Ourselves The Elves

Psychochild has a post up about the perennial topic (I won't say "problem") of Roleplaying in MMORPGs. Over the years, RP has become a niche within a niche but if you drift back far enough in time it was once baseline behavior for the genre.

In 1999-2003, when I was playing EverQuest (on and off) pick-up groups were the norm. I met countless players, some of whom became online friends, some of whom I never saw again. In virtually every group someone, often several people would roleplay. Or rather, they would do something that we all thought of as "roleplaying" back then but which these days comes much closer to what I referred to in my recent "Conversation Starters" post as "character play".

Not if Scarlet sees you first, you won't.

The difference between what I'm calling character play (I'm not sure if its a term anyone else uses) and the practice generally known as roleplay nowadays is mostly - but not entirely - one of degree. Modern-day roleplay tends to be very serious business indeed. As Brian says in his piece, the current understanding is that "RP is basically shared storytelling". People get as deeply involved as actors do in their craft and we all know just how seriously actors take acting.

In-game racial abuse - weirdly okay.

Then there's the emotional commitment. "RP sometimes makes us feel vulnerable because it can expose emotions we often keep to ourselves." says Brian. There's a reason why many non-roleplayers go beyond finding roleplaying not to their taste to feeling actively threatened by it. The reason is fear of intimacy.

This is not the case with character play and it was rarely the case with what many players called "roleplay" in the early days of MMOs. While there absolutely were cadres of serious roleplayers back then, including whole RP guilds and cross-guild RP organizations who treated the virtual worlds of EQ or UO as backdrops for their collectively-constructed dramas, they were not the mainstream. Not even close.

Mainstream roleplaying in the dawn of MMORPGs was tawkin liek dis if you woz a troll or usin' a vera bad Scotch accent fer yer dwarrven clerrric. It was standing aloof and making sarcastic comments if you were playing a dark elf or handing out muffins to everyone in the party if you were a hobbit halfling.

In the lengthy downtime between pulls and set-ups, conversation ranged from what gear you were wearing to the latest sports news. There was no hard boundary between ooc and in-character chat. People dipped in and out of both all the time.

What's more, many people would stay in character while discussing out of character subjects. In EverQuest at that time people playing Trolls and Ogres would often not break character at all. You could be recovering from a bad pull at Back Door in the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen and the Troll SK might say "gunna be afk a minnit. Dam cat skratchin at de door agen".

There were players I knew quite well at that time who I literally never heard speaking normal English. I was never that consistent myself when I played EQ but when I moved to Vanguard my Raki Disciple developed a particular speech pattern almost immediately and never deviated from it until the game closed down.

Names changed to protect the infantile.

Vanguard was, I think, the first MMO that Mrs Bhagpuss and I played mainly as a duo. We'd duoed
many times in other games but we'd also soloed a lot, been in the same and in separate guilds, had shared and separate circles of friends - the whole range. In Vanguard we started together and never really got to know many other people.

That was probably how we came to develop the kind of character play between ourselves that we've carried on in some form ever since. It consists largely of playing our characters as though they were various stripes of siblings or childhood friends (or more often frenemies).

It's actually worse when you can see what they're talking about.

There's a lot of jibing and taunting, frequently based around shared experiences and knowledge of each others (imagined, in game) habits and personality quirks. We tend to play small races as though they are the age their height makes them appear, while taller characters tend to be po-faced, long-suffering adults.

Size matters.

Over time a huge range of in-jokes accrue, some of which get carried over from one character to another or even one game to another. Not infrequently we stay in these character roles even when we are talking in game about something outside the gameworld.

I don't much like formal roleplay. I've tried it and I've watched a good deal. Mostly it seems to be artificial, forced and awkward. I find the conventions of using emotes spelled out in text with some signifier in front excruciatingly arch. The predeliction many roleplayers have for talking about their characters in the third person or the passive voice is about as unimmersive as it's possible to get.

I've also had a number of unfortunate experiences with aggressive RPers demanding compliance with their self-imposed standards in open-world areas and in non-roleplaying groups. I was once pursued for much of a Sunday morning by a Hobbit in LotRO who insisted it was my obligation to help him level for RP reasons which he articulated with increasing vigor and anger when I told him I had other plans.

Part of his argument was that, since I had rolled a character on a designated RP server, my characters were required to behave at all times in a certain manner, one which, in this instance, seemed to have far less to do with RP and a lot more to do with him not being able to find a group. My response was to quit LotRO altogether and go back to EQ2, where people generally let you use the bank without badgering you to take them adventuring.

Even the adults in the room...

All of this puts me in a somewhat ambiguous position. I have major reservations about roleplay in MMORPGs and my experiences with the more serious end of the hobby over the years have mostly tended to reinforce rather than remove those reservations. On the other hand I absolutely love character play and really regret the extent to which it has slipped into obscurity.

I'd love to hear Asuran player-characters talking like brash, self-agrandizing little "geniuses" or Charr gruffly cursing and calling each other out over their supposed legionary affiliations. My game experience would be considerably enhanced if players remembered which of their characters were Priory or Order of Whispers and dropped a few comments accordingly now and again.

It's all about getting the voice right...

It's not that it never happens any more. I see it occasionally. It stands out as the exception, though, where once it was so familiar I wouldn't have noticed.

You don't know what you've got til it's gone as Joni Mitchell used to say. Then again, she was obviously a High Elf, so no-one would have paid her the slightest attention anyway...

Off To The Races

When I checked my Feedly this morning the first thing I saw was this question from Keen:


What’s Your Favorite MMORPG Race and Why?


