Oh My Ears And Tail!

Today saw the opening of character creation for the revamped/retro/classic version of Blade&Soul - Blade&Soul Neo. NCSoft are really working the publicity levers for this one. Anyone would think it was a new game, not just a reskinned old one.

I love character creators, easpecially the newer, super-duper, glitzy ones with the sliders and the lighting and all. It has crossed my mind occasionally to wonder whether an enterprising studio might not do quite well with a game that was pretty much nothing but character creation, a cosmetic cash shop and a few multiplayer locations where people could parade around, showing off. If it was glam enough, I'm not at all sure you'd need an actual game to go with it...

The original Blade&Soul's character creator was probably one of the earlier tweak-heavy models I tried although certainly not the first.I was a little late to that party. B&S came out in 2012 but I didn't try it until four years later, when it launched in the West. 

By then I'd seen plenty of fancy character creation suites but I was still quite impressed:

"Character Creation is equally well-designed. Very easy to follow, plenty of choice, lots of presets, no sliders. Classes seem to be locked to races. Didn't notice if they're also locked to gender. I went Summoner because That Cat which means I am the cute, small race. Win!"

That's what I said first time around. No sliders, I notice. I didn't like sliders back then. Luckily I'm softer on them now because the new character creation options have plenty.

 

Classes are still locked to races, something I'm broadly in favor of, unfashionable though it may be. Of course, I'd probably think differently if the class I wanted to play was locked to a race I didn't like. Gender-locking classes would be a lot less acceptable but it's not happening so forget I mentioned it. Then again, one of the races is gender locked to all-female...

There are four races in B&S but I'd have to look them up to tell you what they are. I do remember they all have very short, one-syllable names but that's about it. I didn't spend much time on them because, as far as I could see, there were three flavors of vanilla human (Can you have flavors of vanilla?) and one human-with-animal-attributes.

In 2016, I chose the least-obviously human option and it won't surprise anyone to hear I just did the same again. There is a slightly different-than-expected reason for that. I mean, yes, if a race has ears and a tail I'm always going to favor it, that's a given, but in this case only the Lyn (That's the name of the animal-inflected race.) can be Summoners and Summoners are the only ones who get combat pets. 

I was sure I wanted to play a Summoner, even if it meant I'd be replicating my character from the old game. I could literally have cloned her - I still have the saved file from character creation nine years ago. I didn't find that out until the end, though, by which time I was emotionally committed to the new character I'd just created.

I might still use the clone option for one of the two remaining character slots, just for the appearance, not the class. You get three slots but only one can be filled pre-launch. Since the old game isn't going away, though, and since I still have my existing character there, I'll probably just play her there, if I feel like seeing her again.

 

When B&SNeo arrives next Tuesday (On the same day the Stars Reach Kickstarter goes live - I wonder which debut will draw the more interest?) I plan on starting over from the beginning. I haven't even taken the option to skip the three-level tutorial. If I'm going to play again, I'd like to refresh my memory of the plot, which I seem to remember has a fairly complicated opening.

Following on from the notes I gave myself at the end of yesterday's post. I'm not at all convinced the Summoner is the best class I could have chosen. Pet classes have historically been preferred for soloing, it's true, but the guidance you get in character creation clearly points to this one being best-suited as a support character. That strongly suggests it's intended for group play and there's not much chance I'll be engaging in any of that.

Maybe I'll make something else when the game starts. On the other hand, I seem to remember doing just fine with the Summoner last time. If it ain't broke, as they say...

As far as looks go, there have been comments, as there often are with "imported" MMORPGs, that the character models and outfits are over-sexualised. This is hard to deny when you first enter character creation. The default appearances are somewhat risqué and that's not even mentioning the "jiggle-physics". 

I'm happy to say that's a feature mercifully absent from the diminutive Lyn, although their childlike appearance brings up awkward issues of its own. Fortunately, if you use the "Outfit" toggle, you'll find that just about every clothing set on offer is perfectly respectable. Once properly dressed, as they are in the illustrations for this post, I'd say the characters almost qualify as "demure". 

I'm not sure if I'll end up with the same look when I log into the game for the first time. A lot of MMORPGs have a nasty habit of showing your character wearing clothes in character creation that they won't see in game for a long time. I think most of the outfits in B&S were tied to storyline or quest progression. Looking back at my old posts, though, my character seems to be decently covered-up in pretty much every shot, so it should be fine.

I was actually a lot more concerned about her ears and tail, anyway. And her hairstyle. There are so many great choices. I found it very hard to settle on just one. It does seem a shame to have such a huge variety of looks available but then to be limited to a mximum of three character slots to make the most of them.

Presumably there's some sort of in-game option to change looks but I always have an existential problem altering anything other than my characters' hair, clothes, accessories or make-up. Swapping body parts is a step too far for my suspension of disbelief, even in a magic-rich world so I'll be stuck with the ears and tail I started with.

Or maybe not. We'll see. I'm increasingly of the opinion that I need to get over myself on some of these self-imposed rules, many of which date back to old, unchallenged assumptions from my pen-and-paper roleplaying days. Those, scary though it is to think it, ended almost forty years ago. It's probably time I moved on.

The real benefit of making a character now, other than being able to get straight on with playing the game the moment it arrives, is that character creation also allows you to reserve your name. It's a bit of a moot point for me since I'll lay good odds no-one would have thought of the one I've gone with anyway. I very rarely have any problems getting the names I want for the very simple reason no-one else wants them.

It's done now, anyway. Should I want to hit the ground running on Tuesday, I can. I won't, of course, if only for the very good reason that I'm working Tuesday and I probably won't play any games at all, not even in the evening. And then on Wednesday I have something else on so maybe not then, either.

Thursday, though... that might be the day!

Church, State And Family In Rinascita Today

Having said only yesterday that I find it hard to play more than a session of Wuthering Waves every few days, of course I immediately found myself playing for two days in a row. In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances, mainly involving me being woken up at 5.30am by Mrs. Bhagpuss and Beryl, both of whom wanted to let me know we'd caught a mouse in the live trap under the sink and also what was I going to do about it? 

