Passing The Time On Patch Day

With luck, I might have something to say about the new EverQuest II expansion by Friday, so I think I'm going to do the Grab-Bag today instead. I have a few talking points bookmarked... let's see... ah yes!

Absolutely Not Garrisons Mk. 2

World of Warcraft is getting housing. At last. Although not quite yet. It's coming as a feature in the next expansion, which we already know will be called "Midnight" because Blizzard is doing a trilogy and they announced the names of all three chapters before they released the first. 

That led some people (I may have been one of them.) to assume or at least hope that it meant a switch to something closer to an annual release schedule but the newly-issued roadmap for 2025 puts paid to that theory. I guess that means they have a ten year plan, near as makes no difference. That's double anything Mao ever managed, so bravo, Blizzard!

This far out (Midnight won't be with us until mid-2026 at the soonest.) we don't know much about how housing will work in WoW although we have been assured development will be ongoing and not one-and-done with the expansion that brings it or even the trilogy it's part of. Wilhelm looked into the possibilities and consequences at some length and thereby sparked a lengthy and discursive discussion in the comments, to which I contributed thoughts and opinions I will not attempt to expand upon here.

Basically, we know nothing yet except that there will be housing of some kind. Syp, as might be expected, is ecstatic. I'll reserve judgment until I see it. At the moment I have no plans to subscribe again, not even for Classic Classic and its fresh start servers but I'd sub a month or two to see how housing pans out. I imagine I'll have to if I want to see anything. I don't suppose us free trial scrubs will get as much as a poxy inn room.

Any Port In A Store? 

I have generally been willing to try any and every new MMORPG as it appears, always providing I didn't have to pay for the privelige and it wasn't too much trouble. It's fun to see new things and it makes for a few easy blog posts. If the game's on Steam, there seems very little reason not to download it and have a look, at least.

With that in mind, when I read that Gran Saga, a game I'd actually heard of, was releasing globally through the platform, my immediate reaction was to go straight to the Store and download it. I got halfway there...

I did look at the game on Steam, where it currently has a Mixed review rating from fewer than a hundred and fifty responses. I read a dozen or so of the reviews and it quickly became obvious that most of the objections were conceptual; people just didn't approve of a mobile game being ported almost verbatim to PC. 

Mobile ports don't bother me in the slightest and other than those complaints, most of the reviews seemed quite positive:

"Good graphics, a lot of side quest and beautiful scenery..."

"Good Story, Graphics, Visuals & VA..."

"Much more to this than what you'll see at surface level in your first 2 hours"

"If you don't mind gacha it's honestly a decent game ..."

And yet I haven't downloaded it. 

Nothing to do with the game. I just experienced an unusual moment of common sense before I hit the "Download" button, as I realised I don't have time to play another MMORPG right now. I also don't have the space for another to sit on my hard drive unplayed, so why not just leave it there on Steam, where I can grab it should either of those factors change.

I may well give it a try sometime. I'll keep it in mind for when I next run out of things to write about, which at the moment seems unlikely. I admit I am curious...

The Door Swings Both Ways

Although nowhere near as curious as I am about this one. I'm guessing the people who don't take to mobile games getting a PC version won't be any happier to see the trend reversed. I've always had the impression that players of Final Fantasy XIV take their game of choice quite seriously so the news that it's getting a mobile version probably isn't going down all that well. 

The comment thread that followed the news on MassivelyOP was predictably dismissive but what's new? Aywren's response was a lot more open-minded but even she's not all that optimistic about the prospect. 

I find myself surprisngly intrigued. I can't really be doing with FFXIV. I've tried it a bunch of times and there are things I like about it but it's always so much slower, stuffier and more ponderous than I remembered.

I spend less and less time there every time I go back and I thought I'd reached the point where I was done with it but the prospect of a mobile port that's much more solo-oriented and - let's not hedge - much less tedious does sound appealing. I would certainly give that a try, although ironically I'd most likely only play it on PC through an emulator like BlueStacks. I doubt I'll ever have a mobile device that could run it.

A lot of objectors seem to be trying to wave the whole thing away by saying it'll just borrow a few keywords from FFXIV and append them to a completely unrelated mobile game that no-one will care about but that's not what Square Enix is saying. In the trailer, Yoshi P (Do people still call him that?) says the mobile game will "faithfully recreate the story, duties, battle content and other aspects of the original game".

I guess we'll see when it arrives. First, though, it has to go through a period of testing, followed by a release in China before it goes global. When we get there, I'll definitely be taking a look, provided I can find some some way of running it. Whether I'll take to it any more than the PC version is another question but it would be funny if I ended up getting further in the mobile port than I ever did in the original game.

Are We There Yet?

I was watching a video on a YouTube channel I follow the other day when I spotted something in the YT recommendations from another channel I sometimes look at. Both channels deal with AI and how it's coming along but the one I follow is more of a "Here's what's new and isn't it cool?", whereas the one I only check out occasionally is all "Here's how you can make some money out of this thing."

That channel is called Comicscape and mostly the way you're supposed to make money is by using AI to make (NSFW) comics. I'm not interested in the making money part (Or the NSFW for that matter, although the examples on the channel itself are always very tame.) but I would like to see what kind of comics an AI could come up with. That's why I ocasionally come back to see what the latest software is capable of, hoping one day it'll have progressed to the point where you can just type in "Make me a comic about a cat that becomes a superhero and saves the world from invading marshmallow monsters" and it'll spew out twenty-two amusing pages all on its own.

We are, as you probably realise, not there yet. Most of the ideas the woman who runs the channel shows seem to require about as much human effort as it would need to draw a comic by hand, assuming you were good at drawing. It's true that she's able to make comics even though she can't draw but it's clearly still a lot of work. Far more than I'd ever be interested in, just to satisfy my idle curiosity.

Anyway, this particular video wasn't about comics, for once. It was all about how to make an illustrated text RPG using AI, which supposedly is something you can do at a website called RPGGO. I thought that sounded intriguing so I went there to try it out.

Suffice it to say I did not make a text RPG, illustrated or otherwise. Once again, the amount of work required felt like more than I wanted to take on just at the moment. I think I'd have given it a go twenty years ago, when I had a lot more patience for this sort of thing, had the software existed then, but these days I'm not really all that bothered about expressing myself through the medium of Go North, Take Axe.

Still, I might come back to it sometime and meanwhile I'm not averse to seeing what other people have done with the technology. I just tried one of the RPGs on the site, Shadows over Eldoria, to test it for the purposes of this post and I've been playing it for the last twenty minutes. 

It's weirdly compelling. Even though I know the plot is being generated on the fly as I type in my responses, I still find myself thinking "Ooh, I wonder what's going to happen next?" The writing is no worse than plenty of human-authored text adventures I've seen, either, particularly the amateur ones, of which I played plenty back in the days of The Quill et al.

I started this section expecting to conclude that we clearly have some way to go yet before AI is ready to provide us with an infinite supply of perfectly serviceable games but actually we might be closer than I thought...

And now, some music and then I must be off. The EQII servers should be up now and I want to go check out the expansion, about which I so far know almost nothing. It's been all Christmas all the time here for so long I'm not sure I have anything much to offer. Oh, I know! How about this?

Board Game - Dog Hair Dressers

Now no-one can say I never post anything about board games!