Early Access Isn't Just For Christmas

I was just reading the combined September and October update for Monsters & Memories. I probably should say I was skim-reading because there's a lot of detail in there, everything from minor tweaks for individual classes to the re-writing of entire back-end systems.

As I was reading, I couldn't help making a few mental comparisons with a couple of other in-development MMORPGs seeking to bring back the experiences of the past. One of them went into Early Access years ago and is still there now. The other enters EA next month. M&M is proposing to join them in 2026.

I think it has an excellent chance of emulating the slow-burning, aesthetic success of the former, something I am not anywhere near as convinced will be the latter's fate, not after years of jumping around all over the place and not really seeming to know what it is or who it's being made for.

The longstanding Early Access game is, of course, the well-respected Project Gorgon, first mentioned here in December 2013 although, as Wilhelm pointed out in the comments, I'd left a comment of my own on his post about the same game over a year earlier. Technically, I've been writing about PG for a dozen years now.

The game about to enter Early Access is Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which made its first appearance on the blog just two months after Project Gorgon, in January 2014. I find it astonishing - scary, even - to see these dates put down in print like this. 

I was still in my early-to-mid 'fifties when these two games entered the public discourse. I'll have hit state retirment age before Pantheon makes it to Early Access and it's likely I'll be in my seventies by the time either of them meets an official launch date. If that doesn't tell you how ludicrously overcooked game development has become...

The huge difference between the two games is that for the whole of the last twelve years I've been able to play Project Gorgon as much as I liked. Even before it went into Early Access, there was an open alpha/beta client available to anyone who cared to download it. In the end, it turned out I didn't want to play it as much as all that but it was still great to have the option.

If nothing else, it gave me a great deal of confidence in the game and its development team. The game may not be "finished" in the eyes of the devs but it's as playable (And as feature-complete, most likely.) as many supposedly launched MMORPGs and I can say that with the experience of having spent many hours there.

Pantheon, despite being the same age, give or take, remains largely a mystery. It spent a decade in closed development, tucked away out of sight behind the money-wall of some hugely expensive buy-in options and even those for only limited test windows. The portcullis has been raised occasionally to allow the curious a peep inside and in the last year or two there have been some cheaper, limited passes available but the upcoming EA launch marks the first time the game will have been widely available to anyone who cares to give it a try at (What we assume will be...) a reasonable price.

Monsters & Memories sits somewhere between the two extremes but considerably closer to Project Gorgon's ready accessibilty than Pantheon's gated privacy. There have been numerous open tests, some lasting several days, with many more promised as the team behind the game readies it for it's EA launch on Steam the year after next.

They seem to have a very clear idea of what they want to achieve and a very realistic timetable in which to achieve it. I've played the game in open testing several times and it already does a surprisingly good job of recreating the era it seeks to emulate. So does Project Gorgon, coming from a slightly different perspective.

Pantheon, by contrast, on the one occasion I was able to play it, felt weird. It didn't look right and it didn't feel right, something the other two easily manage without seeming to try. I also found it quite astonishingly dull, even for the hour or two I spent with it, which was absolutely not the case with either of the others and not at all what I expected.

Visionary Realms released a newsletter a few days ago to say there's been a big uptick in people interested in playing, that the current round of testing has been extended to the end of the month and that there is now a European server. It also warns us all that the Pledge packages will cease to be available on December 1st.

What it does not say is how much EA access will cost, so it remains impossible to judge whether it would be better to buy the cheapest Pledge now (It costs $50.) or wait for the EA package itself. It's very hard to imagine any basic EA access costing more than $50 though, and the fifty dollar pledge now comes with a "Buddy Code", meaning if there are two of you it's effectively $25 each.

Although I think Mrs Bhagpuss's MMORPG days are probably over, this was one of the few new games she was interested in, once. I wouldn't mind having that Buddy Code just in case she fancies giving it a go sometime. On the other hand, if EA turns out to cost $25, as I suspect it might, it makes more sense to wait for that and then just buy a second copy if and when she does express an interest.

In practice, though, I wouldn't mind betting she'd get more enjoyment out of Monsters & Memories, which, in my brief exposure so far, feels closer to the original EverQuest experience and not that disimilar to Vanguard, the game I think Mrs Bhagpuss and I both hoped Pantheon would ressemble a lot more than it appears to at the moment.

I'll have to make an effort to play more during the next Monsters & Memories test. See if I can get a bit further than the starting city. I hope there's a test soon, preferably before Pantheon opens the doors, just so I can get some data for a comparison. If M&M would only go the full Project Gorgon route and have a client up for testing all the time I think I could strike Pantheon off my wishlist altogether.

