Pathfinder: Kingmaker - First Impressions

Yesterday, in passing, I mentioned there's a game I'm playing now that seems like it might have some traction, something that's been hard to find in games of late. Since the only thing that successfully sunk its claws in this year was Baldur's Gate 3, I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that this is something similar.

The game is Pathfinder: Kingmaker, currently on sale for a massive 84% off, which is why I have it. It's an isometric rpg from a Russian studio by the name of Owlcat Games, a pretty good name in my book. It was partly funded through a Kickstarter, one of those really rare ones that not only ended up doing what it said it was going to but in something like the timescale it proposed, the campaign having begun in 2017 and the game coming out just over a year later.

It was originally published by Deep Silver, an Austrian company I've never heard of and a couple of years ago the publishing rights transferred to another unfamiliar name, Knights Peak. That, though, is a subsidiary of someone much better known, at least to me - MY.games, formerly MY.com, publishers of, among other things, Allods Online.

Hey! Look, everybody! I can read Wikipedia!

While I'm cribbing, I suppose I ought to mention how Pathfinder was already a well-established RPG system long before any of this. A decade before, in fact.

Before I started doing this "research", I thought it was a spin-off from the forty-year old classic from Palladium Games, but it turns out to be another Pathfinder altogether. It's from a company called Paizo Publishing and it's based on 3rd Ed. Dungeons and Dragons, which apparently is somehow open source now. How did that happen?

More importantly, why did Owlcat decide to use the same name as another extremely similar system? It's not like we're short of generic fantasy nouns. In this case, confusion doesn't just seem possible, it seems inevitable.

Anyway, that's the provenance. What about the game?

It's weird. I mean, it's not weird as in spooky or strange or outlandish. Just weird in that it looks like other games I've played but doesn't entirely feel like any of them when I'm playing.

It looks like all the Baldur's Gate games or Solasta or Solasta II or Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 or like any other isometric RPG you might be able to name. They all look the same, don't they? Possibly more so than any other genre I can come up with.

It sort of plays like them, too, but only sometimes. The bits where you click to move your party around an open area or through a dungeon, stopping to engage in turn-based battles that take literally hours to resolve. Or the bits where you find every container in a room and loot it and find you can hardly move. Or when you wander around a safe haven selling all the crap you dragged back to town and making small talk with the locals.

All that stuff is there and about as entertaining as it always is. The beating heart of all these games is always the combat, of course. As long as that's good, the rest is a bonus. 

I had a bit of an issue with the combat in P:K (Unfortunate abbreviation, that...) at first because it defaults to some kind of real-time action combat where your party is controlled by AI and you have to hit the space bar to pause it every time you want to take charge. Once I found out how to toggle that off, though, everything was peachy.

It's D&D so all the spells and abilities are at least vaguely familiar, even though I think this might be the first time I've played anything specifically based on the 3rd edition. It seems ferociously complicated even for D&D, with a ludicrous amount of choice at just about every stage. Leveling up requires a degree in advanced RPG mechanics.

Still, in the end it's just move your little pieces about, set some baddies on fire, hit some other baddies with lumps of metal and remember to save often so you can do it all again when it goes wrong, which it will. It's what they call a gameplay loop, I believe, and a pretty solid one at that. (I had a whole sarcastic aside about Stars Reach here but I took it out. It seemed unnecessarily cruel.)

There's a story, too, naturally. Usually at this point I'd say something abut how it's the same story it always is but actually it's not. It's one of the weird aspects of the whole thing. The set-up is that some noble recruits a bunch of people, of whom you 're one, to go into a contested region between two political powers, remove the faction that's trying to establish themselves in the hinterland and then take over and govern it properly. Or something like that. I wasn't paying as much attention as I could have been.

Even weirder, there are two teams, yours and one led by a sociopathic gnome (As though there's any other kind.) and you have to get the whole thing done in three months or before the gnome's crew, whichever comes first, or you lose. It's very odd and made odder because it's all so perfunctory. 

Nothing in the main storyline seems to be explained in any detail, even though there's a huge amount of explanatory text for everything else. You can click on highlighted words and get gobs of lore about the gods or the cities of the world and every minor NPC with a quest seems to have far too much to say but as for why the player character wants to become a landholding baron/ess or why anyone would let them is a lot harder to parse.

My best guess is that it's like one of those classic fairy tales, where the King offers a third of his kingdom to anyone who can free the land from the threat of the Dragon, except in this case it's just some murdering bastard with horns on his hat who turns out to have had a really bad childhood.

The whole fairy-tale element is compounded by the way many of the non-combat dice rolls are presented as pages of parchment in a storybook. Not only that, it's a storybook that's being written by one of your party, a halfling Bard of relentlessly good cheer, who I'm surprised the always-angry Barbarian hasn't stuffed into a barrel and thrown into a river before the end of the first day.

When you run into one of these skill checks, you get to pick them from a list and the bard re-writes history according to how the dice fall. It's quite enjoyable although I'm not sure it's more enjoyable than just watching the dice was in BG3. Still, points for effort, I guess.

Some of the conversations are voiced and the acting is competent but not so much so as to make me want to listen to it all the way through. I tend to read the text and flip to the next stage long before whoever it is has finished talking. I do like the party, though. They're all quite characterful, even if there is one who sometimes sounds more like a Valley Girl than an adventurer.

The art design is excellent. It's a charming game to look at, especially if you like parchment. There's a lot of parchment. 

One thing that I noticed as I was looking up some stuff online was that Pathfinder:Kingmaker is reckoned to be very difficult at the start. Where most similar games lead you fairly carefully through content appropriate to your level, apparently this one just lets you charge through the main storyline long before you're equipped to deal with the fights. 

I've seen a bit of that but mostly I've been keeping to things I ought to be able to handle and that's been difficult enough. There's been a lot of limping through with everyone more than half dead and a few times where I've had to reload and do something else altogether. 

What makes it feel a lot more difficult - and certainly slower and more tedious - than it probably should is the number of times people miss. Geez! Some of these people couldn't hit a barn with a baseball bat. Not if you gave them three goes.

And it's not only the party, either. It's not at all unusual for an entire round of combat to go by with no-one being able to hit anyone! It may be faithful to the rules but it's very poor entertainment. I'm guessing it's a lot less noticeable if you let the game run in real-time, as the default settings would suggest the devs expected but that takes most of the fun out of the whole concept from my way of thinking. If I wanted to play an action rpg I'd go get my head examined.

Something similar applies to traveling on the abstract overland map and setting camp, both of which are heavily prone to being interrupted by random encounters, some of which are with the aforementioned kinds of completely inappropriate, far too powerful enemies I was trying to avoid. All of that put together made the first few sessions something of a trial and yet I persisted, which must mean I was having some kind fun, even if it was the masochistic kind.

The same Reddit threads I saw that made a lot of the low-level difficulty suggested things started to improve around Level 3. That seems like it would be quick to arrive but it's not, really. I dinged Level 3 just before I started writing this and I had over eight hours played.

I did go out and give it another go to see if it had gotten any better and it did seem as if it might have, so I'm optimistic. I'm slightly less optimistic about the ticking timer. Three months might sound like a lot but I've burned through a month of that already and it feels like I've hardly done anything. 

