That had to be done because it's now running on a new engine.

Adventure World Studios LLC, the company behind THE and about whom I can find nothing other than that they're registered in Aloha, Oregon, developed the original engine specifically for that game. I'm guessing they also developed the new one. It's called "Atmosphere Engine" according to the website, which otherwise says nothing about it at all. Google has no comment to make, either.

There has always been a huge mantle of mystery over The Hammers End. It's very professionally produced, a fully-fledged MMORPG with content and systems that work. The content may be quite generic and the systems unexceptional but in the era of paid pre-alphas and "Early Access" that never ends, releasing a game as finished and complete as this seems like a major achievement.

It's still not something you could easily imagine people paying $14.95 a month for. If, indeed, that's how much it costs these days. I can't actually say for sure because the website no longer mentions any fee at all.

Whatever F2P/Premium arrangements I referred to a year ago seem to have vanished with the winter snows. I wanted to see what the game looked like running under the new engine so I tried to log in using my old details. They were recognized but my account was marked "inactive" and to revive it I was directed to PayPal.

I declined to follow that link. Instead I took advantage of the fourteen day free trial option available to new accounts. I made a new account and logged in on that.

I like The Hammers End. It's simple without being simplistic, it's atmospheric and the gameplay is pleasantly redolent of the genre's early days. I harbor fantasies of one day playing long enough to see some of the dungeons that open up in the mid and higher levels. It'll never happen, of course, but it's nice to log in and run around once in a while.

The game looks fantastic. Not that it didn't look pretty good before - "a very atmospheric, attractive world" I said, back in 2013, adding "the art design seemed convincing and coherent" and finishing up with "it felt like a proper place."

All of that is still true but now it also looks, well, magical. It has a picture-book feel to it, while also reminding me quite intensely of actual forests and woods I've known. I took a lot of screenshots, which don't do justice to how beautiful the gameworld can be.

There's not a lot of variety, at least in the parts I've seen. It's mostly forest. The area where you start is autumnal but if you follow the road far enough you come to winter. The zones are big. It took me a good few minutes to find the end of the first one. If you want to take the tour, though, you don't have to run. There's a handy "travel coach" in every village who'll port you anywhere you choose, for free.

Character models are odd. There are nominally six races but that's two kinds of identical frogs, three identical females and a rat. The characterization options must be in the running for the most limited I have ever seen. Brownies, elves and faeries can change the color of their hair, frogmen and nocturni their skin and burwoods a kind of tattoo or marking on the side of their face. That's it.

Other than those minimal identifiers, every character looks the same. Which might be a problem if there were any other players. I didn't see or hear anyone for the hour and a half I was playing and when I checked the marketplace, where players can trade with each other, it was completely empty.

And that brings me back to my perennial question: how does this game exist? It's been running, to my certain knowledge, for seven years. The login screen offers a choice of four servers, although only one was online when I made my new character. It's even enjoying a new coat of graphical paint. It even has raid dungeons. Who are they for?

I don't suppose it matters. It's one of life's eternal mysteries. It would be nice to know, all the same.

If I Can't See It, It's Not There

Above is a screenshot of my desktop. Some of my desktop. I cropped four columns - forty icons - from the left-hand side.

Apart from a handful of single-player games - in fact, all the single-player games I currently own - everything that remains is either an MMO, an MMO platform or an application related in some way to playing MMOs.

The background is a screenshot from Guild Wars 2. All my desktop backgrounds in living memory have been shots from MMOs. I have tens of thousands of them so there's plenty of choice.

Obsession is such an ugly word. Then again, so is breezeblock.

As I mentioned in some post or other a while back, I got a 2TB HDD for my birthday but I only got around to installing it after Christmas. That gave me three internal HDDs and four terabytes of onboard storage in total.

This morning I hooked up an external HDD via a USB caddy and moved a bunch of MMOs across. Then I went through all three drives and made sure the icons for all those MMOs were present on the desktop.

Well, I say I went through them. I mostly opened folders in a haphazard fashion and pulled out any launchers or executables that I happened to spot. I am no more organized in filing or ordering my games than I am in playing them. Still, I think I got most of what there was.

