Good Job, Niffty! - Hazbin Hotel Season Two

Remind me what I said about Hazbin Hotel Season One... ah yes... "great fun from beginning to end". Also "one of the sweariest shows I've ever watched." And I found the characters (All of them, apparently.) "memorable and frequently endearing."

My conclusion? "Highly recommended, provided you don't shy at swearing, sex, religion or song and dance numbers."

All of which applies equally or possibly even more so to Season Two, with the exception of the "great fun from beginning to end" part. I loved the season as a whole but I found the opening couple of episodes overwhelming. Not always in a good way.

Another thing I said about Season One was that it was "a full-on assault to both eyes and ears" and that turned out to be doubly true of the opening of the second season. I'm not sure if I'm out of practice or if the show does actually ramp up the hysteria but I had some difficulty not just following the plot but also hearing what anyone was saying. 

That hasn't happened to me before. Not in a show like this, anyway. Maybe I'm going deaf. I don't think it's that, though. If it was, I'd be having trouble with other show. I'm not. Just this one.

There is some precedent. There was a moment, back in the deep swamplands of the mumblecore era, when I couldn't always make out what the unbearably naturalistic characters were slurring (Looking at you in particular, Garden State, although now I learn that's technically not a mumblecore movie because it actually has a plot. Could have fooled me.) I had to switch the subtitles on for some of those. 

I've rarely had any difficulty picking out the sense and substance in animation, though, even when people are screaming and yelling and explosions are going off all around.

When all that's happening and the dialog is set to music, though? Apparently that's too much for me now. Halfway through Season 2 Episode 1 I had to switch the subtitles on so I could figure out what they were singing about. 

That worked for the songs but then I found if I left the subtitles on after the singing stopped, the subtitles were too distracting. I've been happy to read subtitles for movies since I was a very young teenager. The BBC used to show subtitled foreign films all the time and then I went to university and spent three years watching movies in all kinds of languages (Okay, mostly French...). 

The thing is, nearly all of those films, being arthouse movies, were either visually slow-moving or static. Until Diva and Subway and Run, Lola, Run, anyway. (Although I've actually never seen Run, Lola, Run. I ought to do something about that sometime...) Having your eye constantly drawn to the bottom of the screen didn't generally lead to you missing much of the action. There was no action.

Hazbin Hotel is all action. The screen is a constant firework display of vividly colored (Red, mostly.) weird-looking characters caroming off each other, the walls or the ceilings. It's kinetic and chaotic and almost impossible to take in even when you're looking right into the heart of everything that's happening. When you're half watching the characters and half reading the subtitles, it's totally impossible.

Or it was for me, anyway, in those first two episodes. I had to compromise by toggling the subtitles on when the singing started and off again when it stopped and it was distracting to say the least. I never felt like I was fully engaged, let alone immersed.

And then with Episode Three that all just...stopped. I don't know why. I don't think the show got any less frenetic. I think maybe I just acclimatized to it. From then on, I loved Season Two every bit as much as Season One. More, probably.

Oh, just editing this in... SPOILERS from here on. 

The plot is really involving. It makes sense and you can follow it. Charlie's plan to offer Redemption to sinners in Hell paid off at the end of Season One, when Sir Pentious's selflessly sacrificed himself to save Cherri, an altruistic act that sent him straight to Heaven. The problem is no-one believes it happened and there's no way to prove it. Even Charlie doesn't know for sure that it's true.

Meanwhile TV Demon Vox is ramping up his campaign to become the #1 Sinner in Hell and turn himself into a god. Well, a demi-god, anyway. Alastor, the Radio Demon and Vox's nemesis, is sulking, plus there's something very dodgy about him anyway, even if no-one in the Hotel suspects.  

There are so many sub-plots and back-stories and secrets being hinted at but never explained. The whole thing is layered far beyond reason and good luck trying to unravel it. If ever a show was designed to be re-watched and slo-moed and picked over for hour after hour, it's this one.

None of which I've done or am likely to do, of course. I like not knowing what's going on. Or rather, I like to know something is going on, I just don't care if I ever find out what it is. 

On that level, Hazbin Hotel works wonderfully. It has a single, straightforward, linear adventure plot - Charlie wants to do a good thing, Vox wants to do a bad thing, their two things are in conflict. Which is going to win? Anyone can follow that, pick a side, and start cheering. (No-one would pick Vox's side. Would they? Please tell me you wouldn't...)

Beneath that, it's all a churning, roiling maelstrom of grudges, lies, secrets and despair. It is Hell, after all. You wouldn't expect anyone to be happy, would you?

Enter Niffty. Niffty's always happy. She doesn't do subtext. Niffty grins and cleans and stabs. She stabbed Adam to death in Season One, which I imagine got her a standing ovation all around the world, let alone in Hell. The absence of Adam in Season Two is in itself enough to make the entire show feel lighter. I really, really could not stand him.

Niffty is my favorite character in a show where I like almost everyone. In fact, now Adam is gone, I think I do like everyone. Even Lute, who makes it very hard to like her, sometimes. I can see her point, though. Even Abel, ditto and ditto. 

The show is a musical. It's sometimes easy to forget. I certainly never came out of any episode humming the tunes. Mostly I couldn't remember the melody lines ten seconds after the singing stopped. Amazon keep trying to push the Soundtrack CD/Stream before every episode but I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to any of it away from the context of the show.

That said, the songs are fine. They mostly work while they're happening. One or two I thought dragged on a bit but mostly they didn't outstay the limited welcome I was willing to give them.

The finale, though... Wow!

I loved the finale. I thought it was pretty much perfect. The pacing could hardly have been better, with the whole thing following the structure of a caper movie and doing it brilliantly. I was just starting to notice, more than halfway through, that there hadn't been any songs at all and then there they were, just in the right place, just at the right time.

It was a fully satisfying conclusion to a compelling and engrossing storyline. Every major character's arc concluded there or thereabouts as I'd hoped it would. Niffty's fight with Velvet was just sublime. Niffty has so many great lines in it, too. Check it out above. It works on its own as a short.

That whole scene comes freighted with so many resonances. It's like the animators from Looney Toons and Animaniacs and AAP and Ren and Stimpy all got together and decided to have a baby. Er... no... not that...

I hadn't really thought about it too much until now but Hazbin Hotel is a very Western animation. I'm so used now to just about anything that isn't Disney or Pixar being shorthanded as "anime" I don't pay it any attention but this is so firmly in line of descent from the tradition of Hollywood animators of the 30s onwards it's impossible to miss.

