A Week in the New World

It has been quite a week for Amazon Games and New World.  There was clearly quite a bit of pent up demand for a new MMORPG launch.

Welcome to a New World

I was digging through lists of MMO titles to see when the last big launch really was.

WoW Classic was huge when it hit in 2019, reviving Blizzards fortunes as they shambled about with Battle for Azeroth.  But that was a nostalgia play, and while it did stand out, it was delivering something old.

I suppose there was Black Desert Online in 2015.  That got a lot of attention.  And there was Guild Wars 2 in 2012, which shares a business model with New World.

But I really thing that the last big budget, major studio, all eyes on the launch event might have been Star Wars: The Old Republic in late 2011.  At least that is the way it feels to me.  I mean, you could make an argument for WildStar perhaps or, more convincingly, The Elder Scrolls Online, both 2014 launches, but they feel a bit short of the mark.

No matter which mark you choose, it has been a while and New World is reaping the benefits of that thirst for a new experience.  And it manages to deliver, bringing on board things like skill based classless advancement and a more active combat paradigm for which a some players have been loudly asking loudly for year.  Even the setting feels different.

This combination of a hunger in the market along with getting something fresh, or different enough for the norm to feel fresh, led to success beyond expectations.

I logged on early on Tuesday and created a character and there were already queues for some of the popular servers, with the Valhalla served in US East running up to the 25K mark by the early afternoon.

Server queues on Tuesday

Over on US West the El Dorado server pushed past the 17K mark.

Servers were said to be setup to allow only 2,000 players in at once, so for Valhalla there were 12.5 times as many people trying to get in as the server could hold.  The game quickly began to be called Queue World as Amazon rushed to open more servers.

The irony is that the servers were setup in groups that were clearly designed to be collapsed down into a single server should populations dwindle.

Server groups detail

A classic “plan for failure” mode, which given how the MMORPG market has gone over the years where many a title has seen a huge surge at launch only to have their player base dwindle in months, or even weeks, when the fresh game smell has worn off, is a wise move.  They may yet need that option.  We’re still in the fresh moment of discovery.

Over on the SteamDB charts, New World was vying with CS:GO as the most popular title on Steam.  During the week the game surged past 700K concurrent players, getting into the 900K range with the weekend.  As with EVE Online, the peak concurrent time seemed to hit around 19:00 UTC, when Europe is still online, North American is in full swing, and a few early risers in the Pacific are on and playing.

SteamDB numbers at 19:04 UTC on Sunday Oct 3rd

The queues quickly spread to all the servers.  I thought I had been clever, rolling up on a low population server, but by Tuesday night my character was locked behind a 4 digit queue and I honestly didn’t care that much about the game to wait.  I went and played more Diablo II Resurrected.

As the week went on, some more friends got interested in the title and jumped in.  The plan seemed to be just to get into a server in the same region and work out getting together when the free server transfers Amazon promised came into being.

I gave up on my first character and went to roll up a new one on a server without a queue.  There were plenty of new ones to choose from so it seemed like my problems might be over.  But it was not to be.  I was able to create characters on new servers, but whenever I tried to connect I got a connection error trying to get into the game.

No queue does not mean no problems

My guess is that the starter zones on various servers were full up with new players so the game wouldn’t load me in.  I tried on half a dozen otherwise low population and zero queue servers before giving up.

So by Thursday evening there were a lot of people upset at the game.  Amazon put out a statement that they were working hard to address the situation.

Posted Thursday evening

But promises and good intentions only buy so much.  Belghast summarized the situation and mood very well in his Friday morning post.

But Friday morning also saw an update from Amazon.

At lunch I opened up Steam and went to log into New World, just to see how deep the queue was on my first character and had that awkward moment of suddenly being in the game when I didn’t have any time to play.  I was almost in a bit of panic.  I had better do something while I was able to log in lest I not get another opportunity any time soon.

But I need not have been in a state.  As it turned out Amazon pushed a number of changes into the game including raising the cap on the number of players allowed on a server, adding a much more aggressive idle timeout, and designating some servers as “full” so that new characters could no longer be created on them.  That and more new servers seemed to settle things down quite a bit.

Of course, it isn’t perfection yet.  While in US West as I write this the server queues are all in single or double digits and most servers have no queue, US East still has a dozen servers with four digit queues.  EU Central, which is at its peak time as I write, has four digit queues on a lot of servers and it looks like about two thirds of servers have a queue over 100 deep. But there are still a pile of servers with zero queue.

And Amazon still has work to do on idle timeout.  They’re going after those people you see doing things like running against walls to appear active while they’re AFK.

