Is Wuoshi Up? The Latest EQII Producer's Letter Drops.

A new Producer's Letter for EverQuest II usually gives me plenty to write about. They appear roughly quarterly (Maybe they're seasonal?) so there really ought to be some meat to them. You'd think...

A new one popped yesterday. It's thin. Let me break it down in bullet points:

• Reminder of the beta currently running for the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion on the Origins server.
• Reminder the Zarrakon PvP server will be merged into the Antonia Bayle PvE server in May.
• Details of a technical change to the Character Creation process.
• Information about the new Time Locked Expansion server coming in June.

And that's it. Two things we already knew about, each of which have had their own press releases in the last week or so, one thing no-one's likely to care about and a foretaste of another that, according to Senior Community Manager Angeliana, replying to a question on the forums, will have a full article and a FAQ next month.

If you were hoping for any longer-term outline of where the game as a whole is headed, especially now Darkpaw isn't doing roadmaps any more, you're out of luck. Whether this is because there's nothing to say or because saying anything isn't allowed, feel free to speculate.

So, working with what little we have, let me see if I can spin this up into some kind of post. There might be a couple of loose ends worth pulling on... 

The Origins server is the closest thing EQII has to a Classic ruleset. It doesn't go all the way back to the beginning, like WoW Classic, because no-one in their right mind would want to suffer through the first fifteen months or so of EQII ever again. Instead, it started out trying to recreate the game as it was in 2006, before moving forward, carefully, through succeeding expansions, attempting to replicate them as accurately as possible, striving always for authenticity. 

Or so the story goes. That, anyway, is why the introduction of the next expansion on the assembly line, Rise of Kunark, requires a beta. For regular TLE servers they just switch the expansions on, I think. 

I don't really know, to be honest. I never play on them. I did try Origins when it started but I think I lasted about two sessions. I can see the appeal and the server has been successful but who has the time? Well, not me, obviously.

I wouldn't have bothered going into it at all if it wasn't for the fact that the existence of Origins is highly relevant to the second bullet point, the merging of Zarrakon with Antonia Bayle, which is much more interesting.

Zarrakon launched a sliver under three years ago. It used a factional PvP system of some kind, the exact details of which are unclear to me. I was under the impression most EQII PvP was faction-based: Freeport vs Qeynos or Good vs Evil, if you prefer. 

Whatever the exact details of who could kill whom, Zarrakon barely had a chance to get started before the server itself was killed by much more popular rival. Just two years later, a second PvP server, Dozekar, arrived, using the already highly successful "Origins" model, tweaked for PvP.

PvP players are, if anything, even more nostalgic about the supposed good old days than PvE players. They're always hankering after some mythical ruleset that made PvP fair or balanced or satisfying, even if few of them can agree on when or where it happened. 

Everyone agrees it did, though, and for many the touchstone is the much-missed original PvP server, Nagafen. For once, it seems as if Dozekar came close to replicating that experience. Or, as PCGamer put it at the time, "Nagafen's back, baby!"

With Dozekar sopping up most of the demand, there was no need for Zarrakon. It does seem strange that two PvP servers should have launched so close together but presumably the possibility of an Origins PvP server wasn't in the discussion in 2023. Just bad timing, I guess.

Antonia Bayle, the server on the receiving end of the merge, has a checkered history of its own. For a long time it was the most populated server. It was also the designated roleplaying server, which may explain the popularity. 

Over time, for reasons unknown to me, Ant. Bayle fell out of fashion. The population declined until it became almost a ghost-server. There was talk about merging it into one of the others but instead Darkpaw took the opposite tack, merging failing servers into Ant. Bayle.

When I read the news that a PvP server was going to be folded into AB, my first thought was to wonder how the two populations might mix. Like oil and water, you'd think. Having done some research for this post, I'm now thinking it'll be more like dropping a pebble into the ocean. Barely even a ripple. I'm guessing there won't be enough players left on Zarrakon to make an impact and of those that remain, any still dedicated to PvP won't be logging in much after the move goes through.

So ends yet another attempt to bring PvP to Norrath. At least this time there's an alternative. 

Dozekar, by most accounts I've seen, retains a small-but-active population, which, on the evidence of the last twenty years, is about the best an EQII PvP server can realistically can hope for. Not that EQII PvP players are famously realistic...

