Path Of Fire Preview - Color Me Impressed

Beta weekend. Demo. Preview. Call it what you will, the doors are open. Last time we did this, when we caught the beta bus that was bound for Heart of Thorns, you needed a pre-order to board. This time you don't need a ticket at all. Just jump on.

Okay, it's not quite that simple. Before you grab a raptor and roam the desert you have to jump through a few hoops. First you have to make a new character. Then you get to watch a rather nice cut scene while you take an airship ride from Lion's Arch to Crystal Desert.

I got the feeling I was missing some plot here. Maybe there's a pre-expansion lead-in we're not seeing. I hope so . If not it seems a bit of an abrupt transition form the end of the last Living Story. The view's nice, anyway.

Next comes what is presumably the first segment of the expansion's storyline. There's a lot of fighting, a lot of fire and it's all very orange. You get a mount. It was easy enough but I could have done without it. I just wanted to get to the real map. 

Once the flames die down you begin to see just how gorgeous this thing is going to be. The scenery is astonishingly lovely - and we're only in a quarry!

I wanted to explore the mine workings but this is one of those story instances that warns you you'll be summarily ejected if you deviate from the program. I hate being on rails. I don't have that kind of tunnel vision. Okay, I'll stop.

After a bit of business with Kasmeer and Rytlock, which I found very interesting and amusing enough that I laughed out loud, twice, the story segment concludes and the real doors open.

Blimey, Charlie! It was night when I arrived and it stayed night until I left which seemed like about an hour but can't have been, can it? The city, Amnoon, is stunning. It's mostly the color palette and the lighting, I think. I just gawped.

And gawped. And took screenshots. And ran around and gawped some more. The desert sky at night, the stars and the moon, the sea, the clouds... I'm not sure you even need gameplay with visuals like these.

There is gameplay, though. Plenty of it. And it's the same as you're used to if you've played GW2 in the last year or so. There's something to do in every direction, some event to complete, heart to fill out, Mastery or Hero Point to get, Champion to kill...

Or all of them at once. Here's a snapshot I took mid-battle. Someone had triggered a Djinn at a Hero Point and while we were killing him a Champion Hyena for one of the new Bounty Hunts got involved, so we had the two of them on the go, when a Veteran (or maybe it was a Champion) Hydra wandered over the hill and thought he'd have a go at us as well.

All good fun until someone loses a head, as I think I heard the Hydra say. And enough for me for a first look. I saw enough to know that I'm going to have a great deal of fun exploring and I'll probably need to buy a new Hard Drive just to store all the screenshots.

Not sure I'll be doing any more of the "beta". I don't want to take the edge off and there's always that niggling terror in the back of my mind - this might be the time a precursor decides to drop.

Looking good, though, ANet. Looking really good.

Pink Pet Parade : GW2

What with all the focus on CHALLENGE and DIFFICULTY and RAIDING and ENDGAME it never occurred to me that among the new ranger-tameable pets in Heart of Thorns there'd be anything like this.

I don't have either the time or the inclination to log into the final HoT beta that began tonight but in our brave new world of pre-expansion GW2 you don't need to log into beta - beta logs into you. There we were, minding our own business waiting for Rooba and the C.L.E.A.N. 5000 to go through their vaudeville routine for the n-thousandth time when this apparition appeared.

It identified as some kind of Juvenile animal, marking it as a ranger pet, but I was so taken aback I missed the exact name and by the time I'd finished posing next to it for screenshots and switched the UI back on, the ranger (that's her with the wings) had amusingly renamed the creature "I Love Asuras", thereby overwriting the species tag.

The pink fluffy *thing* scurries about like a cross between a bunny-rabbit and a hamster and occasionally rears up on its hind legs and peers goofily to the left and then the right. What the heck it's meant to be I have no idea but dignified it certainly isn't. Scary, yes, but not in a good way.

The announced list of ranger pets included fearsome beasts like wyverns, dinosaurs and tigers. No-one mentioned anything like this. Unless that is what Tyrian dinosaurs look like. There is a theory currently in vogue that dinosaurs were brightly colored with feathers but I don't think hot pink fuzz was quite what the proposers of that concept had in mind.

