Out But Not Down

I'm short of ideas for a proper post today, or at least ideas that won't take hours to put into words and pictures. Can't even come up with anything much that'd run to a few paragraphs and make up a Grab Bag. 

I do have a few little squibs to throw out, though. Let's see what comes of that.

Hmm. I wonder how many people reading this will know what a squib is and why someone would throw one?  I just googled it to see what would come up.  

Wikipedia has a whole piece on explosive devices as used by the military and in special effects for movies, which wasn't at all what I was thinking of. The folks at Oxford know what I'm talking about, though:

"1. a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding

2. a short piece of satirical writing." 

That's exactly what I had in mind. The first one, anyway, although the second is handily close, too. Not that there's going to be a lot of satire here but a short piece of writing was exactly what I was getting, although I was using the firework as a metaphor to get there, which seems a little tautological now I come to think about it. 

When I was a child, Fireworks Night, which was what we generally called it, rather than November 5th or Guy Fawkes, was a Big Deal. I could do a whole nostalgic number here on the ritual of buying the fireworks a couple of weeks in advance, bringing them home and lining them all up on top of the piano so I could look at the brightly-colored wrappers every day and imagine setting them off...

I'll save you all that self-indulgent claptrap. The point is, on the actual night, my extended family, including my cousins, would start the evening by standing in the dark in the crazy-paved courtyard, tossing lit squibs at each others' feet. I loved to make one of my cousins scamper! 

What? No, no-one got set on fire or even singed! Well, maybe a bit singed... It was, as they say, a different time...

Where was I? Oh, yes...

 

Outbound Isn't Inbound After All

Well, it is... It'll just be a bit late.  

Remember Outbound? It's the game where you drive around some very pretty scenery in a camper van, solving mysteries of an extremely cosy nature. I played the demo in Next Fest and reviewed it here. 

I liked it. What's more, I thought it had promise. In fact, I thought it had so much promise I chose it for my imaginary game publisher, Pretty Blue Fox Games, in Wilhelm's Fantasy Gaming League. Anyone want to chip in with why I called it that? Don't google it!

Crossover readers of both blogs may remember that I was the unlikely winner of the inaugural season back in 2025. I'd love to be able to tell you I was on track to repeat my success this year but in fact I have yet to see any game I've picked launch at all. 

Outbound was going to be the first with a release date of April 23rd but there was an announcement today that launch has been delayed almost a month to May 14th. The stated reason is the late identification of "an issue... that could negatively impact your enjoyment of the game." I suppose that's a good thing. Still annoying, though.

It means my first scheduled launch will now be Mixtape on May 7th. Assuming that doesn't get put back as well. At this rate we'll be half way through the season before I have a single game on the board. And looking at the rest of my slate, I might not have many more by the end. I might ought to rethink.

 

Why Does EverQuest Legends Even Need To Be An MMORPG?

Obviously the answer is "Because it's EverQuest, dumbass!" but that's a recursive argument, isn't it? Sure, it's EverQuest but it's an EverQuest you can solo. 

Not an EverQuest where you can solo. That would be a very different concept. Or rather a very familiar one. To me, at least.

You could solo in EverQuest very effectively and enjoyably in 1999. I did and so did thousands of others. After they added custom chat channels, I was in one for a while that was dedicated to soloists and it was very busy. Nearly everyone was a Necromancer but there were a few Bards and Druids and probably a Wizard or Magician or two in there, somewhere, all soloing away happily. Okay, not always happily....

No, EverQuest Legends is supposed to be a version of EQ you can solo as in Game Over. Every last mob, quest, dungeon and even raid you'll be able to complete without any help from anyone. Mostly in instances. Where there will be only you, if that's your preference.

So why does it need to be an MMORPG? Conceptually, I mean. 

I don't have any problem with it being one. Nothing wrong with a graphical chat channel where lots of people can play the same game alongside each other and shoot the breeze as they go. People have used MMOs like that as long as there have been MMOs. 

It seems, though, that EverQuest Legends could equally well be packaged and sold as a single-player, open world RPG. An offline RPG at that. It could have co-op for grouping. After all, group size is going to be just four people and raids are only eight. The whole "Massively Multiple" part seems like overkill.

I was thinking about all that partly because I'd been reading about the upcoming Closed Beta, to which I have not been invited (And for which I would now most probably not accept an invite anyway, since there's going to be a strict NDA...) but mostly because something very similar did just happen to another would-be MMORPG. 

 

Tiny Gets Tinier

Book of Travels was an MMORPG that I never understood. From memory - and this may not be entirely accurate - it was a Kickstarted game that promised to bring some very slow gameplay to a small population of pacifists. The term "Tiny MMO" got thrown around a lot although exactly what that was supposed to mean I didn't know then and don't know now.

Unlike some Kickstarters in the genre, Book of Travels did at least get as far as Early Access, where it drifted along for the best part of five years, never really going anywhere and making about as much impact as you'd expect of something so tiny. If you're interested in the details, MassivelyOP has a history primer on the game, complete with links. 

Probably to no-one's surprise, Might and Delight, the company behind BoT (Unfortunate acronym, there. Does no-one think of these things before the press releases go out?) has finally thrown in the towel, announcing the closure of the servers (Or probably server, singular, I imagine.) on July 31st.

What is a little more surprising is that Book of Travels won't disappear altogether when the servers go dark. It will convert into an offline game, presumably one no longer even Tinily Multiple and definitely not Online.

Something very similar happened to Nightingale, a much more successful and popular game that still couldn't scratch up enough interest to justify the MMO tag. It makes me wonder how many of these MMORPG projects, Kickstarted, Indie or even occasionally with major studio backing, would have been better conceived as single-player or co-op RPGs in the first place. I mean, it's nice that they're getting a kind of after-market half-life when they fail but maybe we could have skipped the painful process of disappointment and decline and gone straight to the end result.

The odd side-effect of this particular development spiral is that, having not thought about the game for years and never having had the least interest in playing it with other people, I'm now feeling curious enough to give it a try. As an offline game it's going to retail for just $4.99 on Steam so it's hardly a big investment just to find out if there was ever anything there. 

