Is The Bag Half Empty Or Half Full? I think We All Know The Answer To That One...

I was going pull out a Grab Bag today but I used one of the grabs yesterday and made a whole post out of it, so now I only have two left. Two grabs do not a bag make, I fear. Still, I don't have anything else so let's make the best of it. Maybe something will come to me as I go along.

Kickstarter Doesn't Work For MMORPGs

Oh, yeah? Go tell that to Artix Entertainment.

As you may know, Artix is the developer behind the AdventureQuest franchise. I've been playing their most recent MMORPG, AdventureQuest 3D, on and off since open beta back in 2016. 

I still play, on occasion. Steam tells me the last time I logged in was just before the end of January. Yes, this year. 

I will almost certainly play some more AQ3D at some point, most likely when I see they've added something new that interests me. And they will because Artix Entertainment is quite possibly the most pro-active of all MMO studios when it comes to adding new content. They drop new content weekly, without fail, and have been doing so, consistently, for the entirety of their existence, at least as far as I can tell.

That's the kind of behavior that generates loyalty, something that's very clear from the response to the company's new Kickstarter. With 31 days still to run, the project has already racked up over a million dollars in pledges from more than thirteen thousand backers. 

Guess how much they were asking for? 

A dollar. One single buck. Talk about over-achievers!

I guess that's one way to ensure your Kickstarter at least doesn't fail. So, what do they want all that money for, anyway? A new game? 

Not exactly. They already have two successful MMORPGs. They don't need another. What they do need, apparently, is one that will run well and look good on phones, tablets and Steam.

Wait, though... Didn't I just say I played AQ3D on Steam already? I sure did. But the Kickstarter isn't for the newer MMORPG. It's for the older one. The original. The browser-based one you can only play on PC, through the in-house Artix Game Launcher.

The Kickstarter is to convert the entire game, AdventureQuest Worlds, into AdventureQuest:Worlds Infinity, remaking virtually everything and ensuring full cross-play and backwards compatibility with existing accounts. So, why go to all that bother for an old game when you have a new one? 

I guess if you still have 8000 people playing every day, despite the game being ancient and only available through a narrow channel, it might seem worth it. Especially if you can get those people to pay for the conversion. Actually, more than just those people by the look of it.

Here's the thing. Artix has established a reputation that allows them to leverage player trust to an extent matched by few other developers working in the genre. They say what they're going to do and then they do it. They also listen to feedback and act on it when it makes sense to do so. 

As Project: Gorgon proved, if you just keep doing what you said you'd do and avoid ripping anybody off, people will give you money and play your game. And the longer you keep doing it, the longer they'll stick around. It's odd how few developers seem to get that, isn't it? You wouldn't think it would be that hard to understand.

I've never played AQW and I don't plan on pledging the Kickstarter. I'll be adding it to my Steam library when it arrives, though, you can bet on that. And unlike most Kickstarters for MMOs, you can also bet on it really happening. 

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's... Supergirl!

 

Observant users of the Blog Roll off to the right may have noticed a few non-gaming entries creeping in over the years. One such is Supergirl Comic Commentary, a blog by Anj. 

I'm not a huge Supergirl fan like he is but I grew up with Kara, like I grew up with the rest of her family. I read her stories but it was mostly Superman and Superboy that had my attention back when I was in short trousers. (Don't get me started on grown men in shorts or we'll be here all day. It's an abomination, that's all I'm saying..)

I always liked her well enough though, especially when she appeared in my favorite Superhero series of all time, The Legion of Superheroes. Over the decades she's been indifferently served by too many writers and artists to remember, as have most DC superheroes. 

It's the curse of the long-running character. For all the endless droning on about "continuity" and "canon", no-one survives the endless revamps and new directions entirely unscathed. I've learned to tune out the changes I don't like. You have to or you'd go insane, as an hour in the bar of any comic convention will demonstrate all too convincingly.

The Girl of Steel's screen career has been similarly variegated. The 1984 movie featuring Helen Slater was not well-received or reviewed. Worse, it lost money. 

It was thirty years before Supergirl got her own tv series. It began in 2015 and ran for six seasons with Melissa Benoist in the title role. I watched every episode and bought most of the seasons on DVD, so I must have liked it. It wasn't an awful lot like the Supergirl I remember, though.

Nevertheless, it may be the relative success of that show, along with an influential, high-profile limited-run comic, Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, that's led to this year's tent-pole release in the DCMU schedule, the very simply named Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock. And in an attempt to drum up interest and media coverage, DC have gender-swapped this year's Superman Day.

Come on! Don't pretend you never heard of Superman Day! Superman Day is on April 18 as everyone knows. Look, I wrote about it in 2024.  

Only this year it isn't. April 18 is Supergirl Day instead. Not sure why they can't have a day each but there you go. Alright, I do know, really. It's just crass to point out the commerciality.

To be fair, if you scroll down that long, long page of events and special issues I just linked, you'll see it turns into a promo for Superman after a while. He's getting his share and I'm sure he won't begrudge his little cousin taking the lead for one year.

I'm not planing on celebrating the day myself but I might log into DCUO if there any freebies to be had, which I'm sure there will be. I might also pick up a copy of Woman of Tomorrow. We have it at work in the excellent and attractive new DC Compact format, which I highly recommend as a great alternative to the more expensive and generally too glossy graphic novels. 

And I will definitely be watching the movie when it arrives in June. The trailer looks very encouraging. I doubt I'll get to see it at the cinema, though. I'll wait for the DVD. I can shelve it next to the TV series.

Finish With A Song

I mean, it worked for Morecambe and Wise...

Sorry Anyway - Rosa Walton

Rosa Walton is, of course, one half of Lets Eat Grandma. Didn't need to tell you that. Sorry, anyway.

The duo is on a break just now and Rosa's pal, Jenny Hollingworth, has been releasing material under the name Jenny on Holiday, some of which has appeared on this very blog. Big surprise!