In fact, at its core, Hazbin Hotel is an updated, adult progression of the shows that proliferated on TV in the 90s and 'aughts, which themselves paid tribute to the Golden Age of cinema animation. It's louder, faster, redder and much, much, much swearier but it's wholly recognizable as part of that lineage. Maybe that's why I love it so much.

The final episode ends with all the loose ends knotted so tidily you might wonder where the lead-in for Season Three was going to come from. And then Charlie's phone rings...

There will be a Season Three. It's been renewed. And there'll be a Season Four, too. The deal has been signed for both. Actually, it was signed months ago. Amazon have a hit show and for once they seem to know it. 

Looking forward to next season already. 

 

Late Night Brainstorms

It's been two weeks since the last What I've Been Listening To post and things have gotten a little out of hand. Bear with me a moment while I go get my laptop...

Ah, that's better. I emailed myself all the songs I've bookmarked since last time. More than forty of them. Since I stopped using Suno I seem to have gone a bit crazy over new stuff. I go looking for it most nights, either before or after I watch My Shows™ . 

Don't you hate that expression? "My shows"? I do. I never use it. I think it, though. Is that worse? 

Speaking of which, until I realized just how many songs I had stacked up waiting for a turn, today's post was going to be a review of the second season of Hazbin Hotel, which I finished watching last night. That'll probably be tomorrow now but just to give you an idea what I thought about it, I added this T-shirt to my Christmas Wishlist earlier this morning.

Also, it occurs to me that someone may be wondering why, instead of emailing my own bookmarks to myself, I don't just sync Firefox on the laptop and desktop. Or why, indeed, I didn't do that with all my apps and services when I changed PC. 

It's simple. I don't like them to be the same. I like them to be different. I like every device - desktop, laptop, phone, tablet - to be an individual. Who am I to tell them they have to be like all the others? Don't they have lives of their own? Dreams? 

Well, no, they don't. I'm not delusional. I know they're machines. And it is inconvenient, the way I do it. It would be a lot easier if I had all of them set up to be as similar as possible. I still don't like it, though. So I don't do it. Much.

Enough waffle. We have so many tunes to get through. How am I ever going to choose?

Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale

Hah! Easy! That's a set starter if ever I heard one. There are a lot of Lana clones now - and I mean a lot - but almost all of them behave like she never made an album before Norman Fucking Rockwell. I mean, yes, okay, it is one of the best albums ever made, but still.

Aimee doesn't just do Early Lana. She does Early Demo Lana. Pre Born To Die Lana. That's the era where I started and I miss it so finding this was like a lightning stroke. Obviously I wanted to know if there were more.

 Let's Get Married - Aimee Fatale

And there were. Although not many. Aimee is new on the scene. But come on! It's like time slipped. I don't know how long she can keep on mining the vein but I'm here for it while she does. I know it's not the original. It's not even original. But as she says herself...

 It Could Be Better (But It's Good Enough) 

Aimee Fatale

And that's pretty much all there is of Aimee. When there's more it's a safe bet it'll turn up here.

 New Age - Sleepazoid

When the algorithm kicked this up I thought it might be a cover of the Velvet Underground classic. It is not. Bangs though, don't it? I guess you could even say...

She Goes - Girl Group

No? Oh, come on! You've heard worse links on the radio. But anyway...

 I Didn't Come Here For Art - Lynks

Did you?

Alright. I'll stop. 

There's always at least one band like this on the U.K. scene, with a "singer" who did Eng. Lit at Uni and wants you to know and who mostly talks through the whole thing. I won't name and shame but the irony level in the bit where the poodle with the megaphone leads a chant of "No more try-hard, spoken-word, art-school shit" could split a planet.

Not that Lynks is that band. They're not even a band. They've clearly heard a few, though. A few too many. Haven't we all?

Transporter Girl 

Haruka Kamiko Feat. Paint and Copter

Then again, it could be worse. Your pal could take you to a club to see something like this...

Okay, not the actual dematerialization part. That would be cool. And terrifying. just the band, all dressed in Star Trek drag. That would be even more terrifying! 

Wow! We're really getting through these today, aren't we? Must be because I'm talking less than usual. Let's see if I can keep it up.

 666999 

 Arthurnevawakes Ft. R!R!riot & Taco & Billionhappy

That might be the longest artist credit ever. I cut & pasted it from YouTube. Too fricken long to type out, that's for sure. It's a good thing no-one goes into actual record stores and asks for stuff any more. Imagine going into HMV and asking for that. Where would you even start?

Then again, !!! were around when people still bought CDs. It's literally impossible even to look them up on Google using the typography. It comes up "Your search - !!! - did not match any documents." You have to type Chk Chk Chk to get to them.

Weren't we just talking about some people being too clever for their own good?

I Can Talk To Your Voicemail - Colatura

Voicemail. That's another thing I don't like. I use it, all the same. You have to, don't you? I don't want to, though. You could divide the whole world up into things you use that you like and things you don't like but have to use anyway, couldn't you? 

No. No, you couldn't. You could say it if you were a radio DJ, though, and people would ring in for hours telling you which pot they'd put which thing in. And that would be another show over and you'd go home and feel like you'd done a good day's work. Or like your life was a bleak, purposeless void. One or the other.

 Emails - Hotpants Romance

I'm sorry. Do your ears hurt now? I was going to keep that one to myself, along with a few others I found recently, but it was just such an irresistible segue. 

That's only fifteen years old, that video. And the song for that matter. It looks like it was filmed before email even existed. Okay, not before it existed. I know someone's already down in the comments saying how email goes back to the sixties but I mean when people actually started using it. (I had a whole bit here about hunter-gatherers and mammoths but it really didn't work so I took it out. It really is important to know how to edit. Kill your babies and all of that...)

I like email, by the way. Best of all communication systems in my opinion. Well, except talking. Probably.

Young Boys - The Catholic Girls

This is one of the ones I was going to keep to myself. Not the worst of them, either. Very much against my better judgment, here it is. I think this is where I'm supposed to say "It wouldn't be allowed nowadays". This was 1982, too, not the freedom land of the seventies, as Lana would say.

It's also really, really good, as is most of their stuff. I'd never heard of them before. I thought I knew that era and that genre (Herky-jerky avant-garde new wave.) fairly well but there's always something new to discover.