Perhaps the really unusual decision the developers have made, though, is not only to allow modding of the game but to actively encourage it. That's starting even before the shutdown, too. I get it for the offline version but how you mod an active MMORPG beats me. Maybe it never really was an MMO to begin with?

And that's all I have. Managed to stretch it out quite nicely, I think. Just time for a closing song, as is the Grab Bag tradition. Hmm. I guess this was a Grab Bag after all...

What shall we have? Plenty of choice. This was nearly a music post, I have so many songs stored up. I thought I'd save that for Friday or Saturday, though. End the week with some bangers.

Now, when I say "bangers", does everyone know that's what we used to call these little fireworks we'd throw around, back in the day...

 I Know - Swapmeet

I literally just found that! It was in the recommends for the track I was going to use and I had a good feeling about the thumbnail. Boy, was I right!

If this was a music post I'd follow it with... 

 

idk idk idk idk idk idk idk idk - Jim Legxacy

And my work here is done! 

I swear I missed my vocation. I should have been a radio DJ. 

Progress Is An Illusion

This is barely even going to be a placeholder post so don't expect too much. Or much at all. It's only here because if it wasn't there'd be a gap where a post should be and there's been altogether too much of that sort of thing lately. 

What I'm about to talk about wouldn't normally merit a whole post of its own, either, but I'm going to see if I can eke it into one, somehow. It's a topic I'd most likely have given a couple of paragraphs to in a "What I'm Playing" post. Just a little oddity that struck me as curious enough to mention, since I'd happened upon it.

It came across it while I was playing EverQuest II on Sunday. After hitting the cap I decided, as I often do on such occasions, that it was probably about time I sorted my bags. It's not as if I keep them tidy at the best of times but in a leveling frenzy I tend to let anything and everything fall into inventory, to be sorted out later. After a while it turns into a problem that can't be ignored.

One nice feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion was the Illusion Keyring. Even more useful than the Petamorph Keyring we got with the expansion before that, I guess, because everyone can use illusions but only pet classes use Petamorph wands. (Probably. Don't quote me on that. Cf the rest of this post.)

EQII is very generous with illusions. They come to you from all directions; holiday events, collections, crafting and quests are among the many possibilities sources. The problem is, apart from the spells that some classes get, illusions are all attached to items that take up inventory. I have a ton of the things stashed in banks and I keep plenty more - the ones I always think I might use - in various characters' bags.

But of course I never do use them because it would take me an hour to find any of the ones I wanted. Even the thought makes me not want to bother, so I don't.

The exact same thing used to happen with Petamorph wands. At best I'd keep one on hand and make do with that but unless I had a particularly annoying pet, I wouldn't even do that much. I'd just put up with whatever dumb-looking undead or elemental or beast my current best-in-class spell gave me, however hideous to look at or annoying to listen to it was.

Actually, that's not 100% true. There's another mechanic that was added who knows how long ago, whereby you can set any of the appearances attached to any of the pet spells to which you have access to be the look of the one you're actually using. I used to do that, long ago, but when I picked up with Mordita again last year, it'd been a while since I played a pet class and until I started typing this paragraph I'd completely forgotten it was a thing you could do. (Cf the rest of this post.)

And it needs to be a thing because some of the pets you get are blimmin' annoying!. Some of them are so big you can barely see what they're fighting, for a start. I hate that. 

Again, you get a spell to do something about it - Shrink Pet or some such - but I've been forgetting  to use that one, too. There was a time when I'd cast it automatically every time I summoned a pet but that was a long time ago. Use your skills, folks, or you will lose them!

More annoying than being too big is being too noisy. Or too flappy. Or both. Pets of all kinds in EQII, cosmetic or combat, come with a full set of animations and behaviors, which is great for authenticity and ambience, sure, but also fricken' annoying, when you have to listen to them grunt or whinny or bark for the ten thousandth time or when they're flying around your head, making a noise like a broken umbrella in a thunderstorm and getting in your line of sight every two seconds.

Mordita's best tank pet is hideously ugly and it's asthmatic. It groans and wheezes all the time. You wouldn't want it anywhere near you if you had the choice, which you don't. All pets of every stripe in EQII love to cling to you as closely as they can, shuffling around to be near to you every time you move. I had a cat like that once and I had to give it away to someone who appreciated the attention.

Having Petamorph wands on a Keyring means I have all the ones I own, ready to hand and easy to find. Granted, I still have to mouse over them to see what they are but at least they're all in the same place. Before the Keyring, I tried doing something similar by keeping them all in one backpack but I begrudged the space and anyway they always ended up in the wrong place no matter how I tried to keep them together.

So, anyway, to get back to the point, back in the  last expansion, the arrival of the Petamorph Keyring meant I suddenly got interested in Petamorph Wands in a way I never had been before. I went through everyone's inventory, sent them all to Mordita and I even did some holiday quests just to get new ones. Mord hooked them onto her keyring and now she uses them all the time, swapping from one sort of pet to another as the mood takes her.

The addition of the Illusion Keyring means I'm just beginning to do the same thing with all the illusion items I've picked up over the years. And there are a lot, not least because it seems every quest that includes a bit where you have to pretend to be something other than yourself leaves the item in your inventory to keep forever. 

I went through Mord's bags and added all the ones I could find in there, then I went through the shared bank looking for the good ones I'd left for everyone on the team to grab, which of course none of them ever did...

And about now, I'm betting you're thinking this is a post about appearance items, aren't you? Yes, well, it probably would have been, if I'd thought of that at the start, but I didn't. This is just some scene-setting aside that got out of hand.

The only reason I mentioned it was to put a bit of context on why I was going through Mordita's stuff so carefully in the first place. I was clearing her bags, as I said, and one reason I tend to avoid doing it for far too long is that it means examining every single item and making an assessment of its worth and usefulness. It's fun for about an hour and then it's progressively less fun and unfortunately an hour barely clears a couple of bags these days. Bags in EQII are big.

After a while, I was done with the illusion items and I'd moved on to checking for gear upgrades. I'd picked up a few things before I dinged that you had to be 135 to use, so there were some good ones. Most of the decision were very straightforward: check the Resolve. If it's higher, swap it in.

