The Daybreak Home For Failing Games Is Delighted To Announce A Grand Re-Opening Party: Guest Of Honor - Palia.

The most unexpected gaming news of the week has to have been the gathering of Palia developer Singularity 6 into the welcoming embrace of Daybreak Games, an enfoldment only made possible, as Wilhelm was at some pains to point out, through the opening of EG7's wallet. Then again, with EG7 arguably in the process of being consumed from the inside by the company it thought had devoured and digested, the point may well be moot.

I think it's safe to assume we won't be seeing a similar parasitic assimilation this time around. The announced intention and best case scenario would appear to be Singularity 6 continuing in the current direction of travel, driving its own bus in the proven manner long established by Standing Stone Games, the ostensibly independent owners and operators of Lord of the Rings Online, while somewhere in the back, Ji Ham calls out course corrections and tells the driver when to pull over for a comfort break.

Palia is one of many - almost certainly too many - cozy crafting titles, development of which seemed to proliferate following the Great Sequestration at the beginning of the 2020s. The popularity of sitting indoors pretending you were walking around doing the kinds of simple, natural, soul-regenerating things that had suddenly became forbidden in real life - things like meeting friends, swapping gifts and romancing strangers - made a disturbing amount of sense in the plague years but it was always going to be a risky proposition when the masks came off and hands got dirty again for real.

Palia had a good head of steam behind it when it went into open beta less than a year ago (Really? That recently? Seems like a lot longer.) but the game as it could be played then turned out to be a lot less compelling than many had hoped or more likely imagined. I spent a few hours trying to like it and didn't make too much progress, either in the game or with my feelings for it.

Curiously, in about the only substantial post I wrote about my brief experience, I went on at some length about the existential difference between playing a game solo with other people around and just plain solo. Online or offline, in other words. That is also what I came here to talk about today.

When I heard that Daybreak had taken custody of the failing property, alleged to be teetering somewhere between maintenance mode and utter extinction, my immediate thought was to wonder what the heck they thought they were going to do with it. 

On the surface the acquisition makes sense. Their business, going back through ancestral roots with Sony Online Entertainment, revolves entirely on building, buying or curating MMOs of various kinds and Palia is supposedly an MMO. 

In my admittedly brief time with it, however, my overriding impression was that it neither felt like nor needed to be one and that I wasn't sure I wouldn't prefer it if it wasn't, something about which I was quite conflicted:

"As I've said many times, I hugely prefer playing online, among others, even when all I do is solo and never talk to anyone. I've said that just knowing a game-world is shared with thousands, even millions of people makes everything I do there feel more meaningful than if I was playing wholly alone, entirely unseen."

I'm not sure I feel that way any more. What's more, in ceasing to be convinced of the innate superiority, let alone necessity, of a shared, online existence when it comes to playing games, I may be not so much changing my coat as readjusting it to fit the zeitgeist.

A few years ago, all talk was of Live Service. Everything had to be online, always. From the player's perspective, the idea seemed to be that, once you began playing a game, you'd never have to stop. From the business end, expectations revolved around locking players into an eternal purchasing cycle, mostly involving Seasons, that would mean no-one would ever need to make a new game again.

That never-ending search for the Forever Game seems to have morphed into a peculiar form of mutually assured destruction, with swarms of players descending on every new hopeful just long enough to strip it bare and spit it out before swirling up and away towards the next. Developers are indeed freed from making new games but only at the expense of desperately trying to pump out new content for the only one they ever did make fast enough to stop the last few customers abandoning them forever.

Now everyone's had the chance to see how Live Service works in practice, it seems the story has changed. Like gamification and the metaverse it's no longer a buzzword, more of a curse. Of late, we've begun to see not just resistance but active push-back. The pressure may finally be starting to generate a response.

A couple of formerly multiple titles that each built a similar momentum to Palia's before most people could play them - Nightingale and Wayfinder - have each removed the requirement for an active internet connection while playing.

 Airship Syndicate claimed they were responding to "a shift in the industry where players are OK paying for a premium title if it means respect for their time and wallets". Inflexion made it clear they were responding directly to player pressure, saying "We’ve seen a lot of discussion in recent days around our decision to make Nightingale online-only at our Early Access release. We understand that this can be frustrating..."

The upshot in both cases was to take the games offline or at least offer an offline option. Arguably neither was a full MMORPG but another recent title, Islands of Insight self-professedly was and now that, too, will be adding an offline mode in a week or so. Meanwhile, Amazon Games has been tying itself in knots attempting to rebrand New World for console as an "action RPG". They aren't atually taking the game offline but you get the feeling they wish they could.

Everything has its day. Maybe even the Internet. Tobold seems to think so and he stopped playing MMORPGs ages ago, perhaps in preparation for the day when it would all fall apart.

I'm not quite ready to settle down in my bunker with a diesel generator, a console and a stack of cartridges just yet but I do think the online honeymoon is probably over. The days when it seemed like magic just to be there, wherever there was, alongside hundreds, even thousands of other people, all doing the same imaginary things in the same imaginary space, are long gone. 

Now, when you hear people talking about what it's like being online, they're mainly complaining about how awful it is or reminiscing about how great it used to be. If anyone talks about the "magic" you can bet it's the magic of nostalgia. The zeitgeist seems to be in retrograde right now as people rediscover the ownership rights and privacy they thought ten years ago they'd never need to think about again.

I don't think time rolls back that easily. I suspect internet denial will be a niche movement for the rest of my lifetime, at least. Always online though? Live service? I suspect those will slowly go the way of so many other trends that once seemed unstoppable but which now need to be explained to anyone who didn't happen to be around at the time.

Palia, to swing back to where we began, looks to me like the very sort of game that would be well-served by an offline mode. If you google it you'll quickly see I'm not the only one who sees it that way. 

Daybreak seems to be one of the companies least likely to facilitate such a change of direction. As SOE they first had a reputation for keeping dead games online and then for mercilessly shutting them down but they've never been in the business of packaging them up for offline play. DBG has mostly concentrated on curating the games it acquired after SOE cut back the deadwood.

