Category Archives: Diablo II

Do I Even Like Diablo Anymore?

This is something of a counter-point to last week’s post where I noted that we were in an “Age of Diablo.” Almost a golden age, really, what with being able to play various incarnations of the Diablo series while waiting for Diablo IV to come out later this year. How much more Diablo do you want?

Enter The Butcher!

You would think, having put up such a post… and having been effusive about the series on multiple occasions, that I might have spent some time over the weekend… you know… actually playing some Diablo.

I was, after all, getting over a cold this past weekend, which was a perfect excuse to do nothing but sit around and play video games. But did I play any Diablo?

Well, I did play a little bit of Diablo III on Friday evening, getting myself along to the end of Act I with my Season 28 character, yet another barbarian. But I was not particularly enthused and I spent most of the rest of the weekend’s video game time playing WoW Classic and EVE Online.

Now, of course, MMORPGs have that whole sunk cost fallacy going for them, so it is hard to compete… but I am literally replaying old content in WoW Classic and was doing so during the EVE Online move op I wrote about yesterday… my time played in EVE is always under counted because I spend so much of it tabbed out and doing something else… so clearly I could have found time for Diablo, but just didn’t.

All of which got me to question whether or not I even like Diablo anymore? Is it going the way of TorilMUD or EverQuest for me, a game that had a long past happy state that I am never going to relive, so it just exists as a reference point for posts about video game nostalgia and the good old days and whatever it is I have gotten up to here for the last sixteen or so years.

I mean, some of my early posts here were about EverQuest nostalgia, for a game that was all of seven years old at the time. It is going to be 24 years old in about two weeks.

Some part of me longs to go play it, but some part of me longs to go play those other two titles as well, and that just isn’t going to happen.

It wasn’t as though playing through the story in Diablo III was bad. The problem is that I have done it before, multiple times. Many times.

Which led me around to thinking more about what it is I do like about the Diablo series. Certainly the mood it conveys, and the simplicity of the game play. Diablo III loses a bit on those fronts, being a little too well lit, a little too neon glowy at points, a little too much in the indirect lighting to get the mood thing on that the first two titles did so well.

Still, it kept me playing through back at launch, with the expansion, and through a few seasons, though not very many seasons. Maybe that was too much. There are a lot of games in my history that I have only played once or twice, where the story was good enough, but I didn’t really need to see if through again.

Or maybe I am just not in the mood. I suppose the real test will be when Diablo IV comes out. But I felt like I had to ask myself the question, even if I couldn’t really test it right now. Some things just wear out by the residue of the old enthusiasm remains behind.

The Age of Diablo

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It is 2023 and I am able to play on my modern-ish PC three generations of Diablo… four if you insist on counting Diablo Immoral… and we are waiting for a fifth generation of Diablo to be launched come June.

Seriously. We will soon have all the Diablos available.

Over at GoG.com you can find the original Diablo in a form playable on modern PCs, which isn’t bad considering it came out 26 years ago. It predates the launch of the Pentium II processor by 5 months.

Enter The Butcher!

When this playable version appears over on GoG.com back in 2019 I grabbed a copy right away and played through the game. It felt very raw two decades down the road, yet you could still see the magic it kindled, the reason that people get excited whenever a new Diablo title is talked about.

Then of course, there is Diablo II Resurrected, the amazing remaster of the second entry in the series. It is hard to explain just how much it felt like the original release back in 2000 when I first launched it and how startled I am every time I swap over to the original graphics mode… the fact that this is a feature is crazy greatness… and realize that somehow the updated graphic mesh in with my memories of the game so well that I accepted them as being authentic from the get go.

I don’t know how to explain how this is both NOT what the game looked like in 2000 and yet FEELS like the game felt in 2000.

At the Hellforge

I was honestly a little dubious about the remake at first, when it landed in beta. But it quickly grew on me. Vicarious Visions, the “nowhere close to Irvine” studio that did the remaster did a better job that we might have expected, especially given the fiasco that was Warcraft III Reforged.

Then there is Diablo III. As I mentioned in my post about the launch of Season 28, a bit of a troubled child of the franchise at launch, but things were sorted out and it has been the primary standard bearer for the franchise over the last decade.

Four players running in Diablo III

It doesn’t *feel* like its two predecessors in some essential way I am still working out… I’ve played all three now in the last three years, I should be able to figure that at some point… I think the lighting is part of it… but it is a solid ARPG title of its own accord and has found a way to keep fans engaged with the regular season mechanic that sees players roll fresh characters every so often to chase down specific goals and grab special cosmetic items and pets and achievements. Not my cup of tea, not on a regular basis at least, but still solid in its way.

I suppose I will allow Diablo: Immortal into the club as well. Despite its expected predatory monetization practices, if you can just play the game and steer clear of the cash shop, it does come across as a decent ARPG.

A tiny crusader slaying undead

It has a different “flavor” to it in some ways than the rest of the franchise, but it does capture the dark and brooding atmosphere at times and Blizzard did go and make it playable on the PC rather than just being a mobile only title.

Finally, we have Diablo IV coming up this year. In fact, this month. Early Access Open Beta or whatever terms they are using will land soon for those interested in getting an early look at the first 25 levels of the title.

Coming soon

So, at some point this month it will be entirely possible for somebody to play all of the flavors of Diablo in the same week. And come June and the actual release, we will have five versions of Diablo to choose from spanning the 26 year history of the franchise.

I am trying to think if there are other long lived franchises that offer similar options. Did they not remaster the Grand Theft Auto series at one point?

July in Review

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The Site

A few months ago I mentioned that I had decided to confront the spam comment problem on the site by closing down comments on posts more than 800 days old. I was a bit hesitant to do that, because I really don’t mind comments on older posts, so long as they are from real people. But the whole spam comment thing was becoming a pain to deal with and I was more concerned about losing the occasional legitimate comment in the spam filter when there were a couple thousand comments in there than somebody leaving a message on a post about Air Warrior that I wrote more than a decade ago. Sorry man.

Meanwhile, I have also been noting that ad revenue has been down. The first couple of months I had ads on the blog it was bringing in close to $20 a month. More recently it has been down around $10 a month. That is fine, as it covers the Premium hosting plan I have with WordPress.com, but I always just wonder why things like that change.

And then about mid-month some comment spam bot hit the site, targeting more recent posts, and suddenly there were more than a thousand comments in the spam filter to deal with. Just like old times.

Then I was looking at the daily stats for the number of ads served and saw a big spike, but that spike did not correspond with any sort of increase in traffic. How strange.

“Spike” is a relative term here

What I realized a while later was that the spike in the number of ads served corresponded with the day that I got the burst of comment spam.

Spam bot comments generate ad revenue!

And here I had turned off the spigot on my own revenue hose by closing down comments on older posts. Oh well. As I said, as long as the revenue covers my annual hosting cost, I am fine. But if you want to make more money, leave those old posts open up for comments!

Anyway, as always, if you’re going to visit here regularly I suggest using an ad blocker. Let the comment spam bots pay my annual hosting fee!

