Never Turn Your Back On Them Until You're Sure They're Down For Good

I spotted a news item at MassivelyOP the other day. #356 in a never-ending series: "MMORPGs you thought were gone forever but oh boy how wrong you were!" They should call it that. 

I honestly don't know any more why we think anything goes away. It always comes back. Unless you really, really want it to, of course. Then it doesn't.

Things you don't care about, though? Can't get rid of 'em no matter how you try. Just this morning I saw another report at MOP, this time about something called High  Energy Heroes which, according to the article, "looks basically like Tencent just reskinned the now-dead mobile version of Apex Legends". I never played Apex Legends so I can't say how accurate that assessment mught be but I'll take their word for it since it supports the case I'm making, which is that nothing ever really stops any more.

Except Zentia. Why won't someone bring that back? Also, The Regrettes. Why did they need to "break up"? Bands don't "break up" any more, do they? Not if they have "absolutely nothing but love in our hearts for each other", anyway. They just stop recording and touring and do other things and everyone just says they're "on hiatus". Why didn't they just do that? Why be so dramatic?

Sorry I got distracted. I really liked The Regrettes. Where was I?

Yes, it's always the ones you want that stay gone. The ones you never cared about keep coming back like damn daisies. Case in point, Aika. And possibly Rick Astley. Although I quite like Rick Astley...

I played Aika, briefly. I even wrote about it on the blog, even more briefly. Here's everything I ever said about it: "Typical Eastern MMO. Quite pleasant, passably translated. Got to about level eight or nine. It's still running." That was in February 2014 and it was, then. Still running, I mean. The rest of it too, probably.

I had mentioned it a couple of times before, in passing. The earliest mention on the blog comes from December 2011, by which time the game had already passed into that misty hinterland of "MMOs I am thinking about playing, but not thinking very hard". I'd be lying if I said I'd ever thought about it again, other than as an entry in a list of games I once played.

Do I remember anything about it? Not really. In one post I lumped it in with a couple of other Korean MMORPGs I'd played - Loong and Argo. I remember both of those far better. 

I remember that Loong was introduced to me by the much-missed blogger Kaozz of ECTMMO, who also got me started on Blade & Soul (Speaking of MMOs I'm thinking of playing...). I can visualize the central square of the starting city, still, although not a lot more. 

And there it is...

 

Argo I found all by myself, I think. I really liked Argo. I miss it, although not as much as I miss Zentia. Or NeoSteam, for that matter.

Argo has its own category here on Inventory Full, with no fewer than five entries. Then there's a second tag, Argo Online, that I made for the 2014 revival of the game, which had been dropped from its European publisher, Allaplaya, before being picked up by the very unfortunately-named UserGames. 

I always liked Argo, even though it was probably pretty ropey, looked at objectively. Something about it just felt comfortable - friendly, even. I don't mean socially - I'm not sure I ever met another player there and I certainly never spoke to anyone. No, it was more the look of the thing, with its fuzzy foliage and cartoonish wildlife.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to find meaningful information about older MMORPGs. If you google many of them you either get lots of links, which either suggest they're still up and running or go to dead pages when you click on them. MMORPG.com does usually have basic details that seem reasonably accurate, at least on whether a game is still available, but if you want to know the exact date it fell over or what led to its demise, you're going need to do some serious research.

Borrowed from myself but it's fine. No-one remembers.

I don't propose to do any of that about Loong (It's down now but it was still up in 2017 and that's as far as I'm going.) or Argo (The revival failed pretty fast as I recall. I don't think it's going to get a third chance.) and Zentia is gone for good, I'm sorry to say. Aika, though, is back, at least for now and I suppose I'm probably going to give it a try, just for old times' sake.

Even I'm not sure why I'd bother. It's not as though it's been gone that long. It closed down in 2021, at which point I hadn't touched it for a decade. I didn't notice it wasn't there any more so I'm not going to say I missed it. Still, it just seems rude not to at least take a look, now it's back.

Aika is going to have wait its turn, though. The open beta only runs for a week. It started last Thursday, I didn't hear about it until two days ago and it ends tomorrow. I'm already missing the start of Tarisland Closed Beta 2 as I write this and I'm certainly not going to skip any more of that just to make the final day of a beta for the revival of a game I played a few times a decade ago, just long enough to get to Level Eight.

