and so I was nervous and worried but nowhere near panicked and now like the more they drag it out and the more they don't tell us what's going on and they keep pushing us toward this one big you know reveal moment it's making you know what it's gonna be I know what it's going to be. What is it going to be? Elder Scrolls Aeternum. Oh my god. I hope not. They're taking it off of consoles. So it's a brand new direction for them.
Ex-Aternum. Yeah, we're going to give all our love to PC players now, but that's never said once in its life. Yeah, the irony is that I don't feel like Elder Scrolls is in that... bad a place. I don't think it is either. They're doing a weird Hail Mary for no good reason. It has to be about budget. It has to be about staff and budget. They have to be working on another game.
But the new ES game isn't coming out for a good while, too, right? It's not like it's... I thought I saw somebody say that they were gearing up for a reveal, but I mean, it's dragging on for... 14 years so the sims 5 and you know es6 who knows when those might come out
But you know our good listeners here at the Massively OP Podcast because you know all. We're very glad to be in your presence. We learn more from you than you do from us. That's how this goes. I think that's actually fair. It probably is. Yeah.
Everybody's an expert in their own tiny little field, and we're happy to flit around between them, but sometimes we don't have the depth that some people certainly do have, and we appreciate hearing from you guys when you give us some tips and stuff like that. our tips channel that can help us guide us into the direction of true news. But until then, we shall continue to.
I'm going to stop speaking like this. We're going to have a good week. Hey, it's episode 510 of the Massive EOP Podcast. I'm Justin. With me is Bree. And we're here to not talk about... our kids and plays, which we definitely could be talking about because I think that's what you spent your entire weekend doing is going to plays. My fifth grader was the dog in Annie. That was an experience. So that's what we did for the last three days. I saw the costume. Four days.
Salute to that. It was awesome. She did a great job. She was kind of the star of the show. She wasn't really. She doesn't even have any lines. But let's just say people really like puppies. Puppies, puppies, puppies. That's what we could do. We need to change the blog. We'll be all about the puppies. Puppies overpowered. Puppies playing games. Yeah. My wife isn't really a dog person, but she's always said that when we had babies, she's like, I just want to have a bath. We do. Long story.
But she's like, I want a bathtub full of puppies and then put the baby right in the middle of it and take a picture. I'm like, that wouldn't work for so many reasons, but okay. They would not stay still. You'd have to drug them all. How about stuffies? Stuffed puppies. Yeah, there you go. Less maintenance, not going to randomly pee in excitement all over your newborn child. There's that.
Yeah, what fever dream have you guys stumbled into? We're definitely not talking about MMORPGs, which is certainly not why you're listening. We started talking about dogs and I don't know what's going on. Puppies and plays and all this stuff. So did you get any time this weekend?
play some games or this week yeah ssg managed to keep their servers up barely apparently so i've been playing lord of the rings online i've pretty much been playing well i've been playing my mariner but i kind of i don't know it's not really doing anything for me just It's my second one. It's not you, it's him. I know. I just, I love the style of it. I love that when you're, you know.
curing yourself you like take a big swig from a jug like it's the style of the character is fun and i don't enjoy playing it i feel like i'm working a lot harder on that it's like the mesmer in guild wars 2 i it's not bad it's actually really good and in skilled hands it's amazing but i constantly feel like i'm having to do a lot more work to achieve what line were you
I nearly always go red just in everything, just by default so I don't have to think about it, especially when I'm playing a newbie. But I understand that the other lines don't suck anymore. Yellow was a lot of fun. Yeah, branch out. But you're still juggling that resource.
I don't even know what I was going to call it a bar, but it's not. It's like a little compass thing. Yeah. And it just feels like kind of a nuisance compared to so many other classes that... i i like so you know i didn't play that class the way they wanted me to play it so here's how i play it
Justin can't be caged. No, I have a free spirit. Yeah, I don't care about the balance thing at all. I went in with my yellow line. You've got this awesome fire-breathing cone effect that puts a dot on everybody. front of you which is a great way to like you bunch people up throw that on them and that starts taking down their health really nicely and then i just start jabbing on like the first three or four um
Yeah, like your attack combo, right? But in the yellow line, the second part of the attack combo automatically stuns your foe. which is really nice so boom boom and suddenly you're getting a stun every time you fight which is just great so they're not doing any damage to you and then if i overbalance oh well it's like seriously it's like a half a second your character goes
And then you're back. But the nice thing about the Mariners, other than that, Mariners can't get stunned. They can't get dazed and all those effects. I just kind of ignored the balance thing and just started jamming out damage. And yeah, you pump out a lot of good DPS that way. It never occurred to me. It's just... Not cooperate with the game's instructions. I don't know, but that's how you play like quest wise. Like you just go down your own path. So, you know.
that's true you're absolutely right i just need to move that mentality to my character okay that's yellow line yeah it might be worth tinkering around with when i go back to her okay but what did what did you end up playing my champion your champ not my main character or anything she was like the last major alt i was working on the last time i played i don't even remember like my second champ i made one i decided i didn't want her anymore she's actually on peregrine right now
living her best life but now i made another one and that's my high elf and i really really really like champion i it just works for me there's something about I don't know. Maybe they're just super overpowered, but it just seems really easy. You can practically just face roll the skills. Everything just kind of falls over in front of me, and I don't...
It's just so easy. You know what I mean? It's nice to feel... powerful as a melee character not every mmo allows that you know what i mean they're always they're trying to take away some they want you to feel a little bit more vulnerable because you're in melee range and this game is just like No, you can just face roll. It's fine. So I'm all the way in Evendium. I'm almost done with it, actually. I almost finished last night, so.
Finally had my first death. I was telling Chris I got a little overextended and pulled like 10 fire salamanders and they all lit me on fire at the same time and taught me a lesson. I could not swashbuckle my way out of that. They kind of killed me.
with me there but otherwise i'm having fun questing and you know just doing the usual and maybe you're going to talk about this too i'm on glam drink for these characters anyway and it's crowded like i'm running around in even evandim it's not like a hot it's a 30 40 zone right it's not really high end it's not even brand new i don't know why it's so crowded but i was getting that little
What's it called? There's a little thing that pops up and says you're reduced awareness or whatever. Oh, yeah. Reduced awareness. Yeah, yeah. And it kept happening. Like every five minutes, I'd get another reduced awareness warning. And I'm like, what is going on?
on how can it be this crowded in this nowheresville lobby zone i don't get it people be playing lotro it's a good feeling it's crazy like world chat seems like it's all about people comparing where they came from because we're all introducing ourselves like i'm from crick hollow crick hollow represent i'm from landerville landerville represent and but you know we're like making this new weird
mix of a family so there's a bit of that old server pride but it's all in good spirits and i i like it it's it's a fun vibe I can't say the same about Glam Drink. No? I mean, I think I'm on the wrong server. I went on that server because that's where my guild wanted to go. But man, I've spent more time blocking people. for saying just
you know, just trolling and being rude and obnoxious. I don't like it. I never had to do that that much on Landerville. It was an anomaly when it happened on Landy. So I don't know. I kind of like being in the big economy. I like...
idea that there will be lots of people to play with but i also really enjoy global chat in lotro like i don't have to leave global chat like i would in most of those just for my insanity so to see this global chat be kind of like honestly not even as nice as guild wars 2's that kind of distresses me because Landy was not like that and I'm guessing Peregrine isn't like that so
I don't know. Maybe I might leave. I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet. Give it a little time to settle down. You never know. Yeah. And maybe once I block enough of the, you know, I'm...
