My Games Played for 2020 and Looking Forward into 2021

I am a little behind on my usual end of year posts with this.  Generally I have a wrap up and a looking forward post at some point in late December… but then I found a bunch of other things to write about.  I was only reminded of it when Belghast posted his charts.

2020 banner by my daughter

There is a history here, as there is with so much on this blog.  It started with something akin to goals, a list of games I wanted to play, often very specific games.  Then it became games I was likely to play.  Then it turned into something like a long term weather forecast with some easy calls (it will be warm in the summer) and some possibilities.

• 2019 – I played some things that I predicted I would, but not many
• 2018 – Technically, mission accomplished; reality, not so much.
• 2017 – I played nothing from the list, though arguably only two were playable
• 2016 – I played none from the list, but most didn’t ship
• 2015 – literally nothing I listed went live
• 2014 – I played Warlords of Draenor, which was a gimme really
• 2012 – Actually tried most of the items on the list
• 2011 – Tried 3 out of 5 eventually, but then The Agency was on the list
• 2007 LOTRO (shipped!)
• 2007 Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (Didn’t ship)

And so it was that I wrote a post way back when about what I might play in 2020.

The list was broken up into several categories:

The Sure Things

• WoW Classic
• EVE Online
• EverQuest II

The Likely Candidates

• WoW Shadowlands
• RimWorld

Possibilities

• Civilization V
• Stellaris
• World of Tanks
• Minecraft
• The Witcher

The Long Shots

• Lord of the Rings Online
• EverQuest
• Diablo III
• Elite: Dangerous
• New World

I Should Make Time

• Project: Gorgon
• Grim Dawn

So, now that the year has gone by, what did I actually play?  ManicTime has some numbers for me.  I am only listing the top ten because after that the times drop down to mere minutes played.

1. WoW Classic – 33.33%
2. EVE Online – 32.69%
3. World of Warcraft – 14.02%
4. EverQuest II – 6.03%
5. Minecraft – 5.25%
6. EverQuest – 2.16%
7. RimWorld – 2.08%
8. Diablo II – 2.02%
9. Pokemon Sword – 1.24%
10. Minecraft Dungeons – 0.75%

At the top is a close race between WoW Classic and EVE Online, with a gap smaller than ten hours played total between them.  I guess Azeroth wins over New Eden overall, since retail WoW is in third place.  Everything else shakes out from there.

As has become the custom of the neighborhood, I have a chart.

2020 games timeline

At the top are WoW Classic and EVE Online, both of which I played throughout the year.  I also put Pokemon Go on the chart.  It isn’t tracked by ManicTime, being on my phone, but I played every day in 2020.

Technically, looking at my times, I also played retail WoW every month, but there were months where that did not represent a significant investment.  I have made those months where I pretty much just did Darkmoon Faire and some pet battles as a narrow streak.  And once the level squish came and then the Shadowlands expansion launched, I spent quite a bit of time there.

EverQuest II and Minecraft had their runs.  The former was me finishing up the Blood of Luclin expansion to the extent I felt I needed to, and Minecraft was a bit of a pandemic diversion setup by Skonk.  I played a bit of EverQuest after the anniversary gave us another heroic character boost, though I ended up mostly tinkering with the Overseer feature.

RimWorld had an update that I wanted to try out.  That was good for a bit of a run, though like so many build and conquer games, it suffers from the mid-game malaise once you get your base setup well enough.

I had a great run through Diablo II to celebrate its 20 years.  The game still lives up to its legend, though I would like it to run at a resolution higher than 800×600.

I received a Nintendo Switch Lite for my birthday with a copy of Pokemon Sword, which I played for a stretch.  I just wasn’t that into it.  For a Pokemon game to grab me I have to be in the right mood and have a real goal.  I couldn’t quite get either this time around.

And then there was Minecraft Dungeons, which is a serviceable and solid but shallow ARPG whose main attraction is being set in the Minecraft IP.  I played through the story, but it doesn’t have a lot of replay value save to boost up stats so you can face harder monsters that drop gear that let you boost up your stats further.

So that was 2020.  What of 2021?

As with last year, there are some sure things this year, games I am actively playing right now so that has already been decided.  They are:

• WoW Classic
• EVE Online
• Retail WoW
  

And, given the news, we can add one slight variation to that list:

• WoW The Burning Crusade Classic

After that, however, the future is a bit fuzzy, and part of the problem is hardware related.

