Hey, you got to start out the year with a cursed podcast. That way you get the curse out of the way. And we spent 13 minutes troubleshooting technical difficulties. And now, hey, look, we're recording. It's good. We're here. The Massively OP Podcast, episode 501. can we just keep doing this for the next like 100 episodes i mean i think i think after 500 the numbers don't matter anymore nobody's list nobody cares they're just gonna the next
one and the next one. Wow, we went pretty dark there. No, I just mean like until we get to a thousand we may as well not even count. Oh, I think they'll care when we hit 666. Oh, gosh. About to get out the growly voice for that one. Hi, welcome to the Massive EOP Podcast. I'm Justin. With me is Bree. Who's Mike? Is worse today? We don't know. It has a mind of its own. Yeah.
But we're here. We're recording. I'm trying to stave off the post-holiday back in the routine blues that seems to hit right about this time when you can't even pretend you're on vacation anymore. You hold on, you hold on, and suddenly you're in the middle of January. And it's like, well, it's going to be 15 degrees and sleeting and have fun. Obviously, the only way to fix that is to never go on vacation in the first place.
lower your expectations so far that was my entire dating strategy in high school didn't really come on i don't even know what that means it just sounded in my head Your wife is going to hear that. She didn't know me in high school. She was in junior high. So, you know, that would have been weird.
We often talk about that. So anyways, let's get back into our normal rhythm here as we kind of come on the heel of several odd... podcasts and good ones i hope and thank you for listening to our 500th podcast by the way that was a lot of fun but yeah we're back into the news where um things are not quieting down the way that we were kind of a little frayed that they might so it's everything is on fire not the good kind of fire yeah that kind of fire
Keeps you nice and toasty warm. But did you get any time gaming this past weekend? Oh, my gosh. Just this week or the last time we actually? I don't know. Whatever you want to talk about.
um yeah actually my whole christmas was kind of derailed in terms of gaming because do you remember that day we were recording and i said something like this is the last hard thing i have to do today um that don't say things like that because it tempts fate to screw with you and like literally that night i had to talk to god he's like so yeah we we can change before christmas my husband
He had COVID. So his first time getting it. And I was like, well, there went Christmas. Everything kind of went off the rails for me. No way. My wife got COVID for the first time over Christmas. Yeah, it was fun. I managed to avoid it. Still a Novid, but... That was not easy because we were all in quarantine. That's what they call them. I know. It's really dumb. Yes. So anyway, like just the quarantine situation meant I didn't get that much gaming at my PC.
So I didn't get to play Guild Wars 2. I didn't get to play Lodro that much. Anyway, I did a little. But like...
I had my laptop, right? I was just quarantined off in a different room. And so I played a lot of stuff, just not like the big MMOs that need a real machine to run on. I actually played a lot of Star Wars Galaxies because it's old and it doesn't... that much to run and i played a bunch of smaller games um including some multi-players i actually made a list let me see if i have my list yeah i do i played
Okay, here we go. Summer House, Backpack Battles, Gordlet's Children of Morda, Islanders, Forager, Growth, Stacklands, Wildermyth. Offworld Trading Company, Dystopica, Townscape, Ziggurat 2, Desktop Dungeons, Rewind, and then the ones I like the best were Bellatro, Potion Craft, Curious Expedition.
Two, they're both good, but I like two better. And Darkest Dungeon. Those were like the ones that kind of rose to the top as like games I'm going to keep around and keep playing. I also played out... um tinker tinkertown and necess are we calling it necess or is it necessa i don't even know they're like you know
grindy pixel survival sandboxes. Neither one of them is staying on my device. I actually like Tinkertown better. I thought the graphics were better. Necessa is the one with all those crazy videos where the devs are doing wild things. You were so tickled by that one. Pow, pow, pow, pow. I couldn't stop laughing. It was like, I don't know. I'm glad they're all doing well, but that's...
Those devs have a whole... I was totally comfortable putting that video in and they started watching. I'm like, oh, this needs an NSFW tag really quick here.
yeah so i got to play a ton of stuff i'm sure half of those you told me about in the first place because i'm not really much of an indie gamer like i get advice from other people on what to buy and then just play it i recognize a few of those they're not mmos so yeah by the time he finally recovered and then we had my my mother-in-law was in town i didn't get to play while she was here finally so like new year's eve i'm finally sitting down like
yes guild wars 2 finally so that's what i've been up to um
I've been, you know, doing mapping. I think I finished Wayfair Foothills and Caledon Forest. I'm doing like a whole mapping thing this year where I'm trying to get that done in my engineer. But this past week, this past weekend especially has been... just like i wrote all weekend i didn't set out to do this but i think i wrote like 8 000 words in articles just this past like two days so you're gonna see a lot of that this week because stuff just kept happening and i just felt compelled
write about it on friday the uh star wars the legends guys posted a poll about apartments and they were like you know give us some feedback and they did a poll that showed almost no one has apartments and i was like hold up is the coolest feature what's going on so i went in there and i started doing some research they're right they have like 20 occupancy which is terrible um given how many people you know actually are in this game and how many people have houses it's
it's nuts to me that there's no uptake so i did a whole piece on this that almost no one will read but i really wanted to to do it i felt like i was singularly capable of this so that's coming out this week then on saturday and we're going to talk about this a whole bunch more later um we got all the stars reach news and not only did i just sit there listen to the whole
talk, do a whole piece on it. I also have an editorial coming out on the demographic intent of this game and how it could be a game changer for our genre. That's coming later. And then on Sunday, I can't talk about this too much, but I played Aloft, which is a multiplayer sandbox. A lot of people are looking out, you know, looking for it's one of those Skyship kind of games.
