Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt - First Impressions

So, who's up for some more First Impressions posts on Nightingale then? Nobody? Tough luck! They're coming. Why, look! Here's one now!

I think it's fair enough. The Realms Rebuilt update is about as close to a relaunch as you get in live games - the cute callback to Final Fantasy XIV's "A Realm Reborn" being no co-incidence - so a re-review is entirely justified.

There's supposed to be a whole raft of entirely new content but as yet I've seen almost none of it so this is going to be a very first impression: character creation, the opening scenario and the basic tutorial up to the point when Puck (For it is he.) deems you ready to step into the first new, handcrafted, story-rich realm. 

That's about it so far, even though Steam tells me I've played for just over three hours, which seems really high. It felt more like two but I don't think it was because the gameplay was so scintillating the hours just zipped by. The difference is more likely accounted for by the length of time it took me to get my "old" character copied to the offline client. It looks as though Steam was counting every minute of that little escapade.

Anyone got a torch?

I could easily fill a whole post with all the fuss and bother but I don't see why anyone else should have to suffer, even vicariously. All I'll say is that the process is convoluted and messy and really ought to have been made much simpler. It does at least work, though, so there's that.

After I'd managed to get my character successfully transferred to what's now known as "Legacy Mode", the client-based, offline version of the former game that will never receive any more updates, I found myself wondering why I'd bothered. I stopped playing that character because I'd lost interest in what there was left to do in the game. If there's never going to be anything else, why should I care if I can still play that version of the game or not?

I guess the reason rests in those hundred-plus hours I spent there. It just seems wasteful to throw it all away. I might not ever play that character again but I'll probably log her in now and then just to say Hi so I appreciate that Inflexion took the trouble to make that possible. They very easily could have not bothered. This is still Early Access, after all. Wipes were always a possibility. I'm sure it'll be in the EULA somewhere.

Once I had my past safely archived, I swapped back to the present (And maybe the future.) with the regular client, something that was also more awkward than it should have bee. I suspect that's a function of Steam that Inflexion can't do a lot about, though. It looks like they've had to finesse thngs just to get two versions of the game up at the same time. Legacy Mode is masquerading as a beta. 

Then I set about making a new character. That took a while but not for any problematic reasons.

They shall not pass! For a given value of "they", that is.

I couldn't see much different in character creation but I thought I probably ought to go back and refresh my memory by reading what I said last time. Just about everything I said then applies now so I won't rehash it all except to say I still have no clue why there's all that rigmarole about birthdays and ancestors. It never did seem to mean anything but it's all still there. 

Whether it will have any added significance in the new, narrative-focused Nightingale I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I bet it doesn't, though. It looks to me like someone's clever idea they just won't give up on even though it never quite went anywhere. Kill your darlings. It's sound advice.

There was one thing that went differently this time but it was entirely by chance. The first step in character creation gives you a basic face to work with and the one I got reminded me a little of Sabrina Teitelbaum (Aka Blondshell, if you want to go the Blondie/Debbie Harry singer-is-the-band route.) It might just have been because I watched the Deceptacon video from Friday's post immediately before I logged in. Or possibly it was because I'd watched it about half a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours. Not that I'm obsessed with it or anything...

Whatever the reason, I decided I'd try to make my character look as much like her as possible, which took a while. I couldn't get the chin right - there just didn't seem to be a slider that would do it - and none of the longer hair styles came with a central parting but overall I wasn't displeased with the final result. 

My photo-reference and the final result. That's the closest together the eyes will go, the roundest I could get the chin and one of only two longer hairstyles available, neither of which has a central parting. I actually forgot about the eyebrows altogether and the eyes ought to be a darker blue. Other than that...

I did consider naming her Sabrina Teitelbaum, which would be an excellent name for a Nightingale character, given it sounds like it is one already, but I thought that really might be crossing a line . So I called her Califa Mortensen instead. She looks both Californian and Scandinavian so it seemed to fit.

Once that was all sorted out, I logged in and found myself in a very dark cave. I don't remember it  from the original game but I suppose it might have been there. If it was, though, it must have been a lot better-lit because I definitely don't remember being completely blind at the start of the game. I couldn't see a bloody thing!

Puck, our unreliable narrator with the orotund vowels, popped up and told me to follow the sound of his voice but then he immediately stopped talking, which I thought was very unlike him. I blundered around in the dark trying to find where he'd gone, got jumped by a bunch of Bound (Zombies to the uninitiated.), got confused in the dark trying to turn around in the narrow corridors to fight them off and promptly got clawed to death. 

Not the most encouraging of starts but possibly not entirely unintended either, given what happened next. After I'd revived, exacted revenge on my killers and managed through sheer luck to stumble into Puck, he pointed me at a portal he told me would take me out of the cave. Thank god! Daylight at last!

Don't tempt me...

Yeah... nope.  I was very annoyed to find myself ported to somewhere just as gloomy if not more so. I was about to curse all developers who think darkness equals atmosphere when Puck handed me a card and told me to put it in the machine next to him. I did as he said and suddenly the gloom vanished, the sky turned blue and the sun came out.

Granted, it was an impressive piece of scene-setting and a clever way to demonstrate how cards can be used to change the environment but was it worth fifteen minutes of frustration in the dark? I don't think so. If this was a brand-new game I might well have consigned it to the recycle bin before I got to the punchline.

That said, it seems quite likely that the cave isn't supposed to be quite as dark as I found it. A while later, when I reached the settlement where the NPCs stand around waiting to hand out the missions, I was more than somewhat irked to find they'd chosen another subterranean pit of gloom to hang out in. They gave me some spiel about it being safer down there but it cut no ice with me.

Those caves were even darker than the last lot, so dark I literally couldn't see where to go. I couldn't even see the steps leading down. Frustration sent me to the Settings to see if there was anything I could do to make it lighter. 

I wasn't expecting much joy there. I haven't seen a gamma slider in a very long time. But Nightingale has one.

Gamma to the max.

I slammed it all the way to the right and suddenly I could see normally again. I think that's probably what underground is supposed to look like. Unfortunately, when I emerged from the cavern back into the sunlight it was like someone had let off a magnesium flare in my face so I had to push the slider a ways back to the left again. I suspect that slider is going to be doing a lot of work in the days ahead.

Lighting aside, the rest of the visuals seemed much the same. Character models stil feel slightly off and no-one seems to have thought about adding any idling animations yet, which sometimes makes me feel I'm looking at a very clever automaton rather than an actual human being. 

