that if you repeat his name, and success He will appear, he will appear in your He will appear in your forums. He will appear on your site. So never under any circumstances say the word Chris, Chris, Chris. How y'all doing? What's up? Because he's there. That's not where Bree thought I was going with that. That's not where I thought you were going with. Please don't send him to my podcast comments. I don't have another day to moderate.
Well, we summoned Chris, and Chris is here, and he brought along Super Sick and Bree. It's a rare... I'm not that... It's not that bad. I'm getting better. I really am. She initially logged on and she sounded so... I'm ready to go. I did just take a whole bunch of medicine, so it will be slowly kicking in, and I've got tea. I'm good to go. So by the end of the hour, super hyper. That'll be awesome. All right, well, welcome back.
to the massively op podcast episode 518 i'm justin with me is of course brie and chris and we're very happy to all be together and talking about MMOs, taking a break from writing about them, or dreaming about them or dreaming about them or... Occasionally even getting to play them. Installing them, playing them. Oh, that's something we do too, yeah. Looking at the icon on your desktop and be like, hey, yeah, I haven't double clicked on that and then playing something else. Yes.
Do you ever feel guilty? You're like, oh, I'm so sorry, I haven't played you for a while, and you talk to the icon like it can hear you, and it cares, but... You squirt it under its little chin, yeah, totally, absolutely. I do. Sometimes I feel a little guilty. I don't talk to it, but I do feel guilty about it. Sure you don't. Not playing certain games. Alright, we've got lots to cover on today's show.
There's a reason we brought Chris here. He is our horse whisperer. But before we get into all, what do the kids call Hanses? I can't I said haunts to my children and they had no idea what the hell I was talking about. I've never heard that before, the two of you. I think this might be like a... I don't even know where it came from. Like, who misspelled it that way? It's an older meme, but it checks out.
Yeah, I assume it's an old meme. My kids don't know it, though, so that gives you the age bracket. It's like older than alphas but younger than millennials, somewhere in there. I used to try to keep up on memes, you know, like would go to know your meme once a week and just read up on all the latest.
Did you really? Yeah, I really did for a while. Because I'm always curious, and I work with teens, and they're always throwing slang around, and you're just like, what the what is that but i think that they they they know it they know adults are onto onto them so the second they get whiff of that any adult knows any of their slang they're like well done with that one let's get some new one Let's go. My kids have already moved on to Skibbity Riz as an ironic slang at this point. Skibbity Riz?
Yeah, it's a whole stupid thing, but it's like old at this point, so now they use it ironically. That's like a whole different level of memeing when your 10-year-old knows how to meme ironically. I don't... like what's happening to our universe right now that sounds shibby i like it all right well let's get into the interesting part of the podcast which is of course talking about what we've been playing
I looked over today's lineup. I don't think we're gonna be talking about the old usual suspects. We're not gonna mention some galaxies far far away. We're not gonna talk about the old days of Ultima. Middle Earth might not even come up in conversation. But we're going to turn the microphone over first to Chris and ask you, hey, what have you been playing lately? So, very recently, my... Family group has really gotten into tower unite One of our member was recently introduced to the game.
And they got immediately hooked in. And so that's been like our... digital hangout space like almost every week. What is that? I don't know that one. Is that the one with golf? Does it have golf in it? That's the one with mini golf. Mini golf! But it has other stuff too. It's got a lot of other stuff. Really, really quickly. I'll try to be really quick anyway. It was like a social multiplayer space that was built in Garry's mod called Gmod Tower.
And then it got closed down on Gary's mod for the developer Pixel Tail Games to make it its own standalone game. It went to early access like nine years ago. It's basically like they call it like a multiplayer party universe. Which is just basically a social hangout spot. There are a bunch of minigames.
like mini golf or cart racing or like monkey ball style ball races and you've also got smaller quicker hitting things like arcade games and like an actual like arcade space or there is like a movie theater there's a casino there's a bowling alley there's laser tag it's just this big old game of games effectively and It's just been really, really fun, and our group just kind of comes together every other night or so.
goof around in there. Sounds like new free realms or something like that. A little bit, yeah. It's a first-person 3D free realms, and it's highly moddable. There are people... Like, they added a way for people to make their own custom mini-golf courses, but also people have made custom levels for the first-person shooter games that are in there.
There's a lot of, like, models that you can download and use for your character you can use like build your own or like customize your own default human person and there's a bunch of accessories you can earn or buy or stuff with in-game points but like You can also download all complete like
Modded character models like for a little while. I was running around as like a werewolf model from from Skyrim This got up they gotta stick to my brand But there's that, and another thing that's been feeding up a lot of my time wonderfully has been Lost Skies. I was not expecting this to scratch the itches that it has been. I'm so glad you like it. I'm so glad somebody likes this one. Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And.
I don't have any skin in that game. I wasn't interested in World Strip because I was a gank box, and I was like, nope, I don't want to put up with other people who are able to just rush in. blast my freshly made airship apart just because they can and
So the fact that they were working on a PvE version of that had my interest, and then I've been playing it for Choose My Adventure, and like, I'm so hooked into that game. I am astonished at how... how... enjoyable it really is it's just it's so well So even in early access, like it really does feel extremely well built, which I guess makes sense because this is literally built from the bones of an old video game that they started with. Right.
And there's that. And then lastly, I also took a peek into Runescape Dragonwild. I found that to be way more fun than I was expecting it to be. And it also kind of makes me wish that there would be a more modern RuneScape made. You know, even more modern than RuneScape 3, frankly. It's solid. It's a pretty good one. I'm going to have to see if I can't pick up my own copy. I'm using my husband's copy through the Steam Family thing.
So I might need to pick up my own copy and maybe kind of coerce him into playing that along with me. Has Jagex talked any numbers or...? I don't know. I don't think they have. Or if they did bring that up, because they had a stream a couple of days ago, but... Twitch ate the VOD. So they said that they're going to put out a news post and a video about it later this week or sometime this week. But I mean...
They haven't talked numbers, but they also haven't had any patches super recently, but they are still pointing out that it's something in progress. reposted their roadmap and so they're still pointing out that like this is still a thing that we're going to be working It's just been a little quiet. Steamchart says 52,000 peak 23 days ago with a 24-hour peak of 5,300. So they're down to 10%.
Of their peaks, you know what I mean? Right. Yeah, I've heard some good word of mouth. This is not the first time I've heard some people talk nicely about it. So that's why I'm interested to see if... see how it's going to trend. Jagex actually puts, you know, keeps putting stuff into it, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you got the recognizable IP and the baked in, you know, fan base, you know, you might as well leverage that.
So I think it's kind of smart, you know, using the RuneScape name. But yeah, definitely it's a different genre entirely. So some people are just going to be turned off by that. But I'd like to see more people play it. So that's good. That's good. Okay, well. Sickie. Between boxes of Kleenex and trips to the little girls room, what did you play this weekend? Yeah, that's the funny thing. Because I was sick, I pretty much had to cancel everything else I was planning to do. I had to.
