Punching Sheep with Marshal Windsor

It was time to return once more to Blackrock Depths and to continue our adventures there.

Blackrock Depths map

Last time we successfully finished the Franclorn Forgewright quest which gave us the Shadowforged Key.  That gave us some options going into this week.  Our group was:

• Viniki – level 55 gnome warrior
• Skronk – level 55 dwarf priest
• Moronae – level 55 night elf druid
• Ula – level 54 gnome mage

We assembled at Thorium Point and ran over to the mountain, down the chains, through the mine, and into the instance.

Into the mountain

With the Shadowforged key, we were able to head off to the left and through the locked door.

New paths available

We decided to make Marshal Windsor’s quest our goal for the run, which meant defeating General Angerforge and Golem Lord Arglemach, who are at points 13 and 14 on the map above.  As to how to get to them… well, it was a good thing Skronk remembered or had done some research, because the map is pretty bad at showing the various elevations in the instance.

We headed through the gate, to the right, and up into a side door that put us behind the Ring of Law.  There we had to get around to a large gear assembly which would deploy a bridge across the Dark Iron Highway and give us access to our targets.

The bridging gear

We managed to clear that area and deploy the bridge.  We then started working our way towards our targets.  We moved pretty quickly and even managed to bypass one group, and successfully avoided bumping into them by accident later, which was what happened to us last time.

And this was kind of key as we would walk past that group a few times.

Our first bit of trouble was a group of four, two fire elementals and two Dark Iron Dwarves, one of which was a healer.  We decided to kill the healer first, but the elementals hit very hard and I went down suddenly on a crit and we ended up wiping.

We released and ran back and finished them off, but things got out of control again with the next group and another wipe happened.

Viniki and Ula down as the wipe progresses

The fire elementals hit hard, but this also did not bode well for the upcoming fights.

General Angerforge was just down the steps from the elementals, so we made sure to clear them all as well as the groups that were off to either side of the general.  We then got ourselves ready to go.

Ready for Angerforge

Angerforge has a group of non-elites with him that are fairly easy to kill.  Then, when he is down to low health, he summons another group.  Our plan was to freeze and burn the initial non-elites, which went well.  We then burned down Angerforge until he called for help.  At that point, as his team ran in, I lit off my AOE taunt, which has a 10 minute cool down, so I use it only at need.  The plan was to get them all on me, do more freeze and burn, and finish off Angerforge.

My taunt worked.  All the mobs ran to me… and beat the crap out of me, killing me.

Viniki down again

This ended up as a wipe, but we managed to bring down General Angerforge before the last of us died.  We released and ran back to the instance and kept going straight back to the scene of the fight.  I had some unlooted mobs disappear after a previous wipe, so wanted to get back just in case.

We were in luck.  His helpers had disappeared, so we were able to loot the first item for Marshal Windsor.  Then it was across the way to the Manufactory and Golem Lord Arglemach.

Into the Manufactory

Golem Lord Arglemach was straight ahead, but we went about and cleared out the whole area before heading to him.  He will call any left for help.  So we proceeded with care, pulling individuals and groups.  They are mostly non-elite, but there were some elites mixed in.  And once that was done we turned to face Arglemach.

Arglemach waits

He has two golem helpers with him.  A quick check of the fight suggested that we kill the golems as quickly as possible, then finish off Arglemach.  Our first run was fast.  I pulled Arglemach and he and the golems came at me, and beat me down with a 1,500 burst of damage.  It was a quick wipe.

Viniki down in seconds

But we did learn a few things.  The first was that Arglemach unleashes some lightning attacks that are nature based.  We all had two nature resist potions on us.  So the next run we took the potions to reduce damage from Arglemach, and set to slay the golems first again.  And we did fairly well, we managed to get both golems down, but didn’t have enough left in the tank to finish the boss.

Helpers down, Arglemach still up

That didn’t further our cause though, as the golems just loaded back again after the fight.  You have to kill Arglemach or you get nothing.  So we looked at the combat log again and decided we needed to kill the golem tossing fire balls at us first.  He was doing the most damage.  So we took out potions again, focused on the fire golem, and then I shot him to start the fight.  And he just stood there launching fire balls while Arglemach and the other one ran at us.  I panicked and ran to the target golem and got out of healing range of Skronk and died quickly.

