What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

Ready For My Close-Up : Gear, Fashion and Accessories In Black Desert

Writing about the ever-growing influx of Korean MMOs into the Western games market, particularly recent hits like Blade and Soul, Black Desert and Tree of Savior, Ironweakness of Waiting for Rez observed that "many of the systems like gear advancement are unlike anything else I’ve played". He also pointed out that, while a lot of this may seem new and innovative to players unfamiliar with the Eastern gaming scene, "in reality many of the concepts and systems these games are based on have been repeated for years in the Asian market".

It's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from dabbling in the handful of Korean MMOs that make it to this hemisphere. The next one coming down the pipe is Asta: The War of Tears and Winds, currently in open beta. By all accounts, that one is a straight WoW clone, as have been many other Korean MMOs I've briefly played and enjoyed over the years, like Loong, Argo or Aika.

The Korean gaming market is reportedly so extensive, with gaming so much more deeply embedded in broader popular culture than in the West, that you might imagine there would be space for almost any kind of innovation or novelty to find an audience. Whether the drive behind such change is aesthetic, creative or primarily an attempt to carve out a commercially viable niche in an extremely competitive market I wouldn't care to guess. Neither do I know how open the average Korean gamer might be to novel, idiosyncratic or unfamiliar ways of doing things in game.

Looking at both Black Desert and Blade and Soul from a western gamer's perspective, though, some of the design decisions do seem peculiar. When I collected my Cherry Blossom earrings from Hunt the Seed Merchant in Heidel yesterday and slipped them in it really got me to thinking about how strange and alien to a traditional, western MMO gamer  the whole gear and appearance systems in BDO might feel at first blush.

Black Desert has a famously hyper-complex character creation engine. It allows you control not just over the basics like hair, eye color, build and height, but over everything down to individual muscle groups. Daum was so certain this would appeal to the western gamer that they released the whole thing as a standalone to promote the game.

And it worked. There was a ton of media coverage as everyone jumped in to make the ugliest characters imaginable, clone celebrities or just squee about the possibilities. I didn't take the trouble to try it for myself but even then, like a few other skeptics, I couldn't really see what the fuss was about. Most of the screen shots that proud creators were posting looked somewhat bland and rather samey.

When I got to use it for real, though, I was quite satisfied with the look I was able to achieve for my Tamer. The real let-down didn't hit until later.

Whatever the strengths or shortcomings of the character creator itself, the thing that never occurred to me, nor, I suspect, to many people enjoying playing around with it, was that it makes precious little difference how much control you're given over the face and the muscles when you have next to no say in what clothes your character is going to be wearing.

For a while after launch there was an undercurrent of discontent rumbling across the forums and the first impressions pieces. After all those hours spent tweaking characters to get them just so it seemed that out there in the world those subtleties were had to spot. Everyone looked disturbingly alike and there was a slight sense of disbelief as people began to realize that no matter how many upgrades they got their armor would go on looking much the same.

What's more, since BDO has absolutely no concept either of "Bind on Equip" or level restrictions for gear, most players will want to latch on to the very best armor and weapons at the earliest opportunity and wear them forever. The faster you get your character geared, the fewer differences in appearance you'll see.

And it's not like there are so many differences to begin with. There are just four traditional slots. The "Armor" slot seems to cover the whole body. The other three are Shoes, Gloves and Helmet. The Helmet does not display at all. The Shoes I have right now do display, but not as shoes. They are, in fact, 1980s Fame-style leg warmers that run from thigh to ankle and leave my original, default shoes in place.

There are a lot more slots than that, though. There are seven slots for jewellery and accessories with stats plus, of course, the weapon. I don't believe any of those display except, obviously, the weapon and, less obviously, the Trinket, which, for a Tamer at least, adds a neat fluffy dangler to the hilt of your sword, a bit like the old tiger tail a boy racer would have fixed to the whip antenna of a Ford Cortina circa 1975.

Inside the outer ring of traditional gear is a an inner ring of Costume slots: Helmet, Top, Shoes, Gloves, Main and Secondary. All of these display. Oh, and there's an Underwear slot, too. That displays but only, thankfully, when you're in your own house. I don't think we want to pursue the implications of that particular aesthetic decision too rigorously.

All of those can be toggled on or off to mix and match. Finally (I think) there's a row of three more toggleable slots along the bottom for Head/Ear, Eye and Nose/Mouth/Chin.

That is where my Cherry Blossom Earrings go. And they look great. I'm really pleased with them. I feel the hours spent grubbing around in the shrubberies for seeds and sitting on a rock waiting to pull weeds were well worth it. Just like the hours spent in character creation were. Provided I want to spend my gaming sessions zoomed in on my character's face I can consider the whole enterprise a complete success.

If I want to see my character change and grow in appearance in long shot, however, it appears I'll need to pay a visit to Daum's notoriously overpriced cash shop, although there is a limited in-game crafting option available if you buy a house and convert it into a Costume Mill. There's one in Calpheon, although I doubt I'd ever have found it without the help of Google and this invaluable spreadsheet.