Cancel everything I was planning to do so I ended up having a lot of time to sit around a game because I couldn't really get up and do much out And after my attempts to get into the Hans game kind of failed because I had such a terrible bug early on in the game and I gave up, I was like, you know, I've got other stuff to be doing. I should be playing Paleo. And I am now a Paleo fangirl, thanks to playing Paleo for like the last three days straight.
I really liked it, guys. I haven't been back in there since the original beta launch, so it's been almost two years. It's been a while. And I didn't get very far that time either, because my account was borked. I'm really tired of borky accounts. But I didn't put a lot of time into it, and I really had to start over. So I did start over. I have a new account. And the reason I wanted to get back into this is because this week they are launching...
Crap, what's it called? Elderwood. Elderwood, thank you. I could not remember. And so PR, you know, is sending us stuff and they're like, you know, if you're going to do... look at Elderwood at some point you're gonna need like help to start because you you can't go to Elderwood or you can but you can't get anything out of Elderwood until you're like a certain level and you're
so far along in the game and you finish some of the storylines are like you're gonna need some gold you're gonna need some money to actually help you level really fast and even then it's gonna take you 20 hours I was like I'm not gonna put 20 hours into this game And I was wrong. I definitely... I think I'm at 17 hours, and if I could be playing right now, I would be with the servers are down until tomorrow. So if that tells you something, I went in very skeptical, expecting to basically...
use the money that PR gave us to zip through so I'd be ready for Elderwood. Which, by the way, I can't break an embargo on that because I haven't seen it apart from the stuff that we already talked about when the devs took us on a tour a while ago. I haven't seen it personally yet. All I'm talking about here is the regular base Paleo game that exists as of, what is it, Monday on the 12th.
I ended up figuring out how to use that money. I sold it. You basically sell it for gold and turn it into inventory slots. I mean, there was hardly anything else to buy, so I still have a whole bunch of it and I don't even know what to do with it. literally have just been playing I've built my house I've been crafting I've been befriending and All of the NPCs in town.
collecting and gathering my little heart out I just it's it's so much cuter than I remember I don't know like we cover like what's changed over time but I feel like covering them patch by patch didn't really give me a full look at like how the game has developed as a gameplay loop.
Like, they're constantly adding costumes and outfits, you know what I mean? They're constantly tweaking the monetization or adding this and adding that, but it's the gameplay loop that ends up being really addicting to me, which is wild, because usually these games do not get me. I saw a quote on Reddit where somebody was like, yeah, if you like Animal Crossing or if you like Stardew Valley, you're going to love Paleo. I'm like, I don't like those games. I want to like those games.
I want to be the kind of person who loves those games. And every time I try them, I'm like, not for me. Or, you know, what it reminds me of is like this weird cross between I don't know, what are those called? Portia, my time at games, my time at Portia, my time at Sandrock. Reminds me of those, but this is much more of an MMO than I remember.
and i remember justin even pointing out in your very first article about palea you were talking about how you didn't understand why they bothered to even make this multiplayer like there was no good reason for it to be multiplayer but that is totally different now
There's like all kinds of neat things in the game that I'm like, well, I should really join the Discord. I'm in the Discord, but I should really join some groups in the Discord and actually get some multiplayer use out of this because they've added quite a lot of stuff for cooking and gathering and whatnot. that I should really be taking advantage of and I'm not right now because I'm mostly playing solo. I see people all the time.
I was shocked to see that. I actually went to look this up on Steam charts, and they're still seeing like 6,000 people on average. That's just Steam. They're on... um what is it the switch already right and then they're coming out on console this week on the other consoles this week so
I am shocked, actually, to see how well they're doing. I kind of expected it to have petered out, but no, lots of people playing. If you get into the underground, I didn't count, but it's a lot more than just the handful of people I thought could be in a zone at a time. Very impressed by that.
I didn't really see a lot of bugs. I thought it was really polished. The monetization is really mild. I mean, I shouldn't say that. The costumes are really expensive, but there's nothing in the cash shop that you have to buy. I feel like...
Even if I had tried to throw money at the game, there isn't anything in there that would have helped me pay to win. You know what I'm saying? Like, I was willing to spend money. I even subbed. But it doesn't matter. All it really gives you is coins that you can then spend on outfits. really benign i actually kind of think they should be charging more they could probably be more pay to win than they are not that i really think they should but they could be
And they should probably bring some of the costume prices down. But that's neither here nor there. I think they could have gotten more money out of me if they had done a few things differently in their cash shop. Instead, I'm just going to hang on and wait. But overall, I'm having a great time. It reminds me like... Yeah, if some of those cozy, casual games were more of an MMO, you know what it reminded me of more than anything else?
project gorgon i know everybody's going to be like what but it has that i know i know because project gorgon is much more comic-based there's minimal like hunting related you're like firing arrows right at a deer it's not really like hardcore combat there's no you know what i mean But the way Project Oregon is set up where it's very explorer-friendly, it's very, you're going to be traversing back and forth.
talking to these NPCs, working through their little individual quest lines, bringing them gifts over and over again to work up their individual faction. Like, it has the gameplay loop of something like Project Gorgon, just minus the emphasis on combat.
The difference, of course, is that Gorgon also doesn't have that housing loop. You're doing all of the crafting, but you're not actually building anything specific. So this has that. I'm, like, really impressed. I feel like this game should be even bigger than it is. based on how good it is and I wish I wish Singularity 6, I wish Daybreak would infuse way more money into Singularity 6 because it's taken them a really long time to get to this new zone that I haven't even seen in person yet.
And if it's going to take them that long to keep pushing out content, it's not fast enough. Like, this would be so much better if it actually did have combat. Like, if it actually did have a developed combat grinding game on top of it, I just Oh, it's so good, except for the stuff that I feel like it's missing and that I feel like it really could compete with some of the medium or MMOs.
Yeah, I booted it up a couple weeks ago after that whole Elgin news. And I'm not dismissing it, but two things irked me right off the bat. One is that you can't delete your character and start over. That's still true, yep. And, oh my goodness, that's infuriating to me. Like, I just, if you've been away from a game for a long time,
and you never got too far into it to begin with. You just wanted that fresh start. You want to see right from the beginning how it is, have the game teach you all over again, see what improvements. Nope, it was just like, pick it up where you... Okay, whatever, I'll... relearn it but you know a little bit of a sour taste I truly don't understand why they don't at least let you make alts I guess I could just make another account you could but you shouldn't ask
that's just me too yeah that is pretty annoying i agree yeah the other thing is you talked about the gameplay loop and games like that stardew valley animal crossing i have a really hard time yeah maybe we can talk about it um later is just figuring out what that gameplay loop is because there's so many stinking options that I almost have that choice paralysis log in go
okay, holy crap, what do I need to do? I've got one hour to play. What do I do? I was focusing down on, oh, I need to get my glider. Okay, here's the steps. I'll just start pursuing that. But with the day-night cycle and all the NPCs always walking everywhere, it gives I, like, triggered something in my head, like, stand still. Let me get to you one by one by one by one by one. Nope. We're just going to go where we want, and we're going to go home, because this isn't our video.