There's like four or five of those in development for some reason. It's kind of a vibe right now. So you can go on Steam. I think they still have a demo. I can't talk about... the experience because it's under embargo until later this week. So stay tuned for that. I really wish I could talk about it, but next week I will for sure. Okay, cool. So I've been super busy like doing meta.
stuff with the games and not really getting to like play for myself but that's okay that's part of the job right yeah it's it's i always find this is a good time of year to kind of branch out try some new things yes And, you know, kind of force yourself out of our little routines and ruts that we tend to get in. So I've. I didn't actually do that, but I've made plans. So that's something. Concepts of a plan. Well, it's been chaotic on my end as well. And my gaming time has been very irregular.
So when I do sit down, it's like, okay, just straight to the comfort gaming. Nothing, you know, I know I want to play all these other things. I actually made a list of like 12 different MMOs I would love to get into this year. And then I looked at that. I'm like, who?
But when are you going to have the time? When am I going to have the time? That's not even counting any new stuff that might come out this year. So maybe, you know, like if you want to, you want to, you want to laugh. I had a great idea. I had a great idea. I'll never have time to do it. But I thought it would be kind of fun. Like a little bit of a choose my adventure. But instead of that, it would be kind of an elimination thing where you start out a month with like four MMOs around.
playing four mmos around a particular topic but at the end of the week you as the player eliminate one as the the writer player you eliminate the one that interests you the least week two you have three left and you keep playing the three
And then, you know, I guess this is like a survivor kind of thing until you end up at the end of the month with like the one that lasts. So I thought, oh, that'd be kind of interesting. Like start out a month and do like, you know, space themed ones. So you'd have EVE Online, No Man.
sky uh maybe if you got star citizen in there or elite dangerous and then kind of work your way down and i feel like that would privilege the games that really work well in small chunks like probably there's a lot of unfortunate
There's a lot of things that would be, you know, plus you have to push everything to the side for an entire month. And I do not think I could do that. It would just drive me bad. It's a cool idea, though. Yeah, it was like, just, you know, hypothetically, it was an interesting idea. For someone else to steal in you. Isn't that one of the fun things? You know, sometimes you come up with an idea. You do it. Yeah.
uh but yeah for me um a lot of low trope and going through the new expansion i'm about i'm over The halfway mark, which is pretty good for this point in time. I try to make one new zone a month. I mean, there's a lot of quests, so I'm just making sure I go through every single last one. Having a really good time. The stories are really good.
some of them are surprisingly dark some of them are very weird there's elves that are fading and they're fading into trees and so you of course of course they can't be bothered to do any of their own quests so they're like while i fade into this tree will you go pluck me some flowers and go tell this person goodbye forever and go do this and go do that i'm like yeah sure tree elf i'll certainly do that is is is this gonna benefit
Anything when you're faded into three? Nope. I'll have diminished power and won't be able to do much. All right. That sounds like a great plan for you. Is this Tolkien lore? I don't exactly know. It's like a weird offshoot of elves. Like these are the ones that did not want to go into the, the West. So they are choosing instead, like they got kind of cut off from the main branch elves and they're.
the the forest that they protected is it kind of got bulldozed a long time ago i don't know the lorax came along or something i don't you know whatever and so they're just kind of defending their tiny little groves and it makes for a really interesting like oases that are in the middle of this desert so it's that's kind of cool um there was there's this one quest like i clicked on the quest lady she's like yeah these these wild jackals just killed nate my baby i'm like
What game am I playing here? What is this madness? She's like, go kill some. I'm like, I'll kill them all. For your child? I have 200 I have to kill for my deed log anyway. You shall be avenged. Little girl, boy, whatever was killed by Jack. What writer was in a dark place and has to start a quest that way?
way you know that that's kind of funny because with most most lotro quests they're not nearly that dark or if they allude to dark things it's just usually i don't know some of this stuff once but once in a while just like rear up and slappy in the face and you're just like oh i was uh i'm going back to the shire for a while i need to need to get back in touch with pies
So yeah, really just enjoying the expansion. It's good stuff. It really is. And of course, we're going to be talking about the Lojo stuff in a second. So I'm doing some early planning on what characters I want to keep and what I'm doing and what the heck.
my plans are for this year for this game uh that's kind of all all up in the air like everything is just so topsy-turvy but in a very delightful way watching world chat apparently that's everybody else right now too wait are people excited because i haven't dipped in to see what the yeah let's talk about this sega okay okay there's both there's both um yeah the other thing
i probably spent the most time with is just some some wild classic i got my hunter up to level 35 so yeah nothing nothing to i i wrote just last night i said this is such a perfect game when I really want to shut my mind off and just at the very end of the day completely relax listen to some music sit back and not have to worry about like parsing quests and what I have to do because it's all very rudimentary and early
quest design stuff so none of it's going to be too complicated versus retail where i kind of do have to pay attention because there's overlapping quest fields right you know that all the quest designers sometimes are getting too clever for their own good and so you know like they're interesting you need to design your games imagining half the player base is kind of high right now and just it has to work for that level of cognition that's not a horrible way to design
I see what you're saying. I'm not opposed to... uh yeah i was kind of hoping i'd come back and be like oh i had some amazing new mmo experiences and i just have not had time there's there's some that are very on the cusp of of uh wanting to play i just i need my i need my routine to get back. It's been like three and a half weeks since I've had my normal routine.
