Complaints (It's My Department)

I've complained about this before but that's not going to stop me complaining about it again. For some very effable reasons (colder weather, daylight vanishing, people staying indoors) game developers always seem to start throwing freebies around and launching new product just when I find myself with the least time to enjoy it all.

This year it's even more ironic in that I spent the entire summer at home, free (at least when I wasn't hospitalized) to devote as much time as I wanted to playing video games and writing about them (not least because my medication made me extremely sensitive to sunlight so I had to stay indoors even when I was feeling pretty good).

And now I'm back at work so off they go again.

Astellia (which, as you will see if you follow the link (which is where you end up if you right-click the name in text and select "search google for "Astellia"" like I did) has possibly the most annoying landing screen since web site designers stopped using rinkydink music you couldn't switch off; almost as annoying, in fact, as this heavily over-parenthesized and scarcely readable sentence) just had a free weekend.

I only found out about it halfway through, too late to make time to take advantage of their generosity. There's a second chance to try out this new, supposedly oldish school MMORPG, without forking out for a "box" (that doesn't exist) or taking the we're-so-old-school-we-even-even-have-a-subscription option. That's next weekend, when I will almost certainly still not be able to find time to try it out.

Not that I was especially interested in Astellia anyway. As I mentioned somewhere once, it seems to instill apathy in all who've tried it. Still, I hate to miss out on an opportunity to post ill-informed snap judgments on new games based on blink-and-you'll-miss-it exposure to their charms, if any. Especially when it doesn't cost me anything.

Then there's The Outer Worlds, another game I never had the least interest in playing until loads of people started talking about it. I hate to be left out. Such a joiner, me.

It wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't that, apparently, you can play this brand new, high-profile, "exclusive" release for the princely sum of one dollar. That's if you join the beta for the XBox Game Pass for PC (I hope that's a working title. It's informative, sure, but it's hardly snappy, now, is it?) XBGPfPC, as no-one is calling it, has a confusing pricing structure. On full release it will run you $9.99 per month but you can get in for just $4.99 with the Introductory Offer Not sure if there are dates for either of those yet but you could be beta testing it right now for a buck. What's stopping you?

It's a pretty good deal even at the $4.99. There are some well-reviewed games in there. Now that I seem to be dabbling more in non-MMORPG titles there are several I wouldn't mind trying. It would have been great three months ago. Now?  Not sure I'd get round to using it.

Still, I might give them that dollar anyway. I probably ought to be able to get a blog post or three out of it, at least. That would be money well spent.

Finally, at least until the next Autumn Promo lands, there's an entire week of free flying in Star Citizen. Actually, more like free mining, given that's the tentpole feature of the new build. I did get as far as finding my login details and updating the client (an 8GB download) for this one.

I had a very surprisingly good time in the last Free Fly, back in the spring and I wouldn't mind another go. Unfortunately, while my details work fine and my account is still valid, my character has vanished into the void. I made a new character this evening and managed to get as far as finding my ship and launching into space but I was tabbing in and out so much, trying to refresh my memory on how to play the damn game, it crashed and I lost the will to carry on.

Maybe I'll get back to it before the hangar doors clang shut for another six months. Probably not.

And there we have it. Suddenly I have loads of ideas of things to do that will generate things to write about and I don't have the time to carry them through.

I would quite like to take another look at ArcheAge in its F2P version now that the Buy to Play version is making such a splash. There are supposed to be some quality of life improvements in Star Wars: The Old Republic that I really should check out. Anything that empties my overstuffed storage bays has to be worth a log-in. Occupy White Walls had another update. I always get a mild twinge of guilt when that happens and I let it pass...

No doubt there's more I've missed and more to come. Oh well, at least it gives me something to complain about.

I Just Ride: Riders of Icarus

Just because I haven't mentioned Riders of Icarus for a few days doesn't mean I haven't been playing. Secret Worlds Legends has grabbed a sizeable piece of my extensive available playtime but RoI has been rolling along steadily behind.