There was some evidence of the new, hand-crafted scenery off in the distance but the bits I was walking around in felt very familiar. The game now sets you down in an Abeyance realm, meaning it's relatively safe to go exploring. It's a large zone with a lot of points of interest marked on the map, so I guess if you wanted to go off script and ignore the story prompts you could settle down and amuse yourself there for quite a while.

Speaking of the map, it seems to have had a quality-of-life pass. There's annotation now to tell you what some of the POIs are for, not just where they are. It also has the relevant locations for at least some of the missions marked on it.

I know where the bodies are buried.

The first thing the new main questline asks you to do is go find some tools. They're all handily marked on the map but since they're also all right next to the only obvious path that isn't quite the boon it first seems. There are a dozen "treasures" you're supposed to go find as well, which I thought, somewhat goulishly, were going to be on the corpses of Realmwalkers who didn't make it home. They're actually just lying about and they're all marked on the map too, or they appear there once you get the quest. It's defintely an improvement

Everything I've done so far has been pretty much a tutorial and at these very early stages it's all been extremely straightforward. Puck pretty much tells you he isn't going to let you go anywhere until you've learned the absolute basics so that's what I've been doing. Gathering mats, making tools, claiming a base. All the traditional tropes of the genre.

As I said the last time, the basic survival gameplay loop is pretty much bullet-proof by now. If you ever enjoyed it at all, chances are you'll enjoy it again, whenever and wherever you encounter it. It's obvious why these games have been so overwhelmingly successful - they pare that old Skinner Box/Dopamine hit combo down to its core and then absolutely ladle it on. It just works, at a back-brain level that's very hard to resist.

The last thing you'd call it, though, would be exciting. Compelling, immersive, addictive, any of those but thrilling, exhillarating, surprisng? Nope. Not a chance.

Maybe a little more of this, a little less "Go pick up that second-hand mining pick"?

The original introduction, as I remember it, did go a little further in that direction. I seem to recall Puck instilling some sense of urgency into the process as he insisted you experience all three major biomes before choosing one to settle down in. I seem to remember there being some actual plot and an element of danger that did something to pull me into the game.

There's none of that here. This time it's all far more streamlined and considerably less intense. I spent a couple of hours doing pretty much nothing and it's clear I could double or treble that without gettin the feeling I'm going to miss out on anything important or that anything rests on my getting my act together.

Maybe Nightingale is going to re-pitch itself as some kind of cosy base-builder. It certainly has the chops for it. Or maybe once I follow Puck's next instruction and cross the Abeyance realm in search of a way out into the Realms the narrative will pick up pace and I'll start to feel like something's actually happening. 

As for the structural changes, I'm not wholly on top of all of them as yet. I haven't encountered any of the new pets, for example, just the good old dachsund, who I made it a priority to invite into my home. (No sign of my old Twitch drop dog or any of my other Twitch rewards, though. I asume those didn't make it through to the New Nightingale.)

As for the crafting revamp, rather baldly re-badged as "Progression", it seems like a sideways move at best but maybe it'll grow on me. It is certainly a lot tidier and better-presented but also quite a bit less evocative. The original may have been chaotic but it also felt aspirational. This new one looks a bit too much like a work schedule for my tastes.

An example from the new crafting Progression tree.

I think they must also have done away with the system whereby you had to visit all kinds of NPCs scattered throughout the realms to buy most of the blueprints. Now it looks like all of that happens in the UI which, once again, is a lot tidier and more convenient but also considerably less interesting.

The one new addition I was really keen to try out doesn't appear to be available at this early stage of the game at all. I couldn't find the "Glamour Station", the new device that lets you swap the stats of one piece of gear onto the look of another (So you don't have to go around looking like one of those scarecrows even Wurzel Gummidge wouldn't be seen with.) anywhere in the Progression tree at all. [Edit: I found it! It's in the Structures tab, Tier Two. It requires a whole bunch of stuff I won't be able to get for quite a while but it's a worthwhile goal to aim for.]

There seems to be very little information available as yet but from the little I was able to glean I have the impression it relies on tokens dropped by mobs, which seems like an unecessary complication. Changing your appearance seems like something that really ought to be a UI option.

Anyway, there's no need to speculate further on things I haven't had the chance to try out for myself yet. I already know I'm going to be carrying on with the game. It feels both familiar and fresh, which is a nice combination. I wasn't expecting to be playing Nightingale again but it looks like that's what's going to happen.

If I do, you can expect to read about it here. You can take that as either a threat or a promise. Up to you!

Pardon My French

I probably ought to be posting about the Nightingale revamp today but I forgot all about it until I saw Azuriel's post so I won't be doing that. I have the update downloading now, all 28Gb of it so maybe tomorrow. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and finish the Covers post I keep talking about. 

I went through all the possibles this morning and narrowed it down to ten or twelve good ones so all I have left to do is put them into some kind of order, write some words, find them on YouTube, embed them, change the sizes, do the header ...

I might have left this a bit late. I'd better get on with it.

Les Cactus - The Last Shadow Puppets

(Jacques Dutronc cover)

I regret not getting into the Arctic Monkeys a lot sooner than I did and I regret missing out on the Last Shadow Puppets even more. Still, better late than never, eh? I'm not sure if it's Alex Turner or Miles Kane who has the great taste in covers but they did this and they did This Is Your Life by the Glaxo Babies, who I used to go see play locally when I was still a teenager (Just about...) and whio I thought I'd never hear covered by anyone, ever. We've had that one before or it'd be here now. (Don't say that. You know why.) 

They also covered I Want You/She's So Heavy by some band called the Beatles but I guess even that has a kind of hipster cred - I mean, it's hardly Hey Jude, is it?

Miles Kane is also partly responsible for one of my top ten favorite Lana del Rey tunes, Dealer, which comes from what's supposed to have been an album's-worth of songs they recorded together. Every bloody Lana out-take and demo leaks except the ones you really, really want to hear, right?

Les Cactus - Jacque Dutronc

I'm not going to paste in all the  originals full-size for these but there are a few I don't want to throw away on just a link. Also, fair warning, there are quite a lot of French acts coming up. Maybe I should just front-load them. Yes, I think that's best.

It all started when I looked up something by Serge Gainsbourg and ended up down one of those notorious YouTube rabbit holes that are so damn easy to fall into and sometimes so revelatory. The internet in general and YouTube in particular has made it possible, easy even, to shake prejudices that otherwise I would have taken with me to the grave. I mean, who knew French pop before Daft Punk was good?