I immediately thought of the Lunar New Year's race through Divinity's Reach in GW2. I did that over and over and really enjoyed it. Did I enjoy it more than the aerial races organized by EQ2's gnomes for every City Festival, though? Or the many races around Metropolis and Gotham in DCUO? And what about that all-time classic, EverQuest's Naked Gnome Race from Ak'Anon to Freeport?

Then I read Keen's post and realized he didn't mean that kind of race at all. He meant the kind of race you choose at Character Creation. The one that decides whether you're short or tall, hated or admired, a genius or a dimwit. Whether you're covered in fur or scales, have a tail or wings. All that good stuff.

The term "Race", of course, is a bit of a misnomer as it's generally applied in MMORPGs. Sometimes it can be an accurate description, as in Vanguard, which has four "races" with the subtitle "Human", but usually it means Species. Then again, the species boundary gets very blurry in fantasy.

We tend to think of Humans, Elves and Orcs as genuinely disparate, separate species but that can hardly be the case when they can interbreed to give us Half-Orcs and Half Elves. Not to mention Half-Giants. The line fades to the point of invisibility when magic comes into the picture with races like EverQuest's Drakkin, "a human race" with "a touch of dragon blood...scaly skin, marking, hair and sometimes horns that mirror the dragon that gifted them their heritage".

Exactly how a dragon  "gifts" such a heritage is - probably wisely - left to the imagination. The more you ponder on all this, the less sense it seems to make. Why are there so many half elves but no "half-humans"? Is that just a naming convention or are the Elven parent's genes always dominant? If Elves and Humans can interbreed successfully, why not Gnomes and Dwarves? Or can they, but they just don't, for cultural reasons?

At first blush MMORPGs - particularly those with a fantasy setting - appear to offer a multiplicity of racial options but they tend to narrow down to a handful once you look at them closely. For a start, almost every Player Race in every MMO is bipedal. Istaria famously lets you play as a (four-legged) dragon, which was the game's primary USP back when it launched as Horizons. Project: Gorgon's Cows are another notable exception, although even there you can't actually roll a cow (!) at character creation. You have to become one by magic in game.

GW2's Charr are highly unusual in that, while bipedal in combat, they drop to all fours when running. It's one of the features that make them so appealing as a racial choice for me even though they are definitely on the larger end of the scale. I do cleave to the smaller races as a rule.

Many Western MMOs have a handful of options that at least attempt to add some variation to the "Short human", "tall human", "human with horns", "human with tail", "human with wings" palette seen in so many imports from the East. WoW has Bulls, Wolves, Goats, Pandas and Undead, all of which walk upright on two legs and look like humans dressed up for Mardi Gras.  

Allods, which modelled a deal of its visual appearance on WoW, took things a stage further with Gibberlings, who come in packs of three and are a lot closer to "animals dressed up as humans" than the other way round. Indeed, Gibberlings probably rest at the cusp of Fantasy and Anime, or Fantasy and Cartoon if you want to be Western about it, which is where the real non-human races come into their own.

There was that one MMO where I played as a rabbit. What was that one called? Eden Eternal, that's it! It's still running, too. There was also the similarly-named and much-missed Earth Eternal, an all-animal MMO I played in beta with some degree of enjoyment. Those animals still stood upright, though, unlike the deer in Endless Forest, a bizarre affair which has, astonishingly, spawned some kind of sub-genre that incudes Meadow and Wolfquest.

Plenty of choice if you cast your MMO net far enough. Closer to home, in the handful of MMOs we all talk about as though they represented the genre, not so much. Which brings me back to Keen's original question. So, what is my favorite MORPG race?

Just for once I can answer that question! In fact, I can list my top ten in order without having to think too hard about it.

1. Raki - Vanguard - Stocky foxes with a great backstory, characterful animations and the happiest faces.

2. Ratonga - EQ2 - Cute rats with another excellent backstory and the most endearing verbal tic in gaming.

3. Gnome - EverQuest - Short, smart, every one kinda likes them and they have the tickingest city in Norrath.

4. Charr - GW2 - Big cats that don't do the "catgirl/catman" thing, run on all fours and have the city Ak'Anon would be if it was a military-industrial complex.

5. Asura - GW2 - They're rats but they won't admit it. Why do you think they're so obsessed with the Skritt (who would totally be on this list if you could play them). Best animations and great voicework, too.

6. Gibberlings - Allods - Three demented gerbils for the price of one. What's not to love?

7. Vah'Shir - EverQuest - Another non-cute cat race. I never really took to the EQ2 version but I played a Vah'Shir Beastlord in EQ for many years and the combination of a tiger-person with a tiger pet is hard to top.

8. Goblin - Warhammer Online - Cowardly, obsequious, disgusting and only they can be the second-best class in any MMO, the Squig-Herder.

9. Dwarf - EverQuest - Just a classic. So solid, so reliable, so predictably gruff. Everything you want a dwarf to be and everything you don't.

 10. Riven - City of Steam - The race I wish I'd played more before the game closed down. Cool, stylish, mysterious, the Riven could have been so much more if only City of Steam had followed its original plan.

Well, that's the top ten today. Ask me tomorrow and it may have changed. Raki is always going to be number one, though. In my heart, anyway.

Inbetween Days : GW2

Yesterday's update to GW2 didn't add much to the game other yet more pointless nodes for the personal instance and a tweak to the way Black Lion Chests (the game's lootboxes) work. In celebration of that momentous event there's a free chest and a key to open it with for all non-F2P accounts. Look in the Promotions section of the Trading Post while stocks last.