They both have solo albums either out or coming soon. Jenny released hers, Quicksand Heart, in January and Rosa's, Tell Me It's A Dream, is out on June 5. 

Expect further examples of both right here.

Dog Day Afternoon - AQ3D Style

OK, it was Dog Day Morning for me but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. And anyway, it was actually last night when I spotted that AdventureQuest 3D was celebrating something called Dog Day.

My reaction to the news was mixed. I was happy to find out there was such a thing as Dog Day but also uncomfortably aware I was going to have to do something about it. I mean, I covered Cat Day when they ran an event for that. Beryl would never forgive me if I did any less for dogs.

The problem is, I don't really play AQ3D. I haven't even been logging in to open the free daily loot chests for weeks. I was saving up the cash shop currency you get for doing that so I could buy something nice for the house I never visit but then I spent it all on my spiffy new catsuit (Which looks great, by the way.) and that pretty much killed my motivation to carry on.

Since I'd spent almost all my magic money, and assuming the dog event was likely to run along very similar lines to the one for cats, I didn't think there'd be much chance of my getting a full set of dog cosplay gear but I thought maybe there'd be something I could afford with whatever change I had left from last time. Anyway, I knew I had to write about the damn thing so after we got back from walking Beryl and feeding the crows this morning, I logged into the game to see what my options might be. 

Better than I expected, as it turned out. 

I know it's unlikely anyone who's going to read this will be thinking of doing the event so there's no point going into a whole lot of detail about how the event works. It is indeed basically the same as the cat one, as expected, anyway.

There's a boss fight which no-one ever seems to be doing when I log in. The new dog boss stands right next to the old cat boss because both events are running simultaneously. I was half hoping the Vicious Cat and the Big Dog (Those are their boss names. Scaary!) would start scrapping with each other but no such luck.

There's a selection of dog-themed onesies, hoods and tails on both the pet vendor and on Not Alma, who has now added Dog? to her species subscript alongside Cat? just to make her even weirder than usual. All of those were well out of my price range considering that, after my cataclysmic spending spree I only had just over a hundred Dragon Crystals left.

Luckily, before logging in, I had taken the trouble to read the notes for the event and I remembered seeing something about house items. A flip through the various tabs showed me several of those, including a kennel, a feeding bowl and several dogs, all dozing in convincingly doglike poses.

None of them were very expensive but they were on sale for a variety of currencies, some of which I had, some I didn't. I had the right ones for the dog sleeping on her back and for a feeding bowl so I bought those. I also checked the cat tab and bought a sleeping black cat as well. If my new dog is going to be home alone, she's going to want someone to play with and I am very much Team Cat and Dog these days..

On that note, one new addition that came with dog day is a voting booth where you can vote for your preferred pet - Dog or Cat. The rubric explains, somewhat unecessarily I felt, that the vote is confidential and all in fun. I'm not sure how it could have been otherwise, although I suppose some kind of  flag could have appeared over your head as you cast your vote. It's happened before. Remember Evon vs Kiel?

I dithered for a while over which way to vote. Until we got Beryl I wouldn't have given it a second's thought. I was Team Cat for more than sixty years. Now, though... In the end I opted not to vote at all, which makes something of a mockery of the Just For Fun theory. I might be taking all of this a little too seriously but then I get like that with votes in video games. Real life voting is so much more straightforward.

After that, I thought about logging out. I'd done my duty to dogdom and I had enough for the post. I had a feeling there was more, though, so I looked around and found Aria the Pet Shop owner had a quest marker up.

Again, to save time I won't go through the details. The important part is that there's a quest to get a pet dog called Klaus. Pretty sure he's a German Shepherd. The quest is a six-parter, which honestly is really short for this game. Aria has another non-event quest to get a dog called Fluffy that has thirty-five stages (!)

Klaus's quest looks easy as well as short so I'm hoping to find time to finish it. It would have been nice to have done it in time for this post but we can't always get what we want.

Other than that, I think I'm probably done with both cats and dogs in AQ3D for now. It's a very time-consuming game and I'm trying not to get sucked into any of its many time-sinks. On the other hand, there is also a bonus XP event going on right now as well and I did ding doing quests for Aria this morning...

And this is how they suck you in!

That Crazy Feline

Here's an existential question for a Wednesday: why spend time and energy on a character in game you know you have no intention of playing? Why do they need to look good, when absolutely no-one, real or fictional, is ever going to see them?

Don't look at me. I don't know either. But we all do it, right?

Okay, some of us do it. It's not just me. 

I'm pretty sure it's not just me...

It's not like I'm even a cat person any more. Well, I am, I'm just not only a cat person. I was a cat person pretty much exclusively for half a century or so but then, for reasons we won't go into right now, I turned into a cat-and fox person and then fox took over for a while.

Latterly, since we got Beryl, I have also become a dog person, something I never expected, although that's a different kind of "person" altogether. I like dogs a lot now but I don't identify as a dog. Ew!

Expanding a little on that, I find it very easy to imagine having a dog pet in a game but very hard to imagine dressing my character up as a dog. As a cat, though? (Or a fox.) Just try and stop me!

As I think I mentioned a couple of times, Once Human has been eating every other game's lunch around here for the best part of a month now. Before it arrived I was playing Wuthering Waves every day but I was also logging in to AdventureQuest 3D, purely to open my three, free daily chests. 

The reason I was doing that was because AQ3D added housing a while back. Because I have a Pavlovian reaction to housing in games, the  moment I learned I could have a house in Battleon, the capital city, I had to have one. Never mind I don't play AQ3D more than a few minutes a year. Never mind I will never hang out in that house or show it to anyone or probably even write another post about it. Still had to jump through all the hoops to get one.

Once I had it, of course I wanted it to look good. I imagine there are plenty of ways to work on that by playing the game but I've tried playing AQ3D and honestly, although it has a ridiculous amount of content, none of it ever grabs me. The combat is very slow and the graphics aren't really to my taste so even exploring isn't all that appealing.

