Daily Archives: November 21, 2025

Friday Bullet Points about Dates and Remasters and Changes and Regrets

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Another Friday of bite size news nuggets around which I could not get myself to roll out a whole post.  Honestly, I could have probably managed 500 words about each one of these, but some days I am just not feeling it.

Not that it ever left.  It was sitting there on the shelf this whole time.

But we’re back to taking an old game and remastering it… which is something I heartily endorse, at least when done right.  Diablo II Resurrected was an excellent example of the idea… and Warcraft III Reforged (or, in most cases, Refunded) was not, just to get some Blizzard highs and lows out there.

So when ArenaNet announced Guild Wars Reforged, I was on board.

Guild Wars Reforged

At least theoretically.  I like the idea and approve of the effort.  However, as I noted in a post a decade back, the game occupies a strange spot in my gaming history.  I own a couple of the boxes, but never really played it very much.

MMO Boxes on my shelf… some low cards in that deck

I wasn’t a fan of the original for a few reasons, and not just due the complete inability to jump.  It is a title that has a lot of content across multiple boxes, but had the problem both of launching in the back draft of WoW and having character models that did not age well… at least for me.  I found them off putting, even back in the day, and wasn’t big on the “ooh, so seck-say” narrative that some people applied to them.  Way to make it awkward!

Still, it earned its place in the history of the genre by embracing the “buy the box, no subscription needed” model at a time when most studios were living on the $15 a month income drip and “free to play” was something loser titles did.  Things have changed in 20 years.

As such, I welcome this return to the original Guild Wars.  I just wish I knew exactly what they were planning to deliver.  The tag line sounds good.

Own the original Guild Wars Trilogy in one collection. No subscriptions fees, just endless adventure.

But the feature list… leaves me with questions:

  • New low price
  • Steam Deck Verified (pending)
  • Support for XInput controllers (such as the Xbox Wireless Controller)
  • New quest tracking and direction system
  • On-screen control guide
  • UI enhanced with HD skill icons, larger text options, and quality-of-life improvements
  • Support for high DPI displays
  • New ambient occlusion, HD bloom, and antialiasing rendering enhancements
  • Rebuilt audio system with environmental effects (no hardware support needed)

All cool stuff… not sure I care so much about the price at this point, but the rest sounds good. However, I am left wondering the character models got a pass in this?  I’d be on board for another run if they went to the GW2 models.

Anyway, I won’t have to wait long in order to find out as Guild Wars Reforged launches on December 3rd.  I hope it turns out as good as people want!

In something that wasn’t a surprise to anybody who had been paying attention and applied even a modicum of thought to the facts available, the pre-patch for the 20th Anniversary Edition of WoW Classic The Burning Crusade will land on January 13th.  Yes, we didn’t know an exact date until now, but the window of possibilities wasn’t all that wide either.

If you are sensing a somewhat annoyed tone, it is because we have had to endure nearly a year of whining about when TBC will land despite Blizzard putting out a classic roadmap last year that gave some pretty reasonable parameters on which to base expectations.

Blizzard WoW Classic 2025 Roadmap

Seriously.  This roadmap did not exist in a vacuum and we all know that Blizz likes to spread their launches out, so this was never going to land until after housing landed in retail and had a chance to hog the spotlight and it was going to need to go before Blizz started to ramp up for Midnight.

Now all we need is the launch date for the expansion itself… probably four weeks later, but I am a bit surprised they didn’t spell that out, unless I missed it… and then the date at which point most of the people who have been hyping themselves up for Outland become disillusioned with it.

You watch, it will happen this time just the way it did with original WoW Classic… only more so, because Blizz is jumping in even more ahead of schedule features… and I will make it my business to point and laugh when these people start posting about how let down they are.

Actually, I probably won’t do that.  But I may think about it a few times.

Then, of course, the other shoe dropped and, as Redbeard noted in the post I linked, all the add on extra cost options that so infuriated players with original classic TBC made their predictable appearance.  At least someone remembers this.  If Blizz is going to farm nostalgia, they are going to maximize the crop yield.

Meanwhile, for those who know how the Outland story ends and want to stay with vanilla, free transfers will be available to appropriate realms between November 25th and January 12th.  After that you’re on the ride through the black portal.

Here is a completely expected change to a business model that somehow showed up both much later than it should have and much sooner than I expected.

I see no ship, only heroes

Ship of Heroes, one of the titles aspiring to fill the gap when City of Heroes shut down, went live back in September with a $60 box price and a $15 a month subscription fee as their business model.

That seemed ludicrously out of line with reality, and I posted about it with examples from better made and more popular titles that failed with that strategy a decade or more ago, and I was hardly the only one giving feedback on this.  Those paying close enough attention to even know the game was a thing seemed pretty universal about the poor value proposition that the game offered.