Meanwhile, on the Bing front, nothing I have done in the Bing Webmaster Tools has managed to shake their embargo of my site. Their graph… which is a copy of the graph Google uses in their own Search Console Tools, right down to the colors of the lines… shows my site as a flat line from June 8th forward.

But my WordPress.com stats show some traffic.

Search Engine traffic for July 2022

Now, I have said in the past, web traffic stats are garbage, useful for trends but not accurate enough to be more than a hand wave. Still, I do wonder how it came up with four Bing and two Yahoo referrals, since Bing is resolute in saying they have sent me nothing.

Meanwhile, it was a banner month for Yandex and Baidu, who made up for the missing Bing traffic. I cannot explain that either.

One Year Ago

There was the usual Steam Summer Sale. When it ended it turned out that I actually bought a few titles. That led me to sum up what I had played so far in 2021.

At home we were still binge watching TV despite there being a lull in the pandemic. We watched Community, Hacks, Manifest, and The Kominsky Method.

My wife and I completed Pokemon Go Fest 2021, in part because the cut the price to $4.99.

Lord of the Rings Online launched the Shadowfax and Treebeard special servers for a fast or a slow run through the game’s content. I was also on about how much stuff ends up in my bags when I start a new character in LOTRO due to my having been around the game since launch and owning all the expansions.

The instance group was into Burning Crusade Classic and finally creating a guild tabard. We finally had some gold, in part because I was scarfing up thorium in Frostwhisper Gorge. Meanwhile, I was MIA from Outland leveling up alts back in the vanilla content due to the eased level curve and better traits.

Somebody once again claiming they could dictate what immersion meant to other people got me on a kick to explore what immersion meant to me. It is a complex and somewhat less than tangible topic, but I wanted to go down that rabbit hole. Middle-earth was one of my first stops on that exploration.

World War Bee was hitting its nadir, with a declaration that PAPI was going to take the summer off. But lots of people were taking the summer off it seemed as the PCU, which had kept around 30K most weeks, dropped down to 25K. Fraternity, however, was getting tired of the war and demanded and end to it, so PAPI came up with a plan to win in four weeks. CCP also said that scarcity would be over in Q4, which turned out to be a flagrant lie.

Anyway, this is what I wrote about EVE Online in July of 2021:

Then, past me, whom I really hate, wrote four freaking Friday Bullet Point blog posts that were each all over the map.

The first was about Crowfall shipping, RimWorld Ideology, some stats from the Burning Crusade Classic beta, and Minmatar Liberation Day.

The second mentioned the Steam Deck announcement, Pokemon Go anniversary items, the Diablo II Resurrected alpha, and the reserve bank keys coming to EVE Online.

The third was on about the New World beta, the Path of Exile expansion, EverQuest offering old items, and Blizzard’s big harassment scandal starting to come to light.

And the fourth carried on with MORE about Blizzard’s scandal, the Guild Wars 2 expansion, bards coming to Neverwinter, Crimson Desert failing to ship, and a panic about California having some power consumption recommendations for gaming PCs.

It was quite a July.

Finally, there was the traditional announcement that Blaugust was coming.

Five Years Ago

We adopted a new kitten. He is much bigger now.

The Steam Summer Sale wrapped up and I went over what I bought and what I considered buying, but then passed on.

Amazon Prime Day came and went and I realized I had been buying things from Amazon for 20 years.

I started using a dual monitor setup at home. It took me a while to get used to it… I would turn off the second monitor a lot early on… but it seems natural enough now.

Gevlon was telling us about the corrupt game developer career path. I bet you wish you knew it was just that easy to get rich.

The call of nostalgia got me to subscribe to EverQuest II for a bit to try the Fallen Gate progression server. I got far enough to get the crazy mount.

In EVE Online Reavers were deployed in the east of New Eden where we helped blow up a Fortizar in the Great Wildlands. CCP has used a picture from that fight a couple of times. It then took us two days to get back to Delve, during which we argued about BBQ sauce.

Back in Delve we covered the deployment of another Keepstar in the region. I was also producing mechanical parts via PI. And I tinkered around with one of my Alpha clones, running some of the profession quests and mining in a Vulture… I mean a Venture.

The July update for EVE Online brought us revamped Strategic Cruisers… the start of the reign of Loki supremacy… as well as an update to Project Discovery.

It was also announced that the captain’s quarters would soon be removed from the game.

We also got our first taste of The Agency in New Eden. It was just an event at the time, though it would grow to be all things PvE soon enough.

And CSM member Jin’taan was advocating for cat ears in space.

I found that Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin still ran on my system. A great old war game.

Albion Online launched. I didn’t play it.

And, finally, Lord of the Rings Online got us to Mordor. It only took ten years. I bought in, but then there was the question of how to proceed… and with whom… and how to get back into the swing of a game I hadn’t played for ages. I returned to one of my favorite places in the game, Annuminas

Ten Years Ago

In New Eden my heart went “Boum!”

Elligium took its pandas and went home.

Blizzard set the date for Mists of Pandaria.

There was a Steam Summer Sale.

The Secret World launched. I never played it.

I was wondering if Torchlight II could live up to its potential.

Ultima Forever! A shot across Lord British’s bow.

Rift decided to sell mounts for cash. It wasn’t like they were going free to play though… not yet, anyway.

Let it be noted that not all Kickstarters fail. There was the Defense Grid expansion Kickstarter. I kicked in, they built it, I played it. Simple as that, and much better than any 99 cent app I have purchased. And I still get a free copy of their next Defense Grid game when it comes out.

I wondered aloud if nostalgia servers… official ones… would remain the sole domain of EverQuest.

Meanwhile SOE was talking about Vanguard’s free to play plan.

I was underwhelmed at the so-called “reskin” of Qeynos in EverQuest II. The sorrow of Qeynos knows no end.

In EVE Online, there was war in Delve… again… if only I could get there. There were battles in 49-U6U, C3N-3S, and DSS-EZ, a conga line in 319-3D (where we also watched the alliance tournament), and a flying titan in F2OY-X. The tiny Wallpapers Alliance held out longer than Nulli Secunda, before being crushed.

Then having done the heavy lifting for TEST, the CFC was asked to go home. TEST was going to be its own alliance, but we would all remain the best of friends in the big blue donut of love. Anyway, it was time for a convoy back to Deklein. Somewhere along the way I got a warning from CCP for causing lag.

And there was also a link to a list of things to do in EVE Online.

Fifteen Years Ago

Hey, it was time for the Revelations expansion in EVE Online, and I was running through the updated new player tutorial. It was a huge improvement over what I went through when I started the game, though I ran into a glitch or two.

The instance group was still off in Lord of the Rings Online for the Summer, though we were having issues at The Great Barrow when we weren’t playing Truth or Dare.

Vanguard was already planning server merges. 13 servers were being reduced down to 4.

EverQuest II got its own magazine… again (okay, it was an SOE magazine for Station Access subscribers the first time around, but it had an EQ2 scantily clad dark elf on the cover!)… in the form of EQuinox. And they were offering Rise of Kunark beta access to subscribers!