In time I may edge carefully down that rabbit hole. It would certainly be a goal and I'm finding myself a touch short of those in this game. For now, though, I think I'll make do with whatever generic look my gear gives me, accessorized occasionally by such freebies as might become available through holiday events or log in bonuses.

Luckily I quite like how my character looks right now. It's certainly a lot better than some of the horrific fashion and dye disasters hurting the eye and the soul from Calpheon to Altinova as players with more money than taste begin to cut loose their creative drives.

Like everything in Black Desert and Blade and Soul before it, getting dressed is a learning experience. I feel I'm still some way short of being able to tie my own shoelaces but at least I can put my jumper on the right way round. The next step is going to be playing with dyes.

I hope they come out.

A Tall Ship's Tale : Black Desert

Much of the conversation over Black Desert Online has focused on systems and processes. From the arcane and convoluted crafting to the controversial cash shop, to the conflicts between the needs and desires of PvP and PvE players, to the "always online" demands of the afk progression mechanics, BDO has generated controversy and confusion in equal measure.

With all that going on it's easy to forget that this is still an explorer's game par excellence. If you come to Black Desert with an explorer's heart there's no need to know or care about any of these things. From the moment you step out into the world there is quite literally nothing to stop you putting foot to road and heading for the horizon.

Yesterday I had the finest, simplest, open-world adventure I've had for a very long time. It took me all the way back to the earliest days of EverQuest, when I stood at the harbor in Butcherblock, staring at the sea, waiting for my first ever imaginary boat trip.

It all goes back a few days to when I first arrived in the great port city of Altinova. I'd climbed the hills at the back of the town, getting my bearings and my breath after a dizzying jaunt through the red clay mayhem of the souks and alleyways below. Looking out across the rooftops to the docks I saw a square-rigged galleon at the wharf, by far the biggest ship I'd seen.

As I watched, it pulled away from the pier, turned awkwardly and headed out to sea. I scrambled down the hillside and raced through the teeming streets to the waterfront to where the great ship had been.

For half an hour or more I waited there for another seagoing vessel to arrive. I passed the time fishing. My bags filled and I sold the catch to the Trade Manager up the hill. My rod broke. No ship appeared. Eventually I gave up waiting and left.

Yesterday I was in Altinova again when history repeated itself. I was looking down from the heights when I saw the ship, only this time it was just coming in to port. I forgot my plans and sprinted for the dock. This time I made it.

I was the only one waiting to board when the ship pulled alongside the harbor wall. When it set sail again just a few minutes later I was still alone. There were no passengers but me. There was no crew. There didn't even seem to be a captain. And yet the ship sailed.

There I was, the lone passenger on a ghost ship. The sun was going down. Of course it was. It's always coming on night when I do anything in Black Desert or so it seems. I tried to take some shots of the ship but the light was poor and the vessel too large for the frame so after a few minutes I settled down to watch the waves roll by.

And they rolled. And they rolled. And they rolled. I had no idea where the ship was heading. It seemed to be making for the deep ocean. Opening the map after a few minutes it looked as though we might be bound for Iliya Island.

That would be some journey from Eastern Mediah but it would have been handy for me. I could check up on my shipyard there, see my workers were settled, have a rummage around my storage. But Iliya slipped past to starboard and we sailed on into the night.

By this time we'd been afloat for ten minutes or so. I wondered if we might be heading to Velia, which would make for a trip of at least twenty minutes. We were not.

Velia slid by to port. I looked at the map again. Where else was there? There were islands, of course. A lot of islands. Some of them even had names. For a time we appeared to be heading directly for a middling sized isle but at the last moment we rounded its southernmost tip and on we sailed.

It was light again by this time. We were cutting along within sight of land but but the mists had come down to hide the shore. Tantalizing glimpses of towers and walls drifted in and out of view.

I paced the deck from prow to stern, trying to get a clear line of sight. Gingerly I hoisted myself onto the spars and edged along the rails. I was terrified of slipping, falling into the dark ocean. I knew that if I had to swim I'd drown before ever I reached land.

Opening the map once again it was hard to believe just how far the ship had traveled. We had been, quite literally, in uncharted waters almost from the start but for a good while now we were running past unmapped land. Whatever country this was to the lee it was one I'd never seen before.

By now I'd been on the ship for well over half an hour. About the only place I could think of that might be our destination port would be Calpheon. The great city of the West is inland but it stands on a major river. I hadn't noticed a harbor when I was there but then I hadn't looked for one.

After the best part of forty-five minutes, with the sun up and full daylight clearing the fog, finally the ship turned for the shore. A great lighthouse tower on a promontory heralded a major port. A port I had no idea existed.

The ship nudged alongside the planks of the dock of a busy fishing port, with granite fisherman's cottages rising up the hillside towards impressive public buildings and churches above. Wide, sandy beaches swept away to the north. A beached whale lay on the sands, surrounded by curious Shai.

Walking the wet, early morning streets I learned the name: Epheria Port. Standing high on the cliffs that backed the weather-worn, tiled roofs I watched the sails of the ghost-ship shrink to the horizon, heading back to warmer waters once again.

