[You See The Corner Of Something Under A Chest] - I Pick It Up...

I had an odd piece of luck yesterday. I was in the bedroom and I just happened to notice the corner of something, sticking out from under the blanket trunk I inherited from my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. It used to sit on the landing of the house I grew up in and when I was about eight or nine I could still hide inside it with the lid closed, so it's pretty big.

Anyway, what was poking out from under it turned out to be a Steam card. You may have read that they're not doing them any more, which is a total pain because it was only last year I realised you could buy them in our local supermarket. As soon as I realized that, I put "Steam Cards" on my wishlists, along with a note about where to get them, and I got about a hundred pounds-worth for Christmas. 

I added all of those to my account right after I got them and I've spent most of the money now. On games I haven't played, of course. I'm a traditionalist that way. 

I figured it was obviously one of the exhausted cards from back then, It must somehow have fallen on the floor and gotten kicked under the chest. That sort of thing happens all the time in our house. I picked it up but, as I was about to throw it in the bin, I happened to notice it the silvering on the back seemed to be intact.

I don't buy a lot of physical gift cards and I've never bought a scratch card in my life but lately I have been buying those virtual cards the cats sell at the Catzebo booths in Neverness To Everness. In fact, I've been buying some every day since they added them a few weeks back.  

At the time I wrote about those cards, I thought they were going to be a limited-time addition to the game that would go away when the next update dropped but that's not how it went. The booths are a permanent attraction on the streets of Hethereau now, which means I've had to become a lot more temperate with my purchases.

It was fine to go hard when they were only going to be there for short while. Even then, I only had the one crazy day, when I bought out the entire stock. Mostly I was pretty restrained. 

So anyone should be. The odds of winning, though, are very poor. I wrote in the post about how it looked very much to me as though the operation was designed to leech your wallet dry steadily and slowly and now, with a lot more data to go on, I'm still absolutely convinced that's true.

By far the most likely outcome, every time you play, is that you lose 10-20% of your stake. If you stick to the cheap cards (In the permanent version of the game there are only three types of card: 10k, 30k and 50k.) that doesn't matter much but if you buy all the cards every day, or even just all the 50k ones, you'll be broke in a week. 

Well, I would. Might take you longer but you'd get there.

 

Even with my relatively small spend, I wouldn't get ahead of my combined losses even if I won one of the big prizes. I must be well over a million in the hole by now. Most of that happened long ago, though, and I've written it off as part of the learning process. Also, it was fun. 

These days I mostly finish even or slightly ahead. As soon as I start losing, I stop. Well, soon after, anyway...

And it's not like you get nothing for your money, even if you lose. You get a bookmark.

For a long time I didn't really put much effort into bonding with the characters on my team but recently I've started to get into it. I have several at Affinity Level 5 and a couple at 6 and I'm working on getting all of those to ten, eventually. It'll be a long haul but I'm not in a hurry and the game's not going anywhere.

To that end, I'm doing stuff with them all as I run into them around town and I'm handing out all the gifts I'm allowed, every day. Every scratch card gives you a bookmark that's worth a hundred Bond points. That's what I'm mostly using.  

I do all the character side-quests as I come across them when I'm strolling down the wide avenues of Hethereau or whenever one of my imaginary friends sends me a message on Bagel, asking if I want to meet up. Those quests can be short and silly - I did one involving choosing hair-care products for Mint's tail the other day - or longer and weirder - like when Linko and the Appraiser went looking for aliens - but there are only so many of them and some are gated by specific affinity levels. 

Gifting has a daily restriction on how many gifts you can give but you can carry on giving gifts forever. No-one can have too many bookmarks, apparently. It's a guaranteed path to BFF status, if you have the patience for it. Which I do.

Getting back to the point, all these in-game scratch cards have attuned me to the process, so when I spotted that unblemished silver strip my fingers began to twitch. Could it be? 

Yes, it could. It seems that somehow, last Christmas, I'd managed to lose one of my precious Steam Cards under the blanket chest without even realizing it had gone missing. It's not that hard to imagine. There were a bunch of them, all separately wrapped. It's not like I was keeping a count of the number and value when I opened them. I'm not twelve years old!

I scratched the silver off and there was the code. I put the code into Steam and suddenly I was £20 richer. What to spend it on?

It was hardly a pressing decision. I hadn't spent all of what I added to the account last Christmas. I have a strong aversion to spending the last of anything. I always like to keep a little in reserve, just like Beryl always leaves that last piece of chicken for Mr. Manners.

But still. It's very rude to ignore such serendipitous good fortune. If you do, the universe starts to get the idea you don't want any favors and stops giving them to you. It's like anti-manifesting. And as it happened, I did have an idea of something I might want to play.

The same morning, yesterday morning, before I found the card, I'd had one of those emails from Steam, telling me something on my wishlist had gone on sale. I get a lot of those. I rarely pay them much attention. Half the games on my wishlist go on sale all the time.

As it happens, though, this wasn't just some old favorite having another 30% off moment. It was a game that only launched yesterday that had chosen, as many games do, to begin at 10% off for a brief period before going to full price. 

Usually I have no idea when any game on my wishlist is going to launch. Name any of them and I probably put it on years ago and forgot about it almost immediately. This one, though, is one of my picks for the Fantasy Critic League Wilhelm's running, so I'd been waiting for it. 

It's called Nighthawks and it's by Wadjet Eye, a developer many of whose previous games I've both played and reviewed here. I played the demo in a Next Fest last year and I said of it then

 "I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available."

I often say things like that. I rarely follow through. I believe it when I say it but once I've said it I forget it. I'm like that. It's annoying, isn't it?

This time, though, the astral forces were clearly coming together in a concerted effort to make me keep my word, for once. It would have been positively hubristic to have ignored the omens. So I bought it.

Obviously, I haven't played it. I've downloaded it, both to the desktop and the laptop, where I'm fairly confident it will run, since it's effectively a visual novel with mostly static images. Finding the time to play it is going to be the challenge. 