 THE TWINS 

 Flavor Crystals x Suburban Lawns

Like this, for example. I took the order of the title and artist directly from YouTube but it's misleading. The song is Flavor Crystals by Suburban Lawns, the archetype for all herky-jerky avant-garde new wave bands and I believe "THE TWINS" are (Only.) the dancers. I could be wrong. (But I'm not.)

Willow Song - Meels

Remember that guy in the dog hat up above? The one going on and on about how he hadn't come here for art? Well, boy, did he ever come to the wrong place!

She may not sound like it but Meels is in direct line of descent from the Screamers, Suburban Lawns and the rest of the early-eighties arthouse crew. Not so much in her sound but in the way she presents. Half the comments on the YouTube thread for this one are more interested in how the video replicates a lost age of blurry VHS cassettes than they are in the song. I suspect Meels might be, too.

 Potbelly Jesus - Whirlybird

Now we're in a country mood, why not? 

Okay, I guess I'd better wrap this up now. It's running long even if I'm not saying much.

 Teenage Ramble - Lexie Liu

Not that I want get obsessive about views but it is a fascinating subject. Lexie Liu is a pretty big deal. She has more than a quarter of a million subscribers to her YouTube channel. She put this up three days ago, though, and only fifteen thousand people have watched it. That's not even 6%. What does it mean?

Means 94% of people can't take a hint, I guess. Bad luck them.

 MOLLY - Ecca Vandal

Now that's what I call dancing!

Pretty sure this isn't about her BFF Molly. Or then again, in a very important way, maybe it is.

I could go on (And on...) but I'd better stop.

All The News That's Fit To Steal: EQII Rage Of Cthurath, Soulframe Preludes and Guild Wars Reforged

This isn't a news blog. Is there any such thing? Still, sometimes a bunch of stories turn up in the news cycle all at once with at least some relevance to what I do here. And sometimes they turn up when I'm short of time and happy to link a few press releases and embed a few promos and call it a post. 

Am I selling this? Yeah, maybe not...

So, anyway, let's start with the most relevant piece of news, which is that we have a date for the new EverQuest II expansion Rage of Cthurath. It's December 10, 2025. 

Obviously it's 2025. A bit pedantic of them even to mention it, isn't it? I mean, it really would be news if it was December 10, 2026, I guess. It's not like Darkpaw is Rockstar or something. (I've never actually played a Grand Theft Auto game, by the way. Maybe I should do something about that sometime...)

As part of the promotional push for the expansion. Darkpaw did a Livestream on their YouTube channel yesterday. It's pretty long. Nearly two and a half hours. Does anyone have time for that? If so, knock yourselves out. Here it is.

I certainly don't. I watched about fifteen minutes at the start, where they're flying through the new zones (Which look gorgeous, by the way.) until the swooping camera started to make me motion-sick. After that I skipped through to see what else was in there and didn't find much of interest. I guess I watched maybe half an hour altogether.

There's a full transcript on YouTube that I also flicked through. As far as I could see they don't really go into anything that affects me - a lot of stuff about group and raid dungeons and the new Public Quests, for example. I won't be doing the first two and PQs I always figure out as I get to them.

Other than that, mostly just confirmation that the outdoor zones are big and have record amounts of verticality. That makes sense when you consider the creatures that live there can all fly. Of course, we won't be able to fly, not until we've explored the whole place on foot, but I'm sure we're all used to that by now.

It all looks very impressive, visually. Solo content sounds solid. There are three overland zones and the Signature questline wraps up at the end of the second, leaving the third, I'm betting, for sopping up enough extra xp to hit the cap. If it's anything like the last two expansions, leveling will be slow going. I'm looking forward to it, although I'm not promising I'll get all that far this side of the New Year. Bad timing for me, these December releases.

Next up, something that got a mention in the comments of Tuesday's post, namely Soulframe. In case you either didn't know or had forgotten, which would be easy to do since it barely seems to get a mention in anything I read, Soulframe is the in-development MMORPG from Digital Extremes, makers of the very sucessful and also rarely mentioned around here Warframe.

Warframe is SciFi. Soulframe is fantasy. I tried Warframe a few years back, didn't hate it but didn't much like it either. It was the setting as much as anything that put me off. The gameplay seemed okay. 

On that basis, I'm mildly interested to see what the same game looks like with a fantasy skin and I'll be able to satisfy that curiosity very soon because in just five days DE is going to start selling "Founders Packs" giving access to what they're calling "Preludes".

Preludes is DE's name for pre-alpha so this is a buy-in pre-alpha. Are we really desperate enough for those now? Ohh, yes!

How it works is a bit confusing but there's a video. It's only about seven minutes long. I watched it and didn't learn much. Here, you try.

There's also an hour-long livestream video that I haven't watched. Maybe that tells you more. I wouldn't know. I got all I needed from the FAQ,which I read in about a minute. That seemed way more efficient.

I am definitely not interested enough in Soulframe to buy into a pre-alpha. I mean, not unless it costs, like, five dollars or something. I don't think they've announced the pricing structure yet but I'm sure it won't be that.

And finally, something for free! Always my favorite price point.

Of course, it's only free for people who already own the base product, which in this case is the original Guild Wars. They are lowering the box price for those who don't, though. 

I do own Guild Wars, as it happens. All of it. The game plus all the expansions/DLC/whatever they're called.

This is relevant to the blog in a couple of ways, the first being that it's a game I have played and written about before but second and more important because Guild Wars has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade and look! People still play it! It still gets good service from the developers. You might almost say it has a future.

When Maintenance Mode gets mentioned, I can immediately think of two games that have been almost thriving under the regime: Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI. What they have in common is that they're both under the protection of game developers who genuinely care about them, even though they each have newer, much more successful MMORPGs on their books.

New World (That's where I'm going with this but I'm sure you were ahead of me.) had a development team that cared for and valued it but I don't think many people believe it was beloved of the company that owned it. Maybe the comparison isn't valid. Or perhaps, since ArenaNet is a part of the much bigger and generally hard-hearted NCSoft, it might be.

I can think of another example, too: Rift. Rift also wasn't well looked after by the company that owned it, or at least not in the end. Trion sold Rift to Gamigo, who gave it a bit of attention for a while and then effectively put it out to pasture. 