I go from being rested in that case to being highly anxious because every day is just some new chaos and I don't thrive on chaos. Me either. Yeah. I'm okay for a period of time, but then I just like... I need things to go back. So, um, this is this podcast here going back to, uh, I don't know. I'll, I'll make it chaos for you. Well, I mean like record the time. Okay. All right. Let's get into the news. And as we were alluding there,
lord of the rings online uh no surprise they did announce like a month ago that they're going to be rolling out some new servers but then kind of didn't tell us anything and then kind of got a little bit miffed that we were upset that they didn't tell us anything and unnecessary drama entirely so as soon as they all came back to work here in January they got Rob Ciclini
there on the live stream last friday in fact i was down in indiana and i was sitting in a room watching my youngest son sleep because at that age you've got to sit there and make sure he takes a nap when he's that exhausted so in there i'm listening to the pot the live stream taking notes and it was good a lot of good information
everything answered that i think i mean a lot of follow-up questions have come out of this and they there's definitely like an a need for a part two or as they said you know they're going to be putting up a pretty comprehensive back but in short uh lord of the rings online maybe as soon as a month from now and they said definitely you know
by march at the latest they're going to be rolling out four new servers for the game these are 64-bit servers two for us two for europe uh they will be based in u.s and based in europe so for european players that's amazing oh yeah
Same thing that they got when they had the new Legendary server roll out last year. And one of these servers will be Roleplay Encouraged. One of the servers for each territory will just be Normal Rule Set. The whole idea here is to gradually... and maybe not even gradually, maybe very quickly, migrate almost the entire player base onto these four servers with the long-term intention, and I'm not...
reading too much between the lines because they're all about wink wink nudge nudge they want to shut down the old servers they're they're old they're creaky there's the lag issues And they are putting a lot of stock in these new servers. Yeah, they're not going to keep supporting those old servers forever. That would be stupid. Yeah. So you're going to be moving.
So, yeah, that's kind of the choice. They said, well, in the fall, we'll evaluate the numbers on all the old servers and, you know, kind of shepherd you off of them if the numbers are low. If you guys really want to stick around and, okay, I guess we'll keep going. them on but then we'll reevaluate in the spring it's like carrot first and then the stick
So as we talked about in our guild chat last night, it was like the choice is like move now and get the names you want and the housing spots you want or be forced to move later and then you have less choice. So in a way. Yeah, it's exciting. I think it'll be very interesting to kind of consolidate the player base. I think there's a lot of advantages to that. I wrote a column on it. You can check it out this week. There's...
It's going to be interesting. I think there's a vibrancy of, oh, hey, we're moving over. We're kind of setting up our houses again. Maybe some new guilds will come out of this. I have no doubt new ones will come out of this. And it'll be interesting.
be able to just play with other people um especially if you're on some of the quieter more dead servers that still exist right now by the way um transfers off of the old dead servers from 2015 will be dark servers yes the dark servers which i thought was hilarious because i looked on the forums this morning brie and somebody was asking like what were even what were these servers And the general manager had to go to...
what ancient gaming noobs blog to find a list he's like i think this is it here's the list i'm like no you shouldn't have to go to a blog who remembers any but the ones they were on right we were on silver load only reason I remember it. There are a lot of them to shut down. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, there I mean, transfers are going to be free there. They set up.
they're going to be setting up like a three-stage thing like how do you do this without a completely descending into chaos a free-for-all on name grabs and all that right well step one they said the first day whenever they announce it uh
there's going to be a day where VIP subscribers are going to be able to come in and reserve up to three names. First come, first serve, but hopefully you can reserve the name you really want on that server. Day two, you can start transferring, but you can't start.
playing so you can spend the whole day transferring all your characters over and then day three you can start playing and you can rename your characters so you can use some of those reserved names if you want again it's a lot of first come first serve and there's as you asked me earlier yeah there's a lot of anxiety i saw over people very worried very you know very attached to their names attached their kinships and not you know worried about
conflicts and you know also some people not wanting to set up their houses again worried about kinships being split people left behind people who might not be in country right now and will come back and so find like their entire server's dead and everybody transferred and you know by the way you don't get your name like all these sort of situations can and probably will come up uh it's gonna be it's gonna be a mess it's gonna be a glorious mess i think it will be very good in the end especially
especially if these servers do perform as good as the, as well as the legendary servers. Yeah. Yeah. That they rolled out last year with the same 64 bed. I do very much appreciate like. ssg saying you can transfer as many times as you want like you could keep flipping back and forth between the two us servers or the two eu servers uh if you know you find out oh my friends all went to the roleplay one and i went to the wrong one go ahead keep switching
They're going to leave transfers open for a long time. They even talked about possibly giving us far more character slots. So looking into bumping up the character slot limit because a lot of people said, well, if I'm bringing characters across four servers down to one, you can max out your character limit.
And I'm thinking, wow, I have maybe six characters. But, you know, some people, they got a lot. I don't even have my one server filled. But I get it. Some people make one of everything, every gender, every species, every race. you know i get it yeah So it's going to be nuts. I'm excited about it, but at the same time going, man, if those server transfer doesn't work and suddenly you've got thousands of people. It's going to be crazy.
Ryan and Krammen, the forums will be set on fire and it will not stop. Let's hope that the reason things were slow last year means that they were preparing for this and it will go smoothly and perfectly.