When I do, no doubt I'll review it here, but for now I'd very much like someone else to review it. Preferably someone the FCL considers a "Top Critic". It's become very clear in this, our second season, that picking a winner is only half the job. You also have to pick something that's not going to vanish into the great darkness cast by the shadow of the 20,000 or more games released every year.

I'm still waiting for a third Top Critic to review Beastro, a game I picked that came out back in June. It has six reviews so far, only two of which count. If it could get one more, it would almost certainly score me something. It has a "Very Positive" Steam rating from over 600 reviews but that counts for nothing where the League is concerned. Until one more Top Critic weighs in, it's worth a fat zero.

The same fate might befall Nighthawks although I'm hopeful it won't. Wadjet Eye is a reasonably well-known developer and much respected in the point&click adventure niche where it mostly operates. This is a slight departure for them but visual novels and P&Cs are almost interchangeable on many levels so I'm optimistic. Plus, the demo was excellent. [Edit: I've just seen it's got 89/100 from PC Gamer so if thay're interested, I'm sure others will be.]

Nighthawks also received some unexpected publicity just before launch, when Steam's algorithm mistakenly identified it as an "Adults Only" game. The team posted an amusing report on the store page explaining the panic that caused and what they had to do to get their game re-assessed and correctly labeled. 

As they say in that piece, they were lucky to have "the fanbase and the (relative) clout to make a bit of noise and get this handled quickly", which is why I also believe Nighthawks will eventually pick up enough reviews to register a score for my Fantasy Game Company, Pretty Blue Fox Games. Beastro, though, I suspect is a lost cause. 

Sidebar: Pretty Blue Fox, by the way, in case you don't recognize it, is the name of  the game-playing group in Philip K Dick's early-60s novel, The Game-Players of Titan. I've been using it in various contexts almost since I started gaming because heaven forfend I'd actually come up with an idea of my own. 

However well or badly the game does for me in the League, I'm certain it's going to be a lot of fun to play. In that respect, I'm equally confident about the other League pick I have, the  one that's due to launch in less than a week. That one's called Nivalis Nights and it's the sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk. 

Unlike Beastro and Nighthawks, Nivalis already has an Open Critic page set up even before it launches, which I'm taking as a good sign. There's every chance I'll also buy Nivalis Nights on release although if I'm going to be rational about it, I should probably wait until I actually have time to play it, by which time it will most likely be on sale.

But hey, where's the fun in being rational? 

Head In The Clouds

Gaming is weird, isn't it? At one and the same time it's too much and too little. Or maybe that's gamers.

In recent weeks, I've seen people complaining they have too many games to get through, that they're being offered too many games for free, that they've been tempted by deals on games that were too good to miss and now they have a backlog they'll never get through, that too many games are being released all at once, that too many games are being released, period, and that content drops for live service games come faster than they can keep up with them.

Over the same time-frame, I've seen people complaining there's nothing new worth playing, that all we ever get are retreads of old games, that nostalgia-driven retro-gaming is driving out creativity and innovation and that live-service games are stale and static thanks to content droughts.

Obviously, all of these things can be true at once but it's tiring to keep hearing about it. And feeling it. Because I'm suffering from the same mixed emotions about the hobby as everyone else. When the pipeline's flowing, I feel like I'm drowning; when it dries up I suffer from thirst.

All of it's self-imposed, of course. There's no excuse for any of it. Maybe Microsoft was simply acting out a duty of care when they announced XBox Live's new cloud gaming limits of 5, 10 and 15 hours a month. Perhaps they're trying to tell us we all play too many games already.

But, no. It won't be that. They'll be fine with us playing 'til our eyes bleed, provided we do it on our own machines and they don't have to pay for it. They don't care that we're addicted. They just don't want to be the ones running the crack house. 

The Ars Technica article article linked in the Aging Gamer post, which is weirdly the only place I've seen the news at all, it makes it quite clear that cloud gaming, like VR and AR before it, has signally failed to attract any kind of mass-market audience. As the piece points out, Google dropped their Stadia cloud gaming service a few years back and Amazon recently scaled down its Luna service significantly.

Luckily for me, NVidia's still in. My GeForce Now subscription that I took out a few months back has to be one of the best spending choices I've made. I use it every day and it works flawlessly. I hope NVidia don't decide it's too much trouble too because while it lasts, it's saving me a fortune and making my gaming life very much easier.

Backing out of the market for cloud gaming now might be a little premature, anyway. The concept could be on the cusp of fulfilling some of the promises made for it a few years ago, although the reasons why it could be beginning to take off are, ironically, the same as those making it less commercially attractive. 

Hardware costs aren't spiralling so much as sky-rocketing. The insatiable maws of the AI data centers scarf down every available chip, leaving nothing but scraps for everyone else. Running AAA games, at home or in the cloud, is getting expensive.

We could be there a while, too. I've seen estimates that it could take three years for enough new production facilities to come online to meet the unanticipated demand. Even that sounds... optimistic. Fanciful, even. Is there enough raw material available to feed the increased demand, always assuming the will to build these new factories was there?

Maybe it's the beginning of the end for gaming as we've grown up knowing it. Since the 1970s there's been an automatic assumption that kids want consoles in their homes to play their video games. Consoles became handhelds and PCs and all kinds of devices with odd and enigmatic names but no-one ever imagined the flow would end. All those kids grew up and had kids of their own and the family that plays together...

Sure, there've been times when commentators considered whether the latest console generation would be the last but only because they saw games migrating to different platforms and technologies, not because they thought the whole gaming carousel was going to grind to a halt. 

And of course it hasn't and it won't. Gaming's going nowhere. Or, rather, it's going somewhere. But where? And what's it going to look like, when it gets there?

Mobile gaming has been the big success of the last decade and more. It's still growing, too. But smartphones are just as vulnerable to the data center demand as consoles and PCs. It's nice to imagine that, when you can't afford a PC any more, you'll be able to hook your phone to your TV and carry on playing but chances are your phone won't be any cheaper to upgrade or replace than the rest of the tech you can no longer justify buying.

