Quote of the Day – Empty Vision

Yes, today’s world is a magical place. But our online alternatives have gotten kind of… mundane. Predictable. Kill some blues, collect some purples, fetch ten of whatever. They don’t have to be that way.

-Raph Koster, The Future of Online Worlds

I enjoy a good Raph Koster post.  He can bring a lot of insight into the history of online games, especially MUDs and MMORPGs.  So I was anticipating something good, something with some heft, something that would leave me thinking when I saw a new post pop up in my feed from his blog.

That turned out to just be a “go look at the thing I wrote elsewhere” post, directing people to a new item over at Playable Worlds, his current venture.  So I went and read that.

The future is somewhat vague

And it was a whole lot of nothing.

I mean sure, he invoked a some nice ideas, which I will sum up with bullet points that are the phrases he highlighted in the text:

• We dreamt of living worlds
• A lot of those big dreams did not come true
• It’s time
• yes, worlds can feel alive
• fits into your life
• it shouldn’t matter what device you have or how much time you have free
• playable worlds

And in between those phrases is a lot of empty filler.

Seriously, I got to the final sentence of the whole thing…

We can dream big again, together. It’s time to turn those dreams back into playable worlds.

…and wondered where page two was.

The whole thing reads like the opening of an investor pitch or a GDC talk… throwing in the name of the company as the final words is almost too trite… that will then proceed to get into the meat of the topic.  But there is no meat.  That is all you get, a vision so nebulous that one hesitates to call it a vision.

Of course, the mere fact that he posted even that vaporous tidbit will get some people worked up.  This is Raph Koster, who has Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies on his resume, both of which stand out as special in the long line of online worlds.  Part of me gives him the benefit of the doubt just based on that.

So another part of me, the somewhat more abrasive and cynical part that has been nurtured by the industry over the last 20+ years, wants to shout out, “But what have you done for us lately?”

Because those two titles were also from a long time ago in the current technological timeline.  And, after leaving SOE in 2006, his sole public venture was MetaPlace, which had a similar open vision, and which shut down rather suddenly, taking with it any work that those who invested time with it had created.  And even that happened more than eleven years ago at this point.

It is almost a tech industry genre, the young designer with vision who has a huge impact early in their career, and then never has similar success afterwards and ends up on Fitzcarraldo-esque journey to relive and even top their youthful acclaim.  Their names alone generate interest and a following… think Richard Garriortt, Chris Roberts, Brad McQuaid, Mark Jacobs… and set expectations that their new vision, which is generally their early vision reinforced and revised upwards, will deliver.

The next time that pans out will be the first time so far as I can tell.  The jury is still out.

Of course, I might commend Raph for not going too deep or too grandiose with his vision, though it still feels too light to drum up any enthusiasm in my jaded heart.  At least he didn’t lay out a bunch of specifics that we will later hold against him when they fail to appear.  But I remain confident that we’ll find a way.

CCP Removes Most Basic Ore and Minerals from Moon Mining

CCP finally announced the long awaited/feared/expected Moon Mining update to the New Eden mineral starvation plan.

An Athanor pulling a moon chunk

Back in the middle of February, when Fanfest was still on and the Corona virus was something happening mostly on cruise ships and in other countries, CCP landed a radical hit on mining output.  The asteroid count in mining anomalies was reduced and the ore yield per asteroid was cut dramatically across the board.  The only thing left untouched were moon mining operations, though we were told we should expect the following soon:

• Complete removal of all basic ore types from all moons
• Adjustments on ore volume extracted per day, per moon
• Adjustments on moon ore type yields of basic minerals

And today’s announcement came back with most of that.  I’m not sure about the middle item, but perhaps that gets effectively changed with the other updates, which were:

• All basic ores (Veldspar, Scordite, Pyroxeres, Plagioclase, Omber, Kernite, Jaspet, Hemprphite, Hedbergite, Gneiss, Dark Ochre, Spodumain, Crokite, Bistot, Arkonor), will be removed from moons. In some cases, they have been replaced with Moon Ore.
• All basic materials (Tritanium, Pyerite, Mexallon, Isogen, Nocxium, Zydrine, Megacyte) will be removed from moon ore DNA (refining materials output table below) with the following exceptions:
  • R4 moon ores (Bitumens, Coesite, Sylvite, Zeolites) keep their original yield of Pyerite & Mexallon (Tritanium was removed).

I will have a post on Monday about the mineral starvation plan so far via a look at the February monthly economic report, but it looks like the sparks might not really fly until we see what the April numbers are.  Expect the prices of minerals and everything made from them… which is everything… to rise.

The changes went into effect immediately, so that is the way things are now.  Any moon chunk pull that was in progress got to keep the old ore/mineral output, but all new pulls get the new thin soup.