They do not seem like they really want to dilly-dally on pulling the trigger. Yeah, I'm surprised at how fast this is happening. Like my guildies and I have been talking about... potentially going to lotro and playing like as a group again because you know we're all old and we're all looking for a cozy home right and we have a couple of us who already play we are not on the same server anymore when they let us move for whatever reason we just didn't go to this
same places so because we weren't playing like as a group so people just picked whatever now we're looking at this going well this is good timing because we already were thinking about it and now we can all go to the same server and it will be like a live
So Brie will be happy because there will be people using the auction hall. You know what I mean? Yeah, the economy is going to get a huge boost from this. I'm so excited about the economy. Like, I'm feeling really good about... the direction the game is going not just for me personally but in general i was it you who said this in your column that's coming this week because it was really convincing i think you said something like that this is this shows investment in lotro's future
Because if Daybreak didn't see that value, it wouldn't bother. Yeah, as Rob Cicalini was saying that, he's like, it's really cool. He just said our parent company is investing into us. He said even though...
The budget's tight. They want to pour resources into us to make us grow for the future. And so I'm like, yeah, that is the most encouraging bit, I think, out of all of that. Because if this was a game that they just kind of wanted to... coast and make that easy long-term gamigo style money uh you know just keep the servers on and maintenance mode whatever then they would not be taking these steps so when you when you do see games like star wars the old republic last year when we're talking about
A lot of the hardware and tech upgrades that they were doing there. When studios are doing those sort of things, you know that they're trying to firm up the foundation for long-term plans rather than... you know just just running out the clock and so and yeah this is one of those games where i think that's worth it like i would rather have this than content if there were you know if it weren't fungible or if it were fungible you know what i mean like
I think that's important. A lot of times people say that and they don't mean it because they immediately complain about the lack of content. But I'll shut my trap if we get, you know what I mean? If they really pull this off and it really does bring the community back together and people will stop. whining endlessly about how electro feels like a creaky old piece of junk i don't want to hear that anymore so let's just do this now and get it over with rip that band-aid off
Yeah, I'm wincing. I know the drama's coming. It's already here, and maybe that's one of the reasons why they want to get it over and done with fast. Before the anniversary? Yeah, that too. I want people to calm down, and I don't think there's going to be any calm until... It's done. And this has a potential of just dragging on. Who knows? If it doesn't go well in the first few days, this is a game that has shut down for multiple days at a time in the past because they've had rollbacks.
Brought on the new database that was going to save everybody, and suddenly that made the game worse. So I don't know. I'll be kind of holding my breath for a little while until all this gets done. But I think, yeah, long-term this could be... really excellent for the game and the the community in particular so yeah let's look on the bright side of life but you know prepare for the worst prepare for
Playing your character. Put that on the box and ship it. Hopefully nobody loses their stuff. You don't want that to happen. All right, well, let's move on in our stories and talk a bit about Stars Reach, which decided just to pop some minor news into your inbox there, or as you said, a little stream, and drop some rather big news on us.
Yeah, they they have decided. Well, let me start at the beginning. Last last summer, when we were talking to Raf Koster, he said that the team didn't have plans to go to do crowdfunding. They were hoping to do this fully investor fund. And to be fair, they had already pulled in like almost 40 million in investor funding. So that seemed believable. But apparently they haven't had a whole lot of excess.
success pulling in more uh since then and uh the investors that they have gotten you know nibbling at the edges basically want to see
like more hardcore interest. They want to see player investment, bodies in the game, money in the game, that sort of thing. And so Koster et al. have decided to... start a kickstarter to do a kickstarter and try to raise player funds that will not only help develop the game but prove to you know those those investors that yeah there's a big base here this could really blow up
your money will not go to waste if you help us finish the game there's a bunch of little corollaries to this they're um they're talking about alpha like a real alpha by summer which is shockingly fast. But as you guys have been listening for a while, you already know they've made it through pre-alpha way faster than, well, at least I thought anyway. I thought we were probably four or five years away from something like early access.
nope they're saying early access by the end of this year for real and a launch next year and i'm like hold up That's really fast. They clearly have these modules like ready to roll. They just drop them every patch, these big content drops and have their testers test them.
One of the things they said was that they would really like to bring a lot more people in than they have, that they have thousands of people basically waiting on the test list, but their servers aren't, their infrastructure is not ready for that, which is why they can't just go. straight to early access. They're missing major slices of the game that aren't tested properly yet, like the economy. There's no money in the game. That was his favorite example, but there's other stuff.
but yeah also the infrastructure just can't handle tens of thousands of bodies so The Kickstarter will presumably go toward shoring that up so that they can actually make the early access happen. And then hopefully it does well and people will put more money in. Investors will actually put the money in once they see.
you know, okay, this is actually going somewhere. And as you guys know, the investor situation, the gaming industry right now, not going great. Like literally just in the last like two days, we've covered like four or five different, you know, layoffs slash. studio closures slash game cancellations they were like three sunsets last week like it's really bad right now um
So I'm not surprised he's having a hard time getting money. There is no money. The people don't even have money for their own companies, let alone other companies. Don't we tend to see that in early January, though, as budgets and New Year's roll around? A lot of the really bad stuff tends to happen. sometimes but you know it's it's cyclical cyclical based on a bunch of things but this
Last year or two has been specifically bad. Koster was arguing that it's actually as bad as the early 80s Atari crash, which is like, whoa, that seems wild to me. But you know what? Maybe the number. back him up and i guess maybe it's all on how you look at it i've never seen it this bad like we've been doing this for more than 15 years i can't remember a crash this bad
It's always been, you know, dicey, but never this devastating. But anyway, that's not really the point. That that was just some backstory to why they are doing this. The next step is when that's coming in February. We don't know how.
much they want. We don't know what the rewards are going to look like. He did say he's not doing um like physical goods because those are just a pain in the ass don't blame him but also he's very mindful of not doing like pay to win stuff so i wouldn't expect anything you know outlandish there that's not that kind of game But, of course, MMO players don't want to hear the words Kickstarter ever again. Like, just in our comments alone, the vitriol for Kickstarter for crowdfunding. And I...