Meanwhile, the impact of simply allowing more players onto servers has yet to be assessed.  There is already a bit of harvest competition going on as people vie for rare resources and settlements are very crowded.

But overall they seem to have at least momentarily improved the situation.  In these circumstance you fight the battle in front of your and worry about tomorrow when it arrives.

Jeff Bezos was out in the press declaring the game a success.  And with probably a couple million boxes sold at $40 a pop, it has no doubt been a nice payday for Amazon.  Those are some enviable first week numbers.  But, as we know, an MMORPG is a marathon and not a sprint.  We’ll see how it goes in the long term.

Related:

• Tales of the Aggronaut – Ready to Move
• Massively OP – New World Implementing detection for “Bad Faith AFK Players”

September in Review

The Site

And we’re now at the fifteenth anniversary of the first month in review post.  So there is that.

The state of the blog – Sep 2006

In the categories drop down there shows 182 Month in Review posts, one more than there should be because I wrote a post about Month in Review posts a while back.  It even had a poll.  But we’ll get to polls in a bit.

Otherwise it has been quite a month.

I mean, I can’t really complain about the first ten days.  I was in Hawaii for most of that.  But less than a week after I came back I came down with the dreaded “flu-like” symptoms, which was just in the COVID incubation period, so I ran down to get tested and started isolating at home… or tried to, it is harder than you think when your life is intertwined with another person… while my wife cancelled all her in-person appointments.

Luckily, it wasn’t COVID… it took a couple days to get that result… just a cold that has been going around.  I was sick, but just normal-ass sick, not plague sick.

And then the cold developed into an inner ear infection, a malady I could not recommend.  That started almost two weeks ago and I am still recovering, still feeling the effects.  At its peak it was an sharp and constant pain along with my tinnitus cranked to 11 at all times, plus gunk oozing out of my ear, and bouts of motion sickness as it messed with my inner ear functions.

That meant antibiotics.  But, having had an allergic reaction to amoxicillin a few decades back, I have to have the azithromycin based alternative, which makes one prone to stomach upset and what I refer to as “turbo diarrhea” as everything I at seemed to be very much in a rush to exit my body at its earliest opportunity.

At this point you might be saying, “Wow, that sucks… but what does all of this have to do with “The Site,” which is the name of this section?”

Well, all of that has certainly affected the quality of content.  The first eleven days of the month were all pre-written in advance.  I started to catch up a bit, then got sick, and the level of effort devolved to “look, a thing happened” without much in the was of my usual attempts to tie things into a greater theme or the historical context of the genre… though I am kind of curious if anybody actually noticed that or the fact that words per post dropped rather significantly.  Probably not.

All of that added up to the lowest monthly page view count since mid-2007.  It was a slow month here.

Somehow though I kept my post streak going and I still have a stack of things I meant to get to in September that I now mean to get to in October.  I still haven’t even watched that Ji Ham EG7 video.  But here we are.

Oh, and in other news, WP.com broke polls in their attempt to monetize them through their Crowdsignal brand.  My fourth email finally got somebody to look at the problem (the first three happiness engineers just tossed aside everything I said and sent me a link about using the new Poll Block in the awful block editor… which is broken as well so WTF?) and now… they’re looking into it.  I wasn’t planning on creating another poll any time soon, but now it seems I cannot and when I eventually can I will have to buy credits.  So look forward to no more polls I guess.  Yay?

One Year Ago

The blog turned fourteen and I made my usual post about stats and the passing of time.

Nintendo announced the end of their long running DS hardware line.

Chris Roberts was annoyed because people are so cynical online, threatening to unleash an irony-quake.

With no BlizzCon planned for 2020, Blizzard announced BlizzConline for February of 2021.

My third entry in the ongoing binge watching series was posted.  I was also looking at the main streaming channels I was viewing as well as some secondary channels.

In my play through of Diablo II on its 20th anniversary I wrapped up Act II, then launched myself into the somewhat forgettable Act III.  When it came to Act IV I had to go use that one time respec to finish Diablo.  On finishing Act V I summed up with some thoughts about the game.

In WoW Classic we were taking on the upstairs portion of Sunken Temple, though it took a third run to get to the Avatar of Hakkar.  I was also still plugging away with some alts.

In EVE Online CCP introduced quantum cores for Upwell structures.  Abyssal sites also got some updates, with T0 and T6 sites opening up with the Depths of the Abyss update.  They also tried to breath some life into the EDENCOM ship lineup.

Meanwhile, metaliminal storms were doing whatever it is they really do.  There was the GM Week bot bash in Yulai, where high sec players got to blow up some capital ships, including two titans.