Of course, we all have to have a smartphone now, so if it comes to a choice, well it's no choice at all. But if the phones that can play the AAA games cost the same as the other devices that cost too much, will anyone outside of a self-elected elite be playing? And if AAA gaming becomes a luxury pastime, what kind of developers will that attract? Would you even want to play the games they made, if you could run them?

Oh, I do like a bit of wild, unsupported speculation, once in a while? Don't you? And since I don't do doom-scrolling, it's rare for me to get the opportunity.

I don't really imagine any of this is going to happen. Crappy old machines play most games pretty well and if there really comes a time when regular gamers are priced out of the new PC and Console market, there's going to be a huge boom in refurbished hardware. 

I mean, there's got to be a lot of it around, doesn't there? We're all hoarders when it comes to tech. 

From where I'm sitting I can see three no-longer-used PCs and an old laptop and there's another downstairs. That's after I took three more to the recycling center last year. And don't talk to me about graphics cards. I must have a dozen lying around, going all the way back to the early 2000s. 

I don't own any consoles but I just checked EBay and I could have a working PS4 for well under £100. Gemini tells me that would play Fortnite, Apex Legends and Minecraft as well as thousands of top-rated games from the twenty-teens. I could get by on that. If I had to.

So, yes, maybe a bit of belt-tightening might be in order for a while. And maybe game developers will have to scale down their ambitions and work inside some technical constraints if they want to keep hold of their mass-market appeal. But is that a bad thing? Aren't we always complaining about bloated budgets and broken deadlines and reach exceeding grasp?

Not that I want to go all misty-eyed about the good old days because god forbid but one thing that there was a lot of back in the 'eighties and nineties was innovation. Granted, it's always a lot easier to come up with something new when no-one's been there before you but even factoring that in, the things some people were able to do with a 48k memory, let alone half a gigabyte, were astonishing. 

We're not going back to measuring the footprints of our favorite games in kilobytes but does any game really need to take up hundreds of gigs on your SSD? Assuming you can still afford an SSD, of course. 

Let's take Valheim as an example. Kind of successful, Valheim. Okay, it had a great launch window, what with everyone being trapped at home back in 2021 but it's sold 12m-15m copies in five years, depending which source you believe. Not GTA6 numbers, sure, but solid.

Valheim is less than 5GB. Nearer 4GB in fact. It has low-quality graphics that somehow manage to look exactly right for what it needs. It's a good trick but quite a few games pull it off. Minecraft barely breaks 1GB in a standard installation and that one hasn't done too badly. Fortnite will run on a graphics card I could buy right now on EBay for under £25. 

Looks like we'll be able to carry on gaming after all, then. At least until all the old hardware dries up and breaks down. But that could take a while.

And maybe the games will get smarter and smaller and at least no worse than they are now. Might even be better. Who knows? 

Not to mention there might be fewer of them. Which could be a good thing. Over twenty thousand new games were released on Steam last year. We've almost passed that this year already. How many games can you play in a year? Maybe if there weren't so many, you wouldn't have that backlog...

All of the above is merely me, riffing on something I wasn't even planning to write about today. I was going to go over the latest video from Hotta about the upcoming content drop for Neverness to Everness and that got me started on how much content is too much and then the introduction turned into the post and here we are, or here I am, anyway, wondering if less really might not be more after all.

I'll get to that NTE video another time. It's... interesting. Interesting isn't always a compliment, is it? Meanwhile, I think I might play some video games. While I still can.

Valheim Forever?

Wilhelm is playing Valheim again. He says "So there I was, in Valheim again… for what, the fifth or sixth run?  How much appeal could the game have left for me?"

Tipa is playing Valheim again. She says "I’ve played Valheim a lot; I’m not really sure how much I can really say about it that I have not said before."

I'm playing Valheim again. It's my most-played game on Steam at nearly 400 hours, seven of them since the 1.0 official launch earlier this month.

Everything Wilhelm and Tipa say about Valheim, I'm going to say too. The early game is compelling. The low-rent graphics are magical. Going through the grind again does not appeal. Mods make the game better...

And really what is there to say, any more? Everyone who's even remotely interested has played already. Everyone in the blogosphere has read too many posts about it, all of them different and yet all of them still very much the same.

Valheim has the simplest gameplay loop. You start out almost naked in some pleasant countryside. If you're lucky the sun is still up. You figure out how to make tools and weapons and somewhere to live. Then you figure out how to do it better. Then you kill a boss and the whole cycle begins again. And you keep doing that until the credits roll except until this month there were no credits so you just stopped when you'd had enough.

Except, why? Why do any of that?  As Wilhelm also says "The whole thing can be so peaceful and engaging that I wonder why I feel I must do anything at all."

 

I've always wondered. Even right at the start. As an explorer, my curiosity kept me going, all the way to the end of the Plains on my initial run, but long before then I'd realised that, if that was really me there, I'd never have left the Meadows where I started.

I mean, why would you? Why would anyone? The first biome, Meadows, is all lush, green grass, twinkling streams, placid lakes, airy woodland, lovely beaches. There's food everywhere for the taking - berries, honey, mushrooms - and the killing - venison and boar. You don't even need to build your own home. You can just fix up one of the many abandoned villages or farms, plant carrots, raise boars, live the good life. 

And it's mostly safe. The boars can be a bit aggressive and the odd Greydwarf or skeleton wanders in from the Black Forest from time to time but nothing to worry about. Not once you've made yourself some leather gear to wear and an axe to defend yourself. Just be sure to be inside with the doors locked at night and you'll be fine.

So this time, that's what I thought I'd do. Instead of hauling myself laboriously up the tech ladder all over again, I thought I'd find out how long the game could hold my attention if I didn't do any of that. If I just lived there.

And since I wasn't planning on playing the game "properly", I also figured why should I have to deal with any more problems than I absolutely had to? So I went into the controls and dialled everything down to the lowest difficulty possible. Would it still be fun that way?

I set combat to Very Easy and mobs to passive. I wasn't going to fight anything I didn't have to and if I did have to I wanted it over as quickly as possible. I removed the death penalty so I wouldn't have to keep running back to get my stuff every time I died. Not that I was planning on dying much. And of course I switched off raids. I did that, after a while, even back  when I was playing normally. Raids get old fast.

