Krypto? Two Days In A Row?

I'm looking forward to Blaugust beginning on Friday for the simple reason it'll give me something to write about. Let me rephrase that. It'll give me something to write about that someone might want to read. 

It's not that I'm short of ideas. More that I'm short of ideas that fit the supposed purpose and function of this blog, which started out as place where I could write brief, pithy opinion pieces about Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games and shifted over time to accomodate anything and everything in the broad sphere of popular culture that interested, irked or excited me.

And so it remains. Except, as astute readers may have noticed, it now features mostly posts about things I might watch or play or read or otherwise consume rather than those I actually have consumed.

Which is fine, I guess. As a reading experience I'm not sure there's a huge qualitative difference in a post where I describe some new game I read about and speculate on whether I'd want to play it and one where I recount in needless detail my personal experience with a game I have actually acquired an played, based on little more than the tutorial, which is probably as much as I'm ever going to see of it.

Ditto songs. Back when I came up with the intentionally faux-naif title What I've Been Listening To Lately for my regular music feature, it did at least tend to include some songs I'd been playing in the background while I was writing other posts. Now, it's mostly songs I've heard once and bookmarked, then  listened to once more as I decide what goes into the latest post. 

And does it matter? Probably not. They're songs I liked enough to make a note of and then enough more to keep in on a second listen. I can assure everyone I do still listen to a lot more new or new-to-me songs than ever make it onto the blog, so anything that appears here has at least passed the audition. 

Similarly, I read about and watch trailers for plenty of games I can't even be bothered to bookmark and some of the ones I do save for later get kicked out on review without ever meriting so much as a mention here. Does that make those posts materially inferior to the endless stream of uneccessarily lengthy analyses of every last, tiny development in Guild Wars 2, something that provided the backbone of this blog for the best part of a decade?

Second-to-last GW2 screenshot I ever took. Apparently in October 2023,
which means I must have played more recently than I thought.

 

Posts on TV shows describe a slightly different arc. I very rarely, if ever, write about shows I haven't seen and usually I wait until I've seen the entire run before putting finger to key. Which would be all well and good if I was actually watching any but at the moment I'm not. I literally haven't looked at any of my streaming platforms at all for almost a couple of weeks now. I'm not writing about TV because I'm not watching any.

What I am doing, as I've mentioned far too often, is making music with AI. I do this all the time now. It is close to being the only leisure activity/hobby I have at the moment. It's taken over all the time I used to use both to play games and watch shows and some extra besides. And I have more sense than to post about that more than once in a very long while, much though I'd love to. It'd be the blogging equivalent of cornering someone at a party and reading them your poetry.

With any other spare time I get, I've been scanning, digitizing and editing the novella I mentioned, from which I'm spinning off all these songs. That's taking some time, too. What I'll do with it after that remains to be seen but I won't just be putting it up on this blog or talking about it here other than in this kind of tangential reference. I want to do something a bit more substantive than that although I'm still puzzling over what that might be.

All of the above makes for a somewhat self-indulgent post on the last day of July but a week from now, as we approach Week Two of Blaugust - Introduce Yourself Week - it will suddenly become entirely relevant, appropriate and apposite. Even tomorrow, on Blaugust Day One, it will kind of make sense. 

Maybe don't read it until then? Oh, sorry... too late...

Anyway, in the spirit of writing about things I haven't done, let me say a little about the two new superhero movies that just came out - Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first thing I wanted to say is that I have considered going to see both of them. And, indeed, am still so considering.

This is a notable event. I believe the last movie I went to see on release at the cinema was Arrival back in 2016. If I've seen anything since, I can't remember it. I'd blame my absence from the cinema on the pandemic but on that evidence I'd dropped off the wagon well before then. 

Post-pandemic I have tried to get my former movie-going partner to come and see a couple of things with me but she's not interested any more, having also had the habit broken by the enforced shut-down. As for going with Mrs Bhagpuss, who's never been a keen cinema-goer but could occasionally be tempted, now we have Beryl, who cannot be left Home Alone (Although she could sit with us as we watched Home Alone, together, at home, I suppose. I've never actually seen Home Alone...) going out together to do anything non-dog-friendly involves such a logistical performance neither of us can be bothered with it.

Which leaves going to the movies on my own, something I used to do not all that infrequently when I was younger. Much younger. 

I have no existential objections. It's actually a good way to see movies if you want to concentrate on the film rather than have a Shared Social Experience. It's just a bit more effort than I'm quite ready for... although that might be changing.

I want to see Superman enough that I did get as far as looking up the times of showings. I was thinking of going this week but my mother had a health scare and ended up in hospital so a lot of time was spent driving backwards and forwards that could have been spent sitting in a darkened auditorium.

She's back home now, though, and next week is - in theory - clear of obligations (See how long that lasts...) so maybe...

I am and almost always have been a Superman fan, of course, which explains some of the interest. All the same, I haven't felt any burning desire, let alone need, to see a Superman movie since Christopher Reeve first donned the cape in 1978. This movie feels different, though, as evidenced by my previous posts, gosh-wowing over the trailers. 

Superman (And even more so Supergirl.) fans of a certain age have a very particular view of the right way to do The Superman Family. It's been a while since there's been a movie that felt like it might come anywhere close to the mark. This one does and it seems almost rude not to celebrate the occasion by paying to see it.

If Superman has been inadequately served by Hollywood, though, what about The Fantastic Four?  Marvel's First Family, the bedrock on which the entire Marvel Universe was built, have infamously never been given the treatment they deserve by any medium other than the comics themselves. There have been some FF films and they have been bad.

  (The 2015 Version. Apparently the movie is even worse than the trailer. Scary thought.)

By all accounts, the new one isn't. It's good. Maybe very good. That alone makes it worth seeing, if only out of curiosity.

The thing about the Fantastic Four, though, is that they were always more respected than loved, even by Marvel fans. In the 1960s, Superman was old-fashioned in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the company that published his adventures but the FF always seemed to carry an aura of The Establishment about them that made them something of an odd fit for Marvel's increasingly counter-culture image. 

Let's be honest - Reed and Sue Richards came off like someone's parents. Then Franklin Richards popped out and they really were. What with Johnny Storm seeming to have walked off the set of 77 Sunset Strip and Ben Grimm acting like he had to be in his forties at least, I never really got how the FF were supposed to be part of the same teenage Swinging Sixties set as SpiderMan or the X-Men. It's no wonder their classic run is a whole series of introductions for hipper heroes like the Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock. 

For all that, the team is seminal, with an importance that can't be ignored. Once again, if there's finally a version of the Fantastic Four up on screen that works, I can't but help feel I ought to make some effort to go check it out.

Chances are I won't. I'll likely end up getting both movies on DVD or even watching them on a streaming platform, although that's possibly even less likely to happen than seeing them at the cinema.