For almost an hour all I'd done was board a ship and wait for the voyage to end. In the terms of the game my character did not progress by any measurable means. No skills increased, no loot dropped, no quests completed, no achievements accrued. There were no rewards, material, statistical or nominal.

It was the best adventure I'd had for a long time. Something I'll remember the way I remember those first trips across the Ocean of Tears.

It was a mighty long hike back to Altinova, where I left my horse, though. I'll tell you that for nothing!

The Longer View : Black Desert Online

Black Desert is full of surprises.

Late last night I realized I had a conger eel in my pack that wouldn't last the night. Fish spoils quickly. If you don't sell it while it's fresh then you can't sell it at all.

Neither can you sell it just anywhere. Only the Trade NPCs will buy it and they will only pay you a fair price if you have linked all the necessary nodes. Don't ask. Life's too short.

You can sell to an unlinked trader but you'll only get 30% of the price a linked one would give you. For a cheap, common fish that's acceptable to me. I'm not hauling haddock (not an actual BDO fish - as far as I know) five miles just to get a few hundred silver more for it.

Conger eels, though, are not common. They are Yellow quality, which is the fourth and highest tier. That makes them valuable. They sell for somewhere north of 20,000 silver.

That's worth a little travel time although not as much as you might imagine because whoever designed Black Desert's Economy clearly had a soft spot for hyperinflation. Remember those pictures we all saw when we were at school studying the Rise of Fascism in Germany? The ones where someone was wheeling a wheelbarrow full of banknotes to the baker just so they could buy a loaf of bread?

Well, the BDO economy is like that. You have one grade of coin, silver, and even basic items are priced in thousands or tens of thousands. Anything truly desirable goes for tens of millions. There's probably a lot more to it than that but that's the impression I'm getting.

Even so, a 20k fish is not to be sniffed at. So to speak. Examining the fish handily tells you where it was caught and this eel came from the waters around Iliya Island. Since I hadn't connected Iliya to anywhere that meant yet another round on the ferry. Must have been the third round trip of the day. I should get a season ticket. Oh, wait, it's free...

The sun was nearing the horizon as I boarded the ferry. Evening light was turning the ocean to copper. For a moment I contemplated getting my fishing rod out for the journey but the boat passes through the waters attached to several nodes that I haven't connected, which would mean a bag full of fish I'd have to sell for a fraction of their value. Kind of what I was trying to avoid in the first place.

So I left my rod in my pack. Instead I decided to do something I'd seen another player do earlier. She'd managed to sit on the rail of the boat. I thought it looked like something the cool kids were doing so why not?

Black Desert is almost unique among MMOs I've played in that it appears to have no basic /sit command. I tried it early on to no effect. There's a convoluted way to bring up a window with all the emotes shown as icons but there isn't one for Sitting there, either.

As usual I had to google it and it transpires that to sit you have to back up to a potential sitting spot and press Q. If the game deems your chosen object a fit match for your posterior your character will do a little bit of posturing and hoick themselves up onto it, or down, as appropriate.

So, I sidled up to the rail and hit Q and up she hopped. It did look for a moment as though she was going to do a comedy pratfall into the sea but she got settled and there we were, ready for the trip. Which was when the window popped.

As I said, Black Desert is full of surprises and it likes to spring them on you unannounced. The game has an "Observation" mode that comes into effect when you sit down. It allows you to de-link your camera from your character's point of view and send it high into the air, free-floating.

You acquire a whole set of new controls that let you swing the PoV around as though you were operating a high crane. It is fantastic!

The views that open up when you have access to this device are just astonishing. At first I kept sweeping and swerving it around, marveling at the sudden changes of perspective. The painterly long shots made Velia harbor look like something by Breughel. Then I found the zoom, which let me swoop in for close-ups on the crowded streets. It felt astonishingly real.

As the boat left the harbor I turned and saw the sunset. It was just stunning. Small craft moved across the burnished waters between isles that drifted in the haze. On the ferry with me were the NPC helmsman and one other player, fishing from the prow.

The whole voyage lasted ten or fifteen minutes and it was one of the most ethereal, immersive experiences I have ever had in an MMO. It wasn't in any way like a game. I wasn't doing anything gamelike - just sitting. and watching. It was like watching a movie but from the inside.

From time to time I wished I could video the whole thing. I thought of firing up FRAPS but I didn't want to break the mood by tabbing out. In the end I just sat there, soaking up the atmosphere, taking the odd screenshot now and again. They really don't give more than the merest hint of how it was.

And then we pulled up alongside the pier at Iliya harbor and I stood up and the camera snapped back to normal and I got off the boat and sold my conger eel and that was that. Next time I ride the ferry I'll know about Observation mode and I'll be expecting the views and they won't ever be quite as amazing or as surprising or as emotionally involving as that first time.

But they'll always be something worth seeing.

You're Going To Need A Bigger Boat : Black Desert Online

So there it is. My raft. Thanks to everyone who left suggestions, tips, advice and encouragement in the comments. It was all very helpful and some of it made a significant difference.

