Some Words from EG7 about Daybreak Plans

Hello All !! We’ve had lot’s of questions and interest from fans and communities on the future of the games under Daybreak after the EG7 acquisition. We’ll have a community focused update later in April. In this we will shed some light on our vision for the games going forward.

Enad Global 7 tweet, April 2, 2021

The rather jaded part of me that has followed SOE and Daybreak for years was eager to snark that EG7 was following along in the grand tradition of the past companies by delivering their promised update at the last minute on a Friday afternoon.  Low expectations met.

Enad Global 7

And my initial skepticism was reinforced by the letter to the community from EG7 founder and CEO Robin Flodin, which was posted on the Daybreak site.  It is short, upbeat, and empty of any but the most blandly vague statements about the company.  It feels like boilerplate that could have been posted four months ago.  I won’t bother reprinting it here as it was so nebulous I fear it might blow away in a stiff breeze, leaving an empty space in the middle of the post.

But there was also a 14 minute video linked in small print at the end of the statement that does have some more meat to it.

The video starts with some background about Robin Flodin and EG7, then actually gets into some meaty information about H1Z1.

The PC side of H1Z1 doesn’t have a team working on it, which explains much… like why, when Daybreak introduced their new studios, that title seemed left out in the cold.  EG7 put together a team to examine and asses the game, which took them a while.  I can attest that taking over somebody else’s code base is a sure fire way to get most devs to start talking about the whole thing being easier to re-make from scratch.  They have builds of H1Z1 and Just Survive running, which is a not a trivial achievement.  Devs start muttering about starting over for a reason.  They are now evaluating where to take these titles.

While there was no news and no plan announced beyond that, Flodin did acknowledge that a lot of fans were asking for older mechanics and a return of Just Survive and they were assessing how to get there.  He also noted that the game had been previously handed off to another team unsuccessfully, the whole NantWorks fiasco that ended with the PC version of the game being handed back to Daybreak.

For other titles in the Daybreak stable, including LOTRO and DDO, he said that, at the corporate level, they were looking for ways to help the various teams/studios work on long standing issues… the idea of Daybreak is starting to seem a bit superfluous as anything beyond a historical reference in a world where EG7 is working directly with the dev groups… but the teams themselves are handling the directions the games are headed. Hrmmm…

He did say that the HQ was listening to fan feedback, but I don think EG7 is going to save us from LOTRO legendary item grinds and other things the SSG dev team is completely invested in, but maybe they’ll push the team towards large screen support or UI scaling.

Overall the video was a solid performance.  Flodin came off well and, even though he didn’t have many answers or specific plans to share, I came away with a positive impression.  It laid some groundwork, gave us a few concrete details, but didn’t make any promises that we would later use against them.  I’m still not betting completely against EG7 turning into Gamigo once they hit some critical mass of studios and games, but for the moment I am feeling okay.  I mean, at least he didn’t go on about synergy.

Other Coverage:

• Massively OP
• MMO Fallout (also the EG7 2020 annual report)
• Contains Moderate Peril

Darkpaw Announces and Adjusts Plans for the Rizlona and Aradune Time Locked Progression Servers

Sometimes it pays to wait a bit after Daybreak announces something as they are a company that is willing to change their mind in front of a live studio audience.

That can be a good thing.  As I said back in the SOE days, they do try to get to the right answer.  The problem is that their starting point does seem oddly wrong at times.  I don’t think this was necessarily one of those times, but feedback did seem to change their minds.

This all has to do with the Rizlona and Aradune time locked progression servers that were announced as part of the ramp up to the EverQuest 21st anniversary celebration.  This week we got a target date and some more information about the plans for those servers.

Coming this month

The rules were posted and seemed both restrictive and a bit confused.

The restrictive aspect was the plan to stop both servers at the Planes of Power expansion after unlocking an expansion every three months.  That was a plan similar to the Agnarr server that launched back in 2017, which was advertised as a “PoP Locked” server, and which hit that end point back in 2018.

That seemed like a reasonable idea back then, an attempt to recreate something like the locked in time spirit that rose up around the now seven years gone Al’Kabor server that hosted the EverQuest for Macintosh community.  But I am not sure they need to reboot that idea every few years, and not with two servers.