This means I currently have thirty-eight MMOs, MMORPGs or limited tests for MMOs immediately available from the screen. Having an active icon on my desktop significantly increases the chances I will actually play any one of these. If I have to go find the game on an external disc, or even go digging around in the files on an internal drive, chances are I'll get distracted and end up doing something else entirely.

That said, not all of those thirty-eight MMOs are playable right now. The icon for Valiance, for example, one of the numerous would-be successors to City of Heroes, used to go to some kind of tech demo or sneak peak. I don't think that's running any more. Hang on, I'll find out... no. it's not.

As for Minions of Mirth, it used to be an MMO but now it's not. I'd forgotten all about until it got a mention on MassivelyOP a while back. The server hosting the MMO died but the offline single-player version still works. I patched it up today, made a new account and logged in to check. I never got very far in MoM the first (or second, or third) time around and I certainly don't plan on trying to get any further in single-player mode but I've confirmed it's there if I want it.

Dino Storm I did used to enjoy playing. I might very well fancy another go. Is that one still running? It didn't work when I tried it a few minutes ago. I thought maybe it had finally died but nope! As it turns out, it's just not on Bigpoint any more. Not that I 'd remembered it was.

Bigpoint decided to get out of the cowboy dinosaur business back in September last year but the game continues under the banner of Splitscreen Games. I just downloaded the new launcher from their website. It let me log in with my old username and my character was waiting for me just as I left him, what must now be several years ago.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many MMOs there are and how long they last. Also how devotedly they retain our data even when we don't seem to have any more interest in using it. Dino Storm was fairly busy when last I played but there seemed to no-one but me around this time.

Auteria, an MMO in comparison with which Dino Storm is World of Warcraft, is also still plugging away. I just logged in and there it was. Why, and for whom? No idea.

Speaking of obscure MMOs that no-one ever talks about, let alone plays, one that's not on the desktop screenshot above is The Hammers End. Actually, it is on the desktop now but I added it after I took the screenshot. I remembered it as I was writing this post si I went to see if it was still around. It is.

The website has been smartened up somewhat. Not only that but the ludicrous payment model I balked at has been replaced with a straightforward F2P/Premium system. I downloaded the game and, yes, my old login still works and my character is still there.

What's more, THE seems to have received some significant quality of life attention, possibly as part of the F2P conversion. If I can find a spare hour or two I'll have a run around, see what's changed and maybe do an update post. It's an interesting little game that deserves more attention that it gets. Well, it would be hard for it to deserve less since it gets approximately none...

The main reason I started all of this wasn't to dig up obscure old titles and see how they're doing. It was to dig up big, successful titles I keep reading about and see how they're doing. The two I specifically would like to look at again are Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert Online.

There's always seem to be plenty of people willing to bang on about how no-one makes proper AAA MMORPGs any more and how the entire genre is doomed and yet there's these two, seemingly doing great business, both popular and successful. Not to mention Warframe. And FFXIV. Just off the top of my head.

I don't think Warframe's ever going to be my sort of thing, mainly because the suits your character has to wear are so unremittingly hideous. I have never seen one single screenshot of the game where the player-character didn't look repulsive. I thought it might be different in the game itself but if anything it was worse.

If Warframe's off the table for reasons of fashion, FFXIV certainly isn't. Characters there are a pleasure to look at. I might play some more of that, some day, seeing as how Square were kind enough to offer the first thirty or so levels for free.

What I really want to do, though, is to visit my old house in BDO. The housing there doesn't get much of a mention but i thought it was pretty spiffy. and maybe see how much ESO has changed.

I might also, finally, get back to Dragon Nest. That turned out to be another icon that didn't work. Dragon Nest has a convoluted history of ownership/publishing/regionalization that I could never keep straight but it seems whatever version I had installed isn't around any more.

Dragon Nest Europe is still available via Steam, though, and I'm patching that up as I type. (Ed. It didn't work. Now I'm downloading it direct from the website). I also have the mobile version on Android. Supposedly it's cross-plattform now. If I could find my old log-in details I'd test that but I have a horrible feeling I might have to start again from scratch.