As I was going through them all, though, I came across a couple of items that seemed slightly unusual. They had an extra line of description for a start. It read

 "An upgraded version of this item can be purchased from the Norrathian Armory Merchant Sirius". 

And it had a passive effect. Sick Star II, that adds 32.5 Fervor.

I couldn't recall seeing anything like that before so I googled it. And guess what? There's a whole feature that got added to the game back in July 2024 that I've never even heard of!

It's called the Norrathian Armory and there was a press release about it at the time. It explains the whole thing. The tl:dr is that it's a cash shop deal that lets you share specific items across the account. You buy a token from the cash shop and then your alts can use it to buy any of the items you've found as a drop.

Bloody stupid idea if you ask me. It's Heirloom items you have to pay real money for, as far as I can see. Granted, the items are better than Heirloom items would be but even so...

My point, though, isn't to moan on about Darkpaw trying to screw a few extra dollars out of the hardcore. This isn't the official forums. That's the name of the game when the name of your game is EverQuest II, anyway; when most of your money comes from the same few thousand people. 

No, my point is how very complicated older MMORPGs become and how very easy it is for even regular players to miss whole features and mechanics. You just have look away for a minute and there you are, out of touch.

It's lack of knowledge of these kinds of systems that puts new and returning players at such a huge disadvantage. Hard to know what you don't know. And even when you do know it, hard to know if it's worth knowing.

Here's another one I found while going through my loot. Several pieces of armor in my bags that were upgrades for me came with the note

 "This item may be converted to an alternate version using Matter Mallea". 

Really? Converted to what alternate version? And what is Matter Mallea? None of it meant anything to me but apparently it's a feature that came with the Rage of Cthurath expansion. As per the wiki, it exists "primarily to allow players to convert excess blue stat Critical Bonus into much-needed additional orange stat Critical Bonus Overcap". 

Riight...

As for the Matter Mallea itself, it's "crafted by players, from uncommon recipes that drop from the Cthurath-era Invaders of The Unknown Public Quests scattered across lvl 110+ Norrath zones (and The Unknown) ". I guess if I'd done any PQs in this expansion, I'd probably have known that.

The idea seems to be that committed players will have hit the cap on Crit Bonus and will be willing to pay in cash to convert the wasted points to Crit Bonus Overcap. That raises a whole load of awkward questions for me, like for example, how many non-hardcore players even know there is a cap on Crit Bonus, let alone what the cap is? And more importantly, why even have a cap if you're then going to create another stat that raises it? Why not just raise the cap?

Those last couple of questions have been answered by the devs already, I'm pretty sure. I vaguely remember reading about the logic of it a few years ago. But who can keep up with all this stuff? Clearly not me.

It's no wonder returning players tend to bounce. And it's no wonder the most popular server is Anashti Sul, the Origins server. The quasi-Classic ruleset there is so much easier to understand. Everything makes more sense. And there's a lot less catching-up to do.

The other side of that coin, of course, is that on Anashti Sul, a casual player most likely has to work harder and take more care just to do regular content. As I've been saying, on Live, at least as a Necromancer, nothing puts up much of a challenge even when you aren't especially well-geared, even as a soloist. Those complicated systems and mechanics designed to min-max your combat efficiency don't really mean all that much when you're winning all the fights easily already.

The main effect unfamiliar mechanics have on me is to make me curious. I don't like people writing mysterious messages on my boots. I want to know what they mean. Over the years I've invested quite a lot of time, learning how to use systems that I probably could have quite safely ignored. It's fun learning but a lot less fun using what I've learned.

The evidence is right there in my thousands of storage slots - all those arcane materials and devices I used to think I needed but never quite got around to using. I threw a few of them out on Sunday but then I decided better safe than sorry so I woke up someone I hadn't seen for a while and told her to store them for me. In the end, that always seems like the easier option and EQII gives you so much storage space.

Speaking of which, Mordita has over two hundred free slots in her inventory now. Should be good for a couple of weeks before she needs another clear-out. There's no knowing what she might find then...

Ding 135!

Geez! It took long enough, didn't it? At around 11.30 am on Saturday 11 April my Necromancer, Mordita  finally dinged 135, the level cap in EverQuest II. It only took four months (To the day, near enough.) What is this? 2004?

Well, no, I guess not. In 2004 the level cap in EQII was 50, I think. Pretty sure. Wait, let me check... Yep, that's right. MMORPGs usually capped at fifty on launch back in those days. No idea why. What's so special about fifty? Okay, my favorite number is and has always been five so fifty is cool with me but I don't think they did it just to please me.

As of the release of the latest expansion, Rage of Cthurath, in December last year, the cap went from 130 to 135. Remember when expansions went up in tens? That's been a while...

Leveling has changed so much over the years. In all games but let's stick with EQII. At launch it was slow as hell but still a lot faster than we'd been used to in EverQuest so we weren't complaining. Much. It stayed like that for a long time or at least that's how I remember it. 

To get xp in those days, you could do quests or kill mobs or mix it up and do a bit of both. Your choice. Also, you could hand in Collections. They gave big xp and the collectables were tradable so people would hoard them up and then hand them in on the day the new expansion arrived. That way, you could rack up the new levels in minutes. 

Later, after chronomagic came in, you could mentor down and solo dungeons for a level or two a run. Or have a high-level friend drag you round on follow. Or pay someone to power-level you that way, if you didn't have any friends. And then came mercenaries so you could get an NPC to do it and pay them peanuts in plat. That pretty much put the power-leveling professionals out of business.

There were loads and loads of ways to tear through the levels at little effort and no risk. For a while it was all about the Dungeon Maker and I'm sure there were other exploits tricks I've forgotten. Pick one, slam down an xp potion, get your head down, knock the levels out in a few hours. It was hella fun for the first hour or two, then not so much, then dull enough to have you screaming. Still, we all did it, even if we complained about it all the time, too.

This is where I get to quote Joni Mitchell, isn't it? Well, you never do, do you? Who'd have thought I'd be gazing back wistfully at those Sunday afternoons going round and round and round Chelsith or Sebilis? Round and round and round until my teeth ached. Halcyon days...