Steam tells me I've now played for thirty-four hours, although that's somewhat inflated. So long as you have a Familiar summoned it will level up, even if all your character does is stand in a safe spot, running through their idle animations and squealing. What's more, the game tends not to time out when minimized, which has, on a couple of occasions, led to me not realizing it was still open until it came time to shut the PC off for the night.

Even so, the great majoriity of those hours have been actively played, most of it directed towards questing and leveling, which seems to proceed at a relatively stately pace. My new character dinged seventeen yesterday.

I continue to be quietly impressed by Riders of Icarus. There's nothing particularly special about it other than the collecting and taming mechanic but the familiarity of its basic systems form a substantial part of its charm.

It's quite an old-fashioned game, one that plays very much like an MMORPG released a decade ago, not in 2016. There is a market for this kind of thing. That's what the heavily-publicized Astellia is counting on but why pay $99 for beta access when you could play RoI right now, for free?

I spent some time crafting yesterday. There are six crafting professions, five of which you'd expect to find in almost every MMORPG: Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, Jeweller, Cook and Alchemist. The only unfamiliar tradeskill is Bardercraft, which makes armor for Familiars and consumables that buff your chance to tame them.

Tradeskills seem to level up very similarly to what I remember from Lord of the Rings Online, although with a considerably simplified process. You go to a crafting station and make items. When you've made enough of an item you "Master" it. When you've mastered all the items in a tier you pay your trainer a fee, they open the next tier and off you go again.

You can do all the crafts on the same character and since I happened to have a small pile of silver ore in my bank I started with Jewellery. It didn't take long or cost much to complete the first tier. There's minimal randomization of results when it comes to leveling the skill - you get a point per combine and you need a specific number of  xp points per Mastery.

You can get a Triumphant result, which gives you double the xp and two of the item you're making. I think I had that happen twice. Materials come from gathering in the open world or instances and from mob drops plus a range of items bought from your trainer.  A nice touch is that trainers also sell the basic Tier One gathered mats, which gets you off to a running start. I only had about enough gathered mats to do half of T1 Jewellery but I was able to buy the rest for a nominal cost to finish the Tier.

As with all "make items to level up" crafting systems, you end up with your bags full of things you neither want nor need and which no-one wants to buy. My first response was to sell them all back to the Trainer. I made a loss but it wasn't a big loss. I was happy to take it as the fee for leveling up.

Then, as I was moving on to Cooking, it occured to me that RoI also has a salvage system. You can buy Extractors from NPCs which allow you to deconstruct gear and get Tempering Stones to upgrade your gear. At the moment this is of limited use, since most of my gear isn't upgradeable but the stones stack and will no doubt come in handy eventually. (Where have I heard that before?).

I bought all my rings and amulets back from the vendor I'd sold them to via the Buyback tab. I was interested to see that you have go back to the specific vendor you used, meaning they must all have individual inventories. That's something that varies from game to game. I rarely use the function so I tend to be fuzzy on details, game by game, but as Syp found, when he was dabbling in the World of Warcraft Beta, Buyback is a thing you only miss when you find it's not there.

How useful crafting is long-term remains to be seen. One thing I wish I could make is bags but the developers have cannily limited those to quest rewards and the Cash Shop. Apparently there's a market for high-end potions and the Marks needed for taming Familiars but since all the available info on the web seems to be the best part of three years old I'll believe that when I'm high enough to make them, will will probably be never.

Despite the lack of up-to-date guides and commentary online, the game itself always seems quite busy, even though I'm playing weekday afternoons in the U.K. on a North American server. It's certainly busy enough that I can't solo in peace without people trying to chat to me. That's a particular feature of Eastern imports that rarely gets a mention - people who play them seem to love chatting to complete strangers.

I guess that's another feather in Riders of Icarus's old-school chapeau, although, like many of the supposed wonders of the Golden Age it's probably one I could do without. I prefer wombling about at my own pace in this kind of simple, open-world content. Might be a different matter when it comes to dungeons, I guess.