Anyway, enough of this. I'm just hoping that having all these titles directly to hand, ready to fire up on a whim, might lead to me playing a wider variety of MMOs again. Of late I've been in something of a comfortable rut, doing dailies in GW2 and pottering about in EverQuest II. Very enjoyable it's been, too, but it wouldn't do me any harm to branch out a little.

I am very definitely not going to follow the blogging trend and start setting myself goals or targets, let alone producing some kind of schedule. Heaven forfend! I am hoping, though, that merely seeing the icons in front of me each time I sit down at the keyboard might lead to a little meander across the MMO map.

After all, there's so much out there I haven't seen.

All Work And No Play Makes ArcheAge A Dull Game. Maybe.

It seems that ArcheAge is gathering a certain word-of-mouth momentum, which is odd, considering just how long we've all known about the game. I last mentioned it in the context of the eye-watering Alpha buy-in price but its been going the rounds for, what, three years now in alphas and betas and various live releases.

Back then, Ardwulf was drawing comparisons with Vanguard, which naturally made me feel somewhat favorably toward the possibility of playing it one day. Now Saylah is running a series of detailed "what you can do and how you can do it" type posts that are pushing  me two ways. The Piracy on the High Seas post I linked yesterday was kinda exciting but her most recent entry on the various ways of making money in ArcheAge made the whole enterprise sound anything but.

Here's the problem: just about all the activities Saylah lists - mining, crafting, trading, fishing, farming, playing the market - sound like work to me. Yes, they are, by and large, things you can do in most MMOs but in most MMOs they are sideshows, optional activities you could either go at with vigor, dabble in or opt out of entirely. They don't comprise the core activity of the game.

This, really, is my issue with sandbox gaming in general. I don't especially want to come home from a real job to a pretend one. I want to go exploring and adventuring I want to goof around. I don't want to tend crops or carry packages over long distances just to earn enough imaginary money to buy better crop-raising tools and faster package-carrying transport so I can do it all again only slightly faster. At least I don't want to have to do that.

The core activity of MMORPGs, at least in my understanding of the genre, is killing things to see what they drop then putting the best things you find on your character. Serial Killer Barbies; it's what the genre is. My characters live in the world and understand it but as a player looking in from outside, when it comes to actual gameplay, that's my motivation - kill some wildlife, dress a doll. In ArcheAge, that's right out: mobs don't drop coin, gear or crafting components. I'm not quite sure if that means they don't drop anything other than quest items but it doesn't leave much other than maybe consumables.

Saylah explains that questing is at the heart of leveling and gearing your character. "Gear is provided as quest rewards, looted from dungeons, earned with end game tokens or crafted by players...You receive gear sets at the end of quest chains – 3 pcs to the set from this guy, 2 pcs from that gal and a weapon from another one." That just happens to be a mechanic I strongly dislike. Several of them in fact. 

So, we appear to have an MMO in prospect that heavily focuses on things I would consider "work" not play, while excluding one of the key factors that draws me to play MMOs in the first place. Added to which it uses a series of mechanics I usually try to avoid whenever I can. The PvP and Piracy aspects don't put me off the way they did Syp - it's the underlying premise and basic mechanics.

Then I read SynCaine's rhetorical piece, where he asks himself, in tones positively dripping with ennui, whether he might end up giving it a run. He ponders "I still don’t get what a ‘sandpark’ is, in terms of what you are trying to accomplish...if your core gameplay (combat via questing) isn’t fun or engaging, am I really going to keep playing so I can fly around or sail a boat?" Is there a good answer to that? The only one I can think of is that the scenery really is that good and the gameplay you have to endure is not actively unpleasant. That's hardly a ringing endorsement.

Saylah, at least, is reassuring on both those points: Of the visuals she says " ArcheAge on the water has no equal in my MMO experience. It’s simply breath taking. Mining along the shoreline, fishing or standing by watching players load their ships, is a visual treat."  And on quests "All I can say is that they’re not horrible."

Unlike Syncaine I'm not struggling to find an MMO, any MMO, worth trying. I'll probably take a look at ArcheAge when it launches just because its new, it's free and it looks pretty. I wouldn't expect to stay long but you never know until you try. Perhaps what sounds like work in print will feel like play in practice.