The upside of that downbeat projection is that they've done a pretty good job of it. DBG are MMO specialists and they seem to have the knack of keeping the games at least ticking over to the satisfaction of enough players to keep them commercially viable. If Palia is going to make it, somehow, as an MMO, they've gone to the right place. 

The question remains whether there's really enough demand for a massively multiplayer gardening game or, as Singularity Six prefers to put it, "A cozy community sim MMO for you and your friends". If I had to bet, I'd say there may be - but if there is it won't be this one. 

Still, at least now the game is under the Daybreak umbrella, it probably means I'll at least be checking in now and again to see how things are going. That'll be one more for the MAU.

Are we still counting those?

I wouldn't have said that a couple of days ago.

Games For Sale

I logged into EverQuest II for the first time in... well, I can't exactly remember how long. Before I started playing Palworld, that's for sure, so about a month? It wasn't that I even wanted to play the game today, not especially, although I'm pretty much always up for an EQII session. It was more that I felt that, since I paid for an annual subscription last September and the recent expansion two months later, I probably ought at least to make an effort to get some of my money's worth.

And that, right there, is the problem with traditional subscription and buy-to-play payment models. I can't help thinking the best reason I could have for wanting to log in to a game would be a strong desire to play it right now, not because I'm worrying about money I spent on it months ago.

The conter-argument would be that I'd paid for everything up-front so I could enjoy the game and the expansion at my leisure. And anyway, I'd made the decision to spend some time with the game today and I was expecting to enjoy myself. Only I didn't even manage to clock up five minutes in Norrath before I found myself back here, writing about it instead. 

To some degree, that's reflective of where the pendulum is on my gaming arc. I tend to vary between wanting to play games more than write about them and the reverse. Currently I'm in an authorial phase. The pendulum will swing back. It always does.

Mostly, though, my failure to stick with what I'd planned for more than five minutes comes down to what I saw in the launcher as the game was updating, plus some things I've read about EG7 in recent days. Straws are flying in the wind and they're getting hard to ignore.

Wilhelm posted a thoughtful examination of the prospects for the company, under pressure from investors to maximize the profit potential of a portfolio that includes not just the two EverQuest titles but DCUO and - at a slight and somewhat nebulous remove - Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Magic: the Gathering - as well as the ever-promising but rarely delivering H1Z1 and the largely ignored and forgotten Planetside 2. 

Except, on that last one... does the EG7 portfolio still include PS2?

It seems not. Not any more. Word is that Planetside 2 has been sold to... someone. To whom is less clear.

The Enad Global 7 Q4 Interim Report published this week simply states "Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million." As far as I can tell, neither EG7 nor Rogue Planet Studios (The game's nominal developer.) nor DBG has made any public statement about who the new owner might be but it seems certain the title to all Planetside properties has been transferred to a shell company going by the name of Bay Tree Tower Ltd, about whom absolutely nothing of substance is known.

This, naturally, has lead to all kinds of speculation, from the game being shut down as a tax write-off at one extreme to the new owner being Amazon Games who, under John Smedley's auspices, will go on to make Planetside 3 at the other. Someone on Reddit even claims to have found proof on the dark web that the real owners of Bay Tree Tower are Tencent. Feel free to go look that one up for yourselves.

I have no interest in Planetside 2. I'm always a little surprised it's still going, let alone that it seems to be quite popular in certain circles. I have played it and while it seemed fine, it really wasn't my kind of thing. Seeing a whole game removed from the DBG roster and handed off to person or persons unknown, however, is a little... disturbing.

If I was going to speculate, which clearly I am or I wouldn't have started this paragraph by suggesting it, I'd guess PS2 won't resurface as part of the portfolio of another games aggregator like Gamigo or Valofe, for the simple reason that companies like that are usually all too happy to let everyone know when they grab a new moneymaker. 

The use of a shell company suggests something someone doesn't want anyone to know about, which given Daybreak's record, would be business as usual. They seem to specialize in obfuscatory smokescreens, frequently for reasons that never do come fully to light, suggesting they not only do it, they're quite good at doing it. It wouldn't even surprise me if turns out they've sold the game to themselves, somehow, especially since it appears that although the IP rights have moved, publishing remains with DBG. Again, it probably wouldn't be the first time...

In other words, whoever owns PS2, it'll be business as normal for players until further notice, which I guess is something. Meanwhile, the other stand-out item in that quarterly statement was this: 

EG7 has initiated several new growth Initiatives, including... EG7’s own release of a new H1Z1 game.... Currently in concept exploration phase with pre-production phase coming up next.

Daybreak is aiming to enter the production phase for the title on the second half of 2024.

It's ironic that H1Z1 features zombies. It's the franchise that just won't die. I did kinda-sorta know there was some idea of a new take on H1Z1 but I figured it would be another revamp of the existing property or a rerun of one of the old versions. I hadn't realized it was going to be a whole new game...

I'm not going to run through the full report. I'll leave that to Wilhelm, who I'm sure will do a far better job of it than I would. I'll just mention that overall, EG7 seems to be doing about as well as can be expected in what has been a brutal period for game development. The biggest hit to profitabilty seems to have been the inevitable bursting of the My Singing Monsters bubble; that and not managing to get DCUO onto the latest console generation in time for Christmas.

The latter is due to be corrected in the first quarter of this year although there has to be some concern over the letting-go of a number of people from Dimensional Ink, the subdivision responsible for DCUO. You might think they'd need everyone if the game is going to move forward this year.

All of that stands as background to what I saw when I logged in to EQII this morning, which was something much more immediately relevant to playing the game itself. As of now, if you'd like a leg-up doing that, Darkpaw would be more than happy to oblige.

To that end, they've added a couple of packs to the Cash Shop: the Darkpaw Hero Bundle and the Darkpaw Heroic Boost Bundle. The only difference between the two is that one comes with a boost to Level 125 and the other doesn't. Well, that and 3,500  DBC. 

