Episode 525: Microsoftpocalypse

dearly beloved we have gathered together to mourn to cry to weep and to wail at the passing of our hopes and dreams of the mmo industry what do we have left but ashes and dust But yet we remember from ashes rise, the mighty Phoenix, Phoenix online, the new game coming to you from. Oh, it's an NFT game. Don't worry. Like you're not going to want it. It's crypto NFT. Yeah.

I hope there isn't really a Phoenix online because we just ruin them forever. It does sound like semi-legit, right? It does sound like something someone would try. Don't get any ideas, Devs.

Sorry. Welcome back to the Massively OP Podcast, episode 525. Yeah, we know why you're here. You know why we're here. We got stuff to talk about with the capital S. Of course, before we get to that, you're going to have to hear me, Justin, and my co-host Bree talk about what we've been playing this past week. Because it's not all doom and gloom, we've got some cool stories to share. Hopefully. I don't know. Do you? i'm presuming cool stories no okay i mean we're still playing mmos right like so

teasing i i think i think that sometimes mmos are not necessarily um most notable for their excitement factor or for their novelty factor they're just kind of a fun thing to do i don't know i've been playing palea y'all know that um

Mostly this past week in Palea, I got really deep into Elderwood. I had mentioned the last time that I... was kind of blocked in progress because i didn't realize that all of the npcs i needed were actually just moved to elderwood and i needed to go talk to them there i thought they were bugged and they weren't bugged so

Once I figured that out, I went and I was able to like brush past, like turn in a whole bunch of stuff and then like charge forward into the zone. And so now I've pretty much explored, mapped out the whole thing. That's been fun. Honestly, Elderwood is really nice. There's some annoying things about it, but I'm not mad about that. Like there's the mobs are slightly more annoying. They, you know, they have more.

I hate to use the word hit points because that makes it sound like a different kind of game than it is, but they're harder to kill and they're more annoying and they run away and they kind of slow you down. That can be kind of obnoxious. I've had a hard time finding...

Some of the things that I'm looking for, the specific like plants and herbs and stuff, they spawn at different times during the day. So you kind of have to wait and it's just I get really tired of that and whatever. But mostly I've actually been working on skills apart from. actually exploring in the new zone I've been working on trying to get all my skills up I wrote down what I have because my goal was to get everything to 10 once you've got a skill at 10 you can start earning those medals

Yeah. I don't know what they're called. I don't remember. They're like little token things. Medals or medallions or something like that. It's something like that. And you need them because then you can turn those in for all kinds of stuff, extra recipes and decor, but also in some cases...

the stuff you don't feel like grinding for like it'll literally give you you know seeds or specialty ore or specialty wood or whatever honestly i really like that honestly so you can do whatever you want make the metals and then get the thing that you're looking for anyway. So I have my gardening at 19. That's the easy one because you garden like every day, sometimes more than once a day, I admit.

11 foraging, 10 mining and furniture, and so I'm still working on hunting, which is 9, fishing and cooking, which are 8, and bugs. which are seven bugs it's bug catching it's not really bugs but like i don't like the bugs i don't like the bug catching i i get so bored doing it's not that bad but i don't feel like grinding it It just doesn't feel like it's really connected as much to the other parts of the game. I agree.

And I, yeah, I had the same disconnect. It needs like, there needs to be like an alchemy skill. I expected there to be an alchemy system based on the kinds of like plants and herbs and things that are in the game. I was like, oh, for sure. You know, you're going to grind.

up a saranock antler or something and it'll be a cool thing and then i if it's there i don't know where it is or maybe it's buried someplace and i just haven't figured it out yet somebody tell me if i'm wrong but mostly that that stuff is just junk it seems like we're missing a skill

that it's just like an obvious thing that should be there and it's just not because you can make certain things like you can make little fishing tonic things whatever they're called to like buff and every single skill has its own like buff thing or like um like a tool that allows you to find more of the thing, you know, if you're willing to do that. I don't know. It just, it needs like, it needs potions. Give me potions.

But yeah, overall, I'm having fun. I just, I don't want to catch bugs. And also like lots of things count as bugs. So most of the time when I'm farming bugs, God, this sounds so weird. I actually am farming crabs. Which doesn't make any sense either, but they're useful for cooking. I can't believe I got my cooking to eat. I hate cooking. It sucks so bad.

I really, it's so funny because I'm pretty good at rhythm games. I'm pretty good at rhythm. I was literally a drum major for years and years and years. I'm really good at holding a tempo. I can snap out the tempos that I'm looking for without getting a metronome out and actually... You just know these things when you practice it for so long.

there's something about the implementation in paleo where like it messes me up every time maybe it's my mouse like honestly i i had a really rough time when i was doing it on my tv but like even on my mouse it's not that easy i feel like my inputs just

aren't happening when I want them to and there really isn't a ton of wiggle room especially in like the fast thing like when you're chopping I don't know what those are chives or something it's really really fast it's like I can't even get my mouse to click that fast What the heck? So maybe I just need to change it to a different button.

I don't know, but it seems so out of sync for the rest of the game. My son was watching me do that, and I was missing. And the more I missed, the more he was laughing at me. I'm like, stop, dude, I can't. There's a rhythm to this. He's like, you're so bad at this, Dad. I think that's part of it, too, is because you can see the rhythm, but you can also hear it. But they don't give you a lot of lead time, especially for the slightly slower ones. So you might only get...

too and that's not really enough to set the pattern in your head and so by the time it actually gets there you're likely to miss especially if you're trying to watch and listen at the same time or if you can't hear because like you said somebody will just walk in and make a noise it's like well i missed it

Now I've got to rely on the visuals and trying to get my finger to sync with the visual, which they might not – anyway. I'm going to stop whining about this now. It's not that big of a deal. I was going to ask you. You can literally just eat onions in this game or eat fish and it's like fine. Just do whatever. You don't need to cook, but still.

were you ever any good at like the guitar hero yes okay not not the guitar though i'm that's that's the ironic part the thing i specialized in was percussion was the the four pat um you know the little drum set thing it's got like four and then a bass pedal on it and i'm really really good at that but man i suck it there's something about the way this input works

Oh, man, that is so much fun, too. We had so many of those. That's literally the reason we kept our PS3, because all of our equipment is set up for the PS3. Like, I don't even know if you can buy it. Yeah, I don't even know if you can buy it for anything else. But we had gotten, like, all of the downloads.

had gone on ebay and bought like a ton of the you know like the license stuff like we had the beatles disc oh my gosh i love that game so much seriously i can't believe it's like they were just everywhere for the longest time and now they were just not you know like all of a sudden It's like our culture just say, yeah, you know, we're done. I can't believe that people don't have fun doing that anymore. Like that's just, yeah.

There's something I don't know how much of it is not even like demand driven, but, you know, supply driven because. If they don't feel like paying the money for the licensing, they're just not going to ship anything. And there was like so much oversaturation of the market. That's definitely true.

They were releasing way too many of them, you know, guitar heroes and stuff. And at a certain point, people went like, yeah, we've had our fill. Thank you very much. Yeah. What does that have to do with MMOs? We don't know. I would play a rock band in the MMO. That would be amazing. That would actually be pretty cool. Wasn't there that music? It's called Anthem.