Makes you wonder what else might be out there. doesn't it?

Make Way! Druid Coming Through! : GW2

Back when GW2 was still in Closed Beta I was feeling somewhat anxious. I knew it was an MMORPG I wanted to play but some of the aspects ArenaNet were promoting most heavily made me wonder whether they were making a game I'd find difficult to enjoy.

My primary area of concern was the emphasis on active combat and dodging. I don't like Action RPGs very much and at that time I had little experience of any that required constant ducking and rolling to survive. It sounded like a lot of work and not much fun.

I remember quizzing the Kill Ten Rats team, who at that time were quite deep in the loop, on how the combat felt and whether a traditional stand-and-cast player coming from an EQ/WoW background would be able to cope. They were re-assuring but it wasn't until the first open beta weekend that I got to test the waters for myself to find out whether they were warm and balmy or filled with sharp rocks and sharks.

As I wrote at the time "I was apprehensive about some of the things I'd read about GW2's "action combat" so I went with a class that could stand off a ways and see what was going on. That class, of course, was The Ranger and, as I soon discovered, a ranger in GW2 doesn't have to dodge at all. Not for nothing has playing a ranger in the open world been seen as playing the game on easy-mode ever since.

Staff envy

I stuck with my Charr ranger through all the beta weekends and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. When headstart arrived I simply re-made him and started over. He was the first character I leveled to 80 and he's still one of the key members of my team three years later.

Rangers have long had good utility in what ANet now likes to call the "soft trinity". They can stand in all three corners. They bring excellent "Control" (almost unsurpassably so, as was discovered to the detriment of many Mannequin runs) when using a bear pet as a tank. Damage is decent, with exceptionally good burst DPS on the Longbow and a range of conditions elsewhere. What has been less celebrated, although Zubon spotted it as long ago as November 2012, is their capacity for group healing.

Over the years a lot changed and it must be a very long time indeed since rangers were anyone's go-to healers in or out of a dungeon. GW2, of course, famously doesn't have a specialist healer class. The nearest would probably be an Elementalist in Water, a very common and required role in WvW, but there's never been anything even close to the kind of dedicated pure healer role of an EQ cleric or a WoW priest. Until now.

On Friday ANet lifted the veil on the final Elite specialization: The Druid. It brought the HoT wheel full circle. The Ranger was the very first class to have its Elite publicly named and its new weapon, the Staff, announced - all the way back at the start of the year. For once, when all is revealed, the method in ANet's mystery makes sense.

The Druid offers GW2's first and only full-time, full-on, full-function healing spec. Had that been made known back when we saw a ranger waving a stick for the first time there would have been uproar. Rangers get the shaft again. Why do ANet hate rangers? Well that's it - deleting my ranger now! And so on and so on.

Six months later there may not quite be a deafening roar of unanimous approval but there's plenty of love going around in the lengthy discussions and dissections of the new skills, traits and gameplay options offered by The Druid. The addition of raids to the game, the harder open-world content coming in the expansion and, most especially, direct statements of intent from the developers along the lines of "Upcoming content will have stuff that you can’t just dodge to survive" and "The Berserk meta is going away" make it quite clear that the class that gets the best healing is getting a plum job.

Not going to cut it in HoT. Allegedly.

Naturally that won't please every ranger. Not everyone wants to spend their play-session keeping the other folks upright. Enjoying playing a dedicated healer requires a particular personality. After three years in a game with almost no outlet for those tendencies is it likely there are even any would-be full healers still playing and if there are would they be playing rangers?

Well, I am. It's a long, long time since I filled the straight-up, main healer slot but it remains my favorite MMORPG group role. And what's more I don't just have my semi-meta zerker Charr ranger, I also already have a max-level Asuran Ranger, fully kitted out in Apothecary exotics and Ascended trinkets, who, when he hit 80, was specced with healing as his focus. Don't ask why. He just was.

What's more, in a piece of remarkable foresight (even if at the time it looked like a careless mistake) both rangers are on the same account and it's the one that's got HoT. I'm all set up ready for The Druid and I have to say the reveal has significantly increased my excitement for and interest in the expansion.

