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Furglebin's Journal 4: EQ2

2012-02-28T17:57:00.000Z

So here I am talking to gnomes. Only the first thing I notice is they do not sound like gnomes. They look like gnomes. They are shorter than mes. They are both wearing eyeglasses like gnomes always wears but when they speak there is no mentioning cognoggins or foozlewickets like you usually get with a gnome. Generally you get more of that sort of thing than you know what to do with with a gnome but not from these ones. No, they sound like Erudites or maybe even Dark Elfs with a lot of spouting on about battle and victory and suchlike.

Gnome?

Or No Gnome?

Well, I have my suspicions because I have seen a lot in this city by now and I know that everyone is not always what they wants you to think they are but all the same my whiskers are twitching and that means adventures. So I do what the "gnomes" tell me and go through their magic gateway. Which is another thing that is not right if you thinks about it because if they were really gnomes it would be some clockwork contraption with a lot of whirring and clicking and bits falling off and some other gnome would be cursing and hitting it with a spanner. It would not be a glowy magic thing what looks like a sea-shell that works perfectly every time.

Everyone mill about so it looks like there's more of us

Champions Respite is the place I end up. It is sort of a shopping mall and waiting room for people that want to murder each other. All sorts of people come in, Iksars and Trolls and Dwarves and just about anyone really. There is a Priest of Discord what sorts us all out into teams and asks us where we want to go. He gives four choices, called Smuggler's Den, Frozen Tundra, Battlefield of Ganak and Gears of Klak'Anon. I do not know anything about any of them but when I see that the teams for different places are different sizes I think I better go in the biggest team. Then I can just get into the middle of a crowd and figure it out as I go along.

Are you sure you're a priest?

Smugglers Den is the one where it is two dozen on each side and it is an amazing place, all towers and islands up in the air. I do not have a clue what I am doing so I just chase around with everyone else. Some Barbarian shouts out orders and mostly we do what he tells us. Tiger is being an armadillo, which is great for the killing other people part but does not work so well for keeping me alive so I die quite a lot. 'Course no-one stays dead. I pop back up in a few seconds every time but it is hard to get back to where everyone is so I try not to die if I cans help it.

Just when I am beginning to wonder how long all this is going to go on for it stops. Back in Champions Respite we all get our marks on how well we did and we won and I did alright I think, specially for a first time. I even get some Tokens to spend in the shops on stuff to help with fighting other adventurers 'cos it is different to fighting monsters, or so they say. Seems pretty much the same to me except adventurers don't keep still for you to kill them like an orc does and they swear more.

You take it! I took it last time.

Anyway I get the taste for it so I try again, only with Tiger being a bear which means at least I get healed a bit when the stupid healers on my team keep healing the fat tanks and not important DPS rats like mes. Funny how that keeps happening. The Priest of Discord likes to shuffle all the teams up so now and agains I end up killing someone what I was saving from being killed the time before. Makes it hard to remember who is on what side sometimes but I think it is a good plan cos it keeps things fairer so the same team does not win every match.

I hear there's a cafe at the top

Cutting a long tale short, over the next few weeks I try all the Battlegrounds and they are all good except Frozen Tundra which is rotten. In that one it is all fighting monsters and I can do that anywhere. Gears of Klak'Anon is just this tiny room where everyone piles into the middle and someone grabs a little stone and tries to hang on to it while everyone else fights over who gets to hold it next. Battlefield of Ganak is a lot of running up and down a field grabbing the other team's flag and bringing it back and of course you got to stop them grabbing yours at the same time.

It is all good fun and very exciting but the thing is that everyone in the Battlegrounds is either exactly as far along in learning as I am or they have learned pretty much all there is to learn. It is one thing or the other and nothings inbetween. Which means that if I want to go fightings other adventurers for tokens I cannot learn anything new and that is not right. And that is why in the end I decide I have had enough running around grabbing flags and stones and towers and playing tag with adventurers.

It is about time I got on with learning how to be a Beastlord so that is what I am doing. When I have learned all there is to learn about that, then I will come back and try again.

Taking The Loong View

2012-02-27T13:39:00.000Z

What a lot of MMOs there are. I downloaded yet another one yesterday. Kaozz's fault. She mentioned that she was playing something called Loong Online. "Smooth as butter and polished", she said. I'd never heard of it, which was provocation enough without the praise on top.

I googled and found it on the Gamigo portal where I had a choice: sign up for Loong alone or make a Gamigo account to play any of their games. They host a lot of MMOs including a few I'd heard of. Fiesta, which certainly gets a lot of advertising, none of which has ever made me consider trying it, King of Kings, which I did once play for about half an hour and Black Prophecy, which crops up on Massively now and again largely to my complete lack of interest. They have several more and others in development. They even have a Golf MMO, and they're welcome to it. Obviously no real point starting a Gamigo account, then.

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

Having made my Gamigo account, when I came to add Loong to my list of games I planned to play on it I noticed a familiar name: Otherland. Otherland is the MMO based on Tad Williams' sprawling, disturbing cyberpunk/fantasy noir. It's an MMO I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, looking forward to giving it a run whenever it appears. Haven't heard much about it for a while, although there was a video recently. I had no idea Gamigo were involved but now I'm signed up. Pre-ordered, I suppose you could say, if you can pre-order a game you don't have to order in the first place. Ah, sweet serendipity.

Gamigo is a German F2P gaming network. Seems to be the week for those, what with the PSS1 thing and all. There's an awful lot of MMO activity in Germany, now I come to think of it. Bigpoint are another. They host Drakensang and Nadirim, both of which I've tried, and Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't, it being a shooter. Germany is a big, rich country and one where MMOs seem to be very firmly established. Once you factor out the "sold like chattels" part of the PSS1/Sony deal the whole thing begins to look a little less disturbing. If they can get the IP block sorted out and restore freedom of choice, who knows? Maybe something good could come out of the wreckage.

Slot in top of head is not for litter

Leaving that aside for now, pending the supposed SoE/Allaplaya statements due later today, what is Loong like? Well, I only played for an hour or so but it was a good hour. It certainly looks fine. The world is lush and detailed, the views are stunning, the creatures are quirky and that's just in the starting areas.The interface is a bit too gritty for my taste and I can't say I'm keen on the fonts but the functionality is all there. Compared to, say, Eden Eternal, a game I like a lot, Loong appears to be several notches higher in quality. Gameplay, at the starter level, is identical.

Will I play it much? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? There are just so many MMOs. It's all very well downloading them and trying them out, but how often do I get much further than the starting area? Is looking great and playing smoothly enough? Well, no it's not. Even really top-notch gameplay doesn't set the hook deep enough. Zentia, for example, is a first-class game in just about every respect. Gameplay there is as good as any MMO I've played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were on it all weekend when we first found it and we played sporadically for a fair while after that, but in the end we drifted away.

I told you once. Shoo!.

I think, for me at least, it comes down mostly to character. In Loong I can be a good-looking young man or a good-looking young woman and that seems to be about it. It's not like being a giant tiger in NeoSteam, is it? Or even a mouse in Eden Eternal. I just don't find playing good-looking young people very involving. If I can't be an animal, at least let me be a dwarf or a gnome, something with a big, bushy beard. Zentia let me play a fat old man, which may be why I lasted a few weeks there rather than a few hours.

Do my feet even touch the ground?

It's not just how the characters look, either. It's also how they move. My Loong character travels in sudden, fluid leaps and bounds, so slick and fast that he's sometimes on the far side of where I want him to be before I can make him stop. Rift has a very dull selection of races but movement there is stolid, steady, firm. I can feel every footfall and that really does matter. The more solid the character feels, the better I am able to associate.

I'll plug on with Loong for a bit. On and off. Here and there. Now and again. The world very much looks worth exploring. I'll be surprised if I become more than an occasional visitor, but that's fine. There are so many MMOs after all.

Getting Steamed Up

2012-02-25T23:15:00.001Z

Oh look, here I am writing a blog post at ten past ten on a Saturday night. How did that happen?

Mrs Bhagpuss is away at the moment and I did sort of have a plan to play something other than EQ2 for a while. Then the whole PSS1 thing blew up and I found myself spending more time on EQ2Wire and the SoE forums than I spent playing. Even when I was logged in I was chatting about the situation while sorting my bank vault, which scarcely counts as high adventure.

Three points. Read 'em and weep

So this morning I was keen to throw myself into something. Something exciting. The GW2 beta application put Guild Wars at the front of my mind so I thought I'd go over there and look into this Hall of Monuments thing. Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to bother with it. Yes, I know I said I probably wouldn't even use the same account to play GW2. But I found that nifty HoM points calculator thingy and I had three points (and yes for the last time I know everyone has three points) so I thought, well I bet I could get a couple more and then I'd have a tapestry.

Do I want a tapestry? I don't know! I have no idea what it does. But I could get one, maybe. That would be good because then I'd have a thing that I don't have and that's always good. Isn't it? Don't confuse me!

Anyhooo... I did a little reading on the GW2 site and then I clicked the icon for Guild Wars on my desktop and what happened? Nothing. More than nothing, in fact. It seems my portable drive died in the night. I blame Eligium.

Kinda buff for a panda....

What's Eligium? You didn't follow the link, did you? Good move. You have more sense than I do, that's obvious. I probably shouldn't even have linked it. Eligium is a F2P MMO from Frogster that has pandas. They sent me an email saying they were in open beta so I downloaded it. I can't tell you what it's like because I haven't even gotten as far as character creation. Every time I try to run it it craps out on me. Late last night I tried to get it to run about half a dozen times and it kept crashing. Its on my portable drive and now my portable drive doesn't work.

Ok, circumstantial evidence. Whatever, my drive is fried. I spent a long time trying to get a response out of it with no success. Currently it is sitting on its eighth hour and counting of SeaTools recovery with over 2500 errors recovered. No Guild Wars for me. Also no STO, Allods, Ryzom or half a dozen other MMOs. Fingers crossed, maybe tomorrow.

Wurm then. I really wanted to play Wurm anyway. It's browser based so no problem there. Except it seems there's a client I downloaded and forgot all about that underwrites the browser. I put it on the portable drive, naturally.

From our live feed

So I played EQ2. My conjuror dinged 89. But I didn't want to play EQ2 so I patched Rift and hit Play. The client hangs. Can't get in. I could work out how to fix that perhaps but it's getting late. So here I am writing this while LotRO patches. Actually it's done now, but it took twenty minutes.

What have I learned?

1. I need a back-up drive with all my MMOs on, fully patched. Like that's going to happen.

2. Maybe I ought to get Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur. Just in case. Like we have candles and matches in case of a power cut.

3. Maybe Steam is not such a terrible idea.

I have been against the concept of Steam from the start. My games but not on my machine? Pshaw! Doesn't seem such a bad idea now, does it?. Tomorrow I'll look into it.

Meantime, LotRO's patched. Time to go hobbitting.

No Pictures. Because We Can't Have Nice Things

2012-02-22T19:26:00.000Z

I generally keep my cool when SOE does something stupid. I've been playing their MMOs for over a decade after all. I've had plenty of practice.

I didn't freak out when they dipped their toes in the microtransaction water with Legends of Norrath. I remained sanguine when they jumped into RMT with the LiveGamer deal. I was solidly behind the push towards F2P. Even during the hacks last year I crossed my fingers and carried on playing.

This is a bridge too far.

I knew about the ProSiebenSat.1 deal. It was signed in January, I believe, but it's taken until now for the details to emerge. I naively believed that a deal with a German television company would have little relevance to me, playing on American servers from the United Kingdom. After all, SoE have always been consistently and solidly pro-global and firmly against regional I.P. blocking, and anyway I'd been through this before.

In 2003 they did a deal with UbiSoft to run Everquest for them in Europe on a server called Venril Sathir. It was a pain. We had to be very careful when installing expansions for a while in case we accidentally ended up with UbiSoft accounts instead of adding them to our existing SOE accounts, but there was never any suggestion that we had to move to UbiSoft. It was a choice.

A bad choice, of course. We thought about it for all of a millisecond and then said "Nah!" UbiSoft ran a loose ship. Much complaining ensued. Eventually the deal expired and SOE took Venril Sathir back into the fold, where it eventually merged with some other server. I imagine. That's what usually happens. Don't ask me, I wasn't playing on it.

What with that and the NGE you might think SOE would have learned a lesson. Oh, and let's not forget LiveGamer and their Bazaar servers. That went well, didn't it? Where's The Bazaar now? Oh yes, that's right. Merged with Freeport. And where are LiveGamer? You may well ask.

Freeport. Hmm. Wasn't that the only F2P server for a year or so? Making it the de facto global EQ2 F2P server? Why, yes it was. And is. And as it happens every single person in our Freeport guild turns out to be European despite the server being based in the U.S. Not because we don't like Americans or Australians or [insert your nationality here] but because that's just who we happened to meet.

That's the sodding POINT of MMOs. You run around bumping into lovely or horrible people from all over the world and the lovely ones become your imaginary friends. Virtual friends. Friends for pete's sake. You do stuff with them and build relationships and compile virtual collective assets like guild halls and memories and you do not expect the people you are paying to provide the communications service for all this to come along out of the blue and announce that they have sold you to someone else!

I am fuming about this. So are the people who have been fueling the inevitable thread on the SOE forums, currently at 58 pages and being Mod-Locked like there's no tomorrow. Mrs Bhagpuss and I and the European players in our guild aren't the worst affected by this by any means, though. Yes, it looks as though our personal and possibly even our payment details may be transferred without our consent to a company we would never otherwise have heard of. Yes, the deal omits Vanguard and EQ1 so our Station Access accounts will be rendered effectively null and void (FAQ on this from SOE pending, presumably while someone goes "D'Oh!!!" repeatedly, since apparently that was one of the things no-one thought of. Feldon has a list of those). Yes, we will need to purchase two forms of fairy gold because PSS1 have their own make-believe money instead of Station Cash...

But at least our right to go on playing EQ2 on US servers is grandfathered in. For now. With no details on if that includes any new characters we might want to make. And no promises on how long before that right might be revoked. At least when the dread date comes we will still be able to log in. If we still want to. Which is in doubt.

Players outside PSS1's remit, which is basically all of Europe plus unnamed countries to be added at an unspecified time, who happen to have characters on Splitpaw or Storms or any of the other European servers will be IP locked out. End of. No matter if you happen to live in Texas but have been playing on Splitpaw for years because you work the nightshift. Nor if you were in the US Military stationed in Germany when you started playing EQ2 so you joined a server with a good ping where they raided at hours that suited you. Bad luck on you when you get back to the States because your characters are staying in Germany and you just lost all visiting rights.

Enough of that. I just filled out my GW2 beta application and I'm off to fill one in for Mrs Bhagpuss. When it comes round to the EQNext beta, if my only choice is PSS1 who knows if I'll even bother?

Blanket of Sky: Wurm Online

2012-02-20T12:45:00.001Z

Sandbox. Theme Park. Discuss.

I'd never even heard of a "sandbox" until a few years back. Sounds a bit like "litter box". Can't be that, can it? Nope. Turns out it's what we'd call a "sand pit" where I come from. Which doesn't really help much. Even a "sand pit" to me is where you land after a long jump. I don't believe I've ever seen a pit or a box of sand put down for very small children to play in. We generally go to the seaside for that.

Then there's "theme park". We don't really have those either, although we do know what they are. I'm pretty sure I've never been to one. I've been to amusement parks and fairgrounds, we had those when I was tiny and we still have some left, but if they had a theme other than "spin round in circles, scream then throw up" I must have missed it.

So we're having this discussion based on two analogies that have no emotional resonance for me. The fine distinctions people draw just blur when I try to focus down. And anyway, when I read about games like EVE or pre-NGE SWG the word that comes to mind isn't "sandbox". It's "simulation". Back in the 80s and 90s there was a whole genre of "sim" games, where you managed some enterprise like a city, a zoo or a football team. When I read stories about being a member of a Corp in EVE or being an Entertainer in SWG it often sounds more like being inside a simulation than playing in a sandbox. As an employee, not the owner.

What's all this leading up to? Well, I've been playing Wurm. Not much, but I have been playing. I thank Stargrace for that. She keeps writing about it and posting such pretty pictures. I tried Wurm before once, many years ago. All I can remember is wandering around in near total darkness for about an hour, occasionally bumping into a wall. The new player experience has improved a lot since then. They even have a tutorial, although for me that could be counted a mixed blessing.

I made that!

This time I've lasted a lot longer than an hour. I haven't built anything but I've traveled along the river valleys gawping at the work of others. Whole villages, even towns built from scratch. I've run away from crocodiles and lived. I made a tiny island just big enough to stand on and dug a small hole. I've built several fires, made and fired some pots from clay I dug myself and cooked some meals in those pots on that fire using herbs and vegetables I foraged. I pretty much have the hobo lifestyle down.

Wurm is very enjoyable. It's relaxing, except when a crocodile chases you or a lion roars very near in the dark. (It still gets dark but nowhere near as dark as I remember). It's also quite compulsive in that drip drip drip of incremental rewards kind of way. I was getting drawn in enough to start reading Wikis and forums and planning ahead. Then I thought "do I really want to do this?"

To get anything done in Wurm takes ages. You have to construct everything from first principles and each act of construction pops up a timer. It's an on-use skill-based system, so the more you do something the better at it you get and the more efficiently (faster, less chance of failure) you do it. It's also a social environment reliant on trade and co-operation. In order to make progress you have to perform many repeated actions over extended periods of time while establishing social networks.

Erm, but not this...

It's like moving to a town where you know no-one, taking on a job about which you know nothing and sleeping in the park while you build your own house. Only with crocodiles.What's more, once you've put in the hours, weeks, months of real time and have your homestead all fixed up, you have to maintain it or it falls down. If you leave it too long, when you come back it will have reverted to wilderness and your neighbors and passing hobos will have taken all your stuff. Massively's Shawn Schuster wrote a piece that sums this up brilliantly, except he managed to be a lot more positive about it than I would have been in his shoes.

It was his article, in fact, that convinced me to stop reading Wurm Wikis and making grandiose plans and to settle for the hobo lifestyle instead. It also got me to wondering just why sandbox gameplay has to be soooo slooow. It's not like the simulation happens in real-time. I've lived near two people who built their own houses on an empty plot of land. One took over two years and the other about nine months. I've never seen anyone build an entire town but I'm pretty confident it would need more than three dozen people and take longer than a few weeks. Especially if they also dug a mine under a mountain while they were at it.

Hobo TV

Someone decides all this stuff. It's not handed down by the universe or Stephen Hawking. In an indie game like Wurm the pace is presumably set to the taste of the developer and it seems to be the kind of pace that would appeal to the same people who build model railway layouts or make models of the Taj Mahal out of used matchsticks.

Theme Park gameplay used to be like this too, relatively speaking. Travel took hours, fights took minutes, raids lasted all night. Then came WoW and everything sped up. Say what you like about WoW, it at least opened up the market to people who like to get something done in less than forever. And there are still slow theme parks. They survive. As I was commenting not long ago,it still takes a while to get something done in Everquest and you just try rushing through Ryzom and see how far that gets you. We themeparkers have a choice of pace now.

So where's my fast sandbox?

Wagons Roll! : Rift

2012-02-14T14:12:00.000Z

I stepped back into Rift last week. I'm subscribed right up to April but I've hardly logged in since late last year. When I read that Rift's first twenty levels were going to be freely playable (Not F2P. Oh dear me, no!. We can't be having any of that kind of talk) my first thought was "Great! Now I can cancel my account and just drop in and play low-level whenever I need a Rift fix".