Dr. Richard Bartle, keeping to his strict regime of “one controversial fanboi enraging quote every summer” said he would like to improve the MMORPG species by turning off World of Warcraft. Seemed kind of mild after the next year’s entry and reaction!

Perpetual was making crazy-insane statements about Star Trek Online… like no Galaxy-class starships for you! Ships that size were planned to be “space cities” and quest hubs. Back then I told Cryptic take note: If I cannot aspire to be Captain Kirk, I am not sure I want to play! Or just go read Tipa’s post on the subject.

The end of Auto Assault was announced by NCsoft and I took note and pondered a (silly) solution.

I stopped in front of SOE headquarters for a picture. (Mirror universe Wilhelm, with goatee.)

Microsoft finally announced a warranty extension due to the “red ring of death” problem with the XBox 360.

And Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw did his fist Zero Punctuation video.

Twenty Years Ago

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos launched, the third and final major installment in the Blizzard Warcraft RTS franchise. From a graphical and story perspective it was very much a prototype for World of Warcraft.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Neverwinter Nights, the proto-MMO that ran on AOL and not the BioWare game of the same name, was shut down after running for six years on the service. Given the rate of change computers went through in the 90s, that was quite a run.

Forty Years Ago

Timex Sinclair released the TS1000, a modified version of the Sinclair ZX81 that was modified for US TV signal compatibility. I had one of them for a brief period later that year.

Most Viewed Posts in July

Search Terms of the Month

lm-composite molecular condenser
[That’s a new one… no idea]

to get to the elder in valhiem do i need a boat?
[Probably? Eikthyr is the only guaranteed walkable boss]

what happened to battleclinic.com
[All good things…]

rimworld crap game
[RimWorld no crap, RimWorld good]

rimworld dangerous bad game
[Seriously, where is this coming from?]

Game Time from ManicTime

July saw some new titles appear as well as an old title top the list.

Minecraft – 36.33%
Solasta – 25.70%
EVE Online – 22.78%
WoW Classic – 8.03%
Raft – 6.99%
World of Warcraft – 0.18%

However, July was also absolutely the lowest play time number of the year so far overall, running at just over half the time spent playing in June, which was the previously low ebb of the year. But, as you can see, a perennial favorite here has reappeared on the list. Will going back there get me playing more?

EVE Online

Well, that was a month in New Eden. We had the downfall of The Mittani, which constitutes a major change in the political landscape of null sec. The Imperium got a harassment policy and reporting process as a result of the fallout. And even CCP woke up from their usual summer snooze to remind people they shouldn’t be bad and… well, they went back to sleep after that.

I didn’t exactly blaze a trail in game either in July. I went on a couple of ops, but overall I didn’t spend a lot of time playing.

Minecraft

The month started out strong with Minecraft. It seemed like something that would keep our attention for a while, what with all the new things that came into the game since we last played. And that lasted for about two weeks. Minecraft is an excellent game when you have a project in mind. I can play for hours listening to an audio book or some pod casts. But if I don’t have something driving me it can feel kind of empty.

Pokemon Go

I kept plugging away at Pokemon Go, though the fact that I now leave the house about once a week has slowed me down somewhat. If it wasn’t for remote raid passes and the fact that incense now works decently, I would be even further behind my wife. She’s a sales rep, so she leave the house all the time while I work from home.

Level: 42 ( 66.6% of the way to 43 in xp, 4 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 717 (+3) caught, 739 (+4) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 15 of 21
Pokemon I want: I need a Torkoal for my Hoenn Pokedex
Current buddy: Wimpod

Raft

We spent some time with Raft. As I said in my post about it, not a bad game. It didn’t grab me and it doesn’t seem to be a fit with for the group, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its merits. And hey, I played another new game.

Solasta

Potshot and I spent some time playing this, and it has its merits. It is very much a representation of table top fantasy role playing games. But, in our group, I think that might be just a thing the two of us like. It wasn’t an easy sell… or any sort of a sell… to anybody else.

World of Warcraft / WoW Classic

Yeah, I have resubscribed. We’ll get to that in the coming week I am sure. But all of the play time counted above was pretty much just yesterday.

Zwift

At some point I am going to write a post about where all my gaming time went over the last few months, but it has been at low ebb, with July ringing in the fewest hours spent playing so far this year. This has also had an impact on exercise. I still get on the bike, but not as often as I might like.

Level – 15 (+0)
Distanced cycled – 1,104.4 miles (+64.5 miles)
Elevation climbed – 44,337 (+2,044 feet)
Calories burned – 36,215 (+2,002)

Coming Up

It is Blaugust tomorrow… so you can probably expect tomorrow’s post to be something Blaugust related.

There is, of course, the return to Azeroth to ponder. I still really haven’t made a plan, so it seems like I’ll be improvising until I figure one out. But the group seems keen to return after having been away.

New leader of the Imperium Asher Elias is trying to get the coalition serious about our war in the southeast against FI.RE. That could be interesting and, if his call is heeded and it draws a response from our traditional foes, might even help the currently sagging online numbers for the game.

I do wonder if we’ll get the EVE Online monthly economic report tomorrow. CCP Estimate has been on top of that. But, more so, I wonder what the numbers will tell us given the state of the PCU in July.

We’ll no doubt be getting some financial results from Activision Blizzard. They’ll short and to the point without a call or a slide deck, but they still have to report something. They can’t hide in Microsoft’s financials yet.

And I am sure there will be more. It will be August already, and I am not sure how that happened. But there we are.

A Decade in the Shadow of Error 37

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What was going on ten years ago? I mean, I guess you’ll get a full run down in a couple of days with my inevitable May in Review post, but work with me here for a bit. But today we have a special anniversary to talk about.

Back in May 2012 people were trying to play the newly launched Diablo III and complaining about the dreaded error 37 that plagued the early days of the game.

Oh, I remember that

That was just the first of many issues Diablo III faced. For example, there was error 75.

Once we could all log the game wasn’t bad, but there were the problems the itemization and the auction house, both the in game money version and the RMT version.

Wyatt “don’t you guys have phones” Cheng, the principle game designer on the Diablo team, gets irked if you suggest that the itemization was designed to force players to use the auction house (I’m too lazy to find his rant from a few months ago on Twitter), but it sure seemed like the simplest explanation. If you take that out of the equation, then the team just messed up on itemization horribly because at-level drops were badly under powered for the content and the only way around it was to got to the auction house.

Still, even with that, it wasn’t a bad game. The most controversial post I wrote in 2012 was probably the one where I said there wasn’t much of a gap between it and Torchlight II, which raised the hackles of a few Torchlight supporters. A post with 38 comments is what passes for controversy around here.

That was, in part, because there was some rivalry between who would carry inherit the mantle of successor from Diablo II, the official next in the series, Diablo III, or something in the same spirit from a few of the same people who made Diablo II, which was the Torchlight story.

And then there was the dark horse, Path of Exile, the late entry in the race.

In the end, none of them really captured all of Diablo II.

