A Rambling Post About Twitter, New World, Sable, Japanese Breakfast, Posthumanism, Digital Feeds, Steam Sales And Pre-Orders, In Which I Push Declarative Post-Titling To Its Inevitable And Unsustainable Conclusion

This morning I have a few things rattling around inside my head that wouldn't make full posts. Or perhaps I should say ought not to be allowed to make full posts. There's not much doubt I could get a couple of thousand words out of any of them if I set my mind to it but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

If I was on Twitter I could just craft several delicious micro-posts and send them winging into the twittersphere to charm and delight, because that's how Twitter works, isn't it? I am on Twitter, as it happens, but I have never tweeted. Or have I? Let's see... 

Ok, that's quite disturbing. Twitter logs me in automatically even though I haven't knowingly used the service for over ten years. Where is it holding the information that allows it to recognize me without a login or password, I wonder? I never let anything do that, not even stuff I use every day.

I have tweeted five times, all in 2010, all auto-generated from Fallen London, which at that time required Twitter to play. I literally made my Twitter account to play it and that is all I ever used it for. 

I have one follower, a good friend of mine from a long time back. I'm following him too but I have not the least clue how that would have happened. I haven't seen or spoken to him for more than fifteen years. 

Other than that, apart from Failbetter Games, makers of Fallen London, who I had to follow to make the game work, the only other person I'm following is, for some inexplicable reason, Scott Hartsman. Maybe he played Fallen London. He seems like the kind of person who might have done.

It does occasionally occur to me to start using Twitter but I also seem to have set up my Twitter profile using some variant of my real name so if that ever happens it's not going to be on that account. I do appear to be @bhagpuss, though. That would be okay, I guess.

Seem to have strayed from the point a little, don't we? Not sure why I'm including anyone else in that. Share the responsibility, share the blame, eh?

As I was saying, I have a few odds and ends to mention and it's Friday so I thought I might steal Wilhelm's "Friday Bullet Points" idea and run through this and that. Except they're going to bleed into one another a little too much for bullet points, which is a shame, because I like bullet points. And now I've rambled so much I've forgotten what most of them were, anyway. 

It'll come back to me, I'm sure. I'll go and make myself a coffee. Get my thoughts in order. I knew I should have made some notes.

Right, New World! That was one of the things I was going to talk about. I had the email opposite from Amazon this morning.

A few things occurred to me in the light of Belghast's thoughts on the imminent arrival of Amazon Games big new thing/hail mary pass/nine day wonder (delete as applicable), along with the comments of a couple of people in the thread there, an earlier post by Syp about his launch plans and an apparently unrelated post by Tipa at Chasing Dings, which I read this morning.

Firstly, I'm weirdly unexcited by, even detached from this indisputibly major launch, even though there are plenty of reasons I should be super-keen. It's by far the biggest new AAA mmorpg to come along in years. I was in the first alpha, what, three years ago now and loved it. I pre-ordered at the earliest opportunity in 2019. Even though the game has changed almost out of recognition since then, I thoroughly enjoyed the two later betas, last summer and this spring. There's no doubt I want to play New World. I'm just not very excited about it.

I think it's something similar to the Valheim situation and, looking further back, Project Gorgon. I've already expended all the energy on getting excited about these games that I have to spare. They aren't "new" games any more, even though none of them has in fact launched yet. They're games that were "new" six months, three years, five years ago but they're still acting as though they just arrived and it doesn't quite feel real, somehow.

New World is in the better position in that it never had any kind of early access or non-wipe open beta phase. It is a proper launch following a series of proper alphas and betas as we would have understood the process ten or fifteen years ago. And yet it still feels like New World has been around a longish time because that's how we've been trained to feel about these things now.

What I really want, I realized recently, is for New World to have launched, to be running, to have become just another live game, one I can dip in and out of when the fancy takes me. I don't want to invest any special emotional effort or project any particular wishes or hopes onto it. I just want it to be there.

Think we should roll on Sitara? Yeah, maybe not.

I was considering the choice of servers, all 177 of them. It's really not that many to choose from, of course. Clearly I won't be playing on the Australian or South American ones, so that takes it down to 140. I try to avoid playing on EU servers where possible, which knocks out another sixty-four and given a choice of US locations I'd always go East Coast, meaning I really only have to choose from fifty or so names. 