I almost said, if you've seen either of them, let me know what you think in the comments, but then I remembered I'm still trying to avoid spoilers so maybe don't do that just yet. Save it for the post when I talk about actually having seen either or both of them.

You might have a while to wait. 

Here, Boy!

It's been a while since I played DCUO. Given that I post about it every time I play, it seems safe to say it was back in January, when I got stuck on Felix Faust at the end of the first chapter of the game's new "narrative-led" approach and never bothered to go back to try and beat him on a second try.

At least I did actually play the game that time. Usually, all I do is log in, claim whatever's on offer, wander around my new Base wishing I hadn't torn down the old one, put up a few posters, sigh at the prospect of redecorating, wish once again I'd stayed where I was, even if the new Base does have a better view, then log out.

Now and again, probably no more than once a year and mostly not even that often, I might go outside for a fly around. Perhaps even do a couple of missions. The days when I tried to keep up with even the most basic solo content at the start of each new Episode are long gone.

DCUO is a game I used to play. Worse, an MMORPG I used to play, making it even harder to return. How many of those are there, now? Literally hundreds, I think. 

It is, at least, one I still very occasionally write about, which puts it ahead of 95% of them, but it's a game I write about less and less. So, why am I writing about it today?

Because there's a freebie I want of course! Just about the only thing guaranteed to get me to patch up and log in to an MMORPG I no longer play is the prospect not just of something for nothing (You get that in virtually all of them every time you log in these days so it's no incentive at all.) but the offer of something I find specifically appealing, coupled with a limited window of opportunity to grab it.

It's a very weird kind of FOMO. Mostly, fear of missing out is not an emotion I'm personally familiar with. I can let most things slide without being at all bothered. If it's not too much trouble I might extend the very slight effort necessary to pick up something I'm not all that interested in or attend some event that only very mildly intrigues me but if I happen to forget to log in and miss it, I really couldn't care.

There are a small number of games to which I still think, with increasingly slight evidence, I might one day go back and for those I might make a little more effort to acquire something that could be useful, if I did ever return. Things like level boosts or an extra character slot that sometimes attend a promotion, those might be worth not missing out on. 

But these days, even the sort of giveaways that would once have had me looking up my old passwords - mounts or hats for example (I do like a hat, as I believe I have established previously.) - aren't always enough to trigger a response.

So, why am I patching DCUO as I type this? An 8Gb download it is, too. 

I'll give you one word. One name. 

Krypto.

But wait a moment. Don't I already have Superman's dog? Didn't I post about it when I got him and haven't I posted several screenshots since then of my character playing with him in her Base?

Yes, yes and yes.  

But, see, here's the thing... that Krypto can't leave my Base. This Krypto can!

DCUO has a mechanic I've never bothered with. It's called the Ally System and it's relatively recent, dating back only to 2021. When it was announced, I imagined it would be something like the Mercenary systems in the EverQuest games, an NPC you could hire and have fight alongside you as a permanent companion. That would have been great. 

It wan't that. It was more like one of those dumbfire pets EQ mages and necros get, the ones that have fancy names but really just appear, do some burst damage and vanish. They're fancy spells with a visual is all. You'd have, say, Harley Quinn as your ally and when you called her she'd appear out of nowhere, do a big AE, then vanish. 

Big whoop.

Okay, they all also had some secondary and passive effects and there was some upgrade system you could use to enhance them but once I found out you'd barely get to see them before they left, I lost interest. Until now.

What's happening in the current update is a complete overhaul of the system to turn it into something a lot more appealing. Instead of just popping in, doing a special attack and leaving, now your allies will stick around for a while. Still, sadly, not for good like a proper Mercenary but long enough to cycle through their signature attack twice and do some regular fighting alongside you while they wait for it to recharge.

I mean, it's still not great, is it? But it is better. 

The name of the update is Superboy Ally and Ally Update, which doesn't even sound like something thought up by a committee. In a committee at least one person would have vetoed that gibberish. Seriously, who's naming these things now? I'd blame AI but clearly no AI would come up with anything that dull. It takes a human to be that unimaginitive.

Also, as you've probably spotted, it's "Superboy" in the lead, not Krypto. But where the Lad of Steel flies, can the Dog of Steel be far behind?

Well, yes and no. Krypto is part of the package but he's kind of Superboy's Ally, not yours. What happens is, you call on Superboy and Superboy calls on Krypto. 

Okay, technically you do the actual calling, too, in the form of burning a Supply Drop trinket. Nothing's ever simple, is it? 

And what's a Supply Drop trinket, anyway? It's a consumable you can get from a dispenser in your base or from a vendor or in various other ways. Again, I knew they existed but I've never bothered to use one, so I'm not speaking from personal experience.

I guess that's going to change. I'll have to do it at least once, just to see Krypto appear whereupon, I'm assured, he will attack enemies, weaken them with his super-bark and if anyone happens to get knocked down, attempt to revive them. I suppose that means I'll have to do some fighting just to see it happen. 

Also, as I have only just discovered, Krypto has been in the game as an actual Ally in his own right since 2022. So maybe I should just go to Cyborg and buy him. Cut out the middle-dog, so to speak. In fact, seeing he was once given away as a freebie, chances are I already have him and I've just forgotten about it. 

Oh, and Superboy will be there too, of course.

I have only a very vague understanding of who Superboy is in the DC Universe these days. 

I used to know exactly who he was. He was Superman when he was a boy. Just like Superbaby was Superboy when he was a baby. Even a kid could follow the logic.

I have literally hundreds of comic books featuring Superboy's adventures in and around Smallville, growing up on the Kent farm, going to Smallville High, hanging out with his best pal Pete Ross and, of course, courting and being courted by my favorite character in the entire Superman mythos, Lana Lang. 

Sadly, Superboy hasn't been young Clark Kent for a long time. I know Jon Kent had the name for a while but who's using it now I'd have look up. Hang on... let me do that... okay... that's a new one on me. 

So, in answer to my google query "Who is Superboy in 2025?", Gemini's summary reads

"In 2025, Superboy is primarily known as Kon-El, also known as Conner Kent. He is a genetic clone of Superman and Lex Luthor. Conner Kent is a prominent member of the Superman family and is known for his involvement with the Teen Titans and Young Justice. In the Young Justice animated series, he is a founding leader alongside Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Robin, and his relationship with Miss Martian is a significant part of his character. "

I'm not vouching for all the ancillary detail there but after cross-referencing the substantive point then, yes, it does seem that the Superboy we'll be allying with is going to be Conner, who I do actually remember from when I watched Titans. I seem to recall he was a colossal ass then but that was Titans. Everyone was. 