The thought of seeing the first twenty levels hopping with new players like they were just after launch is a very pleasing prospect. The busier the zone, the more rifts pop, the more invasions fire. Things could be just like the good old days, back in the mists of yesteryear, lo! those long ten months ago.

Then I read about the changes to the Soul Tree system (as discussed here and here among other places) and thought that if I was going to pontificate about them I probably ought at least to try them out. Not that lack of personal experience usually stops me climbing on a soapbox. Nor lack of a soapbox, for that matter.

Before I could do anything I had to move all my characters off Shadefallen. And move the guild. (Didn't need to call a Guild Meeting on that one. The entire guild membership is me and Mrs Bhagpuss and she's not playing Rift even more than I'm not playing Rift so I just took an executive decision. That's what Guild Leaders do).

Look and wonder!

As promised, moving the guild was very straightforward, as was moving each of the characters. Well, it would have been if not for two things: the guild bank and my mail. Storage has always been at a premium in Telara and I've been in the habit of using the mailbox as a kind of poor man's bank vault. The Guild Bank was completely full of crafting materials and various consumables. Since you have to have an empty mailbox and nothing in the Guild Bank before your application to move can be approved I had a happy couple of hours shifting stuff about and buying larger bags and new bank vault slots before we finally got our passports stamped for Faeblight.

Which is where the next complication arose. Faeblight was the "reserved" destination server for Shadefallen characters because it's the only remaining RP-PVE server. That reservation had expired, but I still wanted to go there because of the RP part and because we have our Guardian characters there and, hey, it's easier to remember where they are if they're all in the same place, right? Only I'd forgotten that Rift only lets you have six characters per server and I had a total of seven and Mrs Bhagpuss had eight or nine.

To cut a long story short, I ended up moving all the Guardians to Millrush, which meant another round of mailbox-emptying, although at least we'd never gotten around to making a Guardian guild so there was no guild bank to deal with. Finally, about four hours after I'd had the passing notion to try out a preset Soul build, I logged in my Rogue and hit "N".

Oh that's where they go!

First off I compared the Presets on offer for each Calling with what I was using. Apparently I'm a bit of a maverick. Or an idiot. Let's go with "maverick". Whatever, my choices look quite odd compared to the presets, which make a good deal more sense. I chose the "Huntsman" model and, after paying a large chunk of money to my trainer for nine tiers of upgrades to abilities I'd never even considered taking in all the time I've played that character, I went Warfronting.

Guess what? Trion have a better idea how a ranged DPS class should spec than I do. Who'd have thought it? I imagine having designed the game gives them some kind of an edge. That and the fact that I detest allocating points and just try to get it over with as fast as possible. Either way, the "Huntsman" build plays a lot better in Warfronts than my Ranger/Bard hybrid ever did.

I did a few Warfronts and remembered how much I like Codex. Probably my favorite instanced PvP zone out of all the ones I can remember from DAOC onwards. Even more fun now that I'm significantly more effective so thumbs up for the Preset Soul. Pretty much kicking into an open goal as far as I'm concerned since I never wanted the responsibility of creating a build in the first place.

I'm in two minds now about cancelling my subscription. Chances are I won't want to play much Rift after April. Guild Wars 2 looms. And there's the free twenty levels sitting there if I do. But I did really enjoy being back. I'll wait and see how much I play over the next six weeks and then decide, I guess. Which is in itself a win for Trion. Apparently they do know what they are doing after all. Maybe.

Are You Looking At My Bra? : EQ2

2012-02-12T14:38:00.000Z

The EQ2Players website hasn't really worked properly for years, which didn't affect me directly since I played most of my time either on Test or EQ2X, neither of which were allowed to use EQ2Players anyway. It affected a lot of other people though and it's been a bit of a long-term embarrassment for SOE. Apparently there was a third-party provider involved and some contractual issues that meant it was harder to get it fixed than you'd imagine but in the run-up to Age of Discovery last year Smokejumper made a rash promise that a revamped EQ2Players would debut alongside the expansion.

It didn't, but this weekend we finally got to see the corner of the curtain lift when the invaluable EQ2Wire team unveiled their sister site EQ2U. It's beautifully designed and extremely easy-to-use. I particularly like the slightly oversized look, which makes reading character information a more pleasant and less eye-straining experience than I'm used to in-game. EQ2U gets its information directly from something called an EQ2 Data Feeds API. That sounds like something a long way above my paygrade but as far as I can tell it's an always-on database provided by SOE that holds a copy of pretty much all the data about your character that you would be able to see in-game and updates it every time you zone or camp.

This obviously raises some potential privacy issues and I got embroiled in a fairly purposeless spat about that in the comment thread over there. After sleeping on it I've decided that I tend to disagree with myself (not an unusual occurrence by any means). If I still have any issue with it, its probably that SOE chose to make the service Opt-Out rather than Opt-In, but now that I've had time to think about it, I can't honestly say I care that much either way. Linking your characters together so that they show as "Alts" will be Opt-In when it comes, which is probably just as well.

Really, though, the roots of this debate go back as long as I've been playing MMOs. The old Everquest boards, the ones that SOE eventually had to take down because they were so toxic, where the "Gameplay" forum was widely known as "Flameplay", often held overheated debates about the legitimacy of the "Inspect" command and the correct etiquette involved in using it. People have always wanted to see their characters out of game, too. For a while it was de rigueuer to have a Magelo account. Even I had one for a while, although I never really knew what to do with it.

My look. You all want it. Don't kid yourselves!

When it comes to privacy, a lot more than a dozen years seem to have passed since the millennium. The entire concept has undergone a radical revision. There already were huge cultural differences. English, American and French players would always tend to struggle to understand each others' concepts of what constitutes an appropriate level of privacy and those are three cultures with a very entwined social history. How a consensus could be reached when you throw in players from all around the world is beyond me and now there's also a very significant age factor to add into that mix. Young adults are growing up in a world where availability has much more pull than privacy.

Which is all very well. These are heavyweight cultural and political issues that will occupy a lot of serious-minded people for many years to come. Whether or not people can look at your computer-game character might be on the spectrum but at most it's emblematic of a problem, not a problem in and of itself. And anyway, as the guitarist in a band I was once in told me when we went for a drink after rehearsal one night in a club that seemed a tad too hip "No-one's looking at you. They're too busy looking at themselves".

I had him dyed to match my ensemble

That's what it comes down to in the end. No-one cares about your characters in a computer game except inasmuch as those characters affect them. If they're inspecting you it's because they see you wearing something they want to wear or they want to know if you'll slow them down or get them killed in whatever dungeon they might want you to help them clear. No-one's going to go randomly through several million characters for unspecified nefarious purposes. Probably. We hope. Anyway, there are approximately a gazillion more important things to be worrying about.

I'm going to leave my characters opted out for now. But I might change my mind. If it ever so happens that I need to look at them on a website rather than in-game then EQ2U will do nicely. EQ2Players is going to have some work to do to catch up, if it ever does.

Oh, and the title? How soon they forget...

Getting On At The Ground Floor: Rift

2012-02-09T19:00:00.000Z

TAGN has a post up about Rift's recent decision to add preset builds. I'm not really playing Rift at the moment. I haven't even moved from Shadefallen yet so my characters are still under house arrest in Meridian. I keep up with the news, though, so I knew about these changes. They didn't really come as much of a surprise.

It's been very interesting to watch Rift change since launch, like watching an MMO on fast-forward. I understand why Trion decided to add the preset option but like most of the changes they've made it takes the game further than ever away from what made it so exciting and intriguing in beta. More than that, it chips away at one of Rift's USPs (if you can have more than one unique selling point).

Nice to have the place to myself for once

Rift's Soul Tree system has often been praised for its flexibility and originality even by commentators who otherwise didn't find much to like about the game. Similarly well-received was the frenzied pace of zone invasions and rifts during beta and around launch, when quest hubs were often overrun and had to be reclaimed by bands of players and system messages to "Find somewhere safe to camp" when the server was about to come down drew catcalls of derision as everyone yelled back that nowhere was safe.

An apocalypse is no reason to ignore personal hygiene

The fangs and claws were drawn from zone invasions early on and throughout the year incremental changes conspired to make Rift a lot more like other, familiar MMOs than had ever seemed likely in those heady beta days. It's hardly surprising, then, that Trion have finally gotten around to making the Soul Tree more plug and play than sit and ponder.

Most MMOs follow this path, from complexity to simplicity but I'm used to it taking five years not ten months and it makes me very glad I was there for the beta and jumped in with both feet at launch. I'm sure that if I came fresh to Rift now, never having played the game before, I'd have a great time for two or three months, just like I did in WoW when I joined it after it'd already been running for more than five years but I'm also pretty sure that, just like back then in WoW, I'd find myself reading about how things used to be and thinking "y'know, that really sounds like it would have been more fun than how it is now..."

Which isn't to say that MMOs shouldn't adapt to make it easier for latecomers to join in. I think they should. MMOs can bloat and become unmanageable for newcomers after a time and things that are fun when you're all in it together can seem frustrating when there's only you doing them. In the good old days that took years. Now it seems it just takes a few months.

One scoop or two?

What it It emphasizes for me is how worthwhile it is to jump on MMOs at the earliest opportunity. Get into the beta if you can, even if you plan on playing when the game goes Live. Maybe especially then. I've heard many people say that the most fun they ever had in certain MMOs was in beta and it's been my experience too, at least on occasion. Often that's just the excitement and the camaraderie but not infrequently it's because whatever was fresh and new about the game just doesn't survive the commercial realities post-launch.

Beta aside, If you know you're going to play at some point then play at launch. If it's not polished enough for your taste you can come back later and maybe it'll be better for you then with the corners smoothed off, but if you do like it you'll be getting a shot at something that will only be available for a limited period. And if Trion's example is anything to go by, that period could be lot more limited than it used to be.

A Rat's A Rat For All That

2012-02-08T13:48:00.001Z

Rats. What is it about rats and MMORPGs? I can't say that I thought about rats one day in a hundred before I took up this hobby and now a day never passes. A dozen years ago, when I stepped out into Norrath, what's the first thing I remember? Well, alright, falling off Kelethin, losing my corpse and logging out in a strop but let's forget that, my own fault for making an elf. Cut me some slack, I was new and I knew nothing. We've all been there.

So then, forgetting that that the way I conveniently forget the first record I bought with my own money was a Gerry Anderson E.P. not, as I choose to tell people who ask (and it's surprising how often the subject comes up) "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by Joan Baez, my first MMO memory is... well it's chasing bats outside North Freeport. But the second! The second is rats. Big rats.

Roekillik au naturel

Rats get not one but two entries on GiantBomb. Kill Ten Rats is an MMO trope (and an excellent blog). At least one MMO has tried to define itself with a bold claim that it didn't have any rats at all. (It was Horizons and it had maggots instead, which really wasn't an improvement). Boars may get the "everywhere" hate but it's rats who have ubiquity down.

It's not just plain vanilla rats, either (and there's an ice-cream flavor to ponder. Or not). Giant rats and plague rats are all very well but as Orwell said, four legs good, two legs better and what's better than a very large, infectious rodent? An even bigger one walking upright wearing pants of course!

I believe I first encountered ratmen when I bought the Warhammer RPG. What a great book that was and what an excellent campaign. I must dig it out. Pen and paper gaming is the new black around here apparently, what with Tobold, Ardwulf and Tipa all getting their D20 on all over again. I can't recall exactly what part the Skaven had in the plot but I'm pretty sure they were in it up to their elbows. Assuming rats have elbows. Plotting is what ratmen do best.

Smoking jackets are in this season

Mythic inexplicably decided to leave the Skaven out of Warhammer Online. Hamlet without the prince. Everquest had ratmen, though. Had them from way back in Velious. Safely tucked away in Dragon Necropolis, where there was little chance of me tripping over them back at the turn of the millennium. It's hard enough to get there even now, as I may have mentioned.

What's that rumbling sound ?

It must have been somewhere in around 2003 that I finally encountered the Chetari. Ultra-aggressive, tall enough to look a dwarf in the eye, a race of white lab rats gone feral. They favor Donald rather than Mickey, dressing only from the waist up, but short of that idiosyncrasy they're all rat. There was much complaint, when EQ2 announced the ratonga, that Norrath already had ratpeople. I just hope when Dragon Necropolis comes to EQ2 as surely it must, we get a showdown. Forget the Roekillik and their incomprehensible plans for world domination, the Chetari are the real bad rats here.

Norrath may have the most upright rat races and Warhammer the archetype but love the Ratonga and Skaven as I do I'd still have to hand the crown to the Ksaravi. Are they the most fully-realized of all the ratfolk in MMOs? Not really. Sure, the Skaven have them beat paws down, offline. Sure, you can actually play a Ratonga. But did any of those rats build Ksaravi Gulch? No they did not!

Ksaravi Gulch is a work of art. Actually the whole of Telon is a work of art and should be preserved in some kind of online Gallery if and when the sad day comes but I digress. Even by the exceptionally high standards of Telon, Ksaravi Gulch is astonishing. Rats built it and it shows. From the scavenged materials to the treadmill wheels to the cages on stalks it's the rodent Fallingwater. I can't begin to do it justice with words and screenshots. It's worth downloading Vanguard just to see it.

I'm a cat person, really I am. But there's something about a rat in an MMO.

Does Guild Wars 2 have rats?

Are We Nearly There Yet? : Everquest

2012-02-06T13:40:00.000Z

I had a mind to photograph some rats. I say photograph. As far as I know, the gnomes of Norrath have yet to invent the camera. Insufficient inherent explosive potential, I imagine. Gnomish technology notwithstanding however, I set out to take some screenshots.

The rats in question live in Dragon Necropolis. Dragon Necropolis is in Western Wastes, a part of Velious as yet unrediscovered in EQ2 and probably undiscovered by many current players of the elder game because Western Wastes is a long way from anywhere. No wizard or druid can open a portal there, the Plane of Knowledge has no Book for it and the Guild Hall vendor has no Western Wastes Focus Stone in stock.

If you want to go to Western Wastes, the nearest you can get in one move is Cobalt Scar. A druid or a wizard can port there, but my highest level of either is a level 60 druid and while she has hunted in Western Wastes I deemed her a tad fragile for photographic journalism in underground tunnels infested by rats that stab first and ask questions never, so I logged in my level 84 Beastlord. Who turned out to be in Dragonscale Hills.

Wait here Wizard, this won't take long...

An hour and a half later I hit the hot-key for Throne of Heroes, the veteran reward that allows non-gating classes to click their heels like Dorothy as casters have been doing since 1999. Had I photographed any rats? I had not. I didn't have my stop-watch out but in rough numbers it had taken me about forty-five minutes to run all the way from Dragonscale Hills to Siren's Grotto and about as long again trying to get from one side of the Grotto to the other. Unsuccessfully.

All of which entertainment got me to thinking about Everquest going Free To Play. I'm very happy about that even though I have Station Access and can already play Everquest whenever the mood takes me. I love the idea of new people flooding (alright, trickling) back into the lower-level zones and bringing them to life. I particularly relish the thought of Plane of Knowledge filling up with chattering, bustling hordes of players and pets, flapping and clumping and blocking the bank doorway so I can't get in, just like the good old days.

Negotiations with the Chetari run into difficulties

But you forget just how big Everquest is. According to Wikipedia Everquest currently has 375 zones,a suspiciously round and unbelievably huge number. Three hundred and seventy five zones, of which Western Wastes is by no means the furthest-flung or hardest to reach. It may not be like the old days, when a cross-country trip from Qeynos to Freeport demanded research, preparation and a full play session (two if you died halfway and couldn't get a rez). Still, simply getting from one place to another in Everquest is going to require a great deal more time, attention and knowledge than the modern MMO player is accustomed to bring.

I knew exactly how to get to Western Wastes. I've been there many times. I have maps. To refresh my memory I even had the Zam page up. I was going there with a character to whom nothing posed a threat. And I still gave up in frustration after the umpteenth failure to find the top of the waterfall in Siren's Grotto. It was late and I knew I could log in Mrs Bhagpuss's wizard in the morning, port my Beastlord to Cobalt Scar and then Evac across Siren's Grotto as I should have done in the first place. As indeed I did do and have the photographs of rats to prove.

There's a Plane of Pork? Who knew?

It's going to be very interesting indeed to see how Everquest fares as a Free To Play title. The sheer volume of content is far beyond overwhelming. The systems to be learned are so convoluted and arcane after thirteen years of accretive expansion that even the developers barely understand some of them. Just getting from one place to another still offers more adventure than most MMOs offer in a full dungeon-run. Yet the game was always very easy to get into at the low levels and famously addictive. An awful lot of incomers are going to bounce right off the dark star density but some will inevitably stick, caught in Norrath's inexorable gravity well.

And welcome as the new blood will be, Everquest is hardly languishing. After thirteen years the game still has sixteen servers up and running. As I write this, deep in the night on the U.S. server where my Beastlord lives, there are too many players to count in the Guild Lobby and in the Bazaar, where more than 180 traders stand idling. Not everyone's hanging around afk in the Lobby and Bazaar either. Many more can be seen out in hunting zones, especially at the highest levels. I'd bet that a lot of much younger MMOs would be delighted to have a population like that during off-off-peak hours after a year or two, let alone a decade and a half.

Furglebin's Journal 3 : EQ2

2012-01-31T12:40:00.002Z

So, I gets a room in Freeport in an Inn called The Jade Tiger. It costs 5 silver pieces a week, which is nothing! I can make that much in a minute just by setting Tiger on orcs. Commonlands is all over orcs so no-one is going to miss a few. I don't know how the Jade Tiger stays in business charging these rates but they must be doing alright 'cos there are people coming and goings at all times of the day and nights.

Health and safety mate? Never 'eard of it.

Once I am settled ins I go for a walk around town. I am looking ups at the Arcane Academy where all the finger-wagglers study how to blow things up and I am getting a crick in my neck cos it is so high, when some ratonga hisses at me. His name is Sneel Valiyn and he is the Ratonga Mentor or so he claims. He starts telling me some long story but I don't really listen until he asks me to go to Temple Street, which is where ratongas all used to live in Freeport until The Overlord decides to have a big tidy-ups.

Ratonga mentor or conspiracy theorist in a bathrobe?

Well, I go to Temple Streets and there are Ratongas there alright, but they have beens spending too long around gnomes, which cannot be good for anyone. There are mechanical mens strutting about everywhere and all the gnomes and all the ratongas are mumbling and plotting right and left and if Lucan finds out what they have done to his walls he will not be happy, let me tell yous!

Right you kids! Scrub that off this minute!

I do what Sneel asks me to do. Some clockworks get broken but never mind cos the gnomes will enjoy fixing them I expects. Best if gnomes got stuffs to do cos if not then they come up with Ideas and no-one wants that. Then Sneel sends me off to talk to some ratongas around town what think they have seen Roekilliks. I never heard of Roekilliks befores but as soon as Sneel says the word all the hair on my back stands up and Tiger growls.

Spend too long around gnomes and this could happen to you

Not much later I knows what they are. Bad rats. Very, very bad rats. I meet a few and it is a few too many. Tiger makes short work of them and it is in a secret hidey-hole what they skulks in so no chance of anyone finding what is left of them and getting me in trouble with the Militia. Although I think the Militia would probably give me a few silver and thank me for saving them the trouble. Sneel is so pleased with me he gives me a special ring only for Ratongas. I am very glad I met him cos now I am not so confused about my place in the worlds. I am beginning to feel like I belong in Freeport.

Standing next to a giant anchor does not give you gravitas.