Diablo III got story, Torchlight II got mods, and Path of Exile got atmosphere, but none were really a substitute for the original. And then Blizzard gave us Diablo II Resurrected, after which nobody was really the successor because the original was alive and well again.

Meanwhile, over the last decade Blizzard spent a lot more time with Diablo III than its predecessor. It got the Reaper of Souls expansion, which on the PC side of the house fixed itemization and got rid of the auction houses, both gold and RMT based. That was a HUGE improvement for the game. Then they did seasons and updates and a mini-expansion.

They did a lot better by it than they did Diablo II… at least until Diablo II Resurrected.

I even named Diablo III my ARPG of the decade, based primarily on play time. I found it more engaging and playable than either of it rivals… and the Diablo II revival didn’t arrive until last year.

Now we’re about due for another Diablo title. It took almost a dozen years to go from Diablo II to Diablo III, and we look to be about on the same time track as we wait for Diablo IV.

Friday Bullet Points on a Chilly Spring Saturday

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[This was supposed to be yesterday’s post, but then I woke up to a big news event, so it is a day late.]

It is cold out, considering it is spring here in California. It has even rained here in the last 24 hours. I am wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, which isn’t exactly the gear of arctic explorers, but by this late in April I have generally been well into the “I will wear shorts every day until I have finished off the Halloween candy” state of affairs that working from home forever has brought me to.

Not that the weather has anything to do with the rest of this post, but I needed a headline and the weather will serve when nothing else comes to mind. So on with another bullet points post or items I thought worth noting but which weren’t worth a whole post on their own.

Enad Global 7

EG7 Dropping Russia

On the trend with western companies bailing from Russia after its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Enad Global 7 has announced that they will selling off their Innova subsidiary to the management of the team for a total of 32 million Euros, quite a haircut for the company considering they shelled out 109 million Euros for the company when they closed the deal for it a little over a year ago. Innova was primarily acquired because they held the license to run a number of MMOs in the EU and Russia. The current state of the Ukraine conflict puts Innova in a tough spot.

Meanwhile EG7 also announced that they would Toadman Interactive, another acquired studio, would be relocated from its current location in Russia to somewhere in the EU.

Database evolution

EVE Online Database History

CCP has posted another of the dev blogs that makes them a standout on the communications front in the industry. Every time I think that they could do better, I have to remind myself how poorly the industry handles this sort of thing.

New database server upgrades have arrived and that has prompted the team to write a history of the databases of EVE Online, spanning from the early days when they had to solve lag problems with people just warping across systems, to being able to cope with 100 vs 100 fights, to the monster servers that they have today which make the original 2003 game look as powerful as a digital watch by comparison. (Though I still think digital watches wee a pretty neat idea.)

Anyway, if this is your sort of thing… and I am all over these sorts of posts… you can find the whole thing on CCPs news site here.

A new drama generator

RimWorld is Legal in Australia Again

It was noted previously that, after the Ideology expansion for RimWorld landed, it seemed like maybe the thought of feminist nudist cannibals was too much for the faint hearts in Canberra.

And that could have been it, though the whole thing came up due to the fact that there was a console version of the game on the horizon, which was what got the Classification Review Board taking a look at RimWorld again. And they didn’t like what they saw, so flagged it as “Refused Classification” which made it unsalable down under.

That was undone earlier this week… on 4/20 if you think there is any significance in that… allowing the people of Australian to once again purchase RimWorld or redeem Steam keys for the game.

And, speaking of console support, RimWorld also announced that the game now has full support for Steam Deck, so perhaps that was what triggered the whole thing.

The return of the classic

Diablo II Resurrected Gets Ladders and more

Diablo II Resurrected has gotten its 2.4 patch, which is the biggest update the game has received in a long long time.

The lead story for the update is the unlock of the ladder seasons for those who want a competitive Diablo II experience, but there is so much more in the update such as class updates, mercenary fixes, new rune words, new Horadric Cube recipes, quality of life updates, and even some new levels of legacy graphics emulation for those who play with the old school look.

The great thing is that Blizzard has gone all in on this 22 year old game to make it better and fix things that has been problems for decades. The sad thing is that this might be the peak of Diablo news this year unless Diablo Immortal is a lot better than I suspect it will be.

Playable Worlds

Playable Worlds gets $25 Million in Funding

Finally, news got out this week that Playable Worlds, Raph Koster’s sandbox cloud MMO venture, managed to pick up $25 million in financing for the project from a group that includes Korean video game publisher Kakao Games Corp.

That got Raph Koster to speak a bit more about the vision for the title:

“It’s about having environments that are more alive,” Koster said. “Players can affect things that evolve and change rather than being static. Most games build their maps out of static meshes. Ours are dynamic and come down on the fly from the server. It’s about enabling worlds to feel more alive. That’s really what it comes down to.”

“Offering truly and fully persistent shared environments and massive scale is something else that is really important to us,” Koster said. “These aren’t just theme parks that you ride through, right? Where the developers are the ones who are in control. Giving full persistence also unlocks the ability for players to have far more impact. If you chop down a tree, it is permanently gone from the world for everybody.”

Specifics about the project were not forthcoming.

And we have heard a vision like this before, with the EverQuest Next project, which was eventually shelved by Daybreak, in part because of the processing requirements such a dynamic and player changeable world entailed.

Blizzard Sinks Slightly in the Low Key 2021 Financial Results Announcement

My Games Played for 2021 and Looking Forward into 2022

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It is that time again, time to look back at what I played last year and maybe try to get an idea as to what I might play in the coming year.

2020 plus 1

Past Entries

2020 – Combined summary and predictions into one post
2019 – I played some things that I predicted I would, but not many
2018 – Technically, mission accomplished; reality, not so much.
2017 – I played nothing from the list, though arguably only two were playable
2016 – I played none from the list, but most didn’t ship
2015 – literally nothing I listed went live
2014 – I played Warlords of Draenor, which was a gimme really
2012 – Actually tried most of the items on the list
2011 – Tried 3 out of 5 eventually, but then The Agency was on the list
2007 LOTRO (shipped!)
2007 Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (Didn’t ship)

Last year I wasn’t really feeling it for what I might play, probably because the list I made didn’t really pan out, so when I made the call for 2021 I kept it short and sweet.

The likely candidates were:

WoW Classic
EVE Online
Retail WoW
Burning Crusade Classic

I also threw out RimWorld, Civilzation V, and maybe World of Tanks as possible candidates to which I might return.

So now is when I look at what I actually played. I don’t go as into as much detail as Belghast, but my chart is more colorful! The top ten titles, which represent the games I spent 10 or more hours with in 2021, were:

2021 in gaming for me

Overall I tracked time for 20 games, so the bottom half of the list did not make it to the ten hour mark.

WoW Classic – 29.61%
Valheim – 23.10%
EVE Online – 18.73%
Diablo II – 7.18%
New World – 6.67%
Forza Horizon 4 – 3.68%
Forza Horizon 5 – 2.36%
RimWorld – 2.21%
EverQuest II – 1.77%
Pokemon Pearl – 1.21%
World of Tanks – 0.92%
War in the Pacific – 0.56%
MMO Tycoon 2 – 0.49%
The Fermi Paradox – 0.48%
World of Warcraft – 0.38%
Flashing Lights – 0.36%
Runes of Magic – 0.18%
Art of Rally – 0.13%
Hearthstone – 0.05%
LOTRO – 0.05%

EVE Online was the only title I played through all year, and even that was fairly light once World War Bee ended, which explains why it ranked in third in overall time played.

