Hey guys, welcome back to the Massively OP Podcast, episode 514-17, the podcast that dares to ask you, how do you pick between all of your alts to play a character in an MMO? Is that an impossible task because I am feeling it lately? I think it depends on the MMO and what they can do and where they are in content and what your goals are. It's too many variables. I can juggle multiple MMOs. I can't.
juggle multiple mmos and multiple characters at the same time like i need to just have one character per game and stop doing looking over the fence at the grass on the other side and going oh but that all does this and this all does that and That's inefficient, though, Justin, because you've got to work the rest at XP. You know what I mean? You've got to cycle through. No, I'm not worried about XP. I'm worried about finishing their journey in this century, maybe. Oh, wow, that sounds so...
So, oity-toity, I don't even know where to begin. Finishing their journey, I haven't even managed to get a single outro character to cap. I am not very good at finishing. I'm in fear sometimes of finishing, Justin. That's the hard part. There's always alts. There's always other things to do. You can always backtrack and do all the stuff you bypassed. Have you done all the bingo boff and stuff? Have you done that whole quest line? I don't think I actually...
See, I remember seeing some of it, but I'm not sure I've done all of it. I remember doing some of it in Yondershare, right? Because he shows up and you're like dealing with the house and all of that. That's a different one. That's a different one? Okay, so then I haven't done like whatever it is. They've added on. See, there's always so much stuff. 54 quest line that they did and they rolled out one per week over the course of a year. It was awesome.
That's so worth doing. There's so many quests in LOTRO. There really are. It's just really insane how much content that game. This is back in the time when they needed to put stuff on the bullet points and 300 new quests, 400 new quests. They still do it. That's still a lot though. When you actually drill it down to go do it that's gonna take you a while even when you're doing like a clump at a time right you're just it's still yeah it takes it takes a while
I would know I'm trying to complete, like, fully complete zones, and you keep finding, like, out-of-the-way quests you've never seen before, and you're like, what? Dang it, I thought I was done. Yes. Oh well, first world MMO problems. We've got many of them, probably you guys have some more. I'm Justin, with me is Bree, and we've got stuff to talk about this hour. We've got MMOs we need to dive into to explore the breadth and the width of these virtual worlds.
Before we get into all that of course what we've been playing in MMOs ourselves And you said you got a few things under your belt this weekend. I played a teeny tiny bit. Last week was crazy for me because I knew we were going to be cleaning. We were doing like our deep clean of the whole house.
do you guys do spring cleaning? Because we do a, oh my God, guests are coming and cleaning, which is sort of like spring cleaning. It's really dependent if we have guests coming and then we're like, oh, we got to like, yeah. And we also got new rugs, so we didn't just clean. We, like, turned over the entire, like, two different rooms. Like, we really needed it. And one of these rugs was 10 years old, and it's had, like, 10 years of children.
destroying it and so you have to move everything from one room into the other room to put down the rug so you can move everything back and then reverse the pro it took us two evenings basically to do that and i didn't get a lot of time to play i and then we actually had the guests come my parents i for those of you who don't keep track of my life and i hope that's all of you my my parents are full-time revered so
when they come they're usually here for a couple of months and we will probably see them like every week while they're here which cuts down on my you know screwing around time but also you know We're not getting any younger here and I want to see my parents while I can because I don't see them the rest of the year because they're off gallivanting, right?
And doing fun things, not here. So they are in town for the next couple months, so I'm probably going to have a little less time than usual. But once they left this weekend, I got a little time in Lothro, but mostly I've been doing auction stuff. I'm back to my old habits. I always make dyes and sell them. That is one of my favorite ways to make money in the game because it's so easy. It doesn't take me a whole lot of trouble and I've already got huge chunks of supplies for this stuff.
so i just crank them out and then i just flood the the auction hall you know for the weekend and i make so much money just doing nothing i like to farm and make money too but the farming takes a lot more effort a lot more effort and it's way less lucrative even with all the time it still doesn't bring in as much as like say a single thing of dye so if you see dyes on the auction hall that's my bank mule um The other thing I did was I played a little bit of The Sims 4. I played at The Sims.
The Sims like a lot of games for me is mostly modding because every time I go to play it there's been a patch and I now have to like fix all my freaking mods so that is what i spent a chunk of my weekend doing and they had a big sale i wanted to mention this i don't know why i always do this but if you're listening to this on may 5th i think they still have a sale going and they had some of their more recent expansions everything but the last one pretty cheap
I actually got the one like two expansions ago for 20 bucks. The Love Struck, you know, the Woohoo expansion, which is very embarrassing, but okay, I bought it. And I think Night, not Night in Death, what is it called? Life in Death. It was the one right before the businesses and hobbies one. I don't have businesses and hobbies. That did not go on sale. I do not buy them if they're not half off.
But that one I didn't buy. And then the other one was like 40%. Anyway, if you are trying to catch up on your expansions, this was a good time to do it. I actually let my daughter buy the vampires one. So she played vampires when she wasn't busy this weekend. And you were taking your virtual dolls and mashing their heads together and going, kiss, kiss. I haven't even gotten to do it yet. That's the trouble.
I haven't really finished the modding. I get so frustrated with the patches in The Sims 4. Oh, God, what year is it? Sims 4. Ugh. Anyway, I should have counted out how many that I actually have. Wow, they have to have over 100 packs now. It's absolutely bonkers. I counted how many of the mini kits, the $5 kits, I don't have, and it's 37 kits. That's how many I don't have.
You know what I'm saying? They would appreciate it if you bought all of them. I'm sure they would. I will not be doing this. But still, that's just the little $5 kits. It doesn't even count the big kits.
it's absolutely bonkers i'm i don't even know whether i'm mad about it like maybe we could talk about that sometime as relates to mmos like with all of this extra content all of these extra bibles 10-year thing that they've got going on it drags on and on forever and yet People are complaining like it's being milked, but also we're getting all of this content.
Why are we complaining? You know what I mean? I'd rather the game be supported. How many games outside of MMOs are being supported after 10 years? It just doesn't happen. I don't know why I'm complaining. 37. I think we need to have a moment of silence by the way. Oh, what happened? I just read Skype officially shut down. Oh, RIP Skype. Come on, we did some old podcasts on Skype back in the day. We did, oh god.
I forgot that was closing. I don't even think it's on my PC anymore. Like, we just got a new... I got upgraded to Windows 11. I'm not sure it came with Windows 11. I'm going back to Windows 7. Forget this. Oh, nope. Just that iFreeze Skype recorder, which I swear I must have had literally for a podcast sometime. I don't have Skype. There you go. Well, you added to the sunset list. What did you play this weekend, Jessica?
Yeah, a little bit of everything. Actually, I started something. I'm not sure how long I'm going to carry through with it, but I just wanted a bit of a change of pace, so I told myself at least in the month of May, Saturday, I'm stepping away from all my normal games, and I want to just... take a siesta day and just do other games or other things. And so I actually played an RPG that was on my backlog called Dread Delusion.