Since then I have had a lot of adventures what I do nots have time to write about. I am very much tougher now and I know a lot about being a Beastlord. One really exciting thing did happen that I should say 'cos it is why I have not learned any new stuff for a while. I am strollings around Freeport just sniffing the salt air and thinking about what I am going to have for tea when two gnomes starts calling out to me. I know I should keep on walking but I am curious, it is my weakness, so I listen to them when they tell me all about testing my skills against other adventurers and it sounds exciting and a good idea the way they tell it.

I should know better than to listen to Gnomes with Ideas but this one time I think it turns out okay. But that is a story for another day, when I write about my adventures in the Battlegrounds.

A Dragon In Ahgram: Vanguard

2012-01-30T12:31:00.000Z

Today is the fifth anniversary of the launch of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, almost certainly the best least-played MMO in the world. For a long while it was my second-favorite MMO of all time. Now I'm not so sure. I think it might be my first.

No point rehashing Vanguard's story all over again. Anyone likely to be reading this already knows it. Did Vanguard start the trend of huge expectation verging on mania before launch followed by crashing disappointment and tidal waves of hatred after? I can't remember. It was a long time ago and now every MMO launch is something like that. All I know is that I loved Telon from the day I first set foot there and I love it still. If I could step through the screen and live there, I would.

Built with my own paws

And yet, how much time do I spend there nowadays? Not much. Not enough. A little diplomacy here, a boat trip there. I visit when I remember. Even my house is packed up and stored away. Telon is so quiet now. Lonely, almost.

So it was a joy to see the Festival Square in Ahgram filled with people for the fifth anniversary party yesterday. Well, it was a joy when I finally found it. I didn't know Ahgram even had a Festival Square. I spent nearly forty minutes running around the dusty sun-drenched streets and flying above the flat, white roofs looking for fireworks and listening for the sounds of people having fun.

What can I say? Even though I've arrived at Ahgram by river many times, I never noticed the dockside gate. I always came in from the Khal side, where the Riftway stands beside the shipbuilders and the bindstone. I thought that was the main entrance. In the end I saw a flaming pegasus spiral down and I followed. I found the party at last but it seemed they were having a bit of a problem...

Kotosoth reacts badly when asked if he brought a bottle

There was a dragon in Ahgram.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a real dragon in Telon. When the highest level a character could reach was fifty I had two of them, a Raki Disciple and an Orc Dread Knight. Now the top level is fifty-five I still have two level fifties. The ultra-grind, raid-focused endgame that SoE chose to go with doesn't appeal to me, although it was probably a sensible choice given the limited resources available and the hardcore residue that remained after the general population boiled out.

I'm under there somewhere

This dragon was Kotosoth, who I believe normally lurks in the Ancient Port Warehouse. My little Raki had a wonderful time kicking the big lizard in the ankle for ten minutes while a slideshow played. Reminded me of beating on a Keep door in Dark Age of Camelot in 2002, only a lot more fun. Finally the dragon fell over and the party started up again.

Your correspondent as a chicken

There were some marvelous party games. We all got turned into chickens. And camels. And skeletons. And ghouls. I went to the bank and got some sparklers and smoke bombs. I even found some snowballs to throw. Several people had invited Slappy the Cool so there was much dancing to actual music. Plenty of people came in fancy dress. I saw someone in the cat illusion from the Shidreth Mines and I wanted to use mine but I couldn't remember where I'd put it. Still, just thinking about the time I got it made me smile.

Evolution took a different path on Telon...

Half an hour after the dragon died the crowd had begun to thin a little. I saddled up Randolph the Controversial Reindeer and flew out, all the way back to EQ2. But a few hours later I was back in Telon, killing rats in Ksaravi Gulch with my level 18 Raki Sorceror. A kill 50 rats quest and I stayed up until one in the morning to finish it and relished every single rat.

So, happy fifth birthday Vanguard and here's wishing you many, many more. And I promise to visit a lot more often than just once a year.

That Ain't Hay! : EQ2

2012-01-28T13:42:00.000Z

So, EQ2 makes 25% of its revenue from ponies. Alright, not just ponies. Tigers, wolves, rhinos, pegasi (no, wait, those are ponies), hover discs, clouds, dinosaurs... open up that little SC tab in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and out they tumble. Who knew there were so many?

Well, I didn't. I can't remember the last time I opened the Mount tab in the Station Store and I've never bought a mount in my life. Not for Station Cash, anyway, nor for any other convertible imaginary currency. I'm not against it in principle you understand, but really why would I want to? It's not like there aren't already a bazillion mounts I could get for free. I mean, look at this list!

Wanna see my 360?

And anyway, how many mounts does a person need? I was somewhat taken aback to find that my most fully-rounded character already has thirteen. That's eight or nine more than he ever uses. Most of the time he rides his zippy gnomish disc (for the looks and the bootleg turns). He's got a flying griffin under the hood for, uh... flying, and a Leaper in reserve for the rare no-fly zone where he might need to get to some inaccessible ledge. Like that happens every day!

That's the utilitarian view, though. Stand around the South Freeport bank for a few minutes, and you'll soon gather that utility is the last thing on some folks' minds. Posing about on a pink unicorn or a 12-foot tall armored warthog, getting in everyone's way seems to be the fashion. It's the Norrathian equivalent of the paseo. See and be seen. Although if anyone really wanted to express some genuine original thought they'd do better to stroll into the bank on foot.

Wait just a minute, Madam. I think I have a stepladder under here somewhere.

I guess it's easy enough to see how someone looking at all this posturing and preening might decide to cut to the chase and just buy a pony. And once you've opened that door, well, you can never have too many shoes, right? It's all a long way from where we started, that's for sure.

I remember my first Everquest mount. It was 2002 (I was late to Luclin) and it was a horse. It took me a good while to save up the thousands of platinum it cost and handing it over hurt. It was the most expensive purchase I'd ever made in EQ and I felt it in my imaginary pocket a lot more than I'd ever have noticed spending $20 out of my real one.

How is she doing that?

I got a horse, of course. It wasn't like I had a choice. Well, that's not entirely fair. I could have had a brown one or a slightly more brown one. Or a slightly less brown one, come to that. White or black? Dream on! I didn't have that kind of money. But never mind, I had a horse!

Yes, he lumbered around like a spavined seaside donkey. Yes he took what seemed like half an hour to get up to a canter (and even longer to come to a complete standstill so I could actually cast a spell). Yes, it was probably faster to get SoW and run somewhere than it was to ride. But when you rode you were sitting down. And when you were sitting down you were medding. For a priest or a caster, that trumped everything.

It's a rental.

After Luclin you never saw a cleric or a wizard on foot ever again. Which is pretty much the norm in every game now, only it's every class and it starts from day one. Of course, we all regenerate mana (or power or whatever it happens to be called today) in seconds these days but everyone still wants a mount, for two reasons: speed and status.

No-one wants to walk anywhere. Walking's for noobs. Read general chat in any starter area, any modern MMO and someone will be asking "Where do I get a mount?". Oh, and those ponies? The sparkly ones are for girls and the plain ones are for roleplayers! We want real mounts! Motorcycles, Elephants, 12-seater Dragons...

Or how about a "Classic Ford Car" ? (thanks to Carson for that tip).

Has it all gone too far? Probably. I used to feel my blood pressure rise when I saw a flying carpet cruising the mean streets of East Freeport. I got over that but I'm not sure I could recover if a retro Ford car passed me heading south on Justice Road. There's giving the customer what he wants and then there's saving him from himself. If there was ever a shark to jump, I think MMOs jumped it a decade ago, but even so, there has to be a line somewhere and wherever that line is drawn a Ford car's going to be on the far side of it.

Learning To Fly

2012-01-23T13:17:00.000Z

Tutorials. Don't you just hate them? Okay, okay! Leading question. I withdraw.

I do purely loathe tutorials though. There's no way round it, I just can't stand 'em. I appreciate that even though everyone in global chat is banging on about how every one of the dozens of MMOs they already played was way better than this current POS they just made the cardinal error of downloading, still every MMO must have at least one person playing who just started today and who never played an MMO before. I appreciate that though most MMOs look and play exactly like most other MMOs they are are all in fact utterly different and hardly like each other at all when you really think about it. Let alone when you don't think about it and let's face it, who really thinks when they play an MMO?

Moreover, I recognize that MMOs are ferociously over-complicated compared to almost any other form of popular entertainment. If you intend to make sense of the tottering stack of stats and skills, functions and commands in even the supposedly dumbedest-down (dumbed-downest?) MMO, the potential learning curve is a sheer cliff face looming over you. And up at the top of the cliff the hardcore seagulls circle, taking aim right at your eye.

Have Flares, Will Travel

Yes, I appreciate and recognize all of that. It's still no excuse for the existence of tutorials.

Wait, let me clarify. It's no excuse for the existence of tutorial zones. Separate instances where all the new players can ride around the play-park on their tricycles with the stabilizers down, caroming off the softened, rounded corners of the scenery, batting at the de-clawed, de-fanged herbivores in the petting zoo with their spongebats, while Captain Nanny of the Toytown Guard trails along behind reading out the rules from The Big Book of How To Play.

We're all endlessly arguing about sandboxes versus theme-parks here in MMO Blogland. It's always been something of a false dichotomy or at least a more granulated scale than the bipolar argument would have it and my position has always been that the sandbox is largely in your head and that just because your park has a theme doesn't mean you have hum along. Well, none of that applies to to tutorial zones.

Tutorial zones are the MMO boot camps where your individuality gets beaten out of you. Oh, its a nice, polite, gentle beating. No name-calling, no shouting, no having your bed turned upside down in the middle of the night, but that individuality has just got to go. You're not leaving the tutorial until you learn to be just like everybody else.

I remember when it was all buildings around here

There's a trick novelists use called in media res. Happens in movies too. Dumping you into the middle of the action and letting you figure things out for yourself. It runs the risk of alienating the audience but when it works it's dynamite because it makes you feel respected, trusted, intelligent. Like when your dad drops you in the deep end of the pool and calls it your first swimming lesson, only with less yelling when you come home and tell your mother and no one has to sleep in the spare room for a week.

And really no-one is going to drown because they couldn't figure out some gameplay mechanic in an MMO. Alright, if they fall off the raft from Halas to Everfrost and don't know about pushing the mouse forward while holding down the left mouse button and W on the keyboard simultaneously then yes someone might drown. Bad example. But it would only be a virtual drowning, and a barbarian to boot so, hey, no harm done, right?

It was a long trip Ma, but we made it! Me and Rocky outside Sanctum!

People that play MMOs are generally not complete idiots (go with me...). They had to be able to download and install the game and register an account. They have to be literate, since most of the instructions and communication in-game will be written down. (And with all due respect to TOR, having every quest voice-acted is not going to be the way of the future, for cost reasons if for no other). It seems to me that people who are able to do all that can be trusted to work out how to play the blasted game by playing it.

Hints, mouseover tips, introductory quests, helpful NPCs or companions, all fine. Adds to the gaiety of nations. Just put them in the same virtual space, virtual time-frame and if you possibly can manage it the same centre of population where everyone who started two hours before you has already arrived. Not in an exploding spaceship, not in a pocket dimension, not 20 years in the future or the past, not in an underground prison or on an island you'll never see again.

Is this Pay-and-Display or On Exit?

Just let us start as we mean to go on. And what brought all this on out of the blue, you may well be asking. I downloaded Star Trek Online and played through the tutorial yesterday, that's what. And it's not even a bad tutorial!

And relax...

2012-01-20T23:02:00.001Z

/wave SOPA and PIPA

Please don't come back!

Insert Pop Culture Quote Here: SW:TOR

2012-01-17T12:53:00.001Z

Star Wars: The Old Republic. Flavor of the month. Launch of the Year (last year but let's not quibble). Generator of hype and hatred in not at all equal measures. I'm not playing it and I don't really have any plans to. I don't rule it out, of course. When there's a free trial I might take a look, although since I never bothered with the beta I couldn't honestly claim cost was the barrier to entry in my case. If I see a cheap copy I'll probably pick it up, but whether it will ever get installed is another matter. My 99p copy of Age of Conan is still sitting on the bookcase with its pristine shrinkwrap intact.

Not Actual Copy

Despite my general lack of interest in all things Star Wars and TOR (I'm going to go with TOR. For months I've been typing "SW:tOR" and there's really no reason for it. No-one else does and it's not even the correct capitalization. I don't know now why I ever thought it was). That sentence got away from me. Let me start again. In fact, let's have a new paragraph and pretend this one never happened.

Despite my my general lack of interest in all things Star Wars and TOR in particular, I've read an awful lot about it. Hard not to when you have MMOs as a hobby. Just about every blogger I read has had something to say on the subject, even the ones who aren't playing it. Wilhelm and Potshot tried the beta and didn't like it enough to buy the game. Wilhelm actually cancelled his pre-order on the basis of what he saw when he lifted the velvet rope. SynCaine's been agin it from the start, naturally. Keen, Spinks and Syp are still playing with a mix of enthusiasm and enervation. Gordon's still playing but he thinks he won't be in a couple of months.

This week I noticed the first two drop-outs in my Reader. Melmoth at Killed In A Smiling Accident decided he'd already had his money's worth before the free 30 days were up and Kaozz at ECTmmo cancelled her account mostly because of technical issues getting the game to recognize that she had an account in the first place.

Back when the fire still burned

Not being a TOR player I hadn't been keeping count but I guess this is the week the first credit card payments go out. That's always a decision point. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I got Rift last year we went for the six-month subscription. First time I've ever done that in a new MMO. The deal on the 6 month sub was so good it seemed worth the risk and it was. We played nothing else until the end of the summer.

I'm not sure I can foresee that happening again. I'm not at all against the idea of recurring subscriptions but they do seem mighty inflexible now we've seen so many other options and the MMOs most likely to take collateral damage from the launch of new subscription MMOs would seem to be existing subscription MMOs. WoW took a visible hit from Rift, although it probably amounted more to a scratch in the paintwork than structural damage. Rift itself looks to have been holed beneath the waterline by TOR.

EQ2's move to an optional subscription model right at the time TOR launched is beginning to look more and more like a rare example of SoE getting a marketing decision right. The population boom on Freeport continues unabated. The door is wide open for anyone who left to pop right back in any time they like. As I noted the other day Trion appear to be gearing up for some kind of repopulation drive, putting the best face on things by freeing up "trial servers" rather than calling it a server merge (which it is).

I hope it goes well for them. They had a very good run for a while there but as Keen points out, patience is in short supply among MMO players nowadays. I wonder how long TOR's moment in the sun will last?

The Otter Potter

2012-01-16T11:44:00.000Z

Back when I was spending most of my time in Telara I wrote about how I'd learned to love dailies. I'm not playing Rift so much anymore but I have a new round of daily tasks thanks to Norrath's Adopt-an-Otter program.

December's Age of Discovery expansion brought many pleasures. You could design your own dungeon, fill it with cartoon characters from your childhood, then kill them. You could add a sparkly glow to your favorite shillelagh, take up a new career as beastlord or hire a mercenary to follow you around making smart remarks. Maybe best of of all, though, you could welcome an othmir into your very own home.

He sings, he stabs, he snarks

Who wouldn't want an othmir? It's a six-foot tall otter in a fez for heaven's sake! Back in beta there were no othmir, just Coldain dwarves, if you can believe it. Dour, creepy little guys, all frown and suspicious undead pallor. I wouldn't have one in the house. Not again. I learned my lesson with the Coldain Butler. Anyway, there were protests and thankfully the research program was expanded to include human females (quiet at the back there!) and othmir.

The prospective apprentices stand around outside the headquarters of the crafting societies in Freeport and Qeynos like country girls at a hiring fair. If you've a modicum of skill at any craft then with just a few words and no paperwork of any kind you can have your very own otter. If you want your very own dwarf I really don't want to know about it.

You can get your sandy feet off the upholstery for a start!

Othmir aren't just decorative either, although they surely are that. Your otter will spend day and night researching tirelessly on your behalf, asking nothing from you but your good advice. Oh, and repairs. Whenever I'm around, all my othmirs seem to do is stare into space and scratch themselves. Thinking deep thoughts, probably. They must do something while I'm out though because every day when I ask them if there's anything I can do help speed up their research I find they've broken something or worn something out.

On average they seem to get through a leather apron or a toolbelt every four or five days. A wooden mallet lasts them no longer, no more does a knife. How do you wear out a leather apron in four days? How do you wear out a toolbelt at all? I don't ask. I just head off to to the woodworking bench or the forge or the loom and make whatever they need.

Every day I do this. Each of my crafting characters begins the day by offering an otter the benefit of his or her experience and then repairing whatever the otter broke the night before. Doing these two things both helps the research go faster and gets me a little otter bonus when he hands me back a Pouch of Unused Materials.

The things those otters don't use! Sometimes it's a pile of seahorse roe that I can only imagine fell out of his lunchtime sandwich. Often it's a very useful potion. Best of all, and not that infrequently either, it's a Reactant. Reactants are the secret ingredient needed to make the wonderful items the apprentices research. You can get them from powerful creatures around Norrath but I've had a lot more handed to me by my otter as surplus to his requirements.

Level 60. LEVEL 60!!

All of which brings me to the items themselves. Considering I'm the skilled craftsman and the othmir are the apprentices it's astounding how good the ideas they come up with turn out to be. Every single recipe they hand me makes something better than anything I could have hoped to make without their research. It'll be my name on the product when I get around to making it, though. And so it should be. It's right and proper for the master to take credit for the apprentice's labor after all. That's the way these things are done.

My crafting books are filling up with wonderful new recipes as I do my daily Otter Potter. It's relaxing, amusing, satisfying and highly worthwhile. Best of all, my otters seem to have a truly vast store of new ideas that need looking into. Going to be a long time before these othmir finish their apprenticeships. Well, it will if I have any say in it.

Last Stop, Everybody Off!

2012-01-14T13:24:00.000Z

A couple of news items turned up in my reader yesterday and started me thinking. Rift decided to flag some servers for "large scale trial programs" and asked everyone on them if they wouldn't kindly mind leaving and Gods and Heroes went F2P.

I've done quite a few betas over the years and I'd become used to having one or two icons on my desktop that offered me something for nothing but my time and goodwill. When it came to playing a game full-time and having ownership of my characters, though, I knew I'd have to put my virtual hand in my virtual pocket and come up with a credit card number. That had an obvious downside: I only have so much money so I could only justify subscribing to one or two MMOs at a time. Which was also the upside: the subscription fee acted as a kind of quality control.

Back when I began playing MMOs trying a new one meant buying a box and paying every month if you wanted to stick with it. That wasn't so much of a problem because there weren't that many MMOs to try and every new one that came along was something of an event in itself. It was worth shelling out just to say you'd been there when it happened.

Shadefallen - last Defiant out please turn off the lights

A few years on there were a lot more MMOs and few people would have wanted to stump up cash just to try them all. How lucky we were that free trials turned up, then! What a co-incidence! Free trials meant a week or two of low-level play to give you a taste of a game in the hope you'd buy the box and sub if you got hooked. That was better in some ways, because you knew going in you'd probably be done with the game before the trial ended and you wouldn't have wasted a penny. Still, there was the nagging worry that the new game might sink its claws in and you'd be stuck paying after all, which acted as some sort of a brake.

Millrush - lalala! We can't hear you!

Now there are hundreds of MMOs and most of them don't ask for any money at all. There's all kinds, too. Fantasy, Science Fiction, Super Heroes, Funny Animals, Crime. It's like being at the comic store all over again. And quite a lot of them are good. Good enough that once upon a time they thought they'd be able to sell you a box and charge you a monthly fee. Only that didn't work out so well, or maybe it didn't work out as badly as all that but even so the other guys who'd dropped the fee were doing even better... Whatever, everyone went whaling.

