Other Games Are Available

Not that I'm much of a one for making plans but any vague idea I might have had for keeping to some kind of gaming or blogging schedule this year have been wrecked by the arrival of two survival games, one of which I was eagerly anticipating, the other which I'd barely heard of before it appeared. 

Palworld, now claiming twenty-five million players worldwide, claimed more than forty hours of my time over four weeks, making it a very worthwhile purchase, but still left plenty of time for doing other things. Nightingale, with thirty-three hours played-time in just over a week, hasn't been so accomodating. It's left little time for any other games, including Palworld, which I haven't touched since last Tuesday.

Rather than muse yet again on just why Nightingale should be so compulsive, I thought I'd make a short list of the games I had been thinking of playing and writing about, in the hope that naming them in public might somehow nudge me into playing one or two. It's a long shot but it might be worth a try.

Allods Online

I'll begin with the one (And only.) game I have actually logged into since I downloaded Nightingale. And what a weird choice it is, too. Why would I want to go back to this all but forgotten artifact of the WoW Clone era? The game that promised so much and then broke Keen's heart? (Remember him? What's he up to now, I wonder?)

It all started with something I read a few weeks back. Syp wrote a very brief piece for MassivelyOP, answering the question absolutely no-one was asking: "Whatever happened to Allods Online?" In the third and final paragraph he mentioned how a recent patch had "added the Gibberlings’ homeland of Isa". That caught my attention.

The Gibberlings are one of MMOdom's more unusual playable races. They're sharp-toothed, woodlandish animals, which is nothing unusual for the genre, but they come in packs of three, which certainly is. In the game, you run across single NPC gibberlings occasionally but the PC character is an eternal tryptych; three siblings who do everything together, always.

It's very strange and hard to forget once you've played one. Mrs Bhagpuss, who only ever played Allods Online during the beta, well over a decade ago, still mentions the Gibberlings quite often. I've played the game several times since then, in a few of its many iterations; on US and EU accounts, through MY.Games and GPotato, on PC and on tablet, where it was one of the few full MMORPGs than ran flawlessly for me.

I started out playing a Gibberling character but later I played an Orc and one of the catlike race, the Priden. That last was a mistake. The cats have their own starting island and although I tried to level up far enough to get my invite to the mainland I never quite managed it. 

It pretty much put a stop to my interest in the game. Although the storyline was interesting and the quest dialog well-written and fun to read, the mechanics were even more pedestrian than the rest of the game I'd seen - and Allods is not a particularly thrilling title when it comes to moment-to-moment gameplay at the best of times.

That, though, was my only real complaint. In almost every other respect, AO seems to me to be something of an undiscovered - or at least wilfully ignored - gem. I would love to get further and see more than I have so far. Ironically, the furthest I ever got was in beta, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together and got as far as the first of the non-consensual PvP zones, which came in somewhere around Level 30, if I remember right.

I would very much like to see the ancestral homeland of the Gibberlings, long thought lost but recently re-discovered. When I played one (Er... three...) they started off in the Bavarianesque starting area where one of the human races begin. Well, after the dramatic in media res beginning on an exploding space rock, followed by an enforced hiatus on an abandoned Allod, that is. 

Impressed I can remember all that? Well, don't be. I did it all again about an hour ago. It all started after I finished playing Nightingale (Three hours, right after breakfast. What the hell is wrong with me?), when I was thinking about what I could blog about, other than survival games. 

As I mentioned a while ago, I've gotten into the habit of bookmarking things I've seen or read that might make blog posts. I had a flip through those this morning and noticed there were several MMORPGs I'd been thinking, for various reasons, of trying - or trying again. Almost without thinking about it, I googled "Allods Online", just to see who was publishing it now and what I'd have to do to start playing and to my great surprise I found it's available on Steam, where it has a surprising and well-deserved Mostly Positive review rating.

It's entirely possible I haven't played Allods since I started using Steam. It's also entirely possible I've played it on Steam already. I have a terrible memory. Luckily, I also have a blog...

There are eighteen posts here with the Allods Online tag. The first goes all the way back to October 2011, almost the beginning of the blog, when I'd just re-installed the game. My most recent was only a couple of years ago in November 2021, when I was complaining about that damn Priden starting zone and swearing I'd get free of it. I never did.  