My own main character hit 220 million skill points in the game.

And then there was World War Bee, which I will just list as bullet points:

• Eight Weeks of World War Bee and the July MER
• The July MER and The First Month of War War Bee
• Nine Weeks of World War Bee
• Ten Weeks of World War Bee
• Eleven Weeks of World War Bee
• The 49-U6U Fight Foreshadows Battles to Come
• Twelve Weeks of World War Bee

Then, in a final Friday Bullet Points post for the month I looked at LOTRO’s mini-expansion, Microsoft buying Zemimax, PlayStaion 5 pre-orders, the end of FarmVille, EA being dumb about lock boxes again, EVE Online ship models, and something about CCP planning to do some sort of resource redistribution thing in New Eden, which became the whole economic starvation plan of the last year.   Kind of a lot for one post.

Five Years Ago

It was the tenth anniversary of the blog.

I was looking back at day/night cycles and full zone respawns of yore.

My wife’s Pokemon Go account was hacked, but I recovered it pretty quickly.  That post brings in a lot of search engine traffic looking for ways to hack Pokemon Go accounts.  So many bad people.

Daybreak announced that both EverQuest and EverQuest II would be launching Kunark focused expansions, with Empires of Kunark slated for the former and Kunark Ascending for the latter.

Smed was taking his Hero’s Song project back to the crowdfunding arena again, this time via Indiegogo which, unlike Kickstarter, lets you keep the money even if you don’t meet your goal.

I was going on about problems EVE Online has getting new players to stick with the game… again.  We also had the YC118.8 Update which revamped a the look of mining barges and some frigates, among other thing.  It also launched the Purity of the Throne event that had me chasing white skins for Amarr ships.

There was also the ascension of Caitiz of House Tash-Murkon to the Amarr throne.  All those ships are still lined up in Amarr for some reason.  Did they have to wait a year for the first Jubilee?

And Alpha Clones would soon be a thing, so I was wondering what you could do with one.

In post-Casino War events the Imperium finished conquering Delve and a state of normalcy was starting to come to pass.  I also got my last ship out of Deklein.

And then there was World of Warcraft where the Legion expansion was off and running.  There was even an app for it.  I started off slowly as I figured things out and moved clockwise around the Broken Isles.  That didn’t stop me from checking up on my Draenor garrison though.

And then in one of those bullet point posts that I always hate a year later when it comes time to do the summary I covered Star Trek Online going to consoles, Legends of Norrath card packs, rewards for Omega players in EVE Online, and the then upcoming EVE Vegas.

Finally, No Man’s Sky launched, capping off yet another dismal episode of fan behavior.  After getting death threats for delaying the launch, Hello Games finally shipped the game only to have the fan base explode even more so when it was discovered that features that were straight up said to be in the product… multiplayer being the prime suspect… were not.  Still, it made a lot of money and features have since been added and it got its own Honest Game Trailers video.  There are, no doubt, lessons to be learned here.

Ten Years Ago

I did the great survey of blogs that had, at one time or another, included this site in their blog roll over the last five years.  Only 28% of them were still up and active.  There was also the five year anniversary post and all that it entailed.

I implied that Tobold’s mother a llama.  This had NOTHING to do with him not having a blog roll.

I was totally going to resist Steam selling me Rift for cheap.  That didn’t work, and I ended up playing for about a year or so.

Star Trek Online announced it was going free to play, though I couldn’t imagine how it wasn’t already.

In LOTRO, the Rise of Isengard expansion came out and I almost didn’t notice.  Which was odd, because we were kind of playing LOTRO still.

The Goons were going to wreck the EVE economy by blowing up high sec ice miners.  Another vast Goon conspiracy.  I was being nostalgic for my earlier days in EVE.

GameSpy had a post about re-imagining Diablo as a first person perspective game, which was met with much derision.  Me, I liked the idea and even had suggestions for further topics in that vein to explore.  Meanwhile, Diablo III was pushed out to the middle of 2012.

In other Blizzard news, the Official World of Warcraft Magazine went belly up after just five issues.  And then there was a drop in WoW subscribers.  They lost 600,000 players, though I wasn’t one of them… yet.  Good thing they never lost more than that…

I was still playing Need for Speed: World pretty regularly.  I was filming police chases, avoiding police chases, and buying the squarest ride in the game.

In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw server, the retro experience was made complete by “guilds behaving badly” when it came to contested content.  Some GMs came up with unorthodox ways to resolve conflicts.  Somewhere along the way I got my SOE Authenticator, which I never use.

