you Alright kids, pile in the car. I've got my driving glasses on, driving gloves. Mom's over there in the passenger seat knitting up a storm and we're going to go on an internet road trip. Yeehaw! Because that's all we've been talking about and watching and playing in quotes here at the Massively OP podcast. No MMOs, just what's the internet road trip up to today?
They're right now on some dirt country road in Nova Scotia. Are they really? Yeah. Oh. i should look it's hilarious because what this is what we're talking about and we did a little post on this it's one of those silly internet things where somebody like harnessed google street view and then made it into a a democratic car oh man I see them now. I see where they are on the map. They're up to, is it Valentine's Cove? They're almost there.
so they let everybody choose like do you turn do you go straight and everybody votes and uh they started in boston and now we're up in nova scotia because why not and it's hilarious because there's a organized crew on discord that they're like mapping out where everybody's going and then there's the what they call the hive mind which is the other
people who just kind of like us that we lurk and we just vote whatever we want. And we sometimes go against their wishes and they're like, Oh, the hive mind, they thwarted us once again. This is beautiful. It is. I actually really are. gravel road overlooking the ocean yeah yep they did get like last week they got stuck on some some dirt path and it all went black for hours and nobody knew what was happening so they started forming a religion it was
It's hard to describe, but it was the funniest thing I've ever seen. They were just, we're in the darkness. Who will lead us into the light? Yeah, the first time I clicked through this, though, it was a very depressing part of Canada, and clearly the Google car had come through in winter, and so everything was gray. It was the most unflattering trip through that poor part of Canada I have ever seen.
scene and then the people who were in charge were like trying to drive the car off the highway like i don't just mean getting off at the exit i mean like trying to like Turn the car, like spin the car. Like you can't even do that. But they were voting that way. They tried. They tried to run into a ditch. So there's some malcontents. There's a bit of trolling that happens. Yes. Or if everybody jams on the horn and makes this awful noise.
and it wakes you up if it's like in the background of your browser anyways welcome back to the massively op podcast episode 520 i promise you we're not just going to talk about road trips although you know what it's summer it's a good time to think about road trips why not and if you
can't get out of your house and you don't have the gas money to go anywhere you know you can do it virtually we've got worlds upon worlds for you to explore here as we all like to play these online video games and i'm justin with me is brie and we've got Things to talk about this week. They're passing a big orange barn.
On the coast. We've lost Breach. Yes, the big one. I need to close this, don't I? But it's so pretty. They've actually found a really scenic spot. This is so pretty. I want to be there. Okay, I'm closing it, I promise. Can we buy one of these places and be our summer retreat for Masolini? For real? Oh, it's cute. Yeah. Okay, I closed it, I swear. I'm not. This is going to keep me going when you're on your rants.
Ah, Bree's on her 14th minute of a rant. I'm just going to watch the car. It's funny how interesting it is to watch it vicariously for a few minutes. Like it really, there is a weird sense of connection because there's like, it's not just Discord. There's a little chat in the window, right? Right. So you can see.
it even if you're not in the discord and see all what all the goofy people are saying i don't know i even all these years later i'm still i'm still grabbed by you that social connection it's so bizarre and the radio tunes into like local radio Okay, that's cool. Which I thought was kind of cool, too. But yeah, the online thing, it may not be a novelty anymore, but it is kind of cool. And if you ever don't appreciate the internet enough sometimes, just...
Have an internet outage for a few days and suddenly you're starving for that social connection. Oh, they turned around. They're going back. Oh, no. What are you guys doing? They went away from the water. Go back to the water. Oh, I see. They didn't turn themselves around. They're going back to them. main road it's all good
All right. Well, while I watch that, I'm going to have Brie entertain you with what she's been playing this last week. It probably starts with Puh and ends with Aelia. Yes, it does. It's not the only thing I did, though. But yes, I have been playing Paleo. And in fact, I think Chris has...
finally beat me he was he was behind for a while but i heard him mention last week that he has made it all the way through elderwood now like he has done the main quest line yeah he really wanted to do the main quest and like zoom through it and then go back to doing all the like social
puttering stuff i did not want to do that i really really wanted to like take like clean up behind me you know what i mean to have that sense of i've already got a great house i've already got all these you know relationships going i really want to do that so i'm behind I know. They get me. You have everybody wrapped around your little pinky.
following you around some of them yes there's some of them are less easy to get to on like a daily basis because the game is divided into two cycles right you can give gifts out every real world day but you can chat like every single day in game and they're they're fast so i guess the smart thing to do would be to camp out by the guy you are the girl whatever that you're a robot in this case whatever the person you're trying to no entity somebody told me five
5 p.m. game time, they're all in the town. Oh, really? Is that true? Yeah. Is Einar in the town? Einar won't be there and Tamala won't be there. Oh, I've forgotten her name. It starts with an N. There's a girl who lives in... But you're right. I bet most of them are there or close to it. It's just a good time to kind of swoop around. There's just a couple people that are just kind of far flung. So you're taking your time.
Yeah, but I've kind of found that playing small chunks frequently is more effective than what I was doing initially, which was just playing hours and hours and hours, which is stupid. I don't have that kind of time anyway, so I was neglecting other...
hobbies and chores that I should have been doing to play this so now I'm trying to pop in several times a day and try to really maximize the way the farms work and the way the relationships work but it also means that I'm not I don't have as much time to like do the long term questing because I don't always know how long they're going to take some of those quests have taken me quite a long time like once you start in a
one of those zones. Some of them are short, some of them are long, but you don't always know. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I did want to joke a little bit about Maji Market because you guys were talking about it earlier last week and I had forgotten.
that they had just opened it so I went and I was kind of blown away it like it changed my opinion of what the game is again I had sort of talked myself into oh this is just like my time at Porsche but you know cuter and more you know more accessible to my brain anyway but like once i saw manji market i was like oh no this is kind of an mmo again oh and i don't understand what i'm playing anymore because there were so many people there and it was um
I made the joke that it reminded me of the South Park episode where Cartman is running around Casa Bonita, where he's, you know, Black Bart's gay! Woo! and he's like speed running everything like grabbing people's food and stuff that's what maji market felt like to me because i i zone in because you only had a couple minutes right yeah i only had like an hour or two in game time and like all these events are I'm so glad.
I poked my head in because it was really cute. And again, there were so many people. I could not believe how many real players, not NPCs, real players. It was packed. That's what... It felt like an MMO. So I'm kind of, again, not really fully sure where to bin this game. It's not not an MMO, and it's not an MMORPG in the classic traditional sense, but it's somewhere in between, and that's confusing.
Please, fit into my mental boxes. I don't know what to do with you otherwise. The other thing I did, Justin, was I finally got our characters off the stupid Lotro Dark Worlds. Yes!