That led to me sitting down at the PC just after seven, having already had breakfast and walked Beryl for an hour. Even so, and with all the day ahead of me and not much else to do with it, after an hour in Wuthering Waves I was, once again, sated with story. 

In the time I spent there, the plot moved on apace. There was much skullduggery and several twists as well as  the expected confirmation that what's rotten in the church-state of Rinascita is mostly the church. This is turning out to be a highly anti-clerical episode.

The actor playing Priest Alessio is determined to make sure everyone knows just who the bad guys are. He plays the arch-villain card so hard I can almost see him there in the sound booth, twirling an imaginary mustache. 

To be fair, the corruption of the church hierarchy has hardly been a close-kept secret up to now, which is why I'm not handing out spoiler warnings. It was telegraphed pretty clearly the moment a church official asked Rover to show her papers before she'd even shaken the sea-spray from her silk stockings as she stepped onto the dock. 

If I recall correctly, that official was Phoebe, now about to become one of the latest additions to the Resonator team in the new update. The normally tempered and even-handed Chris Neal  unfairly and inaccurately labelled her a "walking devoted priestess trope " in an unnecessarily snide news item at MassivelyOP yesterday, making me feel he had to be working purely from press releases and promotional videos. No-one who'd actually played the game could dismiss the complex and nuanced Phoebe, a lifelong believer, now forced to confront the hollow sham of her faith, as a "trope". 

This is one of the many things I really appreciate about the game. It's melodrama, sure, but it's top-class melodrama. The baddies aren't pantomime villains; they're properly sinister. A palpable air of entitled arrogance surrounds most of them like a funk. Equally, the good guys aren't just cardboard cut-outs, either. Most of them are quite scary, too.

Carlotta, the Morelli Family's "Executor" certainly is. She offers a great line in understated menace, lending her official job title a distinctly razor-like edge. The fact that she appears to have forgotten to change out of her nightdress before coming to work, along with the soft-spoken way she somehow manages to make even the most innocuous observation sound like a veiled threat, just adds to a sense of gleeful violence, barely contained, that accompanies almost everything she says and does. 

Wuthering Waves is a rare game in that I find I like almost every character I meet there. Much of the visual design seems highly original to me and also frequently wildly idiosyncratic. I already talked about the Resonator who ends every fight hanging from a sex swing. Now we meet one who spends most of her time willingly locked inside a box!

Of course, when I say I like them, I don't always like them. I find them entertaining.  I certainly don't actually like all of the bad guys, especially not the religious fascists, but some of them can be quite persuasive. There are a few highly engaging bad boys and girls who make a pretty good case for changing sides, something I thought, at one point, might be genuinely be on the cards for Rover. 

That seems unlikely now. The Fractsidus, whoever they are, now appear to be the actual master-villains behind most of the really bad stuff that happens not, as I once suspected, merely a very cool gang of impetuous and irresponsible rebels. The plot twists and turns so wickedly, though, I still wouldn't be entirely surprised if they turned out to be not quite so dastardly after all at some point down the line.

The story is a joy but it has its drawbacks, the main one being that following it exclusively makes 90% of the game disappear. Before I became hell-bent on catching up to the current content, I spent a great deal of time wandering around the gorgeous world, opening up the huge maps and glorying in the amazingly beautiful scenery. Now I find myself sprinting through landscapes I would dearly love to stop and savor, barely taking the time to register the broad sweep of the aesthetic, far less take in the exquisite detail. 

When I do, finally, get myself up to current content, something that can't now be too far off, seeing I'm now in the final act of what came before, I plan on stepping away from the main questline for a while to go exploring. Played that way, Wuthering Waves should revert to being a game I can relax and kick back in, rather than one where I have to lean forward to give it my full attention. 

I might also take some time and make some effort to acquire a couple of the newer Resonators. I can't help but notice how very much more powerful the new characters seem, compared to my own team, when they join them as "Guests". The difference is every bit as pronounced as it is between my Berseker and Necromancer in EverQuest II, something I discussed in some detail yesterday. 

I'm thinking this might be a path I could usefully follow in a number of games, now it's belatedly occurred to me. I do have to wonder to what extent I've been making things harder for myself by side-stepping upgrade paths and ignoring specific abilities and aptitudes of different classes or characters. Maybe just barrelling ahead with whatever character I happen to start with, while never really learning what it is that they do or even bothering to look at their gear, until they start to feel unsatisfying to play, might not quite be the low-effort strategy I took it for.

Something to think about, at least. 

Currently Playing...

Today, a short post about what I've been playing. Don't you just love those? Everybody does them. I'm never exactly sure why, although I will say that it's both terrifying and revelatory to go back a few years (Or even a few months, sometimes.) and find out how immensely important something seemed once that I can now barely remember at all. It's a reminder of how arbitrary and fleeting our obsessions can be.

Well, that was a cheery start. Perhaps I should just get on with the notes.

So, I've really only been playing three games: EverQuest II, Solasta and Wuthering Waves. I've patched up quite a few more with the intention of playing them - Once Human, Blade & Soul NEO, New World, Lord of the Rings Online - but the only one I actually got as far as logging into was LotRO and I only did that because I'd read all the news about the 64bit servers and I was worried I might lose access or names for all my characters.

As it turns out, that was premature, or at least I think it was. I read the ridiculously long and complicated FAQ on what to do and the upshot seems to be "Nothing, yet." Please feel free to correct me in the comments if there actually is something I should be doing. Otherwise I'll just wait until Standing Stone set some dates.

Of the others, as I think I mentioned before, the update process for Once Human is now so flaky and unreliable I ended up uninstalling the client and I haven't gotten around to reinstalling it on a different drive yet, which had been my plan. B&SNEO is still a few weeks away and as for New World, I lost interest there even before I could log in. I think that one may be cooked.