Oh, I agree that when you've got the little ZZZ by their head and they're sleeping, it's like, look, I just want to turn in my quest. Wake up. Get out of here. I've got a quest to do. You literally can't talk to them through their door, though. Sometimes, yes, you can. Yeah. So maybe that's just a problem that's just solved by familiarity and a little bit more time with it, and that's fine. It'd be easier to build familiarity if you were able to start from the beginning, though.
But that's cool. I'm so glad you're having a really good time. I'm glad I gave it a second chance. I'm much more impressed than I thought I would be. I really truly thought I'd be like, whatever, just take this gold and zip through and I'll just go look at it and write a piece and be done. And now I'm like...
i kind of wish i didn't have any of that because i'm having such a good time just playing i kind of don't want to rush and yet i also can't see it without it so i'm kind of torn right now i don't know Well, I have been playing a lot of random things, but the one thing I wanted to talk about today is Elder Scrolls Online continuing to go through West Weald. Chris, I know you played through that a year ago.
I think you had some pretty good impressions, at least of the story and stuff, right? Yeah, the Westworld story was pretty good. I also liked The Zone well enough, too. It's a fun one. It's pretty. It's really pretty. I'm a big fan of Autumn. Anyways, there's a ton of colors. It's beautiful. Some trees being green and some just having those vibrant autumnal colors. It's just, ah, ah. Yeah, so last night, I think this is what I want to talk about. I went through a public dungeon.
And so every zone usually has one or two public dungeons as a handful of those delves, which are the pocket dungeons. And then it has proper dungeons and proper trials. And so there's all like these different tiers of things, but.
The public dungeon, as I was going through it, I was thinking, so few MMOs really do this anymore. It's such an old school... MMO concept to the point where I know when Warhammer Online was coming out Mythic was talking about like we're going to bring back public dungeons
And most people in 2008 were going, what's a public dungeon? You know, like, we're young. We've just been playing World of Warcraft. We have no idea what a public dungeon is. And so I was like, I'll sit down. Let me school you on that. I like how ESO kind of does that. It just gives you this
larger instance space that's open to everyone. Everybody can run in. It's a little bit more challenging, but it's not, like, if you're solo, it's not impossible. Like, I was just methodically going through it. I had to be, like... seven bosses to clear this particular dungeon and it never got lost. It was very pretty to look at. It was interesting to go around. The last boss was a group event.
So the only thing I had to do was, like, I had to kind of park my character there and just wait until another player came along. And it took about 15, 20 minutes. And finally, somebody came into the room. We're like, let's go, you know. And that was fun, like, you know, and then checked off that whole dungeon. But I liked the feel of that. It was such a... different approach to dungeons like you're not with a team that's going go go go go go
but it's also not like my Fisher-Price first dungeon kind of experience that you sometimes get with those delves in the SO or other little things. Now the delves are very much very soft. And they're fun. They're interesting. They've got their... their pattern is set uh so yeah i don't know it was it was a i was just kind of walked away kind of admiring it not really my
like something I want to be doing all the time, but I don't mind going into them. And one thing I really like about Zenimax is it spends a lot of time on all these set pieces, the towns, the delves, the dungeons. It's always really pretty to look at. It's really interesting, and I'm screenshotting like crazy. And so, hey, that makes me happy. I don't want to just be treated to boring brown dungeon number 522.
Something cool. If I'm going to be spending my time in your space, make it worth my while. Give me, give me some I can. So, yeah, there we go. We got a nice variety of games we talked about. And let's talk about some more games. In fact, we're going to talk about one particular game that we were hinting at here with our equestrian comments earlier, and that's Equinox Homecoming, which came out into Early Access this past week.
and perhaps came out a little too soon. I think we can just all agree right there. Way too soon. This is the sound of our heads nodding. Probably is not ready for any sort of early access, maybe for another half a year, I would say. I don't know. Especially just the fact that they just started really seriously hyping it.
and talking about it. I mean, like last week, I think it was the first time I saw a developer on a video. It was like the day after it came out. Like, oh, no, no, you need to be doing that months ago if you were trying to... Do you guys think they're out of money? Do you think that's why this came out so early? That's my first instinct, for sure. I feel like they... This... They literally said, surprise, it's out now. So it kind of sounds like their timetable was significantly cut short.
That is a likely scenario. I was running some other ones through my head. They're just super enthusiastic. I know they've been talking about, like, oh, we're cracking this holy grail of... demographic and a type of game that hasn't really been done in MMO space, Star Sable, but you know it hasn't been done that much and maybe they just wanted to kind of get it out there and they thought that they were going to start this wave like this was going to be part of the marketing.
Push. I can't see how anybody on the dev team would have honestly looked at this and said, this is ready for public consumption. I really hope not, because the thing that bothered me the most, and I play a lot of early access tiles, so I'm used to day one, week one check, right? The fact that there are missing cutscenes in the first quest.
In the first quest, in the only quest. You didn't even get to the best missing cutscene because it was later. No, no, I got so bugged up I couldn't get out of that quest and I finally gave up. The first one at least they had like storyboard. Then there's one later, and they're just like, they give you a slide. Legitimately slides with text. Not even in pictures. One out of three. You talk to this person. This person talks to you.
And these are really interesting story beats. There's a good, unique setup to something very, very deeply wrong on the place that you're at.
The presentation fell so flat. I was so heartbroken by it. Yeah, some cut scenes are there, and some, I mean, they're just wildly different in quality. Some of the voice acting's not that good. Some of the... character models i guess your friend that runs up to you it's just like i went oh whoa no back up whatever your character's mom was pretty rough to look at
Like, she was... Her, too. Like, there was a couple of just her face. I don't know if there was the lighting doing something to her face, but, like... Like, her cheekbones were cheekbones, capital C. Like, it was really, really hard to look at. One thing I think everybody, I was reading some comments on Reddit and elsewhere, and the one thing everybody was kind of chuckling over is the fact that
During the character creation process, you know, you get to create your character, you get to create your horse, which is kind of cool. That was fun. And then, you know, you name your character and then you go in the game and everybody calls you Alex no matter what.
Well, guess I shouldn't have named myself. Yeah, that's really interesting. Almost like it was a single-player game. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, except that we've known that they've been working on a multiplayer, an MMO, since last year. Why wouldn't they change that? That's so strange. Yeah, I mean, everybody's coming up. The MMO-y thing would be to just not
say her name out loud or just do some generic like, hey pal, what's up, you know, champion. Yeah, exactly. It's not like this hasn't been attempted or done before in other MMOs. you know, it's just I'm sorry. This is $25 early access, apparently lifetime subscription or whatever. for the story. Oh, and we all paid for this, too. I have to point that out. They did not give us copies. We're not doing much outreach here. We ponied up ourselves. Alright, we're done here. Bye!
