A Question Of Pride

I feel like this is the same post I wrote the same time last year but what the hey. Life moves in clades as Bruce Stirling once said. Or maybe he didn't. And even if he did, it's hardly the same thing. I don't know why I brought it up.

Life is one big circle, maybe that's what I mean. Oh, wait, now I sound like I'm in The Lion King. Which could totally work, if could come up with some smart way of connecting Pride Month with a pride of lions.

And why not? It's just what Darkpaw did, when they ran out of rabbits to drape in the rainbow flags of all orientations. They just moved on to lions and started working through the list all over again, three at a time.

This year's trio is Aceheart, Openheart and Freeheart, which I'm reliably informed "represent asexual, non-binary, and pansexual orientations". I think that's in respective order, although it's not always obvious which colors match up with which flags. The names can be a little vague, too, although Aceheart is clear enough. 

The lions, which are Familiars in the game, and therefore functional as well as meaningful, are all free for the asking in the EverQuest and EverQuest II cash shops, as are all those from previous years. Since Familiars are character-bound rather than account bound, you'd need to claim them all separately for each character you'd like to have them, but you have the whole month to do it and indeed a bit longer than that; they'll be in the cash shop until the 9th of July.

I've already picked mine up for my two most-played EQII characters and I'll be collecting them for all the others as and when I log them in. It's been a while since I last logged into EQ and even longer since I actually played but I'll probably make time to get the latest lions for at least a couple of characters before they disappear.

As I said, though, it's no big deal if you miss the opportunity this time around. The whole, rolling carnival will be back next year, I'm sure.

Which is both wonderful and also slightly worrisome, in a way. If you wanted a textbook example of how mmorpg culture has changed for the better in the twentysomething years I've been playing, you couldn't ask for anything more than the widespread acceptance and acknowledgment of difference that comes with incorporating Pride Month into the official event seasons of the games themselves.

It's a very far cry indeed from the genre's origins, when only the bravest of souls would dare to mention the possibility that anyone playing might be anything other than a straight, white male. Back then, you could easily find yourself on the wrong side of a vocally violent in-game mob, just for raising the possibility that anyone might want to express themselves as anything other than that expected norm. Even more disturbingly, you could sometimes find yourself on the wrong side of the moderators or GMs too, especially if you had the temerity to stand your ground.

It wasn't always that bad by any means but it was a time when many, quite possibly most, players seriously did not believe anyone played the games they liked other than people they considered to be exactly like themselves. Anyone playing a female character was assumed to be male because girls didn't play mmorpgs (Or any video games, really.) and any male who played a female character was deemed to have some nefarious motivation probably best not revealed.

Without getting all Polyanna about it, things are demonstrably better now. I'm just not entirely convinced that the best way of expressing, consolidating and cementing that positive change is to keep giving away free stuff. It seems a little odd, that's all.

But, hey, free stuff, right? I'm not gonna say no...

In fact, I'm so much not going to say no that over the weekend I logged into two games I'm not currently playing just to grab the Pride freebies I'd heard they were giving away. I have no shame when it comes to freebies. Plus, I do like to represent, at least in small ways.

I guess that's a cue for a quick aside before I get to talking about the loot I got. As one of those supposedly stereotypical straight, white males, I haven't had to spend a whole lot of time reflecting on either my gender or my ethnicity. Or so you'd think. Except, of course, I have.

I'll put the ethnicity angle to one side for now and try to concentrate on one thing at a time for a change. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. It's something Mrs Bhagpuss and I talk about quite often, too. I'm about as sure as it's possible to be from the precarious vantages of hindsight and hypothesis that, had the cultural framework to support it been in place when I was an adolescent, I would have identified differently to the way I did.

How I would have identified is another matter altogether. Adolescence is a contradictory time of both radical confusion and rabid certainty. I might well have picked a flag and waved it proudly. I might also have found the fence a very comfortable place to sit. 

Now, at my advanced age and with my immense and hard-won wisdom (I don't need to insert an irony emoji here, do I?) I'm starting to realise the Q in LGBTQ+ could have some connection to me. It would be tantamount to cultural appropriation for me to lay claim to Q for Queer but I feel quite comfortable in adopting its alternate meaning - Questioning. 

Next time I have to fill out one of those government forms with a box to tick for gender and/or orientation I'm going to give it a bit more thought. You're never too old to learn new things about yourself - or I hope not, anyway.

While I figure out what questions I ought to be asking, let alone what the answers might be, let's get back to the plunder! ArenaNet is giving away a nice pair of wings in Guild Wars 2 for this year's Pride although unlike Daybreak they don't seem to be making much of a noise about it. I heard about it from MassivelyOP but I didn't get any emails from ANet and there's no mention of it on the news feed on the official website.

The wings are supposed to make you look like a macaw. What does that have to do with Pride? I had no idea, so I asked Bard, Bing and ChatGPT. Unfortunately, the rabbit-hole that led me down would trip the entire post and send it cartwheeling into a thicket of unsubstantiated assertation, so let's just say I was not able to confirm a relationship between macaws and Pride, assume ANet knows something I don't and take it there must be more to it than a mere coincidence of coloration.

The wings, which you can claim for free from the Gem Store under the Promotions tab, are account-bound and work either as a glider skin or a backpack, which makes it odd that you have to have at least Heart of Thorns enabled on the account to claim them. I tried to get them for my Core account but they don't even show up in the shop. 

There's a thread about it on the forums. It appears to be an issue with the Gem Store itself because there's a workaround in which you can get another account to gift the wings to a Core account and the receiving account is able to accept and use the item, which they can then equip as a backpack but not as a glider. Whether ANet will fix this before the offer ends I guess we'll just have to wait and see but it does seem a bit shortsighted of them to have allowed it to happen in the first place.

I've left the best 'til last, although since I led with it as the picture at the head of the post, I kind of blew any element of surprise right at the start.

For Pride '23, DCUO is giving away all ten orientation flags along with a really strong set of posters for your base. The posters feature various DC characters kissing, including Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy and Superman and... y'know, I'm not sure who that is. I really need to find out.

I took everything I could get my hands on and then realized my base is so overdecorated now there's barely any wall space left to hang new art. I eventually found an alcove I hadn't used yet so I put the posters up there but I may need to move them to somewhere more prominent later.

There are also some spectacularly colorful costumes that I haven't quite worked out how to get. I can't quite see myself wearing them so I can't pretend I made all that much of an effort. It's nice to have the option, all the same.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any more freebies that might turn up in other games I play, even if they're games I don't happen to be playing at the moment. I'm always willing to patch up for a good freebie. Pride lasts all month so there's plenty of time for more to show up.