New servers have been the lifeblood of the game in one way or another for as long as I've been playing, which is to say always. The commercial model seems to consist of a core of permanent F2P servers running the "Live" ruleset, to whose players annual expansions and various cash shop specials can be sold, along with an ever-changing line-up of special rules servers, for which a subscription is required. 

Perhaps ironically, it's the sub-only servers that have the shorter life expectancy. They're designed to run only for as long as enough people pay, after which they're merged either into each other or into the Live servers, depending on how compatible the rulesets might be.

There's a perpetual demand for new rulesets to hold the interest of a subset of players who find the endless variations appealing. Once in a while a particular variant will take off and become rather more than just stable, as seems to have happened with the Anashti Sul Origins server, reportedly now the most populated and popular server of all.

The latest attempt to grab attention is the upcoming Wuoshi server, which is going to have a Free Trade ruleset but also launch with all expansions up to and including Echoes of Faydwer active. EoF was the third expansion, right before RoK, which means the new server will be one expansion in arrears of Anashti Sul. 

Why that would induce anyone to move across beats me although maybe I'm missing something. Someone on the forums certainly thinks so:

"Well rip Origins and it's RoK launch if this Woushi server coming out in June with EoF enabled."

I'd have though it'd be the other way around but what do I know?

I was more interested in the name of the new server, anyway. Mostly, when new servers are spun up for either of the EverQuest games, I have to go look it up to find out who they've been named after.  Not this time!

Wuoshi is the extremely annoying dragon that wandered about right next to the druid ring in Wakening Lands. She was the bane of every druid's life back in the day. You'd port in and WHAM! Dead from Wuoshi's massive AoE attack.

Luckily she wasn't always up. I ran a spotter over there and camped them at the ring so I could log in as an expendable character just to check if it was safe to port. Eventually they either moved Wuoshi or changed her faction and porting to Wakening Lands stopped being Druid Russian Roulette but I have never forgotten her. I might roll a character on the server named after her, just for old times' sake.

There is one other odd thing about the new server. I'd talk about it in detail only I have no idea what it is and Jenn Chan isn't about to make it any clearer. She says

"Imagine traipsing through The Crossroads for a minute... You’re just walking along the road, weary from a long day of adventures, when you glance down and see an oddity. You pick it up and open it to find a strangely coded missive. You stare at it until the characters swim about in your view, still unable to decipher it. You feel an urgency to find someone who can decrypt the piece of intel before it’s too late. What do you do? Where do you go from here? "

 Which is helpful. Not.

And even less so the image of the note itself:

Looks like gibberish to me but it turns out to be in two Norrathian languages. One is Dark Elven. I'm not sure about the other.

I only know that much because someone on the forums had the whole thing translated in a matter of hours. The full text, in English, reads as follows. 

Oh, I suppose I ought to give a spoiler warning for this...

As if anyone cares.

 

So there you have it. Gibberish in English, too! If anyone knows what any of that means, particularly in reference to how the Wuoshi server might differ from all the other TLE servers, do tell.

Credit for the image goes to Agarth, by the way, although I'm not sure they did the actual translation. 

And that, I think, is about all the juice I can squeeze from the dry husk of Jenn Chan's latest Producer's Letter.  

Hey, I got more than fifteen hundred words out of it! I'm not complaining.

Don't You Tell Me What To Do! Stars Reach Tries Again.

It seems I was far from alone in my misgivings over the new Introduction and Tutorial added to Stars Reach in the A Recruit No More update back in March. Less than two weeks later, Playable Worlds threw most of it out, revising the whole thing based on "player feedback". Here's part of the official statement:

"Following up on our previous update about the initial game tutorial, we’ve taken a step back to re-evaluate the starting progression based on player feedback.

Concerns were raised that the experience felt too “on the rails.” As a result, we’ve decided to move away from such a linear system..."

To which the obvious response is "Well, duh!" Given SR's supposed sandbox credentials, how the version I played ever got past the discussion stage beats me. I know it's pre-alpha and wild ideas that never go anywhere are part of the process but who thought it was a good idea to add an unskippable, on-rails, theme-park tutorial to a sandbox, let alone one likely to hold new players back for a couple of hours or more before they ever got to see the actual game?

Someone obviously did. Well, they know better now.

Given the quick response, I thought it would only be polite to go back and see what changes they'd made. The new update is called "Open Horizons", which I guess sets the tone. Is it an improvement, though?

Hmm. Yes and no. I prefer the new version but that's not to say I think it's good. It's just not as dreadful as the last one.