Both versions contain a whole load of currencies and tokens intended both to let you skip a large amount of grind and instantly acquire very powerful spells and abilities. Level boosts are no longer controversial. The rest of it could be.

Since there's no limit on how many of these packs you can buy, there's also no real counter to the accusation that this is pay-to-win, pure and simple (Other than to point out that the very concept of "Pay to Win" in a game that, by definition, cannot be won, having no win condition, is meaningless, of course.) In theory, since each pack comes with your choice of a Grandmaster spell, you could potentially grandmaster all your spells for a thousand dollars or so. And who's to say someone hasn't already?

At the very least it represents a way of spending money to skip content and thereby progress much faster than those who choose not to purchase the packs or just can't afford them. And they aren't cheap. DBG conveniently sell their funny money at a thousand DBC for ten dollars, making conversion easy, although inevitably there are value deals for higher amounts to confuse things. For all intents and purposes, though, it's $40 for the Hero Bundle and $75 for the one with the boost.

And that might not be so bad if it was the end of the story but of course many, probably most, EQII players have multiple max-level characters. Even though some of the items in the pack are Heirloom and therefore tradeable within the purchasing account, a determined (Or should that be demented?) player might feel they needed dozens of these packs to get all their characters up to their full potential.

Instead of logging in, I clicked through the link in the launcher to read the forum thread on the announcement. It's three pages long and surprisingly evenly balanced between those who approve of the new bundles and those who object to them. 

Even then, the disapproval seems muted compared to what I would have expected a while back. Granted,  the rather good, newish Senior Community Manager, Angeliana, moderates the thread fairly strictly but I don't see much evidence of multiple posts being suppressed. Just the odd hothead, who can't tell the difference between forceful criticism and personal abuse.

There is an inevitable appearance of the old "I know five people who cancelled their subscriptions because of this" anecdote, of course. I think the first time I saw that on the forums must have been sometime in 2005 and it's been a constant, comforting presence ever since. 

On the whole, though, people seem either glumly resigned to yet another development confirming their bleak view that EQII now exists only as a miserable means of extracting money from fools and cheats or that being able to pay money to progress in a video game is a human right to be celebrated and anyone who says otherwise is just, like, so out of touch. 

I suspect that anyone who's genuinely unwilling to accept offers like these in the Cash Shop gave up playing the game long ago. Probably every game, since all of them do it. Anyone who's still here either does it themselves or has to play with those who do so it's pretty much a given of the game by now.

The more interesting question for me is whether something like this really works as a money-generating technique. It's really hard to tell from my perspective. As I've often said, most years I can barely get through the basic content included in the annual expansion before the next one arrives. The idea of paying to progress faster seems irrational. 

I kind of hope it does work. As someone on the thread points out, they need to monetize the game somehow. And it's not like they don't also sell a ton of cosmetic items that no-one could claim were Pay to Win. I'm fairly sure if those were doing the job we wouldn't be in this situation.

I have to assume DBG know their customers, who are almost all veterans of many years. Equally, those players must know what the game is, now. The entire end-game has been slowly shifted to an endless, incremental grind for various currencies and tokens, while the vast, submerged, iceberg-like bulk of everything else that's been added to the game over the preceding twenty years drifts along beneath, free and fair for anyone who cares to enjoy it. Not that many do.

As with every aging MMORPG, it's current content or bust. And that applies just as much to "Classsic" or "Progression" servers as it does to the "Live" game. Even the old has to be endlessly new or at least sold as such. It's a false dichotomy to pretend, as some do, that the TLE servers, with their throwback gameplay, are in some way more authentic than the rest. They demand their share of anything new that can be shoe-horned in to their rulesets just as vehemently as anyone on Live.

That, or some of it, is what I found myself thinking about when I went to log in this morning, with the result that instead of playing through the next instance in the Ballads of Zimara Signature Questline, I logged straight out again and came here to write this post. Maybe that's what I pay my subscription for - content for the blog.

Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess. I mean, I have literally scores of games installed I could be playing for free. Sometimes I wonder why I still subscribe. Sometimes I wonder why anyone pays for anything. 

I guess it's just as well someone does or this whole house of cards would come tumbling down. 

And then we'd all be sorry. 

Wouldn't we?

EverQuest 3 - What, This Again?!

I'm just going to put this down as a marker. I kind of feel I have to, for some reason, although God knows why.

MassivelyOP has a concise, if somewhat snarky, run-through of such facts as exist. If you're interested, as I'm unfortunately aware a lot of people will be, I suggest taking the thirty seconds or so it'll take to read it. (TAGN also put up an excellent post about it as I was typing this.)

The gist, for those who can't be bothered - and who could blame them after the EQNext debacle? - is that EG7 qua Daybreak Games has finally confirmed, unequivocally, that there is an intent to create a sequel to EverQuest and EverQuest II.

The project is in what they uncharmingly describe as the "ideation phase", which means they're still thinking about it. They haven't done anything yet. They don't even plan to start spending any money on it until next year, at which point they're in for around $30m, maybe more.

That doesn't sound much to make an AAA MMORPG but it does happen to be the same amount FromSoftware spent developing Elden Ring. At least, that's what CEO Ji Ham says in the presentation, although where he's getting that figure from beats me. Some sources suggest it cost more like $200m. Even the low end estimate is $50-$70m.

In any event, he's big on FromSoftware: "Those guys? Love 'em - in terms of their model." He believes their success proves that hardcore gameplay can be both mainstream and highly profitable. And he wants the proposed EQ3 to be all of those things. Especially the hardcore part.

I haven't watched the whole of the near three-hour presentation but I have skimmed a fair bit of it and it's surprisingly entertaining. Ji Ham is an even more surprisingly engaging presenter and a lot younger than I imagined. He's also very clearly a gamer, something I definitely did not expect. At one point he speaks rather wistfully about the hours he spent trying and failing to beat one of the bosses in Elden Ring.