Barely scratched them this time

The fight happened so fast that Moronae didn’t even get a hit in, so was able to stealth and hide without dying.  He popped his combat ress on Skronk, who in turn was able to ress Ula and I, saving us the run back.

At this point we had blown our nature resist potions.  Skronk still had one extra for me, and Moronae still had his up, since he didn’t die.  So we lined up for our fourth run.  It was starting to feel like we were not going to be able to get past this boss.  But we had another go in us.  We planned to all bring it to the fire ball golem this time, to get him down fast.  Then the second golem, and then Arglemach.  So in we went.

And this time it worked.  We got the first golem down fast, then the second, and had plenty of gas left in the tank for Arglemach.  He went down and we were able to collect the other piece for Marshal Windsor.

Golem Lord Arglemach down at last

That done, we went back out the way we had come and set about clearing the big open area between the detention block and the instance exit in anticipation of having to having to finally escort Marshal Windsor out of the dungeon.

We did that and started down the detention block, clearing as we went.  We got in over our heads at one point when, working on a group of four, Ula mis-targeted and brought the next group down on us as well.  And then a group of dogs patrolling the detention block walked into range and joined the fight.

Things looked bad.  But somehow we managed to pull it off.  Skonk and I used every skill that had a long cool down to keep going, and Moronae died at the end of the fight, but in the end the bad guys were all down.

We survive the brawl in the hall

We got Moronae ressed up and carried on, clearing to Marshal Windsor’s cell.  We even cleared the group just past the cell, just to be sure we didn’t get a proximity pull by mistake.  Skronk opened up the cell door and we went in to talk to him.  We turned in the quest, for which he gave us 90 silver, then immediately wanted to get out of there.  But first he wanted to go get his stuff.

I cannot leave without my stuff!

I always wonder who writes the scripts for escort mobs and thinks that somebody locked in a dungeon’s first thought on seeing rescuers is, “I’m saved, but I cannot leave without my random and likely replaceable stuff.”  Of course, Windsor didn’t even suggest leaving on our first two visits.

And then I remembered where the storage area was.  It was on the other half of the detention block loop.  We had cleared the most direct route to Marshal Windsor, but not the path he was about to take.  To illustrate:

The Detention Block

The blue arrow is the path we cleared as we came in.  The orange arrow is where Marshal Windsor was going to go.  We had not cleared that.  So it was on our bicycles to keep up with Windsor and keep him safe despite himself.

I will say, for a guy in just his shorts… where was he keeping that silver he gave us… he got right into the spirit of battle.

Windsor bringing the pain

Unfortunately, he could be kind of random as to who he would attack.  He had a propensity to start beating on whichever mob Ula managed to sheep during these fights.  He seemed to delight in it, changing to beat on the sheep when he had a mind.

We got a break part way through as he stops at Dughal Stormwing’s cell so we can free him as well.

Dughal gets free

He doesn’t join the fun, just runs off into the instance and disappears.

Once he was free and we rested up a bit, Marshal Windsor went on towards his stuff.  We ended up outside the storeroom with only two more mobs between us and the exit of the instance.  Windsor just stood there for a bit, then suddenly announced he was going into the room.

He’s going in!

Of course, there was a group of mobs in that room and, in our attempt to keep Windsor alive and grab aggro and kill them we managed to wipe.

Dead in the storeroom

Windsor fought on, but died not too long after.  We released and ran back, but our expectations were low.  In Classic, losing an escort mob in an instance generally means resetting the instance and starting over.  And such was the case here.  But at least we would be read for next run.

At that point, we called it and headed out.  Skronk and I both managed to finish the fanny packs quest, so we got to turn that in.  Next time around we’ll finish up Marshal Windsor and then move on to the next item in the instance.  There is still a lot of that map we haven’t seen yet.

My Own History in Azeroth

Saturday was the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of World of Warcraft.

I wasn’t there for the launch fifteen years ago.  Honestly it didn’t register with me at the time and I was only really aware of the game after the fact.

As I wrote earlier in the month in recognition of another anniversary, I was busy playing EverQuest II.  And I wasn’t even planning to play that, a tale that was pretty much covered in that other post.  Suddenly invested in EQII after a hiatus for EQ, I was pretty much oblivious to the launch of World of Warcraft when it came.

Eventually it came to my notice and clearly I ended up playing it.  So I decided that I should try to piece together a timeline of my own relationship with World of Warcraft.