ArenaNet said something about private GuildWars 2 PvP servers.  I wonder how that would play today?

EA/BioWare gave us a release date for SWTOR at last, so I could start fretting about pre-orders and grace periods.  While I wasn’t in beta yet, BioWare was asking how I was enjoying it.

There was no word about life on Planet Michael.

And, finally, I was wondering how 9/11, which took place just a couple months before the birth of my daughter, would influence her view of the world relative to my own.  This was triggered by her trip to New York, where she visited the Nintendo Store.

Fifteen Years Ago

Here we are, able to at last dip into the blog archives for fifteen year old items.

There was the first post.  I still haven’t covered all of the topics I promised 15 years back.

After that I was straight into the EverQuest nostalgia, an oft recurring topic here.  The Serpent’s Spine expansion came out for the game.  I would get to that in a bit.

LEGO Star Wars II – The Original Trilogy launched, setting the casual path for future Traveller’s Tales LEGO based games.  My daughter and I would later play this on the Wii, but that was still out in the future.

Pokemon Diamond & Pearl, the first core Pokemon RPG titles for the Nintendo DS platform shipped in Japan.  They wouldn’t reach US shores for another six months.  Again, another series that would show up here as time moved on.

Green Monster Games, later 38 Studios, was unveiled to the public by founder Curt Schilling with R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane as part of the creative team.

Roblox launched.  I didn’t know about it at the time, but the title has grown to be many things, including controversial.

I was into EVE Online, which I began playing just about two weeks before I started the blog.  My first post about it concerned the tutorial, then I went on to my impressions.  I already had EVEMon up and running, because you cannot play EVE Online without it.  And, while I was hardly aware of it, the first titan had been built in New Eden.

I was musing about games slated for the future, including Star Trek Online and Lord of the Rings Online.  I had reservations about both.

I kicked off my old school gaming reminiscences with a post about Stellar Emperor as it was back in 1986.  That was 30 years ago.  Damn continuous motion of time.

The instance group formed up for adventures in Azeroth.

I wrote the first “Month in Review” post.  I am not sure WHY I decided to do that, but it became a thing as here I am doing the 181st such post a decade and a half later. (About nine years ago I decided month in review should have its own category, so I went back and edited each and every last one to put them all in that category.  Fortunately, being a once a month thing, it was easy to figure out if I missed any or not.)

I also wrote something about Saga of Ryzom in that month in review post, which might be the one of the few times I ever wrote anything about it.  It had launched two years before and people were talking about it, but my play time with it was very short and unfulfilling.

But the smartest thing I probably did in that first month was link out to Brent at VirginWorlds in a post, which got him to notice my brand new blog, which kind of got me into the club pretty quickly as well as getting me my first comment.

Twenty Five Years Ago

Meridian 59 by 3DO launched.  It remains part of the perennial discussion as to what was the first “real” MMORPG.

Forty Years Ago

Wizardry for the Apple II launched, one of the early influential titles for me.  I still have graph paper maps of the levels in a drawer in my office.  Robert Woodhead, one of the creators of the title would later serve four terms on the EVE Online Council of Stellar Management.

Apple ][+ back in 1983

Castle Wolfenstein, another influential Apple II title, launched as well.  I needed that two button joystick to play that for sure!

Most Viewed Posts in September

1. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
2. CCP Takes Aim at Cloaky Campers in EVE Online
3. Robbing Some Space Banks
4. CCP Releases the ESS Reserve Bank Keys and Hands Out ISK in EVE Online
5. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
6. Twenty Years
7. Enad Global 7 Q2 2021 Financials and Concerning News
8. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
9. My Blogging Quinceanera
10. Getting Setup with Zwift
11. New World Blues
12. Dealing with Mudflation

Search Terms of the Month

nantworks h1z1
[That didn’t really work out]

is lotro dead 2021
[I mean, it’s been better…]

eve meta 2021
[HACs in null sec]

eve cv-composite molecular condenser
[I’m not going to be much help with gas mining]

eve online jedi gas
[I think you meant “ninja” there, right?]

Game Time from ManicTime

This month we get kind of a Bizarro world “what year is this?” list for my game play time:

• EverQuest II – 35.06%
• EVE Online – 24.37%
• Diablo II – 22.55%
• WoW Classic – 14.42%
• New World – 3.61%

If not for New World I might convince you this was from a decade back or more.  Of course, it was, as noted in the opening, an odd month and my total play time was roughly a third of the average month in 2021 and less than a quarter of the month with the most hours played… which was March.  I guess it was all Valheim all the time that month.

