Persona Non Grata - The Latest EQ2 Producer's Letter

(Written on Friday, hence the present tense.)

I didn't really have anything in mind to write about today. I was thinking of skipping but then I thought maybe I could say something about the EverQuest II Producer's Letter. Or I could if I'd read it. I'll just go do that now...

Hmm. It's not very interesting, is it? Even by Jenn Chan's wonderfully low-key standards. After some of the hyperactive attention-seekers we've had shilling for the game over the years, I do genuinely appreciate her calm, reasonable approach but combined with not really having much of note to announce it can get a little "so what?" at times.

The first half is all "Here's what we've done so far. Aren't we good to you?" which is fair enough. No harm reminding people what the Romans have done for them. Then there's the usual trumpeting of special offers and things we can buy, with the crass commercialism of all that offset by the Good Works for Charity report. Again, expected and justified but really not very interesting.

There are a couple of mildly intriguing items. This Persona thing for a start. I can't remember when they first mentioned it but I feel like it was a while ago. I didn't pay much attention and I couldn't honestly say I knew exactly what it was but I think I do now. It's EQII's attempt to turn itself into FFXIV I think. 

"... this new feature will allow you to level and play alternate class 'personas' on the same character. This enables leveling from level 1 to max on each class while still playing the same character, having access to the same equipment, and credit for completing the same quests and achievements. "

The "all jobs on one character" thing was one of the aspects of Final Fantasy XIV I enjoyed the least. It was a strong factor in our decision to go back to Guild Wars 2, when there was a real possibility Mrs Bhagpuss and I might have moved to FFXIV full time because GW2 was overrun with bots to the point of unplayability (Something no-one seems to remember any more.).

It also put me off playing FFXIV much even as a side game later. I actively dislike being able to play all the classes on the same character. I like making alts.

The ability to play multiple characters, have them do different things, dress them in different gear and have different experiences with all of them is one of the things that kept me playing MMORPGs for so many years. The way that, over the last decade, many MMORPGs have moved towards an account-based rather than a character-based structure, with the more extreme examples making it illogical and counter-productive to do anything on more than one character, has been a significant influence on my declining interest in the genre as a whole. 

Rolling multiple characters used to keep me in a game a lot longer. Years longer in some cases. These days, while you can still do it, most of the practical reasons have been removed and it just doesn't feel fun any more. In fact, it feels like a waste of time and the last thing any MMORPG needs to do is remind you of how much time you're wasting, playing it. 

I suspect it may even have something to do with my growing preference for open world gacha RPGs, In those, you're actively encouraged to play lots of characters.And rewarded for it.

To me, then, adding Personas to EQII seems like a retrograde step. It's another sop to the Toon Brigade, those players who see all their characters as nothing more than interchangeable functionaries. From their perspective, being able to do everything on the same character must look like a huge benefit. 

Also, I suspect, it may have something to do with the ever-declining population of EQII. It's going to be a lot easier to get a group going if everyone can swap Personas to fill the missing roles. Then again, Rift used to work that way and it never did Trion much good...

The letter mentions the summer update, which has a name now: Revelations of Malice. It doesn't really say anything about it, though. In fact, I'm a bit unclear on whether the technical and quality of life improvements listed are part of that update or separate from it. Or maybe they are the update?

UI scaling is one of the proposed improvements although it's only going to be in testing, presumably on the Beta server, not on Live. I wonder how many people play EQII in 4K? Seems like it'd be a niche group at best. I guess when I get my gaming laptop (I was pricing them this morning.) I could hook it up to the big TV we have now and play EQII in the lounge in 4K. Not sure why I'd want to but I might try it, just out of curiosity.

More useful and attractive to me are the proposed upgrades to the number of mount slots and house item caps and especially the option to train mounts that you don't currently have equipped. I have a lot of mount xp potions stashed I'd like to get some use out of and that should help.

And that's about all there is. Not much, is it? Hardly worth sending out a letter.

Oh, there's a whole paragraph about the expansion. Ought to mention that, I guess. Only problem is it doesn't actually tell us anything. 

Here. have a read. See if you can make anything out of it. I can't.

