State of The Redbeard, Summer Edition 2026

I spent this weekend at ARRL Field Day 2026, which is put on by the American Radio Relay League, the largest Amateur Radio organization in the US. I'll post more about it later this week, but the TL;DR is that it's a contest/activity that's intended to get hams and clubs out into the field and away from their home locations to try to make as many contacts as they can. Just like guilds in MMOs, some clubs are far more hardcore about this than others, but I'm grateful my club is NOT one of those.

Anyway, I wasn't playing MMOs much this weekend --only a couple of hours playing WoW this afternoon-- so I got the opportunity to take a step back and consider what I want to do with my MMO playing.

Well, the first thing I did was to admit that I haven't really been playing LOTRO much at all since the great 64-bit server migration. My oldest, who also had been playing LOTRO far more than me, hadn't been playing much either. We haven't set up a new Kinship house --and in my case I haven't even bothered with setting up a new personal house-- and all I've done the past few months was to login and wander around Bree for a few minutes at a time. 

This theme also follows what I've been doing in ESO, where I'm so out of practice that when I do go out and about and fight any sort of enemy I almost end up dying. That's kind of embarrassing, given that I really used to love ESO's and GW2's limited ability bars, but that's the reality of me not effectively playing either game over the past 6+ years. 

I'm the plain looking Dunmer to the side.
All sorts hang out around a bank vault, I guess.

That leads me to SWTOR, where I bowed to reality here and decided to cancel my in-game subscription. I've gone from logging in once a week and doing stuff in the Vanilla SWTOR zones to logging in more like once a quarter. I can trace my decline in interest with SWTOR directly to the change that impacted companions' pathing, but I also think that the success of Classic WoW lead to the realization I liked the pre-expansion Vanilla version of SWTOR more than its current iteration. If the dev team were to come out with a "SWTOR Classic" with a pre-Rise of the Hutt Cartel version of the game available to play, I'd be all for it. I still love the Vanilla storylines, and I'll miss them a lot,* but paying a subscription to a game I'm not playing is pretty silly.

Some of the other games I've played in the past, such as Neverwinter and Age of Conan, I've uninstalled from my PC. I'd login, look at my toon for a moment, and just logout. The former I couldn't get into after a certain level (I think it was mid-20s) and the latter is still a buggy mess that requires grouping up to finish the main storyline, and I honestly don't know anybody who plays it anymore. That the talent tree for AoC is so obnoxiously huge --it makes Rift's talent tree look really basic by comparison-- I have absolutely no idea what my options really are. If you've ever heard about analysis paralysis, I met that head-on in AoC.

Speaking of Rift, there's so few players --especially in the low level zones-- that you really can't do much. You can quest in a zone to an extent, but the grouping that is expected to happen in fighting Rifts or whatnot in the open world simply doesn't happen. You need a critical mass of players to do that, and that's just not happening anymore. I haven't tried their automated LFD tool, but given my experiences with automated tools in other MMOs I'm very reluctant to try it and group up for their equivalent of a dungeon.

Like most days when I poke my nose in Rift,
nary a person in sight.

I do login to Star Trek Online a bit, but like LOTRO, I just wander around and maybe take a trip from Earth to Vulcan. If I were subscribing to STO, it would have also been on the block for unsubscribing.

And now let's circle back to the elephant in the room, the various forms of WoW.

At this point in time, WoW is the only MMO I'm actively subscribed to. Well, kind of: I buy 60 days' worth of WoW at a time, which forces me to review whether I'm enjoying myself every couple of months. And so far, that has been the case.

Among the versions of WoW I've played, the Classic Anniversary servers are what I've played the most. I still poke my nose into the Retail and Era servers, but I've not touched the 2019 WoW Classic progression servers since 2023 or so. About the only thing I did do there was to occasionally login so I knew what my toons originally looked like when I recreated them on the Anniversary servers. 

***

So, that begs the question: what have I been doing?

The most obvious answer is that I've been doing non-gamer things: amateur radio, gardening, repairs around the house and cars. And eventually I'll get back to making more outdoor furniture since the weather has finally heated up.

But what about gamer stuff?

Oh, single player games: Civ IV, Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Age of Empires.