That also leads me to that presumption that they just are running dry on money because it's like, we can't afford to send out keys. even to press. But it's not like they really were raking in thousands and hundreds of thousands of people. It just was a few hundred that I saw. Oh, no. Is it really that bad? Hold on. I saw like 500. I think it's even worse than that now. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Really disappointing. I put in a couple hours.
I did do two hours. I got a lot further than I think you were able to with that first quest. Yeah. The one bug I had, there was a series of three cutscenes and the second cutscene... went to black at one point and it just never came back and I had to shut the game down and restart. But that was the only one that completely bugged out on me.
But there's only about, they said only about two hours worth of story content. And then there's races and... collectibles and stuff that you're able to go do.
But still, it's a little thin. That's what I'm seeing. I did pull... like i was talking with people it was really nice to see a lot of people like i was seeing people right outside of the quest there are lots of people like chatting and everything that was kind of cool and i think that might be part of the problem because the quests are some of the quests anyway i guess are phased
And that seems to be where they were having all of the buggy problems. It's the MMO. The MMO functionality is the problem here. Wait, should I be saying that? In this very specific case of the current building. Right. But how many people are going to put up with that for a long time waiting for the real launch?
I think a lot of people would just be like us, where you're curious, you've paid the $25 for your curiosity, and then you'll put the title down for a long time, and hopefully not forever, but it's not good. I can't see somebody continuing to play this day in and day out. Yeah, no, definitely not. I backed it. I was okay with throwing money on it because I'm going to reference one of my favorite animated films, Ratatouille, here. The new needs friends.
This is so completely new and unique and like I am okay with quote-unquote losing the money if it means that I have hopefully put something in the kitty to make this thing grow and form better I'm okay with that I just wish they didn't push it out so fast painful to see how how incomplete
it would almost be better if they pushed it out and we went like oh this whole thing is completely crap forget it like just yes exactly throw it on the pile of failed ideas this is actually i agree this has a really good idea and has some Very good elements. Like, I was going through it going, you know, this part is actually good. Like, the scenery, gorgeous. The scenery is great. Horses control feels good. Yeah.
what's possibly being set up with the story has my interest like i actually flipped through my mom the mother's journal and like there is some stuff in there that makes me really really curious but just it's not enough there now and it hurts that's the worst part I totally agree with If it was mediocre and uninteresting or routine, this would be totally like immediate.
refund bait but it doesn't feel that way and that's what hurts that sucks way harder is that they just It's just kicked out the door far too soon and you're gonna poison what looks like an otherwise amazing well. Yeah, I mean, the UI is... really good. It's worth checking out. They're It's sleek, like it doesn't really clutter up the screen so you can enjoy the views and whatnot. But when you go into it, there's a lot of different parts of it. There's stats, there's equipment.
things to customize your horse. They talked about taking care of your horse. I found out later on the tutorial. I was like, yeah, don't worry. If you don't take care of your horse, you don't get penalized. It just doesn't advance. friendship meter or whatever you have with the horse that the more you progress that the better the horse handles and stuff like that so I thought that was good that way I'm not
Not feeling like always pressured to go clean gloves for a while. I like the journal. I thought the journal was a good idea. It kind of keeps, you know, it writes down the story as you're going through it.
So you can kind of go back, reference it. There's little doodles and stuff. Really reminded me of the whole Life is Strange series. Yes. The whole game, the tone, the journal. You know, if you've played any of those games, there's... that's a good comparison like that's a really like and also the very chill vibe like just come
Be in a pretty place. Enjoy being in a pretty place because a lot of it's just the fantasy of going to some gorgeous little island and getting to trot around on a horse that you couldn't afford anyways. So, you know, why not?
I love the idea of being able to customize your I was not prepared that you were going to customize your horse from the get-go or get one or be allowed to just go on a long ride right after getting that introductory quest i that's smart honestly yeah But yeah, from what I'm hearing, there's just not as much to do.
We're going to see where it goes from here. I'm concerned. I'm concerned it's not going to have the runway it's going to need to really take off. But it is nice to hear the devs talking about the game. we'll see yeah fingers crossed seriously i want this this more than most early access games i want this one too So we gotta come up with good names for a riding club. Did somebody say it should be massively horse powered? I didn't make that up. Somebody put that in the comments somewhere.
all right well let's chug along with another beta another early access title actually getting very close to launch here and that's dune awakening and you may already know this because it had a big open beta this past weekend so if you wanted to play it You were going to be able to play it, except for Bree. Didn't get her invite email until at this point. They said they kept doing waves and waves and waves, to be fair.
I had asked Funcom for keys and I gave them to everybody else. I didn't even take one. I gave them to MJ and Larry because I knew they were going to stream. But still, my own account didn't get it and I did not buy this. I must have gotten lucky on the very last, the last wave that led us in. But I did not know it because I was playing Paleo. So, you know, one survival box to another. So it sounds like there was some really good feedback from the...
from the playtest. Yeah, a lot of the players who are in there, like, I've been picking in on the Reddit for the past couple of days for news posts, and like, lots of folks are seriously digging into it and there's like some folks who are happy about how stern it can be like they're There's one remark I remember reading.
a one redditor who is really okay with the fact that when they got just numbed by the sandworm that they lost literally everything purely because the cost of getting back to that prior point wasn't really that hard like it sounds like they've had a pretty good balance between survival sandbox hard-bitten smacks and okay so you got knocked down but it doesn't take a whole lot of resources or time to get back to that return point.
You can't just go into the sandworm's stomach and loot your stuff? Come on. Weirdly enough, no. I mean, Shahalud is a greedy, greedy little guy. Sounds like it was a good idea for them to delay it for multiple reasons by giving this extra shot of You know, infusing some players into the game, getting them to check it out, getting that word of mouth going. giving them a little bit more time to test and shore up the game. That was probably a wise move on there. And a coercement to pre-order.
Yeah. And that's the one thing that also kind of struck me as far as I could tell. And I didn't really see a whole lot of other discussions about that in the wider... social media spaces it seems like even with opening pre-order buyers all pre-order buyers to access the beta like There was only one broadcast problem with a server. One of them had to be reset. Everything else seems to have held up from the initial rush.
It's impressive. And it was a big rush. Your post, Chris, this morning said, what, almost 40,000 people at peak? Yeah, over 37,000 at this all-time peak. And when I was writing, it was about 34,000 at the last 24 hours. It's not bad. That's not bad at all. It seems like they've hit the right mark. For a buy-to-play game, I guess you're right. That's not that bad, right? If you compare it to free-to-play games. Sure. I don't know.
