Well, someone every once in a while comes in and gives them a better house, cheats them some money. Honestly, they have pretty good. Yeah, and their bills aren't too high. They're not hit by annual taxes or anything like that. Yeah, and they can just take days off from work, what the heck, and they're not fired. Yeah, you can skip school and you won't even get in trouble for truancy.
You just do it. Meanwhile, if I take a day off from massively OP brief sensor enforcers ASAP knocking on the door. Absolutely. What, are you hugging your kids? You want to keep those kids? You get back to writing, Justin. All right. I'm here. And we're here again at the Massively OP Podcast, episode 515. It looks cool.
I just like that. That's a good number. 515? It probably means something dirty. You know the rules. Where is your mind always going to the worst of the worst? I live on the internet and I work on the internet. You've been on the internet too long. You need to have an internet detox. Yeah. I wouldn't be sad. I actually had a great conversation yesterday morning. I was hanging out with a guy. And the only thing I know that we can connect over is that he does play online games.
And so I'm like, oh, hey, what have you played lately? And he's like, oh, yeah, there's this new RuneScape survival game that came out. And we're like, I know about that. Let us converse. Do you like it? He's like, yeah, it's like Valheim. I'm like, do you not like Valheim? He's like, no, I don't really like Valheim. I'm like, all right. Why did you buy a survival box?
i think he just kind of gets everything he's just one of those like i'm bored i'm just trying out new stuff i see it's all good but then we found out like we both play wow classic together And so we're trying to figure out if we were on the same servers. No, not a chance. Yeah. You never find anybody who's there's too many servers. It's just, well, the new anniversary servers. Oh yeah. No, it's even worse.
There's four of them. He just happened to be on the PvP and I was not. Anyways, I'm Justin. With me is the other one. The other one. We were talking glasses today. Apparently some of us are getting... Reading glasses, and some of us have progressive lenses. Some of us are considering cyborg implants, which sound really cool at this point in my life. Yes, I had to go to the eye doctor, although I wasn't really there. I already knew that I'm old and I needed slightly.
You know, some reading glasses from the drugstore. I was right, too. I had the number pegged, but that's not why I was there. I was there. This is what? Seventh doctor I've had to go to in this long routine of trying to figure out what's wrong with my skin. And I have a new diagnosis. The sun hates it.
So this is not your home planet. You need to go back. I think I'm just never leaving. The world is telling me I should just stay inside and play video games forever. And I'm thinking I might just do that because. It seems like the safe move. And I would highly recommend you get a pair of those glasses that you usually see in...
Like the old timey photos of your great, great aunt. Those are awesome. Yes. That's what I'm saying. Bring it back. Little wings out on the side. The little, what are those called? I forget what they're called. Cat eye. Cat eye sunglasses. They probably have a fancy official term or something like that. I think the problem is just I need to get rid of all my skin. And you can have robot eyes. I would like a robot body. Can I just do that?
You can't be allergic. You can't be allergic to things. That's true. Maybe not. Maybe not quite yet. It's been an exciting, interesting, fascinating week here in MMO News. Crazy, yeah. Yeah, we got a lot to talk about. It's not even going to be all of it. It's just going to be... some of the highlights here as we get into the news. Before that, of course, let's talk about what we personally have been playing So, you know, why we put that at the top of the show?
obviously the most important it feeds our egos we get validation from you It's a cycle. It's a feedback cycle. I'm always surprised at the people who listen to this. I'm going to be honest. Fast forward. I expect you to fast forward this and then every once in a while. Somebody will comment and like, no, you clearly listened to what we were talking about. Okay. I mean, I understand. I appreciate it, but I'm always shocked.
Let's see. Okay, so I actually didn't get as much time to play as I thought I would because of a good thing, actually, because on Saturday my husband decided to completely destroy my computer and rebuild it. That was not actually like a random thing. I just forgot it was happening. He did his like the weekend before. And so when we do our computer upgrades every couple of years, we'll do like we go in order because then the pieces get handed down to the kid computer. That's smart.
hey, we're not made of money over here, so that's just how we have to do it, and it works. When I was a kid, it was hand-me-down clothes. Yes, and we do clothes too. Fortunately, my daughter likes the tomboy clothes, so it actually works.
No, so like I got a complete, the only thing I didn't get was a brand new video card. I have everything else like totally topped up finally. And it's, everything's functioning so much, but everything was just dragging. I needed the new Windows upgrade. I needed so many other things. It's do I need them? I mean, I'm saying need not really because I play MMORPGs and you don't really need.
You need better than a toaster, but you don't need a top of the lane computer for MMOs, let's be real, which is one of the nice things about them. But now I can, you know, run them even better. But I did get to play a ton yesterday. I have mostly been playing Lord of the Rings Online. I don't think that's going to be a big shock to anybody.
Last night I was playing my... Well, actually, mostly I did crafting. I did crafting all yesterday afternoon because they had a crafting bonus going on. I know Justin's like, you ignore those because I know you don't really craft. I decided I would go ahead and... whip through a bunch of the resources i had sitting around and work on some stuff what i'm thinking about doing actually is i still need to move metal craft to one of my character metal smith what do they call it metal smith metal
The one with metal, the armor metal one, not the weapon and you know what I mean. I moved that character to a different server and now I need to put it onto an existing character or a new character. I haven't really decided whom to do that for. I know you can still spend like a thousand points and get a fourth character, like a fourth profession, crafting profession on an existing character. And I'm kind of thinking about doing that.
Because of the current way Lotro is set up, you actually benefit a lot from having that character be the right level because of the way the reputations and the... Whatever. I'm thinking about it. I didn't do it. I almost did it, but I didn't want to spend that many points just for something. I don't know. I was going to say cosmetic, but crafting isn't exactly cosmetic, but a little bit kind of it is.
It's not super necessary. I just that's the one craft I no longer have on my main server. So I almost did that but i didn't i just did other crafting stuff and then yesterday like afternoon and evening i was playing my hunter actually in gundy so i'm like
Working on that first map, what is it? Something Grind? Mgrind? Mumsum Grind? I don't know what it's called. Whatever that zone is, the very first zone in Gundabad, that's what I'm doing. Honestly, I'm having like... Matterguard or something like that. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Who cares? Who cares? Whatever that zone is called.
Really wanted to get into it. You guys know I went to great lengths to actually get to this dumb zone last weekend. Now that I'm there, I'm just having such Moria flashbacks and I'm kind of... All the freaking stairs and how easy it is to fall. The bats, so many freaking bats. I don't know. I'm going to push through it, but I'm not loving it so far. I know you loved parts of it, which is why I wanted to go there. Parts?
parts yeah there's make a beeline there's one zone that's just the worst it's just the worst oh and yet some of the other zones are very pretty i think they do a really good job giving you more of a giving you a sense of space so you don't feel as confined and claustrophobic. There's an entire zone where You see the sky. It's like a giant canyon. So you're looking up and there's a lot of greenery. It is a very annoying zone to navigate, but it's aesthetically pretty.
