Umm... Did We Already Watch This?

One of the unanticipated artifacts of the streaming era, for me at least, is the way viewing stretches out in unpredictable and usually unwelcome directions. Several times now, I've started watching a show only to find that before I get to the end the rights have moved to another platform.

Since I'm usually subscribed to more than one streaming service at a time, if I'm lucky it's no more trouble than remembering where the show I was in the middle of watching has gone. Lucifer jumped from Amazon Prime to Netflix but since I was subscribing to both at the time, that wasn't much of a problem.

More often, though, the move is to a service I'm not using, which means making a choice between paying a further subscription just to keep watching or dropping the show, at least for the time being, in the hope it might eventually resurface on a service to which I have access. Or, if I really want to carry on watching, as happened in the case of Roswell New Mexico, using a VPN to find it on a platform outside my designated geographical territory.

There is sometimes another possibility, of course. In some ways it's my preferred option. That's to buy the damn thing on DVD. I'd add "Or on Blu-Ray" but I still don't own a Blu-Ray player. Every time I come close I remember I really don't care that much about the supposed visual fidelity and anyway isn't the whole physical format about to drop into the trash-bin of history?

Probably not, as it turns out. Back in the mid-teens, I was telling everyone who'd listen how the future wasn't just digital, it was virtual. No-one growing up in the 21st century would want to tie themselves down to a whole load of physical clutter, not when they could carry the entire history of cinema, literature and music in their pockets. 

Yeah. About that. Turns out I could not have been more wrong. Gen-Z flippin' love physical media. I don't have to read articles about it online. I can see it happening every day I go to work. Teens and twenty-somethings are all over the store, handling everything. They love to touch. 

They're the consumers driving the huge boom in exclusive editions, buying multiple variants of the same book just to have them all. They're the ones buying expensive hardbacks and gosh-wowing over the sprayed edges. 

 

It reminds me a little of the comic-book boom of the nineties, when publishers thought they could sell the same comic many times over just by issuing versions with different covers and packaging them in sealed plastic bags. The thing about that nasty little episode, though, was that most of the interest was fueled by greed. Comic fans believed if they bought all six different covers of the latest issue and never opened the sealed packages, all of them would increase in value as fast as the Flash could run.

Didn't happen. In fact, it didn't happen so much that the entire industry almost collapsed. It certainly drove me away from the hobby and from what I read afterwards, I was very much not the only one. 

This seems different. I hear so many conversations between customers as I move through the shop and not a single one has ever mentioned buying anything as an investment. They're all crazy in love with having something that looks great, that was written by someone whose writing they enjoy or which features characters they adore. There's a big collecting aspect to it, for sure, but mostly the drive seems to revolve around the sheer, physical, tactile, visual pleasure of seeing and touching something gorgeous.

Also, there's the permanence thing. A lot more people today seem to be aware that virtual ownership is ephemeral. A streaming subscription gives you unlimited access to what's on the stream but you have no say over what that is or how long it's going to be there. Even digital purchases only last as long as the service behind them and the hardware on which they run.

And it's a lot easier and more impressive to take a picture of yourself holding a book or a vinyl album to post on Instagram. It's harder to do the same with an eBook or a song you just found on Spotify. You can share your digital discoveries easily enough but bragging requires pictures.

Because, somewhat to my own surprise,  I am not utterly constrained by my previous belief systems, I, too, have modified my expectations concerning the digital future. I was pretty excited by it a decade ago, when the idea of being able to junk all my physical crap and replace it with orders of magnitude more convenient virtual crap seemed like an imminent reality.

Now I prefer to have hard copies of anything I really want to be sure I can come back to whenever I feel  like it. (The uncomfortable truth, that I probably never will come back to any of it, is something I prefer not to think about.) My problem is that, more often than you might expect, there is no physical media available for the stuff I want to keep.

Runaways is a good example. The show, produced by Marvel and originally released as a Hulu-exclusive, has, as far as I can tell, never been released in a physical format. I watched the first season some time ago, although I can't now remember which platform that was on. According to the production history on Wikipedia, it looks like it would have had to have been Disney+, to which I did subscribe for a while, but I thought I saw it earlier than that.

Wherever and wherever it was, I didn't finish the whole thing before it disappeared. Either I stopped subbing or it left the service. I'd be lying if I said I'd been pining to see the rest ever since but I did check if there was a box set I could buy. There was not. 

I hadn't thought about the show for a long while until a few weeks ago I spotted it in my Recommends on Prime. I was unexpectedly excited by the prospect of catching up with the show, most of whose characters I only vaguely remembered as "quite annoying". 

My never-reliable memory told me I'd seen the first two seasons so I started watching from the start of Season 3. I had no idea what the hell was going on. Sure, it'd been a while, but usually things like characters and plot come back to me very quickly, given a nudge. This time, nothing at all.

After half an hour of complete confusion I decided to go back to the start of Season 2 and start from there, which was just as well because I hadn't seen any of it before. It turns out I did not watch two seasons the first time around. I only watched the first. 

This post started out as a review of Season 2 of Runaways. That's not where it's going now. I will say that I think it's a very strong show, thematically absorbing, generally well-written and well-acted. As a superhero show it's a lot less superheroic than many and as a show ostensibly centered on teenagers, it has a lot more adult characters and adult-oriented content than you might expect. 