But they changed their mind on that and now neither server will be “PoP Locked.”

They also announced that both servers were to be “GM Dedicated” servers, the meaning of which I’ll just quote:

Rizlona and Aradune are GM dedicated servers, this means they will be more visible on your server and petition queues will go direct to them. It is possible that there will be instances where other GMs may assist when available but most will go to your specific GMs. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more about your server’s GMs!

I remember a time when GMs were pretty visible in EQ, so maybe they are trying to revive that era again.

And then there is the confusing bit… or at least the bit that is confusing to me.  The full titles of the two new servers are:

• Aradune Truebox Dedicated Progression
• Rizlona Boxed Dedicated Progression

In the parlance of past severs, “truebox” means no multi-boxing at all, while “boxed” is a new one on me, but at least implies that they will allow some for of multi-boxing.  But then there are the rule sets described for the two:

Aradune Ruleset:

• Mangler XP Progression
• Agents of Change Enabled
• Pick Zones Enabled

By playing on Aradune you agree to:

• Absolutely No Automated/Unintended Game-play, any incident of automated gameplay is immediate suspension, second offence is ban including Aradune associated accounts.
• Boxing any more than 2 characters will result in the following actions taken against your account. First Offence: A written warning from the GM. Second Offence: A 7 day suspension of account privileges on all Aradune related accounts. Third Offence: Permanent ban on all Aradune associated accounts.

Rizlona Ruleset:

• Mangler XP Progression
• Agents of Change Enabled
• Pick Zones Enabled

By playing on Rizlona you agree to:

• Absolutely No Automated/Unintended Game-play, any incident of automated gameplay is immediate suspension, second offence is ban including Rizlona associated accounts.

Does that mean you can dual-box on Aradune and multi-box to your hearts content on Rizlona?  Did the meaning of “truebox” change at Darkpaw?  It is possible.  I don’t keep up that closely.

And I can imagine why Darkpaw might want to give multi-boxers a fresh server to play on.  While the practice is often decried by the forum warriors, it has been a thing for most of the life of the game and… of course… you have to have to have a subscription for each account in order to indulge in the practice on these special servers.  No free to play allowed.  So if you want to box a fill party to level cap, Darkpaw will be happy to take your money and direct you to a special rules server just for you.

I don’t know that I will opt to play on either server, but my Daybreak All Access subscription will still be running when they launch, so I might log in for a peek.

In advance of these new servers, there is also the planned server merge coming a week earlier.  On May 20th the following which will see the following servers merged:

• Lockjaw into Ragefire
• Trakanon into Vox
• Fippy Darkpaw into Vox
• Brekt into Firiona Vie

I covered the origins of the soon-to-be merged servers in a previous post, so won’t repeat it here, but there are some good reasons for these merges.  Details on naming conflicts and character slots and the like are available in a Darkpaw post.

Celebrate 16 Years of EVE Online by Logging in for 16 Days Straight

They promise it will be worth it.

Yes, that time of year has rolled around again and CCP is celebrating another EVE Online anniversary.  2019 makes it sweet 16 for the game.  That’s old enough to get a driver’s license where I live.  CCP has a dev blog up about how they will be celebrating this milestone.

Sixteen Years and I got a T-Shirt

There will be gifts.  But these gifts will be doled out as daily login rewards, so you will need to log in each account, every day, for sixteen days in order to collect them all.

I am not a fan of login rewards like this.  It strikes me as a rather transparent way to boost the monthly active user, the dreaded MAU at whose altar so many analysts worship, without necessarily doing anything to improve game play or to get a user to go beyond collecting their reward and logging off.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t log in every damn day all the same.  I’ll do that for some free stuff.  If you ring the rewards bell I do salivate.

And, as you may have noted, the event lasts for 18 days, so you can forget to login twice and still get all the goodies..  And what goodies will we get?  The dev blog says:

There’s all manner of gifts and rewards up for grabs including celebratory trinkets, faction ammunition, exclusive XVI anniversary SKINs, apparel and even a monocle, as well as Servant Sisters of EVE hulls, celebratory Permaband SKINs and clothing, along with fireworks and abyssal filaments.