We're brand new here and I can do whatever I want and I have no inhibitions and I'm going to be a jerk. Maybe once those people have quit or calmed down or... sufficiently filled my block list it'll be fine again you know what i mean some people just act out because it's a new experience and they don't know how to handle it it's honestly it's just me i keep creating new characters to troll you so
You would never say some of these things. I would bet a million dollars it's not you. You would never say some of these. You wouldn't even think them. People can be awful. And it just distresses me again. I think of Lotro and Lord of the Rings as being a very welcoming and homey and cozy kind of MMO. So when people just act like, you know, what I would expect out of World of Warcraft, I'm like, meh.
I don't like that. And I know it was there all along. I just never saw it. Anyway. I've seen it every now and then, but it's not too bad. It got pretty bad around the election, even on Landy. Yeah, usually that.
spices stuff up i know i know i'm just i'm just so over it i'm too old to put up with that kind of nonsense you know what i mean it it's one of the things in favor of like being part of a larger guilt because you still have a lot of people to talk to but it's kind of an insulated community so you can block out world chat and not feel like you're really starving yourself of a wider variety of chat so anyhow sorry no it's okay that's what i wanted to hear this weekend
Uh, let's see. So yeah, right now I'm still on the kind of gearing up process and season two here in world of Warcraft, uh, because a lot of my gaming sessions have just been little bite-sized, you know, mostly going in and get my weeklies done, working on my, my.
my delves and working my way up through the gear chain. I will say I'm still really impressed with how they've... redesign some of the delves like the same map but how they've just completely changed the mechanics like one of the ones i went into yesterday
Right at the beginning, this dwarf with his giant mole machine, he's like, hey, we can't get into this delve. They took the treasure. Let's go. And so jump in the mole machine and it takes you all the way to the end of the delve where apparently the treasure. has been plundered and then you have to fight your way all the way back to the beginning so they did a whole reversal same app and i'm like that's kind of clever i you know never
went that way through the map before. And sometimes just a little bit of a shift of perspective can really freshen stuff up. And I think that's a good lesson for a lot of MMO designers to learn. You know, you don't have to completely reinvent everything. Sometimes just like a little rule set.
change or you know something new you're doing with the map or something fun you're doing with the cloud you know whatever you know you can make new feeling experiences with old content and and you know recycle it a bit better i guess what's going on with the nerfs of poor brand yeah
Brand's on a bit of a roller coaster. I think they're finding a sweet spot. They introduced that new tanking spec for him, and apparently it was too powerful, although some people I talked to said he was going down as a tank pretty quickly, even before the nerf. I tried him once. He was okay, but I'm too insecure to go without a healing brand. So I just want my heals all the time. So I just kept him on healing. And yeah, I think they have found a better balance.
for him it just was some of those growing pains and you know whatever um i think it is kind of disappointing one of the things that blizzard was talking about for season two was that originally they said they were going to introduce a new companion character and they did not they were just like nope
we're sticking with brand this time around apparently they didn't get the development time in or you know whatever they were working on the background just it wasn't further along so i think tanking brand was kind of the compromise like oh crap we've got to do something with him so here have a tanking spec so it has the feel of a last minute decision that they're just now adjusting better okay
Yeah. But, you know, otherwise having a good time. In fact, last night had some guildies in WoW. This one guy was a hunter. He said, I want to go into that Operation Mechagon. That mega dungeon that they released back in Battle for Azeroth. I want to tame some mobs for my... I guess he had a theme of all his pets as his hunter pets were all mechanical pets. And this is a great dungeon to tame. They have mechanical pets now? Oh, tons of them.
yeah you want you want to play out your clockwork you know hunter fantasy go for it there's mechanical dogs mechanical sheep mechanical squirrels mechanical everything it's awesome like as hunter pets not yeah as hunter pets That's hunter pets. In fact, you know, I have one of my old hunters. She has two mechanical squirrels. And those are her attack pets. It's the most fun. Wait, what? They made mechanical squirrels, not just a mini pet. Yeah.
There's a quest line in Azura where you can go and not tons of people know about, but you can find out through Petopia. And as long as you go through this quest chain at some point, it spawns a mechanical squirrel and then you can go ahead and tame it. That's really cool. I'm like, yeah, I've never heard of this before. Yeah. So I'm being a little tiny gnome throwing squirrels at people. That was my squirrel girl fantasy.
Yeah, and then over there in Lotro, still working through my completionist. Actually, yesterday I was doing a full comb through of Bree, the town. And I was trying to find every quest in there that I could possibly do. But also...
kind of just poking around like looking at different roads different alleys there's a lot in there that you don't typically see when you're just running through the main thoroughfare and so i got to like a high vantage point i didn't realize there were so many hobbit houses above like I never go up there there's a ton of them up there and then you know the more I explored the more I realized like how much this town is built around and on top of ruins and it's really interesting how
the the game designers made it feel like they you know the the town settlers kind of came upon these ruins and then just kind of built on top of them which they did Which they did, which is, yeah, it's a really clever. Yeah, so it's actually been really good to do that. Of course, now that you're talking about Mariner, I'm like, oh, my burglar, maybe I should be playing my Mariner. It's just grass is greener mentality.
I was looking at the Burglar and the Runekeeper last weekend, too, because those are two classes. keep putting on my back burner as i should play one day but i have never given too much attention to but some people are like yeah they're really underrated i'm like well you don't get more underrated than the burglar because like nobody plays a burglar so um
and it's fun like the burglar is fun it's just it's just one mob at a time kind of fun it's not you know your champion i'm just gonna go slap my head against the keyboard and win listen i believe you be my burglar i have one she holds all my potions and buffs and food and she's like my mule yeah my medicine cabinet and she has never done anything else no she's living the cushy life yeah i would say i mean that the
I like the sneaking ability. It definitely makes some quests a lot easier if you don't want to really plow your way through a camp. Or sometimes it's really fun to get screenshots, like just go into stealth and get really close to mobs before they aggro on you.
