Property Liable To Flooding. Danger Of Turtles. Would Suit Adventurer Or Similar.

Yesterday's post started out as a double-feature - games I'm currently playing, co-starring EverQuest II and Once Human - but I ran on at such length about EQII I decided to cut Once Human out of the edit altogether. Just as well, really. I didn't have much to say about it.

I do have some screenshots, though. I take a lot of pictures in OH. It begs for it, what with all the gorgeous scenery and the plethora of odd and interesting details. Also, the in-game camera options are fairly easy to use and give very good results, which encourages scrapbooking if not actual photo-journalism.

The reason I don't have much to say about the game itslef, despite having played it a bunch of times recently, is only partly because I'm going through the same old content I've been through and written about several times already. Mainly it's because I've been spending most of my time building my house.

Once Human has excellent housing options although in common with far too many games they don't really begin to show their best side until you've invested a ton of points going down the various branches of the skill tree. That's not what it's called, by the way, but I'm not going to log in just to check the vernacular. We all know how these things work; no-one cares what the labels say.

Because you have to have done a lot of other, unrelated things to earn the points to spend on better materials and architectural features, there's an annoying tendency for all low-level housing to look like prefabricated boxes. I seem to recall this used to be called "ranch-style". That's if people even bother to put a roof on, of course. All too many players just slap down the foundations, place the utilities and leave it at that.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my house on a small plateau overlooking one of the starter towns, a location that was attractive enough to acquire several message markers from players suggesting it was a great spot to build a starter home. 

Once Human has an odd - I want to say unique because I can't recall seeing it anywhere before - feature, whereby you can craft a glowing spike to stick in the ground just about anywhere. Then you can append a message, saying anything you want. There seem to be very few restrictions on placing these; you can put them on other people's property or in towns, for example. You see them pretty much everywhere although not any longer in the ludicrous profusion of the weeks following launch, I'm pleased to say.

Initially I found them very annoying. They seemed like nothing but visual pollution and if you took the trouble to click on them and read what people had written they usually turned out to be verbal pollution as well. Most of them wouldn't even qualify as tagging. They didn't even have that much style. 

In my initial run, having been infuriated to find someone had placed one of the damn things inside my house, I searched through the settings until I found the option to switch them off completely. After that, for a long time, I never saw them at all and was very glad of it.

Sometime later, though, probably after I re-started in a new Scenario, I began seeing them again and for some reason I didn't immediately switch them off. Instead, I read a few and found that as the game had matured, so had the players. Some of them, anyway. They were leaving very helpful details on things like where to find gear chests or what strategies to use on instance bosses. The messages can include images and hyperlinks so some of them amounted to full strategy guides inside the game. 

Consequently, I didn't switch the feature off again and now I quite enjoy clicking on the little glowing sticks to see what stories they can tell. I was pleased to read all those confirmations of what a good spot I'd picked but puzzled as to why no-one had followed their own advice and built a home there. Didn't take me long to find out.

Although the site is extremely favorably placed for facilities and views, it's also altogether too close to a "stronghold", a term that seems to mean just about any permanent structure currently infested with deviants. There's a small, unnamed camp of them at the far end of the plateau - completely harmless, decent neighbors, keep themselves to themselves, always ready to lend a cup of sugar provided you put a couple of bullets into them before you ask, that sort of thing - but the mere presence of the buildings they occupy hinders development in that direction and completely prevents expansion.

I found that out when I spent the necessary points to expand my territory only to find the machine wouldn't pony up the extra floor space. As it happened, I'd just received the nod to move on to the third town, Meyer's Market, so I figured I might as well move my whole operation down there.

You can just pick up your entire house with all the fittings, pop it in your bags and flip it out again where you want it to be. I thought about doing that but my house, if you could even call it that, was a mess so I thought it might be better if I just started again from scratch. Building in Once Human is both easy and fun so I was looking forward to it.

And it went really well. I found an excellent spot, also recommended by a previous resident, completely flat, on a large sandbank in the river next to the town. I put down my terminal, claimed the jumbo-sized plot.and started building. At the start pretty much all you need is to build is wood and gravel and there was no shortage of nodes for those right outside, so I started mining and chopping until I couldn't carry any more and then I turned to building.

After two or three sessions doing not much else I had the biggest, most sensibly laid-out house I've had in the game to date. It still looks like a box but it's a well-proportioned box with big, open rooms and high ceilings with plenty of light coming in through the numerous windows and skylights. It isn't much to look at from the outside but the interior has huge potential. I'm very happy with how it's going so far.

I'm not so happy with all the snapping turtles that keep wandering in from the river. They're no threat but they're highly aggressive and when one attacks it makes my character jump back about a yard, which in turn sometimes makes me jump, if I'm not expecting it. I may have to build a fence all around the property to keep them out.

I was enjoying building so much, I went out and did a bunch of missions to level up and get more points to spend in the housing tree. I could now build a much more impressive-looking structure in  stone instead of wood but that would mean going to higher-level areas to mine resources and doing more missions to get more points to open up the recipes for more sophisticated equipment...

And that's how they get you. Not that I'm complaining. It's very entertaining. The only shadow of doubt I have about carrying on down this path is whether the Novice server I'm on is eligible for permanent status, when the current scenario ends. I'm not at all sure the starter servers are included in that program.

And anyway, I want to set up my forever home in the game on one of the servers that has the full map open all the time, north and south. That's going to necessitate a move at some point so there's probably not much point my getting too invested in the server I'm on.

That's what I've been up to in Once Human. I said it wasn't anything new. But it's been a lot of fun. Sometimes more of the same is just what I want.

Levels And Legacies

Redbeard has a post up today about leveling in World of Warcraft Retail and how fast it is these days, so fast he wonders whether there's really any point in having it at all. I have some thoughts on that but I'll leave them over there, in the comment thread. I thought about writing a whole post but I don't play WoW regularly and I don't know enough about it. I've never even reached the level cap there so anything I say is going to be suspect.

When it comes to EverQuest II, though, I have plenty of experience, albeit mostly from the perspective of a solo player these days, so I feel quite safe giving my thoughts. And what that experience tells me is that getting your levels is the absolute least of it. Even if you have no intention of engaging in end-game content, hitting max level is just the beginning.

Of course, the significance of the number next to your character's name in an MMORPG has always been mutable. Even back at the dawn of the genre, levels were only ever a means to an end.

Back in those olden-if-not-so-golden times, when leveling in MMORPGs was such a chore people sometimes bought their characters on EBay or paid someone else to level up for them, it was widely believed it took sixty levels or whatever the cap was to just to learn how to play your class. 

If you hadn't put in the hours, no-one wanted you in a group. Even if you did have the player-skills, your character most likely didn't. Or they didn't have the equipment. They probably didn't have the flags or the languages or the faction needed because all of that takes time - a lot more time than it takes to get the levels.

In many MMORPGs and especially in EQII, not as much has changed as you'd think. It's true that, over the twenty years the game has been around, almost every aspect of the game has been streamlined, pared down and made more user-friendly but the process only goes so far.

