Truth, Time And A Third Word Begining With "T" I Can't Think Of Just Now...

You ever have one of those weeks where everything happens at once? This blog's having one of those right now. 

There's Next Fest, for which I have seven demos to cover, four of which I've already played and one of which I've already reviewed, so that's going about as well as could be expected. Better, really. 

There was also that new, hot game that no-one's talking about that I downloaded the demo for before Next Fest even began. I've played (Some of) that one and posted about it already too, so ditto.

Then there's the launch of a brand-new, highly-anticipated open world RPG that's definitely not an MMO, which has been out for three years now and that millions of people have played, many hundreds or even thousands of them on the same servers at the same time, actually (Oh, stop it!). New World Aeternum, it's called. 

I downloaded that one, with considerable difficulty, yesterday and last night I made a character. She's Level 8 so that's a work in progress, pretty much the same as the game itself, which has been re-envisioned at least three times now to my certain knowledge. Will this be the version that sticks? We'll see soon enough, although whether anyone still cares might be a more appropriate question.

After that comes the second full PvE season in Once Human which, unlike the last two seasons that don't really count because they were just revamped versions of the first season with some bits moved around and some difficulty settings tweaked, brings a huge amount of genuinely new content to the game. 

There's a whole new region with four zones, as we would have called them in the olden days, before everything went seamless. That's an expansion by some people's reckoning. I can think of marketing departments that would be hanging the expansion label on an update like that and charging for it, too.

I read the latest press release for the update yesterday (Version 1.3 - The Way of Winter - that's what it's called.) and it does sound really interesting. Exciting, even. I've had had a really great time playing Once Human for (Checks Steam...) eighty hours so far so I'm looking forward to getting in and seeing all the new stuff. The update went live today and I have it downloading as I write. Now I just have to play it for a while and then post about it. 

I could get right on that today, only late yesterday evening, just as I was about to switch my PC off for the night, I got an email inviting me into a "playtest" for another MMO. I downloaded the client but as yet I haven't checked whether there's an NDA or anything. The email didn't mention one and I haven't signed anything but I probably should double-check before I start rambling on about it in public.

By a conservative estimate, I make that nine posts pending at least, assuming I give all the demos a post of their own, which I'm hoping I won't have to but which experience tells me I probably will. To make it a nice, round ten, I just finished watching two TV shows I want to talk about. At least I can usually portmanteau several of those into one post so I shouldn't have to go to eleven.

I realize I have now spent eight paragraphs basically doing one of those posts about blogging that no-one wants to read but I blame that on Stuart Lee. Mrs Bhagpuss put one of his books on the bathroom book pile and I've been reading the bit where he goes through one of his touring shows as broadcast on the BBC, line by line, with extensive footnotes, talking through his process. I have always had an unfortunate tendency towards unconscious imitation. I think this might be one of those times.

And now I have to go take Beryl for a long walk in the countryside. It's been raining for two days straight and she's barely been outside but today the sun has come out and supposedly it's not going to rain all day so she's more than due. I'll have to pick this up again later. 

At least Once Human has updated now, so that's something off the list, at least.

And now I'm back. 

Is there any point to these "stepping away from the keyboard" sidebars, I'm wondering? It's like when Joanne says she has to go pee in Nobody Wants This. Or, rather, when she does it in the fictional podcast of the same name she co-hosts with her sister, in the hit TV show, also called Nobody Wants This. 

That, what I did there, besides being confusing, thanks to the embedded metafiction, for which I'm not to be held responsible, is called tele-parabalizing. 

Okay, it's not but it kind of is all the same. Douglas Coupland coined the term in his seminal novel Generation X, where he also came up with a whole slew of descriptive terms and labels for quasi-cultural activities that I'm sure he hoped would catch on, making him his generation's answer to Shakespeare. That didn't happen, as the Observer's Christine Smallwood somewhat unkindly pointed out in 2006, fifteen years after the publication of the book itself, but I have a bunch of those definitions in tiny frames on my kitchen wall so I haven't been able to forget them as easily as everyone else.

That's an interesting article, by the way, the one I linked then, although I only skimmed it so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the detail. Still, it is curious how GenX seems to have slipped through the cracks between Boomers and Millennials. Also, what was Generation Y, described in the piece as "the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big"? Anyone remember them?

My feeling has long been that all generations need to be subdivided at least once. The life experiences of children growing up a decade apart are frequently too different to be tidily conflated. We probably should talk about Early and Late for all generations, which I guess would make Gen Y early Millennials. 

I didn't come here to talk about any of that, though. I seem to have gotten myself side-tracked. Again.

While I'm down this byway I might as well mention that, if you google "tele-parabalizing" to check if indeed it might have caught on more than you thought it had, as I just did, (It hasn't.) you'll find one of my posts, the frankly wonderfully-named Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas, at #4 in Google's list. Now I've mentioned it again I wonder if this post will also appear in future searches for the phrase? 

Probably not because the only reason the other one ranks that high to begin with is because I misspelled "parablizing". Coupland spells it without the second "a" and since he made it up, I guess he knows.

This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the imminent "Death of the Internet" we're all supposed to be worrying about. I mean, just how reliable was the information we were all lapping up before the rise of the AIs anyway?

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading a Stewart Lee book (It's March of the Lemmings in fact, although that's not the cover of the edition currently lying on the floor of our bathroom.) In it, he occasionally refers in considerable detail, often with dates and names, to cultural artefacts that don't exist. Sometimes he then tells the reader he's made them up but mostly he doesn't.

For example, when he mentions "an Essex folk song collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the '50s",  he's referring to a real person but when the sentence carries "from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell" he's making stuff up. Specifically, what he's doing is collating the name of Gary Bushell, a right-wing music journalist and cultural commentator no-one likes with the name of Bushell's old band, The Gonads.

That one's a very obvious joke but "The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980" by Daniel Spicer, which I assumed he'd also invented, turns out to be entirely bona fide, as does Julian Cope's band Brain Donor, a Cope project I was completely unaware of until I read about it in Lee's book. 

At one point, Stewart also quotes a lengthy post by someone purporting to be a stage manager, accusing Lee, in an unsettlingly calm, world-weary tone, of all kinds of behaviors and actions that turn out to be provably untrue. But that's what truth is: anything someone tells you until someone more convincing tells you otherwise.