It was kind of a very weird fantasy RPG that looks like it's from 1999. It looks like old school, somewhere between Daggerfall and Morrowind, first person perspective. but very odd. That's a big jump. It is, but it's deliberately designed, like it just launched last year. And so it, um,
It's gotten some really good reviews, and I had a lot of fun. It's different. It's really different to wrap your head around thematically, but the world building is incredible. It's really kind of nice to get to a non... like Tolkien-esque fantasy world something that's very just
the flavor is very different. Other than that, Lotro, yeah, I'm having this main character syndrome in all my games because I have kind of a raft of very strong characters that I have attachments to in each one and I don't know what to spend my pittance of time on playing um so in lotro mostly been i've been playing a bit of the new content that just came out in the last patch the high level quest but mostly just putting working on a
hello be lore master for now um eso having a lot of fun going still going through the gold road expansion and One thing I noted is that those, you know, the Delves, these kind of like little pocket dungeons that they populate. The Delves in Westworld do not mess around. They are way bigger than I'm normally used to. And I got in one, and I'm like, dang, this thing is, like, amazing. And it was also, you know, it's okay because they're really pretty and I don't really begrudge that, but.
It's not the old... loop where the old school design at ESO was always a loop where you just go around right to left or left to right clockwise and you end up on some cliff and then you jump off and you're back at the starting point. That's kind of the old, now they're really getting a little too creative with a little level design. Alright, reel it in, ESO. We're trying to be lazy here. Yeah, it's okay. It's a good story. There's a really interesting story about
tracking down this guy's dowry that somebody stole, and it turned out it was his fiancee who stole it and did not want to marry this guy, so it just kind of took his money and ran. Wow. She ended up setting him up with her sister. She's like, yeah, you want to date somebody? Date her. Didn't like her sister very much, did she? I guess not. I don't know. She was out of the house.
Yeah, and then doing a little bit of WoW stuff, WoW Classic, going through Swamp of Sorrows. That's pretty. I haven't been in that swamp in a long time, so it's kind of weird to... To be directed there. I don't really remember that. I remember the name. I'm not even sure. It's like right south of Booty Bay. Yeah. If you keep going, you know, there's Theramore and stuff there. Seeing like the old school Jaina model.
That was a bit of it. They feature her very heavily in the expansions these days. It's all updated models and you're like, oh, that's adorable. That's how you used to look. Wait, they didn't update the old ones. I didn't know that. Wow, this is classic. Oh, oh, okay, I see. That makes sense. No, that's pretty funny. And so...
So yeah, and then over a while they had the new trading post, so I kind of went nuts this month because it's all critters and got a little fox outfit. So it's stupidly adorable. I look like Mario from Super Mario 3 with his little... raccoon suit going around and it's a me sip yeah so he's allowed to do that he's Italian don't don't write our lawyers it's fine Totally. Everybody should do it. It's fine.
So, yeah, there's just little bits here and there, but nothing, no marathon sessions or anything. Well, maybe this week. This week will open up for me. I will have some marathon sessions this week. I'm so, I need it. I need it. Last week was hard. Don't want to do that again. Yeah, especially, you know, that's one of the things we don't talk about a lot is, you know, MMOs can be such a great stress reliever. Oh, totally. Dude do whatever you find.
the most stress relieving or of course you can just go the opposite route and just add on to your stress by doing highly stressful content which you know you may want to do so That's fine, too. All right, let's get into the news. We've got a little bit to talk about this week We're gonna start off with talking about an expansion coming up for EVE Online You know, I don't know how many are they still like two a year with this? I think they...
It felt like they were on two a year for a while, then they throttled back, and then they kind of came back. Yeah, that's CCP for you. All right, well, at least the first one of this year will be Legion, and we knew Legion's coming up. But over there at FanFest, we got Brendan on the ground, of course. I think he just kind of lives there in the building all year and waits for the next FanFest to roll around.
No, CCP asked for him by name, and they're like, yeah, we want to bring Brendan over. I'm like, well, what do you need me for anyway? It's fine. Um, even longer than any game we've been, like, we have a person writing for on the stage. I think he is the eldest person on staff. Like, not oldest, but he's been on staff longer than anybody else writing.
Yeah, I don't think he started on Eve, though. He took over Eve from somebody else, which is even more wild when you think about it, actually. But before we started there, I believe. I don't think I ever met that person. I don't even remember his name. Yeah, he's been around forever. So much you've covered. Yes. It's got to have been 17 years.
So Legion's coming out right at the end of the month, May 27th. He's still got a few weeks here. But we've got some previews of it. He's writing up a bunch of stuff for us. And you might want to pay attention, especially if you're...
a newbie or somebody who might be thinking of checking out Eve online in 2025 because they're adding something called freelance jobs. Kind of a new... A new system allows corporations, these guilds, to be able to create work orders and stuff for freelancers who are not part of corporations, maybe. a little nervous about it because you've heard stories or you don't want to get absorbed or you just want to
live out your own little privateer fantasy, but you can still be involved in that. And they can kind of use these as maybe a backdoor recruiting tool and run enough missions for us.
And you might want to stick around with us for a while. Yeah, because they added this mission thing originally for Inside of Corpse last year, right? Or I think it was last year. I mean, it was the year before that. But they've been updating it and adding more to it and adding more to it. So this, like you said, this is...
This is a way to expand it outside of corps, like specifically to the kinds of people you might want to recruit without actually entrusting them to, you know, the bank vault. Because that was actually one of the things Brendan says in his piece. It's just like, that's always the hard part of recruiting.
The hurdle that people can't get over, they're like, I don't know when I can start trusting people because this game is full of scammers. I don't mean like gold farmer scammers. I mean like people who are literally spies for rival corporations.
whole tier of gameplay in this this world and it's not going to go away just because we don't like it so that means corporations just take forever to trust people and that that just turns newbies off like they're not gonna go for that they're like look i'm not here to get hazed for your weird fraternity okay online people i just want to shoot stuff in space and can we can we move past that so here is a good way to move past that, for a while anyway. I'm sure people will find a way.
to get their spies in on the freeway system too don't worry but should they do like a crossover with among us That seems like the kind of thing CCP would go for. I don't know about Innersloth. I was going to say they're slightly more selective. I don't know. Probably not the same crowd exactly. I don't know. Yeah, exactly.
So we just want to point you toward all this coverage we've got from FanFest and Legion. He has more coming. I haven't read yet. I'm just looking. He's got one on Evangard coming that isn't done. He's got a hands-on with Frontier. which is Vanguard is the... FPS, the latest in a long line of FPSs. We hope this one won't die. And Frontier is the blockchain game. So he's got more coming on all this stuff, and we'll probably talk about it next week. I'm sure it'll be in by then.
Stay tuned. Or just follow his stuff. We're tagging everything with Eve Evolved, because that's the name of his Eve column and has been for 800 years, so you can find it there. It's exciting. I'm actually kind of glad Eve is here. Still churning forward, right? Sure. Absolutely. Well, one thing that we weren't sure if it was moving forward or not, but now we have a bit of a better idea about it, is Camelot Unchained.
and that kind of went really quiet for a while, and there were some concerns over it.