If nothing else, I recommend listening to a few minutes from 2:18:00 onwards, when Ji Ham buys heavily into the narrative that EverQuest back in the day was a very tough game and that that's nothing to be afraid of, commercially. I don't personally go along with all of it but he's not saying anything out of line with the generally accepted view of either the franchise or the genre.

He even goes as far as to suggest that the time and effort spent trying to make the EverQuest IP (And by implication MMORPGs as a whole.) more accessible was a mistake, even if that interpretation does somewhat fly in the face of the success of World of Warcraft (For which he correctly names EverQuest as an ancestor and prime influence.) much of which can be put down to its design brief, which was in great part to be an easier and more accessible take on the successful EQ formula.

That's all in the past. Now, the future for the IP is uphill in the snow both ways. Again.

And he seems genuinely enthused by it, that's the strange part. It's like listening to a gamer as much as a businessman. Forget the uncomfortable fact that Elden Ring is a finite, single-player experience and the proposed EQ3 an open-ended, massively multiple live service title. Forget that the FromSoftware ethos, far from being any kind of universal gaming paradigm shift, is instead deeply divisive and the subject of endless, often acrimonious debate.

Even leaving Elden Ring out of it, it has to be acknowledged that the mass market credentials of self-styled "hardcore" MMORPGs are seriously tarnished following the failure of high-profile titles like WildStar and the consistent crash-and-burn meta surrounding just about every indie attempt to turn back time to the self-styled Golden Age of MMOs. But hey, props for trying!

A few years ago something like this might have given me heartburn but I just can't summon up the indignation any more. I've seen all this so many times I can barely be bothered to raise a skeptical eyebrow. This proposed game hasn't even begun development yet. Whatever anyone says about it now will be utterly irrelevant by the time it becomes publicly available, if indeed it ever does.

The timescales quoted in the presentation seem radically optimistic. Apparently the plan is to begin development in 2025 for a 2028 release. I'd be interested to know what the last AAA MMORPG to go from concept to launch in three years was. Even more interested to hear about the last one that did it successfully. 

I suppose if you start the clock running from now, you can stretch it to five years, which does sound more reasonable. Maybe the 2025 "Start of Investment" has some financial implication rather than meaning literally what it says. Maybe there are people working on the project already.

Even then, if the putative EQ3 were to hit some kind of Early Access in 2028, by then I'll be seventy years old. I will not be playing a "hardcore" MMORPG in my seventies. Even if you considered me to belong to one of the older cadres of EQ fans, I'd guess by 2028 the majority of EQ vets will be in their 40s and 50s. This game better not rely on the same kind of reaction times as Elden Ring.

It seems to me that, as I've said before, if EG7/DBG really want to publish a third iteration of EverQuest (A count, by the way, that ignores a whole bunch of titles that have used the IP, not least the PlayStation 2 exclusive MMORPG, EverQuest Online Adventures.) they really ought to think about buying Visionary Realms and having Pantheon rebadged as an EverQuest sequel, which it patently is anyway.

And that's about as much as I want to say about EverQuest 3 for now. In fact, I'd as soon forget about the whole thing altogether, at least until there's some kind of alpha or beta or Early Access that I can sign up for or buy into (Because, obviously, no matter how unsuitable it is or how far outside the target demographic I am, I'll have to at least give it a try...)

As Ji Ham rather gleefully suggests and MOP glumly acknowledges, this is a hype train no-one's going to be able to ignore. For reasons I really don't begin to understand, given that the original EverQuest was by absolutely no reasonable measure any kind of global brand, just the biggest fish in a very small pool that most people at the time didn't even know existed, the mere mention of any resurrection of the IP now seems to incite a frenzied response from gamers, most of whom surely can never have played any iteration of the IP at all, far less been there in 1999, when it all began.

At this point, the whole EverQuest phenomenon reminds me of the infamous Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig of 4 June 1976, which was attended by fewer than a hundred people but claimed as a seminal life experience by thousands. I look forward to years of listening to people droning on and on about what they imagine the new EQ will be like and throwing toddler-like tantrums when reality intrudes on their pipe dreams. Just like happened with EQNext and Landmark. Joy!

As for the plans for H1Z1... don't get me started!

Bring The Jubilee

It's technically still Spring, although the weather outside is telling me it's Summer already. The EverQuest II team must think so too because they just announced their plans for this year's Summer Jubilee and they're awesome!

Okay, maybe not awesome because it's not 1992 and EQ2 doesn't have a 90210 Zip Code but summer in the Shattered Lands is looking pretty darn cool, let's just say that much. 

No, wait, no, not cool. That's just confusing. Um... fire, maybe? Okay, that's just as bad, but in the other direction.

Bitchin'? The cat's miaow? 

Erm...this isn't helping, is it?

Minus the confusing and chronologically-challenged slang, Summer Jubilee looks like it's going to be lots of fun. The event brings the three big seasonal holidays - Tinkerfest, Scorched Sky and Oceansfull - together under one, big holiday banner, stretching all the way from the beginning of  June to the end of August. 

The EQ2i wiki, once an absolute authority on just about everything that you could possibly need to know about the game, has been slipping of late. The Live Events Timeline there makes no mention of the Summer Jubilee at all. Worse, it still has Scorched Sky in June and Tinkerfest in August, whereas they actually swapped places last year.

For the most up-to-date information you're always better off looking at the in-game calendar but if you want to check out of game I'd recommend EQ2 Traders Corner, which these days has the considerable advantage of being run by the game's dedicated (In all senses.) tradeskill developer, Naomi Denmother. There, you'll find the dates neatly tabulated:

• Tinkerfest — June 5, 2023 to June 21, 2023
• Scorched Sky Celebration — June 29, 2023 to July 12, 2023
• Oceansfull Festival — August 10, 2023 to August 23, 2023

In fact, now I come to look at it closely, that's even clearer than the official Calendar, which has to cope with two events happening at the same time. So maybe go to EQ2Traders first. I don't know... I'm sure you can work it out!

The full details of what's new for the individual events are still under wraps but there's some exciting news about the new content that runs across the whole summer. First, we're getting a new equipment slot: Plume.