As I wrote about last year, I have a 34″ 3440 x 1440 wide screen monitor now, and I love playing games on it full screen.  But not every game I have plays nice with it.  The three titles I am playing now all happen to work great with it, but others struggle and have issues or won’t run at all.  I actually tried to play Grim Dawn, which was on my “should make time” list for 2020, but it was not having it at all.  It would not even launch correctly with the new monitor hooked up.

And there is a further constraint, which is my video card.  I currently have a EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB card and, given the price of college and my wife being somewhat under-employed for the last year, spending a few hundred bucks on a new one is way down the priority list right now.  So whatever I play needs to work on the big screen with that video card.  WoW Classic and retail WoW both manage very well, with a few settings dialed back a bit, and EVE Online works like a champ, all settings maxed out, save for fights where the ships on grid get past the 2,500 mark.

But most newer games require a lot more horsepower to drive all those pixels.  There is no way I am getting something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption II or Black Desert Online or anything like that to run well.

Meanwhile, a lot of older stuff is a bit shaky.  As I wrote back when I got the monitor, EverQuest, EverQuest II, and LOTRO all sort of work, but have some issues, while Minecraft gives me motion sickness on the wide screen unless I dial back the field of view so far that I might as well just play it on my phone.

First world problems, I know.

Another angle is strategy games.  Things like RimWorld not only run fine, but the large screen improves the experience.  Maybe it is time for a bit of Civilzation V again. (I’m, betting Civ VI has too much going on visually to work with my video card at that resolution.  It is the way.)  Maybe I’ll pick up World of Tanks again when I need something fresh.

Of course, the lack of desire for something fresh is part of the problem as well.  I’ve been kind of okay playing the same stuff all year.  We shall see how I feel in 2021.

SuperData Reviews 2019 Digital Revenue

SuperData Research has put out their 2019 year in review summary.  It is available for free over on their Insights page.  You have to fill out a form in order to get access to it… they have to have an email address to harvest for their efforts… but it isn’t a big deal and I have email addresses just for that sort of thing.

The report follows the pattern set by the 2017 and 2018 reports in providing details.  It is more of an ad for their services, but there is some data to be gleaned.  I do wish they would stick to the categories they use for their monthly report.  I mean, they start there with some opening numbers in the summary.

SuperData 2019 Digital Gaming Revenues

Mobile gaming remains the biggest category.  However, past that point things get broken down into more discreet categories… or mashed together into larger ones… so that comparison and alignment with the monthly charts becomes problematic.  The report, which focuses on free to play, dices up the numbers like this to start:

• Mobile – $64.4 billion
• Free-to-play PC – $21.1 billion
• Premium Console – $13.8 billion
• Premium PC – $5.2 billion
• Pay-to-play PC – $3.3 billion
• Free-to-play Console – $1.6 billion

So consoles look a bit sad there, but you have to remember that consoles are also the market segment that remains the most dependent on physical, as opposed to digital, sales.  As we see in the NPD numbers every month, Nintendo can top the charts there with physical sales… with Switch games taking up half the spots on the chart one month… and still have little or no presence on the digital sales side of the house.

And then I am not sure how they really break out the PC market.  PC F2P is pretty easy I guess, as we all know League of Legends and Fortnite and those three China titles that hold the top spots every month.  And I would guess that Premium PC would be buy to play titles, and that we might find things like World of Warcraft over in Pay-to-play PC, but I don’t really know as the report neither provides details nor uses those categories elsewhere, choosing instead to launch into a couple of broader charts.  First up is free to play, which at least lines up to a chart used last year so we have some year over year comparison value in it.

SuperData Free to Play titles 2019

Fortnite tops the lists for 2019.  Despite it not dominating the monthly categories as frequently, it is available as a PC, console, and mobile title, so when you combine all three you get Fortnite on top.  It topped the same chart last year as well, though in 2018 it brought in $2.4 billion as opposed to the $1.8 billion in managed in 2019.  Still a lot of dough.

Dungeon Fighter Online was second again this year, with its revenue going from $1.5 to $1.6 billion, though that change is small enough that it could be from an adjustment in the US Dollar (USD) to Chinese Yuan (RMB), which was up in late 2019 relative to the same period in 2018.  Still, that is fairly steady as the 2017 number was also $1.6 billion.