In both those posts I said many of the things I've said in this one, which I'm betting won't matter because no-one is going to remember any of it. I can at least confirm that the information about the game being available through Steam is new (Well, new to me...) Back then I was playing on MY.Games own platform.

And I probably still am, behind the curtain. I installed the game via Steam this morning but when you hit Play it takes you to an external launcher. The important part though is having the first button on Steam. I'm increasingly coming to see why people like that. It's just so convenient. No wonder all the publishers want to be represented there.

I wasn't planning on playing Allods today, just setting it up so I could play some other time, but I had to test the login ptocess to make sure it worked and then wouldn't you know I ended up doing the basic Tutorial and some starter quests. When I logged out I was Level 5.

As I said in that post a couple of years back "Allods is fun. Always was. I might keep playing." I probably will - sporadically - but if history is any guide I won't get any further than I ever have. My Priden is still on that damn island and lord only knows where the Orc is now. 

To my considerable surprise and delight, though, the quest relating to the Gibberling homeland that was added in a patch last July begins in a low-level zone and has no level restrictions. I was sure it would be some endgame content I'd never see. 

Surely, between marathon Nightingale sessions, I can at least make it far enough in Allods this time to get the quest, even if I never finish it! Place your bets now.

And speaking of Nightingale, I'm afraid the temptation is too strong. All those other games I was going to talk about, the ones I'd like to be playing and posting about if I wasn't in the grips of this unealthy obsession? They're going to have to wait some more even for a mention. 

Also, it gives me something else to post about another time. Never waste valuable resources. That's all that survival game training paying off, right there!

I'll Get Off This Blasted Allod If It's The Last Thing I Ever Do...

Y'know, I think I might make a good subject for hypnosis. I'm certainly suggestible enough. All I had to do was spot a passing reference to Allods Online in a blog post about something else entirely and next thing you know I've patched the thing up and logged in.

I can't even remember whose blog it was. Oh, wait, yes I can! It was Gnomecore, writing about finishing the Shadowbringers expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. He happened to mention that in Allods "...you could walk through the older leveling dungeons with a generic group of NPCs filling the missing roles... You barely needed to sneeze in enemy’s direction, and trash packs and bosses died in mere seconds"

Gnomecore didn't like that much but I thought it sounded great.  

MassivelyOP has a discussion thread up about whether mmorpgs should be "hard", based on something Damian Schubert said on Twitter, reported by MOP as "...Vanguard was set up as the anti-WoW/EverQuest II, the hardcore solution to “soft MMOs for wimps,” complete with brutally punishing corpse recovery as in the Old Days."

I think the ethereal drain's blocked again

I contributed an irritable correction to that partial and mainly inaccurate description of why Vanguard failed but I don't disagree with his premise, which if I understand it correctly, seems to be that to be truly "massive", mmorpgs need to be easy or at least highly accessible.

It depends, of course. On what? On everything. That's the mmorpg dev's dilemma. The genre predicates on accessibility. Massively multiple implies everyone. If you let 'em all in, though, they don't necessarily want the same things and, people being people, they'll clique up and lobby to have it their way.

The trick, it seems to me, is to remember that as an mmorpg developer your business is running the mall, not the concessions inside it. The company is the landlord, management's the operator and each design team owns a franchise.

And all those franchises have their own clientele, who need to be given appropriate, individual service. Sure, you'd like the other customers to feel curious as they walk past. You'd like them to step through the open doors, wander around, try things out. There are potential synergies you don't want to ignore.

Where did you get that hat?

What you don't want is for the only access to the ice-cream parlor to be directly through the jewellery store, which is what happens when you put raid mechanics into social content. Not an exact analogy. Know your audience is what I'm saying.

Then there's mood to consider. As a player I don't always feel like playing the same way. Some days I want to chill out with something easy or repetitive or both. Other days I feel energized, ready for a challenge. Sometimes I want to relax, sometimes I want a rush. It can change from morning to evening.

I could modify my experience by playing different games but that's the last thing the developer wants. The developer wants me to keep playing their games and if they're an mmorpg developer chances are they only have the one so they'd like me to keep playing that. Unless I'm a minor in China, of course, in which case they just want me to go away before someone sees me.

Making every activity in the game feel the same is asking for people to go outside the ecosystem, which is why the really big, truly massively multiple mmorpgs try to be everything to everyone.Which also has its problems.

Ever get the feeling someone's got their eye on you?