Silverload opened up on Wednesday. It's been... I took screenshots and I showed it to you, but I've forgotten. He hadn't logged into some of these characters since like 2008. 2011, I think, was the last... timestamp and it was like a month before our son was born if that tells you why we left that's got to be why we left my son my son is old at this point he is he is 13 so that's been a really long time so yeah i wanted to ask you like him getting those characters what
And I don't mean this sarcastically. What was the point of it? Why did we care? Or to get his stuff? It's both. He had one character, his burglar of all characters, who had been originally partnered with my... minstrel and we played everything we did everything together so he was like 60-ish 70-ish we had basically done part of Lothorian and stopped and that's when we
didn't play for a long long time so he he had a lot of sentimental attachment to that character and the other characters i had done crafting like a lot of crafting on them because of course i did um and they had all kinds of resources and skill honestly there's you know a good foundation there for him to pick up all of those like you know 20 30 something alts that he had so but mostly he just wanted them i mean he put in that oh the other thing was his wallet
He had a whole bunch of like wallet related. I don't think wallet is the right word because I'm not even sure wallets existed back there. When I, when I logged in his first character after moving them, like the marks rolling in, like.
I don't even know how to describe this. You guys know the scrolling text that pops up in the middle of your screen when things are happening? It was like a solid minute of Mark's rolling into his character account. It just went on forever. I was like, are we bugged?
break it like what's happening no it eventually stopped but he had like marks and destiny points all kinds of stuff that i guess had been lost forever because he hadn't logged in in such a long time so he got all of that back too which was sweet but mostly i just yeah now we've got his all of other stuff back you know what I mean because I felt like some of those characters were sort of mine-ish because I did so much crafting work at the time
It wasn't so normal to have every single craft skill, or at least we didn't think of it that way. We often divided things up. He would take half of them. I would take half of them. And then he would neglect his half. So I would go to his half. If I wanted them at all, they were going to be on his account. We did this and wow. did this in so many games so it was just smart gameplay why should we grind them twice when we could just share but
Now I've got everything and I don't need them. But anyway, I'm so glad to have them back. I'm so grateful that whichever engineer at SSG finally made this work. actually pulled it off and i only had one tiny little bug the whole time a weirdly formatted email to one of his alts that who cares i don't even remember what was some sort of hobbit present or something i think it was like
Literally, I've forgotten what it was. It was some sort of free gift from something. That's it. Everything else, as far as I can tell, even the gold, the inventories, the levels, the names, everything were perfect. I kind of miss being able to... Complain about it? Yeah, complain about it, right?
A little tiny bit, but mostly I'm glad they got it done. And I hope people are paying attention. Like I keep reminding my guildies. Okay, I realize it's been two months since we originally were supposed to move, but they're open now. Go move because you might miss this. They're going to close this down. some point and you won't be able to reclaim anything you may as well install it and go look because 10 years from now you might want it i i said 10 years ago we wouldn't want it and we were wrong
So do your future self a favor and go look. All right. So what did you get to do this weekend? Yeah, so a bit of a lotro. I continue to slowly cycle through my three characters. I've got a high-level Loremaster, my high-level Mariner, and then my mid-level... so many m names the mid-level mariner high level minstrel and then the high level lore master i keep going back in between all of them just because on a different day it just gives me a different different
viewpoint in the world so one day i'm in moria one day i'm in really pretty tropical islands one day i'm in the desert you know so i can i don't feel like i'm just stuck in a certain zone for weeks upon end and i'm not really cruising too fast through the game because i don't really need to at this point so it's it's more that's
I like to use the analogy of like throttling up and throttling down for my engagement in an MMO. Right now, I'm not really idling, but I'm very low in LOTRO right now just because, you know, there's nothing super pressing until the...
comes out and uh you know i'm continuing to go through the new the new content that came out with update 44 which actually does have some really neat battle scenes and i was very impressed with some of the scripting that they did so that it felt like you were actually going
into a skirmish and uh they had you know characters running in and you were just running alongside of them until they vanished because the scripting in lotro is not perfect but you know what whatever it gave me a little moment um yeah and uh into retail wow i'm having a lot of fun simply
blitzing through all the war within zones with my warlock and seeing if i could just speed run all the side quests i'm making it her mission to do all the side quests in the game so right now this is kind of the the test bed for that to see
How it feels to completely clear out zones. How long it takes. It doesn't take... terribly long i mean there's there's more quest than you think it's nice to be able to look at a map and see all the exclamation marks and know you know like okay here's where i need to go i don't have to to do any guesswork about
missing quests but a lot of the quests have like follow-ups and you know stuff like that so it takes a little while to get through some of the chains and it's it's fun i'm mostly doing it just uh To have that completionist sense, but also because I know that a lot of the housing decor unlocks are going to be tied to certain quests.
And so it'll be all retroactive, grandfathered in, and why not start working on your house now? Oh my gosh. I mean, you don't have to, right? This is just me setting a little... It would probably be more efficient to wait and find out what you want and then go do the quest. Maybe.
But this would be fun. So I kind of get it. It gets me some transmog and some gold. Nice gold. I think the idea is also like I'll just be doing something different. I won't be dithering around in the same four zones. And I can just kind of. to bounce around between all the different expansions so and then yeah palea it's it's been growing on me you guys
You guys have been a weird influence. I've bounced off this game several times in the past year or two. And this time it's sticking. And it's good to finally... click with the game and i think it was just a question of sticking around long enough to understand the system same i'm still like
I'm still a little lost in the weeds and I'm going through a lot of like guides and tips, videos and stuff. And every day I feel like my knowledge base is growing, but it still is very scattered when you come to the game and you're just like, they just throw so mad.
so much at you so fast and they're like yeah figure it out and I for me it was just I'll log in on a day and go okay I'm just going to narrow it down to a goal and on top of that goal I'll just kind of build up this routine of okay do the garden you know go out once in a while do a garden uh material sweep and uh do a little bit of that and if i see any npcs i'll go over and chat them up and that's kind of what i've been doing but yeah i've been setting
goals every day so like one day it's i need a repair station i need to build that because i'm really tired of my stuff breaking and i want to keep this around so you know make my goal to okay what do i need to get what do i need to do one day it's like i want to expand all my
gardening and i want to make sure i've got the crops in the right spot because that's a really nice money maker and um yeah today was um i set up my cooking station for the first time i went graduated from a cooking fire to an actual cooking station which was great until i realized that this is like mini game central and i'm like it is there's no way to like casually do this you have to be it's a very active compared to the other crafts i'm not gonna whine about it too much but
But it's going to be hard to grind out. You know what I mean? Like I don't mind doing that to make myself some food to eat. I don't really want to grind it. to level it i made a lot of vegetable stew all at once and i'm just like i just want to queue it up and walk away i know
I like the other stations that you can just do that. And seeing them all doing those idle animations. It's satisfying. It's satisfying, right? Somebody's working even if you're not. And really, I get this. Believe me, this is a large part of why I love Star Wars.
you know it because I can I can really focus my energy on like what i'm doing and then log out and know that it's still happening and i can i can chill i can do something else i don't have to play this game all the time to be productive there i felt the same way about on earth's crafting system. Yesterday actually was really great because I upgraded my bow and arrow.
I was really, really tired of hunting those stupid deer and having to hit them once and then just spend the next three minutes trying to chase this little nervous Nellie down and then hit them again. And then they dive into the ground so you can't get them. You have to wait for them.