I also allowed for items to be taken through portals although exactly what that means I'm not sure yet because at time of writing I don't have any portals. I'm sure it'll come in handy at some point.

 

As for Mods, I would have liked to add some of those as well but playing through GeForce Now and with 1.0 having broken most of the Mods I used to use, it seemed like more effort than I wanted to get into right away, especially not knowing how long I'd be sticking around. If I carry on much longer, though, I think I'll have to buckle down and get some. I'm sure as heck not going through the Mistlands without removing the mist.

But the Mistlands is a long way off. So far, after seven hours of searching, I can't even find the Swamp. 

I started out as usual, making a shack to huddle in out of the rain, killing a few boars for leather (One hit and they explode.) so I could make some clothes, gathering a few provisions for the trail and then setting out to see what I could find. 

One thing that seems a little different is that there are megalithic open tombs everywhere, many with piles of bones in them. I don't remember those. And bears. Bears are new.

I punched a bear. I don't recommend it. It was unnecessary and foolish. I died. My only death so far although I have nearly drowned several times. I've been poisoned by bees, too. More than once. Apparently the non-aggro mobs thing doesn't apply to bees. I hope it works for Deathsquitos.

After a few game-days of aimless wandering I decided I probably ought to map the coast. There's no way to know whether you're on an island or a continent or what biomes there are nearby, other than to go and look. Well, there is, but that's cheating. Not that I have anything against cheating, obviously.

I started out walking around the coast, going widdershins. It turned out not to be a coast at all. I was next to a huge inland lake. Good thing I didn't bother making a raft.

 

I found the real coast and walked around that instead. It took me several more days. Travel in Valheim is slow. Eventually I'd seen the whole place or near enough. I was on a very big island, all Meadows, Black Forest and Mountains.The first two were safe to explore but you can't make friends with the weather. Cold still kills. I'd need a Mod to stop that.

What I was hoping for was some Plains. I really like the Plains. It's always sunny there and the colors are really cheerful and uplifting. If nothing's going to attack you, the Plains is where you'd want to live. Preferably on a cute little island just off the coast. One with some nice beaches. 

I made a raft. I don't like rafts much. Who does? But they do a job. I made one and went where the wind took me (Another Mod I could do with...) which, luckily for me, was straight to the land I could vaguely see on the horizon. As I got close, some mist came down and obscured everything and I worried for a moment I was heading into those awful Mistlands but it was just some sea fog.

Where I ended up wasn't much more use to me than the Mistlands, though, even if it was a lot more pleasant. A small archipelago of tiny islands out in the ocean. Mostly Meadow. A little Black Forest. 

So now I'm stuck on a cold, rainy island far out at sea, no better off than I was before. I'm going to have to stock up on berries, wait for a good wind and set sail again. 

And the weird thing is, I know I will. This game is ridiculously easy to get back into, even when there's nothing new you want to do and nowhere new you want to see. (The only way I'll be seeing the Deep North is on a fly-by like I did for Ashlands.)

But I don't need to see the new biome to have fun in Valheim all over again. All survival games have an element of pure idling, where you just wander around, chopping down trees and picking up stones and enjoying the ambience but Valheim is the only one where that seems like it's enough to keep you coming back again and again for another visit. 

If Light No Fire turns out to be not much more than a very big Valheim, I'll be more than satisfied. 

Forever Games?

There are three potentially major additions coming soon (Or soonish...) to the established MMORPG ecosystem and I don't feel like I've said anything at all about any of them here. So let me address the herd of elephants trying to shoulder their way into the room.

First up and almost certainly furthest off is Light No Fire, the fantasy title announced by Hello Games, makers of No Man's Sky, back in 2023. LNF isn't specifically described as an MMO but it is multiplayer and these days there seems to be little agreement on how many simultaneous players a game needs to support before it qualifies as "massively multiple". 

No Man's Sky caps out at thirty-two players per instance of the game. Light No Fire will probably be much the same. Hello Games deny either of them are MMOs but if it walks like an orc...

Whatever they end up tagging it, Light No Fire is going to appeal to MMO players in much the same way Valheim or Skyrim did and any innovations it brings will affect the wider fantasy genre like those games have. It will be all the more so because HG has a huge amount of credibility, almost all of it acquired the hard way. 

NMS went through a classic redemption arc. Enormous promises were made in the promotional phase, broken in catastrophic fashion at launch, and restored over years of painstaking recovery. Hello Games took a reputational hit that would have sunk most companies and then went on to spend years making good on everything they originally said they'd do, winning back just about everyone they'd driven away. 

They also did it all for free and with such humility and consistency that they almost certainly gained more credibility for making good their mistakes than they ever would have received if they'd gotten everything right to begin with. As a consequence, not only do players trust them to do their best, they feel safe that, even if it should all go wrong again, it will still come right in the end. 

And since Light No Fire looks like it's going to be essentially the same game, reskinned, it feels reasonable to expect that, this time, the launch won't be such a disaster. If nothing else, Hello Games has demonstrated an admirable ability to learn from its mistakes. Maybe that'll be enough to stop them making so many this time.

All of which is fine as far as it goes. But what about the game itself? What, exactly, is it? 

Blessed if I know. The website is minimalist in the extreme. All it says there is that it's

"a game about adventure, building, survival and exploration together. Set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, it brings the depth of a role playing game to the freedom of a survival sandbox."

There's a trailer, too. Just one after three years. It's a couple of minutes long and that's your lot. 

I just watched it again. The graphics looks plasticky. All the visible activity looks like exploration and survival gameplay, except for one short sequence, the one in which a load of rabbit-people kneel as the player walks up to a giant seated on a throne. That, conceivably, could be RPG-related. Nothing else looks remotely like it is.

There's not a hint of combat or questing or dialog or plot or character development. I think No Man's Sky has at least a smattering of most of those, from what I've read. I haven't played the game but I've read a lot of blog posts by people who have. I wouldn't really call it an RPG although, as with MMO/MMORPG, the days when it was possible to state with unambiguous clarity just what an RPG was are long, long behind us. It does have some RPG elements, though, and no doubt those will carry over to LNF.