Noiramore Academy Is Go!

Some good news. I imagine we all need cheering up this morning. I know it's not much in the grand scheme of things but you take the wins you can get.

Still a couple of days to go to work on stretch goals, the first of which is Full Voice Acting at $50k. Go here to join in the fun and don't forget your wallet!

What Are You Complaining About? It Flies, Doesn't It?

With a truly ridiculous number of highly tempting choices vying for my attention all across summer and right into autumn this year, some of the old stand-bys have all but dropped off my gaming radar. I don't believe I logged into EverQuest II even once last month and if it hadn't been for my EQ25 series of posts, I doubt I'd have set foot in Norrath at all.

I've been so lax in attendance during this Year of Darkpaw that I haven't really noticed most of the special events, let alone taken part in any of them. I visited that big tower in EverQuest back in the spring and did one of the floors but I think I have to accept that I no longer play EQ with any real intent and most likely never will again. (Cue whole new series of posts where I suddenly start playing nothing but EQ for a month...)

Perhaps most surprisingly, I haven't even been bothering to check the marketplace to see what's being given away in EQII each month. I had actually forgotten that was going to be a thing for the whole year. It's not like me to miss free stuff. I must be slipping.

Neither had I pre-ordered the forthcoming expansion, even though I believe I said I had. I meant to, after I last posted about it, but then I just forgot. It shows how far down my list of priorities the game has fallen. I have now pre-ordered. For real this time.

At least my annual subscription has renewed. That's automatic, for which I'm very grateful because I would have forgotten otherwise. With the expansion, I've paid almost exactly a hundred pounds up front for my sporadic enjoyment of the two EverQuest titles (And DCUO, I guess.) going into late 2025. It seems like a pretty good deal to me, even though I could actually play all of them for nothing, since they're Free To Play.

This post was going to be all about the current giveaways and holiday events in EverQuest II but I can already feel it lurching off the rails so why fight it? If you want to skip a lengthy digression on spending money and the associated mental health issues you're welcome to drop out now and pick things up below, with the paragraph that starts "Getting back to the original point ..."

Anyone still with me? Okay, on we go. As I wrote that last paragraph, it occurred to me to wonder why it might be that I'd be willing to pay for enhanced access to one set of F2P games even though I play them only rarely or in fits and starts, while at the same time categorically refusing to pay anything at all for games I play far more often, sometimes almost obsessively.

I play a lot of F2P games that offer some kind of extra benefits you can pay for. The exact names and mechanics vary - Seasons, Membership, Bonus, whatever - but they all work much the same. Usually there's a monthly package of perks, sometimes with differing Tiers of cost and content. Always there's a cash shop for ad hoc, individual purchases. I never use any of them. 

I think that's literally true. I can't recall a single instance where I ever paid money for anything in any one of these games. The only money any of them ever got from me was for the game itself, if it was Buy To Play. Why is that? And does it make any sense?

Thinking about it, I believe I can pare the reasons down to three: miserliness, paranoia and inertia.

#1. Firstly, I really don't like spending money. If I don't have to, I don't and that doesn't apply only to games. I find it very easy to say no to anything that I don't feel I need. Just wanting something is no reason to buy it. What's more, I get considerable pleasure from being abstemious. Not buying things gives me almost as much pleasure as buying them. Possibly more. 

#2. Secondly, I have an irrational distrust of giving my credit card details to any company that doesn't have a physical presence in my local area. Somewhere, if necessary, I could go in and yell at someone if anything went wrong. Not that I ever do that but I like to imagine I could, if I needed to. As for my debit card details, I give those to no-one other than major utilities and financial institutions. I don't trust most businesses, even offline, and the smaller they are, the less I trust them. Not saying it's rational.

#3. Thirdly, I'm lazy and I hate filling in forms. Especially online forms. I force myself to make new accounts to see new games but I hate doing it more and more as time goes on and the least awkwardness or difficulty these days is enough to make me give up on the whole idea. Signing up for free to play access to some new game is generally just simple enough that I push through but the extra effort involved in setting up a paid account is too much to even think about.

#s 2 and 3 are alleviated considerably by Steam and PayPal. Having made the decision to trust them years ago and having taken the trouble to fill out all the paperwork already, I'm far more likely to try a game that can be purchased using one or the other than anything that requires a separate set-up.

Buying things on Steam takes almost no effort and I've already trusted Valve and PayPal with my financial details. I figure if either of those get compromised it's going to be such a huge deal we're all screwed anyway so why not?