On the plus side, they did sort of fix that awful skill tree. And the new Intro/Tutorial goes by a lot faster. I made a new character and played through the full thing this morning [Edit: That was Sunday morning. It's taken me this long to find time to write the post...] and I was on a non-tutorial planet in less than an hour. 

On the minus, it would have been a lot less than that if I hadn't had to keep looking stuff up. The game wasn't holding my hand any more but it wasn't explaining much, either.

And it would have all gone a lot faster if I hadn't ended up dying several times, yet again, mainly because I couldn't see much of anything. Even with the new gamma slider pushed all the way to maximum, the screen was still sometimes too dark to see anything at all. I couldn't even figure out what was killing me so it was hard to know what to avoid.

The tl:dr for the new intro/tutorial is that they've absolutely gutted the old one and put almost nothing in its place. They've just left you to fend for yourself. That's not inappropriate for a sandbox but I suspect it just puts the whole thing back where it was before, when the problem PW was trying to fix was new players not having a clue what to do next. On this evidence, they still won't.

It's an extreme response that I suspect may be the result of having a highly invested and experienced group of testers that doesn't and most likely cannot respond the way a genuine new player would. Even the new testers they're bringing in are likely to be coming from the pool of people who've been following the game for a while, people who applied but didn't get in during a previous wave. They're impatient to get started and think they know everything they need to know already.

When the game goes into Early Access, something that was being talked about for this year at one point, the genuine new players won't have even that level of knowledge or expectation. Or, most likely, enthusiasm. Will they deal well with being handed some tools and told to look stuff up in the in-game help section, even if it is now called "The Galactopedia"?

Honestly, If I hadn't already done all of this many times before, I'd have been lost. Even with prior knowledge, I still had to look up several things. The game tells you next to nothing. Just "Here are your tools.".  Any details about how you should use them are left for you to figure out from tooltips and the Galactopedia. As for all the stuff about how to find someone who's dancing when you need to heal your wounds or how to set your spawn point at a Re-Life station? All gone.

Which is fair enough for a sandbox but it does make Stars Reach look like a pretty hardcore example of the genre. And that's a definite theme here. It's hardcore, even if it looks like a kids' game.

Which it does. Or like a cosy game. On the surface, it looks a lot like Palia, only in space. The character models are cartoonish and goofy. The colors are bright and friendly. All the corners are rounded. It's not Palia, although squint and it might be Palworld, albeit without the slavery motif.

Haven, the first planet you see, doubles down on the hopeful, harmless vibe with its wide, tree-lined avenues and its clean, welcoming buildings, surrounded by immaculate lawns and gardens. It looks like a prosperous campus university. There's even a  friendly mayor, waiting to greet you and telling you to take your time and settle in at your own pace.

 

There's no sign of aggressive wildlife nearby, just some rabbits and deer. The sky is blue, the grass is green, the air is clear. Everything feels about as threatening as afternoon tea at the vicarage. Why not take a stroll around? Enjoy yourself. Bring a picnic.

In the new version, there's not much direction at all. You can wander around Haven, see the sights, pick up a handful of very simple tasks, unironically known now as "Challenges" for some marketing reason. None of them is going to take you longer than a few minutes, unless it's time spent trying to figure out the controls.

Once that's done, it's off to Crucible just like before, only this time with fewer dire warnings of what to expect. The journey seems to have been shortened, too. I only had to wait a few seconds for the shuttle this time, not minutes as before. Once you get there, though, it soon becomes clear any peace you thought you'd found was an illusion.  

Crucible itself remains a hell-hole. The only thing that's been done to ameliorate the misery of being there is to dump most of the missions that used to be required before you could get the hell out. No need to make your own spacesuit now. Just grab five Bauxite, hand them in, then take the space-suit you're given in return and get off Crucible as fast as you can. Why would you want to stay?

The place is on fire. Volcanic eruptions spew lava everywhere. Visibility is terrible. The forests and mountains swarm with aggressive monsters. All the peaceful promise of Haven is gone. And lost forever, as you discover when the game warns you that once you leave, you can never return.

It reminds me a little of Pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars, only there the sudden shift was a set-up for a brilliant twist in the narrative. In Stars Reach, the jarring lurch from Haven to Crucible feels purposeless. If the whole game is so much closer to a survival title, and a fairly extreme one at that, one with corpse recovery and loss of everything except your tools and the clothes your wearing on death, why open with such an idyl at all, especially now there's next to nothing to do there? 