Well, they put a stop to that around the time the cap hit 100. For our own good, I think they said it was. Oh, they didn't do anything as crass as ban it. They just started counting the xp needed to level in numbers orders of magnitude larger than anything you could get in old content. 

Suddenly, killing mobs  got you absolutely nowhere. Mobs still gave xp, sure, but it was like trying to fill a swimming pool with an eye-dropper. From then on about the only way to gain enough xp to make a difference was to do quests. 

And for a while that was slow but not so slow you'd really hate it. Constrictive and coercive, yes, but not ineffective. New normal, all fine. 

Then in one expansion, I can't remember exactly which, the new quests started filling the entire bar in two or three hand-ins. Instead of taking a couple of weeks to hit the cap it took a couple of days. Maybe a couple of hours. Seriously, it was that fast.

Leveling to the cap in a new expansion turned into something so trivial there didn't seem much point in having levels at all. Some people liked it, particularly the ones with big stables of alts. Others hated it. Either way, as always, we all got used to it.

And then they took it away again. A couple of expansions back it switched back, without warning, to little dribbles. Actually, I think the dribbles are bigger than they were before the surge but it's like when you were a student, isn't it? A room in a shared house seemed fine but once you get used to living in your own apartment, who wants to go back? 

Only it's not like anyone gave us a choice. These days, there's about one way to get xp in the current expansion and that's do the damn quests. Nothing else makes a dent in the bar. Hah! Dent? Doesn't move a pixel!

And it's not just any quests, either. Do the Signature line, the core story, the MSQ if you will. That's where all the xp is. But don't expect it to be enough. I finished the Sig and it left me about 70% of a level short. It's taken me about as long to cobble together enough xp to finish that last bar as it took me to do the previous four levels.

OMG was it bad! Repeatable quests. Don't you hate them? I hate them! I've always hated them. This is where I get to quote David Byrne. Yes, that line from Psycho Killer. Of course, that line. And well he may ask! Why? Eh? EH?!

I've been grudgingly chipping away at that last 70% for what feels like weeks now. Okay, sure, I could have done the whole thing in a day or two, but only if I could have stood it, which I couldn't. I couldn't even bring myself to do a couple of the damn repeatable quests each day.

I did manage a couple every few days though and the singularity the level cap was getting nearer. Slowly. Horribly slowly. 

And then today it finally occurred to me to check if I really had done all the non-repeatable quests. 

It took me about three-quarters of an hour. Just to check, that is. The quest structure is so convoluted now. Who knows what's anywhere any more? I went through my Active Quests, my Completed Quests, I compared them to the Timeline on the Wiki... In the end it was only by going through the Quest Achievements, something I almost never look at, that I worked out there was a ton of stuff I hadn't done. 

I'm really out of the loop on Achievements. They spent so many years being completely useless for anything other than being able to say you'd done them that I stopped paying attention to them altogether. Which meant I'd missed it when they turned into something useful, not to say necessary. 

They all come with rewards now. Mostly Status but Status is the new Platinum. Hyper-inflation made NPCs stop asking for money. Now all they care about is how famous you are. Status buys you everything.

Anyway, that's probably a post of its own. The important thing is, I was going through the Quest Achievements to see what I might have missed and it cued me into a whole bunch of side-quests I didn't have and among those there turned out to be several where the xp wasn't the pitiful 1.2% of the repeatables but a big, chunky ten per cent!

I spent a happy hour or so finding and finishing those and suddenly there I was, just a couple of per cent from capping. Just right for one last heave...

A couple of repeatables and over the line! Ding 135! There's an Achievement for that, too.

And now I don't have to think about it again until December 2027. There won't be level cap increase this year. It's fallow.

Of course, I do have all those alts. But they can wait until I'm in the mood. Which might be never, now I've found the Necro Hack for EZMode. I really only need them to keep their crafting up to date and thank god tradeskill levels are still relatively easy to get. (Shhh! for gawd's sake...)

Of course, hitting the cap just means the real work begins. Every piece of gear needs replacing and every spell upgrading. Plus all those Achievements and Collections that I'm starting to realize are core content these days, not optional extras like they used to be. 

Only now I can take it all at my own pace and enjoy the experience. 

Free! Free at last. Free!

For now...

Stress On Super, Not On Girl

I couldn't truthfully claim that Supergirl has ever been one of my very favorite characters but, growing up, I was a huge Superman fan and my affection and interest extended to all of the Man of Steel's sprawling family. If a comic had any connection to the mythos, I was there for it. 

Along with the core Action and Superman titles, there was World's Finest, in which Superman shared top billing with Batman in one of the most mismatched double acts of all time. And, of course, there was Superboy, who also turned up regularly in Adventure, home of my all-time favorite superhero team, the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

As well as many, many hundreds of issues of those, my unreasonably large collection of comic books from the '60s through to the '90s contains scores of issues of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Yep, those are the official titles. Without good old Supes, Lois and Jimmy's lives clearly had no meaning.

And I also have some Supergirl comics.

Supergirl never really settled down. I can remember three or four times she had her own title but looking it up I see the official count is now up to eight, although somewhat confusingly that includes a limited series. I'd say it ought to be seven.

To be fair to the Maid of Steel, the publishing history of most DC characters probably doesn't look much different. Comics, even more than MMORPGs, suffer from the "I'll never catch up" problem. In games it's levels; in comics it's issues. There's a theory that new readers, seeing the current issue on the stands is #237, are going to put it back and look for something in single figures.

That's one reason even successful long-running series keep rebooting themselves. That and the doomed attempt to establish some kind of coherent continuity, of course. Something anyone other than the company archivist can follow would do. It never works but they keep trying, all the same.

Supergirl, I think it's fair to say, hasn't run through seven (Or eight.) eponymous series because any of them was so successful the high numbers put new readers off. The longest run might have been eighty issues? It's more like the writers and artists and editors and publisher kept trying to nudge her into a position where that might get to be the problem. 

I mean, it could happen. She's wearing the suit, right? She's got name recognition. Why wouldn't she be big?

Except she never really has been. Not really big. Not even with a movie and a TV show backing her up. Where Superman is likely one of the most famous fictional characters in the world, up there with Mickey Mouse and Dracula, Supergirl is only famous by association. She's Superman's cousin. She wears the suit, sure, but it's his suit.