WoW Classic, which includes Burning Crusade Classic, topped the total time played, but petered out when we were reminded that we did not exactly love The Burning Crusade the first time around. Our WoW Classic time probably peaked in Blackrock Depths, which we ran into a dozen times at least. Leaving was made easier by having Blizzard’s behavior exposed.

Valheim, which came out of nowhere to become our obsession for a few months managed to come in second. We got our money’s worth out of that title, though the content ran out of steam for us and the small team working on it was overwhelmed trying to just keep things going.

Diablo II Resurrected was also a good time for a bit. New World showed up in September, but we didn’t really start playing it in earnest until more than a month had gone by and the login queues began to subside.

The two flavors of Forza Horizon were in there as well. I combined them into one row on the chart, though they would have easily both made it on their own.

RimWorld made the cut when the Ideology expansion hit, giving your colonists their own belief systems to work around.

I wandered into EverQuest II for a bit, as I tend to do, but didn’t make a big commitment.

Once it arrived, Pokemon Shining Pearl was a hit for me, making it into the top ten for time played in just the last five days of the year.

And then there was World of Tanks, after which time played starts to drop off rather quickly on the chart. I suppose my one regret was not being able to get into War in the Pacific, though honestly the biggest hurdle was how tiny the print was on my 34″ monitor. It is a war game from an earlier age of small monitors with large pixels.

So of the four likely candidates, I did end up playing three of them. Retail WoW quickly fell off the rotation for me in 2021 as the Shadowlands expansion turned into a repetitive grind for somebody not interested in raiding. Technically I logged in for quiet a while into the year, but I am not sure you should count the monthly run at Darkmoon Faire as really “playing” the game. I only did that because I was already subscribed and playing WoW Classic.

Which I guess brings us to the 2022 outlook.

2022 is what we get

Here is what I can see from where I sit this week.

Sure Things

EVE Online
Forza Horizon
New World
Pokemon Shining Pearl
Stellaris

I already have time logged for all of those this year. I might give up on them sooner rather than later, but they will be somewhere on the list. I certainly have much still to do in Shining Pearl and the group seems committed to New World for the time being. And I just bought some of the DLC for Stellaris, so I’ll play a bit of that I am sure.

Likely Candidates

EverQuest II
RimWorld
World of Tanks
WoW Classic Wrath of the Lich King

I own the latest expansion for EQII and am subscribed for another two months, I’ll probably play some. Likewise, it is easy enough to pick up World of Tanks whenever.

And, naturally,l I started thinking about RimWorld again since I started writing this, which makes it more likely that I will go back and play it. It happens.

WotLK Classic though, that depends on Blizzard actually shipping it this year, though it feels like that is all the WoW team will manage in 2022, and Blizzard not being a complete shit show that makes me feel bad handing them money. I am biased towards playing it, that expansion representing what is my likely peak in Azeroth, but I am also wary of Blizz and how they might screw it up or just make doing business with them so unpalatable that I’d rather just stick with the memories.

Maybe, Maybe Not

Age of Empires IV
LOTRO
Valheim

AOE4 is part of the XBox PC subscription, so I just need to download it. I am just wary of another 100 megabyte download for a title that might not pan out for me. I haven’t liked anything in the series since AOE2.

LOTRO I want to go back and play now and again, but it looks so bad on my big monitor that they have to do something for wide screen support before I will commit. If they do that I’ll give it a shot, otherwise I’ll pass.

And then there is Valheim. I am wary of this because any updates they ship will only apply to unexplored areas, and on the world we build up we explored a lot, including into biomes that should be getting content. So going back for new content means started over again on a new world, abandoning all of our work. That might be too much to ask.

Unlikely

World of Warcraft
Burning Crusade Classic
WoW Season of Mastery
Diablo Immortal

Okay, I might try Diablo: Immortal when it arrives, having a phone and all that… though I’ll likely play it on the iPad instead. But otherwise the theme here is clearly Blizzard games I would be likely to play in past years not drawing much appeal from me in 2021… and honestly it is as much because of their own lack of merit as much as because of anything Blizzard is up to.

And then there are the new games that might show up. As I have noted in the past, in January of 2021 I wouldn’t have called Valheim, New World, or Pokemon Shining Pearl even being options, yet they all made the cut. So I am open to some new things, but I cannot see far enough into the future to tell what might show up and tickle my fancy.

Looking Back at 2021 Highs and Lows

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I think the best we can say about 2021 was that at least it wasn’t 2020 all over again.

2020 plus 1

Well, maybe that isn’t being fair, but after the eternity of 2020 and the election and the pandemic and staying at home, hearing that we were going to have a vaccine and a boring old guy as president gave us hope for some normalcy.

And then shit happened and I am worried I have reached that point in life where everything is just going to be worse every year. But we’ll get to that. First the usual round up of past years, because this in an annual thing and has been since been for more than a decade.

This year we are back to highs and lows, divided up into categories based on some criteria that represents how my brain sorts things or relevance to the theme of this blog or something like that.

Blizzard

Highs

Burning Crusade Classic launched, keeping the nostalgia party going
Diablo II Resurrected landed on PC and consoles to popular acclaim
Some actual serious talk about doing more with Diablo II Resurrected
We got another run at nostalgia with WoW Classic Season of Mastery
BlizzConline was a nice, solid online event that was FREE to all fans
Hearthstone carried on and came out with a new solo mode
The WoW Community Council could help things if Blizzard deigns to listen

Lows

There was the collapse of the WoW Shadowlands expansion as people lost interest and exited the WoW for greener pastures
I am pretty sure the big level squish was a sign that Blizz just wants people to get to level cap raiding faster rather than any attempt to make that between content more viable or accessible
Diablo IV is still more than a year away
Diablo Immortal, which they were letting people play at BlizzCon 2018, still didn’t ship
Overwatch 2 seems to be some sort of unsubstantiated myth at this point
StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm are on a shelf in the back room
No new WoW expansion announced… or any real tangible public plan for the one franchise that pays the bill
Tainted the Burning Crusade Classic experience with the bonus pack, with the lizard mount and special hearthstone that mostly marked people out for scorn, though I am sure it made money in the short term
So far the WoW Community Council has been a game of Space Invaders, where suggestions are the descending aliens that Blizzard feels they have to destroy before they get too close
And then there was the State of California lawsuit about Blizzard being a hostile work place, which seemed supported by some accounts even as Blizzard tried to deny there were any problems at the company, which then exploded as more and more revelations about the company were exposed, often supported by the social media accounts of the people who were the problem, aided and abetted by senior management and HR who all seemed eager to cover up and excuse bad behavior, tarnishing everybody from Mike Morhaime forward
Lots of empty promises to clean things up while ignoring employee issues and making sure to jump on top of any hint of a union with the usual round of anti-union lies
Eventually there was some cleaning out of those most obviously complicit, but the company was at odds with itself and began to drift like a ship without a rudder as those in the executive suite made sure that they were not held accountable for anything; leading by example is the most basic form of leadership and Bobby Kotick can’t even manage that
As bad as Blizzard and Activision corporate behavior has been, I bet only a small sliver of their fans would even care if the studio actually shipped something new and fun