"Cthurath, reeling from his recent defeat within Gerion, has been suppressed back into the Void. While the majority of Norrath remain unaware of the cataclysmic threat posed by the Consumer, the Overlord’s absence in Freeport has not escaped the notice of the power hungry. Encrypted messages continue flowing, and the feeling of dread seems to suffocate you as you think too hard not only on what you’ve deciphered, but other clues and gut feelings. Something big is about to happen, and you have thus far been unable to home in on what that could be. Words are power, mysticism and darkness go hand in hand, a found missive and a very vague map of islands... what could it all mean? A fair warning Adventurer: pursuing this course can only serve to open a yawning gulf of madness and machinations which will not easily be traversed. Heed the warnings, Norrathians. Beware the Descent into the darkness."

The only thing in that lot that caught my eye was the "very vague map of islands". I hope that means the expansion's set in an archipelago. I like island-hopping adventures. But then there's the ominous "Beware the Descent into the darkness" part, too. I do hope we're not going underground again. I had more than enough of that in Terrors of Thalumbra. 

Oh well. I guess we'll find out soon enough.  

Farewell Bel

A couple of hours ago, I had a post almost finished. I stopped so we could take Beryl for a walk. When I came back, I checked my feeds before finishing the post and saw on MassivelyOP that Belghast had died.

I'm sure I don't need to clarify to anyone reading this who Belghast was. I probably don't need to explain how he'd been undergoing a difficult course of chemotherapy following a cancer diagnosis. Reportedly, it was complications with that course of treatment that led to his extremely untimely death.

Everyone who's likely to be reading this most likely followed Bel's blog, just like I do. We all learned about everything in his life, good and bad, through his conversational, very open posts. We all know he'd had the worst of years, with his wife dying suddenly and unexpectedly and then his own illness appearing.

But I imagine most of us were confident he'd get through all these very bad times and come out the other side, still Bel. Still himself. Still positive, forward-looking, optimistic, ready to give life the benefit even if it didn't seem to want to cut him much slack.

I knew from his posts that he was struggling with his chemo routine. I know from experience how difficult chemo can be like although my own experience was a lot milder than his. But I also know how unpredictable it can be, filling yourself with poisons week after week. Sometimes very bad things happen.

I had my own brush with death thanks to complications with chemo, as documented here on this blog. It's such a terrible shame Bel didn't survive his own to tell us all about the experience on his blog, too.

He would have, of course. He was a fearless examiner of his own life. He talked about all kinds of issues, practical, medical, emotional and personal on what was supposed to be a gaming blog. He was a core influence on my own move to make this blog about more than just games, although his willingness to share far exceeded my own.

But then Bel was ever the sharer. He tried to help wherever he could and he led always by example. His influence has been both deep and wide.

I knew Bel from his blog and also from Blaugust, of course, but he was very active in all kinds of social media and in gaming communities. He was always willing to talk to new people and turn them into friends, even though he didn't always find socializing easy, something he often mentioned on his blog. 

A lot of people knew Bel. A lot of people are going to miss him. No-one's going to forget him easily, not least because his legacy will live on.

According to Roger, Blaugust is going ahead. I'm absolutely certain that's how Bel would have wanted it. I'm sure everyone will have plenty to say about the inspirational figure who started the whole thing when it rolls around again next month. 

For now, though, I'll leave it at that. There's only so much you can say when something like this happens. I just hope someone's looking after Bel's cats. He really loved those cats. 

A Girl And Her Dog

I did it! I went to the cinema to see the Supergirl movie. The first time I've been to the cinema since before the pandemic and even back then it wasn't like I was going often. Maybe once a year, if that.

It wasn't always that way. I used to see a lot of movies on the big screen. Well, on a screen bigger than a TV at least. Screens in the '70s could be tiny. There might actually be TVs bigger than that now.

When I was at university it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say I went several times a week. That was because I was at Cambridge, a collegiate university, and every one of the 30+ colleges had its own Film Society, most of which showed a film pretty much every week during term. I saw a lot of classic films and subtitled foreign movies that way and I saw some of the big, new releases (Like The Empire Strikes Back and Superman.) at the actual cinema in town, too.