Diablo II Resurrected

The last week of the month saw this nostalgia blast arrive and I managed to find some time for it.  I am still not into Act II with any characters, but I am also not in a big hurry.  Some rides don’t need to go fast to be enjoyable.

EVE Online

I went on exactly one strategic operation in September.  The war is over and I was away for one week and sick for another and in the middle there wasn’t a lot going on.  My planetary industry plans kind of crashed when oversupply of what I was producing hit and I didn’t really have it in me to re-do all of that to pursue some other PI goal.  I did, however, get on one Fortizar and two Keepstar kill mails.  Not a bad month for that.

EverQuest II

The announcement of the next expansion got me thinking about post-cataclysm Norrath and whether it might be time for a return to the old game.  After all, Pandas were on the horizon and there wasn’t really much else going on mid-month.  I subscribed, ran the 2020 Days of Summer event and did the intro quests for the next expansion.  Then Diablo II and New World showed up and now… maybe.  I don’t know.  We’ll see.

New World

New World, the new game under the sun.  I’d play more if I could log in.  Unfortunately, while I managed to slip in during the afternoon of day one, since then the queue on the server I chose… which had no queue at that point… has been mid-three to four figures and honestly I don’t want to play the game that badly.  But I am also not keep to toss ten levels overboard just to avoid the queue.  This isn’t working out so well I guess.

Pokemon Go

If you’re one of my friends I might have sent you a gift from Hawaii… and if you’re one of those people who actually look at the gifts you get, you might even have noticed!  I got in a lot of steps with my buddy while traveling, then had to send my wife with my phone out to get me a Pokestop while I was sick.  Not a lot of progress made overall.

Level: 41 (83% of the way to 42 in xp, 4 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 665 (+3) caught, 689 (+3) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 12 of 14
Pokemon I want: I need a Torkoal for my Hoenn Pokedex
Current buddy: Noibat

WoW Classic

My avoidance of Outland overland content continues on.  The instance group did the Blood Furnace in one go, so we have that going for us.  I also did a bit of Brewfest, but honestly I wasn’t up to grinding out the tasks for a mount.  I got the mug and went on to other things.

Zwift

I am going to put my Zwift progress here in the monthly update.  I’ve written a couple of posts about it and I have a few more brewing.  It is now Wilhelm canon.  I did not make my modest monthly goal of 75 miles but, as I have repeated ad nauseum by this point, vacation and illness.  Leave me alone.  Anyway, my standings right now:

• Level – 9
• Distanced cycled – 264.9 miles
• Time – 14h 28m
• Elevation climbed – 11,352 feet
• Calories burned – 8,783

Coming Up

Welcome to Q4 2021 as of tomorrow I guess.  Last year ActiBlizz gave us their Q3 financials at the end of October rather than sliding into November.  We’ll see if they’re as eager this year.  The will probably be eager to get players back to their games, so we’ll see what incentives and updates they throw out.

I imagine we’ll get more info about the EverQuest II expansion as well as the announcement for whatever EverQuest has in store for players as well.  Maybe those perks will go live too.  They were delayed due to technical issues.

The instance group will be headed towards Zangarmarsh in WoW Classic.

I will carry on with Diablo II Resurrected.

And then there is New World, where my mild indifference is both a blessing and a curse.  I’ll play it if I am enjoying it, but I am not interested in queues.  I guess we’ll see how that settled down as time goes on.

Finally, I am thinking about turning on ads for the site for Q4 just to see how that plays out.  Your feedback on them is welcome, though I clearly won’t be putting up a poll about it.  We’ll see if they can offset the extra I am paying for the premium plan.

A New World Dawns

The day has come at last.  After changes and postponements and what not, New World goes live today.

Just how new and how worldly?

I received an email yesterday morning from Amazon with the Steam key that was the fulfillment of my pre-order.  I launched Steam and plugged that in and downloaded the client, which weighed in at about 39GB, putting it about on par with the Diablo II Resurrected client I downloaded last week.

After that all there was left to do was wait.  And even the wait wasn’t that long.  The various server regions were all set to start up at 8am local time… except Australia for some reason.

It is 8am somewhere

That means pretty much everything is live now.  But I won’t bother to log in until later today, after work and the usual rest I need.  It is hard to sit at you desk at home all day working and then transition to games.  I need to be somewhere else for a while.

Amazon has provided a whole bunch of details about the launch in a post on their site, including the list of servers available.

Meanwhile, somebody has also put together a whole web site about which streamers will be on what servers for launch so you can avoid  the servers that are going to get slammed because somebody with 100K followers is going to swamp the server.

As for why I am playing, a legitimate question after my somewhat tepid summary of the latest beta relative to where the game stood a few years back, there are a few reasons.