The key points I've learned:

• You never have to visit your Shipyard. It might as well be a window in the UI.
• It is a window in the UI. Open the map, click on the City, click on your house and there you go.
• All the mats to make your raft go in your Warehouse. That place you probably thought of as your badly-translated bank. 
• Your Warehouse is full of fish. 
• Rotting, unsaleable fish. You probably want to do something about that.
• It has to be the Warehouse in the same town your Shipyard is in. All storage is local.
• No, the Warehouse is not a window in the UI.
• Oh, wait, yes it is. 
• Don't get excited. It's a read-only window. You still have to go to the real Warehouse to put anything in or take anything out.
• I think. Don't quote me on that.

• You can hire multiple workers.
• Every worker needs a bed. 
• Okay, not literally a bed. Just somewhere to sleep. You'll be glad they made you buy those other two apparently unrelated houses just to get to your Shipyard.
• You can set your workers to work on more than one project.
• Or they can work on different parts of the same project.
• Best of all, they can even share the load on the same task for the same project, thereby reducing the overall completion time and the grinding of your teeth.

• You can do all of the gathering and some of the processing yourself.
• The more you do the faster the whole thing goes.
• I  mean, if you want a job done properly, do it yourself, amiright?
• If you set it up correctly your project will carry on just fine without any input from you. You can go do something interesting like kill goblins or something profitable like fish or maybe just afk and do something else entirely, like play another game that has raids and flying mounts and what all..
• I mean, why keep a dog and bark yourself, amiright?
• If you log out your workers will down tools and, for all you know, get drunk and chase girls. Or guys, depending on preference.
• The second you log in they will jump back to work like guilty schoolkids when the teacher comes back into the room.

• Two giants can easily make a whole raft before you have to give them any beer.
• Working together they can get the whole thing done in, like, six hours. 
• Don't laugh. It's better than eleven.

And so I have a raft. It was moderately satisfying, getting it made, and at least next time I'll know what to do. And there is almost bound to be a next time because

• The raft has a set lifespan.
• The raft has durability.
• The raft exists only to remind you that you really need a real boat (just as the donkey exists to remind you that you really need a real horse, but that's a pleasure I have still to come).

 
The appearance of the raft is excellent. It looks very authentic. It handles excellently and the character animations while using it are very fluid and convincing. The way you berth it at the wharf and summon it again when needed are a fine, workable compromise between convenience and realism.

It's a great little craft in every respect but one. It moves at the pace of an arthritic snail. In fact I think it moves at the exact same pace that a character swims, albeit with the huge advantage that you neither drown nor die of exhaustion. Unless you fall off and can't get back on. Don't think that can happen...

The first thing I did was sail - actually paddle - to an island I hadn't yet visited. On the way there the Velia-Iliya ferry ran right over the top of me, apparently doing about 90 knots. I thought that thing was slow when I was riding on it. How naive I was.

The ferry was no more than a dot on the horizon when I beached my raft on the rocky shore of the island, whose name I forget. It had a Node which is why I went there.



You might wonder why a rocky islet with no habitation or significant features would have a Node, let alone a full-time Node Manager. There's a story behind that.

I'm taking it as ironic foreshadowing. I'm getting a bigger boat.

Didn't say I was going to make it myself.

The Bloom Comes Off The Rose : Black Desert

Last night I logged into Black Desert with a plan in mind. I was going to build myself a boat. Well, a raft, anyway.

I got the idea after my arduous trip to Luivano Island the night before. I had this quest to catch an octopus and the quest marker wanted me to stand on some lump of rock a hundred meters out to sea from the Veila coast for it. I fished for a long time.

I didn't get an octopus but I caught a Conger Eel and a couple of other rare fish. My bags were full of them and they looked to be quite valuable so I thought I'd sell them in town.

I already had a rough idea how the "Node" system works but I wasn't looking to get a big mark-up for selling my fish some great distance from where I'd caught them. I was happy to take the regular price in Velia. Only, when I got to the Trade NPC that handles this kind of transaction I discovered I hadn't caught them in Velia at all.

The rock I was fishing from turned out to be in the jurisdiction of Luivano Island. After a bit of googling and a close look at the handy map at BDOTome I worked out where that was, which just left the question of how to get there. Hobson's choice, really. I had to swim.

I'd already discovered that when you swim it depletes some bar that has no tool-tip but is presumably related to your stamina. If that gets low enough you begin to lose hit points and eventually you die. It's not drowning - there's different bar and a different death for that.

The hundred meter swim back from the rock almost killed me so swimming a mile or two out to the island was a daunting prospect. With the help of Google, once again, I learned that you can swig health potions as you swim to counteract the damage you're taking. I had about sixty on me. Surely that would be enough?

I worked out that the shortest sea crossing was from the peninsula to the north of Velia, where the brooding Crone Castle dominates the skyline. What I didn't know until I got there is that it's occupied by hordes of highly aggressive purple con soldiers.

Running back a second time, I managed to avoid them all. I scrambled down the cliffs, got as close to the distant island as I could and swam for it. It took me a few minutes and about a dozen potions but I made it safely. Onshore I found the Node Manager flaked out on the sand. Apparently he was in the grip of the existential ennui of the near-immortal (seriously).