But yeah, some of the vertical navigation is tough, especially in the second zone. I forget what it's called. There's just lots of scaffolds and bridges. He's telling me it's getting worse. Once you figure out where the elevator is, and it'll take you to each level. The second you get that, it becomes about 50% easier. And so if you need help with that, I'm happy to do it. I think it's okay. I know that they were very aware of trying to make it not Moria 2.0. Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah, even in that first zone, they're doing that thing where they're showing the big openings so that the light can shine through and hit the little mirror thingy. They're clearly cognizant of it. It's not bad or anything. I don't mean to say it's bad. It's just not it for everyone. I think I was just imagining like in my head that it was going to be like amazing and like so much better than Moria. And instead it just feels like Moria.
If I blinked, I'm not even sure I would know that I'm not in Moria. Like, it just feels the same. I wouldn't fight you on that. Absolutely. But even Moria has grown on me over time. There's a couple of zones in Moria I feel like get me in the mental zone that I'm looking for out of a quest grinding game. So maybe this will do that for me. Once I know it a little bit better, then I think...
That can really work for me. The other thing I logged into was Guild Wars 1. I don't think that's on our... our deck to talk about today but i did want to at least give it a little nod i didn't play hardcore i was listening to carlo play Like he was talking about how we talked about this last week. I should start over. Guild Wars 1 celebrates its 20th anniversary. I guess it was a couple of days ago.
and arena net put out like a bunch of cool new stuff there's a new patch with a bunch of things in it including like particle effect weapons and like really nice upgrades and stuff and they also put the whole thing on sale for like seven bucks
I know I sound like a salesman here, but if you don't have the game, $7 for all three campaigns and the expansion and the BNB, the bonus mission pack, that's really a good deal. That's like a lot of content. That's months of content for... for somebody if you are looking for something to play.
And hey, it just got an update too. But Carlo was playing a ton and he was like, people are going bonkers because I guess they didn't really think through some of the upgrades where they were giving, I think, like, is it like five points to the... Shoot, what are they called? You get like an innate skill.
type for your class right you can you could always change the other ones around based on your secondary but not your core one and i guess the necromancer soul reaping one ended up being a little too overpowered so people are like running around spending you know gajillions of
ectos and rubies and whatever people are using as currency today on these things and everybody's in there farming so apparently it's gone over very well maybe a little too well and it's probably going to get nerfed but in the meantime apparently really fun i did not engage i just kind of wanted to go in and soak it in a little bit just enjoy seeing lots of people back um in the various
Spamadan and I always hung out in the Great Temple of Balthazar sometimes in the international districts because that was such a good place to trade. So it was nice to look around, but I don't actually really want to play. This is not the moment for me, I guess. I don't know. I'm really glad it made it to 20 and I'm glad ArenaNet is still keeping it going. And that so many people were willing to show up all at once. It's just exciting. It's such a great game.
Good. It's nice to see those little moments where an older game gets another brief... A moment in the sun. yeah moment of the sun and it's like yeah you know the nostalgia hits and the community kind of comes back together and there's those moments and everybody kind of knows like this is not a true renaissance where it's going to go on and on and on but It's still nice to have that and be reminded how really good of a game this was.
and how ArenaNet continues to support it, as we talked about last week. That's really awesome. This studio was under no compulsion to continue anything about it past Guild Wars 2 launching, but it has, so that's cool. Totally. All right, well, what did you get to play?
Yeah, a lot of odds and ends. So while you're in Gundabad, I'm in Moria over here with my... with my mariner and having some some good fun with that just slicing and dicing uh kind of making an effort to accomplish something i've never done in moria i don't think up to this point i've never fully deeded out moria
it's just like one of those things like yeah i got it to a point especially like the older moria where you're just like oh i miss sun i need to get out of here go as fast as possible you know Well, I'm not in a rush. I really like just kind of exploring, doing a lot of different quests, poking around. I found Floyd and DeWitt. I totally forgot that they were in there. You remember them?
Floyd and DeWitt. Why does that sound – I don't know. So it's this – kind of an older gentleman and his pack horse. And they are. Oh, this does sound familiar. Yeah, they're like in all these very out of the way places in Middle Earth. And you unlock a deed once you find the first. instance of them like they're on the side of weather top but really in a very out of the way like off the beaten path so they're also
overlooking that giant staircase that goes up and down into the way, way down part of Moria. But if you find them, you kind of unlock that. And if you get all of them, there's like two different titles. And one of them is The Wanderer. And I thought, oh, that's such a cool title. Like, I'm not a big title guy, but The Wanderer. How did they even get into Moria? I have questions. Lloyd is a very good horse. There's not a lot of horses in Moria, but he's cool with it, I guess.
I don't know. They're explorers. That's what they do. So they could take Floyd in, but they couldn't take Bill, the pony. Yeah, Bill was kind of freaking out. They were really worried they were going to hit small... I just read that part of the book too, like a couple of weeks ago. There were, they're going to hit like small passages and stuff where, where Bill wouldn't be able to get through. And so it was better. But the horse is okay. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously.
I see. I see. Well, this is it. This is where I part ways with Lord of the Rings Online. This is a bridge too far as far as lore is concerned. I'm sorry. Table flip. I'm totally kidding. Now I kind of want to find them. That sounds really cute. I like little Easter eggs like that that are just kind of tucked away. I do too. I like the mindset of just slowing down and really poking around. I think sometimes we get...
We wear deep ruts on all the questing paths that we get very used to, but sometimes it's fun on an alt to give yourself permission to just... you know be be poking around be able to take your time smell the roses whatever you your metaphor you want to go for i i like that It's kind of a different experience, and I'm certainly not in any rush because I already have an endgame character. The other character I'm working on, I'm taking my Loremaster.
who has been parked at the beginning of Corsairs of Umbar for a couple years now, and I'm finally just taking her through just the epic. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I don't feel a huge compulsion to take her through every side quest.
I've already done all of them. I just kind of want to get her caught up. So I'm actually having a really good time with the class. I haven't played the new Loremaster in a while. I found a build that kind of really works for me. It's very, very simple, which is... pretty much any build that i do it's got to be very simple and uh yeah it's good other than that i've been doing some undermined stuff in world of warcraft
I finally got through the whole campaign there. That sounds like an amazing, you know, which is like. an amazing accomplishment it was really just like an evening of oh yeah let's just power through the campaign i got through it was an interesting story some cool cut scenes i dive dive into the raid for a bit of lfr and then it was done i'm like okay now i can do side quests
And as usual, as I just wrote an entire soapbox on this last week, I kind of find side questing to be more interesting story-wise these days. I loved that article. It's generated a lot of conversation. For a weekend article, it blew up. Are you kidding me? That's huge. I did not think. It's just my random. I don't like this anymore. But I do want to clear up something. Really was not saying that I hate epic storylines. I'm just kind of sort of over them.
I used to binge like hour long TV shows all the time. Now I just watch the occasional sitcom. I just, you know, I taste change. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. Also, I totally agree with you. I don't hate them, like you said. It's just, yeah, you're kind of... Just kind of forget the thread of the story after a while. It just goes on and on. It's like somebody's soap opera that started a long time ago. You're just like, oh, that's still going on. Okay, that's cool.
Do you want to talk about the compensation that we had in LOTRO? Yeah, so LOTRO threw a nice compensation package at us this past week. bumps of these shenanigans of march and april here and so yeah well you kind of wrote this up so what did we get for oh let's see they gave us 50 mithril which is worth like what five bucks or so Not a terrible, like, I'll take 50 mithril. I can make that go pretty far. They gave us five lockbox keys.