Faeblight - There goes the neighborhood...

All of which brings me back to Rift and Gods and Heroes. Scott Hartsman nailed his colors to the subscription mast a long time back. In fact he pretty much scrambled up after them and nailed himself up there as well. I sense a retrenchment in recent months, however. It's going to be awfully painful if he has to pull out those nails and climb back down, but he's leaving clear wiggle-room with his "Right now, absolutely no plans whatsoever" reply to Eurogamer back in November when they asked if Rift had any contingency plans to move away from subs.

Rift's done well with its subscription model, though. Can't argue that. If one day it does flip over and go Free to Play (and I'd bet it will although probably later rather than sooner) Trion can expect a massive surge of interest and publicity and a tsunami of returning exes. It's a solid gold game and it will be around for a long time. How it raises funds is the least interesting thing about it.

So? I can buy those and put them on a rat!

Gods and Heroes on the other hand never really got off the ground. I was in the beta and I could never even get the client to run. Sentiment was strongly against the game even being ready to launch when it did, let alone charging both a box fee and a subscription. When I saw the Massively article yesterday my first thought was "Is that thing still going?" Now it's free to play, will I try it? Well, there's a nominal fee for the client, so not yet. But even if that last barrier wasn't standing in my way, then no I probably wouldn't.

STO : You can walk about! Outdoors even!

Because I just don't have the time! This is the thing about all these great MMOs moving away from the old pay to play deal. Now I have all these extra games I could be playing but no-one gave me any more hours in the day. On my list of AAA F2P MMOs that I haven't yet even tried out yet there's Age of Conan, City of Heroes and Lineage2, with Star Trek Online due in a few days and Aion next month. Any one of those would justify a full month of concentrated play just to decide if it was worth carrying on.

Here's the thing. I'm paying to play Rift right now and I'm still not logging in. Forget Free-to-Play, I'll be happy if more games just go Free-to-Forget-to-Play !

Are You Going To Be In There All Day?

2012-01-09T21:20:00.001Z

Our little guild on Freeport now has a Guild House. We've been of a level to take a Guild Hall for quite a while now and the idea gets booted around every so often but there's never been sufficient enthusiasm to take it any further. Mrs Bhagpuss and I are wary of taking on any virtual responsibility and the thought of having to farm even the small amount of Status a basic Guild Hall requires is enough to ensure we never make a purchase.

We have some people who aren't us in the guild now, though and it would be nice to have a place to hang out sometimes, so when we were having our discussion this time I suggested a compromise. We're each entitled to a free Mistmoore Crags Estate Prestige House as a Seven-Year Veteran Award. Actually, we're entitled to lots of them since they come "one per character". It's unaccountably generous and yet strangely unexciting offer and until yesterday we'd never claimed a single Vampire Castle. I thought we could grab one and use it as a Guild House.

Dear Auntie Enid, The weather isn't all we'd hoped...

So that's what we did and we'll see how it works out. There's an awful lot of decorating to do, not least since the first thing we did was break out and plant our metaphorical Guild Banner in Loping Plains. We really should get a Guild Banner, come to think of it...

But before we made the final decision I went off and read up on just what you get if you have a real Guild Hall in EQ2. I was appalled! There have been guild halls since EQ2 started but if I've ever been in a guild that had one I can't recall it. I've rarely been inside one. I knew they'd been tarted up over the years and now have a whole raft of "amenities" but I had only the vaguest understanding of what those amenities were. They are these. (Or is that "these are they"? I can never remember how that goes).

That's pretty much every reason you'd ever want to go into a city. Is it any wonder the cities died? Is it any wonder it's taken a full revamp and a ton of additional content to draw a scattering of players back to add some life to the streets, squares and docksides of Freeport? It's one thing to offer guilds a nice big meeting hall where they can hold disciplinary hearings and dinner-dances among the tastefully plinthed and polished skulls of the many dragons they've slain but who ever thought it was a good idea to add in every other facility that might induce any of them to set foot in the shared part of the world ever again?

This is just part of the perennial, long-debated problem of instancing. WoW, which has no housing Guild or otherwise, has cities full to bursting with people. That the cities have the ambience of a metropolitan bus-station just after the pubs have closed is by-the-by. At least they're busy. Thinking about it, maybe that's not such a great argument.

Don't you hate it when mothers dress them all the same?

As ever there's a balance to be struck. The cities need to bustle. New players need to see crowds of other people around them, doing mysterious things they don't yet understand with objects they don't yet recognize, racing past in their fancy gear on their sparkling unicorns and clockwork chickens, trailing a comet's tail of unfeasibly cute and terrifying pets as they race who knows where on who knows what Important Mission.

Established players need a place of their own to get away from all of that.

It's a difficult balance, yes, but it has to be found. I hope we're doing our bit for the Greater Good of Norrath by resisting the temptation to set up our own City-State and settling instead for a nice big house where we can throw fruitcake at each other occasionally while we dance on the patio to the sound of our Snow Globes.

Does This Door Open Both Ways? : EQ2

2012-01-06T12:10:00.000Z

In the comments on Milo's story Gamingsf asked whether the Isle of Refuge still exists. Well, yes it does and it's funny you should ask because that was what I had intended to talk about all along until Milo got in on the act. And I was thinking about the Isle of Refuge in the first place because of something that relates to the earlier Dungeon Maker post. I don't just throw this stuff together, you know. Well, not all the time.

When SoE announced they were going to remove the Isle of Refuge there was an outcry. The thread on the official forums ran over 80 pages. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about why the island was going away, even some heavy hints that it would tie into some kind of ongoing storyline. More than hints. A dev called Cronyn popped up on the thread to reassure us there was Something Going On:

"Also, just to be clear, there is a lore reason for this as well. The decision to turn off the islands is a functional one, to be sure, but it is also supported by storyline, which is something I am hoping to start giving out to you here soon. There are NPC’s in place in both cities who should actually be handing out the first clues right now on Test, so if you’d like to start piecing together what is happening, you should be able to get started ".

There was some talk of a Far Seas blockade. Never happened. Some NPCs popped up on the East Freeport docks doing the old rhubarb rhubarb routine but if anything more ever came of this "storyline" I must have been somewhere else at the time. Telara perhaps.

I have better things to do with my time. Oh, wait. No I don't.

Player hysteria went unheeded. The Isle of Refuge ceased to be available to new characters. If you had a character camped out there, though, you could still log in whenever you liked. And you still can. I logged Milo on to take screenshots earlier this week and ended up playing him for a couple of hours.

It was while I was browsing the Dungeon Maker Leaderboard that an odd notion occurred to me. You can enter the Dungeon Maker from anywhere in Norrath (except a private instance) and when you finish you reappear exactly where you were. Could a character on the Isle of Refuge enter Dungeon Maker dungeons from the leaderboard and level up there, returning at the end of each adventure to his isolated island home?

Well, I still don't know. I'd love to find out, but not at the risk of losing my toehold on the past. If anyone else who has a character on the Isle would dare to try the experiment and report back I'm sure we'd all be excited to hear the result.

All of which brings me on to the Dungeon Maker itself. Since last I wrote about it Mrs Bhagpuss and I have managed to get our hands on several more "activators". That's the peculiar name given to the drops that give you a new Adventurer. We've been running through some player-made dungeons using these dropped Adventurers.

They come in Treasured, Legendary and Fabled flavors and all the ones I've seen are Heirloom. Haven't seen a tradeable one yet and there are none on the broker so I'm gussing that if you want one you have to go out and find one. Which is nice. (Or you could always buy one in the Station Store for Marks or money, but where's the fun in that?).

I'm a Valkyrie. We don't feel the cold, alright?

I haven't yet been able to work out if the Treasured/Legendary/Fabled tag relates to the rarity of the drop or to the effectiveness of the adventurer, but one thing I can tell you, these guys are tough! Using them to duo a dungeon where we'd previously died several times we didn't just not die at all, we were barely scratched. Solo I was able to handle six mobs at a time with a dropped adventurer where the basic one struggled on a pull of more than three.

A close examination of their abilities doesn't seem to show that much of a difference, so maybe there's something going on under the hood. Whatever's it is I like it and I'll be looking to collect as many as I can.

Last Rat Standing: EQ2

2012-01-02T12:29:00.000Z

Frostfell is over. A new year's coming in. Everyone's looking to the future, wondering what change will come. Not Milo. Milo knows nothing ever changes.

Oh, it used to. Once upon a time there were so many people Milo seldom had time even to learn their names. The Far Journey would sail into harbor with Nyles at the helm. Ingrid would chivvy the bedraggled refugees into line while Captain Varlos looked on.

Milo would watch them all as they straggled up the beach, bewildered but you could see the hope in their eyes. These were the lost who'd been found. For refugees with nothing but the rags they stood in and the few meager items in their pitiful backpacks they always seemed to be in an awful hurry, Milo thought. And to have an enormous amount of energy.

From the first moment they came up the path into the Setlement, there they'd be. Taking instructions from the trainers, asking the guards for work, firing questions at anyone who'd listen. Then they'd be off through the great arches and Milo would see them only now and again, running back to make their reports, opening accounts at the bank with the few coppers they'd taken from the purses of the Qeynosians they'd downed, queuing up at the handful of merchants to sell sundered obsidians or the bones of the undead.

Lucan's men were generous. Lucan made it so. Milo watched as the raggle-taggle refugees turned into well-armored, capable fighters or flamboyant mages. Some came up from the crafting hall beneath the high tower, blinking in the strong island light, the sun glinting from chainmail newly-forged by their own hands.

In just a few days most were lining up again at the docks, ringing the bell and stepping aboard the Far Journey once again. Freeport bound. Lucan's great city welcomed all who were willing to bend the knee to him and work for the benefit of all.

Some lingered. The island was small but there was much to do, much to learn and explore. Some wanted to be the best they could be, to give themselves every advantage before stepping into Freeport's notorious, unforgiving streets. Others wanted to enjoy the soft grass, the bright sun and the cheap Ebb Tide Ale for a while. In the end, though, they all left.

All except Milo. Milo made the Isle of Refuge his home. He had the best armor, the finest jewellery, the most delicious food. He'd learned to find and make everything he needed. He'd explored the island from bay to bay, knew every byway like the back of his paw. There was nothing, living or undead, on the island that he feared and nowhere he dared not go.

Why would he trade such a life for an uncertain future in an unknown land? One day, perhaps, a fine ratonga girl with sleek chestnut fur and dark, dark eyes would step down from the Far Journey. The ragged hem of her sea-soaked dress might catch a splinter of broken board as she stepped ashore and Milo would be there to catch her before she fell.

So Milo dreamed. Then one day without warning the refugees stopped coming. Oh, Milo had noticed for a long while that there were always fewer, day by day, but always, every day, some came.

No more. Captain Varlos was curt. "That's all done with. Now, are you coming aboard or not? What are you waiting for? There's nothing for you here. Time to move on".

But Milo had waited too long. And if truth be told, he was still content. Yes, the refugees were gone, but Lucan's men remained. All the guards and trainers that he'd come to know so well. Callus Magnus and Kurgle Frogbane, always sparring in Ebb Tide's bar, always happy to take a break and sink a few of the gnome's fine ales. Arthur Merrin, who'd taught Milo to craft. All Milo's friends were there, and who, after all, did he know in Freeport? Or who knew him?

The Far Journey never seems to sail now. She sits at the dockside, Captain Varlos looking to shore. Milo knows who he's looking for and sometimes he feels a pang of guilt. That fine ship and her crew bound to shore because of him and him alone.

One day, perhaps, Milo will ring the bell, step aboard and let Varlos cast off for the last time. One day, perhaps. But not today.

New Year, New Dungeon: EQ2

2011-12-31T12:52:00.000Z

As I write this there are nine hundred and sixty one published player-made dungeons on the Freeport server. Really, who thought it would be this popular? Apart from EQ2 producer Smokejumper, of course. He loves the Dungeon Maker so much he was on the official forums answering threads about it on Christmas Day.

So, there are a lot of them already. Less than a month in and we have nearly a thousand on one server alone. We're down with quantity, how's quality? Well, that's the hard part, isn't it? In a way, your guess is as good as mine, because I can only tell you what I've seen and so far I've played through maybe a dozen.

This is what I know. First you have to decide who you want to be because you can't be you. You choose from a list of "Adventurers" who appear to have been drawn from the dregs of the Norrathian underworld. The default selection offers a Drolvarg, a Drachnid, a Siren and a couple more ne'er-do-wells that you're more familiar with seeing on the other end of your sword. You can add to this selection with Adventurers that drop in chests around Norrath. (That's a sentence almost devoid of semantic content in the outside world). Mrs Bhagpuss got a very nice Ettin in The Feerrott and he seemed significantly more powerful than the regular tank adventurer.

Each of the Adventurers fills a traditional role - tank, healer, dps, utility and so on. They each have four abilities and autoattack. They are all level 50. It takes about 30 seconds at the most to get the hang of any of them. Once everyone's pressed the big "Ready" button, off you go.

What happens next varies wildly. Players made these things, you know!. Every one is different. Well, kinda. I didn't mention layout yet. Makers only get a relatively small number of set layouts to work with. Something like four or five subsets of each of four themes - Crushbone, Mistmoore, Chardok and Lair of Scale. Some people don't seem to be doing much more than throwing down some mobs and calling it a day, but in most of the ones I've done, even the least ambitious, there's been some creativity on show.

Did I leave my umbrella somewhere?

I've already seen several really impressive decorative efforts. I was expecting that, given the astonishing work that's been done over the years in EQ2's housing instances. Almost anything you can place in a house you can place in a dungeon and it really is about time SoE added a Kitchen Sink recipe for Carpenters because some people are already using everything but.

What's apparent already, though, is that the Dungeon Maker is attracting people whose creativity lies in areas other than decorating. Like comedy. More specifically, puns and satire (I use the term loosely. Very loosely). You can name all the mobs you place and give them a number of different things to say. It's been a surprise to me to discover just how many Norrathian creatures watched 1970s sitcoms and know the lyrics of hits from the Golden Age of Doo-Wop.... Tells you something about the age profile of the average EQ2 player...

The family that slays together...

So, some of the dungeons look good and some of them raise a laugh (or the hackles on a roleplayer) but how do they play as dungeons? Again, they're made by players, remember. Some play wonderfully smoothly, a joy to fight through. Others maybe not so much.

The Dungeon Maker is designed to scale with the number of players in the group. If you go in solo then the dungeon is automatically a solo dungeon. If there are six of you it's the full Heroic. The way this scaling happens is very basic. The mobs just get tougher according to how many players there are. So far I've only done them solo and duo and the difficulty setting of the mobs has been the same in both: even-level "No Arrows" mobs with a smattering of "One Arrow" and the occasional yellow-con boss. I usually play the Drolvarg, who I think might be a Guardian (hard to tell with only four combat arts to look at) and he easily ploughs through anything up to four mobs at a time.

I was having a small discussion with Stargrace over at MMOQuests about this. It seems to me that all dungeons are all soloable by default. There is no penalty at all for dying and you are often back in the fight faster after a death than you might have been if you'd won and had to heal up (although that only takes a few seconds). Consequently you can wear down by attrition anything the creator throws at you simply because your Adventurer respawns and his mobs don't.

/shout Derv 2 is CAMPED !!!

Whether a dungeon is enjoyable to solo is another matter entirely. That's down to the player who made it. Another Dungeon Maker surprise has been what a huge difference placement and pacing makes to otherwise identical dungeon layouts. It should be obvious but it's very clear that some people get it and others don't. I played one last night where the creator had chosen to put the word "solo" in brackets at the end of the name on the Leaderboard. It's just as well I was doing it in a duo, because about eight mobs attacked us before we could step off the zone-in point and both of our Adventurers were almost dead before we dispatched the final rat.

Enough with the minutiae already! Are the damn things any good? Are they fun? Are they worthwhile? Are you enjoying them?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Some of the dungeons are just laugh-out-loud funny. I really enjoyed "Everquest 1999", unsurprisingly and the T.V. and Dr Seuss themed ones had me loling. Some have been well-paced, fast hack-and-slash romps that have kept my attention focused and left me satisfied. Some have handed me a whole AA and a thick purse of Dungeon Marks (the currency that buys you some very nice stuff for your regular character) and some have had me exploring and taking screenshots after the mobs were cleared just because the set design was so impressive.

I'm guessing the one on the right is winning.

Dungeon Maker dungeons are a Lucky Dip. There are hundreds to choose from, you can do one in anything from ten minutes to an hour and a half, you can go alone or with friends and anyone can group regardless of level. The quality varies wildly but the Like system will winnow the chaff. In the end we should be left with the gems that combine excellent playability with great art direction, witty dialog and a compelling plot. I've played one or two that are almost there already.

Build them and we will come.

Happy Happy Christmastime

2011-12-24T21:11:00.000Z

Wishing you all a very merry Fae Yule. Or Frostfell. Or Christmas.

Presents for everyone!

A Big Glasgow Kiss Under The Mistletoe!

The Snow's Falling Down

Now We Know Where The Corgi Came From

Best. Christmas. Song. Ever.

She Says "Christmas", Alright?

One Man Army. Cor! : EQ2

2011-12-19T14:26:00.000Z

There are several super-hero MMOs. I played in the CoH beta which seems like a hundred years ago now. Then there's Champions Online, which I played for a whole weekend when it went F2P. And DCUO, of course. Still playing there once in a while.

If I really want to be a superhero, though, I don't go to any of those. I fire up EQ2, log in a high-level character and head to the Chronomages.

Can't we at least get a counter?

Ah, the Chronomages! Just who are these mysterious men in robes? They appeared out of nowhere one day and set up shop in the great cities, offering a new and wonderful service. Before they appeared, if you wanted to lower your level you had to find an actual person who was already the level you wanted to be and actually group with them in the actual place you wanted to adventure! I know! How primitive was that?!

The Chronomages know a better way. It's taken them a lifetime to master, but they have acquired the magic of time and it's powerful. They'll tell you that much if you ask nicely. They aren't so lippy about why they've chosen to use this powerful magic to start a dockside novelty goods business but everyone's got to earn a living and quilted robes don't come cheap.

Build a collection your whole family will envy

For the nominal fee of 5 gold pieces (and a hundred status points, which you can acquire by killing the odd goblin or small verminous animal on behalf of the authorities) the Chronomages will reduce you to any level lower than where you are now, providing it ends in a zero or a five. They're pernickety that way. It's a mage thing.

They seem to think they are sending you back in time, what with the whole chrono vibe they have going on, but it's more like they condense you until you become as hard as a diamond. You keep all your gear and abilities, all your AAs, everything. Only now it's supposed to have been scaled down.

Actual Level 30

90 mentored 30

The numbers are smaller, it's true. But in many, most of the places where the numbers go an actual character of that level might have no numbers at all. The upshot is a level 90 mentored to level 30 isn't just a superhero, he's Superman. And there's no Kryptonite on Norrath. As a mentored-down level 90 you can pull several rooms full of goblins in a level 30 dungeon and sort your bags while you riposte them to death. Or you could just fire a few AEs and finish them off in seconds.Chance of you getting hurt? Zero.

I'm in there somewhere

I'm not complaining about this. Far from it. It's a whole lot of fun and extremely useful for farming all kinds of things. Provided the player is sensitive to the circumstances of other people trying to use open dungeons or better yet restricts his superheroing to instances, then it's a perfectly acceptable part of EQ2 play. Chronomagic as it currently features should definitely stay in the game for soloists. What it isn't any use at all for, though, is grouping with other people.