Even though he had lost all will even to sit up straight he was still trading and he gave me the full price for my fish. It was then that I noticed a crude log raft pulled up on the shore nearby, beached by a player more advanced than I. Well, not for long, matey!

Black Desert reminds me of Vanguard in a number of ways. The Amity mini-game is like a pale shadow of Diplomacy and the clutter of sailing ships at the Velia wharf recalls the jumble along the harbor walls at Khal. Acquiring and sailing a sloop in Vanguard is one of the fondest memories I have from all my years of gaming. Anything that might give even a faint echo of that sense of satisfaction and sensual pleasure has to be explored.

When I say "explored", of course, I mean "googled". I'm not sure how far along in Black Desert I'd be if I was relying entirely on in-game information. Probably still just outside the first village, killing weasels. Working out how to make a raft took me about an hour, several guides, a couple of forum threads and three videos. I recommend the YouTube tutorials by Pvt Wiggles.

Even then I misunderstood how the Housing system works. I went to the Shipyard in Velia but because I didn't get a pop-up to buy it I mistakenly assumed it wasn't available. That's how I ended up on Iliya Island.

Iliya is an island city a lot further from the coast than Luivano. It has a Shipyard. I thought that might be available but there was no way I was going to swim there. Luckily there's a ferry (Google told me that, too). Waiting for it at the wharf gave me an EQ flashback - standing in Butcherblock, fishing off the dock, chatting to pass the time, hoping the boats weren't broken again...

The ferry in BDO is a lot more efficient than that. There's one every ten minutes or so and it moves smoothly and safely. It's a free service and you can fish off the side as you travel, so instead of it costing you silver you actually make money as you go.

It felt like it took about ten or fifteen minutes to get to Iliya, which suggests there's more than one ferry covering the route. I wasn't really paying attention because a) I was taking screenshots b) I was fishing and c) I was eavesdropping on an interesting conversation between two players (and trying to work out how they were talking in local).

Iliya turned out to be a mountainous island with one small port and a scattering of tiny hamlets and camps. By this time I had watched a video on Housing and realized that I was doing it wrong. Other than for a Residence - the house you can decorate and live in like a regular MMO home - you don't need to go to the building at all. You just buy it from the map.

To get a Shipyard I had to buy the two houses it was connected to. Don't ask why. Especially don't ask who puts a Shipyard at the back of the town, half way up a mountain, on the second floor of a building!

Once I'd bought my three houses, two of which I didn't need or want, for a total of seven Contribution points (which, fortunately, I will get back when I sell the Shipyard later) it had to be converted for use. That took two and a half hours, which gave me more than enough time to do every quest on the small island and chop enough trees to get the twenty-five logs you need to make a raft, plus twiddle my thumbs and alt-tab out. A lot.

I also hired a worker and then spent twenty minutes trying and failing to get him to do any work before I realized he wouldn't get off his fat, Giant behind until the Shipyard was up and running. By the time I was ready for bed I had a functioning shipyard, a worker and all the wood I needed. I was still missing three black powder but I figured I could buy those from the marketplace back in Velia.

All that was left was to give the order to start processing the logs, switch off and go to sleep. Oh, no. Oh, very much no. No, no, no, no!

If you want to make something in Black Desert you have to be there. Your character doesn't necessarily have to do anything. You, the player, don't have to do very much. Just give an order or two every so often. All the imaginary work is done by your workers. But that doesn't mean anything is automatic.

Remember those twenty-five logs that have to be prepared in some undefined fashion before they can be fitted together to make a raft? Each log takes twenty-five minutes to process. You have to give each processing order separately. If you log out the whole thing stops. If you go afk the whole thing stops as soon as the log your worker is working on is done.

It takes almost eleven hours to make a raft. I have made one of those rafts in real life. I lived by a river as a kid and we used to make them in the summer holidays sometimes. As a nine-year old boy I could make one of those rafts in an afternoon. It did not take me eleven freakin' hours and I did not have a ten-foot tall professional workman and fully-fitted freakin' shipyard standing by!

Watch Pvt Wiggles video on how to make the largest sea-going vessel currently available in the Western version of Black Desert, the Fishing Boat. He begins thus: "Be warned, building this boat was the most stressful time I've had since beginning to play Black Desert". Take that warning very seriously indeed. Granted, by the end he's gushing about how satisfying and thrilling it was when he finally got to plonk the thing in the water and sail away but I take all these "it feels so good now I stopped banging my head against the wall" stories with the barrel-full of salt they deserve.

Suffice it to say that, having made two of the twenty-five required logs, I was thinking wistfully of GW2, wishing I'd spent the last three or four hours wrecking around in WvW, not wasting most of an evening setting myself up for another ten hours of tedious busy-work the next day. As a harbinger of things to come it was a black stormcrow indeed.

The simple fact is this: I'm not interested in any kind of imaginary "job" or "craft". I have never in my life yearned to run a virtual business or spend hours pretending I'm an artisan. If I was going to spend hour after hour doing something like that I'd rather switch the PC off and go do it in real life, where I might make things I could actually use or money I could actually spend.