The current BLC comes with a guaranteed Mini Yellow Jackal Pup, multiples of which can be combined with dyes in the Mystic Forge to make several different colored versions. They are also tradable so you can go for the set without needing to spend real money although it would cost you a fair amount of gold for a full jackal pack.

More interesting and far less publicized was the arrival of the latest Current Event. As I've written before, these supposed side-dishes that ANet slip onto the table to keep us from getting hungry between servings of the Living Story are frequently a lot more satisfying than the main course itself.

The only hint this time was a line in the Game Release Notes that read "Reports of undead attacking travelers near major cities have increased". They did at least make it the first line this time, so it was harder than usual to overlook.

Even so, in all the excitement of World vs World, which was very lively last night, I forgot to go and see what was happening. It was only when I logged in to do the vista daily in Metrica today and nearly got trampled by a stampede of Level 80s on Springers, Raptors and Griffins that I remembered there was something I was supposed to do.

I won't go into details. Dulfy, as always, has an excellent rundown of exactly where you need to go, when you need to go there and what you need to do when you arrive. The event involves the overrated and currently ubiquitous Palawa Joko and his Awakened Army but it's a lot of fun anyway.

It's not dissimilar to the much-missed Scarlet Invasions but this time the whole thing has been streamlined and sped up so that it feels like it's on fast-forward. There's a lot of opening the map, finding a waypoint and hoping your map loads in before everything dies. It's frantic and chaotic which appeals to me no end.

After the Lord Mayor's Show

As is so unerringly the case when ANet makes events of this kind, there's an unfortunate and quite serious bug. The event comes with a series of Achievements, one of which triggers a very nice little follow-on "quest" but lots of people aren't getting the correct credit for participating that's needed to trigger the Achievements.

The bug has been acknowledged by ANet but so far there's been no fix even though we've had several subsidiary updates since the main one. I got all my necessary Achievements on one account on my first attempt but I got nothing at all on my second account and Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't had anything on either of hers.

Even so, it's still worth doing before the fix because it's a lot of fun and there's a lot of loot to be grabbed. I've had two exotic weapons drop (well, pop out of boxes I opened) so far. I know that's pure RNG luck and also Exotics are now barely worth what Rares went for before PoF (and Rares are all but worthless) but it's exciting nonetheless.

And one of them was "Kevin", the bizarrely-named Mace that looks like a thigh-bone . I've wanted that for over five years, just so I can link it in chat at opportune moments. Yes, I could buy it on the TP these days for under a gold but that would take most of the fun out of it.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

Further mention should be made of the the little quest that comes after the events. As is often the case with these Side Stories, it's particularly well done. Better than almost anything in either Path of Fire or Living Story 4 in my opinion.

If that sounds overstated, given that it's no more than a short scavenger hunt with some dialog, I have some evidence to offer. A lot of thought has been put into how the quest is going to be received by the players doing it.

It doesn't require you to have completed Hearts in order to buy the items, for example. Two of them are in boxes on the ground and one is sold by a regular vendor. The locations where the items are found also make complete logical and lore sense.

Better still, even though the items themselves are Account Bound, as is the final item they make, only the character who was present at the original event when the Achievement was completed can take them out of the chests or buy them from the vendor.

I found that out when I sent my Ranger to get one because my Elementalist had never been to Timberline Falls and the Ranger wasn't able to see the dialog or the item on the vendor. The Ele had to fly all the way from The Priory to Fisher's Eye Bridges on her griffon to get it herself.

For special customers only.

That will infuriate some players but it made me happy. I was even happier when Mechanist Ninn, the Asura who makes the final item, told me it would take a day to finish it and my Asuran character was able to say she knew a bit about machinery herself so could she give him a hand?

She and the NPC then had a little chat about it and made the item on the spot. Iron Legion Charr and all Engineers can do the same but everyone else has to wait a whole real-life day! Things like that, and Ninn addressing my character by her class and name rather than just calling her "Commander", go a long way towards drawing me into the story, even when there really isn't much of a story to be drawn into in the first place.

If previous Current Events are anything to go by the invasion should carry on for a few weeks. It's hard to see how it could be made a permanent fixture the way most (all?) of the others have been but I certainly wouldn't complain if it was.

Now if someone would just fix the bug so everyone can get credit for their effort, that would be lovely. Thanks, Anet!

What Time Do You Make it, Bero?

This is the clock Mrs Bhagpuss made me for my birthday.

On the left, in blue, is my Asura Elementalist. On the right, in pink, is Mrs Bhagpuss's Asura Elementalist. Fero and Bero for short (as if Asuras could be anything else).

The shape of the clock denotes their home city, Rata Sum, which is all angles. What the keys represent I'm not exactly sure...

There are also tiny lights that look like the stars around Rata Sum as it floats in space only lights are phenomenally difficult to photograph if you only have a digital camcorder that you don't really know how to use to take stills.

I hung the clock quite high on the wall directly behind my monitor where I can look up and see it. It looks fantastic. I tried to take a picture of it in situ but the result was... less than fantastic. I think I need a better camera. Or to learn how to use this one.

Anyway, terrible photos notwithstanding, it's an amazing present. All those hours at the crafting tables in Lion's Arch really paid off!

A Sense of Scale : GW2

Everything in Heart of Thorns is overgrown, overblown, overloaded. The heights are higher, the depths deeper, the undergrowth thicker, the monsters bigger than anywhere else in Tyria.