The chupas. I'm talking about the deer. Oh, the deer. Yeah, they're... I'm just going to call them deer. Yeah, Selnuk? Is that right? Antelopes, dude. Yeah. Now I can just snipe them. It's so nice. That's very satisfying. And the only thing I don't want to do is bug catching. It's not as bad as you would think. Yeah. Go to the beach. The beach area tends to have the most. I found the beach area over in.
bahari there's just there's they're everywhere and you can use the crabs and things i've for whatever reason those all count as bugs i guess they're sea bugs it makes sense really but you can use them to cook with too so you're not just grinding out butterflies going what am i i don't need 300 butterflies. I cannot possibly give that boy any more butterflies.
At least you know what I mean. I've done almost no bug catching whatsoever to do. Like I said, I thought I would hate it too, but now that I've done it a bunch, it's like, okay, this is actually easier than hunting and way easier than cooking. And I have to do hunting because Hassan is my boy. I mean.
He loves me now. Yeah, the bugs always come out when I'm, like, doing the mining. And I'm like, oh, I guess I should do something. Oh, yeah, no, those are special ones, I guess. They only come out when you, oh, I'm so tired of mining, Justin. It doesn't get any better because you need it for everything.
You'll be mining copper and iron forever. Yeah, and that's an MMO thing too, right? Yeah, exactly. That might be my big complaint is that some of the things they've brought over from MMOs are not the good things. They take forever.
54 now but it's taken me weeks to get there and a lot of that was not fun oh i hate to say that that sounds terrible but it really was just okay well i'm not going anywhere until i have more arrows and i i have like you said repaired armor i need to go get a crap ton of copper i need to get a crap ton of iron yeah i wanted to build up a good economic base before i haven't done almost any quests i've just oh once i got yeah once i got into the game i'm like i just want to
I want to make sure I get an economy going so I can make some money. Maybe that's not a bad idea, honestly, but you will run out of space so fast, and then you're playing the, oh, I need to craft just to use this stuff up, or I guess I'll just sell all this extra wood. I got all my chest filled. You know, I got all my eight chests right now. Okay, good, good, good. I'm good for a while. So Hina, you know what you're doing. You're not a total newbie over there.
If you learn one thing every day, if you increase whatever game you're playing, I think that's a good feeling. You'll eventually get on top of it. Sometimes the learning curve, it's not a steep learning curve, but it's a pretty high hill. So you got to kind of just keep taking those steps up. Yeah.
That's fine. I haven't even gone looking in houses yet. Mistress Brazen, one of our commenters, was reminding me, here's my house, come look. And I'm like, I haven't even clicked on the housing tours. Who am I? I need to go do this. Yeah, you like doing this.
this week. You know what's going to happen, Justin? I'm going to feel embarrassed that my little hovel and my greenhouse and my farm, which is really all I've done, it's boxes out in the yard. Oh, come visit mine. You'll feel better about yourself. These people are going to make me feel very inadequate. I know it. I've just got makeshift stuff and I haven't even worked too much on the house yet.
All right, that's enough about our Paleo thing. Let's talk about some other video game news, some MMO news. It's a big week. It's June. Oh, my gosh. This is probably the biggest. I was seeing this suggestion ahead of time. I looked at what's coming this week.
week this is the biggest mmorpg week of the year i don't think we're gonna have another one that's got this much stuff all stacked up together if i had a big red button on my desk and hit it and like a klaxon went off and somebody went brace for impact that would
I would be slamming it down because this is the week. You need to have a plan in place. If you play more than one MMO or any of the ones that we're talking about, things are happening. And so I guess we're going to start with the big one, which is Dune Awakening.
It's launching into early access this week, right? Yeah, Head Start, what is Thursday? And then full launch next week. Head Start is if you paid for the two upper... pre-order packs and then you know the rest of the plebs can get in next week don't look at me i didn't pay for any of it so
That didn't sound snotty at all. No, I wasn't really intending to insult the plebs. I was trying to insult Funcom, and that didn't come out very well. My insult was directed at them for hierarchying this to make you pay more for it. Please don't.
Just don't buy early access. Just don't. Do not reward this behavior. That's what I'm getting at. So, yeah, Dune Awakening, Funcom's MMO slash Survival Sandbox slash Dune title there. It's, you know, they... delayed it from it was going to originally go into early access last month yeah they pushed it back a whole month for some additional testing opened up the beta so
Pretty much at this point, everybody was kind of curious, had an opportunity to get in. And by all accounts, it was a good move to... push it back a month, and we're hearing some, I don't know, I've heard some pretty positive things. Not universally, and there's certainly some problem areas, but I feel like it's in a better spot than it would have been a month ago.
That's a very good call that they made. Maybe they should have pushed it even more. Who knows? But at this point, Funcom wants its money and they want to get this game really going. So here it comes. Can't be worse than Anarchy Online, right? Knock on wood. Oh, no, don't say things like that. I'm going to jinx everything. That's just, yeah, calling down the gods. Throw salt over your shoulder. It's super superstitious here.
Yeah, I've heard some good and bad things at this point, and I just think we just need to see how it works. actually works with everybody playing and without those caps like we had during the beta because that's just you know bundling everybody down and not really letting them see the end game pvp stuff is sort of like that's like a large part of why people are playing so until you see that in the wild
it's just you know it's just noise almost we've got a lot of naysayers in the comments for sure who are absolutely convinced this thing is going to flop that it's going to go nowhere that people won't even be playing in a month and it's like you know what but then there's something like Conan Exiles which actually did
so well funcom had to like hire more people to like keep the game going all these years because it actually performed outperformed instead of underperformed i don't think you can just assume because it's funcom it's gonna bomb no i shouldn't have to say that but i i kind of do it's fun come i understand why people are skeptical we even made a joke about this a couple weeks ago when they were they were talking about the end game stuff the post um first zone what is it called um
basin the something basin haggen haggen something haggen basin i think it is and we were like you know it's really hard to tell whether we're getting tortaged here right and you i know you guys remember this when tortage was the age of conan thing when you could only see the first 20 zone the first 20 levels right that first newbie zone which was really good
the rest of it not so much and y'all didn't find that out until after you paid for the game and actually you know got through it and you were like oh yeah they they got us they got us hard and the game went nowhere it kind of just vanished right it's
People stop playing it. That's what people are thinking of here instead of like Conan Exiles. And I think the cognate here is more like Conan Exiles. And plus, I mean, you're slathering the Dune IP on top of it, which is an inconsiderable IP at this point. And they've got – yeah. No, you're right. New movie on the way. Yep. I mean –
My stance is Funcom is heavily invested in this IP and in this game. They want to see it succeed. It's not going to be, oh, week one was kind of rocky. We're going to walk away from it. I cannot see it. that happening. Tencent's not doing that either, yeah. They didn't buy Funcom so they could ruin this gig. Not a chance.