I guess I'll wait for the full launch (No hint yet of when that might be.) or another beta, should there be one. We'll see if it spurs any memories when I get there. I'm guessing not but maybe it'll all come flooding back. 

Whatever "it" was.

East Goes West

If playing Bless last month had any impact on me at all, it was to make me feel nostalgic for other Eastern MMOs I've tried. Over the years I've played quite a few. Most of them I've enjoyed but none of them have I stuck with for more than a couple of months at most.

Let's see how many I can remember off the top of my head...

The first must have been Silk Road Online. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta and I remember being quite excited that we were seeing something we'd never seen before - an MMORPG made by and for people from a culture significantly different from our own. I wasn't all that struck with it but Mrs Bhagpuss liked it enough to mention it fondly for a few years afterwards, whenever the topic of imported MMOs came up.

I think Ferentus was the first game where I saw player-placed street vendors.

Then there was Ferentus, a beta for a long-forgotten MMO (also known in some territories as Xiones or Herrcot) that never went Live. Ferentus was the opposite of Silk Road in that it was almost indistinguishable from a Western MMO of the time. We both really liked it even though it was very rough and unpolished. Almost unbelievably, it still has an active Reddit ,where ex-players still hope for some kind of emulator, one day.

Runes of Magic, on which Wilhelm occasionally reports, was the first successful Eastern attempt to play the West at its own game. It was also one of the first generic WoW clones and the standard bearer for the Free to Play payment model. Once again, Mrs Bhagpuss and I beta-tested it and found it lacking, although a decade later I find I can remember it in surprising detail.

After that, the flood gates opened and playing imported MMOs became just something I did rather than something worthy of comment. Back then, I used to be in the habit of playing a number of MMOs super-casually, usually for an hour or so at the very end of the evening, right before going to bed.

That was in the days before I had a Tablet. These days I lie in bed watching American sitcoms or searching for ever more obscure bands on YouTube. I'm not convinced that's progress.

I did take some screenshots of NeoSteam but I have no idea what happened to them. I think I saw this thing once, though.

NeoSteam filled the late-night MMO slot for quite a while. I really liked that game. I was a seven foot tall tiger with a giant hammer - what's not to like? Neo-Steam was around for a good few years and had quite a following at one time. There were a lot of levels and zones but I never saw much more than the first few of either. I'd play it now if it was still running.

I also liked Argo, which arrived a few years later. That one came and went and came back and then vanished. Surprising how often that happens. Argo didn't have much to recommend it but it did have that indefinable vibe that made it feel like a place. Hard to describe but I always know it when I feel it.

Before that, there was the one whose name I always get muddled up with another, Western, title. Earth Eternal? No, it's no good, I'll have to google it...

And this is why we fact-check!  No, it wasn't Earth Eternal. Earth Eternal was the all-animal MMO originally produced by an American indie called Sparkplay Media. Mrs Bhagpuss and I betaed that one too and although we both liked it we found it a tad slow and repetitive.

After Earth Eternal failed in the West (twice) it had a run in Japan, where it was known as Ikimonogatari. According to wikipedia, no version ever made it further than Open Beta bit it still picked up a strong following.

I also have no screenshots of my time in Earth Eternal. Nor did I ever play a frog.

As if to prove that nothing on the internet ever goes away, I am astounded and delighted to discover that there is an Earth Eternal emulator! Now known as The Anubian War, it's even had an expansion, Valkal's Shadow, and the game is still up and running. I'm downloading it as I type!

Getting back to the topic at hand, the Eastern MMO I was thinking of was Eden Eternal. A natural mistake, even more so when you consider that in EE I played a mouse. A large mouse, I'll grant you, but a mouse all the same.

Eden Eternal was probably the first Eastern anime-influenced MMO I tried. It's bright and bouncy and not at all serious, which should please Wolfy and Jeromai. It was also, I think, the first time I came across the wonderful auto-quest feature, something I wish all MMOs would adopt.