But I'll save a full review for when I've finished the third and final season. I'll be starting that tonight. It shouldn't take long. Towards the end of Season 2 I was enjoying it so much I was watching two episodes a night. Let's hope the final season is as compelling.

What I'm more interested highlighting just now is a more generalized observation on the increasing instability of my viewing options. 

I grew up in the era of broadcast television, before the general availability of any form of recording or time-shifting for home use. Until I was in my mid-20s, if I wanted to watch a TV show I had to make time to see it when it was shown.

If I missed that window, I might be lucky enough to catch it when it was repeated six months or a year later but you could never rely on something even getting a second showing. Many of them weren't even stored away safely by the broadcasters. They were treated as entirely disposable and taped over or thrown out with the trash.

 

What that meant was that if you really liked a show you made a point of being in when it came on. Barring accidents and emergencies, you would see every episode, in order, in one extended sequence that might take months. There'd usually be a week between episodes but most people could remember what happened a week ago pretty clearly. Continuity of narrative was mostly maintained.

Later came video and then DVD, meaning some shows could be owned like books or albums. If there was no official release, you could at least swipe your own copy and with timers you didn't even have to be there to do it. Now you had the choice, whether to follow along at the pace the broadcaster set or wait until the end and then watch it all at once. Or on any schedule you chose, really. You could also rewind to make sense of any bits you couldn't follow or to look at a particular scene in detail.

Later came the Box Set (Binge) era, which still lingers on in some contexts, although its cultural hegemony is over. Box sets got pushed into the background with the advent of the streaming era, when I and I'm sure many others thought we'd reached Peak Viewing Experience.

Everything would always be there. You'd be able to start and stop at will. It'd be like having the Great Library of Alexandria a fingertip's touch away.

That never happened. It felt a bit like it in the early days, when there were fewer streaming platforms and it seemed as if there might eventually be just one streamer to rule them all but, like the imagined end of physical possessions, that turned out to be a fantasy. 

Instead, not only do streaming platforms proliferate but they're all subdividing like amoebas, splitting into "channels", each of which requires a separate subscription. And as if that wasn't annoying enough, they're reverting to the traditional practices of the networks and broadcasters they were supposed to replace, scheduling shows weekly or at even less convenient intervals, presumably in the hope of constraining customers from exercising their increasingly numerous but decreasingly satisfying options.

All of which is well-known and most of which I've already hashed out here, about as often as Old Television put out repeats of the same damn shows. Except that watching Runaways has alerted me to a new phenomenon, which is that sometimes access to shows can be so disrupted I can't even fricken' remember what I've already watched!

It really was a shock to find I hadn't even watched an entire season of a show I thought I'd enjoyed. I could put that down to my ever-less-reliable memory but really I'm not going senile, not quite yet. I never had a great memory but it hasn't gotten substantially worse. I just never expected to have to follow a single series across multiple platforms, let alone over a period of years, in this counter-intuitive and very irritating fashion. 

At least in the broadcast era there were magazines you could buy with the schedules laid out clearly and unequivocally. And the networks announced entire slates of shows in advance for the whole of the Autumn, Winter and Spring. (Summer was all reruns, of course Who sits inside watching TV when the sun's out?) You had to wait but you knew what was coming and when and where.

 

I'm not saying it was better then, It was not better then. It's better now. But I think it might have been better still five or ten years ago, just for a moment. 

The good news, at least for me, is that it might, just possibly, get a bit better again, soon. I mentioned the other day that we in the UK are finally going to be able to watch HBO Max. That's quite exciting but there's been a further development.

In March, Sky, a service I have always shunned, will be offering a package including not just its own offerings but also HBO Max, Disney+, Hayu and Netflix. Supposedly, all of this will be available for £24 a month, which is not unreasonable. That's the base price, though, and I haven't seen the details. I bet it includes ads.

I have frequently paid more than that for multiple streaming services so it seems reasonable, especially when you compare it with subbing to Netflix and HBO Max separately. It won't do much for most of the issues I've been complaining about, namely scheduling nonsense or shows changing or leaving platforms, but it ought at least to reduce some of the churn.

Whether I'm willing to give money to an organization I've scrupulously avoided until now is another question. Decisions, as they say, have consequences although in this case the only consequence would be another compromise to feel morally uncomfortable about.. 

I guess I'll find out in March, when both the Sky package and the direct HBO Max stream become available. I suspect in the end my distaste for Sky will trump my penny-pinching parsimony but I wouldn't - ironically - put money on it.

Coming In In All Directions...

Considering how badly most new MMORPGs seem to do when they hit Early Access or even launch, it's surprising how many keep getting made. Sometimes it feels like there are more of the things coming out now than back in the heat of the boom after World of Warcraft changed the rules. Or, rather, after a lot of people mistakenly believed it had.

For a long time, I made it my business at least to take a look at every new entry to the genre I heard about. I was willing - happy, even - to go to a good deal of trouble just to get my hands on any new MMORPG. I'd apply for testing, fill out applications, make accounts, download launchers and generally do whatever was necessary to get onto the servers. I even paid money, sometimes.