Honour of Kings is the top mobile exclusive title on the list, also ringing in at $1.6 billion.  It moved up from 6th place last year when it reported $1.3 billion.

And then we get to League of Legends in fourth spot.  While down a position in the chart, its revenues were $1.5 billion, up from $1.4 billion reported in 2018.  That still puts it off its peak number in 2017 when it reported $2.1 billion in revenue.

After that we see perennial members of the mobile chart listing, Candy Crush Saga and Pokemon Go.  Only the last two spots saw new entries on the list, with Game for Peace and Last Shelter: Survival, which replaced Monster Strike and Clash Royale.

Game for Peace is a reworked version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds made specifically for the China market in order to comply with content restrictions around things like blood and gore in video games.  Unlike PUBG, Game for Peace is free to play, which is probably the most practical approach in the Chinese market.

I couldn’t find much information about Last Shelter: Survival, aside from the fact that it is a mobile game from a Chinese company named Long Tech Network., so I am guessing its position on the chart in based on access to the Chinese market.

The other chart lists out the top premium PC and console titles for 2019:

SuperData Premium PC and Console titles 2019

Unsurprisingly, combining PC and consoles ends up favoring titles that are on both PC and consoles.  Literally everything on the this list is available on Windows and at least two consoles, to the point that I wonder if the title of the list literally allows only games that are cross platform.

We have three sports games… with two versions of the same sports game… five shooters, and action-adventure game that could pass for a shooter, and The Sims 4. (Which I was surprised to find out was on consoles and which really ought to have a shooter mode.)

Unlike the free to play chart, this one saw a much bigger shakeup over last year, with only Rainbow Six: Siege, Grand Theft Auto V, Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII (or 4), and FIFA 19 returning. (Though the 2019 chart also had double FIFA entries, with FIFA 18 and FIFA 19 on the list.)  And last year’s chart topper, PUBG, is nowhere to be seen.

The report goes on into some general statements about the digital market, like that 4 out of every 5 dollars spent on digital gaming were for free to play titles and 3 out of every 5 dollars spent was on a mobile title. (Though given those opening numbers, it is closer to 3 out of every 4 dollars.)

Not stated specifically, but available from some of the charts provided that break out revenue by region, Asia is far and away the top spender on mobile games, with 61% share as well as free PC titles, with a 55% share.  When it comes to premium PC titles Europe is the biggest spender with a 46% share.  And, on the console front the US is out in front with 54% of the premium console market and 53% of the free console market.  But the markets where Europe and the US are ahead are also the smallest markets on the list.  If it is big, it is big in Asia, with mobile being especially so.

The report also wanders off into streaming segmentation along with VR and AR markets.  For the former, Twitch and YouTube are the top dogs, with 23% and 22% of the revenue between them.  On the VR and AR side of things, Beat Sabre and Pokemon Go are probably the titles worth mentioning.

Anyway, some data to chew on there.  There is more detail available if you sign up and download the report.

The Shadows of Angmar

Angmar has a problem in that the level 40 to 50 content in Lord of the Rings Online, incomplete though it might have been at launch, now suffers from some overlap.

As with the situation between the Trollshaws and Evendim, if you commit to the other zones in the same level range as Angmar, which goes up against Forochel and the Misty Mountains to start with, you may find yourself above level before you even arrive in the zone.  On a standard server, where the experience is much more generous, and Moria is in the offing, Eregion might be where you head instead, as it also overlaps with the high end of the 40-50 range, allowing you to bypass Angmar altogether.

Into some legends this time…

Angmar also suffers from its position in the actual story line of the books, which is to say it is pretty much outside of the books save for the occasional historical reference by the likes of Aragorn.  There are no memories from the core books of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to relive there, no landmarks to spot, no adventures to relive.  Who wants to go to Angmar when Moria awaits?

On the flip side, the game’s initial title was The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, making Angmar arguably the raison d’etre of the first 50 levels.  It is your goal, your final destination, the end game content of the pre-expansion era of LOTRO.

The funny thing is how little time I’ve spent there over the last dozen years.  It is on the far side of Rivendell which, as I mentioned, is a place few of my characters have managed to approach over the years.  I also think, as I said with Goblin Town, it used to be more focused on group content.  Certainly the epic quest line was a fellowship only affair.  So, with the Misty Mountains closer to Rivendell, Forochel more inviting, and Eregion on the direct path to Moria, I have managed to avoid most of Angmar.