There's a new event going on but it doesn't seem to be a patch on the last one. It revolves around taming ten horses every day and then Sealing them to hand over to a robot cat from outer space. Since it costs 20 silver to buy the item that seals a single horse, that seems prohibitively expensive for a daily quest. I've only made four gold in total so far!

What's more, the items the cat's selling aren't all that interesting to me and the prices he's charging seem extremely high. I think I'm going to sit this event out and wait to see what the next one brings. I'm sure there'll be another one along any day now.

Meanwhile I'm just going to wander around and enjoy myself. The scenery is often spectacular in an over-sugared, junior-on-psychedelics kind of way but there's some real attention to detail that makes both the art and sound design stand out.

When I eventually found my way onto the battlements of the capital, thanks to a quest, I was particularly taken by the way one of the flowering cherry trees outside overspilled the crenellations onto the walkway. I have seen exactly that effect in very similar circumstances in real life and in video games these things don't just happen by accident, so I'm guessing so had the artist.

When I got my first permanent flying mount (I have two now) I hedge-hopped past a windmill and was stopped in my tracks (not that sparrows leave tracks in flight but you know what I mean) by a hauntingly familiar sound. I have stood next to a windmill of very similar design in La Mancha and that's exactly the noise they make. In game I found it evocative and impressively authentic.

Small pleasures, to be sure, but they add up. I'll be playing this one for a while.

Same Old Song : Astellia

As Mailvatar noted in the comments to the previous post, I do have a lot of MMOs on my desktop right now. Can you ever have enough MMORPGs, though? That's the question. There's always room for one more, isn't there?

A couple of days ago, MassivelyOP reported on a new one to me. I probably should have remembered it - they first featured it back in 2016 - but I didn't. It's yet another Eastern import, coming to us in here the West, this time, from South Korea. It's called Astellia, which is a perfectly functional, -if rather bland - name for what looks to be a standard Eastern take on Western fantasy.

It also just happens to be the name chosen by "a leading provider of network and subscriber intelligence", whose website currently leads the Google search race. If the new MMORPG succeeds in emulating the success of another fairly recent import, Black Desert Online, those rankings could easily change.

On the topic of BDO, while we're talking about it, I patched the game up the other day. I already had a full installation from a few months after the Western launch but to bring it up to date I had to download another 36GB. BDO has had a lot of "expansions" since I've been away. It is, by most reports, thriving.

When I was finally able to log in I found my characters all still where I left them. I'd forgotten I had three. Multiple characters in a particular game is usually a sign that I'm enjoying myself. I did indeed find Black Desert quite compelling for a while.

There's a non-trivial chance I'd find it so again but unfortunately my current installation appears to have a bug that's close to game-breaking: my keyboard doesn't work. When I got into the game I couldn't move or do anything. I stood there by the side of the road and watched horses and carriages pound past me. A giant airship cruised by overhead. I don't remember those being in the game when I last played.

That thing's going to frighten the sheep.

Some fiddling about via the Escape menu eventually got my WASD keys working but that was about it. I can run about and talk to NPCs but not much else. I remembered the way to my cliffside cottage, another indication that I'd been fairly invested in the game at one time. I made my way there and found it exactly as I'd left it.

By this point I was quite keen to carry on playing so I did some research on the bug and tried a number of suggested fixes. None of them worked. If all else fails I can try a full re-install but I can't say I'm looking forward to it so chances are I'll let BDO lie fallow for a while longer.

Anyway, right now I'm patching up Elder Scrolls Online, so I don't have the bandwidth. The ESO patcher doesn't tell me the full size of the download but I'm guessing it's huge because I've been at it for several hours and there's no sign of it stopping. Maybe it'll be ready for the weekend.

I did succeed in getting Dragon Nest installed and patched. It seems to have changed hands yet again. I've lost count of how many different owners and publishers it's had. None of my several previous login IDs worked so I made a new account with the oddly-named Cherry Credits and started over from scratch, yet again. I think that's the fourth time - no, the fifth if I count the mobile version.