Even with paranoia and inertia out of the way, I'm still stymied by miserliness. No matter how amazing an outfit looks, it's very, very hard for me to convince myself to pay money for it. Not infrequently, I won't even be willing to spend in-game money on cosmetics so what chance is there for a cash shop to persuade me to open my wallet?

I might just possibly be able to convince myself that some practical function like inventory space or faster travel represented a justified expenditure in a game but that's a dangerous gamble for the developer to take. It's as likely I'll decide the game isn't worth playing at all, if you have to buy essentials to enjoy it. 

Kind of a Catch 22 from the developer's point of view. I won't buy cosmetics because I don't need them but I won't buy essentials because they ought to be included for free. How are they supposed to make money? Don't look at me. Not my problem.

In my more rational moments, I do see the logical flaws in most of these arguments. It's undeniable, even to me, that $5 or $10 spent on a really spiffy outfit for a character I may spend dozens of hours looking at and of whom I may take hundreds of screenshots I'll stare at as desktop backgrounds for months, would offer a much better return on investment than any number of similarly-priced real life purchases of supposedly practical items I think I need but then, having bought, never actually use. I could give examples but we'd be here all day. The house is full of them.

Given all of the above, why then do I not only feel it's fine to pay Daybreak almost £80 a year to play their F2P games but even thank them for taking my money without asking? That's... complicated.

For one thing, having an All Access account is part of my identity. I've had one since they were invented and before then I had an EverQuest account so in continuity terms I've been a member of that club for a quarter of a century. And everyone knows you pay your dues to be in a club so you can say you're in a club, not necessarily because you're going to use the facilities. That's such a widely-acknowledged experience, comedians base entire stand-up routines on it.

If I let my All Access account lapse it would suggest I'd become a different person and unless I was sure it was a kind of person I preferred to the old one, why would I want to do that? I know this isn't an outlying position among MMORPG players, either. I've read enough of people debating with themselves in public over whether or not to drop a subscription to World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV to recognize a common pattern.

Then there are the actual perks in All Access. I'm not going to go through them - I've done that before - but I will re-affirm that, when I'm playing EQII regularly, the benefits that come from being a member feel more than substantial and significant enough to justify the cost. I always thought it was a good offer and if anything I feel it may have gotten better still in recent years.

Of course, that only kicks in if I do, in fact, play the game(s). Which, as I said, right now I don't. But even when I'm not playing regularly, I'm still covered by the "it's part of my identity" clause so as you see it all makes perfect sense! 

I'm so glad we got that sorted out. I was worried for a moment there I was doing something crazy but now I see it was all perfectly rational all along...

Getting back to the original point of the post and in the unlikely event anyone's still reading after that lengthy and rather disturbing open-therapy session, we are now, at last, getting close to the EQII portion of the Year of Darkpaw, the part where we celebrate the junior game's twentieth anniversary. Twenty years is a one hell of a good run and it would be an even bigger deal if older sibling EverQuest hadn't just spent the last six months bigging up its twenty-fifth. 

You do have to feel a bit sorry for EQII, I guess, especially as it also has to share its 20th with its much better-known, more successful contemporary, WoW. It's not so much always the bridesmaid as always the usher...

Still, EQII is the one I play, when I'm playing any of them, which means free stuff in that game matters more, at least to me. And I do now wish I'd been paying more attention to the free stuff because it seems I might have missed quite a lot of it.

In that spirit, I'm pleased to say that this month's giveaway, which I am going to get, is a good one. Or it will be, when they've fixed it. This is really burying the lede but for what it's worth here it is anyway.

The giveaway in the Cash Shop this month is supposed to be a Griffin mount called Arisata the Noble. It looks great and apparently griffin mounts are relatively scarce so a lot of people would like this one, especially since it's not only free but available for every character on the account.

I wanted one. I logged in to get one. I was ready to log all my characters in so they could have one each and that's quite a lot of work, let me tell you, especially if the freebie applies to all accounts not just to members, which I've just checked and it does. That's like fifty characters on seven accounts if I logged them all in. It'd take all day.

So far I've just tried with my Berserker on my main account and there is indeed a free mount in the Cash Shop waiting there for him. A really nice one. 

It's just not the one that was advertised. It's not Arisata the Noble, the griffin. It's Stratos Aralez Skyvoyager, a mount from the current Ballads of Zimara expansion who looks kinda griffinny to me but since the forum is full of people either saying they already have a griffin so they'd like to keep this mount even if it's the wrong one or that they don't want it because they've already got it and they'd rather have the griffin they were promised, I have to assume whatever Stratos' species might be it's not Griffin. Or Gryphon for that matter.