That said, I am going to be one of the people who are going to step back and just watch it for a couple months. I decided this, oh, I don't know, a month ago. Especially with Vencom backpedaling on the MMO thing.
really just going all in on the gank box stuff in the late game i'm like you know what it's fine i'll just watch how it goes for now i got stuff you know as long as the game still exists i don't think you do yourself a disservice from holding back if that's you want to you know let the first The cutting edge people get in right away. Let them kind of run into all the problems.
Let Funcom deliver all the emergency patches and hotfixes. And then we latecomers benefit. I mean, this is how MMOs go. You benefit from holding back sometimes and then just coming when things have quieted down, when it's no longer. a race. When it's on sale. Yeah, that too. You're giving up the progress, you know, being first in line, but I'm never going to be that anyways. So the decision for me is I'm interested in it, but there's so much other things that I'm playing.
pushed ESO off my plate this week I pushed WoW Classic I mean both of those are on the back burner I've got a lot on my back burner right now and this is you know brand new titles unless it's like a absolutely 100 i must play it's i'm willing to wait so very interested to see how this is going to roll out over the next couple weeks and we will of course continue to cover it both on the site and on the podcast so
Yeah. And Bree will continue to make really bad puns about it. I probably will. Sorry. She said she was going to do the Dune earlier today. Yeah, that's right. The thing this morning was they announced they had originally been planning on having...
private servers, custom servers, basically, but not until well after launch. They're actually having them this week. They're actually going to, they figured out a way to make that work, but they kind of make it work in a really roundabout way. You are really going to only have control on your, your private server, your rented.
server it's not like on your hard drive it's on one of these third-party websites right or third-party hosts you're gonna be able to control some of the stuff in that first zone but you're going to be hooked up to other private servers for the end game stuff, for the hub stuff, for, um, what's it called? The dark, the deep desert.
that's not right the desert the you know the end game desert stuff so it's like not exactly fully a private server you're kind of like a half a private server attached to an mmo but not attached to the official it's kind of a weird setup I understand why it was tricky because, again, this is not really a survival box. They can keep calling it that, but it's very MMO-ish. So anyway, at least they're doing that. They put a lot of effort into making that happen. I'm kind of excited to see that.
see what other people can come up with rules set wise for the leveling area anyway.
And of course, it's not the only thing happening this week because Elder Scrolls Online is rolling out, don't say chapter, but it's a chapter. It's an expansion. It's whatever. They're calling it Seasons of the Worm Cult, which I... that name bugs me it bugs me so much i thought it was a typo when i first saw it a couple months ago and then they kept doing it like that and i'm like oh no i guess it's because it's confusing because they also have this whole season right
right every mmo has like seasonal models i'm like no don't use the word seasons it could have been anything it could have been like i don't know the Well, of course, I'm saying anything and I, you know, it's only like I'm a professional writer. Words are not coming. You know what I mean? Like the doom of the worm cult, the worm cult returns, like anything. The worm cult strikes back, yes. uh yeah well anyways seasons of the worm cult the
Not an expansion, but sort of an expansion. They're big content push for the year. Rolling out this year. You do have to pay for it. It's going to get you a good chunk of content. I think there's more to come. later this year, right? Yeah, so when you buy the content pass, it's for all the content that's come out, the paid content that's come out this year, but also the rest for the rest of the year.
It's super confusing. Remember, this is the $50. It's basically an annual sub, and you get all of the specialty content. So this patch, you get the writhing wall stuff that comes. They've actually moved that off to Q4 now. Then you get the second part of this content. and there's also a dungeon pack coming. So there's more stuff. It's not just this that you're paying for, but you're just going to start with it now.
And for everybody, even if you don't pay for it, you're going to get the patch, which also includes the new subclassing. That's right. So you can subclass your character. And a lot of people are already... I saw the Reddit the other day, which just... strategizing you know what what subclasses will go best with my class and i don't really think you can pick wrong i mean unless you so want to min max but even then yes it was very very forgiving yeah so i
Have fun with it. I think it's a really cool idea. When I do go back, I'm going to experiment around a little bit. I think a warden with a necro... Subclass would be kind of interesting. You know, got to have a skeleton ride my bear. I don't think. That would be awesome. Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's worth it to read Andy's piece that came out this morning. He's the one who went to our second preview of this. I think it was Friday or Thursday or whatever. So he got the final look at it. There's a couple of new things in there, believe it or not, including some stuff on subclassing.
where he got some clarification on what you can subclass to, because originally they said it would be one line from your main class and then two others, but now it sounds like it's not just two others. Those two others have to be from different.
classes which i did not know they they did not say that two months ago or whenever that was so that's interesting i wasn't expecting that and we also he asked a specific question about um whether we were going to have to like, or whether we could really pay for these things if we hadn't leveled them and they didn't answer it, which seems like they're saying yes, but they don't want to say yes.
I would pay attention to how this develops going forward. Subclassing has the potential to be really cool, but also kind of pay to win-ish later if they go that route. It's definitely something that MMO fans are going to watch even if you're not playing. Because this is really, I don't know, we don't get a lot of neat changes to classes midway through like this.
Yeah, I'm also watching how this whole new business model, they're attempting how it's going to go for the next year. It really feels like this is a trial balloon for... Whether or not it's going to stick around, I think they could walk it back if they absolutely had to. But at least for this year.
It feels – it looks like an expansion. It feels like an expansion. And so it's not so completely different. The $50 price tag is a bit much. And I guess that's what they were charging for chapters before, right? I mean – Thank you, Jessica. It's been a while since I outright bought one.
Probably because we would buy them on sale. We would wait and not buy them on lunch day and buy them on sale later. Yeah, I think they were $40 or $50 before. I don't even think that's... And I'm not even sure that's unreasonable. You know what I mean? That's not...
fine that's what you pay for wow or everquest those games that are coming out with expansions it's just that let's talk about paleo outfits and how much oh yeah exactly that's ridiculous absolutely bonker dude i have no idea why you would pay for the full price. They do sales and stuff. There's a couple of packages you can buy that's really the effective way of going about it and their sub.
But nobody's paying that much for an outfit, for a dress. I always like the idea of paying for content, though. I feel like that's very fair. They put in the work. It benefits me. It benefits all my successive characters. going to go through this that's true and you know i'm fine with it you guys put in a ton of work i
I'm cool. I never feel like I'm really super pressured to get it day one either. There are some expansions and some games that I haven't picked up yet, but someday I will when I'm around to it. Again, with ESO, there's a few I don't have. have yet but when the day comes that i really want to do those expansions i will gladly pay them you know throw some money their way right and they still exist they aren't like
They aren't shunted off into some weird leveling experience now. Nope, that's just the open world and you can start them whenever you want on any new tune, any old tune. There are some benefits to that level agnostic experience. yeah there are But if you actually sunk some money into Janthir Wild a year or so ago, here in Guild Wars 2, it's going to benefit you right now because the last part, or the last major part of this expansion...
what we're calling the fourth leg. They keep calling it the third, and it hurts my head to think about it that way. Janthier Wells and then one, two, three. But that's just... stop this is like making your first floor on your second floor I don't like it please stop doing that
Yeah. Anyways, it's the last content, big content update for Jampier Wilds. And of course, if you're playing Guild Wars 2, you already know this. But if you've been away for a while and you bought this, you want to know, like, this is coming. And it's coming this week and it has a new map called Bavanissos. That's right. I pronounced that correctly? I don't know if you pronounced it correctly, but these are all made up words, so it's okay. Yes, I know all words are made up.