Even with nothing to do, though, I can imagine people choosing to stay in Haven for good, the way they did in Pre-Searing. If you knew what was coming next, you'd be crazy to leave. 

It's not as if it's just a quick trip to hell, then back to somewhere fairly pleasant, either. Once you're done with Crucible, which in my case took about fifteen minutes and three deaths, all of them completely unexplained, it's up into space, which is beautiful but barren, then down to the next planet, which is barren and not beautiful at all.

The new introduction has you in space in maybe twenty or thirty minutes, assuming you know what you're doing and don't get lost underground and killed by things you never saw, which is what happened to me. Once in space, you could jet off to go mining but more likely you'll visit the Mission Board to pick up some "Challenges" that are likely to make you feel about as excited as Tom Sawyer did when Aunt Polly told him to whitewash the fence. Then it's a quick spacewalk to the portal to the planet of your choice (There are four, currently.) and back to earth. Well, someplace solid, anyway.

And when you land? Devastation as far as the eye can see. It's like stepping out into the aftermath of a small war or onto the unreconstructed landscape of an abandoned strip mine. Mostly because it is the unreconstructed landscape of an abandoned strip mine, except most strip mines don't have packs of flying predators scouring the scree for anything they can kill.

The welcome board that pops up the moment you arrive gives you a hint of the misery to come: no civil administration, no wildlife, just some minerals waiting to be exploited. Grab your pick and start digging. Everyone else sure did. Try not to fall down one of the holes.

The land management problem has been raised as a potential issue by many people ever since the expected gameplay was first posited. The idea is supposed to be that players will build towns and cities, elect representatives and manage the planets in an ecologically responsible manner. Or that they'll use up the resources, leave a gutted husk and move on to the next, a course of action apparently deemed equally acceptable because more planets will spawn to replace the derelict hulks.  

And maybe, when the game is live and players see it as their "forever game",  it could work. I mean, I doubt it, but it's not impossible. Even if it ever does turn out that way, though, it's going to be difficult to persuade newcomers to stick with the program long enough to find out, if all they see after Haven for the first few hours is some new version of hell.

The sustainability of the galaxy is a macro-problem for the long game. The Introduction and Tutorial is a more concise, contained concern that needs to be fixed up front because that's what all new players see first. Get that wrong and you won't have many old players.

In fairly typical MMORPG development fashion, it does look very much as though the reaction to the negative feedback on the last iteration has been to spin a hundred and eighty degrees and slam the hammer down to race off in the opposite direction. You can have On Rails or No Rails. Hand-holding or free-fall. Haven or Crucible. No half-measures! Screw compromise!

It's pre-alpha but even so it needs sorting soon. In Discord I can already see a certain discontent with the constant iteration over the New Player Experience. And it's true that there comes a time when you have to stop fiddling with the controls and just set a course and stick to it. 

Based on the Open Horizons update, though, it really doesn't look like we're there yet. The intro still needs work. 

A lot of work. And the first couple of items on the agenda at the next planning session ought to be to decide what sort of a game Stars Reach is meant to be and who it's meant to be for. 

I couldn't answer either of those questions a year ago and I don't feel like I'm any closer to answering them now. I just hope someone at Playable Reach knows because right now it doesn't really feel like they do.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker - First Impressions

Yesterday, in passing, I mentioned there's a game I'm playing now that seems like it might have some traction, something that's been hard to find in games of late. Since the only thing that successfully sunk its claws in this year was Baldur's Gate 3, I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that this is something similar.

The game is Pathfinder: Kingmaker, currently on sale for a massive 84% off, which is why I have it. It's an isometric rpg from a Russian studio by the name of Owlcat Games, a pretty good name in my book. It was partly funded through a Kickstarter, one of those really rare ones that not only ended up doing what it said it was going to but in something like the timescale it proposed, the campaign having begun in 2017 and the game coming out just over a year later.

It was originally published by Deep Silver, an Austrian company I've never heard of and a couple of years ago the publishing rights transferred to another unfamiliar name, Knights Peak. That, though, is a subsidiary of someone much better known, at least to me - MY.games, formerly MY.com, publishers of, among other things, Allods Online.

Hey! Look, everybody! I can read Wikipedia!

While I'm cribbing, I suppose I ought to mention how Pathfinder was already a well-established RPG system long before any of this. A decade before, in fact.

Before I started doing this "research", I thought it was a spin-off from the forty-year old classic from Palladium Games, but it turns out to be another Pathfinder altogether. It's from a company called Paizo Publishing and it's based on 3rd Ed. Dungeons and Dragons, which apparently is somehow open source now. How did that happen?