This time around though I was intent on getting through the epic quest line, and that sends you to Angmar, so it was off to Angmar I went.

Arriving in Angmar

I was a bit disappointed on arriving at the first stop in the zone, Aughaire.  Having run myself up to just shy of level 46 in Goblin Town I found myself considerably ahead of the curve when it came to quests out of there.  They started in at level 40, way below my level.  This leads me back to a working theory I have had about the original design of the game.  I suspect that somebody felt that having players run from zone to zone, doing a few quests in here then a few quests there, was somehow a desirable state of affairs.

That may work for some, but I prefer to settle into a zone and play it through.

Also on the disappointment side of things was the fact that there was no swift travel option from Aughaire to Esteldin or Rivendell.  If you get sent on a “Go check in with Elrond” quest… and, of course you get sent on those… the ride back to Esteldin is guaranteed to test your patience.

Angmar as a zone is different from much of the game up to that point.  You’re now in a land that is a suzerainty of Mordor and has been for a long time.  There are no silly hobbits hanging around or reminders of the time of elves and abandon works of the men of Numenor.  The place is a colorless as the Borean Tundra and as spiky as the Blades Edge Mountains with some Stratholme like architecture thrown in for kicks.

Seriously, is this not the Borean Tundra?

The sky is an odd shade as well.

And outpost in Angmar

This is Mordor junior and, while it may be a dark gray shadow of that black land, it is the local focus of evil so when you cut your way through its denizens you’re stabbing at the groin of evil in the region.

The environmental sounds in the zone however are most excellent.

Not having done much in Angmar, I was determined to buckle down and see the sites no matter how many times I had to go back to Rivendell for and advise and consent session.  So you run around slaying plenty of orcs and wargs and men who have sworn allegiance to Angmar.  Oddly though, one of the deeds you get is to slay actual citizens of Angmar who, at first, are pretty sparse on the ground.

The quests were of the normal variety for the game, with the some variation.

Angmarian Jumping Puzzle

I started running into more and more of a bias towards fellowship quests in the mix along the way.  I finished up what I could and followed the epic quest line to the next settlement, Gabilshathur.

Gabilshathur is a niche in rock populated by dwarves who, like the earth-kin in Aughaire, seem mostly interested in setting you to clean up the countryside.  My patience with the fetching lost items and slaying ten of this mob or collecting the gizzards of a dozen of another was starting to wear thin.  I decided to just follow the epic quest line for a bit, a plan that quickly took me to Gath Forthnir in the north of the zone.

Map of Angmar with additional notation

There, of course, I found myself a little in over my head.  I had made it to 47 by this point, but the quests and mobs were closer to 50.  Also, I couldn’t get the stable master stop at the encampment until I had raised my faction with the Council of the North, the local Free People’s franchise in Angmar.

Travel Requirements

This put me back on the “do all the quests” path though, again, fellowship quests were popping up a lot.  Something about it being an end game zone I am sure.

Also, you’d think I’d get something for the kinship I’m in

Fortunately, while the quest lines were not advancing my reputation very much, the local mobs tend to drop lots of tokens that can be consumed for Council of the North reputation.  I just had to take care.  In addition to the whole fellowship quest thing the land had more than its share of elite trolls wandering around.  For the most part I steered clear of them, though occasionally things didn’t go as planned.

Just have to keep running…

Soon enough I was acquaintance level with the Council of the North, so I was able to get the stable master stop.  I was going to need it because the epic quest line had a lot of running about in store for me.

The January Update and the Death of the Agent Finder

In place of the Agent Finder we will set up The Agency. And it shall not be tiny and dark, but as beautiful and terrible as the the star maps both new and old!  Fair as the sea and the sun and the snow upon the mountain as seen from orbit! Dreadful as a sudden hot drop! Stronger than the tanking modules of any faction. All shall love it and despair!

-January 2018 Patch Notes, early draft

Into the cold reality of the new year… unless you’re in Sydney, in which case you’ve recently been the hottest place on the planet… as YC120 comes with new changes.