Reactions in the forum thread about this change are about as expected.

Blapril is a Promise that Blaugust is Bound to Keep

Pardon that mangled quote but I always feel like I have to find a different title when a bunch of people are writing about the same thing.

And, if you’ve been around the blog neighborhood, you may already know what I am talking about, and that is Blapril.

The Blapril commeth

Blapril is Blaugust come early.  Blaugust is the annual festival of blogging that Belghast runs, but with so many people at loose ends and with the general oppressive sense of the world, he thought it might be time for a community activity.

And while I am not thrilled with the name… everything is down hill from Blaugust I suppose, which works so well… I do applaud the idea.

Belghast has a full post about the event here with the usual options.  The schedule, which you may indulge in or ignore as suits you, is set out as follows:

• March 29th – April 4th – Blapril Prep Week
• April 5th – April 11th – Topic Brainstorming Week
• April 12th – April 18th – Getting to Know You Week
• April 19th – April 25th – Developer/Creator Appreciation Week
• April 26th – May 2nd – Staying Motivated Week
• May 3rd – May 9th – Lessons Learned Week

That gives you six weeks of potential blogging motivation.

To get involved you can do some or all of the following:

• The first step is to fill out the Sign-Up Form for Blapril 2020 which can be found here. Only those who have signed up will be given credit towards the awards.
• Next make sure you are active on the Blaugust Discord and the link for that can be found here. This is the third year we have been active on Discord and it is a community that has managed to stay evergreen throughout the years. Maybe even share your content each day in the appropriately named “share-your-content” channel.
• When you share your content on social media please use the hashtag #Blapril2020 for tracking purposes and to make it easier for those watching the event to find fresh content.
• Mingle with your other Mentors and Participants because this is a community event, and part of the fun is getting to know the community. These folks represent a social structure that you can lean on for advice in the coming years. I personally deeply value my ties with other bloggers that I have built up over the last decade of doing this thing.
• If you are so inclined there is a “gaming-together” channel on Discord for impromptu grouping in various games while the event is going on.

If you have a blog already, sign right up and get involved.  If you don’t have one, now would be an opportunity to get one going.

The participant list so far is:

• Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
• Cali – Diary of a Guildleader
• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Discgrace – Daily Creative Thing
• Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Elio – The Path They Walk
• Everwake – Everwake’s Internet Adventures
• Jen Thorpe – Book of Jen
• Joar – WoW Alt Addiction
• Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
• MagiWasTaken – indiecator.home.blog
• Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• Naithin – Time to Loot
• Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs
• Panda Steve – Panda Steve Types Stuff
• Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
• Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming
• Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers Eh!
• Syp – Bio Break
• Tessa/Endalia
  • Narratess
  • Princess in a Castle
• unwiseowl – leaflocker
• Wilhelm – TAGN

That isn’t a huge number.  A lot of those people were still hanging around the Discord channel and chatting from last Blaugust.  But it isn’t too late to get involved.

Quote of the Day – EverQuest Next Reality

There was a real nugget of an idea there, but a technical hurdle the team just couldn’t get over. All the other stuff that EverQuest is kind of got lost because it was focused on voxels and a dynamically-generated changing world. There was not enough computational power. If people are digging holes, you have to update pathing for the entire world.

-Holly Longdale, Variety interview

With the 20th anniversary of the game Holly Longdale, the executive producer of the EverQuest franchise, has been available for interviews, several of which I referenced in a previous post.  The post a Variety showed up last week and I dismissed it at first because of the source.  Variety sticks its nose into gaming rather sporadically, so it isn’t any sort of a focus for them.  Given that they can be quite superficial when it comes to things on which they do focus… I was reading the film section regularly when into Fantasy Movie League… I wasn’t expecting much.

The only reason I even saw the article is that Variety uses the WordPress platform and I watch the “everquest” tag in the WordPress Reader.

But yesterday, on a whim, I read the whole thing.  Not much new appears under that tag these days, so it hadn’t fallen down more than a couple of entries.  And, in reading it, I was a bit surprised at the details that were revealed.  Sure, some of it was the “reacquisition” plan we had heard before. But then Holly started spilling some tea about EverQuest Next.

A Firiona Vie that we’ll never know

Just a bit over three years ago Daybreak announced that they were cancelling EverQuest Next.  In the big statement from then-president Russell Shanks, which is available at that link, the key take away that people saw was:

Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun

And that was that.  People were angry, disappointed, dismissive, and there was much throwing of metaphorical stones at Daybreak.

But other than that we didn’t get a lot of details.  I mean, we had heard rumors that things were not coming along, that the SOE Live demos were all live people rather than any the AI dreams they had been peddling.