Not that I'm suggesting free stuff is the point of Pride. No, not at all. I didn't even think it. 

It's just it'd be rude to say no when saying yes says so much more.

Same Time Next Year?

In a comment on a recent post, Shintar asked whether I was still interested in Guild Wars 2 and what I thought of ArenaNet's new update cadence. The question made me think. What I mostly thought was "Oh yeah! GW2! I used to play that!"

I can fairly honestly say that was the first thought I'd had about the game for weeks. I'm not even sure how long it's been since I last logged in - must be a couple of months - and even then it would only have been to claim some freebie I got through Amazon Prime. I'm not sure I've played the game in any meaningful way since last year.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Actually, more than a couple. I could probably do bullet points.

• A decade is a long time to play any game without a break.
• I probably would have stopped well before this if Mrs Bhagpuss didn't still play.
• Mrs Bhagpuss doesn't still play.
• We got a dog. That's why she stopped. Dogs eat time (And anything else they can grab.)
  
• GW2 can be pretty boring. It's very, very grindy. You really have to have Stockholm Syndrome not to see that.
• Other mmorpgs give much more back, much more quickly and much more easily.
• GW2 got a bit more popular than it used to be and my latent Hipster gene kicked in.

Beyond all of those, though, I think the fundemental issue I have with GW2 is the same one I've had since about October or November 2012, which is that it's not the game I was told it was going to be, which was also, coincidentally, near enough the game it was at launch. I loved the free-form, do what you like, go where you want, nothing matters any more than anything else feel of the original maps, something I felt was well iterated upon in Heart of Thorns, but by and large that has proved neither a popular nor a commercially successful path for the game and has been progressively bred out of the game in favor of zonewide metas that suck the very life out of everyone who experiences them more than a handful of times. 

I accept that may be the minority view. It seems most players like a lot of direction and relish very long-term goals that require a huge amount of time, effort and repetition to achieve, whereas these days I like to be able to complete an entire project in no more than one gaming session and preferably in about ten minutes. Consequently, GW2 and I haven't really been a good fit for a long time.

Other than it being Mrs Bhagpuss's game of choice, what really kept me on board for the last few years was the jump in and have fun chaos of World vs World and the excellent worldbuilding provided mostly by the art team, supported by the writers, when they were on form which, sadly, they weren't, or not as often as they could and indeed should have been. 

I should probably log in and feed my dog...

 

As an explorer archetype, I usually found something to keep me engaged every time new content dropped but as I commented many, many times, it didn't drop often enough and when it did, there was never enough of it.

GW2 also famously has appallingly bad rewards, quite possibly the most disappointing in the genre. I nearly said the worst "risk vs reward" there but of course GW2 offers no risk whatsoever and never has, which is presumably why the rewards for doing anything have always been so abysmally poor. For most of the run of the game, ANet's solution to this has been to emphasize quantity over quality which, for me, has just meant an unconscionable amount of time spent organizing my bags. If I can blame any one game for finally making me agree with the common consensus that inventory management is a chore not a pleasure, it's this one.

None of this in itself would make me walk away from the game and truthfully I didn't and I haven't. It's been more of a drift. For the reasons listed and probably some others I've forgotten, I gradually found myself playing less. And I didn't miss it. I fact, the less I played, the less I thought about playing, until I reached the point I'm at now, where it takes someone prompting me to remember the game exists at all.

Obviously, I will go back and play again at some point. I go back to most mmorpgs multiple times after breaks. Sometimes the return takes, as has happened this year with EverQuest II and sometimes it doesn't, as with Lord of the Rings a few months back. 

One thing that always gives a game a fighting chance of regaining my attention is the release of a new expansion. I love expansions. They're like new games only bite-sized. When I say "expansions", though, I mean the real thing, not just some glorified update. Something that literally expands the game by a measurable percentage, somewhere in the order of 25-50% of the original base release, either by adding land mass, systems or mechanics, but preferably a combination of all three.

Thanks, but I'll pass.

 

Since the runaway success of World of Warcraft, I think there's been a widely accepted idea that mmorpg expansions arrive about once every two years or so. For me that's always been way too slow. My expectations were formed by EverQuest, which for several years put out two full-sized expansions every year, then after that proved to be too much of a good thing, switched to a minimum of an expansion every twelve months and always just in time for Christmas. 

EQII followed suit and I've come to believe that once a year, supported by a couple of major updates inbetween, is the ideal cadence to keep players busy and engaged. It allows sufficient time to assimilate and appreciate each expansion before anticipation builds for the next, which arrives just as people are beginning to tire of the last one.

I ought, therefore, to be very happy to hear that ArenaNet have belatedly decided to go with exactly this cadence from now on. The studio released a couple of "Updates" on the official website this year, one in February, which I confess I hadn't even seen until today, and another this week. Both talk at some length about how the game's content release model is set to change:

"Rather than launching an expansion every two to four years with a season of Living World in between, we’ll be releasing smaller expansions more frequently at a slightly reduced price and adding additional content for those expansions through quarterly updates, meaning that the next big release is only ever a few months away."

The Spring Update gives chapter and verse on what constitutes "an expansion" under the new regime. Or at least, I think it does...

 "In this new model, the first release in an expansion cycle will introduce a new story arc and setting, two new open-world maps, two Strike Missions, new gameplay and combat features, new Masteries, and new rewards."

Typically with an ArenaNet press release, it's a bit wooly. Is "the first release in an expansion cycle" what I would call "the expansion"? The thing you pay for? Unclear.

Let's assume it is. That means that, on the new yearly expansion cycle, we get two new overland maps, which is there or thereabouts half of what we were getting in the 2-4 year cycle xpacks. That makes sense. We also get a storyline and new Masteries, as you'd expect, plus a bunch of unspecified "features" and "rewards". And some bloody strike missions, god forbid, but we won't mention those.

The "What have you done for me lately?" emote. Well, that's what I'd call it.

 

That sounds quite a lot like what we were getting under the last Living World cadence to me, possibly minus the Masteries, although maybe not. I haven't really been paying that much attention to the details for a couple of years. 

Still, it sounds like a decent chunk of content. Not as much as Darkpaw manage to produce for two mmorpgs every year with a combined team team that's probably about a tenth the size of ANet's, but I'll be generous and allow it as "An expansion". I'll likely come back and play through the story and see the maps, provided the release doesn't clash with something more interesting.