And then now, over the last week, we got some official, not just official word, but we got to actually see a bit of it. So what's going on with Camelot Unchained? Yeah, this is really complicated. I almost don't want to... go into the whole backstory, but yes, like Justin said, this game has basically been in beta for years and years and years and pretty much went dark last year as in like even the testers the hardcore internal you know player testers were not able to play it
they basically said um what are they calling themselves unchained games is what they're called now basically said they wanted to pull everything back in house and they were going to do some do-overs and when it was actually good enough to show then they would come out and there was this implication that they would be showing it in the first part of 2025 which is what we're now getting we're finally getting a glimpse at what the current game looks like um
Like I said, where do you even begin? The video... Have you seen the video? I should ask Justin whether he's seen the video. No, because I went to the post and it was like the Twitch stream was already done. Yeah, if you scroll way down to the bottom... Oh, we do have it. Yeah, okay. The reason it's in there is because Marc Jacobs came on the stream, and I didn't know entirely what to expect from the stream.
I was actually prepared. I cleared like two hours of time to watch this stream and I was like ready to take notes and I was expecting we were going to get like detailed.
and we didn't the stream ended up being like 15 minutes long and it was just basically Mark Jacobs he came out and he was like you know I apologize for you know the downtime but here's what happened you know you guys remember they had layoffs At the beginning of the year when they lost something like 40% of the team, a lot of them were working on Final Stand Ragnarok, which I believe at this point is no longer getting updates.
They kind of just went quiet and they haven't been doing anything to it since then. So I think that's what happened to that team. But I think also there were some people affected from Camelot untrained. They definitely had to scale. the team back a little bit um so that they weren't burning quite so much money that was my impression on what was happening there and um basically the remaining team has been
just basically trying to make Camelot Unchained happen. And I don't think that the exact original vision is what we're getting. It sounded, from what Jacobs made it sound like, is that they have scaled some things back to actually focus in on the RVR that people want to the type of gameplay people wanted and not necessarily get caught up in this spiraling feature creep.
that I think maybe had happened over the years as people were coming up with more and more cool ideas to put in, but they're just not going to have time to do that. If you guys remember originally last year when they got all that fresh investment, they were saying, yeah, we're going to launch. um that was last spring so 2024 in spring they said yeah our goal is to
have a playable slice out in 2024 so you guys can see it that did not happen and then they were planning on launching by the end of 2025. now i'm saying launching in quotes so like maybe an early access kind of thing, but a playable, functional, I think he even used the word commercial version of the game that was buyable and playable and that people would actually like. I don't know whether that's happening. Jacobs didn't say whether that's happening.
in like he didn't give any dates there are no dates we don't know exactly when the test will open back up although he said it is going to open back up so if you backed it at some point you are going to be able to get in there but we don't know what the timeline for any of this is going to look like um the reason i asked you if you actually watched the video that was the other thing the other thing he did during the stream was after he explained what was going on he dropped this video
And that was kind of when all hell broke loose. And I wanted you to see it. Maybe you can tab through it. It's not like there's talking. It's mostly visuals and sound, right? Actually, I'm not even sure if there's sound. Did I listen with... I don't know if there was. I think there was new music. People are really upset about the video because I don't think there was
Like, because no expectations for what we were getting were set, people's expectations were, like, crazy high. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, we hadn't heard anything, seen anything. I had no idea. So, like, I didn't have huge expectations. I've mostly been nerves about this game for a while. I want to see it done.
Camelot actually happen. I want to see N. Jane vindicated. I want to see Marc Jacobs vindicated and not be a persona non grata in our comments. You know what I mean? I want to see good things happening here and i want to see everybody get the game they paid for fine so i didn't have huge expectations i just figured this would be your current showcase and if i watch the video without reading what everybody else is saying
It doesn't look that bad to me. It actually, the graphics look great. Honestly, for what I expected out of an indie MMORPG that is focused on PvP in 2025, that's pretty much what I expect to see. I don't think it looks like worse than... ashes of creation. You know what I mean? I feel like it's okay with that.
About what I'm looking for, I was not expecting GTA 6. You know what I'm saying? I think some people were like, well, I waited 12 years. It better look like GTA 6 or I'm out. I think some people are having really crazy high expectations for what it would look like.
um but that's that's what we're really getting though we're really only getting like a look at what sieges look like a look at what some spell effects look like you know some of the animations actually it looks a lot like final stand ragnarok
should not be a surprise because that's what they always said was going to happen. The stuff being put into that game was also going to be here. They were basically making a redundant system so that they weren't wasting any time. They were getting two games out of this development for one.
But if your idea of what Camelot Unchained looked like and felt like was still rooted in that, you know, mid-aught, well not mid-aughts, mid-teens timeline, then this was probably a huge shock to the system, especially since they made it sound like they're scaling back some of the content. But they didn't exactly say what. In fact, we had to go into the Discord to even find out whether crafting is still in the game. It is. It's not in the game right now, but it is still going to happen.
you know what i mean the rvr and the crafting that was the heart of this game originally and i saw in our comments people have no idea what to expect anymore people are like well where are the dungeons where are the mobs and i'm like This game doesn't have dungeons or mo- like it's not supposed to. That was never in the design doc. So, like, people do not really have any idea what to expect out of it anymore. People don't remember. So there's, you know, the internet riots. It's happening.
if you go into the discord if you go into our comments if you go to reddit people are just oh my gosh they're just on fire about it they're like guys look terrible this isn't what i paid for i don't want this There are some people who are excited. They were like, well, this is like Dark Age of Camelot 2, which is all I really wanted, so let's go, right? But other people just, they wanted something to rival.
crowfall or ashes of creation or something and they're not getting that or at least they don't think they're getting that i i don't think the video looks as bad as people are making it sound i think people are just still casting about for like trying to understand what's happening and when and we still don't have complete answers on that so i don't know i mean when i'm watching this video too and i i kind of see some of their points here it really just kind of look like
Dark Age of Camelot and not even Dark Age of Camelot 2. It looks a lot better than Dark Age of Camelot. Do you think? I played Dark Age of Camelot for a year. It looks a lot better. Especially the characters look a thousand times better. But I also see, I turned it back on to look again. This really does look like the animations really do remind me of when I played Final Stand Ragnarok.