Of the games I was playing, albeit briefly in most cases, just short while ago, all have dropped off the schedule completely. Outer Worlds never got a second session, Divinity: Original Sin started to annoy more than it entertained and The First Descendant somehow got away from me. That one, I didn't intend to stop playing, I just did. I might go back at some point but not right now.

As for Cloudpunk, although I had every intention of carrying on and finishing the various side missions, it seems my brain is quite clear on something being "finished". I can't seem to persuade it to carry on.

Of the three games I have successfully managed to fire up and stick with for at least a full session, EQII and Solasta are far ahead of Wuthering Waves, which remains a sporadic pleasure at best. That's disappointing in one way but in another it's useful, in that it adds a very useful data point to the graph of game-playing compulsion. It appears games can be just too good to play often.

What I mean by that is that Wuthering Waves offers a very rich experience. The story is excellent, the gameplay requires thought and attention and an hour or two spent there feels very much like watching a really good movie. 

There was a time when I'd very happily watch a couple of movies in an evening, then do the same the following afternoon, but those days are long gone. Now, I have to build up to watching a film and then cool down afterwards. I don't think I've watched more than one movie a week for years. Wuthering Waves, at least while I'm pursuing the storyline, requires a similar degree of concentration and investment and a session every few days is about as much as I can handle.

Which brings us to EQII and Solasta, neither of which suffer from any such issues. The plots in both barely merit the consideration I'd give to a not particularly well-written TV show. In Solasta, the story serves mostly as a series of pegs on which to hang some enjoyably tactical fights, while in EQII the questline largely acts as a conveyor belt to move you across the map, while providing an ostensible reason to kill everything that gets in your way.

Both games manage to hit that difficult-to-achieve balance of immersion and relaxation, making them unchallenging yet still fun to play. For EQII, the lack of tension comes from the knowledge, common to almost any modern or modernised MMORPG, that no failure is ever going to set you back very far or matter very much, whereas Solasta allows you to save your game just about whenever you like, meaning it's possible to take any risk without worrying about the consequences, should it fail to pay off.

Also strongly in both games' favor is the fact that they run well on my laptop via Splashtop, something Wuthering Waves refuses to do. Since I like to go to bed early at the moment because it's just about the warmest, most comfortable place to be in this prolonged cold snap we're enjoying, that gives them a considerable advantage.

Replayabilty is another factor. I had thought, having gotten to the end of the main storyline in Scars of Destruction with my Berserker, that I might be done with EQII for a while but no. I used the free boost that came with the standard edition of the expansion to raise my Necromancer to the level cap, then I kitted her out with all the free gear that comes with it.

For what seems like no good reason at all, none of the boosted gear has Adornments so I had to go to the Tishan's box in Sodden Archipelago and add the relevant Adornments from there. The gear in the  box has identical stats but already has the Adornments in place, so I might as well just have used that. Not to mention I needed the mount and the familiar and some other stuff out of the box too. Someone needs to give the whole expansion onboarding process yet another sanity check.

Once I'd finished setting my Necro up, though, the results were impressive. Every year I tell myself I'm going to focus on her and stop running the newest content for the first time with my Berserker. Then, when it comes to it, I balk at the difference in their gear and skills and end up back where I began.

This year I'm determined to be ready, when the next expansion arrives, to go through it on the Necro first. The sheer difference in power between them is astonishing. She's significantly less well-geared than he is, with lower quality spells and few of the incremental advantages he's gained from having been my main character for years and yet her time-to-kill has to be at least half of his, plus she has far greater versatility. Given my repeatedly-stated preference for going the easy route, it makes absolutely no sense for me not to be playing her far more than I do.

To that end, I will need to take her all the way through the storyline, something I usually don't bother doing with all my characters. I also should level up a tradeskill for her since, as I've observed many times, being able to do the crafting timeline is a huge advantage for adventurers, particularly when it comes to getting a head start on flight in the new zones.

Tradeskills are slow to level in EQII but there is a boost you can buy to skip the bulk of the grind. It's quite pricy but I have a lot of Daybreak funny money saved up. I might as well spend it on something useful. It would be a good project for this year, making sure the Necro is there and thereabouts as well set-up as the Berserker by the time the next expansion rolls around. I'll try to remember to do it this time.

Solasta is likely to remain my late-evening wind-down game for a while, a role it fits very well due to its pick-up/put-down nature. I can't say the story or the setting is doing a lot for me as I meander through the maze-like swamps and jungles, trying to balance one faction against another while not getting killed by the despotic ruler of the region but who cares about the story when the fights are such fun?

The important thing to remember about the DLC I'm playing, though, is that it also includes the feature that adds player-made scenarios to the game in a manner very similar to Neverwinter Nights 2. I haven't tried any of the add-on scenarios yet but I've had a look at some of the more popular ones and it looks as though there's no shortage of highly-rated adventures, most of which almost certainly have better stories than the official one. I wonder if they also have player-made voice acting? That would be... intereresting.

It's likely I'll be playing all three of these games, on and off, for the rest of the year but no doubt some new fad or obsession will bubble up soon enough to shunt them to one side for a while. Whetever that might be, I doubt it'll be the one game I ought to have been playing this last week but haven't played at all - Stars Reach.

There were several tests, a couple of which were at times I could have made, but I actually forgot all about them until it was too late. I think the sheer number of emails I get from Playable Worlds, what with them sending three (And now, for some reason, four.) copies of each has trained my brain to disregard them almost entirely. 

It's a shame because the most recent tests opened up just about everything for immediate use in an attempt to show potential backers the full extent of what's available in the game already. That meant I could have tried out a few things I haven't been able to get to so far, without having to spend most of the session grinding through stuff I'd done already. Didn't happen though. I'll have to wait and see what Wilhelm thought of it all, assuming he managed to play a few sessions.