I love crafting in MMOs but what I love are the "mini-games" and the progression. I like to level up my crafters for the exact same reason I like to level up my adventurers; because it opens up new possibilities but, most importantly, because it's fun while I'm doing it.

Vanguard's crafting system, the best I have ever seen in an MMO, was a full RPG experience in and of itself. EQ2's is another. I can spend hours, days, weeks immersed in either of them. In WoW or LotRO or Rift even GW2 crafting doesn't have that degree of complexity but it has some, and what it lacks is offset by the benefit of being simple and swift. Yes, there can be a lot of repetitive grind along the way but it's the kind of repetitive grind I find relaxing and enjoyable.

Black Desert seems to me to fall heavily between two stools when it comes to crafting. It has none of the deep creative aesthetic of a game that permits full-scale, open world construction, like Wurm or Landmark, yet it requires a similar degree of time commitment just to perform tasks that are not in and of themselves either involving or interesting but exist only as a means to an end. Even at this early stage, the more I see of BDO, the more I suspect that will apply to most of its systems and gameplay.

The learning curve is so steep and the visual representation so impressive that the initial impact is overwhelming. It feels as though it's a game of vast depths and infinite possibilities. Once the shock wears off, though, it doesn't take long to wonder just how deep it really is.

With no interest whatsoever in the PvP end game, no desire to run any kind of trading operation and finding crafting off-putting almost before I've gotten started, it does make me wonder what I'll find to do once the intellectual stimulation of figuring out how it all works begins to falter. There's the world to explore, naturally, but with everywhere looking surprisingly similar thus far, even that is beginning to look a less appealing long-term project than I first thought.

When I went to log in this morning and found the servers were down for five hours I felt oddly relieved that at least I didn't have to do any more work on that blasted raft. That can't be a good sign.

Trust Me - I'm An MMO Dev: Black Desert, GW2

2016 is turning out to be a surprising year for MMORPGs. At the end of last year it seemed that no-one was expecting much from the coming twelve months beyond another WoW expansion and not many people seemed particularly excited about that. After the tent-pole launches of 2014 - TESO, WildStar and ArcheAge among them, 2015 was a fallow year and 2016 looked like less of the same.

Then, in just the first quarter, seemingly out of nowhere, we suddenly find ourselves with three major AAA contenders: Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online and The Division. What's more, all three seem to be getting a warmer welcome than most new MMOs have had for a very long time.

Perhaps it helps that the first two have already long since been launched in other territories, meaning they arrive loaded with content, finished and polished in their systems and stable in their infrastructure - even if the localization leaves a lot to be desired. Still, successfully re-launching an MMO in the West after a less-than-stellar run in its country of origin is an achievement not to be taken lightly. Trion certainly made a dog's breakfast of it with ArcheAge and SOE failed completely with both Wizardry and Dragon's Prophet.

As for The Division, even though this is a genuine first launch, it's been in development so long I guess you might expect it to be ready by now, although precedent would suggest otherwise. For once, by most reports, all that extra time devoted to "polish" seems to have been well spent. It sounds as though the game's a lot of fun although I can't comment from personal experience because, while I'd quite like to give it a try, my PC would burst into flames at the first firefight.

There's more to come. Waiting in the wings are several triple-A titles from majors, including Bless and Lineage Eternal plus a whole slew of smaller but well-known and widely anticipated projects from independents that might just about see the light of a screen sometime before next Christmas. As ChaosConstant puts it over at Occasional Hero "So Many Games, So Little Time" - and he's only playing the old ones!

When was the last time you saw puddles in an MMO?

I started to think about this while I was running along the muddy roads of Serendia in BDO last night. If there's one thing you can safely say about Black Desert it's that it's going to take some time to come to grips with it. It's hardly the sort of MMO you can dip into for a quick half hour here and there. It sucks you in and holds you fast.

Blade and Soul, contrarily, works very well in bite-size portions. It's filled with neat, complete quests that take a few minutes and tidy, instanced dungeons that don't last a lot longer. It has bosses that pop conveniently, quickly, almost on demand. You can make solid progress in an hour or less.

GW2 used to be like that. It still is and yet it isn't, too. All the old pick up and drop content based around dynamic events and Hearts is still there but the direction of travel both pre and post Heart of Thorns has all been about commitment to lengthier session play. It started with the 40/20 hourly cycle in Dry Top, way back at the start of Living Story 2 and spiraled up from there until it culminated in the epic two hour, hundred player tour de force that is Dragon's Stand.

Wait a minute...why did I come this way?

The next, big quarterly update, due sometime in April, is intended to address this mission creep. Supposedly there will be a return to a more manageable, shorter, and, yes, more casual approach in future. Whether that is the cause or the consequence of Colin Johanson's departure we will probably never know. It seems counter-intuitive, however, given that the main thrust of development remains, for now at least, the intense, fiercely hardcore, highly time-consuming addition of extensive raid content to the game.

Perversely, perhaps, as a self-defined casual-by-attitude, I really like the lengthy sessions encouraged by HoT. All the major set pieces - the endless Day/Night cycle in Verdant Brink, the long build up and short release of Auric Basin and Tangled Depths and, most especially, the movie-length drama of Dragon's Stand - seem to me to offer a great combination of dip-in/dip-out casual play and full-session satisfaction.