First, I remain interested in how it turned out.  The change to a theme park stance has worn away any hype I might have had for the title, but that might be a good thing.  Hype knows no sense or logic, it only knows hype and it is very easy to let hype inflate your expectations.  Lower expectations mean a more appraising look at the title and less likelihood of real disappointment.

Second, it has been a bit of a ride getting here since the game was announced back in 2016.  Five years isn’t that long of a stretch… let me tell you about some Kickstarter backed MMOs that promised to ship more than five years ago that still aren’t even in beta… but given the gyrations and the delays and the change of course… again, I am interested to see where it ended up.

Third, it is a bit of an event in the genre, the first big studio launch of an MMORPG in a while.  How it goes will likely be read as a barometer for the genre as a whole.  Are MMORPGs a thing again?  Is the market ready for new blood?  And how long has it been since I was at an MMORPG launch?  Expansions don’t count and I cannot remember the last time I was there on day one for a new title.

Finally, it is kind of a low commitment.  New World is buy to play; grab the box for $40 and no subscription required.  I am down with that.  Not having a subscription cuts both ways of course.  While it makes it easy to buy in, I also have a tendency to prioritize the games I am paying a monthly fee for when it comes to play time.  But we’ll see.  I also want to see the day one cash shop versus what it looks like a year from now.

I have no idea where I will end up server-wise.  And the fact that companies (guilds) are capped at 100 people means I’ll likely not join one any time soon if only to avoid taking up a limited resource for some group.

And, of course, we’ll see if Amazon is really ready.  There is certainly a chance that there will be issues.  It would barely be an MMORPG launch without some problems.  I’ll be along for the ride.  Let’s see how it rolls.

Addendum: I peeked in this morning just to see how things were going and it is queues everywhere, rolling up into the 25K zone for some “cool name” servers, like Valhalla in US East.  I expect we might see some additional servers coming online before the weekend.

New World Blues

Heroes are not to cry
So hold your head up high
The future is ours to see
So come on and rescue me
So tell me what I have to lose
I am ready to feel these new world blues

-New World Blues, Gov’t Mule

It has come to this.  Once I was annoyed by people always telling me that this MMO or that was so much better in beta, and now here I am treading down that same path.  I am here to say that New World was better.

Kinda… sorta… in a way.

Just how new and how worldly?

I’ve been meaning to write about New World for some time now.  At first it just wasn’t possible.  I was in some of the very early testing, back when the Imperium got a blanket invite to come play test the game.  Everything was under an NDA back then.  No screen shots, no blog posts.

More recently I just haven’t been moved to write because the way the game evolved just didn’t move me.  But the launch date it growing near and soon we’ll be awash in posts and news and whatever about the game.

I am sure that my not being all that enthusiastic says more about me than it does about the current state of the game.  But the way the game evolved also says a lot about what players want, or what they think they want.

Back in the early beta the game felt very much like what H1Z1 was supposed to be… H1Z1 Just Survive that is, not the clownish battle royale game it became.  This was going to be Smed taking what was learned from that and refining it into a better game that would deliver on that promise.  It was going to be sandboxy and allow players to group up and hold territory… you don’t invite a pile of null sec EVE Online players to your early beta for anything else I bet… and have a whole survival aspect to it.

And the initial world felt rough and dangerous.  There wasn’t a lot of guidance, PvP was on out in the open world so people were wary of each other, it had a really interesting vibe to it.  Crafting was raw but good.  You had to make things, and to do that you had to gather resources.

There was an early element in the beta where I had made a bow and was out learning how to hunt deer and wolves that felt really right.  It was that same sensation that later drew me into Valheim.  The early New World felt a lot like Valheim did, only it looked a lot better.

It was easy to get lost in that stage of New World, both on the map and on your path forward.  It definitely needed something more to keep enough people engaged and playing to be viable, but it felt like a world you could get into.

Maybe making it an MMORPG was a mistake.  Maybe it should have been a co-op, host your own world game like Valheim.  I have to imagine that Amazon would have happily come up with an AWS plan to host private instances of the game.  But and MMORPG was what was promised and an MMORPG was what had to be delivered.

That early beta test culminated in a giant PvP battle in a valley.  It was probably as big of a fight as one could have with the current state of rendering tech, and it was strange and laggy and fun.  That was the other promise of the sandbox, something to at least approach the grand battles of New Eden.

Then the beta was over and Amazon went off to work with what they had found and the feedback they have received.  More beta events came and went as the launch was pushed back again and again in order to get the game right.

