Trion Concerns

Trion Concerns

A few days ago it was announced that Trion was acquired by Gamigo, a company that I knew very little about in truth because it catered to an end of the MMO market that I don’t spend much time in.  As a result there were massive layoffs at Trion Worlds.  I am not exactly sure what the starting number was but it is reported that they are down to a shell of 25 people.  Essentially with one action all of the people that I knew that worked for Trion… no longer do…  with the exception of one that I am not entirely certain about the fate of.  I have a feeling that the 25 remaining will only be there during the transition period.  At least with SOE being purchased by Daybreak, it felt that the name changed but the company as a whole was going to continue trying to do the same thing.  This however feels like a completely different beast.

If you follow the course that Gamigo has taken it sort of fits the pattern of a company trying to gobble up intellectual property.  Here is a little timeline that I was able to cobble together rapidly this morning.

  • February 2013 – Acquires Outspark the publishers of Fiesta Online.
  • September 2014 – Acquires Intenium – which is labelled as “a publisher and distributor of casual games designed for females” whatever the hell that means.
  • May 2016 – Acquires Aeria Games – a bunch of Korean localized MMOs – the only one of which I have played is Echo of Soul.
  • July 2016 – Acquires Highdigit – which appears to be a SaaS CRM sort of platform that targets marketing and sale of games.
  • August 2016 – Acquires HoneyTracks – which appears to be a game focused Analytics company.
  • March 2017 – Acquires MMO Games – which you will know for MMOGames.com a site that I wrote for briefly a few years back, and largely dissolved my relationship with because while the other writers were awesome… the company behind it always felt a little sleazy.
  • July 2017 – Acquires Mediakraft Networks – which proclaims to be an “Online Television Network”.  It sorta looks like a German language BuzzFeed?
  • October 2018 – Acquires Trion Worlds – which of course is the reason why we are here reading this post in the first place.

So there is a pattern here…  grab IP content, grab distribution and analytics, and then grab media networks to advertise your products.  It makes sense but it also doesn’t exactly make me have warm fuzzies about the way this is being set up.  The ultimate question is going to be how they manage Trion games like Rift going forward.  Do they crank the loot box and gacha dial up to 11, or do they leave things largely running as is?  I said above that the only Gamigo game that I had played was Echo of Soul…  which I got access to while I was still at MMOGames.com.  This was technically before the site was acquired but regardless… it now feels a little odd.  I was going to write a review of the game, but quite frankly I had nothing positive to say about it.  It felt like a cheaply made generic MMO that didn’t have open world areas… but instead these Guild Wars 1 style on rails “corridors” that you traversed between regions.

I didn’t end up writing the review because I knew it would never see print.  There had been another game that I felt was extremely cheaply made, and wrote what I felt was a fair assessment of its positives and negatives.  I focused on the few things that I did enjoy about it, but the final product wound up being about 50% positives, 50% negatives.  The article never saw the light of day however because the company behind the game was a big advertiser, and as a result wanted positive press to push their product.  I felt like anything I would write about Echo of Soul would be a similar experience so I politely declined the article and moved on with my life.  While I legitimately stopped writing for the site because of personal reasons… it was events like this…  that made me feel not exactly comfortable having my name associated with it.  I’ve been torn for years about this reaction because I had a lot of really good friends who relied and still do technically rely on a paycheck from the site.

Trion Concerns

Basically I am at this point where I have deep concerns about the fate of the Trion Worlds games, because I am not entirely certain that Gamigo cares about these games or their communities.  I legitimately think this is a grab for more potential revenue streams, just like they made grabs to cover the marketing, distribution, analytics and advertising.  Gamigo seems to have assembled this machine for pushing MMO games hard to grind out whatever profits that they can get from them.  On the Wiki there is a list of fifteen games that they have discontinued, this doesn’t include the five that were announced but never made it to production, or the three that they lost the licensing rights for.  None of this really makes me feel like my stable of characters in Rift… or the time that I put into Trion or ArcheAge are really going to be safe.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom… but ultimately I have some deep concerns about this move.  The problem is…  MMORPGs are fighting over what seems to be a static pool of players.  We are likely going to see more of this in the future rather than less of it, as the properties that have been struggling for awhile find a new home in a potentially less than reputable environment.  Ultimately…  play and support the games you love because there is the real possibility that at some point they simply won’t be there…  or else may be so changed that they are barely recognizable from their former selves.