I guess I'd better get on with it instead of sitting here talking about it. I'd hate to think that pesky gnome was going to beat me to it. Whatever it is. 

I Love Lana (No, Not That One...)

Well, this is embarrassing. Two sketchy Grab Bags, then a day I could have posted but didn't, and now here I am again, still with nothing very much to talk about. That's what'll happen when you spend most of your time tidying up the garden, walking the dog, enjoying some beautiful Spring sunshine and arranging a funeral.

I could actually, finally, really get started on the Zones of Norrath feature I keep dancing around but I've left it a bit late in the day. That might come tomorrow.  

I was thinking of doing something on the new game from my Steam library - the one that seems to have stuck. I've tried several of the new titles I acquired over Christmas and the New Year but it took a while to find one that grabbed me.

All of that sounds like work, though. Enjoyable, satisfying work, sure, but still work. A lot more, for sure, than what I am going to do, which is reprint an article I wrote for a comics fanzine back in the 'eighties. Which one, I can't remember. I know it was published somewhere but if I have a copy, I don't know where it is. I just have the original draft.

Tipa was wondering a while back, what of this shall remain and she was of the opinion that putting stuff on the internet doesn't guarantee anyone's writing the kind of immortality some people used to think it did. Obviously that's true but it's equally true that keeping it in a folder on top of your bookcase doesn't, either. Both rely on someone eventually discovering something you've written and thinking it's worth sharing. I'm guessing that's a tad more likely to happen if you post it where the entire world can see it.

Hmm. But now it occurs to me I don't have the piece digitized yet so now I have to scan it. Damned if that doesn't sound like work after all....and it's done! Turns out it takes literally less than five minutes to do that. God bless technology, eh?. 

I imagine this had a title once but I can't remember what it was so I'm going to call it...

 I Love Lana

I always thought Clark Kent was crazy.

He had the perfect life there in Smallville, didn't he? Ma Kent could have baked apple-pie for America. Pa could have given cracker-barrel lessons to Robert Frost. He had the trust and admiration of everyone in town, from Police Chief Parker down to good ol' Pete Ross. And best of all, the girl-next-door was Lana Lang.
If I'd been Clark, I'd never have left. I'd never have taken a chance on the big city and the glitter of the Pulitzer somewhere in the dim maybe future. And I sure as heck wouldn't have fallen for Lois Lane.

Oh, sure, you can say she's tripwire smart and very, well, metropolitan. And she's good-looking, in an austere kind of way, but after growing up with Lana? No, I never really could believe it.

Clark's boyhood was an American classic. If you strip out all that superheroism, it wasn't so different from Tom Sawyer's - all the world to explore and the next town another country, danger and adventure round the corner of the barn then safe home for supper. And everywhere Clark went, there was his rust-haired shadow, Lana, scarcely a pace behind him.

She was the kind of girl who would have driven you wild. She pried and poked and never let go. She wanted into everything you were doing and if you tried to keep her out she'd want in even more. Clark never seemed to know whether she was his best friend, his girlfriend or some pretty little devilette sent to try him. (He could have used some trying, too).

Clark and Lana grew up with each other. As babies they went on hayrides together and played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in Lana's rec room. They went to the circus and the beach with their fathers, who got on as well together as good neighbors should, despite their different stations in life.

As they grew older, the kids were in and out of each other's houses like cousins. Who knew when Lana might drop round with a cake she'd baked for Ma Kent to taste or Clark pop in to the Langs' to see the witch-doctors' masks from the Professor's latest expedition?

Lana had seen a lot more of the world than Clark, of course. She was the same age, but she'd traveled. Her father was an explorer and archeologist, and he'd often take Lana on field trips. Compared to Clark she was a woman of the world and she made sure he knew about it. As Superboy, Clark had been all over the universe, but he had to keep that to himself, so it didn't count for much.

They didn't just live next door, they were in the same class at school, and whether it was a chemistry experiment or a social event, Clark and Lana always seemed to end up partners. Sometimes it looked as though there was some kind of conspiracy to push them together. You couldn't say they were going steady, but you could tell there was an understanding.

Being Lana's boyfriend could be tough. Any adolescent boy would have had a hard time living up to the image of Professor Lang, Smallville's own Indiana Jones, but Clark had to compete with his peerless other self as well. In the years to come, as Lana's life plaited with Superman's and braided with Clark's, people who didn't understand what they shared would chide and ridicule her, saying she was starstruck or a gold-digger. Yet her friendship with Clark never wavered.

Being Clark's girlfriend had it's downside, too. That scared-of-his-own- shadow routine must have been hard for everyone to take, but at least Ma and Pa Kent and Pete Ross could hug the secret close and feel good. At least they knew why.
If Lana dreamed of marrying Superboy, well, what Smallville girl didn't? But dreams are for dreaming and life is for living, and Clark was as real as real life gets. His timidity was probably the one thing that gave Lana doubts. As she said to the reminiscing wardens of Clark's old orphanage, "He still is cute...whenever he isn't too timid and weak!"

Lana wasn't timid. She had the spirit of a tigress. She was tack-sharp, too, and headstrong. She was a green-eyed redhead and she had all the traits. Truth told, she was almost too much for Clark.

She was definitely too much for Superboy, or so he claimed. When Othar of Thrann, the self-styled Super World, coerced Superboy and a claque of lesser planetary heroes into leaving their homeworlds for ever, Superboy was glad of the rest. "Smallville, where I live, is a nice place", he told Stormboy and the others, "The only thing that bothered me was an inquisitive girl, Lana Lang, who suspected my identity!" The endless procession of crooks and creatures that came to Smallville month in, month out, hellbent on mayhem weren't a problem, then. It was only that pesky girl, who might turn out to be just that bit too smart for him, that he couldn't get out of his mind.

Still, he wouldn't have been without her. More than once Lana caught Clark with his super-shirt untucked, but she never took advantage. Once she actually caught him changing in a phone-booth. Instead of peeking, she turned her back. After all, as she thought to herself, "I'm dying to know his identity, but it wouldn't be right to expose it!"

If you take a moment to think about it, a boy who could fly across galaxies and corkscrew through time shouldn't have had too much trouble finding a bit peace from an interfering girl, even one as sharp as Lana. But then, it was obvious the last thing he really wanted was to get away from her.

He had a club all his own, way up the time-line in the 30th Century. Lana couldn't have followed him there, surely? It would have been easy to keep the Legion to himself, but the Legion had girls, and some of those legionnaires had girlfriends. Superboy could hardly wait to show Lana off.

Lana was up for any challenge. They didn't say feisty then, but that was what she was. She was happy to step up into the super-powered leagues, and she wasn't short of opportunities.

Professor Lang was always bringing home talismans and sacred objects. and he gave as little credence to their possible side-effects as he did to the freedom of worship of their previous owners. He wasn't much more circumspect when it came to alien artifacts. One time he came back from Africa with a 21- inch glowing metal belt which he claimed was "the most amazing discovery I've made in my entire career!" That was saying something given his track record, but he let Lana try it on for size just the same.

The belt was made for "a race of very small, slender people" and Lana was delighted to find it fitted her, if she drew her stomach in a little. More than that, though, it gave her amazing powers.