Eden Eternal is still up and running. It even has a Back to School event on right now, which tells you something about the demographic that plays there. I don't think I'm going to download it again but it's an Aeria game and I have their launcher on my desktop...more on which later.

Blurry when stretched. Then again, aren't we all?

Then came Zentia, probably the best Eastern MMORPG I ever played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I downloaded the beta one Saturday on a whim and neither of us played anything else all weekend. The game had a unique style - cheerful, whimsical, lighthearted - that was exemplified by the giant dragon mount that players could hop on as it passed by, like boarding a bus. You could even do trivia quizzes in the central square of the main town.

The whole gameworld had an upbeat, happy atmosphere that was mood-elevating just to be around but it was also a very solid MMORPG, with traditional questing and combat that felt solid and satisfying. It's a game that deserves to be revived but sadly no-one seems to have bothered.

I think most of those games pre-date this blog, although I did write about Argo back in 2012. I also played, and briefly wrote about the oddly (and inaccurately, given how little time I spent there) named Loong, one of many games tipped by Kaozz of ECTmmo. She finds and plays even more obscure MMOS than I do, although currently she's with the crowd in WoW.

Almost the definition of Generic Eastern Import, Loong appears still to be available from Gamigo under the name of Loong Dragonblood

Since Inventory Full arrived, most of the Eastern imports have been relatively big news. In no particular order (least of all chronological) there's been Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online, Revelation Online, Aion, Riders of somewhere-or-other, that one about Dragons that SOE licensed and of course Final Fantasy XIV, which is a whole different story.

Bless Online is the latest and it's... okay. I wouldn't put it much more strongly than that. As I said at the beginning of the post, Bless's main impact on me has been to remind me of other imported and translated MMOs I like more. Two in particular: Dragon Nest and Twin Saga.

Not that Bless is anything like either of those. It's just that I remembered, while playing Bless and reading about how badly translated it was supposed to be, that there's a particular style of translated quest text that I love. Twin Saga is dripping with it and so is Dragon Nest.

It appears we've crossed out last bridge in Dragomon Hunter.

It's as though they'd found a really articulate, bi-lingual seven-year old, with a vivid imagination, and given them a completely free hand to translate the original quests - without worrying too much about whether the finished version made much (or any) sense. It's almost like naive art.

I tried to find my old installation of Twin Saga yesterday but after booting up several Hard Drives without success I gave up and re-installed it via Steam. As it was downloading I thought to google "Twin Saga", which I probably should have done at the start.

Turns out it's also published by Aeria Games, for whom, as I mentioned above, I have a generic launcher on my desktop. They also published Dragomon Hunter, another quirky import I liked a lot, which has sadly closed. The launcher itself is also dead. You have to download and update directly from the website now - or use Steam.

Following that discovery I was able to find the original installation buried in the Aeria Games folder on my C Drive so now I have the blasted thing twice! I linked my Aeria account to Steam and now I'm up and running with my old character, who turns out to be level 50! Proof that I really did like Twin Saga when I last played.

Best name prefix ever!

Dragon Nest is more problematic. It has a convoluted history of versions and territories. Last time I tried to play I couldn't get it to run. I'm running short of drive space right now so I don't think I'll download it again just yet but I guess I shouldn't wait too long. Grab 'em while they're still alive seems to be the motto for some of the less-celebrated imports.

Anyway, that wasn't the post I sat down to write. I was going to muse over returning to MMOs and how it can vary from impossible to ecstatic. That'll have to wait for another day. This has run far too long and there's double XP in Norrath that won't last forever!

You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.

Used MMO, One Previous Owner, Seeks Players : Argo

Massively, which can usually be relied upon for timely notice of new developments across the MMO genre, failed to register the arrival of the resurrected Argo into open beta. How such a momentous event could pass unnoticed beats me. I mean, it's not as though there was anything going on in the MMO world right now.

It would have been handy to have known the open beta was up since my closed beta application was unsuccessful. Well, I say unsuccessful. Hard to tell, really. I can't remember which of my throwaway email addresses I used to apply for it and it's a racing certainty I never checked that inbox again after the first couple of days. Anyway bridge, water, under it.