Which, again, I don't buy lockbox keys. So those plus the freebies they give us as a new character, that's pretty much all I ever use. So I got some nice stuff out of that. I don't know about you. I got a mushroom, a couple mushroom fireplaces. I got two of those stupid fireplaces. After I had bought one. For all of my freaking currency. So now I have three of them. Dang it! I don't actually need three of them. I'm probably going to disenchant them.
That made me kind of grumpy. But still, that was pretty generous. I mean, it's okay. And some other, like Virtue, a Virtue Boost. Yeah, the Virtue Boost was nothing. It's like $2,500. It's not even going to get you a visible tick on a high-level character. There was one more thing. Oh, the pony, the house. Sorry, not pony house. That's not a thing.
The horse, the free horse box, which is that same one that they've been giving out for every blip for the last couple of years. So you have all those horses. Don't get excited. They're not the most exciting horses. No, they're not. They're there. That was a little disappointing. I don't know. I think I was hoping for...
I don't know what I was hoping for. People in the comments were like, I thought we might get a carry-all. I was like, yeah, I could have believed a carry-all or a couple of free weeks of VIP. That's sort of what I was expecting. A choice of carry-all would have been really good. They probably should have done that. I honestly wasn't even thinking about compensation. Oh, yeah? I didn't have any hopes in it. So when they came along, I'm like, oh, okay. Free stuff? Yeah. Yeah.
I don't really need any of it, but that's nice. you know i in terms of like do i feel like it's enough compensation i the response i typically saw was if people are in a good state they were like oh cool and if they're still missing a lot of their escrow or their characters are in limbo or whatever it is they're just grumpy and they're not going to be happy until that gets fixed so it's
It was a good, you know, there was the thing that they had to do. They had to give some sort of composite. This is. This was such a mess on their part. Well, it's still not even really over, like you said. They're compensating us, and it's not even done yet. We still don't have the dark worlds. We still don't have, like you said. the completion of yeah like giving everybody not the most recent expansion but like hey here's corsairs or here's the mariner or
I mean, that wouldn't have been a – to see that wouldn't have benefited people already paid for it. Does everybody not have the Mariner? Is that still paywalled? I didn't realize that. Mariner and Brawler. Did I buy that? I don't remember if I bought it. Wait, the Brawler's paywalled too? Yep. They just gave out the Bjorning to everyone. Not just, but a couple years ago. If they gave the brawler out and people already had it, then people would complain.
You know what I mean? Yeah, it's not going to help everybody. Yeah, so maybe that's why they stick to just currency. Everybody can use the currency. It's 50 little teleports. That's always helpful. Yeah. I always recommend your three mithril coins. Go over to Layla's Market, Lally's Market, and get your free teleport for free. I love that teleport so much. I do this all the time thanks to you, Justin. You're the reason I do it.
You've got your VIP vendor right there. It's a very good teleport to have. And a bank. There's a bank inside of all he is. It's not bad. Not bad at all. And they're redoing it. Like this week or next week, there's going to be the new patch that drops. Oh, yes. Okay, we're getting the furniture stuff, right? I think that's this week, yeah. The furniture token. Wow, that's so fast. Wait, wait.
No, WoW is this week. Lotro maybe this week, maybe next week. It's coming pretty quick. Oh my gosh. Yeah, other than that, I do want to briefly mention I kind of got sucked back into WoW Classic. Oh. And just kind of missing the journey, thinking about it. I have thoughts on it, but we're already 22 minutes into this, so I don't really want to...
We should go a whole hour on this and really, really mess with their minds. They'll be trying to fast forward like, when are they going to stop talking about it? Let me walk you through my hunter's journey. Level one. She was a new dwarf. Straight out of Iron Forge. Nah, she's level 40 and she's still running around without a horse because I'm too poor. Oh my goodness. Hey, I'm an engineer. I'm going to be poor for a while. Trust me.
I've got like 76 gold. It's not terrible. I could just go farm for a while and I probably will. But yeah, it was good. It was nice to see my guild still there, still very populated. Everybody's like, hey, it's you, the person who hasn't been here for two months. Oh, it's kind of cool to be back. Sweet. All right, let's get to the news because as I said, it just was a fantastic week.
In a lot of ways for MMO news. Yeah. And weird week and, you know, some downsides. This is how news goes. Some ups, some downs, and we're just going to tackle all of it. We're going to start by talking about Defiant. Because this is, as we talked about last week, Defiance was getting a relaunch under Fox Games. And it happened over the weekend. And it was nice to see it relaunch. But it was not without a couple hiccups. You had me. I was like, oh no, Justin.
Never mind. I can't remember the last time I really had hiccups. Yeah, they make straws, like these special straws that you can use. I know this because when my husband gets hiccups, he sounds like he's dying and I couldn't take it anywhere. So I bought him one of these special plastic straws. So I lowered the pillow over his face and just held it there. I didn't know this was a thing. A straw. It works too. He's used it and it totally works.
boom hiccups gone look it up guys there's i'm sure there's like a podcast the equivalent of like going to wikipedia and getting sucked down some random rabbit hole a little bit A little bit. Anyway, sorry. All right. Defiance is what we're talking about, Brie. What's going on with this relaunch? Well, so it was an MMO launch, so it was a mess. I mean. You guys know how MMO launches go. How fuck the fuck?
They did their best. They are not a big company. They are a fairly small outfit. And a lot of people were beating down the doors of this game. So they had all kinds of problems. Like even before our first post went out, they were already having problems. I think they launched at like 6 o'clock in the morning on that Friday. And so by the time we were writing about it at 9 o'clock, they were already struggling. So people got up really early to play this game.
But yeah, they had over the weekend, they had some outages, they had some crash problems, they had login problems. I know they took the server down a couple times. It was an MMORPG launch, like full stop. That's what it is. There were a lot of people complaining. Oh gosh, the Discord. Absolutely on fire. I don't know what to tell you. I hope nobody took off work for this because it is an MMO launch and it did exactly what we expect an MMO launch to do.
Yeah, it was really – I think the one silver lining here is just to see the interest in it. Oh, totally. Yeah, a title that nobody cared about and there was – nobody showed up and there wouldn't have been much of a – anything breaking because we've certainly seen those kind of launches and we've seen those even in 2025 where just they're they're blips i mean in fact just this morning here on monday morning we just posted about some another extraction shooter that just got
taken off the market like six days after it came out because just nobody showed up for it And it's like, oh, man, just add that to the pile of extraction shooters, RIP. But, you know, it's really... so heartening to see this many people come out for an older game like this and yes you got the defiance faithful and the people who are like oh you know our our game's back our world's back you're giving it to us and that is such a rush of emotions when you've gone, if you've ever gone through that.
But, you know, this this does they do need to like they're under a crunch right now. They need to get a handle on this. Lest a lot of people just get those bad first impressions bounce off and they're just like, well. You know, the people will come in for a weekend. It's a new thing, but there's going to be a new thing next week and the week after and the week after. So they're definitely under a crunch to make sure that this gets shored up.