And back in the sixties and seventies, when I was reading her adventures, she was a girl too. A girl! I ask you!

Relax. I'm not going to try to stand up that fatuous and fatally flawed argument that super-hero comics are only for boys, not when my personal experience completely abnegates any such spurious, sexist claptrap. The most fervent fans I've known have been female. But I will say that, again back in the sixties and seventies, not all boys were as comfortable with their gender identity as they are now. To be seen reading a comic starring a girl wasn't something they'd all have felt comfortable doing. A female super-hero was a hard sell to young boys and until maybe the 90s, boys were the target market.

For me, the problem with Supergirl comics wasn't that the title character was a girl. FFS, I read pony books when I was ten! It was more that they weren't always very good. (The pony books weren't always up to much, either...) The art in Supergirl stories was generally fine. I never got the impression comic artists of the era had any issues drawing women. If there was a problem there, it might have been they liked drawing them a little too much. Jim Mooney reportedly drew Supergirl naked in all the panels and only put clothes on her afterwards.

No, it was the writers. I'm guessing back in the seventies and eighties, getting the Supergirl gig wasn't seen exactly as a plum job. I certainly don't recall it going to any of the big names of the time. Did Denny O'Neil ever write Supergirl? Or Marv Wolfman? No, it was Cary Bates and Paul Kupperberg. I have a very soft spot for Cary Bates, who had a great run on the Superman titles, but even at the time he wasn't most people's idea of a star writer. I had friends who thought I was nuts for liking him. Paul Kupperberg, I think of as the kind of writer who'd turn up on fill-ins - a pro in the old-fashioned style.

Those are the Supergirl books I remember. Well, I say remember... I remember I bought them and read them. I have no recollection of what was in them. Not a single storyline stuck. Disposable might be the word.

After that, from the late '90s on, the writers' room started to look a little more respectable, with Peter David and Joseph Loeb making an appearance. There's also a host of names I don't recognize because I haven't kept up with the industry in the last thirty years. Maybe some of them are superstars. I wouldn't know.

I do know, though, that there's at least one Supergirl title that has a very high reputation indeed and that's Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. A limited series in eight issues, it was published in the first couple of years of this decade, making it about five years old now. GoodReads has it at 4.39 (Out of 5.) from almost fourteen thousand ratings.

Not everyone loves the book, though. It's controversial, at least in some quarters. I first heard about it from someone who really, really doesn't like it, Anj of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. 

Anj is a proper Supergirl fan, not a part-timer like me. As he says in his bio, "I have been a fan of Supergirl since my early comic days and have followed her in all her incarnations." 

He also has a particular view of who Supergirl is and more particularly who she should be. Not to put words into his mouth but she should be a beacon of hope, a shining light, an aspirational role model, kind, thoughtful, generous of spirit and all-round wonderful. Not a lonely, maudlin drunk out on a bender in some backstreet bar on her 21st birthday before throwing up in a bucket the next morning. She certainly shouldn't be found, as she is in one scene Anj especially dislikes, taking a tweenage girl to watch a public execution.

These things do happen in Woman of Tomorrow. I knew that before I read it because I'd already heard the complaints. And those complaints had put me off a little. I also tend to think of Supergirl as quite a sweet, somewhat naive character. Clean-cut, even. It didn't sound like I'd like this version of her, either, so I didn't bother reading it.

Until a few days ago, that is. It was after I'd watched the second trailer for the upcoming Supergirl movie. In a post I wrote about the first trailer (A post that reads now like notes for this one...) I said it looked "very encouraging". 

The movie is based on the Tom King story. How closely remains to be seen but I'm guessing it'll be fairly similar, although Lobo isn't in the book and I'll take a bet now that Comet the Super-Horse won't be in the movie. She probably won't swear quite as much either, which'll be a pity. The swearing is a highlight. 

Certainly the core elements are all there in the trailers. I can say that now because I have, finally, read the whole eight issues and seen both the trailers. It was the second trailer that eventually got me to the book - that and reading the opening few pages in a copy of the DC Compact version at work, while I was supposed to be working.

The second trailer is a blast. Well, in parts. When it's not bleak, that is. Take a look for yourself.

I watched it and then I read a few pages of the comic and I thought maybe I ought to make up my own mind on whether it was a version of Kara Zor-El I approved of, rather than take anyone else's word for it. So I spent an hour or two reading the whole thing and guess what? It is.

It really is. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a great comic book. The writing is excellent. Top of the range. The artwork, by Bilquis Evely, is just stunning. It's beautiful but also her panel-to-panel flow is exemplary. Great storytelling.  The characters are complex, nuanced and very relatable. There are some good laughs and a lot of tear-up moments. 

Okay, the story itself is basically True Grit in Space but there's nothing so much wrong with that...

I loved it. I whole-heartedly recommend it. I'd also say that, as I somewhat suspected, most of the complaints seem to me to come from a misreading of what is, if I have any criticisms at all, Tom King's rather elliptical, enigmatic approach to narrative. He leans really hard into the unreliable narrator archetype and I'm not sure that's something comics readers are always all that comfortable with. He also deals quite heavily in irony, which ditto. 

My take on his version of Supergirl is that she's a deep thinker, a planner, a strategist and an extremely moral person with exceptionally high standards. She just likes to keep most of that to herself. And she doesn't much mind looking cool while she's doing it. Or not looking cool at all. Either one. She's seen and done too much to care how others think of her and she's young enough to care a whole hell of a lot.

The whole book is like that. Comics do that sort of thing really well, the words and pictures telling the same different story. Better than novels do it, really. Super-hero comics don't always go there, though, and maybe super-hero comic fans aren't always ready to go with them when they try.

The big structural problem with Woman of Tomorrow, though, comes right at the end, on the very last page. I won't spoil the ending even by hinting at what happens because it's a good ending that oughtn't to be spoiled. I don't need to do that to explain what the problem is, anyway.

The book ends with some panels in which a thing happens that appears to negate everything that's taken the whole eight issues to set up and resolve. You seem to get a satisfying ending followed by a coda that turns it on its head and it's unsettling to say the least. I found it so odd and confusing, I had to google to find out what other people thought.