On the plus side, I have this blog to help.  On the negative, this blog started in late 2006, some time after I started playing WoW and long after what I would consider the pre-history of WoW.  And since launch the blog had passed the five thousand post mark, almost 1,300 of which are included in the World of Warcraft category, which gives me a bit of a problem finding some of the exact details I might be looking for.  The search function in WordPress is a bit too loosey goosey for my taste. (I really want multiple tag/category search.)

Still, I managed to scrape something together.

The Years Before WoW

World of Warcraft did not manifest in a vacuum, but was part of a stream of development that started in the 90s with the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.  That launched 25 years ago this past Saturday, sharing a launch date with WoW separated by ten years.

I didn’t play Warcraft when it launched either.  I don’t think I ever owned a copy of it, but I was aware of it.  I worked at a company that did Macintosh products and it was popular in the lab because it was a network game.  I was playing more Marathon and Bolo then, but I bought copies of Warcraft II and Warcraft III in turn.

I never played the campaign for either.  I bought them to play against friends and co-workers on the company network.  Thus, I recognize all the peon phrases, recall some of the units, but am completely lore bereft.  (Same story with StarCraft really.  Played a ton of head to head, never really did the campaign.)

I did, however, play Diablo and Diablo II very thoroughly.  Those do not share the same lore universe as Warcraft, but a lot of the ideas and mechanics that went into WoW came from those two.

Oh look, a quest, potions, and a proto-hot bar! Not pictured: Skill tree and points

There was a point when I was bemoaning the fact that I didn’t want WoW but a Diablo based MMO.  It did not take me much time to realize that much of the underpinnings of WoW were lifted straight from Diablo, right down to gear drops and such.  It is not the same lore, and it is a bit brighter in places (though you spend a whole act in Diablo II in a brightly lit desert) but WoW, at its mechanics core, is very close to what a Diablo MMO might have been.

All of which lays at least a groundwork of familiarity with Blizzard and its games.

WoW While in Norrath

I think I first heard WoW mentioned on our guild voice coms at some point in December 2004.  It was becoming clear that all was not well with EverQuest II.  There were lots of updates as SOE scrambled to adjust the formula of the game to try and stem the flow of players from the game, either headed back to EQ or off to WoW.  The words about WoW were not kind.  It was derided as a colorful kiddie game, not a real MMORPG like EQ was.

But those doing the grumbling had also pinned their hopes on Brad McQuaid’s Vanguard as the real successor to EQ, though, so far as I know, not one of those people grumbling ended up in Vanguard.  Instead, they all migrated to WoW eventually.  Even Wooflin, our guild leader, and the most anti-WoW voice in the guild.

March 2005 – I Go to Azeroth

The weekend of my birthday, at the prodding of a friend from the EQ days, I bought a copy of World of Warcraft, created an account, and attempted to play.  It did not impress me.

Part of the problem was that I bought it on a Friday evening on the way home from work and it required so much patching, which moved so slowly on our rinky dink, but not bad for the time ADSL internet connection, that I did not get to character creation until Sunday morning.

The patcher was so bad back in the day that, when I did start playing, I had a paid account at File Planet because they would host the updater and you could download it quickly and apply the patch long before the default patcher would even realize it needed to update.

Annoyed by that… you buy a game, you want to play that night… I was in no mood for anything when I rolled up a dwarf paladin.  That didn’t click with me at all.  Bland snowy terrain, ugly cartoon character models, none of the depth of EQII, not even any housing, I wasn’t having it.  I played a couple more days then cancelled before my initial 30 days expired.  I went back to the guild and told them how much it sucked.

Late 2005 Return

But EQII was sucking a bit as well, with constant changes and updates along with stability problems from time to time.  We made it pretty well into the first expansion, Desert of Flames, but people in our guild were dropping out of the game, and most of them were headed to World of Warcraft. (Though I recall one person, Oteb maybe, who went straight to EVE Online.)  Meanwhile, more people I knew outside the guild were also talking about WoW.  Maybe six months later I renewed my account there and rolled up a new character on the Hyjal server, where some friends were playing.

Of course, they were all much higher level than I was, so it was sort of a side venture to hang out and chat with them now and then.  I was still more serious about playing EQII.  But the guild there began a full on run for the doors, and those of us from TorilMUD decided we needed to head into Azeroth as a group.  And so I ended up on another server, Eldre’Thalas in early 2006.  It was after Desert of Flames but before Kingdom of Sky.  I know this because I never purchased the latter.