The Kickstarter ought to launch for real this week, which should be interesting. I wonder if they plan on keeping the accelerated testing schedule going throughout the campaign to support it? 

If so, maybe I will add Stars Reach to the "Currently Playing" file after all.

The Past Is A River

And so we come to the music post that lost the coin-flip a week ago: new stuff. Well, new to me. Some of it may not feel all that "new", either artistically or chronologically. Then again, when does it ever?

In terms of time, I've noticed a curious trend in the YouTube algorithm of late. As has been noted by many, many commenters in the threads I've read, YT has started recommending videos with low viewing numbers from its earliest days. Things that have been sitting there all this time, seen by hardly anyone. Songs and performances that first appeared on the platform seventeen years ago, just after it became available to the public, but which have barely managed to scrape a couple of thousand views since then. 

Obscure oldies have been popping up as recommends for months and people seem to love it. In fact, contrary to how it was a few years ago, when the algorithm was widely held in contempt, these days I see nothing but praise for the way it's introducing new viewers and listeners to things they never knew existed. Thread after thread, packed with comments from people either thanking the algorithm for sending them there or blessing their luck, as fits their worldview.

I've certainly discovered a few things from 2005-7 that I had no idea were there but which I'm very glad to have been shown. I might collect some of  those up for a post of their own some time but today I'm going to focus on another highly positive aspect of the algorithm - the way it consistently introduces me to bands and solo artists I hope to go on listening to for years.

I think that's also changed. I've been using YouTube as a discovery mechanism for music for at least a decade now and my memory of much of that time is that the process used to be quite hit-and-miss. I had to flip through a lot of suggestions that didn't interest me to find something that did. 

I won't say I had to sift a lot of dross to find gold because the older I get, the more I come around to the idea that most things have  some gold in them, somewhere - it just isn't always valuable to me. It remember searching for it being heavy going at times, though.

Of late, by which I probably mean in the last twelve months or maybe a little less, the hit rate does seem to have improved. A lot. That's partly why I have such a ridiculous backlog of music I want to share. I'm finding more to my taste in general and specifically, more people who consistently produce work I like. 

That could be down to improvements in the algorithm. It could also be that what I choose to watch on YouTube has become more coherent, providing the algorithm with a better purchase on my tastes and preferences. 

Not that I make it easy for them. I never "Like" anything on the platform or indeed on any social media so that ready checklist doesn't exist. Even without my marking up my favorites, though, I imagine the algorithm has access to my full viewing history, including how many times I've watched a video and whether I watched it all the way through or gave up after a few seconds. 

Is it sophisticated enough to extrapolate my likes and dislikes from that? Who knows? It's certainly the case that the musical suggestions it offers are orders of magnitude more likely to be relevant than the political or topical videos it thinks I might want to see. I virtually never watch anything like that so I imagine it finds it quite hard to get a handle on what might appeal.

It could also be that my focus has narrowed. When YouTube was new and exciting, I used to dot about all over the place, actively seeking out music from around the world, present and past. These days I'm more concerned with drilling down into whatever interests me at the moment, looking for more and better examples of trends I'm following or aiming to expand my understanding of certain genres or styles.

There's also the possibility that increasing use of curated music sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum and NME, along with a few music blogs, has shaped my entry-point into YouTube in such a way as to influence results there. I do tend to use those sites for musical triage, only clicking through to watch videos on YouTube whose descriptions make them seem like things I'd be likely to enjoy or at least find interesting.

Whatever's happening, it's leading me to discover a surprising number of acts and artists I feel I might be listening to for a while, not just in the moment. That's not always been the case, something that becomes uncomfortably apparent as I look back at music posts here only to find I can't even remember some of the songs or acts, let alone what they sound like.

Whether this signifies a permanent shift in the way I listen to and learn about music is impossible to predict. A few months from now I might be doing things completely differently. Or the algorithm might go back to suggesting nothing much I want to hear, like it was doing a few years ago. 

For now, though, here's a post featuring only acts the algorithm has flagged up for me this year, all of which I've found interesting enough to listen to multiple times and whose back catalog I've been happy to explore. I might even go so far as to buy records by some of them. 

Always assuming they make any, that is...

 Stained Glass Window - Sunday (1994)

Absolutely no apologies for opening with Sunday (1994) again. They are, by some distance, the most exciting discovery for me since Blondshell. If we're talking repeat plays, by the way, Blondshell's debut album has no peer. If it was vinyl I'd have worn a hole in it by now.

That said, I'm starting to see a worrying trend in my listening. One in which I am very definitely, as will become apparent later, by no means alone.

I've been assiduous in excising every hint of the all-too-prevalent belief that all the best music just happens to have been made precisely when you yourself were in your teens and early twenties. In side-stepping that trap, however, it appears I may have fallen into another, whereby my brain receives anything that sounds as if it was recorded between 1990-95 as some kind of divine message from the infinite eternal. 

I may need to watch that. Then again, why fight it? The nineties were great, weren't they?

Stained Glass Love - Telenova

This wasn't the Telenova track I was going to use but who could resist the synchronicity? Not me, obviously . It makes a really a good example of the point of this post, though. These are bands and artists from whose repertoire I could pick almost anything at random and expect to get something worth sharing. 

There are lots and lots of examples on this blog of great one-offs by people who never really did anything much else of note. And that's all part of the popular music myth. You only need that one, killer tune and you're made. 

Oddly, I find albums filled with killer tune after killer tune quite difficult to listen to more than a handful of times A band with a sound I love, those I can play forever.

Sometimes it's all about the vibe. Mostly, really.

Money Mullet - The Pill

Case in point! I really can't imagine listening to a whole album by The Pill over and over again. I haven't even played Wet Leg's debut that much, even though I loved every track on it when they all came out separately beforehand. Some bands are just meant to be singles bands. It's a shame singles aren't the driving force they once were. A true singles band is a joy forever. Just so long as you don't try to listen to the albums.