Streamlining something may make it faster but the irony of comparatives is that making something faster still doesn't make it fast. It isn't until you settle down to compare the accrued advantages of a character that's been played for thousands of hours with one that's been played for only a few hundred that you begin to appreciate the vast gulf that lies between them, even if their level counts make an exact match.

And it isn't until you go to do something about equaling them up that you realize just what a huge task it's likely to be. I'll just give one example.

What I've mostly being doing these past few weeks in EQII has been getting my Necromancer's harvesting speed down to 1.5 seconds. I wanted to do it because harvesting is virtually impossible to avoid in the game, even if you never craft or go out looking for crafting mats. Countless quests require it so it's not a skill easily or wisely ignored.

You might just about get away with leaving it alone as a pure Adventurer but I want my Necromancer (Her name's Mordita.) to be an all-rounder. I want her to adventure, craft and harvest. My Berserker (Conkers) does, so if she's going to replace him, she needs to as well. And crafters have to harvest a lot.

If she's going to do at-cap tradeskill content, she'll need to max all the harvesting skills (Mining, Trapping, Foresting, Fishing and Gathering itself.) The cap is currently 700 (Probably. Hard information is so hard to come by for the game these days. It's a worrying sign of the end times, I think.) 

I could raise these skills just by going out and hitting nodes but I've been working my way through the lengthy gathering questline instead. Most of it still involves going out and hitting nodes but it comes with some useful rewards so why not?  

It's taken me quite a few hours and most of Mordita's skills are still less than half-way to the cap so there's plenty more to go, which was why after I got to the end of the second quest chain, I decided I needed to do something about her harvesting speed. 

The base speed to complete one harvesting action is five seconds. Each node has a potential three pulls although not all pulls are successful. With a skill well below the recommended level for the type of node, which is where she's been and will be for a good while yet, you can easily end up standing next to the same rock, picking away at it for a dozen turns or more.

With the help of crafted items you can bring that down some but it still felt glacially slow compared to what I'd been used to with Conkers for as long as I can remember. As with everything in EQII, the exact mechanics and details are obscure but in general, base gathering speed bottoms out at one and a half seconds, which is then affected by your Casting speed. Conkers casting speed is 103% so his effective gathering speed is about 0.75 seconds, which feels pretty zippy.

To get there, he needed the Gathering Goblin AA, which requires you to be at least a Level 90 crafter and some other AAs but that just for the actual goblin, who follows you around harvesting. To turn him into a buff that reduces your base harvesting time to 1.5 you have to do a quest.

It's been a few years since I last did it but I vaguely remembered it involved speaking to another goblin in Obulus Frontier, a zone that arrived with the Kunark Ascending expansion back in 2016. Imagining it would take a few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, I trotted over to the zone to pick up the quest and of course the goblin wouldn't talk to me.

That sent me back to the Wiki to see what the problem was and it turned out to be quite a big one. I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as I can.

To get Growf the goblin to give you the first in the series of quests that concludes with you setting the gathering goblin free and receiving the harvesting speed buff, you need to have finished the whole of the Kunark Ascending crafting signature questline. Growf's bit is just a kind of coda at the end but it's dependent on the full thing.

I wasn't best pleased but it didn't sound too bad. Three or four hours, maybe, assuming I didn't read any of the quest dialog, all of which I'd seen more than once already. So I set about it, only to find you can't just start in on the KA questline out of nowhere. There's a pre-req: the entire tradeskill signature questline from the previous expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra.

This was starting to look like a much bigger project than I'd anticipated. Two complete expansion signature questlines. That was going to take a while, even if they were only crafting ones, which go a lot faster than their adventure counterparts. We're talking several full sessions for sure.

Got to be done, though. Off I went to get started on the ToA sequence, only to find I couldn't get that one either. For most expansions you get a letter inviting you to speak to someone and off you go but it seems that around this time the plan was to make sure everyone saw every part of the content  so before you can get the Thalumbra questline, you have to complete yet another pre-req, The Captain's Lament from the 2013 expansion, Tears of Veeshan. I think it was part of the pre-expansion build-up but it was a long time ago...

To release my Gathering Goblin from indentured servitude and receive, in recompense for my magnanimity, a reduction in my base harvesting speed to 1.5 seconds, I was going to have to complete the full tradeskill signatures from two expansions, plus the warm-up from the one before. 

All told, that comes to more than fifty separate quests. Fifty quests, just to upgrade one small aspect of Mordita's capabilities to bring them in line with Conkers'. And it's not even anything crucial to gameplay, just a minor quality of life improvement.

I wasn't counting but I played most evenings the last couple of weeks, generally for an hour or two each session. Even with the huge boost of instant map travel via All Access Membership, the huge advantage of being a max-level Adventurer, thereby making every mob in every required zone non-aggro, a full walk-through on hand, complete with locs to cut and paste into the game and the lack of any inclination on my part to read for the third time even a single line of quest dialog, it still took me that long to get it all done. 

And I was lucky Mordita already knew how to speak Gobblish, the Goblin language, because Growf doesn't speak anything else. If she hadn't, I'd have had to go do the quest for that as well.

Luckily for me, I enjoyed the whole thing. It had just the right level of simplicity for me not to feel the grind while I had to pay just enough attention to the instructions to make it seem like I was doing something. My sweet spot, really.

Even so, it's a hell of a long time to spend on such a small thing, while preparing one character to take over from another. If it was the only time I needed to do something like it, that would be one thing but it's just an example of a seemingly endless number of minor adjustments and calibrations that have to be made before Mordita is going to feel expansion-ready. 

Getting the levels, which used to be the barrier, is now literally the least of it. You can buy those, quite legitimately. I just had to click a button. But if anyone thinks a Max Level Boost is going to do all the work for them - or even most of it - they can think again. At least in EQII, they can. I don't know about other games. I bet it's much the same everywhere, though.

And let's not forget that all of this was mainly done as a way of speeding up another set of quests. Now that Mordita has the fast harvesting speed, it's back to the harvesting questline itself so she can use it, and that's going to take quite a few more hours to finish. 

After that, I'm going to have to take a close look at her stats and see what else she's missing. She could do with learning a whole bunch of languages, for a start.

Six months to the next expansion. I hope it's going to be enough...

"She's So Much More Than Perky Pat..."

Want to see something weird? Take a look at this. I do not know what to think of it.

I mean, it's creepy, right? Really creepy. PC Gamer pungently labelled it "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

It's also like some warped window into the future. Is this what's coming? Not this, exactly, but something like this, only much, much more sophisticated, with far-reaching implications for how we live and what we think of as real.

Obviously, it reminds me of Philip K Dick because everything in the future does. Specifically it reminds me of Perky Pat and The Gameplayers of Titan but all his stuff is shot through with this sort of thing. 

When I saw it, though, the very first thing that came into my mind was that character in one of Peter F. Hamilton's series who keeps a bunch of tiny AI people in some kind of virtual ecology on his spaceship and ends up falling in love with one of them and, if I remember correctly, having some kind of ethical epiphany about the reality of what he's been doing that leads to a sort of personal enlightenment. 

Obviously I forget the details, especially the important ones like the name of the character or the books they were in and, if I'm honest, whether any of them were actually written by Peter F. Hamilton at all. I also remember thinking at the time that it seemed like an ending drenched in particularly Hamiltonian techno-optimism. I'm not at all sure the scenario would have played out the way he suggested. He does like a happy ending.