And what they think, some of them, and what I think, is that the problem is being too subtle. In this very last few panels, the writing is slightly too nuanced for its own good and the art slightly less demonstrative than it needs to be. The result is ambiguity, whereas I'm pretty sure the intention was clarity. 

It's an editing problem, fundamentally. Someone should have said "They're going to misunderstand this, guys. You need to make it just a tad more obvious what's going on..."

I imagine everyone concerned knew exactly what the scenes they'd written and drawn meant so they saw what they expected to see, whereas readers coming to it without the internal thought processes of the writer and artist could only go on what was there in front of them. Happens all the time.

Which is fine, actually. I mean, if they don't get it, screw 'em, right? It's not like art has to explain itself.

Sounds like I'm being ironic but I'm not, not really. Art is held to different standards than entertainment, which is why we keep running into these issues whenever the lines blur. When we read comics or play games or watch movies or TV shows we expect to understand everything and we get cross when we don't. It's reasonable. 

Only it's not. Nor fair. Not reasonable or fair of us to have those expectations, that is, because we also expect the best of our entertainment to aspire to being art. We knock it when it settles for less and when it reaches and falls short. But even when it succeeds, we don't always like it. 

And that's both reasonable and unreasonable, too. Sometimes things don't make sense because they actually don't make sense. The writer or the director or the actor didn't get it right. We deserve better. Sometimes they don't make sense because we haven't been able to make sense of them. That's when the creators deserve a better audience. 

Often, though, we can't tell the difference. Is it us or is it them? Let's all sit down and talk about it for a generation.

That's one of the things that make it all such fun. I hope the Supergirl movie turns out to be as controversial and divisive as the comic on which it's based. If it does, I hope it's for the right reason. But even if it's not, better that then being bland, right?

And a lot of those old Supergirl comics were pretty bland. If we're going to be honest.

Is Wuoshi Up? The Latest EQII Producer's Letter Drops.

A new Producer's Letter for EverQuest II usually gives me plenty to write about. They appear roughly quarterly (Maybe they're seasonal?) so there really ought to be some meat to them. You'd think...

A new one popped yesterday. It's thin. Let me break it down in bullet points:

• Reminder of the beta currently running for the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion on the Origins server.
• Reminder the Zarrakon PvP server will be merged into the Antonia Bayle PvE server in May.
• Details of a technical change to the Character Creation process.
• Information about the new Time Locked Expansion server coming in June.

And that's it. Two things we already knew about, each of which have had their own press releases in the last week or so, one thing no-one's likely to care about and a foretaste of another that, according to Senior Community Manager Angeliana, replying to a question on the forums, will have a full article and a FAQ next month.

If you were hoping for any longer-term outline of where the game as a whole is headed, especially now Darkpaw isn't doing roadmaps any more, you're out of luck. Whether this is because there's nothing to say or because saying anything isn't allowed, feel free to speculate.

So, working with what little we have, let me see if I can spin this up into some kind of post. There might be a couple of loose ends worth pulling on... 

The Origins server is the closest thing EQII has to a Classic ruleset. It doesn't go all the way back to the beginning, like WoW Classic, because no-one in their right mind would want to suffer through the first fifteen months or so of EQII ever again. Instead, it started out trying to recreate the game as it was in 2006, before moving forward, carefully, through succeeding expansions, attempting to replicate them as accurately as possible, striving always for authenticity. 

Or so the story goes. That, anyway, is why the introduction of the next expansion on the assembly line, Rise of Kunark, requires a beta. For regular TLE servers they just switch the expansions on, I think. 

I don't really know, to be honest. I never play on them. I did try Origins when it started but I think I lasted about two sessions. I can see the appeal and the server has been successful but who has the time? Well, not me, obviously.

I wouldn't have bothered going into it at all if it wasn't for the fact that the existence of Origins is highly relevant to the second bullet point, the merging of Zarrakon with Antonia Bayle, which is much more interesting.

Zarrakon launched a sliver under three years ago. It used a factional PvP system of some kind, the exact details of which are unclear to me. I was under the impression most EQII PvP was faction-based: Freeport vs Qeynos or Good vs Evil, if you prefer. 

Whatever the exact details of who could kill whom, Zarrakon barely had a chance to get started before the server itself was killed by much more popular rival. Just two years later, a second PvP server, Dozekar, arrived, using the already highly successful "Origins" model, tweaked for PvP.

PvP players are, if anything, even more nostalgic about the supposed good old days than PvE players. They're always hankering after some mythical ruleset that made PvP fair or balanced or satisfying, even if few of them can agree on when or where it happened. 

Everyone agrees it did, though, and for many the touchstone is the much-missed original PvP server, Nagafen. For once, it seems as if Dozekar came close to replicating that experience. Or, as PCGamer put it at the time, "Nagafen's back, baby!"

With Dozekar sopping up most of the demand, there was no need for Zarrakon. It does seem strange that two PvP servers should have launched so close together but presumably the possibility of an Origins PvP server wasn't in the discussion in 2023. Just bad timing, I guess.

Antonia Bayle, the server on the receiving end of the merge, has a checkered history of its own. For a long time it was the most populated server. It was also the designated roleplaying server, which may explain the popularity. 

Over time, for reasons unknown to me, Ant. Bayle fell out of fashion. The population declined until it became almost a ghost-server. There was talk about merging it into one of the others but instead Darkpaw took the opposite tack, merging failing servers into Ant. Bayle.

When I read the news that a PvP server was going to be folded into AB, my first thought was to wonder how the two populations might mix. Like oil and water, you'd think. Having done some research for this post, I'm now thinking it'll be more like dropping a pebble into the ocean. Barely even a ripple. I'm guessing there won't be enough players left on Zarrakon to make an impact and of those that remain, any still dedicated to PvP won't be logging in much after the move goes through.

So ends yet another attempt to bring PvP to Norrath. At least this time there's an alternative. 

Dozekar, by most accounts I've seen, retains a small-but-active population, which, on the evidence of the last twenty years, is about the best an EQII PvP server can realistically can hope for. Not that EQII PvP players are famously realistic...