I was reminded of that when I was in the launderette a couple of hours ago (I took a load of washing round after we got back from walking Beryl. If I was a comedian I guess I might say something like "This is what my life has become" but it's pretty much what my life already was, except now we have a dog...). As the load was in the drier, I was reading a novel called Starling House by Alix E Harrow and I was struck by just how many precise, specific references the author makes to books and songs which I was pretty sure didn't exist, at least not in the form she said they did.

For example, on page 44 the protagonist, Opal, makes a passing reference to "that one Prine song that everybody still hates", which would be largely meaningless and pass mostly unnoticed if it wasn't for a footnote on the same page, in which an unnamed annotater (Definitely another character, not the author.) explains "Opal is referring to John Prine's 1971 song "Paradise" on his debut album".

This is an actual song and that is an actual album and the lyrics do concern the mining industry in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, which is where the novel is set - in a small town called Eden. Prine's father grew up in Paradise, a small mining town in the same county and the song is about his experiences there.

Prine's song does not, however, include the line "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Old Gravely's coal train has hauled it away", as stated in the footnote because Gravely Power is a fictional company invented by the author. What John Prine actually wrote and sang was "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.", which is admittedly very similar but not the same.

According to Wikipedia, the real mining company that strip-mined the real Paradise was called the Peabody Coal Company. The fictional founder of the fictional Gravely Power that did the same to the fictional Eden was John Peabody Gravely. 

This seems to me to be getting extremely close to the kinds of "hallucinations" seen in AI-produced text, albeit here intentional rather than accidental. And being set down in print, it's now in the cultural record as much as anything on the internet. Maybe it even has more authority that way, even though its in a novel. Books have gravitas.

There's more, too. Across the next four pages, Alix E Harrow incorporates the full text of a supposed Wikipedia article on fictional author Eleanor Starling. There's nothing very unusual about writers creating other writers who never existed and filling out their bibliographies as though they did but backfilling fake internet data into a printed book adds a level or two of complexity, not to say confusion. 

Here, once again, the author includes a number of direct and specific references from our non-fictional timeline. They're extrmeley well-done and wholly convincing.

For example, there's a quote attributed to Guillermo del Toro: "the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier but to lay it bare". It sounds like something the director might have said, although clearly he couldn't have said it, as the fictional Wikipedia article suggests, about the equally fictional author Eleanor Starling. I did wonder if it was an actual quote, re-purposed but in fact it's wholly made up. De Toro never said it at all.

Better yet, there's a reference to Josh Witter's third studio album, "Hello Starling", which supposedly includes a song called "Nora Lee and Me" as a hidden track, Nora Lee being the name of the girl in The Underland, the one and only book Eleanor Starling ever wrote. 

Josh Ritter's third album really is called Hello Starling, although presumably for entirely different reasons. Having the song be a "hidden track" on it is a master-stroke because, of course, hidden tracks do exist but are never listed anywhere, so even if an internet search brings up no trace of any song of that name you can never be absolutely sure it doesn't exist. All we need now is for Ritter to read the book and decide to write the song and include it as a hidden track on future editions of the album and reality will have fractured into shards.

All of this suggests that humans are and always have been perfectly capable of muddying the factual waters all on their own, without the help of soi-disant artificial intelligences and lumbering LLMs. The internet, which was always awash with nonsense, may yet become so sodden with falsehood it will sink to the bottom of the data sea and lie there, a rotting wreck filled with misinformation, fantasy and lies but whether that makes it materially different from the recorded corpus of human thought and expression from the previous several millennia is questionable at best.

Did I have a point? If I did, I think I made it. Let's move on.

Actually, let's stop. That took most of the day and now I'm one post further behind where I wanted to be. Result!

I suppose I'd better get on and play another of those demos. Or take a look at that game I'm supposed to be playtesting and see if it has an NDA.

Off I go. Wish me luck. And here's hoping I make a better job of this tomorrow.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the final image, which was generated at NightCafe using Real Cartoon XL v4 from the prompt "Nora Lee and Me starling house the underland line drawing color dark gothic scary". It was the second attempt. the first, where the prompt didn't have the "dark gothic scary" part, turned out way too bright and cheerful, as you'd expect.

Sentou Gakuen: Revival - or - Kitten's Got Claws

Yesterday's post , listing the seven demos I'd picked for this Autumn's Next Fest, ended with an exhortation to myself to "go and get on with it" and for once I took my own advice. By the end of the evening I'd made an attempt at four of the demos, some more successfully than others.

The first I tried was Spire Horizon. That didn't get far. The servers were down. I tried again a few hours later and they were still down. Not the best look for a game trying to pick up some traction from a limited-time event. 

Later in the evening, while I was attempting to update the New World client to New World Aeternum, which I knew would need a full download but which in my case also required me to uninstall and reinstall the game on top of that because the new client wouldn't verify, I saw that Spire Horizon needed an 8GB update too. I did that but by then it was too late to see if the servers were up.  I'll try again later today.

Which brings us to the three demos I was able to play. Usually, I try to play demos right to the end before writing about them (Unless they're the open-ended, kind, of course.) but I haven't finished any of these. I clocked up about an hour in two and forty-five minutes in the third. I may well go back to any or all of them for a second look but what I've seen so far has given me more than enough to talk about. 

Sentou Gakuen: Revival 

After my failure with Spire Horizon, I moved on to this one next because I was very curious about it. As I said in a comment at MassivelyOP yesterday, SG:R is "a visual novel “with MMORPG elements”", whatever the heck that means. 

I couldn't quite figure out what to expect from the description and having played the thing for an hour, I'm still not exactly clear on what it is or wants to be. After a very brief visit to Character Creation, the demo begins with a lengthy introduction in which your character arrives at a very busy train station and walks through some even busier city streets on the way to their new High School, where they're about to start as a transfer student.

This part is quite literally a "visual novel" or at least a visual short story. Scene after scene appears, with lines of text at the bottom giving an internal monologue, describing what you're seeing and feeling. Except you aren't seeing any of it.  

I tried to start a new game to get a screenshot of the text but it seems you can't restart, only continue, so just imagine a caption telling you how incredibly, overwhelmingly busy the street scene above is, people everywhere, lots of noise, cars roaring by...

 

The descriptions continually focus on the chaos and clutter of the environment, attempting to conjure an impression of a bustling city, overfull to the point of chaos. Meanwhile, the pictures show serene scenes of completely empty streets with no-one anywhere to be seen. 

The writing is pretty good. It does a fine job of eliciting the sensations of struggling to find your way in a crowded city you don't know. The artists don't seem to have read any of it.