It was a different, like, with a Y. Yes, with a Y. I know the one you're talking about. Yeah, there's going to be this music-based MMO. I think that one even made it off Kickstarter. I think they failed their Kickstarter. I fell way too in love with the concept. I know. And then it failed the crowdfunding. And I'm like, well, I will never. up again no i don't know i no one's gonna make that game but i would play that game which is right i was it just i i i

I'm so tired of the standard fantasy setting. I just want imaginative fantasy settings. I think there's so many that, you know, even in books and to a much lesser extent movies and TV shows that are so much more creative than things that we see on.

in video games but you know they kind of go to the the common denominator when it comes to you know fantasy tropes because they don't want to weird people out too much i guess yes no i was just talking to my kids about this the other day we were talking about simulations because my

My daughter has only ever heard the word sim in the relation as the Sims, like the game, and not actually sim. And I was like, oh, no, it's short for simulation. You know, a simulation is like when you're going out in the world and you're doing a bunch of things.

As opposed to an MMO where you're going out into the world and doing things you would never do. Ever. Like, do not wander into the wilderness and start killing everything in sight. That's weird. And people would not take kindly to it. And then don't bring back the carcasses and put them in your bank. Because that's also not okay.

None of this is okay. Okay? Simulations, the word has gotten a little stuck. It was a whole genre, right? It still kind of is. Oh, totally. Yeah. Not anymore. Well, I actually put Paleo down. I did. I think I've had my fill for now. Wow, I didn't expect that. Yeah, I'm going to back burner it for a little bit.

I felt like I was just doing the same thing a little too much. And I could feel the tinge of burnout come on. And I was trying to push into Pahari Bay. And I just felt like I wasn't making enough progress to really keep. the excitement level up so i thought you know that's okay for now i'm just gonna kind of probably the next time they announce like when they get animal husbandry i'm gonna be back with aurora they have a patch this week but it's not that

I don't think it's that anyway. And part of that equation is I also wanted to – I've been feeling the call to get back into WoW Classic. Oh, yeah. I haven't touched that in a while. So I actually dusted off my – level 25 druid i hadn't played in a you know several months and i thought oh this is this is what i want right now for summer just some some bare bones basic no frills

old-fashioned questing slash grinding slash trying not to dying and i've actually had a wonderful week because of it it was a really great week um probably had more social interaction in classic than i did in retail oh um just like random oh this person needs some help oh yeah no problem i'll come help you or this person just jumped into a you know a spontaneous group with me like hey killing this thing or you want to kill that thing or we need

we need a few people to help out over here yeah no problem okay uh so you know like just having a Some parts of the game map where it is a little tougher, you can't really solo it, so those calls do tend to go out a little bit more often. Or there's a boss, a world boss, you just simply cannot solo unless you're vastly overleveled.

Yeah, it's been good. It was also really nice because I think when the original time I kind of dropped my Druid, her kit still hadn't come together very well. And the Druid is... it takes a while before you can actually start killing things with any sort of speed but i was just on the cusp of it so now having stuck it out for like three levels this past week um i'm starting to get more skills and more talents and

suddenly I'm able to kill faster and that actually makes a world of difference so it's been a lot of fun just doing old school stuff like Darkshire and Or Duskwood or whatever you call it. I forget the name. I'm sorry. I've mixed up so many games. I think both of those things exist. Yeah. Darkshire is the capital of Ashenville. And Duskwood is the one on the other continent? Yeah, the one with the werewolves. That's Duskwood. Yeah, Duskwood. The one south of...

Elwynn Forest, yeah. I feel like I'm brushing off my ancient World of Warcraft cred, street cred. Having to go find Jitters, talk to Jitters a little bit, dodge stitches. Such a well-designed zone. I know, really. favorites in that game so yeah i had um been having a lot of fun in classic nothing Nothing extraordinary, no vast measures of speed, but I feel like, yeah, if this is something I want to keep doing a journey with this character, a druid is really good.

good one to go into the next expansion where they actually get to become a good class instead of a heavily hobbled class. which is what you have to deal with. Other than that, World of Warcraft. I don't know if we actually did a post on this. If not, maybe I could convince my editor that we probably should. But they've been running this month-long buff that started at the beginning of July.

which is called collector's bounty did we do anything on this we might not that sounds vaguely familiar but i'm not sure if So this is really cool. They activated this buff, and we knew it was kind of coming, but we didn't know exactly what it was going to be until it got here. And they activated it, and it's like... It vastly increases the amount of the drop rate of dungeon and raid boss loot. So like infinitesimal, you know.

tiny percentage point chance of this mount dropping suddenly got way way better so now everybody has just like abandoned the war within Everybody's farming for mounts now. They're farming mounts. They're farming transmog. It's so funny because you go into the capital city and you're just like, where is everybody?

like they they all farming dude go farm yourself yeah it was and it was funny because i of course the first thing i do is like well i'm going to ice crown citadel of course gotta go for my shot at invincible who knows you know might get that stupid horse And, um,

and the chat the i i didn't realize this there's like a raid chat you know for the instance and there's everybody's just chatting up and it's funny like everybody's doing the same instance so everybody's like oh good luck hope you get it you know but offering tips and tricks. So wait, everybody's soloing this stuff, right? This isn't group stuff. So this is soloing old content. Everything before Dragon. What has happened to WoW?

I'm not even sure I'm mad about it, but boy, it doesn't really bear a lot of resemblance to OG. It's a little different. Yeah. It's shade. It's fun. I think it's always been fun to be vastly overleveled and just jump into those old. instances and just absolutely steamroll everything because the bosses come out you know they're like 500 feet tall and they start down their script of like oh my a hero has come i'm gonna and you just you know like one shot it

Can't even get out its whole speech at that point. Yeah, exactly. Give me your loot. I must have your loot. Oh, you didn't drop anything good. So I didn't get anything other than some pets and a lot of transmog, actually. But I haven't also. I also did Sunwell Plateau.

That was good times until I thought of that in years. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I got really far into it. And then I don't know if I bugged out something or I needed to clear all the mobs or whatever, but I couldn't trigger the next boss. And I was just. too lazy to really look it up so i just hearted out of there i think i'm making it my goal this month just one dungeon or raid a day just something just go have fun i'm not

Some people have all these checklists. They are going down massive checklists of all the super rare things that now have a plus 10% chance of getting whatever you wanted. So they're really super serious. I'm more of a... yeah i'll do it and whatever drops drops and that's cool you know like why don't they just set it like this all the time um well

I don't know, but I think this is something that if it's popular, they can keep bringing back as a fun event. There is a bit of salty controversy in the end. Yeah, because the people who farm these things the hard way are like, oh, you're getting the welfare handouts. You can't do that.

So it's a, it's that, but you know what? For the most part, I haven't seen that much of that grousing. Most people are just having fun and having a lot of fun farming and go for it. It honestly feels a lot like last summer with Legion or with Pandaria remake.

where they were just throwing all of this you know all these unlocks all these transmog unlocks at you and you were just unlocking stuff left and right and absolutely farming that entire expansion to the point where it just had nothing left Kind of reminds me of my son this morning who said, Dad, I hear on one of those Navy ships, they have a goat and that's where they get all their milk from.