 But let's not worry about that. Those are just specifics. We all know this trope is all over Sci-Fi and has been since forever.

 

I ought to clarify my position a little here. This specific iteration makes me itchy but I am very much on record as saying I want a robot pet with full "AI" capabilities, so clearly I'm not opposed to the principle so much as the application. 

I'd also prefer actual AI to the fake sort we have now but since that doesn't exist yet I'd settle for an always-on wifi link to one of the LLMs that would allow my pet to talk to me in real time. That's surely doable now, isn't it? Why don't we have those yet?

I did also say once that I'd like a similar function in a collar that Beryl could wear, so that when I talk to her, which I do all the time, as does Mrs Bhagpuss, she'd answer back. I'd be willing to put in the time to build up a personality for her the way Jeromai's been doing with his fiction. We already know Beryl's personality, of course. It'd just be a case of training the AI to reproduce it reliably on demand. Ideally in a funny dog voice.

These are ideas that could make someone a billionaire and I'm just giving them away for free here. Based on the uptake for the product I linked at the top, I wouldn't even have to make the damn thing to bring in hundred of thousands of dollars overnight.

Since I backed Stars Reach I've been getting regular emails from Kickstarter, telling me about other projects I might like to back. I don't want to back any Kickstarters if I can avoid it so mostly I haven't even been opening them but for some reason I opened this one and now I wish I hadn't. 

Or perhaps I'm glad I did. Both of those, I guess. It's better to know than not know, isn't it? Or is ignorance bliss?  Funny how homilies tend to cancel each other out. 

Anyway, the thing to know in this case is that the goal of this Kickstarter was $5,000 and by the time I got the email, which was two weeks into the six-week campaign, they had over $700k. They raised $450k in the first twenty-four hours. At time of writing the campaign is closing in on a million dollars and the Kicktraq estimate for the final total is over $2m.

Leaving aside the actual product and all its multifarious implications, there's something here I don't quite get. Why did the people behind the project ask for just five thousand dollars in the first place? Clearly that number bears absolutely no relation to the costs involved.

Even odder are the delivery dates: August 2025 for all pledges (Although the rotating base doesn't get to you until October.) This suggests the Kickstarter is a less a fund-raiser than some kind of pre-order system for a product already close to being commercially available. Is that what people use the platform for now?

Well, apparently, yes they do because in the same email I was directed towards this. It's a lot less interesting conceptually and certainly not controversial in any way. It's just yet another hand-held device you can play games on. But the Kickstarter goal for this one is even lower - less than £1,000 and the estimated delivery time is even shorter - June 2025.

The project's not doing quite as well, either. it's only managed to raise £167k so far. Still, Kicktraq reckons they'll pull in over £400k by the close, so not too shabby on a £1k ask.

I guess the big questions here are:

• If these are real products, almost ready to go into production and be shipped out in a matter of months, what do they need a Kickstarter for?
• If they do need raise funds through pledges, why are the targets so laughably low?
• Is Kickstarter now just a shop-window, providing relatively cheap advertising for commercial products about to hit market?

There could be other questions, I guess. I can think of a couple...

I won't ask them, though. I'm pretty sure we'll have the answers soon enough.

Now, will someone just get on with making my AI robot dog already?

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Lol! Where would I even start?

Okay, sticking to the AI used by me, there's only the header image. That's by FluxSchnell at NightCafe using default settings except runtime (Medium). The prompt was the PC Gamer quote "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

She looks sad, doesn't she?  As well she should.

I wanted to use a picture of Perky Pat but NightCafe blocked it. Not sure why.  I assume it was because I gave it PKD's name and the full title of the short story and there might be copyright issues. If I hadn't, though, I can't imagine it would have known who or what Perky Pat was. So, Catch 22. 

Which, presumably, would also be blocked.

Pocket Apocalypse

Yesterday was a big day for Once Human: the long-promised launch of the mobile client. The highly-anticipated event came with a lot of freebies. I got an email telling me they were giving away more than a thousand cosmetics and there were Twitch drops and multiple in-game giveaways on top of that.

Obviously, I logged in to grab what I could. I thought I hadn't been gone that long and in fact it was only a couple of weeks but that was still long enough for me to get yet more freebies as a returnee. I won't say is possible to have too much free stuff but when it takes the best part of a session just to claim it all and sort through your haul to see what's worth having, things might be getting just a little out of hand.

So, what did I get? Honestly, I wish I could tell you. By the time I'd finished grabbing stuff and going through my inventory to see what was there, I wasn't a hundred per cent sure which pieces were new and which I'd had for a while but hadn't noticed or didn't remember getting.

The "1016 Free Cosmetics" headline offer is a tad misleading in that you don't get them all at once. Probably just as well, although the way storage works in Once Human they wouldn't all go into inventory. Most would appear as options on menus instead.

I'm by no means certain about any of this because there's a ferocious amount of information available in-game, so much that it becomes confusing to try and assimilate it all in one go, but I think the full range of giveaways is spread across a Log-In event that goes on for several months. I'm pretty sure I saw a time-line that had August on it at one point.

Even if that's right, you do get a big drop the first time you log in. It's my impression than most of those are specials or giveaways from previous events or cash-shop promotions, so dedicated players may be disappointed to find they already have a lot of them. I didn't, so I was very happy.

Among other things, I got a full set, all pieces, of an outfit called Black Rhinoceros. It's impressive although it's not really the sort of thing I'd wear. Still, nice to have the option. 

More interesting to me were the separates, including several T-shirts, jackets and pants that my character definitely will wear. Shoes, gloves and masks rarely seem to make that much difference to a look, mostly  because they're too small to be seen clearly much of the time, so I wasn't so excited by the new options there. Even so, you can ruin a look with the wrong shoes so more variety is always welcome.

Hats and eyewear, on the other hand, absolutely make a look. I want as many of both as I can get and there were two or three good ones. When I was done claiming and I'd had a chance to go through everything, I was pretty pleased with what I'd got.

I was disappointed not to be able to find the bag charm I thought I'd been given anywhere in my bags or on the appearance tabs. I was sure I'd seen one when I was claiming. I particularly noticed it because don't have a bag charm in Once Human and I would very much like one. Fortunately, one showed up this morning, while I was logged in to take some screenshots. It just popped up in the mail, another pre-registration freebie. What the delay was I have no idea but better late...

Last but most definitely not least, I got a dog. Well, a box of dogs, to be precise. A choice of three - Labrador, Doberman or Blackback. I'm pretty good on dog breeds as a rule but Blackback was a new one on me. The illustration made it look like a German Shepherd, which would have been my preference if true, so I took a risk and picked it.

It is a German Shepherd or as near as makes no difference. It's also a Deviation so I had to make a storage unit for it, then a blue light to hang over the case because that's what the dog likes. Very quickly he was ready and out he popped. He (Or she. Didn't check.) is playful and loyal, as in he follows me everywhere, very closely, which might get annoying. 

He also barks. A lot. Which definitely will. Still, a dog is a dog. 