It was all so simple then. And we had hats.

It won't all happen at once. There will be an inordinate amount of theorycrafting and trial-and-error for weeks if not months before the inevitable codifying and concreting of The New Meta. Fun for those that like that kind of thing. Maybe in the end it won't turn out to be as spectacular as it looks on paper. Maybe it will be so overpowered it will die the death of a thousand nerfs.

I don't care. I'm just happy to see it tried. I've given the lengthy list of new skills and traits the once-over, surprising myself with just how many times I've nodded and smiled and murmured approval. For now I'm happy to wait until its time to test it out in the field.

There's one more beta weekend to come but I'm working the first day and going on holiday on the second so the first chance I'll have will be at launch. Can't wait!

Tales From Topographic Jungles : GW2

I'd have loved Heart of Thorns when I was fourteen. It's Brian Aldiss's Hothouse as imagined by Roger Dean, lush, overripe, adrip with adolescent sturm und drang. At least that's the impression I'm getting from the smallish portion we've been allowed to glimpse thus far.

As expansions go it's hard to assess. It seems fragmented, a collection of features rather than a coherent whole, a sense that's exacerbated by the piecemeal reveals, the sporadic, shifty liftings of the curtain. To retain the mystery much must remain concealed yet to drum up interest some things have to be exposed. It's a conundrum.

What we're allowed to see varies wildly. The PvP map has not only been open to all, at times it's been all that was open. Later this week there's another beta test of the new Desert Borderlands for World vs World and, unlike the Beta Weekend that's happening as I write, entry to which is guaranteed by the simple pre-purchase of HoT as a banner across every log-in and map transition screen reminds you, the  midweek WvW beta is by invitation only.

I haven't been invited. No-one in WvW chat has mentioned it. No-one mentioned any of the previous closed borderland tests either. There's no NDA and yet no-one is talking. I'm driven to wonder if that's because no-one cares.

People certainly cared about the first pay-to-play Beta Weekend. Last time we had one of these events the place was swarming and chat was scrolling almost too fast to read. When I logged into Verdant Brink last night map chat was silent. There was no-one in sight. About the only person I heard in the first half-hour was someone asking if he'd come to a dead map.

Maybe he had. Or maybe it was quiet because ArenaNet opened the doors two hours earlier than the time they'd announced. Whatever the reason it was jolly quiet. And peaceful. And nice. Hold that thought. I'll come back to it.

Last time round our little corner was the eastern half of what ANet very confusingly refer to as "the jungle-floor biome". To me, a floor is something solid that you can walk on but here it seems to include yawning chasms and gulfs as well as tree branches accessible only by leaping or gliding.

It's still not very big, is it?

Everything about the open maps in Heart of Thorns seems designed to confuse, not least how much of them there really is. We know for certain that there are just four open-world, explorable maps. We also know that all of them are tri-partite - "Roots", "Floor" and "Canopy". According to details that were datamined as long ago as April, the last two beta weekends have given us access to the whole of one layer of Verdant Brink. Assuming all the layers have the same surface area if not, necessarily, the same volume, then we should have seen 33% of the full, three-dimensional map. ANet don't seem to see it that way :

"For our second beta weekend test, you’ll be landing in a different part of the map than the one we showed in our first beta weekend, and you’ll be able to explore a new area: the jungle-floor biome. The playable content will comprise about 25% of the expansion’s first map."

Since they said the same last time, I make that 50% of the "playable content" in Verdant Brink they've revealed so far, but in just 33% of the map space. Either the other two biomes are smaller or there's less going on in them. I don't know. I should probably just stop thinking about it so hard.

Don't you just hate being photo-bombed?

Much more important is whether it feels like a place you'd want to spend your leisure time. Not your character, who, as the locals will never for a moment let you forget, is The Pact Commander and therefore is On Duty at all times, but you, the player, relaxing at home.

The first beta weekend revealed a hyper-active, frenetic environment where every hard yard had to be earned with blood. When the events worked the fighting was constant. It was tiring, draining, exhausting and frenetic. I could easily imagine it being fun for a couple of full-on days but after that I'd never want to see it again.