New servers have been the lifeblood of the game in one way or another for as long as I've been playing, which is to say always. The commercial model seems to consist of a core of permanent F2P servers running the "Live" ruleset, to whose players annual expansions and various cash shop specials can be sold, along with an ever-changing line-up of special rules servers, for which a subscription is required. 

Perhaps ironically, it's the sub-only servers that have the shorter life expectancy. They're designed to run only for as long as enough people pay, after which they're merged either into each other or into the Live servers, depending on how compatible the rulesets might be.

There's a perpetual demand for new rulesets to hold the interest of a subset of players who find the endless variations appealing. Once in a while a particular variant will take off and become rather more than just stable, as seems to have happened with the Anashti Sul Origins server, reportedly now the most populated and popular server of all.

The latest attempt to grab attention is the upcoming Wuoshi server, which is going to have a Free Trade ruleset but also launch with all expansions up to and including Echoes of Faydwer active. EoF was the third expansion, right before RoK, which means the new server will be one expansion in arrears of Anashti Sul. 

Why that would induce anyone to move across beats me although maybe I'm missing something. Someone on the forums certainly thinks so:

"Well rip Origins and it's RoK launch if this Woushi server coming out in June with EoF enabled."

I'd have though it'd be the other way around but what do I know?

I was more interested in the name of the new server, anyway. Mostly, when new servers are spun up for either of the EverQuest games, I have to go look it up to find out who they've been named after.  Not this time!

Wuoshi is the extremely annoying dragon that wandered about right next to the druid ring in Wakening Lands. She was the bane of every druid's life back in the day. You'd port in and WHAM! Dead from Wuoshi's massive AoE attack.

Luckily she wasn't always up. I ran a spotter over there and camped them at the ring so I could log in as an expendable character just to check if it was safe to port. Eventually they either moved Wuoshi or changed her faction and porting to Wakening Lands stopped being Druid Russian Roulette but I have never forgotten her. I might roll a character on the server named after her, just for old times' sake.

There is one other thing. Not about the new server. It's a hint about the next expansion. I didn't give it a bullet point because, as anyone who read this post in the first few hours it was up will know, I didn't even spot that the following was about the expansion. I thought it was about the new server.

I've revised the post, now I've realized my mistake. I'd talk about it in more detail only I have no idea what it means and Jenn Chan isn't about to make it any clearer. She says

"Imagine traipsing through The Crossroads for a minute... You’re just walking along the road, weary from a long day of adventures, when you glance down and see an oddity. You pick it up and open it to find a strangely coded missive. You stare at it until the characters swim about in your view, still unable to decipher it. You feel an urgency to find someone who can decrypt the piece of intel before it’s too late. What do you do? Where do you go from here? "

 Which is helpful. Not.

And even less so the image of the note itself:

Looks like gibberish to me but it turns out to be in two Norrathian languages. One is Dark Elven. I'm not sure about the other.

I only know that much because someone on the forums had the whole thing translated in a matter of hours. The full text, in English, reads as follows. 

Oh, I suppose I ought to give a spoiler warning for this...

As if anyone cares.

 

So there you have it. Gibberish in English, too! If anyone knows what any of that means in reference to where we might be going or what we might be doing come December, do tell.

Credit for the image goes to Agarth, by the way, although I'm not sure they did the actual translation. 

And that, I think, is about all the juice I can squeeze from the dry husk of Jenn Chan's latest Producer's Letter.  

Hey, I got more than fifteen hundred words out of it! I'm not complaining.

Don't You Tell Me What To Do! Stars Reach Tries Again.

It seems I was far from alone in my misgivings over the new Introduction and Tutorial added to Stars Reach in the A Recruit No More update back in March. Less than two weeks later, Playable Worlds threw most of it out, revising the whole thing based on "player feedback". Here's part of the official statement:

"Following up on our previous update about the initial game tutorial, we’ve taken a step back to re-evaluate the starting progression based on player feedback.

Concerns were raised that the experience felt too “on the rails.” As a result, we’ve decided to move away from such a linear system..."

To which the obvious response is "Well, duh!" Given SR's supposed sandbox credentials, how the version I played ever got past the discussion stage beats me. I know it's pre-alpha and wild ideas that never go anywhere are part of the process but who thought it was a good idea to add an unskippable, on-rails, theme-park tutorial to a sandbox, let alone one likely to hold new players back for a couple of hours or more before they ever got to see the actual game?

Someone obviously did. Well, they know better now.

Given the quick response, I thought it would only be polite to go back and see what changes they'd made. The new update is called "Open Horizons", which I guess sets the tone. Is it an improvement, though?

Hmm. Yes and no. I prefer the new version but that's not to say I think it's good. It's just not as dreadful as the last one.

On the plus side, they did sort of fix that awful skill tree. And the new Intro/Tutorial goes by a lot faster. I made a new character and played through the full thing this morning [Edit: That was Sunday morning. It's taken me this long to find time to write the post...] and I was on a non-tutorial planet in less than an hour. 

On the minus, it would have been a lot less than that if I hadn't had to keep looking stuff up. The game wasn't holding my hand any more but it wasn't explaining much, either.

And it would have all gone a lot faster if I hadn't ended up dying several times, yet again, mainly because I couldn't see much of anything. Even with the new gamma slider pushed all the way to maximum, the screen was still sometimes too dark to see anything at all. I couldn't even figure out what was killing me so it was hard to know what to avoid.

The tl:dr for the new intro/tutorial is that they've absolutely gutted the old one and put almost nothing in its place. They've just left you to fend for yourself. That's not inappropriate for a sandbox but I suspect it just puts the whole thing back where it was before, when the problem PW was trying to fix was new players not having a clue what to do next. On this evidence, they still won't.

It's an extreme response that I suspect may be the result of having a highly invested and experienced group of testers that doesn't and most likely cannot respond the way a genuine new player would. Even the new testers they're bringing in are likely to be coming from the pool of people who've been following the game for a while, people who applied but didn't get in during a previous wave. They're impatient to get started and think they know everything they need to know already.

When the game goes into Early Access, something that was being talked about for this year at one point, the genuine new players won't have even that level of knowledge or expectation. Or, most likely, enthusiasm. Will they deal well with being handed some tools and told to look stuff up in the in-game help section, even if it is now called "The Galactopedia"?