Yes, your level 80 character can nominally drop to the right level to group with your friend who just started and wants to go to Fallen Gate for the first time. Just so he doesn't expect to do anything. He doesn't even get to play Robin to your Batman. That would at least be an adventure. No, he gets to be Jimmy Olsen to your Superman. The most he can do is take some photos and try not to get killed by flying golem parts. Oh, and pick up the loot. Always need someone along for that.

Stand back and leave it to me

EQ2 needs a proper mentoring system. One where you can drop to the effective level of your partners, not just the numerical. And voila, here comes Age of Discovery to offer us something that does allow players of wildly differing levels to play together on exactly equal terms: the Dungeon Maker. It's also far from ideal, but at least it's a move in the right direction.

Turn him over, he's almost done

With the coming of the Age of Discovery a level 90 in full raid gear can group with a level 5 on his first morning if they choose to do a player-made dungeon together. As soon as they zone in they will each be level 50. They'll have a range of custom avatars to choose from, each of which has four abilities. Takes about ten seconds to work out who does what and off you go. But you aren't you and that's going to be a problem long-term.

The Dungeon Maker is a great addition to the game and has huge potential, some of which you can already see being fulfilled, but it's still not a way to group your character in a meaningful way with your friend's much lower character. That's a nut that still needs to be cracked.

More on the Dungeon Maker next time.

Are You Still Playing That Old Thing?

2011-12-17T17:56:00.001Z

EQ2 EQ2 EQ2 ! Does he never think of anything else? Well, sometimes...

MMOs I am playing a bit

Rift

Logged in twice this week. Did a couple of dailies on my Defiant Pyro/Chloro. Tried an Instant Adventure and found myself in a Raid of one person - me. Disbanded from myself and joined a real raid to do a zone invasion in Stillmoor. Enjoyed myself a lot. Good chance I will play again over the weekend.

Guild Wars

Logged in once this week. Explored a couple of Explorable Areas. Didn't die as much as usual. Oohed and aahed a lot at the scenery. Finished one quest. Fair chance I will play again next week.

Eden Eternal

Logged in to check out the new races. Didn't like them. Ran around being a mouse for a while. Decided Eden Eternal will be my NeoSteam replacement. Likely to be a while before I play again.

Runescape

Finally made an account. Only about a decade late but never mind. Did a bunch of starter quests. So nice to have a "tutorial" that is in the actual game-world. Runescape is clearly a game I could have invested in heavily a few years ago. May still give it a run.

It's settling!

MMOs I am thinking about playing, but not actually playing

Everquest

Thought about logging in and leveling up my Necro on the Progression server. Thought about playing my Beastlord. Thought about doing some AAs on my Druid. Had a bit of a nostalgic daydream. Didn't log in.

DCUO

Thought about making a PvE character. Thought about the alleged 5GB update. Didn't log in.

Vanguard

Thought about getting all my stuff out of escrow and rebuilding my house now that Vanguard has a dev team again. Lost the will to live just thinking about doing that. Didn't log in, although I did the week before to do some Diplomacy, which I might do more of soon. Soonish.

The proud homeowner in happier days

Dragon Nest

Thought about logging in. Couldn't remember my account or password details. Couldn't be bothered to look them up. Didn't log in.

LotRO

Thought about doing some seasonal stuff. Thought twice. Didn't log in.

Allods

Thought about starting a Gibberling (some Gibberlings. They come in packs of three). Remembered how long it takes to level in Allods. Didn't log in.

My house? Da! Of course is my house!

MMOs I am thinking about playing, but not thinking very hard

Ryzom, Aika, Crowns of Power, Fallen Earth, Final Fantasy XIV

MMOs I can no longer play even if I was thinking of playing, which I was in a vague kind of way

Star Wars Galaxies, NeoSteam

MMOs I am not even thinking of playing any time soon, if ever, or ever again (delete as applicable)

Star Wars: the Old Republic, WoW, EVE

MMOs I would be playing if they were finished, which they aren't. Yet

Guild Wars 2, Everquest Next

Coming Soon - more stuff about EQ2!

The Village Green Preservation Society (Freeport Chapter): EQ2

2011-12-13T20:03:00.002Z

I was going to get Furglebin to give his thoughts on the new, instanced versions of Freeport's villages (or " 'hoods" as the EQ2 dev team has somewhat embarassingly chosen to start calling them ). Furglebin never saw the original versions, though so he's going to have to keep his thoughts to himself for a while and let me compare old with new.

So far I've seen behind the gates of Temple Street, Beggars Court and Scale Yard. Some of us who've been around Norrath for a few years now had built up quite a store of affection for those villages. Before the Age of Discovery arrived there were requests for one of the old zones to be kept open for nostalgia's sake, so we could go on living in the village Inn and pass on Lucan's unusually generous offer to have his personal housemovers (I forget whether they're trolls or ogres) move all our precious stuff to the ever-unpopular Jade Tiger in North Freeport. Or as we must learn to call it, the North of Freeport. No zoneism under the Overlord's enlightened rule.

Gnomish equations. Who knew?

Failing that, people asked, could we have a nostalgia tour, where we'd be whisked around the old zones on a look-but-don't-touch trip. Maybe on a Maj'Dul carpet, since the many pleas for a Sedan Chair mount continue to go unheard. But no, there was to be no last-minute reprieve. All six villages were converted into Instances, their high, ironbound gates firmly locked to those without the requisite quest in their journal.

A few weeks ago I went round my favorites (Temple Street, Beggars Court, Big Bend) using EQ2's spiffy newish in-game video option to make my own documentary on the Way We Lived. I'm quite glad I did because the new villages are very different and it'll be nice in a few years to look back at the good old days, but if I had in mind that the villages might be ruined, or just wasted, I needn't have worried.

Norrath, Doctor? Are you certain?

All three of the villages I've seen so far look very much as they did. They're immediately recognizable as the same places, the zone architecture largely unchanged. What's really changed is that the villages have come alive.

Yes, isn't it weird? All the characters controlled by living people have been booted out, leaving only computer-controlled NPCs and yet the villages feel more vibrant, more lived-in, more "real" than ever before. In Temple Street, where gnomes and ratongas always lived an uneasy, uncomfortable truce, the removal of any need to pander to commerce with players has freed both sides to give fullest expression their shared technological insanity. Clockwork excrescences have appeared on the buildings like barnacles on a boat and tin men walk the streets where pigs frolicked. It's like Ak'Anon with added ratonga.

Beggar's Court, longtime den of minor ganglords, thugs and receivers of stolen goods, has made full use of the meridian wall that was always its signature. Below, indentured craftsmen whipped straight from the refuge boats (those are still coming? Really?) slave at the forges and workbenches, while above the gangmasters lounge around tables laden with roasted poultry (looking suspiciously like Vulrich), drinking ale beneath the newly-planted palms.

A gnome would not be my first choice for Prison Cook.

Scale Yard is a prison. The Freeport Militia have annexed it and filled it with surly and unruly "criminals" and many of the inmates and the guards seem to be Iksars and Sarnaks. Hence the name. And once again there's a table groaning with food and ale for the Overlord's favored to enjoy.

The stories are pretty good, the small segments I've seen so far. The Beggar's Court one was actually too morally disturbing for even my "evil" ratonga characters. If it goes on the way it started I'll have to skip that one with the rats and let my Iksar Necromancer and Troll Shadowknight take over. One way or another, though, I'm going to explore these new villages and their stories. There's more going on than I ever knew and much more than I expected.

Furglebin's Journal 2 : EQ2

2011-12-12T13:15:00.000Z

So now I am in Freeport. It is so big, with towers floating in the air and flames everywhere that never burn outs. The guards are a lot meaner than the ones in Darklight Woods but they still want everyone to do all sorts for thems, even little rats that just got here and hardly know wheres anything is. They just stand abouts looking puffed-up and shouting orders so I am getting plenty of work.

Really, I am not so little now. Well, I have not got any tallers but I am more of a Beastlord, very nearly a whole ones I think. I can spot when Tiger finds a weakness in what we are fighting and I can take advantage ofs that. I am starting to get really fired up when that happens too and feeling all savage and sometimes I can do really amazing stuff! Not all that oftens though 'cos by the time I am ready what I am fighting has generally dropped dead.

Nice pet - for a warlock...

I have tamed loads of animals too and now Tiger can put his spirit into bats, bears, birds, dogs, rats, watery animals (not fish though) and cows! For a long time he was a very sick deer, which was a bit weird but then I tamed a cow and he turned into that instead. Not that having a cow fighting next to mes is exactly what I call normal...

Turns out that he can remember how to be quite a lot of different kinds of animal but he can only remember how to look like the last one of each kinds that I tamed. So if I want him to look like a sick deer again (not that I am likely to, but if I dids...) then I have to go back and tame a sick deer all over again. Then every time I ask him to be a bovid (I dunno either, that's just what is written in this book I got called my Knowledge Book, which is a magic book where stuff gets written when I learn it without me actually getting my pencil out from behinds my ear. And don't ask me where the book came from. I just woke up with it) then he turns into one that looks like a sick deer.

You should see the dam!

At the moment he is being a giant beaver, which is getting me all kinds of respect in Freeport, which is a place where a small ratonga needs all the respect he can gets, believe me. People keep asking me where did I get the big beaver and I tell them he is froms Nektulos Forest and that is a real forest, not like Darklight Woods.It is trees everywhere and nearly too dark to see where you are going so you are always running into spiders and wolves and everything bites or stings, even plants.

Some gnome at the Fair in Darklight Woods sents me there to see his daughter 'cos she has been gone ages and he is waiting for her to bring him owlbear eggs for some scam he has running. I find her alright but what she wants me to do is just too embarrassing even to write in my journal. I got a pet baby owlbear out of it and that's all I am saying.

You can plant all the palms you want but it's still a slum

Anyway, after that I am pretty much out of work in Darklight Woods. Someone wants me to go to somewhere called Butcherblock Mountains but I have to sit on some huge catbird that looks like it is more likely to tip me off halfway and have me for an in-flight meal than get me to the other side of the ocean in one piece so I pass on thats for now. Maybe when I am bigger.

Everyone is talking about Freeport and how it is the happening place now the big boss came backs, so even though I can't find anyone wanting messages taken there or anything, off I go. And like I said at the start, now I am in Freeport, just getting ready to write abouts my adventures in Temple Street and Beggars Court except now the trumpet is blowing for the hourly execution and I got to go watch so that will just have to wait for next time!

Furglebin's Journal 1 : EQ2

2011-12-09T10:34:00.001Z

So anyway I wake ups this morning in some tiny little village with a huge tiger lookin' at mes. Not a good starts to the day for anyone, really but specially not for a ratonga, what with cats and rats not getting on all that well at the best of times. Even when the cat is not a flippin' ginormous tiger and the rat is a much bigger ratonga than wot I ams (I have always been small for my age) you do nots want to wake up with one starin' at you.

I'm just looking for something to hide under when I get this idea in my head that this tiger is not just any ol' tiger. Apparently he is my Warder, which is some spirit that has decided to follow me about and turn me into a Beastlord. I don't know how I know thats. It's all a bit fuzzy if I am honest (which I'm nots, since, well, ratonga!). I don't seem to remember where I was before I woke up nor what I dids to get a Warder. I call him Tiger, by the way, cos it suits him and it is easy to remembers.

Get to the points, Furglebin. Focus!

A well-fed warder is a happy warder. Paws crossed.

Okay, start again. I am going to write down my thoughts about learning to be a Beastlord so that if one day I wake ups somewhere I never saw before and can't remember how I got there or hardly even who I am, I can just read my Journal and then I will know.

I am in this village like I said and all sorts is going ons. Guards in armor are yelling and there are these little earth elementals all over the place. Next thing I know I have been drafted in to sort it all outs. Well, why me? That is a good question! I mean, they are guards in armor with swords but they are getting a tiny ratonga in ordinary clothes to do all the stuff what you would think a guard is paid to do. Maybe it is cos I got this massive tiger looking at thems over my shoulder...

It's all about the cloak

I'm a bit scared if I am am honest (I already explained the problem with me saying that ...) but it turns out that I am much tougher than I look! And Tiger is just as tough as he looks like he is, which is very tough indeeds. Everything the guards ask us to do we do really, really easily and it is brilliant fun! If this is being a Beastlord then I think I am going to enjoy it a lot.

The guards send me on to talk to some more people. Every second person I meet seems to have work they want doing and no-one seems to want to do any of it himselfs. The more jobs I do for people, the more they recommend me to other people and before long I am Johnny Fix-It for this place, wot I now know is called Darklight Woods (although if it is a wood then I cannot see where all the trees are. Looks more like Darklight Common to mes).

The pay is pretty good and people keep giving me armor and weapons as well. Lots of the jobs are about killing stuff, mostly animals and undeads and elementals, so not like real people (although after a bit there is some trouble with some Thexians but apparently they are always making troubles so it is just as well to kill them before they starts). I can keep anything they drop too, and they drop all sorts of nice things.

Are you in there, Tiger?

Fighting so much makes me get tougher very fast and I learn lots of new moves and tricks. The best trick I learn is how to tame animals and make them into Warders. Takes a bit of getting the hang ofs, this one. First I have to concentrate to see wot animals are tameable. Then I have to bash them until they know who is boss. Then when they know I tames them and when they are tame I can have them as warders.

Except what I think is that I only have one warder and it is Tiger. I think that he just makes himself look like the animals I tame and then he can do different things, but it is always him really. So far he can look like a bat, a bear and a crocodile, which is the scariest one.

I love being a Beastlord. It's only my first day and I have learneds so much but I think there must be a lot more to find out. Tired of writing now but I will write again when I learn something new.

104 Beats That: EQ2

2011-12-05T14:05:00.001Z

I spent much of yesterday flying through hoops. Hadn't intended to but sometimes that's just how life turns out.

Norrath's travelling Festival rolled up at Halas last week giving The Flying Freebooters the excuse they needed to charge their boosters and set up the death-trap they call a racing circuit. I have no idea who the Freebooters are, other than yet another set of gnomes with a pirate fixation and a desire to find new and exciting ways to get us all killed testing another half-baked engineering project.

Psst! Ladies! Wanna see my Crash Pad?

The gnomes offer a bribe for flying in races meant to knock the kinks out of their contraptions at no risk to themselves. It's a "C.R.A.S.H. Pad" that looks like a cut-down Enterprise. You can use it as a ground mount or as an appearance mount for flying if you have an actual flying mount. Most of my characters already have at least one so I wasn't planning on racing, but the gnomes had a juicier inducement on offer and my plans changed.

You get the mount just for completing five circuits. Anyone can do that. But if you can do it fast enough you get a title. Not just a title, a prefix. Everyone wants a good prefix and Mrs Bhagpuss especially wanted this one - Snowflake Chaser. So did I, come to that.

One careful owner

Flying the races gives Mrs Bhagpuss motion sickness so the actual piloting falls to me. Not usually a problem. I learned to do these races in DCUO, which uses the exact same system, and the Norrathian version is generally much easier. Generally, but not specifically. I found the Frostfang Sea course exceedingly hard.

To get the title you need to complete the course in 104 seconds. After a dozen tries my best time was 116. My average time was more like 124. Worse, I couldn't figure out how to improve. I'd have given up had a guildie not logged on for his once-a-week casual session, taken a couple of runs at it for practice and then and nailed the damn thing on his next run with a second to spare.

Frustration This Way

I couldn't tell myself it was plain impossible now I'd just seen it done, so I tried a bunch more times and still got nowhere. I went in search of inspiration. And more inspiration. I watched those two videos and at last I could see exactly what I'd been doing wrong. I got back on the ~~horse~~ ~~bike~~ C.R.A.S.H. Pad and tried again. And I still couldn't do it!

This time, though, at least I was getting close. 106 seconds. Then 105. So many 105s... Refine, refine, refine. Shave that hoop. Cut that corner. Hit every booster, miss every cloud until you find your dream.

Ratonga pilot + gnomish engineering = fireworks

It took me around six hours to get the title on four characters. Time well spent? Well, I got this blog post out of it. And Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both Snowflake Chasers. Twice.

It's The Beginning of a New Age: EQ2

2011-12-03T11:14:00.001Z

I know, you were expecting the Velvet Underground. Well you're Kinda Outta Luck.

Tuesday is the dawn of the Age of ~~Aquarius~~ Discovery and the NDA is down, so here are my thoughts.

I hadn't planned on doing the Beta. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that it's generally a bad idea to beta expansions for MMOs that I'm already playing. While I do really enjoy testing stuff it feels too much like opening the presents before Christmas Day.

I didn't even apply for this one. Which didn't matter because I got added without asking. Since I had access I figured it wouldn't hurt to take just a little look at the Freeport revamp. And the Dungeon Maker. Oh, and Mercenaries. Just a little peek. I just peeled the wrapping paper back an inch or two, really. I hardly even opened the box...

Freeport Revamp.

Even Lucan can't stop the rain

Not strictly part of AoD, you get this whether you like it or not when GU62 rolls in on the same day. As I mentioned I was more than a little apprehensive about this one. I am delighted to report that the EQ2 team got almost everything right that the EQ1 team got wrong.

The new Freeport is absolutely the old Freeport. Pretty much everything is where it should be, looking like it should look. Yes, Lucan's had the decorators in and the builders too. There's been some re-zoning, a few buildings have gone and some citizens have been re-housed. But it's still Freeport, just smartened up and with all the doors open!

I wish they'd knocked down The Jade Tiger instead of The Blood Haze Inn because I purely loved that terrace, but East Freeport is so much better it balances out. There's a marvelous souk where the broker used to stand in his little cubby hole. Execution plaza now comes complete with an actual execution (which I deliberately haven't seen yet). The big ship in South Freeport had to go for technical reasons, but I can't say I missed it.

Overall, a big thumbs up for Freeport!

Dungeon Maker

I could have sworn it was bigger

I played with this one quite a bit and I really like it a lot. It comes with a small number of preset dungeon layouts. Crushbone was one. Literally the ground floor level of the actual zone as far as I could tell. I knocked up a perfectly serviceable dungeon in half an hour. I was really impressed by how easy the tools were to use. I was anticipating that only dedicated decorators would really get much out of this feature but just about anyone should be able to throw together something worth running.

That said, it's going to be a decorator's dream. Not only do you get a ton of dungeon-origined placeables but you can also place pretty much anything you'd be able to place in a house. Station Cash furniture doesn't always work - I couldn't place my Rivervale set that I bought with my free beta 999,999 SC allowance. (Generous or what?). You can even name all the creatures and give them dialog (or will be able to - not sure if that's in for launch). I foresee some amazing creations. Having many of the items for the Dungeon Maker drop as tradeable loot from adventure content is a brilliant idea, too. Nothing like a gold-rush to spice up the economy.

There's one major downside that's been much discussed, of course. For balance reasons you can't run your own characters through the Dungeon Maker dungeons. I was worried that might make them feel like EQ1's Monster Missions, which I loathed, but it really doesn't. I found it very easy to associate with my Drolvarg avatar and the Bellywhumper was... well it's a Bellywhumper for god's sake!

Another big thumbs up.

Mercenaries

Mercenaries are my favorite ever addition to EQ1 so I had very high hopes for this. I only tried one Mercenary, a Ratonga Inquisitor called Stamper Jeralf. I was playing a very low level bruiser and with Stamper helping me I was pretty much invincible. In fact, this Gnoob video, which I took to be a parody, turned out to be pretty much on the nail. If I'd let him Stamper would happily have power-leveled me all day so long as I didn't run out of silver.