That is quite a range.  I’ll go anywhere for SKINs, and SOE ship hulls are fan favorites.  I’d like another Astero or three.  I guess Permaband is featured as a ceremonial farewell and/or clearing out of virtual stock, since Permaband if effectively dead with the departure of CCP Guard.  I mean, who else is going to front for them?  CCP Falcon?

That is all cool, but I image that the real draw will be skill points.  The Dev Blog declares that this will be the largest skill point grant they have ever given away, with over a million skill points available if you log in all 16 days.

That is a lot of skill points.  Given that I used to rack up ten million skill points about every seven months, picking up a million in just 16 days is an accelerated pace.  That is about 2,600 skill points an hour.  You can optimize your attributes and plug in +5 implants to train faster than that (my skill point farming clone, back when I did that, rolled along at 2,700 sp/hr), but you have to keep to specific skill.  These skill points can be applied to any skill, plus you still have your normal, ongoing skill point accretion.

Of course, the usual caveat applies: To get all the goodies you must have an Omega level account.  Free to play Alpha accounts get some prizes, but to get the full haul you must be paying in cash or PLEX for an Omega account.

Naturally, on the events page there is a convenient link to the page that lets you upgrade to Omega.

So there it is.  If you want all your goodies make sure your launcher is up to date and ready to go so you can start logging in tomorrow.

Lost Dungeons of New Eden

This past Saturday I wrote about the EverQuest Agnarr server, one of Daybreak’s progression servers, and passed over at one point one of the expansions slated for it, Lost Dungeons of Norrath.

The main focus of that expansion was instanced content, a brand new concept for EverQuest at the time.  They were dungeons that came in a few basic flavors that had some variations between them, allowed the players running them to choose a difficulty level, and ended up rewarding players with “augmentations” that they could use to upgrade their current gear.

It was a moment of change for EverQuest and MMORPGs in general.

Saturday evening I decided to log onto the EVE Online test server, Sisi, where early cuts at the upcoming abyssal deadspace content had been made available for people to try.

The “How to” aspect of this new feature wasn’t obvious to me, but I found the thread about trying it out in the forums, which at least got me pointed in the right direction.

I wasn’t sure what ship or fitting I ought to try, so I just used my ratting Ishtar fit and figured I would adjust from there.  Everything on Sisi is 100 ISK and the market is stocked with all the non-faction non-officer hulls and modules, so you can grab what you want.  When grabbing some ammo I accidentally bought 2,000 Ishtar hulls, but what the hell right?  It is all 100 ISK.

I then grabbed a “calm” filament, the level 1 flavor and headed out to give it a try.

Ishtar in an Abyssal pocket

The tiers run like this:

1. Calm
2. Agitated
3. Fierce
4. Raging
5. Chaotic

And each comes in variations, the difference between which I have yet to see.

Tiers and types of filaments

I spent most of the first run fiddling with my drones to figure out what would work and what I ought to skip.  All the NPCs had placeholder names, but they were either ships or drones.  I seemed to be running into just Sleepers, but that might be related to which filaments I picked.

It seemed that 5x Acolyte IIs would eat up anything small and be able to dodge incoming fire.  Mediums and heavies were too easy to hit and I had to pull them right away.  So I plowed through a room, went through the gate, which opens up once you’ve cleared, then did another room, and then another, and then was back in normal space again wondering when I would get my prize.

I knew that ships did not drop loot, so skipped past them, but I didn’t notice the part about blowing up the structure in each room.  That is the loot pinata.  So I grabbed another calm filament and gave it another try.  This time I broke all the pinatas and came out the other side unscathed.

That run dumped a bunch of loot on me, though the loot payout is cranked up at the moment, well beyond what it will be when it goes live, to let people experiment with drops.  I got a mutaplasmid for a large shield extender so bought one off the market to mutate it.  The result was okay.

Mutated shield extender II

CPU usage went down but power grid went up.  Sig radius got a little bit worse, but the shield hit points were boosted quite a bit.  Not a bad mutation I guess.  And the newly created module shows you what was initially mutated and what got better or worse.