Registration was simple enough, just an email address required. The download took about 15 minutes. Unpacked, Argo weighs in at just under 5GB, which is pretty hefty for a F2P translation. The new owners, UserGames (did they really think that name through?), require GameGuard, an annoying extra step that my virus checker strongly disapproves of, so that took a while, but eventually there we were at character creation.

Why are you all staring at me like that?

Argo has a lot of classes. Sixteen, or so it's claimed. That might be stretching a point. There are two factions - the militaristic, technological Noblians (makes me think of knobbly knees every time I read it) and the collective of superannuated flower-children with the unpronounceable name, The Floresslah. The classes appear to duplicate for each faction although not exactly. You can only play one faction and I've only tried the Noblians so its hard to be sure just how closely a Handler matches a Tamer or a Bomber a Wizard.

Plenty of choice when it comes to class but none whatsoever when it comes to gender because Argo is one of those irritating MMOs that gender-locks classes. I started off making a Bomber but Bombers have to be boys and I was already mildly miffed that I had to be human so I swapped to Shooter instead. I do like these elegiac, imaginative class names. So much better than boring old Shadow Knights or Bloodmages.

I've always felt that what most MMOs lack is a good Instep slider

Next up character customization, which is a cut above the average for this stripe of MMO, I think. There are about ten or so faces to choose from, the difference between which mostly seems to be scars and tattooos, although some of the men get wispy little beards or mustaches that make them look even more like adolescents than they already do. Eye and hair color are unusual in that the choices are exactly the same and none of them are brown. Or black. Or indeed any natural shade that human hair has ever been. I went for white hair as the only quasi-authentic option. It also had the welcome side effect of making my character look vaguely like an adult.

There are plenty of sliders to get the body shape you'd prefer. It's possible to flaunt a bit of excess poundage, especially on the hips and waist, but obesity's not an option. Fair enough, I guess. There's a war on and you've been drafted so you'd be expected to keep in reasonable shape. You can have arms like twigs if you want though.

Gosh! A whole training area just for li'l ol' me?

Once all that's out of the way it's on to the real business at hand: another seemingly endless tutorial. I remember this from the last time I played Argo. There's a nice introduction where you arrive at the training camp on a hoverbike the size of a tractor and then it's time to get down to the serious business of running about following blue arrows.

There's a guy who pops up in a window to explain the arcane color-coding system Argo uses for quests and a whole lot more important technical information, such as how to open your inventory and what key opens the mini map (It's "M" in case you were wondering). All of this is fully voiced by someone who sounds like a natural English speaker and probably a professional voice actor at that.

Oh, go on then...

They must have spent most of the tutorial budget on him because they clearly didn't have
enough left to hire a professional translator for the multifarious dialog windows. In common with many MMOs, Argo is verbose in the extreme. No quest-giver or trainer wants to let you in on the secret of which particular set of foozles he'd like you to eliminate until you've been formally introduced and each of you has learned something about the others thoughts, beliefs, feelings and way of life. Since I'm almost pathologically incapable of skipping narrative or background lore this tends to slow things down a tad.

Now that's what I call a Crit!

Eventually I extricated myself from the conversation and set out to cull some Pantheras, panthers that have grown an extra vowel. These supposedly deadly cats, which have been hunting the loggers and making life generally impossible, mill around in clumps not ten yards from the camp. Far from being a danger to Noblians going about their workaday routine they seem to be about as threatening as so many oversized kittens but hey, I'm in the army now. I'm just following orders.

Or I would be if I had my rifle equipped. Take the mickey out of tutorials all you like but if the talking head doesn't remind you to open your inventory and equip your weapon what do you do? You bitter vets, you think you know it all. Well you know nothing, Noob!

Take two, with weapon in hand:  down goes the Panthera. Eventually. Only takes half a dozen shots with an assault rifle at point blank range. This Noblian tech is impressing me already. One Panthera down, four to go. It's at this point that I notice the pop up asking me if I'd prefer to have someone do my hunting for me. Probably saw me trying to kill a Panthera by pointing my finger and going "Bang!" and figured I needed any help I could get.