More importantly, why did Owlcat decide to use the same name as another extremely similar system? It's not like we're short of generic fantasy nouns. In this case, confusion doesn't just seem possible, it seems inevitable.

Anyway, that's the provenance. What about the game?

It's weird. I mean, it's not weird as in spooky or strange or outlandish. Just weird in that it looks like other games I've played but doesn't entirely feel like any of them when I'm playing.

It looks like all the Baldur's Gate games or Solasta or Solasta II or Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 or like any other isometric RPG you might be able to name. They all look the same, don't they? Possibly more so than any other genre I can come up with.

It sort of plays like them, too, but only sometimes. The bits where you click to move your party around an open area or through a dungeon, stopping to engage in turn-based battles that take literally hours to resolve. Or the bits where you find every container in a room and loot it and find you can hardly move. Or when you wander around a safe haven selling all the crap you dragged back to town and making small talk with the locals.

All that stuff is there and about as entertaining as it always is. The beating heart of all these games is always the combat, of course. As long as that's good, the rest is a bonus. 

I had a bit of an issue with the combat in P:K (Unfortunate abbreviation, that...) at first because it defaults to some kind of real-time action combat where your party is controlled by AI and you have to hit the space bar to pause it every time you want to take charge. Once I found out how to toggle that off, though, everything was peachy.

It's D&D so all the spells and abilities are at least vaguely familiar, even though I think this might be the first time I've played anything specifically based on the 3rd edition. It seems ferociously complicated even for D&D, with a ludicrous amount of choice at just about every stage. Leveling up requires a degree in advanced RPG mechanics.

Still, in the end it's just move your little pieces about, set some baddies on fire, hit some other baddies with lumps of metal and remember to save often so you can do it all again when it goes wrong, which it will. It's what they call a gameplay loop, I believe, and a pretty solid one at that. (I had a whole sarcastic aside about Stars Reach here but I took it out. It seemed unnecessarily cruel.)

There's a story, too, naturally. Usually at this point I'd say something abut how it's the same story it always is but actually it's not. It's one of the weird aspects of the whole thing. The set-up is that some noble recruits a bunch of people, of whom you 're one, to go into a contested region between two political powers, remove the faction that's trying to establish themselves in the hinterland and then take over and govern it properly. Or something like that. I wasn't paying as much attention as I could have been.

Even weirder, there are two teams, yours and one led by a sociopathic gnome (As though there's any other kind.) and you have to get the whole thing done in three months or before the gnome's crew, whichever comes first, or you lose. It's very odd and made odder because it's all so perfunctory. 

Nothing in the main storyline seems to be explained in any detail, even though there's a huge amount of explanatory text for everything else. You can click on highlighted words and get gobs of lore about the gods or the cities of the world and every minor NPC with a quest seems to have far too much to say but as for why the player character wants to become a landholding baron/ess or why anyone would let them is a lot harder to parse.

My best guess is that it's like one of those classic fairy tales, where the King offers a third of his kingdom to anyone who can free the land from the threat of the Dragon, except in this case it's just some murdering bastard with horns on his hat who turns out to have had a really bad childhood.

The whole fairy-tale element is compounded by the way many of the non-combat dice rolls are presented as pages of parchment in a storybook. Not only that, it's a storybook that's being written by one of your party, a halfling Bard of relentlessly good cheer, who I'm surprised the always-angry Barbarian hasn't stuffed into a barrel and thrown into a river before the end of the first day.

When you run into one of these skill checks, you get to pick them from a list and the bard re-writes history according to how the dice fall. It's quite enjoyable although I'm not sure it's more enjoyable than just watching the dice was in BG3. Still, points for effort, I guess.

Some of the conversations are voiced and the acting is competent but not so much so as to make me want to listen to it all the way through. I tend to read the text and flip to the next stage long before whoever it is has finished talking. I do like the party, though. They're all quite characterful, even if there is one who sometimes sounds more like a Valley Girl than an adventurer.

The art design is excellent. It's a charming game to look at, especially if you like parchment. There's a lot of parchment. 

One thing that I noticed as I was looking up some stuff online was that Pathfinder:Kingmaker is reckoned to be very difficult at the start. Where most similar games lead you fairly carefully through content appropriate to your level, apparently this one just lets you charge through the main storyline long before you're equipped to deal with the fights. 