After quite a bit of that you find your way to some suburban avenues that are actually supposed to be quiet. Except they aren't because that's where the action is. Action so bizarre I could hardly believe I was seeing it. I'll summarize: 

As you walk along the street, you step in something squishy. Looking down, you see it's a half-eaten fish. It belongs to a scraggly black cat. The cat takes this interruption to its meal badly and hisses at you. You try to talk your way out of the confrontation but the cat is not to be persuaded. It attacks. You fight the cat and lose. You end up in the school infirmary, hooked up to an IV drip. 

You and me both, sister!

 

Let me make this clear. It's a cat. Not a giant cat or a magic cat or a cat-like monster. Just a cat. 

You, the player character, are a full-sized, human girl (Or boy, you can choose at character creation.). Your age isn't specified but is most likely mid-to-late teens. 

Fit, healthy teenagers do not lose fights to cats. They might, at the very worst, get badly scratched or bitten, which would be unpleasant and potentially dangerous if not treated, but since no-one gets attacked by a cat in the street, something like that could only happen if the teenager tried to pick the cat up or otherwise interfere with it. 

The cat would not, under any imaginable circumstances, pick a fight with the teenager and even if it did the teenager would not fight back.  And even even if all of that actually, through some indescribably unlikely chain of circumstances, was to happen, the teenager would not lose the fight, let alone "get their ass kicked".

I thought for a while that the game might turn out to have some kind of fantasy element that would make sense of the cat fight but no. It's supposed to be a naturalistic setting or close enough. I'm wondering now if cats in Indonesia behave radically differently from cats in Europe or the UK. Or maybe its cats in Japan, since that's where the game is set. Or maybe people in Indonesia believe Japanese cats are peculiarly aggressive and/or Japanese teenagers exceptionally fragile...

What she said...

Whatever. It happens. And what happens next isn't much less disturbing. 

You wake up with the nurse standing over you only she turns out to be both the school nurse and the biology teacher because that's a thing that happens. Maybe in Indonesia. Or Japan. 

She's very sinister and scary, her bedside manner clearly modeled on Nurse Ratched. Not only is she deeply unsympathetic, she also makes her own medicines. Unlicensed ones that she tells you, almost gleefully, are not sanctioned by any authority but her own. She makes you take one of her concoctions...

And it makes you feel much better. Anticlimax! 

That's it for the Infirmary. At least it for now. But don't worry. You'll be seeing plenty more of that hospital bed. It's basically your respawn point. Every time you get knocked out, which is going to be often unless you learn to fight a lot better than I did, that's where you'll wake up.  

May as well get used to it. You'll be back.

And you'll stay there, too, because every time you lose a fight or get caught doing something you shouldn't be doing (Which sends to the Detention Room instead of the Infirmary but same difference.) you get a timer that prevents you doing much of anything until it runs down. 

I think it may also get longer the more times you "die", too. I wasn't keeping track but I think my timer started out at about a minute and ended up closer to two and half by the time I logged out. I know it felt like a long time to just stare at the screen and not be able to do anything.

After you get out of the Infirmary, the first thing that happens is you walk into a riot. In the corridor outside, kids are fighting over lockers. There are factions, some dressed all in white, some all in black, some in cosplay or regular clothes. One guy is in full plate armor with a sword but its all plastic. 

They fight with weapons including baseball bats. It's anarchy.

All of this, once again, is in the text and only in the text. On the screen all you see is a pristine, entirely empty corridor. Once in a while a single character will appear and stand while what they have to say scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Then they disappear again. Mostly, though, you just stare down that empty hallway into the vanishing point. 

I'm not seeing it. Are you?

And it kinda works? The writing is good enough that I got the full impact of the chaotic, violent scene without needing to see it. Which means I might as well have been reading an actual novel, I suppose.

So how about that gameplay, then? Is there any? 

Quite a lot as it turns out but you really have to go look for it. I'd call this a sandbox, near as makes no difference. Or possibly a sim. There's plenty to do but don't expect anyone to tell you what it is.

I only began to get the idea once the math teacher turned up, threw some chalk around (Which, now that I come to think about it, did sparkle and leave glowing marks on the walls, so maybe there is a fantasy element in play after all...) and told everyone to get to class. 

The next station stop is: Math Class.

I thought it was going to lead to some more structured content but it didn't. Instead I slowly figured out that from this point on you're largely free to roam around the school looking at stuff, fighting other students, picking up anything that's lying around, slipping on banana skins and starting "Investigations".   

Movement took me a while to figure out. It's like an old Text Adventure game. You can go into any of the adjacent rooms. There's a little grid at the bottom right that shows you which is available. 

I found out later you can also go by train to any location. Yes, you can go to a third floor school room by train... It's the game's version of Fast Travel.  Like a lot of things in the game, it's probably best not to think about how it works.

It'd be strange enough if it was an instruction manual but it's a coloring book.

Absolutely none of this is explained, except for the combat, instructions for which come by way of a coloring book featuring Kungfu Komodo given to you by Nurse Eiko. My character was unconvinced by these idiosyncratic teaching methods and I regret to say I didn't pay much attention to them either, which is why I kept ending up in the Infirmary. 

Combat consists of some kind of symbol-matching game but I never figured it out and for once button-mashing wasn't enough. After being decked by a couple of students in the hallways and an angry Salaryman in the street when I went outside for a breath of fresh air, I gave up trying to fight people.

Also, is Salaryman an acceptable term? I seem to remember reading it had gone out of fashion but it's the one the game uses. And whether or not it's acceptable to call a middle-aged man by that term, whatever you call him is it okay for him to punch a teenage girl in the face hard enough to knock her out and leave her needing hospital treatment? 

Just because he's having a bad day? 

Seems harsh. 

Just say yes and don't think about it too hard.

It's the kind of thing that happens all the time in Sentou Gakuen, though. I know that because of those aforementioned "MMORPG elements". 

There's a box you can tick to give permission for your character to be used by the game as an NPC. It defaults to "Yes" so it's an opt-out, really. As far as I can tell, what it means is that everything your character does, like be hit in the face by a Salaryman or falling over after stepping on a banana skin, is going to be reported to every other player, using your character name, either in a window called "Info" or as a small pop-up on screen. 

I'm fairly sure your character can also appear as one of the NPCs other players fight, although I'm not so sure you'd know about it until you read the result in the Info report. I don't think it interrupts your own gameplay. Certainly, if anyone called me out I never noticed. I insulted several of my fellow students to provoke a fight so I apologize if does actually yoink you out of class for an ass-kicking. Not that it's likely to be your ass that gets kicked if it's me that's calling you out.