Whatever kind of game it turns out to be, Light No Fire has the chance to change the entire game-space. If Hello Games can make good on their promises this time, we'll have a fantasy-based game with almost unlimited potential to suck in players from existing games and genres, survival and MMO and RPG alike. It's going to be a true, virtual world. Perhaps the first.

With that promise, it doesn't need to be an MMO to put enormous pressure on the genre, not least because what it could conceivably represent is the final fulfilment of the original promise of the genre, the chance to live a complete life as a citizen of... somewhere else. Chris Roberts wants to do that for space even though arguably it's already been done, several times, not least by No Man's Sky. No-one has done it yet for fantasy. Light No Fires might.

I wishlisted the game when it appeared on Steam and I'll be buying and playing it when it appears, assuming I'm still physically and mentally capable of playing video games by then, which is a non-trivial concern. There's absolutely no indication whether it will come out this year, next year, the year after that... Hello Games have said pretty much nothing for three years other than "It'll be done when it's done".  

That, at least, gives other players in the market a chance to make their own play for dominance before the rug gets pulled out from under them. Next in line with a big announcement comes ArenaNet.

Guild Wars 3 was officially announced back at the start of the summer. Everyone knew it was coming well before that because NCSoft let the news slip in their financials. Even so, it was still a surprise to find it was real.

Once again, whether it's actually an MMO is up for debate. The official description of the game calls it

"... an action-adventure MMORPG, a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." 

GW3 also has just the one trailer and it's even less indicative of gameplay than the Light No Fire one. It's mostly a lot of over-excitable, breathy voiceover work, some dodgy conceptual art and a few clips of of random exploration footage from the alpha that's running behind closed doors. 

Unlike the NMF trailer, though, it doesn't look in the least bit plasticky. It looks gorgeous. If there's one thing you can never say about ANet games it's that they don't look good. Their art department is second to none. I'm sure GW3 will be worth playing, at least for a while, just for the visuals alone.

Unlike NMF, it has a declared development timeline. It will enter beta testing a year from now, in "Fall 2027". Based on how GW2 progressed, I'd expect launch in first quarter 2028, although I suppose they might get it out for Christmas '27.

 ANet appear to be following almost exactly the same marketing strategy they used for GW2, namely to drip-feed lots of relatively detailed information about the game for 12-18 months before allowing people a hands-on with it. That approach worked very well for them back in 2010-2012, building up a huge head of steam for the game. There were open beta weekends towards the end of the process and the game really caught the attention of the MMORPG-playing public.

It was only after launch that things started to fall apart. It doesn't always seem to be remembered or acknowledged now but, despite the lengthy build-up and the solid testing program, the game was buggy throughout and barely playable in the higher level maps for months. And even with all the explanations and interviews ahead of time, a very significant proportion of the audience seemed confused by the paradigm-changing nature of the gameplay, which (As with Rift before it.) had to be quickly adapted to something much more familiar to meet player demands.

I'm in a difficult position when it comes to reporting on Guild Wars 3. I played GW2 solidly for a decade and by the end of that time my love-hate relationship with the game had shifted noticeably away from love. I never lost my affection for the world or the world-building but actually playing the game stopped being much fun for me several years before I finally walked away.

GW2 is an exceptionally repetitive, formulaic game, even by MMO standards. While you're inside the ecosystem, it's  all too easy to ignore the way you're doing the same things over and over again to no real purpose. Because there's little or no vertical progression, horizontal progression is stretched out to an insane length. Everything takes forever and requires vast quantities of whatever you need to increment the counter. Some people find that entertaining but I'm not one of them.

Consequently, having escaped the gravitational pull of the game, I feel extremely reluctant to allow myself to be drawn back into its orbit even by proxy. I haven't read anything about GW3 beyond the initial announcement. I've been actively avoiding it. Everything I know about it, which is almost nothing, has come from a few unintended glances at news items as I flip through my feeds or from occasional blog posts by others a lot more interested in the game than I am.

I know it's set in the past, before either Guild Wars or GW2, thereby avoiding new players feeling they ought to know the other two games first. I know it's an "action MMO". whatever that means these days. And I know one more thing...

In Guild Wars 3 you will only be able to take part in the "action" part of the MMO with a maximum of nineteen other players at any time. The tech will somehow limit combat and similar events to twenty players, while allowing a much larger number to see each other passing by in the open world or in cities.

 

This sounds a lot more like Guild Wars than GW2 and there has always been a heated debate over whether Guild Wars is a true MMO. I remember it from forums all the way back when the game began and at that time it was my feeling that it wasn't. 

Since then, as I've already observed, the definitions have blurred. More than blurred. They've almost rubbed away. Games that are clearly MMOs go out of their way to claim they're not because admitting your game's an MMO is seen as commercial suicide. Meanwhile, games that add four-player co-op as an afterthought blithely market themselves as "multiplayer" because it affords credibility, somehow.

Where GW3 is going to fit into the fractured mosaic is going to be hard to know until beta and most likely it won't be all that clear even then. ANet doesn't have the greatest record on judging what players want or expect. Guild Wars was intended to be a PvP game until they found, after launch, they'd somehow landed an audience that was more interested in PvE. GW2 was meant to break the mold until it became obvious many of the people who'd bought the game preferred to do things the way they'd always done them.

Unlike Hello Games, ArenaNet does not have a reputation for learning from their mistakes or for correcting them. In the decade I played GW2, as I reported in many of the seven hundred plus posts here about the game, ANet repeatedly tried to come up with solutions to problems of their own making and frequently their fixes only made things worse. GW2 is and has always been a game that succeeds despite the best efforts of its developers, not because of them.

For this reason alone, I don't expect great things of GW3. I do expect it to get a lot of attention within the genre and because it's launching on Steam and on PlayStation 5, it ought to get some traction beyond the niche the two existing Guild Wars titles have carved out.

Once again, it's going to feel silly not to give it a go. I've wishlisted it on Steam. If it turns out to be good, it might be the game I play all through my seventies, which I'm sure is exactly the target audience they're aiming for...