You don't actually need to play the game to decorate your house, of course. You can buy housing items in the cash shop because why else have housing in a F2P game at all? 

I hope it goes without saying that I am not going to pay actual money for pixel furniture in a game I don't even play. I may be whimsical but I'm not crazy. Well, not completely, althogh apparently I am sufficiently dislocated from reality to consider it worth my while to log in every day to see if I can grab a few coins to put towards a rug or a lamp one day.

The daily log-in reward gives you three chests to open, the first of which always contains some cash shop currency. Usually it's a pitiful amount. Single figures in a game where basic items are priced in hundreds. Once in a while you can get a bit more. I had thirty or so one time. Mostly, though, it's peanuts.

Still, peanuts add up, as any mathematically-inclined elephant will tell you. After a few months of logging in religiously I had about 1600 of whatever the currency is called. 

Hang on, I'll look it up...Dragon Crystals, that's it.

I stopped logging in to AQ3D when I started playing Once Human. In fact, I stopped paying attention to any other games for a few weeks but as we near the end of the first season and I wait to find out just how that's going to work, my motivation there has dropped and my desire to play obsessively has diminished. I suspect that may turn into a problem for the game going forward but we won't have long to wait now to find out for sure.

On Monday I actually logged into EverQuest II for the first time in weeks, mostly to collect my free play-money, something you have to do once a month or you lose it, even though the stipend is part of the All Access sub. While I was there I even did some content. I've missed most of the big, summer event sequence that takes in several holiday festivals but the final one, Oceansfull, is still running and I did the main dungeon for that one. It was a lot of fun and quite profitable in terms of upgrades.

I say upgrades... I haven't gotten around to equipping them yet and I'm not sure I will. The big, mid-year Game Update is in beta right now and when that goes live I'm sure the drops and rewards will raise the item level cap yet again, making the stuff I got two days ago obsolete. Then a month or two later we'll have Pandas, meaning upgrades to everything yet again and a month after that the next expansion will come out and...

Well, you get the picture. It happens in every game but in EQII it happens at the very least four times a year, every year. It can be a bit much. I was quite into it for a while - upgrading is weirdly satisfying in its own right, regardless of how useful it is - but I think I might take a break and skip all the interim steps until the expansion arrives in December. 

At least, now I'm coming down off my Once human high, I'm starting to pay attention to what my other options are. Tomorrow there's the second major update to Wuthering Waves so I'll most likely go back for a while. 

I did consider the Guild Wars 2 expansion, dropping next week, for the sole reason that it adds housing to the game but it costs money and I'm not convinced I want what looks to be GW2's typically half-assed version of owning a home enough to pay for it. Which, given my aforementioned housing obsession, says a lot about my opinion of GW2 these days.

But enough about housing (If such a thing could ever be possible.) You may recall, although no-one could blame if you didn't, that I started off talking about cats. 

You may also remember that 8 August was International Cat Day. Or maybe you don't because it seemed to get surprisingly little attention, probably because there are thousands of Something Days every year, all piling up against each other like junk mail on a 1980s doormat.

According to Wikipedia, whch has a very short entry on the subject, "International Cat Day is a celebration which takes place on 8 August of every year. It was created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It is a day to raise awareness for cats and learn about ways to help and protect them."

I'd have thought if there was one animal that didn't need awareness about it raised it would have to be the cat. Cats infamously rule the internet and are ubiquitous in all forms of popular culture around the world. In some countries, cat-worship appears to be an almost un-ironic national stereotype.

Nevertheless, cats have their day and at least one game I nominally play has decided to honor it. If anyone knows of any others that have, I'd be interested to hear about it because I didn't spot anything else in my feeds this year. I'm surprised Gamigo didn't come up with a quiz about cats for Rift. That does seem to be how they like to pretend they're still invested in the game these days.

AQ3D went all-in on the cat theme with a whole bunch of purchaseable cat-themed items - cat pets that follow you about, sleeping cats for your home, cat-paw-and-claw weapons and the one that caught my eye - Cat Onesies. Some of these can be bought for real money in the cash shop, others require a special event currency - Cat Fur - that can only be obtained by defeating the Cat Day Boss, an Astral Tiger.

There's a Cat Day vendor by the name of Not Alma (I'd explain but life's too short.) and the regular Pet vendor, Aria, also has a lot of new, cat-related stock. In keeping with AQ3D's consistent drive to make everything immediately accessible to everyone all the time, especially if makes them money, you can just click on the event notification in-game to be taken straight to the shops.

Which I did as soon as I logged in this morning. Then I spent an hour (Yes, really. A whole hour.) browsing the cat-wear, trying it on, deciding what to buy, buying it and finding somewhere good to pose for the pictures. It's far too difficult in most games to find a nice, plain wall to pose against.

It wouldn't have taken quite so long if I hadn't had to work out how to clear my bags, which were so full from the free stuff I'd been getting from the log-in rewards the vendors wouldn't let me spend any money until I made some space for what I wanted to buy. I even took a swipe at the big tiger to see if I could snatch some fur. I knew it was suicide but what the heck. There's no death penalty to speak of. It was worth a shot.

I had almost exactly just enough Dragon Crystals to buy the three pieces for the Onesie. Kind of a dumb thing to call it, if you ask me, when you also need a hat and a tail for the full look. Might as well call it a set and have done with it.

I would have liked either the black or the ginger one but both were only available for Fur. For Dragon Crystals you get a choice of either pink or grey. I went with grey, which I think looks very stylish. Pink would have looked... pink.

I would have liked to have bought the cat pet, Skratch, to complete the look but I didn't have the crystals. Maybe next year. I may not play AQ3D but that doesn't mean I won't do all this again next time it comes arouind. Or whenever I see something I like.

Why? Probably best not to think about that too much.

What's Going On

Steam has several primary functions. It's a store-front, where you can buy games. It's a platform, from which you can access and launch them. It also acts as a kind of social network for players and it provides a virtual fairground for games companies and developers, with its endless parade of special interest events, such as next month's NextFest or next week's Open World Survival Crafting Fest.