get some fun little like up close i never thought of that before okay so screenshot the photographer thief yeah there you go so that you know that's mostly what i was doing just been talking with my guildies as they continue to transfer in every day we keep asking the same question like oh who showed up today who showed up today and uh as i think i told you one of my one of our officers accidentally
transfer to the wrong server so went over to glam drink and just like no i can't transfer back until they open up those transfers i mean that was supposed to be this week yeah who knows at this point right so so she's just she made a temporary character just to hang out with us but in the meantime she's like i feel like i have to go over here i'm at the kids table and you're all at the adult table
Yep, we're on the good server. The non-Bree server, we call it. Yeah, if I need to come back to Pippin with my... head on don't you're gonna you're gonna be dragging that world chat with you i don't want that i want the good no it's so good i try to be helpful yeah i'm sure you do my best actually i don't know if i've ever bumped into you in lotro i don't think so
Even when we played on Landy, I don't think I ever saw it. I'm just wondering if we were ships passing the night and we passed by each other. Who's that? I think I have posted all my character spreadsheet in chat. before in WorkChat. I don't remember what your names were. All right, let's get to the news today. Let's talk about Transmedia Synergy. I'm so glad that we didn't let that die. Like, I know we have been beating that dead horse.
whole last 10 years and this is the moment it pays off yes it never stopped being funny but you know in today it's a whole new level i'm sorry when try try and worlds came out they're like hey we're we're creating this new mmo called defiance and it's going to be going alongside a tv series and it's all about the transmedia synergy and you heard that phrase in every single single...
press release they did i heard it when i sat down and did an interview at pax with them on it and they just like i think they were under contract to say it like at least three times a minute and at that point we're like well you know we're just going to ironically start using
and now we just kind of like it anyway so we have a whole like mini award at the end of the year dedicated to the dumbest transmedia synergy in mmos for that year like we have literally kept this going the whole time and there are so many great entries That's one of my favorite end of the year awards easily. So why are we talking about this? Because defiance is.
back. It died. It died several years ago. In fact, you'll remember that it actually splintered off. It was an original Tryon Worlds MMO. It's an action sci-fi shooter MMO. And when it got kind of handed over to to gamigo it was effectively into two different versions there was the original flavor defiance and then there was the extra crispy defiance 2050 and the xbox version Oh, is that the third version? I'm not sure how different it was. That was a 2050. Oh. Was it?
it's been a while i'm sorry it actually was running on x was it xbox 360 too yeah did they bring it out on i don't remember i remember when 360 when that version closed because that was like oh Oh, Gimmy is going to close them all, isn't it? Yeah, it was. Yeah. But I don't remember if it was on other Xbox. You know what I mean? More, what was after it? X-Bone. Okay. Was it? Somebody tell us in the comments. We'll look it up after the show.
Well, Defiance and whatever version, Gamigo closed in 2021. So it's been four years since we've had Defiance, any version of Defiance to play. And now we know it's coming. back and it's not coming back under Gamigo. It's coming back under a company called Fox. Yeah. And I've never heard of Fox in my life. Although apparently I should have, I guess. I don't know if you should have. It's kind of obscure. Gamigo has been like a couple of years ago. If you guys think back, Gamigo had a huge.
stable of MMOs it was like over 20 MMOs now some of them were browser games and stuff but MMOs and over the last you know four or five years they've been slowly unloading these games and some of them they offloaded to Fox which is this American company that has up until this point, anyway, literally just been running old games, right? Like they have a bunch of them. I'm trying to remember what they are off the top of my head. I didn't write it down here.
Bri, where's your context box? Shia, Last Chaos. Yes, are those the two that they have? And then the two war games went to the other company. Desert Operations. And then, yeah, that's what they do. They're literally kind of like the Deck of Games or Broadsword.
They're in that vein where they're very small. They're fairly indie. They're not here to, you know, start a brand new game. They're here to maintain older games that have a small but loyal population that is willing to at least pay for their maintenance and whatnot.
and some of them get development and that's kind of what we're hoping will happen with defiance too but this will be the first time they've brought back a fully dead game and not just taken over like existing publishing duties right they have licensed the game from gamigo and now they're going to start it back up again so they're not starting
with the database they are not starting with everybody's old characters and everybody's old accounts everybody's starting fresh this time yet it's still a pretty awesome thing to see oh my gosh absolutely Anytime. I mean, this is the big story last week, just out of nowhere, a dead MMO that's been dead buried in the ground for three years is being brought back to life under new ownership. Well, sort of, you know, as you said, but with the possibility.
of a second lease on life and that's really awesome to see it's something we always hope would happen in fact i i know i've been beating this drum for so many years of going why are these companies pouring so much money into creating brand new MMOs when there's so many really decent ones that were shuttered along the way that could theoretically be dusted off, updated, and put back into operation for much less money.
than creating something from scratch. Of course, I mean, there's licensing fees and all that stuff. But still... This is cool. And for people who are big fans of either the game or just an idea of a sci-fi shooter MMO, this is really neat to see come back. And our commenters were...
really on fire about this. This is fun to see the chatter swirling about the resurrection of Defiance. And we're going to be seeing it, by the way, I don't think we mentioned this. They're looking at relaunching it next month in April. 18th I think okay off the top of my head yeah I was really excited to see how excited people were I wasn't really expecting that
Maybe I should have been. In my head, I don't think of it as being a beloved old game. But you know what? It wasn't a disliked old game. And that gets you really far in MMOs. If people didn't hate it, they probably have a soft spot for it. It's a small soft spot. And Defiance had some, you know.
plenty of things to recommend it even though it did have that tv show tie-in that might be considered a negative but i remember like when we covered this even on old massively people really liked some of the egalitarian mechanics right it wasn't like super level stratified it was very jump in jump out that kind of stuff you know played really well back then and i think it'll play really well right now especially so i can kind of understand why people are really excited
Yeah, Defiance, the TV show, has kind of its own cult following. For some reason. I kind of liked it, although I didn't see it past season one, so maybe I'm not the best example of it. It was goofy. It was. It was different. Yeah, it's sci-fi channel stuff. It's always going to be goofy. It was before Sci-Fi Channel really went down the Sharknado whole tunnel right there. They were at least trying a little bit back then, but this definitely wasn't like Farscape level quality. It just was...
I don't know. I think it kind of was. I think it was literally that level. They had really good sets. They hired really nice actors. They had good sci-fi. Honestly, I don't think that was the problem with it. The story was just kind of all over the map. But the sci-fi parts of it, I thought that held up. It was interesting to set it on Earth, but it kind of transformed Earth.
And I thought that was that's a really neat way to go about it. So maybe I'm just thinking of Farscape as being a lot more low budget than you are. No, I was I was trying to agree with you and then you disagree with me even more.
I don't know what's going on anymore I don't think sci-fi ever put tremendous amounts of money into any of these series but i still think they came out better than than the cash flow you know what i mean they yeah they were up to a certain point than you would expect them to be for that kind of money
Yeah, up to a certain point, they were honestly trying with their shows, whatever budget they had, they were trying to produce something of quality. And then they realized they could get tons and tons of views of creating like horrible CGI. animals just attacking people and like ha ha ha let's just do that forever and that's what they've been doing they just went like they just threw whatever integrity they had out the window because they were this was a better path for their financial
Yeah, whatever. In any case, Defiance, the TV show. Yeah, I think some of the people who still carry Torch for that may see this pop up and want to, you know, this is a way to revisit it. But probably it's just most people who have fond memories. of playing whatever version of the MMO. We should probably mention this is the regular Defiance, right? It's the last version of the original version. Was it 20?