 

Nightmare Matrix

Nightmare Matrix

Last night I dove head first into the Haunted Forest activity associated with the Festival of the Lost event.  There is absolutely no hyperbole intended… but this might literally be the best content they have created for Destiny 2.  The only unfortunate part is that it is associated with a limited time event, and it isn’t available for that much longer.  When they first talked about the Infinite Forest I pictured this mode where you go through a random series of changing and shifting segments until you face a boss at the end… that then gives you a chance at loot.  Basically I pictured it working a lot like the Court of Oryx or Archon’s Forge events in Destiny 1… and then was completely disappointed when it released and was ultimately nothing like that.  What we got felt super repetitive and didn’t have any real hook to make you want to keep roaming around in there.

Nightmare Matrix

The Haunted Forest is 100% recycled content, but re-purposed in such a way as we are descending into the nightmare visions created by the Vex that we saw bits and pieces of during Curse of Osiris.  Firstly instead of a washed out digital landscape, we have dark and brooding levels with very sparse lighting allowing for monsters to seemingly jump out from the Darkness.  Additionally there is effectively the stand in for Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head in the form of a giant Hive Knight that is indestructible and chases after places hitting you with a giant axe and doing nonsense amounts of damage.  Each time you dip into the Haunted Forest you are trying to kill a certain percentage of the projections of the various enemy factions within Destiny 2.  When your bar hits 100% you get transported to fight a Nightmare, or a version of one of the Ultra boss monsters that exist in other areas of the game.  Upon defeating the monster a timer starts that gives you a certain amount of time before the Haunted Forest collapses upon itself, and effectively you are trying to see how many times you can get to the Nightmare boss and defeat them before you run out of time.

Nightmare Matrix

There is a reward chest at the end after defeating your final Nightmare that rewards a currency specific to the Festival of the Lost called Fragmented Souls.  These are then used to purchase the paper masks and if you can manage to save up 120 of them… a item level 600 Auto Rifle called the Horror Story.  It is the last item that I am grinding for.  In previous iterations of Festival of the Lost the masks were purely cosmetic, but this time around they have a purpose and can be leveled up through doing content.  So while they add no item level, they do have a bunch of perks that tweak your gameplay in the Haunted Forest.  For example I went with Vampiric Touch that increases damage to challenging enemies and triggers Health Regen on precision kills.  There were three other options and each one was effected by a different type of kill, and I’ve managed to get a single upgrade so far that increases the drop of Heavy ammo, which speeds up the killing of Nightmares.

Nightmare Matrix

It also seems like you have the chance of getting Legendary drops from the various mobs inside of the matrix.  Can we talk about how much better it feels to have engrams decrypt immediately showing you if you got something useful in the process?  I managed to pick up Go Figure a really bad ass Pulse Rifle, and mine rolled with range boost which makes it silly to effectively snipe things with pulse shots from across the map.  It also has High Caliber rounds and High Impact Reserves making it stagger like crazy.  I am super in love with this weapon so far and I thought it looked coolest in the white and black color scheme that I ended up choosing.  So far… I am greatly enjoying my time back in Destiny 2, because things feel “better” in ways that I am not exactly sure how to quantify.  Time will tell if I feel the same once this event is over, but for the moment…  I am grinding Fragmented Souls for that Auto Rifle.

 

Fragmented Gameplay

Fragmented Gameplay

This was a busy weekend, largely because I spent most of it not in Oklahoma.  We opted to take a fall break trip down to Dallas, and in some ways it was a really awesome trip…  but in other ways it was not.  When we left town on Friday morning it was raining, and for the most part did not stop raining until some time over night.  This made for a very cold and wet trip, combined with lots of moments when it was raining so hard that I could barely see the road ahead of me.  This became more stressful when I was crammed between two lines of K-Rails and the two lanes of traffic felt super squeezed together.  We made it there safely, but the trip took way longer than it normally would have given the circumstances.  Under perfect conditions with zero stops, we can make it to Frisco where we were staying in the hotel in roughly 4 hours…  we were not under perfect conditions, and we stopped constantly to roam around.  Friday was largely spent meandering around hitting various places along the way.

