Ashes To Ashes: First Impressions Of The Apocalypse

Ashes of Creation is one of the contenders for the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I might play together as a main MMO, the others being Brad McQuaid's Pantheon and Mark Jacobs' Camelot Unchained. To that end, when I kickstarted the game back in the spring of 2017, I made two pledges, one for each of us.

Ashes got the nod partly because it proposes using a form of "hybrid" controls that supposedly meld action and tab-target into a version suitable for fans of either. I'm somewhat skeptical of how that might work but at least they're trying.

Mrs Bhagpuss isn't a fan of action combat and doesn't favor games that lock the mouse. She's tried a few - DCUO and Black Desert to name a couple - but I think it's fair to say she's not keen. I wasn't either, to begin with, and although I've become more accepting of mouse-mashing over time, I still very strongly prefer what's often known as "WoW-style" combat.

Ashes will also offer a great deal of non-combat content, or so the developers claim, so there seems to be a passable chance of the game working for both of us. It is, however, still a long way off and most of the eventual systems and mechanics are shrouded in fog.

That's why I was pleased to see that what had been proposed as a closed alpha test for combat a few months back was going to spin off into a publicly playable mini-game known as Ashes of Creation Apocalypse. Eventually AOCA (now we can use the acronym!) is supposed to include full-scale siege warfare and a PvE Horde Mode but for now, of course, it's a Battle Royale.

There's been a certain amount of huffing about this. Some Kickstarter backers and later adopters  claimed to smell bait and switch. It's true the precedents are alarming. H1Z1 and Fortnite both started out as co-operative PvE projects only to find themselves derailed by the runaway success of their supposedly subsidiary Battle Royale modes.

I don't think there's any doubt that AOCA is intended to provide developers Intrepid with an income stream. It's monetized both via "Legendary Paths", which equate to seasons, and by a robust cash shop seling cosmetics. I understand why alarm bells are ringing for some but for now I'm willing to give Intrepid the benefit of the doubt and believe them when they say the main thrust of their operation is still working towards finishing the MMORPG they promised.

I backed Ashes at close to the lowest level, giving me access sometime in beta. I'm always interested in seeing MMORPGs develop but I'm not so keen on paying for the privelige. Not to say I'd never do it again but it would have to be for a game that appeals to me more than Ashes of Creation.

Low-level though it was, my commitment turned out to be enough to entitle me to an early-doors entry to the Apocalypse. A few days ago I got an email inviting me to stress-test AOCA before the gates open wide on Tuesday.

The testing was quite restricted, just a few hours a day, centered on primetime for the U.S. West Coast. There was about an hour or so when I could have feasibly given it a shot but unfortunately the launcher refused to accept my credentials.

I was going to forget about it but then this morning I received another email saying testing had been extended for twelve hours, meaning the servers would be up for much of Sunday. This time, a new launcher installed itself and my login details worked. I spent a couple of hours playing, took a bunch of screenshots, then I logged out to write this post.

With the exception of GW2's Southsun Survival I have never played a Battle Royale game. I've read enough about them to know the basic principle: you drop out of the sky, pick a place to land, grab some gear and weapons, then either hide and hope or search and kill.

I felt I that was enough. It's last man standing in a shrinking ring of fire. How hard can it be to understand? As yet there's no Character Creation (I believe there will be at some point) so I just picked a gender and hit Play...

My very rough first impressions:

• Not impressed by having to wait five minutes in a queue just to get into the lobby. I was begining to wonder if the thing was working at all. Is that a normal wait-time for one of these games? I was under the impression part of the attraction of PUBG/Fortnite et al was instant gratification. Maybe I got that wrong.

• Once in, it's slick. Everything works smoothly. The animations are fluid, movement feels weighted and natural, the UI is intuitive. 

• It needs to be because there are no instructions of any kind. At any point. Anywhere. Okay, there are tooltips and a small pop-up window appears when you pick up a new item to explain what it does but that's your lot. I'm against tutorials but I'm pro instructions. Access to a simple "This is how to play" FAQ while you're waiting in the queue would be handy.

• Graphics are appealing but somehow not quite there yet. Everything has a fuzzy, soft-edged look and although scale is naturalistic there's still an off-kilter "this is just a tad too big" feel to the architecture.  