But it's something we'll continue to follow. I really hope that they get the numbers to want to be able to forward and want to continue development. Right. Yeah, we really don't actually have any hard numbers because they're not actually on Steam yet. which is kind of frustrating. I wish we could see that. So we're kind of dependent on the fact that people are mad about it being down to...
glean that people want to be playing. We have to use their launcher. Yeah, right now. I think they said in their FAQ a while back that they were considering a Steam launch in the future, but not yet. I think so, too. I think that will help them out a lot. But if like you said, if they have to last that long first, and I'm not really sure. Well, I really have no idea. I have no idea how well this will do. There was a reason Tryon let it go, or rather Gamigo let it go in the first place.
Still, you could keep a game up for a long time without getting tons and tons of content in, as ArenaNet has just proved, like just in this show, right? We had an example of maintenance mode that worked. Yeah, and sometimes it's always, you know, it's always a big factor is timing. You know, sometimes maybe it didn't work back during the original run, but...
let it go fallow for a while, bring it back, and suddenly can explode and be an amazing thing. It's not outside the realm of possibility. It's happened from time to time. And sometimes people just like their appetites change and they might be in a better position to want this kind of game or just be so bored that they don't have other alternatives. We can think of a few other games we would like to see brought back this way. One or two? That was the wild star? Could you bring back wild star?
the top of the list some people pining for that right now somebody on reddit posted like 10 years ago today you know it's a whole bunch of wild star pictures and i'm like oh don't break my heart this early in the morning it's not that's not cool wow Yeah, and I'm worried if they ever did bring back Wildstar by this time, I don't... I don't know. There's so many games with great housing systems and a lot of...
Good, you know, older MMOs have been shored up and they have some better content. I don't know if OG Wildstar would really bring... that much to the table that's not already present. I don't know. That's just kind of a random thought I was kind of kicking around in my head earlier. You should do that as a post. I would love to see you flesh that out. Okay. Seriously. Because we are. We are coming up on the actual 10-year anniversary of the launch, aren't we? Isn't that next month?
I don't remember, is it? I think it is. 2015, was that the one? No, it must have been 2014. I'm wrong. It has to have been 2014 because it came out like a week before my daughter was born. That's how I remember this because I missed the whole thing. Or maybe like a week after. It was crazy. Was it like the first week of June? Okay, now I'm going to pull up my thing. Somebody named Sip has this really great timeline of all the MMOs.
On his website that he's been maintaining for 20 years. Obviously, I keep it right in front of me at all times because I'm that much into my own stuff. Yeah, it was 2014 and it was May. It was May. Okay, there you go. A month before Vanguard and Wizardry Online closed. Wow, that's depressing. Two months, I'm sorry. Wow, I would not have told you Vanguard made it all the way to 2014. For real?
Yeah, because remember they had the free-to-play like that. Oh, we're going to give them free-to-play and that'll be a... you know like a second shot in the arm and then they shut down all of those games right at the same time oh i see it got it was the big purge yeah i remember the big purge Wow, I didn't remember that it had been caught up in the purge. I think of that as being free realms and not as being, wow, that's rough. Sorry, Vanguard. Okay, Vanguard, there's a game that can stand up.
We don't have a lot of games that you're doing. I'd be honestly, at this point, a little more interested in it, no offense, than Pantheon, but I wouldn't mind both succeeding. I'm okay with that. I've got another article coming out about just... loving older MMOs and what they can offer us. I've read that one too, by the way. I approved that this morning. I really like it.
Justin's like, I sound like an old man. I was like, no, you really don't. You sound like somebody who has some perspective and some experience here. And sometimes old things are better than new things. And we need to recognize that. Sometimes we lose things in the march forward. We do. I don't think I've ever sweat a column that greatly as that one I wrote. And I went back and I don't know if you saw the revisions. I like made probably a dozen times little tweaks here and there.
I don't know why. You put out a lot of stuff here on the site. When you write for Mass Lead, you're putting yourself out there a lot. And it's okay. You put your opinions. You know sooner or later people are going to disagree with you sometimes. very adamantly and you just got to be okay with that but sometimes you put out really personal stuff and that's the stuff you don't want people to like bite you back on because You're like, oh, my skin is way too thin right now to handle that.
But this has been on my heart for a while, so it's fun to share. We'll talk about it next week. I'll tell you what. We can do a whole little segment on the next week's podcast when it's actually out and people know what the hell we're talking about because they don't right now. Well, let's talk about Dune Awakening because we got some news about that. It was supposed to be launching next month. And when I say was going to be launching.
Funcom. Funcom is being funcom while I've been here. We are delayed, says Funcom. They are delaying it from May 20th, and they are pushing it to June 10th. Probably from what I'm hearing, a good move. Yeah, I'm not sure how much we're allowed to say. I have no idea how under NDA the current press testers are, but from Justin is correct, our current press testers are like, ooh, yeah, they really need more time. So...
Well, I mean, even Funcom is saying that. We can say that because they quoted it. They said, we've concluded that we need a little bit more time to cook. We've gotten... feedback that we need to act on from our beta tester. I don't know if three weeks is going to be enough. That's not a lot of extra time there, no.
They are going to be running an extra beta weekend. So if you are curious about this title, want to see it maybe in a more firmed up state, that's going to be coming. When is that beta weekend? They didn't say. They said it would be in May, but we don't know when. No, really, I looked, I had the same question, and it just says next month. So at some point in May. So kind of replacing the May launch, at least you get to play it in May. Right. Just not permanently. Okay.
So yeah, just rearrange your calendars. Again, if you took off time from work, hopefully you didn't rearrange that right now. I think June is actually a really good time to launch an MMO. You know, May was not bad either. Isn't that when the Switch is launching? When is the Switch launching? Is Switch 2 launching?
Hold on. June? I don't know. I have to look this up. I thought it was fall. Oh, maybe you're right. Okay. I'm not buying one, so it doesn't matter. Yeah. Like I said, not made of money. Don't tell my kids that Switch 2 is coming out. I could have sworn it was June. The joke in our household is that I was gifted the Switch. That was my Christmas present and I have yet to actually play it that much. Everybody steals it, yeah.
But the kids get such a use out of it. It's probably been one of the Switch and the GameCube. Those two things we use on a regular basis, and they just love them. They're good consoles. But the new ones, I'd be more likely to buy a new Switch 1 than to buy a new Switch 2 right now because of how useful it's been for us.
$450 is a lot of money. Then they want full price $80 for the games. That's a lot. That's a lot of money, fam. You could buy a whole laptop for that. You know what's kind of weird? I haven't played... using analog controllers in a very long time and i do have like i do have a gamepad for my computer for certain games and So it's like, oh, this is weird. My hands just aren't used to that. Give me a mouse. Give me a keyboard. I need to crank my fingers around the WASD thing.
Yeah, so my kids are like, hey, come play with us. And I pick up the controllers and they're like, Dad, you're horrible at video games. Do you write about video games? Like, I don't play with this tiny little chiclet-sized controller for a living. Thank you very much. Funcom's delaying in Dune Awakening. We are going to get through this podcast. No, we're not. We're high water. Yeah. Let's talk about the thing that Brie was hinting at widely last week.
That Paleo's got a little bit something up its sleeve. It's not launched, but it's kind of an expansion thing. I thought for sure it was going to be launched. So we knew this was coming, right? It's called Elderwood. We've known it was coming because they've been talking about it for ages. Every tweet that Singularity 6 puts out, the players are like, where's Elderwood when? That kind of thing. Over and over and over again.
from the eg7 investor talks right where they were basically coming out and saying that paleo was working on this and it was coming out in q2 and we're like okay well thanks for spoiling that right Can we pause? Yes. This is the third zone. So the game has two zones. Right.