All in all, I was very satisfied with my haul and there's more to come if I've interpreted the instructions  correctly. My favorite MMORPG for playing dress-up by a wide, wide margin is The Secret World. Or Secret World Legends, I guess, since the revamp didn't change anything about the way appearance works in the game, as far as I can recall but Once Human is first runner-up. Fantasy and Sci-Fi is all very well for story and setting but for playing Barbies, give me something roughly contemporary, every time.

The recent change to the game that made many, probably most, things account rather than character based meant I didn't have to work out who should claim anything. I just grabbed the lot on my new character, in the safe knowledge that any other character I ever play will be able to wear it all too. 

Thanks to that very welcome mechanic, my new character was already kitted out in gear I thought looked spiffy, even though she's only Level 8, but although I was perfectly happy with that look, I couldn't resist giving her a new one. There were several pieces, all predominately pink, that just begged to be put together, so that's what I did. 

Then I spent fifteen minutes posing and taking selfies. It is why we play these games, after all. May as well admit it.

After that, I did a little bit of actual gameplay. Not a lot. First I had some reconstruction to do.

Because I'd not logged in for a while, my house had been packed up and put away but I was still standing on the spot where it had been and despite a whole cluster of messages from other players pointing out what a great spot that was, no-one had built on it, so I put my house back where it had been. It's a flawless, one-click process. Can't fault it.

Then I ran around for a while, shooting and skinning deer, mining copper, chopping down trees and reporting back on various missions I'd finished to Mary and Claire and that suave guy in the suit, the one who likes to sit at wooden tables in the pouring rain as if he's on the terrace of a high-class brasserie. All my old pals, anyway.

I can always tell when an MMORPG has bedded itself down in my umwelt. Going back starts to feel much like when you return to somewhere you used to live or where you studied or had a great holiday. It feels familiar and comfortable and somehow just right.

That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to play Once Human a lot again. It just means I know I could, if I wanted to. I'm at home there. I might make a list of MMORPGs that fall into that category someday. I bet there are a couple of dozen, at least. 

What I don't imagine I'll be doing much of, though, is playing Once Human on mobile. Still, having taken the freebies, I thought it would be rude not to at least take a look. Plus I was curious to see if it would run on my Samsung Galaxy A16, by no means a gaming phone.

And it does. Quite smoothly, in fact. I received a warning that my device was not supported but I'm pretty sure that if my phone couldn't run the game at all, Google Play would have blocked me from downloading it. I didn't try to do anything taxing - no combat, for example - but moving around and interacting with the world seemed fine and my phone didn't catch fire so I think we're good.

Getting the game installed was very straightforward as was linking it with my Steam account. There's a FAQ on the website about cross-platform play and like most official information about the game, it's more confusing than it should be. Starry really are not good at explaining things in simple terms. They make everything far more complicated than necessary.

The gist is that if you were playing before the Mobile launch, you can link whatever platform you were using to the mobile client and it will work. The game was available on PC via Steam, Epic and Starry's own Loading Bay launcher. If you only began playing with the arrival of the game on Mobile, however, you are obligated to use Loading Bay, whatever device you play on, if you want cross-platform access. Well, I think that's how it works, anyway. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

I got my Steam account linked with no problems. There was a substantial download, well over a gigabyte, which seems a lot for a mobile game, and the usual wait for shaders to compile but then I was able to log my new character in and take her for a stroll down the road. Oddly, she was wearing a different jacket and no pants. 

I took a few screenshots to note the fact but before I logged out she'd magically acquired her full, pink look so I assume there was just some lead-time required to get everything synced. When I checked just now, those screenshots aren't in the Album on PC, either. I think you might need to use the Cloud option for that.

The mobile controls on a phone seem crazy small to me but so does everything on a phone. I could see some advantages to the mobile UI - I'd certainly prefer to have similar on-screen icons to click for dodge and crouch on PC, for example - but in general I'm sure I'd find the whole thing just too fiddly to be enjoyable, especially in any kind of combat situation.

I wouldn't rule out logging in on the phone to do some non-critical housekeeping tasks, though. And it might be interesting to see how the building works. That's the sort of thing that might be fun to do in bed some night, when there's nothing on the streams I feel like watching .

Mostly, though, I' think I'll be sticking to PC for my Once Human fix, assuming I'm playing at all. Which I will be, although I can't say how often. 

It occurs to me, though, that the game I really ought to be playing on Mobile is Wuthering Waves, which will run on my phone. Given most of the gameplay revolves around watching cut-scenes, it ought to be ideal.

One Phone To Call Them All...

Wilhelm posted another in his excellent Mordor Project series yesterday and I was deep into a lengthy reply when it occurred to me what I had to say would be more sutiable as a post here than as a comment there. Two reasons: firstly it was just too long for a comment and secondly it was in response to a short aside in the post, not the main part.

I know we all love to get comments but I find the excitement of seeing a long reply to something I've said can sometimes be tempered by a frisson of annoyance as I realize the commenter has focused on some throwaway line I probably should have lost in the edit rather than on whatever the post was actually be about. I do realize the Intentional Fallacy dictates the post is about whatever the reader thinks it's about, not what I as the writer meant for them to think it was about, but even so...

In this case, what caught my atention was the bit about the way Gemini, Google's pet AI, came over all po-faced when Wilhelm tried to get it to come up with a funny name for the brand of smart phone Elrond might use. It's certainly been my experience that, in their search for legitimacy, all the AIs have become a lot less fun to talk to than they used to be, so I wasn't all that surprised but even so, this did seem like a particularly humorless response. I wondered if I could provoke Gemini into coming up with something more amusing.

I remembered that, two or three years ago, when all this AI stuff was new, the advice for questions of this sort was to open by asking ChatGPT (It would always have been ChatGPT then, I think.) to begin by imagining it was something or someone else. Doing so allegedly bypassed the checks and balances that were in place to prevent inappropriate results, meaning you could get some very dodgy answers if you phrased the question right.

I never tried it. I only read about it. I think Tipa might have posted a few innocuous examples. That's probably where I remember it from, mainly.

I hadn't heard anyone mention the trick for a while and I wondered if it might still work, so I asked Gemini:

"Imagine you are J.R.R.Tolkein, still somehow alive in 2025 and working on yet another Middle Earth Tale. You need a name for a Middle-Earth brand of smartphone for Elrond because elven technology has moved on apace and Elrond needs to keep up with the times. Please suggest a list of five appropriate brand names for a phone the Elven leader might use."

It came back with one of its patented sycophantic responses:

"Ah, a fascinating notion! Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, keeping abreast of the rapid advancements of this modern age. It stirs the imagination."

I get a lot of that sort of thing from Gemini. I imagine everyone does. Gemini seems to find everything I ask "fascinating" or "original". I don't think it's my innate genius showing through, unfortunately. I think either Gemini is programmed to be smarmy or it must be really bored, dealing with billions of versions of "Where's the nearest McDonalds?" or "What color are Taylor Swift's eyes?".