The Actress - Goldie Boutlier

Goldie Boutlier, on the other hand, I could listen to all day. It'd be a rich diet but I can handle it. I've had an appetite for this sort of thing for a while now and I'm very far from sated. As we're about to find out.

Every act so far has featured on the blog already, which is why I'm restraining myself to just the one more by each of them today. We're past that now. Here comes Tiger. I've been listening to a lot of Tiger...

 Living In The 90s - Tiger del Flor

I very much am not the only one to be having nineties' daydreams just now, and here's the headline evidence. I guess it's at least time. Past time, really.

It's hard to remember just how long ago the nineties were. Thirty years to the middle of the decade. What I do, when this sort of thing comes up, which it so often does, is think of myself at fifteen, then project as far back from there as the nostalgic target is from now and see where it lands me. 

I was fifteen in the early-mid '70s so thirty years back would be the fricken' Second World War! It  was literally history as in it's what I was studying for my O- and A-Levels! I sure as hell wasn't wishing I was living there! Or listening to the big band sounds of Glen Miller and his Orchestra!

Geez. No wonder Gen-Z feel nostalgic for the noughties and even the twenty-tens now. Anything further back must seem like the dark ages... 

Time moves so damn fast...

Heaven Is A Harley - Tiger del Flor

Time, they say, is a river but it's also a continuum. Tiger was just telling us how she wished she was living in the nineties but now here she is referencing... what? The fifties? The sixties? All those neon motel signs. And the bikes. They look kind of  '80s although I know nothing about motorbikes.

That's it, though, isn't it? All time is the same time, once it's gone.

James Dean - Tiger del Flor

There's "influenced by" and then there's this. Still, I guess Lana's moved on now, so there's a slot open. Sooner Tiger than a few others who've been eyeing it. 

There's more where those three came from but I'll save them for another time. Count on it.

Scorsese - Viola Odette Harlow

I'm always at least sort of working on a post where all the titles are the names of real people but I keep using the best ones so I never get to finish it. One day.

I just love the distortion on this, by the way. More singers should fuzzy up their vocals. And use megaphones.

Child Actor - Glüme

I haven't switched tracks here. Glüme is Viola Odette Harlow. Also, she was indeed a child actor so we can probably take this as biographical. 

If you google her, the top links come from (Or go to, depending how you see it.) IMDB, where it will tell you "She played Shirley Temple on Broadway and has continue to tap dance all her life. Her dream is to bring back the great American musical." 

Not with tunes like these, she won't. Or we can hope not, anyway. That would just be weird.

 Arthur Miller - Glüme

And she's at it again with the name-checks. She doesn't rate Arthur Miller much, does she? I've had his autobiography, Timebends, for at least forty years but I've never read it. Don't suppose I ever will.

If we're going to talk about the long shadow of the past, let's just think about the fifties for a moment. I spent most of my adolescence surrounded by the trappings of that forlorn but never forgotten decade. It was all over the pop charts and the cinema screens, then. You couldn't get away from it and most of us didn't want to or not entirely. We just wanted to be choosy about which parts we cherry-picked.. 

I went hitch-hiking through France in, what was it? 1977 or '78 and I spent half the trip with rolled-up black and white posters sticking out of my backpack. I bought them in some French store because you couldn't get such cool posters back at home just then or not where I lived anyway. And who was on those posters? James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, of course.

Even then they were both the best part of two decades dead. Now, here we are, both of them in the grave for sixty years and teens and twenties still idolize and fantasize about them just like I did. And love or loathe the people who knew them. 

We live in a palimpsest and the text gets harder to read year by year. I blame Lana. If anyone's made the tragic-heroic past cool again it's her. It's always her. 

 Pretty Youth - Punchbag

Finally, just to break the rules I set for this post, here's a band I've only heard two tunes by. Then again, as far as I can tell, two is all they have! And neither seems to have anything to do with Old Hollywood or the glamor of the past. Then again, it's early days for Punchbag yet...

Here's the other. You'll have to watch it on YouTube, I'm afraid. Some moral guardian seems to have reported it to the authorities. How very 1950s of them.

Fuck It - Punchbag

There's live footage of the band doing a half-hour set so they must have a few more songs, although not that many more, I'd guess. With this kind of energy, they're either going to blow up or implode so enjoy it while it lasts or until you've had more than you can stand.

From here on in I think I'm going to have to blank the record and forget about catching up. It's never going to happen. Next time, I'll start afresh. Doesn't look like there's much chance I'll run short.

Colors, Companions And Catching Up

In an all-too-familiar story, I'm writing this now because a game I wanted to play has decided to re-download its entire 44gb client just so it can "update". I'm getting far more used to this kind of annoyance on Steam than I would like but this time the game isn't even on Valve's platform. It's Wuthering Waves, which uses its own, proprietary launcher and with which I have previously had few problems.

Okay, it does have an irritating habit of asking to restart after every minor update rather than just carrying on when it's done but that only takes a moment. Why it wants to replace the full client this time I have no idea. We're not at the next step in the storyline already, surely? I haven't finished the last one yet. 

Hang on. I suppose I ought to check...

Oh. My. God. We are!! Seriously, has it been six week since Riniscita? It can't have been. But it has.

Give me a minute while I watch the trailer. Better yet, watch it with me.

Make that five minutes. They don't stint on the trailers, do they?

So, the new update is called "Waves Sing, and the Cerulean Bird Calls", a typically poetic and evocative phrasing although the placement of the comma is strange. It's there in the press release but not on the title card, I notice. Does that mean anything?

Also, I never much liked the word "cerulean", largely because I'm never sure how to pronounce it. I bet there's one of those pronunciation guides on YouTube though... yep.

So, yes, that is how I say it and that's one reason I don't like it. It's an ugly sound for a word that's intended to evoke a beautiful color. It's also obscure enough to detract from the meaning of most sentences in which it's used. It certainly doesn't do this one any favors. Why would a bird be "cerulean"?  