The after module

It also has a button to find that sort of thing in contracts, since these items won’t be on the normal market.  I am going to guess that contract usage will jump sharply when these are introduced and that we might get a pass on the contract UI after a lot of people are suddenly using them more than ever before.

I also had a mutaplasmid for a medium shield booster, so I grabbed a tech II version and ran it through the process… and ended up wrecked.

Worse for the tinkering

I also got a tier 4 filament drop so decided to give that a try.  That went less well.  I managed to blow up small stuff in the usual way… a pack of cruisers in this case… with acolyte IIs, leaving me with a Sleep battleship once they were out of the way.

Sleek Sleeper Seeking Me

And even that seemed to be going well.  I pulled in the acolytes and sent heavy drones after the battleship.  Not problems at all…. right up until my ship suddenly exploded and I was dead.

And that was that

I am not sure what did me in really.  I may have flown into a pocket of toxic space.  The timer may have run out.  Nothing in the feedback (or in the logs) indicated what happened.  Something just turned my ship into mush, ripping through armor and hull in a flash before I could react and do anything.  Surprise!

That threw me to where my death clone was set.  From there I had to move to a station that had stuff up on the market then set about fitting another ship.  I decided to go with an Eagle this time.  It could hold the five acolyte IIs I’d need and I thought the guns might speed things up.

Eagle on a run

As it turned out, nothing I could do would make medium rails track the small drones once they closed range, but my own drones took care of them as expected.  Being able to reach out and shoot larger targets seemed to work okay.  And I could pop the structure right away.

Structure going up as the gate opens

I ran some tier 1 and 2 versions just to get a feel for it.  It sure looks pretty.

Eagle waiting for the gate to open

My tour ended when I had another insta-pop event.  This time I didn’t even see things change, I was flying one moment and dead the next.  The logs don’t show anything, just my drones popping away at the small stuff… and it was all small stuff.  Maybe I hit a mine.  I don’t think the timer ran down… but there is no visible timer, so I am not sure.

Just before my sudden demise

Anyway, that was enough for me to get at least some flavor of what is in store.  I might try it again as we get closer to the Into the Abyss expansion release and things have settled down some.

But as I tinkered around with all of this my brain kept making the link with the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion for EverQuest.  Here we have players being given instanced content, able to choose the style and challenge up front while the actual layout comes from a set group of possibilities, and offering up items that augment current equipment as a possible reward.

Nothing new in the world I guess.

Unfortunately my impression so far is that abyssal deadspace has all the drawbacks of of PvE in EVE Online; It is fun and interesting the first couple of times, but it becomes tiresome on repetition.  And there is the insta-death timer thing.  I don’t know enough to know if that is avoidable or if we’re going to get a visible timer, but it will rile people up when it happens on the live server.  People do not like to get their shit blown up.

In the end some people will optimize and do abyssal deadspace for the rewards, and then complain about having to grind and the lack of predictability in getting what they wanted.

And that leaves aside the whole RNG module upgrade element, which already has people annoyed, as well as the strange new contract marketplace that will spring up where you’ll have to be very careful to inspect whatever you buy because every mutated module could be different.

That it doesn’t appeal to me doesn’t mean much in the larger scheme of things.  Somebody will love it.  There is a niche fan base out there for every feature.  But will it be a draw for enough people to have been worth the effort?  Will it change the game in a good way?

Rumors of Future Daybreak Projects and the End of EverQuest

Because we just can’t stop staring at Daybreak now that they’ve drawn our attention.

The eye seems more angry today

Over at Massively OP they reported on a Reddit post by an alleged former Daybreak staffer who was part of the big layoff and who decided to spilled the beans on what the company has under wraps.  I am going to quote the substance of the post just to have it here for reference now and in the future.

The list re-ordered for narrative flow and importance to me:

Everquest will have one last expansion. The 20th anniversary will introduce a series of nostalgic raids that tie into complex quests. These quests can be done in order to grant alternate characters powerful scaling weapons.