The irony, as Wilhelm often points out, is that overreach often leads to failure. Not many developers have both the talent and the resources to roll out good content in many styles consistently and reliably. To do that you need to be Blizzard or Square Enix and as we've seen of late even Blizzard couldn't keep it up forever.

I had plenty of time to think about all that this morning as I tried to get back on the Allods horse. Patching up wasn't a problem. I still have the game installed and my MY.games password still works. I just have to hope they never send me any emails that need a reply because the email address I used, which is also my username, expired years ago. 

The Allods client is charmingly small compared to modern-day bloat. If I'd had to reinstall it would only have been a 12GB download. As it was, I just needed a 2GB patch. The news ticker on the launcher talks about a "new platform", arriving on December 4th but for now the old one works just fine.

I'm not sure when I last played Allods. Oh, wait... I have a blog... looks like the last time I patched was almost exactly six years ago. I do remember that for a while I was playing it on a tablet, where it works surprisingly well.

I think he's part Pointer.

That was six months earlier, in March 2015, when the game added a new race. I believe I made the account I'm now playing then, too, because when I logged in the only character waiting for me was a Priden, the first race added to the game that doesn't automatically fall into the clutches of either the Alliance or the Empire.

I would hesitate to recommend starting as a Priden. There's nothing much wrong with the race itself, "A hearty race that seemingly prefers to run around naked on four legs like an uncivilized tribe of half-beasts", according to the official website. The problem isn't who so much as where

Priden begin on their own island or, I guess, their own allod. They have a very detailed, some would say over-detailed origin and backstory, all of which plays out in a lengthy racial questline. In common with everything in Allods there's a lot of reading to get through before you kill anything.

As well as the seemingly numberless elders and trainers and wise ones, all of whom can't use ten worlds where a hundred will do, there are delegations from both the main factions, the aforementioned Empire and Alliance. As you will have guessed, assuming you've ever played any other mmorpg, at some point your character is going to have to make a choice between the two and throw in with whichever looks like the least horrible.

Even the pet pays respect.

I thought that would happen at level ten. It did not. Then I thought it would surely happen at level fifteen. I was guessing. I couldn't be sure because at level thirteen I ran out of quests. That's why I stopped last time. And the time before that.

I was enjoying myself a lot until then. Allods, as I have said every time I've written about it, is a very good theme park mmorpg. In my opinion it's the best of the WoW clones that popped up like mushrooms in the late noughties and early 2010s. It's like World of Warcraft if it had been made by crazy Russians, which is pretty much the elevator pitch.

The elvator pitch for my Priden experience the last couple of times I played would be "Imagine WoW with no quests at all and the only zone is Mulgore". I did try grinding mobs to get to fourteen to see if a new questline opened up but it was so slow I just couldn't do it. And I like grinding mobs for xp.

After ten minutes in game this morning I was about ready to give up again. I still couldn't find a single NPC who wanted anything done and the spiders I killed gave no xp at all. As I was set to leave the game for another five years, I thought to check my bags to see if I'd missed anything. 

This might be the game where I finally play an elf...

There were no quest starters lurking in the corners but I did find a consumable that said it would boost my xp by 30k. It looked like it meant it would give me a boost per kill until until I'd made that much, which wasn't great but might at least do something to help. 

I must have misread the instructions because I clicked on it and BOOM! Instant level 14!

Yeah, level fourteen. It's no big deal, is it? Doesn't even end in a five or a zero. But it changed everything because at fourteen there it is! The next racial quest! And from there they just keep coming.

I spent the next two hours very happily questing away, vaguely trying to follow the increasingly baroque storyline and struggling to keep up with the never-ending torrent of upgrades. Every quest gave me something new and at one point I got more than a dozen boxes all at once, every one of which had an upgrade to a different item.

Probably should have saved those for later but based on my history with Allods "later" could be a long time coming. I've had this account six years and I've played one character and my total played time is eight hours and eight minutes. There are mmorpgs where I've played longer than that on launch day.

Advertisement for an expansion I'm never going to see.

When I logged out I was level seventeen. There was a heady moment around level sixteen when I thought I'd come to the end of the racial storyline and maybe I was going to get to choose a team but it was just the end of a chapter not the whole tale.

I finally went and looked it up. Priden don't get to leave the island until around level twenty-five. At this rate thta's going to be some time in 2025. 