After I graduated and moved back home, all through the 'eighties I lived in the middle of a big city with at least three arthouse cinemas and a couple of commercial cinemas all in easy walking distance. I saw a lot of films all through that decade. 

By the '90s I'd moved. I didn't have a cinema I could easily walk to any more. My cinema-going was slowing down but I still used to get to the pictures maybe six or eight times a year. By the turn of the century that was down to two or three and by the time Covid shut the cinemas I was already going a whole year between visits.

So, yes, it certainly takes something special to get me to make the effort, these days. Why Supergirl? And was it worth it? 

First question: I guess Supergirl because I've always liked her and also because I didn't make the effort for Superman last year. I felt I owed it her. Plus the trailers made it look hella fun.

As for the second, Hell, yes! I loved it! No, I fucking loved it! It was everything I hoped it would be and more. The movie, that is. The cinema experience itself? Ehh... that was okay.

But then, what can you expect when you see a movie at half-past nine in the morning? I was literally the only person in the screening. It was in an out-of-town multiplex with a dozen or more screens and my showing was in one of the smaller rooms. Still big enough for about 130 people though. Or it would have, if anyone other than me had wanted to see Supergirl right after breakfast on a Thursday. 

I'm quite a proponent of the value of seeing a movie as part of an audience. I know it has its downsides but you don't need an evolutionary biologist to point out the synergies of a shared experience. There's also the Big Screen Effect, where the more of your field of view the image occupies, the harder your brain finds it to separate the image from reality, which is great for immersion. 

Whether it's worth leaving your house to watch a movie alone, on a screen that's not really all that big, well that's another question. I just didn't want to have to wait six months for the DVD to come out. Although I will be buying that DVD. This is a movie I'll be watching more than once.

So much for the experience. What about the movie? So I liked it. Big deal. Why did I like it? (Might be some mild spoilers in this part but nothing very specific. Probably safe to carry on.)

For a start it's a good movie as a movie, which is very definitely not something you can say about all superhero films. Probably not about most of them. Supergirl has a coherent, linear plot. It starts at the beginning and goes through to the end with precious few diversions. 

There are some well-judged flashbacks that add depth and nuance to the narrative and illuminate certain things about the central character and that's it. None of the usual darting about from place to place and time to time you usually get in comic-book movies. Also it's quite a small cast which helps to keep things focused.

The movie's an adaptation of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, a strong story in itself, but the movie script cuts a lot of the sometimes over-complicated to-and-fro of the comic. It condenses the action from a few weeks to just three days. The ending, which we'll get to, is very different. I think Woman of Tomorrow may be a better story but sticking closely to it would make for a much worse film. 

That's one of the big, BIG problems with superhero movies in general. Comics have so much more time to tell their stories and so much more freedom to be completely confusing about it and get away with it. Comics fans are nothing if not tolerant of cruft. They relish it, for the most part. The kind of excruciating detail that has comic fans arguing deep into the night just about kills any movie stupid enough to include even a small fraction of it. 

Supergirl keeps things tight. The plot is a revenge arc yoked to two coming of age stories and the writers and director wisely recognize that's plenty. Even so, they still manage to throw in an origin story and make it feel like a natural progression. Origin stories wreck far too many superhero movies. If you're going to do it, this is how. Really, really good work.

Continuity is another bane of superhero franchises. James Gunn has been tasked with rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe so of course this film has to dovetail with the recent Superman movie, something it does perfectly. David Corenswet, an excellent Superman, appears just as often as he needs to and there's just enough cross-fertilization to bang home the message of his own recent movie, that Superman needs to be a force not just for good but for restraint and tolerance.

Supergirl is a force for good and also a bit of a wild card. There's an argument to be made that she's tolerant and restrained, alright: just of the wrong things.

As her mother, Lara, tells her just before she dies and Supergirl leaves doomed Argo City in a pod with her puppy, she needs to be good but she doesn't need to be nice. And she's not nice. But she's more than just good. As Ruthye tells her late on, she's kind. Kind and good does it for me. Screw nice.

I know some Supergirl fans won't like it. Supergirl's been nice all her life. Too bloody nice if you ask me. 