That release. So we've been, yeah, everybody's known that this third zone was in development for a very long time. Right. Go ahead. But we also thought it was going to launch, like this would be the final launch, the real launch, because it's been lingering in beta. It was 2023. When did it first? I don't even remember now. It's been at least a year and a half or so.
since it actually came out. So we were expecting it to launch, and this is not the 1.0 launch. They are still going to be in beta, but they are now coming to console, real console, not just the Switch. so at that point when it launches on on console and elderwood is out it will be completely what did they say it was completely Cross progression and cross play. Completely. Everything in full parody. I was like, okay, that's pretty good. Poor Switch is over there. I'm a real fan.
So technically not the real launch, but it sounds like this is going to be a very launchy kind of time to jump in. A very significant step for us. Yes. That was how I took it. I'm going to jump back in. This is going to be my jumping point to try it back out again. Okay. Yeah, I went through. I sat through. I got my own little session with the devs. They were awesome. They showed me everything. I had no idea.
It's funny because I cover this game. Every time there's a patch, I'm usually the one who covers it because I'm the one who follows it in Discord. And I'm like, I'll just type it up. And so I know what's going into the game. And yet somehow like the aggregation of all of the stuff that they have added to the game just kind of didn't have an impact on me until I saw it in the demo where the devs are showing off that player made houses. And it's like.
oh my god this is like the sims like the level of detail and effort and you know people making things weird shapes and weird like um scales and like putting them upside down and putting them in weird places to like build stuff that's not supposed to be a thing but is now, I really was blown away at the building capabilities of the game now. The devs even said at one point during that talk that something like half of their player
are just builders. They don't really do the rest of the game. They're not like into the social stuff. They're not really into the crafting. They're just builders. I'm like, okay, now it makes sense why they put so much.
effort into like the sims 4 there's like different communities and there's a big community they just want to build houses they don't want to actually play the game and then there are people who just decorate that's how i tend to mostly just decorate i don't i don't even like to build the houses i like to flesh them out and make them pretty then there are people who just make characters they don't play them They just make the coolest characters they can.
Then there are people who like download other people's characters and make stories and they do poses and they do like scenes. Or they do challenges. And then there's the whole challenge community. It's really cool. how many different player types you can get into one game like that i think that's clearly what paley is going for here at this point because elderwood actually has more of um i don't want to say it's combat oriented
But it definitely has more of an adventure-y kind of feel than the rest of the game, which is much more, you know, social and whatnot. So, like, I'm watching the devs run around. They have a bow and arrow, or kind of. It's like a bow and, like, magic. The animals like jump around and you're trying to hit them and then they kind of poof and they turn into like magic sparkles. It's like, okay, there's no blood. It's not gory.
There's no, you know what I mean? I want to see giblets. I know, I know. Come on. It's just, it's like very toned down and they made it feel like a minigame instead of like. a murderous rampage which you know i kind of i kind of understand that but yeah it it honestly looked really good i'm very impressed absolutely stunning in person
But mostly I was just drawn back to the housing. I really didn't understand how good it had gotten and how they were trying to serve the building community specifically since so many builders showed up to play. So I kind of wonder sometimes if that's why Elderwood kind of got backburnered a little bit. If adventuring players weren't the types who actually show up to play, why should you keep building for them? I don't know.
Just kind of throwing that out there. But yeah, they had good things to say about Daybreak too. I should point that out. They were very complimentary about Daybreak's involvement and support. At one point, one of the devs basically said that this zone would not have happened without Daybreak, and there might not even be a studio without Daybreak. So that really stood out to me. You don't expect them to badmouth the studio, but you'd also...
don't necessarily expect anybody to fall in love with their owner. You know what I mean? That's also pretty unusual. Usually... studios like that teams like that would try to wiggle their way out of saying something at all like if they have nothing nice to say they'd rather just no comment but they did the opposite of that so that really stood out to me
Because a lot of people, when Palea got bought by Daybreak in the first place, they thought that was the end. That was going to spell doom for Palea, and it really seems like it's been just the opposite. Yeah, I got it back into the game last Thursday and Friday. I spent a little bit of time just realizing, oh, yeah, this is still the game where you can't delete your character and restart. Like you have to create a completely new thing. Yeah.
which like why the heck why why just like especially if you've been away from the game for like a year year and a half which is how long i've been away like i don't want to start over like i need a fresh start like there's just to learn it from don't make me
go into my inventory people i don't want to look at my all right fine so i i just kind of bit down and uh just spent a whole like hour just kind of sorting stuff out went around my house just seeing oh this bug was fixed okay this bug was fixed that's cool this this system's in place
And just kind of set one little goal in front of me, which is like, okay, I want to get a glider. I don't want to get my glider yet. Like, okay, here are the steps I need to take for that. But I was also really thinking about why I have such a hard time. getting into life sims like this my kids big stardew valley fans they two of my kids just play the same game back and forth they love it they talk about dad why don't you play this game like
I don't know. I've sat down so many times with Stardew Valley. I own like three different versions of it. And I can't really get that far into it.
i'm wondering if it's just because like sandboxes and this is one reason why i i can't get into the sandbox lifestyle as much as i should is because there's just so many options and there's very lack of clear direction like you really need to go do this first and then this first and then this first if you're giving me a hundred things to do in any given day and i don't know what's like most beneficial and what
Yeah, I guess you can kind of just artificially limit yourself down to like, okay, this is the goal I'm going to start pursuing. I got to figure out my own gameplay loop instead of like having the game set it for me. I know, it's just like retraining your brain, and that's a bit of a barrier. I'm not saying it's impossible, I think it's very possible, but it's hard to come from a game like Lotro, where...
I know that gameplay loop very well and it's very easy. Next quest, next thing, go here, go there. And Paley is like, hey, do you want a garden? Do you want to build a house? Do you want to go fishing? Do you want to do the other 500 things? Do you want to go follow all and make friends with all of these NPCs? Which, by the way, won't stop moving.
They just keep going everywhere and you're trying to track them down and you're like, stand still. Dang it. We don't have cell phones. I've got to go run up to you. I think that's really fun, Justin, because I feel like Lotro is... Very sandboxy to me. I realize it is technically a theme park, but man, every time I log in there, there really are. Do I want to play dress up? Do I want to farm? Do I want to craft? Do I want to gather? Do I want to quest? Do I want to rep grind?
Do I want to go grind some virtues? Do I want to play in my house? Do I want to go tour other people's houses? There's still tons of stuff to do. I think you're right that there's something like mental about going into an MMORPG where there's still this fundamental I should be leveling thing in the back of your mind and everything else is like extraneous and sometimes you almost have to squash. the I should be leveling voice and then go do the other things whereas in a game like this
That's not really a thing. Those extraneous things are the thing. That's the thing you should be doing, all of them, any of them. I kind of understand. And I guess there's no rush to do any of it at any length. you know, you're not under a time crunch. Right. Unless there's certain events or festivals or whatever. But, you know, I also kind of feel like these games are so designed to be like...