I'm like, one goat? What is it? Like a Capri Sun that you just suck dry? It's the thinnest goat you'll ever see. That's not how goats work, sweetie. That's great. It might be a mascot. It's not going to be a source of the milk for an entire time. Fire battleship. But now that image is in my mind of this absolutely suck dry goat. Someone who has been in the Navy, tell us if any of that is true. Do you have a goat or is somebody just pulling? Where do you keep the hay? I just want to know.

Who actually gets a sign taking care of the goat on my submarine? I need to know this. The lowest of the ranked people, I guess. Actually, I wouldn't mind caring for a goat. I was going to say, that might not be the worst job ever, honestly. Goats are cute.

Yeah. Well, our job is not to care for goats. It's to cover the MMO news. So let's transition out of whatever we were just talking about. No, I want to keep talking about goats because I know what's first and I don't want to talk about it. Yeah.

Okay, well, that's called denial, and it's not very grown up of you, is it, Bree? Okay, I'm fine with that. And let's get into the worst week of MMO news that we've had this week. year it was just not even mmo news it was just a bad week of video game industry news and you know what we're talking about microsoft had been alluding to these upcoming layoffs for a while uh this is not the first round of layoffs

they've had, but this was easily the most brutal. 9,000 people across Microsoft and its many, many umbrella organizations. No, no, to be clear, that was just the games division. Okay, I thought it was from Microsoft down across all their game divisions.

like xbox and then everybody that xbox owns yes so okay the way we're saying the same thing no no we're just saying the same thing yes because microsoft has non-xbox stuff i was i just want to say this wasn't like this was all xbox everything in the xbox gaming stuff yes just to be clear it wasn't like they laid off you know

9,000 people working on AI and then 100 from Xbox. They should have. It was 9,100 from AI. All of Xbox and also Bethesda and Activision and all of the studios. That's just how they've got it organized now. So Spencer is in charge. charge of like all of it the whole shit show all right you got one swear on this podcast and you chose did i just use it okay all right that's fair i might have saved it for you know specific people who deserve it, but instead I'll just... I hear you.

Yeah, I was actually super busy the day that all this was happening, and I didn't even want to get into the chat or anything. Sometimes it just feels nice to disconnect and go, okay, bad stuff's happening over there. I'm just going to go mow my lawn for a while. Brie's in charge. Bye. Brie cannot rip herself away from the computer as much as she might like to. So yeah, 9,000 people across Microsoft's Xbox division let go.

And this has affected so much. Of course, we've had smaller projects go away. For us in the MMO genre, first of all, I think we should preface this by saying... We feel super bad for everybody. Oh, my God. I should probably go without saying. Yeah, but I think we need to. I don't want to sound like, oh, let's go. And then there were 6,000 just a couple months ago. So that's 14,000 people just this spring and summer. And that doesn't count.

the people they laid off at the top of the year or all the Activision people they laid off spring of last year. Like it's been nonstop layoffs at Microsoft. It's a miracle to have anybody left to make games. I guess they don't. I don't know.

But the biggest hit, I mean, by far, ZeniMax Online announced that not only they're laying off a lot of people, hundreds, hundreds of people here, but they canceled the MMO that they've been working on for how many years, Bree? Seven years. Seven and a half, actually, I believe, Mr. Justin. Yeah, seven and a half years. At least we can console ourselves that it sounded like a horrible project. Oh, wait. No, it sounded amazing. Yeah, it kind of did.

So this project was called, was it a codename? It was a codename. They didn't have an official name. It was called Project Blackbird, which is kind of, okay, we should probably point out that seven years and y'all still don't have footage, screenshots, a name. It's been a long time. We know MMOs take a long time, but this one has clearly been a little messy along the way. They clearly had some false starts and do-overs. Okay, fine.

But it was still being made. They were still pouring money into it. They were still pulling people into it. Clearly, you could see how ESO was suffering to bring people over to this new game. And it kind of made sense. ESO is 10 years old. We expected... the new game to kind of be ZeniMax's new thing. And so it was hard to even begrudge them for that. But now we don't get to have it.

And all of those people lost their jobs. So we didn't just lose the game. We lost all of the hundreds, hundreds apparently it was, of people who had been pulled in to work on this brand new MMO. Top of the line, AAA. Big Studio MMORPG. And...

Probably many of the best minds from the Elder Scrolls Online team, too. Oh, my God. Yeah, because they had been siphoning off from ESO. Yes, they had. And ESO was, that community was a bit, had a bit of a chip on their shoulder over all of this. Like, you know. we're you know that's why chapters have gone away was the assumptions because you know there's fewer and fewer people working on this and all these resources are being poured over to this project and now

the project isn't existing. Now, was this the same project that was rumored for a short period of time there to be possibly a Star Wars title? Probably. I think so, because at one point, yeah, I was talking to Alessio from WFC, crap, I always screwed up, WCCF Tech.

And he was saying at one point he swears it was going to be a fantasy MMO. And I was like, well, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if they've changed it from fantasy to sci-fi to Star Wars to sci-fi. Back and forth because they clearly went through so many iterations along the way.

Eight years, seven years is a long time. Yeah, that does sound like they went back to the Jordan border. So it's very likely they considered trying to get that IP. I don't think they were working on another game, if that's what you mean. Okay. So, yeah, it sounded to me from the description, we have a lot of details about...

This project, which we'll never get to see. So if you want to torment yourself, I guess, with the what if of what never will be, you can check that out. It sounds a little bit like. Destiny-ish? It was very Destiny-ish. So there's a lot of people claiming that it's not really an MMORPG, that it's more of a looter shooter, that it's going to have small-scale fights, but most MMOs also have small-scale fights. I don't know how to

break this to you, but a lot of games really only have four or five people in dungeons. Calm yourself. I almost did it. I almost said a rude thing, and I didn't do it. I'm just saying people are constantly freaking out about this without putting it into context. World of Warcraft has five-person dungeons. Calm down. So, yes, it was going to be fairly small-scale in terms of raids and groups and stuff.

like large scale in terms of everything else so yeah I think people were thinking it might play a lot like Destiny 2 which hey coincidentally Destiny 2 has been screwing the pooch for like two years now and there's a huge gap in the industry where a new Destiny 2 or Destiny 3 with a different name could easily slide in and whoo brand new game just waiting to grab all those players and Microsoft is like oh well that's nice

And didn't we just hear this week like the actual closing – speaking of Anthem, the Anthem is officially shutting down in January. Is it January? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Because they haven't been working on it. It's been maintenance mode all this time. Right. It just kind of reminds me there have been people who have tried to take a shot at Destiny 2. Oh, absolutely. I think the Division kind of did fairly well for itself.

Yeah, I think that's in the same subgenre, but maybe a little less RPG-ish, maybe a little more war sim, but not really. I mean, it's got the same DNA, for sure. They've survived fairly well. But yeah, this is...