There's a few other games scattered in there, but I've stayed away from long games that require a lot of attention, such as any of the isometric RPGs (Baldur's Gate 1/2/3, Icewind Dale, Divinity Original Sin 1/2, Disco Elysium, etc.). I simply don't have the time to devote to those games, and I realized that when I came to the conclusion that my BG3 playthrough was long enough in the past that I can't even remember what I was trying to do at the time. Maybe I'll get a chance to play these longer form games another time --I'm looking at you, Planescape: Torment-- but that's not about to happen right now.

Yeah, buddy. I'm done with trying to figure it
out, so you'll just have to wait and I'll recreate you later.

That's the biggest drawback to video games made over the past 10-15 years or so: the hours to completion has become so large that you'd have to devote a significant amount of your free time to playing them, and that in the end works against my enjoyment of the game. While I no longer have kids around the house, that doesn't mean I'm swimming in spare time. And these 100+ hour video games demand enough of your spare time that it becomes increasingly difficult to justify devoting that much time to a single endeavor. If I read a book about an hour a night, for books not named Don Quixote** that'd take me about 40-50 hours to complete. So, somewhere between 1-2 months. But a game such as BG3 or The Witcher 3, with their playtimes of well over 100 hours each***, can take me a lot longer than that. I think that when I played the original Baldur's Gate back in 1999 it took me somewhere around 4 months, and that didn't include the expansion.**** 

There are other games I do want to play, such as Dispatch and Stray Gods, but I suspect that I'll get so invested in the story that when difficult choices come along (and from what I understand, you're given a very short period of time to make a choice in these Telltale-type games) I'll likely freeze and simply stop playing. The old line from the Rush song Freewill "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" looms large over me whenever I play one of these games. Maybe its my acknowledgement that there are no objectively good or bad solution in these games that causes me to freeze like that, but I do feel bad for all participants in a video game when push comes to shove and I have to let someone down.

I believe this is one of the "easier" choices
in Dispatch. I mean, you could be a selfish jerk
with the left option or have an overinflated ego
in the mid, or just propel the story forward on the right.
Screencap from Dispatch.

***

Does that mean my MMO playing days are winding down?

Not really. Just like everything else, it evolves around here. I expect that as Fall heads toward Winter my MMO playing will go up a bit as I'll be doing less and less outside. Still, you never quite know around here. Who knows what Microsoft might be up to this Fall? More cost cutting? Same thing goes for all of the other game companies, as the "good times" in the post-pandemic world come to an end.

I guess we'll see.

*You know, I still never finished the Agent's storyline. I got mid-way through Chapter 2 and... Just stopped. That's when the pathing issues kicked in, and I couldn't stand it.

**Unabridged version. The abridged version is significantly shorter.

***And I'm here to tell you I do NOT operate at the same speed as the "average" player; I spend way too much time enjoying everything and contemplating my choices before I move forward. What, you thought that I only did that in MMOs? 

****I was loaned the copy of BG1 that I played, so I returned it when I was finished. The guy who loaned it to me kept pestering me to finish it, but I was like "Dude, I have a newborn at home, I'm working 50 hours a week, and I'm wiped. I'm moving as fast as I can."

Enough to Give You Flashbacks

I spent this past week sick. As in, "I should have been in bed but work wouldn't let me" sort of sick.*

While that didn't exactly help me with keeping up with the blog (as well as playing games), I did have time to finish up a book on the video game industry. For people who read Kotaku, the name Jason Schreier should sound familiar, and his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a look behind the development of several video games. While none of the games featured were MMOs, several of the games were those developed by game companies that do develop MMOs, such as Bioware and Blizzard.

And if I thought that his article on the disaster behind Mass Effect: Andromeda gave me flashbacks, this entire book was akin to reliving a five year stretch of my life.

This pic popped up when I searched Google for
"generic software developer working photo".
In my experience, these people can't be
actually coding at that time because they're
all smiling. (From thebalance.com.)

