The Endless Forest

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The endless forest was a niche little MMO by the dev team Tale of Tales, most known in modern times for having a meltdown in 2015 because they couldn't break into the commercial game scene (which I honestly feel like was because they were hung up on being ‘auteurs’ first; walking sims like Sunset were in fact popular around the time of Sunset’s launch but they chose to try to pitch to gamers rather than to either the audience they already had or the subset of gamers that would actually be interested in a game like that and then just got big mad that they didn't get immediately hailed as Auteurs).

Still, it was a niche little MMO that was more about the vibes and hanging out and I adored it and the roleplay scene on the community. As with any tight community there were likely issues with cliques in hindsight.

Also coincidentally the spot where I learned how to Code HTML / CSS, but also it was not learning good stuff because it was mostly “how do you make the preexisting janky code spit out the stuff I want it to”.

Honestly I’m gonna likely see if I can dig into my old accounts and post some of the weird css / html coding. If you’d like to look at what amounts to html / css coding for characters I had in middle school / end of high school and see that there’s links here. Alternatively this was a little directory I made around 2014 that's got links to all my characters I had back then, some things may look worse than they did 10 years ago because so far attempts to get back into my old account are not going well because the community site management seems to be languishing.

It also had great community RP stuff going on but a lot of it has unfortunately not held up well because none of this was done with longevity in mind (on either users end or on developer / forum moderator / etc end).

Lot of cool stuff being done with a combination of html / css and rp stuff to convey really cool stories. That being said even during my brief stay before dipping around 2014 when flight rising started I was a bit of an outsider looking in due to the clique-y ness as well as the fact that most people really cut their teeth on RP through skype and other off-site communication avenues for text RP.

Most of the stuff I did there was during middle school / high school but it really dipped out as soon as dragons appeared.

While I do think people are still active and doing stuff (and there's also plenty of people who were doing stuff and have moved on to newer pastures but are still active active and haven't completely fallen off of the internet), the site and the old game feels rather forsaken by the devs in terms of upkeep. It makes sense why keeping up with maintaining the old site would fall to the wayside because there is apparently a upcoming re-release / port of some sort where they converted it from the Old engine (Quest3D) to the Unreal engine to keep up with things (kind of a reverse aging thing where if the tech is old enough it can't be handled on new computers not due to tech limitations but because it can no longer interpret the old stuff to properly do it).

While I do have a lot of fondness for this game, I don't think i'm going to financially support the developers at all for entirely personal and petty reasons. Like, the disrespect they flung at gamers and people who play videogames on twitter was just not great, alongside the fact that they later got really into NFT's, and nowdays are rebranding but with the funny tilt of "well we deleted all the tweets but we haven't changed our minds we still hate gamers (: "

I can't say for everyone but I can definitely say that at least for me they burnt all of the bridges of good will that I was willing to give them given my fondness for their earlier games like The Path and Graveyard.

Kind of a shame though since I will always have a soft spot for this website / MOG and my time spent there. Might even look at the new remake game but the odds of me playing it given how the devs are, are pretty slim.

it should be noted that I don't think i've ever given these devs money, and there was some sort of crowd funding for the game remake that I wound up completely missing since I dipped hard from the website in 2014 and haven't really looked back until roughly 2022-2023 and even then it was looking back and not really engaging with it (for those wondering / concerned about me giving these people financial support in light of them getting super into NFT's post-Sunset Launch).

It's a shame that the pictogram viewer no longer seems to work. Hopefully if they do bring back the old game they’ll bring the pictogram viewer site back as well but eh.

It's rough because while I still may engage a little bit with this game and feel conflicted in doing so, there's not really a whole lot of low / no stakes MOG's (Multiplayer online games, in contrast to MMO's which are much larger in scope) out there outside of this and Sky: Children of the Light (of which I never got into until now and i'm debating on whether to wait for PC launch or just start playing on mobile). It exists in a small niche and I am still fond of it, but also not enough so to be completely onboard with playing it again and / or giving the devs any money. The Endless forest has been a free thing for a long time and since I never handed over any money for their kickstarted projects of any sort I can at least say that I've never supported them financially so far and don't plan on doing so in the future.

It's a shame that the pictogram viewer doesn't work without a flash player since the thing runs in flash. I may just yoink my TEF flavored characters out of that setting at some point and just like, file the serial numbers off of them so to speak. It's very fun to do that and be like "hey they came from here but also look at this character that is suspiciously similar yet distinct from the source media".

Some examples of characters and Bios of rp characters people have made, plots written, all that jazz. Partiall just CSS (some that's held up, some that's not held up as well)

• The Fortress; Iaurdagnire
• Eye of the Storm - biography of Ephiré
• Ravenflight; The Queen of Changes
• Gehirn
• Herla's Diary Archives

It's a bit rough trying to see where the modern scene is at on the main community site, though it seems like there's a budding toyhouse community.