Or maybe it'll be this weekend. Just so long as the quests keep coming. Allods is fun. Always was. I might keep playing. I would like to see some of those dungeons, with that team of NPCs that mows down everything without me having to lift a paw. I've never been in a dungeon in Allods since beta and that didn't go well as I remember.

No promises but I might be back. At least long enough to get off the damn island.

The Way We Were

This afternoon I got an old PC working again and on it I found a few folders of screenshots I hadn't seen for a while. Nothing all that far back, but some half-lost memories all the same. Here's a selection.

The house Mrs Bhagpuss was working on in Landmark way back in very early alpha. It was called Little Qalia in homage to Vanguard's superb open-world housing.

And here's the original, Mrs Bhagpuss's Qalian home on a very stormy day. We had properties on close-by plots along the same beach. I'm hoping the Vanguard emulator team gets around to restoring housing one day. I'd love to build my house again. In the same spot.

While we're on the subject of housing, I think this is from a project Mrs Bhagpuss was working on in Rift. There were a lot of shots of it on the drive I was lifting files from. I'm always very loyal to EverQuest II and Vanguard when it comes to housing but I never really investigated Dimensions in Rift. 

On this evidence it seems I really should have paid more attention. Of course, the way mmorpgs work, I imagine these houses are still sitting there, in stasis. I'm not sure what level of dimensional access you get in Rift on a free account these days. Maybe I should log in and find out.

Finally, just for comparison, here's a shot of a room in one of Mrs Bhagpuss's many, many houses in EQII. It's striking how rough the textures seem compared to any of the other shots in this post. I'm not sure if that's what the game's graphics generally looked like back then or whether the quality had been dialled down for practical purposes, which was sometimes necessary when working on large housing projects. Whatever the reason, EQII looks a lot better these days - on my screen, anyway.

Allods is another game I regularly think about revisiting but never follow through. I don't even have it installed on this PC although I noticed it was there on that old one. Allods would feature high on my list of underappreciated mmorpgs. Visually, it's stunning, paricularly for it's age, and the graphics have aged exceptionally well.

These shots are from beta back in 2009 I think. The PC I was tinkering with was an old one of Mrs Bhagpuss's, as must be obvious by now. We both played gibberlings in the beta and had a great time.  There's no race anywhere in the genre like the gibberlings. Or if there is, I've never been lucky enough to find it.

The images I was most excited to see again were the ones from our time on EQII's Test server. We played there for several years, duoing with a variety of characters but most often with these two: Mrs Bhagpuss tanking as a ratonga Bruiser and me providing dps, off-tanking and heals as a Necromancer. Between the two of us and the pet we could just about make a full group. I loved healing as a necro although it required constant vigilance. I've seen necros main-heal groups in both EverQuest and EQII because necros can turn a claw to anything but a duo is about as far as I'd care to push it.

I even found a handful of shots from Final Fantasy XIV. We came close to sticking with that one after the revamp but in the end we gave it up to go back to Guild Wars 2. Good decision, I think.

If we hadn't, we'd never have seen the things we did. I haven't cropped the UI from this so as to leave the chat box where you can watch Yaks Bend's much-missed superstar commander setting up another of his hallmark golem rushes. This looks like a big one but I've seen bigger!

A golem army's not just for offense, of course. This defensive ring is a prime example of why Yaks Bend was the most-hated server in World vs World for many years. No-one remembers any of that now, it seems. Sic transit gloria mundi.

And that's why we take screenshots. And hope not to lose them.

Look Around You, Art Is Everywhere

I was digging around in the depths of my files yesterday and I came across a whole load of screenshots I'd forgotten. Since it's coming up to the end of IntPiPoMo and I just knocked out three long-winded posts in a row, I figured I'd give myself and everyone else a break with some pretty pictures.

Rift has to be one of the best MMORPGs I've ever played for taking landscape shots. The eponymous rifts, the stunning weather effects, the numerous, mysterious ruins and monuments and the rich color palette all lend themselves to virtual nature photography.

It also has more bleak, downbeat, lonely zones than just about any game I can remember. There's a huge amount of open space, much of it moorland or desert. There are, famously, no cities. It feels like a world coming to the end of its time. Maybe that's more appropriate now than ever.

Allods, by contrast, is bright, cheerful and does cities brilliantly. It's also hugely underrated and probably the MMORPG I most wish I'd stuck with and played to a higher level. It's still going so maybe that could happen yet.