Well, some Supergirls have. This is the other big, BIG problem with superhero movies. Any superhero a mainstream audience recognizes will already have been a dozen different people in the comics before they even get to the screen. And like Swifties, comic fans always have their favorite eras. 

I've known Supergirl since I was about five years old. I have a couple of favorite eras myself but I think this is my favorite now. Milly Alcock is a superb Kara. She looks the part but that's easy. Any blonde can wear the suit. But as she says to Ruthye "It's just a suit". 

Except it's the suit. Not anyone can wear the suit. She can. Magnificently, she spends almost the whole movie not wearing it. She strides about looking seriously cool as fuck in a duster coat. Then, when she puts on the suit, it's like the sun coming up. And you know what happens when the sun comes up. Well, you will if you watch this movie.

Many, many things about the writing and the acting worked for me. I love Kara's pub crawling bad girl act. I love that it isn't an act and yet it so obviously is. Also isn't it interesting she calls it a pub crawl not a bar crawl?

I think the way the movie goes through a whole sequence of adventures with Supergirl winning fights without her powers is genius. She isn't just a badass because the yellow sun made her one. She was born badass is my guess. And if she wasn't, hardship and trauma made her one. I bet on both.

Her relationship with Krypto is just wonderful but so is the relationship she builds with Ruthye, the thirteen year-old orphan who just watched her whole family getting slaughtered and plans on doing something about it. Of course, that relationship also relies on Ruthye and Eve Ridley is stone solid in the part. They're mirror images, through a shattered mirror. 

It should be said that I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. People doing the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing, just makes me happy. And also makes me cry. I cried a lot during Supergirl. At one point I actually sobbed. I was glad I was the only one there. 

I tend to cry a lot at movies, though, especially when anyone does something unselfish or noble or when something happy happens. Sad things tend not to do it for me or not to the same degree. I didn't tear up when Krypto got shot but I did when Supergirl told him "See Buddy? I told you I'd be back" at the end.

I laughed a lot, too. Out loud. There are some great lines. I think I missed a couple when Lobo and Supergirl were exchanging quips mid-fight. Fights are loud in cinema-sound. Jason Momoa as Lobo is... well, he's Lobo. He doesn't get to do a lot else but then when was Lobo ever anything but Lobo?

While I'm praising the plot and the writing I'll also mention a couple of things that absolutely don't ring true and yet ring completely true in comic book terms. Kara shouldn't win some of the fights she wins without her powers. Ruthye absolutely shouldn't win her one fight. They're both fighting way out of their weight class. But they win and they should win.

They win because they're heroes. Heroines. Whatever. They win because comic book stories are myth. If you don't get that you're probably watching the wrong movie.

And then there's the ending. This hasn't been too spoilery so far but here's a big one. I'll stick something under this paragraph in the edit so there's a break and you can leave if you want.

 So. At the end, Kara kills Krem. Krem's the main villain. He has no actual personality, no backstory, no arc. He's evil. That's it. Oh, and nasty. The two aren't always the same. 

Having a villain so straightforwardly villainous and unredeemable simplifies things. I was sitting there wondering just how they were going to resolve the storyline without killing the bastard when Supergirl killed the bastard. She ran him through the neck with Ruthye's sword after talking Ruthye out of doing the exact same thing. Oh, and first she stabbed him somewhere else because of what he did to Krypto. "That's for my dog".

In the source material, Supergirl does not kill Krem. She sends him to the Phantom Zone where he serves three hundred years. At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, he's released as a very old man. And he's learned right from wrong. It took him three centuries but he's done it. Rehabilitation worked. 

He apologizes to Ruthye, also very old by now because living three hundred years will do that to you. She clubs him with her stick and then hits him a few more times when he's down. But she doesn't kill him. She, too, has learned something in three hundred years. 

That's a good ending for the comic. It would be a terrible ending for the movie. We're supposed to wait three hundred years for catharsis and then it's an old woman clubbing an old man while Supergirl stands by and watches? I don't think so.

All this Phantom Zone stuff, anyway - and the damn place has a history as complicated as Ancient Rome - just doesn't play on screen. It barely plays in the comics, frankly. Calling the authorities isn't going to fly. Who they'd even be in this scenario, god only knows. Clearly Krem and his crew are doing whatever they want already. If there was an authority capable of stopping them or holding them, wouldn't they be doing it already?