As it happens, I don't already have Stratos. I believe that requires more progress in the storyline than I've managed, or more research, or possibly both. I'm quite happy to take him (Her. Them. It. Where Stratos is concerned, the appropriate pronouns remain, like the species, uncertain. Also, it's really hard to construct an elegant sentence about not knowing what pronouns to use while also not using pronouns.) 

Whatever and whoever Stratos may be, one thing I do know is that there are other ways to get the mount. I just need to get on and finish the damn expansion. I'd rather have the Griffin, please and thank you, since that one's entirely new as far as I can tell, so I'm holding fire for now.

How long it will be until the issue is addressed is hard to say. There's a thread about it on the forums, to which the estimable Ttoby has replied, saying he'll bring the issue to the notice of the relevant people, so presumably it will get resolved eventually, but that was last Friday and no other dev has popped into the thread to confirm anything's being done as yet. Until I hear news, I am not claiming the mount on any of my characters, so that's a couple of hours of my time I'll get back today. I think I'll use it playing more Once Human.

I did take the trouble to log in one of my several unsubscribed accounts just to check if free players also get the giveaways and I'm happy to confirm that they do. I can also let anyone who might be thinking "Oh, I used to play EQII - maybe if I can remember my password I'll log in and grab that sweet free ride." (Because I know that's how you all talk...) know to give it a day or two. Your character needs to be level 126 before they can even equip Stratos Aralez Skyvoyager and if you haven't played for a while they're not going to qualify so if you take that one and they never swap it out you'll be lumbered with a duff mount you can't even sit on to pose for pictures.

Hopefully, the griffin, when it finally arrives, will have a much more lenient level requirement. In the meantime, we'll all have to content ourselves with the other freebie for November .Yes, there's another. Did I not say? It's a statue of Wuoshi, the infamous dragon from original EverQuest, the one who used to guard the portal to Wakening Lands and who I was at one time so scared of meeting I parked a character I didn't much care about at the druid ring so I could log him to check if Wuoshi was up before porting in someone who mattered.

Or rather it's a statue of Woushi, a Wuoshi tribute act who presumably had to spell her name differently after the real Wuoshi's legal team sent her a Cease and Desist notice. That has to be the explanation, right? It couldn't just be that whoever was given the job of designing the statue didn't know how to spell the name of one of the most iconic NPCs in the entire franchise? 

Nah. Couldn't be that.

Whover the statue is of, it looks great in my Berserker's Mara Village home. Goes beautifully with the architectural style. Even if it may not be such a great fit for a Qeynos inn room, I'll probably pick one up for everyone, all the same. 

I mean, I may as well. I'll be logging them all in for the mount anyway, so why not?

PS: It took me so long to finish this post (Started before nine this morning, typing this at just before seven in the evening.) that there have now been corrections to the announcement and the correct mount will be available after the weekly update tomorrow. So that was all a complete waste of time...

Once Human: Winter Has Come

There very nearly wasn't a post again today. There barely is one now. I am not exaggerating when I say my desire to play Once Human is all-consuming.

Okay, I am exaggerating. That would literally be the definition of an exaggeration, to say that I am entirely consumed by the desire to log in and play this particular video game. That I would cease to eat or drink or sleep until I dropped dead of exhaustion, thirst and starvation at the keyboard. Although thirst would kill me quickest so hunger wouldn't get a look-in and no-one ever died of falling asleep unless it was at the wheel.

Okay, yes, there are lots of other ways falling asleep could kill someone. I get that. It kind of ruins the joke, though, don't you think, to have to list them all? 

There was a joke in there? Must have missed it.

Enough with the padding. The reason this post exists, other than to avoid my missing three days in a row as I work the weekend, is to share some snaps I took of the sudden, unexpectedly heavy snowfall that hit my home in Once Human this afternoon. 

Until now, the most I'd seen of snow, outside of the mountains anyway, were some thin sheets lying on the ground here and there and a flurry of flakes whirling in the air now and then. The temperature fluctuates a great deal, frequently dropping below -30, leading to hypothermia and death for anyone insufficiently well wrapped up but until today I hadn't seen anything pitch, as we say where I come from.

As you can see, that's all changed. Not only is the snow sticking (Other people say that. I don't.) it's drifting too. It's lying a foot or more deep all over my territory and it looks fantastic. 

I'm a long-time afficionado of virtual snow. It has its own tag on the blog. I once wrote an article for a fanzine about the depiction of snow in comics. I love me some good flake.

I think this is the best ground snow I've seen in a game. Rift probably had the best white-out blizzard conditions but I can't recall seeing snow lying this convincingly before. When I stand in it it comes up to my knees and when I move I see myself trudging through it, leaving a deep trench behind that doesn't fill in and disappear in moments like footsteps in most other games.