It's a gut punch in many ways. And on top of that, we heard that Matt Fuhrer is stepping down as the studio head of Zenimax. Of course, he's been one of the right out there. personalities, communications, the figurehead of ZeniMax for over a decade now. 18 years. Oh, almost two decades. It's crazy. I know. We're all getting old here. I thought it was 12 years. I was 18. Wow. I know.

Or at least that's what he said in his goodbye. Before that, wasn't he mythic? I could swear he was mythic before. I need to look this up. I should have looked that up again. Yeah. But like, he's been around for forever. He is like, you know, one of the founding fathers that no one really even considers a founding father, because if he didn't start in 1997, a lot of people don't think of it that way. But I could have sworn.

Hold on. I'm just going to look it up. Type-a-type-a-type-a. And I can spell fear. It's fire, isn't it? Yes. So he's considered, he's the co-founder of Mythic. I was not crazy. 10 years as a producer on Dark Age of Camelot. Camelot. Camelot. I am very fancy. Oh my gosh. I mean, come on. Like he's, he's one of. the OG MMO devs he really is and I don't know that there's anything like objectionable that's ever come out about him and do you know how rare that is in our genre

Yeah. Almost all of them have a little baggage somewhere. And if he's got it, he's got it under wraps. And I never, never heard, you know, people publicly say much of a mean word about him that wasn't just some salty gamer crap. You know what I mean?

Yeah. We don't actually know where he's gone either. I should point that out. At least as of right now, I don't know, has he left all of Microsoft or just Studiohead? Did he decide to retire because... of all the shit going down and he didn't want to preside over this shit going down sorry that's two more or did they offer him a vp spot of you know in charge of like you know feeding

money into the ai grinder i don't know i have no idea or did he just say you know what this is bull i'm out i'm gonna go sit on a boat which to be fair if he's gonna go sit on a boat peace out bro you deserve it i mean 18 years yeah i don't begrudge him it just it's yeah at times like this what

players what i i myself want is some sort of stability like you you've just upended a lot of things you've cast a lot of uncertainty over you know not just a mmo genre but the video game genre and i want to look for where are my my figures

Where are my figureheads? Where are my studios? Where are my games that are continuing on or showing some signs of the future? I know like ESO players are right now just looking around like, I mean... glad that their game didn't get the chopping block but at the same time not knowing like does this mean we're going to get those resources back or is Zenimax just kind of kind of continue to milk this game dry and Kind of slowly decline. I don't know. It seems like this offers up.

a lot of question marks around ESO. I would feel like ZeniMax would just go, okay, we're going to rally around this, you know, very popular franchise and this property that's been lucrative to us for a while and maybe... invest in it a little bit more that would be a happy silver lining but

And I guess we need to talk about a bit of Blizzard, too, because Blizzard is a source under all this. Yeah, it didn't just start and stop with ZeniMax. And they didn't do anything wrong. Just so we're clear, Microsoft has basically said, oh, yeah, business is booming. We're making tons of money, more than ever. Yay!

So just so we're clear, it doesn't sound like this game was in trouble, sucking, not making people happy. I saw the story where Jason Schreier was saying that Spencer had to be pulled away from playing Blackbird.

so much we're like dude we need you to come back to the meeting now and he's like oh i want to keep playing so like it was apparently very good and like it's it's really important to say this because a lot of people really want to believe that that the games industry is a meritocracy and it is not it has never been a meritocracy and if you believe that you are fooling yourself things fail all the time that were really good that people would

have bought you would think that people in charge of these megacorps would make intelligent decisions based around making money but a lot of times that's just not how it works so all kinds of good people talented people people who've been in the industry for longer than i've been alive

right i mean like they get axed they get sacrificed on this altar of whatever the you know pivot to ai that they're they're doing right now which will also fail the exact way seem the lot the same way that all the other pivots to whatever What we should do, pivot to video games. That's my new thing. Can I sell that? Will you buy that? I'm going to pitch it to Microsoft. Yeah, that's how like in the TV industry, why we get like 10 seasons of...

Big Bang Theory and you're just like, whoa. That's it, exactly. guess you know in meanwhile you're you're canceling like arrested development after season three and that's right so it's just not always about merit it's not it's not even always about what people will pay for

That's not how the resources work. And that's not how convincing investors of your little shell game works. It just isn't. So don't take it out on them. Don't be like, oh, ZeniMax sucks. And obviously ZeniMax was setting itself. We have no reason to think it has.

anything to do with any of that which is the frustrating part like all these people are being punished including us for nothing for for microsoft getting too greedy all right so while i was trying to take this in the direction speaking of yes yeah i want to talk about uh warcraft rumble which activision yeah yeah activision blizzard got

slammed as well. I think the most noticeable thing is Warcraft Rumble is... Not exactly getting canceled, but it is being put into deep maintenance mode. It's being shoved right there next to Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft 2 and games that are technically still on live under Blizzard, but they're really not going to do much.

much more from this point out other than some bug fixes or reactivating seasons or events or whatever. They've been putting stuff into Hots. In fact, there's a Hots patch that just hit the server. It's even in our newsroom. Like you said, it's been like quarterly updates and they've been fairly small. They're not like massive. Like they're giving themselves a leeway to ramp it back up if they wanted to. So yeah, the Haas thing, I think that's a really good.

example because yeah that's always noticeable because you think maintenance moded games never get anything ever anymore it doesn't necessarily mean that's true but uh in this case though because it's rumble yeah Yeah, they're pulling way back on development. They let a lot of the team go, right? So it's not like those people even exist. They're doing something else now. They're not going to come back.

do a quarterly update for rumble and just keeping it up with mobile the mobile um platforms is no way they're not going to do that it's going to be too much work they yeah they were trying to bring rumble or they did bring rumble to pc yeah and i I felt at the time when they announced that last November that this was kind of a bit of a Hail Mary for Warcraft Rumble. It's been in a weird spot. Like, again, Blizzard identifies...

where the popular game genres are. And then they try to go, like they try to make a super polished version and try to, you know, one up them and then take over that spot. This is, this is what they kind of always do, you know, Oh, you're making, you know, command and conquer. We can.

do it a little bit better we're gonna call warcraft you know that sort of thing um so rumble i think the clear goal was to try to take over like the clash of clans and clash royale style of mobile gaming and they made it just a little bit too hard too fiddly too frustrating and you had to scroll the screen which i think that was i know it's such a small detail but it was kind of a killer all these other games everything's on your screen you don't have to keep

panning it up and down trying to figure out where all your units are and i mean i i there were a number of admirable things about rumble but after about a few weeks i went this is just it's too intensely yeah fiddly to be a casual game and that's not a good sign um so it's it's really unfortunate it's another I know Blizzard really hates to take those black marks because you know that that's

they don't like talking about those. They'd rather talk about their super successes. And yet, yeah, they still have the heroes of the storms to talk about and are existing and bringing them great shame. Sometimes they remember they still have Diablo three. and there's still brain seasons out for that so yeah there's you know who knows um anything else from the fallout of this we need to mention i mean

I guess maybe just the impact we should probably talk about. It sucks to lose a game, obviously. A major AAA game that was coming for our genre. But I think... Even more than that, maybe we're going to do a daily grind on that later this week. But even more than that for me is just the thought of all of those devs leaving. 9,000, 9,100 devs on top of the 6,000, on top of the thousands before that. A lot of those people,

There are no game jobs right now. They're not fungible like that. They're not going to slot into some other company. Some of them will. But most of them won't, which means they'll either leave and slip into other tech industries or they'll just leave.