Anyway, I don't care about Conner. Or any of the Superboys, unless its the Silver Age Superboy I grew up with. I'd take him as an ally although it goes without saying I'd rather have Supergirl. Any of the Supergirl variants, really. And believe me, there are plenty of those.

Would I rather have Supergirl's pet Streaky the Super-Cat as an additional Ally instead of Krypto, though? Hmm. Not so sure about that. Streaky was always kinda sneaky. He had a great line in that side-eye cats like to give you. Also he was not exactly what you'd call reliable.

Moot point. No-one's offering me Streaky. Or Supergirl. I'll just have to settle for the boy and his dog. 

And after all that, the game has patched up and I can log in. I believe there's a bit of work to do before I can take possession of the pair ("Complete Patrol 3 in Campaign 2025", whatever that entails...) so I'd better get on with it.

I'll report back when I'm done. With pictures to prove it. 

The Plan Is No Plan

Ahead of Blaugust, which begins on Friday, I thought I'd post a list of everyone who's signed up so far. I knew there had to be one somewhere because Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob posted a then-complete list of all the names and blogs a few days ago and he must have gotten it from somewhere! 

Turns out he's the one who's maintaining it this year and he's been kind enough to format it and include a link (Which I won't include since I don't believe Wilhelm has posted it himself yet.) 

Here's how sign-ups stand so far:

A Lovely Harmless Monster

A Nerdy Fujo Cries

Achille Toupin

afsheen.me

Alligators And Aneurysms

An Archaeopteryx

august morning

Axxuy.xyz

Aywren's Nook

Calishat

Casual Catte Creations

chaosgoat.neocities.org

Chasing Dings!

Contains Moderate Peril

Cubic Creativity

Dave Henry Blog

Divergent Rays

EVE Online Pictures

Exposition is Inevitable

finnybox

Forking Mad

Gaudete Theology

Geek on a Harley

In An Age

Indiecator

Inventory Full

isa.tiger.place

Juhis

Kay Talks Games

Keeroks Space

Lameazoid.com

Lars-Christian's website

leekscosycorner

leveret.study

Mailvaltar - MMOs and other stuff

manonamora's computer

Many Welps

Midnight Dreaming

Mmo one night

Monsterlady's Diary

Musings and Mumblings

Musings on seeking

Nejimaki Blog

Nerd Girl Thoughts

Nerdy Bookahs

Nero Villagallos O'Reilly Art Blog

NickSimson.com

Nik Kantar

notes / druchan

Notes by JCProbably

owlblog

Pixel Nomad

Queen Of Squiggles's Blog

Reay Jespersen

ribo.zone

Rosaria Delacroix

Shadowz Abstract Gaming

Small Good Things

Tales of the Aggronaut

Taxodium

Technbuzz

The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Dragon Chronicle

The Ghastly Mirror

theTangentSpace

Tim Bornholdt

Time to Loot

Ubergeek Kellys World

Unidentified Signal Source

Virtual Moose

Why I Game

Words of the AgingGamer

Words Under My Name

Your friendly neighborhood Blu

That's exactly 74 blogs which, by a wild co-incidence is exactly the same number I claimed had signed up when I posted my Day One Blaugust post last year. I was a bit behind on the count then, as I recall, and by the end of Blaugust the grand total had grown to an astonishing 119 so there's plenty of room for more this year. 

Do tag on if you fancy it. The sign-up form is here.

More than half of the above are names I don't recognize, which is fantastic. Lots of new  blogs to check out. Looking forward to that most of all. I guess I could start looking at them now but it seems like cheating to go peek before the gun goes off.

Of course, in most cases it probably will turn out to be no more than a peek and maybe a supportive comment. It took me a while to learn my lesson but I've finally come to realize that trying to keep up with more than a hundred bloggers, most of whom are trying to post every day for a month, is just too much of a good thing.

A picture of Beryl,
because you have to break the text up with something
and would you rather have AI?

If you add that to the dozens of RSS feeds in Feedly that already ping me daily, some of them many times every day, it's not hard to see the potential for burnout. And yet every year I somehow manage not to see it anyway and pile in to that first week, trying to read everything. 

By the start of the second week, I'm already feeling overwhelmed. Even the inevitable drop-out rate as people find they didn't want to post every day after all, or couldn't, or wish they'd never started, doesn't bring the flood down to manageable levels. Last year I felt it particularly badly and made a promise to myself that I wouldn't do it again next time. We'll see how that goes.

I always have a lot less trouble with the writing thirty-one posts myself part. Thirty-one posts that anyone would want to read is another matter but that's not part of the challenge. Maybe it should be but who would judge!

Even so, I also decided I would actively avoid the 31 posts thing this year. I had a clever trick in mind. I wouldn't post on 1 August, so I'd automatically have missed the target. Except then it occured to me that the challenge isn't to post on all thirty-one days of the month but to post thirty-one times during it. And that inevitably means that at some point I'd find myself double-posting to catch up.

So I'm not going to make any rules for myself this year and I'm not going to set up any special routines or series, as several other Blaugustians have already said they're going to do. I'm just going to treat it like any other month and post when I usually do. Probably. 

Who knows, really? It's so easy to get carried away. And it's one of the easiest times to just knock out a quick post because of all those prompts and the wealth of other good posts to bounce off. So I'm making plans to not have a plan.

The way my plans have been going lately, that's probably going to fall apart, too.

The New New

Despite my immense solipsism, I have still managed to listen to a few new tunes by people other than me since last time. Got some good ones, too. 

Of course, when I say "new" I don't always mean "new". I have one candidate running in the background now. It's from 1989. Mind you, it sounds like a ton of stuff I heard last year that was supposedly new-new so go check the dictionary, I guess.

Not going to start with that one, though. More of a mid-programmer. Always an idea to open hard, I think. 

Have you made playlists? I bet you have. Everyone makes playlists now. It's difficult, isn't it? Gives you some respect for people who have to do that kind of thing for a living, although I suppose it gets easier with practice, like everything else.

Anyway, There are a couple of obvious candidates jostling for the job of opening the post this time. Guess I could flip a coin. I have a stack of them on the desk in front of me. It's between Fcukers and Punchbag, neither new to this space... 

Heads Fcukers, Tails Punchbag...

 Play Me - Fcukers

The winner! How do you say their name, do you think? I'm assuming it's "Fuckers" and they spell it that way to be clever but maybe it's as it looks. Like, Ferkukkers. 

I mean someone thought it was a good idea to call a band !!! and then tell everyone it was pronounced Chkk! Chkk! Chkk! so frankly it's anyone's guess. Unsurprisingly, I haven't heard anyone say their name on the radio yet...

I Love This! - Punchbag

Yeah. Should have gone with that one, shouldn't I? Can't go against the coin, though. The coin decides.