Besides starting fights with random schoolmates and passers-by, gameplay options come in a pop-up window for each room and include Info, Upgrade, Encounter, Nearby Students and Investigation. Not every room has all of them. Although the tabs are always available, often some of them are empty when checked. You need to check all of them in every room if you want to be sure of not missing any.

See? I told you he punched me in the face!

As well as the four tabs there are also icons that appear at the top of the screen. They do change as you move from room to room. If you mouse over them you get an explanatory tool-tip like "Do something stupid to provoke someone to fight with you." or "Buy ticket". There are quite a lot of locations outside the school grounds - shops, cafes, parks - all with their own potential activities.

You can start an Investigation in any room. Investigations can last an hour or several hours or a whole day. And that's real time. I had two complete overnight but then I couldn't figure out how to see if my investigation had uncovered anything. Maybe you have to go back to the same room to check. I just thought of that!

There are two factions you can join and actions you take affect your standing with both of them. I joined Yami, whose motto is Freedom, Diversity, Laissez-Faire. The other faction is the authoritarian one that goes about the hallways telling everyone else what to do. We hate them.

You can form a Club, which I think is like a guild in other games and you get an apartment, where as far as I can tell you can do absolutely nothing. I think your Club may get a room of its own too. If so, I bet you can't do anything there either.

I logged back in after I'd finished the post to take a screenshot and in five minutes I discovered enough new information to write a whole other post. Like there's a train for fast travel and a shop and a cafe and a whole woodland area with a "dungeon" you have to be Level 15 and get a permission slip from the Principal to enter...

 

All of which, I realize, doesn't really make it clear whether or not I liked the demo. Or whether I had fun playing it. That's because I don't know, either.

I know I was intrigued by it. Fascinated, even. I was certainly never bored. So much of it made little or no sense. It so often went places I wasn't expecting. It made me think. 

And it was well-writen, in perfect English, and the pictures were pretty to look at. So there's all of that, which is a lot. 

I just never had the least feeling I knew what I was doing or even what I was meant to be doing.

It's very likely that had more to do with my lack of familiarity with the kind of game Sentou Gakuen: Revival is than it has to do with the game itself. I'm guessing it's part of a sub-genre that has, until now, completely passed me by, meaning I have no idea what it's intending to achieve or what it expects of me.Meanwhile the developers clearly expect their audience to be extremely familiar with the whole thing and to be happy to get on with it on their own.

Either that or it's just nuts, which is always a possibility. 

I'm beginning to see how this is an MMORPG now. Just a really weird one.

Whichever it is, I'd say the demo is definitely worth a look, especially if you haven't come across this kind of thing before. It kept me fully engaged and entertained for an hour and I only stopped because it felt like I'd taken the whole thing about as far as I could without going and doing some secondary research. I'd pressed all the buttons and found out what they did. (I hadn't. There were more and it turned out I didn't really know what some of the ones I'd found did, either.) but I didn't know why I was pressing them or what I was hoping to achieve by doing it.

I may go back and play some more when I've looked into things a bit. I think I most probably will do that. Or I might just call it quits, add it to the experience pile and move on. There's a lot going on in gaming just now. I'm not sure I have the time for experimenting with unfamiliar genres just now.

More to the point, I've gone on about it for so long here that I don't have time to talk about the other two demos I was going to write about today so that's going to have to wait until next time. Or maybe the time after that.

I'm off to see if Spire Horizon is up yet. Then I ought to check out New World Aeternum. And tomorrow is the start of the Big New Season in Once Human.

It's going to be a busy week.

Next Fest - Lucky Seven

Picking half a dozen interesting-looking demos last night from the couple of thousand available in Next Fest seemed to go about the same as last time, when I said "It wasn't too difficult". There didn't seem to be quite as many obvious choices this round but there were enough.

There did seem to be an awful lot of cheap, amateurish-looking efforts, more than usual, several of which I rejected after watching the promotional videos. I do think that if you haven't been able to program your main character to walk in a straight line without looking like Mr Bean applying for an internship at the Ministry of Silly Walks, you'd probably be best served not making a video at all. 

There also seemed to be more outright pornography than usual. There's always some but this time several of the more heinous examples appeared quite high in the "Most Wishlisted" category, which is a tad disturbing.

I didn't pick any of those but I did manage to find seven demos that looked like they might be worth trying. I made a feeble attempt to find some balance in genres and gameplay but even though quite a few of the better-looking, more polished demos were for games of the kind I don't generally play, in the end I decided there wasn't much point picking them, even to have a better range to post about. I am never going to enjoy pretending to be a shopkeeper, no matter how well the profession is emulated and I'm too old to learn how to platform, even if the reward is some stunning scenery to jump through.

The games I picked break down roughly into two mystery adventures, a point & click, a sandbox, an open world rpg, a visual novel and an "AI rpg". Two of them might also be MMORPGs. Let's fill in some details. 

I'll take them in the order shown in the post header, reading left to right. It's a screen grab from my Steam Library and I can't say I'm impressed by the three that don't even have a thumbnail to show. Maybe there's a technical reason for that but it really isn't a good look if you're trying to stand out from the crowd.

Noiramore Academy - "On the cold planet of Noivesse lies a mysterious old school called Noiramore Academy. When one of the teachers is violently kidnapped during the night, and a student named Judith Hovern is the only witness, she must use her wit, powers, and puzzle-solving skills to save him."

Described variously as a "mystery adventure" and a "3D puzzle adventure", this is a demo for a game currently seeking a measly $40,000 on Kickstarter. Even with that low ask, things aren't looking great. So far they've only raised just over $8k in pledges. The Kickstarter does still have three and a half weeks to run though, so maybe Next Fest will draw some attention to it.

The promotional video for this one, using pre-alpha footage, actually looks really impressive. It's set in a school for young wizards except all the students seem to be some kind of unicorn or goat. It's probably the demo I'm most looking forward to playing. If it turns out to be anything like as good as it looks, I might even pledge, which would make it the first Kickstarter I've backed in quite a while.

Story Crafter - "Storycrafter is an AI-powered online RPG combining simplified TRPG rules with advanced AI. Enjoy AI-generated characters, dynamic storylines, and AI DM. Easy to start, it offers deep immersion and ultimate freedom. Customize characters and explore endless possibilities. Join for an epic adventure!"

I picked this for obvious reasons. AI is going to be in our games from now on, whether we like it or not, and I prefer to engage with that inevitability rather than hide from it. Whether this example will be any good is another question but the design looks quite slick at least. It's supposedly going into Early Access before the end of the year so if the demo is promising there's a chance I might pursue it further.

