The Cat In The Hat Strikes Back : GW2, Istaria

I had a few ideas of things I might write about this morning. There was the unexpected email from Istaria, the game that used to be called Horizons, David Allen's much-hyped MMO from 2003, which failed horribly at launch but refused to die. Not only is it still up and running but apparently it's thriving. "We've grown by leaps and bounds this year...Last year was the best ever for us here at Virtrium", they say, which is great news, not only for Virtrium's employees and Istaria's players but for all friends of the form.

We hear a lot of bad news about MMOs closing down, development studios downsizing and projects stalling. Massively dutifully reports each brief press release as one F2P bucket-shop MMO after another takes down the sign and closes the door. When a game who's name we might actually recognize,Vanguard, say, or City of Heroes, some MMO we might have a dim memory of once having played or having thought about playing, when such an MMO sets a sunset date, the blogosphere incandesces with outrage, schadenfreude and despair.

Such news strengthens the fears of those who feel the genre is in terminal decline, its best days long in the past, its present uncertain, its future bleak. The stream of closure stories encourages the narrative, growing in credence, that the whole industry took a bad wrong turn sometime back in the first decade of the 21st Century, when developers decided the best way to sell their games was to give them away.

I was going to say something about that, about how any narrative only tells the tale the teller wants to tell and that's half the story at best; about how the old school games we yearn for never really went away and whether we need Brad McQuaid's jam tomorrow when there's jam right here on the table today. And since Istaria is the only MMO that let's you play as a dragon I was going to work in a link to Syl. So that was one idea  might have gone with...

Then there was the comment thread that span up out of the day before yesterday's post. That raised some ideas worth pursuing and since my own replies were getting as long as blog posts anyway, why not give them room to stretch out even more? We seemed to be paring something down, examining the nuances of hardcore versus casual as something closer to a philosophy than a playstyle, considering elitism versus accessibility as a moral choice and there's much more to say in that discussion.

Then it occurred to me that here we all are, rehearsing the same arguments that must have been heard in salons and drawing rooms two centuries ago. The form changes, video games stand in for poems, but the substance remains the same. It's Romanticism versus Realism all over again, Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, the Sublime vs. the Rational.

I think my days of trying to change anyone's mind on any of this are behind me. There aren't enough oak-panelled pubs, worn leather benches and strong, continental lagers in the world to see this one through to a result that anyone's ever going to accept. As I said in the thread "If you don't intuitively feel the difference I don't think it can be explained" and as Jeromai replied "We can agree to disagree". Which, the older I get, seems less and less like the kind of compromise I once would have condemned and more and more like the right, respectful, human choice. 

Still, I could have whipped something up around that and I was thinking it over when I switched my computer, my randomized desktop background came up with this and all my plans went straight out the window:

That's an unedited screenshot from one of GW2's beta weekends, graphic glitches and all, and it says everything to me about what was lost. Forget all the stuff about horizontal or vertical progression, zerging, Living Story, one-time or repeatable events. None of that matters. 

I was a tiger in a trenchcoat and a trilby hat!

I'm sorry to have to shout but it needs to be said, loud and clear. I. Was. A. Tiger. In. A. Trenchcoat. And. A. Trilby. Hat! And yet, unbelievable though it is, it gets better than that! Wait, let me just turn around...

 I was a tiger, in a trenchcoat and a trilby hat, wearing a backpack!

A proper backpack. That you can see. That you can see and which looks like an actual backpack. I could go on (and on) about how betas are better because everything is fresh and new and everyone's excited and open-minded and optimistic and how there's something new to discover over every hill and all of that would be true but it wouldn't tell you the real secret of why betas are almost always better than the Live game when it arrives. 

It's because no-one's asked the art department to come up with yet another set of skins for some holiday or achievement or raid so no-one's wearing anything that looks like they called Liberace in to design it because Carmen Miranda was worried she'd look under-dressed playing Joan of Arc. That's why! No-one's wearing an entire, working dwarven forge for a shoulderpad. No-one has armor that's on fire or has their paws in gloves made of lava, dripping hot gobs of molten metal onto the floor. No-one has Dr. Octopus arms or metal-jointed spider legs sticking out of their back. And most especially not one single person anywhere in the entire game has a bow that fires unicorns!

 
During one GW2 beta weekend I spent a whole Sunday farming leather from skelks near the Irondock Shipyard in Plains of Ashford  to make my own leather armor and when I was done my charr ranger looked fantastic. I was so happy. What I didn't know then was that was the best he was ever going to look.

As if that wasn't enough, here's another Charr I made in beta. I can't remember the class but she's wearing Light armor and as far as I can remember she never even left Black Citadel so those are almost certainly the clothes she started in. 

 She doesn't just look great, although she does look great; she looks better than any Charr I've seen since launch. It's true that Charr probably have the worst clothes and armor in the game but in beta we were blissfully unaware of what lay in store for us. I only played Charr in beta so I can't say if all the other races also looked better back then. I bet they did, though.

Now it may well be that all of these clothes are still in the game (except for the Charr trilby hat - not that I'm bitter...) and what's more, if they are, then anyone can easily transmogrify a hideous high-level abomination back into something tasteful, but that's not the point. The point is that GW2 has a progression mechanic partly built on the acquisition of gear that varies primarily by appearance, not by power and, like almost all MMOs, that gear appears to have been put together by a motorcycle gang working from bad photocopies of designs sent to them by Kiss's stage costumier, a sensibility that doesn't sit at all comfortably, I might add, with an ever-growing mini-pet collection clearly under the direct control of a five year old girl in the grips of a fever dream.

Or, if you prefer, none of it's much to my taste. And if you don't want to see your character wearing any of the things to which you are intended to aspire, and if you can achieve the stats you need easily and early with easily attainable items, then there really isn't much of a progression mechanic at all. 

And yet, as I mentioned at the end of my previous rant, GW2 remains one of the MMOs I enjoy the most, coming in somewhere around fifth if I was to make a list of my all-time favorites. I play it all the time and plan on doing so for a long time to come. Which, I guess, proves that an MMO doesn't really need a progression mechanic at all. Or something.

Now excuse me. I'm off to transmogrify my exotics. And see if that backpack is still in game.