You just lose yourself in it. This becomes your one game where you just do all the things. And if it's part of a whole buffet of titles that you're bouncing between. you know, like you can't really give the time to it that it needs. And now they're going to introduce a new zone, but it was really cool to go in and see the excitement for it going on the Reddit.
People are just going, oh, I've been holding off. I've been holding. I wanted to come back. And this is a siren call. I've got to go back now. So a lot of people super excited about Elderwood comes out next month, right? Yeah. And let me look up the exact day. It is like, I want to say it's like the 12th. You wrote a huge post on this. I'm sorry. It's the 13th. Yeah. The 13th. So yeah, go check out Bree's post on this. It's not just a post. It is a novel that rivals Moby Dick. It's really good.
A lot of information here, especially if you've not touched Paley's grass for a while and you want to go and check it out again and find out what's been going on in this game and what its future is going to look like. definitely read this but yeah may 13th is when we're going to be looking at elderwood here we as in you and me and everybody else i'm really excited to finally get to go and dive in this is what i was waiting for excellent Alright, finally, let's talk about a game that I don't...
think we've almost ever talked about on the podcast. Not that often, at least. And that's Maple's story. It needs a time on this podcast. And why not now for MapleStory? It's one of those MMOs that we know a lot of people play. And there's a pretty. And we don't know any of them. Who are you? But we've never bumped into them. yeah i don't think they really have a lot of overlap with the with the blog reading sector of mmorpgs but that's okay there's just some mmos like that they're just not
our communities and their communities don't seem to bump into nevermind overlap each other, but we do cover maple story. And especially we've talked a lot about. maple story 2 and and the very brief rise and fall of that game but maple story has been going strong for a very long time in fact 20th anniversary is hitting here for MapleStory. We're getting a lot of games here that came out in 2005 hitting their 20th anniversary.
right now. And MapleStory is celebrating with a number of things, including... A classic server. Yeah. I saw this, Bree, a few days ago, and it started popping up on various Reddit and some other social feeds, and people were just going bananas for it. I saw so many people go, not so many, but I mean, I saw some people just like absolutely lose their crap going, holy crap. Yeah. And I'm like, Oh, cool. I,
MapleStory, okay. I didn't know there was any demand for a classic server, but I guess there is. I'm not surprised, honestly. MapleStory does so freaking well. for Nexon in terms of money in terms of revenue I'm always surprised by it and I shouldn't be surprised by it it does well overseas it even does well here like
There's a big player base for this, and they've been around for a really long time, right? This is not a brand new game. I don't know if you guys remember, but last year, last spring, The Western team basically split away from the Eastern team and they are no longer running the game with complete parity to the Korean version of the game.
which you might be thinking oh no because usually we're like parody is good but in this case the western team deaf team was like look our player bases just don't want the same things anymore And we need to like follow what the actual Western player base wants. And so far, as far as I can tell, it has been kind of a success. And so I'm not super surprised that they're using the 20th anniversary to double down on that and like put out more servers and go back to this.
you know, OG kind of experience for players here. And the coolest part, right, is that they actually found some of the original MapleStory devs to actually do it. That is awesome. Including the lead dove. They got the lead dove to come back and she is like running this whole show to redo, like put out a version. I shouldn't say it's like OG. It's like.
It reminds me of no changes. It's not really no changes. There are changes. You know what I mean? They're making some quality of life upgrades and things like that. I got a bit of a... A RuneScape 2007 feel. Yeah.
It's like that. It's not really supposed to be super old school. They're cognizant of the fact that people really don't want it to actually feel like 20 years ago. They want it to feel like 20 years ago, but they don't want the clunk of 20 years ago. They want some of the basic... quality of life upgrades too so big injection of nostalgia right to the veins
And in fact, they even said that, like this is going to be a very nostalgic experience. So, you know, good for them. Good for MapleStory. No timeline on this. They said we'll find out more in the second half of the year. Yeah, they didn't even put a...
They didn't even promise the game in the second half of the year. They just promised more details. Yeah, I remember noticing that like, oh, okay, so maybe next year or maybe not. Maybe it's the kind of thing they'll announce in November for Thanksgiving. Who knows? I don't know. So anyways, really cool for you, you MapleStory fans and people who have maybe never played it before and want to go.
Check out an earlier version. Maybe you've ever felt really overwhelmed. It's a very different MMO experience. I think Chris did it once for Choose My Adventure. It was kind of fun to watch him. flounder about it. It's a game that I think all of us kind of coming from very modern MMOs and jumping into, we just have a very hard time. wrapping her head around it yet it just it absolutely does have a huge fandom oh yeah
Yeah, there's a reason why they tried to make a sequel. This is an outright franchise that Nexon wants to continue for a long time. Hopefully this, instead of going forward, going back, that might work, you know, worked for some other classic servers. So why not here?
All right, well, that's about all the big news we had for this week. Again, we've had a lot of other odds and ends and things we talked about previously. This week, by the way, we got the new WoW patch. We'll be talking about that next week, I'm sure. But let's get into some mailbag because he pulled out some interesting ones here.
Yeah, sorry. I was looking at the week in review to see if there was anything we missed. Was there anything? There was a couple other. I thought, well, yeah. Oh, wait. I don't want to talk about Dragon Wilds again. Oh, maybe we should at least mention the Camelot Unchained thing. We'll be talking about it more when they actually do it, but Marc Jacobs resurfaced last week and said that they are literally going to do a big reveal.
By the end of April, like this was the thing they've been teasing since last year. And people were like, no, they're not going to do it. Apparently they're going to do it. So I hope you didn't have any money riding on that because. Well, I don't know what it's going to look like, but I guess we're going to find out, right? So that is happening. Heads up for that if you had a bet running against that.
I'm a little speechless myself, honestly. I think it's not going to be that much. I think it's going to be very underwhelming, but we'll see. He made it sound like they've really redone a lot of things. They've kind of retooled a lot. I don't know what it's going to look like in the end. But maybe players will be happy with that. What is that Simpsons lie on you? Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong. All right. I'll shut up. Mailbag. The first one is from Graham.
Controversial. I'll warn you ahead of time. I know, I know. He says, Though I still love classic MMOs, I do feel like the whole MMO scene has stagnated since WoW was the only one to ever truly break into the mainstream in any meaningful way in its earlier expansion. Why do you feel there has been such a limited evolution of the genre? Do you feel a game will come to lift the genre back into the mainstream again? Or are the days of 12 million subscribers gone forever?
See what I mean? Those are some fighting words, Graham. Yeah, so obviously we're going to give Graham's home address out if anybody wants to go pillory. We're kidding. Do you want to address the first part? Do you think that's even... Do you think that's true? Do you think he's right? The MMO scene has stagnated since WoW? No. I don't either. I don't think it has. But, you know...
There's a subjective part to this and there's an objective part. It could feel like that. I would understand WoW was such a ginormous... presence that it almost seemed to push everything else to the side. But that's really doing a disservice to all the other stuff that's happening.
Especially over the subsequent decade from 2004 to 2014. There's so much MMO movement in that time period. And a lot of games, yes, they took a big cue from WoW, but they were also doing some... other things and some new things and some new ips and kind of eventually went down a different track and so yeah i I don't know. I think philosophically, I can understand what he's getting at. There was definitely a hard break there.