All of which is very helpful and useful and so on but there's another aspect of Steam's service I'm only now beginning to appreciate. It's a great place to get gaming news.

You'd think there'd be enough of those around already but I've always found it unecessarily hard to find the kind of news I wanted, presented in the way I wanted to receive it. Many, maybe most, gaming sites seem to be more interested in being entertaining than informative.

I used to complain quite frequently that what I wanted from MMO news sites like MassivelyOP was a lot less editorial and opinion and a lot more straight news reporting. I fully appreciate that just recycling PR handouts doesn't bring the eyeballs and pay the bills like snark, sarcasm and clickbait headlines but it's a plain fact that the posts I read all the way through at MOP are the ones that stick most closely to the information handed them by games developers. 

I realize it's hypocritical of me to complain about other people doing exactly what I do here all the time, namely using publicity material as a springboard for a string of self-indulgent dad jokes. My justification is that this is a personal blog, not a professional website. My one and only brief is to keep myself amused. If in doing so I happen to amuse anyone else, that's gravy.

I hate gravy, by the way. Who wants wet food? How did that ever get to be the benchmark?

See? That's the sort of self-indulgence I'm talking about. And so is this. Do you really want that sort of nonsense in your news reporting? I don't, which is why I'm constantly on the verge of removing MOP from my news feeds. 

And yet somehow it never happens. The problem is, no-one else covers the industry segment that interests me as fully and accurately as they do. MassivelyOP doesn't catch every development in the genre but it nets more than anyone else I've found and frequently tells me things I didn't know about games I play or introduces me to games I hadn't heard of. I have other MMO news sites in my Feedly, notably MMOBomb, whose coverage tends to be a lot straighter than MOP, if still prone to the occasional, unsolicited opinion, but it's rare for any of them to scoop Bree and her team.

Still, what I would really like is a true news aggregator for the genre. Something that just collates and distributes the press releases sent out by gaming companies and links them, unedited and unfiltered, under simple, declarative headings. That would allow me to skim them, read the ones that interest me and then do my own research to see how accurate or otherwise I feel the information promulgated by the marketing departments might be. I do love to do my own research.

It's taken me a long time to realize it but in a way that's what I already have with Steam. 

I tend to use Steam mainly from the Library page. Along the top is a band called What's New. For a long time I ignored it completely. It was only when I started to notice that information about a game I thought was all but dead was appearing almost daily that I started to pay attention. 

Few people reading this probably remember Bless Unleashed. Even fewer care what happened to it. I imagine most people who recognize the name assume it either closed down or went into maintenance mode long ago.

That's about what I thought, too. I did have a vague recollection of some half-assed conversion to NFTs or blockchain, back when those were the scam-du-jour, but so many fading, failing games tried jumping that bandwagon, none of the details really stuck with me. 

I still don't really have any clue how Bless Unleashed is doing. I uninstalled it a while back to free up some hard drive space so I can't log in to check for myself. I can tell you that according to the Steam charts it has a 30-day average of just under 500 players, which isn't a lot, although it's better than many MMOs on Steam. Lord of the Rings Online, for example, only has about a hundred more Steam players than that. MMOs often have multiple points of access, so Steam charts don't tell the whole story.

As for Bless Unleashed drifting dead in the water, belly-up in the oil slick of maintenance mode, thanks to Steam's What's New strip rolling along the top of my screen, I can confidently say it's not. As I write, news of updates for Bless Unleashed takes up much of the row. The game patched twice on May 17 and again on May 22. It also required an Emergency Update on the 20th and on the 22nd. An activity called "Ordo Chess" was added, along with half a dozen quality-of-life adjustments and the inevitable cash shop offers.

It's nothing major in itself but having played many similar MMORPGs, where even minimal updates like these dried up completely with no word at all from the developers for months on end, it definitely shows the game remains a going concern for the publisher and that there's still someone being paid to work on it.

Steam's What's New is how I heard about the bizarre bee competition in Rift. Like Valofe, who publish Bless Unleashed these days, Gamigo pump out a stream of "updates" I only know about from the news squibs. Granted, almost all of them are re-runs of events Trion originated but even that shows a kind of active engagement missing from games in true maintenance mode.

As a promotional tactic, it works. Better than you'd imagine. I still have Rift installed and I do occasionally log in as a result of reading something in that strip across the top of my screen. I did the quiz and I don't even want the prize. If I'd read about it in a quip-filled paragraph on a gaming website, I doubt I'd have bothered. 

I find  information presented this way, unmediated and without commentary, more engaging and involving than most of what I read after it's been filtered through the observations and interpretations of a third party and there's good reason for that. It's how I was brought up by print journalism.

Back in the day, when I got all my music news from the inkies, there was a very clear division between news and opinion. The first few pages were filled with news, which was presented entirely without comment, just the bald facts. Once past that, opinions ruled. Interviews, editorial, reviews, columns - it was a free-for-all filled with irony, ridicule, posturing, pretension and pontification and I loved it. 

Even now, most of the music websites I follow operate under roughly the same rule: news up front, no commentary; opinion in the back and give 'em hell! I'd love it if I could get my gaming news the same way but so far I've yet to find a site that covers the games that interest me in the way I'd like, which is why I'm so pleased to have identified a possible alternative.

The limiting factor for Steam's What's New, of course, is that it only feeds me information about games I have registered with the platform. And it seems as though only a subset of developers choose to send that information to the channel. 

I hear a lot about Bless Unleashed and Rift. I read plenty on AdventureQuest 3D (Did you know they're about to remove level scaling from the game almost completely? That's worth a post of its own.). Palworld, Nightingale, New World and Palia all keep me up to date with everything they're doing. I even hear from Legend of Edda occasionally, although that one sends me emails more often than it posts updates.