And so to the present. The third elephant has long been rumored but its existence was only confirmed officially a few days ago. Launching almost as you read this (Okay, November, but that's only a few weeks away.), leaping ahead of the rivals I'm sure it hasn't even thought about comes World of Warcraft Forever:

"...an iconic world reimagined with new and expanded zones, new gameplay enhancements, upgraded graphics, and more."

Of course there's a trailer. It's a much better advert for the game than either of the others. That dwarf hunter and his bear could front a cartoon show of their own.

It'd be hard not to know about Forever. I've already read more about this one in three days than GW3 in three months or Light No Fire in three years. Everyone's talking about it. WoW is still, after more than twenty years, the MMORPG market leader, quite possibly the only game in the genre to have any kind of genuine recognition factor among the general public. A new World of Warcraft game isn't just news; it's an event.

And this is a new World of Warcraft game, not some kind of remake. We were expecting Classic Plus, if we were expecting anything. What we got was closer to WoW2.

It is, though, isn't it? I mean, what else would you call a game that stems from the old one but intends to add new content, incrementally, "forever"? It looks like an attempt to have cake and eat cake while also selling slices of that same cake, with no suggestion that the cake will ever run out.

Commercialism seems to be at the forefront, here. The game doesn't require a separate subscription (Like EverQuest Legends.) and there's no box to buy (Like EverQuest Legends.) but if you want the new race and its starting zone it's going to cost you $30. That sets the frame. There will be continuous updates, sure, but you will be paying for at least some of them. Oh, I'm sure there will be free content additions all the time too, but as an ever-evolving world, New Old Azeroth (That's what I'm calling it.) is infinitely amenable to monetization. 

They'll be able to sell you new zones, new races, new classes, new features. They'll be able to sell them a lot more often than the 24-30 month expansion cycle Retail WoW is stuck in, too. Although where Retail WoW (I think they're calling it Modern WoW now?) will be in a year or two if WoW Forever takes off is anyone's guess. Will there even be any more expansions?

It's a gamble but it looks like a solid bet. Blizzard started out with one MMORPG and that worked just fine for a decade and a half. Then they toed the water with a nostalgia-driven recreation of their own storied past and that could hardly have gone better.

WoW Forever brings them up to three. Or more, depending how you count them. There's Classic, Modern and Forever but Classic comes in so many different flavors now I've lost count. Blizzard only needs one of those to succeed and they're back where they were before they got into all of this. From their point of view, I guess it doesn't much matter which one it is. I doubt Jagex are bothered that the runaway success of Old School Runescape comes at the expense of Runescape itself. Or their accountants won't be, anyway.

If I was going to bet, I'd bet on Forever. They didn't come up with that name by chance. It's the follow-up MMORPG they've been threatening to make for a long time and they've finally come up with a way to make it without cannibalizing their own sales-base. Classic was a dry run for this. If it goes well, they'll invest in it heavily.

The chances look good. It's a new start in the old world, which we all know and love, but with an endlessly expanding frontier. They've also fixed the population problem by grading players by playstyle rather than server. An always-busy MMORPG is good for publicity and avoids all those difficult dead server stories.

How many times can they can peel the onion? Based on her experience with the EverQuest franchise, I imagine Holly Longdale thinks there are plenty more layers to go still. But Forever is the one that has the chance to turn into a whole new crop.

I'm still thinking about it but there's a very strong chance I'll resubscribe in November and buy the new race for the full experience. Like Classic back in 2019, it looks like one of those moments in MMORPG history you wouldn't want to miss out on, even if you're not the greatest WoW fan.

Whether I'll still be playing it by Christmas, let alone "forever", though, is another question entirely. 

Beryl On The Bill

I just got back from a couple of days by the sea. Well, a few miles from the sea to be more accurate. On a farm, in fact. Lots of geese, hens, sheep, cows, ducks...

We went to Portland Bill yesterday, which is one hell of a weird place, let me tell you. Much bigger than I expected. Very windy, unsurprisingly, since it sticks out into the Atlantic. It's an island but it's connected to the mainland by a bridge and a causeway.

You can't say a certain word there. It's like saying the name of the Scottish play in the theater. They had to change the name of a Wallace and Grommit movie when it played.  Like I said, weird place.

As you can see from the pictures, we had great weather. The sea was blue. Not used to seeing that in England. 

Beryl had a fine old time. She likes the seaside and the wind.

She's been under the doctor as the old joke used to go, with an embarrassing condition I don't think she'd want me to broadcast to the world. It's not serious in itself but it could become problematic and lead to an even more problematic operation if it did so let's hope that doesn't happen.

She's on antibiotics and they seem to have worked - fingers crossed, touch wood. She was pretty droopy just before we were due to leave, though, and we thought we might have to cancel but in the event she was much better on the morning we were traveling. We figured an adventure would take her mind off her problems and it did.

Beryl's an excellent traveler. She thinks the car is just another room in the house. Mostly she falls asleep as soon as she gets in. It was only about a two-hour drive anyway.  

She also loves new places and exploring so she's no problem to take on holiday. We were staying in a pretty large cabin in the orchard of a farm in the back of beyond beautiful Dorset countryside and about five minutes after we got there she was settled and ready to stay there forever. 

It did take her somewhat by surprise when half a dozen geese turned up to eat fallen apples just a few feet from the gate to our cabin but she's met a lot of animals in her time - pigs, hens, sheep, horses, alpacas - and she's always up for meeting a new one. At a safe distance, that is.

We did an inordinate amount  of walking, some of it along Chesil Beach, which is extraordinarily peculiar and really hard to walk on. Even harder for a dog. 

Beryl tried to run on the deep shingle which was pretty funny to see. She was a lot more impressed with the flat rocks around the lighthouse on Portland Bill. I had to stop her trying to drink seawater out of a rock pool there. She's mad enough already without that. 

I took a lot of photos and I was quite pleased with some of them and I just wanted to get something posted tonight so here we are. I might do a follow-up because this has been a real rush job but I expect other topics will quickly push their way to the front and this will be the last we'll hear of it.

