Embarassment Of Riches

An actual Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday! Can it possibly be true?!

Yes, it can. As we cruise towards the end of Blaugust I have a couple of completed posts in the bank and no work to get in the way because I'm home for two weeks recuperating from my recent minor op. Consequently, I feel quite confident in throwing away a few ideas I could potentially have blown up into whole posts. 

First I Look At The Purse

Case in point: I spent half an hour last night cobbling together this awkward composite of my currency window in EverQuest II. I had it in mind to write a piece about how out of hand these special currencies can get in long-running games.

That's a lot of tokens, tickets, coins and crystals. Seventy-four, to be exact. I very much doubt I could tell you what more than half of them are for without looking it up. Whether they're even valid any more, whether the vendors who take them are still in game or whether, if they aren't, they'll be back again next year, are all questions about which I have even less of a clue.

I was thinking about it because I logged into EQII last night in the hope of doing the new quest that got added for Oceansfull this year, only to find the event finished on Tuesday. I'd been so wrapped up in Dawnlands I forgot all about it.

The end of Oceansfull also marks the end of the Summer Jubilee but the vendors are still up until the end of the month, in case you want to spend whatever tokens you still have left. I was going to do that, which is how I came to be looking at my currency window in the first place.

It occured to me that, more than most MMORPGs I can think of, EQII thrives on excess. In other games a panel like this might be considered an embarrassment; in EQII it's more of an endorsement. This, after all, is the game where damage numbers are quantified in the quadrillions. Blizzard might feel the need to squish big numbers; Daybreak just changes the notation.

The current EQII playerbase just dotes on really big numbers and vast amounts of cruft. It's absolutely alienating to incomers but who cares about them? Fortunately, as with most MMORPGs, if you don't go looking for the hidden nine-tenths of the game, you'll never even know it's there, lurking in the deep, dark waters down below. 

Speaking of which...

It's in the trees! It's coming!

Not having to deal with a huge bunch of outdated content is one reason we all gravitate towards shiny, new MMORPGs, right? It's not that they're any easier to understand but at least we can all be ignorant together. 

Once I'm in, it doesn't take much more than the lure of some new systems and mechanics to get me started but there are a lot of new games these days. In what is fast becoming a looser, sloppier genre as boundaries between MMORPGs, survival and crafting games shift and blur, there just isn't time to try all of them.

When you see a trailer like that one, though...

I imagine everyone's getting Secret World vibes but looking into it further it would seem to be a mash-up of TSW and Fallen Earth. I was a little surprised NetEase would want to go there. I mean, the whole post-apocalyptic "all the nightmares came today" routine hasn't exactly set the genre alight thus far.

The website looks slick but isn't as encouraging as you'd hope when you take a closer look. Yet again, the translation lets the whole thing down. It really is starting to bug me, the way even major players in the market seem incapable of finishing the job when it comes to editing the text. I'm pretty sure no-one would let an artist get away with a six-fingered hand so why is it okay to sign off on mismatched grammatical numeracies like these?

Build home, create team and fight monsters...

Plant, animal and human infected by Stardust will transform into disfigured monsters called Aberrant.

It's like no-one knows the differrence between singular and plural - or that there even is a difference. 

Other than a dodgy translation (And when has that ever stopped me playing anything?) the main strike against Once Human is that it seems to be a shooter. I am not keen on shooters although at least it's a third-person shooter which, if I have to, I prefer. 

The official gameplay trailer that came out a few days ago makes the whole thing look a lot less inviting than the one I embedded. It's way too dark and most of it seems to be cut-scenes not gameplay anyway but I've pre-registered and wishlisted it on Steam, anyway. We'll see what happens. 

No Secrets

For the first time since the game launched back in 2012 I declined to pre-order the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. It went live yesterday and I still haven't bought it. 

I was very amused by Paeroka's admission that she had to look up the name of the expansion before she could write her post about it. When I first heard what ArenaNet had chosen to call it, I thought it was a truly terrible name for an expansion and it really hasn't grown on me since. 

Being charitable, it sounds more like a parody than anything, but I very much doubt ANet are playing meta games with their livelihood. That leaves the distinct possibility that someone genuinely thinks "Secrets of the Obscure" is an awesome thing to call a game. If that's true, I really hope that someone is about fourteen because if they're any older it would be really embarassing...

Leaving aside the name, there's nothing much in the package that calls to me. I quite like the sound of the rifts, even if it is a feature we've seen in multiple mmorpgs already. I'm mildly curious to see what's inside the floating wizard tower. The easier access to a flying mount is overdue but welcome.

Watching the launch trailer, what really surprised me is how old the game looks. It really seems to hark back to another era. I'm so used now to cleaner, flatter surfaces with less clutter. All the extraneous detail I used to think exemplified the art team's stellar reputation now reminds me of those long, instrumental passages in prog rock epics.

GW2 looks like a very adolescent game from a team with a very adolescent outlook is what I think I'm saying. I never really noticed it while I was playing but it's hard to miss now I've had a lengthy break. Sometimes you need to go away and come back before you can see what's right in front of you. 

Tell 'Em Eda Sent You

Singularity Six certainly aren't sitting back and letting things ride since Palia's reasonably successful and passably well-received launch earlier in the month. I was quite surprised to hear about the game's first holiday event, Maji Market, which begins in just a few days. 

On the face of it, the event looks lore-appopriate, accessible and entertaining, which is pretty much all you could hope for from something like this. I hadn't been planning on going back to Palia quite yet. It's altogether too similar in some important ways to Dawnlands, which I much prefer, and also to Valheim, which would probably have been next on my list of games to revisit, following the long-awaited (By me, anyway) Hildir's Request update (Of which more later. Although not a lot more...)

I was going to wait until I heard something definite about the squashing of the "You just lost all your progress" bug, which is kind of off-putting, but this little affair looks like fun so I might risk it. The event runs for almost the whole of September, so there's no rush. 

If It Wasn't For Bad Timing I'd Have No Timing At All

Had Dawnlands not happened along, this is what I'd almost certainly be playing right now. From the moment I heard Iron Crown planned to hand control of challenge and difficulty in Valheim over to the players, I had it in mind to start a new playthrough. Later, when I recklessly charged into the Mistlands and lost not one but two corpses there, along with my best and second-best armor, I made a back-up plan to reset my original world when the update arrived, should that prove to be possible.

Now, it ought to be said that Valheim has always allowed players to get their hands on the controls the devs use. There are console commands that let you change the game in all kinds of ways. Using those is a bit like delving into regedit, though; not for the faint-hearted or fat-fingered.

The new version should be much simpler and more straightforward. Whether I have the interest or the will to start over, especially now I'm basically playing Valheim with an anime skin in Dawnlands anyway, very much remains to be seen. Valheim does strike me as one of those games you're never really quite done with so I wouldn't discount the possibility. Not going to happen for a while, though.

I would have confirmed a few more of the details on this entry only Steam seems to have choked on the download and it's looking as if I might need to uninstall and reinstall Valheim before I can check it out for myself. That's definitely not happening today.

At this point, which is the end of the post, traditionally I'd slip in a music video. As it happens, one of those stashed Blaugust posts I mentioned right at the top is my latest "What I've Been Listening To Lately" collection and I pretty much threw everything good in there. 

Give me a minute. I'm sure I can come up with something... ah, ok, here... how about...

Real Life - Art School Girlfriend

That should do it. All good now? Okay, then.

Bye!