I never got Life is Feudal

 And now I guess I'll never have to

Ever now and then I ruminate on the fads that just passed me by, caught between the dual thoughts of 'maybe I'm missing out' and 'maybe it was never meant to be.' As someone who, as a rule, never lets regret stay for tea, my reflections are never long, but they do probe. Maybe if I were a more accepting person, with wider taste and appreciation, I'd be able to love this thing that everyone else seems to love; but I suspect the truth is just that there's some preferences that I'll never understand. (As hard as that is to swallow for someone who has forced himself to play and find something he likes about every single genre he doesn't naturally take to. Heck, I'm currently playing 3 of the best rougelikes I could find in order to brainwash myself into liking those games.) In point of today's blog; I've never really understood the mass appeal that folk have to the medieval time period. Like what's up with that?

Okay, that's not entirely true; I understand the appeal of adventure and armoured combat; nobility, honour and other pretty lies all make for great fiction and I can sort of see where people come to it from that angle. But I'm a fan of completely new worlds and stories that defy my imagining; so I tend to lean towards worlds of fantasy with magical worlds, reality defying threats and unassailable monsters to challenge. The closest I get to the blunt reality of the straight medieval genre is the throes of Dark fantasy like Dark Souls, Diablo or that new 'King Arthur: Knights Tale' game which looks pretty cool. Yet all of those examples wouldn't fly with fans of hard medieval, oh no. Those fans aren't happy unless they live their lives in the dirt encrusted, historically accurate, hovels of the dark ages, match'd with an aged wife, to mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race, that eat and sleep and hoard and know not they. Huh? Sorry I got a little lost there.

The point is that I don't see the appeal of roleplaying one of the crummiest periods of history with some of the worst general living conditions outside of active warzones. Even The Witcher, with all of it's revelling in mundane medieval life, recognised that the least interesting parts of it's world where that which concerned human toil, thus it focuses on the exploits of a literal hybrid so that no matter what dank filth-ridden hole you end up in there's a least a spark of whimsical intrigue there. There's none of the glory-driven fervour of the age of Vikings, pompous dichotomy of the colonial ages or aged grandeur of any of the classical periods. It's just humanity at it's least interesting. And yes, you might point out how I'm being obscenely dismissive in a manner more akin to older academic views on the period, which have now been eclipsed by ideas that some cultural value existed within what is rather begrudgingly labelled 'the Dark Ages', but that's just where I'm at; I can't help it.

Thus even though I heard a absolute great deal out of 'Life is Feudal' when it first launched, my mild interest in the survival genre could not extend to this iteration of it. By that time I was already beginning to become jaded with the sorts of games that forced one to collect resources on a loop forever; but the best did so in promise that, should you stick through it, the end will be worth it. 'Ark Survival Evolved' promised ridable mecha-dinosaurs, 'Subnautica' teased a world of underwater wonder and submarine mastery; Life is Feudal offered the modest life of a dirt farmer. How enticing. (No offense to the developers, but I already live with a toe above the poverty line, I don't really need to fantasise about it.) For a frankly surprising amount of people out there, however; Life is Feudal was everything they dreamed of.

That is to say, 'Life is Feudal: Your own', in which players were dropped into a 9 square kilometre map and allowed to go absolutely nuts in their quest to realise their manifest destiny and create a rudimentary medieval hamlet out of whatever you could find. In traditional Survival game fashion this meant lots of grinding for resources whilst you made the game you wanted to play in your head. (Again. The appeal of this genre is long lost on me.) The game did have some multiplayer built into it too, where up to 64 people could hop onto the same server for some large scale re-enactments and the like, but the networking was never really spectacular and this online games tended to chug worse than an alcoholic. What a shame, if only there was a way for lots of players to get together and play without constant crashing...

That's where 'Life is Feudal: The MMO' came into the picture and how I saw the game on my Steam homepage for literal years whilst the algorithm absolutely did not get the message that I couldn't be less interested. Neither, it would seem, were the fans because this MMO never quite took off. From accounts I here tell of simply insane grind to the extent were gathering took entire play sessions and crops grew in real time. (As in; taking months) Now as much as I exaggerate the mundane existence of playing Medieval games, I'm mostly being facetious in the knowledge that a lot of these games are intentionally sensationalist for the purpose of generating fun. Life is Feudal: MMO, however, appeared to have opted for a more 'simulator' approach to the genre, which is puzzling when you're talking about an MMO. Isn't the whole point to rope in as many players as possible? So why aim for such an incredibly niche subset of the genre that even fans of Medieval games aren't always immediately down for. (Some people out there have lives. Not all of them, but some.)

That might have something to do with the shutting down of the MMO version of this game just last month, although the team did declare that from their point of view this is down to a deal falling apart which makes server costs too high. (However, I'd imagine if the venture were worth the commitment, with players actually playing the thing, they wouldn't have erred towards closing the whole venture.) It is perhaps something of a shame because, judging from the snippets of gameplay I can look up, this title was actually incredibly robust for something of it's kin. The game seemed to run decently, look fine and, for the people who were actually on board for that sort of experience, I'm sure it played great too. It just fell for the pitfalls of trying to be a decently successful multiplayer game in a market that only really has space for the incredibly popular. Same mistake as a thousand hopeful developers before them and a thousand after.

Despite my disdain towards the topic, I actually was quite sad to hear the news, because a death in the gaming world always takes to my heart. I know that someone out there is crushed by this news and that's a shame. For consolation, however, the original game is still very much available and probably a lot more accessible to casual medieval fans, so perhaps it's not all doom and gloom. But let me still offer my condolences to Life is Feudal, and the enigma of the medieval genre that I find so darn perplexing. Maybe one day I fork out for 'Kingdom Come: Deliverance' and see what all the fuss was about. Huh? What do you mean, of course I'm a 'Mount and Blade' fan. How is that the exact same thing? I mean sure there's no magic, lots of talk of fiefdom, medieval siege units and- oh my god... I was one of them all along...