• Given the small map there's an impressive array of geographical and architectural features. Fields, farms, gardens, rolling hillside, coasts, caves, rivers and waterfalls, villages, mines, castles, towers, lava fields, giant mushrooms... it's as if the designers decided to showcase all the environments in one place. I didn't see any snowfields but I bet they're somewhere.

• The interiors of the buildings are sumptuous and attractive. Bodes well for the housing. 

• The music is generic but the soundscape is decent. Birdsong, water, explosions.

• There's a bewildering array of gear already. Every building is loaded with stuff just waiting to be looted. When you open a chest everything bursts out and scatters around you so you have to pick it all up individually. I'm guessing this is a function of the PvP nature of the Apocalypse, creating ambush opportunities and adding a sense of urgency. It's certainly not going to play as a standard loot mode for PvE.

• Gameplay is addictive. I can easily see why Battle Royale has become so successful so fast. There's a fascination with grabbing free loot combined with a tension caused by the imminence of sudden death that creates an immediate sense of immersion. Death, when it inevitably comes, is swift and sudden, leading to an immediate desire to try again.

• On the other hand... the first two times I was killed by another player I never even saw them. Then in a later match another player and I spent the best part of a minute hacking away at each other with greatswords and axes and literally no injury to either of us. The fight only ended when a third player appeared and shot us both dead with his longbow.

• Suffice to say weapons might need some balancing.

• I don't know if this is a common trope of the Battle Royale sub-genre but I was surprised when, after my first death, my point of view changed to that of the player who'd killed me. I was then able to sit back and watch the game through his eyes - or rather from a few feet behind the back of his head. That's how I learned how deadly the longbow can be.

• As a beta-backer I'm supposedly entitled to the benefits of the first Legendary Path. It's fifty levels (yes, there are levels and xp) of cosmetic rewards that carry over into the eventual MMORPG. I'm interested in that. Sadly, even though I finally managed to rack up some experience points, they disappeared the moment the match ended. I might have to wait until the official launch on Tuesday before I make a real effort. Nothing more annoying than losing progress you thought you'd banked.

• I didn't count how many matches I played but it must have been at least half a dozen. They varied in length from barely a minute (I attacked an obviously well-geared player and he smacked me down in a second) to nearly twenty (I lasted eleven minutes, my best run so far, and then I stayed on in the persona of my killer to see him go on to win the match with the other three in his team). 

• I found there was a real "just one more" bite to the game, although I can also see the impact fading quite quickly once the novelty wears thin. I also found that I was improving a little after each run, which is motivating. I'm certain I'll never be anything anyone would call skilled at this kind of thing but there seems to be enough randomness and luck involved to make it entertaining even so. I just know I'm going to yell out loud the first time I actually kill someone!

The more interesting part of AOCA for me is going to be the sieges and the Hordes, I think. Deathmatches and one-on-one PvP have never been my thing - I'm a lot happier hunting in a pack. As a taster for the eventual MMORPG I'm not sure it really tells us much (it doesn't even feature the "hybrid" combat I wanted to see) but at least it doesn't raise any red flags...yet.

It's The Beginning Of A New World

This week's big talking point in MMOland has to be the unheralded info-drop on Amazon's New World. Until now we knew almost nothing about this title, other than its setting, an alternate, magical version of the 17th Century.

Massively OP seem a little confused over the timing of the reveal but no-one's questioning the authenticity. Interestingly, the last time any significant information emerged about New World it was also described as "possibly leaked", making me wonder whether there's anything truly accidental about any of this.

The M:OP piece is a tad misleading. I'd recommend reading the full article at TechAdvisor, which gives a good deal more detail and some important context. For example, the "full loot" PvP alluded to in Massively's bullet point list, is heavily qualified in the article itself, which says

"...currently when you die you drop all of your gear which can then be looted by other players"

That "currently" is crucial. This is a game in pre-alpha. Unless Amazon come out and state that full loot is a core game feature, I'd bet it won't make it out of beta. If it even gets that far.

That said, there's no glossing over the bald facts: New World is a PvP game.

 Or is it? Even the blatant

PvP seems to be at the very focal heart of the game

is more nuanced than it first appears. "Seems to be" is either a bet-hedger or an admission there's a lack of hard information. And what's with that "very focal heart"? Does that mean PvP is everywhere or concentrated somewhere in the center? I can see why Bree thought this might be a draft text.