The mittel-europa, art deco, constructivist montage works magnificently, especially in a genre over-stuffed with this kind of thing done badly. So many imported games use the Imperial Palace motif but almost all of them look like movie sets where no-one could actually live.

One reason Allods visuals work so well is that the artists get the physical and emotional scales just right. The buildings are huge and imposing but the doors, the windows and the rooms are human-sized. There are parks and bandstands and restaurants and advertisements. The whole place feels like it could taken straight from the pages of a National Geographic photo essay from the 1930s.

Not all imported MMORPGs look like they've been blown up to double size on a cheap color copier. Twin Saga looks far more beautiful than any game featuring guinea-pig mounts, houses on the backs of turtles and giant, bubblegum pink pussycats has any right to look.

It's another game I wish I'd played more of, although in Twin Saga's case the shut-off point came from ramped-up difficulty rather than dodgy monetization issues. I was going great guns until I hit a leveling wall in the 50s. Maybe I should just make a new character and start over. That never gets old.

Perhaps the most frustrating title among games I'm not playing as much as I feel I could be is Dragon Nest. As the screenshots here suggest, it's a quirky, characterful setting, painted in rather blurry brush strokes but oozing with personality and charm.

Unlike Dragon Nest M, the mobile version, which is brash, loud and garish. Which would be bad enough, but the PC version is still running in some territories, just not the one I'm in. Grrrrrrrr.

That's probably enough pictures for one post. I could go on for a while. Quite a while... My screenshot back-up file is 36GB. More than 30,000 files. And that's by no means all of them.

Sometimes I think the main reason I play MMORPGs is to take screenshots. I am a virtual tourist, first and foremost, after all. And a virtual travel writer.

Since it's Thanksgiving, even though that's a holiday not celebrated here, let me give thanks to the countless, unsung, uncelebrated artists who created all this wonder we take for granted. Not for them the kudos and reward of exhibitions or auctions, let alone the gravitas and honor of retrospective documentaries and movies about their lives.

I've always loved commercial art - advertizing, posters, spot illustration - and I guess video games are just the latest in a long line of work-for-hire exploitation. If you can call doing something you love and getting paid for it being exploited.

We're just lucky there are always people whose need to express themselves artistically outweighs their desire to be recognized for doing so. Thanks, to them all.

IntPiPoMo running total: 119

A New Career In A New Town

Every so often I get the urge to start a character and level up for the sheer fun of it. It could be in a game I've played for years or it could be somewhere completely new. When the mood strikes I'm not that fussy.

Well, perhaps I am. In the back of my mind I always have a template and it's drawn directly from the DIKU-MUD playbook. I want to goof around at low level in a western fantasy, quasi-medieaval setting. I want to fill XP bars by killing monsters and kit out my new characters in gear those monsters drop or that NPCs give me for killing them.

That's the minimum entry requirement. For bonus credit I also want to be able to play someone three feet tall or less, preferably with fur and/or a tail.

I have a mental list of games that work: EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Allods Online, Rift... The problem with those, though, is I already have established characters in all of them. After a whle I start to feel that perhaps I should "work" on those instead, make some "meaningful progress", push into the higher echelons of the game, see new zones, spend my time "profitably"...  stop goofing around, basically, forgetting that goofing around was the reason I rolled a new character in the first place.

That's one reason "New Start" servers work so well. I can start over on a brand new server and feel like my efforts are meaningful, even though I'm doing something I've done many times before in the exact same place I did it every other time.

Anarchy Online has a New Start server called Rubi-Ka up and running right now. I have some small nostalgia for AO. I was in the closed beta, for which I received an installation CD in the mail. At the turn of the Millennium, no-one could be expected to download an entire MMORPG through a 56K modem. If you even had a 56K...

I never played in that beta, though: I couldn't get it to run. Didn't stop me buying the game when it launched but I couldn't play it then either. It was one of the first, worst MMO launches. It set standards of unplayability seldom matched since, although hardly for want of trying.

Eventually, Funcom got that sorted. It took them a couple of months as I recall, during which time subscription charges were waived. When they started the subscription clock running I played on until the end of the thirty days that came with the box and then stopped. I liked the game but not enough to pay $14.99 a month on top of my EverQuest sub.

AO was one of the first Western MMORPGs to go free to play, as far back as 2004. I've been back a couple of times since but never for long. There's a whole new introduction, tutorial and starting area for F2P and although it's undoubtedly more user-friendly it has zero nostalgia factor for me.

