It's Friday. End of the working week. For some. Start of mine. Well, tomorrow is. Let's grab our bags and get started. No time to waste chatting.
It's Road Map Season!
Apparently. Everyone's doing them. Here's Pantheon's.
It's in full effect in this image. Everyone does Road Map graphics these days and lots of them are really pretty to look at. They make me think "Ooh! I might have to go play that again". This doesn't. It makes me go "Ow! My eyes!"
Moving on from the look, there seems to be a lot going on this year but I notice none of it expands the world, other than downwards. There are new dungeons "throughout 2025" apparently but we'll have to wait for 2026 before we get "new zones". Well, you will, if you're playing. I don't think I'm likely to be directly involved.
Given how few zones there are in the game now, 2026 seems a like a bit of a wait. Just about everything on the list falls under the heading of "ongoing development" rather than new content. There're a lot of "improvements" and "enhancements" and "upgrades" in that line-up, along with a few "systems" but precious little adventure. That's all kept for the grey banner along the top - dungeons, raids, boss encounters, POIs. Not sure of the marketing logic there.
I saw an interesting comment yesterday from one of the people behind the Star Wars Galaxies emu, to the effect that they discovered you can't just hang an mmorpg in a steady state and expect people to keep playing. You have to dump new content on them every ninety days or there's a huge drop-off in population.
I mean, we all know it but it's surprising how many people, players and developers, try to put their fingers in their ears and deny it. In an odd kind of way, it might be easier for games in Early Access to hold attention. If things are going as they should, there'll be a constant drip of new content or at least disruption to what's there already, which is often just as effective. It's when the game is supposedly done that the real content treadmill starts up and with it the inevitable droughts.
By the look of this Road Map, Pantheon's a loooong way from having to worry about that. EA looks like it could take a while. And I didn't even mention the baffling current obsession going on over there with FFA open-world PvP. I do wonder what Brad McQuaid would have had to say about that...
You've Got Mail
Over at the home of the game Brad made when he was practicing, Jenn Chan, that most amiable and charming of Producers, has a couple of letters out. Producer's Letters are maybe one down from Road Maps - they don't have the graphics for a start - but they mostly perform the same function: letting players know what to expect next.
Neither of the letters, for EverQuest and EverQuest II, has anything very surprising to say. At this point Darkpaw could pretty much swap out the old SOE mission statement, "You're in Our World Now" for "Business as Usual".
The only item of real interest in the EQII letter is the upcoming Game Update, Lure of Darkness. It brings back the Void, including a new Void Anchor in Sodden Archipelago. I bet we don't actually get one of the whirling vortexes reaching far into the sky, though. I bet it's just a portal somewhere.
I had quite a lot of fun in Void instances for a while. There was one I used to run repeatedly for platinum, back before inflation made every in-game source of income other than selling on the Broker entirely irrelevant.
This one ought to offer me a chance to find out just how much more effective my Necromancer is in new content, when compared with my Berserker. He usually has to wait for GUs to recede into the past before he can make any progress with them. I'm optimistic she'll do better. The Lure of Darkness arrives on the 8th of April but I imagine I won't get around to it right away. I'll get to it before the next one arrives in the summer, though.
The EQ letter is more interesting in that Jenn reveals a few secrets concerning the thinking behind some of the choices the team makes when setting up new ruleset servers. There is, of course, yet another of those coming in June because new ruleset servers are the engine that drives EQ's longevity. To some extent they always have been. The concept goes back pretty much to the dawn of the game.
This one is an "experimental" TLP server. My impression is that Everquest players are more open to experimentation than EQII players, the younger game feeling oddly more old-fashioned now and certainly more conservative than the older.
I don't get the feeling EQII's time-limited expansion server scene has ever been quite as essential or vibrant as EQ's but it's still clearly vital enough to the continuing health of the game for new editions to be rolled out at least annually. This summer we're getting a PvP Origins server, which I would have thought was limiting the appeal considerably but at least it should keep the ever-angry PvP lobby busy complaining about the ruleset for a while.
Last but very much not least in this round-up of points of interest from the two letters, I was much heartened to see the exact same degree of attention as usual being paid to this year's Pride celebrations, starting at the end of May and running on into June. Given the current unfortunate political climate it might not have been surprising to see some backsliding there but no, the two games remain exemplars of modernity, with Patches of Pride in EQII and Pride Month in EQ each being afforded the same level of attention as any of the many established dates in the packed Norrathian calendar.
That's a deal of game news. Shall we take a short break for some music? Yes, I think we shall.
That Difficult Second Album
Catch These Fists - Wet Leg
Having covered music here for quite a few years now, I find myself in the odd position of having artists and bands I "cover" in much the same way I "cover" games. There's no necessity for it in either case but if you keep up a blog for long enough, after a while you get a feel for what it's about.
As well as the inevitable "anything that catches my interest", this blog mostly covers games I play, games I might play and games I used to play, along with music I listen to, TV I watch and of late developments in AI as they pertain to everything else I write about.
As the years go by, there are certain games, shows, creators and performers that come up over and over and after a certain point I start to feel I "should" mention it, when I find something new involving any of them. That's why there's stuff in this post about Pantheon, EQ and EQII and it's also why there's a video of Wet Leg's first single from their upcoming sophomore album, Moisturizer.
Because I was an early adopter and because I went somewhat overboard about the first few singles, Wet Leg have become a band this blog pays attention to, even though I don't quite feel the same attachment to them I did a couple of years ago. I like Catch These Fists well enough but it isn't demanding the same level of attention from me that Chaise Longue, Wet Dream or Too Late Now did.