The Plume slot allows you to equip an item that gives you some very big bonuses to one of your choice of three key stats: Ability Doublecast, Crit Bonus or Max Health Percentage. You can obtain these by doing Summer Jubilee content but once you get one, you also get a recipe that lets you craft more. 

As the illustrations show, the stats are hefty enough to be useful even at Level 1 but of course you can level them up as the event goes on. If you're one of those strange people who actually play with others in MMORPGs, it gets even better:

 "When grouped the power of your Plume will be amplified by how many other group or raid members are also using a Plume."

Not only that but 

"The power your Plume gains is based on the tier of your Plume, so even groupmates that have not yet unlocked the best tier of Plume will contribute fully to the amplification effect of everyone in the group or raid."

It seems like a well-designed, well thought-out addition to the game to me but of course, this being EQII, the initial reaction on the forums is one of deep suspicion. One annoyingly persistent Debbie Downer (2004 says Hi!) wanted to know if this was just another way Daybreak planned to screw more money out of the players:

"Also, could you tell us if this new system will be monetized like the merc, mount familiar? Or will it be an extra item simply lootable via quests or achiev ? Basically, is this implementation only the beginning of a new cash system planned later? Like seeing op plume in crates, pushing players and raids to look into it, After a well-crafted hook? "

Naomi Denmother, employing the infinite patience for which she is so well-known, while no doubt wishing she could clout the Moaning Minnie (1942 says Hello!) with her rolling pin, explained that it was none of those things:

"No. This is an event slot, for participating in holiday events. It is 100% meant to be a fun, attainable item. Let's please not remove everyone's fun and enthusiasm with such speculations on the first day it is announced."

I very nearly signed in to alert the complainers to Wilhelm's excellent post about the current attempt by minority EG7 shareholder Alta Fox Capital Management to force the whole group, Daybreak included, into a series of moves designed to wring every last dime out of the games before they toss the empty carcasses onto the pile of corpses left by the rest of the late-capitalist leeches and move on, like the vultures they are, to the next victim. For all that EQII players think they're being screwed over now, they'll be looking back at this as some kind of Golden Age, when the bastards get their way.

Or if. Let's go with "if". If there's one thing the last decade or so has shown us, it's that Jason Epstein and whoever else is in charge over there really don't like to let too much light into the room. I'm guessing Daybreak has ended up tucked safely under the wing of the Swedish regulatory authorities through something more than pure happenstance. If the games have any protection, it's probably that.

At least we can hope so. Meanwhile, we can just play the damn games and enjoy ourselves. Well, some of us can.

Getting back to the joys and pleasures of an EQII summer, the other significant feature highlighted in the announcement is this:

 "Summer Jubilee Dungeon – Triad of Elements - Opening once Tinkerfest goes live is a new solo dungeon called, Triad of Elements. Whether you’re level 1 or 125, this dungeon is open to all and can be repeatedly completed throughout each Summer Jubilee in-game event... head in and farm to your heart’s delight... the loot that drops will be level-appropriate every time"

A new solo dungeon is always welcome, especially a scaling dungeon that you don't have to be a subscriber to access and that drops loot. Whether it's loot worth having, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Also whether running it gives decent xp below level 100 (It certainly won't after that but that's a diferent question). If it does, I have a level 60 whose going to be very interested.

The dungeon looks like it'll be the primary source of Silver Jubilee Medals, this year's summer event currency, as well as the way you'll upgrade your Plume. The medals can be spent at the appropriate Jubilee merchants, who've added twenty-two new items to their stock, including a dog pet and a mount, species unspecified.

Well, unspecified in the official forum post, that is. If you'd care to look at that EQ2 Traders post I linked earlier, however, you'll find an absolute wealth of detail, including a full list of those twenty-two new items, with pictures. The mount is a "Parade Roan Stallion" and it's an appearance ground mount , which means I probably won't use it. These days you'd pretty much have to be a dedicated roleplayer to use a ground mount, I think.

The dog, though, looks fun and I could find plenty of uses for some of those house items. EQ2 Traders has a full list of how to get the medals needed to buy them (Do all the quests, basically, then keep running that dungeon if they're not enough or if you hate doing quests, in which case boy, are you playing the wrong game...)

There's also a clear explanation of how to upgrade the Plume (Do the dungeon ten times.) and how to get an even better Plume than that (Do it ten times more so you can buy an upgrade from the in-game vendor.) Also, the crafted Plumes aren't quite as good as the quested ones, presumably for reasons.

I'm very happy with all of that. It seems like a much more egalitarian system than the Summer Ethereals it replaces and the 2023 event looks like a good iteration on the inaugaural version from last year. About the only thing I really wish was different would be for the Plume to be a display slot. It'd be so great to be able add a Plume you could actually see to your hat! 

Or maybe that's just me.

Shadow Of Renewal

EG7 or Daybreak if you prefer, since they seem to be pretty much interchangeable at this point, seems to be doing rather well right now. Yesterday, MassivelyOP reported an 11% bump in "monthly active players" over the same period as last year for Lord of the Rings Online, an increase the company rather self-effacingly ascribes to the impact of Amazon’s Rings of Power TV series.

As I think I may have mentioned in a previous post, I watched the first episode of the Amazon show, which I described, unenthusiastically, as "alright". I went on to say that a week had passed since then and I hadn't gotten around to watching episode two. I still haven't.

I haven't even bothered to find out whether the show has been either a commercial or a critical success but I did chat about it, briefly, while I was having a birthday lunch with a friend earlier this week. She'd asked me to get her an expensive boxed set of the books and it turned out part of her reason for doing that now rather than any other time in the last quarter century or so was not unconnected with the show. 

Grey and yellow wouldn't be my choice
for a promo.

As she put it, a lot of fans seem to be reinforcing their interest in the source material as a tangential result of what have been seen as controversial choices made by the makers of the new series. As with the desire to return to the Classic era in World of Warcraft, it's not so much open hostility to the new stuff (Although it can be that.) as a re-ignited affection for the way things used to be.