I've seen a bit of that but mostly I've been keeping to things I ought to be able to handle and that's been difficult enough. There's been a lot of limping through with everyone more than half dead and a few times where I've had to reload and do something else altogether. 

What makes it feel a lot more difficult - and certainly slower and more tedious - than it probably should is the number of times people miss. Geez! Some of these people couldn't hit a barn with a baseball bat. Not if you gave them three goes.

And it's not only the party, either. It's not at all unusual for an entire round of combat to go by with no-one being able to hit anyone! It may be faithful to the rules but it's very poor entertainment. I'm guessing it's a lot less noticeable if you let the game run in real-time, as the default settings would suggest the devs expected but that takes most of the fun out of the whole concept from my way of thinking. If I wanted to play an action rpg I'd go get my head examined.

Something similar applies to traveling on the abstract overland map and setting camp, both of which are heavily prone to being interrupted by random encounters, some of which are with the aforementioned kinds of completely inappropriate, far too powerful enemies I was trying to avoid. All of that put together made the first few sessions something of a trial and yet I persisted, which must mean I was having some kind fun, even if it was the masochistic kind.

The same Reddit threads I saw that made a lot of the low-level difficulty suggested things started to improve around Level 3. That seems like it would be quick to arrive but it's not, really. I dinged Level 3 just before I started writing this and I had over eight hours played.

I did go out and give it another go to see if it had gotten any better and it did seem as if it might have, so I'm optimistic. I'm slightly less optimistic about the ticking timer. Three months might sound like a lot but I've burned through a month of that already and it feels like I've hardly done anything. 

I guess I'd better get on with it instead of sitting here talking about it. I'd hate to think that pesky gnome was going to beat me to it. Whatever it is. 

I Love Lana (No, Not That One...)

Well, this is embarrassing. Two sketchy Grab Bags, then a day I could have posted but didn't, and now here I am again, still with nothing very much to talk about. That's what'll happen when you spend most of your time tidying up the garden, walking the dog, enjoying some beautiful Spring sunshine and arranging a funeral.

I could actually, finally, really get started on the Zones of Norrath feature I keep dancing around but I've left it a bit late in the day. That might come tomorrow.  

I was thinking of doing something on the new game from my Steam library - the one that seems to have stuck. I've tried several of the new titles I acquired over Christmas and the New Year but it took a while to find one that grabbed me.

All of that sounds like work, though. Enjoyable, satisfying work, sure, but still work. A lot more, for sure, than what I am going to do, which is reprint an article I wrote for a comics fanzine back in the 'eighties. Which one, I can't remember. I know it was published somewhere but if I have a copy, I don't know where it is. I just have the original draft.

Tipa was wondering a while back, what of this shall remain and she was of the opinion that putting stuff on the internet doesn't guarantee anyone's writing the kind of immortality some people used to think it did. Obviously that's true but it's equally true that keeping it in a folder on top of your bookcase doesn't, either. Both rely on someone eventually discovering something you've written and thinking it's worth sharing. I'm guessing that's a tad more likely to happen if you post it where the entire world can see it.

Hmm. But now it occurs to me I don't have the piece digitized yet so now I have to scan it. Damned if that doesn't sound like work after all....and it's done! Turns out it takes literally less than five minutes to do that. God bless technology, eh?. 

I imagine this had a title once but I can't remember what it was so I'm going to call it...

 I Love Lana

I always thought Clark Kent was crazy.

He had the perfect life there in Smallville, didn't he? Ma Kent could have baked apple-pie for America. Pa could have given cracker-barrel lessons to Robert Frost. He had the trust and admiration of everyone in town, from Police Chief Parker down to good ol' Pete Ross. And best of all, the girl-next-door was Lana Lang.
If I'd been Clark, I'd never have left. I'd never have taken a chance on the big city and the glitter of the Pulitzer somewhere in the dim maybe future. And I sure as heck wouldn't have fallen for Lois Lane.

Oh, sure, you can say she's tripwire smart and very, well, metropolitan. And she's good-looking, in an austere kind of way, but after growing up with Lana? No, I never really could believe it.

Clark's boyhood was an American classic. If you strip out all that superheroism, it wasn't so different from Tom Sawyer's - all the world to explore and the next town another country, danger and adventure round the corner of the barn then safe home for supper. And everywhere Clark went, there was his rust-haired shadow, Lana, scarcely a pace behind him.