That was the start of a brief spell as Gravity Girl, who also turned out, luckily, to be invulnerable. ("That's nice to know!" she observed as the first bullets bounced off her chest). In the end Superboy convinced her it wasn't the right career move. He was only too glad to melt the belt with his heat vision but it didn't put an end to Lana's super-heroics.

She established a successful part-time career as Insect Queen, who looked better than you might expect. She had a Bio-ring, a striking yellow-and-black costume and the power to change into any insect she could think of, which was plenty.
When she turned her back on him in the phone booth that time, it was the excuse Superboy had been waiting for. He flew her through the time-barrier to meet the Legion of Super-Heroes as a reward for curbing her natural curiosity.

Lana realized right away that this was a club girls could join. She happened to have brought her Insect Queen regalia on the off chance, but she didn't know that Legionnaires need a natural power to pass the exam and a bio ring wouldn't qualify. She tried out but they told her to go and wait with the other rejects.

Lana didn't get into a pet. She didn't cry or sulk, she called in a favor from Dream Girl and ended up saving four Legionnaires on a mission to Ice City. She was such a hit, they admitted her to the Legion Reserve. They thanked themselves for doing it years later, when they turned up on Lana's doorstep, running down the centuries in fear of Mordru and their lives.

Lana did the right thing then, like she always did when it really mattered. So, she was nosy and sneaky and there was an acid edge to her tongue. So what? She was the best friend Clark ever had or would have. He knew it, too, though he could never resist a gentle joke at her expense.

When Superboy needed someone to help him in his work, it was usually Lana who got the call. Out to break a narcotics ring, he involved Lana in a typically elaborate scheme that required him to pretend to be an imbecile. Lana in turn was required to pretend to take advantage of his disability by tricking him into writing his secret identity in her notebook. "This way", she said, to prove to the audience of dope-pedlars just how far Superboy's wits had dulled "if you ever get amnesia, I'll be able to tell you what your secret identity is!" Ever the wag, Superboy wrote "Clark Kent" in her book and smiled to himself. He'd probably just done Poe in English Lit. At the end, as they laughed together over the private joke, he was thinking to himself, "Even more private than you suspect! The laugh's really on you, Lana, because... I am Clark Kent!"

They had a real rapport, Clark and Lana. They made a good team. In the comic-books they looked the part, perfectly caught by Curt Swan, a master of nuance. The stories they shared were silly, often ludicrous, but Swan and the rest of DC's wonderful artists gave them dignity, while the awkward, naive phrasing of their speech gave them charm.

I grew up with Lana and Clark, while they were growing up with each other. I didn't think so much about it at the time, but the way they were with each other, their mutual respect, helped to legitimize friendships with the opposite sex. Where many comics, especially the British ones, talked up the natural uncertainty and confusion between the sexes that makes girls and boys seem to each other like ambassadors from an alien race, Lana and Clark showed that despite evidence to the contrary it was quite alright to be friends with a girl.

I never lost my affection for Clark, but somewhere along the way I kind of fell in love with Lana. As she grew older and left Smallville I admired her career as a roving TV news reporter for WMET-TV and applauded her graduation to co-anchor on WGBS's Evening News. It seemed so right that after following Clark into journalism, she should end up sitting at the desk beside him, facing the world. "Every station manager in town would give his right arm to have this gal!" Morgan Edge told Clark, and it was no more of a tribute than she deserved.

The WGBS years were my golden-age for the Superman family, and the tart, cosmopolitan Lana, who had to hold the line before a live TV link every time Clark thought of a job for Superman, was the best she was allowed to be. Later came John Byrne and the Reformation. Some of it worked, but babies were being slung out with bathwater everywhere you looked and the real Lana went too. Truthfully, I still care what happens to her, even if I have to do that thing with my mind, eliding the bits of history I don't want in favor of what seems right. Last time I touched base with her she was on the verge of marrying Pete Ross, which seems infinitely sad and plausible.

Whatever happens, Smallville will remain. In the middle of a long, late- summer afternoon where it's always 1959, a dark-haired boy will be walking home a red-headed girl with laughing eyes. She'll let him carry her books. And that's as it should be. 

That was all before the Smallville TV series, of course. That was a very different Lana. But then, over all the years there've been so many...

These days, the whole rickety structure of the superverse is so fatally compromised, only a 12th level intellect like Brainiac 5's could hope to make sense of it. It's far beyond me, now. 

I'll stick with the Bronze and Silver Age Lana. I'm not a big one for nostalgia but sometimes the past does have its allure. 

Never Forever

Yesterday it was a music Grab Bag, today it's games. Once again, I don't have anything particularly substantial to offer but you do the best you can with what you have. 

How Long Is Forever, Anyway? 

I'll start with the news everyone already knows, which is that Fortnite isn't all it used to be. Given that it used to be pretty much everything, that still leaves a lot of territory to cover so let's not go writing the game off just yet but maybe the writing is on the wall.

Fortnite isn't a game so much as a phenomenon. Lots of games blow up out of nowhere to dominate the sales charts and the gaming news cycle for a while but few hold that kind of attention for more than a few months. Fads happen and keep on happening and will always happen.

More rarely, a game will break out of the gaming silo to make an impact in the mainstream media. Animal Crossing: New Horizons did it a few years back and World of Warcraft a long time before that. The number of games that establish a seemingly permanent foothold in the wider culture, though? Still very small.

Fortnite was one of those. Still is, I guess, although it's probably more a part of the infrastructure now, like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or FIFA. Games that get referenced a lot when journalists write color pieces about what sporting heroes or pop stars do in their time off. Not a lot different to playing golf, really. Just indoors.

Fortnite, though, like Second Life before it, made it out of the lifestyle pages into what passes for cultural analysis in the popular press. I read a number of articles about how Fortnite was changing the way a generation thought and behaved, how it was replacing the village pump, the water-cooler or the Junior Common Room. There was a school of thought that believed nothing would ever be the same again, now the kids had a virtual clubhouse the adults couldn't chaperone.

Epic Games believed it and still does, apparently. I was pretty sold on it, too. I wrote some posts about it during the pandemic, when it did seem like meeting up and going to gigs in a video game might be the future. Still did, too, not so long ago. Like a lot of people, I'm too easily swayed by the science fiction I've read, although most days now it does seem disturbingly likely we'll all get to live in Phil Dick's world if we live long enough. Mercer help us. 

It wasn't just excitable journalists and eager bloggers who got swept up in the Fortnite feeding frenzy. As GamesIndustry reports, as with WoW before it, a swathe of the gaming industry did, too. Just as we had a decade of companies making WoW-Killers that went on to fail in the marketplace, so Fortnite has left behind it a comet-trail of burned out Forever Games. We have Fortnite to thank for the largely failed or failing Live Service model, at least in part.

With hindsight, it seems obvious. Not so much the grandiose claims of Fortnite-as-Metaverse, which turned out to be fairly accurate at least in a technical sense. More the idea that people en masse would want to keep logging in to the same virtual space "forever".