And, let's face it, Asura aren't big to begin with. We have trouble climbing the steps in Hoelbrak. Of course, so do the Norn, but only because they're always drunk.

Then again, whoever built these cities, the ruined and the golden alike, worked on a scale that even a Norn would balk at. If it wasn't for the endless stairways this would be a fine place for a stilt-walkers' convention. They'd never have to duck going through an archway, that's for sure.

This is country that demands heft in all things. No wonder the cities are the way they are. The trees, the cliffs, the canyons, you could hardly put up a bungalow and call it home. Shhh. Don't mention Bongo. We're not talking about him. Whoever he is.

Even Rata Novus is oversized for an Asura settlement. Then again, so is Rata Sum. It's Dwarven Architect Syndrome all over again.

In the end all you can do is embrace, go with the flow, cast yourself to the winds and trust them to bear you up. And if they don't, well, if an Asura falls in the jungle, who's going to hear?

Chin up. It's not like the Charr have it so much better. Although they do have that always landing on their feet thing going. I wonder how that's working out for them?

Ah well, at least we're not Sylvari. That's a thought to keeps you warm at night. Sweet dreams.

The Past Is A Different Country: GW2

Ravious has a very positive post up about the latest Living Story installment, Seeds of Nightmare. I'm not quite as impressed as all that but I liked it too. Well, what there was of it.

Adrian observed in the comments yesterday " It was shorter than the last one and not a whole lot happens." That about does it. I would guess there's maybe 10-15 minutes of dialog and cut scenes. There is a lot of really quite intriguing back-story and lore but the main storyline comes to a dead stop.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that after completing the entire episode I have no more idea why Caithe took Glint's egg, where she went with it or what she might be about to do next than I had two weeks ago, when she ran off with the dam' thing in the first place. I do, however, know a lot more than I did about the Sylvari in general and several of that race's featured players in particular. If I was asked to sum up what I now know I think something along the lines of "they're a race of sociopaths" would probably cover it.

Take my word for it - you don't want to. Not this lot.

Of course, that description fits the Asura pretty tightly too. It's hard to say which sequence in the current chapter is the more unpleasant - the Inquest and their vivisection lab for sentient races or the Sylvari runaway-slave-recovery/ethnic cleansing squad. Either would sit a lot more happily against the relentless grimdark of The Secret World than the watercolor wash and neon rainbow backdrop of Tyria.

Safe to say there aren't a lot of laughs in this episode. The only one of either Destiny's Edge or the Biconics to make an appearance is Marjory and she's never a barrel of laughs at the best of times. Even less so now she's carrying her dead sister in the form of a six-foot sword and brooding on fantasies of revenge.

She and your character visit The Pale Tree, who is not best pleased when she learns you let Caithe get away with the egg. She's positively snappy in fact. She reminded me of a mother who just found out her son "forgot" to deliver a note from school. I never trusted her anyway and not one thing I have heard her say thus far gives me any reason to change my mind.

Pwincess! Come back from the edge!

After that it's the usual traipsing about to find this or that location, before entering an instance, where you have some fights. The McGuffin this time around is a handful of Memory Seeds that let you relive significant events in Caithe's past, the idea being that you might thereby get some handle on her future, viz and to wit where she went with the egg. Well I can't say that worked for me. Don't have a clue.

The traveling is done as yourself with Marjory tagging along. There's a nice new widget that uses a "...warm, warmer, now you're getting cold..." routine to locate the exact spot and then it's into Caithe's memories you go. Marjory stays outside, presumably guarding your inert body, while you get to spin and leap about in the form of Caithe.

Caithe is a thief. I have a level 80 Thief but I rarely play her. Leveling up I pretty much used the bow and spammed Heartseeker and that was it. Shadow Refuge if that didn't work. Whether Caithe's skills bear any resemblance to a player-thief's I can't say, partly out of ignorance and partly because I didn't bother to examine them. I followed the tried and tested method of spamming everything all the time whenever it wasn't on cooldown, dodge included.

Look, I've told you once. You'll be going in the bag if this carries on.

This had me throwing myself around like Batroc ze Leaper on amphetamines but it seemed to get the job done. I died once, thereby discovering Caithe has no downed state and the health of her enemies resets so I made sure not to die again, which wasn't difficult. Normally I'd say I'd rather play my own character but frankly anything that gets these obligatory fight sequences over faster is worth a try.

There's a bug in the Inquest Lab section where Caithe can get stuck in perma-stealth, meaning she can't fight or interact with objects - game over, start the instance again in other words. That happened to me but luckily Faolain was already in combat so I just sat back and watched while she cleared the room. She's unkillable but she has the DPS of an elderly armadillo so it took a while.

Oh yes, Faolain. Wherever you go in Caithe's head Faolain is sure to be there. She's Caithe's quondam lover and current leader of The Nightmare Court, a bunch of bona fide, full-on psychopaths who broke away from The Pale Tree a couple of decades ago so they could be free to act like emo teenagers. And kill people. Most of this chapter is effectively their origin story.

Canach shows his softer side. I think he's over that now.

It's also Canach's origin story and Trahearne's origin story. It's like a Secret Origins Annual! They come out of things about the opposite of what I'd have guessed. Trahearne acts like a stubborn, bigoted ass while Canach is empathic and sympathetic. I wondered if someone swapped a Post-It on someone else's desk back in the writers' room. Can't deny I found it intriguing though.