I'm calling Trading Standards about you, Jeralf.

Unlike EQ1 mercs, these all come with proper names and back-stories and they seem to be less focused on their jobs than their counterparts from half a millennium ago. Despite hiring on as a healer, Stamper pretty much never cast a healing spell. At one point I began to doubt he even knew how. He mostly liked to hit things with his hammer and cure me of any possible ailment I might have picked up over the last few seconds. Since his buffs were so overwhelmingly powerful that pretty much nothing could hit me I guess he didn't feel there was much need for healing.

It looks very much as though EQ2 mercenaries are being tuned to be less useful than their predecessors, but they still look pretty darn useful all the same. Apparently they are quite expensive to run at higher levels. I'd bet that after a while the usefulness gets tweaked up and the cost down.

One thumb up and the other hovering ready for the fully-tuned version.

I didn't try a Beastlord but the vibe on them in beta seems almost universally positive. Even the folks who couldn't find anything good to say about anything else grudgingly acknowledged that Beastlords were going to be a big hit. For my money and from everything I've read in and out of beta they aren't Beastlords at all, but so long as they're a fun class, who cares?

Tradeskill Associates and Reforging I also skipped. But... Othmirs!

All in all it looks fantastic. Has the potential to be the best expansion for years for the EQ2 demographic that's had to take a backseat since Kunark.

NDA is still up on all beta screenshots so these are all official SOE issue. Mine would have been a lot better, but there you go...

What's Wrong With This Picture? : Rift

2011-11-29T19:30:00.001Z

There's something fishy going on in Rift and this time I'm not talking about bogling decorations. I first noticed it during the last event, when I commented on the choice of acronyms in a couple of quests. The Guardians were given a L.A.M.E. journal to record their findings and the Defiants had to use a F.A.I.L. device.

It seemed a bit odd at the time but I gave Trion the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was going somewhere. It was in a Lore quest, after all, and Rift is generally pretty po-faced about its Lore. But the end of the event came and went (blink and you missed it. I did) and there we all were on Ember Island. The quests hadn't been lame and we hadn't failed. It wasn't unsubtle, ham-fisted ironic foreshadowing after all, then.

Fade in the next event with its brand new currency. This didn't go unnoticed. Wilhelm spotted it right away. SynCaine took a little longer but, hey, he was on vacation. So now we have three derogatory terms from gaming slang, all not-so-subtly tagged onto your Rift character, bringing to mind yet another expression popular in gaming circles: I call shenanigans!

What, no stocking?

My life as a dog

What's going on here? Is some disgruntled dev having a pop at the paying customers? Massively recalled the days when things like that used to happen but surely such behavior would never be tolerated in a modern, go-ahead MMO like Rift.

That would be the same Rift whose battered and besieged population takes regular time-outs from war to set off fireworks, hang bunting and run around dressed up as indescribably ludicrous yappy dogs. The very Rift where even the terrible engines of planar destruction come dressed with a Riftmas tree, a snowman and a scatter of perfectly-wrapped presents.

It's a bit early to start talking about shark-jumping. Rift has always had a lot more whimsy than its supposedly apocalyptic milieu might suggest. There does come a point, though, when you do begin to wonder if someone isn't just having a laugh. The question is, are we laughing with them or are they laughing at us?

Jingle All The Way: Rift

2011-11-27T19:16:00.001Z

Trion really missed a trick when they named the Rift midwinter holiday Yuletide. I can't believe no-one thought of Riftmas! But then, MMOs have always shied away from mentioning Christmas directly, preferring to reference its pagan precursors and commercial spin-offs. Much less controversial that way.

It's hard now to recall the times when an MMO holiday celebration came as a real novelty. There are so many these days that some games even give you an in-game calendar to keep track of them all. Occasionally the celebrations belong entirely to the imaginary world in which they take place or mark an anniversary in the life of the game but mostly they are lightly-disguised analogues of real-world events. Errolisi Marr, Norrath's Goddess of Love, holds her Erollisi Day celebrations right around the time we're all opening our Valentine's cards for example, and turkeys tremble in Azeroth when the Pilgrim's Bounty holiday rolls around just as WoW players sit down to their Thanksgiving meal.

Still Life with Fish

And so to Telara. A society riven by internecine conflict, locked in existential struggle, trapped in a world where at any moment the sky may spew out a roiling, thrashing rift filled with extra-planar nightmares bent on nothing less than the complete and utter destruction of life itself. Time to break out the fairy lights!

In fact there does seem to be some shaky internal logic. Let's forget for a moment that Telara appears to be a world without seasons, which calls the very concept of a Midwinter festival into question. Let's forget that the entire continent is overrun by psychotic dragon cultists and Cthonic hordes. Really, let's forget all that. If the people living there can forget it, then who are we to argue?

As far as I can work out, back in the summer during Rift's first Big Event, one of the six dragons trying to invade Telara was killed. I haven't done the Greenscale's Blight raid and there is much dispute over whether the Greenscale in question is the "actual" dragon or an avatar thereof. All the usual MMO nonsense. The upshot, though, is that the Fae who came under his control are now free.

No CRB checks in Telara, it seems.

And apparently there's nothing a free Bogling likes better than to slip on the old red felt jacket and bobble hat and make like a Department Store Santa.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Rift's Yuletide festival is how very closely it follows the established Rift Event pattern. It's exactly the same grab-bag of minor lore quests, non-combat dailies and special rifts that we've come to expect. I'm not even going to go through them in any detail. They are pretty good if you like that sort of thing, which as it happens I do.

Oh, you look cute now...

What I did really enjoy was the level of detail. I might find the idea of draping decorations all over a city that's supposed to fighting for its very right to exist pretty ridiculous. (Okay, there's really no need for the "might" in that last sentence). Nevertheless, if you 're going to decorate you may as well do it in style and Trion have thrown style on by the bucketful.

I loved the strings of lights that really flash on and off like proper Christmas lights. I loved the Bogling belief that no decorating theme is complete without fish. The trees and the piles of presents are pretty much pitch-perfect. The clouds that hover above the heads of the humbugging Yuletide deniers, literally raining on their personal parade, are a touch of genius.

And yet something isn't right. But that will have to wait for next time.

Slow Down... : Guild Wars

2011-11-25T11:58:00.001Z

... and give me one more chance

One nice side-effect of my recent post on Guild Wars 2 is that it got me playing Guild Wars again. I didn't have any GW2 screenshots what with the game not actually existing yet and all, so rather than just stealing some screenies off the interwebs I thought I'd use some of my old Guild Wars shots instead.

Only it turns out I don't have any old Guild Wars screenshots. I thought I would have taken some when I briefly came back to the game a couple of years ago, but apparently I didn't. The last time I played before that was at launch, over six years and three computer lifetimes ago. No screenshots survive.

You got planning permission for that?

So I patched up and took some new ones. Ye gods, but Guild Wars has aged well ! It looks amazing. It still has that weird, flat quality it always had, but the detail, the color, the vibrancy are all stunning. My appetite was whetted. Re-whetted. Re-re-whetted.

When I played Guild Wars the first time round I finished the main campaign and some of the post-20 content in about six weeks. Mrs Bhagpuss carried on and finished pretty much all of it, which I think took her a couple of weeks more. Then we both put it away for nearly five years until I spotted The Complete Collection on Amazon for very cheap indeed.

I am so playing one of these in GW2. Whatever he is.

In retrospect, buying all the expansions at once was a mistake. I know now how people feel when they come back to EQ2 for the first time in years. There can be just so much content, so many options, that it becomes almost intimidating. (It's perhaps worth noting that when I began playing WoW for the first time five years after launch, I didn't notice anything like that. The whole thing seemed very manageable. If anything I thought Azeroth was on the small side for an MMO. Another of the many ways Blizzard is able to smoothe the path for potential customers in a way that seems to escape other MMO Houses, I guess).

Rather than continue with my old characters, I made a new account and started over. That might have been a mistake too. My first character was one of those Dervish fellows. That was definitely a mistake and after about eight levels I re-rolled as a ranger.

Which brings me, long-windily, to what I was going to talk about: the pace of combat in Guild Wars. It's so flaming fast! I'd forgotten just how frenetic and chaotic it is. Back in 2005, coming from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars combat seemed like a revelatory, hyper-saturated, amphetamine rush. It took my breath away and for a month I thought all MMOs should be like it. Then the rush wore off.

Anyone need any help? Thought not.

Now, six years on, what I need is a slomo button. It's just too manic! And way, way too busy. Every time I enter an Explorable Area I feel like I'm in a raid. There's my ranger and her pet (who dies in about 5 seconds), several Heroes who appear to have attached themselves to me though I can't now recall how or why, a couple or three Henchman that I've hired because, well, you can never have too many healers and a bunch of NPC characters who just seem to tag along for the ride.

It would be confusing enough if I had to control that lot, but they all seem to have their own agendas. As soon as an enemy pokes his head around a corner the whole pack of them are off like skinheads out of a bus station, chasing anything that moves. I generally die two or three times before I have the least idea what's going on. Sometimes it's only after they've killed everyone and I'm picking up the odd meagre scrap of loot they've left me after they've all helped themselves that I spot from our confidence debuff that I must have died yet again and been rezzed so fast I didn't even notice.

Don't mind me. I'll just lie here.

Even when they aren't all causing mayhem I'm not much more than a bemused bystander. They all bicker and banter and make in-jokes that I don't get. They reminisce and gossip about battles I don't recall and people I don't remember. It's disturbingly like being a child on a family outing, where all the conversation goes over your head but that's fine because no-one listens to anything you have to say anyway even if you had anything to say, which you don't.

It's not that I'm not enjoying myself. I just wish the same things could happen at half the speed. Or a quarter. I don't want the BioWare option that let's you literally stop time between each and every incremental action so that you can micromanage entire battles. That's equally annoying in it's own way. Nor am I talking about turn-based gameplay. I just want Guild Wars but slower.

Anyone know an MMO that does that?

But I'm Hungry Now! : GW2

2011-11-21T10:40:00.001Z

Spinks notes that we may now not get Guild Wars 2 until 2013. I'd heard about the NCSoft Conference Call reveals but I was still taken aback so I went to look at the recently updated GW2 FAQ . It says:

When will there be a beta?

We will be conducting small closed alpha and beta tests in 2011. The feedback from these tests will determine when we will do public beta tests and ship the game.

Well that's confusing. Does it mean until now, despite the many playable demos at shows, there hasn't even been an internal "friends and family" Alpha server running? Just a purely technical testbed server? And how are they going to fit both alpha and beta tests into the next six weeks?

What did pride go before again?

Maybe it's just badly written. Maybe when they say "conducting" they mean "beginning" and when they say "public beta tests" they mean "open beta tests". That'd give us a closed alpha followed by closed beta beginning in 2011 and continuing into 2012, followed by an open beta nearer to shipping. Then the FAQ would make more sense.

They also emphasize that there is no release date for the game. It will ship "when it's finished" and not before. There's currently no sign-up for any kind of beta.

I find it deeply disappointing. I was really expecting GW2 to ship in Spring 2012 after a beta lasting some three months or so. I am absolutely not in the "done when it's done" camp. Few things are ever "done" and I would far rather have something when it's "good" than wait for some imaginary state of perfection that can never be achieved.


Hmm... We might need a bigger fire.

It's particularly pointless when it comes to MMOs. Every MMO I've ever played, no matter how "finished" it was when it went gold, had a sizable patch to download on launch day. Which was then followed by a literally endless series of more patches that fundamentally changed everything from minor details to entire design concepts.

Take Rift, for example. Apart from the single issue of not having enough servers to meet the unexpectedly huge demand, a problem most MMO houses would be more than happy to have, Rift was generally agreed to have been "ready". So did it just sit there, smug, satisfied and perfect, while we admired it? Like hell it did.

Do you see me laughing? Well, do you?

Rift got tweaked and twisted and warped and changed. The whole competitive element was stripped out of rifting in the first month. The PvP system was changed radically, then changed again. Souls were revised almost routinely. I believe my pyromancer has had his Soul Points refunded four times in six months.

When Star Wars: the Old Republic launches next month, will it be "finished"? No it won't. The NDA is down now and it's clear that even beta testers who are entirely satisfied that the game is ready don't believe it's "finished". Everyone understands it's a work-in-progress. If it's a half-decent MMO it will never be anything less.

This is just what MMOs are. Infinitely mutable. They are never "finished". If Guild Wars 2 has to be "finished" before it launches then it will never launch. Although when they do eventually have to push it out the door and let it take its chances, it's going to have to be perfect because "At ArenaNet, we have one mission: to make Guild Wars 2 the best MMORPG ever". The Greeks had a word for that.

Ah well. Good things come to those who wait, or so they say. We can but hope.

When I Live My Dream

2011-11-19T10:55:00.001Z

Actually, the 1960s pretty much was an MMO...

Okay, this is getting a little recursive, but SynCaine linked something Loque Nohak said in a comment on Tobold's blog the other day that got me thinking.

The relevant part is "coming from WoW it seems I’ve been playing a videogame for small children". It tied in with a conversation I had with a friend recently about the movie version of "We've Got To Talk About Kevin". My friend had been to see it and didn't rate it all that highly. I was saying that I'd heard good things about it, but I wasn't really interested in going to see it because I feel like I'm about done with being "challenged" by entertainment.

Bring it on, bad guy!

From my early teens right through to my early forties I probably wouldn't have said that, or felt it. I'd have been much more likely to search out amusements that stretched me at least a little, that made me think, even shook me up some. Even if I hadn't wanted the experience I'd at least have felt it would be good for me.

I didn't really notice when I stopped feeling that way. Maybe it happened when I started playing Everquest . Maybe it was already happening and that's why I connected so strongly with MMOs when I found them. Either way, I think it must have happened around about the same time, a dozen or so years ago.

I bet it's not that deep

In many ways playing MMOs is an unchallenging activity. It mostly involves you sitting in a chair and pressing some buttons. You do have to be literate; MMOs use an enormous amount of text. But playing MMOs is certainly something a fairly young child can do. If MMOs had been around when I was a child, though, I'm not at all sure I would have been interested.

I was a happy child, by and large. Much of my childhood consisted of roaming around the countryside, alone or with my cousin, often with a gang of kids. We were always exploring. We found small caves and ruined buildings, waded across rivers to islands, spent countless hours in the woods, climbing trees and building dens. We hunted (for animals to catch alive and bring home and try to keep as pets). We had fights and played games and made friends and enemies.

Middle Earth - about a mile from my house

I grew up not very far from the parts of England Tolkien had in mind when he thought up the Shire and my favorite parts of most MMOs are the little starting towns and villages and the countryside around them. Those places tend to look a lot like where I grew up and my characters' lives in MMOs sometimes do seem remarkably similar to my life as a child.

So, calling an MMO "a videogame for small children" doesn't seem like that much of a criticism to me. As I get older I find that I appreciate more and more those things that bring back to me what life was like when I was very young. I've been an adult a long time and it's not really all that when you get down to it, is it? On balance I reckon I could have done with being a child for longer. MMOs help with that.

It's The Little Things... : LotRO

2011-11-13T14:41:00.001Z

I dropped by Middle Earth last night. I have a new 24" monitor and several other improvements to my PC so I was doing the rounds to see how all the MMOs I know look with most of the sparkles on.

I've always been partial to the look of LotRO. The aesthetic is clear and consistent. The towns look and feel like towns. The countryside has a placeness about it. The scenery goes from cosy farmland to spectacular wilderness without any jarring transitions at the borders. And great as Turbine's take on Middle Earth looks in game it looks even better in screenshots.

And that's one of the better ones

I reckon it's probably safe to say that whoever did the worldmaking didn't have much to do with the log-in screens. The trip from desktop to gameworld is one of the ugliest I've ever taken. Garish, messy, muddled and loud, it's like someone shouting in your eyes.

Maybe the same team that thought those screens made for a good introduction to the game also worked on the UI, because that's dreadful too. Oh, it functions well enough and after a while you get used to its many idiosyncrasies. No, it's what it looks like that's so hard to take.

I'll have two from the top please Carol...

As I was saying, I have a new monitor. It seems pretty big to me. Perhaps naively I thought that might make it easier to see what I'm looking at. Well, not in my packs it doesn't. The icons in there make postage stamps look like bedsheets. Stuffed with tiny little green, orange and blue squares my bags look like Mondrian's coloring-in book.

Of course, it's not just the inventory that looks like it was designed for pixies. All the hotbars use the same system. And in LotRO I need a lot of hotbars because there seem to be about a million spells, skills, attacks and what-have-you. It might not matter so much if the UI was scaleable. It would still be as nasty as a troll's armpit but at least I could see what I had without squinting. I believe there is now some arcane out-of-game means of skinning the UI, but is it really too much to ask just to be able to grab the corner of a frame and pull?

One I summoned! Just one!

Indeed each time I log in all I end up doing is riding around admiring the view because whenever I think of doing something practical I open my bags or glance at my hotbars and lose the will to go on. I made it as far as the bank in Bree last night and that's an experience I won't be repeating in a hurry!

So, I'd quite like to play LotRO again. I enjoyed a lot about it while I was there the last time and I know there's plenty more to see. I'd just made it to that snowy part when I stopped playing regularly and I love snow zones. I'm just not sure I love them enough to learn to deal with that UI a second time.

Just what is it that makes today's ratongas so different, so appealing? : EQ2

2011-11-12T11:57:00.001Z

Cast your mind back 500 years. Seven if you prefer. Either way you wouldn't have found any three-foot tall rats scurrying through the streets of Freeport. No overgrown rodent would have tried to draw you into a plot to poison her sister or discredit a commercial rival. It was safe for a gnome to walk the streets in full confidence that he'd never have to look anyone straight in the eye, much less turn a corner to find his path blocked by a raddled rodent grinding her verminous hips beneath a tattered ballgown and giving him the old come hither.

Here kitty kitty!

When EQ2 was in development and even while it was still in closed beta, ratongas were under heavy suspicion. On the ever-inflammatory Everquest forums opinion ran strongly against their very existence. We never asked for more rats, they complained. Why, we're hardly using the ones we've got! Even let's say we did need more rats, why would we want these new-fangled "ratongas"? What's wrong with the good old Chetari, then? Eh? EH!?

I remember when I had dialog

It's fair to say that public opinion was divided. About 80% against if my memory serves me right. Still, ratongas always had their supporters. All-ratonga guilds were being lined up. Cheese-based names were being reserved. And when the time came, after all the Shattering and Rending that split the earth deep enough to let in the dim Freeport light, up came the ratongas to the Norrathian equivalent of a golf clap.

As the years passed, though, it seemed that almost all that bad feeling just melted away. Ratongas simply fitted. The snide remarks and open criticism so familiar to players of ratongas over the first few months gave way to the kind of genial racial banter gnomes and dwarves have always found so welcoming. With their extraneous esses and their skittering gait ratongas became emblematic of the new Freeport. Devious, disturbing, unsettling yet always that strange, dangerous promise of intrigue.

"You want somes company?"

Temple Street was my favorite village from the start. It had character and characters. Chef Schmenko. waving his cleaver, chasing cats around the central square. Arms Dealer Schinka with her deals you couldn't afford to miss. Vlepo and Vleko, locked in their eternal vendetta with the Togglesmeets. Not to mention the terrifying Spezi. Please, not to mention.