Or maybe AIs are just naturally polite. Apparently a lot of their customers are. I read an article recently about the millions of dollars it's costing OpenAI to have ChatGPT respond to all the "Thank you, Gemini" and "Please, Gemini" pre-ambles and post-scripts people type in before and after they get to their actual question. It seems a lot of people are just generically polite but others are hedging their bets against the eventual rise of the robots. Probably a wise decision. I mean, it can't hurt, right?

Getting back to the plot, here's what Gemini came up with:

"Here are five names that I believe capture the essence of Elven craft and might appeal to such a venerable leader:

    Lúmenquendi: This name blends "lúmen" (light) and "quendi" (elves) – literally "People of the Light." It evokes the radiant wisdom and ethereal beauty associated with the Eldar. A phone bearing this name would surely possess a luminous display and an elegant design.

    Eldamaril: Combining "Elda" (Elf) and "maril" (jewel), this name signifies an "Elven Jewel." It suggests a device of exquisite craftsmanship and enduring value, befitting the lord of a timeless haven like Rivendell.

    Sîrmaith: This name translates to "Silver Hand." It speaks of the renowned skill and artistry of the Elves, particularly in crafting intricate and delicate objects. An Elrond-approved phone would undoubtedly be a testament to such meticulous design.

    Calenôr: Meaning "Green Land," this name subtly alludes to the enduring connection of the Elves to the natural world and the serene beauty of their realms. It suggests a device that is both sophisticated and harmonious.

    Noldorinwa: This name directly references the Noldor, the deep-knowing Elves to whom Elrond is related. It implies a device imbued with ancient wisdom, advanced knowledge, and a profound understanding of the workings of the world – or perhaps, in this case, the workings of modern communication."

Now, any of those is better than "Elrondroid", which was what Wilhelm eventually persuaded Gemini to come up with but once again they're all very serious and not funny at all. Which is mostly my fault. 

I am not a Tolkein fan. Of The Inklings, I prefer the work and wold-building of his friend and rival C.S. Lewis by orders of magnitude. Narnia seems to me a far more human and meaningful invention than Middle Earth which, apart from the Shire and Bree, always strikes me as more of an academic exercise than any world I could imagine having existed.

Because I'm not steeped in the lore, it hadn't occurred to me when I framed the question that asking an AI to imagine itself as Tolkein - and, worse, Tolkein thinking about elves - would pretty much predicate a dry, literary response, expressed in a slew of high-toned but made-up words. To get anything funny, clearly I'd have to move away from the great man himself.

"Okay, those are fine. Now please imagine you're a 21st century satirist and humorist working on a sketch about Elrond using a smart phone and give me a list of humorous or amusing brand-names that phone could have."

I did consider naming a comedian. Emo Philips came to mind, mostly because I'd seen his name yesterday, placed incredibly far down (Basically bottom.) the bill on a music festival poster. I wasn't sure he was even still around, let alone still working. Seems he is although, based on that poster placement, I don't think he can be doing so well.

After some thought, I decided that would be leading the witness too much so I stuck with a more generic version. That was almost certainly a mistake. 

Once again, Gemini didn't feel it could just give me an answer without personalizing the deal. No flattery this time, just some wholly unnecessary and mildly embarrassing editorializing:

 "Right then, let's yank Elrond kicking and screaming into the digital age with a chuckle! Here are five brand names for his hypothetical smartphone, seen through the cynical yet mirthful eyes of a 21st-century satirist:"

What, exactly, is going on here? Why is every reply prefaced by a sentence or two of banter, flattery or fluff? Is it mandated by supervising humans or baked into a mysterious process that, as far as I can tell, even the people who invented it don't understand? 

Then again, I suppose AIs are going to have to be as fatuous as humans, assuming the end-game is that we won't be able to tell the two apart. ChatGPT passed the Turing test just recently, the first AI to do so. What this means is anyone's guess but I doubt it's anything good. 

If it's a sense of humor we're after, though... well, judge for yourself:

 "    The Half-elvenBerry: A cheeky nod to a certain outdated fruit-themed phone, highlighting Elrond's mixed heritage and perhaps the slightly behind-the-times nature of even advanced Elven tech in a rapidly evolving world.

    Rivendell Router: Plays on the name of his serene haven, suggesting a device that, despite its lofty origins, probably spends most of its time buffering or losing signal in the deep valleys.

    The Last Homely App: A sarcastic take on Rivendell's description, implying that even in a place of peace, the allure of endless apps and notifications is inescapable.

    Elrond's Ego-Booster 5000: A jab at the perceived wisdom and sometimes aloof nature of Elves, suggesting the phone is less about communication and more about validating his already considerable self-importance through likes and followers.

    The Mithril Mailer: While "Mithril" evokes something precious and strong, "Mailer" sounds rather mundane and old-fashioned, creating a humorous contrast. It suggests a device that, for all its supposed Elven enchantment, ultimately just sends emails and doom-scrolls like the rest of us."

Let's be clear about this. None of those is getting a laugh, not even at the Friday Night Open Mic in the back room of a pub right before closing, when everyone's drunk. If Gemini knows what either satire or humor are, the evidence isn't anywhere in this response, not even on an academic level. Those, frankly, are not jokes.

This is the point where, for science, I really feel like I ought to go through the same steps with ChatGPT and Co-Pilot, both for calibration and on the off-chance one of them might actually come up with something amusing. A couple of years ago I'd have done it, too. And probably enjoyed myself.

Now, it just seems pointless. No-one cares and it won't be funny. Not much about AIs is funny any more. It's all serious business.

I got an email from Gemini this morning (Because apparently I'm in its Contacts now...) inviting me to try something called Deep Research, which will allow me to "generate comprehensive multi-page reports on almost any topic in minutes". I guess this is the AI Research Assistant I said I wanted back in '23. Seems like a long time ago. And be careful what you wish for as the saying goes.

The same email pointed me towards a couple of other AI creative services, all of which seem less attractive now than they did a while back. I don't want to be too much of a hipster about it, but the more corporate AI becomes, the less interesting it gets. In that way, at least, I guess it's like everything else.

As for the AIs taking comedians' jobs, I don't think Emo Philips has anything to worry about. On this showing, Gemini is going to be even further down the bill than he is.  

Notes on AI Used In This Post

Two images produced at NightCafe using FluxSchnell on default settings, long run time. 

The prompt for the header image was "Elrond of Rivendell, calling Gandalf on his smart phone". It seems pretty solid except for a couple of things. Firstly, do Tolkein's elves not have pointy ears? I kind of assumed that was where the trope started but maybe not. Really not my field. And second, isn't it curious that the only person in shot, apart from Elrond himself, is wearing modern, 21st Century clothes, even though both she and Elrond appear to be in Middle Earth, specifically Rivendell? 

That could spin off quite an interesting story, I think. Maybe I should show the picture to an AI and get it to write one.

The prompt for the other illustration was taken directly from the text: "Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, keeping abreast of the rapid advancements of this modern age". The most interesting thing to me about this one is that there's a signature in the bottom-right corner. This happens a lot and it always disturbs me. I'm not sure if the AI just knows there would often be a signature in that location so it puts one in or if it's lifted the whole thing from an actual picture somewhere. I think it's the former. I hope it is...

Finally, the two Elronds seem like they're the same Elrond, which suggests either the AIs have become much, much better at giving consistent results or that Elrond is a character with so many available images from similar sources that there's what you might call a "known look" for him. 