On it goes like that. Lore, backstory, characterization, no plot progression. Having riled up The Fans throughout Season One by seemingly turning their faces against anything that happened in Tyria prior to 2012 Earth Time, the writers appear to have done a one-eighty and decided the past is where it's at. Or The Fans are where the money comes from and long-term future of the game, if it's going to have one, has to be curated to their satisfaction. Both, probably.

I played a bit of Guild Wars. Origins around launch, Eye of The North and Origins again much later, when I was warming up for GW2. A smattering of the rest - I own all the expansions. I am no kind of GW lore buff though. About all I know of Abaddon or The White Mantle are the names. Consequently I am beginning to feel slightly at sea. I have to wonder how appealing this stuff is to the GW2 players who only know GW2.

Pwincess! Pwincess! I'm sorry I yelled at you. Oh, where did she go?

I imagine that's the demographic that wasn't quite so gosh-wow over the books in the Durmand Priory Library; the players who'd quite like the story to be more about the big dragon we're fighting now and less about things that happened twenty years ago. There are rumblings of dissatisfaction on the forum to this effect although that proves nothing. Rumblings of dissatisfaction is the forum.

It'll all lead somewhere. Most probably to an expansion in the Spring or early Summer. All will no doubt be forgiven and forgotten then. Meanwhile we'll take our story in drip-feed form and like it. It's not like we have a choice.

What's more, the story formed only the most minor part of this update. There was a big revamp of the PvP game, a small addition to the overland map and a humungous new jumping puzzle. To no-one's surprise more than my own it's the jumping puzzle that looks like being the highlight. It may well be getting its own post here, when I have time to explore it further. I spent a very enjoyable hour there today, mostly taking screenshots of my Charr Ranger in heroic poses (see above).

Charr ranger is categorically the worst class/race combo for jumping puzzles so next time I'll be taking an Asura. That'll mean a lot of screenshots looking up. As for that story about a big dragon...next year for that I guess. Hope he's the patient type of dragon.

Oh, Hey! Destiny's Edge! Didn't You Guys Used To Be Famous Or Something? : GW2

I had something of a GW2 epiphany this week. I was reading the Edge of Destiny novel and  suddenly I understood just why so many players really hated Season One of The Living Story.

Sure, it was episodic and fractured and all over the place, I knew that. Sure, Scarlet was a deeply unconvincing villain and the plot, in so far as there was one, made no sense at all. I got all that, even as we were playing through, but none of it particularly bothered me at the time. It was like the buffet at a wedding - you pick out the bits you like and leave the rest, don't you? And if that turns out to be most of it, well, it doesn't really matter because the food's hardly the reason you came, right?

Well, maybe. There's another way to look at it, though  Try turning that analogy on its head. It seems some people hadn't come expecting a big, flashy wedding at all. They'd come for a satisfying meal with some old friends and that hastily thrown-together buffet left a lot of them feeling very hungry. I was a bit puzzled by that but now I think I understand.

Edge of Destiny isn't great literature. It's not even great genre literature. It's fluent and professional but somewhat perfunctory, something Ravious picked up on in the review he posted back when the book came out, some two years before GW2 . Despite being over 300 pages long it often feels more like reading notes for a novel than the novel itself. In part  that's down to the minimalist prose style, which uses a lot of short, declarative sentences and one-line paragraphs, but mostly it's because of the vast number of fight scenes. Detailed descriptions of fights and battles probably make up almost two-thirds of the word count.

Nevertheless it zips along. I've read a lot worse. If I'd never played GW2 I'd probably still have finished reading it. Of course, if I'd never played GW2 I would never have started reading it in the first place. Edge of Destiny exists only as an adjunct to the game. Nothing unusual about that. Lots of successful enterprises in many forms of entertainment have spin-offs in other formats. That's fine.

It's fine, but it's not what's happening here. Not all of it by a long way. Having read the thing at last, I'd say that far from being just a bit of ancillary fluff or deep background for lore obsessives, a reading of Edge of Destiny is pretty much required if you hope to engage emotionally with the whole Elder Dragon storyline. They should have included the eBook with the game purchase. It's that essential.

MMOs always have an awkward, difficult, relationship with narrative but GW2 is even more problematic in that regard than most. For a start there's the vast iceberg of the original Guild Wars looming ominously below the surface. GW1 was a narrative-driven rpg that over many years produced several lengthy campaigns and a number of smaller expansions. The plots, characters and stories of many of these feed directly into the lore and storyline of GW2.

GW2, then, does not come clean to the table and neither do its players. Depending on their previous level of involvement with the franchise they will have highly varying degrees of both pre-existing emotional commitment and knowledge and understanding of the ongoing story and the world in which it takes place. But it doesn't end there.

ArenaNet chose to use a highly divisive Personal Story format, in which not only does each of the five races get served a different piece of the narrative cake but the slice they get is divided at least twice more, first according to the somewhat arbitrary and uninformed choices the player was forced to take at character creation and then again depending on his or her choice of Order in the game. Although everyone comes back together for the bulk of the storyline, a player's understanding of what is going on, why and what it all means will necessarily be highly colored by that point, depending on her race and the choices she has made.

As well as reading the novel this week I also played through the Asuran Personal Story as far as Lion's Arch for the first time. I've never been an admirer of the Personal Story in GW2 but I have run through variants of both the Human and Charr versions up to Claw Island. Neither of those runs told me much of specific relevance to the overarching Elder Dragon narrative that forms the spine of the entire game, or at least nothing I remember.