The supposed emphasis on what sounds almost like forced socialization is also heavily tempered in the full text of the TA piece. While it does indeed say that

 "The game puts a very heavy focus on social features and everything that comes along with player interaction"

it goes on to clarify that

"Forming guilds to take on greater challenges and build your empire... will be a good idea if you want to survive".

That's really not so different from any other MMO, is it? Greater challenges almost always require guilds. We tend to call it "raiding" in PvE or "guild vs guild" in PvP. You're hardly going to be building an empire on your own, are you? I wouldn't read that as meaning there's no place for solo or small group play at all.

The article goes on to explain how empire-building might work in practice: 

You can capture land and build upon it, creating outposts and bases for your guild to operate from which can house more advanced crafting stations giving you access to better gear. Your territory can expand over time... You will be able to tax players that wish to operate or build within your territory, which allows their structures to be under your protection for a price.

So far, so familiar, but the crucial part, which I've pulled out for emphasis, is this:

"...territory control ... will be a large part of the 'end game'."

Taken in context, this suggests to me that New World's end game is very similar in concept to Ashes of Creation's. A never-ending tussle between guilds and allainces to rule the roost and rook the peasants.

As a prospective peasant in both games I strongly expect to be able to wander around largely oblivious to the machinations of my rulers. I will be beneath their notice and they will be above mine.

The writer of the piece, Sean Bradley, did at least get to play the current demonstration build, so his assessment that it feels

"...like a survival game in the vein of Rust, Conan Exiles or Ark"

 can probably be taken at face value. That's not appealing to me and neither is the choice of action combat rather than tab targeting and hotbars, although I will concede that it was inevitable. No-one but MMO nerds want WoW-style combat these days and Amazon wants to cast its net a lot wider than the pre-existing niche audience that, bizarrely, WoW now represents.

And yet, even here there's a hint of grey in the black and white. The current build allows you to lock to a target using Tab. Sean also describes it as "very fluid and responsive" and "not too fast or slow", which is encouraging for a pre-alpha.

Like Telwyn, I found a lot of the Massively:OP summary off-putting. I was inclined to cross New World off my wishlist completely. Having read the full article at TechAdviser, however, my interest has been tentatively re-ignited. It's not a long read but there's a lot in there, more than I've singled out for attention here. I recommend anyone even vaguley interested in New World to read the whole thing.

Finally, and most importantly, this is a game in closed pre-alpha. A lot can change. A lot will change. There's a "sign up" for alpha available on the website that consists merely of registering your interest on your Amazon account. It takes five seconds. I've done that.

It still doesn't look like my kind of game but who knows?

Drive, She Said

Azuriel came up with an interesting analogy that found approval from Gevlon, which might be the first time the two of them have ever agreed about anything. The gist is that "action gaming" is more like driving to see a movie than it is like seeing the movie itself:

"The action of driving somewhere is much more involved than watching the screen – there are thousands of more individual choices and reactions necessary to drive somewhere safely. But is it more engaging? At the end of the night, which do you remember more?"

At first blush I thought this summed up the situation brilliantly. For many people, learning to drive is a complete pain; stressful, difficult and sometimes it seems to take forever before things click into place.

Once they do, however, there's a surprisingly swift and often sudden transition to thoughtless facility. Almost without noticing, you move from concentrating ferociously to the whole thing happening almost automatically. Even more so if you do, in fact, drive an automatic.

It's an appealing metaphor for the experience of learning to play a game that uses "action rpg" controls - usually a combination of hammering left/right mouse button and a handful of Function keys. The more I think about it, though, the less sure I am of its fundamental truth.

I should admit up front that I'm hardly in a position to judge as far as action games are concerned. I have never reached that autonomic stage, where my conscious mind no longer has to deal with the controls. I know exactly how that feels in driving, though. I can even pinpoint the specific moment when the transition occurred.

My brain in an action rpg.

I had two goes at learning to drive. The first time was when I was eighteen. Unlike  many teenagers, I had no interest in driving, but my mother was positively evangelical about it, believing driving to be an essential life skill. I let her pay for me to have lessons, mostly to get her to stop chewing my ear off about it.

I took my test, failed, told her I'd done my bit, then went off to a University whose rules dictated that students were forbidden to own or operate a car anywhere in the city. That suited me fine. I forgot all about learning to drive for a decade.