Les Cactus - Vanessa Paradis

(Jacques Dutronc cover. Oh. You knew that.)

Good things always come in threes, right? More to the point, Vanessa tees up the next one perfectly.

Joe Le Taxi - Petite Meller 

(Vanessa Paradis cover)

A fan-made video, using a whole bunch of clips from other Petite Meller videos, which is one way to do it. Probably means that this will be a dead link in a year but no-one is ever going to come back and try to click on it, so so what? Anyway, the entire internet will be dead by then if you listen to some people, so so so what, what? Eh? Eh?!

Ces Bottes Sont Fait Pour Marcher - Muguette  

(Nancy Sinatra cover)

Okay, I admit it. This is what I think of when I think of french pop music from the sixties. Kitsch covers of kitsch songs or kitsch originals that sound remarkably like songs you already know. Which is how I found Muguette.

As I was tumbling down my rabbit hole I happened to hear Ne Fais Pas Le Tete by Katty Line and I thought to myself well that sounds familiar, which led to me to wonder if any of the many French Ye Ye girls had actually covered Nancy's classic stomper and of course they had.

Ce N'est Pas Un Vie - Pussy Cat  

(Small Faces cover)

I thought this sounded remarkably familiar, too, which it should do, seeing as it's the Small Faces' Sha La La La Lee with the title changed. And quite possibly the rest of the words, too. 

When I was about sixteen or seventeen I once did the lighting for a school dance. There was a band playing and a friend of mine was in it. He later played keyboards and did some of the vocals for the band I was in, although only for our first three gigs, which was how we got a review that compared us (Inaccurately but favorably.) to Capt. Beefheart but for this band, which I think was his older brother's outfit, he was on drums. I was in the wings, supposedly working the lights but actually doing something entirely more interesting with a girl I ended up going out with for about two weeks. My pal Chris, who was also doing the lights, had to do the whole thing. He was quite good about it, considering.

The band played mostly covers, as you'd expect at a school dance. They did Sha La La La Lee. Can't help but think of that night every time I hear the song. Even in French.

All Shook Up - Camp Claude  

(Elvis Presley cover)

Transitioning smoothly out of the francophone pop phenomenon by way of a band whose origins I still haven't entirely figured out. They certainly have french connections. I suspect they might be French-Canadian. I'd look it up but where's the fun in that?

I thought I'd heard all their stuff but there was an EP I missed at the end of last year and it's all covers. All of them great, too. Could have used any of them but this is the one with the video so that's the one we're having. 

They seem to have been doing this one for a while, too. There's a live TV performance from 2017 I like but not as well as this.

Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) - Oktavia  

(Cover ... Your guess is as good as mine.)

This is where things get messy. This is a cover but not only had I never heard the original before, I'm not entirely sure what the original is. I came across it while I was doing a bit of "research" on AI music, which this isn't, not really, but even before I got started I found myself deep in a subculture about which I know a little but understand almost nothing.

The singer is a vocaloid, meaning it's produced artificially. How? Don't look at me. I don't know! I mean, I've read quite a bit about it all  and I know who (What?) Hatsune Miku is but I'm still not at all clear on how it actually works. 

There are lots of variants on Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) on YouTube but I haven't had much luck working out which is the ur-version. Plenty of them have millions of views so that doesn't help. Most of them have a name or a pair of names appended to the end (GUMI, GUMI&Rin, GIgaP&Shooze...) but I get the impression at least some of those are the names of the vocaloids used in the cover. 

Also, I'm not sure cover is the right word. It seems to me these are more like remixes. Further research is required but if anyone is already deep in this and wants to school me on how it works, the comments are right down there.

These Days - Miley Cyrus 

 (Nico cover... or is it?)

On the subject of what constitutes a cover, here's an interesting case study. This was posted on a YouTube account by the name of MileyCyrusFans with the rubric (Nico Cover) appended. And it is, in the sense that Nico recorded the song on her first solo album, Chelsea Girls. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that most people who know the song would think of Nico in associoation with it before they thought of anyone else but she didn't write it.

Jackson Browne, who plays guitar on the album, did. He wrote it specifically for Nico. Astonishingly, given the elegaic feeling of looking back in time to an earlier version of yourself that it so perfectly evokes, he was just sixteen at the time. Nico, of course, has always been older than god.

Nico's album came out in 1967 and Browne didn't get around to releasing his own version until 1973. @MileyCyrusFans acknowledges Browne's authorship in the details but that knowledge clearly doesn't make it a Jackson Browne cover as far as they're concerned.

To make things even more complicated, the arrangement Nico used, which Wikipedia credits to her, has been followed by many subsequent artists, including Miley, but when Jackson Browne recorded his version he used an arrangement originally created by Gregg Allman, earleir in 1973. But things gets fuzzier yet.

Wikipedia may be wrong about Nico being responsible for the arrangement in the first place. I was skeptical, thinking that it sounded an awful lot like the kind of arrangements John Cale was doing for his early solo albums like Paris 1919. Cale was in the studio, played on most of the tracks and wrote or co-wrote some too but he wasn't credited as either Producer or Arranger. Those roles fell to Tom Wilson and Larry Fallon respectively but Fallon's distinctive string and flute arrangements were done at Wilson's request and overdubbed later without Nico's knowledge or agreement.

So, when Miley covers the song, is she covering Jackson Brown or Nico? And if Nico wrote neither the tune nor the lyrics and possibly didn't have much to do with how the song turned out other than the way she sang it, is her version a cover, even though it had never been recorded before? Are all songs sung by singers who aren't also credited at least as co-composers covers?

No, of course they aren't! That would be silly. Let's move on.

Let's Get Lost -  Fontaines DC  

(Chet Baker cover)

They get better and better, don't they? Give them another couple of years and I reckon they could make an album their fans hate as much as Arctic Monkey's fans hated Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. And it'll have taken them half as long to get there.

Probably should have a couple of fast ones to finish with. Send everyone out into the cold night air sweating and buzzing.

Deceptacon - Blondshell  

(Le Tigre cover)

I fucking love Blondshell! I fucking love Deceptacon! I don't love the mix but you have to take what you can get when it comes to audience recordings.I'm just happy I get to see and hear it at all.

Deceptacon - Le Tigre

I'm not hiding that behind a link!

Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've?)