Other games on my roster remain silent, which might lead me to think they'd died, if it wasn't for another benefit of having them on Steam: the Community Hub. The hub is not, in my opinion, as good as the What's New feed for the simple reason I have to go looking for it. I have to think of the game, wonder what's going on with it, find it in my Library and click through to the Community page before I can see any news there might be.

I just did that with two MMORPGs I play - or at least used to play - through Steam. Both of them used to post regular updates in the news feed but neither of them has appeared there for a while. Having made the effort to catch up with them both, I can now tell you Dawnlands hasn't issued any kind of update or news since just before Christmas but Dragon Nest has been putting out a solid four notifications per month all year, none of which I have seen.

Why those have stopped appearing in my feed I have no clue but I wish they hadn't. I don't care that i'm not playing the game any more. I don't even care that I maybe can't play it, thanks to the endless fuck-ups with regionalization Dragon Nest has always been subject to. I would still like to read about what's going on there even if I can't join in.

I was a tardy and reluctant adopter when it came to Steam and since I caved and began using it I've treated it grudgingly and with bad grace. No more. I'm beginning to see more advantages than drawbacks in using the platform and I plan on making more of the opportunities it offers in future.

If I can't get what I want from the gaming press, perhaps I can get it from Valve. Or from Microsoft, if rumors are to be believed.

I didn't read that on Steam, though, and I doubt I ever will, at least until it's a done deal. 

I guess I won't be removing those gaming sites from my Feedly after all.

Four Years Later: AQ3D

According to Steam, the last time I played AdventureQuest 3D was back in 2016. It was also the last time I wrote about it here.

That's perhaps surprising, given the highly complimentary things I had to say about the game. It was in beta back then but I was already impressed. I liked the combat animations ("fluid and satisfying") and the UI (slick and extremely easy to use").

The overall feel of the game, particularly the writing, appealed to me: ("The whole game has an off-kilter, meta feel to it, a kind of post-post-modern sub-ironic knowing-yet-innocent stance that reminds me somewhat of Project: Gorgon."). I concluded my First Impressions piece, saying "I enjoyed it" and promising to "play more and write more."

That promise was, technically, kept when I posted about the game again a couple of weeks later. By then I had identified what appeared to be a problem, : "...the extreme dichotomy between what the game looks like it's going to be and what it is. It looks like a cheerful, cartoon-colorful knockabout MMO aimed at a younger-than-average audience. You come to it expecting a light-hearted, unchallenging romp and you get something that plays like EQ circa 1999. Only more so."

Back then, AQ3D had one of the most ferocious xp curves I'd ever encountered at the starting levels of an MMORPG. It took me two hours to get - barely - to level three. The game was also hard. I died many times on that epic journey from character creation to the starting zone.

Still, I was optimistic: "It has a great feel, tons of personality, huge potential... there's nothing very much wrong here that can't be fixed with some tuning, tweaking and a general reality check". My feeling was it needed a little longer in the oven: "The game probably could use at least the rest of the year in Closed Beta".

I think, back in 2016, we hadn't fully acclimatized to online gaming's new normal. I feared for the reviews if the game declared itself ready too soon. Four years later AQ3D is still in Early Access and my concerns that "Once it goes to Open Beta... that verdict could be as harsh on the game-makers as the game itself is on the players." appear hopelessly naive.

AQ3D currently enjoys a 76% "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam from over five thousand reviews. Its recent review rating is even better, 87% "Very Positive" from just under a hundred and fifty satisfied new customers.

I'm not surprised. This isn't the post I meant to write today. I had other plans. I'm writing this because somehow I ended up playing Adventure Quest 3D for much of the day.

I have the game bookmarked and I occasionally take a quick look to see what's new. I clicked on the link this morning, while I was waiting for something else to load, and I happened to see a news item about dungeons getting an auto-level feature, meaning they could be soloed. That sounded interesting and I'd been meaning to take another look at the game for... well, for years.

I dug up my old login details, patched up (it took about a minute and a half - Steam has been dutifully updating everything even though I never play), and logged in my one and only character, a level three warrior.

I clearly remember logging out four years ago in the main hub city, Battleon but the game wasn't having any of that. There's a new tutorial, it seems, vastly improved over the one I nitpicked back in closed beta, and I wasn't going to be allowed to skip it.

The new tutorial is every bit as peculiar as the original but infinitely slicker and far more amusing, featuring a personification of Death that owes no small debt to Terry Pratchett. I thought that was a fine idea, not because it's clever or original, which it profoundly is not, but because if you don't like pop culture references, pastiches and parodies this is very much not the game for you. It's best you see what you're letting yourself in for up front so you can bail if you don't like it.

From then onwards the gameplay is remarkably similar to how I remember it from four years ago, only now everything's on castors. If I had to pick one word it would be "slick".

The flow is just about perfect. So perfect, in fact, that when I thought to tab out and check the time so I could start on this post, I fouind I'd lost nearly two hours of my life. I thought I'd been playing for about ninety minutes. It had actually been three and a half hours. There's never really a moment when things stop. Everything leads into something else but it never feels forced or rushed.

Artix seem to have performed some kind of minor miracle on the xp curve. Looked at objectively it's still fairly slow by modern-day standards. In over three hours of continuous play, during which I was questing, killing and receiving experience non-stop, my character managed to progress from level three to level six.

That's not much in the way of progress but she did do it twice. There are regular levels and then there are class ranks. I started as a Level three character with Rank three in Warrior and ended rated six in both. The xp bars for each start in the middle of the screen and progress outwards to the left and right, which is a trick I've never seen before. I don't know if they fill out equally or at the same rate or from the same source. I was having too much fun to notice.

The thing is, it doesn't feel slow. Not at all. The sense of grind I remember from beta is gone. Time to kill is measured in seconds. A few seconds. Kill quests only ask for five or eight mobs. Mobs that drop quest items drop them every time. There's a quest tracker and a directional pointer so you can get to where you need to be without delay.