Well, I have long asked how many expansions could EverQuest sustain.  20 years is a pretty good run, and I imagine that they’ll keep playing the progression server card.  But it will be a sad day when the final expansion hits and Norrath reaches its final size.

Everquest 2 will also have one last expansion and eventually a similar series of send-off weapon quests and raids.

I seems like 2019 will be a final kiss-off for the slowly dwindling and increasingly bitter base of Norrath fans.  EQII will have made it to 15 years but won’t end up with nearly the immense scope of places that EQ has.  Another sad day for the MMO with my favorite housing scheme ever.

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

I guess we should be happy about this, but after the first EverQuest Next announcement, then the restart, then the voxel word promises and Landmark and the faked AI in all the demos and the final cancellation I cannot find any enthusiasm for this at the moment.

There was a rumor going about last year that there was a Norrath based multiplayer RPG in the works that would not be an MMORPG, but I guess once you are on the stage with the other MMOs it is hard not to keep going that direction.

The idea of competing with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen AND injecting the flavor of the month feature of battle royale PvP seems silly.  Would picking a focus be too much to ask?  And what would team battle royal PvP be anyway, and how would it be different from World of Warcraft battlegrounds?

I realize this isn’t an official announcement, but they have a lot to sell on this one if it is anywhere close to true.

Just Survive is on its last legs. Several ideas for increasing profits have been floated around but at this point it looks like a sunset is most likely.

Not unexpected.  Certainly the most credible item on the list.  The name seemed too on the nose when it was given, like naming a mayfly “dead by Friday.”

Planetside 2 was supposed to be getting new character models and animations in May. A new map and an aircraft carrier are planned for the end of the year.

Sounds okay I guess, unless you’re planning to replace the game.

Planetside 3 is in early development. Other teams will be siphoned into this project next year. This will be a team based battle royal game that combines the building aspect of Fortnite with territory acquisition.

Oh, you’re planning to replace the game.  The ghost of Smed continues to wander the halls of Daybreak I guess, which is odd because he isn’t actually dead.  And, of course, battle royale figures into it because of course it does.  Doesn’t Daybreak already have a battle royale game in H1Z1?

H1Z1 will get a smaller map as well as a remake of “Z1”. The PS4 port is looking good. After that new skins will continue to be released but most of the team will be moved over to Planetside 3.

Drop work on the current battle royale game save for cash shop items so you can work on the new battle royale game, which will probably launch when the market has gone well past saturation and will have to be altered to fit whatever the flavor of the month is at that time.

Well, down 70 people and with a handful of games to maintain I guess they have to make some tough choices if they ever want to launch anything new.

Of course, this could all be nonsense or misdirection too.  You can’t really know from the outside.  But I figured I would mark the moment so we can return to it later and see if any of it plays out.

I doubt there will be any official response to any of this, but we’ll all keep an eye out for announcements in the distant future from the house that Jason Epstein built.

Return to the Land of the Ten Dollar Horse

In my fantasy MMORPG malaise I have been sifting through various options looking for something that might interest me.  The usual round of options all seem worn out for me for now and I have been reluctant to dive into anything new that requires some money up front as I have sought something to spark some interest.

And then the other day one of my co-workers was talking about how he and his wife had gone back to playing Runes of Magic and I started thinking about that.

Runes of Magic was kind of a big deal when it launched eight years back.

Happy Anniversary

The game was an Asian MMORPG title built in the style of the then current and popular Western model.  Up until then there had been a pretty solid divide between East and West when it came to MMORPG design.  Asian games were were pretty but very grindy while the West favored… well… the theme park aesthetic where quests quite you through the game.

The basic plan was to make an Asian WoW.

But just to throw a twist into things, it was also going to be a free to play in a sea of subscription model MMORPGs.  At the time free to play wasn’t a big deal, and the selection of titles in that zone tended to be kids games like Toontown Online, Club Pengiun, or Habbo Hotel, browser games like Maple Story or RuneScape, or Asian titles that failed to crack the western market.  The big story for free to play was probably Anarchy Online, which converted to that model back in 2004, something that likely saved the game.