Twilight Cadre and Servers

When the TorilMUD faction washed up on Azeroth’s shore we decided to create a guild… because of course we did.  Back on TorilMUD we had been the Shades of Twilight guild, and had even managed to create an alt guild in EQII with the same name.  But that name, and most obvious variations, had already been taken in WoW.  Eventually we went with Twilight Cadre, which has to be something I came up with, having a vaguely Soviet feel to it.  But I cannot say for sure if that was so, just that we adopted it.

We were not much of a guild though.  I think many of us were a bit burned out by our time in EQII.  I pottered around, made the human pally that remains my “main” on retail through to today, along with a few other alts, getting to around level 40 and losing my way.  It was almost all solo.  Some people got more into it and joined raiding guilds.  But this was the time of server splits, and a couple of raiding guilds, and my friends in them, went off to new servers.

I also rolled a couple characters on Hyjal only to have the people I knew there disappear when their raiding guild opted to take a free server transfer to a new realm.

On Eldre’Thalas activity tapered off and with the impending arrival of the Echoes of Faydwer expansion in EQII… expansion number three… and its promise to revive the game and get back to a more EverQuest-like theme, WoW didn’t have much of a hold on me.

The Instance Group Forms

In September 2006 I started the blog, so events start to have hard dates… at least if I had a mind to write about them at the time.  The early days here were somewhat chaotic when it came to figuring out what I ought to record.

One key post in hindsight, made just 16 days into the life of the blog, was about changing my solo ways with WoW, which had been the default for many months.  I don’t remember why I dropped Skronk a line, but he was interested in playing WoW with me.  He was already playing, had something of a group, but was on yet another server, which was ever the problem back in the day.

Somehow I was able to convince him to start over on Eldre’Thalas.  I had already taken over ownership of the Twilight Cadre guild, so we rolled up new characters, I invited them in, and the instance group began.

Tales of Dungeon Crawls

At this point there is a paper trail of blog posts.  I have a nice summary post about the instance group in vanilla WoW with all the dates.  We played through until March, when Earl had to move across the country.  During that time the four of us remaining ran off to play LOTRO at launch.

Earl returned in September and we picked up again at Zul’Farrak and played on through and got our epic mounts.

The instance group all mounted up

We moved on into The Burning Crusade and got fairly far, but eventually tapered off before we had finished all of the instances.  We were struggling a bit as a group and had been playing for ages straight through, so there was a bit of a break once we got our flying mounts.  The next item on our list was Warhammer Online, which brought us together in late summer of 2008.

Also, somewhere in here, before WotLK, my daughter, I setup an account for my daughter who has been watching me play.  She was about six and now, nearly a dozen years later, she scolds me for letting her play WoW at such a young age.  I think Pokemon is her main gaming with daddy memory, but WoW is a close second.  My mother also picks up the game and at some point we have a three generation group going on.

Three Cats in Hillsbrad

She drew this picture in KidPix to commemorate the event.

Her Mount

Now she has PhotoShop and is taking AP Art and does amazing work.

Wrath of the Lich King

Probably the high point of the group and my longest continuous stretch of playing WoW.  I was there from the pre-expansion events… remember the plague… through until Cataclysm launched.

I should go through and create summary posts for the instance group in each expansion at some point.  But for now it was quite the time.  We jumped from Warhammer Online into the launch of the expansion and carried on as before.  We finished up the instances that were available, then there was something of a break.  We did spend some time as Horde, but didn’t get too far.  But I didn’t leave, and kept on going with the Argent Tournament until I had earned every item it had to offer.

The Cataclysm

The instance group came back to WoW when Cataclysm hit.  The old world had been reworked and we rolled up a fresh group to experience it.  Unfortunately, the world had gotten much easier. (Or we had gotten less bad.  Or maybe both.)  Reworked instances and the dungeon finder and all that combined to make for an unsatisfying experience.  We got bored and stopped playing.  However, I was still subscribed because I opted in for the offer to get a free copy of Diablo III if I subscribed to WoW for a year.

Long term subscription offers always seem to coincide with player unrest in WoW.  When the year finally ended I wrote a post about my final achievement and predicted that while I might come back to visit that I would never be as invested in the game again.

The Year Off

I spent a full year away from WoW, during which many other games were played.  The instance group went to EverQuest II and Rift for a while.  There was a return to LOTRO.  I think I finally got through Moria then.  But Blizz was not spoken of for a long stretch as the stink of Cataclysm remained in our nostrils.