It's really hard for me to judge because we don't really know how many people they actually let in unless they said that somewhere. Not that I saw. The only thing I saw was the fact that they... Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Alright, so when is this launching? When is this puppy going? Oh gosh, what day? It's June... I've forgotten. Is it the 20th? June 10th. June 10th? Oh no, that's too soon. Oh, that's like a month. Come on.
That can't be right. Is that right? I don't know. Some website, Massive AOP, written by an article by Brie Royce. So many things are happening, and so many things just keep getting reshuffled and delayed.
this and that and uh june 10 do you think they get together they have their own discord server all the studios and they're like let's mess with their minds i really don't no you've seen all the mainstream articles right where they're talking about all of these studios that are now like literally freaking out because
And now they're like, oh, we've got to change our schedule. Now we can't come out here. We have to come out here. We've got to move around. I don't think there's any collusion where people wouldn't be having such a bad time right now. I feel sorry for all the devs. Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, there you go. Dune Awakening had a pretty good beta weekend. And if you guys played it, let us know. You got plenty of space on the...
the website, especially in our weekend, WRUP. What are you playing? Let us know your thoughts on Dune Awakening and whether or not it's going to be worth it. Yeah, you can check out, if you want a direct look, MJ and Larry played it, like you said, on Friday, so they've got a nice long stream up. They stream sandboxes all the time, so this is right up their alley. I don't know whether they liked it or not. I haven't actually gotten to watch that yet.
I know that Larry had some reservations when he actually handled it a couple weeks ago. This is MJ's first time. We'll see how many times he got her killed. I don't know. And then, Chris, you actually played it during that same beta period as Larry, and I know you had some reservations also.
so i think i think there's a lot of like um uh consternation over like how mmozy it is we talked about this in a different article last week too where funcom was kind of trying to like walk back some of the mmo-ness of the game While pointing out the LMO-ness. Yeah, it would like its cake, and it would also like to eat its cake. If you have any extra cake, it will take that also.
it's it's you know we're having one of those new world moments with it where amazon is like winking at the mmo players but also trying to rope in the non-mmo players and I don't know, it seems like kind of a big eye roll, but if you're looking for something that's more... I think survival MMO is the right category for it, right? Yeah, for sure. It's not a traditional MMORPG. It's not even a pre-traditional... It's not like a...
It's not Ultima Online, right? And it's not EverQuest, and it's not World of Warcraft. It's none of those templates for our game. It's got guilds, it's got friend lists, it's got chat channels, it's got all those. It's way more than something like...
arc or something. Do they have guild spaces in terms of guild plots? Can guilds build houses? There's no guild spaces, but players can... put their permissions to specifically allow guild members to manage certain things so you know there okay there is permissions for pretty much everything who can drive this vehicle who can turn on and off the shields who can access this chest You can handle the headlights, Timmy! Click, click, click!
but like there's no like guild bases and I there's technically no way for as I understand there's no way for bases to be like physically linked to one another but they can be built close to each other within accepted limits and again players can like you know set permissions amongst their friends so you can kind of have like multi builds going of a sort adjacent multi builds Yeah.
I know a while back we were talking, especially when the whole Cryptic thing was going down with DECA coming in and Cryptic basically being kicked out of the building and these games being taken over. on that whole transition. And when we were talking about that, we're kind of, Bri and I think we were discussing how we don't remember the last time Neverwinter really got an update, like a serious content update.
and we're just kind of rocking our brains. Oh, no. No, that's the thing. Neverwinter keeps getting updates. but does it because it does i'm the one who always writes and that's the only reason i know yeah i think i remember this conversation because if we had this exact same conversation too where i went back and i looked there's like no they had an update Here's the module and here's the module. The modules are numerically numbered, but the hype around them...
It's definitely non-existent. Less than it was. Almost no one comments. If you go to the forum, there's almost nothing. The Reddit is kind of dead. The Discord is kind of dead. Well, I just ruined my lead-in. No, no, no. I think this is important to point out that Neverwinder is still getting content. But DECA and Cryptic before seemed to be having a hard time making it flashy and really draw headlines. For D&D, that's crazy. Yeah.
So what we want to point out here is Neverwinter got an update. Yeah. Got a new module there, and they're not staggering it. It's not just like on PC today, and now you're going to have to wait a whole month for the consoles. They just rolled it out in parity. So it's called Red Harvest. It's got a new Adventure Zone. You can go and enjoy some new storylines, and they also have a new trial. Yeah, this is the one that's based on the movie. What do they call it?
Honor Among Thieves. Yeah, that one. I still haven't seen this, by the way. Amazing movie. incredible film it is on my list to watch it is bump it up it is everybody who sees it goes that was surprisingly one of the most fun movies we've seen in the past few years there you go funny. It does the source material so much better than a certain Jeremy Irons movie I can mention from the year 2000. Oh my god.
With the guy with blue lips. Oh my goodness. Wasn't there a Wayne's brother in there too? I guess there was. He was the guy who was constantly throwing hold portal. Do you know I saw that movie in Vegas with my guildies from EverQuest? We had a Vegas meetup that year, and we were like, yeah, let's go see it. It'll be fun. It was not fun. It was terrible. We were no longer a guild after that day. It was so awful. Oh, God.
It was awful. And then they made a sequel that nobody remembers, but they actually got Blue Lips back for the sequel. Oh, I had no idea they made a sequel. That's extra depressing. I had no idea either. Wow, I'm going to have to watch that because if I suffer through the first one, I've got to suffer through the second. It wasn't as notoriously bad, but they threw so much money at that first one trying to be... dungeons and dragons star wars instead of just a dungeons and dragons movie which is
So this is kind of cool. A new module. It's inspired. So if you've seen the movie, unlike a certain podcaster here, you might actually find it a little bit more enjoyable. But in any case... You were talking about games that are just not touched. That's one I haven't touched in a while and I still look at it. I do kind of feel bad because I don't dislike it. I feel DDO does Dungeons & Dragons better, but like... I had fun playing a bard in Neverwinter. It's fun. It's...
I feel like I'll have to revisit it at some point just for the heck of it. Oh, it has a feature, by the way, that Equinox Homecoming also has that I really like. which is a sparkly little trail that you can follow to your next quest objective. I was like, oh, I was hitting that Q button in Equinox all the time. Like, I don't want to get lost on my horse.
i have horse gps i don't know how that works but where are you going to go talk about this new neverwinter content while you're not going to talk about it on the forums Because that's not really going to be a thing anymore. Deck is shutting down the Neverwinter Champions and Star Trek Online forums. And moving over to, drumroll please, Discord. Because Discord is like forums, right? They serve the same function, and you can... No, no, they don't. No, no, it's not. Not even a little bit.