2050. 2050. It's not that version. It's the final patch of the original. I couldn't even tell you what the differences are between the versions. I don't even remember. It's been too long. I know that they had two or maybe three. This is apparently what people want. Just FYI, that's like the people who are into Defiance did not really get into 2050. So they're mostly excited for the classic version. So it seems like Fox was actually paying attention to what people were asking for.
it and discords and stuff they didn't just decide one day they were going to just bring it all back and have no idea what they're doing so that's i find comforting i don't know if i i don't know if they're right i don't know if the players will really come back for it But at least they aren't doing it in a vacuum.
Yeah, I would love to see them actually pouring some work into some new patches, events, you know, like how they're going to handle this if they're just turning on the servers and hoping to make, you know, like this is a brief influx of cash or if they're really trying. to go a little bit of the distance here and it sounds like both
Okay. There's an FAQ that they posted that goes into detail on what they're plotting, but it sounds like their goal is, at minimum, to keep the servers up and to make the game run long-term, which, yay, maintenance mode is still... You know what I mean? I'll take it. But if it does well, and there's a lot of players and there's actually, you know, a financial incentive there, they might, might expand the team and develop more, but it will depend entirely on how well.
what they've got up does man i wish we could be saying this about rift i know but you know who knows you know like okay so this yeah this is really cool i'm glad to see it in my mind uh some of the closest analogs to defiance would be say tabula rasa um i i don't know some of these are like i don't know even auto assault matrix and beyond wait there's already an enemy for that some of these games they have i know
old school style i i think i you know looking i'm as you were talking i was looking over the screenshots you put in the gallery i'm like yeah it's it's not a bad looking game at all if you like that firefall kind of you know urban combat with some sci-fi overlay there you go but it isn't just like a little tiny shooter that they're calling an mmo right you know what i mean it really isn't it really is there's progression gameplay
Kind of like Planetside almost. Okay, yeah, Planetside too. I could see a bit of that. We don't have a lot of those. This actually does help fill that niche. Yeah. So we're obviously going to be continuing to follow this story up to and hopefully well past launch here. But it's pretty exciting anytime. You know, we've been talking kind of the running joke here for 2025 is whatever random things that we do.
didn't anticipate being on our bingo card this would be yet another one nobody predicted this one I guarantee it I'm going to start sending myself notes back in time. Justin, you can make the most amazing prediction sheet ever. And Brie will be like, what are you smoking? Defiance coming back? Just you wait, Bree. Just you wait. Oh, my goodness. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
Anyways, all right, time machine technology being what it is, we shall move on to the next story here and talk a little bit about... Oh, yeah, we're going to talk about another business move here with Pokemon Go, not... pogo sticks as brie was talking before the show yeah we were wondering how much you guys would pay if we did the whole podcast on pogo sticks the whole time
I don't know. Is that worth it? Would we die of heart attacks from trying to do that? I don't know if I could do that for an hour. I'm going to be honest. Poco sticks are not fun. I know. I know that's not a controversial statement, but you don't really get the lift you think you're. No, they're challenging.
They're really great for suddenly falling off and into your mom's headboard or something like that, but no. Okay, so no one will pay to see us bring bodily harm. But they might pay Pokemon Go a little bit of money. It's still pretty popular. popular franchise. This is a weird story. So walk us through what's going on with Pokemon Go and Niantic and all that.
So, okay, so Niantic has been running Pokemon Go through license with the Pokemon company for, what, it's been eight years or so? Something like that. 2017, 2018, whenever it came out. I don't remember. So... it blew up you guys remember you were there you remember how it like dominated like the headlines for like 10 years the church i was working at was like a pokemon go training spot so one day suddenly everybody's like walking in our parking lot i'm like
What the what is going on? And then I started bringing them lollipops every time somebody came out. I'm like, hey, have some lollipops. Have fun. That's some real church outreach there. You know, come for Snorlax, stay for Jesus and lollipops. lollipops man
All right, go. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It was just a crazy experience. It was kind of an MMO. Even Raf Koster called it an MMORPG, and we were like, what? But there's some overlap. You are definitely playing with millions of people around the world, kind of. You know, when Raph Koster said that, I was like, he's trying to justify a business account expense on his Pokemon. I hope it worked. I know you're listening, Raph. I got your number.
So that's pretty much been the state of things. Obviously, it's fallen a little since then. You guys are not getting Pokemon Go headlines every five minutes anymore. They still make a lot of money if you follow MOP's Andrew. He's been covering the game in depth more in depth than like any game deserves like
Yeah, he's done a wonderful job. He will turn in a 4,000 word column like I'm done. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to be here for three hours. No, I have to prove it. No, I'm teasing. So if you really want the whole story, you have like. like, you know, 100 hours of content to consume. But the long and short of it is after COVID, Niantic started doing some interesting things to Pokemon Go. They started taking things more like in-house. Sorry, that's not a good way to phrase it.
instead of making you go out into the world they were letting you do more things from inside your own house which is extremely popular and the game bounced back in popularity people love that I don't have to walk anymore I can just you know raid for my and i don't have to risk getting sick i love it all this all the time and then as soon as covid started to let up niente was like actually no you know we really need you guys outside walking around um for your health wink wink
Definitely not because we make most of our money selling your data when you're walking around and milling around stores and whatnot, collecting data for their real business. So that has been the situation since then. a lot of Niantic's moves in Pokemon Go have not been the kind of things you do if you want to make a good video game. They've been the kinds of things you do when your video game is really just a front for your AR business, for your AI business.
that has all come to a head now um as Basically, Niantic is splitting off the majority, not all, but the majority of its gaming business to Scopely, which is a largely mobile video game company headquartered in the US, owned by Savvy Games, which is basically the... Saudi Arabian governments.
it's their their games washing outfit basically um for those not in the know saudi arabia has been doing all kinds of things in sports and video games and i'm sure other industries i know less about trying to improve its image with the youths and other people with money, using these, you know, activities to try to, you know, bolster the way the country is perceived around the world. So Scopely is one arm of savvy, which is doing.
All of those things. So there's a weird political angle to the whole thing that kind of casts a little shadow over all of this. So does Scopely itself because a lot of people are like, ooh. mobile games monetization in mobile games sucks and a lot of it is scopely's fault on the other hand as andrew argued on friday it might not be gloom and doom Pokemon Go was really not being maximized. It was not going down a great route for events and in-game content and monetization.
anyway Niantic was definitely dropping the ball on it so offloading it to a compi including the original pogo team I should clarify that the pogo team that works at Niantic on the game is moving to scopely it's keeping them So they're not going to start over fresh. Yeah. And those people, I guarantee, are not interested in the AI stuff that's going on at Niantic. They care about this game. So they, I'm hoping, will be financially motivated.
to actually improve the game itself, maybe that is wishful thinking. Maybe it is. I don't know what's going to happen. Andrew seems to think we might get a couple of good more years out of the game as Scopely is going to be unwilling to like screw it up too much and in fact may invest in it to try to like recapture that audience, make sure it doesn't go anywhere.
before it starts to tighten the screws. I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't think it's gonna be any worse than it was already under Niantic. But who knows? It is definitely a huge change for this major, major MMO. All right. It's a wild story. I'll tell you what, guys. If you want more, Andrew's piece on Friday goes into great detail. It's called Massively on the Go. Niantic Games under Scopely may not be so bad, actually. Just look for Massively on the Go.