In contrast, the Asura personal storyline (College of Statics version) confronts that narrative head on. The whole "elder dragons are waking up and eating all our magic" thing is directly addressed and examined, along with the ongoing issues of governmental cover-ups and subterfuge that seeks to keep this information from the public. For the first time I didn't just feel I understood what was going on but also why we, as players, were involved with the Orders and why those Orders were necessary.

So, we already have a narrative structure in which it is entirely possible to play several characters to the level cap and complete their personal stories and yet still have no clear idea of what it was all about. Unless we assume everyone will play all variations, that's not ideal. Unsurprisingly, many, many players complained on completing the Personal Story that it felt hollow and they felt emotionally disconnected.

Much of the blame was placed on the deeply unpopular Trahearne and the anticlimactic Zhaitan "fight" but there's also a soggy hole right at the center with the supposed "getting the band back together" sequence in Lion's Arch. Just who were these people and why should I care? My character might be understood to know and be awed by these Tyrian celebrities but as a player my only real knowledge of their history came from the three children playing "Destiny's Edge" in the plaza as I arrived.


For all its faults as a novel, Edge of Destiny succeeds admirably in introducing the reader to several eminently likeable and well-drawn characters. For that reason alone, for those who came to GW2 having read the book, meeting Eir, Rytlock, Caithe, Zojja and Logan in game would inevitably offer a greatly increased potential to achieve significant emotional impact. I had seen that sequence several times before but this time, reaching that stage of the Personal Story just a few hours after living through the downbeat, depressing ending of the novel, watching them bicker, argue, trade recriminations and finally stalk off across the Plaza in different directions came freighted with a whole, new, powerful set of resonances.

Partly it's that I feel I know these people now, in that way all readers feel they "know" characters in books they have read, a mental trick that prose finds much easier to achieve than almost any other narrative form. Partly it's that I understand, in detail, what they achieved, what they failed to achieve and what that failure cost. My pleasure and interest in GW2's storyline has been immensely enhanced as a result of reading the novel and that's a problem.

MMOs already suffer badly from portmanteauism. They have no through-line. They exist as an often disparate, even conflicting, congregate of parts that, we hope, somehow contrive to form a  greater whole. There are many voices raised against the wisdom of including narrative in the genre at all. To hold significant elements outwith the game itself seems almost reckless and yet it seems to be the trend. Just this week SOE released the latest of their series of EQNext "Lore Books". I haven't bothered with any of these in the past; now I feel I probably should, although I imagine I have plenty of time to get around to doing that.

Reading is dangerous. It gives people ideas.

In a way, though, I'm quite glad I waited until two years after launch before I thought to read Edge of Destiny. Yes, I missed out on a deal of emotional weight that the game might have had for me until now and yes I'd have had a significantly better understanding of what was going on around me. On the other hand I saved myself a lot of what I now see as entirely justified anger and frustration over the year and a half that ANet spent fiddle-faddling around with a bunch of annoying second-string characters and an aggravating Mary Sue villain instead of just getting on with the real story. I was able to take Rox, Braham and the rest at face value and get to know them without strongly wishing they were someone else.

I was lucky. I had just enough GW1 background to get by on the lore and more than enough residual affection for the franchise to give the new game a pass when it needed one. At the same time I wasn't drenched in the world and all its trappings to the point where everything that didn't feel "just so" jarred.


GW2 sold a lot of boxes and a lot of them went to people who didn't know GW1 or Edge of Destiny from a hole in the ground. The Personal Story didn't seem to grab many of those people and neither did the big, out-of-narrative, one-time, dynamic open world events. Meanwhile the established franchise fans who knew all the lore and had read and played all the things weren't happy either.

ANet made several attempts to appease the uncommitted with varying degrees of success but in the end the difference is this: disgruntled fans stick around. They kvetch and complain and make everyone feel uncomfortable but it takes a lot more than a few badly-implemented game mechanics and a botched narrative arc to drive them away for good. Which, I think, is why we find Season Two playing so solidly and deliberately to the established fanbase. That's the mature market for the game.

And I guess, like it or not, it includes me. I'm contemplating starting the Sylvari Personal Story later today. No-one but a fan could possibly stomach that.

Listen With Zojja : GW2

For a quite a while I was somewhat down on story in MMOs. I don't think I was alone in that. By the time we arrived at the open beta weekends for GW2, quite a few MMO aficionados had already lost patience with the so-called "Fourth Pillar" after what seemed like years of artless propaganda from the self-appointed saviors of the genre, BioWare.

Just in case anyone's forgotten how messianic the rhetoric had become, even today the SW:ToR FAQ makes the following claim:

"At BioWare and LucasArts, we believe most MMOs ignore an important fourth pillar: story. Our mission is to create the best story-driven games in the world, and we believe that the compelling, interactive storylines in The Old Republic are a significant innovation in the MMO genre."

Two and a half years on it seems that SW:ToR may not have been quite the Tortanic failure some commentators gleefully claimed around the time of the indecorous F2P conversion. If we believe recent figures the hybrid F2P model is bringing in a tidy $165m and even if we take those figures with a pinch (or maybe  bucket) of salt, no-one could reasonably deny that the ship is still in full sail.

That's Zojja on the right. Waaaay on the right. I'm giving her some personal space. Don't want to seem pushy.

SW:ToR's long-term financial viability notwithstanding, when GW2 opened the doors some eight months after the Star Wars MMO launched, that fourth pillar was wobbling badly. By then sentiment was running with a different High Concept approach entirely: Dynamism. We wanted to be out there in a vibrant, living world that changed moment by moment in response to our actions, not locked in a stuffy instance with a bunch of NPCs, answering an endless series of inane questions.