Still a lot. I need to look at that website Bel linked that warns where the streamers are going, then pick somewhere else. I like a low-pop server if I can find one. I quite like the sound of Frislandia but my favorite would be Morrow, which makes me think of the great Gray Morrow.

I was interested to see that Bel had cancelled his Amazon pre-order in favor of buying the game directly through Steam. I wonder if that makes a difference since Amazon are apparently going to email Steam keys as the standard means of access anyway. I guess it depends a) how much you trust Amazon to send things out promptly and b) whether you care how soon you can get online.

As to a) I have had nothing but exemplary service from Amazon for a decade and a half but also as to b) on this particular occasion I'd be fine with getting my key a few hours or even a few days late. I'm not crazy keen to begin  with and even if I was, avoiding the initial feeding frenzy would probably be in my best interests. Letting the hordes move through the first couple of starter areas and then follow along at leisure seems like a good plan.

What I'd really like would be an option to buy a physical box and wait for it to drop through my letter box next week. As I mentioned in a comment to Tipa on the post linked above, I have a DVD case for Guild Wars 2's  Heart of Thorns sitting on a shelf in the bookcase to my right, even though the expansion was only ever available in digital form.

All the case contains is a piece of paper with a code on it. I could have gotten that code added directly to my account by clicking a box online but I chose to pre-order it from Amazon just to get that empty case. I would do that for all the games I'm actively interested in if I had the choice because I like to see the cases displayed in my room so I can handle them occasionally and feel some kind of tactile, physical connection.

As far as I can remember, Heart of Thorns was the last time I was able to do any of that. I was reading the other day how Gen Z buy more vinyl than Millennials. I think the death of physical media may have been overstated. Were not posthuman quite yet. We might have to wait for the singularity before people stop feeling the need to nest.

Conversely, and flipping round to touch Twitter if only tangentially, I do appreciate the speed and range of digital communication. Time was I'd have to wait 'til Thursday to get my fix of music news. These days I get it the same day, possibly the same hour, the journalists do.

 

I recently subscribed to (by which I mean added to Feedly, not payed money for) two additional music sources. I was getting the feeling Pitchfork was missing stuff here and there so I added Stereogum and my teenage mentor, NME.

What I didn't realize was that the 21st century digital NME is hard into gaming, too. I am now getting more gaming news from there than most of my gaming bookmarks. It's very odd but also very welcome, not least because the news items are short, concise and gloriously free of snark. 

Since NME used to be the very fountainhead of snark and also pretension that's a big reminder to me of how the world's changed. I do like me some snark and I live for pretension but it's nice to have the facts plain, no chaser, once in a while. 

Having all three sources in my feed might be a little too much, though. Some days I can't get though them all before a whole stack more have arrived. I mostly just scan the headlines. They tell me all I want to know about most things and give me that heady, fake feeling of not being out of touch with the world. The bits that matter, anyway.

I most likely will keep all of them. Naturally a lot of the news duplicates but you can never be sure which will focus on what. Pitchfork, for example, even though they don't carry a lot of gaming news, was the first to tell me Japanese Breakfast did the full soundtrack to Sable.

I wrote about Sable a while back and I've had it in my Steam wishlist ever since. Today, the same day I got the New World pre-order warning, I also got this (on the right) from Steam.

So there's another game I'm not going to buy. I want to play it but do I want to pay  twenty pounds for the chance? Probably not. Not because I don't think it's worth that much but because I don't need a new game right this moment. Too much going on already. 

Knowing the soundtrack is by someone I'd buy an album by and also knowing what a good game (I loved the demo) makes me considerably more likely to buy it eventually. It's like buying a game and album all in one. Bargain! And an even bigger bargain when it goes on sale.

I guess I am turning into one of those people who waits for things to go on Steam sale before they buy. Is that personal growth or just my standards slipping? Hard to say. 

So far this year, though, five of my wishlisted games have become available and I haven't bought one of them. And yet I'm going through with my pre-order of New World despite my aforementioned apathy.

This is why companies do pre-orders, you know. Lock in the excitement before it fades then trust to a combination of laziness, lack of attention and an uncomfortable sense of commitment to carry those sales through to the end.

It works, too.