I would quite like to see the original starting grounds again, though, and now I can. In theory. Rubi-Ka features the "classic Arrival Hall and backyards". It also requires a subscription. I don't want to see them that much.

Reading through the FAQ, Funcom's take on the concept of Progression or New Start servers is unusual to say the least. Requiring a subscription is standard practice for milking the nostalgia market but setting the server to last just 12 months and then deleting all the characters on it definitely isn't:

How long will the server be open?

The current plan is to run the server for 12 months- however, if near the end we see the community wants to keep it going, that is an option we are not taking off the table.

If the server closes, what happens to my character?

If the server does end, characters do not carry over from RK2019 to the original server

Other than bringing back the old starting areas, Funcom isn't even paying lip-service to re-creating the original Anarchy Online experience:

What about balance, mechanics, and systems?  Are those being reverted?

We are not reverting any code, systems, or balance changes with the new server.  Existing mechanics and systems such as damage caps, falling damage, XP loss, Improvement Point (IP) menu, profession balance, PvP, etc. will not be reverted from how they currently are.  

The actual "progression" aspect is unusual, too. Firstly, the server begins with a level cap of 10. As I recall, even around launch that wouldn't have taken very long.

What about the level caps and expansions? How will those be handled?

The server starts with no expansions and a low level cap (10)... expansions will be added to the server over time.

If that sounds vague it's because it is. Intentionally so. Funcom appear to be running the whole thing as some kind of democratic social experiment. All the things that other developers wrangle out with the players before launch are going to be decided according to feedback as people actually play:

You’re steering this ship - We’ll be on deck to listen to your feedback and thoughts on when level caps should be raised as well as when expansions would be added to the game.

If it wasn't for the subscription I'd give it a go but I know I wouldn't even last a month so I'm going to save my fifteen dollars. It's not like Anarchy Online is the only New Start in town.

As previously discussed, EverQuest and EQII are each launching not one but two new start servers later this month. I'm still in two minds about those but I'll probably at least roll a character on Kaladim and possibly one on Selo.

Later in the year we have WoW Classic to look forward to, of course. It's odds on I'll resub for that although I imagine that sub won't be renewed. A month is probably two weeks longer than I'll need before my curiosity is satisfied.

There is at least one other upcoming option for some kind of a "fresh start" that hasn't been getting anything like the attention. It's not a new server and it's definitely no kind of time-limited progression: it's the long-postponed transition of Dark Age of Camelot to a Free to Play model.

DAOC must be just about the last subscription-based holdout from the first wave of MMORPGs. It's astonishing it's taken this long to get there but supposedly "early 2019" is the target for the launch of what Broadsword is calling Endless Conquest:

What is Endless Conquest?

Dark Age of Camelot: Endless Conquest is a way for players to experience the core features of Dark Age of Camelot without a paid subscription.

Who is eligible for Endless Conquest?

New accounts are eligible and previously-subscribed accounts that have been closed for at least 120 days can downgrade to Endless Conquest status.

What do I get with Endless Conquest?

Endless Conquest accounts receive complementary access to all Dark Age of Camelot expansions through Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Endless Conquest accounts have access to Dark Age of Camelot’s core features and can enjoy exploring Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia, leveling their character to 50, and fully participating in realm vs realm combat, and much more!

That does sound quite appealing, especially the part about being able to play your old characters. I probably still have my original login and password details lying around somewhere. Or I might just start over from scratch. I always rather liked DAOC's low-level PvE game - it's about the closest anywhere to EverQuest's and unlike EQ's I haven't played through it for about a decade and a half.

At the very least I'd like to take some screenshots. I don't seem to be able to find anything I took in any MMORPG from before about 2004, meaning nothing at all from DAOC.

I wonder who's going to be next on the New Start/Progression bandwagon? Are there even any likely candidates left?

Walking My Dog Named Cat : Bless Online

When I learned that Bless Online has a different starting area and storyline for each of its seven races I was quite excited. I found the storyline for the first race I tried, the diminutive and (optionally) furry Mascu, engaging and entertaining. The prospect of another half-dozen narratives of that quality was enticing.

When my Mascu ranger ran into a minor roadblock in the main storyline somewhere in the mid-teens, rather than grind out a level or two on Monster Books and side quests to get past it, I decided to roll another character and see what their starting area and story was like. Of course, it doesn't take much to persuade me to roll an alt.