 Le Butcherettes  

(Buzzcocks cover)

Remember last time, when I posted Le Butcherettes cover of Miley's Wrecking Ball and I said I had another by them that was even better? That was it!

And we're done. Managed to get through less than a fifth of the covers I had bookmarked. I guess I'd better do another one of these pretty soon...

Back To The Future

After the flurry of recent name-drops, on the blog and in comments elsewhere, I'm sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I am, once again, playing Star Wars: the Old Republic. Although, as yet, I have to use the term "playing" advisedly. I haven't actually done anything that felt like play so far.

It didn't take a huge push to get me interested again. Since I stopped, several years ago now, I've thought surprisingly often about giving the game another go. There always seemed to be other things to do, though, and besides it seemed like too much trouble to get it all set up. (Ironic foreshadowing ftw!)

The trigger for me to actually do something about it at last was pulled by Yeebo's post on the game but also by Shintar's reply to my comment, in which she reminded me that I did actually seem to quite enjoy myself when I was last there, something I was aware of in a general fashion even though I'd struggle to bring any specifics in mind. I was almost there and then the final shove came from a post at AI MMORPG News that I read this morning.

AI MMORPG News was one of the two highly controversial AI-generated blogs that participated in Blaugust this year. I can't actually remember what the other one was. I know I never even saw it, much less read anything that got posted there. The AI news blog, though, I read every day. I'm sure it will annoy some readers to hear that I found the posts generally quite a good read and also reasonably informative, which is why I added it to my blog roll when Blaugust came to an end. 

Can anyone smell sulfur?

One of my main complaints about most pro/semi-pro MMORPG coverage of recent times has been how snarky and cynical it often is. I know that's rich coming from someone who sometimes satirises company press releases and official statements for the purpose of so-called humor but I hold personal blogs to a very different standard than supposedly professional news sites and I like my gaming news as straight and un-quirky as it comes.

AI-generated text has a tendency to be far too gosh-wow and gee willikers for any rational human being to feel entirely comfortable reading it but after years of trying to extract a few facts from what too-often appears to be someone's attempt to hone their routine for Friday's open mic night, I'd take sickeningly sweet over solipsistically sneery any day. If nothing else, I find saccharine praise far easier to filter out and ignore.

The AI blog posts every day with no particular agenda that I can ascertain and I always read it with interest. Today it came up with one of those listicles much favored by sites seeking to harvest clicks: The Top MMORPGs on Steam. 

For some reason it decided to stop at seven, which I very much doubt any human intern given the thankless task would have done. Star Wars: the Old Republic was not one of the picks, which I found strange. World of Warcraft was, though, which I found even stranger. Had I missed a major development or was it just one of those infamous AI hallucinations?

Neither, as it turns out. Blizzard have not yet become so desperate as to share some of their enormous yet possibly dwindling revenue stream with Valve but of course you can link your Battle.Net account with Steam and set WoW as an external game to be played through the platform. It bends the definition of "on Steam" a little but I don't think it breaks it.

Who said the graphics were old-fashioned? This looks just like The 5th Element!

Final Fantasy XIV, however, which is also on the AI's list, is fully playable on Steam, something I either never knew or had forgotten. So is Elder Scolls Online, ditto and ditto. I found that out when I fact-checked the whole list and it made me think. In some cases, like Guild Wars 2, playing through Steam means starting afresh; in others, like ESO, you can link the accounts and (I'm guessing...) carry on playing your existing characters.

Given that I was only yesterday musing about the possibility of starting over in games I used to play, either option sounded valid. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how convenient it would be to have most, if not all, my MMORPGs on one platform. The me of even five years ago would be outraged but I'm not that guy any more. 

As I said, I was somewhat surprised not to see SW:tOR on the AI's list. I'd had it in my head that the game had long been available through Steam and it would certainly seem to be one of the better-known games in the genre. I checked and yes, it very definitely is available on the platform, where it enjoys a Very Positive rating. 

I couldn't remember whether I'd played the game through Steam myself or whether I'd used a standalone client so checked that too. It seemed I hadn't played on Steam because there was no sign of the game in my library. 

Then again, there was no sign of it anywhere else, either. I couldn't find a client on any of my hard drives or an icon on my desktop so I have to assume I uninstalled it in one of my Marie Kondo moments.

Do I know you? Nope, don't believe I do.

All the more reason, then to re-install it through Steam. Or install it, I guess. Whatever. 

But first I had to check whether that would mean starting over from scratch or whether I could link my EA account and pick up from where I left off. I did remember that EA handed the game on to Broadsword a while back  - I even wrote a post about it, in which I speculated about coming back to try the game under its new management - but I figured the account I had would still be with EA. 

It was not. As it happens, my EA account is already linked with Steam for some reason but there's no sign there that I ever played SW:tOR at all. Fortunately, Broadsword have all my details safely in hand. I don't remember doing anything to pass the details across so presumably the transfer went through on the nod.

I did a bit of research on what I needed to do to link the accounts. The advice I found was less than clear but the gist seemed to be that just adding the game to my library and installing it through Steam ought to take me to a Broadsword login the first time I pressed Play. From there, I'd be able to sign in using my old account details to complete the handshake.

It kind of worked. Eventually. After a lot more messing around, googling, reading Reddit threads, cutting and pasting some code into the Steam folder... the usual sort of thing that anyone wanting to go back to play an aging game they stopped playing years ago is going to be perfectly happy to do. It took me about forty-five minutes altogether. It really didn't help that one of the authorisation screens uses borderless black tick boxes on a black background - just sorting that out took at least half the time.

Oh, so that's who I am!

Finally, I was able to log in. And there were my characters. Two of them. Neither of whom I remembered at all. 

It is very unusual indeed for me to come back to an MMORPG I played for months and not even being able to remember the name of my character when I see it. It may even be unique to SW:tOR. Apparently I did fifty-nine levels on someone called Fentara Michington, which doesn't even sound like a name I would make up, and thirty-nine on someone by the name of Coyenne, which sounds only slightly more plausible. 

I said in reply to Shintar yesterday that "I can remember precisely nothing about any of the story in SW:tOR from when I played" but even when I wrote it I was thinking "but I imagine it might come back to me if I started playing again.". Well, it hasn't. Nothing much about how to play the game has come back to me either. 

Steam tells me I've played for 68 minutes and as I said earlier about 45 of those were spent trying to link the accounts and log in. The rest were taken up with staring at the UI then going through all the menus and pressing buttons to see what they did. Without a great deal of success.