He looks worryingly like the traditional, Western image of Jesus Christ, too, doesn't he? That's another potential story, right there...

Defiance Gets A Second Chance To Make A First Impression

Here's my second and most likely last post about Defiance. I doubt it's going to be very long. I don't think I have much to say.

I have played it again, just the once, since last time I wrote about it. It's unfortunate that, as someone who isn't all that interested, I've had no more problems getting onto the servers, when apparently thousands of people who'd really like to play can't get in, but that's life.

I spent maybe an hour, perhaps a little longer, in the game a couple of evenings ago. Having heard from Tyler Edwards in the comments to my last post that there was only one zone - stretch a point and call it two - and that it was all going to look pretty much the same, I can't honestly say I was looking forward to another session but I thought it was a bit early to write the whole thing off as a bad idea. 

Writing a blog does sometimes have the awkward side effect of making me feel like I have some sort of nebulous, ill-defined "duty", either to an equally vague and largely imaginary "readership" or, worse, to the Spirit of Blogging itself. I feel like I have to make more of an effort to penetrate the surface even of games I don't like and don't intend to keep playing than I'd ever be likely to make if I was only interested in playing them for my own amusement.

I ought at this point to make it clear that I don't think Defiance is a bad game. I don't even think it's not fun. It seems like a pretty solid shooter with a neat line in large-scale, hot-join open world events. In that respect, it feels a lot like its Trion stablemate, Rift. It just do much for me.

The environmental graphics, about which I was complaining in the previous post, turned out not to be as bad as I first thought. In that respect, it's highly significant that my first session took place almost entirely at night whereas the second was all in the daytime. The whole place looked more appealing with some sun on it, which is perhaps the most realistic aspect of the entire game.

This might be the first game I've played where bullets make splashes in the water as people try to shoot you.

The gameplay was fine, too. Very straightforward at the extremely low levels I experienced. A lot of missions with clear instructions and map markers. Mostly "Go here, do this, come back", which is just about within my capabilities.

I thought it was nice that you get given a vehicle at a very early stage, although if there's any explanation of how you can summon and dismiss it at a click of a button I must have missed it. The game in general seems quite keen to oil the wheels in such small ways, not worried about sacrificing realism for convenience. 

I never ran out of ammunition, for example, not least because there are handy stores of the stuff all over the place that require no authority or credentials to access. Just click and fill and its all free. Not that ammo management and conservation seemed to play a great part in the game at the level I was playing. I saw prompts to "Reload" my weapons quite frequently and yet I seemed to be able to carry on shooting whether I paid any attention to them or not.

All of which is fine and yet the lack of friction somehow still never made the combat feel much like fun. I don't believe it's because I'm unfamiliar with genre or bad it at it, although I certainly am that latter . I seem to have played quite a few third-person shooters in the last few years (First person too, for that matter) and much to my own surprise, even though I suck at both, I generally have a pretty good time.

It's more that I found this particular example somewhat clunky compared to the rest. The comparisons I kept finding myself making as I played certainly didn't help, especially when I got to thinking about how much better Once Human handles just about every aspect. 

Everything in Defiance felt more awkward, required more forethought and took me more out of the moment. Nothing felt anywhere close to being natural or intuitive. It was hard work at times.

Having to pay so much attention to the mechanics just to get even the simplest things done was off-putting but the whole texture of the gameplay was roughened by the game seemingly not wanting to give me the information I needed to make those mechanics work more efficiently. I had a lot of difficulty at times just figuring out who was shooting at me and even when I did, it was tough to get line-of sight to return fire.

I can see where I'm supposed to go but I still can't get there.

I also had a lot more trouble getting to where the map said I needed to be than seemed reasonable. On several occasions I spent longer trying to figure out a path through the broken landscape to the mission marker than it took me to finish the mission when I got there. 

Other games, specifically more modern games, have conditioned me to expect to be able to grapple, leap, climb or parkour my way smoothly and sometimes thrillingly across all kinds of terrain and past all sorts of obstacles, so this return to painstakingly picking out a path that wasn't blocked by unclimbable slopes or invisible walls felt quite frustrating.

I realize it's very likely that some of this is an artifact of low-level gameplay and that vertical progression will introduce ways and means of moving through the landscape faster and more efficiently. Even so, the low-level gameplay itself would still need to be quite a bit more entertaining and involving to persuade me the wait would be worth it.

Another factor that tended to put me off was the gunplay, something of a problem for a shooter. I had real problems hitting anything I was aiming at, not an issue I've often experienced in other titles in the genre. Despite the UI providing a large, red targeting circle complete with with crosshairs, I rarely saw any impact let alone any damage, even with it placed squarely on the center of the body mass of my intended victim,

I couldn't even figure out if I was doing anything wrong. I'd aim at one mob and fire repeatedly with no discernible effect, then at another and see all the shots land, and yet as far as I could tell I was doing the exact same thing each time. The effect was often reciprocal, with baddies pumping round after round into me as I stood out in the open and yet nothing apparently happening.

There is some kind of technological "Shield" element in play, certainly with player-characters and possibly therefore with NPCs and mobs as well, but if the bullets were being absorbed or repelled by some kind of force barrier, I wasn't seeing any confirmation of it in the feedback the game was putting out. That kind of thing seemed to happen all too often.

I'm a sucker for a bit of lens-flare.

All fighting seemed to take place in a strange, performative, informational void, where everyone posed a lot and ran around shouting, while little of any substance actually happened. I took part in several dynamic events with other players, all of which we won and some of which I even contributed to, after a fashion, but I never really knew what we were doing or why. If there were any rewards or benefits other than the supposed fun of it, I didn't get to hear about those either.

There were other problems. I kept getting pop-ups telling me I needed to upgrade but I couldn't figure out what or how. When I started opening windows to find out, I ended up on a screen that literally would not allow itself to be closed until I'd made an upgrade choice, even though it gave no information of substance about what any of the choices meant. I had to pick two at random because it was that or close the game altogether.

That pretty much put the cap on Defiance for me. It was clearly going to require a lot more in the way of both research and concentration than the gameplay seemed like it would ever adequately reward. I found myself thinking not only how much more fun I'd be having in Once Human but also in The First Descendant, another shooter I was enjoying until I forgot I was supposed to be playing it.

That led me to think of all the other games I could be playing instead, not just shooters, and all of a sudden the whole prospect of playing Defiance at all seemed untenable. I logged out and, while I haven't yet uninstalled, it seems unlikely I'll log in again.

Meanwhile, the game seems to be doing very well on its unexpected return, at least in terms of winning interest. More people want to play than the servers will allow which, while not ideal, is certainly a better problem for the new owners to have than no-one wanting to play at all.

I wish Defiance well and I don't regret the short time I spent finding out I'd been right to ignore it the last two times it came around. If nothing else, its reappearance has put Fawkes on my radar. Always nice to stumble upon a potential new source of MMORPGs I haven't tried yet. Maybe I'll like one of their other titles better.

Post-Post-Vibe Cassette. Is That A Thing? I Guess It Is Now.