That behavior pre-dated my entry into into blogging by some years so I couldn't even claim, as I went on to say many times later on, that my real motivation was to have something new to write about. No, I just wanted to try out every possible variation on the already well-established format, not so much in the hope of finding something different as in getting another fix of the familiar.

I'm not sure when that urge started to fade but it's been quite a while since I felt the need to grab onto any and every proto-MMORPG that stumbles into open alpha, as if to miss even one would be some kind of sin of omission. I think my first sign of recovery was an increasing reluctance to fill out any more damn forms or make any more accounts.

These days, if getting a look at a new game requires anything more from me than an email address, chances are I'm going to pass. It has to be something I'm really excited about (Looking at you, Neverness to Everness. Not that you ever look back at me...) to make me start handing out personal details and completing questionnaires.

There's certainly no shortage of options, though. I must have skipped a dozen new MMORPGs in the last year alone. It's like a cult. Who are they all supposed to be for? Why do developers insist on making them? 

 

I can't answer that but I can say that the ones that stand out are the handful of exceptions, the oddities aimed at a very specific audience rather than some notional, generic-fantasy-loving demographic that never seems to turn up when the doors open. Even more common but significantly more likely to be successful are the MMO-adjacent survival or creature-catcher knock-offs that never seem to stop coming. 

There's another of those on the way that I'll get to, briefly, later on. First, though, something genuinely original, although not necessarily any more likely to find an audience of any significant size.  

I posted about the "horse mystery" game, Equinox Homecoming, back in May of last year, when it was just going into Early Access on Steam. It ticked all the boxes necessary to make me think it might be worth a look. 

The game has a very unusual and original, not to say bizarre, premise: you ride around the countryside on horseback, solving mysteries like you're in some YA novel from the 1970s. And when you're done you go back to the stable and tend to your horse.

Looking back at that post, apparently I was willing to spend $25 for the privilege of playing a buggy, content-lite version of a game clearly not meant for me. The only thing that stopped me were the minimum specs, which looked like they were out of my reach.

Luckily for me, I've upgraded my PC since then and now there's a demo, which I'm downloading as I type, which means I can take a look for free. The demo's been released as part of the Steam Horse Fest, which is running from now right through until Next Fest takes over on the 23rd.

Did you know there was a Steam Horse Fest? I bet you didn't. (Unless your name is Aywren, in which case you're most probably putting a post together about it right now.) Steam runs an almost never-ending series of events promoting various genres and types of games, almost none of which ever seem to get a mention on any of the gaming sites I follow. Next Fest is very much the exception.

Speaking of Next Fest, it looks as if the upcoming Winter edition (It is Winter, isn't it? They're not going to pretend February is Spring, are they?) looks like it's going to be a good one for MMO fans. I've already spotted a few new-to-me MMORPGs, or games that might at least be genre-adjacent, that either have demos available or will, when the festival begins.

Probably the most interesting is Outbound, a multiplayer "cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future" in which you roam around in what looks suspiciously like a VW Microbus, solving mysteries and exposing fake ghosts scavenging materials to pimp your retro ride. I'd like me some of that action.

Less interesting to me but maybe of interest to someone reading this is the creature-catching survival game Guardians of the Wild Sky. It looks slick, I'll say that for it. I'll probably skip that one, just like I already skipped the solo (Not solo player - solo developer.) Faehnor Online. 

I took a look at that last one after I read about it on MassivelyOP today. Well, I took a look at the screenshots on the Steam Store page, anyway. 

A few years ago I'd have downloaded it without a second thought but this time I read the reviews and decided life's too short, especially at my age. It doesn't look at all bad for a game in early development with just one person working on it but what would be the point? I'm never going to play it and it's not going to be anything I haven't seen before.

Then again, it is in French, which is new. It also has some form of PvP that's not explained on the Store page. I can read French well enough but I don't fancy my chances of following French voice acting, which apparently the game has, particularly when someone is trying to hack my head off. (Edit - Apparently there is  now also a PVE server...)

How it can be fully voiced with just one developer is a curious question, too. Does he do all the voices himself? That would actually make me a bit more interested. But no. I'll still pass.

As for Next Fest, I'm really looking forward to It. I always enjoy it but this time I'm really in the mood for some video-game tapas. Should make for a nice palate-cleanser after my heavy diet of BG3. I will try the MMORPGs I've mentioned but MMO demos always take far longer than any other genre so if any more  turn up I might have to pass. 

Or I might not be able to resist. It's a one day at a time recovery I'm enjoying, not a full cure. A relapse is always on the cards. 

And So We Came To The End - Almost

Time for a little update on how Baldur's Gate 3 is going, I think. There's a very good chance this might be the penultimate post on the subject because I have reached the final battle. Well, probably. You never can be sure with this game.

And I am not looking forward to it. Not one little bit. I'm imagining it's going to be some ridiculously overwrought epic with vast numbers of troops on the battlefield. Far too many enemies with insanely over-powered abilities and vast heaps of hit points. The chaotic kind of fight where I can't even see half the units, let alone get to them.

I really enjoyed the D&D-based tactical combat earlier in the game but only so long as the scale remained manageable. In the latter stages, there have been a few fights where the biggest challenge was working out where everyone was. That's not fun.