Yes, well, we know how that worked out. Hitch your wagon to a star you should expect to get burned. But that's a cautionary tale for another day. The point is that BioWare's hectoring, lecturing tone meant that I, for one, took dead against top-down, imposed narrative in my MMOs.

I'm not sure it was something I'd ever previously needed a position on - I can't recall any MMOs I'd played prior to the arrival of SW:ToR (which, for accuracy's sake, I should point out I have still never played) that had any significant narrative. FFXI had some semblance, I guess,  but I was only there for a month so it didn't make much of an impact. And anyway, Square...

I think old Gorr might just be on to something...

Between the releases of SW:ToR and GW2, however, I did play The Secret World. That turned out to be an MMO that steeps itself in narrative and does so brilliantly. It was a revelatory experience and one that neither Funcom themselves nor anyone else has been able to replicate reliably since. It simultaneously proved how seamlessly and successfully narrative can permeate an MMO and at the same time how immensely difficult that level of quality is to maintain.

Thus, when it came time to try GW2's own Personal Story, the one-two of BioWare's infuriating bluster and Funcom's effortless sophistication landed a knockout blow. Whatever we got it was not TSW which made me come over all petulant. I didn't want your stupid story mucking up my open world in the first place, ANet, and if I did I'd want a really cool story like this one over here! 

Even if I'd been in a more receptive mood, GW2's Personal Story suffers from a number of well-known issues that made it unpopular with a lot of players right out of the gate. Some people found it too hard solo while others complained the design was unfriendly to duos and parties. The continual prompts from the UI suggested your main goal should be the storyline but if you stuck to it the difficulty quickly outpaced you, forcing you to leave and level up, which many found confusing. When you were in the instances themselves, the puppet-show cut scenes seemed wooden and artificial, compared to the fluidity of the rest of the gameworld.

I'm guessing that's a bad thing?

For those who persisted the problems just kept on coming. The early promise of the story strands that branched out from the choices made at character creation dissipated as we learned that all roads lead to Claw Island. Choices seemed increasingly arbitrary without any noticeable effect on gameplay. And then there was Trahearn. And Arah. And Zhaitan. Even for some of those who persisted it all came to seem like one long series of anti-climaxes and disappointments.

I was not a persister. My first character, my Charr Ranger, made it to Claw Island eventually but by then he'd already been all the way to Arah in support of Mrs Bhagpuss's own, human, ranger, who was well ahead in the plotline. He'd seen Zhaitan "die", he knew how it all turned out and he didn't feel the need to see any of it again.

Of my subsequent ten characters, nine found their way to level 80 without feeling the need to bother much with a "personal story". Only my thief, for some reason that now escapes me, got as far as choosing an Order and she chose the same one as the Ranger - Whispers. Consequently much of the background knowledge that ANet's writers, presumably, rely on longtime players of the game possessing has simply passed me by.

Hmm. I wonder how that dialog reads in the Chinese translation?

All of which has left me, these last couple of years, in very much the same position I'm in when I play Everquest. I'm aware there's a lot more going on than I understand but it all happens in a fog. All that I know comes from fragments, rumors, hearsay. Somewhere in Norrath (or over it or under it or beside it) raid guilds slowly mine narrative from the rockface of high-end content that forms the dense core of each expansion but none of it really affects me. Just knowing there is a storyline is enough. I've never felt the need to know all the details.

Tyria has been like that. There's a huge iceberg of established lore from GW1 looming ominously below the surface but I'm happy prancing around on the little bit that sticks up above the surface. Or I was.

For what, I'm certain, are extremely sound reasons, ANet have declined to expand or continue the Personal Story, which always sat so uncomfortably alongside their "dynamic" world. Instead they decided to combine the two High Concepts of the current MMO Generation - Dynamism and Narrative - into a single Even Higher Concept - The Living Story. It took a while for them to get that working but the engine finally seems to be ticking over nicely.

Developments have been interesting enough for me to make the effort to buy the Destiny's Edge novel so as to get somewhat up to speed, as I mentioned the other day. Still haven't actually opened it yet and there wasn't really all that much effort involved, either, come to think of it. It was more that I noticed we had a copy in the SF section at work so I bought it on a whim. Still, it shows I must be engaged with the plot because spin-off novels from video games are along way out of my comfort zone when it comes to what I choose to read. In fact, this will be the first.

After every mission comes a frank and fearless debriefing session.

It's good timing as much as anything. Long enough has passed that my negative reaction to BioWare's bullying tones has faded into the mildest of irritable memories, allowing me to recall that I do quite like stories, even in my MMOs. Moreover, now that we don't get those stick-puppet playhouse scenes in new content any more they've acquired a curious nostalgic glimmer.

As I read around various forum discussions or listen to lively debates in map chat, as current developments in Tyria are pulled apart from all angles - Scarlet, The Eternal Alchemy, The Pale Tree, The Elder Dragons, Destiny's Edge, the whole rickety paraphernalia of open-ended genre fantasy storytelling - I noticed a lot of references to the Personal Story, particularly those of Asura and Sylvari. For once, instead of shaking my head in disapproval, I thought I might just go take a look for myself.

One more Myth Dock and I'm done.

As it so happens I have a young Asura just starting out in the world. He's made it his mission to Find Out What's Going On. For a Snaff Prize Winner like him (just how many Snaff Prizes do these people give out, anyway? Does every Asura get one?) that should be a snap. Indeed, it's already paid dividends. That lecture, extensively and pictorially quoted above, by the (late) Professor Gorr was a revelation. When we get to Claw Island (again) we might call it a day but before that happens I'm hoping the veil will have been pierced by the bright light of finally getting a clue, at least a little.