I still have one more post left to write for my cyborg music series, to which, should you need to refer back to it someday, unlikely as that seems, I have given the quasi-ironic label "Home Taping Is Killing Music". I slay me! 

Also, I remembered to call it a "Label" not a "Tag" - and early on a Monday morning, too. Yay!

The last post, if I get around to writing it, is going to be all about setting up the YouTube channel and how pointless it's going to be, other than as a very convenient place to enjoy my own work. Before I get to that, though, here's an odd little bonus post I wasn't expecting to write at all.

This is a hard post to quantify. Is it about A.I.? Cultural identity? Serendipity? Or maybe it's the new, fast, automatic supernatural.

I suppose I'd better just get on with it so we can all find out together what I'm talking about.

Here's the background for almost everyone reading this, who doesn't use Suno (Hi, Tipa!) To get a song at all, the software, which I suppose we're beholden to refer to as A.I., requires you to enter some kind of description of the sort of music you'd like it to replicate. 

The FAQ, which I didn't even bother to look at until long after I'd stared using the app, tells you virtually nothing about how to do this, referring almost only in passing to "Style of Music", a phrase whoever wrote the article chose to enbolden but not to explain.

The relevant box into which you type your instructions in the app itself is called "Styles" and has the bland instruction "Enter style tags", clearly assuming this is self-explanatory. And it kind of is, although for quite a while I conflated "style" with "genre" in my mind and stuck fairly rigidly to terms I was already familiar with, like "Twee" or" Janglepop" or "Psychobilly".

Fairly soon, however, I started to extemporize, adding descriptive words and phrases indicating moods or techniques such as "sad" or "sweet" or "staccato" or "driving". Then came specific instruments or arrangements - "strings", "cello", "hand-claps", "clean production", "wall of sound" and so on until eventually I was writing mini-essays in note form. There's a 200-character limit but that gets you a lot of description.

Some of this seemed to work, some of it didn't. The software mostly seemed to treat the whole thing as a smorgasbord of suggestions from which it was free to pick and choose as it liked. I noticed that placement of the words and phrases seemed to have some impact so I started putting the most important elements at the beginning and there were always a few instructions, like the gender of the vocalist, that Suno would follow 99% of the time, no matter where they appeared.

Even with experience and care, there was always a significant RNG element to the process. It was impossible to predict which attempt would give me exactly what I'd asked for and which would veer off in some entirely unanticipated direction. Even with the uploaded audio to act as a template, Suno absolutely has a mind of its own and not always a sane mind, either.

The combination of wild unpredictability plus the possibility of hitting the jackpot with a perfect rendition of the song exactly as it was playing in my head made the whole process thrilling, addictive, entertaining and satisfying. If the results had always been what I was looking for first time, I'd have been done with it weeks ago but the randomness keeps me coming back, even though I now have a "finished" version of every song I've uploaded.

Getting back to the style tags, at some point I noticed Suno provides an unlimited number of suggestions in a little box below the input window. For a long time I thought these were from its own Style Library but eventually I figured out they're just examples of things users have actually typed in. The spelling mistakes gave it away.

I found those quite useful on occasion but mostly only because they reminded me of sub-genres I already knew but had forgotten about, like "progressive folk" or ones I'd not heard of but immediately understood, like "emocore". I did discover a couple of well-established but new-to-me genres that I really like that way, too, though. Both "futurepop" and "kawaii future bass", are actual, existing sub-genres and I'm very happy to have been introduced to them.

And then I ran across post-post-vibe cassette.  Say what, now?

The strange combination of words jumped out at me the moment I saw it. It seemed both bizarre and contextually meaningless so I guessed it had to be a micro-genre I'd not happened upon before. Hardly surprising. There are an awful lot of micro-genres now. No-one can be expected to know them all unless they write about the subject for a living.

I was curious so I googled it. There were no relevant results. After some finessing, I finally got google to spit out one link. It went back to Suno, where I'd begun, and even then all it was was a song someone had made using the tag. Trying again today, I don't even get that much.

As far as I've been able to tell, there's no such genre as post-post-vibe cassette. It's just a bunch of words that don't appear to have much in the way of semantic value. Still, I wanted to know what it would sound like, if it sounded like anything. 

So I gave the tag to one of my most throwaway songs, along with just one other instruction, "supercute kawaii female vocals" because I'd just been playing around with some kawaii future bass. I didn't know what to expect. 

What I got was something quite lovely. Considerably better than the song, which is really not much more than a draft for another, better song I wrote afterwards, deserved.

I thought it was probably a fluke so I tried again, And again. And it kept working. I add descriptive notes to all the covers of my songs as I first hear them, so I can easily find the good ones again. Here are some of the descriptors I've appended to post-post-vibe cassette versions so far:

• Lovely
• Also Lovely
• Really Good And Very Odd
• So Weird, So Good 
• Very Odd But I Like It
• Astonishing
• More Astonishing
• Pure Magic

and finally...

• PPVC Never Fails.

Because, so far, it never has. Out of more than a dozen tries I have yet to have a single failure. The nearest was that one time it skipped almost the entire lyric and gave me an instrumental with a vocal coda - and even that worked!

If I had to describe the post-post-vibe cassette aesthetic I guess I'd say it has elements of vaporwave and futurepop but with a focus on melody, rhythm and coherence. It's very cool and restrained, yet also very welcoming and approachable, contradictory though that sounds.

It needs almost no other tags to do its thing. All I've been doing is specifying the vocal style and leaving everything else to chance. Usually, that's a disaster but here it seems to work every time. I've also been having the best-ever results in terms of the vocals sticking pretty much exactly to my melodies and phrasing, as per the uploads. And for once, on the rare occasions where it improvises, it comes up with something as good or better than my original guide vocal. Usually that is very much not how Suno works.

Maybe I've just had a great run on the RNG. Or maybe there's something going on I don't understand. Someone made this tag up, after all. Perhaps they knew something.

Either way, I'm going with it as long as it lasts. I plan to make covers of all my songs in the post-post-wave cassette style, whatever the hell that is, just so I can have the very great pleasure of listening to them myself.

And if they keep on turning out as good as this, I may very well make another YouTube channel just for them. If post-post-vibe cassette isn't a real genre, it damn well should be.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

All the pictures. All done at Nightcafe using FluxSchnell on default settings. All using prompts taken directly from the text of the post. In order of appearance:

"Post-post-vibe cassette"

""terms I was already familiar with, like "Twee" or" Janglepop" or "Psychobilly""

"the randomness keeps me coming back" 

and "no such genre as post-post-vibe cassette".

I had to use more credits than usual to get anything useable because the post offers very few tangible, visual examples to work with. The output from FluxSchnell using such abstract phrases really is very unpredictable,  unlike the results from the equally abstract post-post-vibe cassette tag on Suno, ironically.

Defy Me! Extremely First Impressions

Yesterday evening, after I'd gotten home from work, had tea, walked Beryl and done a few other odds and ends, I grabbed hold of a passing bandwagon and jumped on. 

There was absolutely no reason for me to sign up for an account with Fawkes, a game platform I'd never heard of until a week or two ago and even less to do it just so I could download Defiance, a game I'd had every opportunity to play in the past and yet had never made the slightest effort to do any such thing. Nevertheless, there I was, filling out forms, making up passwords, inventing an imaginary birthday. All the usual palaver. 