Enad Global 7

Highs

2021 opened with such optimism about what EG7 was going to do now that it had acquired Daybreak
Then CEO Robin Floodin seemed eager to invest in the Daybreak portfolio, though he seemed oddly obsessed with H1Z1
Even replacement interim EG7 CEO and former Daybreak CEO Ji Ham admitted that the Daybreak portfolio of games had been neglected during his time as leader of Daybreak
We got to see Ji Ham speak and, while he wasn’t a font of insight, he did okay for his first public engagement as CEO of a public company
Ji Ham actually admitting on camera that Daybreak had not been investing enough in their game portfolio and saying that EG7 wanted to rectify that
New expansions for EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Lord of the Rings Online
Continuing new content for DC Universe Online and PlanetSide 2
MechWarrior 5 released on multiple platforms
Ongoing promise of a revamped LOTRO and a console version of the game
An unannounced Marvel IP MMO in development that got more headlines than anything Daybreak has done in the last five years
Daybreak taking over running Magic: The Gathering Online also put the company in the spotlight, adding another very visible franchise to their portfolio

Lows

Time and reality seemed to crush that initial wave of optimism that the acquisition instilled in us, as it tends to
Difficult to find anything real (as opposed to promised) where one can accurately declarre, “This is better today, right now, because of EG7” since the Daybreak acquisition
Worrisome feeling of deja vu when Ji Ham replaced the popular Robin Floodin as CEO
Some clearly impractical promises like LOTRO on consoles or bringing back H1Z1
Even the more practical promises are still out in the distant future
Really kind of business as usual for most of the games, which isn’t bad, but we were hyped for more

CCP

Highs

Opened the year with another Guinness Book World Record internet spaceship battle at M2-XFE
World War Bee proved once again that things happen in New Eden that no other game comes close to achieving
Lots of work on the whole new player experience thing and making things within the game more comprehensible
Came up with not bad solutions to the endless complaints about warp core stabilizers and interdiction nullification
Server upgrades to raise bar on performance in New Eden
Return of the Alliance Tournament

Lows

Economic starvation policy directly contributed to the stalemate that marked the last six months of World War Bee
The economy, the dull end of the war, and the COVID vaccine combined to slam the weekly peak concurrent user count
The promise of “prosperity” by CCP turned out to define “prosperity” as “more scarcity”
The CCP plan to make capital ships rare by making them expensive after years of them being way too cheap was both way too late to fix the proliferation issue and made capital pilots much less likely to risk their now very expensive hulls
The new player experience work has been focused pretty strongly on the initial tutorial, after which new players are still sent into the mediocre and now comically out of date career agents
Introduction of NFTs into the Alliance Tournament with the promise that this is just the start of those shenanigans
For some reason CCP can’t even ship what seems like a slam dunk improvement, like the new skill management interface, without screwing it up on the first pass and having to go back and fix blatant issues that were reported on the test server… and which should have been obvious to anybody with eyes honestly
UI design team philosophy seems to always default to “what if we added an additional UI pane to the game?”
I guess EVE Echoes is still a thing… oh, look, it has become a horrible, cash shop focused vision of what might be the future of the main game
Weren’t they working on a first person shooter or something?

Amazon

Highs

New World was an undisputed success at launch
Server queues are bad for players, but they are a good problem to have to solve when compared to server merges
Huge player numbers in the first month, with almost a million concurrent at its peak
Even when things died down, low six digit concurrent numbers are something many live games would kill for
Actually an MMORPG that felt different from the WoW-centric experiences we’ve been having the last fifteen plus years
Being skill and not class based means your character can do it all… theoretically
Planned for the future with a very obvious server merge path

Lows

When you’re getting 5 digit server queues with a game that has a low four digit player limit per server, you have not launched enough servers
So many bugs, so many problems that won’t go away, so much time spent waiting for the damn game to load
A lot of “nice to have” features left on the cutting room floor
You know “Azoth” makes half of us think of “Azeroth” every time we see that word
Some very odd UI design choices… beyond the clearly “designed for consoles” aspect even
An attempt to forestall players leaving made crafting and high end content so grindy it accelerated players leaving
In reality, I desperately want an alt so my main doesn’t literally have to do it all and respec with every change
Also, alts aside, two freaking character slots per region? I remember the EQII launch and being dismayed that they only gave us four character slots, and New World somehow topped that
Server merges already as it is a game that has a minimum population in order to be viable
Getting to the “so what are you going to do next?” phase in New World
Didn’t Amazon have some other games in development?

Pokemon

Highs

We finally got a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl
A great Pokemon Go Fest back in July
Pokemon Go keeps adapting and getting better

Lows

We will see how well a faithful remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl plays in 2022 I guess
Pokemon Go Fest was largely a success because they cut the price down to something reasonable
Sitting at level 42 in Pokemon Go it looks like a long, long ways to level 50

Television, Books, and the Media

Highs

The binge watching continued into 2021 and there was a lot to watch
Some solid IPs hitting the airwaves with series based on The Wheel of Time and Azimov’s Foundation series
A new attempt at a Dune movie, as well as a new Bond and Matrix movies
Ghostbusters Afterlife was the sequel the original deserved
Actually went out to the movies a few times; the popcorn was excellent
Lots of new seasons for things we like previously
Managed to get through 28 books this year
I did a lot of podcast listening as well
Twitter remains a fairly hospitable place for me

Lows

The problem with binging TV is that you become very aware of the tropes of the genre and the clues indicating where the plot is going
A lot of what I call “next season” fatigue, where I find that shows I liked in past seasons don’t really live up
We watched such a breadth of shows that when a new season drops I cannot remember what the hell went on before
Some extremely crap “previously on X” 30 second recaps in front of a new season that don’t help at all
Not a lot of new movies interesting enough to risk going to the theater, and a couple I might have gone out to see were released simultaneously on streaming, and our couch at home wins by default even if the popcorn isn’t as good
The whole Dune “we’re hiding the fact it is only part one until you see the opening credits” thing bugged me
Bond should have stayed retired
A lot of my reading this year was re-reading books for comfort, so not a lot new managed to get on my list
A lot of what I call “podcasts” today, such as This American Life, I would have just called “shows on the radio” 15 years back, while I rarely if ever find time for the amateur affairs that represented podcasts back then

Blogging and Such

Highs

The blog, it lives still, fifteen years into the game
I once again posted more than once a day in 2021
For no good reason I have been on a post-a-day streak since April 2020, which puts me into the mid-600s for days in a row of posting
Blaugust was a thing again this year
The local blogging community still carries on