There is, as there needs to be, a scaffold to support the game between these new, yearly expansions:

"In the following quarterly updates, we’ll add story chapters, an additional open-world map, challenge modes for the Strike Missions, a new fractal dungeon and challenge mode, new rewards, additions to the new systems introduced in that expansion, and—depending on the release plan for that expansion—new gameplay and combat features."

If I'm reading that correctly, they're committing to a specific number of new maps each year: three. I'm not about to go back and count up what we were getting under the last set-up but I'm fairly sure it was more than that, so this is an effective reduction in the speed at which the world-map expands. That may not be a bad thing. 

There was a sense that some previous Living World maaps were getting a bit samey and as other long-running mmorpgs can attest, the bigger you make your world, either the wider you spread your playerbase or the emptier most of it feels. Three good maps a year is better than four mediocre ones.

Other than that, I have to say it sounds remarkably similar to what came before. While I can't argue that the change to a fixed, yearly, paid-for expansion cadence doesn't appeal directly to my own preferences, a decade of experience with ArenaNet's propositions and plans tells me not to take any of this at face value. The company has a consistent history of devising and floating plans like this, trying to stick to them for a while, failing and then dropping them for something new.

Still "in development" after, what, five years?

 

If they can stick to this cadence and if players accept it, I think it could be a good change for the game. Annual expansions with new settings and storylines could keep the game feeling fresher and more lively than it has for much of its run. There should be fewer longeuers, fewer content droughts, less overt timewasting.   

All of this, though, we've heard before. Every new release cadence was supposed to provide stable throughput of content to keep everyone entertained but none of them was judged to have succeeded well enough not to be retired and replaced within a year or two. Other mmorpgs truck on steadily, year by year, with much the same release schedules and don't seem to do too badly by it but Guild Wars 2 has never been able to settle down to a comfortable routine.

Not playing the game regularly any more and having no real plans to return any time soon, I have never had less invested in the outcome of one of these lurches in direction, which makes it somewhat ironic that, on paper at least, it looks like one more suited to my preferences than most. All the same, I do hope it's a success. I very much approve of the concept of annual expansions. I just don't entirely trust ANet to keep pumping them out the way Darkpaw does.

I'm sure they'll at least manage one this year. It would be excruciatingly embarassing to miss that target. If nothing else, it'll provide an excellent opportunity for me to return to GW2 for another run. I'm pretty sure I won't be able to resist. Whether there'll be another such opportunity the year after that, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Or maybe there'll be a new cadence model by then. If there is, I certainly won't be surprised.

Inconvenience Regretted

This week is Developer Appreciation Week in Blaugust, something that used to be a thing of its own, once upon a time. I found it a bit odd then and, if I'm honest, a little uncomfortable, heaping praise on people I tended to think of primarily as technicians, beauraucrats and functionaries or on companies I knew to be, well, companies. 

Over time, though, I've either changed my mind or had it changed for me by my peer group. It seems that praising game devs and the people who employ them is a thing we do, so who am I to argue? And it fits very nicely with something I was going to post about anyway, so there's that!

It isn't so much a paean of praise to any particular developer or team as it is a general observation. I've noticed a difference in attitude between some of the companies behind what we in the West like to call imports and the way our home-grown game producers tend to operate. 

 

In all the years I've been playing, scheduled interruptions to service (aka maintenance) have been a routine, background hum that everyone accepts, sometimes irritably, usually stoically. Only one mmorpg that I play has managed to do away with downtime altogether and that's Guild Wars 2. The game remains seamlessly available except for the briefest moments, a few minutes at most, when players have to log out to download a patch. Even then, the servers themselves stay up. 

The game uses a megaserver configuration so there's never even a time when individual servers go offline. Everything just keeps chugging along.

Does anyone notice? No. Does anyone think it's unusual or exceptional? No. Players of every other game I can think of have to take enforced breaks but GW2 players can keep playing until their fingers bleed without fear of interruption. I guess that's a good thing? I'll say thank-you ArenaNet for it, anyway.

In all those games where the servers do come down periodically, players are generally expected to suck it up and power through, at least so long as there's notice beforehand. Back in the days when subscriptions were the norm I did occasionally see some of the more combative forum warriors suggest there ought to be some kind of extension to their subs if maintenance overran, as it often did, but their complaints would be drowned out by people telling them to grow up and get real.

Only when unforeseen circumstances lead to unplanned downtime is there any meaningful discussion of "compensation". EverQuest II, for example, does sometimes add a day or two to holiday events that have been disrupted by the servers not being up when they should. For anything approaching an actual compensation "package" to appear, though, it takes something like the SOE hack or a hardware failure that leads to unrecoverable rollbacks.

In other territories the culture is different. I've played a few mmorpgs where every time the servers go down, planned or otherwise, something turns up in my in-game mail to compensate for the inconvenience. It's in my mind right now because since I started playing Bless Unleashed I've been making bank on both scheduled and unscheduled interruptions to the service.

This is a game that just launched. Naturally there are some teething problems. Happily for the developers and publishers both, the game seems to have been received with more enthusiasm than they were expecting so there's been some congestion. Not everyone has been able to get onto the server they wanted, when they wanted, all the time. 

Also, unsurprisingly, the influx of players has brought a few hitherto unknown bugs and glitches to light, so a few extra fixes have been needed. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary by genre standards. Indeed, I'd say the game feels remarkably polished and stable for an mmorpg just a few days past launch. 

For all of these issues there have been both apologies and gifts. I've had lots of gold, some resurrection scrolls, a few speed buffs, an extra bag slot and also plenty of promises like this : "We will do our best to provide a better environment for your game play". Or this : "We will always make efforts to provide a stable service of Bless Unleashed PC".

There have been thank-you packages, too. Thanks to the players not just for putting up with the disruption (minimal as it's been) but just for playing the game at all. I've had a costume and I think I got a mount, although I've had so many things in my mailbox I've kind of lost track of where most of them came from.

It's a bit much, actually. I'm not complaining but I'm not sure all of this apologizing and compensating is really necessary. Okay, I'm sure it's not necessary. Free stuff is free stuff, though, so I'll take it.

So, thanks to Round 8 Studios, who make the game, and NEOWIZ, who publish it for the PC. If I had to pick between the radio silence of most developers and your effusively apologetic approach, I guess I'd pick the one where I get given stuff.

I'm not sure how much good it does from the developers and producers perspective. I had to look both of their names up because even though I'm playing Bless Unleashed all the time at the moment, I had no idea who'd made it. Why would I need to? It's on Steam, isn't it?

I suppose that means I ought to thank Valve too, while I'm at it, then. They make the whole experience so seamless and unobtrusive I don't even know whose games it is I'm playing. 