I wonder what this button does?

I began by trying to find some way off whatever space station I'd found Fentara on. I had three tracked quests on screen so I thought I'd go do one of those but I couldn't work out how to get off the damn orbital. I tried the map but it just made things even more confusing. 

That was about the one thing I did remember from before - I never could work out how to get from one place to another without it taking forever. I'm so used to being able to just open a map and click on something to be ported there instantly or at the very least to be ported to somewhere I can get a ride to where I want to go that having to pass through the places inbetween on the way seems positively archaic.

By dint of pressing everything in every drop-down menu I did manage to find my way back to my apartment, which seemed barely furnished and not at all like anywhere someone might be living. Great views though. I also managed to get myself thrown out of the game altogether onto some selection screen that threatened to take me into one of the expansions instead. I chose to log out and back in again rather than end up somewehere I couldn't get back from.

After much trial and error I finally worked out where the elevators were on the map and by a process of elimination found my way to the spaceport on whatever planet the station was orbiting. Or at least I think that's where I went.

What I actually did was click on the door of the only ship that had one that did anything, then tried both options until I got to some place that looked like it might be somewhere I could get to somewhere else from. 

Left hand down a bit...

I looked at the map and spotted some docking areas labelled with Class names, Smuggler being one of them. I had the vaguest idea that might have been the class I originally chose, although when I checked against Fentara's name it said Scoundrel. Rude!

I had a dim inkling Scoundrel might have been a sub-class choice at some point so I made my way to the Smuggler bay, which is not a thing you'd imagine would be advertised as clearly as that, if at all, and when I got there I repeated my previous tactic of finding the only ship with an interactable door and hammering on it.

It was my ship. I got lost in there, too. I met a Wookie who wanted to talk to me. I couldn't remember where I'd met him or why he was on my ship but I talked to him anyway. Apparently, I said something he disapproved of but my standing with him went up anyway. Must be a Wookie thing.

There was a robot hanging around, too - a droid in the jargon, I guess - just standing in a corridor. He didn't have anything to say so I just left him there. Didn't rememeber him either.

After a few minutes aimlessly wandering the halls I somehow managed to find what I took to be the Bridge or the Cockpit or the Flight Deck or whatever it's called. There were no obvious controls but there were three chairs so I tried sitting in all of them and, like Goldilocks, I didn't find the one that was just right until the end.

From the command chair I managed to find the planet I had a mission for on the map  The mission step I was on actually said "Fly your ship to..." whatever the planet was called. I've already forgotten. It began with O, I know that much. 

Ah, it's called Oricon. I just read the description. Looks like we're in for some "fun" there.

So I did that and got out of the ship. Or, rather, I watched a cut scene where my character told the ship's onboard computer to set her down and pick her up later. By that point I would have been fine with everything being handled in a cut scene. I didn't feel I was in much control of the situation anyway.

Outside, the planet I'd arrived on appeared to be on fire. Maybe it was Hell. It felt like it could be. It was also time for me to go and start making lunch so I decided to quit while I was, if not exactly ahead, at least slightly ahead of where I had been when I started.

As a returning player, I have had a lot better welcomes back than that. Unless I missed something, the game made absolutely no reference to the fact that it had been several years since my last login. In a way it fitted in nicely with what I have to say is now the extremely old-school feel of the game. 

These days, almost every other MMORPG I can think of, even the old ones, takes its cues from the F2P imports, gach agames and mobile titles that do everything but kill an actual fatted calf whenever you come back after more than a day or two away. SW:tOR clearly does not care one whit whether you play the game or not. In a weird way it's quite refreshing to be taken so utterly for granted but I'm not sure how wise a choice it is, commercially.

I will persist, despite the lack of bunting and presents. Having made it to the right planet I feel I ought at least to try to carry out the mission I went there to do. Whatever it is. I have no idea. Probably going to involve murdering someone, I imagine. Usually does.

I just hope I can remember which way round to hold the gun.

Same Same But Different

I was going to take (another) day off from posting because I was out for much of the day and I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to talk about but then I was idly scrolling through all the Amazon Prime Gaming and Steam games I haven't played (or installed) yet and I happened to notice two or three occurrences that looked like they might tie together into a quick post. So here we are.

It's something of a follow-on, thematically at least, from the post I wrote on Monday about playing the gaming field and not staying loyal to a single game, a topic and a concept I'm still mulling. With Solasta out of the way, I've been in search of a game to fill that pause-friendly, tactics-heavy, somewhat cerebral slot and I was browsing the possibilities to see if I already had something that would fit the bill or whether I'd need to find something to buy.

To forestall the inevitable suggestion, obviously the best choice would be Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm definitely not spending that much money. I may see if I can get someone to give it me for my birthday or Christmas although if there's one major downside to  digital distribution it's that it renders video games entirely unsuitable as gift recommendations for aging relatives. Until then it'll have to be something on a budget or preferably free.

While I was dithering, I took a side-turn and started playing Crowns and Pawns, a classic point & click adventure I bought on sale earlier this year. It ticks the pause and brain boxes but as I discovered, after an hour of mostly enjoyable puzzle-solving, it does absolutely nothing to scratch that tactical itch. I'll definitely keep on with it because it seems like a really good game - just not the game I'm looking for right now.

I also tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall, a tactical rpg I picked up at 90% off recently, which ought to have been exactly what I was after but very much wasn't. While it absolutely nailed the tactical elements as well as being fully pausable, it failed to engage my interest in either the characters or the plot. The minute size of the characters and the lack of anything much in the way of visual effects had the unfortunate effect of making the combat seem perfunctory, even though it probably has at least as much going on as the games I'm comparing it with unfavorably. I might give it another go but I suspect I won't.

With nothing meeting my exacting standards, I found myself idly scanning the news along the top of the Steam screen, which was where I was reminded of a couple of items I'd read earlier, along with some new news I hadn't seen before. Two games I'm kinda-sorta still playing are on the cusp of turning themselves inside out in the hope of attracting interest and players and it occurred to me that, if I wanted to see how that went, I'd probably have to start both of them over from the beginning.

Starting over seems to be a recurring theme just now. I wrote recently that I'm on hiatus from Once Human because I haven't quite decided if I want to start afresh on a Seasonal server, either right now or as soon as a different scenario becomes available. Now it seems I can add both Nightingale and New World to that decision tree.