I like that better. I don't know how the Mursat would say it. I guess that's really what we should be asking because this is one of those abandoned Mursat. If we were true journalists, we'd get a Mursat on the podcast. Yeah, there you go.
It sounds delightfully creepy. It does. Did you look at the fly-through video? No, I looked at the screenshots. It's gorgeous. I'm really impressed with how this looks. I don't even... i don't even know what to compare it to i really don't the green and the orange yellow it's very sickly looking it's like lava but also kind of arbor stoney but not really and they did they did a good job they
Guild Wars 2 always does a good job coming up with biomes. I don't know how to bin them. That always impresses me. And it's always curious to me when it comes to the last... part of an expansion cycle, because it feels like these poor designers, they know they're creating a chunk of content that people will get and immediately go, okay, what's next?
they're not as invested. Like it's, you know, time to move on, time to go past, but they really at the same time need to stick the landing, have a memorable conclusion. And so that, you know, people don't feel like they're cheated or disappointed in the end. So. I don't know. I feel like a lot is resting on that, and it kind of works against the developers a little bit. But I hope that this is really good. I am curious what's next for Guild Wars 2, though. Same. I would like to... Yeah.
New homestead, new adventures, new expansion. What are they going to do? Or is everything going to go on the back burner as a gun for Guild Wars 3? Well, I mean, we know there's another expansion being told.
we do know that i don't know what's in it i thought that's i thought that's where you're going with that like i don't know where we're going and i don't like honestly i can say that they haven't told us yet um i don't know where they're going and i don't know what the specialty thing is i don't know how you top something like homesteads you know what i mean and and free dragons for everybody like how do you talk that i don't know they merge homesteads and skiffs and you got okay see now
That's really cool, and I don't hate it. I would come back for that just because I thought skiffs were very underutilized, and they could really use something like that. I don't know. I don't know what they're going for, but what we do know is that they delayed it slightly. Remember, they moved their cadence off a little bit, so it's not coming exactly two and a half weeks or two and a half months. So it'll be later.
They say it was September or October. Now I don't remember which one it was. So that'll give them more time. I wouldn't expect, like, this patch comes out tomorrow, right?
But I wouldn't expect them to immediately tell us what the expansion is. They're probably going to wait a little bit. They bought themselves more time with that delay. But yeah, I'm excited. This is going to be good. It's not just the new zone, but there's... what do they call it a fractal there's a new fractal coming i don't do fractals but fract dungeon people are going to be super happy with that and um yeah that that legendary backpack is ridiculous
I can understand why people lost their minds. Watch the video, guys, if you're curious. It literally, it's like one of those backpacks that turns to a glider, but then the glider turns to this rideable dragon, and it's like the Guild Wars eel-like dragon, you know what I mean? Chinese floating dragon that doesn't really sound like, it doesn't really look like a Western dragon. It's that eel-like dragon that I love so much. That's, only it's like made out of like glowing light. Like it's so cool.
I have never wanted a legendary item more in my life. So... Worth it. Worth it. They did a fabulous job of engineering on that weird piece. Like a serpentine dragon. And that's not something you can just buy. Just to be clear, that's not a cash shop item. That's an in-game item you're going to have to work for.
Cool. Good job. Now it feels like we were just – changing course by the way just feels like we're just in miss of pandaria last year with pandaria remix and of course we were all talking about the fact that wow classic was getting very close to miss of pandaria and would this be stepping on that when it happens i guess we're gonna see because in july specifically july 21st wow classic is officially moving into pandaria classic now this is the the main line
wow classic uh to differentiate it from the other 12 13 versions of the wow classic universe it's it's more complicated than the mcu it's just you have to have flow charts and everything but you'll remember there was the old original progression servers and that's what this is that's you know what they just call wow classic and it's moving into miss a pandaria on july 21st of course people really excited about it a it takes
him out of cataclysm nobody's really crying too much about that and it takes him into one of the fan favorite expansions and of course you know it's weird how that happened right because it's kind of controversial like the people who hate it really hate it And the people who love it are like, dude, what's wrong with you? This is fun. You know what I mean? There's something weird about it. Very subjective. Yeah. More than most. I'm still not a fan. Playing it last year.
opened my eyes to some of its strengths and i will gladly like i'm not here to hate on it or anything but i don't I still don't feel like it really fits in the world, and it just probably will never do that in my head. That's fair. They really leaned into the Eastern design very, very heavily. I love that. That's why I like it is because it's not just more wow. And if that's what you like, then go for it.
That's really cool. So in any case, that's going to definitely kind of dominate the WoW Classic gaming scene for the next year or so. WoW, of course, the 20th anniversary servers are continuing their... March toward Burning Crusade later this year. Wait, is that classic classic? Yeah, that's classic classic. New classic. I don't know what you want to call it. Crystal classic.
Season of Discovery, which was a temporary server, is kind of wrapping up its run, but it kind of ended in a really interesting way. This was a server where they were just trying new stuff. And initially it was like, hey, we're just going to let you all grab all these runes that are going to give you all these different skills and abilities and let different classes kind of try some wacky things in the vanilla setting. And it initially was...
insanely popular and it died down but it still had its loyal fan base and they kept experimenting and then at the tail end of it they were going to wrap it up around I think it was like phase six and then they just kept going because they're like
yeah, we're going to create some new content, by the way, for vanilla. We're going to create a raid. We're going to create another raid. We're going to do this dungeon and we're going to finish, you know, like Karazhan Crypts and Scarlet Enclave and all this stuff that's never actually, you know, was original.
kind of on the drawing board for this somehow i thought that was okay yeah so that that was kind of in season of discovery and so i think the current plan is they're just going they're going to do some wrap-up you know like minor stuff but no more actual content but a couple of interesting things have come out of that which is
This is really, I think this has been a test bed for Classic Plus. I've got a column. They're hinting very, very heavily about they're going to take some of this stuff and move it forward with whatever they're working for a new version of Classic.
But also for people who are invested in Season of Discovery and kind of do want to... progress i guess a little bit they're not going to be able to transfer their characters as far as i know but you can earn a free level boost up into mist of pandaria classic by going through i think it's scarlet okay i see now So it's a way to...