That's a great chorus. Reminds me of something but I can't think what. I find that happens a lot these days.
 

Chains And Whips 

 Clipse, Kendrick Lamar, Pusha T, Malice

I'm thinking it's probably as well I don't have a video for this one. There might be one. I haven't looked.

Clipse was all over my feeds this week, as if everyone knew who they were and were just waiting for them to drop something new. Which, since they date back to 1994, I guess people might have been.

I never heard of them until a few days ago. How does that happen? I mean, I read a freaking book on the history of hip-hop last year or the year before. Were they in it? Can't recall but I don't believe so.

Good though, aren't they? Also, since Clipse is made up of Pusha T (Who I have heard of...) and Malice, it seems a bit weird to have them both also listed as if they were featured artists on their own song... but that's how they have it on their official channel so I'm just gonna go with it...

 Goldie Montana - Goldie Boutlier

This could not be fresher. It dropped yesterday and I literally only spotted it a few minutes ago, in the recommends next to one of the tunes above as I was pulling the link from YouTube. Why it hasn't appeared in any of my feeds is almost certainly because no-one's really pushing Goldie hard enough. There's a lot of new music being made and it's not just luck when you get to hear about it.

Puzzling title for a puzzling song. Sometimes having the lyrics in front of you really doesn't help as much as you'd think it might. It seems like it's about a gold-digger's wedding. I can parse it all except 

"You’ll get the estate"

What d'you make of that? Some quirk of the law I don't know about? Explanations welcome in the comments and not just from lawyers.

 Look At That Woman

 Suki Waterhouse  (Role Model cover)

Welcome to the rock section of our program. Cover of a song I never heard before so new to me twice. I did do due diligence and listen to the original and I did not enjoy it. I like Suki's cover though. It's very, very seventies, isn't it? That's not as common as it used to be. It's all nineties and noughties now.

 New Year's At The Airport - Yawn Mower

Case in point. This lot either have a good publicist or a knack for doing it themselves. Unlike Goldie, everything they do pops up in my feeds, even though I'm not convinced anyone cares. After week on YT and with links on major music websites, which is how I found it, it has 555 views. Their channel has 95 subscribers. 

I'm wondering if that terrible dad pun name is the key to their unsuccessful success so far? It certainly was what got me to click through the first time I saw it, mostly because I couldn't believe anyone would actually call themselves that. And what's with releasing a song about New Year in July? And with a video memed on The Big Lebowski? I can't help but wonder if at least one of them doesn't have a day job in marketing somewhere.

I don't even like the song much, either. I just wanted to write about it. See? That's how they get you.

Pillman's Got A Gun - Jobber

If we're going to have 90s slacker rock, which by all means lets, I'd much rather it sounded like this. One for the wrestling fans among you. Great title for anyone, though and a really nice video. 

Musically, it reminds me of a whole lot of 90s bands I liked in the way the sweet, tuneful vocals fight their way out of the guitar storm once in a while before being dragged back under. This is one where having the lyrics in the description really would help. So of course there aren't any.

 Fanciable Headcase - King of the Slums

If we're talking great titles, this one has two of them. The same clip taken from 80s/90s BBC show SnubTV, is also on YouTube under the equally great title Vicious British Boyfriend. Not sure which is the official version or which I prefer.

I vaguely remember this lot but by name only. Not sure if I ever heard them when they were around. This is from 1989 but they were going through the 90s, I think. There was a lot of this around back then but not with violin like that, more's the pity. Trumpet and electric violin ought to be the first two instruments in any rock band after guitar, bass and drums. Certainly way before any kind of keyboards or someone jigging about behind a set of conga drums.

Pick Up That Knife - Wednesday

We conclude our brief visit to the Land of Rock with yet another great title and a typically gorgeous number from critical darlings Wednesday, a band never short of column inches in all the usual journals. And deserving of the attention, too.

It's her voice, isn't it? Aimee Mann meets Patti Smith. What's not to love in that? I should play more Wednesday.

Speaking of, did you see Netflix are claiming there could be seven seasons of (the other) Wednesday? We haven't even had the second yet and how long has that been? Two years? At that rate, five more will take us into the mid-2030s and Jenna Ortega will be in her mid-30s too. I hope Wednesday'll at least be in post-grad studies by then.

Still, when did Netflix ever make seven seasons of anything?

Doom Bikini - james K

Not sure if Doom Bikini' qualifies as great title but it did get me to click through, so...

Come for the title, stay for that synthesizer wheeee-oooh-wheeee. I am a total sucker for that thing. It's one of the reasons Venice Bitch is my favorite of all Lana's songs. I'd love to know exactly what makes it and how and then I'd like to be able to make it myself. 

 The Daylight - Robin Kester

In this one it's that bass tone. Also very familiar. Can't help but love it whenever I hear it. Certain sounds just do something, don't they? This one's full of 'em, actually. That processed guitar too, although I could do with it not playing those exact notes. The whole production here, in fact. 

One of those songs that's exactly the sum of its parts, I think, which is not a bad thing at all.

Let in the Night - R. Missing

Always leave 'em wanting more. And everyone wants more R. Missing, amiright? Well, rest easy. More R. Missing guaranteed. Just keep coming back.

Also I just noticed that's daylight followed by night. I could maybe get the hang of this programming thing one day, if I keep at it. 

It's Beautiful... But What Does It Mean?

I had a very simple plan for today. I was going to patch up Wuthering Waves, log in and do as much of the new story content as I could cope with, then stop and have lunch. After lunch, I was going to write a post about it. The story, not the lunch.

And that's still the plan, except for one very slight variation. I won't be writing about the new story any more. I'll be writing about the old one.

I thought I'd finished the main story quest last time. I thought I was ready to jump straight into whatever came next as soon as it appeared. I even said so in print. Confidently. Definitively. 

And as I also said then, I even had the screenshot to prove it. A screenshot that read 

"No Content. No New Quest". 

I'm just going to have to take your word for that, Lupa.

Under the Main Quests category in the quest journal.

I don't know... seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

Except for one thing I'd missed...

Kuro, in their wisdom, decided to split the story content in Update 2.4 into two parts. I had indeed finished the first one but there was a Part Two I didn't even know about. 

Chapter II Act VI - Flames of Heart dropped on 3 July. 

I didn't spot it because I haven't logged in since I finished Chapter II Act V - Shadow of Glory back in June. I also didn't read anything about it in any of my gaming feeds, which is a bit worrying. I imagine it was covered, WW being a very popular game, but either I just didn't see it or I didn't bother to read past the headline.

Luckily, it only took me a few seconds to figure out I still had another chapter to do before I could take a look at the new stuff. And anyway, the old stuff was still new stuff to me, so I was fine with having to take a bit of a run-up to get to the current chapter, Dreamcatchers in the Secret Gardens. 