No-one generally has a good word to say about either NCSoft or Gamigo but in a face-off with Amazon, I suspect both would coming out looking like the good guys by default. At least they've kept the servers up and even Gamigo manages to keep some events recycling in Rift to give the illusion someone cares. The game is currently experiencing a bit of a dead cat bounce thanks to a player-led initiative. It's not a lot but it does at least show that maintenance mode doesn't mean the end.

For Guild Wars, Reforging might even be the end of maintenance mode. There's yet another video. It's thirty seconds long. It went up on YouTube two days ago and it has nearly two hundred thousand views already. 

For comparison, the EQII video I linked has a tad under two thousand views. The Soulframe one has eight thousand. A lot of people are interested in a version of classic Guild Wars with updated graphics and Steam Deck compatibility, apparently.

Given a response like that, it's hardly surprising ArenaNet are hinting there could be new content, too. We'll see, I guess. I haven't played through all the old content yet. I was planning on it either but if there's a shiny, new version I'm going to get for nothing, I might change my plans.

At the moment, though, I'm enjoying New World. It's a really good game. I always knew it was, seeing as how it's my second most-played game on Steam at over 250 hours. And counting.

I just hope someone at Amazon notices what other companies do with their old MMOs and at least doesn't want to make things look even worse than they already do by closing the whole thing down at the earliest opportunity. I'm not counting on it, though. I doubt we'll ever get to see New World Reforged.

Ride Your Pony, New World Style

I'll resist the temptation to moan on yet again about how I don't have time to do anything these days. Except I just did exactly that so I guess I failed the resistance check.

Anyway, I really don't have much time left for blogging today so I'll keep this short. It's just going to be one of those "What I've Been Playing" posts and since all I have been playing is New World and EverQuest II, that's not going to take long.

When I say I've been playing EQII, that's not strictly true. I did manage to get in one good session while the huge Extra Life xp buff was running. I decided not to bother grinding through the last five levels on anyone, on the very valid grounds that it wouldn't be much of a laugh. Instead I logged in Mitsi, my Level 67 Swashbuckler on a different server, and spent a very happy couple of hours taking her to 80 in Kylong Plains.

She drank a two-hour 100% xp potion and with the server bonus she was getting +375%. If they hadn't somehow borked the bonus for having multiple max level characters that would have been 425% but it was plenty anyway. By the time I finished, most things in the first part of the zone had gone green. (They were orange when she got there.)

I did plan to move her to a more suitable area and carry on but the opportunity never arose and now the bonus is gone so that's the end of that. Fun while it lasted, though.

The other very satisfying thing I did was copy all of my character files across from the old PC. I looked up what was needed but in the end I just copied every .txt and .ini file and let the game sort it all out, which it did perfectly. When I logged in, all my hotbars were back and correctly populated and all the weird tweaks to the UI I've made over the years were in force again. Everything just as it should be!

The new PC is also running EQII like a dream. Loading times are much shorter and everything moves like butter. Does butter move? Oh, you know what I mean.  

As for Overseer, which is mostly all I do at the moment, I'm a level and a half from dinging into the current tier, which I believe must be Tier 7. I might just about get there by the time the expansion arrives, at which point I'll need to do another ten levels to get to the new current tier. It never fricken ends!

Assuming there is another tier, that is. I don't see Overseer mentioned in the promotional material for Rage of Churath. Maybe it's going to become a legacy feature. I'm not sure if I'd be sad or happy about that...

Other than that, most of my gaming time - no, all of my gaming time -  has been spent playing New World. Or New World : Aeternum if you prefer. Not sure anyone does.

And again, I'm not sure "playing" really describes what I've been doing there. I've been doing time trials. Pretty much just those. 

I mentioned before that I'd finished the basic mount quest and acquired a horse. And that I'd done the first five races. They call them "races" but in my book a race requires someone to race against. Racing against the clock is a time trial so that's what I'm calling them.

The NPC who gives the first set claims they're difficult but they really aren't. I'm playing on the U.S. East Coast server, which is suffering some very bad lag, so I've been stopping dead and even rubber-banding backwards a fair bit and yet I've only failed one trial so far and that was in the second lot, which are supposedly even harder. The timers seem to be pretty generous.

When you complete all five of the first batch, the horse guy says there's no more he can teach you and sends you on to another guy, like they always do in these games. He warns you the next guy is weird and sketchy and that he likes to set really tough races but so far the second guy seems exactly as weird and sketchy as the first guy and the "races" seem no harder.

I've done three of those now and honestly I could keep doing these time trials for ages. I always enjoy races in MMORPGs although usually I'm racing against someone, which I always thought was kind of the point. I like time trials too, though, so this suits me just as well. 

One thing I've noticed is that I seem to have a huge number of talent points or whatever the game calls them left to spend. Like almost 250. And another 60 or so of some other kind of points. I'm guessing there must have been a reset at some stage while I was away.

None of it seems relevant to the content I'm doing, i.e. riding along roads on a horse and avoiding anything that looks like it might give me a fight, so I haven't done anything about it yet. I suppose I'll have to at some point but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

New World is certainly holding my attention for now, anyway. It also runs extremely smoothly on the new machine, the only issues being the terrible ping to the servers. I initially blamed that on our ISP, Virgin Media, always a likely source of any problems of that kind, but apparently it's due to some wider issues at the server end. I certainly never used to have such a poor connection to the East Coast last time I played so I hope they fix it soon.

It doesn't make the game unplayable, though, or even particularly annoying. I've played through far, far worse. 

I plan on re-installing Once Human on the new PC soon and I already have Blue Protocol on an external drive but until I have time for one or both of them I'll just carry on with the riding lessons.

And when those come to an end, I think I'll go take a look at Nighthaven. I'll be way under level for it but when has that ever stopped me before? 

Alpha, Beta, Early Access, It's All The Same To Me: Ashes of Creation

There are eighteen posts here on Inventory Full with the "Ashes of Creation" label attached. The earliest is from the end of April 2017, just before the Kickstarter, when it seems my main interest in the proposed MMORPG was how good the housing was going to be. It seems an odd feature to focus on in a game that, at the time, I was repeatedly calling "Fantasy EVE",  but housing appears to have been my Big Thing back then.

Skimming those posts, it seems I was never all that keen on the project, not even when it was all new and shiny. In 2017, eight years ago, I described the promotional material for Ashes of Creation as giving the impression of "an MMO that would have looked about par for the course four or five years ago", the final big push for Western Mass Market MMOs. I seemed to think it would have fitted right in with the wave that gave us Guild Wars 2, Wildstar and The Secret World.