Truly, this is a brave new world we're living in! Oh, wait, that's next month.

That's When My Patience Went Away : GW2

Following my return to work I had the shell of a plan prepared for what I wanted to write about today. I was thinking along the lines of a meditation on the different entertainment needs brought on by enforced leisure and enforced labor, how one requires stimulation and the other just the opposite.

It was all percolating quite nicely. And then I saw this. 

The headline Massively:OP went with was

"Guild Wars 2 delays End of Dragons to 2022, brings Colin Johanson and Josh Davis back."

That's enough to put the fear into anyone. Reading through the official press release, it gets worse. Much worse:

"Alliances When?

This year."

That about puts the cap on it for me. Along with the rest of the handful of people still playing World vs World, I'd allowed myself to get comfortable. I thought this insane idea had died of neglect long ago and we could all just carry on as if the whole ludicrous farrago had never been suggested. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.

If that wasn't sufficiently disheartening, there's this:

"In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward."

It's that sickening moment, when the door opens to your nice, quiet office on the ninth floor, where no-one ever goes and most people don't even know anyone works, and in come three suits from corporate with a checklist and an appraising look. Sometimes benign neglect is the best you can hope for.

In this case, it's not just simple fear of the unknown. There's the plain fact that every single iteration on WvW since 2012 that pretended towards anything more than a basic bug fix has been at best a downgrade and frequently a disaster. Every. Single. One.

Desert borderlands even killed EBG.

 

Naturally, the plan comes with promises and safeguards. Most of the section in the press release relating to Alliances is made up of apologies for previous errors and promises not to repeat them. All of which we heard last time and the time before that and the time before that again.

There's a touching naivete in the promise of a collaborative process based around a beta:

"World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. ... Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta."

It sounds reassuring until you realize the despised revision that removed all of the alpine battlegrounds and replaced them with their desert counterparts was the result of a similar collaborative beta, albeit a closed one.  That was the update that drove maybe half of all WvW players to stop playing, most of them for good. Several badly-received revamps led to open rebellion that was only quelled by a public poll on what should be done, a poll that resulted in a humiliating defeat for ANet and the removal of all of the new content to which they'd tied their banner. So that went well.

I'm less disturbed about this than I might be. Two or three years ago Alliances seemed like a terrifyingly bad idea but that was when the game mode still retained a vestige of the camaraderie it once had. There's none of that any more. All that remains is some knockabout fun, something very similar to an oversized, hot-join, never-ending game of capture the flag in which no-one really cares where the flag is or who's got it. It's hard to see how Alliances can make it actively worse but I have faith that if there's a way, ArenaNet will find it.

We had fun, once.

 

Going back to MassivelyOP's headline, there are more bad things. First and worst is the postponement of the third expansion, End of Dragons. This is embarrassing. Guild Wars 2 has had two expansions to date, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire. The first took three years to arrive, the second pegged that back to two. So far, so good. Not great, really very not great, but at least heading in the right direction.

When (I guess I should say "if") it launches, EoD will have been four and a half years in the making. The original game only took six months longer than that to build from scratch. At this point I'm certain the better plan would have been to start on GW3 right after the second expansion. If you're going to take the time you might as well make the damn game.

The given reason is, of course, quality. It's always quality. 

"...we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha...We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves"

Seriously, screw your "creative vision". And screw the self-congratulatory tone. Just get a damn expansion out in something close to the timescale every other major manages. 

The problem doesn't just lie with the development team, unfortunately. There's a glib, knowing wink in that "we appreciate your patience".  You can start a conversation about expansions in game any time you like and half the people talking will be saying they don't want one at all or they don't want one yet. It's not patience, it's apathy and antagonism. A lot of GW2 players will be cheering today because they won't have to suffer another expansion until next year.

I am not one of those players. The game is stale. It's been stale for much of its ten year run. The only time it freshens up is when we get a new expansion and so far that's been twice. And I only liked one of those.

Straight up, if there was a good alternative to GW2 I would be done with it now. I was done with it after Path of Fire. I keep logging in because it's there and it's familiar and it's easy and because it's the game Mrs Bhagpuss plays but mostly I'm still playing GW2 because not one of the alternatives I'm waiting on has made it to market yet. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, who only plays GW2 and, unlike me, rarely goes back to older mmorpgs she once enjoyed after she moves on to new ones, has been asking more and more often when the next good game is likely to appear. I can only hope it's soon but sadly I know it won't be before the delayed End of Dragons expansion so I guess we will indeed end up being "patient". But only because we have literally no choice.

So much for the expansion. How about those two guys coming back, eh? 

Heart of Thorns introduces a hitherto unknown problem to the game: too much loot.

 

This one's a bit more nuanced. From a company's point of view, can it ever be a good thing to have to announce you re-hired people you said goodbye to years ago? I guess it depends on why they left in the first place but at best it is, by definition, a backward-looking move. 

Colin Johanson was a very controversial figure in much of his time at GW2. He was the figurehead of a direction of which a vocal majority of players strongly disapproved. Whether it was true or not, he was labelled as the guy who wanted to make GW2 harder for casuals. 

He was the showrunner for Heart of Thorns, the expansion many players found daunting and difficult. The sales of the expansion were reportedly underwhelming and the aftermath confused and chaotic. Johansen posted an emotional and upbeat farewell when he left but my summary of his tenure, written at the time, was less than complimentary:

"Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw."

Given the history, it's hard to see why his return should be greeted like the prodigal son. Or indeed, like Scott Hartsman riding in on his white charger to save EverQuest II, a comparison I am absolutely certain Colin wouldn't want anyone to make.(I imagine he'd prefer us to cast him as Yoshi P riding to the rescue of his own personal FFXIV, but then what dev wouldn't?).

I never had carried much affection for Colin Johanson's style or approach. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the direction the game took under his tenure, up to and including the release of the first expansion, made it by some margin my favorite era. 

I liked Heart of Thorns. I liked it a lot. It would quite possibly make the list of my top ten favorite expansions for any game. I've played through it start to finish twice and partially several more. I still go there most weeks and goof around just because I enjoy being there.

The adventure begins!

Conversely I dislike, maybe even detest, the second expansion, Path of Fire, which attempted to be all the things HoT was not: accessible, steeped in Guild Wars lore, commercial. I found PoF smug, irritating and, by far the worst of all video game crimes, stultifyingly dull. I forced myself to complete the main storyline on one character. Never, never again.