The western half of the Verdant Brink jungle floor is not like that. Not at all. There's much more opportunity to stop and smell the orchids. There seemed to be fewer mordrem and fewer mobs in general. Whether that's a response to feedback from last time or just A Different Part of The Jungle I don't know, but I like it a lot better.

I'm not hiding - I'm ranged support I tell you!

There also seemed to be fewer events and the ones I encountered flowed much more naturally. I hardly dare say this but there was a fifteen minute period where I was having a really good time.

I'd been exploring and enjoying that very much when I happened to arrive in a cave just as a Legendary mordrem attacked. The few players who happened to be there rallied to assist the embattled Pact survivors and after a very well-balanced and enjoyable fight the mordrem was defeated.

Drops poultry meat. Must be a chicken.

After we'd picked up the fallen the entire Pact contingent decided to move to another location, requesting we players escort them, as is traditional on such occasions. If there's one thing GW2 does better than all other MMORPGs it's an escort quest and this one was a lot of fun. We fought our way up a long incline, dispatching numerous mordrem champions along the way, until the Quaggan in charge of the expedition found a nice, exposed position on the edge of a long drop and decided it was perfect for a camp, so much better than the secure, defensible cave we'd left behind.

At that point Tequatl was calling so I left them to it. I expect they're all dead now. That's what you get for putting a Quaggan in charge. The thing is, it really was exciting and it didn't feel forced. It was just a bunch of players happening on a situation and getting caught up in the moment. Y'know, the way they told us it would be all those years ago. The way it really could be, sometimes, back then.

Meanwhile all that Dry Top/Silverwastes timed objective twaddle was ticking away in the top-right corner of the screen. No doubt the events I was caught up in were contributing somehow but I cannot emphasize enough how much I do no give a flying monkey's cuss about that. In fact, if ANet would like to raise my enjoyment of HoT by an order of magnitude, all they need to do is make that map event timer optional. I'll switch it off and we never need to speak of it again.

Chocks away!

Other than get my wings and explore that was about all I did. The glider was another positive. It only takes three mastery points to complete first stage of the track and one of those points to buy it. It was very intuitive and easy to use; much more so than the glider in ArcheAge, for example, or the gliding mounts in EQ2. Any apprehensions I had about the efficacy or user-friendliness of gliders was quashed the moment I unfurled my wings.

The Mastery system itself I quite like. It's very similar indeed to the AA system in Everquest or EQ2 in that it's not really much more than an alternative set of levels. That suits me. I love leveling. The points seem easy to get. You simply gain Mastery xp as though it was ordinary xp by doing whatever you normally do, filling out the same bar that used to be your xp bar. You also get whole points at a time for doing specific things. I got one for killing the Legendary mordrem for example. Again, that is identical to how AAs work in Norrath.

Aw, c'mon! Don't be such a tease!

While exploring I found a map portal in the extreme south-west corner of the map so I know at least one way we'll be going. What the other maps are like we won't know until October 23rd. I hope there's a bit more variety than trees, lianas, cliffs and more trees but apart from that I'm feeling a tad more hopeful than I was. If nothing else it'll make a bit of a change.

How durable these environments are long-term is something I'm still very dubious about. There are only so many treefrog villages and jungle clearings I can take. If the entire future development of GW2 during the lifespan of this expansion is going to be tied to the Maguuma Wastes then I think we may have a problem.

Who knows, though? Perhaps it won't be three years until the next expansion takes us somewhere else. It might only be a year. I think I could handle that much jungle. Even without going raiding.

Show, Don't Tell : GW2

Guild Wars 2 has been around for almost three years now. It promised to break the mold but in the end it broke itself. A mere nine months after launch I had already given up on the promises they'd made. It was easy. I never believed them anyway.

In March 2013, in a post titled Direction of Travel I wrote:

"GW2 for me has turned into a still-new, still-shiny version of every other MMO. There's an increasingly big part of the game, the part the developers seem mainly focused on and to which players are expected to aspire, from which I have largely opted out...As for where the game is going, I suspect ArenaNet are painting themselves into a corner with an increasingly restrictive, coercive, hardcore end-game bolted onto a free-wheeling, roistering, genuinely casual-friendly open-world leveling game. Unless they have better solutions than anyone else has come up with so far this is a road that can only lead to a fractured, dislocated playerbase where different interest groups lobby hard for their individual, incompatible aspirations."