And they'll find something else or they won't. They'll just, we'll never see them again. And they take all of that institutional information with them, all of that practice, all of that expertise. It kills me. It absolutely kills me to think of that. I mean...

We were before the show started, Justin and I were talking about have we ever seen anything like this happen before? And I even went back and looked it up because I remember the last time we had a major, major implosion. I looked up the date. It was March 11th. 2016, it was over nine years ago, and it was the day that they canceled EverQuest Next and Wildstar on the same day. Like, I remember at the time I had this... absolute dread, this panic in my chest.

You know, I didn't play Wildstar, really, and EverQuest Next wasn't even live. But just the idea that, oh, no, this is the beginning of the end. And I remember having to, like, force myself to come out and write an article and say, it's not, actually. Pay more attention to what's happening. We've been losing games this whole time. We started with less. We have a thousand times more than we did when we started as a genre.

And we're not doomed just because we lose a couple of games in the pipeline or we lose a couple of games that we already knew were struggling because their pipelines weren't strong. I don't want to say that this is... like exactly like that but i'm just saying i've felt this before that kind of dread and we survived it

yeah i don't know i mean it sucks i i understand the feeling of it it absolutely does it doesn't give you a lot of confidence for the future but yeah at the same time it's not like we only have three games out there and then right

But they're old and I can understand why people are worried is that most of the major games right now are old. And when I say major, I mean like the big five, the big 10 games are all 10 years or older. They really are, which is wild. And we have a smattering of games from the last.

couple of years most of them are imports or they're being run by amazon and barely maintained right you know your new worlds and whatnot there there's the genre is definitely precarious right now but it's been precarious for 10 years i i don't want to say that nothing could ever happen my husband was explaining the atari situation the the et moment to my son the other day 1983 baby yes he was basically

He was explaining that, yes, it is possible for a whole industry to fail so badly at its one job that it literally capsizes, that it literally ends up... folding in on itself and like the vast majority of people lose their jobs their companies go under and there's nobody left and you have to rebuild that industry almost from scratch and we didn't i japaned it you know what i mean like

I don't know. But it comes back. It doesn't like go away forever. And, you know, that's the thing about MMOs when they say, oh, MMOs are dying or MMOs are dead. And then we're just and I go, well. How do you envision this? Going forward as a video game culture... That we're suddenly just going to always forget about online video games in a very online world. And we're never going to have giant connected massively games ever again. No, we absolutely will. And it'll be.

If the genre does kind of... absolutely shrink at some point there will be a come day where somebody's going to create a really cool game and they're going to almost be like reinventing the wheel all over again and there's going to be this influx of people go wow this is really cool why hasn't anybody

ever thought of this before and meanwhile all of us were just like yeah that's like yeah okay whatever like when they reinvented the the large-scale sandbox as a metaverse right yeah no you're not wrong This will come back around again. How old are we going to be when it comes back around again? I don't know. Do we have to literally sit here while brand new devs relearn everything all over again and drag us through the same rounds of mistakes? I don't want to do that.

an article coming tomorrow about this like I wrote it before all of this happened and it's like even more pertinent right now so I don't I don't necessarily think that's gonna be fun but as gamers like you will always have games that's that's not going to go away even even if a large number of them are piled in with et in a pit in the desert i'm just saying a lot of them will not make it they won't

Yeah, and we've absolutely seen many of these games just be shoveled right into the grave even before they've ever launched. And several that shortly after. And I mean, I can sort of feel both sides. I can feel this. tug back and forth between blind optimism for the future and this, you know, doom and gloom attitude that seems to be persuasive, pervasive in some sectors of our culture. And I go, well, okay, you know, like we've been covering MMOs for a long time.

want to be blindly optimistic but you know we the realism of it is we've had a lot of you know they've so many of these games that they've tried to make succeed just haven't for whatever reason but There have been some that do. And the ones that do pay off so lucratively. They're a great cash cow for decades long. The people will keep trying.

The gamblers are going to keep gambling. I see what you mean. And so I think this will be a very high risk, high reward sort of project that some people, some developers, I guess, some studios will just find irresistible. And for those of us who just simply love MMOs and we really appreciate what they are, we're never going to give up hope. I mean, I will say like.

brie i'm i'm there like i i want the next generation i want degrassi high the next generation of mmos to be here you thought i was gonna go star trek i went in a canadian direction yeah deep cut I would love the next generation of MMOs to really like roar into existence while I'm still young enough to truly enjoy them. But, you know, it's I also want to see us like if this.

I don't want to use the word shrinkage. If some of the bad stuff that we're going through, if some of the contractions that we're going... Man, that's a pregnancy metaphor. I'm going to stick with contractions. If the MMO contraction era that we're going through does result in maybe casting off some of the less desirable business models or some of the grosser elements like, hey, we could totally just absolutely jettison.

all crypto everything and then maybe at that point start to come out with better games i i could take my lumps there i could go okay well then that was a worthwhile period of time um and if that's what we're happening i i think that people would be we would feel better about it except that we know we're losing games that would have been good games that you know a lot of mid-level games that had a lot of great ideas that

don't have any money which is super frustrating you know what i mean they just need investment money to get to where they could be making money and they can't get it like there's a dry desert there too This sucks, and it's going to suck for a few more years. It might even suck beyond that.

I don't see the daybreaks of the world going under. You know what I mean? I don't really see World of Warcraft going anywhere. Amazon doesn't even seem like it's going to give up. I don't know why, but it's going. You know what I mean? It's charging forward. is pouring money into this if you're looking at Asia

All of the Chinese and the Korean companies are just pouring money in. They see this as a gigantic opportunity, not just to, you know, yoink away American capital, but to yoink away American eyeballs, American and European, I mean, Western in general. like this is a chance for them to like home in on you know a whole audience and make to like

Create a whole new obsession with them the way we grew up with obsessions with Blizzard. You know what I mean? They can do that. The same way Koreans grew up with an obsession with Blizzard. Now they can flip the table. Again, I hope you like those games. I hope you like gotcha games because we're going to keep getting a lot of those in the short term while the industry sorts itself out. But yeah, part of the problem is that Microsoft really was not a gaming company to begin with.

And so, you know, they were part of the buying spree a couple of years ago, and now they're just going to spend those billions of dollars. They're just going to throw it all away, which how can you argue? How can you even try to make sense of something that makes no sense? You can't like that's there's no meritocracy there. That's super frustrating. And so you hope I have to hope that the gaming companies that are actually gaming companies instead of whatever the hell Microsoft thinks it is now.

We'll actually keep making video games. Crazy. We're going to become an Excel podcast. Oh my gosh. I'm sorry. They want a subscription for Excel now, so nobody uses Excel. We're all over in Google apps because... I hate this. I hate this timeline. All right. 45 minutes into this podcast. We're going to have to swivel a little bit. That was an important one. That was important. Like you said, this is a big moment for.