It may be coincidence but in one of the other MMOs I'm playing when I can tear myself away from GW2, City of Steam, my main motivation to log in is also the storyline. My Goblin Gunner there has finally reached the point her predecessor was at when they shut down the R2 version of the game last year. The possibility that after more than two years I might find out who the guy sending me the mysterious messages is and what he wants from me is strangely motivating. That and all the free stuff...

So, stories: they're not all bad after all. They can even be quite entertaining. Who'd have thought?

It's Gonna Be A Long, Hot Summer : GW2

It's horribly hot and humid and I have a head-cold. Not ideal conditions either for playing or posting but I plan on doing both all the same.

It's still too early to begin to disentangle GW2's Entanglement without spoilage and in any case I've only finished it on the one account so far. I'd like to take another pass and maybe fill out some details while I chip away at a few achievements before I get into any full-on textual analysis.

Ravious gives a good account of the type of activities on offer in the ever-expanding Dry Top region. Mrs Bhagpuss wasn't all that interested in the first set of rewards (the ones Jeromai decided must all be his) but this installment several of the skins caught her eye and she's rarely been anywhere else all week.

A Charr can look at a Queen - if it's a T4 Map.

After the initial day-long session she was distinctly under-impressed with the amount of geodes she'd collected and had some choice words to say about ArenaNet's increasingly elitist-without-the-infrastructure-to-support-elitism development ethos. When I came home from work the following day, however, she'd discovered the LFG tool (something I quite literally forgot GW2 had) as a direct result of which she'd been in T4 maps most of the day and, once, even T5. Domestic harmony restored.

Much though I like the new events and the area that contains them I haven't spent all that much time there doing them. After getting multiple Light and Heavy versions I gave up on trying to get the Medium Cleric's Spectacles and Medium Adventurer's Scarf the honest way by opening chests. I just bought them from the Trading Post since prices have dropped. Finally, headgear for a Charr Ranger that doesn't look positively awful.

Snout hankie with attitude

That was the main thing holding me back from playing the new character I started last weekend (that makes eleven). Other than that, when it comes to a choice between repeating new content for currency to buy new stuff I don't especially want and repeating old content to acquire old stuff I don't particularly need, well it's no contest.

That's a very unfair and inaccurate description of what's going on, though. Every time I level a new character, regardless of having played through the maps many times before, I see new events, fresh content, extra detail. Despite having map completion on Metrica Province, for example, and having, as I thought, meticulously combed every corner well beyond the required tick-box map items, my new Asura warrior hadn't been there more than five minutes before he found a whole underwater cave I'd never seen. On top of that, within half an hour he'd done several unfamiliar events, one of which had me squawking with laughter.

I'm not saying Dry Top isn't good. It's really good. Moreover, rather than just appreciating any new content I welcome this particular, visually spectacular, entertaining, highly re-playable new content. It's more that I'm not going to let this much-needed rain, after the long, long drought, trick me into mistaking Dry Top's focused, purposive drive for the kind of deep, nested, organic complexity of the original maps. But, hey, I'll take what I can get, especially when what I already have is still there and still doing such a great job too.

It's only while I'm playing up a new character that GW2 goes back to feeling like an MMO, or what I expect and want from an MMO, at any rate. It's fortunate, then, that it's so remarkably replayable. I've often said that I wouldn't consider that anyone could claim to really know an MMO until they'd played all the race/class combinations available to maximum level but it's always been more of a thought experiment than a blueprint for gameplay. I think even I would lose patience and affection for EQ or EQ2 if I tried to enact that principle there.

Who you calling shorty, fatso?

In GW2, however, it almost feels like a realistic proposition. Leveling's so very fast and easy; each class plays radically differently from every other; there more than enough paths to max level to keep the journey fresh and fun; all of that is true, but there's more. The races genuinely play very differently one from another even when playing the same class, more so than most MMOs I've played at least since Vanguard half a decade ago.

It's not just the size differences and the radical shift in perspective those supply. It's that each race has an entirely different set of animations and voice samples and boy are there a lot of them. I never particularly warmed to the Guardian when I did eighty levels as a Sylvari but going the distance as a Charrdian was a hoot. She's now one of my favorite characters both in personality and gameplay.

 You might say that was predictable given my predilection for the Charr race but I never really got on with my Charr warrior, who has languished after reaching eighty, skulking around the low-level World Boss circuit wearing the same Rare gear she was wearing a year ago,. My new character, an Asuran Warrior, bounces around like a superball, looking like the rough sketch for an Animaniac that got thrown out at the script meeting for being too ridiculous. I can already tell he's not only going all the way, he's not going to stop there, either.

Hai-ya!

Time is tight. I still haven't used the generously-donated WildStar guest passes, I haven't signed up for the ArcheAge closed beta, I probably won't find time to pop back into FFXIV on the "come back, all is forgiven" weekend offer. I haven't managed to visit The Secret World for the Gaea re-run even though I really like those big events. I still can't find a window for The Hammers End. I barely manage an hour here or there in CoS:Arkadia, Everquest, EQ2 or Landmark. That's not even mentioning the dozen or more other MMOS on my desktop I kinda, sorta want to play.

All of that stuff's not happening and yet I can come home from a long, hot, day at work feeling very under par looking forward to an evening of leveling up yet another Asura mostly just so I can watch him jump about. Either they really nailed the things that matter or I'm easily pleased.

Probably a bit of both.