The characters are bouncing around and zinging, and it has kind of a loosey-goosey feel to it, which is exactly what I felt when I was playing that game. And I don't necessarily think it's a terrible idea. And the reason I say that is because this is not a PvE MMORPG. You know what I'm saying? This is an RVR game. So they are really... Super hyper focused on making a game that actually functions for PvP because targets of Camelot
Did not function. Like, it was a mess. You know what I mean? It was a laggy nightmare. You get, like, hundreds of people on the screen doing RVR, and you would lag out, you would crash at games. So was Warhammer Online. Yeah, right? These things were terrible. This is... what they're trying to do. And I think I'm willing to accept a certain amount of like graphical and quality lossiness.
in exchange for nobody lags out. Everybody fights. This is a really... You know what I mean? This is what it's supposed to be about. Yeah, the functionality of the gameplay is really solid, and there's very little latency of that. It's just... Again, I can kind of see why people are very nervous and um maybe even upset over this it's just it's been in production for a very long very long time at this point so
A lot of the people who were very diehard fans for a while, they've fallen off. Oh, totally. People were already primed to be pissed off. I don't think there was anything he could have shown. Other than a complete, you know, gameplay pass through and a new name and everybody gets a pony and here it's coming out tomorrow. Like nothing he could have announced.
It's not bad what he's shown. It's just it is underwhelming after such a long quiet streak and after all the very disturbing news over the past year or two and so i i guess the next steps are pretty important for you know what's going to happen like if if we're now going to go into another six months where we hear nothing
And then this is going to be a very sporadic, you know, I hate to invoke, but Chronicles of Valyria, like, hey, we're still alive and doing the project. I'm not saying this is on the same level. I'm just that the amount of communication just once in a blue moon. If this is truly coming back, Jacobs and his team are really going to bring this to the finish line, then...
It feels like they're almost having to start all over again to build up the trust and build up the hype and build up the community. And that's going to require a lot more communication and more than just one 15-minute video. Yes. I think that might have been a mistake, and I didn't know exactly what we were getting either. So I was expecting, like I said, a whole rundown with details. I don't know. Did I really expect Marc Jacobs to read us the design doc?
I mean, kind of a little bit, you know what I mean? I wouldn't have been sad to get like a complete, here's what's making this new cut, here's the things we've deleted. It might not even be things we care about. Or it might be like, you know, here's some of the classes. We've trimmed them down and we've pushed, you know, to get this out the door. I think...
I think sometimes people really just needed to know and see that. And I don't think it helped that the comments, they might not have even done that on purpose, but the comments in Discord, not Discord, on Twitch were disabled. So people couldn't fire off questions. They couldn't react there. So people took it elsewhere. You know what I mean? That fiery response. I don't know. I still feel kind of confused. I definitely think that it's
It's not a perfect game right now, but I don't think anybody thought it was going to be. But also, I think people overreacted a little bit. But also, I understand why they overreacted, so I'm not really blaming them. I really think we need a lot more information. I want to know what the new timeline looks like. Is it really coming this year or has there been another delay?
Yeah, I want to know everything. Like you said, I don't think this is like Illyria levels. I know some people are like, it's a scam. It's not. Come on, Illyria has one guy working on it, maybe. You know, they have dozens of developers still working on this and investor money. They're going to produce something. It's probably going to come out. I don't think the investors are going to let it not come out. I just, I still don't know what's going to happen.
Because we have seen something similar to this. capsized in the last couple years. I'm talking about Crowfall specifically. Crowfall looked gorgeous. It played okay. The systems were interesting. The devs were passionate. And it still didn't bring in the people, the bodies. They weren't there. Even, you know, a Kickstarter game even brought in all those people. Yeah.
That's pretty concerning. That's the only thing I'm worried about right now. Now, Pantheon brought in a bunch of people. Pantheon is a totally different game. It is an EverQuest Vanguard-style PvE grinder, right? totally different from this. They're not even in the same genre. That's how far apart they are. So, I don't know. All MMOs need a critical mass, but PvP MMOs need a very specific critical mass to work.
Yeah, and it's not even a gank box. It's an RVR box. You know what I mean? It's so they need an RVR box. And I know Ken Loving Chase has always been saying there's going to be a smaller crowd, and that's understandable. but it still has to be more than 150 people or some of those micro MMOs you see on Steam. Sometimes you can't survive on that. Project Gorgon can almost get away with that. Almost. But an RVR game? No way.
they got to do better than that so that's another thing i keep thinking of and the reason that they put so much into fsr although it didn't actually succeed. That was clearly one of their goals was to try to elevate their you know their base try to bring in more people to their studio into their their, you know, orbit around their games so that they could market it to more than just us. Just old school people who remember Dark Age of Game a lot. They need a bigger base than that.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see them continuing to focus on that. I mean, you could almost pull in like a battle royale or MOBA type of crowd on this if they market it right. have no idea if that's what I'm literally just talking off off my off the cuff here right but that's kind of where I feel like they should do this at this point they should be trying to pull in outside player bases not just MMORPG players for so many reasons. I feel like they need that.
I don't know what's going to happen. I think y'all should watch the video. Go in with an open mind. for an RVR game and don't make the mistake some of our commenters made going where's the dungeons because that's just that's not this game that's something else and I think maybe I don't know. I'm going to stop talking because I put a period at the end of your sentence. You said some really good stuff. But yeah, I agree. I agree.
Okay. All right. Well, let's move on to World of Warcraft for a little bit here. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're not. I know we talked about the drama of the previous patch as they're continuing to sort out 11.1.5. The next team has already leaped ahead and they're furiously testing and working on 11.1.7.
At this point, I've always felt like this. Anytime you end up with more than one decimal point in an MMO in your numbering scheme for patches, you just need to come up with a new way to number or name them. This is fair. Yeah, especially because there is an actual title for this, which is kind of blowing my mind. Back in the day, whenever they did these smaller patches, they never gave them names. And now they're kind of like...
elevating them. So this is Legacy of Aerithor, and they actually put a big post, a couple of posts out about this, and even a dev stream. about this next patch, probably coming out sometime this summer, maybe June, July at this point. But it's kind of like the last patch where there's just a lot of everything. There's some new campaign story quest going to take us back to Arathi Highlands. Why not? Let's go back to some of those old zones. And I'm not being facetious here. No!
Use them. Give us a reason to go back. You've got this giant world and we've just bypassed all of it because you built a bypass ramp. and we just scoot around all of the content to get to the latest expansion. Let's go back. Let's reuse some of that stuff. Totally. They're bringing back the Turbulent Timeways event, which, if you remember, is an amazing way to level up some new characters.
And they have a different like expansion every week. So they're going to be bringing that back for like six weeks. But probably most notable and what has everybody talking here is that there's some severe quality of life improvements for the user interface. In fact, we were talking before the show about how... Blizzard for as long as I can remember with World of Warcraft. I've always been watching the modding, the community modding.
seen very closely to see what's super successful and then goes yoink and puts it in their game which is not a bad thing i mean back in the waters i guess do you remember back in like vanilla they had like the guys who would create um I would show you where all the quests locations were so you could just open up your map and you would get a blob or something and that's where you needed to go and do the thing and by burning crusade blizzard's like yeah that's a great idea
Don't mind if we take that from you because you were charging for it and we wanted to answer. Oh, that's right, yeah. I don't think they should be doing that. That's a little... Anyway, so what's coming out in Legacy of Aerithor is pretty interesting because they're calling it like a combat assistant. In fact, if you watch the dev stream, they were talking about wanting to end combat mods
in this game forever. And they don't mean like they're going to forbid them. They mean like they want to make them unnecessary because the default UI has everything you want. So combat assistant looks like it's really interesting for those of us, and I'm pointing at myself. You can't see it. I am. Love thumbs.
those of us who are just not the best at figuring out rotations especially when you're in the middle of like end game content raids mythic plus dungeon stuff like that combat assistant will basically give you a key and kind of kind of suggest the next skills in a rotation. So to help you get used to a certain rotation, like what you should be casting now based on what you've already done and what's happening.
and kind of giving people who are new to raids kind of a leg up on optimizing their combat experience because you can get away with very sloppy combat on you know like landscape or like Lola you know like solo delves, regular dungeons, whatever, you can do almost anything and blow through that content. But when you're starting to push into the tougher stuff, you need to tighten it up and to become a little bit more, you know, to get good.