That does give me some hope for Colin Johanson's return. He did once do stuff I really liked and, let's be brutally honest, he can hardly make things worse. Except, of course, he can. It's amazing how often that happens. Still, we can hope. 

That just leaves the return of Josh Davis, about whom I have to say "Who?". I vaguely remember his name. I have no idea who he is or what he did. The only GW2 writer I remember is that one who got canned for fighting with players on social media and I don't even remember what their name was.

The writing in GW2 has been all over the place for years. It has some standout moments and a vast amount of ho-hum filler. Storylines blow up then blow away like dust on the wind. Who was Mr E.? Anyone know? Anyone care? How's Zojja doing? Is she dead or alive? Is Taimi still ill or did her incurable condition cure itself? Marjorie and Kasmeer, are they still a thing? 

Gliding. 100% more fun than mounts. Official!

 

It's soap opera and melodrama. Most people probably just click through it to get to the fights anyway. I'm sure Josh Davis coming back means something to someone but not to me.

And there we must leave them, Colin and Josh, setting out their desks, going down the hall to have their photographs taken for their security passes. We'll have to judge them by their works, I guess, although precedent suggests we'll be lucky if we have the least clue who's actually responsible for what.

I'll spend my summer dreading the onset of the Alliance beta although at least it's going to give me something to rant write about . I'd far rather have had an unpolished expansion in August than a supposedly tarted up version of the same six months later but no-one's asking my opinion because the people who actually matter have already decided what my reaction's going to be: I'm going to be patient. I've been thanked for it so it must have happened.

Ashes of Creation and Pantheon need to get a bloody shift on. There's an open door here waiting to be pushed. At this stage I'd even take Camelot Unchained as a stepping-stone to something I actually want. I know Mrs. Bhagpuss will try it. I wonder if she'd give New World a look... she does have that new mouse now...

This Day's Portion

Among the many fine points made in the lengthy comments on yesterday's posts was this from Yeebo: 

"In terms of whether I consider the ongoing support from developers of a MMO adequate, it comes down to how much of the revenue seems to be getting folded back into the development of more content for the players vs. siphoned off for shareholders or to support projects that few players of the game could reasonably bet expected to care about"

Later, I read this post from Azuriel at In An Age, in which he talks about non-service games ("aka regular-ass games") and the shock he feels on realizing a game he's bought has reached a point of equilibrium from which it will receive no further amendments of any kind: 

"The thought that nothing will happen with the game anymore though? It feels like I was duped."

It seems the whole idea of "games as a service" has fostered a sense of expectation that affects not only the way we pay but the way we think. We want value for money, of course, but in a some strange way we also want to be valued ourselves. We don't just want a game, we want a relationship.

Players often claim to have a clear idea of what's fair when it comes to value for money but what is fair, really? Back in the days when a video game was a once-and-done purchase it used to be easy to tell. You bought the game, you played it, you knew. These days it's a lot harder to be sure. 

Take Guild Wars 2 for example. In theory it operates somewhere in the "games as a service" model but as a buy-to-play game it's less than clear what that means. And the more you think about it, the less clear it gets.

Whatever the service is, it's certainly not an ongoing arrangement between you and the company. As a service-user no commitment is required from you. That one-time payment is all you'll ever be asked for. GW2 has no subscription, optional or otherwise. If you want to give the developers any more money you'll have to buy something from the cash shop.  

Oh, except for the expansions. Those you'll have to buy. Another one-off payment. Twice in nine years that's happened. And even then you can just not do it. You can just carry on playing the content you originally bought. That's service for you!

It gets more complicated because ANet also pride themselves on keeping all the content relevant all the time. Most of the new stuff added within an expansion cycle requires that expansion but not all of it. So even if you just stick with your original purchase you'll get some new content, now and then.

Of course, if you're new to the game, you get everything for that one payment because now you get the expansions thrown in. At heart, GW2 remains a buy-to-play game. It's just that these days what you're expected to buy is the latest expansion. Buy that and you get everything. Until the next one, of course.

Only, there weren't supposed to be any expansions. Ever. ANet claimed on multiple occasions they weren't going to make any. They kept trying various ways to add content without going the full box route. 

They couldn't do it but what if they had? Then they'd have been giving all the new content away for free, forever. That single box purchase I made back in the summer of 2012? It would still be giving me two or three hours of entertainment every day of the week, nine years later. Even as it is, I've only had to buy two more boxes in nine years to make sure I don't miss out on any content at all. It certainly sounds like a good deal.

Not everyone would agree. Last night, as I was happily fighting holograms in the arena, I listened to someone in map chat complain at length about how worthless the whole Dragon Bash event was because ArenaNet have done nothing with it since it was first introduced. 

Which is kind of true in a way. Dragon Bash was on hiatus for years and when it came back it was much the same. They certainly haven't added an awful lot of new events to any of the holidays over the years, but then again, why should they? That guy aside, most people seem happy enough already.

GW2's holiday events aren't particularly imaginative and they rarely get updates or additions of much significance year on year, but they remain fabulously well-attended. Dragon Bash has been running for a week now and it's still heaving. There are been multiple instances of Hoelbrak and the Arena instance running every time I'm on. Several times the map's been so laggy from all the people crammed into it I could barely steer my beetle round the sharp turns. There are so many people clustered around the guy who takes the bets for the moa races you can't see him at all, sometimes. Granted he's an asura but even so....

It does make me wonder just what this "games as a service" idea hopes to achieve, when it's a service no-one has to pay for. If a company is going to keep servers up and encourage players to log in to them, it is, presumably, in the hope of somehow making some money out of the whole affair. If the players aren't paying for access (no subscription) and only paying a one-time fee for the game (buy-to-play) that only leaves the cash shop.

No wonder most players don't like cash shops. Or say they don't, anyway. It follows that cash shops must be more profitable than selling games and content for games, at least in those games that don't also charge a sub. 

Those are the games that are either being given away (free to play) or sold as loss-leaders (buy-to-play) after which they exist solely as reasons for players to spend money in the cash shop. That becomes the game's entire raison d'etre. There has to be a game to hang the cash shop on because otherwise there's no reason to buy anything. You have to have a game. But the game itself is secondary. It's not why you're running the service. The cash shop is.

I never really realized that before. It explains a lot although not why the games are still so frequently entertaining. That's because you catch more flies with sugar, I guess. (Actually, you catch more flies with rotting meat but that's a whole different metaphor...). There doesn't just have to be a game. There has to be a game people want to play, and keep playing, otherwise they won't be around to buy things in your cash shop.

All of which brings me back to the question I began with: just what kind of a "service" is it these games are offering? I'm not exactly clear on how there's even a service at all.  