Or it might be total garbage. Could go either way.

 Au Revoir - "Use your investigative skills in this point-and-click adventure to retrieve human minds stored in synthetic brains in 2071. Immerse yourself in a retro-futuristic world with neon-noir graphics from the 90s, and uncover a conspiracy that will challenge everything you know."

I had to pick at least one cyberpunk title and this is the one I went with. I can see exactly the look it's going for and it doesn't do a lot for me. I'm not quite sure why graphics from thirty years ago are still so strongly associated with visions of the near future. It may have made sense then but it makes none now. 

Indeed,  a "retro-futuristic" setting that uses "graphics from the 90s" is verging on the paradoxical to begin with. I mean, are we in the future or the past or the past-future or the future-past or what?

These types of retro cyber-noir games tend to be quite bleak and depressing, too, which really isn't what I'm looking for these days. Still, I keep picking them so maybe I don't know what I want as well as I think I do. 

Ad Memoriam - "Ad Memoriam is a mystery game about a band with a curse: at every single one of their concerts, someone dies of an accident. Follow the band and the trail of bodies that they leave behind, reconstruct each accident from witness testimony, and unravel the truth behind Ad Memoriam and it's curse."

A mystery adventure with a rock band at the center and a couple of nosy Nancy Drews, who also happen to be superfans with their own podcast, on the case. What's not to like? 

I like mystery games but I'm not actually very good at them so I hope someone's done a walkthrough...

The Precinct - "Averno City, 1983. Gangs rule the streets and your father lies restless in his grave. Clean up the city, uncover the truth, and embark on thrilling vehicle chases through destructible environments in this neon-noir action sandbox police game."

At least this has its timeframe nailed down. 1983 is very specific. This one was very high on the Wishlist chart and it immediately appealed to me as someone who grew up watching cop shows on TV. I did think those had gone completely out of fashion now, with the police, particularly in America, being seen more often in the roles of villains than heroes but maybe that's swinging back around.

Or maybe they're bargaining on people just liking car chases where you can smash into things and not really caring who it is that's doing the smashing. 

Sentou Gakuen: Revival - "You are one of the students of Sentou Gakuen, a random school in Japan, filled with delinquents, rascals, and of course some good students. How will you spend your days in Sentou Gakuen? Forge your own path in this online interactive Visual Novel, make friends or foes, the choice is yours."

This one is really weird. It's a visual novel set in a Japanese high school (Ho hum...) but it's also an MMORPG: "The characters you interact with are not just NPCs—they are players with their own unique stories." How that's supposed to work I'm almost too scared to find out. It sounds like a complete nightmare.

Also, if that wasn't odd enough, although the game is set in a "random school in Japan", it doesn't come from a Japanese developer. It's made in Indonesia. It also uses AI "as a tool during the creative process to enhance the storytelling and dialogue" and is hoping to go into Early Access, once again before the end of the year.

Spire Horizon - "Discover a thrilling world of adventure in Spire Horizon, an RPG open world game, where you embody a skeleton protagonist, explore a visually stunning world, engage in battles against formidable enemies, and traveling in search of a beloved wife."

Steam told me this was an MMORPG but the developer doesn't seem to agree. It's also already on sale in a final version (i.e not Early Access or beta.) having launched in February 2024, although many of the reviews call it "unfinished", so make of that what you will. It has a Very Positive rating, anyway, albeit from only 174 reviews. What it's doing in Next Fest I'm not entirely sure.

It's cheap, too, at just £8.50 for the base game or a couple of pounds more if you want the "Expansion" that lets you have companions so you don't have to wander the world alone. (And there are a whole load more "expansions" for specific companions available separately as well, all for a couple of pounds or so each.)

It looks very cute and quirky and according to various reviews it was developed by one person, allegedly as a student project. I'm guessing it will never be finished but it could be fun to run around in for an hour or two.

And that's the lot. Now I just have to find the time to play them before the event ends. I guess I'd better go and get on with it.

Metaphor: ReFantazio: A Brief Review Of Half A Demo. Maybe Not Even Half. And Maybe Not All That Brief, Either.

Today sees the start of the latest Next Fest, an event generously arranged by Steam to give lazy bloggers like me something to write about. Seriously, the posts pretty much write themselves for this one as I rip through half a dozen demos, then review them in unecessary detail as though they were finished games. A whole week of posts right there for almost no effort at all!

I would normally begin by posting a list of the demos I've chosen. A brief description and a couple of lines about what I'm expecting for each of them. Easy money.

Unfortunately, the event doesn't go live until 10 AM Pacific, which is six o' clock in the evening here and I'm too impatient to wait. Luckily for me, I'm already in the middle of a demo that may or not feature and I've taken a whole load of screenshots so I'm going to post about that instead. If it turns out to be in the Next Fest running order then I'll be a post ahead before it even starts!

The game in question is one I'd never heard of until a few days ago, when it started appearing in huge banner promotions across the top of the screen every time I logged into Steam. The image I was seeing was so striking and the name of the game so peculiar and evocative that I did something I very rarely do: I clicked through.

The game itself hadn't quite launched yet (It has now and it's something of a hit, with a peak concurrency over 80k, a Top Seller tag and a Very Positive rating from just under three thousand reviews) but there was a demo available so I downloaded it. And then I played it. 

I'm still playing it, although obviously not at the moment, because at the moment I'm writing this post. It's a very substantial demo, given I'm already three hours in and it shows no signs of stopping. There's a trailer just for the demo (See below.) that I this minute watched and most of what's in it I haven't seen yet, so heaven knows how long the whole thing lasts. I did think of finishing it before I posted but I have more than enough to say about it already and it would be nice to get into print about something while its hot for once.

Oh, it occurs to me I haven't yet mentioned the name of the game I'm talking about. Silly me! It's called Metaphor: ReFantazio. I said it was peculiar. Also, that joke would have worked better if I hadn't put the name of the game in the title of the post but you gotta get those clicks...

It's also confusing, or rather the developer's description is, because the first thing I saw when I clicked on the banner was a load of guff about it being the "35th Digital Anniversary Edition". Naturally, this made me think I was looking at a revival of a game from the tail-end of the 1980s, which did not inspire me with enthusiasm. 

On the other hand, neither did it seem to fit, even remotely, with the images I was seeing. If this game came out in 1989 someone must have done one hell of a lot of updating to produce the "live" stream Steam was showing of someone playing the current build. 