Even less enthusiastically, I was musing on whether or not to pledge, noting that "after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was."

Somehow, I must have managed to overcome my reservations because a week later, on the day the Kickstarter went live, I was watching the numbers tick relentlessly upwards: "the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter had been live for a quarter of an hour.  In that time there was already $161,872 pledged of the $750,000 goal. Not bad for the first fifteen minutes." 

I was pondering on whether it might be worth ponying up $80 to get into the first closed beta, which at the time was predicted for December that year. Closed Beta 2, access to which cost half as much, was due by the following Spring.

I didn't even especially want to play the game. I just wanted to get in early so I could blog about it. $80 sounded a lot for that, though, so I was inclining against it. I thought $40 sounded more reasonable.

And then, just a day later, I was back to say that I had, after all, stumped up my $80, only it wasn't on a pledge that would get me into the earliest closed beta. I'd bought two $40 tickets to Closed Beta 2, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss, who was at least theoretically interested, again mostly for the housing.

Fast forward eight years and Ashes of Creation is still in Alpha. Eight. Years. Later. Just think about that for a moment. Eight years and still in Alpha, when pledges were sold on the basis that Beta would start... eight years ago.  

The Kickstarter, famously, went extremely well, bringing in over $3m on an ask of just $750k. Three million dollars, though, doesn't take you far with an AAA MMORPG. I haven't been paying enough attention over the near-decade the project has been running to be able to say where the rest of the funding has been coming from, but it appears the well has finally dried up because as of 11 December, Ashes of Creation is going into Early Access on Steam.

The stated reason is to "expand the audience" but the sentiment among redditors is more along the lines of cash grab or just plain Hail Mary pass. 

Intrepid may be short of money and desperate but I don't think anyone could reasonably call it a scam. The game has actually been in non-NDA Alpha for about a year now, and the build that will come to Steam is going to be much the same, so it's not hard to find out what you'll be getting for your fifty dollars.

Not hard, but you will have to look. The thing is... no-one outside the bubble has really been talking about it. Literally the only blogger or professional gaming website of the 200+ in my Feedly that's done more than post the odd Press Release this year is Heartless Gamer and he hasn't been all that impressed.  

Still, the game going into Early Access is a big deal, especially on Steam. Bree at MasivelyOP, in that post I linked above, re-iterated the point made by numerous commenters on reddit that AoC is "one of the few major Western MMORPGs currently in development." That could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You might think it means a whole lot of pressure to perform for Intrepid Studios. Or you might, as I'm starting to believe, begin to wonder if it means the day of the Western AAA MMORPG is over.

I played New World Aeternum for a couple of hours yesterday. I had a good time. I did all five of the first set of time trials in the Mount quest-line. The game ran well, the scenery was glorious, chat was busy and there were players everywhere. All of this in a game that's not only in maintenance mode but which has been mostly seen as a failure since a few weeks after launch. You wouldn't really know New World was a failure. But it is.

New World was first revealed to the public as a game in development in 2016, about a year before the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter. It launched as a fully live game in September 2021, re-launched on Console as Aeternum three years later and went into maintenance mode a couple of weeks ago. 

The game, which as far as I can recall is the only AAA Western MMORPG to have launched this decade, has completed its full development cycle in significantly less time than it's taken Ashes of Creation to reach Early Access. Or get out of Alpha, for that matter.  Even though New World sold over four million copies on PC at launch and is also available on console, and allowing that it may have been a recent victim of larger restructuring at Amazon, it has not been widely regarded as a success.

It's not for want of trying. New World is an excellent MMORPG and for most of its lifetime it's had the resources of a huge, wealthy parent company propping it up. Millions of players gave it a chance, enough, it's said, to have recouped its development cost in its first month of operation. 

And yet it still could not hold an audience. It seems not to have remained profitable for long, either. Many older players and veteran developers remain convinced there's an untapped mass market for fairly traditional Western MMORPGs but the evidence to support that belief seems harder to find. 

Players flock to new games in the genre but they very rarely stay for long. Whatever it is they're looking for, they just can't seem to find it. Maybe Ashes of Creation really is the last hurrah for big budget Western MMORPGs. If so, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for the genre after that.

Back when I was pledging to the AoC Kickstarter, I was also interested in another would-be new entrant to the genre - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. That game, which has been in development for about as long, preceded AoC into Early Access. It's done quite well there, attracting a peak concurrent player-base of around 7,000, very similar to AoC's reported peak alpha concurrency of about 8,000. 

These are solid figures for a niche game in closed testing or Early Access but they're not mainstream AAA game numbers. Not by a couple of orders of magnitude. All the big Eastern MMOs of the past few years have attracted millions of players. New World, as I said, sold four and a half million boxes in its first month. Concurrency on Steam peaked at more than 900,000. 

New World was considered a huge success. For a while. And then it wasn't. Build it and they will come. And then they will leave.

I'm coming around to the opinion that there will be no more long-running, mainstream MMORPGs produced in the West. There will be plenty of small, niche successes. There are lots of players out there, ready to pick a horse and sit on it as it plods along. But not that many. Success for those games is going to mean a loyal following in the low tens of thousands. At best.

And maybe that will be enough for Ashes of Creation. It is supposed to be the Fantasy EVE after all and EVE's concurrency is usually quoted somewhere between 20-35k. EVE is a long running, successful MMORPG, no question. But t's nowhere even close to being a mainstream game. 

All of this talk of populations and break-even points for commercial success and what it might mean for future game development in the genre is speculation, though. What we soon won't need to speculate about is whether Ashes of Creation is any good. 

Does it run well or is it a buggy mess? Does it look amazing or like the decade-old game it is? Is the gameplay fun or frustrating? Is the PvP balanced or is it a gankbox? And is that housing anything you'd want to live in?

All of that is already open knowledge, of course, or should be, since there's been no NDA for a year, but in a few weeks anyone who cares will be able to put down $50 and find out for themselves. 

I will not be paying another $50 on top of the $80 I already gave Intrepid eight years ago. Luckily, I won't have to. 

I was initially irked at the thought that the game I backed so long, long ago was going into Early Access with an Alpha build, apparently leaving me still waiting for the second round of Beta before I could join in. I figured that had to be what was going to happen. They'd have sent me an email if my pledge qualified me for EA access, surely. Wouldn't they? They send me plenty of PR emails, after all. It's  not like they don't know where to find me.