So this is going to be a part of the UI that's going to basically be your tutor and help you to get good. And then people kind of hit the... They kind of lost their minds over it. No, actually, I'd say it's a fight. I wouldn't say that everybody is mad about it. A lot of people are like, eh, that's okay, that's nice, that's great for my kid who plays, or it's great for me when I'm...
you know just chilling and i don't want to stress about this or i'm playing any waltz or yeah i'm doing something and i just want to learn it before i turn it back off so that i can or you haven't played a character in a long long time returning players totally like i i feel like there's so many good reasons to use this and the only
reason people have is that it's too easy you're dumbing things down well if you're feeling it dumbed down turn it off you know what i mean it's not mandatory nobody's making you if you want to sit there with your calculator and your spreadsheet and figure out exactly the best rotation for your class from scratch For every alt you ever played, do it. Nobody's stopping you. You don't have to do that.
But this should make regular players a little bit better. I feel like this is a net positive. You know what I mean? Yeah, because even veterans would want better players on their... Yes, exactly. That would help everybody. Or you can just...
If you figure it out yourself and then you want to test it against the math, then you turn the thing on and say, well, I was going to do that anyway. I nailed it. I got this right. That should give you a nice ego boost that even the devs agree. Even the math agrees that you're doing it right. This doesn't really bother me at all. Fine. I actually kind of like it. I wouldn't mind having this in Lotro. Because I do play a lot of alts, and they're freaking...
Classes are constant, specs are constantly changing. And every time I come back to the game, it's like, oh, what did they do to my lore master? I don't even recognize my bar anymore. My pets, where are they? These older MMOs that have like, you know, 20, 30 skills.
and then maybe that's part of the the snobbery too people are like thinking of things like guild wars 2 where the builds are not nearly as complicated right you know what i mean they're they're bound to weapons and you're only you've only got what is it ten eight ten skills on your bar you know what i mean it's not Unless you're playing an engineer or something or whatever, it's not
It's not that complicated. Well, maybe it's the way people are, like, gatekeeping. Like, they want to keep their elitist, like, you know, I'm really good. I put the time in to... figure out my rotation in my class, and I don't want these other people to have training wheels. I think that's part of it. They should learn it the hard way. I think, yeah, we need to be reaching out as a community and also the developers and helping people.
because one of my biggest frustration points in MMOs is whenever I get to content that's just not explained well it's not documented well you have to go to the wiki you have to go to videos and even then just like oh crud i'm gonna mess up i'm gonna do so bad and you know social anxiety kicks in or whatever and you just back away and go to back to more familiar lands i mean
yes you can throw yourself into the deep end of the pool and splash around and try to hopefully you won't drown but sometimes we need a little help and it's not a it's not a bad thing to have it so
Yeah, I'm very interested to look at the videos of this. I didn't get a chance to, I don't know if they actually showed it in action, but I would really like to see it. I'm not sure, because people keep talking about it as if it's like an I win button, you know what I mean? And I don't think it's going to be like that. Just for mages.
you know what I mean I think people just because there's there have been mods like this before where you would just push the button over and over again and it would change the button the macros would change the button to the next thing you should hit So you literally could just keep doing that. I don't even know if that's possible anymore. I hope not. That's maybe a little too far, but even then I wouldn't be sad. Like, my kid could use that. You know, it's fine.
People are so wild about this stuff. We need this scaffolding, okay? It's scaffolding and it's fine that we're getting. Yes, what were you going to say? We went to Disneyland a couple weeks ago in California and did the Smuggler's Run, you know, where you're flying and running and talking.
which is apparently really fun if you're the pilots. I never was. I was always the gunner because my kids are like daddy we want to be the pilot and you're like oh okay i guess i'll get the crap job so I'm sitting back here and you're thinking Gunner's really fun no it's just like a single button and it's like it's not even on it's not flat on the surface before you it's on the wall so you have to
put your hands sideways and then just start slamming this button which is not that you know it's like it's a pretty durable hard to push button And, man, my finger fatigue. I was like, dude, I just want to. Just give me a mouse and let me go click, click, click, click, click, click. Oh my god, I knew that was coming. Yeah. So, Blizzard, we're going to have a whole class action lawsuit against Blizzard for making us push the button. Push the button.
Carpal tunnel in our pointer finger. Every time you do, somebody dies. But you get a million dollars, so it's all good. Oh my goodness. yeah the other thing before we before we do the other thing i wanted to mention uh that elliot did a long form piece on this if you want more on or were you going to say more about wow Nope, go ahead. Oh, you were going to move on. Okay, so before we move on...
He did a long form piece on all of this WoW stuff. He talked a little bit about the I win button or whatever you want to call it, but he also talked about some of the raid related stuff that they're taking out. and trying to some of it will be integrated some it will just not be functional anymore and I wanted to point that out because I really really like the I like what Blizzard is doing here like
This is, again, me praising Blizzard and I just want to do it because it doesn't happen that often. But this is smart. The raid game had been bloated for years and they were designing around the mod. which is nonsense. You shouldn't have to design the game and the content around the mods themselves and expect that because then the mods become required.
That is what they are clearly trying to do away with on that end of the modding situation. I think it will probably make the actual rating a little bit more interesting, I would like to say, instead of just, you know, watching... You know, your boss mod that's telling you what to do. Like, by the way, that's just the same mod.