I had to go look it up to be sure what was going on but it seems the anniversary in question refers to the studio that developed and publishes the game, Atlus, not the game itself. Atlus was a new name to me but they've made some games I've heard of, if not played, like the Persona series and... well, just that, really.

Once I'd reassured myself I wasn't going to be wasting my valuable time on some cronky old relic from the dawn of the digital age, I downloaded the demo, thinking that at more than 50GB it damn well better be worth it.

And it was. Very much so. It's really good. As in really good. I can see why all those reviews are so very positive. This one is going to be, too.

Since I'm just reviewing a demo and one I haven't even finished, I'm going to be brief and to the point. For me, that is. I'm just going to cover three aspects of the game as I've experienced it in my three hours thus far: Graphics, Story, Gameplay. Of course, those all sub-divide into things like Aesthetics and Design and Writing and Voice Acting and Music and Combat and UI so it might not be as brief as all that...

Graphics

This was what got me interested in the first place. At the top of the post you can see the image that introduced me to the game and to the left is the full image from which that scene was culled, as per the developer's website.

It's a striking picture with a huge amount of detail that instantly draws the eye and fires the imagination. There's a dynamic energy to it that fascinates. If it was a panel from a comic book or a still from an anime I'd be interested in reading or watching so since it's a game I ought to be interested in playing it, too. 

Except, as we all know from countless, disappointing experiences, concept art and promotional videos for games do not always accurately represent what you see when you play the games themselves. In this case that's broadly untrue. 

Sorry, that's not as clear as it could be. What I mean is that yes, the game by and large does look like that picture, which is a fair and accurate representation of both the aesthetic and the graphic quality, but it doesn't look exactly like it.

In some important ways it looks better. The designers do a great job moving between graphic modes in the game so the street and city scenes look like animated movies with all the depth and detail you'd hope for, while the combat and travel sequences are much flatter and less ornate. 

The illustrative quality is gorgeous and rich, with many scenes ressembling stills or panels from purely graphic media, whereas the design aesthetic in play for the UI and the interstitials is mannered and intense in the best way of magazine layouts. Whenever you find yourself at liberty to enjoy them, the visuals are there to be enjoyed. When you need them to do a job and get out of your face, that's what they do. Smart.

Character design is charming. Characters, playable and otherwise, seem to play a major role in the gameplay (You collect them for your team and engage with them to gain powers.) so it's vital they look appealing and original, which they do. 

Well, okay, when I say "original" I mean you can easily tell the players without a scorecard, not that they're "original" in some kind of authentic or literary fashion. They aren't. They're tropes. But we'll get to that in the Story section.

Are we done with Graphics yet? I guess we are. You can get some idea of the style and quality from the screenshots. They're stylish. They're modern. They're clever. That about covers it.

So, on to the Story then.

Story

It's good. Again, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's good in context. Yes, it's the same damn story it always is - Threat to the Kingdom, Evil Mastermind, Secret Rebel Resistance, Only You Can Save The World (Because you're so special!) etc. etc.

Of course, that may all turn out to be a blind and there may be some big metatextual inversion of expectations turnabout deal coming, down the line. I wouldn't know. This is just a demo that starts at the tutorial and takes you through the prologue and I haven't even finished that. I'll just say that even if it doesn't turn out to be a hyper-aware, post-modern deconstruction of familiar tropes, I'll be perfectly satisified with the good, solid genre plot that's in evidence so far. Nothing wrong with a traditional tale told well.

And it is told well. The writing feels fluid and confident and crucially the translation is exemplary. In three hours I didn't notice a single syntactical infelicity but also and more unusually still there was little to no sign of the near-universal tell-tale signs that this was a translation of a Japanese original.

I would really like to do a whole post about this some day but I'm painfully aware I don't have the lingusitic understanding for it and I haven't done the necessary research to obviate that lack. I will just mention, though, that having now played very many games of south-Asian origin (Japanese, Korean and Chinese mainly.) one thing almost all of them have in common, in translation, is a much higher incidence of adverbial phrases than almost any native English speaker would be likely to employ in either in speech or in writing. A flurry of "recentlys" and "latelys" at the end of sentences or even sometimes in the middle is a dead giveaway.

There's none of that here. If the prose style doesn't always feel contemporary or naturalistic, that's just because it follows the more formal and flowery conventions of the fantasy genre as it's frequenly represented in video games. It's not going to win any literary awards but it's firmly within the parameters of "good writing" as those are understood within the genre.

I also saw not a single incident of deviance between the written and spoken word, except when the voice acting intentionally stops shadowing the text and devolves to an "I see" or "So then..." to indicate who's speaking, while the player is left to read what's been seen or concluded for themselves. I wish game designers wouldn't do that. It's annoying.

As for the voice acting itself, it varies from decent to very good. I was particularly impressed to hear a character with what sounded to me to be a genuine Scottish accent, an occurence so rare it deserves an award just for being there. There were a couple of moments where an accent or two veered dangerously close to those usually heard in Amateur Dramatic Society productions but there weren't many of those and they weren't that bad. I mean, it's not like we're talking Dick van Dyke...

Most of the characters were pleasant to listen to, which is the main thing. I very predictably enjoyed the perky American-accented fairy who accompanies the Protagonist (Who's actually called The Protagonist at one point and who very confusingly has to be given a different name to the name you give to what I thought was going to be the player-character but wasn't. I still don't know who I was naming when I did that...). The fairy, Gallica, gets all the best lines but the actor voicing the player-character has a deliciously subdued, resigned delivery that immediately endeared my own character to me, even though I'd had no choice in who I was playing, something that occasionally irks me. 

There's a lot of story to get through. (A bit like this post, then.) At times it can feel like a visual novel, although the frequent bursts of combat soon remind you you're playing a game. It fairly zips along, though, and I was always keen to see what happened next. I don't recall any longeurs although I did read ahead and cut the chatter from some of the minor characters. I often find voice acting, even when done well, can get a bit much after a while.

Perhaps the best part is the world-building, which I found fascinating. The part of the gameworld glimpsed in the demo is a quasi-nineteenth century monarchy with a monotheistic religion and access to both technology and magic. Outside the walls of the city-state the countryside is rife with monsters, making travel hazardous. Very curiously, the worst of these monsters are known as Humans, although when we get to see them, human is the very last thing they appear to be.

There's a great deal of play on the concept of bigotry and prejudice, a difficult theme here handled very adroitly. There are numerous tribes - nine I think it was - each with one or more distinctive features that make them easy to identify, although the protagonist's tribe, the least populous and most obscure of all, ironically has as its identifying feature the lack of any identifying features at all, something the other tribes find highly suspicious.