Looking at some of the commentary around Kuro's decision to split the last drop into two episodes, I see there was speculation that the second part might be more combat-focused, presumably fueled by the fact that the first part very much wasn't. If anyone was hoping that prediction would turn out to be correct, they'll have been disappointed.

I can't remember exactly how long the first installment took me back in June but today's session, in which I did nothing but the aforementioned Flames of Heart, lasted a couple of hours. I did have to stop once to play with a very insistent Beryl, so maybe it was about an hour and a half to an hour and three-quarters of actual gameplay.

Don't mind us, We just live here.

Or, to be more accurate, about fifteen minutes of pressing buttons. The rest of the time I was watching a movie. 

A very absorbing and enjoyable movie with some excellent acting, skilled direction and superb set design but also with a plot that was very hard to follow. 

I mentioned last time, how the plot in Wuthering Waves is generally "so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it". It's really not getting any easier, even now more of the mysteries have been revealed.

In fact, forget the plot... I couldn't even claim I understand the setting. I imagine we're all used to games and books and movies and TV that relies heavily on the audience's preconceptions and prior experience and which draws extensively from a huge corpus of long-established tropes, symbols and devices? Well, Wuthering Waves doesn't do a lot of that.

It's not a Western fantasy with dwarves and gnomes and elves and orcs but it's not strictly an Eastern fantasy with dragons and demons and spirits either, although there are a few dragons or dragon-like creatures, now and then. 

It's not science fiction in the familiar aliens, rayguns and spaceships mode, but there are plenty of robots and one hell of a lot of advanced technology. It sometimes has an urban-fantasy or cyberpunk moment but mostly its just hard to place, exactly.

I guess it might fit uncomfortably within the ill-defined parameters of science-fantasy but then doesn't everything? That's a tag that never feels like it's telling you much, anyway. 

Oh, right... that makes everything clear...

It's post-apocalyptic in a  sense, in that there was some sort of catastrophe called The Lament in the near-past, but that seems like it must have been either a very metaphysical event or longer ago than you'd think from the way everyone talks about it because there's very little sign of devastation in the urban areas and not much in the hinterlands. You have to go a fair way into the boondocks to see the remnants of the disaster, whatever it was.

There are superior beings in the world but they aren't gods or deities per se. They're "Sentinels" or "Guardians", usually tied to a locale like some kind of genius loci. There's an evil version called the Threnodian but your guess is as good as mine what sort of entity that is.

There are Tacit Discords,  aggressive mobs that come in industrial quantities. They're the grunts of the game, filling the roles orcs or demons might take in other settings.  And then there are Echoes, which are like the TDs but on your side. Mostly. Except when they're trying to kill you.

Somewhere behind all of this is some network of what I can only take to be AIs: sentient supercomputers that run everything but frequently have issues or need assistance for reasons I could not begin to explain. They seem to be fairly universal in a world made up of city states, each with its own form of government - monarchies, technocracies, theocracies and so on.  

And everything is sound or music-themed, from the Resonators and Echoes to the Frequencies that make up everything in the entire world. That's not confusing at all...

How all of this ever came to be I have no clue, although I'm more than willing to believe it's explained somewhere in the narrative. That's part of the problem - everything is explained in the narrative. So much is explained so often, in such detail and by so many characters, many of whom are written to novelistic standards, meaning there are unreliable narrators and limited narrators and subjective narrators and first-person and third-person and omniscient... that in the end the sheer wealth of information isn't just confusing but overwhelming and, I find, impossible to remember, even if I feel like I understood it at the time.

The game also uses any number of visual and gameplay devices to tell its story. I tend to dwell on the cinematic elements but there are sections told in stained-glass panels, in picture-books, by holograms and malfunctioning robots, in pages torn out of notebooks, on computer screens, in flowcharts and over com-links. Significant plot and narrative elements are sometimes conveyed by way of mini-games, where the whole game becomes a 2D scroller or a platformer, something that really doesn't add to my ability to follow what's going on in the story.

And of course there's the ever-popular developers favorite - key speeches on major plot points delivered by significant NPCs in the middle of a pitched battle. Always fun, that one.

Somewhere in the back of all of this lies one of the most meta-fictional devices I've ever encountered, namely the ability of some of the characters to place other characters and even the player-character, inside a fictional reality within the game-world, sometimes without the game giving any indication it's happened. Awareness is then leaked in ways that are familiar from novels and movies but even when the artifice is revealed it persists, stubbornly, as though just knowing something isn't real isn't enough to stop it being real.

And there's a lot more besides. Not least, The Fractsidus.

The Fractsidus might be the real arch-villains. Or they might be just another faction. At one point I thought they might be anti-heroes or even The Good Guys.  And maybe some of them are. Who's to say they all have the same agenda?

The Fractsidus have been in it almost from the start and they keep coming back. In the next chapter it looks like we might find out something more material about the mysterious organization or at least one of its members, Phrolova, because she's set to be the next playable Resonator and therefore is presumably the player's ally for the meanwhile, at least.

I was very keen to find out more when I logged in this morning but now I guess I'll have to wait a little longer. I have a full slate of things to do through into the middle of next week so it's going to be a while before I can clear the necessary morning or afternoon to watch the next Wuthering Waves movie. 

Pretty sure I won't be any the wiser about what's really going on by the end. But that's how I like it.

Nothing Seems To Satisfy

I wasn't going to do anything to commemorate the death of Ozzie Osbourne. But then I didn't have anything else in mind and I hate to skip a day when I'd normally be posting...

And it is true that although I haven't listened to Sabbath for, oh, about half a century and I've never heard any of Ozzie's solo stuff - ever - and I haven't seen even a few seconds of The Osbournes... Black Sabbath was my first favorite band.

Weird but true. For about five minutes (Okay, a year.) when I was in my very early teens, my best friend and I thought Sabbath were the best band we'd ever heard. Of course, we didn't exactly have the breadth or depth of musical experience we'd have by the time were fifteen...

Anyway, I bought Masters of Reality when it came out in 1971 (Meaning I must have been thirteen...) and then backfilled the first two albums, Paranoid and Black Sabbath, which turned out to be very easy to find in my favorite used record store. My pal bought Sabbath IV the following year but by then I'd already moved on to kneel at the feet of the Velvet Underground and the rest of their art-house ilk so heavy metal just wasn't pretentious enough for me any more.

There was no second coming for metal for me, either. I still don't much like any of it. My fling with the heavy stuff was brief and left little impression. While I retain a nostalgic affection for some of the prog bands I liked around the same time (Well, Yes mostly. The rest I can do without.) I can't say I've ever felt the urge to go back and listen to my old Sabbath albums. Which I still have, of course.