It's telling you what to do. But in content where you're actually supposed to be challenged as opposed to just regular open world landscape content, it's fine. Who cares? No one cares what you're doing at the level. There's a longer form version of this is what I'm saying. Go check out Elliot's wow factor from last week where he talks all about both sides of this. It's wild and the comments were really good too. People really had some good debates about
about dumbing down and about scaffolding. Anyway, it's a fun conversation and I'm glad we get to have it. I'm glad Blizzard is actually tackling this instead of just letting it linger. Excellent. Alright, well, really quick, we want to mention kind of a win for the little guy here. Amber's adrift. This throwback MMO, PVE MMO, that's been kind of clicking along for a couple years here. and has been the subject of no end of drama, not necessarily on this part, but...
losing its payment provider and suddenly not having a way to get money for the game it was providing. Pretty much got swindled. Lost months of money because that company went under and didn't tell anybody. Yep. And fortunately now has kind of a bit of a lifeline and it's on steam. you can go check it out just launched on steam and that's a really really good thing for a game like this so some games it's it's just kind of a cherry on the top of the cake but for games like this that's
That could be the difference between life and death and keeping this game afloat. I wanted to see how they were doing on Steam Charts. Bree is furiously checking on Steam Charts right now. Oh, it's not very good on Steam Charts. Now that could be because some people are just not playing on Steam yet. so like they've got they've got a whole system set up so you can like convert your account basically into a steam account and they're going to start subs back up
So if you had an account, even a free-to-play account before, you're going to need to convert it into a Steam account. I don't think they'll still work anymore after a couple of weeks. So you have time. And I wouldn't panic about a low peak here. But we always knew this was a small game. This was, you know, a teeny-weeny game. I just hope this helps them perk back up. They deserve it. They didn't deserve the crap that went down last year. It was totally not their fault.
So if you're the type of person who always waits for games to come out on Steam before you play them, even MMOs, this is another one you could possibly add to your list. doesn't yeah it's pretty sad not not everybody plays it but some of the people who do are just fanatical about embers adrift and so it has a very uh very vibrant, small community that would probably be welcoming of anybody coming in and willing to give you a hand and showing you the rope.
So we're going to be doing something here we haven't done in a while. We call it Daily Grind Blitz. And that is certainly not one we want to fill in some time here on the podcast. I was going to say, Justin, we made it to 47 minutes before we actually got to the thing we were going to do today. Yeah. It's going to be a really short one. We actually turned out to have a lot more news and a lot more to say about it than I thought we were going to have, so good.
You don't see me softly banging my head against the dust, do you? I know. Sorry, Justin. No, it's all good. All right, so Daily Grain Blitz, how this works is what we do is every day, of course, at 8 o'clock, Eastern we put out a new daily grind that's our discussion topic for the day that we invite our community kind of just to kick off the day of news
with a discussion about MMOs and we're constantly having to come up with new or, you know, occasionally repeated questions to ask and some of them foster a lot of discussion, some of them a little bit. Yeah. Damn it, Bree. Every once in a while, I get a real, real fail vote, and I'm like, well. Oh, you feel bad when it's just like the single digits. Yes.
That's okay. It's certainly not something that we watch and our egos are based off of. But since we have so many of these daily grinds, one thing we like to do every now and then on the podcast is for us to pick some and lob them at our co-host. So I'm going to be picking ones that I wrote and Bree is picking ones that she and Elliot wrote. And so she's going to give some to me. I'm going to give some to her. And we're going to just answer the daily grinds that you guys also answer.
So I'll let you go first. Oh my goodness. I made a big list because I expected us to have time and we don't have time. Well, we can go as fast as we want. You're right, we'll go fast. All right. Does your MMO have a feature that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness? Or a weakness? Something that is both a strength and a weakness. Yeah, so Lotro, biggest strength and weakness is the size of the world. They have been adding to this thing like a Jenga tower.
for so long, but it's proved to be one of the hardest things to optimize because of the sheer amount of information, the database, all the things that your character plays into, all the tokens and the currency. It's awesome to explore such a big world, but also I'm sure it's a nightmare on the database side.
That's something that they've been talking about, trying to trim down and get back to more sane numbers. But it's kind of the nature of the game. They have to keep adding to it. They're never going to stop doing that as an active team. So yeah. Alright, well my first question for you is when I wrote back in April, I said, do you research your MMO character builds or do you just wing them? Oh, it depends on the game.
For Guild Wars 2, once I started researching my builds, my game, I don't suck anymore. I feel like my characters are overpowered instead of underpowered, and I'm really glad I started doing that. It also gave me totally... more in-depth understanding of how the game is put together and more appreciation, but also more criticism for ArenaNet and the way it's, you know, builds are actually a little too cookie-cutter.
I'm really glad I do that, but I don't really research that much in LOTRO. Occasionally I'll look up What virtues do I need? But most of the time it's kind of self-explanatory and I can kind of figure it out. I only do that with virtues because virtues are one of those things that you can't really reset.
So you kind of want to get them right-ish the first time because I've screwed that up so many times in the past, especially when they changed our character so dramatically that they don't even use the right um the same things as originally ground back in the day so like with lotro though i mean i'll like justin what should i play should i play red or blue and you're like whatever play red and i just you know just
get stuff. It doesn't even matter that much. It's not that hard a game. You know what I mean? So I don't stress that much about it there. But it really does depend. I don't really look stuff up in Star Wars either. In Star Wars Gods. and just wing that. Again, I feel like I know the game so well I don't really need it. I don't even need your opinion. I probably haven't.
Alright, let me pick a good one out. What do you consider a good player in an MMORPG? Like, how would you define it? How would you define being a good player? Ah, man, that could be so many things. That was one of Elliot's. That was a good question. Yeah, somebody who knows the game well. but also is not really out for themselves. They're very comfortable being in the game, but they're really...
wanting to contribute toward it. So they're very encouraging to the community. They're willing to teach. They're willing to participate and help. I'm just thinking of a lot of people in the guilds that I'm part of. And you just know them. You know them when you see their names. They're just...
They're not like, hey, look at me and look at the thing I did. They're the, hey, how can I help you with this? Or, you know, I've been around for a while, but because I know this game, I can, you know, educate you on it if you want. Like, that's not kind of pushing my knowledge on you. And obviously somebody who has an amazing fashion sense. I mean, if you're a walking fashion disaster, I'm not listening. Yeah, get out.
or somebody who has way too many weird characters in your name because you're trying to come. Okay, well, that's fair. We can't type your name without looking up an IP recognized name. I was so proud of this one, Brie. This was one of my favorite daily grinds I wrote, and it's one of the ones that got, like, the single digits. Aww.
although I'm noticing I got eight comments on that one and the day before you got one comment yeah no it gets worse like some of these have like 50 or 60 comments and then like the next day people are like no, it's a holiday, or the question just did not land for whatever reason. It didn't resonate, right? We just never know. You're just flinging out questions into the void and hoping.
So the question I came up with is I was kind of using this food metaphor of pairing and I asked, you know, which two MMOs pair well together. Which kind of accent each other, not identical, but just go well together in some way, shape, or form. I thought that was such a broad you know creative question and like eight people showed up that was uh maybe a little too vague i don't know but i'd like to ask you do you have
Any thoughts on which two MMOs would pair well together? Yeah, and I think this is the right question for me personally because I play so many games where I only play like one slice of what's in them. Like with Star Wars. I just did that interview with Star Wars Galaxy's Legend team.
on their new patch and it was like they were like yeah you're gonna do an exclusive interview all about the new jedi theme park and i'm like i don't have a jedi and i don't do theme parks are you guys sure you want me i don't i don't do that i you know what i mean they did want me but i just mean i really just craft and do house stuff and farm and stuff in that game i don't do combat
I know how to do it. I've done it in the past, but I would never consider myself an expert on that. I really just focus on crafting, and I use other games. for for getting my combat fix because i like to kill stuff too i want to kill you know video game pixels so maybe i throw in something like City of Heroes? Because I feel like it gives me a lot of flexibility for both big group content and solo content and lots of customization. And then how about something like Project Gorgon?