Ten years later, aged 28, I found myself going out with someone who believed it was a cardinal rule that anyone who rode the bus after age 30 was a failure. It was the 80s - what can I say? I didn't subscribe to that theory, then or now, but I did once again subscribe to not having my ear chewed off if there was something I could do to stop it. I took some more lessons, took my test and this time I passed.

Very soon after that the relationship ended. With no more motivation to drive, the day I took my test was the last time I sat behind the wheel of a car for about five years.

Fast forward to the early 90s and my first ever foreign holiday with Mrs Bhagpuss. For reasons that are now lost in the mists of time we decided to fly to Lisbon and hire a car to drive into Spain. I had, at this point, never driven a car for any other purpose than taking a lesson or a driving test, far less driven a strange car on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country. It was the 90s, what can I say?

It's all so much easier in the sky.

I took a few refresher lessons before we went, just to remind myself where the steering wheel was, and then off we went. It's quite surprising we're still around to tell this story, I guess. Actually, it's quite surprising I got the car out of the airport car park.

What did happen was revelatory. Somewhere on the long, straight, quiet multi-lane highway that runs along the south coast of Portugal into Spain, I became a Driver. I left Lisbon in a sweat of concentration and terror and crossed the border in a state of calm control.

Ever since then I have been able to drive. I'm not recommending it as a method - it's from the "throw them in the deep end and they'll learn to swim" school of thought, I guess - but it worked for me.

My action gaming has never enjoyed such an epiphany. When I play DCUO or Neverwinter I still have to concentrate on the controls. I never get to experience the game directly, only me playing the game. I'm comfortable enough with DCUO in particular that it's not offputting or unpleasant, but it's a good way from Azuriel's "just like with driving, I kind of zone out the experience when I’m killing enemies in Action games."

So, I can't really speak to the accuracy of the analogy from personal experience. But even if I could, I see another flaw: I really, really love driving. From the moment those pieces fell into place back on that Iberian highway I have found the process of controlling and moving a vehicle to be a pure joy.

I'm one of those people who sees every minute behind the wheel as an opportunity for entertainment and pleasure. I drive for the sake of driving. I go the long way just so I can have more of it. Almost every holiday we take is a driving holiday and while the scenery and the exploring are a huge part of the attraction, so is the opportunity to just get out there and drive.

A little trouble with the exhaust on that broom...

I can unironically affirm that for me driving to see a movie is often more engaging than watching the movie itself. It doesn't even have to be a bad movie for me to feel that the best part of the evening was the drive there and the drive back.

Given all that, how can I know how I'd feel about action game controls if I ever mastered them? Maybe, as Azuriel and Gevlon contend, facility would lead to ennui. Or maybe I'd just be so thrilled by the process I'd want to keep doing it and doing it and doing it...

My time with GW2, which is sometimes considered to use a hybrid of traditional and action rpg controls, gives me reason to believe it would be the latter. One of the main reasons I have stuck with GW2 so loyally and so long is the way it feels when I'm driving my characters there.

I find the controls wonderfully fluid and intuitive. I love the constant movement and especially the dodging. I fling my characters around as though I'm driving at speed - all the sensation with none of the danger. (It's also the main reason I so dislike GW2's implementation of mounts. It turns my elite sports cars into clumsy, awkward trucks).

Whether Azuriel's analogy has universal application or not, it's been very useful to consider. I'm now wondering whether, rather than veering away from games with action controls, I should steer into the learning curve instead. If I could push through the membrane that separates thought from action, would I find myself zoning out in boredom or riding the crest of an ever-breaking wave of exhilaration?

Okay, now we've gone surfing. Time to stop. Suffice it to say I recognize that it might be me that's missing out here. Whether I'm even capable of making the transition is another matter. And while we're on the topic of driving, how ironic is it that the one MMORPG whose controls I literally cannot master, even to the minimal level required to finish the tutorial, is The Crew?

Remind Me Again? : Dragon Nest Oracle

Time was when Dragon Nest would get the odd mention around this corner of the blogosphere. Its biggest exponent was probably Tipa, who wrote about it a number of times. That was back in 2011, when, according to my comment in Tipa's thread there, I had reached the dizzy heights of "level 8 or 9".