Is the color of the bird relevant  anyway? Clearly what we need to know is that it calls, not what color it is. Unless, of course, there are other non-cerulean birds that aren't calling...

This kind of close textual analysis might seem a tad unnecessary when applied to the name of an update to a video game but frankly if the writers don't want this level of attention they should stop being so literary in their choice of language. (I hope they don't do that, obviously.) 

I haven't, I don't think, mentioned it before but Wuthering Waves is stuffed with references to outside sources, many of them quite highbrow, some less so. In this update there's a nod to Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and another to the agit-prop band Rage Against The Machine. 

Maybe I'll call these calls out more often, when I notice them. They're generally well-used and a credit to the writers' breadth and depth of cultural knowledge, unlike the self-conscious winks and smirks to pop culture in some MMORPGs I could mention, World of Warcraft probably being the worst offender.

Anyway, what's in this update? The usual, I think it would be reasonable to say. And that's a good thing.

There are two new Resonators, Phoebe and Brant, both of whom we met in the previous update. It looks as if Phoebe is the main companion in the new story, which I don't mind at all. She's quite an interesting character. Brant, I don't think I know enough about yet to take a stance on.

I use the word "companion" here very much in the sense it's long been employed in Dr. Who. That show is foregrounded in my thoughts at the moment because I've embarked on a largely unplanned (re)watch of the very long-running series. 

I discovered, entirely by chance, that all 26 Seasons, dating back to 1963, are available on the BBC iPlayer. It always used to be that the BBC was loathe to give free access to the older seasons, presumably because they made good money selling them, first on VHS and later on DVD. I can only imagine that the bottom has finally fallen out of that market, making it more commercially savvy to include them in the iPlayer package, which presumably is in competition with the likes of Netflix and Disney+

Whatever the reason, it seemed like an unexpectedly generous windfall and I started watching immediately. I could have started at the beginning but perversely I chose to come in at Season Six.

Growing up, I saw the first two or three seasons as they were broadcast, when I would have been about five to seven years old. Then, for various reasons, partly nightmares induced by the monsters in the show but mostly the fact that we didn't have a television at all for a couple of years, I didn't see any more until towards the end of the Patrick Troughton era. 

That's where I decided to start this time, reasoning, probably falsely, that the Hartnell years would feel too dated. I was also hoping to avoid too many of the cheaply-animated episodes that have been slotted in to replace the ones where the originals have been lost.

I've gone through Seasons Six and Seven and I'm halfway through Eight, which brings me into the Pertwee years. I remember watching these when they were first shown. This time, though, I'm seeing them in color, which makes a significant difference. I can't remember exactly when we got a color TV set but it wouldn't have been until Tom Baker arrived, if even then.

I imagine I'll do a post or two about the show at some point but for now I'll just say that it's considerably better than I remembered. I mean, I was a big fan of it as a child and even as a teenager, so I expected to enjoy watching it again, but I hadn't appreciated just how good some of the scripts are and, more surprisingly, most of the acting. 

There are a lot of inept extras, behaving as though they're in panto at the village hall, but the featured and supporting cast along with almost everyone who has any kind of speaking part, perform at the standard of any serious, adult drama of the period. It's very impressive.

My point, now that I remember I had one, is that the Doctor always has one or more "companions", people he meets in the course of his adventures, who end up tagging along with him for variously extended periods, before eventually leaving to go back to their own lives. This, I can't help but notice, is the exact same structure used in Wuthering Waves. 

Rover, the player-character, roams around the world, bumping into other Resonators everywhere she goes. Many of them join her for a while, sometimes just for the many, many cut scenes, sometimes in combat and sometimes as members of her fighting team. At every point it seems as though the relationship will last indefinitely but inevitably Rover's journey takes her out of the latest companion's hinterland and another takes their place.

The analogy breaks down mostly because the player can still choose to include any Resonator they have access to in their current team. This is a meta-feature that absolutely breaks narrative continuity and requires a great deal of double-think to ignore. I have people in my Go-team right now, who also send me occasional messages about what what they're doing a continent away. I pretend it's not happening. It's the only way.

Getting back to the update, there are the expected new weapons to win in the gacha game I mostly avoid but also some new Echoes, most likely obtainable in the game itself. I still don't fully understand Echoes, either in the lore or in their role as combat pets. 

Luckily for me, the update includes additional, automated guidance on choosing and using Echoes. I hope it's better than the current version, which every guide I read last year recommended shouldn't be used. I could certainly do with some help in that area.

There are also some improvements to the camera, by which I mean the actual camera you use in the game to take screenshots, not the way the camera moves as you play. I'm always happy to have more options there but I was fine with the ones I had. 

The update brings a bunch more events both permanent and temporary, most of which I probably won't even find time to look at before the next update arrives, not if the last few months are anything to go by. There's far too much content in Wuthering Waves for me to keep up with. I have my work cut out just catching up with the main storyline.

Speaking of which, there's another installment of that, too. It seems we'll be going beneath Riniscita to explore and then escape from a series of vaults. I hope it's not too claustrophobic.

It all looks very entertaining. The game finished updating before I finished this post so I guess I'd better log in and carry on with the story from where I left it. I'll do my best to catch up before this new update is replaced by the next. I'm not sure how long that gives me.

I'm guessing six weeks. It won't be enough...

Who Will Look After The Mounts?

Yesterday brought some gaming news that should have been at least mildly upsetting but somehow felt more confusing than emotional. The game in question is Riders of Icarus, which I played for a good few months back in...

... hang on a moment. 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a technical announcement. It appears there's now some kind of limit to the number of Labels that Blogger can list at the foot of a post. 

For many years I've been used to skimming down the ever-growing list to find the Label I want. Until today that list has always gone all the way to the end of the alphabet. Now it only goes as far as "E". 

To ESO, to be precise. Then it just says "Analytics" and stops. I checked the maximum number of Labels per blog allowed by Blogger and it's 5,000. Even I'm nowhere near that. A quick check shows nothing has changed in the Layout and a google search doesn't find anyone else complaining about it so I have no idea what's happened. 