There is one song of theirs that I do still listen to, though. It's hard to beat in its field and it seems to stand a little to one side of most of the rest of the Sabs catalog. What's more, it's the only Black Sabbath song I'm likely to hear coming at me down the street from the bunch of buskers who "perform" on weekends, fifty yards from the doorway of the bookshop where I work. (That said, they did take a run at War Pigs once. I bet that didn't put much in the bucket.)

Obviously I'm talking about Paranoid. Let's hear it one more time. 

Paranoid - Black Sabbath

There they are on Top of the Pops in 1970. I don't remember seeing them. It might be very slightly before I started watching the show or maybe I was out that evening. Kicking a ball against a wall, probably. 

I didn't actually realise Paranoid was a Top 40 hit. (Top 30 then, I think, actually... Top 40 came later.) Again, I think it just predates my obsession with the weekly chart rundown. I'm slightly too young to have been there for the start of Ozzie's career and I'm only ten years younger than he was when he died.

There are many covers of Paranoid on YouTube and most of them are like you'd expect. Not all of them, though.

Paranoid - Lonely Sock 

Paranoid - Harp Twins

Paranoid - Cindy Und Bert 

Paranoid (That She Mighteth Be A Witch) 

Starshine Audio

Something there for everyone, I think.

Ozzie famously had a great sense of humor. I hope he'd be amused by at least a couple of those.

Rest easy, Prince of Darkness and thanks for starting me on a lifetime of listening to great music. Even if very little of it was yours.

Five Characters In Search Of An Illustrator

If you're going to carry on reading today's post, I'm afraid you're going to have to indulge me. There's no purpose to it other than for me to create yet one more self-indulgent reflection of myself I can gaze into, lovingly, which seems to be my main occupation these days. Also, it's mostly about AI so that's always welcome, isn't it? Anyway, consider that a trigger warning and act accordingly.

I have mentioned, repeatedly, that I've been spending a lot of time (A lot of time...) working on making artificially-generated music from various organically-generated sources. Most recently, and very definitely most successfully, the source has been a novel I tried to write in the mid-90s. 

It was (Still is, I guess...) called The Final Line and it revolves around a chosen family - not an expression in common use then, I don't think - of four youngish adults and a close friend or two as they deal with the typical concerns of any group of friends in their late twenties or early thirties - death and resurrection leading to demonic possession, mass murder, general mayhem and being hunted to extinction by the provisional wing of the Roman Catholic church. The usual everyday stuff we've all been through, I'm sure.

It's a bit like the plot from This Life grafted onto the characters from Twin Peaks but in an episode of the X-Files, I suppose. It was the nineties, after all. 

It's also the sort of thing that everyone in in my own friend group back then was doing. I don't mean we were all hanging out together, drinking and smoking in the day and going out murdering people at night, well not the last bit anyway. No, I mean the construction of extended narratives focusing on that kind  of behavior. I think at least half a dozen people in the Amateur Press Association I belonged to back then were doing something similar. Maybe more.

I hadn't read my story for a good, long while before I picked it up again a few months ago. I'd run out of songs I'd put down on cassette in the eighties and I was scratching around for something to use to keep my Suno addiction fed. God forbid I should actually have to sit down and write something original. I'm far too old for that.

Johnny Paradigm

It occurred to me I might be able to extract a paragraph here and there from something I'd already written, just to keep the hobby going a while longer. The obsession, I mean. Let's call, it what it is.

Being my own #1 fan, I'd always thought it was good but re-reading it after a long gap I was astonished just how good. As I've often aid, I had no idea at the time how I wrote it other than it involved what I like to think of as a fugue state, like I know what that means. There are many passages I can't imagine having written but apparently I did. I mean, there was no-one else there at the time so it must have been me, right?

I'm the worst person to assess it anyway, so I'll stop going on about it and get on to the point I was going to make. Two points, really. 

First, it turns out descriptive, poetic prose is a really good source for song lyrics. Barely needs tweaking. It took me a while to get into the swing of hacking it up thoroughly enough to make it flow properly but even from the start it was clear it was going to make for much better songs than I used to write, mainly because it forced me out of the usual, rigid, traditional structure I always thought songs demanded. Anyone would think I'd never actually listened to any.

This isn't a post about songwriting or using AI to make music, though, believe it or not. I'll do one of those soon I expect. Or maybe I won't.

The second point about the story was how much of it there was. I never finished the draft that I was embarrassed to call a "novel", which is probably why I'd always thought of it as being quite short but I've now transcribed it I find it comes to more than 35,000 words. 

I haven't done a final word count because I only have it in the seventy or so original pages, as it was published in the apa. I need to proof-read it, edit it and collate it into a single file before I'll have an exact count but it's definitely pushing the accepted boundary of a novella - forty thousand words - and it's not even finished.

I was dreading getting it onto the PC. That would be a lot of typing. Fortunately, this is the 21st century and no-one needs to type anything twice any more. I couldn't find a readable file for the original draft on any of my old floppy disks but it occurred to me there was probably some free website that would turn an image of text into a text file for me. And there was. There is.

There are loads of them in fact but the one I used, the best by far of the several I tried, was the no-frills and proud of it jpgtotext.com. If you ever need to convert a Jpeg into a text file, I thoroughly recommend this extremely simple option. It allows you to upload ten images per day for free, although one day it let me upload twice as many for no apparent reason. If you need more than that, the pricing is extremely cheap but I just did my free allotment every day and had it all done in a couple of weeks.

Cado Babe with Cathy

It produces a very accurate text file in seconds, even from some pretty dodgy thirty-year old photocopies of dot-matrix print-outs. None of the other websites I tried came anywhere close to doing as well. Most of them were next to useless, in fact. Some couldn't read the images at all and those that did garbled so much it would have been quicker to r-type the whole thing than correct the errors in the edit.

Some of those failures claimed to be "AI driven". This seems to me to be a very good example of one of the problems with what we're calling AI these days. Most of it isn't AI at all. I bet those weren't. People slap "AI" on the front of all kinds of apps and programs and utilities that would just have been called algorithms a couple of years ago because they think it's the way to get customers. Get them, maybe, but not keep them. For that, you need a service that works.

The number of songs you can get out of even thirty-five thousand words of prose is finite and I must be getting close to the limit now. I've done over fifty already so I really can't complain. I love almost all of them, too. I listen to them all the time, to the exclusion of just about anything else. How long that will go on will be interesting to find out.

It could be a while. At present, I'm making them so fast I forget the ones I did a while ago, so when I listen to playlists I've made I keep surprising myself. I also have a second, longer, completed novel from the same time that I will almost certainly start mining when I'm done with this one, so I'm good for a while yet. 