Put like that, I guess LotRO, fifteen years old and famously stolid in its reverance for the source material, qualifies as a safe haven for anyone looking to rekindle old fires. It would be interesting to know how many of the 11% are brand new to the game and how many are prodigals returning to the fold.

I suspect Standing Stone (And by implication Daybreak Games and by further implication EG7.) are about to add a percentage point or two to that enviable uptick. This morning I received two emails from the EG7 stable, one of which I'll get to later, the other asking me if I'd be interested in the new expansion, Before the Shadow.

I've never bought an expansion for LotRO. Indeed, other than the base game and a few months' subscription, I've never bought anything from Turbine or SSG at all. I hadn't been thinking of starting now, either, until I read Wilhelm's recent post. 

As Wilhelm says, $20, is a pretty reasonable price, even for a mini-expansion. It sounds even better in sterling, where it comes in at just £15.29. Even so, I wouldn't be considering it if it wasn't for one thing; the new levelling experience. 

I do like the low-level game in LotRO. It's solid, entertaining and old-school in the best way. It might be fun to start a new character and play them up through whatever the new zone or zones are - some sort of hobbitty-shire experience I think it is. Not only would it be interesting in its own right, it would also make for a convenient fresh start in a game where my other characters are mired in previous poor decisions and lumbered with bags full of items, the use of which I no longer understand nor care to learn.

I'd have to say this looks a lot more appealing.

As always, the real question is "If I buy it, will I play it?" I'm leaning heavily towards "Yes, I will", on
the fairly solid grounds that LotRO is free-to-play, I always have it installed and I've been back for brief visits many times over the years. Also, playing through something that other people are also playing and talking about is always a bonus for the blog.

Mitigating against the idea is the other email I received, this one directly from Daybreak, wearing their Darkpaw hat. I was somewhat surprised to receive notice this morning that the new EverQuest II expansion, Renewal of Ro, now has a firm launch date and it's less than two weeks away.

As the website has it, "The next expansion for EverQuest II, Renewal of Ro, is set to launch on November 30, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. PST". That is pretty much when you'd expect but I was on the beta forums only a couple of days ago and I had the impression things were lagging a little this year. Then again, when aren't they? I'm sure it'll be fine.

I've already bought this one, of course. The only question is when I start playing. The 30th is a Wednesday, which should give me a couple of days to get started before my working weekend. Then again, based on prior experience, I'll probably be doing myself a favor if I wait a week until everything's working properly.

It's nice to have something to look forward to, anyway. I might not be able to join in with the frenzy when Dragonflight lands (Any date for that, yet? Oh, yeah...) but I should at least have something to talk about.

Embrace The Future!

I've been thinking a lot recently about the old "One Game to Rule Them All" trope. OMG! A Lord of the Rings reference! Get out of here!

Way to go to derail your own post in the opening paragraph, Bhagpuss, but did everyone see that news item yesterday? Of course you all did. You could hardly miss it. It was everywhere, even in the mainstream press. Tolkein is a globally bankable name.

Embracer Group though? Not so much, although I guess we're starting to get familiar with it. It does keep cropping up, doesn't it? And doesn't it sound sinister? Reminds me of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner or maybe Omni Consumer Products from Robocop.

Who the actual hell are they, though? According to Wikipedia, they're "a Swedish video game and media holding company based in Karlstad", which I have to admit doesn't really sound all that terrifying. 

Whoever they are, they seem to be on some kind of pop culture buying spree right now. It seems to have begun with a whole load of companies I'm fairly certain most people reading this have never heard of - I certainly hadn't - but last year they started making raids into our hinterland, acquiring Gearbox, Perfect World/Cryptic, Dark Horse Media and Asmodee.  

If you missed all that, you probably sat up when, earlier this year, Embracer Group scooped up a bunch of stuff Square Enix had lost interest in, a bumper bundle that included IPs like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and, I believe, Oxford University's current focus of interest, PowerWash Simulator. 

It's an impressive line-up but they all seem like opening acts compared to the headliner, Middle Earth Enterprises, which "gives the company IP rights to Tolkien’s literary works related to The Lord Of the Rings and The Hobbit" including "movies, tv shows, games, theme park rides, board games and merchandising". 

The NME article includes a quote from EG that specifically refers to "the mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth" published by Electronic Arts but Lord of the Rings Online doesn't get a mention. LotRO is, of course, owned and operated by Standing Stone Games, who, as we only recently learned for sure, are owned by Daybreak Games, who were acquired by Enad Global 7, another expanding Scandinavian media aggregator, who may themselves have been reverse-taken-over by whoever the fuck it is that really owns Daybreak...

Vic! I've fallen down a conspiracy rabbit hole and I can't get up!

I'm no expert on LotRO (I'm no expert on anything...) but it's always been my impression that there's some kind of grey area around what part of the Tolkein legacy rights ownership it falls under. People always seem to have some get-out clause they throw around to make everyone feel safe when, as often happens, talk turns to rights renewals and possible repercussions for the game. 

If so, maybe none of this directly affects either the mmorpg or SSG but I can't help wondering just what it means for EG7/Daybreak. The whole thing is more than confused enough already without factoring some kind of slap fight between Scandinavian would-be media giants.

Who would win in a fight between Embracer Group and Enad Global 7? Um.... I think we can guess.  It'd be like a fight between a wolverine and a lemming. (Both Scandinavian animals. I checked.)

I'm not honestly sure I care all that much. To loop back around to where I started, before all this research took over (I wish there was a typographical convention for expressing sarcasm or contempt - italics don't always cut it.), I'm beginning to think that getting all wrapped up in a single game for months or years isn't necessarily the universal good we always believed.

We all do it, don't we? Some of us more than others, naming no names (Points at self.) One minute it's Valheim, Valheim, Valheim, then Lost Ark is the best game ever made and no-one's ever going to need anything else (Yeah, that wasn't me.) Game after game, month after month, year after year, individually and collectively, we get obsessed, talk about nothing else, play every hour we can snatch, then...