Two and a half years later I think I might just be able to make out the faintest glimmer of one of those "better solutions" in this weekend's Heart of Thorns beta.

Not, for sure, in the fundamentally compromised version of The Manifesto under which we now operate. Remember "It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward" ? Such delicious irony.

Back in 2013 I was puzzling, as many were, over the addition of Ascended gear and the apparent willingness of GW2's core audience to accept grind-based, acquisitional gameplay, even to welcome it as aspirational. That's now embedded into the framework and here we are, anticipating eagerly the addition of new timesinks in the form of precursor crafting and new, account-bound Legendaries. If that's not the very definition of "preparing to have fun" and "grinding for a future fun reward" I don't know what is.

Then there's Verdant Brink. Good luck not "preparing to have fun" there. If you're the explorer type you'll certainly want to rush straight in and get on with it. It's visually stunning. It also has a war going on, a vicious day/night cycle, psychotically aggressive wildlife and a three-dimensionality that lets you see everything without being able to get to anything. Yet.

The peace and quiet that I lauded previously turned out to be largely unintended. A major event chain on one side of the map had stalled. On Sunday I found myself in an instance where the frogtown sequence wasn't bugged. All hell was breaking loose. That, naturally, was the time I chose to show Mrs Bhagpuss, deeply unimpressed as she was by then with the "Now! Now! Now!" action-oriented frenetic pace she'd experienced so far, that Verdant Brink does have its quieter side.

No it doesn't. It has a few quiet spots, like the Temple, with its magnificently atmospheric lighting or the oddly empty caverns, with their suspiciously climbable fungal outgrowths that don't seem to go anywhere, but pretty much anywhere you might want to go you can expect to fight all the way there and fight all the way back.

We fought. We ran. We died. Often. The novelty outweighed the frustration this time but that can only work once.

To cut ANet a little slack, it really isn't very fair to judge either Verdant Brink or Heart of Thorns on this limited exposure. It's not just unfair in the usual way that first impressions of MMOs are always unfair but more particularly because the whole zone has very clearly been tuned around the acquisition and possession of Masteries. With enough mastery points we'd be gliding past many of these fights, or bouncing on springy mushrooms, crossing the zone in seconds instead of slogging through it on foot, battling for every yard. Or so we imagine, anyway.

Masteries, clearly, will not be optional, not if you want to explore beyond the original game or, as we are now apparently calling it, "Pact Tyria". Without gliding and bouncing there will be parts of The Heart you'll never reach. Well, not until a Mesmer pops in to portal you. And mesmers do love to portal, bless 'em. But on your own? Not going to happen.

It sounds elitist, restrictive, dirigist and my natural inclination is to take agin it but I confess to being swayed by this explanation of why it's being done the way it is:

"We want our in-game progression to be about earning abilities that actually make a difference to what you’re doing in the game by opening up more of the game for you...the things you’re getting with the mastery system are very contextual and impactful for what you’re doing in that region by opening up new content and abilities that are more meaningful than numbers going up. We want you to see the gliding stuff and think, ‘I wanna do that!’

(Source MOP interview ) 

That does make some kind of sense and I can attest from personal experience that it's working. A few hours before I read that quote I was hopping about on a tree branch over what looked like a mile-long fall when someone swooped past me on a glider and disappeared into the depths below. And I found myself thinking "I want to do that!".

Until then I'd been looking at Glider Mastery as a bloody nuisance. It was an injury to need the glider in the first place and an insult to have to waste my time grinding points to be able to use it. In that one moment gliding went from imposition to aspiration.

So, maybe they do have some idea what they're doing after all. Hard to believe, I know, especially on previous evidence, but maybe it will all work out for the best. After all, some of us even came to appreciate Scarlet, in the end. 

One beta weekend isn't much to go on but on balance I would say I'm cautiously optimistic. Very cautious and only mildly optimistic but even that's more than I expected.