All the tribes stand in varying social relationships to each other, with a clear hierarchy marking some as superior, at least in their own estimation. Whether any of this has anything to do with the title of the game I couldn't say, although if so I'd say it's not so much a metaphor as an analogy. Whatever it might be, I found it very intriguing and I would like to learn more.

In summary, there's a solid if unoriginal story here that might or might not develop into something less predictable as it goes on. There's certainly more than adequate evidence to suggest the writers have the ability to pull some rugs. It's more a question of whether they have the will.

Gameplay

Often, when I'm demoing a game that looks good and reads well, it's how it plays that kills my interest. Very much not the case with this one. I was surprised, verging on astonished, by just how quickly I picked up the mechanics and how enjoyable they felt.

On the face of it, Metaphor seems like a mechanically complex game. Overly so, perhaps. The tutorial keeps introducing new elements and there are more and more screens to look at and tables to parse. The highly sylized typography, while striking, looks like it could make things harder to read than they need to be. 

Except they're not. Everything may be on a slant and fizzing with motion lines but I had absolutely no trouble seeing what I needed to see, when I needed to see it. Similarly, the combat options, so complex in the explanation, turned out to be intuitive and natural in context. 

Fights can be both real-time and turn-based. You can run up and hit the Space bar to launch a direct attack, then swivel to target another mob and do the same again in a frenzy of unprovoked violence or you can press "V" to go into a stately gavotte of mayhem, where you and your opponent take it in turns to try to set each other on fire or slice each other in two.

The game tells you it might be better to straight up charge into weak opponents and floor them before they have a chance to react, whereas tougher enemies could need a more sophisticated strategy. You can assess the threat levels of specific creatures as well as the general level of danger in the area by hitting "G" to see what Gallica sees. Fairies, apparently, know this sort of thing.

The fights, of which there are many, I found most enjoyable. I mentioned a couple of times that I was in the market for a tactical, turn-based game and this one admirably fits that bill. I can readily imagine spending many evenings battling my way through set-piece scenarios, figuring tactics on the fly. 

Should that later prove too difficult to be fun, as sometimes happens as games roll along, there are five difficulty settings to choose from, some of which can be changed and corrected as often as required, others which have to be set at the start and kept to throughout.

I played, as always, on the default "Normal" setting but for once that represents the dead center of the spectrum of difficulty. Below lie "Easy" and "Storyteller", above "Hard" and "Regicide". There really should be something in there to suit everyone.

Conclusion

All things considered, I'm quite impressed with Metaphor: ReFantazio. Or at least with the demo. Or at least with as much of the demo as I've seen. The website has a lot of media that give a good idea of what the game looks like and some text that tells you what it's about but since there's a demo, why not play that? Demos are great, aren't they?

Better than games, quite often, although I doubt that's true in this case. I'd happily carry on and play the whole thing if it wasn't for one factor: the price. The game retails at £59.99 for the Standard Digital Edition and £89.99 for the Deluxe version. While I appreciate that's the going rate for an AAA game, even the Standard comes in at roughly double what I'd be comfortable paying so I'll be waiting for a sale, something I imagine could take some time. I have wishlisted it on Steam, anyway.

In the meantime, I'll get back to finishing the demo (How much more can there be?) and then it's on to Next Fest.

#14 - Timblewoot - Born 20 November 2002 - 61 days 8 hours

November 2002 saw the beginning of a sea-change in the way I'd spend my time in Norrath. Until then, the overwhelming majority of my gameplay took place alone. Not for much longer.

I'd duoed a little with people I'd met along the way and Mrs Bhagpuss and I had made a few not very successful attempts to find characters we could play together, hampered by the fact that we rarely played on the same servers. I'd done as many pick-up groups as I could get with Rachel but those had mostly dried up with the coming of Velious.

Things were rolling along comfortably enough but I suspect now that, had Dark Age of Camelot not intervened, I would have drifted away from the game sooner rather than later, to return only occasionally over the years to come as a curious, if somewhat detached, tourist.

DAOC changed everything in that it introduced me to the dark, invasive, insidious and compelling power of playing with people you know instead of alone or with strangers. For a decade, from late 2001 to the first year or so of Guild Wars 2 in 2012, I spent at least as much time playing with friends and guildmates as I did alone. Quite probably more.

It was a mixed experience. The highs were intense but so was the drama. My god, the drama... I didn't mind it so much in the game itself but when it leached into offline life, as it regularly did, I found it draining. By the time the shift to the kind of alone-together play we take for granted today began, which for me was something I first experienced in Rift, I was more than ready for it.

That was still more than a decade away, when I made my first and so far only Ogre Shadowknight. I made him as a joke, in response to a character Mrs Bhagpuss was playing. At the time, I never imagined he'd become anything more than that.

That's the thing about these games. You make characters you never intend to play and then end up playing them for years. Four of my five most significant EverQuest characters fit that bill, the exception being Rachel and of the five, she made the least progress. 

EverQuest was very much in a growth phase when we left for DAOC. Just before we went, SOE added two servers based in Europe - Antonius Bayle and Kane Bayle. 

When we came back we began by picking up our existing characters on the various servers where we'd left them but for reasons I no longer remember (Maybe someone we knew had moved there? Maybe we were having connection issues with the US servers?) we chose to relocate to Ant Bayle, as everyone called it. 

I'd love to be more definitive but my memories of those times, while sometimes clear, are frequently fractured. I can remember many of the people we played with and a great deal about what we did together but as for the way we met them or why we made some of the choices we did, I can only guess.

I do know that not long after we moved to Ant Bayle, Mrs Bhagpuss made a character called Wimbletoot. She named him after a village in Ireland and he was a gnome. I can't remember his class. 

One afternoon, when I clearly had nothing better to do, it amused me to spoonerize Wimbletoot's name and blow him up to the largest size possible. I imagine I thought it would be funny to run around as an ogre/gnome duo with matching names. 

If that would ever have been funny, something I very much doubt, it certainly wouldn't have been funny for long. Luckily we never had to put it to the test because very soon after, Mrs Bhagpuss deleted Wimbletoot to make room for some other character she wanted to make.

I remember being a bit outraged by that. I almost never delete characters in any game. At the least level of affection I think of my characters as something akin to cuddly toys or household pets, not to be disposed of lightly, but if they gain any traction at all I think of them as people with rights. Virtual rights.