Playing Black Desert, it's begun to dawn on me that I rather like a structure that allows for plenty of individualism and freedom of action and yet encourages me to spend dirty great chunks of time in game without really noticing the hours tick past. It is, of course, a famous feature of sandbox gameplay, be it PvE or PvP.

They also serve, who only stand and watch.

World vs World, for example, offers it on a grand scale. Night after night I "just pop in to see how we're doing" and end up following a Commander I like for a couple of hours. I can run with the zerg, in or out of squad, I can roam, I can scout or tag siege or just sit in a keep and watch the ebb and flow on the map. I can be useful and effective or useless and ineffective and yet if I'm the former I can still drop out at will and if I'm the latter no-one notices or yells at me.

What all these systems - open world dynamic events, realm vs realm warfare, sandbox exploration and trading - have in common is ease of exit. In a Raid or a Heroic Dungeon or even a segment of your solo Personal Story you have to see things through to the end. Quit half way in and you either let down your friends and guild-mates or lose the progress you've made and have to start over another time.

With so many, so very many, interesting, exciting, enticing, tempting new MMOs to explore the one immutable factor is time. Even if you're willing to sacrifice every single other aspect of your life on the altar of the hobby, (which, fortunately, very few of us are) it's still utterly impossible to do any kind of justice to more than a handful of games.

This is why I feel that, to be successful in an increasingly competitive market, MMO developers have two, contradictory options. They can attempt to coerce players to stick with their game and only their game by heavy use of time-limited or gated content, progression that relies on constant repetition and the imposition of a subscription fee, or they can trust that what they have to offer is sufficiently entertaining and involving that players will become caught up in it and stay because they're having too much fun to leave.

Both methods have been proved to work but I know which model I'd prefer to see succeed.

First Impressions : Black Desert Online

Where to begin? At the very beginning, I guess. Buying, downloading and installing Black Desert Online was exceptionally easy. Like all modern MMOs it has a huge footprint but in not much over two hours the 30+ GBs were tucked away on my hard drive and I was staring down the barrel of the Character Creation screen.

I'd heard about this one. I knew Daum had released the thing as a standalone long ago. I'd seen videos of people playing with it and read whole blogs about how great or not-so-great it was. Well, I'm not all that much of a one for over-complex character creation systems. I prefer to be in and out in under ten minutes.

The final version in Character Creation. Of course she arrived wearing something entirely different.

Tough luck. Not happening. It took me about an hour and that was trying to hurry it along. There are a lot of options and, very annoyingly, no randomized choices that I could find. I got particularly hung up on the eyes. Must have spent twenty minutes on those alone.

In the end I got something - someone - I was happy to look at long-term. While the game downloaded I flipped through the mostly useless, exceptionally vague class descriptions on the website and read a few basic class "guides", which weren't much better. They couldn't even seem to agree on what the classes were called, far less how they played.

When in doubt go for a pet class or a warrior. I went Tamer. At level ten, as I was when I logged out last night, she still doesn't have a pet but it doesn't seem to be slowing her down any. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Is there a good optician in this town? My peripheral vision's gone all blurry.

Visually everything looked slick and smart in the creation screen but that soon fell apart when I appeared in the world. Following Aywren's lead I went for the Orwen server, Calpheon II channel. Even though it was flagged as Crowded it let me join and I popped out into the starting village, the name of which escapes me.

One of the key reasons I ended up buying BDO when I'd really not planned to was something Syl said about the city of Heidel : "It is an incredibly well-designed site as far as an authentic medieval-feeling city goes and I have been to a fair few in real life." So have I and I love them. That promise and the gorgeous screenshots were what tipped the balance.

OMG! It's getting worse! Someone check my pupils - I think I might have a concussion!

Unfortunately, the thing I forgot to do was check the minimum specs. My PC is elderly. I forget how long ago I bought it but it must be at least six years now. I last upgraded it significantly about four years back. I've been meaning to buy a new one for two years but the plain fact is that it runs everything I play really well so I haven't gotten round to it yet.

MMOs generally aren't very demanding, even the newer ones. Blade and Soul, for example, runs perfectly and looks fantastic. Black Desert...doesn't. The prime reason for that is the textures. The game would prefer I leave them set on "Low", which looks abominable. It tolerates "Medium", which doesn't look much better, but if I try to move to "High" it throws up dire warnings about my video card having insufficient memory.

On the other hand, at night it doesn't really matter how bad the graphics are - you can't see them anyway.

I struggled along with the recommended default settings for a while, wandered around, started the tutorial quests, killed some weasels, took some screenshots. Not good. By the time I'd graduated from slaughtering wildlife to murdering Imp Soldiers for their hats night had fallen and I literally couldn't see what I was doing.

I stopped, took a look at the screenshots, which were generally dreadful, when you could make out what they were at all, and went back to GW2. Several hours later, when Mrs Bhagpuss had retired to bed, I went back to try again.

Okay! This is looking better. That's a fox, isn't it?