I hadn't really considered the quasi-relaunch of New World, under the New World: Aeternum brand to be something that would necessitate a clean start. I suppose it doesn't, per se, but having read Tyler Edwards' piece on his experience of the press version of the upcoming beta it seems fairly clear that there's at least an opportunity to begin again anew.

The Nightingale marketing department, meanwhile, is urgently attempting to explain to worried punters that that the upcoming Realms Rebuilt update, a rewrite so extensive I have seen it described as a relaunch, will allow players to clone their current online characters to the offline version of the game. 

This, apparently, will take place in something called Legacy Mode, the explanation for engaging with which requires a very complicated FAQ, which I have skimmed but don't yet fully understand. It appears that as of tomorrow, when I next log into Nightingale, all my character slots will be empty but somehow I will be able to recover my "old" characters and play them offline, even if I haven't done anything to prepare for the wipe.

I have to say all of this came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't even realise the update constituted a full character wipe. If I was currently playing Nightingale I might have been a tad miffed. Since I'm not, though, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity to start the game again from the beginning.

But is it an opportunity I want to take? I enjoyed both New World (Almost 250 hours played.) and Nightingale (Over 100.) but do I want to do it all over again, slightly differently? 

I certainly didn't get much value out of My Time At Sandrock, which I bought at a very early stage, while it was still in early development, then ended up hardly playing at all. I jumped on it because I'd really enjoyed My Time At Portia but it transpired that playing what turned out to be a very similar game (At least at that early stage of development.) didn't light the same fires.

Now I see that the My Time crew are trailing a Kickstarter for a third game in the series, My Time At Evershine and for no good reason whatsoever I find myself quite excited by the prospect all over again. I have at least learned my lesson. I won't be pledging or buying in to Early Access. Even so, when the game finally arrives in a full-featured, launch version, I wouldn't bet against me buying it anyway

A few years ago - okay quite a few years ago - starting over in games and playing through the same content only slightly differently was pretty much standard operating procedure for me. As my EQ25 series is more than amply demonstrating, I used to make a lot of characters in the same MMORPGs, especially when there were different starting areas.

Yeebo posted today about the attraction of all those very different class stories in Star Wars: the Old Republic. I commented to say that the sheer number of stories had actually put me off the game and it did to an extent but I'm sure it would have the opposite effect had the game been around back in my EverQuest days. I'd have taken it as an opportunity to play lots of characters without having to go through the exact same content every time.

The question I'm asking myself, as I look at the revamps of New World and Nightingale and the possibility of a third My Time game, is whether I still find the prospect of rolling a new character in the same game as appealing as it once was. It's a question that applies, not equally but to a significant degree, to my search for a suitable replacement for the turn-based, tactical combat titles I'm craving.

To some extent, every return to a familiar genre or style of game could be said to be tantamount to playing the same content with a different skin. It's just a matter of degree. There's a considerable appeal to the familiar and the more I think about starting over, the more I remember how much I used to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if any of that enjoyment is still there to be had. I could even give SW:tOR another run. 

Okay, let's not get carried away...

#10 - Osterberg - Born 13 May 2000 - 6 days 16 hours

Before we get started, I feel I really ought to apologize for the abomination you see directly above. I have no idea what Osterberg is wearing but clearly he ought not to be allowed out in public dressed like that. He looks like a still from a slasher flick with the polarities reversed.

And he's such a nice chap, too - for an Iksar Shadowknight. Arguably the most evil class and race combo you can get in EverQuest, although I wouldn't say it out loud anywhere near Neriak. Dark Elves have a rep to keep up.

It might be quite surprising, looking back, to hear it took me exactly a month after the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, to get around to making an Iksar, the new race that came with it. I can remember exactly why it happened. It was because I was worried that if I made one right away I'd find it too distracting. At the time, I was on a break from Rachel, my druid, after her disastrous introduction to the new continent but I was planning on getting back on the Druid horse and I felt having a whole new city and no fewer than four fresh starting zones to explore might pull focus from that plan.

Ruins of Kunark is considered by some to be the best expansion for any MMORPG ever and while there's always going to be a great deal of partiality in any such assessment, it's hard to argue with the sheer scale of the thing. Arriving less than a year after the launch of EverQuest itself, RoK all but doubled the size of the game. It came so feature-complete it could have operated quite effectively as a sequel, let alone an expansion.

Instead of bolting the new content on to the top of the level range, as has become the custom for most expansions in most MMORPgs ever since, Kunark simply duplicated the entire base game in a different setting; specifically a jungle. It came with a huge, new city, Cabilis, big enough to need splitting into two separate zones, East and West, in which lived a new, playable race, the reptilian Iksar. 

In the classic language of Dungeons and Dragons, Iksar were Lawful Evil, with a complicated, hierarchical society largely dominated by Necromancers and Shadowknights. There were other class choices available to them, most notably the new Monk class, which turned out to be extremely popular, but I kept my own monkish experiments for the PvP server, Rallos Zek, about which we will hear no more, mostly because whoever my character there was, he no longer exists.

I decided to make an Iksar SK rather than a Monk because... No, at this remove, your guess is as good as mine. Possibly I'd enjoyed the Necromancer and fancied something similar but more robust. Who knows?

One thing I do remember is that I was very impressed by the starting options available to new Iksars. They had four full-size starting zones! What the heck were the devs thinking?

The zones were Field of Bone, Swamp of No Hope, Warsliks Woods and Lake of Ill Omen. Strictly speaking, I suppose only the first was a pure starter zone, with mobs tapping out around level 20. The others all had content that went right into the low 30s. But all four could be accessed directly from Cabilis and all began at Level 1. It was perfectly possible to level up in any one of them or in any combination.

If you could find your way out of the damned city, that is. I never could, not without going wrong half a dozen times first. 

Eventually I became quite fond of Cabilis but for a long time I found it extremely frustrating. Not only was it a confusing maze of streets, it also had canals everywhere and more three-dimensionality than any of the original cities, even treetop Kelethin. There were ladders in Cabilis and you could climb them, which was just as well because when you fell in the canals that was the only way you were going to get out.

I don't remember a huge amount about hunting in any of the starting zones other than Field of Bone, where I spent most of the first ten or twelve levels. As you might guess from the name, FoB is full of undead, which worked out very nicely for a Shadowknight - or at least it did when they got spells at level 9. Until then it was all straight-up melee combat much like a warrior.