Where I'd put those two together, not necessarily blend them together, but play them back and forth. That's how I interpreted your question. Because Project Oregon has this very... Everything is very open world. Even the instance dungeons are not really instanced.
you're doing lots of overland questing everything feels very hand placed and you really need to talk to the NPCs you're not just zipping through as fast as you can you know with with your flight or your super jump trying to like whiz through the instances and I don't know they have like totally opposite feels And yet they both have an old school vibe that I think would appeal to a lot of people. Even though Gorgon isn't really old school. But it has an old school feel.
How about those two? That sounds good. Alright. You are now in charge of deciding what counts as a classic MMORPG. How do you decide what makes the cut? Where is the line? What does it have to have? Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok For a classic MMO? Yes, to become an officially classic MMO. Not like a throwback. I mean like literally the line between where we use classic and when we don't use that word at all.
Yeah, if I had to off the top of my head, I would just make it an age thing. I'd say once you're... Just a number. Again, I'm just going for the easiest. It's never going to be... Does Eve count? Does WoW retail count? Okay, so what you're talking about, is it like the older version growing back? Because when we started calling things like classic MMOs,
People weren't doing that. Not like whole school. They might do a legendary server or a progression server, but they weren't calling them classic servers back then, and now it's all the race. Yeah, see, that's where we trip up in language sometimes is when we're using the same adjective to describe like completely different things. So if we're looking at kind of a broad view of the industry, like from a historical standpoint, and we use the word classic.
Yeah, I would say probably anything over 15 years old. 15, okay. So even Lotro now counts as a classic MMO. Oh yeah, yeah. Anything prior to 2010, I would say, yeah, probably very easily. I think that's fair. Wait, 2010? Oh my god, it's like it came out in 20... 2008? Is that when it came out? 2007? Which game? Lotro. Yeah, that was 2007. Oh my god, my bones just turned to dust.
That's how time works. Wow. A couple of years ago, we gave Lotro Classic MMO of the Year or whatever it was, and people got really, really mad. and said it wasn't really a classic MMO. Where are you guys now? All right, I'll stop talking. You go. I mean, but again, it's not a perfect, like, you can throw down a number. It's hard, right? It's just a number.
in sometimes games like WoW where you're kind of a ship of theses seeing it yourself. Can I use that as a verb? Yeah, I think you can. Where you kind of reinvent yourself to the point where you don't look anything like you used to and you actually have to create a classic version of the game too. be the classic you know okay you know we're just getting lost in the weeds but yeah that's kind of in my head it's somewhere between
At least 10 to 15 years. 15 feels better. I think that's good. I agree with you, actually. That's pretty close. So we talk about player housing a lot. Oh, yeah. And I think we're well past asking Daily Grinds, like, which MMO needs player housing that doesn't? Because almost all of them have it at this point, which is great. Great win for us.
But where, I asked, where in the game do you wish for MMO had player housing? Like, what zone, what area would you just love to plop down a house? And make that your little virtual home do you know justin this is the one daily grind i wrote down from you i liked it so much i liked it so much i put it in your list in the list even though it wasn't a deli or a pre-question because I really liked it I don't know that I have a great answer like
I think it's, I mean, obviously it depends on the game. I would like to see more MMOs find ways to integrate the housing into the game world somehow, even if it's like EverQuest 2 style where like, or I guess even... New World and Elder Scrolls Online kind of have this same vibe where like you're walking around town and then you're at your porch now the porch belongs to a lot of people and when you click on your door you're going into your version of that house but
It's still in the town. I don't even care what the game is. I would love to have, for example, City of Heroes basis.
like just be attached to a door pick any door in the entire zone and now that's your base and you get to pretend that whole skyscraper is yours and other people could pick it too but it would feel so much more integrated than clicking on a teleporter like a portal in the middle of the zone that just takes you to whatever base you want like there's something that feels very fake and
meta that i don't like about that and i don't even really need like it to be a specific zone i just want it to be in where the people are that to me is huge it's one of the reasons i lost my marbles for star wars galaxy's legends investment apartments it's not because you know apartments are like something I'm dying to have I'm not really but like just having them be in Cloud City and like be actually able to like look down at Cloud City and see them that just
i can't even explain how cool that is i want that in every freaking game i want to be able to walk into my apartment building or my skyrise or my guild hall or whatever and not just a portal you'd be proud of us for star wars day we watched new hope and empire why did you stop there because it was eight o'clock at night and i had two sick kids oh that's right do we have to watch jedi it's so late i'm like It's my favorite one of the bunch you're going to watch now.
No, it was good. Well, I was thinking, because I know how much you love Cloud City and Empire in particular. It's the best. Although, I've got to say, I really liked Rogue One, too. I feel like Rogue One is my number two. Wow. I know. I think I like it better than A New Hope. That's really saying something. A New Hope, it kind of stands on its own. It's like its own whole thing.
It was a lot of fun. Watching it last yesterday, I'm like, yeah, it never seems to be very high in people's rankings, but it's still leaps and bounds are better than Rise of Skywalker or something like that. Yeah, I don't really watch those for fun anymore. But Rogue One I've always thought was just it was such a fascinating imperfect gem. Yes. There's so many things. That's what made it feel like a star Wars movie, right? Yeah. It was kind of a mess, just like the original.
to respect, you know, but they were kind of a mess. In a good way. One of my favorite little bits of Rogue One is when they're having the Battle of Scarif, and they're going back and forth between the different cockpits, and there's the one guy who goes down, he's one of the X-Wings, who goes down into the surface of the planet and gets strapped under the shield.
and he's got a mustache on, and he's just like grinning. He was just having the time of his life. This was awesome. And of course he dies, but he's just like, every time he goes to him, he's just like, I know everybody knows a movie, but I'm just like, you know, bristle mustache, dude. I love you, man. You're awesome.
Can I answer this too? Yeah, you should answer it too. Okay, so there's probably a lot of places, but in both real world and virtual, one of my favorite places to be is just on a lake and I give me some pine trees give me the quiet serenity of a good lake in front of me and the long lake and Dale lands in Lotro is a great place that's one of my Favorite.
screenshot opportunities just because it's so pretty. So many of the Vistas just work out really well for the camera. You can just see a very long way away. It has a completely different vibe than Evendem, which is fine. I mean, Evendem's fine. I don't have any problems with Evendem. That actually probably feels more alpine, but there's something more... I don't know inviting about the long lake that i really like and i wouldn't mind if i had a little cabin with like a million hooks in it
But that's never going to happen. I wonder. I don't see them letting us build. Wouldn't it be cool if they had little, what do they call them, stilt houses over the lake? That would be cool, but they'd never do that because that wouldn't be... Yeah, I wouldn't want one over the lake. I'd put one on the shore. They could put them in Lake Town. You could go up to the little outhouse and boom, you're inside your magical house.