If you feel like you've wrapped up your adventures, but you want your time to be invested at least into another character, you're able to transfer that over. But they can't let you take the existing character because that character bears no resemblance to the characters online. It's like broken, like beyond belief in terms of overpowered. And yeah, it's crazy. So yeah, a lot of interesting things happening with Classic. And it's going to be very fascinating to see if they talk about their plans.
later this year for the whole classic universe. But in the meantime, you've got a classic Pandaria and it's coming this July. So have some fun palling around with the pandas.
all right what do we got going on in new world because you want to talk i did i wanted to talk about this briefly because last week um which i should point this out two weeks ago we actually got the the new season right and last week they put out a video and made very clear that we have a new game director on new world so scott lane had been the game director since before launch he wasn't the original one
But he was the one brought in... ish i guess around the time where they started revising i don't even remember anymore it's been years but he's been in charge for a really long time and now they have promoted katie kaczynski who has been like the senior producer type person and um
She had a couple different titles, but now she has been promoted to game director. And it sounds like that wasn't the only big move. It also looked like the creative director had been turned over. And also, oh, who was it? person who was like in charge of seasons, that stuff that I don't know what that title is called. So that's a new person too. We recognize those people. They're not like brand new to Amazon, but they've been kind of.
brought up through the ranks and katie kaczynski made it clear that scott lane is still at amazon like these people didn't like get fired and cast off to the winds it kind of made it sound like they're maybe working on the new lord of the rings mmo but we're not really sure we're guessing that for all i know they're on a completely different game that amazon
hasn't even talked about yet so so yeah it's kind of a weird like transition and it sounds like maybe this has been going on for a while but they have only just now announced it uh since kdk had um Kind of intimated that this whole modern season thing they've been doing post the Aeternum launch is...
what this team it's this particular leadership team where they're trying to do these specialty season servers and that sort of thing that this is all they're doing so it sounds like this has been ongoing since maybe closer to a turn up so it's i don't know i think it's an interesting
mix-up I always liked Katie Kaye personally a lot of people who follow New World hate everybody so take that with a grain of salt they didn't like Scott they didn't like Katie they didn't like David they don't like anything nothing was good so you know You got to take that with a grain of salt. But I always thought she had a really good eye for what's going on in the game. And I'm really curious to see what's going on.
What they end up doing going forward, because there's been, at least from what I can see, there's been a lot of concern over the PvE and PvP balance in the game.
Not that those things are balanced poorly playing together, but more like the philosophies going behind them are putting too much emphasis on PvP instead of PvE. I don't... know whether that's going to be the case going forward but if you look at the way they're playing their season servers they are very pvp oriented right they are very squishing down making the leveling very short so that you know you can get to the pvp faster and then there's a leaderboard
based on whether you die in PvP. And so... I don't know. I don't know what this will translate to in terms of health for the game and whether it'll keep it alive. But I made a point of this. I'm noting that they made it sound like they have plans for quite a ways into the future. So it doesn't sound as if Amazon is just like... completely gutting the game and going to let it lie fallow. So maybe a good thing. She's got a superhero name. Katie K. She does.
If I ever meet somebody and they have the same first and last consonant, I'm like, hey, you have a superhero name. And I always get blank looks. I'm like, you know, like Peter Parker. All right, I'll shut up. I also just get excited a little bit when we see any women in leadership positions on MMORPGs, because we don't often see game directors busting out as a lady. That just doesn't happen very often. They tend to get relegated to other roles.
Now, now, nothing, nothing, um, no, no pressure or anything. Katie kisses. skateboarding I just put way too much pressure on her you know what I mean it's just I find that exciting especially since we were just talking about this with the passing of Sandra Powers earlier this year that we don't recognize people enough we don't recognize pioneers in our own genre so
As we've often said, we need more talent to be trained up. Yes, exactly. To not just stagnate at a certain level, but to continue to improve and hopefully train up future generations as well. Yes, please. Best of luck, and I hope that, you know, of course, we're always hoping that New World does well. Please save New World. Yeah. Please. It's not a bad game. That's not a crushing amount of pressure. No. Keep piling it on.
Why don't you save Dune Awakening too while you're at it? Just save all of them. All right. We also want to talk a bit about City of Heroes Homecoming. My co-host knows nothing about this game, so I'm going to take the burden of responsibility on this. Oh, no. I read on Discord that we hate this game. We've always hated this game. Did we?
No, Discord is just stupid. I had a server named after me for like three minutes. That's what I said. I was like, hello, they named the servers. Ugh, y'all don't know anything. For three minutes. I wish I had a screenshot of that. I can't prove it to my kids. Oh, I bet someone has it. If you have a screenshot of the old Justin server, I would really appreciate that.
In any case, we're not talking about that. We're talking about City Heroes Homecoming. Yes. And a rather large and also surprisingly controversial patch that they've got in the making and in the testing right now. Without going into a five-hour diatribe on this. Aww.
Okay, four hours. You can do four hours. Walk us through what's going on in City Heroes. So this is I-28, issue 28, page two, Legacy, right? This patch has been a really long time coming. We haven't had a major patch since last year.
the homecoming team which was a little disappointing because they just became official at the beginning of 2024 so i think people were expecting the floodgates would be open and it was just the opposite stuff kept slowing down um and we had all kinds of hypotheticals about why that might be
behind the scenes. But this one is finally here and it's got a lot of stuff. The main thing that I think people will be excited about before they get into the nitty gritty is the fact that they have completely revamped Calisti Worf.
it's not just existing now it is like a leveling zone now instead of just a place you can go visit and do various you know there's leveling arcs there's a whole bunch of contacts with brand new quests for characters over level 40 which is important because we really needed content for characters over level 40 otherwise you are doing the same radio missions over and over again there aren't nearly as many fun modern
arcs for that level band new enemies all that kind of stuff there's a new world boss they really fleshed it out honestly they really it looks awesome The problem is that all of that work is kind of being overshadowed by the other half of the patch which is the balance patch because the devs kind of came in and
took a flamethrower to like stuff people really like and are continuing to ignore this is the perception anyway anyway continuing to ignore things that are super overpowered and instead they're just nerfing things that were already not that overpowered and so people are like Why, though? Why? Why are you balancing anything at all? This isn't even a game we're paying for. No one's getting paid for any of this. Stop touching stuff that worked and has worked for 20... Like, seriously.
So this this kind of when I wrote the first post, I was like, oh, man, some of this looks bad. You know, plant dominators are going to be really pissy. I'm a plant dominator. I can just tell this is not a great change. Sleep doesn't go far enough.
I forget what it's called, but there's another skill they're doing where they're changing a lot of the duration, the ratios basically between duration and the number of targets they hit. Whatever that's called, they're changing that for controllers. There's just a bunch of little minute things.
things that if you're not playing that archetype, you would skim over and go, I don't know what that means. Ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore. But if you are, you're going, holy crap, that is not fun. You just took all the, are you the fun police? you know what i mean like why why are you doing this controllers are already so unloved in this video game you did not need to do this so it kind of blew up and elliot did a piece on it like yo what's up with the balance on this on this this
jump up, jump private server. Why are you doing this? And it kind of got more hits, some more clicks. gotten on a lot of our columns in a very long time because the the city of heroes community is relatively small compared to a lot of mmos but it's not tiny i mean it's bigger than new world can we just be honest about that so
People had opinions and they were willing to come tell us that we were totally wrong or we were totally right. And apparently some of that has gotten up to the uppity ups over at Homecoming. And maybe things will change and maybe they will not change. Who knows? I don't know. So it's mostly one of those. Well, I can tell you the real problem in a nutshell. I'll tell you what Elliot.