She was the kind of girl who would have driven you wild. She pried and poked and never let go. She wanted into everything you were doing and if you tried to keep her out she'd want in even more. Clark never seemed to know whether she was his best friend, his girlfriend or some pretty little devilette sent to try him. (He could have used some trying, too).

Clark and Lana grew up with each other. As babies they went on hayrides together and played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in Lana's rec room. They went to the circus and the beach with their fathers, who got on as well together as good neighbors should, despite their different stations in life.

As they grew older, the kids were in and out of each other's houses like cousins. Who knew when Lana might drop round with a cake she'd baked for Ma Kent to taste or Clark pop in to the Langs' to see the witch-doctors' masks from the Professor's latest expedition?

Lana had seen a lot more of the world than Clark, of course. She was the same age, but she'd traveled. Her father was an explorer and archeologist, and he'd often take Lana on field trips. Compared to Clark she was a woman of the world and she made sure he knew about it. As Superboy, Clark had been all over the universe, but he had to keep that to himself, so it didn't count for much.

They didn't just live next door, they were in the same class at school, and whether it was a chemistry experiment or a social event, Clark and Lana always seemed to end up partners. Sometimes it looked as though there was some kind of conspiracy to push them together. You couldn't say they were going steady, but you could tell there was an understanding.

Being Lana's boyfriend could be tough. Any adolescent boy would have had a hard time living up to the image of Professor Lang, Smallville's own Indiana Jones, but Clark had to compete with his peerless other self as well. In the years to come, as Lana's life plaited with Superman's and braided with Clark's, people who didn't understand what they shared would chide and ridicule her, saying she was starstruck or a gold-digger. Yet her friendship with Clark never wavered.

Being Clark's girlfriend had it's downside, too. That scared-of-his-own- shadow routine must have been hard for everyone to take, but at least Ma and Pa Kent and Pete Ross could hug the secret close and feel good. At least they knew why.
If Lana dreamed of marrying Superboy, well, what Smallville girl didn't? But dreams are for dreaming and life is for living, and Clark was as real as real life gets. His timidity was probably the one thing that gave Lana doubts. As she said to the reminiscing wardens of Clark's old orphanage, "He still is cute...whenever he isn't too timid and weak!"

Lana wasn't timid. She had the spirit of a tigress. She was tack-sharp, too, and headstrong. She was a green-eyed redhead and she had all the traits. Truth told, she was almost too much for Clark.

She was definitely too much for Superboy, or so he claimed. When Othar of Thrann, the self-styled Super World, coerced Superboy and a claque of lesser planetary heroes into leaving their homeworlds for ever, Superboy was glad of the rest. "Smallville, where I live, is a nice place", he told Stormboy and the others, "The only thing that bothered me was an inquisitive girl, Lana Lang, who suspected my identity!" The endless procession of crooks and creatures that came to Smallville month in, month out, hellbent on mayhem weren't a problem, then. It was only that pesky girl, who might turn out to be just that bit too smart for him, that he couldn't get out of his mind.

Still, he wouldn't have been without her. More than once Lana caught Clark with his super-shirt untucked, but she never took advantage. Once she actually caught him changing in a phone-booth. Instead of peeking, she turned her back. After all, as she thought to herself, "I'm dying to know his identity, but it wouldn't be right to expose it!"

If you take a moment to think about it, a boy who could fly across galaxies and corkscrew through time shouldn't have had too much trouble finding a bit peace from an interfering girl, even one as sharp as Lana. But then, it was obvious the last thing he really wanted was to get away from her.

He had a club all his own, way up the time-line in the 30th Century. Lana couldn't have followed him there, surely? It would have been easy to keep the Legion to himself, but the Legion had girls, and some of those legionnaires had girlfriends. Superboy could hardly wait to show Lana off.

Lana was up for any challenge. They didn't say feisty then, but that was what she was. She was happy to step up into the super-powered leagues, and she wasn't short of opportunities.

Professor Lang was always bringing home talismans and sacred objects. and he gave as little credence to their possible side-effects as he did to the freedom of worship of their previous owners. He wasn't much more circumspect when it came to alien artifacts. One time he came back from Africa with a 21- inch glowing metal belt which he claimed was "the most amazing discovery I've made in my entire career!" That was saying something given his track record, but he let Lana try it on for size just the same.

The belt was made for "a race of very small, slender people" and Lana was delighted to find it fitted her, if she drew her stomach in a little. More than that, though, it gave her amazing powers.