This is where I need a tutorial

This is a development I don't remember at all from my first go round with Argo. It's not just the old auto-run to target feature, either. No, it's something much more sophisticated than that, a fully-configurable macro for automated hunting. You can set all kinds of parameters - when you need to be healed, which items or consumables or abilities you want to use, the skills and combat abilities to employ, the range at which you consider something should be considered a target. You can even specify what kind of items you want to loot and what you'd rather leave on the ground.

I'm not opposed to these systems in principle. I quite like the idea of leaning back eating a
sandwich and watching my character slaughter wildlife  discriminately. Coming after the very first kill, however, I found it a bit intimidating. All those choices. I let the Automatic Hunting run me through my four remaining Pantheras just to see how it went and then I turned it off. Easier to do it myself until I have several hours free to work out the settings.

Just nod and smile

Thus passed my first hour or so back in Argo. By the time I found myself being stalked by another player (one of those really creepy ones who follows you around but never says anything) and decided to call it a wrap and go back to Tyria I was level four and still deep inside the tutorial. At least all the training is in-world. I could just take a sharp right and hack off into the jungle on my own but no, I'm under military discipline. I'll see my training through to the bitter end.

How much time I'll spend in the world of Argo after that I wouldn't like to say. Not all that much I imagine. It did, however, grab me on this return visit in exactly the same way it grabbed me the first time round. The translations may not be perfect but they're endearing. The graphics may be undercooked but there's a real sense of place. The systems may be ridiculously overcomplicated but they're manageable. The controls are natural and comfortable and there's just an amiable, puppylike feel to the entire enterprise that makes being in that world a warm, pleasant experience. When you're not being stalked, at least.

If UserGames can keep a server up I'll keep popping in, much good may it do them. They aren't going to get any money from me and I find it hard to believe they'll get much from anybody else, although there does now appear to be a Cash Shop, which I don't remember from last time. I wouldn't bet on a long, successful second life for Argo but here's hoping.

Now someone bring back NeoSteam.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! : Argo

Yes, alright, it's not that frabjous. It's not like SOE changed their minds and decided to give (or even sell) Vanguard back to its creators. What's so special about Pox Nora that it gets preferential treatment anyway? Not that I begrudge Pox Nora fans their luck. There must be some, right? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?.

Longtime readers of this blog probably have no recollection whatsoever of my brief flirtation with the SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO Argo. It merited one post and it was something of a guilty pleasure, albeit a considerable one. It was the game I made an Allaplaya account for, which felt a little like forging my own long-handled spoon (not that I've ever actually forged a long-handled spoon, or indeed anything else...)

No sooner had I made a throwaway account on a garbage email address and bowed down to worship the devil himself PSS1, Allaplaya's mighty overlords, than they decided to pull the game from their sad collection of no-hopers roster of quality MMOs, leaving me bereft, or at least mildly irritated.

Yes, I've used these pictures before. What do you expect? Game's been down for 18 months.

In a pattern frustratingly familiar from my distressing experience with the even better SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO, NeoSteam,  Argo continued to run successfully in Korea. Then, in July last year, it was reported that Games-Masters.com, purveyors of SEA shovelware quality MMOs such as Cabal and Ran (no, me either...) had acquired Argo for the European market.

Well, I'd heard that one before. Some company I'd never heard of, can't remember and really don't have the willpower to google, claimed they had bought NeoSteam for an EU release - that never happened. Fool me once and all that jazz.

Except this time it seems there really is a pony! Massively just reported that the European beta for Argo starts tomorrow and I just signed up. I really shouldn't be excited about this but I am all the same. It's like when your cat goes missing and he's gone for six weeks and you're certain he's gone forever and probably dead and then one day there's a knock on the door and you open it and a stranger says "Excuse me but I think this might be your cat" (True story).

So, I might get in beta or I might not and the game might actually come back or it might not but either either way it's another notch on the "MMOs never really die" tally-stick and that's a warm fuzzy if ever there was one, so be happy even if you never heard of Argo, never play it and have no idea what I'm making all this fuss about.  

Back To Base : DCUO

What would make you log back into an MMO you haven't bothered with for a while? Nostalgia? Bribery? Novelty? Sentiment? Boredom? I don't really do boredom, but any of the rest work on me and in the past week several old favorites have had a try at reeling me in again.