Honestly, If I hadn't already done all of this many times before, I'd have been lost. Even with prior knowledge, I still had to look up several things. The game tells you next to nothing. Just "Here are your tools.".  Any details about how you should use them are left for you to figure out from tooltips and the Galactopedia. As for all the stuff about how to find someone who's dancing when you need to heal your wounds or how to set your spawn point at a Re-Life station? All gone.

Which is fair enough for a sandbox but it does make Stars Reach look like a pretty hardcore example of the genre. And that's a definite theme here. It's hardcore, even if it looks like a kids' game.

Which it does. Or like a cosy game. On the surface, it looks a lot like Palia, only in space. The character models are cartoonish and goofy. The colors are bright and friendly. All the corners are rounded. It's not Palia, although squint and it might be Palworld, albeit without the slavery motif.

Haven, the first planet you see, doubles down on the hopeful, harmless vibe with its wide, tree-lined avenues and its clean, welcoming buildings, surrounded by immaculate lawns and gardens. It looks like a prosperous campus university. There's even a  friendly mayor, waiting to greet you and telling you to take your time and settle in at your own pace.

 

There's no sign of aggressive wildlife nearby, just some rabbits and deer. The sky is blue, the grass is green, the air is clear. Everything feels about as threatening as afternoon tea at the vicarage. Why not take a stroll around? Enjoy yourself. Bring a picnic.

In the new version, there's not much direction at all. You can wander around Haven, see the sights, pick up a handful of very simple tasks, unironically known now as "Challenges" for some marketing reason. None of them is going to take you longer than a few minutes, unless it's time spent trying to figure out the controls.

Once that's done, it's off to Crucible just like before, only this time with fewer dire warnings of what to expect. The journey seems to have been shortened, too. I only had to wait a few seconds for the shuttle this time, not minutes as before. Once you get there, though, it soon becomes clear any peace you thought you'd found was an illusion.  

Crucible itself remains a hell-hole. The only thing that's been done to ameliorate the misery of being there is to dump most of the missions that used to be required before you could get the hell out. No need to make your own spacesuit now. Just grab five Bauxite, hand them in, then take the space-suit you're given in return and get off Crucible as fast as you can. Why would you want to stay?

The place is on fire. Volcanic eruptions spew lava everywhere. Visibility is terrible. The forests and mountains swarm with aggressive monsters. All the peaceful promise of Haven is gone. And lost forever, as you discover when the game warns you that once you leave, you can never return.

It reminds me a little of Pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars, only there the sudden shift was a set-up for a brilliant twist in the narrative. In Stars Reach, the jarring lurch from Haven to Crucible feels purposeless. If the whole game is so much closer to a survival title, and a fairly extreme one at that, one with corpse recovery and loss of everything except your tools and the clothes your wearing on death, why open with such an idyl at all, especially now there's next to nothing to do there? 

Even with nothing to do, though, I can imagine people choosing to stay in Haven for good, the way they did in Pre-Searing. If you knew what was coming next, you'd be crazy to leave. 

It's not as if it's just a quick trip to hell, then back to somewhere fairly pleasant, either. Once you're done with Crucible, which in my case took about fifteen minutes and three deaths, all of them completely unexplained, it's up into space, which is beautiful but barren, then down to the next planet, which is barren and not beautiful at all.

The new introduction has you in space in maybe twenty or thirty minutes, assuming you know what you're doing and don't get lost underground and killed by things you never saw, which is what happened to me. Once in space, you could jet off to go mining but more likely you'll visit the Mission Board to pick up some "Challenges" that are likely to make you feel about as excited as Tom Sawyer did when Aunt Polly told him to whitewash the fence. Then it's a quick spacewalk to the portal to the planet of your choice (There are four, currently.) and back to earth. Well, someplace solid, anyway.

And when you land? Devastation as far as the eye can see. It's like stepping out into the aftermath of a small war or onto the unreconstructed landscape of an abandoned strip mine. Mostly because it is the unreconstructed landscape of an abandoned strip mine, except most strip mines don't have packs of flying predators scouring the scree for anything they can kill.

The welcome board that pops up the moment you arrive gives you a hint of the misery to come: no civil administration, no wildlife, just some minerals waiting to be exploited. Grab your pick and start digging. Everyone else sure did. Try not to fall down one of the holes.

The land management problem has been raised as a potential issue by many people ever since the expected gameplay was first posited. The idea is supposed to be that players will build towns and cities, elect representatives and manage the planets in an ecologically responsible manner. Or that they'll use up the resources, leave a gutted husk and move on to the next, a course of action apparently deemed equally acceptable because more planets will spawn to replace the derelict hulks.  

And maybe, when the game is live and players see it as their "forever game",  it could work. I mean, I doubt it, but it's not impossible. Even if it ever does turn out that way, though, it's going to be difficult to persuade newcomers to stick with the program long enough to find out, if all they see after Haven for the first few hours is some new version of hell.

The sustainability of the galaxy is a macro-problem for the long game. The Introduction and Tutorial is a more concise, contained concern that needs to be fixed up front because that's what all new players see first. Get that wrong and you won't have many old players.

In fairly typical MMORPG development fashion, it does look very much as though the reaction to the negative feedback on the last iteration has been to spin a hundred and eighty degrees and slam the hammer down to race off in the opposite direction. You can have On Rails or No Rails. Hand-holding or free-fall. Haven or Crucible. No half-measures! Screw compromise!

It's pre-alpha but even so it needs sorting soon. In Discord I can already see a certain discontent with the constant iteration over the New Player Experience. And it's true that there comes a time when you have to stop fiddling with the controls and just set a course and stick to it. 

Based on the Open Horizons update, though, it really doesn't look like we're there yet. The intro still needs work. 

A lot of work. And the first couple of items on the agenda at the next planning session ought to be to decide what sort of a game Stars Reach is meant to be and who it's meant to be for. 

I couldn't answer either of those questions a year ago and I don't feel like I'm any closer to answering them now. I just hope someone at Playable Reach knows because right now it doesn't really feel like they do.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker - First Impressions

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

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

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

Hey! Look, everybody! I can read Wikipedia!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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