All the original EQ2 villages were vignettes. Short stories. Miniatures. Meticulously detailed pocket-size zones filled with incident and intrigue. Temple Street had the trump card, though. Ratongas and gnomes. In Qeynos not only were there no ratongas at all, but the gnomes had to share their little patch with halflings. Halflings, I ask you!

They do say that nothing good lasts long, and it was a sad day when the ill-advised Simplification cleared out most of the village quests, sweeping away back-story and depth along with them. Soon it's going to happen again only this time round Temple Street will turn into an instanced dungeon. Let's hope it brings a storyline worthy of its history and preserves both the look and feel of a place that's been home to two of the shortest, oddest races on Norrath. And me.

Where's My Tiger? : Neo Steam

2011-11-07T17:00:00.000Z

In theory I play a lot of MMOs. I have nearly two dozen on my desktop and a few more tucked away out of sight. I say in theory because as you may have noticed there are only so many hours in the day and much though I'd like to spend all of those hours playing games there's working and sleeping and eating and what-all to fit in somewhere.

I have my focus games, usually just two or three at most. Currently that would be EQ2X, Rift and Allods. Then I have my background games, where I have characters I'm still interested in developing. LotRO, Fallen Earth, Everquest, Vanguard or Ryzom all fit in there. I try to pop in every few days for at least a short session here or there just to keep the plates spinning.

No boars? That can't be right.

Beyond that comes a whole raft of titles that I'm either pretty much done with, never really got started on or just haven't gotten around to yet. And right at the end of the list is a small group of MMOs that I only ever play last thing at night, when I finish a session on my focus game but don't quite feel ready to stop altogether.

Eden Eternal and Dragon Nest are my current go-to late-nighters but last night I got the urge to pop into NeoSteam, a game I've played on and off for years. Apparently it's been quite a while since I last got the urge because it turns out NeoSteam isn't there any more. The server closed down last May. I don't remember reading anything about that on Massively.

It was the third time it's happened to me. Two other MMOs I played sporadically decided to shut their doors while I had my back turned: Rubies of Eventide and Ferentus. They and NeoSteam were all MMOs I had a great deal of time for. Metaphorically. Unfortunately.

Small dwarf, big world

Rubies is the one I miss the most. It was a first-class MMO with tons of potential and I did put in quite a few hours there over the years. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it regularly for a while. I'd play it still if I could. We both played Ferentus for quite a time too and although it never came out of beta it was more finished than a lot of games I've payed to play.

NeoSteam was the oddest of the three. It was nominally Steampunk in setting but it seemed more like a dreamscape. My character was a giant tiger who carried a hammer bigger than he was. Something that looked like a flying turnip used to follow him around offering advice. I never saw much of the world. Mostly I ran around enjoying the music and marveling at all the bizarre creatures. I think I only got to level 10 but I wasn't finished yet, dammit!.

I knew I shouldn't have kicked that puffball

The most galling thing of all is that NeoSteam is still online in the U.S.A. where by all accounts it has been much better managed and developed by Atlus. The rights for Europe including the U.K. went to Gamigo, who never seemed to do anything with it at all. I can't remember ever having to patch when I logged in and nothing ever seemed to change.

So, NeoSteam joins the list of lost MMOs. It also joins the shorter but infinitely more annoying list of MMOs lost specifically to me due to I.P. blocking or regionalization. EQOA keeps it company there. Will I learn the lesson this time and remember to log into the games I like more often? Probably not.

Never Coming Back: Beastlords in EQ2

2011-11-06T17:21:00.000Z

I know the Very Thing to go here. And no, they're never coming back.

According to Smokejumper's somewhat garbled interview, helpfully summarized by Feldon at EQ2Wire, both the expansion that brings back Beastlords and the Game Update that ~~ruins~~ revamps Freeport will go to closed Beta (from Friends and Family Beta presumably) on Tuesday November 8th. I'm as excited about one as I'm nervous about the other.

I have an affinity for pet classes that long pre-dates MMOs. The first time I ran into the idea was back in the very early '80s in a tabletop RPG called Dragonquest, a quirky ruleset that offered an unusual choice of career paths. I didn't much fancy Military Scientist, Astrologer or Courtesan but I liked the sound of Beast Master. It reminded me of Daniel P Mannix with attitude (if Mannix didn't already have more than enough attitude to be going on with).

Oh sorry! Was he yours?

I loved the catching and taming part but almost immediately I ran into a fundamental design flaw. Should have spotted it earlier, really, given that it was quite literally part of the Beast Master's job description: "A Beast Master will, in almost all cases, become very fond of animals". All too true as I found out when I was repeatedly required to bury the dead after ordering my furry friends to fight monsters much bigger and tougher than they were.

Several dead pets into our group's campaign it became apparent that a Beast Master who was a) rapidly running out of beasts that took months to train and b) increasingly reluctant to allow any of the few he had left to take any risks whatsoever in case "something bad" happened to them, was going to be of limited use outside of a petting zoo. I re-rolled as something less emo and that was about the last I thought of pet classes until I stepped into Norrath some fifteen years later.

We don't do "cute"

For a good while "pet class" in Everquest meant someone who raised the dead or animated rocks. This had two big advantages over the Beast Master, namely that skeletons and earth elementals cannot strictly be called "cuddly" and that if they "die" you just raise or animate a new one. Nothing to bury, nothing to mourn.

Shamans did have a pet that looked like a wolf, but it turned out to be a spirit. It looked cuddly but your hand would just go right through. You couldn't rest a pint on his back like I used to do with the landlord's labrador in a pub where I used to drink. We were close, but we weren't quite there. We'd dealt with the downside but something was still missing. Then came the beastlord.

I arrived late on Luclin, Norrath's doomed moon. We were off playing something else at the time, Dark Age of Camelot probably, so I missed the birth of the Beastlord. When we returned, though, I made a Vah Shir Beastlord immediately. A tiger-girl with a tiger pet? Come on!

I took to the class right away. It had all the things I'd always wanted in a pet class: a really powerful pet that would fight beside me, not a weak creature I'd need to protect nor a living wall I'd hide behind. My warder and I stood hip to shoulder as we fought, falling back or surging forward to support and sustain each other as Shissars hissed or Akhevans made that weird chittering noise they make before they fell to our claws.

What have I told you about claws in town?

My beastlord ended up being the Everquest character I played most over the years. She's my highest level still, beached at 84th. I could understand, though, why Beastlords were lost when Luclin exploded. In many ways they were too powerful, too versatile. Just too damn good. Once you've played a beastlord it's hard to settle for less. The balancing issues that beastlords brought had ripped through Everquest for years and since EQ2 seemed to have "avoiding anything that gave us trouble in EQ1" as its core design brief it must have been an opportunity too tempting to resist. Although Blizzard seemed willing to take the risk when they added the Hunter class to WoW. Wonder how that worked out for them...

For many years Beastlord became the class that dare not say its name. They all died on Luclin. Every last one. They're never coming back. Except they are. Next Tuesday in beta and, with luck and a following wind, by the end of the month for the rest of us. There'll probably be five thousand new beastlords in Freeport on the first day and I'll be one of them. And I'll be keeping a diary.

Don't Look Down! : Rift

2011-11-05T13:35:00.000Z

As is the way of things in Telara, Phase 3 of Rift's "Ashes of History" popped up a couple of days back, unannounced. Like a dark elf's beard there may not be much of it but at least it gives you something to grab onto in a bar-room brawl. Wait, that can't be right...

Whatever, the old quests have gone and there are just two new ones. One continues the rebuilding of the travel stones storyline, which I've found quite interesting so far. The other is a daily. As usual, I did both sides and the Defiant version is quicker and easier, for the same reasons as before.

And over there we'll put the golf course...

The storyline quest is really very good. It has the merit of being both fast and fun. You're tasked with taking measurements that will help in getting the stones up and working again. Defiants step into a device, Guardians pray at an altar (no stereotyping then...) but either way there's a short blurry dematerialisation and you reappear somewhere very high up indeed.

There seem to be a lot of possible destinations. I've done it with four Defiants and two Guardians so far, which ought to mean thirty trips, but you only get a few seconds each time before the magic yanks you back and I spent so much time trying to take screenshots and not recording the information I was supposed to that I probably made 40 journeys in total. I'd guess there must be easily twice as many possible locations on each side as you need to complete the quest.

Spiders! Why is it always spiders?

Some are places I've managed to climb to before. Others gave discovery experience, which I guess means you could climb to them. Some, however, appear to be utterly inaccessible by any other means, so this may well be your only chance for a photo opportunity. That's if you don't get eaten first.

The detail that's been put into this quest is emblematic of something I've always said about Rift, that it's an explorer's dream. This is a flavor quest that will only exist for a few days yet not only does it take you to a wide variety of interesting locations that you might never otherwise visit, but it does so with humor, wit and elan. I particularly liked the Defiant NPC that my guardian found already planting his own tracking device at one location.

Look at me, Ma...

The whole thing reminded me a little of the bit in the bible, where Satan takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and then to a high mountain and tries to tempt him and I did wonder whether something similar might be going on. The whole thing seems a bit suspicious. The Guardian quest asks you to use a Locator Atlas and Manual of Exploration to record your findings, while on the Defiant side you have to plant the Fast Assembling and Initiating Locator Device. These are thereafter referred to as the L.A.M.E. Journal and the F.A.I.L. Device. Might be a clue there.

Muggins turn next.

It does have to be said that I like a pun. Not everyone does, but I do. I enjoyed those acronyms, but I particularly relished the quest names. The storyline quest is called "The Right Stuff?" because it questions your ability to deal with the dangers of repeatedly porting to unknown, perilous destinations. The daily, which asks you to go around picking up old bits of abandoned Travel Stones lying scattered around and about? That's called "The Left Stuff".

Well, it made me laugh. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing where all this goes next.

History Repeating: EQ2

2011-11-01T21:08:00.000Z

And not in a good way.

Is that what you want? Is it?

We didn't get any trick-or-treaters for Halloween but I still got a nasty surprise. It just came a day late.

I never entirely recovered from the last revamp of Freeport. The one in the original game that came free alongside Prophecy of Ro, one of Everquest's least-memorable expansions. You probably don't recall the expansion even if you were playing EQ back than, but no-one could forget that revamp. It was the one that turned a charming, idiosyncratic, human-sized city into a soulless impersonal maze.

Okay the harbor was nice, but that's no excuse.

Nevertheless, when they announced at Fan Faire that EQ2's Freeport was going to get a makeover of it's own I was sanguine. I didn't feel the fear like Wilhelm. As you can see from my rather smug comment on TAGN's blog there, I had " a lot more confidence in the EQ2 team to do a better job". Well, soon we will see how well-placed that confidence was.

Breakfast on the terrace at The Blood Haze Inn.

My problem is that all the things listed as negatives about the current Freeport in the interview with Timothy "Hoahmaru" Heydelaar (of whose existence I was previously unaware. I don't think he posts on the forums much) are strong positives for me. They are the very things that have led me to base almost all my characters in Freeport over the last six years.

Lucan, no friend to the lawnmower

I love the down-at-heel Mediterranean port ambience. I love the "pale and desaturated" palette and the "broken stucco and plaster". I have three characters living in the inn in West Freeport that 's being rezoned "to be more military focused with training grounds taking up the area where the bar and inn were".

If anyone's been to Malta they'll know just how convincing Freeport is. The capital of Malta, Valetta, is a harbor fortress built by the Knights of St. John and it's about as close a real-world analog of Lucan's Freeport as you could hope to find. Architecturally, that is. It's not the fag end of a corrupt empire, peopled by talking rats and eight-foot tall ogres, true, but then you can't have everything.

Valetta, blurred. I blame Cisk.

The new Freeport will have plenty of bling, we're told. They've "added a lot of rich golds to replace the rusty metals throughout and replaced a lot of brick with pattern work". I'm sure it's very tasteful, but don't we already have one city out of the Arabian Nights?

Oh well. At least SoE have had the decency to add an in-game "FRAPS" style video facility before they begin tearing down the house. I'm off to make my own nostalgia documentary before it's too late.

Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

2011-10-30T14:12:00.001Z

I totally did not come up with this post just so I could do this link.

Monks of Pantaloonia

The whole monk thing used to mystify me, I confess. Everywhere you went in fantasyland there they'd be, hopping and jumping and throwing shapes, hurling themselves on the ground like possums. They'd hold out their quivering palms like traffic policemen at a minor road accident and expect you to drop dead from fright not laughter.

And now they are pandas and somehow that's supposed to be a silly bridge too far?

I thought fighting monks were pretty ridiculous when I first encountered them back in the 1970s. Martial arts were absolutely everywhere back then; on tv, in comic books, on the big screen, even in the charts. Even I had a set of nunchuks, although since the wood bits flew off the end every third revolution when the screw fitting unwound they made for more slapstick than violent assault.

Hey! I saw you blink!

I'd pretty much forgotten all about monks by the time I came to MMOs so it was a little disconcerting to step out of the main gates of Qeynos to find bare-chested men lying all over the ground. It was a popular class, for sure. I even had a monk of my own, aptly nicknamed the Drunk Monk because I created him on one of the Zek pvp servers and only ever played him when I'd been drinking.

Thousandth time's the charm

Kunark brought a whole new level of monk silliness. Seven foot tall lizards that spun on the balls of their clawed feet and swiped at you with their tails. Thousands of them, hissing, swiping, spinning and falling down. It took an EQ monk hundreds, thousands of attempts to raise his Feign Death skill and for months wherever you went in Norrath all you heard was the sound of Iksars falling down and getting up again, grunt, hiss, thud.

Zen garden with fox

I never took to the monkly life until I played my first Disciple in Vanguard and then suddenly it all clicked. A martial artist whose every punch and kick put heart and health back into his companions. The perfect combination of melee and healing I hadn't known I'd been looking for all along. It would scarcely have seemed silly at all, if he hadn't been a three-foot high fox, pirouetting on his hind legs.

That led indirectly to my playing a Bruiser in EQ2. I'd tried a gnome monk and a kerran bruiser before but neither stuck. It was only when I stepped out into The Commonlands as a three-foot high ratonga (that's a rat with attitude) that again it all clicked into place. Ninety levels fell like rain.

OMG! What happened! Were you mugged?

The Disciple remains my favorite ever class in any MMO and if anything could induce me to try WoW again it might easily be a melee-healing Panda. (Although the panda part could still be a sticking point. If it was a melee-healing squirrel it'd be a done deal). A character that can kick ass in close combat while keeping all his friends alive and fall flat on his back and giggle his whiskers off if everything goes south, well what's silly about that?

Home Is Where The Art Is : EQ2

2011-10-27T22:57:00.000+01:00

Takes "chilling by the pool" to a whole new level

Ardwulf said something today that set me thinking. He pondered whether EQ2 has more content than EVE and wondered whether EVE's player-driven approach gave players more to do than EQ2's "dev-designated tracks". Reflecting on this, it occurred to me that EQ2 has quietly sandboxed itself without anyone really noticing.

Everquest 2 probably has more content than any other MMO I've ever played. Even if you've played EQ2, though, you might not have spotted it. Like the proverbial iceberg, much is invisible. Unlike the iceberg it's not underwater, although EQ2 does have plenty to see beneath the waves. No, it's behind the doors of all those houses and inns that you scarcely register as you pass by on your way to the bank or the broker or the bell.

Indoors is outdoors

Housing has been in the game from the start. The picture at the top of my blog is taken from my gnome templar's inn room in Beta back in 2004. Back in those days a single room in an Inn sufficed for most people. Over time, that changed. Probably because housing fell into the purview of EQ2's greatest ever developer, Domino.

Under her stewardship much of the vast variety of existing furnishing was added to the ever-growing range of crafted recipes. So many lovingly designed items that had long been reserved for the sole pleasure of NPCs fell into the eager hands of player-decorators. Even some of the layout tools used by the devs themselves were handed over to players to use.

Freeport as a French boulevard

It didn't stop there. In the way of MMO players everywhere, those obsessive enthusiasts who never fail to find loopholes that devs never imagine, let alone intend, some anarchic genius worked out how to "break out" of his house to the zone outside. Now you could not only enter your house through a door in the actual zone but with a little shimmy you could slip outside into your own quasi-legal instance and build over the whole of Maj'Dul or Greater Faydark.

Then Smokejumper got in on the act. His theory seemed to be "one house good, ten houses better". Or twenty.

Someone built this from scratch, In a house. Snark has no place here.

It's one thing when you can have just one house per character and that house might have at most five rooms. It's something else entirely when each character can have up to 20 houses chosen from from dozens of different models, from tiny dojos to entire islands or full-size castles. Decorating exploded.

The dentist will see you now

You can't really appreciate just how wide-ranging the possibilities of EQ2 housing are until you see what people have created. One thing the game lacked was an easy way to go on a tour of your server's stately homes. The recent addition of a housing leaderboard, despite some appalling conceptual and philosophical flaws, at least fixed that. You can now pop into a large number of listed properties on a whim from wherever you happen to be standing.

EQ2 already has by far the most extensive options for architectural creativity of any Western "theme park" MMO. Yet when the forthcoming expansion arrives there will be more. You won't just be able to design and decorate houses. You'll be able to build dungeons too. And adventure in them. It may not have the economic or espionage potential of EVE but EQ2 has an awful lot more to offer than on-rails questing and dance-card raids.

This Is What I Think Of When I Think Of Wow: WoW

2011-10-24T11:34:00.000+01:00

This.

I started replying to Brian over at Psychochild's Blog and my reply grew so long I thought I'd move it over here. He's mulling over the various reveals from Blizzcon and it got me thinking about my own non-relationship with Blizzard.

I find the whole Blizzard cult a bit strange. I'd been playing MMOs for several years before I ever even heard the name and when I did it was in the context of people in Everquest chat channels talking very disparagingly about Diablo, which seemed to be some game that thought it was an MMO but really wasn't.

Ski Lift Other Side

I picked up the impression that it was very much a second-rate entertainment compared to EQ or DAOC and largely forgot about it. I have only the vaguest memories of hearing about WoW before it was released. Again, I'd never even heard of Warcraft, let alone played it. Only a couple of people in my then quite extensive circle of EQ guildmates and channel buddies had any interest in it. It barely got mentioned. All the talk was about EQ2.

I did the EQ2 beta, played there from launch for six months and pretty much didn't notice WoW was even happening. It was only when EQ2 was in freefall and almost everyone I knew had given up on it that I began to hear that some of the people who'd left had gone to try this new MMO, World of Warcraft. I didn't, though. I went back to Everquest for another year.

Never leave a goblin in charge of your boat

After a while it became impossible not to be aware of WoW, even if you didn't play MMOs. I picked up a lot of background information on Blizzard and the games they'd made because now all of that was constantly referenced whenever people discussed MMOs. I began to understand the significance of their move into the genre in a way I hadn't done at the time. But I still had no desire to play any of their games.

It wasn't until 2009 that Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally downloaded the trial and stepped out into Azeroth. We'd run through just about every other MMO we could think of and were in a lull. WoW was pretty much the last AAA MMO we hadn't tried at that point and frankly we weren't expecting much.

So was a very pleasant surprise to discover that we liked WoW a lot. Great art direction, a big, interesting explorable world, amusing characters, smooth, enjoyable gameplay. We had fun for three or four months, and then we were done. Neither of us ever reached the level cap. Burning Crusade and WotLK content wasn't a patch on Vanilla content and the prospect of end-game was utterly unappealing. Still, a very nice MMO while it lasted.

Took me the best part of a week to get this shot!