That was probably about as far as I got, too. I played Dragon Nest a few times with pleasure but never with much commitment. I don't think I ever did a full post on the game although I referenced it once or twice while talking about something else. It would be fair to say I'd all but forgotten about it, having neither played nor heard about the game for several years, so it came as something of a surprise to find an email about it in my in-box this morning.

It began without pre-amble, as though I'd never been away:  

"After spending a few weeks on rates X2 and reading your suggestions, we have decided to pass on X10 for better gaming and fun!" 

Wow! Suck on that, Daybreak, you and your piddly five days of double xp! You know nothing about better gaming and fun. Although I have to say they weren't my suggestions. I didn't even know your game was still going...

There was more to come:

"To celebrate, we also added mounts available directly in shop".

Gee! These guys really know how to throw a party! I guess they need to know what they're doing though, seeing how they run

"the fastest action RPG game".

I mean, just look at what you get for your no money down. Can your MMO compete with this?

Server EXP X10 - GOLD X3 - DROP X3
Shop -50% permanent
Free Altheas Crowns voting system (okay, I have no idea what that one means...)
DDoS protection

Not to be pedantic here but once you put a permanent multiplier on your xp, gold and item drops doesn't that just set a new base level? Only the players who used to play before you upped the ante will ever know they're getting a bonus. If you want to reward any players in future you'll have to increase it again. And similarly if you cut all your prices in half forever, well, those are now just your regular prices, aren't they?

Still, no need to get snooty about it. If the result is something that feels like fast xp , a good drop rate and a cheap cash shop then who's counting? And don't I wish every MMO I played had DDoS protection! Anyway, the mounts were what really sold me on taking another look. Those are some great rides. Look at that sheep!

I'm not entirely clear on whether Dragon Nest Oracle, as it now seems to be called, is supposed to be a whole new game or a revamp of the old one but I guess it doesn't matter all that much. The extensive wikipedia entry goes into way more detail on the history behind the whole thing than I could be bothered to plow through but it's there if anyone cares.

There's a much handier and rather spiffy website which reveals that this "new 2015 action RPG" is currently in beta.  It must be one of those notional F2P "betas" because it seems anyone can join and there's already a cash shop up and running (which I haven't yet looked at and almost certainly will never use). The most important question is: is it any good?

I so want to charge into battle hanging from a gyrocopter! That better be a thing!

Yes it is. It's great. It's just like it always was only slicker and smoother and even better looking. Dragon Nest always had a goofy, cheerful, good-hearted humor about it and that's not changed. Neither has the setting nor the mechanics nor the gameplay as far as my admittedly dim memories tell me.

There appear to be several new classes, all of which are handily tagged by difficulty-of-play at character select. Naturally I went with one of the ones flagged suitable for beginners, which meant a choice of Cleric or Academic. The thumbnail descriptions indicate they are both support classes but the Cleric "does less damage than most other classes" while the Academic has a "variety of attacks that hit a wide area from mid- to long-range" and "uses the power of science to control her enemies and summon robots".I mean, come on! That's not even a choice, now, is it?

Pigeon toes /= cute.

So, Academic it is. The class is apparently called The Tinkerer on North American servers, which leans towards its evident steampunk gloss but only Academic comes up here. I guess that means I'm on an EU server. On either side of the Atlantic, however, if you choose this class you get to play it in the form of a girl child. No ifs or buts. Deal with it.

I'd have said she looks about eight or nine years old but I'd have been wrong.  Even though NPCs in game seem to concur and regularly refer to her as a "cute little girl", early on there's a quest that involves answering True/False questions from a Lie Detector and the True answer to the question "How old are you?" turns out to be "I'm 13 years old".

Okay, so I'm playing a very-small-for-her-age teenage girl carrying a BFG that looks like it weighs more than she does. I can live with that. No robot pet yet. Yet to come, presumably. That should just about round things off nicely. Oh, and it turns out I'm from the future and I can talk to my sarcastic, studenty elder sister Jasmine through some kind of transtemporal thingummy-jig. I'm liking this a lot. Syp should play this - it'd be right up his street.

Its a translated game (into English and French, from Korean - I haven't tried the French version but I'd like to) and the translations vary wildly. None are idiomatically perfect. The best of them have that slightly askew feeling you get from earnest translations of text that would have been overblown fantasy even in the original. I love that vibe. The worst are barely comprehensible gibberish but mostly that's the explanatory system text not the dialog and this is still beta, let's remember, so that may get fixed. There''s some audio work too, mostly just a few lines here and there, which is, by contrast, universally solid; confident, knowing line readings by fluent English speakers. A couple made me laugh out loud.