Which brings us to the current state of the game.  That rough feeling, that survival vibe, that sense of danger, all gone, paved over by a slick guided PvE experience.  I had skipped some of the interim beta events, having decided that the game was going to be worth the effort when it finally showed up.  But it changed so much.

Some of the early version still comes through.  The crafting is still similar, though it feels a bit out of place, almost awkward now, in the shiny quest drive PvE world the game has become.

It isn’t a bad game.  Far from it.  And clearly a lot of people like the way it has turned out.

It is quite possible that I just haven’t gotten into it enough to find the hook that would keep me invested.  I am notoriously reluctant to get too involved in beta, to get took deep into any game before launch, before everything is “for keeps,” because that advancement is part of the hook a lot of games have in me and dulling that with early play and resets could turn me away… or make me that person who always says that the game was better in beta.  One of my minor claims to fame is that when Aradune asked me over on TorilMUD if I wanted to get into the EverQuest beta I turned him down.  So I might just be bad at getting a read in beta.

But still, I am wary.  I saw an article over at PC Gamer that sort of put a finger on a bit of my angst, the idea that the game had evolved from something different into something trying to be the next World of Warcraft… though even early WoW was a lot less hand-holdy that New World is now.

I will be there at launch all the same.  Like I said, I could very well be wrong, though I’m still just tagging posts “New World” rather than making it a full fledged category yet.  And it is sill another event in the genre.  We’ll see where it ends.

Friday Bullet Points from a Leading Smoke Exporter

Fires have begun burning on the west coast of the US as predicted, thanks to droughts, record heat, and dry lighting strikes.  But the smoke from the fires, which in past years has settled in on top of the SF Bay Area where I live, has decided that it too wants to travel this summer and has been hazing up sunsets back east.  So while we’re sending out smoke I thought I would cover another set of things that I didn’t want to work up a full post around.

• Blizzard Blows Up

Already foundering for being unable to bring home a win with retail WoW and the 9.1 update, causing many players to head for Final Fantasy XIV, the company took another body blow this week when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the Activision Blizzard for creating a hostile work environment.  While Activision got most of the headlines, the complaint is full of examples of how Blizzard specifically let a wide range of egregious behavior go unchecked and failed to respond to complaints.

Singled out in the complaint was Senior Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi, who had been with the company since 2004 and who had left quietly last summer.  He is referenced in WoW in a number of places, including as Field Marshal Afrasiabi out in front of Stormwind.

Welcome to Stormwind baby!

The disturbing nature of the issues detailed in the complaint was topped by the company’s response to the suit.  With the Blitzchung affair they didn’t seem to know what to say, but this time around they lashed out immediately (text at the end of this post) at the state agency, decrying government overreach and complaining about unaccountable State bureaucrats driving companies from the state, very much politically motivated talking points.

Otherwise the company statement claimed that while some of the things detailed may have been true in the past, the company is all better now, everything is fine, and nobody needs to be held accountable for anything.  They want to have it both ways, saying both that the state is wrong and that they’ve fixed everything in any case.  It is usually better if your statements don’t tend to contradict each other.

Any adult that has worked for a big company knows that corporate culture doesn’t change quickly.  It takes a lot of effort, and the word is that the company hasn’t gone there yet.  That references to Afrasiabi remain in the game is a testament to the lack of progress they have made.  And the internet is compiling testimonials about the company’s problems.

Anyway, the Q3 2021 Activision Blizzard financial report ought to be a real charmer after this.  Massively OP, in their coverage, rehashed the litany of problems the company has been facing in recent years.  It ain’t pretty.

• A New World Beta

Amazon’s MMO New World went into what is supposed to be a final, pre-launch beta this week.  I don’t think they’ll yank the game back from the precipice this time around, but you never know.  I have been interested in the game and was in one of the big early NDA protected test runs a couple of years back

Just how new is it at this point?

I liked what I saw back then… it seemed like what H1Z1 ought to have been before they went all-in on battle royale, but I guess John Smedley being at Amazon Games now might explain that.  I did not pre-order, so no beta invite for me, but Bhagpuss seemed happy with how things looked.

The one thing that seems to be dominating the press coverage is a problem where high end video cards seem to be failing in the beta.  We’ll see how that works out.

• EverQuest and the Ghost Collector’s Editions Past

EverQuest pretty much lives on nostalgia, with their retro and special servers keeping a good portion of their players invested in a $15 a month subscription.  But they have to farm the live servers as well, so they get an expansion every year an a cash shop that is always looking for something new to sell.  Now they are trying to farm a bit of nostalgia from the live server players by offering a pack that features items from the collector’s editions of no longer available expansions.