Still, I thought before I started complaining I probably ought to check. And guess what? On the Ashes Moments Substack (Whatever that is...) it says "all Beta-1 and Beta-2 key holders will also be granted access to the Early Access launch on December 11th". That's my ticket in.

Actually, my two tickets because Mrs Bhagpuss has long since moved on and won't be playing this or any other MMORPG. I'll have her account to play with as well. Not that I want two of them.

It looks as though I won't be playing on Steam, though. Current testers and anyone invited in on later pledges when the game hits Early Access will reportedly have to use Intrepid's own launcher. If they want to play on Steam, they'll have to buy a $50 Steam Key like anyone else. I'm unclear as to whether we'll all end up on the same servers after that. 

I guess I'll find out come December. It'll give me something new to write about for a while, at least. 

Which is really all I paid for in the first place. Eight long years ago. 

So Much To Do Before I Can Do Anything

As promised, I downloaded New World Aeternum yesterday evening but I only had time to log in and make sure it was working before it was time to stop. I logged in one of my lower-level characters and ran her around a little just to see how the new PC handled things. 

It seemed okay, although there was that familiar hiatus at the start, where the textures load in sperately and very slowly, making the whole world look like it's either floating in space or flooded. It often used to do that on the old machine so I'm not reading anything into it. 

There were some hitches and stuttering that might have concerned me more had the conection to the East Coast server cluster where I have always played not been so awful. Given Amazon's pre-eminent position in the server rental business, I'm a bit surprised by just how bad it was. 

It was even worse today. Then again, I am on Virgin Media Broadband, which isn't all that impressive at the best of times, and recently it's been worse even than usual, so once again I don't think the issues I'm seeing necessarily have anything to do with my new set-up. I might have to swap to an EU server. It looks like you can chop and change at will now.

If you factor out those two elements - poor connectivity and New World's inherent flakiness, the new rig is handling things very well. Once the textures had loaded and whenever my ping was decent everything felt very smooth on High graphic settings. The game looked gorgeous as always and everything behaved just as it should.

This morning I downloaded EverQuest II, expecting it to be equally satisfactory, especially seeing as how it ran perfectly well even on the very old machine. Things didn't go quite as well. 

First off, a new installation of EQII these days defaults to the streaming system introduced a long time ago, whereby each new area only downloads as and when you enter it. That sounds great in theory but even with a fast connection it's a total pain when you experience it in action. 

It's not even zone by zone. It's individual areas within zones. Possibly every separate Point of Interest, of which there are thousands. Imagine the old loading times for zones fifteen years ago. If you liked waiting for those, you'll love how long this takes!

I was fed up of it by the time I'd sat through separate downloads for Character Select, my Mara house and East Freeport. I logged out and googled "EQ2 Full Download", which turned out to be harder to find than you'd expect.

In case anyone is likely to need it, I'll point you right now to the excellent Wiki page on Installation. That was where I learned that to download the whole game before you try to play it you have to open Advanced Tools from the tiny cog icon on the launcher and then click on the "Select Game Version" button. I had already thought of the Advanced Tools part all on my own but once I got there I couldn't see anything that looked like it was relevant. I certainly wasn't thinking of a download as a different version of the game.

When I got that started, I was impressed by how fast it was. The current EQII footprint is surprisingly small at just under 33GB and it took maybe fifteen minutes to get the whole thing onto my external drive via a usb cable. 

With everything already there, zoning times were hugely reduced. Very noticeably faster, in fact, than I've been used to on the old system. Big pat on the case for the new computer there.

What was less impressive were the graphics, which looked just awful. Digging into the Options showed me it had defaulted to Extreme Performance. I changed that to High Quality and things looked much better but there was a lot of hitching and juddering, none of which I ever had with the old machines. 

Once again, the Installation guide was very helpful. Apparently even now the game is optimized for single-core CPUs and has very limited support for the multiple cores newer games take for granted. My old machine did have multiple cores - four, I think - and the very old one had just two. I never even thought about it in respect to EQII though. The new one has six cores and twelve threads and apparently that's enough to confuse the poor old thing.

The wiki suggests using a "lower core index value" which is a setting in Options I'd never even noticed. Then again, it also says that's for Intel processors. It doesn't mention AMD, which is what mine is. Still, I thought I'd try it, so I shifted the slider back from 31 to 6. I have no idea what that even means but it seemed to make a big difference. The game is now running just as it did on the older machines.

EQII has always been a nightmare to optimize for graphic performance, though. There's a lengthy guide on how to do it stickied on the legacy forums. It goes back a few years - well, to the launch of the game in 2004 in fact, although it was updated in... er... 2014. I don't know how relevant it is any more but I might have a look at it if I run into any more graphic or performance problems.

Once again, it does appear that the main issues I'm likely to experience are going to have more to do with outside factors than any shortcomings of my new PC. Like, for example, the supremely irritating re-discovery that all the UI and character settings I'm used to in EQII are held client side not on the server. I'm going to have to set up my old PC again just to copy the .ini files onto a USB stick so I can transfer them to the new machine. Ah well. It's not like I haven't done that before...

While I was on the EQII website initiating the download, I remembered I hadn't yet gotten around to pre-ordering the new expansion, Rage of Churros Churrath. I have now. It was already very cheap at £25.12 (Nitpickingly accurate currency conversion there, I notice.) but as an All Access member I get a ten per cent discount, so it actually cost me just £22.61. And there's a level 130 Character Boost included, which I will happily use on one of my Level 125s.

Once I had all that sorted out, I went back to New World and played for about forty minutes. I logged in my original character, currently Level 60, and did the quest that gets you your first mount. It was easy and fun and now I have a horse called Moonshadow. My plan this afternoon was to post about that but things seem to have gotten away from me as usual so I'll save it for another day.

What I will say is that just a few minutes back in the world reminded me what an enjoyable game New World is and always was. I know it's often (Usually...) been quite buggy but honestly, if an MMORPG with as much going for it as New World hasn't been able to generate enough consistent and reliable interest among gamers to turn it into a profitable, long-term concern then I'm starting to doubt such a thing is even possible any more.

And that would be a really great lead-in to a rant about what's happening with Ashes of Creation right now. But once again, I'll save that for another post. I'll be pissed if I don't get a free pass into Early Access, though, I'll tell you that for nothing! (Edit: Apparently I do so just ignore me...)

A Quick Technical Update

There wouldn't normally be a post here on a Sunday because for me that's always a work day. Except when I'm on holiday. Which I am. 