For the games industry, for Elder Scrolls Online, for ZeniMax in general, even for Blizzard. This is not a small thing. We just lost 9,000 devs, boom, just like that. This is crushing. I feel so bad for all those people. We never will see them again. Most of those people are just going to flee.

oh that hurts so bad because then who's gonna make the next one someone will come up with money and someone will come up with ideas but like all of that institutional knowledge is gone And I'm telling you, you wouldn't think that matters, except gosh dang it, every time we get a new MMO, it's like they've designed it in a world where they don't know how MMOs work.

and it keeps happening and they'll be like has no one's tried a gank box let's do it and you're like what wait a wait a minute yeah we've done it like for like 25 30 years please don't do this this doesn't work you you really can't do it like that guys like really oh no we've never heard of it like oh my god

I'm literally over and over. It's killing me. And I don't want this to happen because I really am glad newbies are coming to our genre and building for us. But please read a book. Okay, I'm done. That's the name of the article. Just look it up. It'll be out tomorrow.

Well, let's talk about something that actually is coming out or, you know, hopefully. Hey, Ship of Heroes. I almost said City Heroes. Ship of Heroes, which, of course, is connected very much to City Heroes, at least as a spiritual successor.

Came out in the wake of... This project came out in the wake of City Heroes' death when they had all these wannabe... you know superhero mmo projects kind of emerge and ship of heroes might have been a little late to the party but it also came out also first yes very strong and it's actually releasing yes and that is the big news here august 18th

going to be the official launch date for Ship of Heroes. This is an indie superhero MMO that just so happens to take place on a giant spaceship that has a regular city inside of it for some reason, but... There you go. Don't question it. Just play it. That's what they want you to do.

um it's i don't know i haven't i haven't checked in with it for probably like a year and a half maybe two years at this point i don't know how much they've shaped it up if this is just getting to the point where they need to get it out or if it's actually in a good position for it to launch It is at least the last time I saw it, and according to a lot of our news, still very, very, very indie. So set your expectations accordingly. But also, when's the last time a superhero MMO has launched?

right so not in the last in 2010 i was gonna say not since the 10s and the 20s so 2011 maybe it was way back then yeah a little a little tough to come out in an environment where city shippy heroes came back in the meantime that's rough yeah and we felt bad for all these projects but you know good for good for uh shippy heroes for enduring and um And even overcoming the fact that it didn't succeed in its Kickstarter, which is sometimes a fatal blow for these projects.

This one is so weird because we're calling them indie, but I don't even know if that's even the right word. Like, I feel like indie actually has this vibe of making a small amount of money, and I have the impression that Ship of Heroes is primarily done, like, literally on donations. Like, I don't think they're...

So I'm not sure they have to launch. I think they think they're finally at a spot where they could maybe make some more money on Steam than they are off Steam. Do you know what I'm saying? Not necessarily that that will even fund the game. crazy level but just then they can have a system and a subscription and a box price whereas now everything is done very ad hoc on their website for like donations and access and stuff so

Like you said, I'm glad for them. I'm glad they're finally getting out of the door. We had four of these guys at one point. Not even counting all the City of Heroes emulators. But like four... superhero like spin-offs that were supposed to be like city of heroes and it's good to see one of them actually happening i know city of titans is actually still working on theirs and they had some like nasty setbacks in real life that like were not foreseeable like they lost one of their major devs

He died. It was kind of a tragedy. You kind of understand why they're lagging a little behind. Either way, I'm glad to see Heroic Games pulling this off. I don't know if I want to play it. Maybe I shouldn't say that, because I don't want to poo-poo it, but I don't even really want to play City of Heroes that much right now.

I'm kind of like frustrated. Maybe that's actually my cue because I'm so frustrated with the way City of Heroes Homecoming has been developed that maybe I should try this actually. I take it back. Maybe I'll give it a go. I'll probably... duck in and take a gander i mean it was really interesting to uh to check out monsters and memories this past week yeah there you go i didn't even mention that no yeah

But yeah, I have a bit of a first look at that. So if you like some really, really old school EverQuest vibes, that might be the game for you. But I would like to see how Ship of Heroes... feels and functions and if this is something like hey you know best case scenario sleeper hit right it's

you know it's really good but you know this is kind of like project gorgon kind of really under the radar you guys should come check this game out word of mouth you know else i don't see much of a future for it but we'll Yeah, maybe it'll be like the superhero Embers Adrift. Like it could happen. It could. Could. Another thing that could happen is John Smedley could make an MMO. But probably not. Anyway.

that's based on a hot sauce i don't know what is going on with reaper actual so The ironic part is we actually did have a legitimate article about hot sauce today, so that just makes it more confusing because Warframe is actually doing a collab with hot sauce. But if you look up John Smedley's new game on Google, what shows up is a hot sauce because Reaper actually...

is the name of a hot sauce, like a famous, I don't even remember what it is. I'm not a hot sauce person. It comes in a grenade bottle. Yes, it does. So like, I guess this is the whole thing. I don't know if Smed did that when they picked this name. I don't know. But yes, this is their new game is out or not out. It's coming and it's been like revealed. It's been outed. That's the word I'm looking for. We knew they were working on something.

Y'all know Smed. He was the former president of SOE. And then SOE got spun out in a daybreak. He was in charge of that for a while. And then some stuff happened I'm not even going into. And then he resigned from SOE and he founded his own company. They made...

that that game was pixel mage that really cute game that i really wanted on kickstarter and then amazon pretty much just said actually and like scooped everybody up all of his workers and him brought them in-house to work on a different game refunded pixel mage stuff and So they worked for years in the Amazon mines, laboring on some sort of science fiction game that we don't know what's happened to it. But Smed left a couple of years ago.

And we were like, huh, that seems bad. But anyway, I actually have no idea whether that game is even still being developed. But Smed left, founded a new company, brought on some of the original leads from Planetside 2, and has been clearly working this whole time. on something that's probably just Planetside 3 without the name because, of course, they don't have the name. Although, really, now that I think about it, they should have bought it because...

They sold Planetside. Daybreak sold... Anyway, this is off on a tangent. Daybreak sold Planetside a year or two ago, so maybe they should have grabbed it while they could, but they didn't. So anyway, whatever. Now we know it is called Reaper Actual. which is not a good name no i'm right there with you okay i'm just shaking my head like no i don't like it it does not roll off the tongue as i said hot sauce but

Also, you know, it looks kind of like Planetside 2. It has a lot of only modernized fully, you know, graphically and whatnot. It is a MMO. FPS, I think would be a fair way of terming it. It's not really... an MMORPG. It's an MMORPG in the same way Planetside was in that there are mass scale battles, lots of people on the field, lots of people on the server. But yeah, it's basically a multi-way PvP type war thing with lots of smaller scale battles along with the larger scale stuff.