The first update of the year for EVE Online is upon us and it touches a sore spot with me.  I’ve been over this already, so I won’t rehash history.  The short version is that the old Agent Finder, which I still think of as “new,” is going away.  The replacement is in the iron framework of The Agency.

You shall put nothing before The Agency

There is a reasonable logic to this change.  CCP wants to put all things PvE into The Agency framework.  The filters for finding an agent in The Agency are even a little bit better than they were in the Agent Finder.  The problem is that The Agency only has room in its soul for a dozen results.  Maybe that is all that people need.  I just rebel at the thought of replacing something that shows all the agents that meet your criteria with something that only shows the nearest twelve.

Anyway, I’ve probably given that change to the game all the weight it deserves and then some.  There is a Dev Blog about changes to The Agency which will now also serve as a way to locate:

• Factional Warfare Sites
• Incursions
• Expeditions

In addition the Journal window will see some changes, with The Agency taking over a number of its roles.  I suspect that this will annoy some people merely due to having to change long instilled habit, but for me the Journal isn’t that big of a deal.  My primary use for it is to check on how may Loyalty Points I have earned but never spent over the years.

Also, NPC Forward Operating Bases… which are also becoming more numerous with this update… will be visible via The Agency interface as “Pirate Strongholds.”

Anyway, the reach of The Agency continues to grow.  If you’re a fan of the interface you’re probably happy, and if you’re not… well… you’d better get used to it all the same.

Also in this update, NPC coloration in the overview is now supposed to follow a consistent pattern:

• Blue – Friendly NPCs
• White – Neutral NPCs
• Red – NPCs that mean you harm and are probably trying to shoot you even now

I’m pretty sure it was always supposed to be that way, but seem to recall some neutral, or at least non-hostile, NPCs getting colored red in the past.  Maybe that is all good now.

On other fronts CCP has applied their current shader technology to more objects and structures found in deadspace and missions areas.  I expect asteroid mining stations to be at least 30% more “shiny.”

CCP has also reworked the occasionally problematic reload cycle in an attempt to fix issues that occur when you’re reloading and do a state transition.  While the work was done in the background it does have some user end changes which include:

• It is no longer possible to group or ungroup weapons while the weapons are reloading.
• Cloaking, docking, and jumping after reloading will no longer interfere with reloading (but a cloaked ship can still not start a reload).
• After the inventory operations have completed the reloading will no longer be interrupted by anything (but other things can be blocked until the timer has finished).
• All inventory operations connected to a reload command are now done at the beginning of reloading and the reload timer is behaving like a reactivation timer on the module.
• Several other minor bugs and inconsistencies around loading and unloading ammunition have been fixed.
• Fixed a bug, which could lead to loss of ammunition when grouping the weapons of an Upwell Structure.

Hopefully this will resolve the issues intended and only introduce a few minor new issues.

In addition there is the usual long list of smaller issues addressed.  Information about the release can be found on the Updates page and in the Patch Notes.  As of this writing the update has been deployed successfully and is the current reality in New Eden.  There is a known issue when it comes to expeditions in The Agency already, so that functionality has been returned to the old Journal for now.

Daybreak Doomsaying

Since the announcement last week that Daybreak would be shutting down Landmark, there has been quite the hum of doom and gloom and wondering what other titles in their catalog might be headed for the chop.  Over at Massively OP they turned this into two posts, one asking if you’re worried about any Daybreak titles and then a poll as to which game people think is next.

It is watching you

The articles themselves are not big thrills, but the comment sections of both are rife with wild speculation and what I would consider unfounded and counter-factual claims.  All of that got me to mentally stack ranking the titles based on what I perceive as their viability based on what we can all see in the news and the occasional rumor that has come my way.

Given that, here is my list, from least to most vulnerable.

EverQuest – Bedrock

Emotionally I am tempted to say that SOE/Daybreak without EverQuest is a ship without a rudder.  EQ is the cornerstone on which the empire was built, so widely popular and wildly profitable in the days before World of Warcraft, it spawned a port, a sequel, two false starts at a second sequel, and likely represents the most valuable IP the company holds.

Also, a lot of people still play it.  And they pay to play it.  Two of the three most popular servers require Daybreak All Access subscriptions.  Every time Daybreak stands up a nostalgia server it gets swamped, to the point that they had to write a login queue and take the zone instancing tech from EverQuest II in order to keep from having to put up overflow servers.  And as the pre-WoW subscription champ, it has a lot of former players to pitch nostalgia at.