People don't want it. They don't want to hear those words. They don't want to be asked for money. They have been, as Koster put it, burned so many times. And we chronicle this every couple of weeks in Make My MMO. How many MMOs have gone to Kickstarter? and failed it sucks it's an uncountable number because it's so high most of them
Do not go anywhere. The ones that do, like Elite Dangerous, are like, I can count them on my hands. It's bad. How few actually succeed. So people are not necessarily going to be willing to shell out for this Kickstarter. Even though they might have done it like five years ago, at this point, I don't even know how it's going to go. I'm really nervous about this.
Yeah, I looked at the landing page, too, and a lot of these same thoughts were kind of bubbling through my head. Right. You know, look at this weird little graphic. It doesn't probably mean much, but they said, you know, we're most of the way through development.
arrows and it's like you know we're almost at alpha and then there's beta and then there's launch i'm like oh that's that's cool that's encouraging that's further along than i thought that they would be but my next follow-up question was so why do you need our money you know like that close and you've gotten that far on investor funds then you know maybe yeah the the situation is pretty bad as you said um but yeah that's uh it's gonna be a hard sell where people you know we used to hold up
Kickstarter as the next coming of MMO development, of funding these games. We are Kickstarted. you know what i mean and we were kick-started yeah yeah and it was really cool like we could make these projects happen uh that normally couldn't um and now you know we've yeah as you said we've been burned out we've been disappointed or we've seen some
of these titles just fall into limbo for you know just so long as we go like you know how much money did we drop and for a studio to come along now and go like you know hat in hand right love to give you this mmo but we need some money to get across the you know i i do think
The one thing in their favor is, again, that they're far along. Like, if this was like, hey, it's a brand new idea from Raph Koster, the guy who made Star Wars Galaxies, but we had done nothing on it whatsoever. We just need a whole crap ton of money. Yeah. started that would be a even tougher sell but if it's like okay we if they can show us like specifically this is how much money we need that's that'll get us across the finish line this is what you're going to get in return for that
Yeah, maybe some people may be a lot more comforted by that. Well, they'll think of it more as like a fairly safe bet, like a pre-order, right? A pre-order for, I don't know. It's not usually something I would encourage. I don't. We don't really do that. You know what I mean? We're usually like, just hold on to your money until there's a game. This one might be an exception maybe because...
I don't really think Koster's going to screw everybody. But it's definitely going to push this game more and more into, not the mainstream, but more and more into people's understanding of this is a project, this is a game. That's exactly true. Yeah, it needs that marketing tool. And that's, I think, one of the maybe the I don't want to say disingenuous, but confusing parts of when they're showing that development.
bar on how much they have done when he says it's five six finish or 83 or whatever it is like He's talking about development of the core systems for the minimum viable product. You know what I mean? They've already clearly moved a lot of things, PVP being one of them, to the post early access phase, right? Like that's not coming in now.
They're just trying to get the basic survival box shored up so that it's playable and people like it once they actually get to early access and don't just immediately bounce off.
bar doesn't show is all of the marketing that they need to do to actually reach the demographic they want one of the things and this is what my article later this week is about one of the things he talked about during this very long talk on discord to like I don't know, a couple hundred super fans like who are around on a Saturday night to listen that they're not necessarily aiming this game at us.
um which is a very painful thing to think about when i say us i mean hardcore mmorpg fans who've been here for a decade or decades right who've been playing his games and know who he is that like they care about us and they want us but the game isn't necessarily aimed at our foreheads that their metrics their statistics show that the average age goal age and likely to play age of this game is
you ready for this 25 or 26 like i was actually floored at this i know he's talked so much about wanting to have you know a a player base that spans a much wider age right he's little little chunks of content everything from like you know no lifers retirees to kids everybody gets to play everybody has a home fine but like to actually see that number it's people who were born before his first
mmo came out you know what i mean that actually blew me away i started thinking about this i'm telling you my whole thesis before i even read it but i started really thinking about it in terms of a demographic shift and how much he's not relying on the hardcore MMO faithful I think that's even his frame to get the game into the limelight so While he's asking for our money from Kickstarter, I think he's figuring that ultimately it will be the post-Minecraft
survival fan base that floods the game that actually shows up on you know steam early access and plays which honestly i think is amazing we could use the new blood here in the mmo industry because this is a real mmo and not just some tiny survival box but keep that in mind um that we're not necessarily the only people who are going to be interested in this game so even if we say to kickstarter
Hopefully there will be lots of other people much younger than us, much younger than we are. And, you know, from not necessarily from an MMORPG background who are interested. That's, I think, what he's banking on, what he's hoping the investors.
are seeing if their metrics actually pan out so there's like there's a lot going on here and I feel like the game could kind of mark a shift in how MMOs are not made but whom they're made at you know what i mean because right now every classic designer who's come back with a game like this has aimed it at the hardcore old school we remember the old days kind of folks and they don't work very well like there's a small audience
of people out there for stuff like that but not a big one because it doesn't actually reach down into the younger generations and appeal to them give them something maybe this one can do it. I'm just real nervous that what will happen is because all the old farts are going to give the middle finger to crowdfunding that the Kickstarter won't do well.
and then the investors will just give up and then the game will peter out that's my panic right now and why i kind of wish they didn't have to do this because i really want this game made I agree. It's one of our most anticipated MMOs right now. Yeah, we called it most anticipated for a reason. Yeah. Well, okay, I'll tell you what. I'll do you... help you out here if you're too worried about that. Let's give you something else to worry about. No!