Silence. The toy goes back in the box. Once in a while we get it out, play with it for a few minutes, put it away again. Eventually it disappears, lost, no-one remembers where, or cares.

I forced myself to play EverQuest II yesterday. I didn't much want to but I felt I ought. I hadn't finished the Oceansfull dungeon (Still haven't. Can't beat the second boss.) or even filled my bags with freebies from the clams (Still not done that, either.) and there's only a few days left. 

What I wanted to be playing was, of course, Noah's Heart. It is literally the only game I've played since I got it apart from things I've logged into out of a sense of duty or for a blog post. I was in the middle of several single-player titles on Steam as well as at least three mmorpgs I was actively playing and now I've abandoned the lot of them. 

I haven't even logged into New World to check out the Summer Medleyfare or the music system. Guild Wars 2 has the long-promised Steam launch and the tenth anniversary celebrations incoming and I have no interest in either of them. There's that new game, Tower of Fantasy, that everyone's talking about (Actually, surprisingly few people seem to be talking about it...maybe just Belghast). 

It almost feels like a dereliction of duty  to ignore it all, particularly because of an obsession with a game I know for certain I won't be playing in a few weeks. (Do I know that, though? Do I really?)

Or maybe it's a sign of good mental health. Video games are meant to be fun, aren't they? Not work, not responsibility, not duty; fun. And it's got to be a good thing, not getting too emotionally attached to any of them. It's not a marriage. Play the field, as they used to say in the godawful '70s.

If the putatively evil Embracer Group (I'm sure they're not evil. I'm sure they're all lovely, really.) guts LotRO like a fish (Has anyone ever gutted a fish? It's a disgusting analogy. Why do we keep using it?), ought that to be a tragedy? Or is it just entropy rolling ever onward towards the heat death of the universe, another Ozymandian signifier that all, all is vanity?

Well don't look at me! I'm not Alain de Botton, thank the Lord. I just know it'd spoil my week if LotRO closed down and I barely play the game.

It won't happen though, will it? I'm sure everything will be fine. Game companies are our friends, right? They wouldn't do anything bad...

Cheap At Twice The Price?

Time for a very quick Friday Grab-Bag. It's almost becoming a thing here. Maybe I should try to think of a fancy name for it. 

Going to be slim pickings on the blog for a couple of days but I'll give notice now; it could get worse. This is my working weekend but I have dog-minding duty Fridays as well, that being one of Mrs Bhagpuss's main work days, so every other week is going to be a three-day drought. I probably should think seriously about giving up the post-a-day routine.

As I explained in yesterday's post, though, there are some unexpected benefits of having a puppy in the house. I am finally starting to get to grips with writing shorter, faster posts, something I've complained about wanting yet not being able to do for years. All I have do is work out how to make them worth reading and I'll be home free! 

On to to the meat, such as it is. (I've been a vegetarian of sorts since the late 'eighties so what would I know about meat?)

Everything So Expensive These Days, Isn't It?

I guess the big news of the day is the announcement from CCP that the basic monthly subscription for EVE Online is jumping a massive 33% from $14.99 to $19.99. Wilhelm has a post up about it, including the wide range of pricing options avaiable, depending on how long you want to commit to the game. It drops as low as $12.49 if you're willing to buy in for a couple of years.

Back when subscriptions were the norm, I almost always paid by the month. In retrospect I can't imagine why I was so unwilling to go for the six-month or annual options. I could certainly have afforded it back then and it would have saved me a significant amount of money.

These days, the only mmorpg subscription I hold is Daybreak All Access, which I pay for annually at a very considerable discount. According to DBG's website, the annual rate is currently $119.88, a weird-sounding number that actually works out at a neat $9.99 a month. 

That's a good deal for four mmorpgs, EverQuest, EverQuest II, DCUO and Planetside 2. Even more so since I actually play three of them, on and off. It would be an even better deal if Daybreak's owners, EG7, decided to turn it into EG7 All Access and threw in the rest of their games, including Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. I'd pay a discounted annual fee based on a regular $20 monthly sub for that. 

Wilhelm speculates on which other subscription games might follow CCP's lead but there aren't really all that many left, are there? Almost every game has some kind of optional sub these days but hardly any make it mandatory. I imagine the few that do will be watching carefully to see if EVE players complain then pay or complain and leave. If the price rise is deemed a success, though, it will set a new baseline. 

Get Your Filthy NFTs Off My Nice, Clean Metaverse!

There's been some suggestion that the hike is either a passive-aggressive or a desperate response to the company having been forced to backtrack on the potential introduction of NFTs to EVE. If that's caused a potential shortfall in income, maybe it has to be made up some other way.

There was a very good opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz about NFT's and the metaverse that I'd like to bring to the attention of anyone still capable of caring. The fundemental argument is handily summed up by the title: "Metaverse concepts should distance themselves from NFTs". They really should.

I particularly liked the author's take on NFTs: "which can most charitably be described as a solution in desperate search for a problem, and perhaps more realistically as a home-brewing kit for wannabe Ponzi scheme orchestrators". The metaverse, or more probably metaverses, is going to happen whether we like it or not, in the form of "some blend of virtual world technology with location-based augmented reality, delivered over high-speed wireless networks to a whole spectrum of access modes ranging from immersive headsets to discreet wearables" but NFTs absolutely don't have to be any part of it.

At least Raph Koster, all in on the metaverse as he seems to be, isn't showing the least interest in adding NFTs to his mix. Venturebeat has an interview with him about Playable Worlds, the "sandbox mmo" he's working on and for which he's just received $25m in outside investment, partly from Korean publisher Kakao, formerly home of Black Desert, now of Elyon and ArcheAge.

We still don't know what Raph's game actually is. As the interview rather coyly puts it, "The founders still aren’t quite ready to reveal their intellectual property and setting behind the game". We do learn that it's been "in the works for about two years, and now it is in full production", which I guess means we might get an alpha sometime around 2024.