Even more impressive is the way it coats the surfaces, clinging to the flowers in clumps and leaving the grass coated and bowed down. It's almost eerily realistic. 

Meanwhile, my household deviants carry on as though nothing has happened. They happily trot through the new-fallen snow - or wade through it in the case of the shorter ones, like the somewhat startled bunny in the picture below - somehow finding their way to the rocks and plants buried beneath. The harvest must come in, regardless of the weather.

My plan for today, before I decided I'd rather play the game than write about it, was to go into some detail about how much I'm still learning and discovering, even after a hundred and thirty hours and counting. I feel like I'm only now starting to realise just how much I've missed so far. It's like I missed half the game. More.

That's all going to have to wait. I want to get another couple of hours in before I have to stop for the night and I won't be able to do much after that until next week.

No point wasting time talking about it, when you could be doing it, right?

A Plague On Both Their Houses (It's What They Would Have Wanted)

In recognition of the season, Mrs Bhagpuss, far spookier than I, has been re-watching the Addams Family movies along with the Wednesday TV show, which was presumably why she came into the kitchen as I was sitting there, eating toast the other morning and asked, a propos of nothing, "Munsters or Addams Family?".

Clearly there could only ever be one correct answer to this question, an answer which I duly gave without hesitation. That evening, though, as I was trawling YouTube for even more obscure and ludicrous Christmas songs for the 2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar (Oh yes, it's coming...) I found myself wondering if there were any covers of the theme tunes to either of those shows.

Of course there are. Fricken' hundreds of them. There were so many, I gave up scrolling after a while. It was like one of those spiral staircases that keep going down and down and down until you scent the faint reek of brimstone wafting up to meet you...

I guess it's not surpising so many people have felt entitled to take a tilt at these two. They're both insanely catchy, as was the way of TV themes once upon a time, most especially in the 1960s, when subliminal advertising was an actual thing and the goal of most TV theme tunes seemed to be to embed a short, musical phrase so deeply into the viewer's brain it could never be dislodged even by years of therapy. 

Advertising of the time worked on the same principle, which is why anyone over fifty can sing you the jingles written to sell several dozen products and services that ceased to be a commercial proposition before you, my little angel, were ever born.

No, the question wasn't so much would there be any covers. It was would any of them be any good?

And the answer? 

Not really. 

I listened to far too many of them. Or, rather, I listened to fragments. Most of them I couldn't stick for more than the time it took to register how dull they were. Here's the thing with theme tunes of the era. They're really short and yet far too long and for good reason. 

Back in the days of broadcast TV, when it was be there or miss out, the theme needed to be highly distinctive so that everyone in the house, no matter where they were, could prick up their ears at the opening bars, put down whatever they were doing, dry their hands or adjust their clothing and have time to get to the lounge or the living room or wherever the one TV set in the house was casting flickering black and white shadows across the floral wallpaper, in time to get settled down on the sofa for the start of the actual show.

At the same time, the theme had to be short enough not to wear out the patience of anyone already watching when it began, so as to minimise the chances of their switching to another channel. A delicate balancing act, especially when the music also needed to be supported by something to watch while you were waiting for the damn show to start.

None of which really leans into the strengths of three minute pop songs, which is what theme tunes turn into when musicians get their claws into them. Even if you cut that three minutes in half it seems long. Most covers of The Addams Family theme clock in around 1.45 and it still drags.

The Munsters theme benefits from having no words. It's easier to listen to an instrumental that overstays its welcome because it's easier to tune it out. Which isn't much of a compliment, now I think about it. 

The odd thing about that is that the Munsters theme actually does have lyrics. They just aren't used in the opening to the show. You can hear them on an L.P. (That's a kind of vinyl record they used to have in the olden days before the Beatles invented The Album.) It was called "At Home With The Munsters" and it came out in 1964, which seems surprisingly early, although I imagine in the UK we got the show several years late.

Being an instrumental also fits the Munsters theme very well for the kind of bands who seem keenest to take a crack at it. Given the macabre theme, you might expect it would be goths but I imagine most goths wouldn't be willing to acknowledge the comedic influence even of the genuinely macabre Addams Family, much less the cartoonish slapstick of the Munsters. 

Surf bands, though... they freakin' love this kind of stuff. And the theme itself is kinda surfy already so it's not a long reach. The early sixties was the heyday of surf rock so the synergies are clear. The Munsters theme does work as a surf tune, even at three minutes plus. I found it far easier to listen to a few of those all the way through than to hear all that finger-clicking and herky-jerky, stop-start performance art from the folks who like to dress up as Wednesday and Fester.