Are you going to want it? I don't know. Probably not because of the thing they're sticking into it, which is crypto play to earn stuff. Pay to earn. Pay to earn, not play to earn. I do that every time. Pay to earn. It's going to be a blockchain game built on the blockchain. Now, to be fair, they actually have two versions of it. This is the new trick. I don't know if you all have noticed this, but this is the new thing they've... been a lot of these blockchain games are doing in that when the

So investors come in and they're like, we want a blockchain game. And then the devs come in and they're like, we don't want a blockchain game, but we need money. So the compromise that they're coming to is to have two versions. This is not the first time at all. Is this the EVE Online strategy? That's what it is. Yeah, EVE Online.

and eFrontier are two sides of the same coin this is like way more overt though this isn't just like the nft spinoff it's like these are basically the same game it's just one of them has this player economy that runs on you know tokens and weird crypto cash so if you like that that will exist and i imagine that will fund maybe the real game that people will actually care about that will you know

function like planetside i've heard some complaints already there was somebody in blue sky screaming about how it would have gotcha and i'm like i don't even know if i don't even want to listen to this is for real smed was on twitter uh talking up The pay to pay to earn stuff and how important it was to have it on the blockchain. And then he was talking about how there were things like this in Daybreak Daybreak's games. A lot of them had this version where you could.

craft stuff and like put it on their market do you guys remember this you could like model weapons and like gear and sell it in game like yeah it's gonna be exactly the same as that except you know it's not because that didn't have a blockchain blockchain because you didn't need a blockchain you don't need a blockchain for any of those things the player studio that's what it's called you don't need a didn't need a blockchain for any of player studio that's that's uh

Anyway, I'm not even going to keep ranting about it. I'm a little disappointed. I'm glad to see Smed back. I have long considered him to be slightly underrated. In fact, I think a lot of people are really hard on him and really only remember the bad stuff and none of the good stuff. This is kind of like, I really wish they could have found a way to do this without the crypto crap. And I think MMORPG players are going to be especially...

old-timers like us, people who remember who he is, are going to be really hard on him for stuff like this and are never going to leap on this. Apparently, planetside players are not leaping on it either, which may be a bigger problem for them than they realize. I've just never been under the impression

that Planetside ever did well after the first game. It did okay, but it wasn't like... It does okay. It's not huge, but it's fine. It's enough to keep it alive. And I think that... the name still has some some cachet to it so yeah we don't have a lot of games Wow, that was a low blow. No, I think there's room in the industry for stuff like this. Like we have a couple of these games where we have these large scale battles. I don't mean like small scale extraction stuff or small scale FPSs.

where they're built at engines that cannot handle hundreds of people. We like these things. MMO players like big, gigantic battles. And so putting it in a three-way or whatever it's going to be, I think they said three-way. Now I don't even remember.

Putting people in and having all of the RPG systems stacked around the edges instead of it just feeling like another crap match. You know what I mean? Making it feel more persistent. That's the thing they're going for here. We have space in the genre for that.

And we really haven't had a lot of other games other than Planetside 2 that are really, really, truly trying this. So I don't... well and planetside one you know what i mean the planetside franchise and there's a couple like world war ii online always pops to mind as being very similar in that genre but it's even tinier than planetside there's a couple things out there we we could use more this is uh something that people are not fully developing or they're they're making um

like an rpg mmorpg grinder where like most of the focus is on grinding through content and then there will be pvp at the end whereas this is like no this is mostly about pvp with uh you know advancement stuff tacked on around the edges people people i think will like that should appeal people this should be the natural extension of people who like grew up on battle royales

You know what I mean? Like this should be an easy jump for them into the MMO industry. That's why I'm excited about it. But like if we have to keep selling out to NFT vendors and NFT investors who do not care whatsoever about our genre. just to get funding man we're cooked you know what i'm saying that is that is not i mean it's got to be my thought is it's got to be absolutely tight like the um the gameplay because there's

The novelty of massively multiplayer is not there the way that was in the 2000s. And for an online shooter today, for you to say, okay, hey, put up with some lag and all these fiddly bits of, you know... rpg or advancement system so when all you want to do is get in and shoot there are so many online shooters these days so they really do have to kind of focus on setting themselves apart that's it you know okay fine you know

Smedley knows this type of gameplay fairly well. It's not mine. My interest is just almost zero other than, hey, Smedley's working on a project. It's good to see. another MMO-ish type game come out, and best of luck to them. I want to see the 200-person battles. I'm not going to lie. I think that is a really cool space to be focusing on.

But yeah, I'm nervous about how that's going to work if and when the crypto version fails. And it will because they all do. If they ever even make it out, they all fail every single time. If that happens. I worry about the future of this game. Eve doesn't have this problem. Eve Online is going to outlive us all. And I'm not even kidding. They will have that game looking into the future. Eve Frontier is going to fail.

And it won't matter. It won't take a single penny. It won't hit Eve at all because all of those people are going to keep playing Eve online. I don't know what will happen with this one. This is fledgling. This is new. This doesn't have that dedicated fan base. I'm really nervous about this, but it will sure be fun to watch. You know what else is going to be really fun to watch? Uh-oh.

I'm afraid of. Last thing we need to talk about here today is Guild Wars 2. It's up to something. And we're going to find out in a couple weeks what they're doing. A lot of teasing. A lot of coy teasing. Oh, Guild Wars 2.

So coy on social media, posting icons, which look a lot like elite spec icons. They sure do. Maybe this is a... of an upcoming expansion where we're going to get a new slate of elite specs i think that would be maybe a safe bet when's the last time we got a full raft of elite specs 2022 when end of dragons launched yeah okay so it's been yeah two and three Yes, a while What day is it?

We're in July, aren't we? Yeah. Summer is just zipping past. So, yeah, we know we're getting expansion. I think it's earmarked for October now. It got a little bit delayed. They announced it. change up in their schedule a while ago so i'm i'm looking on blue sky they have five of them up now um the one that caught our attention was the first one because it's a lute as in a mandolin it's like a little you know little bardi instrument

And people are like, okay, we're here for that. Justin and I are both going to fight over who gets it. Then there's one that looks like some sort of, I mean, it looks like a plate helmet. Do you think that would be a... I'm sorry. Yeah. What, the loot? The bard, do you think that would be like a thief spec? See, that's a really good question. I was originally guessing that maybe it would be a thief spec, except there's one later I think will be. We haven't even talked about it yet.

So I'm hoping it's not the Mesmer because the Mesmer already has the Virtuoso spec and it's not very Barty. I would love to see this for the Warrior. That's my secret hope right now is that this will be for the Warrior and we're getting, because the Warrior has all those shouts and stuff.

I would love to see the warrior be more like a scald. You know what I mean? Am I saying that right? The scald? Scald. No, it's scald. Like the Viking song fighter. You know what I mean? That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, they got a Skald in Lotro. Yeah, there you go. Oh, that's right, they do. So that's what I'm kind of hoping for. I think that would be cooler than just giving the Mesmer yet another instrument that doesn't play like an instrument.