My plan was just to log in and have a quick look around but I ended up playing for more than two hours, getting drawn into both the progression and the plot. There's no formal tutorial, a huge plus, although since the quests I'm getting at level 11 are still tutorialesque I probably haven't yet arrived at the game proper.

That's weird. Where did I get that axe from?

Dragon Nest Oracle calls itself an Action MMO and I'm not about to argue with that. As far as I ever saw it in its original incarnation, and as far as I've explored in this new one, it would seem to be one of those lobby-based, instance-focused MMOs like the original Guild Wars. If there are any open-world areas beyond the quest hubs it will come as a pleasant surprise.

Each "dungeon" has a difficulty setting, a feature of which I thoroughly approve. I did the first one on Easy, which led to my Academic taking no damage whatsoever even on the Boss. Thereafter I cranked it up a notch to Normal, which was still easy by anyone's standards I'd have said.

In the original you could hide the UI and your name. Doesn't seem to work any more so a lot of these shots are cropped very tight.

So far it's been fun all the way. I like the environments and the look and feel of the world (there's a particularly unusual graphical design choice that I very much like whereby your character is in perfect focus while everything more than a few yards away is slightly blurred), I like the music and the ambient soundscape. I'm already interested in the plot, fond of my character and curious to see where things are going.

Of course, I liked the first iteration of Dragon Nest a lot too but I still didn't play it very much or stick with it for very long. I'm easily hooked but harder to reel in. It's an encouraging beginning though. We'll see how much staying power it has.

Never Say Neverwinter

John Smedley believes user-generated content is the future. He may be right. It certainly has been in the past.

Ten years ago I spent a big chunk of time working on a module for Neverwinter Nights, much of it struggling with BioWare's custom scripting language, something with which I never really came to grips. Eventually the thing was as near to finished as it was ever likely to be and I uploaded it.

In the way of the internet, I was able to find it with only a small amount of effort this morning, still sitting in the IGN Neverwinter Nights Vault ten years on. As the comments clearly show, my scripting skills weren't up to the complexity of the task I'd set myself, although some people managed to enjoy parts of it despite all the things that just didn't work as they should have done.

I enjoyed making the module but once was enough. I didn't even buy NeverWinter Nights 2. When the Neverwinter MMO was announced, to be made by Cryptic and published by Perfect World, my ears perked up then perked right back down again at the dreaded phrase "action MMORPG".

I never really "got" action RPGs. The first and last one I ever bought was Dungeon Siege, which came out just before NWN in March 2002 (which, incidentally, suggests that MMOs had considerably less of a lock-hold on my gaming in 2002 than I would have remembered). I probably played it for three or four hours, tops. It's not that it wasn't fun; it was just too fast and too very obviously pointless.

Since then, "action" as a prefix has acted as a brake to any interest I might otherwise have had, doubly so when attached to "MMO", although since I've played and very much enjoyed Dragon Nest and DCUO, my longstanding ability to believe one thing while doing another clearly remains unimpaired.

How I felt after ten minutes in Torchlight2

All the same, I had been resolutely ignoring Neverwinter until I happened upon Massively's recent mention of the Neverwinter Foundry.  I already knew of Star Trek Online's Foundry. Tipa at West Karana used to write about it sometimes back when she wrote about MMOs not bridges. It always sounded intriguing but it was coupled to a franchise for which I have little affection so it slipped from my mind.

When EQ2's Age of Discovery expansion trundled up with the Dungeon Maker system in tow I was somewhat excited. I'd very much like to be able to tell some stories inside an MMO that I play, especially if I don't have to wrestle with scripts to make it happen. The Dungeon Maker hit the mark for ease-of-use but it worked about as well for telling a story as semaphore did for Wuthering Heights.

You've ruined your own foundry...

There's not much detail on the Neverwinter Foundry yet. Just a brief FAQ and some indistinct screenshots. Enough to pull the game off my MMO slush pile and shove it onto the ever-growing heap marked "Give this a go".

I suspect that if it's going to work for me, this set of dungeon creation tools will need an easy mode. It's not that I think I won't be able to master a more complex set of commands, it's that when it comes down to it I'd rather be playing. Or blogging about playing. I can knock up a dungeon in EQ2 in three or four hours. I'd be happy to double or treble that writing dialog to tell a story but much more and I'm going to get itchy.