Because oh yes, you have to drag up if you're going to cover the Addams Family. It's the law. I mean. quite a few of the guys doing the Munsters theme give a nod to Fred Gwynne's goofy take on Frankenstein but it's so much easier to put on a black frock and white socks and do your hair up in pigtails than it is to get a bolt through your neck...

Anyway, that's enough pre-amble. Let's have some of the more listenable examples I found. Somewhere in the Addams Family's sub-basement there's a helpless fan who stopped by to get an autograph and just happened to mention they loved the theme tune, who's now trapped there, doomed to watch every cover version ever recorded on a loop. Forever.

Sorry. That was The Good Place bleeding over I think. Which is kind of appropriate. That show is turning out to be a lot spookier than I was expecting...

First up, I think we should remind ourselves of the originals.

There's a version someone hand-colorised, too, if you're into that.

Good job! As Miss Rachel would say. Up against this, though...

Class will out, as the saying goes.

And now, the covers. I think three of each ought to be more than enough. Let's have them take it in turns, like it's some kind of competition.

That's Surfquake. The sound's a bit muddy but bonus points for working a little Led Zeppelin in towards the end there.

From the aptly-named "Covers No-One Asked For" channel, this stands out for being what a good cover should be, namely recognizable but also very different from the original. Bonus points for doing Morticia and Gomez not Wednesday and Fester.

At this point you should have just watched a video credited only to "4 sisters". It's four sisters. In their house. And a fifth sister who runs in and out of shot at the beginning and the end. Unfortunately, they turn out to be on one of those irritating channels that blocks playback anywhere other than YouTube so you'll have to go there to watch it. It's worth the trip. The concentration on display could fuel a mission to Mars. Bonus points for no-one dressing up as Wednesday. Not like any of them needed to...

Anyway, I had to substitute, so what better than fourteen (By my count.) kids playing the spooktacular theme outdoors on a blazingly sunny day? They're Miramonte's Modern Band because nothing says "modern" like a cover of a sixty year-old TV theme. Bonus points for there being so many of them and not one of them looking like they ever saw the show.

I don't know about you but I'm always saying how there just aren't enough washboard covers on YouTube. Worth watching all the way through. The ending is really weird. Bonus points for dressing up as Wednesday and getting it right, for once.

I'll see your washboard and raise you a harpsichord, a tuba and an accordion. Bonus points for keeping it really short.

And finally, a Blues Rock band from Lyon France because who doesn't want to hear that? Especially with guest vocals from a woman who sounds like Violet Elizabeth Bott on helium. The band is called Midnight Burst, which doesn't sound very french to me and the singer is Astrid Gaspari, "singer of B-Odd, Fancy Hell and Back to the Seventies", all of whom I'm going to check out immediately I finish this post. Bonus points for... well, everything.

That's it. I'm done. Happy Halloween!

#14 - Shonki - Born 13 April 2003 - 49 days 4 hours

Shonki may have fewer played hours than some of my other characters but he racked up nearly all of those in groups. He's without doubt my most-grouped character, the time I spent with him marking the apogee of my social career in EverQuest, which was, for a time, all-consuming.

Before I played him, I already knew I liked healing for groups. I'd done a fair bit of it with Rachel. Main-healing at max level as a Cleric for a static group in EQ in the early years, though... that was a lot different to playing a Druid, healing for mid-20s pick-up groups at back door behind the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen.

I was a purist back then. It was okay for a Druid, being something of a Jill of All Trades, to be doing other things between heals but a Cleric had one job and one job only: to keep everyone alive. 

I was pretty good at it, too. I ought to have been. I sure took it seriously. I took a dim view of Clerics who didn't. The kind who thought it was okay to get a few licks in with the hammer now and then or cast the odd Smite. I hated it when one of those narcissists turned up in any group I was tanking for, so I made sure never to be That Guy in any group I joined as a Cleric.

Not that everyone appreciated such thoughtfulness. There was a term in use at the time - Sit-and-Heal Cleric. It sounds now as though it might have been an insult and it was, on occasion. If the group was cruising, sometimes resentment could attach itself to the poor old Cleric, just sitting there at the back with his spell-book in his lap and his mind on God, raking in the xp and doing sod all.

My semi-static group didn't feel like that, fortnately. We had maybe fifteen or twenty regulars from whome we permed groups most evenings and all of them were more than happy to have me as main healer, even if I did meditate the day away. They all knew the value of a trustworthy, reliable Cleric one who wasn't going to run out of mana on a bad pull. 