Skim-reading the interview, it sounds about like you'd expect a Raph Koster project to sound, all economy, interdependency and socialisation. He's been banging the same drum for over thirty years now. I don't imagine metaverses are going to shake his rhythm.

I did have a couple of other things I was going to mention but certain puppy-related incidents have bitten into the time available so I'm going to leave it at that. That way, I still have a couple of items in reserve for tomorrow evening, when time's going to be even tighter still.

Also, in case anyone's trying to find any significance in the screenshots, you can stop now. There is none. I just don't like posts with no pictures and any excuse to use some of my Secret World poses.

The Lonely Financial Zone

Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob has an excellent post up about the latest in the seemingly never-ending cavalcade of weirdness that trails along behind Daybreak Games wherever they may go. 

Back in the winter we learned that a company called EG7, of which I feel safe in saying no-one reading this had previously heard, had acquired DBG's entire catalog, including, to no-one's entire surprise, the games formerly believed to be independently owned by Standing Stone and only published by Daybreak. 

Almost before we had time to work out whether we thought this was a good thing or not the new owners released a slew of information about game profitability, income and player numbers such as we'd never seen in almost twenty years. The openness and transparency was refreshing but not as much as the bright, optimistic, confident personality of the EG7's youthful CEO, Robin Flodin. 

Since then, anyone who reads MassivelyOP can't help but have noticed a marked change in the tone in which news items relating to the Daybreak Games portfolio are reported. The snark, which used to be both extreme and perpetual, has softened to no more than the occasional raised eyebrow and with good reason.

Almost from the moment EG7 took over there appears to have been a loosening of the bonds that held the individual studios within Daybreak Games back. There's been readjustment, alteration and innovation within the games themselves and within their interactions with the players and the press. 

 

Just yesterday I posted on the latest changes to DCUO, a game that seems to be thriving under the recently enhanced authority of Jack Emmert, the man now leading Dimensional Ink. Planetside 2 is restructuring, adding content, looking refreshed. The EverQuest titles appear solid, albeit more so the elder than the younger. New expansions for 2021 have been confirmed.

Everything looked altogether rosy in the EG7 garden. And then this happened:

"The Board of Enad Global 7 AB (publ) and Robin Flodin have agreed that effective immediately Robin will transition away from his current role as CEO of EG7 and will be replaced by the current CEO of Daybreak Game Company, EG7’s largest subsidiary, Ji Ham. During this transition Robin will stay on for six months to assist Ji as he assumes his new role within the EG7 family of companies. Ji will be appointed acting CEO of EG7 as a search for a permanent CEO has been initiated. Ji has an extensive background in both gaming and finance and has for the last six years been the CEO of Daybreak. During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company."

Wilhelm covers the backstory and the event brilliantly and his post led a commenter on the thread to point to the following piece of information, essential to a full understanding of what might be going on:

“The news that Robin Flodin is leaving the CEO position came after an interview with Dagens Industri on Thursday, in which Robin Flodin has difficulty answering questions about the difference between total revenues and net sales during the quarter. The answer is that the company has capitalized development costs for new games of approximately SEK 36 million in the quarter, something that turns into an income in the accounts, something Robin Flodin failed to explain.”

That's Google Translate's version of a paragraph from this Swedish article. The piece states that after the release of EG7's second quarter figures the share price dropped by 25% although in the translated version it's ambiguous whether that happened before or after Flodin's interview. 

 

Either way, having the CEO unable to explain why there appeared to be more money coming in than the sales could account for would not have done anything to help. Precisely the reverse, I'd imagine, since the two logical explanations for the discrepancy would be either that something was going on that shouldn't be or that the CEO didn't understand the finances of the company he was leading.

In that light his sudden departure is not so surprising. It does however, still beg the question why replace him with the ex-CEO of Daybreak Games? Or wait, no! The present CEO of DBG. Because of course, even though EG7 bought the company, Ji Ham retained his place as Daybreak's CEO.

I confess I'd completely forgotten about Ji Ham. It's not hard to do. He never says anything. He never does interviews. He never releases PR statements. I have never even been able to find a photograph of him. If you wanted to throw this hot potato into the safe hands of someone guaranteed not to say something unfortunate to the press, now or ever, you could not hope to find a person better suited for the task than Ji Ham. Potato? What potato?

What does all this mean for the games? If I had to guess, and I'm going to, whether I have to or not, very little. Whatever plan there was, whoever was making it, whoever was implementing it (and we have no real answers to any of those questions) I would bet nothing much has changed. Robin Flodin may have founded the company (and I notice his two co-founders have both cashed out already) but, like one of those over-ambitious, expansionist rulers from the history books, in attempting to assimilate a more powerful neighbor he has himself been assimilated.

 

Daybreak and Standing Stone carry on. Jason Epstein remains on the board at EG7, where he holds a very significant 8.335% of the shares. Another 11.732% is held by the founder of Innova, which, as Wilhelm pointed out to me in an email, is a name that has certain similarities with Columbus Nova and Renova. Remember them? No? Good. That's working as intended, then.

Whatever is going on is most likely not of much concern to any of us as players. As the revelations from the time of the EG7 acquisition told us, these games are making money. Who they're making money for is less important. So long as they continue to be profitable, chances are the servers will remain up and running. Maybe the games will even be given the chance to grow a little. That does seem to be happening.

And I am on record as saying that I've found Daybreak's tenure to be largely favorable as a player. It hasn't seen spectacular growth or innovation but neither has it seen the kind of self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, borderline crazy behavior SOE turned into some kind of manic trademark in their latter years. I think some of us tend to forget just how derided and despised SOE was for most of its existence.

There is one curious thing (One? Hah!!) that comes out of all of this. The "revenue" Flodin was unable to explain supposedly derives from some arcane accounting procedure regarding the spend of 36 million Swedish Krona in a single quarter on "development costs for new games". That's about $5m.

What, as Tom Waits would say, are they building in there? We have a right to know.

Actually, we don't. But we'd like to all the same.