What Elliot's opinion is, and I tend to agree with him, he has basically come to the conclusion that some of the folks who are running and playing Homecoming at the highest levels are... pushing the game in the direction of being more of a rusher game not that you rush through your levels they mean like rushing through dungeons rushing through missions as fast as possible which if you guys know anything about city of areas you know that's not the kind of game this was designed to be it's
meant to be more strategic. It's a tab target game. It's the kind of game where buffs and debuffs and shields and damage mitigation and control are super important. It's a very strategic... play style even for a big group now yes of course everybody was always trying to make it faster but in the past making it faster wasn't really possible except through like high quality like um
enhancements and like really good skill you know what i mean there were there were only so many ways you could go faster um none of those original classes were being devalued in any way you still needed a controller or you know the alpha was going to destroy you whatever you still needed tankers to tank or somebody to tank and so forth but the current version of the game really doesn't look anything like that at end game
If you're just playing it, you know, being a regular old player like us, it probably just looks the same as before. You're not even going to notice. But if you get to the end game where people are, you know, doing incarnate trials, they're doing some of the high end trials and whatnot. You know, those people are like, we don't.
Are you a controller? Why are you here? Get out of here. Nobody is taking those kinds of stalkers, dominators, controllers. They're not completely unwanted, basically. And if you are one of the classes, the ATs that is in demand, they want you to be a specific type of... at that contributes to the speed run kind of gameplay that the game is now being tailored around so there's a huge for my vantage point there's a big like
clash between these two groups the people who want gameplay to feel like the old days and people who were like no i want this to feel like every rushing game that exists in 2025 and i can kind of see both like i understand wanting to go faster but in my
we already have a bunch of those games and they're all better than city of heroes at that and i would rather have the older strategic game playback because that's the thing the city of heroes has that nobody else has got like if i tell this to people all the time if you want to play a control character if you love the idea of locking down mobs city of heroes was your game and it's still your game if that's what you want to do that's that's the best place to do that period full stop so
I kind of hate to see the official version of City of Heroes in 2025 turned into something that looks nothing like the thing that the game was known for, was good at. That's depressing to me. I think that this patch kind of like stepped on a landmine and like really blew up the, you know, detente between these two sides. And now like everybody's just kind of losing their mind, screaming and yelling about it. So like I said, sit back and watch.
see what homecoming does and the worst part of it is completely unfinancially motivated so there's no way you can vote with your dollar on this you know what i mean they're going to do what they think is best and it may not actually be best for the game or the original players Bummer, but there it is. At the risk of triggering an additional rant. Well, actually, that wasn't even a rant. That was just a great explanation. I hope so.
Yeah, my take on all of this, anytime I hear this, and just really quick, is that I really do appreciate what these private server people do in terms of game preservation and trying to continue the game and grow it. At the same time, it does occasionally show why true professional developers
our developers and why volunteers are not always qualified to make sweeping giant changes to the games. And I know that sounds a little harsh and I don't mean it to be even in this case, but you know, when you're, when you're monkeying about with balance, issues and stuff like that and you're not somebody who's been professionally trained in you know game development and stuff maybe you should leave well enough alone unless you're very sure you could walk it back or
It's not going to make huge changes. Again, I don't mean that to be harsh. No, I wouldn't take that harsh. I wouldn't feel qualified to do that. You know what I mean? I wouldn't feel qualified to just jump in into the spreadsheet and start number crunching. But I also don't think we should be driven by the spreadsheet in the first place. I've made this joke a couple of times now that there's two kinds of development on City of Heroes. There's the kind where they drive everything by.
spreadsheet and by numbers and by we don't want you to have any more fun than necessary and then there's the kind of developer who puts a talking seagull in pocket D so you don't have to grind. And I'm team seagull. You know what I'm saying? And like, I really support the rule of cool. And this should be about having fun. No one's playing a game. So you don't want them to rush. but you also want like instant.
and game access no so what i mean by the seagull thing was literally what it did was make it so that you could change sides it was actually an accessibility thing uh not so that you don't have to level because you just don't have to level through the game and in my opinion it's still kind of slow even when it's double that's my personal opinion
But no, we took away the hard caps on moving back and forth between the sides. So if you're a hero, you can very quickly switch to whatever it is. I forgot what they're called. I almost never play anything but a hero or a villain. A vigilante and rogue is what they're called. Brain fart. You need to get back on an internet road trip right now. They're at the top of a hill and there's a lighthouse. Wait, really?
cruising around a lighthouse at this moment i've taken screenshots i wanted to break into your like oh now i see a picnic are they in the middle of the what are they doing if they turn around they'll see the the lighthouse they're at a light it looks like they're driving through the grass in a park with picnic tables. They are. They're not even on the road. This is the internet grass trip. It was like a blurry image of a guy. Yeah, I think the street view guard killed somebody at some point.
anyways okay well there you go city heroes testing out a really interesting patch of course check out both our column on that and our patch uh or i'm sorry our post talk oh yeah well we'll keep covering it because like you said we're it's still in testing and i meant to do this yesterday actually i want to go test this oh i see now hi canadian car I see it. Okay, so there's two new power sets, too, that are coming in. I didn't even mention that, which is really cool. Again, I would...
If the balance team could be channeled into making more power sets just 24-7, I would be stoked. That's what I want to see out of the game. I want to see 24-7 new cool power sets and new content. Stop balance. Stop touching the numbers. It's fine. You know what I mean?
just quit just let people play that's why they're here and not not in some other game but yeah so there's two new ones and i want to go check at least one of them out one of them is a control set it's called the pyrotechnic set and it's like right up my alley blowing stuff up i'm here yeah like the fire It's going to be fun. So I'm going to do that like probably this week. I wanted to do it yesterday, but it was my daughter's birthday party and I was at a party with.
a whole bunch of 10 year olds and it was a lot so I did not get to play that yesterday but I will try to do that this week I went to the prom with my kids last weekend what They had a prom. It was like a whole family prom thing and we all got dressed up as crazy. I'm sorry. No, no, no. I was just saying either I'll do that or Chris. Maybe I'll talk Chris into playing it on stream because I know he loves to check out the new power sets too.
But yeah, I really hope they can get their philosophy issues, whatever's going on behind the scenes with Homecoming, how they can sort that out. good luck because it really sucks when you're not getting paid and you still have all of the same pressures you know the player pressures and you know what i mean on you yeah i feel sorry for them but at some time at some point you got to say look you know
You need to remember that you are also the keepers of the game and not just the changers of the game. Because you do have to find a balance between preservation and updates. That actually segues really well into our mailbag. Oh, it does. Do we have time for mailbag? We have a couple minutes. Okay. So I pulled this one to the top because it was...
referencing something we just said like a couple of weeks ago. It's from Catriona and she says, while talking about the problems with the Defiance relaunch, Justin threw out the comment, but it's better than no game at all or something to that effect. This made me wonder, is it though? It's an easy idiom to throw out to express that you like something that's at least getting a chance.