Fragmented Gameplay

This made for a very compact Sunday, trying to get everything that we normally have to do on a Sunday done as well as anything triggered by being out of the house for two days.  This mean’t that most of my gameplay yesterday was in several fragmented chunks which largely involved running Headless Horseman in World of Warcraft on all of my tanks, and leveling in Destiny 2 as I had yet to hit the level cap nor really make much traction in the story.  I am a little weird when it comes to approaching Destiny content in that I prefer to level up independent of the story, and then grind through the story knowing that anything that happens to drop will potentially fuel my later item level grind.  I largely took this screenshot because occasionally I forget that I end up getting paired with local people through Bungie’s matching algorithm that factors connection quality above pretty much anything else.  Notice the player GerthBrooks…  which made me chuckle at first and then was a little disturbed by it.  For the uninitiated, Garth Brooks is also an Oklahoman and while his girls were in High School literally lived in the same town as I do.

Fragmented Gameplay

Another thing I found out this weekend is that Escalation Protocol is really damned good for leveling…  as there were groups I managed to get in the same instance with that were farming the level 7 boss.  This thing drops some shaders, but also a chest that requires some sort of key that I am going to have to figure out.  Upon some quick googling it seems like I simply didn’t do much content in Warmind, and as a result don’t have any keys to open these things with.  The truth is that I largely bounced hard after grinding up my second account worth of characters upon the PC release.  I managed to stick it through until the Curse of Osiris expansion, but the repetitive nature of that content left me annoyed.  I will admit however that so far Forsaken seems really cool, I picked up and did some more of the story last night.

Fragmented Gameplay

My highest priority however is to sort out how to do the Festival of the Lost content before it disappears.  I had enough of the cash shop second chance currency to pick up this sweet corrupted ship.  Past that I hear there is a better version of the infinite forest that I need to check out, that has a chance of dropping what appears to be a really sweet auto rifle.  I contemplated playing God of War, but with the fragmentation of my play time…  I focused on something that I could drop in and out of quickly rather than something that would require my full attention for long periods of time.  Depending on how tonight goes… will determine if I return to Destiny for Festival stuff, or play some Dad of War.  Regardless I managed to hit 50 the new level cap and am at 500ish light, so now to finish the story and get geared again.  The lack of weapon options are driving me insane right now… but it is forcing me to use combinations that I never would have before.  I’ve been getting a lot of play out of sidearms since they game keeps dropping them for me.

AggroChat #224 – If Twinkies Cared About You

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Tamrielo

aggrochat224

Tonight we lead off the show with a brief explanation of why there was no show last week.  Namely Bel was at a wedding, Grace still in DC, Tam and Thalen in Japan… and Kodra and Ash probably wisely decided not to record a duo show.  No offense to any of the bajillion podcasts out there that are always a duo show… but that isn’t our schtick. Since Tam is in fact back from his vacation we talk a bit about his experiences on his first trip to Japan.  This leads into a discussion about the Pokemon Go culture and how popular the game is there. From there Bel talks briefly about his nonsense “Wireless Ethernet” set up and playing the latest God of War game over it. From there we delve into a discussion about the Hollow Knight Randomizer and Steel Soul mode.  Finally we briefly touch on The Messenger and Gris.

Topics Discussed:

  • Why No Show Last Week
  • Tam’s Adventures in Japan
    • Pokemon Go Culture
  • Wireless Ethernet
    • Parsec Remote Play
    • Playstation Remote PLay
  • God of War
    • Dad of War
    • Wages of Toxic Masculinity
  • Hollow Knight
    • Randomizer
    • Steel Soul Mode
  • The Messenger
  • Gris