That's so disappointing. this story is so wild because it did really well on the site because people are so mad like yeah i hate to say that but like on social media also it just blew up people are like on fire about this. MMORPG players who remember the old internet get so angry about this, even if they used and liked Discord. It's not even really about Discord as a thing I use and like Discord.
They're just really mad about the idea that Studios are hiding they're getting rid of these searchable
right, these bastions of history on the internet and hiding, tucking everything away, trying to pretend like their customer service can function through a discord and it makes it impossible to search. No one can find anything. Everything is, you know, hot takes and live commentary and nothing is around for new players to find when they're actually going how do I where's blind Mary you know what I mean how many years
content of written questions answers information all that searchable stuff is just you know just yeah just wipe it away just just throw it out because that's that's really important if somebody's struggling through an issue that's kind of rare and you know the forums most likely will have somebody go oh yeah i've done that too but it's such a small case that it doesn't come up a lot it's just nice to have that preserved somewhere
Yeah, throwing that out. I know even if they say they will, if they're just going to make them read only or whatever, that usually only lasts for a few years because You have to pay someone to keep updating the software or it becomes an exploit haven. So as soon as that becomes too much for them to invest in, those forums are gone. So archive what you got, because that's all there is. Throw that crap up on Reddit while you still can.
A lot of people share their screenshots, share stories. There's a lot of community building that happens on forums. That's another thing that just gets wiped completely off. This is not a net positive for the MMO industry. It's just another one of those. Oh, crap. I don't ever think I'd get to the point where I'd be nostalgic for forums. Who remembers Easyboard? Y'all do remember Easyboard?
Yeah, I was on several roleplay forums. I'm trying to remember what this software used to use for my old website. You probably used PHPBB. Everybody did. Before that, there was VBulletin. That one was paid. i'm trying to remember what some of the other ones were oh my god proborts oh my god wow Yeah. And the thing is, I saw some people also point out that these three games don't have a lot of comments on their forums anymore.
like all but stopped interacting there over the last couple years for obvious reasons as this transition to a totally different studio was ongoing, right? There were no comments on the Neverwinter one at all. Nobody even said, oh man, this sucks. There was nothing. Maybe there is now, but when I was writing this up, there wasn't. There were a bunch on the Champions Online one, but that's only because
The Champions Online community is kind of fractured over a whole bunch of different discords. This might actually help them. And Star Trek Online, they use Reddit. they don't use the forums nearly as much so like a lot of these communities have already i don't want to say abandoned but they definitely have moved the communities elsewhere because of the neglect. That doesn't mean they're really excited to see the neglect codified, you know what I mean? That's not necessarily what they want.
It really is like a look at the bunnies George kind of moment. Like, just making sure that people were comfortable with them being shot. Sure, right. And it's one more example. I almost said, what year is this? Because there was a couple years ago when this was happening like every other week. We had another story like this. So many companies did this.
And now they're just hiding. Now they're just completely isolated from everywhere else. You can't use that as marketing. You can't look that as, hey, look at how vibrant our community is and look at how we treat our newbies. All of that stuff is hidden away. I don't think this is. good long-term decision any more than I thought it was a great long-term decision to get rid of your own forums in favor of reddit where you can't control anything and now
You know, the Nazi bar takes over your Reddit and now your game looks terrible. Like, that's not a great idea either. But this scene's even worse because it's hidden too. And also, it's not as if you can trust the corporation behind Discord to not completely and shitify Discord. I think they're going to regret this. I would love to say that the next generation will fall in love with forums again, but I don't even think there's going to be anything left.
Wow, that took a dark turn. I'm going to take my medication. Sorry. You've got to get some more of your medication going there. I was going to say it. I think the team is working. Let's see if we can keep the good times rolling and talk about PAX Day. Oh, gosh! Yeah. I am. It was my fault. But partly I wanted to talk about this. Chris actually has first-hand experience with PAX State. Not good experience, but experience.
That makes for a good discussion. So it's a sandbox MMO that's been in early access for a while, right? It was the end of last year, I think. It's only been about a year. really big into building things. That's what comes up in my free memory association anytime i think of pax day i'm just thinking well every article i've ever written on it is talking about the building system and right adding a ton of new stuff to it right think of it this way we're doing awakening as a survival mmo
PAX Day is a survival MMORPG in every sense of the word. It is a sandbox MMORPG where it is not trying to hide and it's not trying to up jump and be something that it isn't. It truly is a full-scale, massively MMO sandbox. It was also a game where a fox nearly kicked my ass. So, you know.
So that was a thing. I'm not sure I would take on a fox. I'm going to be honest. I mean, they're not without weapons. They're just foxes. I had a weapon. It didn't matter. A fox did not care about my weapons and armor. And a fox was like, I'm coming for them. Right here. You walk near my mulberry bush, you die. Reminds me that. First time I ever played Final Fantasy XI way, way, way back when it originally launched.
and walked outside of town, and there was a sheep, and I went to attack it, and it killed me. A sheep. That was uninstalled right away. My ego cannot take that. You can do a whole perfect ton on this. A whole perfect 10 on like the lobby mobs in MMOs that have killed you, that have completely wrecked your face and embarrassed the crap out of you. It's Heinz. It's little baby deer. They get you every time. When you don't know what you're doing, they're going to kill you.
I always think about how you can take these like little innocent critters from uh you know like the most recent expansion or the highest level like a tiny little sparrow in lord of the rings online and take it back to the shire and that thing would be death incarnate for everything there nothing would be able to stand against it
It would be the new Sauron. Look upon me in despair. Just because of the stats and everything. What are we talking about, PAX Day? Why are we talking about it? They laid off staff. That's not good. has nothing to do with the deer or sparrows, but rather people. And that is incredibly unfortunate. Uh, this is an indie studio, right? Mainframe. Uh,
I'm sorry. I know I keep asking these questions. At one point, they were being backed by Microsoft, but I don't think they are anymore, and I don't think they were ever owned by Microsoft, so I guess... to that extent i mean they have it they have investment and whatnot but that doesn't necessarily so yes i would say yes
yeah but not like they're like indie in in the great no grinding gear isn't even indie anymore either but not like in the project organ set set sense where there's like three people you know what i'm saying it's no you can be indian still yeah people it's Unfortunately, the studio did get smaller. They said they laid off like 17 people out of their 60-person team, which is, that's a pretty significant chunk out of that size right there.
Um, as said, you know, of course, like, the game's gonna continue forward, they're doing the next patch and all that normal, like, don't, don't let this ruffle your feathers kind of thing, but still... just kind of ruffle feathers. That's pretty concerning for an early access title like this. Especially, as Bree just said, on such a...
ambitious scale that they're trying to pull off here in terms of feature set and everything like that. I don't know if I have anything else to say. I just always feel bad when people get laid off from these things. I hope that they find a better place that they land. I haven't been in there since that quick visit. So I definitely can't speak to where things were between then and now, but like...
