Well, it’s time to face facts. This blog is probably on its last legs.
It hasn’t seen a lot of updates in the last year. It’s not likely to see many more. Well, nineteen years is a long time, and I feel quite frequently that I really don’t have much more to say on MMOs.
But I still play. Again, not as frequently as I had in the day, but I play. So it’s worth taking a look at the previous year to see where things are at.
Guess I’ll start with Star Citizen. It’s easy to take shots at it, given its business model and the apparent lack of progress-except, it really wasn’t a big lack this year. The big one was the Persistent Entity Streaming patch, which allowed just about every object in the game to stick around for as long as the character did in a server-and potentially longer if the server managed to still be around when the player logged back in. This came in with a cargo refactor which allowed cargo boxes to actually be moved around. Then the long delayed salvage gameplay came in. Then ship-based tractor beams capable of hauling ships. The cargo refactor also made piracy a valid profession instead of the “I’ll kill ships and call myself a pirate hr hr hr.” Racetracks became a thing for racing ships. And the annual CitizenCon announced that the single player game of Squadron 42 is “feature complete”, leading to a polishing phase. (What that might mean or how long it may take is probably going to be longer than a lot of people are hoping.) Bigger still, the star system of Pyro, the second system that will be released for the game, was revealed and players were able to do some testing in that system; it’s not impossible to believe that Pyro may be ready for the general playerbase this year. (We’ve heard that before, of course.) It’ll be interesting to see if the goodwill gained during the presentations will still be there by next October. As for my own playing time, I’ve kept exploring a great deal of the various types of gameplay that currently exists. While I’m not a big miner, and I don’t really do the pirate/PvP thing, I indulged in cargo hauling, salvaging, and of course, shooting things in space and on the ground. I’m clearly not leaving SC anytime soon-unless my SSD finally finds itself unable to hold both Windows and SC. (This is a real concern of mine.)
Star Trek Online picks up the next spot. The biggest news was its sale from Perfect World Entertainment to Gearbox. Content-wise…there wasn’t a lot. I think there was maybe three episodes released through last year, and it felt like even the lockboxes weren’t being produced at the same rate. Rumors about that Cryptic-the developers who keep trekking along-are dealing with layoffs or preparing for them. Their fourteenth anniversary is upcoming in less than a week, along with a new episode, but one can’t help but wonder if the game is drifting into a pseudo maintenance mode. With PWE, that wouldn’t be that big a deal; they kept Champions Online afloat for years, after all. But Gearbox may be another story-and I keep hearing that they’re having issues, too. We could be looking at a rocky year for STO. Despite this, I keep playing primarily during my Twitch stream, having spent most of the year playing a Starfleet TOS Science captain.
The biggest news for my gameplaying came just a couple of weeks ago, when the Homecoming servers of City of Heroes announced that they had been given a license to run the venerable MMORPG by NCSoft. That news probably can’t be understated. This made the game legal again, and I’ve dabbled a bit in streaming it now that I don’t feel like I’m advertising an illegal server. (Playing on one didn’t bother me-I have the client software; my brain is weird sometimes.) With this announcement, it looks like the Homecoming devs are going to be putting out some delayed content. How much they’ll put out over the next year is an open question, but I’m not sure the players mind. In addition to my stream, I continue to run with villains on a weekly basis with a less than semi-competent group of bad guys. (I’d refer to them as semi-competent, but these days, they seem to be dropping half of that phrase-it’s not the “semi” part. :D)
The one thing that isn’t likely to see much development in the next year is this blog. It’s been getting pretty obvious that it’s not getting updated regularly, and I have a hard time seeing myself ramping up all that hard for it. I was all set to announce that I was going to close the blog down for good with this post, but I figure I should at least try to get it to twenty years. It’s a nice round number, after all. We’ll see how it shakes out.
Here’s to a good 2024.
Faces of the Ranger 