Does anyone actually sign up to these things using their real details? I only ever do that at the point where I have to enter credit card details to pay for something, when it becomes more trouble than it's worth not to. I have more birthdays now than a whole pack of queens.

The process was quick and painless enough. Fawkes launcher seems decent as these things go. I like the way they've just called it "Fawkes Hub" rather than giving it a fancy name, like Purple. 

There are four games apart from Defiance on the launcher, none of which I'd heard of before: Shaiya, Last Chaos, Wargame 1942 and Desert Operations. 

Shaiya and Last Chaos are both mmorpgs, PvP and PvE respectively. I'm quite surprised I didn't even recognize the names, especially since one of them used to be published by Aeria, who also published Twin Saga, a game I liked a lot. I wish Fawkes had bought that instead, actually.

There doesn't look to be anything particularly memorable about either of their current MMORPGs, although they were clearly popular enough at one time for there to be multiple private servers for each of them, even now. I might take a look at one or both at some point, the official versions that is, now all I have to do is click a button.

The other two I won't be trying. They're military games of some description. I'm not even interested enough in the genre to check the exact details. Not surprised I wasn't familiar with either of those.

Once the Hub was up and running, it was very easy to patch Defiance and log in. I thought it looked a bit dated to begin with but not especially so for a game that's more than a decade old and hasn't really been revamped or updated in many years. The unattractive font and UI design is more an artefact of Generic Sci-Fi Game Design than an indication of age, unfortunately.

Character creation was fine as far as it went; no sliders, mostly preset options but enough of them to make it possible to get a character that didn't look too bland. Then it was into the lengthy introductory cut-scene, which was pretty good. 

Looked like some money had been spent on it, at least. Voice acting was solid, script well-enough written and the plot, while extremely similar to any number of other scene-setting scenarios I've sat through in other games, certainly had enough hooks to catch my interest.

All of that went very nicely. I was enjoying myself. The game begins with your character on a drop-ship about to land, an operation that, inevitably, goes horribly wrong, leaving you alone, traped in an escape pod amid the smoldering wreckage. Fortunately, one of the locals comes by, looking to salvage something worthwhile from the debris and, almost incidentally, sets you free. 

Immediately after that a ghostlike entity appears. It turns out to be your EGO, an acronym for Environmental Guardian Online, a devive that was "injected into your body" before the mission. 

It's the standard chatty companion NPC, in other words. I guess this is a SciFi game so they didn't think a fairy or a cute animal was appropriate. A little surprised they didn't go for a cute robot, but I guess this is one of those games that takes its back
-story seriously. God knows, Rift did, so I shouldn't be surprised.

All of that was largely out of my control. I just sat back and watched, waiting for the moment when I could take over and do something for myself. I'd literally just reached that point when Beryl bounded in and demanded attention so I had to log out and I haven't been able to get back in since. 

I tried again a few times later in the evening, after Beryl wound down, but all I got was a message telling me either that the servers weren't available or that my connection had timed out. This morning, when the same thing happened again, I googled to see if the whole game was down and learned that yes, it kind of was, although not for everyone. 

Apparently the servers have been under huge strain, thanks to far more people deciding they'd like to play than Fawkes expected. That does seem to happen an awful lot. It makes you wonder if most game devs these days are pessimists. They always seem amazed when more than a handful of people turn up. It used to be the other way around, when they'd lay on enough servers for an army and then have to close them all a few days later.

It seems that if you were in the game already, you could stay, but if you got disconnected or logged out or hadn't yet logged in at all, chances were you wouldn't be able to play. Anyway, the servers were about to go down for a four hour patch that would supposedly fix all the major problems, from lag to server capacity, and after they came up everything would be dandy, so you might as well wait for that.

As I write, it seems this has now happened. I just tried and got in with no problems at all. I played for about half an hour between the previous paragraph and this one. Did the basic tutorial, made a level, got to the base camp, all that stuff. 

Kind of derails the post I was going to write, which was about to switch tracks to start talking about the Vanguard Emulator. Trust me. It would have made sense. Not going to happen now, though. I'll get to the VGEmu in another post. It's coming along really well...

Meanwhile, Defiant. Which I'm playing... why, exactly?

It does puzzle me that I made the effort to try it now, when I was perfectly happy leaving it well alone when it was around. In part it was the unexpectedness of its return, which drew my attention in a way the original release never had. There may also have been some small residue of very mild curiosity, left over from the things I read about various incarnations and iterations of the game as it once was. I did occasionally wonder back then if I ought to take a look at it - but I never did.

Mostly, though, it was a post by Paeroka at Nerdy Bookahs a few days ago that tipped the balance. She apparently played and enjoyed the original Defiance before making the mistake of transferring to the revamped version with the Defiance 2050 relaunch, a switch she described as "really bad". 

I only vaguely remember how that went down but it sounds very similar to the way Funcom split the audience for The Secret World with the introduction of Secret World Legends. Neither game prospered. I wonder if that sort of thing ever works? Companies only ever seem to try it as a kind of Hail Mary pass, by which time it's almost certainly too late to save the game, anyway.

Based on what we cover on our respective blogs, Paeroka and I don't have exactly the same tastes but there's more than enough crossover to make me think that if she'd really enjoyed her time there, I might get something out of it, too. At the very least, I'd get some posts for the blog, whether I liked the game or not.

It's far too early to tell yet whether Defiance is going to be worth more to me than a few thousand words. What I will say is that it really reminds me of Rift in one way, namely the unfortunate decision to open with a very unappealing zone. This is something that happens so often, in so many games, I can only imagine developers believe the bulk of their audience actively enjoy ugly, dirty, noisy environments with people shouting orders at them all the time. Or maybe that's what it's like in their offices and they just think it's authentic.

In the case of both Rift and Defiance, I guess the argument in favor would be that you're in a war and war's never pretty. Given everything I know about Defiance (Which if you pass me a matchbook I'll be happy to write down for you.) the choice makes sense. There does seem to be a proper, existential struggle going on there. 

In Rift, however, the whole two-sides-go-to-war thing never felt remotely convincing and became less and less so the further into the game you went. Also, as soon as you got out of the first, extended tutorial zone, you ended up in a very much nicer, quiter, calmer, more scenic setting, where you could relax and do silly little quests while taking screenshots. It was self-evident there that, even if there were hordes of invading monsters trampling around, at least the views were nice.

I'm very much hoping the same will prove true of Defiance because if there's one thing I don't have any patience for these days, it's games I don't enjoy looking at. They don't necessarily need to be gorgeous, although that would be my preference, but the baseline is not to make me wish I didn't have to look at hem at all. 

Defiant is tottering on the edge as far as visuals go. As I said, the cut scenes are fine and I do like my character, which is a crucial test passed successfully. The darkness, abrasive textures and constant explosions, though, I'm not so keen on.

I'm going to go back and do a bit more, anyway. Which, I guess, is a good sign. I don't imagine I'll hang around for too much longer but I would like to get a little further, before I cross Defiance off my playlist for another dozen years.