Gear rains down, although a lot of it is the same, over and over. I got several upgrades. Everything displays, too, so it's a perpetual fashion show. Crafting options appear early and seem useful. There's a linear storyline quest but also plenty of sidebars. Not just NPCs with problems for you to solve or the inevitable mission board but oddities in the landscape that lead into mini-dungeons or boss fights.

The game looks good. A little hypersaturated but I like that. It's cartoony in a brash way and someone is far, far too fond of the color orange. Nevertheless, Lore (that's the name of the world, because if AQ3D is anything, it's meta) feels like a place, somehow. It probably shouldn't but it does.

Since I spent so much longer playing than I planned this afternoon I'm going to cut this short. A first impressions of first impressions if you like. I can't see any reason why I wouldn't play more given how much fun I had but then I said something similar four years ago and look what happened.

I also said back then "My previous post on [AQ3D] drew fewer page views than just about anything I can remember writing; certainly fewer than any post this year". At the time the only people I'd heard mention the game were Syp and Kaozz. Syp still does post about it very occasionally. No-one else seems to remember it exists.

Anyone else want to admit to having played it? Or want to read about it? Not that I either need affirmation or take requests but it's always interesting to know.

I Know When I'm Not Welcome : AQ3D

I haven't played much AdventureQuest 3D since it went into Open Beta. Indeed, I haven't played much AQ3D at all so far, just dabbled. Any impressions I have of the game come from the first three levels, although it should be emphasized that this an MMO where Level 13 apparently counts as "end game".

As I've attempted to explain in previous posts, the cheerful, child-friendly cartoon visuals belie the steep leveling curve and unforgiving difficulty setting of this decidely un-casual MMO. It wasn't until I read this post on Artix Entertainment's website today, however, that I realized just exactly what kind of a truly elitist, hardcore game AQ3D is setting out to be.

In getting on for two decades of playing MMOs I can't recall ever seeing any developer talk down to all but their hardcore players in such an un-nuanced way. I thought Yoshi P from Square Enix was a tough customer but he's a pussycat compared to this.

Indeed, the last time I can recall anything even approaching this level of passive-aggressive disdain directed at the customer would be when Abashi (or was it Absor?) repeatedly referred to players who pushed back against the EQ grind as "bottom-feeders".

The linked post has to be read in full to appreciate just how dismissive the underlying ethos appears to be towards the more casual or, perhaps, just less obsessive player but here are a few choice quotes:

They are jumping in and trying to coast on the coat tails of their stronger team members

 They are taking up a valuable seat on the team that could be filled by someone level and gear appropriate

You might think it's not fair to only allow top level players access to the hard to earn gear. You're wrong.

The higher level players have worked hard, gotten to or near the level cap and played through much of the game's content that is still waiting for you lower level players

This, bear in mind, is in the context of players of a game in Open Beta, who are trying to see and enjoy a limited-duration Halloween event. Granted it's only one part of that event, a dungeon wing "balanced for five level +13 plus members to tackle with some difficulty" but even so the solution is harshly exclusive rather than warmly inclusive.

Where most modern MMOs would use scaling, mentoring, smart loot or one of the many non-divisive methods developed over the past two decades to allow friends to play with friends regardless of the level of their characters or time in the game, Artix Entertainment has found a much simpler method of dealing with those pesky coat-tail grabbers. Level-lock them out.

As I think I said before, if you're one of those bitter vets, yearning for the days when it was uphill to the dungeon both ways in the snow, when low-levels knew their place was watching you strut around the bank in your high-level gear, well, there's no need to wait for Brad McQuaid to bring back the good old days - AQ3D is ready for you right now.

None of which suggests AQ3D is going to be a bad game or even a bad MMO. It just isn't going to be the MMO I thought it might be. And probably not one for me.

Maybe it's time to write this one off. Leave it for the hardcore. The players who have "worked hard" at playing a video game. Perhaps I should just get out of their way and go somewhere I might feel more welcome. I might take another look at Villagers and Heroes for that elusive cross-platform MMO fix.

Passive aggressive? Me? Well, who started it?

Making Games Is Hard, Yo! : AQ3D, 9Lives

AdventureQuest 3D went into Open Beta while we were away. I popped in for just a few minutes last night to take a look. I found it quite different to how I'd left it.

My character was still there (no wipe) but she was back at the very beginning of the game. There was a new "tutorial", hosted by Zorbak, a sarcastic little...something, who self-identifies as "evil". He might be a rabbit. It's hard to tell.

He also claims to be AQ3D's "mascot". One thing that's immediately apparent in this new version that's been opened to the public is that this is going to be a much more self-consciously arch, even camp, MMO than I was expecting from my limited experiences in closed beta.

There's a post-modern, meta vibe hanging over the whole thing that I swear wasn't there before. NPCs openly discuss being in a game, often. A grandfather and his granddaughter raised a cheer when they saw me coming and then lost hope when they saw I was "very low level" and this while they were cowering in fear of their lives from a bunch of skeleton invaders.

At the same time there's a whole, traditional MMORPG plot going on, with the whole world being invaded by Dark Forces and you being the Last Hope. It's all a bit of a puzzle.

There are also a slew of new cut-scenes that work rather well. Quests offer a lot of dialog but no actual choice, which leads one NPC to wonder whether you can actually read or whether you might just be clicking, blindly, trying to get to the end. As I said, very, very meta...

Coming to the gameplay,  at first I thought the danger rating of the mobs had been toned down several notches; then I realized I was still Level 3 in a Level 1 area and I still had all my old Closed Beta gear. No wonder everything was dropping in a few hits.

I got as far as the first (only?) town, Battleon, where I camped for the night. Overall I thought the very early stages gave a much better impression than in Closed Beta. We will see if that continues.

One thing you can't help but notice and admire about AQ3D is the immense enthusiasm and energy of its developers. They all seem to love what they're doing and feel very proud of it. There was a choice of ten or so servers at log in although only two were open. They are clearly planning for success.