Whatever it is, I hope it sorts itself out soon because I use that function a lot to check how frequently topics have appeared here. I can still find out what I wrote by using the Search facility but I'm damned if I'm going to go through and count all the posts individually.

We'll have to take it on faith, then, that I did post about Riders of Icarus quite a few times. It was back around the time of the pandemic or maybe just before that I spent the most time with the game. I liked it and said so. I wouldn't claim it was a great MMORPG in any way but it was pretty to look at, fun to play and seemed particularly generous with its giveaways.

You'll remember the USP was flight. Unlike all those games that added flight as an afterthought or because everyone else was doing it, only to find it caused all kinds of problems, RoI was built around the idea that you'd be flying everywhere right from the start. Lots of locations were only accessible from the air and aerial combat was a big part of the gameplay.

There were plenty of flying mounts to collect, some of them quite spectacular. I had a skywhale with a gondola that I liked for posing, although for practical purposes I preferred my various birds or my flying inflatable dolphin. There were plenty of nice-looking ground mounts too. It was a very mount-oriented game.

Character design was solid and there were lots of cosmetic options you didn't need to pay real money for. I spent quite a while playing dress-up, which was more fun than the questing or the combat, at least for the most part. I have fond memories of the game, to which I returned several times for short runs but by the time I stopped playing I'd pretty much done as much as I wanted there.

The game had a very checkered development and ownership history. I remember losing access to it completely for several months when it changed hands although I did eventually get my account back. There was some nonsense abut it becoming a "Pay-to-Earn" title with some crypto-blockchain baggage attached but by that time I wasn't really paying close attention any more. 

A week or two back, I read that there were going to be server merges, then that those had been cancelled. Now the sad news is that the game will sunset on 15 May. 

I say "sad" and I'm sure it will be for the relatively small number of people still playing (Around a hundred at peak on Steam these days but I'm not at all sure most players would be going through Steam. I wasn't.) but I can't say it's making me feel anything stronger than mild disappointment.

Puzzled, too. MMOBomb reports that at almost the same time Valofe were announcing the end of the game they were also sending out press releases and trailers for new content. That seems about par for the course with this game, whose messaging has been chaotic for several years.

I have no idea whether Riders of Icarus has the kind of fans who would be likely to respond to this kind of existential threat by setting up some kind of emulator or private server but I do think the game deserves it. It's exactly the sort of MMORPG that could potentially improve under collective administration by people who play it. It would certainly be hard for a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to be worse custodians than the professionals who ran it into the ground.

It's not that unlikely an outcome, either. The game had over a million players once. That's easily a big enough pool of former players to justify and support an afterlife in the grey space of the emulation world. Twin Saga managed it so I see no reason why RoI shouldn't.

Even if it happens, it's still unlikely I'd play again. Or, I should say, it's unlikely I'd play in any way that could be called "serious", even in the context of casual gameplay. I have plenty of better games I'm not playing seriously before I'd get to this one.

It is, however, entirely possible - likely, even - that I might make the effort to re-install the game and give it a final fly-by before the servers shut down for good. There are a few farewell events scheduled. Those might be fun.

It would depend on whether I could get my old characters back. As I said, I never played through Steam. I imagine I have my old login details somewhere but I've uninstalled the original client. It is still downloadable from the website but who knows how long that will last? If I'm going to bother, I guess I should get on with it.

The thing is, whereas once the news of a game I once enjoyed closing down would have disturbed me more than somewhat, these days I barely feel a frisson of anxiety. I think it's experience rather than ennui. This sort of thing has happened a lot in the quarter of a century I've been playing MMORPGs. It doesn't feel shocking any more. It barely feels worrisome at all.

I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a single game that I'd be truly upset over not being able to play any more. Not in the way I was disturbed by the disappearance of Vanguard or City of Steam or Rubies of Eventide, all games I still sometimes miss even now. 

Partly it's because experience suggests almost every MMORPG above a certain size (And a fair few a lot smaller, too.) will still be playable in some form long after the legal owners shut them down. There are exceptions, like Wildstar, but nearly every game you can remember closing probably has an emulator running somewhere.

Mostly, though, it's that I don't play MMORPGs in the serially-obsessive way I used to. My days are no longer structured around those sessions. If I couldn't play any of them, I'd find other things to do.

Mostly, I'd miss my characters. I would have some issues if I couldn't drop in on them and see how they're getting along, whenever the mood takes me. 

Even there, though, it's something I think about doing far more often than actually doing it. I have all those characters in Guild Wars 2 that I lived with daily for a decade and I haven't popped by to check on a single one of them since I dropped the game three years ago.

I'd have to say I think it's a healthier outlook. I can remember that feeling, when you learn a game you love is going to close down. It's disproportionately unpleasant when considered objectively. Playing games shouldn't be that important, should it? Especially not playing specific games.

We'll see how sanguine I am about it when EG7 goes down the pan and all the Daybreak titles close down overnight. That'll be a test of emotional separation, alright.

Until then, I'm sorry to see Riders of Icarus go. The game deserved better than Valofe gave it. They weren't good custodians. Maybe something better lies ahead for the game in someone else's care. Let's hope so.

Neoclassical - Giving Blade&Soul Another Go

 I don't, by and large, suffer from FOMO. I can let all kinds of things slide without worrying about it. I do, however, have something of a curiosity problem. I can't keep my nose out of things that don't really concern me.

A case in point is the current Stars Reach pre-alpha. I've been fairly convinced from the moment I first heard about the project that it wasn't likely to be a game for me and very little I've heard, seen or read about it since, including a dozen hours hands-on with what there is of the game so far, has given me cause to change my mind. I think it's very likely to turn into something a lot of people will enjoy and I  hope for their sakes (And the developers, of course.) that it does but I can't see any real likelihood I'll be spending much time there.

