When games die

Memento Mori

You wouldn't know it from speaking me, but I'm not always the most staunch realist. Why? Because I could never come to terms with the concept of death. Don't get me wrong, a large part of me takes comfort from the fact that there is a finite time for everything, a promised end for all things, and yet a small part of me can't help but pine for the impossible. For immortality. I suppose it comes with the human condition, to believe in myths. And that is largely the reason why I could never wrap my old noggin around the concept of purely online games, because those are titles that are ultimately destined to die.

When I read news about how Xbox's project Scarlett might be entirely disc-less it does make my stomach churn, because I know that the second all of gaming becomes digital is the second we, as game players, lose any and all control over the software. Sure, we can download games from the aether, but we can't pop them in and just play them like the old days. I know that way of thinking is particularly redundant in today's day and age, (wherein games all require considerable online downloads anyway, even when acquired as disks) but I still can't shake those nagging doubts from my mind. (And then there's the conversation about the death of second-hand, something I use to buy 90% of my games, but that's a topic for another blog.)

These are the kind of thoughts that come rushing back everytime I see a game have it's support dropped and it is ultimately left to die. (Something I am forever in fear of considering the fact that my Father's favourite is a 10 year old online EA game.) I had those pangs of fear when I heard about Anthem letting up on development, although the fact that are planning a huge resurrection does cheer me up a tad; I mourned when news broke that Battleborn's servers would be shutting down in January next year, despite not really liking the game and feeling that it tried too hard to be Overwatch despite possessing nowhere near as many memorable characters; and I was darn near having an attack when I heard about Bethesda dropping support for the Elder Scrolls Legends yesterday.

This 'announcement', if you can call it that, was unceremoniously dropped upon the world via an innocuous Reddit post in the dead of the night. In this post, Bethesda provided an 'update' wherein they essentially threw up their hands and admitted that their 'Roadmap', which promised a new expansion's arrival anyday now, was being revised to the tune of removal. That new expansion alongside it's promised 'misc changes' had been scrapped and that choice would "inform our decisions on content and feature development going forward." So far so foreboding, but no one ever explicitly said that the game was dead, right? Wrong. "We will also continue to support the game with monthly reward cards and regular in-game events. New expansions and other future content, however, are no longer under active development. We will continue to provide ongoing maintenance support." If that ain't a farewell, I don't know what is.

Let me be abundantly frank with you; this news does spell the end for ESL. Being an online game, and a card game at that, The Elder Scrolls Legends counts on the ecosystem being supplied constantly with new updates to card values, new cards pack and, occasionally, new mechanics. It is what is know as 'shifting the Meta' and it's how all the people who follow the game can keep themselves entertained by doing their best to account for new variables. If nothing changes then 'winning' decks never change and people get bored as they have nothing to keep up with. Additionally, when a game admits to having no more updates it upsets potential newcomers from getting involved as none one wants to dedicate their time into a game that is already on it's way out the door.

Personally, I think this announcement hit me so hard because I was actually invested in this title at some point. I never believed in Anthem in the firstplace and I only ever played Battleborn for the first few days after release, but ESL was something that I actively dedicated hours of my life trying to improve at. (I never did, by the by.) In another life I even had the chance to play this game with other people, which makes this an especially rare game in my book. Sure, I may have dropped off in recent years but that was just because I was awful at it, I still enjoyed the game and planned to try my hand at it again sometime. (Guess those plans are null and void.) As an inherently anti-social individual, this is the equivalent of finding out that an old acquaintance has passed away and thinking "Damn, never got that £5 he owed me."

What's more, I just can't wrap my head around why exactly all of this is happening, I mean I never thought that things were this bad. Early pundits who have covered the issue usually default to bringing up Steam charts to point out how the game was never doing well in all its life time, with an all-time peak of around 8000 concurrent players, but this metric vastly misses the point. Not only was ESL's major debut on the phone, but the game was first debuted on Bethesda's own launcher; Bethesda.net, which, say about it what you will, does not offer up it's user stats to be counted along Steams. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this means Elder Scrolls Online was really a powerhouse in terms of player concurrency, just that things couldn't have been as dire as people are initially thinking.

The game was even well received once it actually came out. Sure, initially people rallied against the thing for not being The Elder Scrolls 6 (Just like they did with The Elder Scrolls: Blades) but after launch the title did pick up praise from regular players. Those who instinctively accused the game of being a 'Hearthstone clone' picked it up and realized that there were some cool differences which kept things familiar but still changed them up. Heck, the game even won some accolades in it's time, with it being hailed as the second best online card game. (although I feel that list was missing a couple major players like 'Magic the Gathering') Bethesda didn't let the game rot either, dedicating a trailer for the game once every E3 as well as semi-regular streams of playing the game with Pete Hines.

And yet, for whatever reason it all just wasn't enough and now it seems that Bethesda are counting their losses and packing bags. They're still yet to bring the game to consoles (They're a year late on that) and the team have still thrown in the towel. I've heard a few folks guess that this is a decision with next year in mind, ease off their slate of games in 2019 in preparation for their new IP 'Starfield' which is rumored to launch in 2020, but I still don't think that requires killing off a decent card game this unceremoniously. Even Fallout 76 is getting more of a chance and that game is hot trash.

But nothing I can say on the matter will change things. The decision has been made and the doctors have called TOD on ESL. In the next year or so the team will wind down as player numbers slowly dwindle down to nothing, at which point the plug will be pulled on the servers. Their final sputtering as the light leaves their LEDs will mark the last moments of a once-promising project. This is the fate that awaits all online-only games sooner or later, and indeed us all. It's a situation that never fails to get me all melancholy and torn up in the feels. It's never pleasant to feel your own mortality. Memento Mori.