I work in a bookshop. It has to be staffed and stocked and lit and heated, all so we can sell people books. Lockdowns notwithstanding, you can count on the store being open seven days a week, all year round. We don't call that "shopping as a service". We just call it running a shop.

In a game that funds itself by cash shop sales, isn't keeping the servers up and the game stocked with events and "content" just "running the shop"? The cash shop, in this case. Where, exactly, does the "service" part come in?

Mmorpgs with subscriptions and cash shops are in an even more dubious position. Does the sub pay for most of the costs and provide most of the profit, with the cash shop being a minor add-on? That seems fair enough, but how would we know? Are there still any games like that? WoW? FFXIV?

Usually, a subscription is really just another purchase, a way to rent items and functions that could be (and possibly are) sold piecemeal through the store. That also seems fair in principle. It's up to the player to decide if the perks represent good value or not. It's still not a "service", though. It's just more shopping.

Years ago, when Free to Play was something new and scary, we talked about this sort of thing a lot. We don't so much, any more. We're used to it now. And we've changed, many of us. We don't think like players so much as customers. 

Back then, there was one choice. Which game to play. Make that decision then all you had to do was buy the box and input your credit card details for the monthly subscription. That was "gaming as a service", the service in question being guaranteed access to the game 24/7/365, patch day excepted.

It's no wonder people hanker after the good old days. I'm not at all sure it was better value back then but it sure as heck was easier to understand. Now games are just another contract with costs that need constant monitoring to make sure they're not running out of control.

According to the Inflation Calculator, the standard $14.99 monthly sub from the turn of the millennium would now cost a shade over $27. Not quite double. Would you pay that for an mmorpg with no cash shop today? 

I might... until I think about my nine years in Guild Wars 2. Nine years in which I've used the cash shop exactly once, about seven years ago. Nine years that have cost me around $150 for one account, expansions included. Six months' subscription at the 2021 mark-up, in other words.

I think my real question here is how the hell do ArenaNet stay in business?

The Rain, The Park And Other Things

It rained all day today. It's still raining now. I spent hours in World vs World, mostly defending our one and only T3 Keep or retaking the rest of our stuff after we lost it, which was about every five minutes. 

This week's event must have been wildly successful if the marker of success is how much time I've spent playing, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I killed close to a thousand players, ranked up more times than I can remember and made it into the final set of skirmish rewards, Diamond, for the first time in years.

Activity was about as manic as I've seen it. For most of the day no side in our match owned more than one upgraded keep. Almost everything was paper. There were players running around all over the place. Crystal Desert were on a mission to overtake us and go up to Tier Three at the weekly reset later tonight. They had close to a full squad runing all day, even at the times when there are normally none of them to be seen.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Despite all that action and chaos and effort, I didn't see a queue on any map, not even once. I've barely seen one all week and even the couple of times I did it was only one or two people. Measured by that metric, things were actually busier a few weeks ago, when there was no event of any kind.

This is Tier Four we're talking about, of course. Maybe the matches above us had deeper queues and more of them. Then again, much of the time when I check, Yaks Bend is listed as "Full" and you can't get any more populated than that. You'd think, right?

It doesn't work that way. No-one knows how it does work, exactly, but we do know it's not a head-count. It's an algorithm or I imagine it is. Everything's an algorithm nowadays. All ArenaNet will admit to is that they calculate how busy Worlds are by reference to a number of factors including but not limited to how many people log in to WvW, how long they stay and what kind of things they do while they're there.

By that measure, earlier this week about two-thirds of the servers were flagged "Full". Today it was just over half. It changes all the time but if there's a pattern to it I don't know what it is. 

I do know that when people wanted to move to a server that was always "Full" they would sometimes stay up until three or four in the morning in the hope they could catch it in one of the brief windows when it dropped to "Very High". Back in the days when people used the forums for more than just arguing and badmouthing developers, you'd sometimes get public-service posts letting everyone know some server or other had opened for transfers, which, naturally, meant that server would be "Full" again at the next update.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had a brief discussion abut it in guild chat as we were running to defend something or other this morning. I was venting my irritation at people who don't care about the match result and Mrs. Bhagpuss was explaining to me why I could go boil my head. She takes the very widely held view that server pride died when ANet changed the rules on transfers and moving to the winning team every six to eight weeks became the meta. 

I can't really argue with that. Server pride doesn't make much sense when there's a whole playstyle devoted specifically to switching servers. Even harder to take it seriously when you factor in the link system, where you don't even know which server it is you're on half the time. 

Just keep telling yourself that.

Even so, a competition is a competition and a match is a match. You don't get a prize or a title for after a pick-up game in the park but I would contend that you do still care who wins. Yes, when you all come back the next day and pick teams again you're probably going to end up playing alongside the kid you were trying to kick in the shins the day before but each pick-up match is a discrete event and each one matters or else none of them do.

That is the problem in a nutshell for a lot of people. None of them do. So why do they bother? Same million reasons anyone does anything in mmorpgs. Loot, gear, achievements, bragging rights, social pressure, fun, boredom... When GW2 began, ArenaNet wanted WvW to be the endgame. They included the maps in world completion and tied a bunch of stuff in the Mists to other features of the game. 

You can guess how that went down with PvE players. Once the dedicated WvW crowd that arrived expecting DAOC 2.0 had left in a huff, ANet moved quickly to pacify the people they had left. The problem was, they had a set of maps, rules and mechanics designed neither for pure PvP players nor monster-bashers. We've been living with a series of passive-aggressive compromises ever since.

Just keep telling yourself that.

All the many, many redesigns have failed. The last one, the supposed mega-revamp that would do away with Worlds entirely and heave everyone into some kind of ludicrously over-complicated parody of high-school, with everything built on popularity and cliques, thankfully appears to have died of lack of interest. What might replace it remains unspoken. 

My guess would be nothing. There's a conspiracy theory, so widely accepted now it might as well be confirmed fact, that ANet make major bank on transfer fees. Another of their dirty little secrets is how the links are decided every other month. Some of the decisions seem so nihilistic that monetary gain appears the only rational explanation.

Whether it's true or not that they couldn't do without the income generated by thousands of people paying to change the name of their team every few weeks, I suspect another well-founded theory will be proven to be correct. There's no-one left at ANet who cares enough about WvW to try to make it less disfunctional. 

Okay, maybe don't keep telling yourself that. And definitely don't tell anyone else.