Lows

Finding something to write about that I also care to put the effort into… ideas are cheap and plentiful, time and enthusiasm are much more rare… is becoming more difficult
The backbone of the blog was MMORPGs, which lend themselves to blogging as they are very much progression based and tell the story of your character, and since I am barely playing any MMORPGs at this point, those tales of progression have largely gone missing
There is no feature that WP.com cannot screw up on the first three tries
WP.com tech support will tell you you’re wrong when you say they’ve broken something, then fix it two weeks later

Just Life

Highs

As I stated at the top, at least it isn’t 2020 anymore
Still hanging on; my wife and I combined made more money in 2021 than any year previous, so we’re not too worried about the immediate future and doing okay compared to many in these trying times
Managed to refinance our house, lower our monthly payment, and pull out enough cash to pay for the last two years of college for our daughter
Back to having a boring president is good for the blood pressure
Covid vaccines available for most everybody at this point; I got my booster just ten days back
Even Donald Trump says you should get vaccinated
Managed not to contract Covid myself yet
Going to the store was mostly back to normal, save for masks, and there was toilet paper and antiseptic wipes available
The news wasn’t one outrage or horror show after the another; we let things slide in 2020 that would have been headlines with two week life cycles in a normal year

Lows

2021 would seem like a pretty bad year if it hadn’t followed 2020
The price of the final two years of college for our daughter is easily going to get into six figures
Oh, and everything else is more expensive, so we’re not actually gaining any ground, just holding on
Everything is still worse than before Covid; prices are up, quality is down, portions are smaller, supply is unreliable, and the chip shortage remains
I didn’t catch Covid, but I got an inner ear infection that made me deaf in my right ear for about a month, and I have still not fully recovered my hearing there months later
Delta and Omicron variants have made it clear than Covid isn’t going away any time soon
Covid boosters are likely to become like flu shots, something we’ll need to get every year it seems, and masks in enclosed public spaces are going to be a thing for the rest of my life it seems
Apparently the ONE thing Donald Trump’s fans cannot abide is him endorsing Covid vaccines
We have reached a point where billionaires have their own space programs like Bond villains
I’ve really had trouble recalibrating to a news cycle that isn’t one insane thing after another, so when the top story of the day is about Biden’s dog or Kamala Harris buying cookware my gut reaction is “who gives a flying fuck?”
Remember when we were worried about Democracy in Hong Kong? Yeah, China stomped that idea out of existence
China is starting to seem impatient about bringing Taiwan under its control
Russia is still working on reconquering the old Soviet/Imperial Russian empire, with an invasion of the remaining unoccupied parts of Ukraine as a distinct possibility, and we know how well wars in Europe work out for everybody
Boring presidents don’t actually do much it seems, so the new James Buchanan we have now is just forestalling conflicts to come
The November 2022 elections could very well decide whether or not democracy is a thing in the USA
We’ll be close to 8 billion people on earth soon, well up from the 3.3 billion who were around when I was born; Thomas Malthus would be telling us, “told you so” if he were still around today

Anyway, I had better stop there before I get myself too down. Bad news does tend to push out anything good, so I should be happy that the bad news hasn’t been as frequent or as close to home.

Tomorrow is the last day of the year. Enjoy it. 2022 is coming, and I am sure it is keen to leave its own mark on our collective hides.

Answers to My Questions for 2021

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Back at the start of the year I eschewed the usual predictions post and instead went in for a round of questions. After 2020 I was clearly feeling unprepared to predict anything, though this was not the first time I went down that path. Now we have hit the middle of December and it is time to see if any of my questions got answers we like.

2020 plus 1

There is a long pattern of me making such posts on the first of the year.

2008 – Predictions (silly, mostly wrong)
2009 – Predictions (mostly silly, mostly wrong)
2010 – Predictions (lots of bullet points, mostly wrong)
2011 – Demands (mostly unmet)
2012 – Questions (mostly unanswered)
2013 – Goals (mostly unfulfilled)
2014 – Predictions (serious, mostly wrong again)
2015 – Predictions (serious, mostly wrong as usual)
2016 – Predictions (serious-ish, mostly wrong)
2017 – Predictions (more wrong than usual)
2018 – Predictions (serious and maybe less wrong than usual)
2019 – Predictions (scandalous and mostly wrong)
2020 – Predictions (2020 made me so very wrong)
2021 – Questions (we’ll see how it goes)

Anyway, let’s get tucked in and see what I can come up with.

What will a return to normalcy bring to the video game industry?

Right off the bat I am going to have to object here to the assumption that we’ve returned to anything like normalcy. We’re not in 2020 anymore, but we’re not not in 2020 anymore either. The shadow of that year lay heavily over this one, its poison seeping in. People who can are still working from home, Covid is still spreading, the economy is still in a bind from the pandemic, and the world still seems to be going to hell at a rapid pace.

Will Shadowlands hold players?

Well, at least we have an easy one here. The answer is “no.” There are a few reasons, not the least of which is Blizzard not releasing much in the way of additional content and Blizzard being revealed as a nightmarish Dickensian workhouse of misogyny and intolerance. Also, maybe “run Torghast every day for the next two years” wasn’t the winning plan that somebody thought it was.

Will Diablo Immortal ship?

Another easy one! And another “no.” Wyatt Cheng once asked if we had phones. Many of us probably have new ones since he asked that question at BlizzCon 2018. Now does he have a game? That seems to be a more pertinent question at this point.

Does Blizzard have anything new planned?

Three for three here on the easy questions, with another big “no” on the tally. Diablo II Resurrected is about as “new” as they got, and they had Vicarious Visions do the remaster of a twenty year old title for that. It was a good remaster, but it wasn’t new.

Along with that we had Burning Crusade Classic and WoW Classic Season of Mastery, also not new. Even the solo mode for Hearthstone didn’t feel very new. I guess their bigger company issues got in the way for some of that, but it still feels like they came into 2021 just winging it and hoping something would come up. And, honestly, they don’t seem to have much lined up for 2022. How can such a big studio… more people work on WoW than most MMO studios have total employees… deliver so little?

What does Daybreak under EG7 really portend?

A reverse merger, with Ji Ham now at the helm? I wouldn’t have called that one. Otherwise there has been some promises for the future, but the first year really seemed like business as usual for Daybreak… except maybe they didn’t lay so many people off in 2021. That’s a plus.

Will Norrath continue to boom?

Kinda, maybe, sorta. As noted above, things were mostly business as usual. That has generally been good for the Norrath titles, EverQuest and EverQuest II, which get an expansion in November/December and a major content drop in late spring/early summer every year. So things roll on there.

But when it comes to doing anything new, it is LOTRO they want to put on consoles, DCUO they want to update, and an unannounced Marvel IP MMO that gets all the headlines. They even keep bringing up H1Z1. But EverQuest as a franchise? Any plans for that look to be dead.

What happens with H1Z1?

Nothing. As I wrote above, EG7 keeps bringing it up when they talk about the important IPs they control. There is clearly some wishcasting going on about the title returning to the top of the battle royale genre. But actual progress? There was some mention that they had a few people look into being able to run a build, but otherwise nobody appears to be working H1Z1 in any meaningful way.