It doesn't help that the camera in BG3 really isn't great. Is that something people complain about? I haven't seen anything. Maybe it's just me. I don't think I'm imagining it, though.

For example, there's a huge problem with the z-axis. Since the game uses click-to-move, if you want to go upstairs, you have to click on a point that is literally up the stairs. Unfortunately, the camera doesn't understand that's where you're going until one of the characters gets there, meaning if you sweep ahead to see what's coming, as I do all the time, your POV goes through the staircase as if it wasn't there, leaving you on the lower floor.

In some locations, that makes it extremely awkward to get any impression of where you're going. One especially bad example is the artist's house, which is on several floors and has mezzanines as well. 

The house is haunted, filled with possessed items that blast you as soon as you come into range and/or sight (Never did figure out which.) Working my way up the floors, I had to re-load numerous times because I just couldn't get the camera to give me any useful information before my party arrived at the danger spots, where they'd be killed before I could see what they were supposed to be fighting. 

You might think that's just the game preventing the player from having information the characters wouldn't have but it was plain my characters ought to be able to see the relevant locations from where they were. It was just me that couldn't. 

There are lots of other things wrong with the camera but I'll leave it at that. Suffice to say I feel like I've spent nearly as much time fighting the controls as I have the baddies.

And speaking of baddies, are we them now? It's starting to feel like it.

I'm watching the second season of Marvel's Runaways at the moment. I'll get to reviewing it soon enough so I won't say any more other than it's excellent. The reason I mentioned it is that it's very strong on how good intentions can be corrupted by necessity, compromise, pragmatism or self-delusion, often without you even realizing it's happened until it's too late. You can start out with the noblest of ideals and end up doing  the very thing you thought you were against.

Let's just steal a boat and make a break for it!

There's a lot of that in BG3. It's one of those "Decisions Matter" games in both the positive and the negative meaning of the phrase. The good part is that, when you make a choice, the narrative and even world changes as a result. That is almost certainly something you want if you choose to play an RPG.

The bad part is that the writers have deliberately set out to create situations in which there is no good choice. They mean to back you into a corner, where you have to make a decision you're almost bound to be unhappy with. Presumably this is supposed to suggest emotional depth. I just find it irritating.

There is, of course, always the option of walking away. I've done that several times but it's rarely satisfying. Or there's the ever-popular save-scumming, whereby you try all the available choices for size before picking the one you're going to walk out of the store wearing. Done that a few times, too. It's more satisfying than just skipping the entire thing but it still feels cheesy.

The cumulative effect of all of this is the reverse of what's presumably intended. Instead of choices that matter all that's left is choices I don't really care about. I just want to get on with things and see what happens next. Moral consequences be damned.

And what does happen next seems to get more perfunctory the closer to the climax we come. In my last session there were at least two decision points that felt like they were bound to lead to big fights but instead the person I was thwarting just shrugged their shoulders, mumbled something along the lines of  "Well, if you're going to be like that about it..." and left. 

Which was fine, in a way. I really didn't want another big fight and it's not like I hadn't done the same a few times. 

The main reason I didn't want those incidents to turn into fire-fights is that I'm all too aware the really big fight is just around the corner. And I'm not there for it. If I could skip it without actually giving up, I would. Sadly, I don't see any way to avoid it other than to stop playing altogether. 

Is that the state of mind the developers were hoping to encourage in the endgame? A kind of weary, grudging acceptance of the inevitable? One last heave and it'll all be over. Then I can uninstall and forget this ever happened. Shouldn't I be excited, thrilled by the prospect of one, titanic, final battle, followed by absolute victory? Maybe want to start over again because I had so much fun?

This wasn't what I meant...

Yes, well, I expect it's me. I was already very annoyed by the way all progress stops when you hit Level 12. That really put a damper on my enthusiasm.

Larian decided, quite reasonably, that since D&D basically goes insane at high levels, it would be impossible to balance the game after that. They'd have to allow for characters throwing around Wishes, Earthquakes and Meteor Storms and bringing dead party members back to life with full health at the wave of a hand. To avoid the inconvenience, they capped levels for the player and their companions at 12, giving them access to 6th level spells and nothing higher.

It's a choice I have no problem with. Or it would be if they'd also switched off the xp spigot. But they didn't.

I had to go look up why my xp was frozen even though I kept seeing yellow numbers every time I killed an enemy or completed a quest. It seems you get the xp but it just dissipates into the ether, leaving you forever stuck on whatever you were when you dinged 12.

It's far more frustrating to carry on gaining xp but not be able to use it than it would have been had it stopped altogether. Every time I do anything of any significance now it feels like I'm being cheated out of my rightful progression. It's very disheartening and it makes me want to avoid doing anything more than what's absolutely necessary.

None of which entirely stops me from enjoying myself altogether but it certainly hasn't been as much fun for a long time now as it was at the beginning and it gets to be less fun the larger the ending looms ahead of me. I'm at the point where I can feel the finish so close by, it seems more trouble to stop than it does to go on. One more push and it'll all be over and thank god for that.

I can't wait to be done with Baldur's Gate 3. It's been an experience, that's for sure. Whether it's an experience I'd recommend is another question. It feels masochistic occasionally and enervating much of the time.