By the way, Beryl is in that last picture with the lighthouse but not only is she tiny, I used the free version of SnapEdit to remove Mrs Bhagpuss, who would not be pleased to have herself included, and it slapped the watermark right on top of poor old Beryl. Still, you can gauge the scale from what little you can see of her, which was why I picked it over a lot of better shots of the lighthouse itself.

And I'm going to leave it at that because it's late and I'm tired. Normal service may very possibly be resumed tomorrow. Let's hope so.   

 Bonus picture of the geese. No Beryl in this one. They'd have made very short work of her!

What Are The Chances?

It's going to be slim pickings here for the next few days because we have a lot going on, one way or another, but I'll try and get something together. Don't be surprised if there are gaps, though.

One thing I was going to do was record another success in the lottery that is adding a new character to the roster in Neverness To Everness. I have had a modicum of luck with gacha draws in the past. In Genshin Impact, back when it started, when the fist banner arrived I got Diluc, a highly desirable five-star character (Although not, according to the search I've just done, an S-Class.) almost on my first roll, which certainly gave me the impression it was going to be easier than it was.

I didn't stick with Genshin long enough to see my luck change and in Noah's Heart, the gacha I played the longest, they gave so many free rolls all the time I still had hundreds left when the closure of the game was announced. I think I had pretty much everybody by then. And even if I didn't, I certainly had far more characters than I needed.

 I can't remember who I rolled on in Wuthering Waves. Whatever was going on there, I don't seem to have made a big deal of it. There are 43 posts labeled "Wuthering Waves" here and the only one that seems to be about a successful roll is the one where I say "I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull."

At that point I was clearly still figuring out how it all worked, which is odd considering it was the third gacha game I'd played. You'd have thought I'd have known by then. 

Part of the problem, if it can be called a problem, is that I don't much like swapping teams around for combat. And in the open world I almost always want to play the character I started with. That's "my" character. None of that fits very well with a game design that assumes you'll constantly flip between characters, always looking to play the best one at any given time. Although it is interesting that, in cut scenes and quest dialog, the game usually shows the player-character as the Appraiser, regardless of who was being played before.

 It's a little bit different in Neverness To Everness in that some of the characters seem to have more obvious roles than I noticed in previous games, both in and out of combat. I was keen to get Iroi, for example, because I thought she'd make a good team healer. I wanted Hotori because her time-stop outside combat looked like it would be fun. I wanted Lacrimosa because she's fricken' vampire. And Nanally can run up skyscrapers...

Hotori, and Lacrimosa, I got extremely cheaply. Nanally, I haven't yet rolled for. Iroi, I tried to get and failed.

Then there was Linko. I wanted Linko because... I have no idea why I wanted her. Because she has a backpack? Because I found her conversations with her devil-doll funny? You tell me. I don't even know what she does. 

But I wanted her anyway, so I skipped rolling on Zankou, the first character in the current update, who I had no interest in and waited for Linko.

 I did not get Linko. Not on my first roll. Or my tenth. Or my twentieth. 

I wasn't keeping a close count but it probably took about thirty goes before i got her. I went in with a tally of about forty unsuccessful rolls behind me, following my unsuccessful attempt to snag Iroi. I used ten Fabricated Dice out of the thirty-five I had, then I bought another twenty-five or so with various currencies I had saved up.

Before I'd used all of those, I hit the threshold at seventy failures, where the chance of winning increases substantially. I won Linko on my first roll after that. 

It was very exciting but once the thrill wore off I realised I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with her, now I've got her. For now, I'm just working on building a bond of affection between us so she can come and live in my apartment, along with Lacrimosa and Chiz. Mint is still living in my old apartment.

The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. But I'm doing it anyway. 

Next time a character turns up that I want to roll on, I won't have a feather-bed of forty failures to fall back on. But if I don't get that one, I will for the one after that. It looks like every other character is an odds-on win. 

Seems like decent odds to me. 

Have You Heard...?

A day late, a dollar short. Isn't that the saying? Only I guess it can't be a dollar because, as J.J. Barrie said, there's no charge. 

Ye gods, but that was a dreadful record. I'd all but wiped its existence from my mind but then someone gave it as an answer in a rerun of Pointless Mrs Bhagpuss and I were watching as we had our tea the other evening and now I have the damn thing stuck in my head again. 

Actually, I don't. I have the concept stuck in my head. Fortunately the tune, if it ever had one, has stayed in whatever hell it went to after the seventies ended and the likes of St. Winifred's School Choir and Lieutenant Pigeon receded into that grim darkness reserved for one-hit wonders with hits no-one would ever admit to having bought.

Okay, fair dues. I didn't buy Mouldy Old Dough but I did quite like it. It is, at least, jolly, unlike, say, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs or  Grandad. It didn't make me want to chew my own arm off to escape when it came on Top of the Pops, at least. I'm not linking to any of these, either. If you already know them then just my naming them will have put the awful earworms back in your head (You're welcome!) and if not, trust me, you're so much better off that way.

All of this is making me think I ought to do a One Hit Wonders post some time, although if I did it would have to stop in the mid-90s, which is about the last time I was paying attention to the charts. I do, often, think of making some effort to follow the charts again but one of the few old people beliefs I do subscribe to is that the charts aren't real charts any more.

I mean, they were artificial enough before digital downloads and streaming, back when sales only counted if they were from a specific list of "Chart Stores" and all kinds of shenanigans went on to make sure the right records were in the right shops on the right day so the sales would all count. But at least they were sales. Money had to change hands. I'm not sure what the charts are even supposed to be a record of these days.

And with that cloud firmly shouted at, it's on to a selection of mostly new recordings, few of which, I suspect, will be bothering whoever or more likely whatever it is that compiles the mainstream charts these days. Let me just have a quick shuffle through the options... but nope. I could be wrong - I hope I'm wrong - but I can't see any of these troubling the top 40. There's no Olivia Rodrigo or Charli xcx this time around. No Sabrina Carpenter or Addison Rae. Not even a CMAT or a Magdalena Bay...