People, by and large, just aren't that interested in going to the same places over and over again. They lose their mystique, their thrill, their attraction. For everything there is a season, as Roger McGuinn liked to say. (Alright! It was Pete Seeger! No-one likes a smart alec.) 

More prosaically, look at your local high street or shopping mall. That's if you even still have one. Not only have most of the names over the stores changed since you first went there but these days even the idea of going to one place to find everything feels out of fashion.

And with games, particularly zeitgeisty ones like Fortnite that spring up out of nowhere overnight, there's always the Older Sibling Problem. Everyone knows most kids over the age of eight or nine think pretty much everything their parents like is either incomprehensible or embarrassing but there's a similar vibe to the media most loved by older brothers and sisters, except the younger kids do understand it and want no part of it.

Fortnite has been around for a decade now. A decade is literally a lifetime for a ten year-old. Is it surprising there's some resistance creeping in? Fortnite might be too new to feel retro but it's also too old to feel fresh. 

It's not like the game is going away, of course. It's robust. It works. It has many, many millions of ex-players. But is it ever going to be cool again? Magic 8-Ball says Very Doubtful.

I guess the upside is that now game developers are going to have to find a new high to chase. The downside is it'll probably be something a lot less interesting than Fortnite looked for a while as if it might be.

Never Is Closer Than Ever

Less than a month! Neverness to Everness, the game I'm most looking forward to this year (Sorry, EverQuest Legends.) has a launch date. It's April 29th.

You can pre-register now. It takes about five seconds - an email address and a couple of clicks. If you do, you'll be joining more than thirty million people so far. The current target is 35 million although I imagine if they hit it the ticker will move along to reveal the 40 million milestone. 

So far, pre-registrants get 30,000 Beetle Coins, 20 Elite Hunter Guides, 5 Fabricated Dice and A character called Haniel. What any of that actually means I have absolutely no idea but I'm sure it's something very important.

The reward for getting to 35 million pre-registrants seems a bit lame. It's just another 15 Fabricated Dice. But then, maybe Fabricated Dice are a big deal in Hetherau. I wouldn't know because they never let me into the beta. Not that I'm bitter... 

There's also a Social Media target. That's a lot lower at just five million Official Account Followers and so far the game hasn't managed it, which is probably a data point that means something. If that many people sign up before launch they get a Whisker Glider Skin. Or maybe we all do. It's unclear.

I just subscribed to the official YouTube channel so I guess that means I'll get the glider either way, so long as 4,999,999 other people sign up as well. I actually thought I was already subbed to that channel. Maybe it was on my other YouTube account. If it was, would that count twice? 

I don't have any qualms about the quality of NTE. I'm certain it'll be as good as it looks. What I'm a lot less sure about is whether I’ll make time to play it, no matter how good it is. By all accounts, Wuthering Waves continues to be every bit as good as I kept saying it was, which was very good indeed. 

And yet I haven't played WW for months, not least because it got to be too good. I seem to have developed a quality ceiling for video games beyond which I find it ever harder to rise. Somewhere in my psyche, a fail-safe is tripping, preventing me from becoming too engaged. If it feels as immersive a movie, it gets treated like a movie and movies require a level of commitment at least an order of magnitude higher than games. 

It's a weird Catch 22. Don't get too good or I won't be able to play you. And I fear Neverness to Everness might just be too good.

Sunnydale Forever, Doubters Never!

I meant to mention the bad news that the Buffy revival has been canceled before it even got started but I never found a spot to fit it in and it turns out I'm glad I didn't because now there's this to talk about as well. I heard about it from NME, my ever-unlikely source of gaming news that doesn't get covered in the general gaming media.

There is - because of course there is - a campaign to reverse the decision or to reboot the reboot or to free the rights so someone else can take a run at it or something. I haven't virtually signed it or indeed read it. My feeling is that the Buffy IP is so strong, someone will do something with it it eventually but it won't be because Buffy fans ask nicely. It'll be because someone thinks they've figured out how to make money off it.

Meanwhile, as well as all the original seven seasons, the comics, the novelizations and the spin-offs (I'm halfway through Season Two of Angel now and boy does that take a left turn...) we now have a game. It's called Welcome To New Sunnydale. It's text-only. It plays in a Browser. And it was made by a fan.

And it looks interesting. I've only played around with it so far. I haven't played it. It isn't really my sort of thing or not any more although there was a time when it might have been. I don't have the patience for these kinds of textual puzzles any more. 

I know a few other bloggers around these parts do, though, and a lot of people like a bit of Buffy, so I offer the link above as something of a public service. I very much doubt the game will do anything to change the minds of anyone that matters but it's nice that people are trying.

And that's all I've got. I suppose I'd better find an actual topic for tomorrow's post. My Grab Bag pile's empty.  

Old Rock Stars And Their Funny Little Ways

I'm having a bit of a lazy day today but I don't want to skip posting altogether, so let's have a half-assed musical grab bag! First and second up, two very odd news stories about possibly the two most famous rock stars on the planet. 

I mean, yes, obviously that's a contentious claim to make about anyone but if you can't claim something like that about Dylan and the Beatles... 

Oh, alright then, how about the two most famous octogenarian rock stars? Anyone going to fight me on that? 

Fab Macca Wacky Paul "Thumbs Aloft" McCartney Banned From Reddit 

When I say the Beatles, obviously I mean one of them. Well, two, kind of. As will be revealed, Ringo was there, too. But no-one would claim Ringo Starr was one of the most famous rock stars in the world, would they? Not even when he was in the sodding Beatles. He's just Ringo ffs!

Paul McCartney, though. He still has power. Although not enough to keep the moderators at Reddit from banning him, apparently. Here's how it supposedly happened.  

Macca played an "intimate" gig yesterday in front of an audience that defies belief. So much so, I'm going to copy/paste the highlights of the guest list, as reported by Stereogum:

"Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Tate McRae, Christina Aguilera, Steven Tyler, Anthony Kiedis, John Mayer, Renee Rapp, Finneas, Nat Wolff, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockart, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Jason Bateman, Jon Hamm, Owen Wilson, Steve Carrell, Joey King, Emma Watson, Jake Shane..."

Oh yeah, Ringo was there, too. 

That's a list of people so famous there is literally just the one name I don't recognize, Jake Shane. What's even more amazing is I don't just know the names, I know who every last one of them is and what they're famous for. (Okay, okay. You got me. Not Nat Wolff... although I swear I have heard the name. I just don't remember where or when.) 

I'm surprised all these people are allowed to be in the same place at the same time. Isn't there some kind of insurance thing, where they have to go to gigs in groups of no more than three? Like how heirs to the throne have to travel on separate planes?  It's just as well there wasn't a fire. We'd have needed a whole new zeitgeist.

Unsurprisingly, given the audience, it was a no phones show. No phones means no pictures. 

Wasn't it nice, then, for Paul to post some pictures of the gig on his personal subReddit? Video, too. What a generous and thoughtful chap he is! 

Someone at Reddit didn't seem to think so.  Not long after the links appeared, Paul's  account got banned. I can hear him, in my mind, yelling "Don't they know who I am?" He's not quite as cuddly as he looks, you know.

His account has been restored but the pictures and video haven't. Maybe he'll put them on YouTube instead.