That's all of his stuff for the Pokemon games and a whole bunch of other ARGs and like mobile games that he covers under that banner. He's got everything. It's a good read. Excellent. Speaking of staying in the house and making your house nice and cozy, I guess we can go over to World of Warcraft, which is continuing to ramp up to its housing expansion. At this point, the next expansion is just housing. I don't know if there's going to be...
storyline fights rate doesn't even matter at this point doesn't even matter it just needs to have housing and that's all they're going to talk about for the rest of the year we got the second of a series of articles covering the upcoming world of warcraft housing system whereas last time they kind of did a broad overview of just a general philosophy behind you know pillars and whatnot in housing neighborhoods this time we got to go into a house and this time they actually showed us
how placement tools are going to work, some of the ideas, some of the color designs, how they're going to repurpose some assets. And they're also going to be creating brand new assets and also showed us some floor plan, which I thought was.
really neat and some finished rooms yeah it sounds like the floor plans might be like adjustable did you notice that because they said the the floor plans don't have to track with the exterior view so you can have like a teeny tiny shack on the outside right and like a mansion inside so i'm wondering how like modular the whole thing actually is well if you notice that one screenshot has a room limit like two out of ten oh yeah good point and and also floors there might be multiple floors yeah
Yeah, see, that's actually, that's neat. Yeah, I think one of the complaints we've often said about, like, say, Lotro is we wish we had a tiny cottage to decorate that had tons of hooks. I don't want it to be so big. And it seems like if you want a lot of options to put stuff down, you have to have a massive facility. Whereas, you know, this is nice. It gives people...
the best of all worlds, really. So it's nice to see that they also talked about how there's going to be two different sets of placement tools. There's going to be a Fisher-Price version for me, and there's going to be a much more detailed Star Wars Galaxies level for you. you. No, it's better than Star Wars Galaxy. Yeah?
Yeah, Star Wars Galaxies, I mean, it's an even older than WoW. And it hasn't had the benefit of a full 20 years of professional development from an overpaid dev team, right? So Star Wars does not have that. um,
You can rotate things in all directions, but it's really awkward. It's not really smooth. You can't scale things in Star Wars. You can't make them bigger or smaller. Rift always could, and I really appreciated that. Yeah, that's really... cool that yeah you can do a lot of stuff you has and i'm sure wildstar had it too didn't everquest to also have that i'm not saying it's unheard of at all it's just you know i think but suddenly like star wars here flipping for
around suddenly you can make other things out of them you can embed them into the wall so parts of stuff come out and it looks completely different like the creativity level like you can just see people their their juice is starting to flow in their head because this is exactly what you want you don't want just like oh hey it's a place i can hang a trophy here and there which you know honestly i would have still salivated over and that would have been nice but
But the fact that they're giving a really nice, unprecedented level of customization and control so that people can just go and. totally Sims their entire house out as much as they want. That's exactly what you and I were talking about when we saw this blog. I was like, I almost said it's pretty much the Sims if you just turn move objects on. And then I was like, I didn't put it in there because I was.
afraid not enough people would get it but that's exactly what it is yeah and there yeah there's really nice little uh bits here like i really like that you can attach objects to other objects and then they'll move together yep
Yeah, so the linking thing, that's not something I would have consciously thought about, but the second they talked about it, I'm like, oh, thank goodness, because that'll make it so nice that you don't have to move every single object on a bookshelf or on a table or on a bed or whatever.
so uh what do you what do you think about just you know straight up just the graphics of these you know the house that they're showing here i think i'm having a hard time Totally deciding because it's completely not to my style, but it does look like wow. Like if you showed me this screenshot and didn't tell me it was WoW and didn't tell me it was WoW housing, I would still know it's WoW or like a game that's clearly stealing from WoW. You know what I mean? A WoW clone.
like in the absolute artistic look of wow so how else would i expect him to do yeah like i couldn't expect anything else but that it would look weird it has to look like wow they have to work with you know what i mean the the visual they've already got i i think it looks fine it's about what i expected No, that's not fair. It's better than I expected, honestly. Because a Blizzard half-ass is a lot of things. They polish what they half-ass, but this doesn't seem half-assed at all.
I'm a little shocked to say like they are just not phoning it in here. And the same thing was true of ArenaNet. ArenaNet had a chance to, you know, just put in something. And instead they put in something really good, maybe a little too good. for the level of player the type of players who play theme parks maybe even i don't know these i'm just getting whiplash oh you are yeah well whiplash for so long for blizzard to have downplayed housing i thought you meant
No, no. I mean, just for so long for them. I thought whenever they would maybe put housing in, it would just be so... back it would be that the um when they gave us wild classic it's like fine whatever we told you you didn't want it you made such a big stink out of it here you go i mean they did a good job with wild classic i'm not saying they didn't but the attitude of the company wasn't
The best. Here it's like, honestly, it reminds me of the early days of Wildstar pumping out those blogs and giving so much attention to housing. And it was like, I don't remember an MMO ever coming out, which put that many. like hey let's just talk about housing a lot and i'm like okay usually it would be like one article once and here blizzard is like obviously gonna
They're going to milk this for most of the year. And they should. There's a lot of questions. In fact, they did mention a lot of those questions. They said, listen, we understand you have a ton of questions. Let me read these real quick. Where do we get stuff? How do I... show off my collection of transmogs pets and mounts how do professions fit in
There's more teases in those questions. Right, yeah. So those are entire new articles coming. But just seeing this, I like the style. I know that they've already teased at least two different thematic sets. that they've got like a a humans type and a horde type but i'm sure that this is just kind of the
the groundwork for a lot of different styles here. I mean, I'm looking over the pictures. It looks like they're, they quickly jumbled together some very different things. Like you've got this weird Valentine's love couch. that's like very goblin-esque and then it's right next to a blood elf fireplace and you're like oh okay that's a choice it's an interesting choice it looks like what players do with houses no offense it's all the pieces i have
So it's just what I'm going to work with. Yes, that's what the majority of players are going to do. So I don't think it looks bad. I expect that. Small things. It just is. It looks like everybody's my first apartment. You know what I mean? tree over here I do like the vines in the ceiling I really like that and I also was looking at the windows because obviously this is all instant space yeah there's nothing outside so it looks like the windows are giving us some Or maybe that's just not done.