I know I got spells well before I decided I needed a change of scene. In fact, I got to the second set at level 15. By then, xp in Field of Bone was slowing down somewhat and it was a few years later because I hardly played Osterberg most of the time. He quickly became one of the many characters I was "working on", which meant I logged him in now and again, when I remembered, for bit of leveling before I rested him for another few months.

For most of my first decade in EverQuest I didn't just make a lot of characters, I played several in every session. I would routinely spend two or three hours on whoever I was supposed to be leveling at the time, then another thirty minutes or an hour or so each on  two or three others, often on different servers. It's no wonder it took me years to get any of them to the cap.

Osterberg got played non-stop for about two weeks, which seems to have been the limit of my attention span back then, after which he was mostly forgotten. He was stuck at level 15 for a very long time until finally I decided I'd had enough of Kunark and moved him to Antonica. In a way, it was a repeat of the Tarquinn episode, undertaken for much the same reason and with much the same result. 

I don't have any clear memories of the trip except that it was a lot easier because by then we'd had the Plane of Power expansion so getting from one continent to another was very straightforward. You just clicked on one of the new books that popped up on pedestals all across Norrath, particularly in starting zones, and ported yourself up to the Plane of knowledge. From there, you just needed to find the Portal for the city or zone you needed and port yourself back down again.

That got Osterberg out of Kunark but it didn't endear him to anyone in the old world, where Iksars are even more reviled than Trolls. Even Dark Elves won't tolerate them, mostly for reasons of religion, I believe. 

Unlike a Troll Shaman, though, an Iksar SK does have some options. They can use the bank by feigning death next to it - apparently even dead people can use a safety deposit box. Even better, they can turn into a skeleton, at which point most Dark Elves become quite comfortable with them and are more than happy to trade.

Or so the rumor has it. Osterberg wouldn't know. Back when he was in the leveling business, SKs didn't get Feign Death until level 30 and Shroud of Death not until fifty-five. But it didn't matter. He could always jog back to the book and port himself up to Plane of Knowledge, where everyone's money is good. Or use the Spires to go to the moon of Luclin, another egalitarian society.

One of the defining factors of Norrath is how its inhabitants became progressively less psychotic, less ready to kill strangers on sight, as the years rolled by. With the exception of the xenophobic Iksar, just about every subsequent outpost of civilization that revealed itself in an expansion was happy to open, if not its arms, then at least its banks and stores to outsiders. 

If I wanted to go back and play Osterberg now, which having written this I feel I just might, I could do it with little more difficulty than any of my more broadly-tolerated characters, always provided I took care not to stray into any of the unreconstructed pits of bigotry that pass for towns and cities in Antonica. Or the strongholds of Faydwer, either, obviously, although no-one goes where there are that many elves, not if they have any sense.

There's only one thing left to say about Osterberg and that's to tell how he got his name. I named him after Iggy Pop because Iggy does look kind of like a lizard and "Iggy" just sounds reptilian. Then, having thought of it, I decided Iggy was too obvious. Everyone would know why I'd picked it and I couldn't be having that!  So I borrowed from Iggy's real name, James Jewel Osterberg, instead.

Even then,I was sure someone would spot the reference and ask me about it. Of course, they never did. No-one ever does with any of the names I pick. In all the time I've played EQ, a few people have sent me tells saying they like the name of a character I'm playing but only one person has ever asked me why I chose it. 

That was when I was playing Osterberg but it had nothing to do with Iggy Pop. I got a message one day while I was playing him, asking me aout the name and when I explained how I'd come up with it, they clearly had no idea who I was talking about.

"Oh, I thought you might be a friend of mine. That's his name. Osterberg" was all they said and I never heard from them again. 

Social gaming, eh? It's so overrated.

Currently Playing...

Time for a quick update on what I'm playing, I guess. Because that's what we do here, right? 

Not sure I could explain to a space alien why it's what we do, even assuming it's anything a space alien would want to know, which seems unlikely, now I come to think about it. You'd imagine, if they'd come here all the way from Alpha Centauri, which always seems to be where most of them come from, any self-respecting space alien would have better things to do with their time than quiz random bloggers on why they keep telling everyone what games they're playing.

Or not playing, come to that. It's not like I'm keeping a tally but I'd have to guess I've read as many posts about what games someone has stopped playing as I have about those they still are. And that's not even getting into the count for games we're all thinking of playing!

So, what started all this introspection, if that's the word? ( I was going to say "nonsense" but I think Belghast has that one trademarked.) Well, if you really want to know it was Jeromai.

Jeromai's signal blinked back to life yesterday after a couple of years of silence, proving yet again how crucial it is never to remove anyone from your blog roll. Well, not anyone you would actually want to hear from again, that is...

The name of Jeromai's blog is Why I Game, which seemed exceptionally appropriate for his post on coming back to Guild Wars 2 after a long layoff. Among other things, he talks about coming home to a former MMORPG and indeed back to the corner of the blogosphere where he used to chat about such things. His conclusion is that you can't really come home to somewhere that was never really home in the first place, which really puts another layer on that overused line of Thomas Wolfe's. 

I have a seasick feeling I covered all that stuff here once before and anyway it's not what I wanted to talk about today. I'm a lot more interested in something I said in my reply to Jeromai's post (Well, there's a surprise...).

Looping around to those blogging about blogging discussions that always come up during Blaugust, I've mentioned a few times how I tend to just sit down and type to get a post going and how that sometimes means I end up writing something I wasn't planning. Like this, in fact.

It goes further than that.

Writing the way I do, not just in posts but in comments as well, sometimes means I hear myself saying things I had no idea I thought. It's not that unusual for me only to find out what I think about something when i read back what I've written. It's even more common for me to think I think one thing, only to discover, as I try to put it down in words, that I don't quite think that at all but something else entirely.

In this case, what I discovered when I replied to Jeromai is that right now I prefer not having a "main game", as I did for more than twenty years from the late 90s onwards. It's liberating. And relaxing. And more fun.

I remember how important it felt to have that one game, always an MMORPG, naturally, as the spine of my gaming anatomy. How unmoored and at sea I felt whenever I reached the end of my time with my game of choice at the time.

There were many times when I felt the urge to move on but it always seemed extremely important to have a new game to go to whenever I considered leaving an old one. Gaming was like serial monogamy back then. You stayed faithful to one game until you broke up, then you either began a new relationship with some other game you'd been eying up for months or you thrashed around desperately until you either swallowed your pride and went back to what you knew or somehow managed to convince yourself you'd fallen in love all over again with something else - anything else.