At least they stopped renaming it I suppose.

Where is Cold Iron Studios?

Not with Daybreak and EG7, we know that much. Somewhere between the announcement that Daybreak was purchasing Cold Iron and the launch of their game Aliens: Fireteam Elite, Cold Iron went somewhere else. Details are hazy, the story is mostly inferred, but Cold Iron never made it into the EG7 stable of studios.

What does ArenaNet do after all the departures?

Pretend nothing has changed and announce an expansion? This is the problem with bringing up studios and games I do not watch closely. A bunch of key people left ANet last year, but back in August they announced the End of Dragons, slated for February 2022, so I guess everything is good. Maybe? I don’t really know.

Where does CCP go next with New Eden?

Nowhere? Seriously, after the Triglavian story cycle the company has been been focused on the new player experience and trying to force the in-game economy into a form that they believe is best for the long term survival of the game, ignoring the short term “hey, can you give us something fun?” requests from the players. Short sheeting the economy isn’t fun. Even if you don’t care about the economy and mock miners and industrialists who are complaining, you have to admit that there is very little fun in what CCP has been doing for the last year.

Will CCP stop strangling the New Eden economy?

No. There was a promise over the summer that the end of scarcity was coming. But the Q4 quadrant, New Dawn: Age of Prosperity, involved very little prosperity. For every relaxation of the economic restrictions there was some matching nerf to offset things, often hidden behind some oppressive new game mechanic. CCP said they were listening to feedback, but they mostly slowed their roll a bit (compression will be in 2022 now) and tried re-arranging the deck chairs some (“waste” got renamed to “residue”) as they carried forward with the goal of resetting the economy to some past halcyon state. I am sure this will end well.

How Will World War Bee End?

The side with the 3:1 numbers advantage got tired and went home.

There are many ways to spin who “won” the war. PAPI can claim that they forced the Imperium down from four regions to one constellation and destroyed trillions of ISK in ships and structures. The Imperium can claim that they held out, denied PAPI their stated victory conditions, and in the end destroyed as much in ships and structures as PAPI did.

As for losing the war, that award generally goes to the group that loses their space and has to move elsewhere. That makes Legacy Coalition, the main instigators of the war under Vily, the losers. TEST, the leading alliance in Legacy, lost their old space, couldn’t hold their new space, and ended up trying to live as far away from the Imperium as they possibly could. Brave gets a special mention for losing hardest of all, as not only did they lose their old space and their new space, but now the rest of PAPI is attacking them because Brave sold structures to the Imperium so they could at least asset safety their stuff and get some seed ISK in the bank to carry on.

Really though, the honor of ending the war goes to CCP. It was already somewhat obvious after the second battle of M2-XFE that their servers were not going to be up to a final mighty battle. And then CCP made changes to resources and production that made capital ships too valuable to expend freely, so the attackers were limited to subcaps. In the choice between investing a lot of time and effort in a real blockade of the final Imperium constellation or just going home, they opted to go home.

Will Nintendo announce a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl?

Yes, goddammit, yes they did. About freaking time. And it has shipped and there is a copy for me and my daughter under the Christmas tree. We’ll see how that plays out soon enough.

Will crowd funded MMOs finally find their way?

Ha ha ha ha… no. I mean, Crowfall went live I think. I am not sure it will survive, but it shipped. And they are a stand out in the stable of crowd funded MMOs, which mostly promised things they couldn’t deliver. Don’t spend money on things that you cannot play today.

Project: Gorgon is the right path, as it was in playable form from the day of the first monetary ask. Camelot Unchained is the wrong path, asking for money, blowing through every promised date ever, and starting a new project before the promised one is even in beta. And then there is Star Citizen… well, they certainly know how to milk a community. Star Citizen is a lot of things, but being an actual video game seems to be a few bullets down the list.

Is there anything new possible for MMORPGs?

The metaverse maybe? That seemed to be the topic for 2021. I don’t know if it is Raph Koster’s desire to remake the simple days of MUDs in the 90s or Mark Zuckerberg’s dystopian vision of an all controlling metaverse that turns our very desires against us, but I guess either might be something new… at least for MMORPGs.

Oh, and something about crypto and NFTs. But we’ll probably burst that bubble in 2022.

Will I play anything new this year?

Valheim. That was a bit of a left field star, but ended up being our main game for about two months earlier this year. New World showed up and, once the initial chaos settled down, the instance group got into the game. And then there was Forza Horizon 4 & 5. Open world driving for the win. There were a couple of other small titles that were new, but nothing that I invested more than a couple of hours in.

That I played three new games made 2021 a departure from the usual routine. In 2020 80% of my game time was spent in WoW, WoW Classic, and EVE Online. The year isn’t over yet, but so far those three titles represent less than 50% of my tracked play time.

Will VR get a killer app this year?

Ha ha ha ha… no. VR will remain a niche so long as it requires a real world obscuring mask strapped to your face… oh, and the motion sickness issue gets addressed. Ready Player One and Zuckerberg’s idea that we’re all going to live in his ad laden VR metaverse hell is a pipe dream.

Will the industry be smart enough to keep regulators away?

Not really. The industry’s best defense so far has been regulators being interested in other things to further their own interests. It has to be a slow news day for lockboxes to make the headlines of late, so politicians and regulators have mostly been busy elsewhere. Except for Blizzard. Yeah, Blizzard is having some regulatory issues, though not over lockboxes and that sort of thing, just mundane things like running a hostile, discriminatory work place. The usual corporate thing.

But the industry keeps on trying to get the government to come down on them hard, with cryto and NFTs on their list of things to try next.

Will We lose Section 230 Protection?

Not yet, though Facebook seems to be pushing to have that taken away, because they have the money and the staffing to deal with any new regulations which would help them cement their place in creating our dystopian future… and present… and recent past.

What will I do when the blog turns 15?

Write a post about it. That is my answer for most things I suppose.

So that was the list for 2021. As those were just questions rather than predictions there is no score.

I think I’ll be able to warm up to doing some predictions for 2022. I have a couple of weeks to get on it. But first I need to make a 2022 graphic.

Blizzard

Enad Global 7

CCP

Amazon

Other Areas of the Video Game Industry

Television, Books, and the Media

Blogging and Such

Just Life

What will a return to normalcy bring to the video game industry?

Will Shadowlands hold players?

Will Diablo Immortal ship?

Does Blizzard have anything new planned?

What does Daybreak under EG7 really portend?

Will Norrath continue to boom?

What happens with H1Z1?

Where is Cold Iron Studios?

What does ArenaNet do after all the departures?

Where does CCP go next with New Eden?

Will CCP stop strangling the New Eden economy?

How Will World War Bee End?

Will Nintendo announce a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl?

Will crowd funded MMOs finally find their way?

Is there anything new possible for MMORPGs?

Will I play anything new this year?

Will VR get a killer app this year?

Will the industry be smart enough to keep regulators away?

Will We lose Section 230 Protection?

What will I do when the blog turns 15?