Maybe not. Maybe that's their placeholder until... It would be pretty cool if they were able to do something like that. But how would it even work if your interior doesn't match your exterior? I don't like it when I'm in a house and the windows are... are just flat and lifeless i would rather color or even time of day you know lighting oh maybe they'll give you that kind of control because it does sound like you're gonna have you know wildstar had it
Well, no, no, no, I'm sorry. Let me back up. Wildstar had the ability, you could place a window and then you could put a light source behind the window and create like those god rays or, you know, different like red lighting or something like that. So you at least had the...
option to create the illusion and i i really like doing that that sounds cool i didn't know you could do that yeah there was a wild star housing had a lot of neat touches although i will say it's it's how its placement tools were a little bit of a barrier
to work with. And I'm glad to see that these look very user-friendly although you know who knows between now and launch uh what what refinements or changes they'll do it's been 10 years i wouldn't even hold wild stars like wild star was a new territory almost you know what i mean i'll forgive it
We should probably also mention BlizzCon because that was another story related to World of Warcraft. So BlizzCon is coming. It just ain't coming this year. And that's kind of the story here. Yeah, kind of.
bummer i went through and uh like went back to 2020 and kind of chronicled the whole progression of not blizzcon that we were having right because it got canceled in 2020 then it got canceled no they did blizzcon line in 2021 and it was kind of bad yeah it wasn't the best they were going to do blizzcon line again And they were like, actually no. And then.
They brought back BlizzCon in 2023 and didn't even sell it out. It did not go well. Was that the last one they did? That was the last one they did. And then they canceled last year's. And now they've, I guess, canceled this year's. They didn't even really say that. But that's what they've done. And now we're getting one next year. All the way at the end of the year. We're not talking about... So 23 was the last one when they had Metzen come out and announce the trilogy. That's right.
Yeah, wow. I really thought that was, for some reason, I thought it was last year, but I know it wasn't last year because it's last November, but it seems like it was just a few months ago at this point. The years start coming and they don't stop coming, Justin. I'm sorry to tell you. You sound like you were going to rap there. Keep going. You stop coming in Don't stop coming in That's true
So we're getting in 2026. That'll be the next. In fact, it'll be in September, not November, 2026 and a two day event. So obviously Bree's going to foot the bill and I'm going to head out to Anaheim. If you actually wanted to go, I would consider it. I've never actually gone to a BlizzCon. That would be pretty interesting. It's almost always better for us to pay for someone to see it online. If they're even going to charge. Like last time, I don't even think. there was a charge.
Let me ask you this, Bree. Can I go in person and not wear pants? Because I can do that at home and watch BlizzCon without pants. I'm not sure they'll let you in without pants. Oh, well, that's a deal. I mean, even in California. Pajama pants? No, everybody wears pajama pants now. You go to the store and half of the people are in pajama pants and the other half are in athletic pants. You're really good as long as you got on pants. Hot pants? Yeah, okay. No, no, not hot pants.
Anyways, we just want to mention that. No BlizzCon this year. Probably, though, like they do in the past, Blizzard likes to leverage Gamescom and some other big outlets to make whatever announcements they want to make. And we kind of already know what's going on.
coming for the rest of this year at least in terms of world of warcraft so it's not you know both wow and wow classic so what they'll be announcing next year it'll be really interesting to see but we've got a year and a half until that happens so i will have plenty of time to buy new pants. That's what we're taking away from this.
All right, let's wrap up the news real quick and talk about some Pantheon. What's going on with our Panthers over there? Oh my gosh, yeah. Wait, I got to open it up. This is the PvP thing. Yeah, I didn't even read this. I just saw Lawless PvP. And I'm thinking Lucy Lawless. Wow. She was a crush. Lucy Lawless is a total badass. Even to this day, she is really fun. She pops up in the oddest movies and then you're like, dude, it's Lucy Lawless. Or she wasn't there.
Was she on Battlestar Galactica? Wait, was she really? I never watched it. She was on some sci-fi show and she just appeared. I'm like, dude, that's Lucy Lawless. That wouldn't surprise me at all. For those who have no idea what you're talking about, she was Xena Warrior Princess. That's how everybody knows her. With all the crossovers. Anyway. We're not talking about Lucy Long. No, we are not.
This was a good headline out of Elliot. He managed to derail at least three minutes of conversation on this podcast. Good job, Elliot. Yeah, wonderful. No, so Pantheon, which has only just entered early access as of December, it was. She was on Battlestar Glass. I'm right she was in 16 episodes thank you very much I'll be here all day you just calmed down the people in the listening audience who were really angry at us just now for not remembering that good job well done
Anyway, Pantheon has announced that it is adding a PvP server, right? It's not the main server. It's like a PvP vibe. And it is like... completely unlike anything i would have expected out of pantheon it is like open free for all pvp there's no rules don't call the devs if you something bad don't even bother everything is on you know the table they're looting it's not complete
full looting it's like half full looting there's some rules here i'm reading this there's like you can't attack somebody unless you're within five levels so it's but That's not enough. That's really not. There's going to be a lot of ganking. Oh, yeah. The ganking is going to be magnificent. The whole thing is a little bit... weird i don't understand first off i don't understand why the kinds of people who are playing an everquest clone are
hungry for free for all pvp because i don't know if you guys remember this everquest did have a couple of pvp servers they were very small um most people played on these pve only servers and the only way you could really pvp was like go to arenas and stuff you couldn't even attack the other faction um without duels and arenas and stuff that just that just wasn't a thing we did that for role play you didn't do it to be a ganker so i know there was a small group of everquest players who was
really into the faction warfare but it wasn't even free for all it was faction based pvp i don't understand this because the The hardcore Free For All PvPers stayed in UO, and then later on they were like, well, we'll put up with Dark Age of Camelot, or we'll go to, what was it, Dark...
darkfall in asheron's call whatever that server was called and then they moved on to shadowbane and there were plenty of places to get your hardcore free-for-all or ish free-for-all ish pvp on not everquest everquest was synonymous with hardcore like open-world leveling and endgame large-scale rating like So I don't understand why those kinds of players are like pestering poor visionary realms for a PvP server.
What are you guys doing? Visionary Realms has so much they need to be doing right now. So much. And all I can think of is this is not something they should be frittering their time away from. But is this also the mentality of what made them want to pull the trigger on that extraction shooter version of the game? They get too distracted and you're like, no, no, focus. Make the core game.
Awesome. Well, that's the thing is I'm not sure how much this is going to distract them. Okay. Like, I mean, philosophically, it's a distraction. I mean, just the way of it. Some things aren't fungible, but... Like, this server is not really taking that much compared to like working on a PvE server. That's why PvP games are so popular to make when the players are the content, right? I mean, I can kind of understand that.
in my head canon visionary realms is like literally like oh my god these will not stop they keep bothering us just give them something so they'll shut up and they're giving them this server so they'll go away and leave them alone That's probably not true. That's my headcanon on this. But I just feel really sorry for VR if people really are hounding them for this. Because this is not... I don't think this is...