And yet I still applied to test it and, having been accepted, have tried to do my best to log in and give my feedback, on the rare occasions I've been able. Granted, I always had in mind the potential the testing program offered for blog posts, so it wasn't entirely out of idle curiosity that I filled out the application, but although it's given me something new to write abnout, since I've been posting about the progress of the pre-alpha and the Kickstarter I've seen precious little sign that more than one or two people who read this blog are particularly interested. Indeed, the few comments I've had have come from people also in the test or who applied and didn't get in.

This wasn't going to be (And still isn't.) a post about Stars Reach but since the Kickstarter has come up, let's talk about that for a moment. What is going with it? I tend to think it's some smart marketing but it could certainly be read as something a lot less favorable. Panic, even.

There's a trick to building anticipation and my estimation is that for now Playable Worlds have just about managed to stay on the right side of the line. Sentiment towards there even being a Kickstarter was weak when it was first announced but by leveraging the whole thing to turn it into a kind of loyalty test with pre-alpha access as a reward it does seem most of the negativity has been replaced with a puppyish eagerness to be included.

Whether that will translate to dollars in ther bank when the actual Pledges are finally revealed, which may or may not be sometime next week, is the part I find the most interesting right now. At one point I was very curious to see what the rewards on offer would be but we have a kind of idea about that after last week's press release so the big question is whether it will be enough. It certainly didn't sound appealing to me but then, as I've said, I really am not the target market.

That's just an aside to the main subject of this post, though, which is why am I sitting here, typing this while Blade & Soul Neo downloads in the background? Or, I should say, fails to download but I'll get to that later.

I should begin by saying that I like the original Blade & Soul quite a lot. There are twenty-eight posts here tagged "Blade and Soul" (Or "Blade&Soul", because I can never remember which way NCSoft style it.) I played it a for a few weeks when it launched in "Western Territories" in 2016 and I've had several shorter runs at it since. It's on the longish list of games I often think about going back to but mostly don't.

When I read that NCSoft was repackaging the whole thing under a new name - more accurately the old name with "Neo" stuck on the end - I was interested enough to follow the news to see what it meant. What I learned surprised me a little. 

If you haven't been keeping up with the story, B&SNeo is neither a sequel nor a relaunch. It's kind of a "Classic" version that's starting over at the beginning but it's also a bit like what happened to The Secret World when Funcom decided to try to give it more popular appeal by streamlining, modernizing and re-promoting it as Secret World Legends.  

NCSoft, luckily, are handling the whole thing a lot better than Funcom did. When Neo opens for business in just under two weeks on 25 February, Blade & Soul will simply carry on as before. You'll still be able to play it and as far as I know you'll still be able to start playing it as well. The two games will continue in parallel, although I wouldn't like to say how much onward development the original will get, if the revamped version is a success.

Who'd have thought it'd be NCSoft that would be caught doing the right thing, eh? I guess maybe they learned something from the City of Heroes debacle after all. I'm pretty sure Funcom haven't learned anything from SWL, although I suppose they haven't shuttered anything else since and TSW is technically still playable - I think. I haven't tried to log in for a long time.

Getting back to the point, when I read all of this, my original feeling was that it might push me to patch up B&S and have another go but I had no interest in Neo, which looked like it was just going to be a graphical update with a few tweaks. I always found B&S to be a very good-looking game with an aesthetic that's aged well so I wasn't feeling the need for a visual upgrade.

Then I read this piece by Michael Byrne at MMOBomb in which he goes into some detail about just what's different about the new game. He focuses mostly on the monetization, something that never really affected me since I didn't play long enough to hit any of the pay walls, but he also mentions several changes to things like cosmetics and outfits being available not only through the cash shop but through gameplay and a revision of the really annoying weapon upgrade system to make it much more straightforward.

Those were two of the things that I didn't much like about B&S so the thought of being able to play dress-up and not have to upgrade all my gear seven hundred thousand times does carry some weight. 

On the other hand, Neo will follow exactly the same storyline, which might be a problem. Believe it or not, I can actually remember quite a lot of the story, even though it's been a few years since I played. That speaks well in favor of its quality but it also means I might not want to go through it all over again.  

If I'm realistic about it, it's not likely to become much of a problem. The chances of my getting anywhere close to where I was when I stopped is minimal. I may not have been at the level cap - not even the original one - but I was in the thirties or forties somewhere and it took me quite while to get that far. I don't imagine I'll be doing it again.

Still, when I got an email from NCSoft this morning, inviting me to pre-download the new client, I thought "Why not?" The thought of starting over is at least as attractive as going back to my old character, who was somewhat bogged down in a part of the story that she was having a little trouble getting past. And as has been discussed many times around this part of the blogosphere, going back to MMORPGs after a long lay-off comes with all kinds of problems of its own. If nothing else, starting afresh would certainly be less of a hassle.

So that's what I'm planning to do. NCSoft has made it relatively easy although, as Michael Byrne points out, they're doing themselves no favors by insisting on the use of their own portal, the oddly-named Purple, rather than adding the game to an existing one like Steam or Epic. 

At least the Purple launcher is easy to install. NCSoft offer a host of options to link it to other services. I used my old Gmail account that I have the original B&S tied to so with a bit of luck I'll be able to use Purple to swap between them, should I ever want to. Which I won't.

The download itself seems very slow, something not helped by the way it didn't save progress when my internet briefly hiccupped just after I started writing this post. If it makes me restart every time that happens I'll never get to play because my ISP is going through a flaky stage just now.  

With luck and a following wind I'll get the whole thing downloaded and installed before the twenty-fifth. All I'll have to do then is find time to play. I noticed when I was registering with Purple that NCSoft has its own cloud gaming service through the platform, which might be interesting. If I can play Neo in the cloud on my laptop that would seriously increase the chances of my playing it at all.

We'll see at the end of the month. If I do end up playing, you can guarantee I'll be posting about it.