There was a moment of moderate shock recently when one of the former WvW devs returned to work on it again. That was seen by some as a sign that life might be about to be breathed back into the corpse. It seems a bit of a stretch. It's not like much changed the last time he was in charge. Or, rather, things did change. Just, well, nothing that mattered...

The moment of truth will be when we get to hear the full feature list for End of Dragons. Back when Heart of Thorns was in development it included the biggest shake-up WvW has ever had. That was an unmitigated disaster. Path of Fire didn't even mention WvW let alone change anything there. PoF is generally reckoned to have been a popular, successful expansion. A lot of people still detest HoT. Draw your own conclusions.

As far as I see it, WvW is in maintenance mode now. It's there. It works. If you want to play it you can. People do. Still, even now, quite a lot of them. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it for five or six hours today. It was fun.

Maybe that could be the WvW slogan: "Raining out? Bored? Can't think of anything better to do? Come play WvW"!

There are worse ways to spend a wet friday in May.

The Outskirts Of Expansion : GW2

I thought I'd pop this up to bookmark the day it happened. ArenaNet just soft-announced the third expansion for Guild Wars 2.

And when I say "soft" I mean talc on Mohs' scale of hardness. The reveal is virtually buried at the end of a dev blog going under the tedium-inducing title Looking Ahead to Spring, Summer and the Future. It doesn't tell us very much. It's more an announcement that one day there will be an announcement:

Development is underway on a third Guild Wars 2 expansion. The team is hard at work, and it’s much too soon to talk about any details right now, including features, story, release date, or development timeline. We’ll have to stick to that until we’re ready to reveal more information to the world. When we are ready, you’ll definitely know!

Path of Fire, the second expansion, went live in September 2017. I would have said the third expansion should have dropped absolutely no later than two years after that. Judging by the above quote, I guess we might expect to see it  sometime in 2021 at the earliest.

A four year gap between expansions is desperataly unhealthy for a supposedly successful MMORPG but at this point I'm just surprised - amazed, even - that we're going to be getting one at all. The previous management at ANet seemed to be fairly committed to not doing any more expansions ever again if they could possibly avoid it.

When there was regime change last year I did momentarily imagine attitudes might shift but the party line held for a good while. Now it has finally collapsed and ANet appear to be ready to rejoin the rest of the world in seeing expansions as a natural and desirable part of the process rather than some dire fate to be avoided at all costs.

We're going where? Sorry, never heard of it.

I suppose I should be pleased but the prospect of playing the thing is so remote I can barely manage a tickle of interest. The fact that I strongly dislike the last expansion, to the point that I can almost claim it ruined the game for me, is not helping me to drum up enthusiasm for whatever it is they're working on.

That said, the Icebrood Saga so far has been a significant improvement over pretty much everything added to the game since Heart of Thorns. I particularly like the sound of the forthcoming instalment focusing on "capturing and defending territories in a PvE map, using objectives similar to WvW". If they can pull that off I could see myself playing it a lot.

The "early concept art" included in the announcement has everyone believing the expansion will take us to Cantha, although that bridge just reminds me of one in Vanguard's Kojan. I guess they all draw from similar real-world source material.

For some reason I can't fathom, Cantha seems to represent the promised land to many former Guild Wars players. I played some of the content there but I have only the dimmest memories of it. It certainly holds no strong nostalgia for me.

At this point I don't really care where we go. Anywhere is better than nowhere, which is where we've been going for the last three years. I hope the inevitable Big Feature, when it's revealed, turns out to be proper housing. That really would fire my enthusiasm. It won't be, though.

Anyway, at least we're getting something. And whatever it is, it can't be worse than PoF. Can it?

Size Isn't Everything: Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet have problems. The recent introduction of the much-ballyhooed "Build" system has been received extremely poorly by its target audience. The only demographic that appears to have anything pleasant to say about it are those, like me, who never had any interest in builds in the first place. And even I'm not as happy about it as I was, now I've had a chance to experience some of the drawbacks for myself.

ANet have retreated behind the barricades to think again. Not for the first time, a structural change to the game has had a destabilizing and demoralizing effect.

Never mind, though. Here comes the first full instalment of the revamped Living Story/World, rebranded this season as The Icebrood Saga. That'll take our minds off the build crisis. But wait! What's that? There it goes! Did you miss it? Well, you shouldn't have blinked, should you?

The shortness of episodes has been something of an issue for many years. The average time to complete the story part of any update in Seasons Two, Three and Four has been around four hours or so. Not impressive for a quarterly delivery.

For the longest time even that duration was padded with increasingly tedious and frustrating boss battles and an annoying insistence on adding new skills and tutorial sections for every episode. The very good news is that The Icebrood Saga, so far, has avoided those pitfalls. The less good news is that, without the time-wasting filler, "Whispers in the Dark" takes about two and a half hours to finish.

And that includes map completion of the new zone, the oddly-named Bjora Marshes. Not that map completion is required, per se. Nor are there any of the repeatable "Hearts" that formed such a significant component of releases in the last couple of Seasons, helping to spin out the storyline for an hour or so more.

There is a story requirement to participate in and complete several map events, which feels a lot more organic than the "help the locals" trope Hearts offered. The events are all at least approximately part of the storyline.

Completing those got me so close to having the whole of the map open I thought I might as well finish the job. It was easy because, in keeping with the rest of the episode, the new map has to be one of the smallest we've ever seen.

It's also another glorious tribute to the never-failing strength of ANet's art department, who also contribute some gorgeous interstitials as well as some fabulous, frost-rimed frames. Bjora Marshes, one of the least marshy zones imaginable, is by some margin the most convincing winter landscape yet, in a game that does cold weather exceptionally well.

Most of Tyria's snowy areas feature blinding white snow and a great deal of arctic blue. Bjora Marshes has none of that. The scene is unrelentingly grey. The sky is perpetually overcast, flickering with boreal light. It's a land locked in endless twilight.

When snow falls it feels desultory, hopeless. There's no sense of wonder or delight, just a grim, cold emptiness. The forest is a wasteland of broken, lifeless wood. The snowfields are barren wastes of grey, studded here and there with the ruins of a civilization long ago driven into retreat.

The whole place is one of the most convincing replications of winter I've seen in a game. I have walked through woods that felt like these (minus the Aberrant wildlife, naturally). The quality of the light feels familiar. The eerie, muffled soundscape rings true.

So, I liked the new map as an aesthetic experience. As for the gameplay, I'm not sure I'll ever know what that's like. There are a bunch of events and a meta as always. From what I read it's a short and easy meta, which would fit the rest of the episode perfectly.