Missed out? Fear not!  But act fast or you WILL MISS OUT!  AGAIN!

For just 7,999 in Daybreak Cash, which is about $80 in real world cash depending on your purchase quantities, a selection of no longer available items can be made available to you.  It is like nostalgia for fear of missing out!

• Path of Exile Expedition

I have something of a checkered past with Path of Exile.  On paper I should enjoy it, and I am always into it when I start out.  But something… network performance, bugs, no knowing what to do next… always seems to stymie me.  But I think about it every time the offer up a new expansion, and one if launching today.

Play the Expedition Expansion Today

This one is interesting in that Grinding Gears Games has decided to try and roll back player gear and power in an attempt to revitalize the feel of the game and to give it an overall more satisfying experience.  But it is always a risky move, taking power away from players.  Destructiod’s headline about the expansion is an illustration of that risk:

Path of Exile is nerfing everything, and players are unhappy

We shall see how it plays out I suppose, but a power reset might be a good time to jump back in.  Maybe? I took a look at the patch notes, which are a freaking book, but can’t tell either way.

Amazon’s New World

Amazon’s new game studio announced three games that they are working on at TwitchCon yesterday.  (Amazon owns Twitch, so there is that connection… and you can now get some Twitch bennies for being an Amazon Prime customer.)

Of the three, the one garnering interest in this corner of the internet is New World, because they used our three favorite letters, M, M, and O.  Or, at least they said “Massively Multiplayer,” but the “online” part is more that implied at this point.

New World is the one for us though.  I think.  I hope.  I guess.

Just how new and how worldly?

It was hard not to roll my eyes a bit, mostly because the acronym “MMO” has been so stretched and otherwise abused by now that I don’t trust my gut when people use it.  Everything that can get a dozen players online at once seems to feel entitled to that tag these days.

Yes, yes, cynicism is my thing here, but after the last decade of MMOs I think anybody trying to use the designation has to earn our trust.  I am a product of my environment.

Old man yells at cloud base gaming… and AWS…

We have a description of sorts, right there on the store page over at Amazon.

New World is a massively multiplayer, open-ended sandbox game that allows you to carve your own destiny with other players in a living, hostile, cursed land. How you play, what you do, and whom you work with or against is up to you. Live on your own amidst the supernatural terrors or join with others to build thriving civilizations. In this evolving world that transforms with the changing of the seasons, weather, and time of day, the only limit is your own ambition.

And for those who don’t like their information in paragraph format, there are bullet points as well.

• New World is a massively multiplayer, open-ended sandbox game that allows you to carve your own destiny with other players in a living, hostile, cursed land.
• How you play, what you do, and whom you work with or against is up to you.
• Live on your own amidst the supernatural terrors or join with others to build thriving civilizations.
• In this evolving world that transforms with the changing of the seasons, weather, and time of day, the only limit is your own ambition.
• A release date for New World has not been set.

Of course, tossing in the word “sandbox” got an audible sigh from me as well, as it is also a favored term of late and seems to mean something like, “We’re not going to completely copy World of Warcraft.”

At least we know it will be released on Windows.

Minimum System Requirements:

• Processor:   TBD
• RAM:   TBD
• Hard Disk:   TBD
• Video Card:   TBD
• Supported OS:   Windows

However pricing, business model, and whatever have yet to be announced.

I like the price so far… unless that means F2P cash shop hell

And given how long it can take to get a real MMO together… if it is a “real” MMO, by which I mean a worldly, persistent, shared experience, multiplayer RPG… I suspect it will be some time before we get enough details to begin projecting even our most optimistic fantasies on it.

But it has been announced, so I figured I had best take note.  And, of course, because it is already listed over at Amazon, it has reviews.

Only 4 stars for a non-existent game

The other two titles that were announced:

• Breakaway – Breakaway is a 4 vs. 4 mythological sport brawler built for fast action, teamwork, and live-streaming.
• Crucible – Crucible is a battle to the last survivor on a hostile alien world. Players choose and customize heroes, making alliances and betraying allies on their path to victory. An additional player heightens the drama by triggering events, live-streaming the battles, and interacting with viewers

So that sounds like a streaming optimized MOBA and something that might be Overwatch meets The Hunger Games maybe?  I don’t know.  Not MMORPGs.

New World is the title that fits here, though I have to say that all three of the titles chosen seem likely to have problems standing out from other uses of those words.

As I noted above, others in our little internet tribe are talking about it as well.  They might even be less cynical than I.

• Bio Break
• Endgame Viable
• Inventory Full
• Just For Crits
• MMO Gypsy