Video game developers are a breed apart of most other software developers. While I used to hear stories of the earlier days of Microsoft when upper level managers would roam the hallways, complaining that too many people had gotten married or had families for Microsoft to keep their edge, video game developers pretty much lived for writing code 24x7. A coworker of mine was once on the dev staff for Betrayal at Krondor, and the stories he told of the insane hours worked made for good lunch discussion.**

And the stories that Jason told in his novel really hit home for me, such as:

• The doomed Star Wars 1313, the game that was going to restore LucasArts to its former glory but was destroyed by micromanagement from the top (George Lucas) and the sale of LucasFilm to Disney. This reminded me of my company's attempt to capitalize on the rush to get everything on the web by creating a "web based midrange CAD program"***; which was great in theory but was about 10+ years away in terms of bandwidth and raw computing power. All his initiative did was suck up resources when they were much better spent getting the last major release of our CAD software bug free (it wasn't, and the product when shipped was a disaster). There was even a last ditch effort by a sympathetic EA executive to try and save the LucasArts team and 1313 by arranging a 1313 presentation to another of their studios, but that ended in defeat when the head of the studio was only interested in acquiring the talent and not the product. And that reminded me of when my company was finally acquired, and I could only watch from afar as friends I'd known for years were let go in the massive bloodletting at was once a proud development and engineering house.
  
• The redemption of Dragon Age: Inquisition, after the poorly received and hastily thrown together release of Dragon Age 2 (which was originally intended by Bioware to be called Dragon Age: Exodus, but EA forced them to say "2"). The original sequel to Dragon Age: Origins was meant to be Inquisition, but because SWTOR was slipping in the release schedule the corporate parent EA wanted to release another Bioware game instead, and so the dev team had to rush in and create what became DA2. The failures behind DA2 really weighed on every aspect of the work on Inquisition, as Bioware wanted to prove that they were more than just a Mass Effect studio with some other games of lesser quality. As a side effect of both DA2 and ME3, Bioware also had to handle corporate pushback as to whether they should really do the ME3 extended ending. Bioware wanted to get it right, but corporate looked at it as essentially feeding the trolls.
  
• The lonely development process of Stardew Valley, where Eric Barone labored for years to get what he felt was a "good enough" product for release, to the point of nearly working himself to death. Even when he released Stardew Valley, he had no idea whether the public would think his labor of love to be any good. That crippling self-doubt plagues a lot of creative types; I see it from software developers to musicians to actors to painters, and yes, I've seen it in the perfectionism of the mini-Reds when they practice their instruments.
  
• The eventual trainwreck behind Destiny, and the real reason behind why Peter Dinklage sounded like he mailed it in during the voice acting. (Not Quite A Spoiler Alert: it wasn't his fault.) As well as Activision/Blizzard's corporate handled the Diablo 3 fiasco (another chapter), it didn't handle Destiny's problems quite so well.
  
• The soul crushing doubts that drove the Witcher III development, and whether the game would be good enough to meet the standards of Western RPG developers/fans, not to mention whether there would actually be enough content in the game to not have long stretches of simply "not doing anything".

I could go on and on, but the entire book is filled with stories about many games we video game players know, and yet don't truly know because we've not peeled back the curtain to what lies behind the game.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels provided me with a bit of catharsis. I used to work in the software industry, so I know what it was like to be in their shoes. At the same time, I realize that is the sort of work that is by far a young person's game, because I'm more interested in trying to keep my work hours down to reasonable levels. I have become the "married guy with kids" that so upset Microsoft's old management, and as a consequence I want to step back from the intensity (and insanity) behind software development and enjoy more of the fruits of their labor.

But it has also increased the respect I have for the devs who make these games. I already had a lot of respect for their work having lived it, but you'd have to take my old job and crank it up to eleven to get what crunch**** is like for them.

So I'll raise a glass to Jason for a very well written book, and another glass to the devs who put together these games.

*We do have "sick days", but there were too many deadlines that were suddenly foisted on us this past week to take time off.

**He also used to tell us "you don't know how good you have it here, as we'd be sleeping on cots to finish the release."

***The midrange CAD/CAM/CAE market was above the level of Autodesk. Software in that range is what is used by major corporations to design products, such as CATIA or Pro/Engineer or Unigraphics. These are the software packages that auto companies use to design cars and electronics firms use to design televisions.

****Another dev term. We used to simply call it "hell", as in "we've got another hell week ahead if we want to lower the amount of bugs to acceptable levels."