The future of Planetside 2. What the heck is happening with this poor game? It's not even under Daybreak anymore. It's kind of spun off into its own. That's confusing. Daybreak was still publishing it. Like... but it wasn't actively just kind of right So what they had done was last year, they sold off the IP for cash, basically, and then they moved development out of Daybreak itself and to what I assume were a group of contractors at...
toadman interactive so that's why it was so confusing last year when we would get like letters from the team and they'd be posted on the daybreak planet side to site that's why that was happening i'm not sure how much like separation there really was except that it wasn't literally coming out of daybreak's budget anymore i assume actually we don't really know that i'm guessing so that's that's how we ended up in this position where
EG7 has decided to cut Toadman loose. And we're like, what? You just moved, but you got the, come on. So we don't really know what's happening to Planetside 2 right now. They haven't told us. We did. I reached out to them. Was that Saturday morning? And I sent. like eight different emails to all of the PR and contact emails I could think of over there and they almost all bounced and the one that didn't bounce didn't get answered. So maybe somebody else will get a response.
but i didn't get one because we want to know what's going on like uh eg7 when they said they were closing down toadman and they're also laying off a huge chunk of the piranha team that was working on the mech warrior games we also asked about mech warrior online we haven't we don't know yet we don't know if that's going to keep
how that's going to function with the loss of a large chunk of piranha. But Toadman were more concerned with that. And they did imply that they were going to keep some of the contractors at Toadman who were already working on some of Daybreak's projects. Didn't say Planetside 2 specifically. I saw one article say it was Lotro. And I was like, I don't think that's true.
True, but I can't prove it. Did you just look up a list of games that Daybreak has and just pick one? But anyway, I'm pretty sure it's Planets Eye 2 and also the new Cold Iron Studios gaming that... that daybreak is going to be publishing that's it and they're keeping those guys and i think it said for the duration of the contract something like that so i don't know what happens like
how long is the contract what does the contract entail are they going to bring everything back in house are they just going to close down the game without telling anybody like the whole thing is super weird typical daybreak you know lack of corporate communication on things like this so So, I mean, I don't really think they're going to close down Planetside 2. I think they'll just bring it back in the daybreak umbrella and then neglect it.
But it's kind of a bummer because last year, the Toadman guys actually did some work on the game. They had fishing. Not that anybody asked for fishing, but they did it. And they had a roadmap for 2025. Things were starting to turn around. Every MMO is going to squeeze in fishing no matter what. Even if it doesn't make sense. So weird. But yeah, and then they had all those server merges, which sounds like a bad thing, but you guys got to understand the Planetside community was like jumping up.
down throwing parties over the server mergers they wanted them so badly so they got one for europe and they were supposed to get one for the americas and now that's in limbo we don't know what's going to happen to that so As usual, here we are. I didn't even think Planetside was like doing that badly. It's very small. Don't get me wrong. But it wasn't like it didn't give the impression that it was like bleeding cash.
So I'm hoping Daybreak will just, you know, subsume it all over again and move forward with something. At least keep it online. Eve online, you got your spaceship and suddenly a little fishing. Lion comes down all the way to the planet. There you go. All right, so keep it in our eyes. Yeah, I just wanted to point out too, the last corporate news we got out of Daybreak and EG7, we even covered it like positively.
on this podcast because uh jiham was up there telling investors how great lotro everquest one and paleo were doing and how they had bolstered daybreak's quarter last quarter so
It's frustrating because a lot of people still think of Planetside 2 as being a daybreak game. So this, you know, implying that this... is a black mark on them but at the same time kind of it is a daybreak you know what we think of it as being a daybreak game because it was for like i don't know how old is it 15 years i have no idea how it is I'm so frustrated Justin that everything is on fire. I can't even explain to you guys how depressing it is.
to watch the industry and specifically the genre like unravel before your eyes and know that there's nothing you can do to help it or to even stop it from affecting us like it's just so it's the worst Absolutely sucks. Okay. Well, let's... On that note. On that note. No good segue there. Let's talk about a couple previews we've got here for you. Upcoming content that's coming for you MMOs. Elder Scrolls Online after...
Oh, yeah. Oh, this is good news. It is. It is. Because after kind of delivering that roadmap – well, not a roadmap, but that letter where they were saying like – we're just going to do our own thing next year and not give you an expansion, but it'll be okay. It'll be a lot of quality of life stuff. There'll be this and that. And everybody's like, okay, we'll believe it when we see it.
At least this is a good sign that something's going to be continuing to come out of ZeniMax because they previewed, the studio previewed update 45 with a new DLC. It's called Fallen Banners. It's basically your dungeon DLC.
i'm sorry two new four player dungeons and some other you know nice quality of life changes you know some small stuff you know starter zone improvements and whatnot coming with this but you know at least It's... some more stuff and it's just good to see this kind of going now what happens beyond this how how does 2025 continue to roll out for ESO that's going to be very interesting to see we're not going to be actually seeing this patch this DLC until March. So...
Well, technically it goes to the PTS this week, right? Yes. So technically you can go see it. But you can't buy it or play it. It won't be rolling out for good. Yeah. So I'm hoping we're going to hear more about. pass this dlc before march that they're not just going to say we're not talking about anything until this comes out because that'll be kind of a long time um especially after that letter we need a lot more details a lot more information but this you know
Hey, it's stuff. It's a good start, especially if you like to have those additional dungeons there. And new houses, by the way. That'll be coming with update 45. So buy yourself a weird house with a... gelatin rib cake i don't know what's going on in there that's weird i pulled the pictures out and they look really cool i mean i guess i wouldn't want to live in it but you know yeah i'm i'm glad that
in a way that they're getting like this part of the cadence like it feels normal to get a dlc that's just dungeons again like that's so part of the classic cadence that it's comforting And what's going into the accompanying patch is, again, the zone revamps. Yeah, I mean, they promised that, and I think that will really help, you know, to get more people in the door of the game. Yeah, take your best foot forward. You don't want to...