The Runes of Magic launch pre-dates a lot of what we now sort of assume as general knowledge about the who free to play business model.  The conversion and subsequent success of Dungeons & Dragons Online was still in the future.  Zynga hadn’t yet finished ripping off Happy Farm to launch FarmVille, a game that opened the discussion about things like cash shops, whales, exploitative design, and dubious business practices.

Anyway, Runes of Magic hove into view a little over eight years back and I was there to witness the launch.  It really felt an Asian fueled World of Warcraft knock-off back then, which I took to be a good thing.  As the Alganon development team would later claim after nicking the WoW UI almost pixel for pixel, if you’re going to copy WoW, you might as well not be shy about it.  That was a plus or a minus, depending on your point of view.

And then there was the cash shop, from which the ten dollar horse controversy arose.  That got our corner of the web buzzing for a bit about what should be store bought and what should be earned in something of the opening shot of the cash shop rage wars to come.  And then about a year later Blizzard put out the $25 greed steed and RoM didn’t look so bad.  Today just about everybody is selling mounts.

As for playing Runes of Magic, I tinkered a bit with it at launch, then got the instance group to come try it for a couple weeks, after which it sort of faded.  I remember seeing the publishers at at GDC in San Francisco one year, where they were talking about a web client version of the game, something that I don’t recall ever going anywhere, but otherwise my interest in the game didn’t stick and I removed it from the list of games I keep track of about five years back.

And there things stayed until my co-worker mentioned the game, which set off something of the reverie in my brain which I just disgorged above into the text editor.  So I asked him how the game was going these days and he said that not a lot had changed.  The developers, Frogstar, adds new content now and then, but for the most part have left the game itself coast as it was back in 2009.

This piqued my interest.  Ever the nostalgia buff… I still hold out hope against hope that some day Blizzard will see its way to rolling up a retro vanilla WoW experience… I decided to go give it a try.

Thanks to the fact that I still use pretty much the same set of email addresses I did back then, I was even able to recover my account.  I did that, reset the password, then reset the cash shop password, and set about getting things downloaded.  The main packages wants 15GB, which would have seemed like a lot back in the day, but which barely merits consideration now that I have multiple terabytes of hard drive space and a 75Mbit internet connection. (Remember back when having a T1 connection was a big deal?  Now I have the effective equivalent of 48 T1s piped into our home.  We live in the future.)

Select to download

The system requirements still list Windows XP.  After the install ran, the game had to patch.  My co-worker was starting to seem spot on about nothing changing, as the patcher for the game is still the remorseless always on top of every damn thing window it was back at launch.

Reading something? Let me just get in the way!

Fortunately, the current install package seemed to be reasonably up to date, so there was just a couple minutes of patcher intrusion before it wrapped up.

Once downloaded and installed I… had to figure out how to launch the game.  It didn’t bother installing a short cut on the start menu, preferring to put something on the desktop in the old school fashion.  It was a short cut to a launcher, which in turn let you launch another launcher, which finally let you launch the game.  After launching and logging in I hit the server select menu and was surprised to see the game still listed two characters for me.

Server selection

However, that number was just the ghost of same ancient data in a database table, because when I got to the character selection menu there were no characters there.  I would have to start from scratch… which was probably a good thing after at least seven years away from the game.  So on to new character creation and all of its sliders.

New character creation

Character creation lets you select from three races and a series of classes, some of which are race specific.  Only humans can be knights or priests, only elves can be druids or wardens, and only dwarves can be so damn ugly… erm… only dwarves can be warlocks and champions… oh, and they can be priests too, so forget what I said about humans only being priests.  Anyway, there is a matrix of race class combinations.

Customization is available through the many sliders which mostly control how thick a given body part looks.  Of note is the “breasts” slider, which does nothing for males but which controls cup size for females.  Probably the most distinctive thing you is choose a hair style and color.  That is about all that stands out so far as I can tell.  I considered going with a warrior modeled somewhat on that guy from the Diet Dr. Pepper commercial.

Lil’ Sweet says Hello!

I decided that maybe pink wasn’t the right hair color.  But there is a whole CMYK color wheel there of choices if you want a specific shade.  I decided to go back to blonde, though I left him otherwise the same.

And then it was in to the game.  But that is the topic of the next post.