Sadly, the same can't be said of another game I've had my eye on, Ninelives. It appeared to be trundling ahead steadily if unspectacularly, adding new content and polishing up old, although things had gone rather quiet over the summer. Then I checked the website last night and found this:

After careful consideration, we SmokymonkeyS have decided to temporarily suspend the operation and development of Ninelives.

The main reasons are because since the game couldn't gain enough support from players, we don't have enough funds to continue operating and developing the game and we couldn't maintain the motivation to continue the development. 

 That's a terrible shame. Ninelives was shaping up to be a minor work of art. It's hard to understand why someone would put so much work into creating something so rich and strange only to abandon it out of ennui.

For now the server is still up. SmokeymonkeyS promise that they'll "... keep operating the game server of Ninelives as long as possible". If anyone reading this had vaguely meant to check it out one day but hadn't gotten around to it yet, well, now would be the time.

My feeling is that, as a poster on the forum suggests, the game could be packaged for offline play and either given away or sold for a nominal fee. I'd certainly pay $10 for an offline version as it stands right now. Or they could open source it, but obviously that's more problematical.

One in, one out. The dance goes on.

Ready For Prime Time? : AQ3D

In his September In Review post, Wilhelm observed "... if you want to be popular, post about WoW". To this sage advice I can add a corollary: if you want to be ignored, post about AdventureQuest 3D.

My previous post on that particular game drew fewer page views than just about anything I can remember writing; certainly fewer than any post this year. No-one, it seems, is on the edge of his or her seat waiting for the upcoming Open Beta of this one.

Ah yes, the open beta. The open beta that's scheduled for "October". That's now.

Is it ready? Not according to most posters on the forum. Here are some sample quotes:

"After playing for quite a lot over the past few days, I feel that this game isn't ready to be launch to the public yet at its current state"

"I personally think launching the game in October is dangerous when the game is at this current state"

"...it might be a good idea to postpone the beta"

"Really can't see why you'd put the game in open beta in this state so soon."

"The game, at the current state, is not ready for Open Beta"

I do love how my character looks.

And so on.  Now, I've beta tested quite a few MMOs. Comments like this are not all that unusual because there's a contingent that thinks things could always be better and that nothing should ever be revealed to the general public until it shines like the Spirit of Ecstasy on a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. They're usually drowned out by the majority that just wants to get on with it.

The last time I had access to beta forums so determined that the doors should stay shut must have been the original launch of FFXIV. We all know how that turned out. AQ3D does not have the kind of problems SquareEnix did. The game works. You can play it. It doesn't claim to do a thousand things it doesn't do. It doesn't have a rabid fanbase hammering at the doors trying to get in. As far as I know...

The reason AQ3D may not be ready for Open Beta is not what you might think. It's not overly buggy or filled with half-finished systems that don't work. It runs fine for the most part - for an MMO in closed beta. No, the real problem AQ3D has is this: it's bloody hard!

Ye gods, is it hard! If you yearn for those glorious days in the late 1990s, when Level 3 took you six hours grinding orc pawns, get those rose-tinted specs on and sign up now.

Remember the fun you had killing hundreds of lions in East Karana in the vain hope that this time, this time, the High Quality Lion Skin would drop and you'd finally be able to craft your Fleeting Quiver? Imagine how much more fun it would be if that drop rate applied to all crafting mats!

Drop table needs work.

Disgusted by the way MMOs have shifted over the years to favor soloists over groups?  Here are dungeons so hard that solo players can't expect to get through the first room; where even being grossly over-levelled doesn't guarantee you won't die horribly.

Don't just take my word for it. Have some more quotes:

"... the drop rate for the items are terrible, you will be sitting in 1 farm location for 1-3 hours and still not have any of the materials you were farming for"

"...part of the dungeon is almost impossible for me, and I'm a level 14 player with Nightlocke weapons. I don't think it's a level 7 dungeon at all."

"The drop rates to get crafting items are horrible, and you need to run the same dungeon approximately 10 times (if you have some luck) to get ONE item. ONE upgrade."

"Made it to level8, and still lvl4 monsters in the first dungeon are impossible."

"I have been fighting the monsters ... for over four hours and I am still only level four. ... I am level four and a level two monster can almost kill me".

I could pull out dozens of quotes like these. Surprisingly, perhaps, most of the players complaining
have actually taken the time and effort to grind their way up the levels, through the dungeons and into the meat of the game. I haven't. I'll just have to take it all at face value because although I've played three or four times, I've already decided there are more entertaining ways to spend an evening than grinding the same two or three mobs for incremental advances and identical drops. And that's at level three.

Camping a single spawn for a quest drop. Two more mobs trained on me by another player. Both of us dead in a second. Brings back so many memories. Sadly, none of them good...

Part of the problem is the extreme dichotomy between what the game looks like it's going to be and what it is. It looks like a cheerful, cartoon-colorful knockabout MMO aimed at a younger-than-average audience. You come to it expecting a light-hearted, unchallenging romp and you get something that plays like EQ circa 1999. Only more so.

As several commenters point out, this is not likely to sit well with the audience it's sure to attract, particularly as a cross-platform game appearing on Android and iOS. This final quote neatly sums up the situation:

"I have not even touched the game for weeks now, simply because of all the issues with the XP curve, progression difficulty curve and combat system. If they can't even hope to keep their already loyal players entertained at this point, then the game will most likely not survive the general public".

It's not that AQ3D is a bad MMO. Not at all. It has a great feel, tons of personality, huge potential. Neither is it that there's no audience for a game that harks back in difficulty and challenge to the world as it was before WoW. Lord knows there have been enough calls for that Return to Values for years now.

In fact, there's nothing very much wrong here that can't be fixed with some tuning, tweaking and a general reality check. The game probably could use at least the rest of the year in Closed Beta, where major changes could be rolled out and rescinded as required, after which it would stand a good chance of launching to resounding applause.