Hi. I'm Bob Dylan. Can you spare $5?

Bob Dylan is a Nobel Prizewinner. For literature, no less. His writing has value. And that value is five dollars a month.

Bob started a Patreon because of course he did. Why wouldn't he? He's Bob Fricken' Dylan!  He can do what he likes! He always has. 

Seriously, when did anything Bob Dylan did ever make any sense? Have you read Tarantula? Has anyone? (Clearly no-one on the Nobel Committee...)

Even so, this one takes some beating. Patreon is that platform people use when no-one in whatever business they wish they were in thinks their stuff is worth paying them for, isn't it? The idea is it lets you bypass the regular distribution channels (I.E. the professional ones.) and go straight to the audience. With a begging bowl.

OK, cheap shot. Patreon is a good option for all sorts of perfectly bona fide projects in the same way Kickstarter is, even if some people abuse it. We do tend to give the side-eye to established companies launching Kickstarters, though, so if a semi-billionaire (He's worth $500m, supposedly.) with a guaranteed pipeline to mainstream publishers starts a Patreon for his fiction and charges $5 a month for it, is that abusing the platform? Or the audience? Or is it just Bob being Bob? 

Whatever it is, that's what he's done. And what does your five dollars get you? 

"Audio Essays" about figures from American history, read out loud by AI, according to some reports. And "Letters Never Sent", which is a series with one entry so far, that being a note from Mark Twain to Rudolf Valentino. That widely-used expression "You couldn't make it up" somehow just doesn't seem strong enough, does it?

There are also going to be short stories. Bob's posted one already. It's called Bull Rider and it "tells the story of a man who seeks out a Texan rodeo to try bull riding." It's credited to Marty Lombard, who may or may not be Bob writing under a pen name.

Just for the hell of it, he's also thrown in a video of Mahalia Jackson because why not? If you want to give Bob five dollars, which I can't imagine why you would not, here's where to send your money.

And now for a couple of covers. The first is odd. Not Bob Dylan on Patreon odd or Macca banned from Reddit odd but still... odd.

 Goodbye Horses - Kevin Abstract

Kevin Abstract used to be in Brockhampton, about whom I know very little. Goodbye Horses is "that song from Silence of the Lambs" as I put it back in January of last year, which is selling it very short indeed. It's a song people like to cover. 

There are at least three versions of it on this blog already, although the one in the post I linked has been taken down from YouTube due to "a copyright claim by Leslie Mentel".No clue what that's about. The two versions in this post are still up, though.

Kevin Abstract chose it for TripleJ's Like A Version segment. He also chose to do it with a string quartet, while reading some of the lyrics off his phone. Not the choruses, though. Why he chose to do it that way may be explained in the inevitable "Go Behind" video that always accompanies the cover. Or it may not.

It's actually a really good cover but then it's a bombproof choice.

 

 Age of Consent - Lime Garden (New Order Cover)

A couple of weeks ago I'd never heard of Lime Garden. Now I have two of their songs cued up for a post and then there's this fantastic cover. Just feel the bass on that!

In fact, as it happens, one of the songs I have backfiled to share is the second one they do in this video, Downtown Lover. I guess I could have edited it out but that would have meant doing some work and I'm really not up for any of that today, as must be obvious by now. Not when it's so much easier to crib ideas off someone else.

But, hey! At least I did the re-writes myself. I could have gotten an AI to do it. If it's good enough for Bob... (Ok, I did get AI to do the Macca pic at the top.)

 

AI Used In This Post

Just that header image. It was that or steal someone's copyrighted photos so... lesser of two evils?

It was done in five seconds using QWEN Image SD at NightCafe with the relevant headline as the prompt. Then I used the Ink Sketch filter in Paint.Net to rough it up and called it done. I did say I was feeling lazy. 

Stars Reach - We Can Do This The Easy Way Or The Hard Way

There's good news and there's bad news. Which do you want first?

Ok, let's start with the good news. I managed to get Stars Reach to work. 

And the bad news?

Aww! You guessed it! I managed to get Stars Reach to work!

Alright, that's not entirely fair. Just the set-up for an old joke. But the new tutorial/introduction? Not a fan.

It's almost as though they were trying to weed out every last player who might actually have come looking to have some fun. To be entertained or amused or enjoy themselves in any conceivable way. Only serious players need apply. That's the kind of vibe I was getting.

Since I've gone there first, let me do this out of order. I'll start with the game, not how I got it to run.

Not the choice I made...

I've played two sessions, one yesterday and one today. Each session took around about an hour. 

The first was perfectly fine. Pleasant, even. Nothing special but certainly not off-putting. I was moderately engaged and mildly interested in seeing what came next. Op success for an introduction to a new game, I'd say. That's a game I'd carry on playing to see where it went next.

It began with a brief lore dump. I get why the game calls players "meatbags" now, something I found highly offensive before, when it wasn't contextualized in any way. Now I know its a robot doing the talking, I'm finding the insult considerably easier to take.

Next comes character creation, still extremely basic. Pick a race and that's about it. Fair enough. It's pre-alpha. I'm sure they'll get around to individualization eventually.

After that it's into that same old ultra-low-level tutorial that was there before, the one where the game shows you how to move, interact with objects and generally treats you like you don't know what a video game is. It takes less than five minutes and it's painless enough.

Then it's on to Haven, the old-new tutorial, although it's completely new to me. Haven is a safe(ish) planet with a large(ish) settlement. It has all mod cons including a nightclub that seems to have been lifted directly from the 1990s. Possibly via the 1970s. The only thing missing is a disco ball and a few go-go girls in cages.

The nightclub, bizarrely inappropriate as it is, exists entirely to support the even more outré design choice of dancing-as-healing, a carry-over from Raph's other star-game, Star Wars Galaxies, where it existed mostly to give the Entertainer class a reason for existing. (Is that right? I didn't play SWG until after the NGE and even then only for about five minutes...)

Play that funky music, catboy!

The problem with the mechanic in Stars Reach so far has been that it's been next to impossible to find a player willing to dance for you when you need one. The nightclub has NPC dancers on tap 24/7 (Or whatever the rotational period of Haven might be.) Once you get to point of handing the service off to NPCs, it hardly seems worth the bother of keeping it at all but I guess it is pre-alpha. Maybe when the game goes live there really will be players willing to stand around in town, dancing just on the off-chance some beat-up person stumbles in. 

In Haven you get to talk to the mayor, who sends you to speak to a bunch of other, notable residents, all of whom have some little task they want you to do because of course they do. Again, it makes a bit more sense here than before, now you know you're effectively a refugee, living on the goodwill and largesse of a society of AIs and you're expected to work for your handouts. I mean, I wouldn't have gone for such a self-loathing backstory myself but at least there is one now.

Haven itself is very pretty. I've seen a fair amount of criticism of the graphics in Stars Reach, mostly because they supposedly look childish and remind people of games they don't like or respect, especially Fortnite, but I like the way the game looks. The art direction seems solid, the color palette is restful and the general ambience is relaxing. Well, until you hit one of the many hellscapes, anyway.

I hope you've got a widescreen monitor...