Pandas Come Calling

After a year or so things were idle, the group was on a break, and I was looking for something to do.  Blizz, in an uncharacteristically well timed move, sent me a note that Mists of Pandaria was half price.  So I bought a copy and went back to give it a try, and it was delightful.

MoP was probably some of the best PvE content ever in an MMO.  On expansions for me it ranks only behind Wrath of the Lich King for my level of satisfaction.  I rolled through and did the dailies got most of the factions to exalted (examined here), worked up with pet battles, did the LFR to see the fall of Garrosh, and got that azure water strider, probably the most OP broken mount that Blizz has ever handed out.  I used it constantly on my main and alts for years.

We all loved that water bug

The instance group came back towards the end as well, and we did some of the instances with our original characters.  We also did the Cata instances, including the raids redone as five person dungeons, and they were all pretty damn good.  We warmed to WoW again as a group.

Warlord of Draenor and the Big Fall

The build up to WoD was huge.  Blizz was promising to get back to some old school orc shenanigans with what seemed like a re-roll of The Burning Crusade.  And, according to Tom “they should never let me speak off script ever” Chilton, garrisons were going to be housing for WoW.

In hindsight, it wasn’t a bad expansion.  There was good overland content and such.  But it did not live up to the hype, and garrisons backfired in a big way, becoming grindy little hidey holes that took people out of the world just like Blizz said housing would, but did not provide any of the player satisfaction that housing does in other games.  Subscription numbers tanked, falling back to 2005 levels and causing Blizz to stop reporting them.

The instance group did a few dungeons, but we were fading by then.  Life was getting in the way and the passion was not there.  In April 2015 we ran what remains the last dungeon in retail WoW we did as a group.  I took a big break in there, though came back before the next expansion and did what I needed to do to unlock flying.

Legion

Legion was good.  I played it through with multiple alts.  It was enjoyable.  I unlocked flying, which has now become something of the benchmark “I really played this expansion” achievement.  But it was completely solo experience.  I did a few Dungeon Finder groups for quests, but gave up on that.  I hate those groups not because people are hostile or toxic or don’t talk, but because they are all about getting things done.  You are at a run through the whole thing and then it is over and I barely know what really transpired.  Just follow the tank, hit what they hit, move on.

In all I played about ~15 months out of the two years that Legion was the main content.  Not bad.  I ended up with seven or eight characters at the level cap, including a Horde character.

Battle for Azeroth

I wanted to like BFA, thinking that Blizz had figured stuff out with Legion.  But the broken content scaling that favored either people who upgraded no gear or who went epic made the whole thing a grind.  After getting used to class reworks in Legion having to relearn them yet again threw more cold water on my enthusiasm.  It was an expansion where I liked the world but had no love for the updated mechanics.  Only my main has hit max level there and I have not unlocked flying yet, though I still have a year to go.

WoW Classic – The Second Coming of WoW

And then there was WoW Classic, which launched back at the end of August.  You can follow the WoW Classic tag to see all I’ve written about it. (This post will be at the top the day it goes live, so scroll down.)

My hopes for it were tentative.  I’ve gone back to retro/fresh start servers before in EQ, EQII, Rift, and LOTRO, and they are fun for openers, but they have an expiration date, a point when the joy fades and I just stop logging in.

WoW Classic also relaunched the instance group and my baseline hope was that we could get together and run Deadmines again.  That seemed viable.  Instead we have carried on.  For the last couple of months WoW Classic has easily been my most played game.  And even this month, where it has gotten some serious competition from EverQuest II due to its anniversary, it is still getting a lot of play time.

The Future

If you’ve read my annual predictions, you know I am wrong way more often than not when trying to see into the future.  But it sure seems like I’ll be sticking with WoW Classic for a while. It is also likely that I’ll buy the next WoW expansion and probably play a bit in that, though now I only have a single character at level cap and ready to move on to the next thing.

What Blizz does with the WoW Classic idea over time will play into how invested I remain in the game.  If they do “off year” updates and give us The Burning Crusade Classic and Wrath of the Lich King Classic I will no doubt dive into those.  A new branch of content based on WoW Classic would be interesting as well, though I am not sure Blizz has the mental flexibility to manage that.  They have grown too big and the whole company depends too much on WoW revenue to gamble, which means that things will likely stay safe and dull.  We shall see.