I'm 100% against capital punishment in real life but this isn't real life. It's myth. Krem has to die. There's just no other ending that's going to work.

I know some fans agree with that but think it shouldn't have been down to Kara to do the killing. Lobo's right there. He's up on a ridge, watching it all go down. Lobo, as Supergirl warns Ruthye when they meet him in a bar, killed his entire planet. If you want some killing done, he's your boy. 

Except if Supergirl lets Lobo do this one instead of doing it herself, it doesn't define her as somehow above the act, it devalues her as too weak to do the difficult thing herself. Plus Lobo already saved her from what looked like (But obviously wouldn't have been, somehow.) certain death. How many times is he going to fix things for her? 

The two  or the three moments in the whole movie I didn't like all make Supergirl look briefly like she's not in control but at least in those she's mostly just unlucky. If Lobo swooped down on his big bike and killed Krem for her, it would make her look weak and indecisive. 

Supergirl is neither of those things. She's angry and bitter and sad and good and kind and strong and brave and irresponsible and responsible and human all the way through. And she needs to kill Krem, so she does. She's good. She does the right thing and, in that situation, that's it.

It's possibly the most responsible thing she does in the whole movie, ironically. And then she goes home and tells her cousin she's grown up. 

Except she doesn't tell him what she's done. Superman wouldn't have done it and he wouldn't get why she did. Best he never knows. She doesn't tell him she's grown up either. Not in those words. She doesn't have to. That, he knows and we know. He can see it. We can see it. He can hear it. We can hear it.

Coming of age story, remember?

I could go on, at much greater length. Sometimes I wish I was back at college so I could write a dissertation on something that fires me up like this instead of bloody William Blake. I like Blake but I never wanted to write five thousand words about him. I'd happily write five thousand words about Supergirl. 

I won't though. I'll just say the music is great and so are the special effects, the fights and the mise-en-scène. A lot of the scenes are lit really dark but I always could see what was going on. It's a mood piece so it works.

I won't say it's a masterpiece. It's not that. It's a great movie though and not just a great superhero movie. It has the feel of those bleak, existential seventies films I grew up with; Five Easy Pieces, Brewster McCloud, Dog Day Afternoon. Like that. Except in space and with lots of people punching each other up into the air.

It was nice to be back in the cinema. I'm glad I took the trouble.  Maybe I'll go again. 

What's My Motivation?

I'm having a slight problem just now, what with with this being, ostensibly at least, a gaming blog: I'm not playing any games. 

I haven't reached some kind of existential crisis, where I find I've outgrown or lost interest in what, for convenience, I'll call "The Hobby". I've noticed a few erstwhile games bloggers hitting that wall lately but I'm not one of them. I'm still enjoying my gaming. 

I'm not really even in a lull or slump, one of those times when interest wanes temporarily as you wait for some new game to grab your attention and pull you back in; a state of mind familiar, I'm sure, to plenty of people reading this.

No, it's more of an enforced hiatus, just while I sort out a new gaming PC. The one I'm using to write this post seems entirely reliable so long as I don't ask it to play games but I've decided, rather than try to rehabilitate it for that purpose, it's going to be relegated to a media center role downstairs. I'm still looking into what will replace it. Until I make up my mind about that, I'm kind of off games for now, whether I like it or not.

I've found taking an enforced break from gaming these past few days has been quite useful in clarifying a couple of things for me. I've mentioned a few times that I don't play games as often these days as I used to, or for as long, when I do. It made me wonder if my interest in the hobby might be winding down. 

I'm happy to say I'm now reasonably sure that's not what's happening. I found myself getting quite twitchy, not being able to play my games, Neverness To Everness in particular. 

Not being able to play, I've been reading about them instead. Nimgimli posted about the upcoming 1.2 update, which looks amazing. I didn't find time for the full hour-long preview but I did watch the almost eight-minute trailer.

It's impressive. Not to say insane. So much packed in to what's going to be a six-weekly update cadence. How do they do it?

Raph Koster was reported by MassivelyOP the other day as saying the theme park model for MMORPGs was unsustainable because of the cost of producing content and the speed at which players get through it, which seems fair enough until you consider games like NTE, Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact and the rest of the gacha gang. 