I spent maybe fifty minutes running through all the jobs in Haven, by the end of which I had tools for mapping, harvesting, and shooting things and I knew, vaguely, how to use them. I also knew how to cook and how to spend my xp on new skills plus a load of points to spend. Not that I did. 

Oh. My. God. The skill system! It's terrifying! Let me just take a minute here. You've heard of skill trees? Stars Reach has a skills forest. It could be a parody, it's so extreme. The "tree" is so huge it doesn't even come close to fitting on one screen, even at a resolution so tiny you can't read anything on it. You have to pan across multiple screens and zoom in to see even one small section. 

If anything tells you who this game is designed for, it's the skill tree. Housewives from the '70s who buy everything from catalogs. People who work in the stores departments of hardware wholesalers. Anyone for whom no nitpicking little detail is too small or too tedious.

That was about the only thing that cropped up in haven that would really have put me off the game, though. The rest of it was fine. Everything worked. I didn't run into any bugs, either the coding kind or the aggressive flying ones that made earlier sessions in the game so annoying. The only wildlife near the settlement is non-aggro deer and rabbits, which made a pleasant change.

And then came Crucible...

Anyone bring marshmallows?

 

Crucible is the next planet. It's non-optional. You have to go through it and pass some tests before you can play the game proper, which is a big mistake in my opinion. Gating of that sort always is but this is a particularly bad example.

Where Haven was a calm, lucid introduction, Crucible is a frenzied nightmare. They do warn you it's going to be bad and they are not kidding. Why anyone at Playable Worlds thought it was a good idea to force new players out of a friendly, peaceful environment into a dark and violent one, a hell-hole where every step outside the landing zone is likely either to kill them or leave them hopelessly lost is a puzzle but then developers often do shit like that. It's like they never learn.

To get to Crucible from Haven you have to stand on a platform and wait for a transport "skiff" to pick you up, like it was EverQuest in 2002. I was getting Nexus flashbacks. At least you only have to wait a minute or two for the ride, not twenty, like back in the "good" old days.

There's only one person waiting to give you work and he wants you to mine some Bauxite. To that end he gives you a Terraformer which doesn't entirely connect with your hand when you lug it about. Some work still needed there.

The mining guy tells you to use Tab to select the mineral you want to mine and "E" to ping a search for it. That pops up a crescent of colors that vaguely indicates the direction. As I eventually discovered, that should lead you to a forest uphill from the landing zone. A forest that's not on fire.

Suure it is...

Most of Crucible is on fire. So was I, frequently. For whatever reason, my crescent pointed me straight at the lava. I triangulated many times and it always said the bauxite was across the lava and up in the mountains on the far side. 

I tried to go round but there was no quick route and the distance seemed too great to go looking for one. After I set myself on fire one time too many, I remembered you can set one of the tools to freeze a path. Not any of the tools I had, though. Also, it was a skill I'd have to buy. The skill tree had put me off spending any points at all back when I was in Haven.

To buy skills you have to go to a Skill Terminal, another clunky, old-fashioned mechanic I could do without. Worse, if there's one on Crucible, I couldn't find it. I had to go queue up for a skiff back to Haven.

In Haven, I found the Freeze skill in the Ranger branch of the tree (That took a while.) and bought it. Then it took me another few minutes to figure out it wasn't for any of the tools I had. The Ranger line comes with its own tool, which I ended up buying from a vendor back on Crucible. Lucky I spotted that when I was over there.

None of this did the game explain to me, possibly because it all turned out to be completely unnecessary.  I did manage to cross the lava using the freeze-ray although I still caught on fire half the time. When I was out of the firepit, I climbed the mountain, where I was immediately set upon by hordes of flying mobs throwing fireballs. I ran away from them - they leash a lot sooner now, which is an improvement, at least - and by sheer chance I found a tunnel. Whether natural or player-made, I couldn't tell.

I went down the tunnel looking for Bauxite, still trying to follow the pings. With no light source other than the intermittent glare of the mining laser, I very quickly got lost. I'd still be down there now if something hadn't killed me, allowing me to respawn back at the base. I have no idea what it was. Not a mob. Possibly I fell down a hole? Don't know, don't care. Just happy to get out.

On my third attempt to find Bauxite (Which, I might point out, turns up occasionally when you mine other minerals right next to the base, only that Bauxite doesn't update the mission...) I found my crescent of colors was pointing in a completely different direction. Go figure!

That took me up into the forested hills behind the base, where I was once again immediately attacked by roaming mobs. This time I stood and fought and killed them all although it was a close-run thing. I carried on pinging and the crescent took me to the entrance of another tunnel, whereupon the mission updated to the next stage. That, it seems, was where I was supposed to go all along.

I just hope I don't meet whatever dug this hole.

My trip down the second tunnel was much the same as the first - dark, claustrophobic, not fun in any conceivable way - except that there was Bauxite down there, eventually. There was also another player, clearly on the same mission. We didn't speak.

It took an inordinately long time to find the Bauxite, even with the ping telling me it was right in front of me. It turned out to be in a small cavern deep under the rock. Once I found the lode I had all I needed in a minute or two. The problem was finding my way out, something I managed more by chance than planning. 

I made my way back to the base, did the hand-in and got told to go back to Haven to refine the ore into aluminum. I did that and got sent back to Crucible to ask for more work. I did that and got told I'd need a space-suit to get off the planet and if I wanted one I'd have to work for it by doing jobs for three or four other NPCs.

That was enough. More than enough. I hadn't been having fun since I left Haven the first time and it sure didn't look like fun was going to come any time soon. If Stars Reach had been a new game I'd been trying out, I'd have given up on it half an hour earlier. I only carried on as long as I did for the benefit of this post.

Crucible is an ugly, tedious waste of time and why anyone would think it could make a good introduction to any game beats me. The old beginning, where the game just dumped you on a planet and let you get on with it, might have been vague and confusing but at least it wasn't actively hostile to the very idea of fun. This is. 

If I was still in testing mode, I'd send some blistering feedback but I'm not, so I'll just suck it up and move on. If ever there was a game not made for me, Stars Reach is it, so it seems churlish to complain. I'm sure it's the game for someone and whoever they are, they're welcome to it.

That said, I'll bet stubbornness will lead me to go back and finish the introduction, get my space-suit and get off Crucible. In all the time I've played video games there's only ever been one game where I literally couldn't get through the tutorial. That was the Crew and it still galls me when I think about it. I don't need another of those on my resume but that's not a positive endorsement. Making potential customers so mad at you they swear not to let you beat them might be a winning strategy for a Souls-like but not for the tutorial of an MMORPG.

Maybe there's a job going in Haven? I could live here...

So much for the game. Back to getting the game to run at all. Boy, that was confusing... 

I took Wilhelm's hint from the comments on yesterday's post, where he mentioned having two clients. I activated one of my other keys, which required making a second Steam account. Then I logged in as the new account and installed the game from the prompts, using a different folder.

That gave me two Stars Reach games in my Steam Library, one just called Stars Reach, the other Stars Reach Playtest. I logged into the Playtest version, which at the time was the only game showing on that account, and it worked first time. 