Then there's one that looks like a plate helmet with wings, so it's guardian-ish or maybe even paragon-ish, dare I hope. It kind of has the, you know what I mean, like the Valkyrie.

wings out of the helmet maybe it's like a valkyrie class or something i don't know we've got like a million of those then there's one that looks like probably an elemental thing it almost looks like an atom or a like satellite with like an orb in the middle and like two little swirlies around it that could be like anything some sort of

Asurintech, I have no idea. And this one, I think, is probably for the thief. It's just three playing cards. So it makes it sound like some sort of gambler thing, which actually sounds really cool, honestly. Yes? Am I crazy?

i kind of like that and then there's this one i have no freaking clue what this is it might be a claw it kind of looks like a claw that's been like you tip your hands up and then you've got like giant claw i don't know what it is so that's what we've got so far i'm sure by the time that was like a claws holding flames yeah it could be i don't know but i really my question is like they got way more days left than they do actual classes in the game if they're teasing.

Yeah, but they've been doing every couple of days. Are they? And they'll probably, I mean, they didn't do any over the weekend, did they? Yeah, I think they skipped the weekend too. They did one on Friday and then they did one today. So... I think that's what it is. At this point, I wasn't sure the first one. I thought it was possible that I could see them giving like an instrument to every class. That's the kind of thing that...

Daybreak. That Arena has been doing the last two years, right? Like in Soto, we got weapon proliferation. So like if you didn't have the spear, not the spear, like the sword or offhand guns or whatever, now you...

do like you got something or at least one thing that you didn't have before which gives you more skills and more options for builds and that sort of thing that was kind of cool and then last year we got the spear everybody got the spear so everybody got a new weapon all at the same time but there was just one weapon

So I thought there was a possibility that maybe everybody was going to get a new weapon like this beer, only it was going to be some sort of instrument. But then once they kept going, I was like, yeah, these are elites. And that's so cool to me because I wasn't even sure we were going to get elites. ever again. They didn't say that, but when we didn't get them for two years in a row and people kept complaining anyway, I kind of thought maybe ArenaNet had decided three was enough.

three plus the original default. And that was too much for them to put in to one expansion. Like it really is a lot because there's a lot of classes. What about nine classes? No. Is it nine? I don't remember. I don't play. I don't remember. I don't play them all. So I'm having a hard time remembering the ones that I don't play very much. So I think that's a lot for their balance teams to get right because...

They've already got some, you know what I mean? There's three for four, really, for all of the other classes. It's a lot to stack on top of there. It does make me wonder, what aren't we getting? You know what I mean? Like... for each one of these we've gotten like something related to classes something related to mounts and then like something else so last year we got housing like it was huge you know what i mean that was not a small thing so

I am a little concerned that this is a lot more than just adding one weapon or taking weapons that exist. This is going to need new stuff across the board, and I suspect we're not going to get anything brand new. But I'm not sure I'm mad about that either.

Well, especially if they are working on a possible Guild Wars 3 here. I mean, I keep getting the feeling, I have an article kind of brewing in my head about, I feel like ArenaNet is really spreading itself then. And it's under pressure to get these expansions. out I think that's a great they should keep doing that Guild Wars 2 is not

a dead game by any stretch of the imagination and investing into a really full featured expansion is great. Aside from housing, I kind of always got the feeling like Janthier Wilds was on the smaller side of the expansion. especially coming on the heels of End of Dragons. I'd like to just see, even if they're not reinventing brand new systems or anything, just a lot of... Good new content and good new systems for people.

specs and stuff for people to enjoy i'm looking forward to this announcement i'm looking forward to the gamescom announcement for midnight i mean there's there's some interesting things that are yet to be announced for 2025 and 2026 so yeah i You know, and as always, I think my attitude, especially toward games that I've played in the past, is, okay, I'm listening. I dare you to make me want to play you. I don't know if this will make you want to play.

I don't know that specs are going to bring – that's the other reason. It makes me want to come play because now I want to go play with all of my characters again and pull them all out and poke them and stuff and change them around and play with their new possibilities.

Um, but I'm not sure it will bring, maybe I'm wrong in the way housing did, but I will tell you, Justin, if you are going to write that article, swing by the Guild Wars 2 Reddit and just Google for some, you know what I mean? Search for a couple of.

Google loves it when I do that. It's like when you say band-aid when you mean bandage. They love it. They get money from the universe every time you say it. No, look up... Just put in some keywords and see if you can find anybody else having that same thought. Because I'm going to tell you right now, this has been the pervasive attitude of the Guild Wars 2 subreddit, what you just described, for like a long time. I haven't been lurking on that.

No, I'm just telling you that you will find juice there for this article. A lot of people think that they're stretched too thin and they don't like the content cadence. I think... That I understand why they think that, but I think they're actually wrong when you actually look at how much we're getting. End of Dragons came after years upon years where we got no expansions at all. It only had four zones, and they're not really that big. I realize they actually...

added more later but you know what I mean um some of them are very small and not particularly impressive and on top of that um I forgot what I was going to say no on top of that on top of that we when we were getting content in the gap between uh path of fire and end of dragons that content was not coming quarterly a lot of that content was stretched really far and it was really not that great hello iceberg saga you know what i'm saying like wait it was not the greatest period

Compared to that, this is phenomenal. We are getting a new thing, a new map, a new something, and some cases more, like when we got housing and all that other stuff, every quarter. I prefer this a lot. to the dead zones to the zones where it was like well i guess i'll wait another eight months because there's nothing in this for me

But I understand why people think it. If you are expecting End of Dragons every year or every quarter, you're not getting that. That was never going to happen. I don't think they could possibly do that. And I also didn't get the impression that they were pulling... Maybe I'm wrong about this, but just the way NCSoft made it sound is like this was not something that was necessarily dragging from ArenaNet, sorry, from Guild Wars 2's resources.

They were definitely building up and hiring more people to work on Guild Wars 3, but not necessarily that it was coming at the expense of Guild Wars 2, if that makes any sense. I think that when they're saying things like, you know, we need to reorganize this for the safety and health of our own people, I don't have any real reason to doubt them because that's what they've done.

So what's the date that we're looking at here for this reveal? Oh, my goodness. What did they say? It was ten days from – no, eight days. from today's so one two three four five are they counting the weekends well you know what you're probably right it's probably the 15th because they always do they often do not always often do reveals on um on tuesday sorry tuesdays at noon eastern sometimes they'll do like if it's an event or something they'll do like late on thursday which is really annoying

I see your pattern, Guild Wars 2. You're not slipping anything past us. But yeah, it's probably the 15th. All right. Well, we'll keep our eyes on that as we continue this month and we'll see what Guild Wars 2 is up to in the meantime. You know, get your speculation machines up and roaring. I think we're all really good at that here at Massively OP. And hopefully we'll find something to...

really hang our hat and our hopes on going forward after a very rough week here but hey we're still playing MMOs we're still enjoying them there's still plenty out there and more games and more expansions and more content to come so Yeah, if somebody tells you it's dead, you go, okay, but then this is the liveliest corpse we've ever seen. It's just, you know, it's taking a shot or two. Exactly. It's taking some nasty blows. We need to wrap them up.

Protect the people who are harmed by it, but not panic about the IPs. Sure. Well, thank you for listening to the Massively OP podcast. Of course, as always, send us in some reader mail we didn't get to or some listener mail. We didn't get to get to that today, but hopefully we will in future weeks. We always like to talk about some of your.

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