Cherry Credits appears to be some kind of Singaporean portal for any number of games. Why I now have to go via Singapore to play a game called Dragon Nest EU beats me but Dragon Nest is worth any amount of hoop-jumping. I think it's probably fair to say it's one of my favorite MMORPGs of all time, now. Maybe one day I'll actually manage to get far enough to find out what's going on in the demented storyline.

Dora Dora Dorah!

With all that re-installing and re-investing going on I probably don't need to be looking to new games to satisfy my craving for "novelty" but I am anyway. What caught my attention about Astellia was the producers' insistence that it's going to be "a Classical MMORPG striving to return the genre to its roots". 

Doubling down on that bold claim, in an interview with MOP, Astellia's Western publisher, Barunson (no, me neither...) goes on to predict that "Astellia is positioned to appeal to players who have enjoyed EverQuest, Guild Wars 2, and other content based MMORPGs". 

The game uses the modern version of the Holy Trinity (Tank, Healer, DPS) and has an old-school PvE/PvP split, with solo and group dungeons, instanced battlegrounds and large-scale, three faction realm versus realm PvPvE. That's quite a list of things I like, if only they're done the way I like them to be done.

What's been somewhat harder to establish is how the controls work. Combat is tab-target but I have yet to ascertain for certain whether it's also hotbar-enabled in what we've learned to call "WoW Style". It doesn't necessarily follow but from this video it certainly looks as though there's a free mouse pointer in play. 

So far, so good, from my perspective, at least. Also, the world looks visually attractive and the characters and animations seem smooth enough. I did a bit more digging and found some comments from people who have played the Korean version. For example: 

"I played a healer (it has defined roles) but found it really mediocre - its not horrible, but its also not anything groundbreaking or amazing. The questing is boring, its hub based - the game just feels like something that belongs in 2005."

"The questing was really bad - kill stuff, pick plants - and always have to run back to the quest guy - no remote turn in - just a bunch of time wasted. The first mount comes in early - I think at level 7 or 8, but even with the mount I felt like I was moving really.... slow... back from one NPC to another to do these mindless quests. The game does have sort of an old-school feel to it but it's nowhere near as good as old school MMORPGs." 

Which is... kind of what I wanted to hear. Not the part about it being not as good as the games it professes to model itself on, obviously, but that it does, in fact, ressemble them to a significant degree.

Something I found significantly more intriguing was this interview. It seems to have been Google-translated, which makes it for a highly, if unintentionally, amusing read but there are also some quite surprising revelations concerning the thoughts and intentions behind the game.

"Q. The composition of the content looks like a game that requires patience, which should last a long time. I wonder how you look at the age group playing this game.

Chung Hyun-tae, CEO: It aims to make sure that a game is convinced, and it is aimed internally and at the 30th and 40th user groups. Of course, it is said that the age group is the same for all ages."

Borrowed from the official website

What this means (it's clarified later in the interview) is that the demographic targeted by the Korean developers is players in their thirties and forties but younger players might enjoy it anyway. The character visuals do play a little younger than the setting suggests but targeting an older audience makes quite a lot of sense when you consider the retro gameplay.

Chung Hyun-tae goes on to say "I want to point out that if you were targeting users of 3:40, you are not focusing heavily on a niche market", by which I interpret him to mean that there are a lot of MMORPG players in that age bracket. And I think that's right. You just don't often hear MMORPG designers admit that their core audience is aging.

Al this and I haven't even mentioned the title's USP, which is the eponymous "Astell Companion System", which consists of  "Dozens of Astels to acquire, level, and build effective support teams that can combo directly with your character based on classes and skills". It's a collectible card game inside an MMORPG, essentially. I remain to be convinced how well that will work but it'll be something different to play around with and learn, which is always fun.

All things considered, I'm not expecting much of Astellia. It's going to be a very odd duck, something of a hybrid throwback, combining WoW-clone era gameplay and design with relatively recent Eastern visuals. It's also likely to have a Buy-to-Play business model. They promise no "Pay to Win" and a relatively inocuous cash shop but we'll see.

I'll probably buy it. I'm not so sure about the "play" part.