I left a comment wondering, among other things, what the difference was in terms of production costs, to which Raph replied with a terse two word answer: "Server costs". I'm not quite clear how that explains the way gacha games can pump out as much plotted, scripted, written, voice-acted content on a six-week cycle as the average Western MMORPG can manage in six months...

The second update for NTE adds an entire game-within-a-game, a fantasy RPG inside the magitech shell, the conceit of which is that the characters themselves will be playing it. I love that part. It even makes the medieval fantasy element palatable. It's permanent content, too, which is just as well for me since I may not have a machine capable of running it before the new update becomes the old update in a few weeks and we're on to the next thing.

My uninformed, outsider's take on how it's possible is that MMORPGs these days just aren't popular enough to generate the kind of income that supports this pace of content production. In that respect, Raph's quite right that the Western model isn't sustainable. 

We can see it, over and over, with every new attempt to break the market open. The locust swarm pitches up, strips a new game bare of content then flies away before the first update arrives. When it eventually comes, some come back for a fraction as long as the first visit and after that there's no getting them back at all. With ninety per cent of the customers gone, who can afford to keep making new content for the few that stay?

With the open world gacha titles, though, there's always another substantial content drop on the way. Even then, players still complain about not having enough to do or finishing everything too fast but instead of having to wait months for the next hit they're into the hype cycle almost immediately and the fix lands a week or two after the cravings begin.

Are theme park MMORPGs unsustainable or just inefficient? Is it inherently harder or more expensive to produce content for servers holding hundreds or thousands of players than for those serving solo or co-op play, even when the nature of the content is very similar? I have absolutely no idea but I'll take Raph's word for it that it is, somehow.

Even then, surely server costs can't directly affect the rate at which the content itself is produced, can they? Not even if it's orders of magnitude more expensive to get that content in front of the players. The issue of content drought, endemic in MMORPGs for many years, seems like it would be independent of the cost of keeping the servers up. 

And when, even in the glory days of World of Warcraft, did MMORPGs ever get content flow at this volume and speed? (I'll answer that one: First five years of EverQuest, that's when. And never since that I've seen.)

But what do I know? Or, frankly, care? My concern with Western theme park MMORPGs these days isn't so much whether they can provide me with content fast enough as whether they can produce content that interests me at any pace. If you remove nostalgia, loyalty and familiarity, the main factors that keep me playing some old favorites, I can't easily come up with many good reasons even to look at most of the MMORPGs I see being promoted or developed these days. They just don't look very... erm... modern.

All of which makes it quite ironic that my current darling, Neverness To Everness, a game a huge part of whose appeal for me is just how very modern it does feel, has chosen to add, for only its second update... a traditional, western medieval fantasy RPG. If they'd asked me what I wanted it wouldn't have been that.

Oh, wait! They did ask me! Several times. And what did I say? Like Mailvaltar, I said I wanted more city. 

Still, I'm not complaining. 999 Nights, which in a magnificently confident coup de theatre we're told should be read as ‘One Thousand Less One Nights’, looks very interesting. I'd love to give it a go.

Luckily for me, as is generally the case in games of this kind, most of the content won't go away when the next update arrives. The big FOMO push is always for the banner characters, none of which particularly interest me this time around, and the various mini-games and events. The substantive elements, scripted content, items, gameplay additions and innovations, those tend to hang around.

In this case there are a whole load of costumes I might be interested in, including some that have something I did ask for - customization. Okay, it's only colors and hiding some panels, not swapping whole pieces between outfits, but it's a start. And I really want that "Unassuming Warrior" outfit for Flora. Anything that looks like regular clothes is good with me.

There doesn't appear to be much, if any, new story content, which is fine with me, this once. It'll keep me from falling behind while I sort out my hardware problems, something I feel quite motivated to do now.

I'm not saying I'm going to buy a whole, new expensive computer just to play NTE but having a game I really want to play does clarify things a little. I was wondering if I needed to bother getting a gaming computer at all or if I couldn't just make do with this one and do without the gaming part altogether.

Yeah. Not happening! Bring on the One Thousand Less One Nights.