You know what I mean? Like there was, we stopped making a lot of types of MMOs. We definitely don't just make WoW clones post WoW. We make some other games, but we're not like innovating at the rate we were innovating between 1997 and 2004. We are just not. The money is not there and the money we have is too dear. to spend it on weird crap like City of Heroes, right? Or Dark Age of Camelot or Star Wars Galaxies, all these weird games that really have no modern cognate. They just don't.
Or a lot of the weird projects that really never got off the ground. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's just the ones that succeeded, never mind the ones that didn't. So many of these weird projects. Yeah, there just wasn't a standard template. And I think once WoW came along, it was almost like so many of these studios just took a big, heavy sigh of relief and like, finally, a template. And, you know, that wasn't...
That wasn't the right mindset. But I could understand it like it was working. Don't make me laugh like that. I'm trying to drink tea. All right.
Anyways, so... I agree with that part, but also I agree with, it's not fair to say like Final Fantasy and Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert and Albion Online and all these games that like... did do something different they did so many things different that wow is now stealing from them you know what i mean like we can't say that wow is
But as from a market standpoint, it would be fair to say we're not getting as many MMOs as we used to. So I feel like that's probably what Graham was getting at. But it's worth breaking it down, I think, so that it doesn't sound like we're just piling on him. I think this is a good question. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, you're good. Keep going. Probably also the division between like macro evolution, micro evolution, at least in terms of video games here, you know, like.
If you trace back enough in early history, like what Brie was saying, and that the first, you know, from mid 90s to mid 2000s, there were just so many ideas being thrown all over the place and so many different approaches. and some of the stuff was working, and it wasn't just ideas, but also the technology. How many people could we fit on the server? You know, how many people can we, you know, like dial up versus, you know, like when Internet speed started to go past dial up to cable and and.
all this, you know, better technology and stuff like that. So those were other big steps forward for people accepting. online culture and being able to know like how do we interact with other people going from being a novelty to social structure right to the third place Yeah, it's a third place, right. So, I mean, there's...
That's just the story of the early internet. Like all these things were brand new and people are just trying to figure out. And in a way, it was just this wonderful, special, wild, crazy time period. We will never, ever be able to replicate ever again. At least in that way. And so it just, it was inevitable that sooner or later, like. There's only so much innovation you can do until it becomes like, okay, now we kind of understand where it's going and this is where we're going forward.
I want to take you to a slightly different tack. And this is not a rabbit hole. But I was watching a video. It kind of goes with my column we were talking about earlier. But it was talking about phone innovations, cell phone innovations. And then he's like, look back at how innovative cell phones were. And all the different models, all the different, the crazy ideas, the things where people were trying to figure out and just the leaps and bounds that we're doing with space.
you know cameras and all this and and eventually we got this slab and nowadays like the only thing that they really want to say is like hey we put another camera on it hey we put another hole in the snap yeah Different dimensions of slab. But we're not like now, like the iterations are so.
small like oh we shaved off another millimeter hey we got another you know a couple hours of battery life okay but we're very far past the era where you know suddenly there was this giant steps forward what happens with technology sometimes like there there comes a point where you can't keep doing giant steps forward you just kind of get to where something works and either somebody is unwilling or unable to take it forward any further until there's
some other breakthrough over here. And maybe that's what we're kind of waiting for in the MMO genre is like, as other projects come along and they're trying their things. And there's some, there are some really cool, like micro evolutionary.
developments in the MMO space. I think you could like say, look at what No Man's Sky was doing, procedural generation and kind of building this game in a different... A different way than MMOs were usually built, like starting with a single player game and kind of. Gradually graduating to an MMO. It's a very different way of developing an MMO. But we haven't seen anything like giant, huge steps forward. What we'll see in that.
Where that might come out, I have no idea. It's probably not going to be VR. I'm sorry, VR headset owners. Probably not going to be that. But, you know, it could be something just like completely out of left field. New technology comes along. Some new idea comes along. One game happens upon a certain formula that just really hasn't been tried in that combination before. It takes off like fire. Cool. Like that. And we'll be off to the races yet again. In the meantime, we have.
smaller ideas and smaller iterations and yeah i do feel like we're in kind of an era where studios are giving themselves a little more permission to innovate and be creative and try some different ideas and not do the same old, same old, same old thing. Because really, that's been played out. There's only so many times you can make a WoW clone. So they just stopped and now they're kind of...
They might have elements of that, and you can certainly see the DNA. You can go all the way back to Deku months and stuff like that. But there's some – I don't know. I like a lot of the projects that are coming up. It seems like a lot of these projects – What they're emphasizing is here's what makes us different. Here's a new idea that really hasn't been tried to.
I know one of the titles – I'll stop talking soon, I promise. No, keep going. One of the titles that is coming up and I talked about in the MMO hype column, hype train, is Eternal Tombs. And I simply just like this project because I really like the idea. And it's not a brand new idea, but it's not really been done the way that they're doing it in the MMO space, which is to bring in Game Masters to... really be a constant act of
presence in the game and go around and being given a giant suite of tools so that they can go in and kind of basically mess with players and trigger events left and right and not just do it as a one-off thing or a special thing here or there but make it a core part. of the gameplay experience. And maybe in a way, that's kind of like going all the way back and reclaiming something that MMOs kind of used to do back when Game Masters used to be more of a force.
but it's i i thought that's cool like that's something that's a great selling point but that's also a great idea like that I want to see more good ideas like that. I want to see revisiting some old things that maybe we have let go, but also trying some things that. tried once didn't really work in that way try it in a different way try try i don't know
All right, I'm out of batteries on this one. I want to bounce off of what you were just saying, because you were talking about how phone developers were...
You know, they they they keep innovating until they're out of innovation, each other out of space. And then they're just making money and they're just trying to come up with new ways to make money. And eventually they often incentivize or they take things out or they make them worse so that you're paying more money for less. And that's how they keep.
you know, increasing their value because that is what our society values. But like a really good MMO is not going to necessarily do that. A new innovating MMO is not going to say, how can I squeeze the most money? out of copying the same old thing, and it's going to say, what kind of need can I fill? What is the need out there? And the kinds of games you're talking about are doing that. They're saying, look, what don't MMOs have?
What could elevate them in one of those things? Humans, right? And that sounds crazy in the world of AI, but like actual human game masters, it's something we have in very, very hand, a tiny handful of MMO. It's like, UO, we're talking about ancient games. not new games. That is something that they could bring to the table that would actually be newish, that would actually feel novel, that wouldn't just feel like another WoW clone.
will that ever be mainstream though like that's actually what graham is talking about and i do not think that is ever going to be mainstream i don't i don't think mmo rpgs are ever really going to be mainstream again and i don't think they need to be
Because the companies that are making the kinds of games that go mainstream are not making this kind of game. They're making much cheaper games that appeal to a broader group of players who don't necessarily want to live in their games. They just want to play them for fun.
So they're coming up with, you know, they came up with MOBAs, they came up with... uh battle royales now they're doing extraction shooters out the wazoo and most of them are dead on arrival occasionally one will break through and then you'll have you know a fortnight or you'll have And you get the one game, you know, they have their wow. You know what I mean? The shooters have a couple of wows and there's a couple of battle royales.
that have a wow. And now we have a couple of wows and that's just how genres work. You know what I mean? I don't necessarily feel like it's necessarily a bad thing if we don't have another wow. But then again, we might. Then again, maybe there will be a whole other generation of these things that finally does appeal. Maybe people get really tired of...
oh my god, I'm in another match with bots or there's nobody here and I came here to be less lonely and instead I'm more lonely. I want to be in a game with a ton of people.