On balance, though, the more I think about the full implications of sandbox gaming, the less attractive they seem. Oh, and since I didn't have any pictures of ArcheAge, I've taken the liberty of using a few snaps from The Hammers End. I finally caved and started the free trial last night. It's definitely not any kind of sandbox, the questing is meh and I don't think I'll be staying there long either but, hey, I'm a rat with a sword bigger than he is exploring dark woods with his undead, dual-cleaver-wielding pet fish! Beat that, ArcheAge!





 

When They Said The Subscription MMO Was Dead...

...clearly they hadn't seen The Hammers End.  Neither had I until I stumbled across it  by  chance while visiting MMORPG.com looking for something else entirely.

Lemme guess. A goblin stole your pants, right?

The Hammer's End is a new MMO that seems to have sprung fully formed from the void. Developers Adventure World Studios eschew the traditional route to market. Not for them the seemingly-endless PR campaign building up to a series of limited-access events ending in an "open beta" that goes on and on. No weeks, months, years drip-feeding content reveals in "exclusive" interviews. No competitions or giveways with counters ticking down the limited number of precious keys.

Pretty flowers, elegant UI

None of that. They just made an MMO and launched it. They put up a one-page website with a description you could fit on a postcard, threw in a Download button and bingo! Take it or leave it.

What is it then? F2P, cash shop, all that jazz?

Nope. It's free to download but if you want to play it it's $14.95 a month.

Whaaaa?

Ok, at least tell me it has a free trial!

Sure it does. It lasts an hour. One hour and then whatever you happen to be doing, you're done. Game over, out you go. Want to finish that starter quest? Better pony up that $14.95.

Pickable flowers means Gathering's in. Crafting? I have no idea.

And y'know what the weirdest thing of all is? I probably will. If there wasn't so much going on in MMOland right now, what with the FFXIV beta, that interesting low-level Rift event, the Aetherblades over at GW2, Greenskins reaching City of Steam and FireFall going live in just over a week I'd have paid my $14.95 already.

That's my pet. He's a...I'll get back to you on that...

It really does look like an interesting MMO. I can say that with authority because I spent a whole hour playing it. It has a very pleasant old-school vibe, gameplay and graphics both. Apparently they built their own in-house engine and they've used it to make a very atmospheric, attractive world. Well, a forest. That's as much as I saw, but it was a really foresty forest.

The art design seemed convincing and coherent. Most importantly, THE  passed that most crucial test; it felt like a proper place.

The controls all worked, the UI was minimal and elegant, the whole thing felt...professional. From comments on the MMORPG.com thread there are 50 levels followed by an AA system, it has a number of non-instanced dungeons and the world is sizeable. I'd also second the comment that claims "You can definitely feel the "Everquesty" influence" . I could, in spades.

Have mallet, will travel.

Oh, and as you probably already figured out from the screenshots, you can play a weasel. Or is it a beaver? Don't fancy that? Try a Brownie then (they look more like bixies who got dressed in a hurry to me) or a frog or a lizard. It's a woodland animal MMO.

If there was one thing that could possibly make this Everquest-influenced, cartoon-animal populated, $14.95 a month retro-graphic MMO more commercially viable, what do you think it might be? Go on, take a guess.

Yep, that's right - non-consensual open-world PvP!

Cheese and springwater? Why, yes we do!

Get to level seven and it's every weasel for himself. If you ever meet someone of the other faction, that is. (It's Brownies and Weasels vs Frogs and Lizards, in case you're laying odds). With current populations estimated in low single figures by a couple of commenters on that thread you're probably safe for now. If you're still nervous maybe best wait until they turn on the other three servers I saw listed when I made my weasel - another PvP server and two flagged PvE. Nothing like being prepared.

Still and all, I'm going to play this thing. If it had some kind of F2P model or a normal free trial (a week would be the minimum you'd expect) it'd be in my rotation right now. I'm willing to give it $14.95, one time at least. But if I'm paying I probably should be sure I have at least a few hours to play  and this, as I mentioned, is a busy time.

There's no place like Bind. There's no place like Bind.

So I'll have to get back to The Hammers End when I have a suitable lull. I just hope it's still there when I'm ready for it.