I don't know, man. It seems like they have so much more work and now they have less people to do it. The last major patch, they were talking up the fact that there was a compass UI at it. That's not...
It's not the hot button thing y'all think it is, man. I mean, I'm just putting it out there. Like, cool, compass is fine and wonderful, but like, that's like the first bullet point in your patch notes? I mean... I think part of that is because they keep putting out a lot of small patches, you know what I mean?
instead of doing like one big patch every couple months they're putting out a lot so yeah it probably was the biggest thing that week they've done some other stuff i know i remember we covered that they added like a fast travel I don't want to call it a currency, but like a resource kind of thing. Grace. You used grace. Yes, grace. And then before that, they had added like economy type stuff. So it's not like they're not doing anything, and it is very MMO-centric, but...
Wow, I meant to check how many people were playing. Since I live on Steam database anymore, how many people are playing PAX today? And I don't know, can you play this off of Steam? I'm not even sure. Not price history. I don't think so. I didn't think you could either. I'm pretty sure that is a specific standpoint. Yeah, so 11.5 thousand all-time peak 11 months ago, around 524 hour peak. So that's... I mean, that's a little over 5%.
A little under 5%. I can do math. The association I always put PAX Day right next to is like Worm Online, and I don't know if that's really fair or not. It's way prettier than Worm. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a low bar to clear, let's be honest. I don't know what the audience they were going for but I thought that would find maybe Yeah, I think that's fair. Or Mortal Online 2 or something like that. Yeah. It's just a bummer. Just another bummer to add to this podcast, right? Yay!
Well, maybe we can pull things up a little bit and talk a bit about Star Wars. I almost called it Star Trek The Old Republic. And now we get crucified by both sides there. Star Trek The Wizarding World. Yes. May the Gandalf be with you. Star Wars The Old Republic. That small team, speaking of a small little indie team there under Broadsword now, is working on their next major update, update 7.7. You know it's going to be serious because that's a...
That's a chunky update number right there. So they're working on that. This update is coming out at the end of the month or at the beginning of June, and they're not specific about when, but you should be seeing it within a few weeks here. So there is a big live stream talking up all the features going into it. And so we have two things to talk about really quick here. We have the features of 7.7 and the story that won't be in 7.7, but should be in 7.7. The story problem is continuing.
They're basically backlogged. The story is backlogged in Star Wars The Old Republic at this point, where previous patches have had story beats that they have not yet been able to activate because of the voice actor strike. So until they get the voice actors to record these, the story is just like all being put on hold while the patches continue to roll forward. So at some point, the dam hopefully will break, and they'll just...
bring in all these voice actors, give them a mochaccino and say, we're here all night, man. We're just going to record all this stuff and we're going to push it out the door. Until that happens, don't expect to see any new story content in Star Wars. But there is going to be some nice features, some really nice quality of life stuff, including kind of like a summary, like speaking of journals, like a summary of all the story to date for your character, all the expansions you've gone through.
The mission log is getting some really nice improvements, including a map where you can just click on the map to do fast travel between fast travel points. And a lot of new skins. This is the buzz thing. Sometimes never underestimate things like character customization to get people excited because some of these alien races are getting like... dozens of new skin types and including uh i saw like the swilex and uh natolians natolians
Nutella, whatever. Nautolans. The ones with all the little squid heads. I love Nautolans. They're so cool. I do too. They're very neat. And then past that, they're going to do a minor patch, but that's not going to be so minor because they're talking about a lot of combat balance changes that are going to come for 7.7.1. Okay, so Justin, just to clarify for me, they have the storylines for all of these chapters written.
but they're not implementing them at all until we get voice acting? No. Yeah, that was my understanding from having gone through all of this. In fact, they clarified it on the stream like...
They have it animated. They have it programmed. They just can't put it. Why? Why don't they just put it out without... I'm asking because this is happening to other games, right? This is happening, like, for example, Guild Wars 2 has stuff left over from last year, like the last several chunks of the expansion. haven't had some of their actors back, so they just don't have voices, but they still put out their content. I thought of that exact thing. Yeah, so I wondered why they're not doing that.
So maybe an answer to that would be they've done it once before. They did it during the Knights of the Eternal Throne, like those two expansions that... Um, you might recall everyone hates yeah they kind of hate now but they like so there was a period of time where there there were some of these like companion quests that they would send you on and they deliberately designed it to look like the old knights of the old republic interface so the dialogue like the screen would
do the widescreen thing where it'd do like black bars on the top and bottom and then you'd get like subtitles and quest dialogue choices and stuff like that. That's kind of cool. Well, yeah, I didn't have a problem with that. I'm wondering if it just didn't get that nice of a reception and they're worried about, like, Bringing that back, getting a bit of hate, or doing that and people going, oh, well, this is what happens when you sell the game off.
Suddenly you're not at the quality level. They feel like they have to keep the quality level super high. It really does sound like a no-win situation when you frame it that way. That was just what I was working through in my head. I actually am one of those folks who wasn't a super huge fan of the way they did that in Kotfi. I guess that's how we're going to shorten it.
it was fine i guess i i i think my problem with that wasn't necessarily the fact that they i felt like they cheaped out so much as that i'm not just not i don't like the old the original RPGs from BioWare very much.
hard to play they are hard to play but the storytelling was so good like it was worth it to wade through the joke yeah for sure to get to the story i liked it at the time it's hard to go back to i did try to go back to like baldur's gate 2 last year and i'm like no no no even the enhanced edition it was just like
uh and i bought i bought like mass effect i bought the legendary edition i've still yet to crack into that because now i'm worried like it's just going to ruin all those memories by so yeah i can never agree it's a little hard to go back when we've gotten used to it so Boy, it could be a while though. That strike doesn't really seem like it's about to get resolved.
Yeah, everybody's heels are digging. I was barely even aware that that was still going on. I thought that got resolved when that whole actor strike got resolved. Sure didn't. Sure didn't. So, yeah, that's just something to be aware of. But still, you Star Wars The Old Republic fans. are going to be getting a bunch of stuff with 7.7. So check out that article and the video that they showed talking through all that. So there's a lot of interest still in this game.
I'm glad the team is still working on it. Absolutely. And then seeing some of these really nice quality of life improvements. But the story is the meat and potatoes of Star Wars The Old Republic. And if they can't keep that going, then that's a bit of a problem. Maybe they need to do a remix. Or a progression server. I would love to see a Star Wars progression server. That would actually be really cool. I would actually consider trying it again for something like that.
Especially if they did a fast leveling one where you could just ignore everything but the storyline. I know you can almost kind of do that now. They're making even more of that streamlining with this patch. I kind of like that that's an option. Well, you said we had a bit of a small email, but we want to tackle this. Yeah, we can slip this in. It's from Mike. And Mike says, hey, folks, I wanted to bring up something I don't see any info about on the site.