I hope I'm right and I really am almost at the end. I'd hate to think there might be some kind of coda to drag it out even longer. I suppose I'd better wrap this up and go make my final assault on the Netherbrain. 

If I said I was looking forward to it I'd be lying. 

I just want it to be over.

Everyone Knows I Had Some Trouble...

Ten months, it's been. 

A looong ten months. 

Was it worth the wait?

Hell, yeah! 

 

White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter 

Lana Del Rey

It'd be very remiss of me, not to say selfish, to keep this to myself a moment longer than absolutely necessary. So here we are. No need to thank me.

Only minutes after it landed, a YouTube commenter going by K65_mdd had the lyrics. Or a version of them, anyway.

I thank them for that. And, again, share.

[Verse 1]
He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Likes to keep me cool in the hot breeze summer
Likes to push me on this green John Deere mower
I know you wish you had a man like him, it's such a bummer
When I met him, like an arrow
Like a bird in the heart, like a sparrow
In the dark (Snap), snap, crackle, pop, tch
We're a match, he's just in my bone marrow

[Pre-Chorus]
Everyone knows I had some trouble
But I'm home for the summer
And I wanted to know if I could use your stove
To cook somethin' up for you 'cause you

[Chorus]
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Take my hand off the stove, hun
Yelling, "Yoo-hoo, dinner's almost done"
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do
Know how absolutely wonderful that you are

[Verse 2]
He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Before I met him, Moorea boat over three summers
Now it's a ribbon 'round my neck, and it's cherry-colored
I've just been breaking, waitin' on a spirit hunter
I got a nicotine patch for the summer
Yeah, I'm a ghost, doesn't mean I feel nothin'
Put it on my ass, no tan lines, summer
I love my daddy, of course we're still together

[Pre-Chorus]
Everyone knows I had some trouble
But it's been three summers
I know it's strange to see me cooking
For my husband

[Chorus]
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
Take my hand off the stove, hun
Yelling, "Yoo-hoo, dinner's almost done"
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do
Know how absolutely bad I'm with an oven

[Bridge]
Whoopsie-daisy, do you think it's okay?
Whoopsie-daisy, deposition cocaine
Yikes, like, maybe should've saved for a friend
Stick with baking, Daisy's very chagrined
Whoopsie-daisy, do you think it's okay?
Whoopsie-daisy, deposition cocaine
Yikes, like, maybe should've saved for a friend
Stick with baking, Daisy's very chagrined

[Chorus]
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
(I know you wish you had a man like him, it's such a bummer)
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Positively voodoo, everything that you do
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Did you know exactly how magical you are?
(He's my white feather hawk tail deer hunter)
Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, "I love you"
Out to my white feather hawk tail deer hunter 

Couple of lines I'm not wholly convinced by there. More than a couple, actually. I'm not at all sure she says "deposition cocaine" for a start. What would that even mean? I think it's something about fish cooking but the exact wording eludes me. And as someone points out, "Before I met him, Moorea boat over three summers" is almost certainly "Before I met him, wore a bow over three summers"

I'm also pretty sure it's "Take my hand off the saucepan" not "Take my hand of the stove, hun" or at least I hope it is because the implications are very different and disturbing if not. 

"Daisy's very chagrined" seems unlikely, too, but neither am I convinced by the suggested alternative reading “Stick with picking daisies for instagram”. I imagine we'll get an official lyric video at some point, at which time all will be revealed.

My favorite lines? Oh, I'm so glad you asked!

"Everyone knows I had some trouble
But I'm home for the summer"

That's a whole novel, right there.

Also 

"Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, I imagine you do
Know how absolutely bad I am with an oven"

Again, the subtext is positively tectonic.

Whatever the exact words, the vibe is unmistakable. Doesn't look much like we'll be getting that country album any more, does it?

There are lots of comments in the thread already, going on about Lana's new Southern Gothic era and well she said she was a witch didn't she? (She did.) all of which is very fair. Surprisingly, no-one yet seems to have made the obvious Kate Bush comparisons but then Lana fans have a vested interest in her uniqueness. 

As a fan myself, I don't necessarily believe she needs to be unique, although frequently she has been. She can just be better than everyone else. Which she is. All the time.

Lana, of course, is a cultural polymath, anyway. I'm certain the whole "Kate Bush doing Indian Love Call" feel of the piece is entirely intentional. You take the parts and put them together in a new way and that's how it's done.

And thank god for that. I was saying only the other day how I tend to drift away if new work doesn't draw me back in. As they say now, we are so back! 

Now, when's that damn album coming? 

The Gallery Is Closing. Please Take All Your Memories With You.

This is going to be a bit of a sad one. Also quite short, possibly, because I don't think I have whole lot to say about it. Sometimes you just have to make the effort, anyway.

So, I read yesterday that Occupy White Walls is closing down. For those who don't remember, which I'm going to guess is nearly everyone reading this, OWW was one of the oddest, most idiosyncratic of all MMORPGs. There was and still is nothing like it and most likely never will be, which may explain why it's going away.

The game, if we're going to call it that, which we probably shouldn't because if there was a game in there, I never found it, will shut down for good almost exactly a month from now, on 16 March. It hasn't had a bad run. It first became available to the public eight years ago although the exact date is a little hard to pin down. 