But there still wasn't going to be a post today because a) I had two separate things to do in two other towns and b) when I got back I had my new computer to set up. 

There wasn't an awful lot to it. I bought an off-the-shelf machine from Dr. Memory via Amazon, where I paid less for it than that link shows. Either way, it's the cheapest "gaming computer" they do. It wouldn't qualify as any kind of gaming machine by most gamers' standards but these days I don't really qualify as much of a gamer, either.

It's a curious device. It has one of those new-fangled CPUs with its own graphics chip. It's alleged to be able to run modern games on its own and there are YouTube videos and benchmarks to suggest that, if you're not all that fussy about framerates and resolutions, it pretty much can. 

That's nice but I already have a halfway-decent graphics card that I paid nearly as much for a couple of years ago as I just paid for this computer, so I checked before buying it that the motherboard would accept it, that it would fit in the case, that the PSU could cope with it and that it wouldn't clash with the CPU graphics. 

All of that, so far, seems to be true. It was a bit of task getting it set up because the clever people who put the thing together hid all the internal power connectors so tidily away I thought for a while there weren't any. Once I'd found where they'd hidden them, though, it was all quite straigtforward.

Everything seems to be working now but because I always like to treat every new PC as a complete fresh start and never allow it to sync with any of my old ones, the next few days (And weeks.) are going to involve a lot of downloading stuff and signing in to accounts. 

The idea is that by doing it that way, the new machine will only have stuff on it that I actually still use, not ten years of kipple and clutter. It's a really annoying process and the "clean machine" era won't last long but it will at least give me breathing space for a while.

I do have some stuff on external drives I can connect via USB, so that will save some time. I've been playing games on those for a few years now and I can't tell any difference in performance from the ones I have installed on internal drives. 

I have a few Steam games immediately available that way, including Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, but right now, I'm downloading New World: Aeternum. That should make for a good test of how well the new PC performs. I really want to give it another try anyway, now they made all the content available for free.

When I get everything running how I like it, I'll probably report back on how well it's going. It'll be interesting to see how viable it is to play the games I play on a really cheap-ass rig. 

And that's all for now, I think.

Back to the downloading. 

It's Real If I Say It's Real

Yeebo dropped by the comment thread on the last post I wrote about Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, to mention how he'd started playing Honkai Star Rail a while back and was somewhat enjoying it, until he spotted a sale on Neir: Automata, which he'd heard described as "one of the best games ever created by humans". And that was it for his time with HSR.

That got me thinking about a lot of things, some of which came up in my reply, like how I really never get on with the combat in Honkai Star Rail and how any combat that isn't really easy puts me right off any game these days. Then I got to thinking about my gaming habits in general and how they've changed, both over the whole of my life and more specifically in the last few years.

I was going to write something quite specifically related to that today but then before I got down to it, I read this article at NME about a large-scale survey commissioned by French music streaming platform Deezer to find out if listeners really can tell the difference between music made by AI and music made by humans. And this one at GamesIndustry about the absence of player pushback over the use of AI in mobile games. And this one from the same source about Nexon suggesting everyone should assume every game company is using AI...

All of which made me think even more. Which is why this post is all over the place. I'm still thinking. But I have to start somewhere...

Let's begin with the shift from MMORPGs to Open World RPGs and Open World Survival Games, which for simplicity's sake I am going to lump together. I could also have linked a bunch of articles on that but I'm going to stick to my personal experience and some general observations because why do proper research when you can just wing it? That's how all the best columnists do it, anyway.

It seems hard to argue that these kinds of games, gacha or otherwise, haven't largely eaten the MMORPG sector's lunch. Still  as Sony/NCSoft's announcement of the in-development Horizon MMORPG, Steel Frontiers, proves, there is still a degree of interest in and commitment to the genre outside of its established, specialist niche market. MassivelyOP, who always nitpick over genre tags, were very keen to point out the acronym "MMORPG" appears right there in the title screen. 

And it is something worth mentioning. A lot of developers and publishers in recent years have gone out of their way to call their games anything but MMORPGs, believing to do so would harm their chances in the wider market.

Is that true? No idea. How would I know? Certainly, every new AAA game that claims to be an MMORPG seems to attract a million players on launch day. But then 90% of them are gone in a month and the rest a month after that. 

Was it because the games weren't MMORPG enough? Too MMORPG? Just not very good? Or were most of those people only there because it was the Big New Thing and a Thing can only be Big and New for so long?

Search me. No idea. And neither do the devs, apparently, because it keeps on happening.

What I can say, though, is that the naming of things is important. We should all know that as fantasy fans. To know a thing's name is to control it. 

Why, though? Why does a name, a true name, hold so much power?

It's all about authenticity, isn't it? That elusive, nebulous, indefinable quality that we know when we feel it. The Massively editorial team knows when a game is an MMORPG, regardless of what the press release they just received tells them. Just like we all know an NPC we're listening to was voiced by a human, not by AI. 

Except, do we? I can't help but think of the old Coke vs Pepsi test. That wasn't a notional thought experiment. It wasn't even something set up in some side-room in a University somewhere. It was an actual, physical test you or I could try for ourselves, when we went into town to buy an album or some new trainers.

If you search "Pepsi Challenge" you'll get the idea it only happened in America but I remember seeing the van parked in the shopping precinct near the bus and railway station in a city where I lived. I just can't remember which city... 

I didn't try it myself but I was always absolutely certain I could tell the difference. Pepsi is a lot sweeter than Coke, to my taste at least. Now, if it had been Coke vs Canada Dry, my all-time favorite cola, I'm not so sure. 

Which is kind of the point. Maybe I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Certainly, to me, they don't really taste all that similar. Between Coke and Canada Dry cola, though? Those two are so close I wouldn't like to put money on it.

Whether I can tell or not, though, I think I know. Do I want to put it to the test? Not really. Why would I want to find out I was wrong? How would that make my life any better?

I have listened to a lot of music in my life and until very recently all of it was made by humans. There wasn't really any other option. Despite that intense and continued exposure, I don't doubt that, like 97% of the 9,000 people Ipsos tested for Deezer, I would not reliably be able to differentiate between music produced by AI and music produced by humans.

Mrs Bhagpuss says she can. She really likes the music I've made with AI but she says it all sounds "pink". She can hear the pinkness in it the way some people see auras. I cannot hear the pinkness. I did think about playing her something extremely similar that was made by humans to see if she still thought it sounded pink but that's an experiment that's going to stay firmly in my thoughts only.