The Peace - underscores (Frost Children remix)

Y'know, I think underscores might be the biggest name in today's list. She's really come on. Charli xcx brought her out for the opening night of her Music, Fashion, Film tour in Philadelphia last night. They did a track from underscores new album, which is really spotlighting the guest artist.

This whole thing about "bringing people out" is very strange. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about it in the car the other day. Musicians have always guested on each other's records and at each other's concerts but until the web we didn't always, or even often, hear about it. It was one of the things I found highly exciting at first, when I came back into music in the twenty-teens, but now it all feels a bit formulaic sometimes. It seems like if you're an act of a certain status it's almost obligatory that you "bring someone out" for any big gig. I wonder if there's a rota?

Getting back to the song, this is more of a Frost Children joint, I think. I like what they've done to it - clubbed it up, basically - but I prefer the original underscores version, which does in fact sound not unlike what Charli's doing these days.

Junior Beat - DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ

I was, happily, off the scene when Flat Eric was king for a week. Somehow I don't think this is going to replicate that success but it's a great groove and a super-clever video for something Sabrina knocked together in an afternoon. The video, that is. I have no idea how long it took to make the song.

 Drop Your Spirit - Brutalismus 3000

Heheheh! Okay, I'll stop with the club mix after this one. Another great minimalist video though. 

Speaking of clubs, has anyone noticed YouTube now automatically tells you the date, time and place of the next, nearest public performance of whatever act you happen to be looking at? It's just about the most useful, helpful and unobtrusive use of targeted advertizing I've seen. I really like it.

In fact, it's acting as quite a strong nudge to make me seriously consider going to see someone play live for the first time in decades. Not this lot. The nearest they're playing to me is Boston. And not even Boston, Lancashire. Boston, Massachusetts.  Underscores, though, is playing about a dozen miles from where I'm sitting. On my birthday...

 Scam Manifesto - M(h)aol

I read the Warhol Diaries for the first time this year. He was an excellent writer and he wrote a lot, too. I must read the rest.

The Devil - Young Jesus

Hmm. That does sound a bit like John Cale's viola-playing with the Velvets, which I hadn't thought about when I programmed it after M(h)aol and their slinky sixties subculture allusions. The subconscious is wonderful thing. Or is it the unconscious? I always get those two muddled.

 Sailor - Told Slant

Okay, you got me. There's nothing unconscious about the placement of this one. That's the thing about Warhol and the Velvets. Say their names and it can't help but summon up the spirit of Old New York. And who embodies that spirit better right now than Told Slant?

I can't believe I only just found out about Told Slant a few weeks ago... 

Haha! Joke! Of course I can! There is So. Much. Music. So much good music. There's all this fuss about AI swamping the streams but they were already swamped beyond all hope of draining. Or navigating. An algorithm isn't going to guide you through the mangroves to the best alligators. You need a guide like Lana's old man. 

I can prove it, too. The other day at work, my fellow Lana fan (One of them. We have several.) asked me if I'd heard Jessie Murph. It seems Lana had given Jessie the nod on socials. Instagram, probably. Lana likes Instagram.

I am not on Instagram or any socials so I don't follow even Lana because you can't follow if you're not on the road. I follow her on YouTube but she only ever posts anything there if it's an official release. It's not like she chats.

Anyway, I went home and watched some Jessie Murph, which you're about to do, too. If you click. I was expecting someone new and relatively unknown. I'd certainly never heard the name and I read three music news feeds every day and click through dozens of YouTube recommendations every week.

 Heroin - Jessie Murph

This one has just over 600k views but it's a live video. Some of her official videos have 8m, 12m, 15m, 29m views. I cannot fathom how I've never even seen her name before. My working theory is that I have but it's such a bland name it didn't register.

That doesn't really work for the titles, though. I'd for sure have clicked through to see if a song called Heroin was a cover of either the VU all-time classic or Lana's own, excellent song of the same name. And I wouldn't have missed clicking on something called Drunk In The Bathtub or A Little Too Drunk or Sobriety or even Ur Bill Is Big As F*ck either. I don't know... you do the work, you put in the hours and it's still not enough. Thank god for word of mouth, that's all I'm saying.

Everything In The Shade - Fine

As I was saying to my friend at work, though, there are a lot of post-Lanas. And I mean, like, A LOT. You could spend your whole day sifting through them, looking for the good ones. 

Aren't you glad you have me to do it for you?

The World Keeps Spinning - Almeda and Foushee

Almeda doesn't sound like Lana. Almeda doesn't sound like anyone, much, other than Almeda. If you sounded like Almeda, would you want to sound like anyone else? No, of course you wouldn't.

One thing that's great about the way everyone guests on everyone else's songs now is the way it introduces you to new artists. I guess that's another personal recommendation, in a way. Parasocially personal. 

What I'm saying is, Fousheé is worth checking out, too. In case that didn't come through.

Soft Spot - P!lot

Short, isn't it, that one? But so sweet.

Following bands on YouTube is like adding blogs to the blog roll. I add them and then forget about them if they don't post anything new for a while. Then, one day, could be months later, could be years, up pops a new song or a new post and it's a little gleam of sunshine in the day. It costs nothing to leave them there forever so why not?

And now I guess it's time to take things home...

WALLFLOWER - DOMINIC FIKE

About time we had something in ALL CAPS! Plus I suppose Dominic Fike might be someone who'd get into the charts. Is he still a thing? He was a thing wasn't he? Once?

Whether he was or whether he wasn't, I have to say I didn't remember him sounding like this. I had him mentally filed somewhere not too far from Rex Orange County. 21st century blue-eyed soul. But Rex also has a new song out that sounds literally nothing like I remember him sounding, either. It sounds like an out-take from Red Rose Speedway ffs! Are the Beatles still a thing? 

Don't answer that!

Why won't people stay in their goddam lanes?

 I Do - Sophia Stel

This does sound like Barbie Girl, doesn't it? It's not just me?

 

 when we first met - twisted teens

I worked it out! They're America's answer to Sleaford Mods, aren't they? This is from their new album, due out in November. It'll be their third album. This year...

Lotta back catalog to get through...