The reaction from the Ship of Heroes team was one of obstinate denial of reality.  They locked down their forums, requiring moderator approval of all posts and went on a bit of an offensive against players over on Steam.  They knew best and the poor reviews of the title meant they were being review bombed and not that they had made a huge misstep.

As the concurrent user count dropped from a first day peak of 100 to end up flirting with double digits on a good day within weeks, I wondered how they might fix their pricing issue, running down a list of possible options.

I also expected them to not relent on the pricing until next year, perhaps believing that the Steam Winter sale might save them.  (Now I have to go change a 2026 prediction I guess.)

Then, this week, it was announced that they would be cutting the box price in half and dropping the subscription model.  The announcement was so brief that I might as well just quote it in full.

Following the recommendation of our current players, we are reducing the price of Ship of Heroes and removing the subscription.

Ship of Heroes still has no other monetization: no microtransactions, cash shop, addons, or premium anything.

Stay tuned for our next announcement of new content included in the price.

Now, will that make a difference?  It is hard to say.  You only get one launch day to set the tone for a game.  There are very few second acts for titles after launch.  And the dev team did a poor job of both listening to and responding to what was valid, and often very mild, criticism.  That hostile and defensive mode… that is now how people see the team.  You go to war with your potential customers at your peril.

The 2017 Kickstarted and yet to release MMO title Ashes of Creation will be inching closer to… something like a release I guess.  Maybe not the release they wanted, but all the release they are likely to get.

Is this still a logo for the game?

Kickstarted MMO titles have garnered a deservedly bad reputation for… basically not delivering.

Star Citizen, a title that arguably started the MMO Kickstarter craze of the last decade, has settled on a business model of selling a vision while crashing through release date promises like a Death Race 2000 competitor, and few similarly funded live service titles have done even that.  I’ve been over this before.  Star Citizen at least has an alpha something you can play.

Ashes of Creation was a latecomer to the Kickstarter party, landing in 2017, and did very well for itself on that front, topping a brief list of such campaigns I was tracking.

And since then… uh… I haven’t mentioned it here.  Not once since 2017.  That can’t be good.

Granted, by that point cynicism had won out over optimism on the Kickstarter front, so I didn’t back it.  I had sworn that off by then.  Or I should have.  We’ll see how Stars Reach pans out.

I mean, you can at least credit Ship of Heroes for not being a Kickstarter project… right?  Oh, wait, they tried that and failed, didn’t they?  Maybe that should have been a sign.

Anyway, AoC did get into some sort of double secret pre-alpha for a bit.  So that was something.

Now, however, it is headed to Steam for early access, slated to start on December 11th.  Given how things go, THIS is the game’s launch.  Removing the “Early Access” tag at some date down the road won’t change this.  You get one launch and no take backs.

Is it ready to go?  Will it succeed?  Can we have a Kickstarted project where there is some correlation between campaign success and quality?

We shall see.  I certainly don’t know.  I never backed the project.

This is more a general industry note than anything to do with MMOs or like topics.

Until a few months ago all I could have told you about them was that they published Subnautica, a successful title.  And they didn’t actually do that, Unknown Worlds Entertainment did, but the Krafton acquired them.  But they were there for Subnautica 2.  That was probably a bad sign.

This year, however, Krafton execs have been weighing on the whole AI game development thing.  They want Krafton to be an “AI First” company and have started culling their own ranks in order to be completely on board with that plan.

So it was probably no surprise when it came out that the CEO had been asking ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas to help him avoid paying out $250 in performance incentives that the Subnautica 2 studio earned.

Oh, and he formed a working group to help with this and exchanged messages on Slack and Discord, all nicely archived and backed up, wherein he stated his desire to cheat the Subnautica 2 team out of their bonus.

To quote Stringer Bell, “is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?”

And this was all taking place at a time when Krafton was making record revenue.

The problem with the gaming industry is that during its 10 year boom cycle the place was bought out by malignant shitheels like Lars Wingefors who thought the line would keep going up forever and never had any passion for the products or investing in things that would help sustain their companies.

All of which is just another reminder that the boss doesn’t want to use AI to make your job easier or to get better quality or to be quicker to market.  The boss wants to lay people off and line their pockets.

Also, they’re dumb enough to believe the AI hype, and that whole house of cards is going to come crashing down soon enough.  But don’t worry, the CEOs will get bailouts and bonuses still while you and I are bemoaning the wreckage of our retirement savings.

So that is it for Friday.  Five bullet points, ~2,300 words… so fewer than 500 words on each.  But not by much I guess.