I can say when I started playing. I first downloaded the client in May of 2018, when it was in open alpha, although as I mentioned in the post I wrote about it at the time I'd seen the name floating around before then. 

OWW was all about art but one of the exciting features of the project was the way it claimed to use AI. Thatit was something everyone seemed both proud to be associated and excited to engage with then. How times have changed. 

Of course, AI back then didn't mean what it does now. The AI in OWW was called DAISY and all she wanted to do was learn what kind of art you liked and show you more of it. Who could be scared about that?

Well, maybe not scared but uneasy? Sure. 

I included a video, still available on YouTube, in which Fevir, the video-maker, describes the process of interacting with DAISY as "uncomfortable". He said it made him "uneasy" and put him "on edge". He specifically didn't like the way the machine not only seemed to learn about him but then was able to prove to him that it was possible to "like things you don't think you like". If only he'd know what was coming!

Forget about the AI, though, which in any case back in 2018 would have been a plain old algorithm given a cute name and gussied up to look smarter than it was. What was OWW like as an MMORPG?

As far as the RPG aspect went, it did have progression of a kind. There were no levels or skills per se but you could open up more features and extend the scope of your existing abilities by displaying more art and attracting more visitors. 

All your abilities related either to acquiring more pictures or expanding your building options. Both were essential. The be-all and end-all of the game was building art galleries and as MMO housing goes, OWW was right up there with the best.

As for the Massively Multiple part, I was never entirely sure how that fitted in. There was always the option to visit other players' galleries, but I can't recall there being any shared spaces where players actually met and hung out together. The visitors who came to look at the art in my gallery and paid me in-game currency for the experience were all NPCs. 

Or I thought they were. Honestly, I'm not sure how I would have known. Players and NPCs used the same abstract avatars. It was all a bit confusing... 

I didn't want to interact with others, anyway. I spent almost all my time building my one gallery and I was pretty happy with both the process and the result. As in all games with building systems, though, anything I was ever going to build was always going to look primitive compared to what others were able to put together. 

It was possible even in alpha to make some very impressive structures and spaces and after the game went into Early Access those options expanded enormously. People were able to replicate real-world galleries with considerable precision as well as to create their own spectacular display spaces that breached the laws of physics.

I did not do any of that. I went for a clean, minimalist look that felt fresh and open. I enjoyed being in that space a lot.

Even so, I didn't really spend that much time in the game. Steam tells me I racked up just short of eighteen hours, which would be a very decent run for a single-player game but wouldn't normally be enough to get you out of the starter zone in an old school MMORPG. And the last time I played was June 2022.

There were two reasons I stopped. The first was that I'd finished my gallery and although by then they'd added the option of building others, I didn't want to start a new one. As I said, I was satisfied with what I'd made. It felt finished.

The second and more significant reason I lost interest was the shift in emphasis by the developers from promoting what felt like an educational tool for discovering and learning abut fine art to creating a free-for-all in which nothing had cultural weight or value. I did not like the new direction.

The closure notice sums up the change of philosophy well, when it describes DAISY as "the AI that treats everyone's taste as equally valid" and talks about "connecting artists with audiences" and making art "accessible, democratic and personal". All very laudable ambitions, I'm sure, but the effect was to turn a guided tour through the history of art into a chaotic jumble of unfiltered images of indeterminate interest, quality or technique.

As the scope of the project expanded, I found it harder and harder to get DAISY to show me anything I wanted to see. Whereas at the beginning it had felt like being given a personalized lecture on great art, now it felt like being button-holed at a convention by a bunch of would-be artists, all intent on showing you their portfolios. 

That very much seems to have been the intention. OWW may be closing down but the company behind it, StikiPixels, is very keen to assure everyone the project will continue. At some point in the life of the MMORPG they span DAISY off into a side-project called Kultura, which gives you much the same experience, only on a website instead of in a game. Kultura carries on undaunted after OWW ends.

I'm guessing it must be a lot cheaper to keep a website up than to host an MMORPG because cost is the sole reason OWW is going away. The game has always been truly free-to-play, bringing in no income at all. Keeping the servers up costs $3,000 a month and the developers have been funding the servers out of their own pockets since 2022. Unsurprisingly, they've decided they just can't afford it any longer. (And if you look at the Steam Charts it's hard to see why they've kept going this long...)

It's a shame because, as I said, they had a great building game going there for a while. I imagine that was the aspect that interested them the least but leaning into it harder might have been the only way they'd ever have made some money.

They aren't giving up on the idea of melding art with gaming entirely, all the same. They say the original motivation to make OWW was a realization that there were no video games about art (Not true at all but it's what they said...) and eight years later "the idea that started all this hasn't stopped being exciting to us."

They're not promising anything but they might be back, one day. I hope so. Whatever OWW might not have been, it was original, ambitious and for nearly eighteen hours of my life, fun. They say, "if it happens, it might be a very long time from now, and it might look nothing like what you remember" and that's as it should be. Let's not go back over the same old ground for once.

In that spirit, I won't be revisiting my gallery to, as they suggest, "Take screenshots. Record videos. Stream it. Capture the spaces you built". I'd have to re-install the client for one thing and anyway I have plenty of screenshots and several blog posts to remember my gallery by already. 