Leather hot pants and thigh boots. I know! it's a classic, right?

Heading back into character creation, I was reminded of something I'd skipped over the first time around. I didn't think to mention it in the post I wrote about making a character but six of Bless's seven classes are faction-locked. More significantly, since this is a faction-based PvP game, you can only play one faction per server.

By sheer chance my race of first preference , Mascu, is the only one shared by both factions. I didn't know that when I chose it. I also knew nothing about the factions so I picked Hieron pretty much at random. From a few things I've read since, apparently Union is the casual-preferred faction, partly due to snazzier mount options and partly because of the lore.

If I'd wanted to try one of the Union races I could have started over on a new server (there are four, two each on EU and NA, down from fifteen at launch according to the wiki, which might be some kind of record in just a couple of months... ) but I also wanted to find out if bank space was shared so I chose what I thought was a catlike race from the Hieron options in front of me.

Young wolf, run free.

Making the character was an absorbing experience. I could spend a long time playing around with Bless's options and sliders. Eventually I dragged myself away from the controls, settled on a look, gave my new cat-girl a cat-person name I often use when playing cat-people and logged in.

Imagine my surprise to discover I was a wolf. You'd think I might have noticed, not least because the freakin' race is called the Lupus, but no. This is what happens when you don't do your research. Or pay attention.

Just for information, there is a cat-person race. It's on the Union side and it's called the Pantera. These aren't hard codes to crack. The other four racial options are two flavors of human (Habichts and Armistad) and two sorts of elf (Sylvan and Aqua). I plan on trying them all.

Spooky red glow. It's a bad thing.

The Lupus starting area is delightful if entirely unoriginal. It reminded me of both the Priden starting area in Allods Online and the Tauren newbie zone in World of Warcraft. Lots of totem poles, wooden lodges and forest trails. Everyone's drawing from the same real-world well but it's always a refreshing draught.

The Lupus storyline isn't as unusual as the Mascu's but it's a decent example of the tribal rite-of-passage that goes wrong trope. I quickly found myself drawn in to the narrative, which was interesting enough that I wanted to explore all the conversational options to find out more of the back-story.

Bless has a lot of conversational options. Not the kind where you get to choose from a snarky, noble or neutral response for your character (I hate those) but the sort where you can interrogate NPCs at some length to reveal more about the gameworld's biography, history or lore. It also has a lot of good quality cut-scenes, something I should have mentioned in my First Impressions posts.

Smoke gets in your eyes. And your fur.

Wherever the quests are voiced, the additional text options also seem to have been fully translated from the original Korean. Those are definitely worth reading. I read all the quest text anyway, regardless of the quality of the English, but the well-translated ones are good enough that it makes me wish they'd had the time, money or inclination to buff up the rest as well.

So far, so good, then. I've played two races and very much enjoyed both starting experiences. There is a problem, though. They're too short.

I was hoping the individual racial storylines would take me all the way to Level 30, which is when both factions come together to compete over the same quest content. Sadly, that's not how it works.

Look at the way she stands on the balls of her toes. And those gigantic hands. Best werewolf ever.

The Mascu and Lupus storylines merge much sooner than that, around level five, at the point where you arive in the factional capital city of Hieron. I knew it was going to happen even before I got there. It was a bit of a give-away when the same NPC that my Mascu ranger sidekicks for turned up to take my wolf-girl under his wing in the Lupus starting story.

The upshot is that there's nowhere near as much unique questing and storyline content in Bless as I'd hoped. It was a bit much to expect, thinking about it. On the positive side, however, there are still six short stories of some quality to enjoy and two full-length storylines, assuming, as must be the case, that the Union story is entirely different to the Hieron throughout.

No airship trip for me. All the way on the back of a flying lizard. Hmm... that reminds me of something...

That does mean playing two elves to see them all but you can't have everything. It's also more achievable. I don't imagine I would ever had worked my way through seven sets of thirty levels, no matter how good the stories might have been - and I'm not saying they're that good. Just decent.

And that shared bank? There isn't one. But there is a shared wallet. My wolf-girl was able to dip into my Mascu's savings to buy herself a full set of armor at level one, rendering any combat in the starting instance trivial. Also any quest rewards. I'm not sure they've entirely thought this through...