Just to make it even less likely I'll stop, Suno recently added a feature that's absolutely perfect for me. It lets you direct the AI to make new songs using only the songs on a given playlist as reference. That means you can control the outcome with a great deal of precision and end up with a whole lot of songs that sound like they were made by the same imaginary people. 

I'd probably never take the headphones off again if the damn thing worked. It's in beta and so far it works just well enough to let me hear how perfect the output would be if it didn't glitch and scratch and skip and pop constantly like a vinyl album someone dropped into a deep fat fryer then tried to play. God willing they get it fixed soon. It's so frustrating it makes me growl.

Working with The Final Line so extensively over the last few weeks, though, has made me keener than I was back when I wrote it to do something with it. What, I'm not sure. These days, it's incredibly easy to self-publish but I'd have to finish the thing for that and the main reason I didn't do that the first time was because I have no idea how it's supposed to end. I have a slightly better idea now though...

Buddy. Last name pending.

Other than actually publishing it, I could put it up on a website or a blog or turn it into an audio book with AI reading it. I did once try to read it myself. I have a couple of chapters on cassette. It's very hard work, though, reading that much prose aloud. No wonder people get AI to do it. 

There was a very revealing article at GamesIndustry.biz yesterday, quoting extensively from voice actor Jane Perry's keynote speech at Develop:Brighton 2025. I recommend reading the whole thing but I was struck by her observation that generative AI has already taken a big bite out of voice actors' potential employment because the profession isn't all about exciting movies and games. A lot of it is less  romantic and most likely quite tedious work on things like "audiobooks, narration, corporate videos, e-learning, localisation".

Leaving aside the enormous amount of very badly voice-acted "localization" I've suffered through in various F2P imports, something for which AI replacement could only come as a blessed relief, that's a pointer to the kind of work that won't just be taken by AI tomorrow but that's already being taken by it today. I believe in the realms of self-publishing, authors quite commonly read their own work if they want to sell an audio version, though, so using AI would only be taking work away from themselves.

It won't be any comfort to anyone who used to make a decent living voicing incredibly boring corporate videos but in this respect AI isn't so different from the endless march of technology through the ages. When I got my first job working for an insurance company back in the early 1980s, if I wanted to send a letter, which was a big part of my job, I had to read it into a Dictaphone, walk down the corridor, hand it in to the woman in charge of the twenty typists sitting in the typing pool then wait a day to get it back, typed up, occasionally with errors that needed a second stroll up the corridor. 

By the time I left that company two or three years later, I had a PC on my desk and I was typing my own letters and printing them out on the printer next to me. The typing pool was gone. Jobs, like games, have their time then leave. Or they would if no-one kept making petitions to stop the flow of entropy. 

One thing I won't be doing is getting ChatGPT to give me some ideas, as Jeromai has been doing with one of his old stories. He's been writing a fascinating account of how he's been getting on, which I recommend to anyone curious about the process.

I'm far too prissy about my own prose to let any AI get its chrome paws on it so I'm stuck with doing it myself. We'll see how that goes. I have no such compunctions about the illustrations, though. I'd like there to be some pictures and I can tell you no-one wants to see anything I'm ever going to draw so it's either pay someone or get an AI to do it.

Cado Babe Under Glass

The idea of paying someone is intriguing. I've seen a few examples of illustrations various bloggers have commissioned and they've been pretty good, by which I mean they seem to realize the intentions of the commission quite accurately. I wouldn't rule that out for the future but for now, while I'm just in the playing around with ideas stage, AI is the inevitable answer to my curiosity about what my characters might look like, outside my head.

I am lucky enough to have one superb illustration already. Back when I was serializing The Final Line in the apa, one of the other members, professional comics artist and colorist Steve Whitaker, now deceased and very much missed, was so taken with one of the characters, he drew a picture of her and gave it to me. I've had it on my wall for thirty years.

This morning, I tried uploading that image as a seed so I could get an AI image generator come up with some variations. The results were not impressive. In fact, they were awful. I should say upfront that I was so annoyed with the first two that popped out, I gave up on the idea immediately, so it's very possible some more effort on my part would have seen some improvements but really I couldn't bear to go on.

Instead, I went back to the good old ways and did some text prompts instead. I wrote some character descriptions, used those as prompts, tweaked them a little as I went along and ended up with a set of images of the five core characters I'm fairly-to-very happy with. You can see those here today.

I won't go through the entire methodology in detail. I may do a separate post about it because I find it interesting even if no-one else does and it would be good to have a record. What I will say here is that I get by far the best results from the cheaper, supposedly less-sophisticated models than the expensive state-of-the-art super versions.

NightCafe is a website I often mention when I'm talking about AI and it's another I very much recommend. It has a generous free option, which is all I've ever needed, but it also regularly hands out free tokens for the upmarket AIs that otherwise require you to subscribe. Not that I recommend those, for the reason I just gave...

NightCafe has always handed out five tokens a day just for logging in but they recently gamified that into something any MMORPG player will immediately recognize as "a daily". Now, you still get a minimum five free tokens a day but you have to "create" something to get them and now you get an RNG roll to see how many tokens you've won. Five is guaranteed but you can get all sorts of numbers above that. And you get a fat reward for completing a "streak". I got 25 tokens for doing seven days in a row recently.

 Because I've been diligently collecting my free tokens every day for ages, I have almost three thousand in the bank. Again very generously, they don't expire, so there's no pressure to use them and I only bother with making AI pictures when I have a reason these days, not for fun like I used to. The fun in doing that wore off a long time ago.

Rachel Sunday and Sheba

I spent about two hours at NightCafe this morning. That's how long it took me to get satisfactory images of five characters. The time wasn't spent evenly across all of them. Looking at the images, all of which are handily stored indefinitely on my account, I see the first character took me just four tries, the second twenty-two, the third five, and the fourth and fifth both four goes each.

Guess which one took four times as long as any of the others? Yep. The one I already had a picture of, done by a human artist. Using that as a starter was a complete disaster but trying to get anything even a tenth as good by creative prompting wasn't much better.

And that's because I had an actual image with which to compare the results. Benchmarking the output of an image generator against a mental image is a lot more forgiving than comparing it to a real, high-quality picture.

Even leaving aside the personal connection, which honestly did color my reaction a little, the hand-drawn image just has something none of the AIs have. Life. It doesn't even look all that much like the character I had in my head back when I created her but ever since Steve handed me his idea of her, that's who she's always been.

Which isn't to say the AI versions of the characters are bad. Not at all, They're pretty good and I'm pleased with them. They're satisfying because I was able to nudge the AI into giving me something that closely resembled the image in my head, though. Steve gave me something he saw in the character and made me see it, too. AIs can't do that. Yet.