The band is currently out there, playing live and debuting a whole load of tracks from the new album. I watched audience videos of half a dozen of the new songs and they all sounded good but none of them really wowed me.
Rhian Teasdale has a definite new look she's really working and the band have what keeps getting described as a punkier sound. It all looks and sounds like it would be a great time in a club or on a festival stage. As something to listen to at home, I'm not so sure. I await the album with interest to see what the songs sound like in their fully produced form. I will be buying it, anyway, or at least putting it on a list so someone else can buy it for me.
Horse Latitudes
Here's the oddest MMORPG story of the week by some margin. Have you ever thought that what the genre really needed was more horseback riding? Or more murder mysteries to solve? No? Well how about more mysteries to solve while you're out horseback riding?
It's a niche pitch, for sure, but it's happening. The game is called Equinox: Homecoming. Nothing like hanging your entire fortunes on a convoluted pun, is there? As if the concept wasn't high enough already.
It's in production from a company called Blue Scarab, the guiding force behind which is one Craig Morrison, a name that may be familiar from his time at both Blizzard and Funcom. The official website describes the game as a "multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, murder mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay!"
There's a trailer, which looks a bit janky in the way of most early-development footage, but which also makes me think it might be something worth keeping an eye on. The pitch is for a “unique blend of cozy escapism and true-crime” but I'm getting some Secret World vibes, too.
Morrison goes on to say
"We're very excited to see what people make of Equinox. We’ve had faith throughout development that there is an audience out there for different and interesting experiences... there is definitely a risk, but we're in a position where we can take this shot and try to provide players with a truly unique world and story."
We do all keep saying we want developers to try new things, take some risks and stop copying whatever's just made money. It'll be very interesting to see if this one goes anywhere. NetEase is backing it so it probably will.
Take Me Home
A few months back, James Gunn gave us a first look at his new take on Superman in a short trailer that featured Krypto, the Dog of Steel. The NME keep reporting the reaction to it as "mixed" but I'm pretty sure just about every actual DC fan did that thing where you relax a whole lot of tension in your shoulders you didn't even notice you were carrying. The comment thread on YouTube is that, all through.
Now Gunn's put out an extended, five-minute version with a whole narrative section from the movie and it does not disappoint. For a Superman fan there are all kinds of oddnesses, like Krypto having long fur and the Superman robots not wearing costumes but instead of detracting from the lore those differences feel like an evolution of it.
Put simply, this is Superman, in a way almost no version of the icon since Christopher Reeve really has been. It's also very clearly the work of someone who understands not just the character but the backstory. Like, all of the backstory, not just that tedious bit on Krypton before it blew up, the part that's been done to death about a million times now.
I am more than optimistic about this one. Whether the movie can survive the current resistance to all things super-heroic evident in the wider cinema-going audience is another question but I'm confident the longtime comics fans in that audience are going to be well-served, in the best possible meaning of the phrase.
And On That Blondshell
Much of what I said above about Wet Leg applies here, too, except for the implied part about the dangers of over-exposure. This is the third single from Sabrina Teitelbaum's second album, "If You Asked For A Picture" and once again I'd say it's good but not great, which is pretty much how I felt about the other two as well. I do think this one might be a grower, though. That chorus is sticking.
Where Blondshell differs from Wet Leg in this respect, at least for me, is that Sabrina's sound is a lot more amenable to repeated listening. Wet Leg have the immediacy of a great singles band. A lot of their songs sound like they were made to be heard coming out of car windows or transistor radios. Blondshell is more the sort of thing you play at home on the stereo on a Sunday morning.
For that reason alone I'd bet that, even if the two albums are equally far behind their immediate predecessors in essentiality, it'll be Blondshell's that gets listened to the most in this house and by a margin. That's already the case with their debuts, although I've probably watched the Wet Leg videos more than the Blondshell ones.
Speaking of videos, although I've embedded both of them here, I don't very much like either. The Wet Leg one is okay but feels a bit like they might be trying just a tad too hard for the wacky funster vibe they nailed so effortlessly last time around.
The Blondshell video, on the other hand, goes right to the opposite extreme. It looks like a bunch of pals goofing around but doing it with a degree of self-consciousness that makes it slightly uncomfortable to watch. Also, they clearly bought the absolute cheapest strollers they could find, just for the purposes of the video, and they bought them as a job lot. It just looks false.
As for the song itself, I love the chorus and the overall Blondshell sound. The words are typically elliptical in that way I love about her writing but the subject matter is a little disturbing. It reminds uncomfortably of "Too Much, Too Young" by the Specials, an unnecessarily harsh and judgmental song I always disliked.
Fortunately, these days you rarely get a new song without a gloss on it from the songwriter and what Sabrina says about the lyrics makes me happier. As per Stereogum
“The song is partially about being in your twenties and feeling like you’re supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!) yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,”
That's a much warmer vibe than the words feel like they support. I find this a lot with Blondshell's lyrics. Possibly because they're so pared-down, they often feel harsher than Sabrina's explanation of them suggests they were meant to. It's the good, old intentional fallacy at play again, I guess, although here it's working in my favor.
Anyway, I like "23's A Baby" best of the three singles to date. Looking forward to the album in May.
And with that, I'm off to make some music of my own. There may not be another post here until Wednesday, what with me working and also having something to do on Monday but we'll see.
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