Maybe that will have its moment again. I just feel like we kind of go back and forth in terms of how much social each generation is looking for out of... big games and how much they're willing to pay for really good social and what are we going to do about the anti-social creeps that show up in these games how are we going to clean that up to make it feel social for the people who came there for the social man i don't know i i don't
I don't know that the genre needs to be lifted back. I'm reading the question again. How? Will a game come to lift the genre back into the mainstream again? Or are the days of 12 million subscribers gone forever? I think the days of 12 million subscribers for an MMORPG are mostly gone forever. But that's because almost no games at all are getting 12 million people. right on day one and most of those games don't last like they'll blow up
And then you pretty much don't. Yeah, right. You'll get, you know. pal world or something will blow up and then it kind of peters off they're still making money people are still playing it it's really big in one country or one language group or another and like for the rest of us it's like people move on and that's going to be the case with a lot of these games so i don't
I don't really see that happening again, but I don't think that means it's moved out of the mainstream. It's definitely moved out of this like i don't know track of games where like this disposable track of games where The whole culture plays the thing. We descend on the thing like locusts and then we leave.
I kind of don't want MMOs to be like that. I don't want MMOs to feel mainstream like that. I want MMOs to have longevity to them and the kinds of people who play them to be the kind of people who aren't going to leave in three weeks. So maybe that's a good thing. I don't think that's a bad thing. I mean, you can look at kind of a broader scope, too, and say that's just not how our culture is right now.
The internet has really just scattered everybody instead of centralized. We're all in our little niches and we're over where we want to be. Culture isn't kind of moving together to follow particular TV shows or particular games. There are things that will come along and once in a while we'll capture.
a larger amount of people but it's it's just sure it's um it's you know we it's almost like we just have so much choice and so many things going and yeah how many steam games come out all the time I'm admiring these MMO studios right now that are trying so hard knowing the risk, knowing the... The failure rate is really high, and yet we're cheering them on. We're covering them. We're doing our part. We want to see these titles succeed, especially if they're worthy of succeeding.
But they're going to have to be comfortable with, you know, not wow numbers. You're absolutely right. They're going to be comfortable with. thousands or tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands, but not. millions I didn't list her even the word subscribers is is a contentious word right like just and I know that sounds crazy we just had this discussion in our work chat like a couple weeks ago because somebody came in and said that
I think it might have been Carlo or Ben. They were talking about their students who didn't, I think it was Carlo, didn't, could not understand the idea of subscribing to a game. Thought that was just the craziest thing they'd ever heard of. And I was like, but. Yo, we subscribe to everything. I subscribe to apps on my phone. We subscribe to Netflix. You have a subscription for...
Like so many cars have a subscription. Sometimes fridges have a subscription. Like it's really baked in right now. You can get a subscription for your hair salon. You can get a subscription for everything. Everybody's used. subscriptions the idea of it being so anathema to games is very strange but sometimes it really is especially when a lot of gamers are younger they don't have credit cards when they aren't you know what i mean so
Just the idea of having any million subscribers is kind of crazy. That's just not a thing. that the vast majority of future games are going to have not anytime soon anyway until someone can make that like spin it like a luxury good spin it like a boutique product that you're paying an exclusive fee for Someone will try this, and it might make some money. But for the most part, it's a handful of older MMORPGs.
And most of them are offering optional subscriptions. WoW is one of the very few that doesn't really do that. And Final Fantasy, I guess. Everybody else has options. So that's never happened.
Right. You're going to have to. Honestly, we have given up on counting those when they give us numbers like that. They don't mean anything. We just have to focus on even Blizzard. When Blizzard was still giving us numbers, wasn't telling us subscribers. They were telling us monthly active users. That's what they're looking for.
And so that's what the new number has been for MMORPGs, too. You're looking at how many people are actually logging in and interacting, not necessarily how many people are paying a monthly fee who might not be interacting at all. I don't know. Sorry, that was just kind of a tangent on the idea of subscribers being just it is becoming a weirdly like antiquated idea for games, not for anything else, though. So one of my final thought here on this is just to say.
I love following the MMO genre, not just participating in it, which obviously I enjoy these games. I hope we all do to some extent. If you're not, if you don't, why are you listening to us? One of the reasons I still love, after all these years, after 15 plus years of... covering mmo news professionally i still am i love it because we can be surprised all the time like this past week
you know, just the news we were doing, surprising news. There's, you know, not always earth shattering, but it's interesting. The things you predict. don't often end up happening but sometimes the things you didn't see coming can just come out of nowhere and be horrible be really exciting change the course of all of this and being able to actually go through the history of you know being part of the history of this genre and just kind of kind of surfing it and seeing where it goes and going like
Okay, one, it's not dead. Like, we know MMOs are not dead as a genre. Right. We're entrenched, right? I don't want to use the tick metaphor, but we're dug in here, right? We're here. These games have shown that they really do have legs, that there's a real desire and interest in. for additional titles out there and expansions and further refinement. And there's things we like about these games, so they're not going to vanish the way that, like...
adventure games were supposedly vanishing and dying, and yet they have not died either. They came back in different formats. Real-time strategy games? Same thing. Yeah. Same thing. They're not really dead. People think they are. The wheel keeps turning, right? So where we are on this wheel, I don't think we're at the lowest point. I don't think we're at the highest point, but I think we're on the backside.
We're coming up to an interesting place. I'm very fascinated to see, Bree, where we're going to be at 23rd. uh in the mmo genre i i think we've got some things brewing that might be interesting maybe not game changers uh in terms of the whole genre but significant. And I think that there might be a lot of stuff kind of behind closed doors that are already... ready to give some of these titles a run for their money. Maybe not giant evolutionary steps, but...
This could be very interesting back at half the decade. I'm going to write this down. This would be a fun thing. What do we think the genre is going to look like in five years? Hmm. Justin inspired. Because. Because it's already hard enough to predict a single year now. It's really hard. I predicted classic MapleStory, right? Nope, that's not on my video chart. Same with Defiance. Absolutely nobody saw Defiance Revival 2025 happening. Zero. Zero people saw that coming.
Four months into this, I think we could actually create a bingo chart of the weird stuff that's happened this year. All right. Well, you guys keep the weirdness going there in the comments. And we really want to thank you for listening to the Massively OP podcast today. Follow us on social media. Send us in some more podcast emails, some topics. questions we'll put them into the queue and as time permits we will get to them and talk about the things you want to talk about
I get very excited about because it's not send us more controversial ones. That was, that was intense and fun. I really liked it. All right. I'm just banishing the first. Three thoughts that just came to my mind. Oh, no. Check out our Patreon program if you'd like to. Support us financially here at MassivelyOP. We are an indie MMO news journalist site. We have been for the last 10 years. Yes, 10 years you heard us, right?
For over 10 years now that we've been operating and we've been doing it largely with your help. So thank you very much. And thanks to all our patrons for continuing to. To lift us up and say, look at this shining beacon on a hill of MMO journalism. All right. Now that I've totally, you know. engage in hubris. I'm going to back away and just say have a great week. Later, everybody.