A lot of PUGs were also happy to get a true Sit-and-Heal Cleric. Someone who could be relied on not to have blown all their mana when it came time to bring the heals because they'd used it all up nuking. Someone who wouldn't be caught round the side of a mob, flailing away with a hammer for next to no damage, while not even noticing an add had arrived. 

Someone who could be trusted to do the damn job they'd be invited into the group for in the first place in other words. That was me.

For a while I was damn near religious about it. I used to rate my performance and the performance of the group as a whole on how little I'd had to do. A perfect two-hour session would involve me sitting on my backside at full mana for maybe an hour and fifty minutes. I'd pride myself on having done absolutely nothing apart from standing up occasionally, casting a perfectly-timed Complete Heal, then sitting down again.

That was the dream but there weren't too many sessions that went that way. I imagine if there had been we'd all have gotten pretty bored and if there was one thing I never suffered from as a Cleric in EverQuest in those days it was boredom. Anxiety, stress, blind panic - sure. Every night and twice on a Sunday. Boredom, rarely.

What generally happened was that the session would start with some tense moments just getting to the pull spot, followed by some more adreniline rushes as we got it cleared. Then we'd settle into a ryhthm and start chatting, between and even during pulls, until we'd all relax and slip into a false sense of security.

At which point whoever was pulling would stumble back, close to dead with an add or several on their tail or the group down the corridor would get into trouble and run, leaving us to deal with their train or some careless twonk would break mez or aggro a passing mob that ought to have kept walking and it would be Deal With It Or Die time. Again.

That was when I'd have to jump up and start throwing the heals. It was a bit like being a museum guard. Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens but you daren't fall asleep because when it does you have to be the one to stop it. 

I loved the quiet but I also loved those moments of chaos and although I would certainly have taken a peaceful session over a chaotic one, it was the frenzied, desperate battle to survive our own or someone else's mistakes that created the memories that lasted, some of them until this day a couple of decades later. Blurry, sure, but still recognizeable.

As time went on and the game changed around us, the need for Clerics to do nothing but sit and heal diminished and my personal commitment to the abastract purity of the calling began to fade, too. Eventually even I used to cast that hammer that hit things without needing me to hold it, because why not? I even threw in the occasional nuke here and there. And when the all-instance Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion arrived in September 2003 I added pulling to my clerical duties. 

I'd done some pulling as Druid and I loved the role. Druids and Rangers get a spell called Harmony. It's an AE, it's unresistable and it causes mobs that would usually come to the assistance of their nearby colleagues to just stand there, oblivious, ignoring their best pals as they scream for help. It's ridiculously overpowered outdoors but it doesn't work at all in a dungeon. 

I'd used Harmony with Rachel, acting as puller for groups at the Sarnak Fort and especially outside the Tower of Frozen Shadows, so I knew how to pull, which at the time was a very particular and specialised role in any group. Clerics get a line of spells that does much the same thing, except it's nowhere near as good, being both single target and resistable. 

It does, however, work in dungeons and when LDoN led to Mrs Bhagpuss and I spending almost every evening for six months doing nothing but instanced dungeons with our semi-static group, I became the puller on the nights we didn't have a Bard, Bards being the undisputed kings and queens of dungeon-pulling. Or they were back then, anyway, just as Rangers held that title out of doors.

Clericking suited me. I loved pulling, I loved healing and quite liked buffing, too, which was something else Clerics became increasingly valued for. There was a time when no-one would even leave Plane of Knowledge without Virtue or Temperance, whichever would stick at their level. You could get rich, casting those for a fee or a donation.

Buffing your own group cost money, though, which is why a lot of Clerics got grumpy about being asked to do it for free. I was lucky. Playing mainly with people I knew, I'd get handed Peridots to replace the expensive gems I was using as reagents, sometimes so many I'd come away with a small profit.

As must be obvious, I really loved being the main healer in groups. Indeed, it was many years before I stopped thinking of myself as that in every MMORPG I played, despite there being precious little evidence to support the claim. 

I drew the line at healing raids, though. I did try it a couple of times, in open raids, which were a thing for a while. Someone with more patience than a rock would spend an hour or two recruiting players in chat to come join a raid on some fairly accessible boss. Then they'd try to manage the ensuing chaos so that not everyone died.

At the time raiding generally required multiple clerics just to keep the Main Tank alive, a task they achieved only by means of something called a Complete Heal Chain, which was like playing Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at sombody else's head. A bunch of Clerics would all be given a number. They'd have the tank targeted and when the fight started they'd count off until it was their turn to cast Complete Heal. Then they carry on counting until their turn came around again and that was the raid as far as they were concerned.