Right? It's bigger on the inside. No, but seriously, they could add a couple of houses. That's what I'd want to see SSG do, is add a couple of houses to the existing world. Yeah, instead of having to go into... I always thought that was the way Anarchy Online did it back in the day and Champions Online did it and Neocron did it. Did Champions really have housing?
Champions did. Somebody sent me a screenshot once for one shot. I never knew that. I played Champions and I didn't. I know. I never knew it either. And they're like, this is me in my hot tub in my house or my apartment. And I'm like, what now? I'm going to have to investigate this. My goodness, I had no idea. Or if I did, I've forgotten. How about one more age? Okay, let me pick one. Go ahead.
Some of these are like too close. Okay, I know you'll have fun with this one. Do you appreciate brutal honesty from MMO devs? Do you want them to tell us all the bad news or do you think they should try to be more politic about it? I mean, there's a thing called oversharing. Oversharing? Yes.
You know, it's like, okay, how are you doing? And there's a line between I'm fine, I'm doing fine, and let me spill all of my life's blows on you because you dared ask me that question. Yeah, I'm fine with the answer being somewhere in the middle.
Brutal honesty? I want... truthful honestly brutal seems like it's just without any care for the recipients i i think you do need to let know your audience i think if you're talking you have a rapport and a relationship with your players so you're not trying to slam them into the ground saying it's our way or the highway deal with it this is how things are But straightforward and just tactful. I do appreciate, like, even if it's bad news for a developer to come out and say, hey, we tried Axe.
And it's just not going to work. And here's why. And we're just going to have to push it to the side and move on. And we're sorry. You know, like. okay, that's not exactly what I wanted to hear, but it's better than you being so embarrassed over a failure of a project or thinking that we're going to have backlash that you just go completely quiet on it and hope we don't know. Yeah. So, yeah, I would, yeah, I prefer honesty. That's mine. Yeah.
Okay, so a little joke we have, of course, in Daily Grinds is that if you ask A negative question. You tend to get a lot of responses because sometimes we just like to vent. And so here's your opportunity to vent, Brie. Is there an MMO expansion that you would never, ever want to play again? Yes. Rise of the Wookiees.
I think I might have even answered your daily grind. I think I might have because I might have said this same thing because I thought people would never guess in a million years. Everybody's like, oh, it's going to be the NGE year. Oh, it's going to be Cataclysm. I didn't hate Cataclysm that much. I actually kind of liked Cataclysm. It was fine. I liked Pandaria a lot. You know what I mean? Some of these are iconically bad, but I thought they were actually okay.
Maybe don't take my judgment on anything, but I personally really hated. Rage of the Wookiees because Kashyyyk as a planet is as envisioned in Star Wars Galaxies Sucks. It's all, like every, how do I explain this? I don't, I've never been in a zone like this in any other MMO. It's just terrible. Like it's five or six levels down.
And each one is like this warren, this maze, right, that you're winding through. But it all is green. It all looks the same. Occasionally there will be some mobs. Occasionally there will be like a little treehouse. And you've got to find your way down to the steps to go down one more tier.
and when you want to come out, you have to come all the way back up. You can't just teleport out, or maybe they've changed that in Legends. I don't even know. This tells you how long it's been since I bothered with going there. You can't use your... mounts or your vehicles on most of these areas or some places you can, but not everywhere.
it's so low level it's like medium level like 60s or something so there's no point in like trying to it's like super strenuous for no good reason the loot sucks Everything about it is bad and I can't even blame Legends because this went into the game during SOE's reign. They own this and it's bad.
Wasn't it the last one that happened before NGA? No. What's it called? Trials of Obi-Wan. The one on Mustafar. Mustafar is not my favorite because I hate Mustafar in general. Lava zones are not my vibe. But that zone is pretty open comparatively, and they made a special mount at one of those little stop vehicles. It works better as an endgame zone for Star Wars Galaxies.
Kashyyyk is just terrible. It needs a complete do-over. In my head, it's really weird. Star Wars Galaxies, I know it kind of was being developed and came out around the time that they were also... releasing the prequels, but in my mind, the prequels came out a long time before Star Wars Galaxies. I had the same, you know, this happened to me because we were thinking about going to see the, what, um,
The last one, Revenge of the Sith. Thank you. Revenge of the Sith in the movies, in the theaters. I know you're not too much of a Star Wars fan. I was having a brain fart. We were going to go see it, not last weekend, but the weekend before, but my kids were sick, so we didn't. But anyway, we thought about it, and we were like...
That can't be the 20th anniversary. It must be older than that. And we're looking at the calendar like, oh my god, it's only 20 years old. That came out in 2005. How the heck? It feels like it came out so much earlier than that, but it totally didn't. I don't... I don't know how that happened. But now that I think back, you know, yeah, they were like staggered with Lord of the Rings movies, right?
Yeah, Lord of the Rings was 2001 through 2003, and the prequels were 1999, 2003, and 2005, or 2002 and 2005, something like that. Were they ever three years? That can't be right. Because they put out... Oh, man. I thought they started putting out... the remastered of the original trilogy. in the late 90s. That was 97 for the special editions. They did all three of those in a row and then they launched
That was January through March 1997. Oh my gosh. I remember going to theaters. We were so stoked to see Star Wars. For the first time. Well, I saw Jedi in the theater when I was a kid, but still. I never did. I stood up as a little kid, and Luke was fighting the rancor, and I was like, Go, Luke! You can do it! Oh my god, that's adorable. Yeah, that was pretty cute.
Now I do it and people are like, shut up. You're on social media. You need to behave yourself. People clap. People clap in movies the way now that they didn't used to. I like it, honestly. People treat it like it's their real theater experience. I feel like they used to a long time ago, and then they just stopped for a while. Oh, maybe it's just that I only go to, like, those kinds of movies in the first place. The really nerdy movie stuff. Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably it.
Well, this was fun. We'll have to do the Daily Grind Blitz a little bit more often. It's been a really long time, but it's a fun thing to... answer these questions because we're often we're throwing them out to the community but yeah I guess we can answer them ourselves I rarely do sometimes I do if you if you get one yeah I like to mouth off what can I say You're lurking in my DMs for that.
All right, well, that's it for today's show. We covered a lot of territory here. And you know what? You are the better for it. Your skin is glowing. Your eyes are shining. Your hair and your teeth are stronger than ever before. And we have fortified you for another week of your life. There you go. The Massively OP podcast. Send us. We're a vitamin. Are we selling vitamins? Like, that's what we sound like. Vitamin D is what you want if you want the nails and the hair. That's the.
I saw vitamin fortified soda the other day. I'm like, no, no. That's not a thing. I think those things cancel each other out. 2025, I'm going to have to ask you to stop. That is too much. Well, you know what? You guys continue to ask us some awesome questions. You can do that through the podcast, submit a podcast question. Check out the show notes. We always have links in there. You know the spiel. You've heard it before.
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