I'm curious if you're aware of a somewhat recent addition to EverQuest emulator servers called the Hero's Journey. It's a solo duo rogue server where you can triple class on a single character. Y'all, this is addicting and hits all the right spots for our nostalgia trip back to EQ. I found it by chance two weeks ago and have been hooked. Even my wife is now playing it with me and we are absolutely loving it.
Yeah, I wanted to read this because Mike probably has no idea why we wouldn't cover something like this. So I thought it would be worth it to tell everybody again.
People just... they're not thinking about it this way and i don't really blame them we we generally don't cover emulators for live games that's that's kind of the line we have tried to draw if the game has been sunsetted or is super dead or is not accessible in the west somehow or whatever we tend to be okay with covering those emulators because there's no competition like you're not taking money off somebody's
you're like you bred off some some studio's plate but when it comes to like the daybreak games the broadsword games the blizzard games the stuff that is still alive we don't really cover it so you'll notice we don't cover any of the everquest emulators we try not i don't we don't cover the lotro emulator we don't cover
What else am I thinking? On any of the Ultima Online. Yeah, we skip all the WoW stuff. Actually, we do cover the... We've mentioned the Terra one several times. Terra is a weird case. Yeah, because the PC version is dead and all they have is the console version left. So that one's kind of like, if you're running a PC emulator, you're not really taking away from the console.
But also, it's Tara, and not a lot of people care anyway, so it hasn't been a big... It's true, it's true. If you care about Tara, you already know about the emulator. And you don't even need us to tell. A single tear tracks down Tara's... i liked chair i didn't think it was that bad but whatever you know what i mean so we're that is that is the line we draw and that is why we don't cover things like this however i still like hearing about them because it's fun to hear like
what people are doing with these old IPs. I've been really obsessed, honestly, with hearing people talk about Turtle Wow. I think you even mentioned this earlier before the show started, Justin. Because Hurtwild does so many things that I wish Blizzard would do. Like, it's really got the Classic Plus Plus thing going, you know? And it's been a huge point of conversation because of Classic Plus and people going, look, if they can do it, and it's been that popular, like, they've...
They've already kind of tested it there. Why not borrow, you know, quote unquote, borrow it and bring it over here and make it official. Yeah. Okay. Another edge case has been City of Heroes because when it came back, it was fair game right because it was all a rogue server and
All of the rogue servers were rogue servers. There was no official version to compare it to. Now that Homecoming has been licensed, it's like, I don't know, I guess we can keep covering some of the servers that play nice. So I've kept doing that, but... I don't know, like, that's another gray area that hasn't really resolved in my head anyway. I don't feel like that's an easy call. But when it comes to EverQuest, I do not. really want to help people
like, I would rather Daybreak, I don't want to screw with Daybreak on this one. I know, I know you're shocked to hear me say that. Yeah, that's part of it, but honestly, it's more like, especially when small a smallish company like that where I know they don't have thousands of devs and I know they don't have a billion dollar remit you know what I mean like I'm not trying to kill these games I don't want these classic games dead I don't want that to hasten their demise
That is not why we're doing any of this. So that's why we don't cover those, even if we might personally think they're neat. That's all. I wanted to tell everybody just because it's not like, I'm sure it's somewhere in our FAQ, but I don't even know. But sometimes just being able to explain why we've put that line there. I don't know, I think that's helpful anyway. It's nothing you did. As readers, you're fine. I'm not mad at you. It's all your fun, Mike. You did this to everybody, Mike.
You did this to all of us! I'm serious though, I'm not even judging you. A single tear goes down Mike's cheek. Because I've played some of the Ultima Online emulators. And some of them are really good and they're doing stuff that's really nothing like the original game.
But I'm also not really interested in screwing over Broadsword. Yeah, because there's a difference between an emulator being direct competition for a product that's already out there and one that's invested in game preservation. Right, yeah, exactly. That just feels like ethically different to me. I'm sure there's still a little bit of a legal gray area. I mean, they don't own...
Unless it's like a City Heroes thing where the company says, yes, it's open source or... you know we'll give the licenses to anybody who wants it or whatever like that it's still a bit of a legal gray area but if nobody's really caring and the alternative is these games are going to completely go into the ether, then I'd rather see somebody trying to do the effort of preserving that. Plus, Daybreak has cooperated in the past. Was it Project 1999? Something like that?
that exists like they got an official license like that's a thing that there's clearly an avenue for that somebody at daybreak was at one point willing to negotiate on things like this and i kind of wish more of these emulators would do that because then that makes them fair game for for everybody, right? Alright, there you go. We have covered everything. Every MMO that's ever existed. We've done it in the past hour. Congratulations.
no we haven't even touched the surface of the iceberg here but you know what it's okay because we have a website that covers it day in and day out 24 hours a day our writers are busy at work Chris has not seen his bed in a very long time. He just, uh, briefed hands behind him. Come on, Chris, ride faster. She, like, lets me look at a JPEG of my bed every once in a while. So soft, so comfy.
It's so out of reach. But seriously, we do have a website that we continue to cover. The big news, the small news, the big games, the small ones. We love them all, and we're glad to do it here at Massively Overpowered. Send us in your podcast emails. Check out the show notes. You can click on that little button. You had a question about the site, question about MMOs, topics you'd like us to talk about, a game we haven't discussed on the podcast for a while.
It's all for our game. Just go ahead, no pun intended. Go ahead, throw it into that podcast email. Check out our Patreon program on the right-hand side of the site. Oh, yeah. Actually, I should jump in there. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary on Patreon specifically.
Which means, if you have been subbed to our Patreon for 10 years, you now have a nice shiny new 10-year badge that Larry has made for everybody. And I put them up, that was last week, it was, I don't know, Wednesday, Thursday, whatever day that was, so... Check to make sure and if you're not sure that you have the right badges or if you're like, hey, I don't have any badges and I know I should have some because I've been sub for 100 years. Just email me and I will double check you.
Sometimes stuff gets messed up on Patreon because about every year they're like, We should start over. And they change something drastic in the UI. And it makes my scripts go crazy. And it always happens.
sometimes I don't have you all lined up like I wasn't able to match your old account to what patreon says your new account is and so I'm having to like manually add your numbers back anyway long story short if you think you're wrong just contact me and I will dig into your account I want to make sure you guys get your badges because Cool. You remember the movie Clue when he said, long story short, too late. Too late. Exactly.
Good to know. Ten years on Patreon, and to those of you who have been subscribed to Patreon for that long, or maybe just multiple years or even months at this point, we just want to say a very sincere thank you. Totally. Keeps the kibble on the table, and we appreciate that. All right, guys, that's it for today's episode of the Massly OP Podcast. Chris, thank you again for being on the show. My pleasure. I always love doing these.
Get back to writing, man. No, actually, he's done. He's done for today. You go play video games. This is not a corporately mandated break time, man. This is on the clock. But no, we're very happy to have you and Brie feel better. Thank you. Later.