Now she is saying that it wasn’t going to work as envisioned in any case.  Emergent AI and being able to change the world weren’t in the cards with the current level of tech.

She calls the cancellation a “deep burn,” but then goes on to deliver something of a burn herself.

Of the team that exists now, we spent two and a half years defining what the franchise really is, going to our archives and retconning some stuff to prepare it for a really strong future.  EverQuest Next is not a game I would have made. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, but we’ve been evaluating what makes EverQuest EverQuest. In my opinion, that wasn’t where the game was going with EverQuest Next.

It sounds as though there was a struggle over what EverQuest really meant as a franchise and that the fundamentalist wing won out in the end, which probably also meant the end of Landmark, which fell under the EverQuest franchise umbrella.

And Holly Longdale is of that fundamentalist breed.  Early on in the article she plays up the social interdependence of the game, even going for the reputation card, how being bad would make you an outcast server-wide.  Anybody familiar with Dunbar’s number can spot the hole in that idea… Fansy the famous bard was the outlier exception, not the rule… but certainly in smaller circles you had to get along or find new friends.

And in the past she has made her own questionable statements when it comes to the purity of the EverQuest game experience.

What we don’t want to do is instance raids, which is what casuals want us to do because they want to fight Nagafen. Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen… that diminishes the achievement of others. That’s part of the challenge: You have to be better than the other guy; you have to be more strategic that the other guy.

The EverQuest team did walk that back eventually.  Raids got instanced on the progression servers after all, if only because the company couldn’t afford the resources necessary to mediate all the disputes that open world contested raiding brought about every single time it was a feature of the game.  Even the hardcore raiders want to be able to just go and do the raid when they’re all together rather than having to cancel because somebody got there first.

But that is where you end up when you take a hard look at what made a game what it was.  You start back down the path of the original features and have to examine things like corpse runs and instancing and the like.

There is nothing concrete in the article about any future games, such as an EverQuest 3, but neither is that sort of thing ruled out.  But she does say that the two key elements of EverQuest are “classic high fantasy and community dependency.”

“Anything we talk about in the future, those are the two nuggets.  I would never say that there isn’t a world where I wouldn’t love to do another co-op or even a single-player experience that tells some of these amazing stories that we’ve fleshed out over 20 years, but the social dependency is who we are. It’s questing with other people. It is having a role on a team. I don’t think we’ll ever move away from that, even if it were a single-player game like ‘Dragon Age,’ that’s our special sauce and what our players would expect. You don’t think ‘EverQuest’ and think ‘single player game.’

And on the topic of MMOs allowing a single player experience she responded, “That will never be us.”  Maybe this is why the team had such an odd view of what “super casual” meant on the first round of the Selo progression server.

Of course, my post from yesterday might indicate that the game is not so pure on that front as one might assume, given her statements.  When you give players mercenaries to tank, heal, or DPS, you’re pretty much catering to solo.

Still, you can see why rumors of an EverQuest 3 put it as something that would compete with Pantheon.  I’m still not seeing the battle royale aspect of it, though maybe with that part of the business falling flat at Daybreak, it will be allowed to die in the context of any new EverQuest title.

Overall though, Daybreak continues to cater to the core EverQuest audience with annual expansions and updates for the audience on the live servers and new progression servers on a regular basis for the nostalgia audience.  It seems to be working.  As I quoted last week, the franchise has more players now than it did back in 2015.

Shroud of the Avatar Goes… Whatever You Call It After a Long Early Access

When I saw the email from Potalarium… well, I saw it several times as I end up getting updates on three different email addresses… I was a bit taken aback at the message.  Shroud of the Avatar was on the eve of launching finally.

March 27 Launch – That is Today

I couldn’t remember if there had been some build up to this in the weekly email updates, which at this point I just skim for headlines then delete, or if this was a brand new twist.

Well, at least I moved Shroud of the Avatar to the “will ship” list on my predictions this year.  I am up at least five points today.

The suddenness flustered me a bit, and I half expected to see a follow on message announcing a delay.  But there was only a follow up about Release 52 that went through in detail what was going into this release build and linked out to the whole how to get started document for the release.

Of course here we are, just shy of five years after the Kickstarter for the project closed, having secured a little over $2 million, and I am trying to recall what this was all about again.

There was that whole Madness of Lord British season where he was talking at (not to) EA about wanting his IP back, thinking a line about great fondness might help I guess.  EA chose that moment to launch Ultima Forever, which seemed to answer the question.  So it was just Lord British talking about his Ultimate RPG, set in a land which could not yet be named. (His comment at the end of that about “ville” clones was doubly amusing given his then recent attempts to get into bed with Zynga, complete with comedy quote.)