When it comes to dungeons I'm probably more of a consumer than a creator. Won't be long before I can put that to the test. Release date for Neverwinter is listed in the FAQ as "4th Quarter of 2012". Even with traditional slippage that ought to see it out before next Easter.

If I do end up making a dungeon, Neverwinter is completely F2P so you're all invited.

Slow Down... : Guild Wars

... and give me one more chance

One nice side-effect of my recent post on Guild Wars 2 is that it got me playing Guild Wars again. I didn't have any GW2 screenshots what with the game not actually existing yet and all, so rather than just stealing some screenies off the interwebs I thought I'd use some of my old Guild Wars shots instead.

Only it turns out I don't have any old Guild Wars screenshots. I thought I would have taken some when I briefly came back to the game a couple of years ago, but apparently I didn't. The last time I played before that was at launch, over six years and three computer lifetimes ago. No screenshots survive.

You got planning permission for that?

So I patched up and took some new ones. Ye gods, but Guild Wars has aged well ! It looks amazing. It still has that weird, flat quality it always had, but the detail, the color, the vibrancy are all stunning. My appetite was whetted. Re-whetted. Re-re-whetted.

When I played Guild Wars the first time round I finished the main campaign and some of the post-20 content in about six weeks. Mrs Bhagpuss carried on and finished pretty much all of it, which I think took her a couple of weeks more. Then we both put it away for nearly five years until I spotted The Complete Collection on Amazon for very cheap indeed.

I am so playing one of these in GW2. Whatever he is.

 In retrospect, buying all the expansions at once was a mistake. I know now how people feel when they come back to EQ2 for the first time in years. There can be just so much content, so many options, that it becomes almost intimidating. (It's perhaps worth noting that when I began playing WoW for the first time five years after launch, I didn't notice anything like that. The whole thing seemed very manageable. If anything I thought Azeroth was on the small side for an MMO. Another of the many ways Blizzard is able to smoothe the path for potential customers in a way that seems to escape other MMO Houses, I guess).

Rather than continue with my old characters, I made a new account and started over. That might have been a mistake too. My first character was one of those Dervish fellows. That was definitely a mistake and after about eight levels I re-rolled as a ranger.

Which brings me, long-windily, to what I was going to talk about: the pace of combat in Guild Wars. It's so flaming fast! I'd forgotten just how frenetic and chaotic it is. Back in 2005, coming from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars combat seemed like a revelatory, hyper-saturated, amphetamine rush. It took my breath away and for a month I thought all MMOs should be like it. Then the rush wore off.

 Anyone need any help? Thought not.

 Now, six years on, what I need is a slomo button. It's just too manic! And way, way too busy. Every time I enter an Explorable Area I feel like I'm in a raid. There's my ranger and her pet (who dies in about 5 seconds), several Heroes who appear to have attached themselves to me though I can't now recall how or why, a couple or three Henchman that I've hired because, well, you can never have too many healers and a bunch of NPC characters who just seem to tag along for the ride.

It would be confusing enough if I had to control that lot, but they all seem to have their own agendas. As soon as an enemy pokes his head around a corner the whole pack of them are off like skinheads out of a bus station, chasing anything that moves. I generally die two or three times before I have the least idea what's going on. Sometimes it's only after they've killed everyone and I'm picking up the odd meagre scrap of loot they've left me after they've all helped themselves that I spot from our confidence debuff that I must have died yet again and been rezzed so fast I didn't even notice. 

Don't mind me. I'll just lie here.

Even when they aren't all causing mayhem I'm not much more than a bemused bystander. They all bicker and banter and make in-jokes that I don't get. They reminisce and gossip about battles I don't recall and people I don't remember. It's disturbingly like being a child on a family outing, where all the conversation goes over your head but that's fine because no-one listens to anything you have to say anyway even if you had anything to say, which you don't.

It's not that I'm not enjoying myself. I just wish the same things could happen at half the speed. Or a quarter. I don't want the BioWare option that let's you literally stop time between each and every incremental action so that you can micromanage entire battles. That's equally annoying in it's own way. Nor am I talking about turn-based gameplay. I just want Guild Wars but slower.

Anyone know an MMO that does that?