Stop and examine that for a moment. Is it really better to have a version of a game that's buggy as heck or one that's full of toxic players or Cheater McCheatersons if the alternative is no game at all? Does this really help the title or benefit people who like the game and want it to thrive but know what's... probably doomed because of all the issues it has. I'm not sure it is but I would love to hear your reasoning for or against.
This was such a fun question. Yeah, it was. Defiance is still kind of new, and Defiance has already done two DLCs since we talked about this. They're cranking out a new old DLC every week. This really is kind of relevant. Yeah, and it also kind of goes back to the handling issue. Of course, this is not like volunteers handling a game. company that should know how to handle an MMO, and we're seeing that they sort of do and sort of don't, and they're learning some hard lessons.
But this question is good, and I want to be totally fair to it, because I see Catriona's point. Like, sometimes just releasing trash is, you know, maybe you just shouldn't. I mean... What I'm thinking of is here of like movies where there's a huge debate over whether sequels ruin.
the original the original movies right some people go well it doesn't really matter the original is great and even if the sequel is horrible you always have the original and some people go no well the sequels will always be tethered in some way shape or form to the original
and they kind of drag it down. So quality is important. And so it's not just a, hey, let's release sequels all willy-nilly because they can have an effect. If they're all trash, don't just... release trash for the sake of trash so yeah i mean in an ideal world all these mmos would be preserved in a wonderful state and i guess i guess my i i do want to kind of like defend my position a little bit because yes i still would rather have The crappy game that she was defining here.
over no game at all i mean just just for the sheer sake of game preservation because it does make somebody happy that it still exists and it gives them the option to play it because it really sucks when you just can't play a game you've wanted to play because it was an mmo and it got taken offline and it doesn't exist anymore right and here's my other qualifying factor there's always a chance of improvement in the future that You know, maybe the company devised the odds.
little pun there defies the odds and improves things down the road and gets better patches or better community management uh or you know better optimization and of course that's something that really defines mmos that they have this potential to improve and over time and sometimes uh they truly do so yeah um but at the same time i all acknowledge that yeah it's not
It's not a great look when you release a totally cruddy game. In fact, we've seen some MMOs that have been released so many times and so half-heartedly. And you're just like, no, put some... If you're going to bring it back, put some actual... development some actual skills some really good hardware tech behind it otherwise just don't bother all you're trying to do is make that cheap buck and that's a i hate that feeling too that's that's just low effort and
we don't have a lot of respect for that here at Massively OP. So, I mean, I guess I'm not going to really fight you too hard on this, Catriona, if that's your position. I could kind of argue against myself here, too, but I still would want the game to exist.
Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with anything you said. And I don't really disagree with anything Catriona said either, do I? I think it's one of those, eh, game preservation is probably going to win out for me in the end. You're going to have cheaters in every game. You're going to have trash in every game. Every game has messes. Every game has bugs. You know what I mean? It's just a matter of degree. I guess...
What was popping into my head while you were talking was when stars reach. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Actually, it was, well, this road is really pretty. I want to go to Canada. Yeah. Sorry.
No, I was thinking about when Stars Reach got announced and how part of my trepidation about Stars Reach was that if he does it, no one else is going to do it. So he has to do it well. And if he doesn't do it well... no one's gonna you know what i mean like when i say he i mean i mean raf costa i mean like he's sort of taking up the mantle of this is there any other yes it's fair fair fair king of mmos right um
But if he takes this up, no one else is going to be like, well, I'm going to do better than Raph Koster. I'm going to make Stars Reach-ish and make a different game that's exactly like Stars Reach. No, that's just not how it's going to work. um so i sometimes i worry that if a game company picks up an old game like this and reboots it well like no one else has access now that they have that license nobody else can even try you know what i mean there it's like an opportunity cost that's
being paid here. There's no other effort. No other way we can get an effort out of a different team or a different studio. I guess we see that a lot even with Emulim. Homecoming is another example. There are a couple of tiny servers out there, but they're either really small or they're not the kind of place where you would take your grandma to hang out. don't really want to be there at night. You know what I mean? They've sucked all of the air out of the room.
in terms of that game. So that's why it's so important that people fight and make sure that that version of the game is actually the preservation they said it was going to be that we were supporting all along. So with something like Defiance, that's... That's just the opposite. That's a for-profit venture. No one else has that. Literally no one else can take that license. I don't know. That's my only real concern is that I would like it to be done well because if it's not done well...
Not only can no one else try it right now, but they'll be even less likely to try it once this one closes down. Because they'll have seen how it goes. And it didn't go well. You know what I mean? It's really tricky. Do things excellently.
I mean, seriously, do things excellently. My mom would always say, if you're going to do something, do it well. Do it right. Yep. Do it right. But, you know, unfortunately, just the work ethic and a lot of people are just like, no. Our moms are so Midwestern. We have the Midwesterniest moms of all time.
yeah and i just seen studios that are lazy and just trying to to milk dead cows beat beat dead marsupials whatever nobody mangles nobody mangles an idiom like i do but justin has has taken me for the title this episode my my kitten what was The whole kitten shebang or something. Yeah.
I was so happy you left that as a title. It was funny and it made fun of me. I was betting that you were going to change it. Please laugh at my ridiculous mixed metaphors. You guys know how my brain works. It trips over itself the whole time. All right, well, thanks for sending that in, Catriona, and I hope that that...
you know, continued the discussion in an interesting fashion. That is about it for today's podcast. We want to encourage you to a couple of quick things that you can do to help us out. Check out the Patreon program on the right-hand side of the site. You can just see what some of the benefits are of supporting us. financial here. Massively OP is an independent.
mmo journalist site so we don't have big pockets behind us we are just kind of scrappy and doing our things we we run bake sales and lemonade stands in the summer but mostly my boss won't let us do that Yeah, mostly we just have our Patreon program and we do rely a lot on that. There is no boss. That's not a thing. That was a joke. Some people really don't understand. I shouldn't make jokes like that because people don't know what's going on.
You have to create this imaginary mythology. I try, but it doesn't work. Not for you, no. You can be kind to each other in the comments. You can, of course, send us in a podcast email. All the show notes have a link to that, and it's very, very easy to do. So go ahead and whip something to us, and we'll put it in the queue and talk about it on a future show.
And that should be about it. Follow us on social media. And, of course, check out the site and our streams as we continue down this crazy, crazy news week. Road in Cape George Point, Canada. Yeah. I miss the lighthouse, though. Oh, they're going to turn. We have to turn on the gravel road. Oh, no. Don't do it, guys. Don't do it. Oh, they didn't do it. They didn't. We didn't even get the option. Yeah.
All right. Well, we're going to continue our road trip. You guys come along with us. We'll have fun this summer playing MMOs all over the place. We, of course, want to hear what you're playing on WRUP on Saturdays and see what you've been playing in one shots on Sundays. Those are a couple of our regular columns and we'd love to have community participation in those. All right. You guys have a fun week. We'll take care and we'll see you again next week. Later, everybody.