And so it goes, my general tale of my time in Azeroth.  When I had the idea for this I was somewhat determined to create a hard timeline based on blog posts.  But we’re past 3,000 words with just my vague, hand waving tale.  Imagine how long it would have gotten if I nailed down dates?  I don’t think either you or I have the time for that!

Final Notes as I Move on from EverQuest II Yet Again

As has become obvious to any regular reader, my time with EverQuest II has fallen by the wayside with the coming of the LOTRO Legendary server.

It isn’t quite correct to say that the latter drove out the former.  Instead, the story is pretty much as it always tends to be with EQII, where I find a path, play it through, and then am left wandering about, looking for a new path, which the game tries to hide from me.

In this case, I hit level 100, finished out the zone I had been running, and was offered several paths forward by the game.  I wrote a post musing about why Battle for Azeroth has levels, and I think EQII made a case for every expansion having a boost to the level cap.

Gating content is reason enough, even if the levels are not that much of a hurdle.  Since EQII hasn’t raised the cap much of late, my hitting level 100 yielded three in-game mail messages inviting me to come experience some content.

One proposed to send me to an alternate version of Zek, though the transportation method wasn’t all that encouraging.

Is there room for my horse in there?

There I encountered a rogue orc priest and then the Zek triplets, Rallos, Tallon, and Vallon, who discussed the nature of things over my dying body.

Les Triplettes de Zek

I ran that alternate version of Zek for a bit before getting hung up on a quest with prerequisites that needed me to go elsewhere.

I spent some time chasing down the Words of Pure Magic quest in order to learn the Druzaic language, which I needed for some reason I cannot recall.  Along the way doing that I managed to pick up the Hierophant’s Crook, one of the early heritage quests.

I am not a crook

I also ran into Firiona Vie.  Despite not being a staple of the cover art for EverQuest II expansions, she is apparently in the timeline.  I probably knew that already, but I have forgotten so much over the years.

Posing with Firiona

And then she died, which was awkward for all concerned.

Look, I was just following orders…

I understand that she is better now, but it was a moment.

And then at some point I ended up in the Vespyr Isles and started doing some quests there and simply ran out of steam.

I thought that perhaps I should change things up and decided to roll a new character.  I was surprised that I even had any character slots left.  The idea behind the new character was to explore some of the old zones from the early game and maybe write up something about them, the way I did with Thundering Steppes way back in the day.  Was that really eleven years ago?

Of course, nothing evokes nostalgia like a completely out of date welcome to the game.

Welcome to EverQuest II

The funny thing is that the graphic there makes me think this was updated around the Echoes of Faydwer time frame.  Even then, three years into the game, it would have been tough to call the experience entirely new.  And fourteen years into the journey?  Forget about it.

I did, however, try to run through a new character, doing the Isle of Refuge and then launching into Qeynos.

Arriving in Qeynos Harbor

But it wasn’t sticking with me.  I found it a bit difficult to get around Qeynos, in part because of the semi-regular bell reorganization plan.

What do you mean the bell “moved?”

And in part because I was used to going through some of the sub-divisions, the racial ghettos like Greystone Yard, to get to some of the early zones.  This was not helped by some of the quests still referencing a layout of Qeynos that is only one of memory.

The destination map

Eventually I figured it out and visited a few key points.

Somebody will get this reference

But I wasn’t feeling it and let it slip.  I got myself wrapped up in writing two more TorilMUD posts, one of which will go live this week, and then came LOTRO Legendary to fill the void left by my tiring of Norrath once again.

So another autumnal venture into EverQuest II draws to a close.  My interest has slackened and awaits once again the siren’s song of nostalgia.

That is not how this works

Maybe next time around I’ll get a bit further past level 100.

Feature Creep – On The Cost of Making Video Games

I saw a post over at Massively OP trotting on the argument that video games should cost more because they are more expensive to make than ever, that being part of the justification for the EA lockbox and pay to win scheme in Star Wars Battlefront II I was on about yesterday.  So it seemed timely for this video to show up.

The summary, should you want to skip, is that big companies like EA and Activision are actually making less games, spending less on making games, yet pulling in more revenue than ever because microtransactions, season passes, subscriptions, and all that money spent after the box sale more than make up for the AAA box price staying at $60.

Basically, it turns out if can keep one game going with post-launch addons you don’t have to make any more new games.  Imagine that.