Early zones, you do not want to drop the ball in those and have those look so old and so out of date. New people coming in like, everybody's talking about how great this game is, how pretty it is, and this is what it looks like. Yeah. The beginning of the game.
Even after they redid it, it wasn't that great. We also got some roadmaps there for EverQuest and EverQuest 2. Some really nicely detailed ones, especially if you like to just sit there and kind of get the, not just... what's happening in terms of new content but also event schedules which is really nice i know i'm still waiting for the lotro one is supposed to come out really soon but this is not about lotro this is about everquest and everquest 2 both of those got some really nice um
you know roadmaps for the year of course they're going to end a year with an expansion uh looks like november for everquest 2 december for everquest 1 and you know up is up and down is down and water is wet and these things will continue to go on probably till the heat death of the universe but that is not a bad thing no yeah it really isn't yeah i didn't really see anything like
amazing in the the list the roadmaps as i was going through them i mean kudos to daybreak for actually giving a full um roadmap because a lot of these games are like we still haven't even gotten like for the one for the first quarter yet and here you know we've got the whole year i'll take that and right down to like the expansion window i really like how daybreak does this most of the other people in the industry
who are now doing this copied it from them. They really did. But yeah, there's like nothing like unremarkable about it. Like you said, we know we're getting that patch. September NeverQuest 2 has Panda Panda Panda. Stop. It does. I saw merges in there, possible merges for EQ1. Again, not really a bad thing. I would never consider merges for these older games a bad thing. It's always a good thing. Especially when they're doing those.
progression servers and then you kind of roll those in yeah right because those are like you know just the fact that they're constantly coming out with progression servers means that they're dividing their player base up so you don't need as many older servers of the core servers if you're putting people on progression servers over and over like it just seems smart to me
smart to me but yeah paying attention to that there is a new progression server coming and everquest 2 is getting an up a gu up two gu updates game updates gu updates you know like atm machines they're getting two gu's how's that but everquest doesn't really get those so it's just they're slight they're developed slightly differently that's all
All right. Do we have any mail this week? Oh, gosh. I didn't even tell you the mail. No, you did not. It's okay. Let me pick one. How much time do we have? A little bit. Not too much. Ten minutes. All right. Well, let's just let me just start at the top. Actually, the first one is it's left over from the mailbag that we didn't get to. Number one.
It was number one on the list and never actually went. And it's really for me. It's from Pantagruel, who says, on the MLP podcast, Bree occasionally mentions that she's an avid, even expert modder. I have a rudimentary understanding of modding.
is based upon the data files from older games can you describe what mods you make to the games you play and how it affects your gameplay or enjoyment actually this is this is relevant too because one of the things we didn't mention i don't think we mentioned this for the elder scrolls online stuff is that they're going to add mod functionality plugin functionality for consoles which i was like how is this not bigger news that's really great that's one of the
big things that keeps people from enjoying things on console is that you just you can't fix your ui you can't add that map thing that you wanted you know what i mean I was surprised that more people weren't ecstatic over that. So this is kind of at me, but you can, you can answer it too. Cause I know you mod a little, don't you?
you mod stuff no i mean i once in a while i'll add in a mod but i've never ever created a mod in my life well see the way i look at it there's really like two kinds of modding right there's you know what Justin is talking about where you're like curating a list of other people's mods and I don't mean to poo-poo that at all I do that all the time very important and very difficult if you've ever had to try to bash you know 300 mods and make them all work together that's
That's a technical feat. That is no joke. But then the other type is making your own mods, like Justin said. And I would say I am avid at both, but definitely not... expert outside of like a couple of games where I've spent like way too much time playing them and not touching grass.
And some games are like way easier than others to muck around with. I kind of got started like way back in the day in stuff like Diablo 2 and Arcanum only because I was not very good at them and I was looking for hacks. Like I was looking for ways to make, like I'm thinking of Arcanum because I would make like a character who was like all charisma and that game would just punch me in the face repeatedly. It was really hard to get through a gimmick character like that.
so i remember like trying to fix it like okay i gotta redo my stats i'm like 80 through the story i've got to fix this character how do i do it and then you kind of fall into like you're like in these weird dirty hack forums like and they've got like all kinds of cool stuff you can do and like you know five days later you're like an expert you're smoking a cigarette and the lights are dark and it's green matrix screens every you know what i mean it's you just become
a modder without like actually meaning to you were like look i just wanted to finish the game and suddenly i'm hacking it but like um i kind of moved from that into sims one which at the like compared to sims 4 like it was all very like hacky uh sims 4 is like designed around the idea that you will make custom content and share it and whatnot since one was really not so you had to like jump through like tons of hoops all kinds of programs to like make it work and that's
where i really got off took off because i was like i had a website i had like i was like offering my downloads i even made a little money at it um taking donations because that's all you were really allowed to do back then um and then i kind of doing you know
moved on to sims 2 i did more when stuff i did uh oblivion stuff i did skyrim stuff most of them i didn't upload because they were mostly for me um and then i did some mods for like star wars galaxies which are still in line if you're interested like texture mods and stuff just fixing ugly stuff um of all the games i've just mentioned star wars galaxy is is the worst because it was not designed for it and you're really mucking around in files you're not supposed to touch um
But yeah, sometimes for me, it just matters like how many people are interested in it and whether there's like a, there are enough other players interested in it with the technical skills to like.