Wimble's demise left me with a joke with no punchline. I'd never intended to play another SK but since the record shows I didn't acquire any further characters (The significance of that verb will become clear in the next post.) until almost six months later, it would appear I must have been happy enough to take the challenge on. I'd like to say I remember my thinking there but I very much don't.

Rather than any organized plan, what I mostly remember are a number of significant incidents from Timblewoot's long and eventful career. He was a character I came to hold in considerable esteem and take quite seriously as I leveled him to the cap in something not far off real time. 

In those days, the level cap went up only infrequently. Reaching it involved some hard graft and felt like a big deal. The EverQuest Show has a handy timeline indicating the level cap only went up twice in the first five years, during which time there'd been no fewer than eight expansions, the link between expansions and level rises being far from established at that point.

Timble hit both 60 and 65 when each was as far as you could go. He did most of  the work in groups, which was how he came to be the character with whom I learned to tank. I was never a very good tank but I became good enough for most casual purposes. 

I was very lucky to be able to learn by example from some of the very best tanks on the server. Almost from the moment she started playing, Mrs Bhagpuss had become adept at both making friends and joining guilds, something that took me a lot longer to pick up, but by the time we came back from DAOC I was fair to middling at it too. 

Soon after our return, Mrs Bhagpuss quickly got invited to a middling-sized friends and family guild and I joined too. Then I somehow managed to make friends with a very skillful and even more sociable Enchanter and together we ended up starting a custom chat channel that somehow became the hangout of a number of raid guild players looking for somewhere fun and frivolous to hang out between raid nights.

Between the guild and the channel I suddenly had all the group offers I could handle. Thanks to the high-end company in the chat channel, I also got to spend a good deal of time with players who really knew how to play and I learned a lot. Eventually I even knew enough to be able to pass some of that on. It was an intense but often very fulfilling time to be playing EverQuest. I kind of miss it, sometimes, but I wouldn't have it back for the stress that sometimes came with it.

Most of that stress came from the aforementioned drama, which was never-ending, but I also found tanking pretty stressful in itself. Definitely a lot more stressful than healing, which turned out to be my metier. Nevertheless, I mustn't have been that bad at it - good enough to get asked to do it pretty often, anyway. 

Timble's class and race had something to do with that. At the time, Shadowknights were becoming a popular choice for Main Tank, having been very much also-rans to Warriors and Paladins for a while, and Ogre SKs were the most welcome of all since they enjoyed the considerable advantage of being immune to stuns while facing front. Even so, you still had to know how to play one and with some practice I became reasonably confident that I did.

The highlight of my tanking career came when a friend asked Timble to tank for him when he went to face the triggered version of the dragon Trakanon in Sebilis for his epic. I'd already tanked the Drolvarg Warlord earlier in the same extremely lengthy questline. I seem to remember that not going particularly well but it can't have been that bad or he wouldn't have asked me back for the much harder Trak fight. 

I also remember being there when he took on Phinagel Atropos in Kedge Keep for the same never-ending quest. It was an absolute nightmare of a zone and a horrible fight but at least I wasn't tanking for that one, thank Tunare.

Granted, triggered Trakanon isn't as tough as the full-fat version but at the time he was still a bona fide raid mob and we made a raid to kill him. I was flattered to be asked and excited to be there but I can't say I enjoyed it. Main tanking for a raid to get one of the final drops needed for someone's epic felt like a lot of responsibility at the time and if there's one thing I've never enjoyed it's responsibility.

In the event, everything went off about as well as could be expected. I still have flashes of the fight burned into my memory even now, like a series of still photographs glimpsed in a lightning storm. I never did anything like it again, nor wanted to. It was one of those things you're glad you've done for the experience but not until it's all safely behind you.

Everything was a learning experience back then, though. It was one of the best things about the game. Now, it takes a never-ending sequence of new games to provide that level of intellectual challenge but in the early years of the millennium just learning to play the one game adequately was more than enough challenge for me.

Playing Timble, I learned to do all the things a tank was supposed to do - taunt, hold aggro, peel, turn mobs - and I enjoyed all of that. One of the best things about combat in EverQuest in those days was how busy it felt. Unless you were playing a pure DPS class, of which there were very few, you had all kinds of things to do in a fight. It made combat feel much more tactical, more like a game of chess, sometimes, if you imagine trying to make your moves with someone beating you about the head and shoulders and yelling orders at the same time.

With Timble, when I wasn't tanking or off-tanking, a role I much preferred because of the diminished levels of responsibility, I was either leveling alone or working on his faction. Leveling speed was faster in groups but those were the days of hell levels and sometimes even grouping didn't make as much of a dent in the xp wall as you'd have liked so I spent much of my downtime from grouping fear-kiting solo to eke out a few more per cent.

As for faction, I'm still stupidly proud to remember how Timble was eventually able to stroll across North Freeport to do his banking. Not a lot of Ogres were welcome there but he was. He had to kill a lot of corrupt guards in the back alleys to gain the respect of the rest of the guards but it was a task both he and I were happy to take on. Getting to a safe spot in the city then locating, pulling and killing guards was one of the highlights of my time as an Ogre.

I carried on playing Timble all the way through until the next split in the timeline. That came a couple of years later, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I jumped ship once more, this time for EverQuest II. That proved to be a much more fundemental schism. A number of our friends made the transition but the only one who stayed for more than a few weeks after launch was the Bard I'd tanked Trak for. We played with him, on and off, for many years, all the way into GW2 until we finally lost track of him sometime in the twenty-teens. 

All the rest either went back to EQ or moved on to other games or stopped playing altogether. We never saw any of them again.

Looking back, I can see it had as much to do with with the infamous Gates of Discord expansion as it did with competition from new games like EQII or World of Warcraft. The infamously overtuned, unfinished and unforgiving GoD arrived in February 2004 and the damage it did, especially to morale, didn't begin to mend until the appearance of the following expansion, Omens of War, six months later, by which time it was too late for many who'd either already left or wished they could. 

For some of the latter, including Mrs Bhagpuss and myself, plus a few members of the guild we were in, the launch of OOW co-incided almost exactly with invitations to join the later stages of the EQII closed beta. The beta still had several months to run but once we got in and saw what was on offer I don't believe any of us came back to EQ, not even to say goodbye to those who remained.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I did return eventually but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that, when we did, we made yet another new start, leaving Timblewoot and all our old characters on both accounts beached on the sandrifts of the past. 

It seems fair. Timble had a great run. He's earned his peaceful retirement. He's probably just happy he doesn't have to tank any more. I know I am.