Which is why I don't think artists have much to worry about, aesthetically. They're always going to be preferable to and better than AI, at least until AI becomes truly sentient, at which point I would guess it will have better things to do than knock out commercial art samples and pictures of waifu by the gazillion.

At this point the post started to spiral into a general rant about AI and we've surely all had more than enough of those by now. I exercised my right as a human writer and deleted the rest of it. Another thing we can do that AIs can't. Exhibit judgment. 

I'm off to play with that potentially game-changing, practically infuriating new feature in Suno for the rest of the afternoon. Wish my blood-pressure luck!

PS. That's Sally Mandragora at the top, in case you were wondering. 

How Hard Is Too Hard?

I really don't have anything much to talk about today, or nothing most people reading are likely to be interested in, anyway. More like actively annoyed by, I would guess. I left a comment on one of Tipa's posts the other day, to the effect that I'd rather write about AI than gaming most days and I'll add now that I'd rather write about music than either.

When I do write about games here, which I think is still easily the majority of the time, it tends not to be about MMORPGs. Belghast has a thought piece up today that goes some way towards explaining why that might be. 

The idea that MMO developers pay too much attention to the hardcore is far from new, of course. I remember discussions and arguments about it often on blogs like Spouse Aggro and Hardcore Casual, well before I had a blog of my own and I've been blogging since 2011. 

Has it gotten worse, I wonder? I'm not sure. It's easy to forget the pattern of these things.

There was a long period, measured in years, when there seemed to be more complaints within the blogosphere about MMORPGs getting easier than the other way around. The hardcore perspective back then seemed to be that they were fighting a mostly-losing battle against the dumbing-down of the genre, with filthy casuals swarming over the battlements to parade up and down the castle walls, showing off their vanity pets and fancy mounts, rather than learning their rotations and parsing their DPS like real players should.

All of that got muddled up with the Free-to-Play revolution, too, the theory being that if you let anyone in without proving they owned a credit card and were willing to use it, the whole thing would fall apart. Of course, at the same time, the exact same people were complaining bitterly that the F2P hordes were all-too-willing to whip out their credit cards to buy power and advantage in the cash shop...

None of it made much sense then and it makes even less with the benefit of hindsight. But of course, we all see things through our own lens or from the inside of our own silos. Assuming you can see anything out of a silo, that is, which would, were it true, break the metaphor.

Scopique points out in the comment thread to Belghast's post that "there’s the potential that such not-so-hardcore MMOs exist, but they aren’t on your radar for one reason or another". This is a very valid observation, one made all too rarely in my opinion, as we all tend to write as though our experience is somehow universal, something of which I'm as guilty as anyone.

Kay of Kay Talks Games, another blog I believe I picked up in last year's Blaugust (Or possibly an earlier one...) and still read with enjoyment, even though I rarely find cause to mention it here, wrote a very good piece about the problem a while ago. I've been meaning to say something about it ever since but haven't found the opportunity until today

The post is called Gaming Bubbles, which is self-explanatory and I found it particularly interesting since it comes from someone who knows of the genre but generally doesn't play many MMORPGs. I found it particularly telling that she says, of Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, "Those games have accumulated 26 million and 23 million players, respectively, yet I never really hear about them online unless it’s someone bringing up how disastrous the Fallout 76 launch was."

It's all too easy to assume everyone else is talking abut the same issues we focus on but it's long been my impression that, in what we loosely and not entirely accurately call "the West", very few self-identifying gamers would be able to name more than a handful of MMORPGs, let alone claim to have played any of them. (And if they had, it would inevitably be World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.)

If you cast the net outside the self-proclaimed "gaming community", I'd bet the question would be met with a blank stare. Both the movie and the infamous South Park episode were so long ago now, I doubt many non-gamers remember WoW exists.

In that context, whether the developers' assumed focus on the hardcore part of the audience is misguided or merely an act of increasingly desperate self-preservation becomes much harder to judge. It's very tempting to think that, were the barriers to entry lowered and the obsession with endgame abandoned, currently uninterested casual gamers would come flocking in but I suspect the result might be somewhat less heart-warming. Or commercially desirable.

There might be little or no increase in interest from the casuals but some of the disgruntled hardcore might leave. Probably for one of the gazillion games that likes to describe itself as "Souls-like". The success of Dark Souls certainly added some fuel to the hardcore argument that everyone wants challenging content as well as giving those who actually do somewhere to go to find it.

One MMORPG company that gets - often grudging - approval these days for being able to hold and serve an audience is Daybreak, particularly in relation to EverQuest, which is still objectively successful, albeit on a small scale, after more than a quarter of a century. It's also frequently cited as a benchmark for difficulty in the genre, even if it isn't anything like as difficult as it once was. 

I don't play much EQ these days but I do play EverQuest II and there you can see the devs trying to balance on a slack rope over a ravine as they attempt to appease the voluble and volatile hardcore, the people who presumably pay most of their bills, while trying to ameliorate the situation for the softer-core crafters, decorators and general casuals, who pay the rest. With the game almost certainly teetering on a financial knife-edge, they really can't afford to piss off any significant demographic to the point where money stops changing hands.

To a greater or lesser extent, I imagine many MMO companies are in similar situations. That explains some of the decision-making, although I also think that game devs en masse are almost bound to be more hardcore than the overwhelming majority of their potential customers. It would be hard for them not to be, really. Wilhelm makes that point in some detail in Bel's comment thread.

And, as has been demonstrated countless times, developers think the broad mass of players in their games are going to find content easier than they do. Also proved by experience is the way the cutting edge of the playerbase will always either find new content too easy or work out some way to trivialize it the developers never imagined.

As Muspel says in the same thread, multiple difficulty settings are always an option. EQII has done a great job of that by literally making every new dungeon come in several flavors, with the same content available for solo and two grades of group, if not raids too. 

That's a welcome approach that I certainly appreciate but it does tend to push players even deeper into their own, ever smaller silos. While it's true that every motorist is also a pedestrian, it's not always true that every raider is a soloist, so not everyone is going to appreciate the effort that's been made to satisfy all tastes.

I don't have a solution for any of this. I don't think anyone does. If they did, they'd presumably be running the biggest, most popular MMORPG out there right now. 

And maybe they are, at that. Looping back to the idea that we don't really look far outside our own comfort zones, I'm occasionally reminded that almost no-one I read ever blogs about some of the biggest MMOs, like Old School Runescape or whichever version of Lineage is in favor these days. For all I know, someone in one of those may be thinking of all of this as a solved problem already.

I kind of doubt it, though. I suspect it falls under the rubric “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Abraham Lincoln used to get the credit for saying that, which would mean the problem has been around for quite a while, but these days it seems to be accepted that it was first said by John Lydgate, who died in 1451, so we've known about it for a lot longer.

And I fear we're probably stuck with it.