build the infrastructure to make the modding possible which is why you'll see like millions of mods for world of warcraft and like if you go over to the lotro site there's like hundreds you know what i mean it's not like they're bad or they're not worthwhile i think i have probably 15 lotro mods installed right now but like that's nothing compared to what
we would run in like world of warcraft but yeah for me mostly like when i'm modding stuff for myself it's about fixing annoyances like it not in mmos really well no that's not true even in mmos it's about fixing like ui annoyances or like information annoyances where they're not showing you enough quests or you know the thing you want to track on your screen at all times whatever or adding maps like um
Elder Scrolls Online didn't have a proper, was it a mini map? It was a mini map, right? That everybody adds in Elder Scrolls Online. Yeah. But like for non-MMO games, I'm almost always fixing things like speed because I hate being slow. I'll add teleports. I'll add encumbrance. totally thinking about Elder Scrolls games right now because I just hate dealing with those annoyances I don't feel like they add that much to my game they actually detract from my game so that's usually what I fix
But yeah, things have changed so much in the modding community over the last 20, 25 years. Everybody's on Patreon now. So all the good modders are actually making some money off of Patreon by coming out with... cool mods for all these games it's so different because you were like really really looked down on for trying to be a pay site you know around the turn of the century but now it's like no people gotta
You've all got to make a living. And I wish that more MMO modders could do that. Blizzard would crack down on you so fast and has in the past for things like paid mods. People do. I know. In the WoW Classic community, there's some leveling guides that are integrated by. Yeah, oh, guides. That's a good one. And people pay. I mean, you...
go to the website and you pay, you know, 20, 30 bucks, whatever, and then it'll activate it for you. There you go. But that's another big downside too of like single player games compared to MMOs. It's like in single player games, you can just make your game bigger.
You could just add... land masses quests houses whole new guilds like anything you want thousands of npcs to make the whole thing feel super real and an mmo is like you cannot do that that's not a thing you know what i mean you're just really maybe changing your own textures and tweaking the UI. It's so completely different. And there are some mods in MMOs that I just really don't like to play without.
My for example here is World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft-esque games where you're like raid healing. I don't even want to play if they don't have a... like a click and grid system i don't know what it's called anymore but like back in the day even warhammer like copied this mod because it was so essential to be able to see all of the people in your your pvp raid just to heal them
in a tiny little ui frame with all the superfluous crap stripped out those are like what i want in an mmo please every game give me great healing Anyway, sorry, that's like mostly kind of not even about MMOs. If you really do care about my mods, I have a link to them. It's skycandy.org slash mods. I just dumped everything up there so people could find them, but...
I miss having the time to spend all my time modding. Because it's not something I feel like I can do casually anymore. It's so time consuming. You know what I mean? Yeah. It always struck me as something that does require a lot of time. It does. And that's kind of the mentality that people really like to engage with it because you're tweaking and modifying and you want to... You have a vision, and then you want to make sure that vision is enacted in your game. Sure.
i don't know i've just never been that attracted to mods for the most part like one of my most played games is room world which has a massive modding community and they're always talking about all these amazing mods you can do i'm like nope i'll just play the core game thank you very much that's all i need it was like i don't but i have nothing against it if you want to make them or if you enjoy playing them it's just once i i
feel like i step out into mod world it's no longer the intended game it's some other players game and i don't i don't know why it's just mentally i don't like getting on board with that i can understand that it doesn't feel official anymore yeah in mmos i do appreciate like i like to keep my modding very minimalistic but there are some that are just such huge quality of life improvements and it's
really nice to have those it's just of course you know there's the downside of the more mods you get the more you have to kind of stay on top of yes you know what what happens in the day that they break or the developer you know like there was a mod that i used for a long time
time and then the developer sadly died and then it was no longer being developed anymore and i just found this out a couple months ago i'm like oh so what do you guys do like you can't use this mod you know we there's another mod it doesn't work as good it's like so I guess that's one reason I don't want to like use those as too much of a crutch because if you get so dependent on one and then, you know.
It just goes away because it's not studio-supported, it's just a player effort. You've got to find a workaround, or you've just got to make do with a loss. And then again, sometimes there are whole games... Don't want my heart broken, Bree. I know. But there are some games you just... you're not going to play them at all without a mod so sometimes i think it's
worth it to just go ahead and do it like darkest dungeon is one of those games that i really liked over the christmas holiday i've owned it forever i have all the dlc i had just never actually spent serious time in it and once i did i was like wow yeah, this is tuned to hate me and I'm going to be depressed at how depressed my characters are. Cause that's part of the, you know, that's part of the game.
But there are mods that will fix that, that will balance that so that it's present in the game, but it doesn't drag you down. And once I put those mods in, I was like, yeah, this is tuned better for my brain.
this this makes the game not just playable but fun and something i will keep going with that to me is when you should use the mod but you got to know yourself really well to like not take it too far my kids will mod over there at their computers and my son especially will take it too far where they're it does just cheats brah and you're you're you just ruined the game for yourself you got to know yourself so well and be like hyper vigilant that you aren't gonna go too far sure absolutely
all right so have fun you know hey keep the conversation going about modding down there in the comments i think that's a always a fun thing to talk about especially if you've come up with maybe a daily grind like what's the coolest new mod you found lately or just something you would really encourage other players to grab onto because usually it's word of mouth like i hear that you know you know some friends go oh you gotta try this this one is such a such a game changer for you
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