At one point Complete Heal literally healed the target to full health, no matter how many hit points that took, but later it was given a fixed, very large total. Either way, it was the biggest heal available. And the slowest. 

Complete Heal takes ten full seconds to cast.  I got to be very good at timing its use in a group, where I was in full control of when to start. In a Complete Heal Chain, all autonomy is stripped away. You count the seconds between the first cast and your turn and god forbid you be the one who fucks up. No pressure, then...

It's one of those gaming experiences I'm happy to be able to say I did but which I did not enjoy at the time and never wanted to do again. Although I did do it a couple of times so it can't have been that traumatic.

I did know my limits, though, and raid healing was outside of them. So, as it turned out, was main-healing bleeding-edge, at-cap content in the infamous Gates of Discord expansion. One of the last things Shonki did before Mrs Bhagpuss and I decamped for EQII was to join a PUG going into one of the early GoD zones. 

This was a good while after the expansion had landed, by which time pretty much everyone I knew was already refusing to set foot in it again. I was still curious to see more, though, so I answered a LFM call for Clerics from someone wanting to do something or other in one of the instanced zones, one I'd never seen.

The group turned out to be just two people, a couple of high-end raiders who wanted a healbot. They told me what to cast and when to cast it and I did exactly as I was told. A bit of a change from my regular groups, where it was me calling all the shots as often as not and always me grunting "FFS!" angrily, whenever anything didn't go exactly the way I thought it should.

I still marvel at the fact we all didn't die on the first pull. In fact, the three of us managed to do whatever it was they went there to do and got out in one piece. It was one of the most stressful groups I ever had in any game and it pretty much decided me I was done healing in GoD for good.

Maybe Omens of War, the next expansion, woulfd have set things right. It ddid for some people. By then, though, I was ready for something new. Off to EQII I went, along with half the people I knew.

And that was more or less the last I saw of Shonki. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I returned to EQ, it was to play different characters on a different server. I did briefly try soloing Shonki with a mercenary when they were added to the game but that really was boring. I retired him after that and in retirement is where he remains.

I realise now I haven't explained why I called him Shonki in the first place. There's a reason for that. I didn't. Mrs Bhagpus did. He was her character, at least to begin with.

Shonki had a very odd start in life. Mrs Bhagpuss created him and named him that because she liked the sound of the word, which means something like "dodgy" or "shifty" in Yiddish. She then proceeded to play him in a way that entirely lived up to that name, especially when spelled with an "i", the way a stripper would spell it.

Okay, let's be honest. Shonki was once, as Mark Knopfler put it in the song he wrote and later gave to Tina Turner,  a privated dancer, a dancer for money. He did what you wanted him to do. And got well paid for it.

At that time in EQ, guard-killing was an established if controversial method of soloing. Later, the devs made many guards virtually unkillable but in 2003 most of them were still (un)fair game and there would usually be a couple of Dark Elves or an Ogre or two outside the gates of East Freeport, pulling the gate guards and slaughtering them as fast as they spawned.

As I mentioned when I was giving Timblewoot's backstory, there were some corrupt guards whose helmets you could hand in for a decent cash reward and some very good faction and xp. The bad guys killing guards at the gate didn't care about any of that. They just wanted the xp for killing them.

For a few weeks, Shonki, with Mrs Bhagpuss's help and encouragement, ran a small business servicing these reprobates. They couldn't go into Freeport for food and drink or whatever else they needed so she Shonki would go and get it for them. 

That wouldn't have been so bad but she'd also dressed him all in leather armor, which for some reason displayed on a Gnome like a shiny, wet-look gimp suit, which may be why she also had him dance for them, a sight some of the evil crew found highly amusing.

In return for Shonki's self-inflicted humiliation, they tipped him well and also let him loot the helmets, which he handed in to level himself up. That's how he got as far as Level 9. He certainly never healed anyone.

Eventually the appeal of this wore off for both sides and Mrs Bhagpuss was about to reward Shonki with the gift of eternal oblivion, when I stepped in to offer him both a home and moral redemption. I returned the little pervert to the one, true path, following his god...

...actually, I can't remember who his god was. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Church in Norrath back then. 

Probably just as well he retired.

Fun And Games

There was no post today for two reasons:

1. I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to talk about. 

Obviously, I could have come up with something but

2. I spent pretty much the whole day playing Once Human and I did not want to stop.

Probably the most hours I've played one game for months. Many months.

Very pleased with my progress so far.

Absolutely delighted with my new look.

Less happy about where two of the four sceenshots I took for this post have gone. Nowhere I can see.

Normal service may be resumed tomorrow.

Or it may not.

I may play Once Human all day again. 

Five more levels and I can start working on T5 gear.