Maybe I've misjudged the type of classic MMO player who is in Pantheon. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe people who just like PVE games are already in other PVE games and... The people who have glommed onto this one are much more into... I was going to say something crude. Much more into... measuring themselves against others. I'll phrase it that way. Oh, that's pretty proper. Okay.
really respectable all right so new pvp server coming to pantheon april 2nd it's not an april fool's joke it's coming and you can check it out if you want to uh otherwise you can just stick around and see uh if this server is end up having like five people at the end of the month and all of them yeah i have no idea what's gonna happen yeah like i said if if visionary realms can put it out there and it fails then they can be like sorry guys y'all don't really want this after all
stop asking do you remember when lotro tried to do a pvp server for that did they really why would you do that when you have monster play They did it a couple years ago. It was this weird seasonal server that they were encouraging everybody to fight for one of Elrond's sons. I don't know why that would inspire anybody to fight, but okay.
and you would like just you know fight in their honor and and the server was so unpopular they shut it quietly shut it down i'm gonna have to write a column on that because it was they barely talked about it it was so under the radar
and then it just went and it was gone. That's wild. Yeah. The fun thing is that I don't miss that or rather I am glad that I'm on Glamdring for this because people actually... do monster play on glam drink there's like whole dedicated guilds for it which you didn't see that very often on land of all there would there would be like a couple of groups that would like do it once a week and try to get people involved but it was very small compared to this so
That's kind of cool. I don't really want to do it, but I like that it exists. Yeah.
all right well let's move we got a few minutes and we can move on to some yeah we got a couple minutes that's fine the mail is from brandon who says having just spat my hot cocoa in disbelief at dungeon fighters aka dungeon fighter online's 22 billion dollars in lifetime sales I have to ask my favorite American MMO journalist have you ever tried it and if so what did you think and if not do you have a favorite niche or unusual MMO that you want to spotlight
He's not wrong, by the way. We are his favorite. He's totally not wrong. I mean, a month ago we covered the Nexon financials. And yes, DFO. is still huge and it has been huge for such a long time if you guys remember back when we used to cover super data every month when they would put out their numbers their you know games industry global numbers
DFO was almost always at the top, and this was even 10 years ago. This game makes more money than God. It's insane. Yeah, and there's some titles like that in this industry that we just... kind of shrug and go okay it's super popular nobody in our sphere really talks about it none of our audience really wants to us to cover it occasionally and it's like crickets
so you know like i get it like so who's playing somebody's playing it like obviously it's a big hit overseas and and maybe they have a you know a big following and there's some massively op like a twin version of us somewhere over there. And they're like, we don't know about this World of Warcraft game. Apparently it's popular, but nobody plays it over here.
Yeah, so DFO, it's just one of those games. You just kind of look at it like there's no conversation about it, but there's a lot of players and a lot of money, so it creates this weird anomaly that... Okay. But I do like the question, like, okay, first of all, did we ever play it? I never have played DFO. I never have either. Okay. Yeah. So we obviously do not have the credibility here to speak on it.
But we can speak to maybe some deep cuts, some MMOs that we like that are not as well known and maybe have played in the past or play now. So yeah, what comes to your mind? I listed off, well, Gorgon, but everybody knows Gorgon now, but it's really obscure. I mean, it's got like a couple hundred people online.
That's like peak. I mean, you know what I mean? It's small. Glitch was very small and, you know, middle finger to that guy on Reddit who always yells at me when I talk about glitch. I'm talking about glitch. Maple Story 2. like that shouldn't be obscure it's freaking i almost mentioned maple story as well yeah but it like showed up and died so fast here it's hard to say like i really played it because it was so here and gone but it was cool from what i saw like
I always feel like it should have stuck around. Villagers and Heroes is like a pet favorite of mine. I dip back in there. Everyone's in a blue moon. I think it's really cute. It's like wow, but indie. And it's just fun. It's like... very cozy i'll say that and then the one i really wanted to talk about the most justin already guessed he guessed before we even went on the show because he's clever it's zentia which is that um
That Chang Yu game that came out. Yeah. Gosh, was that 2011? It was a long freaking time ago. It was a Chinese game that was... Oh, and nowadays I think we might call it...
I don't want to call it an auto clicker because that's not quite right, but it had a lot of those kinds of mechanics where you could like click on the quest and it would run you to the quest or put you, you know what I mean? There was a lot of like automated gameplay. You didn't have to do that, but you could. But the whole thing. theme was like this very cute cartoony, you know, um, uh, I don't even know what I'm trying to think of. Is that Wuxia?
It wasn't exactly Wuxia. It was... like they were going for like a Taoist theme which is probably inappropriate but like that's what they were doing where they were going for you know Taoism for mystic Chinese mysticism and you know things were imbued with magical qualities It was very fanciful for a Chinese game. And I just really freaking loved it. It was so cute. And you could play a baby. Okay, back that up. What?
I should show pictures. This is one of the things I loved about it. One of the classes, the tanking class was literally a baby. So you could like, you were like brawling around as like a little baby. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. But you know what I mean? It was that. It was like super mystical, but also super weird. And I just, it vibed with me so much. And I played it a lot. And I played a lot of characters, roughly to level 20 in this game, over and over again.
because i loved it so much and then at level 20 it became an open pvp gang fest so have fun and it was like what like a complete 180 on the kind of game that it was it was such a bizarre twist I really miss it. I honestly miss it. I understand that it's still up in China if you speak Mandarin, which I do not. So I guess I'll never see it again.
And no one's going to make an emulator for it because it's super old and obscure. But it was fun. I didn't really get into a lot of overseas games back then. That one just absolutely grabbed me. I was going to say, in my head, it's... That's the only Eastern MMO I've ever really heard you talk about. Yeah, I don't really play a lot of them.
It's just not usually my vibe. I'm not really an anime kind of person. Sure. That one just really worked for me. Now, granted, you know, my degree is in. So, of course, you know, anything that touches on historical themes is going to grab me. But I don't know. I still miss it. All right, what's your list? What do you got? Yeah, I have a few because, you know, probably most of the MMOs I have.
i have played or i play are very much you know the the main ones um i will say i'll start out by saying every time i mention i still feel like dungeons and dragons online is still weird weird anomaly in our genre like it's it's big enough that you know ssg covers it it kind of rides on lotro's coattails to some extent just by virtue of being in the same building and getting a lot of that same promotion and whatnot um it
And it has a pretty solid IP, which definitely helps. But it's such a weird, very specific taste of an MMO that a lot of people have bounced off of it or a lot of people don't know how to approach it. You know, a very deep character building system. the D and D mechanics are kind of obtuse to work with. So it's, it's weird, but yet I have loved it. There's, I've written several articles about all the things that I do find really cool about it. Some really awesome ideas.
having a... narrative game master and a lot of more puzzle mechanics we've talked about that's a good game but anyway so i'll skip past that i'm gonna mention two more um fallen earth would be probably i knew you were gonna say yeah i mean that's that's of course i'm gonna say fallen earth i love fallen earth it's here's hoping it'll come back online someday but yeah it's it was a game that i it was recommended pretty heavily to me
way back when it first launched i tried it i hated it i tried it again i hated it again and then the third time i tried it like it stuck and it kind of taught me this lesson of kind of more sandboxy style or strange mmos that aren't easy super easy like world of warcraft easy to pick up uh sometimes you kind of do have to stick with them like you do need to give them a bit of a shot to figure out like
How do they play? What are they going for here? What's the gameplay loop? Like once you understand that, you can make more of an informed decision whether or not it's for you. And I had not the first couple of times really understood what the gameplay loop was. I really liked the game.