And it isn’t just nostalgia.  The game still gets an expansion every year, which is something you don’t bother doing if people aren’t buying enough copies.  Expansions would have to stop before I would consider the game was closer than five years from being shut down.

DC Universe Online – Profit

This is sort of a blank spot for me.  I don’t play the game, not liking it on Windows.  However I have heard, throughout its life, that it is profitable… at least on PlayStation, where at one point Smed said it generated more revenue that any other F2P option on that platform.

It is also unencumbered by Station Cash/Daybreak Cash, at least on consoles, which makes its accounting all the more simple.  And DCUO is the only game to actually expand during the Daybreak era, having been ported to XBox.  I have heard that did not go as well as it could have, but a game has to be doing okay to expand its base.

EverQuest II – Stalwart

The other game that gets people to subscribe to Daybreak Access.  Never the star and not as successful selling nostalgia as its older brother, EQII still has a solid following.  It must have been doing okay for a long stretch, as it seemed to be the focus of SOE’s oddball science experiments with things like SOEmote.  And, of course, it does get an expansion every year, which I think marks it as pretty safe for the near future.

Still, I can’t mark it as solid as EQ, and I roll my eyes every time somebody in the comment sections assumes that it has many more subscribers than EQ merely because of their relative ages.  EQII also remains the one Daybreak game I play regularly so, strictly speaking, I am not even picking my favorite as safest.

H1Z1: King of the Kill – Wunderkind

I hesitated to put this below EQII as it is Daybreak’s darling, the star of Twitch, and is getting its own currency in order to break it free of the burden that is Station Cash.  But it is the new kid as well, so that decided the ordering.  Safe so long as it remains popular, it seems to be getting all the development resources when it comes to the H1Z1 duo.

PlanetSide 2 – Struggling

The favored child of former Chairman Smed, the seemingly simple sequel to the original PlanetSide has had a whole host of issues over the course of its career.  It managed to get all the aim-bot and hacking problems of its predecessor while not having as much draw as $60 shooters like Call of Duty.

The executive creative director said the game was “really struggling” a little over a year ago, unable to get people to subscribe to Daybreak All Access just to play.  The game has been shut down in South Korea and China, hasn’t come close to Smed’s old feature list, and there hasn’t been much in the way of news about the game, a danger sign at a company where silence leads to closure.

H1Z1: Just Survive – No News is Bad News

Not done, not loved, and not very high in the queue for resource, Just Survive doesn’t need a blood red mark the size of a doubloon on its cheek to cement its position at the bottom of the safety list.  SOE/Daybreak have a long tradition of neglecting titles, failing to mention them, promising some news “soon” in the run up to the point that they are canned.

Not a bad game, this base building zombie survival variation, but you have to play with a regular group on a server where there are other players but where you are not overwhelmed.  But if somebody at Columbus Nova showed up and said that their research indicates that Daybreak should only have five games, I have no doubt this is what would get cut.

Not Candidates

I keep seeing Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online come up as doomed in the dystopian  Daybreak future.  However, while we still don’t know the full extent of the relationship between Daybreak and Standing Stone Games, I doubt the team in San Diego is going to be able to shutter either title of their own accord.

Furthermore, WB isn’t spinning those games off out of the goodness of its heart and a love of the player base.  WB expects to get paid over time, and it wouldn’t have bothered setting them up as an license revenue income source if it didn’t think it would at least pay back the lawyers fees needed to setup Standing Stone.

When?

While I may have picked H1Z1: Just Survive as candidate for closure in my 2017 predictions post, I don’t think we’re going to hear anything about the game for a while, if we do hear bad news.  Its code connection with King of the Kill may be close enough still for it to get some attention.  Eventually though Daybreak will either need to do something with the game or stop wasting resources on it.  The more time that passes without any real change, the more likely it seems to me that closure will be the end result.

And then there is PlanetSide 2.  I am still stuck on that “really struggling” statement.  Then again, it is linked to King of the Kill in its code base and does seem to be getting some attention.  If Smed were still around I wouldn’t even consider PS2 for closure, as it was his baby.  Without him around and the harsh realities of being and “indie” studio nothing is strictly safe any more.

Anyway, that is my outsiders opinion on the subject.  We shall see what 2017 brings.