And I know from experience that all those videos I take when a game is about to sunset just sit there, taking up hard drive space and gathering virtual dust. What's lost when an MMORPG sunsets can't be regained by watching a moving image. You have to be there.

I'm glad I was. 

The Story I Made Up

Remember when I was doing that series, where I posted about all my EverQuest characters, or some of the older ones anyway? Probably about three or four people actually enjoyed those posts but they had the huge benefit for me of being something I could always drag out if I was completely stuck for ideas.

That hardly ever used to happen. I had more ideas for posts than I had time to write. Not any more. I've been at this for - what is it? - coming up for fifteen years now. Maybe I have finally said everything once, to quote David Byrne. 

Which reminds me. They - and by "they" I mean I have no idea who but probably someone in the band, maybe? - found an old demo tape of Talking Heads doing some numbers from the first album, before they were even a four-piece. I think it must have been Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz. Jerry Harrison would have come over from the Modern Lovers a little later, I imagine.

I don't why I'm guessing. I could just go read the news item where I heard about it, of which so far I've only glanced at the headline. Let me do that a sec, just so I know what I'm talking about...

Ah, that's reassuring. I got most of it right. It's cuts from the first two albums, though, not just 77. 

The first two Talking Heads albums are two of my favorite albums of all time, even if I haven't listened to either of them in twenty years. I am not good at going back and listening to old stuff, even old stuff that was very important to me once. 

I was talking to someone at work about that the other day. It's been three years since Lana del Rey last released an album and I find I'm listening to her less than I was. It takes that continual drip of new material to keep me engaged, apparently. Just sheer quality isn't enough. How shallow I am.

I bet those first two albums hold up, though. Talking Heads were unimpeachable for a while back then, until they turned into the New Wave's answer to Steely Dan. 

Not to denigrate the Dan. Does anyone call them that? "The Dan"? I very much doubt it. 

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were talking about Steely Dan just the other day, which I would like to point out is not something we would normally be caught doing. 

We were watching an old edition of Pointless on YouTube, which very much is something we would normally be caught doing, especially at tea-time, and there was a question about the Beach Boys Top 40 hits in the UK. I remembered a few but there was one I thought might be a good bet for most people not to get, which was the one where they look back at their early days and get all nostalgic about them. 

I couldn't remember what it was called and I complained to Mrs, Bhagpuss that the main reason I couldn't was that I kept thinking of the Steely Dan song "Do It Again" and it was blocking me from the title of the Beach Boys song, which was something similar. And then the Beach Boys song came up, as a pointless answer, and it bloody was "Do It Again", so I had remembered it, even though I didn't know I'd done it. Bloody Steely Dan!

Anyway, that led to a discussion about how Steely Dan made two great singles, namely Do It Again and Reelin' In The Years, before they became so ultra-professional only other professional musicians could stand to listen to them. The same thing that happened to Talking Heads, give or take. 

No-one wants rough edges on a coffee table but on a band they're a feature. Or can be. Smoothing them all off is a mistake.

I wonder what those demos sound like. Shall we find out? Together.

Well, that was lovely. I wouldn't call it "raw punk minimalism" though, would you? Would anyone? Maybe they mean some of the other tracks on the 3CD set because that version of Psycho Killer sounds more like psych-folk than punk.

I saw Talking Heads in... when would it have been? Going to have to look it up...  May 1977, supporting the Ramones. I'd be lying if I said I remembered much about Talking Heads' set. I really only remember the Ramones for the bit when the power went out and they all stood there like puppets with the strings cut.

I really need to get on and write down all the gigs I went to before I lose the whole lot. Maybe that could be a feature. Bhagpuss name-checks gigs he went to half a century ago and tells everyone he remembers nothing about them. I can see that being very popular.

To quote David Byrne again, how did I get here? I sure didn't sit down intending to write about New York art-punk in the 1970s. Good example of how you always have something to write about even when you don't know what it's going to be, though, isn't it? Or maybe that should be I always do.

Ah! Now I remember! Back to the thing about my EverQuest characters and how handy it was to have that feature to fall back on, whenever I couldn't come up with anything better. If I ever needed a backstop like that, this is the time.

So, I've had this idea floating around for a while, now. Months. I thought I might go through all the zones in EverQuest II and reminisce about them. I thought of doing EverQuest but Wilhelm pretty much covered that for the 25th anniversary. I don't think anyone's done EQII though, or certainly not recently.

Obviously I wouldn't do all the zones. There must be a few hundred by now. Just the ones in the original game and maybe a few favorites from the early expansions. That should last me longer than than the rest of my life, given I'd probably only do a post every few weeks. Or more likely months. 

Today won't be the first because look! I've done a post already! I'm just putting the idea down in writing in the hope it might make it happen. 

Of course, it might help if I was actually playing EQII, like I was when I came up with the idea, but I imagine I'll be back in Norrath soon. Well, if I ever get to the end of Baldur's Gate 3. And if I don't go from there to Project: Gorgon, which I keep thinking I might.

There we have it, anyway. A potential new feature that will only appear when I can't come up with anything more interesting and which almost no-one is going to want to read. I bet that's sold it to you all!

Now all I have to do is come up with a snappy title... 