Once it goes to Open Beta, though, the reviews and Let's Plays and Steam Ratings will roll in, like it or not. On this evidence, launching as it stands, that verdict could be as harsh on the game-makers as the game itself is on the players.

A Couple Of Comments On AdventureQuest 3D And DCUO

It's not uncommon for bloggers to claim that the true measure of success is found not in page views or followers but in the quantity and quality of the comments they receive. That's certainly how I see it.

Five years ago, when I was vacillating over whether or not to take the step up from commenting on other people's blogs to starting a blog of my own, perhaps the biggest concern I had was the risk of opening a comment column to...well, to the world. After all, I certainly wouldn't want to wake up of a morning, sit down with a cup of coffee and find myself confronted with some of the comments I'd made.

In the end I decided to risk it. After all, as Wilhelm observed in his magnificent Ten Glorious Years post, in extremis you can always just switch people off because "life is too short to put up with that sort of thing".

Judging by the moss on the boots I'm guessing this place gets a lot of rain.

So far, fingers crossed, that hasn't been necessary. Most of the comments here are well-intentioned, good-mannered and a pleasure to receive. I'm very poor at checking my spam folder so most of the automated nonsense there goes unseen. Apologies to anyone who may have had a comment left there to languish but there are only so many hours in the day.

The best thing about comments is how much you learn. I try to fact-check before I post but this is a blog not The New Yorker and sometimes I just wing it. It's great to be corrected or be given fresh information by better-informed readers who just want to help, not score points.

Last week I had two extremely welcome comments that I was happy to put to immediate use. One was from an anonymous reader who explained, with appropriate links, how to access the nested levels of DCUO's Style tab so that I could undo the creation error that gave my new character banana-yellow lips.

Tell me again. Why can't we just start here?

It turns out that was a "Make Up" option. I vaguely remember fiddling with that in Character Creation to see what it did before deciding it didn't do anything I wanted. It seems that when I closed the window I left the pointer in the yellow quadrant of the color chart and that's how it saved. Thanks to the anonymous commenter my Hero now has lips that match her face and I have a much clearer idea of how to use the Style tab.

The other comment was from Kaozz of ECTMMO. She was one of the few people who read my  recent post on how much I was looking forward to trying AdventureQuest 3D. The AQ3D fan club doesn't seem to have many members in this neck of the blogging woods. It might just be me, Syp and Kaozz because that post probably had the fewest views of any post this year.

Although I mentioned in the post that Artix Entertainment was planning on doing some Closed Beta giveaways I hadn't come across any on the MMO sites I read and I hadn't taken the trouble to look any further. Luckily Kaozz had spotted that there were keys to be had at MMORPG.com, a site I haven't looked at in years, and thanks to her alert in the comments I was able to snag one of the last few.

They were down to a hundred and fifty or so by the time I arrived and that had dropped to just over a hundred in the time it took me to make and register new accounts for both MMORPG.com and AQ3D. It's not a quick process, let me tell you.

I'll come back when you're ready.

There's no NDA as far as I can tell so I'm free to say that getting the game itself up and running is very quick and easy. I've only played one session so far so I've barely got a feel for the game yet. Still, "First Impressions" matter and so far mine are very positive.

Character Creation was very simple and straightforward. Four classes, two genders, one race. Some basic appearance choices. In and out in a couple of minutes. That leads into a strange kind of limbo wasteland introduction that I didn't really understand, where your character is confined to a very small area with never-ending skeleton spawns and a quest to find a wheel for a wagon to get you out of there.

I couldn't find the wheel and the quest interface was far from clear. After a few frustrating minutes I gave up wheel-hunting and just clicked on the "Travel" option the goblin-analog was offering. A swift loading screen and intro movie later and there I was in the real starting town of Battleon.

Sorry, I can't concentrate on what you're saying with that...thing...watching me.

I'm not entirely sure why we don't just get sent to Battleon directly from Character Creation or what the whole "I can't take you until you get me a wheel" thing was all about. That needs some tidying up or I need to L2P. From then on, though, everything was much clearer, smoother, better explained and a lot more fun.

It's apparent this is still beta. Most of the buildings and some paths to other areas come up short with an abrupt "Currently in Development" screen. There's plenty to be getting on with, though, with some nicely humorous, occasionally disturbing, quests and some delightfully designed creatures to kill.

Combat animations are fluid and satisfying and the UI overall is slick and extremely easy to use. The cross-platform aspect of the game is evident in the clustering of controls at the sides and corners of the screen, where thumbs will naturally find them on a phone or tablet. They work perfectly well for a mouse-clicker as well. It's an elegant solution.

Prime example of meta. Her full name is Robina Hood and she puts the gold on the monsters that you kill so you can loot it. Of course back in the glory days of EQ we literally did do that...

From reading the developer posts on the AQ3D website I was forewarned that leveling in this game is not the blink-and-you'll-miss-it afterthought you might expect from something with such child-friendly graphics and cross-platform aspirations. Well, they weren't kidding. It's flipping slow!

I played for a couple of hours and my character is around 10% into Level 3. What's more, everything is a tough fight. Take on a mob one level above you and expect it to be close. Get an add and expect to die. Go in the Level 4 dungeon at Level 3 and don't plan on making it past the first pull.

I died a lot. A lot. There doesn't seem to be much (any?) penalty for dying other than the delay and the shame but there doesn't need to be. This is a world that requires you to pay attention from the get-go. Try yoloing this and you will regret it. When you wake up.

Surprisingly nihilistic. Or maybe fascist?  Definitely not kitten and bunny talk anyway...

The writing is interesting. The whole game has an off-kilter, meta feel to it, a kind of post-post-modern sub-ironic knowing-yet-innocent stance that reminds me somewhat of Project: Gorgon. This is fantasy gaming for sophisticated gamers who come with an innate understanding of the layered patina of the form. Or else it's for kids. Same thing, really.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. I will play more and write more as I learn more. Whether anyone else is interested I guess we will find out from the comments - or the lack of them.