This time I spent the best part of an hour going through the Options. I switched off all the incredibly annoying blurs, fuzzes, fades and camera tricks that are supposed to improve your screenshots but which actually make them look like you have no idea how to hold a camera, much less focus one. Then I overrode the nannying voice with its over-protective concerns for my video card and risked the dizzy heights of "High" textures.

Eventually I arrived at a compromise that, even if it's not the gorgeous visuals I was expecting, is at least not actively painful to look at. The screenshots look better than the same views in game but the game looks...okay. If I want anything more I'll have to buy a new computer and I don't think I'm going to like Black Desert that much.

And I think that's a cat. It's so badly-drawn it's hard to tell. Especially with that giant chick throwing off the scale.

But I do like it. It's surprising, because one heck of a lot of things about the game are annoying me already and I've only played for about three or four hours. Still, it definitely has that hard-to-define quality that means I want to persist and overcome the annoyances rather than just write it off as a bad decision and move on.

The world is very worldly, just like everyone says. It's also set in that low-magic, quasi-realistic, pseudo-high-medieval milieu that hits my personal sweet spot. For an explorer archetype with my particular aesthetic it's close to a bullseye.

We have this darling little place in Tuscany...

Of course, being a game, it's also crazily, ridiculously unconvincing as a working environment. All those people walking the road with their gigantic backpacks, far from adding authenticity, look about as realistic as the forty or fifty foxes milling about next to the forty or fifty wolves just after the forty or fifty weasels, all romping aimlessly together in the shrubland a hundred paces from the center of town. Anyone who thinks this is a proper virtual world needs to re-calibrate their suspension of disbelief, pronto. It's running wild.

As an MMORPG, though, I can see it has promise. I know it's getting all the big praise for its sandbox gameplay, all that trading and taming and farming and such, but I have to say that none of that interests me in the slightest and yet I can still imagine enjoying Black Desert for a while.

Why, Grandma! What big teeth you have!

It has a plot that's not entirely uninteresting, for a start. That disembodied presence with the teeth is a wrong 'un if ever I saw one. What's up with that? It's like I'm playing a character that comes complete with her own psychotic episodes. I don't know where this is going but I'm curious to find out.

Then there are all the races. I was miffed that the only playable choices seem to be big human, normal human or elf (aka human with big ears) but I was mollified to find even the first village a hotbed of multiculturalism. Goblins, dwarves, creepy Midford Cuckoo children, even creepier guys with antlers... If this is rural life I can't wait to see the big city.

Tell me about it...

So far in this sandbox game my experience has been largely indistinguishable from what I'd be doing in a supposed themepark but I think that has more to do with how I approach MMOs than anything else. They really are all quite similar from my perspective. So, as yet, BDO doesn't feel a lot different yet to Blade and Soul or ArcheAge or GW2 or FFXIV.

It is, however, a lot less comfortable to play, from a technical point of view. The UI isn't terrible but it's not great. The screen looks quite cluttered even after I've switched off virtually everything that can be switched off. I really don't like the way the whole thing plays in a letterbox frame. It constantly draws my attention to the fact that I'm looking at a screen, not a world.

I don't even...

I was very apprehensive about the combat in BDO but after doing really quite a lot of it, it seems okay for now. As several people said it would be, it's just button-mashing, at least at this stage. There's a whole lot of guff about combos the game tries to teach you but just hitting left and right mouse button and a few random keys once in a while for variety seems to do the job just as well. At level 10 I haven't died yet and that includes many yolo runs into swarms of imps running into double figures. J3w3l suggests it gets harder in the 30s, as I guess it should, but I'll worry about that when and if I get there.

No, the thing that I'm finding most difficult to deal with isn't combat. It's movement. For a start I purely hate having my mouse pointer withheld from me. It's like trying to do up a bow tie wearing boxing gloves. What is the point? Can developers really not program a UI that allows simultaneous use of center-screen targeting and the mouse pointer? Really?

A minute ago there were about a dozen imps here, performing some kind of ritual. They got in the way of the shot. So I killed them

I'm constantly wanting to swap between the two things, especially when moving around town. It drives me crazy. Added to that there appears to be some kind of inertia factored into character movement. I am constantly overrunning my destination because my character keeps on going after I lift my finger from the W key. It's like I'm driving a vehicle not directing a person.

Even worse, there seems to be a short delay at the end of every combat that disables all movement in any direction. I have to count a beat of two before I can move. It's infuriating. At one point I was so irritated by all of this I went so far as to enable "Move by Mouse". That works very nicely but unfortunately whoever programmed it thought it would only be used by idiots and tiny children so they plonked a six foot high glowing flag at the destination click, making it visually unbearable.

I move faster the less I carry.

And yet, with all these structural drawbacks, I'm still itching to finish this post and get a few more hours in. The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying. I especially want to understand the Conversation system, which is the first thing I have seen in any MMO that reminds me, even a little, of Vanguard's much-missed Diplomacy gameplay.

And I guess at some point, as a Tamer, I probably ought to tame something. So much to learn. At this early stage it's impossible to judge the stickiness but I think I'll get the box price out of this one, at least.