There's a new currency and a vendor with stuff I don't care about, like there has been in every new map for years. I haven't spent any significant time in one of the new maps since Season Three. Other than for their brief appearance in the story itself, most of them might as well not exist as far as my time in GW2 goes.

Ah yes, the story. The supposed reason we're here. How's that going? Other than quickly.

It's... okay. If anyone reading this hasn't done it yet and plans to, perhaps it's time to skip ahead. Don't look at the pictures after this, either. There will be spoilers. Come back when you've played through it. You could go do it now. It's not like it'll take you very long...

A good test of how engaging and well-handled the story is could be how much of it I remember. I'm writing this three or four days after I completed the whole thing. Let's see...

It begins with a rather good set-up, a suspiciously distorted call for help from a supposed ally. I thought it had "trap" written all over it but of course we have to go find out for ourselves. There's a brief meeting with the extended "family", in this case Rytlock and Crecia, the ever-bickering exes, Braham, once again slipping into post-adolescent angst, and Marjory, seemingly herself as always. That won't last.

I do like the characters. Affection for them is just about the only thing that carries me through some of the unconvincing, incoherent plot twists. It irks me more than somewhat when the characterization slips.

I can just about cope with Rytlock's conversion to guilt-ridden 90s New Man Charr, emotionally scarrred by relationships past. I'm teeth-grittingly inured to the way Braham lurches from brash, drunken frat boy to viking warrior to emo soul-searcher. The days when I expected continuity and contact with all of my character's extended family are long over.

Even by those standards, Marjory's breakdown in the Labyrinth stands out as poor writing. It happens during the heart of this very short episode, a puzzle-based trip through a maze once used to test potential followers of the Norn Spirit, Raven.

It's a decent segment. The puzzles are intuitive and the Labyrinth limited enough that I was able to move through the whole thing with reasonable facility. There was no point when I even thought of stepping out of the game to look anything up.

Nothing much happens in the spooky corridors that hasn't happened to all of the characters countless times before. Being faced with phantoms from your past is par for the course in Tyria. Why Marjory should react to the spectral sight of her dead sister Belinda with a set of the vapors worthy of a Victorian melodrama beats me.

I've jumped ahead a little, though. Before the Labyrinth comes a very nicely handled horror movie intro in which the crew arrive at the military outpost where they're supposed to meet their contact, only to find it deserted. The grey light and softly falling snow play wonderfully into a sense of impending doom. I thoroughly enjoyed that part.

The camp leads to the new map, the weakest part of the episode in terms of narrative. There's a half-hearted attempt to pad things out by splitting the team up and sending the player character - sorry, The Commander - off to help each party in turn but the effect is ruined by poor design and buggy implementation. I could hear Rytlock and Cre bickering from the other side of the map!

The only other part I remember is the finale, a blessedly short boss fight of the kind that would have been sub-boss #2 back in Season Two. I can't actually remember how we got there but I do recall how the fight went.

There were no pointless new skills to learn, just a single special attack button to press at the appropriate moment with a big on-screen prompt in case you couldn't figure it out for yourself. As for the infamous "the floor's on fire, the air's full of lightning" mechanic so beloved of ANet's fight co-ordinators, there is some of that but it appears to be largely for visual effect only. I didn't bother dodging much, took very little damage. Also, if you want a break you can just back into the corridor for a timeout.

There is one celebrity death, part of the reveal that caps the aforementioned "suspicious call for help" plotline. Anyone who played through Heart of Thorns will surely have figured out the twist at the first hint of a mysterious whisper. Dragons will be dragons.

The impact of the death, which apparently upset some players quite a bit, was muted for me since I couldn't remember having seen the character before this Season. Apparently she was a key figure in Path of Fire but I've evidently blocked most of that farrago from my memory. The further we get from PoF, the more I loathe everything about it. The only good thing about not getting a third expansion is that we've been spared another one as bad.

And that's about it. As far as I can sum it up without fact-checking, Jormag is somewhere under the ice, whispering doubt into everyone's minds while promising some kind of help with some kind of threat. The Charr general and his followers, including Rytlock's son, are somewhere out there doing whatever it is they threatened to do (I've forgotten what that was) and we're no nearer to catching up with them than before.

Marjory's having a nervous breakdown, Taimi, Kas, Cannach and all the rest are off somewhere, doing something about which we don't need to know. Zojja is still missing. No one ever mentions her. She's been in rehab since Heart of Thorns. When and if we'll see any of them again seems almost entirely random.

Despite all the carping, I did enjoy "Whispers in the Dark". It's ludicrously short even by ANet's unimpressive standards, some of the characterization is threadbare, to put it charitably, and the new map is pocket-sized but I'd still take this episode over pretty much anything from Seasons Three and Four, if only for the hugely improved combat sequences, which allow me to use my character's regular abilities while fighting manageable opponents.

Perhaps the strangest thing about "Whispers" is the labelling. Described in the press release as "The first episode of The Icebrood Saga", it's much, much shorter and contains far less content than the "Prologue", "Bound by Blood". I suppose there's no reason the preamble shouldn't be several times the length of the first chapter but it's an unconventional approach.

Looking forward, Wintersday is next up on GW2's calendar. That would usually take us into the New Year. Lunar New Year follows that fairly swiftly. It wouldn't be too much of a surprise to see the second instalment of The Icebrood Saga drop sometime in February, although it could be any time, since the whole point of moving to a saga format was supposed to be flexibility.

A recent interview with a German website, as reported on Massively: OP, confirms there are no immediate plans for new Fractals, Raids or Legendaries. Even new hairstyles are nowhere in sight. None of this affects me personally, since I neither raid, run fractals, craft Legendaries or re-do my characters' coiffures on a regular basis, but all of these are matters of pressing interest to the hardcore GW2 player.

It is now almost impossible to picture ArenaNet as anything other than a studio in difficulties. The entire seven and a half year run of GW2 has been a series of badly mishandled changes of direction evidencing a complete lack of vision. The core game remains strong enough and - absolutely essentially - replayable enough to hold the attention of thousands of players but the increasingly feeble drip drip drip of new content is taking its inevitable toll.

I'll be on board for the whole trip, one way or another, but I foresee a future of sporadic visits, dropping back in for the infrequent updates then moving on to other MMORPGs where stuff actually happens. How long that can remain a viable business model is hard to judge but from waht I read, revenues don't seem to be down all that much, if at all.

Guild Wars 2 was originally conceived as a user-friendly, hyper-casual experience. Perhaps what we're seeing is a return to the game's roots. For all the drawbacks that come with this latest lurch in direction, I think I prefer the way things are going to the last couple of years.



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