It's very janky. It's very weird. It's got a weird off... black sense of humor and i like that i i like the crafting system i like the post-apocalyptic you know just journeying through the american southwest and there's mutants and radioactivity and giant ants of course giant
And my favorite, of course, are hamster crabs that are mutated and they're using like CRT monitors to... be their shells and whatnot so see and you you guys thought the baby thing was weird and just what justin just said way weirder than a baby is it though a little Baby tanking? Okay. The other one I'm going to mention and maybe you wouldn't have predicted this is Dungeon Runners. Oh no, I would never have guessed that one. Yeah, I ran down my list of games that I used to really like.
i played that got shut down along the way and nc soft's dungeon runners was a title i had some some decent affection for it was basically a diablo clone it was your free-to-play diablo clone that they came up with but they went like an extra step further and made a game where it was like just tongue-in-cheek poking fun at rpgs in general like crpgs and arpgs and mmos and it wasn't like deep satirical humor it was just very
surface level like what's the main town going to be called townston wink wink and you're like all right so we'll call it this land yes
It had a good feel. The combat was really decent. It was fun. It was just a very mindless go and click and kill and click and kill and click and kill. It was also kind of famous for the fact that NCSoft was experimenting with different... free-to-play options and the way that they came up with it is like let's slap ads on the top of the screen all the time like there's a banner ad
If you don't want to pay for the game, you're just going to have to have a giant banner ad. Mobile games before there were mobile games. Exactly. Yeah. Which, you know, definitely didn't help. the integrity of this title and unfortunately it did get shut down but it had its fans and i was one of them um it wasn't the prettiest looking game it had a weird quirky sense of humor and a weird quirky soundtrack and it was um yeah
It's one of those titles I don't regret playing. Awesome. There's probably a few others. I don't know if Kingdom of Loathing is still out there. It's ish. mmo yeah it's definitely multiplayer there's guilds there's i've forgotten this you can i own this and i've forgotten it's a browser-based title and it's
Mostly text, and it's mostly a lot of incredibly bad puns. And then they spun it off into some successful CRPGs, single-player CRPGs, West Overloathing and Shadows Overloathing. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. Because I haven't played the original in a minute. million years yeah i have the new versions i didn't realize they weren't really just the same do yourself a favor not just you but everybody west over loathing is an incredible game and i've never laughed my head off so hard
And all of the puns, all of the wordplay, all of the weirdness, it's basically a cowboy CRPG. There's no multiplayer or anything, but it's spectacular. The Shadows Over Loathing is kind of more of a Cthulhu. i don't know victorian london thing and it was okay i didn't actually beat it but i beat uh west overload thing is just so good it's so good i'm gonna put that in the newsroom and have somebody do a whatever happened to yeah just a kind of a timeline I'll do that tomorrow.
yeah yeah but kingdoms overloading it's it's still going it's it's been there for a long time people like it and yeah there was a good good period of time like like mmos were expensive yo and i could only afford one subscription a month and when i was at work I was obviously not going to be able to play during lunch. So Kingdoms Over Loathing kind of became like a lunchtime game. You can sit there and play a dorky game where meat is currency.
i don't know i had robot zombie ninja pet and there's just so much weirdness i love it how is it that the niche games have all the weird stuff have you noticed this i think you answered your own question
How come we're niche? I don't know, are we? We're the Massively OP Podcast. And whether or not we're weird, you guys are here. You're listening to us. And while you're listening, just listen for one minute more. We're going to tell you all about some ways that you can help support the site. Of course, follow us on social media. We're out there on pretty much everything that was invented after the year 2000. So MySpace, you know.
tough live journal um what else was there i don't know aol instant messenger you're not going to probably find us the icq i don't know before 2000 yeah follow us on social media obviously follow the site If you want to, please whitelist the ads. It really does help us out an awful lot. We do have a Patreon program on the right-hand side of the site. It's a way for people to directly financially support Massily OP and independent MMO journalism.
which, by the way, if you haven't heard, has been going on for 15 years now. It's our 15th anniversary, and a lot of you have made that possible. Wait, that's not right, is it? 10th anniversary. I just promoted us. Well, but how old is the... If we combine the sites, how old are we? I guess we're 15. I don't know. Actually, that would be 17, 18 years. Wow. Yeah.
we're old i guess i was thinking i joined massively in 2010 that's yeah i always think of this as being our 15th year of my 15th year and your 15th year so that's what you had in your head yeah so in any case how many years so many years
We've been doing Massively OP far longer than we have the old Massively. So it's really cool. It's sticking around for a little bit. Bree's going to be doing this from her retirement home. It's going to be kind of cool to see. I sure hope not. I might be doing the podcast from my retirement home.
What did you play last week? I found my teeth. That was the game I played. Hey, we should be so lucky. Absolutely. Good Wi-Fi. That's all we want in our retirement years. Yes, I want a computer. Just hook it up to my bed, please.
i got a farm in star wars galaxy's legends so she's got to get top 10 score on all her major mmos and then she'll die happily if i sound like i'm kidding i am not kidding that does it's i don't know i'm with you on that but also i just want to room with a lot of books and a lot of quiet and some coffee all right and that'd be awesome you're you're more erudite than i am i just can play video games if you want to eat it's fine
All right, guys, that's all we have time for today's podcast. We do want to mention we're kind of a little hard up right now for podcast emails. We have not used more. We have a couple, but. Like, not enough to fill time. We could use a little bit more. So, you know, use this as your prompt. Like, hey, get out there. You know, check out the show notes. There's a link right there. And you can easily, like, within, you know, 10 seconds, send us in a podcast email.
going to put a little plug in for one shots we have a weekly column out there on sunday where we put out player screenshots and i don't know if you check in with the website over the weekend and maybe it's kind of slips by you if you don't but every sunday we have that and i would
like to encourage people to submit their screenshots because we're a little low on those as well and i always love to see some new awesome you know like what are you up to in mmos where you know what are you gaming right and it's a really cool way to kind of show off like different worlds
different games your niche games the obscure things that you play a couple weeks ago somebody posted a picture from nine lives nine lives i'm like that may be the first time i've ever seen what that looks like i'm gonna have to go look It wasn't the worst. It was our headlining picture that week. Just because of the weirdness of it. Alright, that's all the time we got for today's show. Yes? I guess so. We out. Later everybody.