Black Hole Star? Layoffs Hit Playable Worlds

As you may have seen, either on MassivelyOP or TAGN, Raph Koster's Playable Worlds team has just gotten a bit smaller. How much smaller we don't exactly know yet but presumably it's a significant number or they wouldn't have needed to issue a press release confirming the layoffs.

Playable Worlds is, of course, the studio behind Stars Reach. In fact, SR is the only game they have. 

Realistically, they don't really even have Stars Reach yet. It's still in pre-alpha, which sounds really weird now I say it out loud. I had to go check to make sure that was right. It felt like the game had to be at least in full alpha by now, but no, pre-alpha it is. 

Laying people off before you even get to an alpha build does seem like a worrying sign. Hard to spin that as anything other than a crisis. 

Maybe it's not that bad. I don't want to oversell it. It's difficult to know what to say about events like this other than to express sadness and/or concern and wish the departing devs well in their upcoming search for new roles elsewhere. However you rate it, though, it can't be good.

As I've said many times now, I don't think Stars Reach is likely to be a game I'll want to spend a lot of time with. It's just not my kind of thing. I thought for a while it might be but almost every new build made that feel less likely and now we have a fairly clear idea of what the finished game will look like, I'm as sure as I can be, at this very early stage, that I won't be playing any more, other than in a fit of passing curiosity.

Nevertheless, I do think it's one of the more convincing attempts to bring a completely new MMORPG to market we've seen for a while. The team seems to have a relatively well-defined goal and the leadership looks able to retain sufficient focus not to wander off and make something else entirely, something we've seen happen more than a few times in recent years. Just because I don't particularly want to play it myself doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it do well.

Looking a little further, beyond my own personal preferences and sympathies, there's also the potential impact a failure here could have on the overall market for new MMORPGs. That's always assuming there is a market, something I think could be up for dispute.

People do keep trying. There are a surprising number of MMORPGs in development still, some in Early Access, others in various types of closed testing. Only a tiny handful could make any kind of claim to having a presence outside their own, specific niche, though, and Stars Reach would certainly have aspired  to be one of that few. 

Whether it ever was is another question but the last thing likely to boost its profile in the wider gaming market is news that the development team is being slimmed down before the game even hits alpha. Following the high-profile implosion of Ashes of Creation, it sends the worst kind of signal about how the genre is coping with the broader issues afflicting the entire gaming sector.

Without wishing to sound like a doom-monger, this does strike me as yet more evidence that the MMORPG genre as a whole is in steep decline. I wouldn't say terminal decline because I believe there's a substantial core audience that still prefers the familiar gameplay we've grown used to over the last twenty-five years to the pared-down, sped-up alternatives. 

The problem for anyone hoping to enter the market with a new MMORPG is that the existing, core demographic is, for the most part, at least resigned, if not actively happy, sticking with the games they know. I suspect the more failures there are among the aspirants, the more strongly entrenched the incumbents will become.

 

None of which is to suggest Stars Reach won't be able to buck the trend. Raph is at pains to make it clear that development continues. He's also going to take a more direct role in that development, apparently. (See the two links above for all the relevant quotes - I won't pad things out by repeating them here.) That did surprise me a little. I presumed he was already calling  the shots.

He also talks about recent builds in the pre-alpha having been buggy of late but he doesn't explain how letting people go is likely to improve things. I'd have thought it would get harder to release better-tested, less buggy updates if there were fewer people on the team but what do I know? 

The team wasn't even all that big to begin with, it seems. Here's a quote Marketing Director Rick Reynolds gave to MassivelyOP last August:

"It’s not a big company. There are probably more people in chat right now than we have in the company, or it’s probably pretty close." 

How many devs can they afford to lose? A fair question, perhaps, but unfortunately the real one is how many they can afford to keep.

The reason behind the layoffs is obvious: lack of funds. Raph doesn't go into details but he does talk about a need to be "prudent" in what Playable Worlds spends on developing the game in future. In an ideal world, you'd like to think developers and their accounting departments would be prudent in all circumstances but in the current financial climate I guess it's more of a necessity than an aspiration.

He's bullish about the future of Stars Reach, as you'd expect and as he has to be. Development will continue and there will be no reduction in scope, although some things that have been talked about may take longer to arrive. 

And there's the real nub of the problem. MMORPGs already take a ludicrously long time to build. Stars Reach, as I said, is still in pre-alpha. Other games in the genre have taken five or even ten years to get from there even as far as Early Access, much less a genuine 1.0 launch. Anything that pushes those timescales towards the back end is very likely to see whatever interest there once was wane dramatically.

It is a bit of a Catch22. Pushing development faster costs money that may not be there. Slowing down risks potential customers walking away. Now the funding streams have largely dried up there's no easy way to find the necessary balance between financial security and getting the game finished in good time.

That said, it is possible. We have a shining example in front of us in the form of Project Gorgon. Somehow, a handful of developers and artists managed to steer that one through the rocks and rapids of lengthy development on a shoestring to the safe shore of a genuine Steam launch and a positive reception that saw the game land with a Very Positive rating and enough new players to require extra servers. And that after years in Early Access, too!

I hope Raph and his reduced team are able to pull off something of the kind. If they do, I probably still won't want to play the game but I'll be cheering it on from the sidelines.