That was the start of a brief spell as Gravity Girl, who also turned out, luckily, to be invulnerable. ("That's nice to know!" she observed as the first bullets bounced off her chest). In the end Superboy convinced her it wasn't the right career move. He was only too glad to melt the belt with his heat vision but it didn't put an end to Lana's super-heroics.

She established a successful part-time career as Insect Queen, who looked better than you might expect. She had a Bio-ring, a striking yellow-and-black costume and the power to change into any insect she could think of, which was plenty.
When she turned her back on him in the phone booth that time, it was the excuse Superboy had been waiting for. He flew her through the time-barrier to meet the Legion of Super-Heroes as a reward for curbing her natural curiosity.

Lana realized right away that this was a club girls could join. She happened to have brought her Insect Queen regalia on the off chance, but she didn't know that Legionnaires need a natural power to pass the exam and a bio ring wouldn't qualify. She tried out but they told her to go and wait with the other rejects.

Lana didn't get into a pet. She didn't cry or sulk, she called in a favor from Dream Girl and ended up saving four Legionnaires on a mission to Ice City. She was such a hit, they admitted her to the Legion Reserve. They thanked themselves for doing it years later, when they turned up on Lana's doorstep, running down the centuries in fear of Mordru and their lives.

Lana did the right thing then, like she always did when it really mattered. So, she was nosy and sneaky and there was an acid edge to her tongue. So what? She was the best friend Clark ever had or would have. He knew it, too, though he could never resist a gentle joke at her expense.

When Superboy needed someone to help him in his work, it was usually Lana who got the call. Out to break a narcotics ring, he involved Lana in a typically elaborate scheme that required him to pretend to be an imbecile. Lana in turn was required to pretend to take advantage of his disability by tricking him into writing his secret identity in her notebook. "This way", she said, to prove to the audience of dope-pedlars just how far Superboy's wits had dulled "if you ever get amnesia, I'll be able to tell you what your secret identity is!" Ever the wag, Superboy wrote "Clark Kent" in her book and smiled to himself. He'd probably just done Poe in English Lit. At the end, as they laughed together over the private joke, he was thinking to himself, "Even more private than you suspect! The laugh's really on you, Lana, because... I am Clark Kent!"

They had a real rapport, Clark and Lana. They made a good team. In the comic-books they looked the part, perfectly caught by Curt Swan, a master of nuance. The stories they shared were silly, often ludicrous, but Swan and the rest of DC's wonderful artists gave them dignity, while the awkward, naive phrasing of their speech gave them charm.

I grew up with Lana and Clark, while they were growing up with each other. I didn't think so much about it at the time, but the way they were with each other, their mutual respect, helped to legitimize friendships with the opposite sex. Where many comics, especially the British ones, talked up the natural uncertainty and confusion between the sexes that makes girls and boys seem to each other like ambassadors from an alien race, Lana and Clark showed that despite evidence to the contrary it was quite alright to be friends with a girl.

I never lost my affection for Clark, but somewhere along the way I kind of fell in love with Lana. As she grew older and left Smallville I admired her career as a roving TV news reporter for WMET-TV and applauded her graduation to co-anchor on WGBS's Evening News. It seemed so right that after following Clark into journalism, she should end up sitting at the desk beside him, facing the world. "Every station manager in town would give his right arm to have this gal!" Morgan Edge told Clark, and it was no more of a tribute than she deserved.

The WGBS years were my golden-age for the Superman family, and the tart, cosmopolitan Lana, who had to hold the line before a live TV link every time Clark thought of a job for Superman, was the best she was allowed to be. Later came John Byrne and the Reformation. Some of it worked, but babies were being slung out with bathwater everywhere you looked and the real Lana went too. Truthfully, I still care what happens to her, even if I have to do that thing with my mind, eliding the bits of history I don't want in favor of what seems right. Last time I touched base with her she was on the verge of marrying Pete Ross, which seems infinitely sad and plausible.

Whatever happens, Smallville will remain. In the middle of a long, late- summer afternoon where it's always 1959, a dark-haired boy will be walking home a red-headed girl with laughing eyes. She'll let him carry her books. And that's as it should be. 

That was all before the Smallville TV series, of course. That was a very different Lana. But then, over all the years there've been so many...

These days, the whole rickety structure of the superverse is so fatally compromised, only a 12th level intellect like Brainiac 5's could hope to make sense of it. It's far beyond me, now. 

I'll stick with the Bronze and Silver Age Lana. I'm not a big one for nostalgia but sometimes the past does have its allure.