She also says the vocals sound "too perfect".  I hadn't noticed that but after she pointed it out... I still couldn't hear it. What I think I can hear is the AI being imperfect on purpose sometimes, which isn't the same thing at all. And I certainly couldn't pick an AI singer out of an audio line-up based on perceived flaws.

But then, the AI vocals I'm listening to, the ones in the songs I've caused to be made, like a Renaissance artist overseeing a workshop filled with talented but anonymous craftsmen, are my vocals. The imperfections are frequently my imperfections, replicated as though they were intended.

I remember Tipa, who also uses Suno, mentioning a while ago that, while she liked the music she made with the software, she hadn't found much she wanted to listen to by anyone else there. I'd go further than that. I haven't heard anything there that I haven't found intensely irritating. The app defaults to playing the next tune on some playlist or other if you don't stop it, so I've been forced to hear snippets of lots of AI tunes and there hasn't been a single one I haven't almost broken the keyboard trying to silence.

But is that because they don't sound like they were made by humans or because they're just terrible songs? I could do much the same on YouTube and many of the tunes would be "authentic". They'd just be awful. A lot of people who can't play an instrument or sing also have terrible taste in music. Suno lets them share their lack of talent with the world, too. AI is really egalitarian that way.

What are we really lookng for when we listen to music or look at images or play video games, anyway? Authenticity or entertainment? Is a real, bad thing better than an artificial, good thing? And anyway, what even is authenticity?

At the moment I prefer Open World RPGs to MMORPGs and I prefer Eastern games to Western games. I'm not saying this is a permanent change or even a lasting one. It's a snapshot, like all preferences. It may stick or it may slide.

Looking at that preference as objectively as a person can observe a subjective preference of their own, I'd question some of the assumed positions on authenticity that come up repeatedly when games and especially RPGs are being discussed. There's long been a trend in the discourse over automation. It predates any queasiness over the use of generative AI, although that does seem to have intensified the and polarized the debate considerably.

MMO players in the West have tended to react very negatively to many of the things that are currently drawing me towards both open world RPGs and mobile ports and which a few years ago led me to appreciate a number of imported games that were calling themselves MMORPGs.  

One day I'll write a proper post about why I like these sorts of games but for now, here are a few of the more obvious reasons. 

 

I like the brighter colors and the flatter surfaces of the graphics, for a start. I like the cleaner textures. A lot of older or more traditional MMORPGs look gritty, somehow. Dirty, even. I can deal with that look but I'd rather not have to.

I like the stories, which seem a lot more modern and relatable than those in Western games. The characters are younger and more enthusiastic. The themes are stronger; the emotions clearer. 

There's a tendency to call them "anime" games but they could as easily be called "YA" games instead. I read a lot of YA novels (The acronym stands for Young Adult, marketing-speak for what publishers used to call "teen fiction".) and the characters in many of the games I'm now darting between remind me very much of the ones I meet in those books.

Ironically, these games, clearly aimed at a younger demographic than the traditional Western MMORPG, also tend to have a lot more time and respect for older characters. In most of the MMORPGs I've played, the characters are much of a muchness when it comes to age. 

The Elves all live forever so they're ageless. The dwarves are all old even if they're young. The humans are inevitably somewhere in their 30s or 40s. The anthropomorphic races (And the gnomes.) tend to be child-like. Mostly, though, unless a character has to be a specific age for a plot point, age barely even rates a mention.

The open world rpgs and anime games give me stories across the full age range, from small children to the elderly. And those stories frequently reflect the kinds of concerns real people in those age ranges would have. It's not all gods and mosnters. Sometimes it's homework or rivalries at work or the way your hip doesn't want to let you climb the stairs like you used to.

That feels more authentic to me but I'm betting it's a black mark against authenticity for anyone looking for the traditional, high fantasy MMORPG experience. Still, a lack of authenticity in the story is nothing compared to what happens in the gameplay. 

As I said at the start of the post, I bounced off Honkai Star Rail partly because I found the combat too much like hard work. I dropped Genshin Impact because I literally couldn't beat a boss to carry on with the story. Not all of these games have Combat For Babies enabled. Just the ones I like.

After a quarter of a century and more, I think I can say I'm officially over finding combat in MMORPGs fun for its own sake. I never liked it that much but it did used to have its moments. Now, it's almost always a means to an end. The easier it is, the better I like it. I like one-shotting mobs. All of them, if possible.

The received wisdom is that making combat too easy turns players off. They get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge isn't there. Not me. I get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge is there. One of the things I like best about BP:SR is the auto-combat. I use it in every fight. It's even better than one-shotting mobs because I don't even have to press a key.

Except I do press some keys, sometimes, because that's fun, too. I dodge a bit now and then. Jump about. Change position. Not sure if it makes any difference but it makes me feel like I'm involved. Because you want to feel like you're doing something, don't you? You just don't always want it to be true. 

Authenticity is in your head. There may be an objective reality out there but you do not have access to it. You think Coke tastes better than Pepsi because your eyes tell you so when you see the label on the bottle. Your taste buds have no say in it.  

That NPC you hear, the one that sounds so flat and uninflected? It might be AI. Or it might be a voice actor who isn't doing such a great job. That song you like? The one that came up on that auto-generated playlist that's by someone you never heard of before. Are you sure it's a real person singing? 

Yes, you know. Of course you know. But how are you ever going to know?

And what about the fun you had, playing that game?  No, wait...   

I won't say the fun you had. You may not have had that fun. I'll say what about the fun I had, playing that game where the AI (Different kind of AI, of course. The old, good kind.) did all the fighting for me. It even did the running, there and back. All I had to do was take the quest and hand it in. Did I really have fun or was I just imagining it?

Maybe I was having more fun all those times I spent an hour trying to beat some stupid boss in a Guild Wars 2 Living World instance. One of those times I lost so often all my armor fell off and I had to give up and leave. That time I had a headache for an hour afterwards. When I felt like uninstalling the damn game, I hated it so much. 

That was some authentic gameplay there, right?

Yeah, I don't miss any of that. What is authentic isn't the experience but  how I feel about it. If the game feels like it was fun, it was fun. If the song sounds good, it's good. If the voice acting is convincing, it's convincing. 

And that would appear to be why I prefer the games I prefer just now. They're authentically entertaining. Whether they're any good...

Well, that's an entirely different question.