In Guild Wars I was back to check on my Anniversary presents. A couple of months too early as it turns out but my visit wasn't in vain - I found some still unopened  from last year.

My timing was better in Vanguard, where there were 60-slot chests waiting for everyone. Now I just need to rebuild my Qalian beach villa, not to mention the second home we paid subscribers are entitled to under the New Deal. I'm going to rebuild my Thestran hunting lodge. I'll get right on it just as soon as I can work out some means of keeping the rent paid when I only play once in a blue moon.

Can I get an appointment to view?

Most disappointing by far was my return to Argo. It wasn't there. Well, strictly speaking it is there until the first of March, when it closes down for good, but my client no longer patches so I can't log in. Our friends at Allaplaya, gaming subsidiary of everyone's favorite Megacorp PSS1, cry a few crocodile tears as they explain that, hey, no-one was playing Argo anyway and we got these shiny new games like Planetside2 and DCUO that you're rilly gonna love...

Think I'll keep my capes in the top drawer...

I'm very happy to say it appears Argo isn't vanishing altogether. It's a quirky, likeable MMO as I wrote a while back and one that I definitely wasn't done with. Like NeoSteam, another MMO I still miss, Argo will carry on in its homeland but as was sadly not the case for NeoSteam, it looks likely that Argo's new provider will make it available to all, no matter where in the world they happen to log in from.

It's my tail. Wanna make something of it?

I'll just have to try and make the effort to play it this time, before it does finally disappear for good. MMOs are odd beasts. Sometimes it's "use it or lose it" as it was for The Matrix Online or Lego Universe; other times worlds roll on seemingly forever despite the apparent lack of interest. It would be unkind to name names. If there's an old favorite you haven't visited since, well, you can't remember when, probably best not to leave it too long. Things are getting rough out there.

A Hero casts no shadow

The fourth in my flurry of re-visits certainly doesn't look to be in any danger of folding its tent right now. DCUO was a game that most observers felt had launched with the wrong payment model and it duly floundered as a subscription title. A deft F2P conversion, combined with server mergers that appear to have done what server mergers should, namely stabilize and concentrate the population, seem to have left the game in a good place.

As it happens, I do have a subscription. Rather, I have SOE's All Access which, along with the merciful removal of the mandatory PSS1 requirement (yes, them again), means I can slip into my cape any time I fancy. It also means that , as a Legendary member, I don't have to pay extra for the recent Home Turf DLC, which brings instanced housing in the form of lairs and bases. Of course, I only found that out after I'd wasted ten minutes fiddling with the Station Store trying to figure out how to buy it. Sometimes you just can't give your money away.

Table - check. Chandelier - check. Mirror - hmm, I got a clock.

I wasted a further fifteen minutes running through the tutorial on a new character. The only two characters I have in DCUO, a level 19 hero and a level 11 villain, are on a PvP server and much though I enjoyed the mayhem while I was playing regularly, for infrequent pleasure trips I really would like to be able to fly around gawping at Metropolis without three or four level 30 muscleboys introducing my face to the sidewalk every five minutes.


What I didn't notice was that you have to be level 12 before you get the mission that gives you your base. If I'd paid attention to Tipa I'd have know that. So, now I have a homeless level 3 Hero on a PvE server and level 19 on a PvP server who's too nervous to leave his  Art Deco lair.

I could get a bowling alley in here

At least his new base looks great. There's a lot of space, several floors, big windows (pity you can't see out), huge potential. I placed my three free pieces of furniture, which was quite the flashback to EQ2 circa 2005. I checked the broker to see what I could buy but it seems things you'd be embarrassed to throw in a skip go for six figures and my total fortune in DCUO is about $5k. I just hope the minimalist look is still in in Metropolis.

Do you take pocket lint? It's all I got.

The best thing was that I immediately remembered just how much I like DCUO. And a couple of fights reminded me just how bad I am at playing it. My "skills" will come back to me, I'm sure. I hope so because I need to do some Alerts so I can steal confiscate a sofa or two. Although judging by general chat I'd better brush up on my Russian or my Turkish before I join any groups. This on a North American server, I should add.