Confusingly, now both accounts show all my games, even though I used different email addresses. I can toggle between them from the Steam login window and they both have the same Wallet, too, so to all intents they're the same account as far as I can see. What the point of having them both might be defeats me. Maybe someone can give me a use case other than getting around the kind of one-per-account restriction I was trying to dodge.

And that's where things stand right now. It's been six months since I last played Stars Reach and it might be another six before I play again. Especially if they don't revamp the introduction to let me skip the Crucible. 

Stars (Out Of) Reach

This is going to be a very short post. Although I've said that before...

It's been a long time since I took a look at Stars Reach. I'm pretty sure it will never be a game for me, no matter how much they tart it up and fill it out, but even as a curiosity it was already wearing very thin last time I played.

Still, I haven't forgotten about it completely, not least because Playable Worlds keep on sending me emails about how things are going. I can't fault them for information flow, even if some of their priorities seem a little skewed. Is it really a good use of resources to pump out detailed guides on how to roleplay specific races when the game is still in pre-alpha?

There was a big flag - yellow if not actually red - back in February, when layoffs were announced. The whole industry is struggling as we know, so that wasn't as much of a surprise at is might have been, but having to let people go before you're even out of pre-alpha does seem like it might indicate a more serious problem.

Then this week I received a couple of slightly strange emails. No, that's underselling it. I got five in five days. 

One was a promo for the new update - The Crucible - which looks like a substantial revamp of the starting experience. That's something they've been tweaking for a while but this would seem to be the finished version. Well, the latest finished version, anyway. I'm sure it won't be the last.

The email describes the update as "a big one" and suggests now would be a great time to "jump back in" if you've been away for a while. I think the last time I played was September 2025. I guess six months counts as a while. Seemed like it might be worth taking another look.

I gave it a little thought but I didn't do much about it beyond re-install the client in case the mood took me to log in. Then I got another email, telling me there were a thousand more keys available for new testers. That didn't interest me personally. The last thing I need is another key for Stars Reach. I already have three and it's confusing enough. I only use one and I'm not even sure it's the one I paid for with my Kickstarter pledge.

I did wonder why they were inviting more people, though. In the past, I think key giveaways have been part of a promotional drive of some kind. Or maybe they were short of testers?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, Stars Reach is one of those rare games in development where you can see how many people are playing. That's because it's only available on Steam, which means a public day-by-day record of activity via the Steam Chart. 

I may be misunderstanding something about the testing process and Steam here, in which case please feel free to correct me in the comments. I certainly hope I've got something wrong because the Steam Chart doesn't make very encouraging reading.

I'm not sure I've looked at the charts for SR before. I certainly don't remember the numbers being so small. Can it really be true that the most players ever online at the same time was fewer than two hundred? 

In a way, that makes a little more sense when you consider the testing schedule of a year ago. The server was only up for a few hours at a time, a few days a week. I certainly found it very inconvenient so I guess others did, too.

For the last few months, though, uptime has been much longer, with the server staying up for days. And yet the numbers have been falling quite dramatically. The average number of players online had barely ever hit double figures and February saw an all-time low.

I'm finding these number very hard to accept. Surely there have to be more people playing than that? I must be missing something.

It would explain the recruitment drive, though. And so would the next email I received, which warned me one of my keys was about to expire. I'd never claimed it and now Playable Worlds was purging unused testing spots and "releasing unused keys on March 31 to make room for new players."

Whether there are any new players waiting to take them up remains to be seen, although I notice there was an uptick in interest with the Crucible update, almost a 50% increase in concurrency. Or fifteen more players, to put it another way.

There's a recent reddit thread that asks "Whatever happened to Stars Reach?", a question Raph Koster dropped by to answer. His comment begins "We are still working away, putting out updates every three weeks like we have been for the last 18 months. The game is open to testers most days of the week." 

As many commenters in the rest of the very well-mannered thread suggest, though, there's a very long way to go. Several make the point that there's no game there yet, nor indeed much sign of what game will ever be there. That was my main reason for dropping back from testing. 

A new player experience, though, a tutorial - that I could test. It's likely to be a relatively directed, coherent, finite sequence of curated events because a tutorial pretty much has to be, even in a sandbox. I thought I'd give it a go and get a post or two out of it.

And I have, in so far as this is a post about my experience of the new update. As I said, it's going to be short - or it would have been, if I hadn't bulked it out with all that background detail.

Here's a screenshot that accurately represents most of my time with the update so far:

That's character creation. All of it, apart from a bunch of meaningless flavor questions and a few "Under Construction" screens. If there's any actual character creation going on, I didn't get to see it.

Even so, it's more of the update than I got to see after I gave my mustard-colored rectangle a name and went to log into the game-world. All I got then was this:

And here's the bug report I submitted after trying multiple times to log in:

The game goes to Character Creation but the only thing it allows is adding a name. All panels are blank. From there it goes to the loading screen with "Attaching Camera" etc. All four items read 0% and stay that way. I left it for fifteen minutes with no change.

I am not using a VPN. I have verified the files, which are correct. I have re-installed on both an SSD and a mechanical HDD. Nothing makes any difference.

I used to play on a different computer with no such issues. This is the first time I've tried on this newish machine, which meets the required specs. I can play any other game I have on Steam with no issues. The problem is just with Stars Reach.

Before sending in the report I did a bit of googling to see if it was a known issue. All I found was one person on Discord with the exact same problem but he fixed it by disabling his VPN. I haven't used a VPN for a long time so that was no help.

If I was really motivated, I'd boot up my old PC, which ran Stars Reach just fine, and see if the same problem happens there. That's what a dedicated tester would do. But I'm not that invested. 

It's a bit annoying, the way it always is when you can't play a game you were thinking of playing, even if it was only an idle thought and you didn't really want to play anyway. It's happened to me countless times over the years. I'll soon forget about it and move on to something that does work.

It would have been nice to check out the new update, all the same. I do like a new tutorial. They're so easy to review.

Maybe after the next patch. It's surprising how often these things fix themselves. And if not, well, I guess it isn't going to matter much. It's likely to be a while before there's a game there, anyway. If there ever is.

 

ADDENDUM: After reading Wilhelm's comment below, I thought I'd try redeeming one of my other keys to see if that made any difference. The terms and conditions state you can only activate one Stars Reach key per Steam Account but it doesn't specify one per person so I just made a new Steam account and completed the registration with that.

Then I downloaded the game and hit Play and guess what? It worked first time!

Well, actually second time because I used the same character name and it was rejected as already being in use, which suggests my previous attempt got at least as far as the database that holds the names and therefore that that version is also in some way "live". Unless someone else is calling themselves Floradelle, of course, but I very much doubt that.

I tweaked the name a little and was able to log in just fine. Well, until I managed to get disconnected, anyway. But after that it was fine! 

I notice that the name of the game in the two accounts is different. The original just says "Stars Reach" whereas the new one says "Stars Reach Playtest". I have two separate installs of the game on the same drive but in different Steam folders. Both accounts show all my games, even though they use different email addresses. It's very confusing...

Anyway, now all I need to do is play through the tutorial and I'll be able to write that post after all. There's something to look forward to!

And There Shall Come A Reckoning...

All this talk about a new EverQuest game is fine and quite possibly dandy but what about the old ones? The ones I'm already playing?