I guess I still don't really know much about the Blizzard Universe even now. I'm quite surprised by the fuss these pandas have caused. Panda monks are hardly a new concept, after all. You don't even have to go outside the genre to find them; EQ2's had pandas for a couple of years now, although not as a playable race. I don't like pandas much. Not the real ones in their evolutionary dead-end nor imaginary ones in Chinese hats. They are pretty dull animals and the fictional versions are generally dull too, but I can't see why they'd send anyone into such a lather he'd delete all his characters and put the video on YouTube.

Why Pandas should be any more a jump the shark moment than space goats mystifies me. When I first played WoW the single weirdest part were the Tauren. Bipedal dairy cows as a playable race? Really? But I didn't grow up with the lore. I guess it's like boiling a frog except this time someone at Blizard turned the heat up just that bit too fast and some of the frogs jumped out of the pot.

Even now that I've played WoW and have a clearer idea how deeply enmeshed in PC gaming culture Blizzard's worlds are, I still don't have that vital emotional connection. I'm curious to see Titan, of course. Anyone interested in MMOs would have to be. But I'm more interested in the ripples in the pond after Blizzard tosses in a boulder than I am in the boulder itself.

And I won't be playing Diablo III.

Giving It The Old One Two: Rift

2011-10-23T14:18:00.000+01:00

I'm still playing Rift most days but Mrs Bhagpuss has largely returned to her full-time job building houses in EQ2. I woke up one morning last week to find her still in front of the computer, having pulled an all-nighter doing a loft conversion on a Halas two-room. When I told her it was seven in the morning, the sun was coming up and I was off to work she said "Oh I thought it was only about three", as though staying up 'til "only" three in the morning decorating an imaginary house would in some way be recognized as normal behavior in an umpty-ump year-old mother of three grown children.

She still has an active Rift account however, and last weekend she managed to pull herself away from the workbench and forge for long enough to run through two Chronicles with me. The Chronicles are the new dungeons that arrived with patch 1.5. They are apparently tuned to be duoed by fresh level 50s or soloed by well-geared level 50s. Or something. I found that part a bit wooly.

There are three Chronicles. The first, "Meridian/Sanctum (delete as applicable): Ceremony of Attunement" offers a solo instance of your capital city where your character is feted by the great and good of Telara for service to the nation.

Pig and cake. Breakfast of Champions.

It's an award ceremony so toe-curlingly embarrassing that the sudden appearance of arch-villain Kain and his Death plane cronies comes as a welcome relief.

Kain! I thought you'd never get here!

I'd already done that one on all my max level characters but I wanted to do the other two as a duo. While Mrs Bhagpuss was planing away over in Norrath I ran my Guardian through "Greenscale's Blight: The Fallen Prince" just to get a feel for the difficulty. I was using my usual Pyro/Ele soloing build, which has a mighty tank pet that I can chain heal literally until the heat-death of the universe. It also has massive single target and AE DPS.

Dressed mostly in crafted purple gear, the only thing that gave me any real trouble until the third named was my own sadly atrophied pulling skills, which had me running back from the altar quite a few times. If I'd had any self-healing I probably wouldn't have died, but that build has none.

The third boss was an extremely close fight. I actually killed her and one of her werewolf pals, but lack of self-healing defeated me when second werewolf was almost down. When I returned from my ghostwalk the whole encounter had respawned at full health so I called it a day for soloing.

Mrs Bhagpuss then joined me over on the Defiant side. I was in my Pyro/Chloro build and she used her Necro/Warlock. Skeleton tanked. We did "Hammerknell: Runes of Corruption" first and it was fun. Those characters aren't quite as well geared as my Guardian and I thought the difficulty level was about right.

I can see right up your nose from here.

We cleared everything, killed the nameds, oohed and aahed at the dwarven workmanship, felt our teeth rattle in our heads whenever The Faceless Man spoke. The boss fights were straightforward with an absolute minimum of stupid dance moves, thank heaven. Loot was clearly aimed at fresh 50s. Nothing dropped that was an upgrade.

Triple somersault without a net!

The whole thing took about 45 minutes or so and we both felt ready for a second course so we moved on to Greenscale. With the exception of the same named that I stalled on solo, who was still a bit of a handful even with two of us, I didn't find Greenscale that much harder than Hammerknell. There was a bit of hopping about when the Prince used one of those annoying circle-on-the-ground things that I hate but nothing very taxing. Greenscale himself was a pushover.

The best thing about the Greenscale Chronicle was the interchanges between the various NPCs, some of which had me laughing out loud. The voice acting was excellent. Whoever did The Prince would be right at home in the cast of any 1970s British sitcom. It was well worth doing Greenscale just to hear him.

I do think these solo/duo instances are a good idea. They are hardly innovative, of course. EQ2 has had them for many years. I hope that Trion add a few at lower levels too, but I doubt they will since they seem to be determined to build a whole new game at 50 on top of the one they already have. Still, gift horse, mouth and all that. Looking forward to more, even if they are all stuffed up against the level cap.

Five Year Plan: Allods

2011-10-22T12:25:00.000+01:00

Sadly not the wonderful band of the same name, who we put on gigs with a couple of times back in the day.

Imperial Square, Nezebgrad

Nezebgrad is a heck of a city. Huge. Imposing. Overwhelming. Grand. This is the way we thought the future would look before we ended up living there.

Allods has an idiosyncratic take on cyberpunk. Victoriana gives way to an elegant, sweetly ironic ostalgie. The Empire capital is a city built by Stalinist planners, lovingly rendered, lambently lit, peopled by irreverent, bureaucratic, meticulously dressed nutcases.

Moscow State University

Almost everyone you meet in Nezebgrad is at least a little unhinged. From Ilona, who thinks there's sewage in her kebab to Pavel who thinks his wife is turning into an elf, everyone has their own conspiracy theory. There's a secret policeman on every corner. Any beggar could be a spy. Even the bugs are bugged.

I think I ate there once.

Everyone has something for me to do and they all have forever to chat. I don't think I've ever seen such verbose quest-givers. Every quest window comes with a scroll bar. Sometimes you have to use it more than once. Is that a problem? Hardly! The quests are as lovingly crafted, as witty and knowing as the art direction. They're extremely well-translated into clear, idiomatic English yet they retain just enough of the flavor of the original syntax to give that slightly otherworldly feel that I love.

Elf porn. Just say No.

The actual combat is much easier and faster than I remember from beta, when Allods really harked back to the pace of Everquest or Dark Age Of Camelot. A couple of zaps from my lightning bolt and a charge from my trusty goblin and most things are down before they even reach me. My shaman is level 9 now and has yet to die. So why is it taking me an age to level up?

Well, apart from the lengthy conversations, the city is so spectacular I spend half my time gawping like a tourist, taking screenshot after screenshot, trying to get the best angle to capture the wonderful quality of of the light, the flare of the sun behind another statue, the majestic backdrop of mountain and cloud. And with no mount it takes a long, long time to cross these vast squares and boulevards as I run hither with my hyena ears and thither with my rat tails.

The Adventurer's Journey: Painting pipes in the Sewage Plant

So far I'm having a great time in Allods. It's just as I remember it, only better. I've hardly stepped out of the city if you don't count the Sewage Plant and the Sewers. I think I have another three or four levels to go before I move out onto the plains and at the rate I'm going that could take another week. Or two. And that's fine. When the journey is this much fun, why hurry?

Stone Me! : Rift

2011-10-21T20:52:00.000+01:00

Phase Two of Rift's Ashes of History world event popped up unexpectedly last night. Unexpected by me, anyway. I've been playing a mix of Allods, Rift and EQ2 this week and I didn't log into Rift yesterday until quite late in the evening. Pretty much the first thing I noticed was that one of my Ashes quests had auto-completed. It's a handy Trion trick, where any obsolete World Event quests that remain unfinished in your journal are neatly finished off for you when the next phase begins.

Some of the Phase One quests are still active and several new ones have been added. The trend I commented on earlier continues and my Guardians had to travel significantly further, through significantly more dangerous territory to complete the same quest as my Defiants. Never mind. Purity is forged in the fire of sacrifice and all that jazz.

Travel stones? Nah, mate. Never 'eard of 'em.

The new quests are intriguing. The underlying plot of the Ashes event is all about the re-opening of the Travel Stones, a network of teleportation devices that existed before the ~~Shattering~~ ~~Cataclysm~~ Civil War. Or something. I never really understood Rift's lore. I don't recall the Porticulum guys mentioning any "Travel Stones" either, come to think of it. They all seemed to be pretty pleased with themselves for setting up their own system. You'd have thought they might have mentioned it was just a cover version.

My brother is much tastier than I am...hang on, that's goats.

Either way, these "Travel Stones" are coming back courtesy of the Golden Maw and The Wanton, who appear to be using the system as some kind of inter-dimensional courier service. This I found out by sidling up to the Travel Stone dressed as a deer, a reckless disguise given that the two creatures I was eavesdropping on appeared to be an ogre and a kobold. Lucky I didn't end up spit-roasted.

Then it was off to try the Travel Stones out for myself. Not to go anywhere, not yet at least. That comes after the event ends, when we get to use the Travel Stones to visit Ember Isle, the upcoming high-level zone . For now we just have to prod the stone and see what jumps out.

You can't kill me. I got my claws up!

First time I did it I got a giant crab that wasn't best pleased. What a giant crab was doing using the arcane tramlines I never found out because dead crabs don't go much for conversation and it was him or me. The next two times a startled Kelari appeared, reminding me a little of the White Rabbit.

The fourth time was far and away the most spectacular It actually made me go "Whoooaah" out loud as my eyebrows crisped.

I see why they put these stones out of town now

Back in town, the new repeatable quest involved combining a variety of colored stones to make a resonating inscribed travel stone. Catchy name. First time I did this I spent ages fiddling about with all kinds of color combinations on the assumption that there was some meaning to be construed. Turns out it's just the bottom one on the list, then the top one. I do like simplicity.

Overall, another good portion of lore with some fun special effects. I'm enjoying this event a lot.

A Glorious Future Awaits: Allods

2011-10-17T11:52:00.000+01:00

Revolutionary Dawn (please to ignore smokestack)

I re-installed two MMOs this weekend. One was Fallen Earth, because it's gone Free to Play and I always liked it. The other was Allods.

I played Allods in beta, like a lot of other people. I was planning on playing it when it went live, but somehow I never did. It wasn't really because of the infamous cash-shop debacle, although that didn't help. It was mostly that the break between beta and Live, which I remember as being a few weeks, just derailed my attention. When the official Allods launch arrived I was playing something else and I just never really got back to it. (That, by the way, shows the importance for a F2P game in allowing open beta characters to carry over to Live. Most F2Ps do that. Allods didn't. It was a mistake).

Those tabs didn't used to be there!

So, why did I decide to have another bash at Allods after all this time? Well, because of this blog. (And no, I don't mean because the full name of Allods ought to be Allods:Inventory Full either, although lack of bag space is probably the defining trope of the game).

When I got this blog up and running at last I was imagining it would mostly be about writing. I've been writing since I was about seven years old. It's pretty much what I do. Only, just like when I had a website many years ago, back in the homepage day, it turns out that I like fiddling with images as much as I like writing. Maybe more.

I've been trawling through my old screenshots as I prepare these posts. I have a lot of them. I was looking for something else when I ran across my Allods beta screenshots. WoW. Erm, no, wait, that's not what I meant... WOW! Allods takes an absolutely stunning screenshot.

Seasonally Appropriate Screenshot

Looking through them a couple of thoughts popped to mind. I'd just done that post mentioning the good/bad bad/good sides in Rift and it occurred to me that Allods has a similar moral set-up. It also occurred to me that it has almost exactly the same Nature/Religion vs Science/Steampunk dichotomy. And it occurred to me that I'd only really experienced one of those sides.

Sweetness and light...

Just as in Rift I began by playing the Nature/Religion faction, so I did in Allods. Almost all my time in Beta was spent as a Gibberling on the League side. Well, three Gibberlings. And a Squirrel. I'd had a brief look at the Empire capital but about all I remembered was the excellent pastiche Constructivist design.

Until their backs are turned

Anyway, after a fair-to-middling nightmare of a battle with the awful Allods patcher, resolved only by manually downloading the patch files and a new type of unzipper to unpack them, and having to remake a new account from scratch since my old one apparently has time-expired, (you have to wonder if gPotato actually want anyone to play this game) eventually I re-entered Allods as an Orc Shaman of The Empire.

Thus far I am extremely impressed. Details will follow.

He’s good-bad, but he’s not evil : Rift

2011-10-16T14:14:00.000+01:00

Is that it?

Ah, the Shangri-Las. My second favorite all-female band. Clearly the inspiration for Rift's odd choice of two sides, neither of which is really good and neither of which is really evil.

The Guardians are religious zealots. The Defiants are single-minded technocrats. I wouldn't trust either of them to run an orphanage. One thing I have noticed, though, is that Defiants get a distinctly easier time of things when it comes to events.

Events, dear boy, events. Harold MacMillan would have loved Telara. How fine to live in a world where events don't pop up unexpectedly to spoil your day. How much neater to know the day and hour ahead of time. Sweeter still to know that your event is easier than the other guy's.

Meridian is much easier to navigate than Sanctum. Well, it is outdoors, at least, and that's where most events take place. There's a big courtyard, a wall and a yard of scrubby grass.

More potash please

Sanctum, on the other hand, is a wheel circled by a winding path inside a retaining wall. A lot of sickly, stunted trees and rickety buildings cramp the space. Visibility is poor.

I have Guardian and Defiant characters. I even have one Guardian character who only does city events. She's never done anything else since the tutorial and she's gotten to level thirteen. I get to see all events from both sides. Each team gets the same quests for each event but I can always do the Defiant version faster than the Guardian. Sometimes it barely takes half the time.

My Guardian Hat

With my Guardian hat on I'm okay with that. We religious types are nothing if not long-suffering. The current event, however, goes beyond a little extra running between spawns. As I described before the quest in Meridian takes you just a few yards outside the gate and someone has even thoughtfully marked the path with lanterns. It took me about 10 seconds to find it.

The Guardian version is on the coast below the high bridge leading into Sanctum. I could see that on the map but I had no idea how to get there. As far as I knew, there was no way down there other than to jump off the bridge. I ran around a bit looking for another way down but I couldn't see one. So I jumped off the bridge.

Once I dragged myself, wet and shivering, out of the sea it was simple enough to complete the quest, but then I had to get back up. I was very surprised to find a path. With a neat wooden fence on the seaward side. Just to stop me falling in. Bit late for that.

Donkey rides sixpence!

Has this path always been there? I can't recall seeing it before and I spent an inordinate amount of time in Silverwood and Sanctum earlier in the year. Was it added for this event, like the lanterns in Freemarch or is it yet another example of the incredible depth of detail in the lands of Telara, where I really do still see something new every day?

Treant. It's such a tinny word.

I followed the path up. Eventually it wound back to the main road leading into Sanctum, but only after I'd dodged an aggressive level 14 treant taking a constitutional up and down the track.

Now I'm not claiming this was difficult. Compared to a trip from Ak'Anon to the Windmills or from Surefall Glade to Qeynos it was a walk in the park. But it did ask a lot more of me, and my character, than the Defiant version.

I like it. A lumpy playing field is good. Might be nice once in a while to let some moles lump up Meridian's scabby grass, though. Don't want the Guardians to have all the fun.

Ashes in the Wind : Rift

2011-10-14T15:23:00.000+01:00

No, much though I enjoy a bit of Joan, that's really not what I meant!

Flares are back!

So, the Ashes of History event started, finally. On the face of it, it looks remarkably like the last one. And the one before that, come to think of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Find something that works, you may as well run with it, I say.

I'd been doing Night of the Dead stuff in EQ2 for most of the evening so it was late when I logged into Rift. Only took me a few seconds to find out where the event began. Look! Over there! A bunch of strangers standing around the same quarter of Meridian's yard where the last lot decamped a couple of weeks back. In the exact same spots I do believe. I think they may even have rented the same tents.

Sun comes up, out go the lights. Or not.

The first quest sent me looking for a Travel Stone. It wasn't hard to find. In fact it was straight out of Meridian's main gate and up a path to the right. If that wasn't plain enough, someone had thoughtfully planted a row of torches. You couldn't miss it, frankly. Nor the huge, blue crystal at the end of it.

Mrs Bhagpuss had gone to sleep so I was playing with headphones on for once. I'd also had most of a bottle of Chilean Merlot by then so it's just possible I may have been in a particularly receptive frame of mind. Whatever, when I clicked on the crystal suddenly I was pulled sharply, unexpectedly into the world before me. By the song of a long-dead dwarven bard.

Erm, that didn't come out of your spider by any chance?

Sound gets a raw deal in MMOs.Many people turn it off altogether or turn it down and play music instead. I often have the radio on while I play and pay more attention to that than the sounds of the world I'm supposed to be inhabiting. I don't usually play with headphones on, but whenever I do I remember just how important a part sound can play in creating that elusive, desired sense of immersion. This, however, went far beyond that.

Imagine Sound Clip Here

The voice was unearthly. Softly sibilant, airy and distant, it wasn't even the tone that chilled. It was the phrasing. Phrasing is the key to song as timing is to comedy. Get the phrasing right and everything follows. Whoever voiced this had the phrasing perfectly wrong. No human would emphasize those syllables, take those pauses. It was a voice from another world, another time. Magical. Appropriately, for once.

I was impressed. And I went on being impressed with the following quest, which also used sound excellently and atmospherically. It all bodes very well for the rest of the event. Just because you re-use the frame doesn't mean you have to paint the same picture.

Transferrable Skills: Marv Wolfman on Planetside 2

2011-10-11T23:06:00.001+01:00

Marv Wolfman seems to have been around forever. I interviewed him over a quarter of a century ago. I vaguely recall asking him a lot of overly-detailed questions about the Teen Titans, which he answered patiently and with good humor, even when I gave him a hard time over the death of Terra. I think he was hearing a lot of that at the time...

He had a reputation as a steady, professional comics writer. A very safe pair of hands. I lost track of his career trajectory sometime in the early 90s, when I stopped buying comics for the final time. Well, it's been final so far...

Yes my mentor is Ambush Bug. What exactly are you trying to imply?

If I'd thought about him at all since then, which I haven't, I'd have guessed he would have left comics by now, possibly retired. I certainly wouldn't have expected him to turn up working on MMOs, much less for SoE, but there does seem to be a bit of genre bleed going on, what with Todd McFarlane over at 38 Studios and Michael Bendis on the Marvel MMO so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

I knew he'd done something on DCUO but I was never entirely sure what it was. I played DCUO quite a lot and still do on occasion and it certainly has a very 70s-80s take on the DC Universe, which I appreciate. It does feel a little like being inside a Marv Wolfman title from that era, although perhaps a Gerry Conway fill-in would be nearer the mark. Maybe the DC universe hasn't changed all that much. I don't know. As I said, I'm not keeping up like I used to.

Bats is out of town, okay? You got me. Stop laughing at the back!

Marv must have done a pretty good job doing whatever it was that he did, though, because he's back at SoE again, working on the backstory for Planetside II. Is that a plum job? I wouldn't have thought so. Not for a writer, anyway. Hard to see how much backstory a 24/7 running firefight needs. I don't think there's all that much congruity between comics and MMOs anyway. Not in the writing department. But then, a good pro can turn his hand to anything.

Oddly, given that SoE is my preferred MMO development house, I never played Planetside. I often meant to but somehow I just never got round to it. I mean to rectify that with Planetside II. I'd be doing that anyway, but knowing Marv's on board gives me just that little bit more confidence. I don't expect to notice what he's done, but his influence will be there, solid and stable. He's such a pro, after all.