Eventually though he seemed to get back on the rails in the right direction and launched the kickstarter to fund his project, Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar; Forsaken Virtues.   Aside from that whole “game designers suck and/or are lazy” thing (later he explained that when he said people he worked with were essentially shit he was taken out of context) the whole thing went very well.  Lord British still has name recognition and the whole nostalgia factor going for him and was able to haul in double the amount of money he was asking for.

From the official site

Since then however… I haven’t really been paying all that much attention.  By late 2014 there was something you could download and tinker with, but it was a very rough cut.  I tried it for a bit and then let it be.  There was also something about virtual real estate that came up at one point.  But other than putting it on my possible list of games to play every year for a few years, only to have it still be in development, I haven’t paid much attention to it.  Somewhere along the line I got a Steam key and activated it there, but otherwise it has just been news about the game coming along.  Even Lord British, with something to occupy his attentions, has kept his crazy side out of the news.

But today it is live.  The server status declares it ready.

Launch version has launched

I checked over at Steam and the early access warnings have all been removed and there is a launch day sale for 15% off the $39.99 price, which keeps it higher than the $30 I pledged five years back.

It looks like the the four modes originally promised are there, offline solo, online solo, online friends, and online in an MMO-esque setting.  It is also available on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.  The reviews, however, are mixed, something that seems to come from the cash shop.

And now to see how big the launch will be.  I have speculated in the past that doing crowd funding and early access means that a game’s core audience has likely already bought in by the time that launch comes, so there is no big boost at launch.  That is what we saw with Landmark certainly, and H1Z1′s recent transition out of early access was pretty much a yawn until they made the game free.  And even that only got it back up to its December numbers as opposed to its peak over the summer.  But H1Z1 has better competitors now in PUBG and Fortnite.  Still, launch alone didn’t seem to do much.

So how will launch affect Shroud of the Avatar? 

Also, when am I going to find time to play it?   I am currently still noodling around with Rift Prime, and there is Project: Gorgon now available on Steam.  It seems like 2018 is the year of stuff from five years ago.  Maybe Camelot Unchained will stir this year as well.

StarCraft Remastered Announced

I was hoping to hear something about this at BlizzCon back in November, but everything takes longer than you think it will, and at Blizzard you have to dial that up by another half again.  So while the word first leaked almost a year and a half ago, Blizzard has finally announced the remastered version of StarCraft.

About damn time indeed

The StarCraft site has the current details.  Sort of…  And there is a trailer.

The key bullet points for the remaster are:

• Remastered Graphics
• Revised Dialogue and Audio
• Blizzard Friends and Matchmaking
• Classic StarCraft Gameplay

The graphics will be 4K HD, which is quite a step up from the 640×480 the game has run on for the last 19 years.  The whole thing will still be 2D perspective, it will just finally look good on your widescreen monitor.

The revised dialog and audio… well, I guess if you are in there and changing stuff, higher quality audio might be something you want to change, but I worry a bit about that one.  A lot of StarCraft to me is the way it sounds.  If the marines don’t say, “Jacked up and good to go!” it might be an issue for me.

Blizzard “friends” and matchmaking are fine as far as it goes.  But the important/traditional aspect of the game, the LAN connection, remains which seems to indicate that it won’t be converted into another Blizzard game that requires and internet connection in order to play.  For a stretch back in the day StarCraft was our after hours game at the office thanks to LAN play.

And then there is “classic” StarCraft game play.  This is, after all, the game that was an esport before people were talking about esports, the game that pretty much became the national video game of South Korea.  So while remastering is good, I do wonder how it will impact game play with more data on screen and the whole “zoom out” view.  Part of the challenge of StarCraft was dealing with limited view of the terrain that you were given.  If you didn’t have scouts out and your eyes on the mini-map, your foe could surprise you.

The target date for the release of StarCraft Remastered is this summer.

As part of this, the original standard definition version of the game is getting an update and will be free, which certainly implies that the remastered version will cost you something.  I wonder what a price tag will do to enthusiasm for the project.  Of course, I was happy enough to shell out for Age of Empires II: Age of Kings when the HD remaster of that came out, so maybe that won’t be a barrier.

Of course, the other question that springs to mind is what does this mean for StarCraft II?  I haven’t heard anything bad about the successor title aside from the gripe that, in an effort to not screw up a good thing, Blizzard did not stray very far from the original, so that it did not stand out on its own.  But at least it had up-to-date graphics and supported modern screen resolutions.

What happens to StarCraft II now that the original is coming back in a remastered format that should “fix” the key barriers to playing it?

And, finally, I wonder where things stand on the other two remaster projects, Warcraft III and Diablo II?  The trio being remastered represent the greats of the pre-World of Warcraft era for Blizzard.  What happens when they return fit to be played on modern machines?