The life of an MMO gamer could all too easily descend into a series of intense, increasingly short-lived relationships or, if you prefer a less emotionally taxing metaphor, an endless skip across a line of ever-decreasing stepping stones, heading always into deeper water, farther form any safe shore. OK, that wasn't much more re-assuring.

It absolutely wasn't just me, either. It was the way it was for a lot of people. Leaving one MMORPG for another was reckoned a Big Deal. There used to be all kinds of talk about loyalty that seems positively delusional now: loyalty not to the people you might have been playing the games with but to the games themselves. As though they knew or cared.

Some of that still clings to the periphery of the hobby but the zealots and loyalists eem ever thinner on the ground. No-one cares as much and ironically that feels like progress to me. Or  perhaps I mean persepctive.

Even calling it a hobby is telling. No-one ever called it a "hobby" back then. It was a lifestyle as much as anything. Maybe even a calling, a vocation.

Now, it's a hobby. Maybe even a pastime. A bit of fun. If we're lucky, a lot of fun. Just not anything that really matters any more. That has to mean some kind of emotional growth, doesn't it?

It feels that way, to me, anyway. Or it does at the moment. In that comment to Jeromai I surprised myself when I said "I tend to get heavily into each as it comes, play for 50-100 hours then get caught up in the hype for a new one and move there instead to do it all again. I think it’s a vastly more healthy way to play games than getting stuck with one and just trying to keep convincing myself I like it because it’s familiar." 

It's true, though. And now I point it out to myself, I realise I've been doing it ever since I stopped playing GW2, which may have something to do with how loathe I am even to consider going back. I don't want to become one of those bitter vets who can't leave their old game alone even though they haven't played for years but sometimes the metaphor that comes to mind is less one of a relationship that soured than of a substance finally purged from the system. And you know how careful you have to be about those.

This blog has always been a record of my gaming infidelity, of course. I've played countless games, gotten excited by them, posted frenetically about their pleasures, then dropped them and moved on to the next. And often I've gone back, again and again. As with romantic relationships that turn into friendships, it's always good to keep in touch and hang out together occasionally. Sometimes, though, you have to make a clean break.

All of which is an extremely long and uneccessarily introspective introduction to a post that was going to be about my having completed the main questline and all the sub-quests added to Wuthering Waves for the Moonchasing Festival, about having done as much of Solasta as I think I'm ever going to and about why I'm not playing Once Human at all at the moment

I was full of praise for Wuthering Waves' first major update, when I wrote about it almost three weeks ago and I'm very pleased to say the high standard was maintained throughout. There's hours of content in the event, all of which I found involving and entertainning. The storytelling is solid, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is convincing and the mini-games are fun. 

I didn't run a timer but I would guess the whole thing took me six or eight hours to do, a great deal of which was watching and listening to scripted narrative of sufficient quality to hold my attention throughout. There was hardly any combat at all and the couple of set-pieces that did pop up were quite manageable even for someone as bad at the fighting part of the game as I am. (I'm really bad.)

The whole thing ended with an excellent, lengthy cut scene of the quality usually reserved for promotional trailers. Don't take my word for it, though. Take a look for yourself.

Of course, without the kind of parasocial relationships built up between player and NPCs over dozens of hours in game, the emotional impact is lost, but the production values still shine through. Wuthering Waves is a quality game.

So is Once Human as far as I can see, although even people who like it insist on describing it as "janky" and "full of bugs", neither of which has been my experience. I was fully intending to carry on with OH once the Season system came into operation but I just haven't and I can't even say why, for certain.

It would be neat to claim it had something to do with the way the Seasonal process derails progression but I'm playing Wuthering Waves still and that has absolutely the worst "progression" system I've seen in years. I probably ought to do a whole post about that but the tl:dr is that almost every reward and drop is some kind of consumable used to upgrade your character but as yet I haven't felt that upgrading any of them is something I much want to do. I just do the bare minimum I can get away with and then carry on enjoying all the excellent narrative content, most of which doesn't seem to care whether I've upgraded or not.

At the moment I'm sort of thinking about letting my server in OH expire, forcing me to Eternaland, then waiting for the next PVE scenario, whenever that is, before picking the game up again. By doing that, though, I feel there's a real danger I might just never get around to going back in any serious fashion at all. Once Human would then become yet another in my large pile of games I used to like but don't really think about any more. Which would be a shame.

And yet, I can't say I really care. That old loyalty to individual games that used to come so naturally is a lot harder to find, now. It burns hot still when the games are new but allow it to cool and it gets harder and harder to fan it back to life.

It seems much easier and a great deal more enjoyable to get excited al over again about something new. If there was a shortage of good games to try (Or, indeed, old ones to revisit.) then cultivating a loyalty to a specific title might make more sense. As it is, though, I feel the problem revolves more around finding the time to try all the interesting new possibilities than finding something to hang onto like a life-raft.

Which brings me to Solasta, about which I haven't really posted anything and now most probably never will. I've been playing it somewhat obsessively and with considerable pleasure for what Steam tells me is more than fifty hours but now I'm all but certain I'm done with it. 

A couple of nights ago I found myself unexpectedly in the midle of what felt like it had to be the grand finale, the big battle to decide the fate of the world. I was completely unprepared for it, both in terms of where I'd thought I was in the game and in the sense of being in a position to have any chance of succeeding. 

After the first couple of catastrophically unsuccessful attempts I did some googling and found that, yes, it was indeed the very last fight but also that, if I somehow managed to win, the game would literally flash up a Game Over screen and that would be that. I wouldn't even get to loot the corpses of my enemies.

That put a pretty large dampener on the prospect of completing the game at all but I still might hve tried because the comabt in Solasta is a lot of fun and I would quite like to have finished that last fight. When I found out through trial and error that there didn't even seem any way to back out of the whole thing and start over, having prepared myself a bit better, short of going back to a save that was several hours of progress in the past, it seemed to me that the rational reaction was simply to treat the game as over and move on. So I have.

An that's a good thing. I was never a completionist. I never felt I needed the closure of a Game Over screen in a single player game and I'm happy to say I no longer feel the need of a "good reason" to stop playing an MMORPG. 

Now I think when it's time to stop, you know. And if you don't know why you're still playing, then it's time to stop. At least, that's what I think now. I'll know what I think tomorrow when I read what I've written about it then.