Well, my good intentions for a return to OG EQ came to not very much, as I expected they might. I did at least get the game installed on the new(ish) PC and patched up, so that's something. Better yet, I logged in and claimed my free Level 115 but then I had no clue what to do with her, so after I'd opened all the goodie bags and gotten her dressed, I logged out again.

As for leveling up a new character with the big xp bonus, that hasn't happened and now it's too late. Not that I'm bothered. If yesterday's unexpected announcement means anything at all, I'd guess it signals the end of leveling random characters on live EverQuest servers just for the hell of it. 

I mean, why would you do it the hard way, when you know there's a version of the game coming later this year that's designed specifically to make it easy? One thing I haven't seen discussed yet is what kind of impact EverQuest Legends is going to have on either the regular, "Live" game or the TLE servers but I'd bet it's going to be considerable.

The Game Jawn folks have been quite clear about how they're targeting an audience of people who either last played EQ many years ago or who've never played it at all - that's what all the quality of life improvements and UI tweaks are for - but it seems highly likely they'll also pull in a lot of people who still play. Maybe most of those will only come for a quick look-see before going back to their regular servers - sunk cost and all that - but there's still bound to be a hell of a population dip in the short term, at least. And who knows how long it'll last? 

 

Presumably all of that is factored into the agreement between GJ and Darkpaw. I guess if EG7 get a big enough cut of that sweet subscription money, they won't really mind that some of it is coming from people who might otherwise be giving it to them direct. Then again, they did sell all those thousands and thousands of Lifetime Subscriptions a few years back. I bet the Accounts Dept. will be more than happy if some of those loyal customers move over to the Game Jawn servers. At least that way they'll get something out of them again.

So much for EverQuest. What about EverQuest II? That's the game I'm actually playing, isn't it? 

Yep. It sure is. I played some EQII yesterday and some more this morning.

It's been lost in the noise of the EQL publicity blitz but EQII just got its big Spring Game Update. It's called Gerion's Reckoning and plotwise it follows directly on from the Signature Questline in the expansion. That did end somewhat abruptly. I almost expected a big To Be Continued sign to appear, only I thought we'd have to wait for the next expansion, not see it start up again just three months later.

Here's a summary of what's in the GU:

•        4 New Dungeons with Solo and Heroic Content
•        1 New Untold Heroic Dungeon 
•        4 New Tier 3 Raid Dungeons 
•        20 New missions 
•        10 New collections 
•        Shiny Critter Collections 
•        9 New Adventure Quests 
•        New Overseer Season 8  

If you want more detail, like the names of the dungeons, which won't mean anything to anyone who doesn't play (And, frankly, not a lot to most people that do.) it's all at the link above.

It occurs to me as I write this that I don't even know who Gerion is, let alone what's being reckoned. Does it matter? I doubt it. I did a whole quest yesterday where I barely understood one word in three of the extensive dialog, most of which seemed to be names of places, people and things I'd never heard of - and I've been playing this game since there was a game to play! Who can keep track of all these names? Who even tries?

Ahem. Getting back on track...

I was looking forward to the GU because I thought the new quests might be enough to get me over the line to Level 135, the expansion cap. I still have half a level to go and I was very keen to avoid having to do another couple of dozen tedious repeatable quests at 2% a pop to get there.  

Things looked bad on that front when I saw the update came with a caveat:

 "The content in Gerion’s Reckoning is for adventure level 135 characters." 

I took that to mean questgivers wouldn't even talk to me until I dinged 135, which has certainly been the case in other games I've played and probably in this one, too, although I can't actually remember for certain. Still, might as well go make sure.

My fears seemed to be confirmed when I zoned into Yon Gorroth, the opening zone of the expansion and there were no new quest-markers on the map. Luckily, I didn't give up right away. Instead, I went to check the update notes and the wiki and it was then I realized there aren't any new quests in Yon Gorroth anyway.

Button grayed-out because my Journal was full, not because I wasn't 135 yet. Phew!

I checked the wiki and got the name of a questgiver in The Unknown. Then I went to see if he'd talk to me. At first things looked bleak. He wasn't turning up on the map as a flashing feather. Bad omen. 

Luckily, once again I didn't give up. I flew over to see him in person and it turned out he'd just been too far away for the map to show he was looking for help.

I got the quest from him. He was fine with me not being 135 yet. He gave me a whole lot of verbiage about something I'd already done for him, which I'd completely forgotten, then he sent me to one of the new instances to do him some more favors.

He gave me a specific location but obviously I couldn't remember where it was was so that took some more research. Eventually I found the entrance, way off some rocky island, and in I went.

Now, here's the good part. Necromancers are awesome! I believe the class doesn't have a great reputation just now but that'll be from raiders and raiders have no clue how real people live. I can tell you that compared to playing a Berserker, soloing a Necro is EZ-Mode.

I'm glad Mord remembers because I sure don't.

Usually I like to have the wiki open when I do a new instance so I can at least check which resists I need for which bosses and whether there are any special tricks I need to look out for. It's generally possible to figure all of that out from first principles but doing it the hard way often takes a few deaths or all afternoon. Occasionally both.

Either the first instance is very easy or my Necro is at least an order of magnitude more capable than my Berserker ever was. I just treated all five bosses in the instance as Tank&Spank and all of them died in 60-90 seconds. If they had any clever tricks, I missed them.

My Necro didn't die at all although she bloody would have if she'd relied on my Mercenary to heal her. He is so slow to pull the trigger on the big heals! Fortunately, Mordita can do a pretty bang-up job of healing herself, so that's what she did. 

As for her pet, Midnight, he still seems to be almost completely indestructible. She has great heals for him, too, but since he's at 100% health about 95% of the time, she rarely needs them. On one boss I think I saw him lose about 5% health, just for a second or two, but that was about it.

The instance was fun, which was just as well because I had to do it twice. The first time, I killed the final boss before I finished one of the quests and it turned out the final step of that quest was to kill the boss I'd just killed. That's another reason I always like to read the wiki first.

I finished there yesterday and today I came back, reset the dungeon and did it again, even faster. Then I came out and went back to the questgiver and did the hand-in and guess how much xp I got? Two fucking per cent!

Yes, the same as for a repeatable quest where you just pick some grass and click on a few nests. A quest that takes maybe five minutes including travel time versus clearing an entire dungeon with five bosses. Same reward. Does that seem fair to you?

Okay, the bosses all drop gear that's an upgrade to anything I'm wearing plus a bunch of other stuff worth having so it's not like it was a total waste of time but still. 2%!

All of which means I guess I'll be grinding those repeatables after all. I need another forty per cent of Level 134 so that's twenty of the damn things. I might just do one or two a day and let it take another month. It's not like being 135 is going to make much of a difference to anything...

Oh, wait... yes it will! All that gear the bosses dropped? That I said was upgrades for Mordita? Well, it would be if she could wear it. It's all Level 135 Required. 

You can't even add the shinies you pick up in the instance to their their collections if you aren't at the cap because those are level-locked too! It makes the whole Hot Zone - Bonus Shinies thing that popped up the second time around feel like more like a prank than a perk.

Such is the life of an EQII player. I should be used to it by now. 

When's EQ Legends coming out again?