Test Department: GW2

One of the supposed perks that comes with a pre-purchase of GW2's Heart of Thorns expansion is "access to all beta weekend events". Although that sounds mighty inclusive, ArenaNet has a very specific understanding of what counts as an event.

It doesn't, for example, include the testing of the new Desert Battlegrounds for World vs World, which is By Invitation Only. It also doesn't in any meaningful sense include testing of the Stronghold sPvP map, which, on occasion, has simply been dropped into the live game for all PvP players regardless of any preference they might have had to the contrary.

Similarly, while only pre-purchasers got to drive a Revenant in the recent weekend event, since testing took place on Live maps everyone got to test out what it felt like to fight alongside someone trying to come to grips with a max level class they'd never played before whether they liked it or not.

It's a very odd way to run a business. I can't imagine it going down too well if Microsoft had decided to activate various features of Windows 10 for all users of Windows 8.1 for a few days to see how they worked before switching them back off and fiddling about with them based on how many complaints they got. How would a football team like it if half way through a match a bunch of people charged onto the pitch wearing roller-skates and joined in? That was pretty much how it felt when the Revenants appeared in WvW.

I guess when you don't charge an entrance fee you can get away with these kinds of shenanigans. If I was a paying customer, by now I'd be starting to have some serious issues with the cavalier attitude to the service for which I was paying but since I'm not I guess I just have to put up with it.

First impressions can be misleading

As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I have paid up front for the expansion, which means that at least next weekend I get to be the one running around on Live maps getting in everyone's way as I struggle to understand a whole load of new Elite skills rather than being the poor schmoe who has to stand back and watch. Go me! I guess.

Like Jeromai I'm fortunate (if that's the word) in that the first of who knows how many beta weekends falls on a long weekend off work. Should I wish to do so I'll be able to give the whole three days over to "testing" the limited content on offer. We'll see how it goes but I'm anticipating the novelty will wear off a lot sooner than that.

My interest and enthusiasm for HoT waxes and wanes depending on what aspect ANet has hyped most recently. Currently it's at a low ebb. The announcement on the proposed changes to Fractals seemed almost beyond parody. As I was reading it I kept hearing Nigel Tufnel's voice saying "These go to 11".

Then there's the threat promise to bring us "challenging group content". They've been at some pains to stress that we haven't seen any of this yet. It appears to be ANet code for "Raids". The reveal is probably what they have planned for the trailed live announcement of "the details of one of our Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns features" during next weekend's livestream from Gamescom. Can't say I'll be on the edge of my seat for that one.

Don't think much of the view.

They do seem to be mordantly committed to making things slower, more painful and more tedious. Sorry, sorry. Off message. Of course I mean more challenging, fun and involving. As they put it in the request for focused feedback after next week's test:

"Do you feel the need to use your entire skill bar in battles? 
Does teaming up with other players feel more rewarding? 
Do you find yourself wanting to change your skills and traits to overcome encounters?
Warning—creatures will be more challenging than in the existing Guild Wars 2 world."

To which I would expect my answers to be

"Why would I want to? 
It already did, thanks.
At the risk of repeating myself, why would I want to? 
If this is something I'm supposed to enjoy, why do you feel the need to issue a warning about it?"

Oh well. As Jeromai, who has already seen and played the Verdant Brink content that will be available for testing next weekend puts it, "...it felt like more of the same. Which wasn’t -bad-, it was comfortable, familiar, a little bit grindy, but neither was it blow-your-socks-off-spectacular either. It felt like, okay, we’ve had Dry Top, we’ve had Silverwastes, and now Verdant Brink is the next continuation of that. Right. It’s (more or less) playable. I get where you’re going with this. I guess… it’s all right, it’s acceptable".

And this isn't much better.

That is very much what I expected and feared. I enjoyed Dry Top and Silverwastes for what they were, but what they are is levels in a video game. I'm not really very interested in that and it certainly doesn't offer much in the way of replayability beyond the specific rewards that have been attached to it. I'm much more interested in immersion in an imaginary world, something I found, and still find, in most of the games original maps.

It's going to be interesting to take a look at what our future holds but I'm not getting my hopes up. Three years after launch I still spend most of the time I'm not in WvW in The Shiverpeaks and Ascalon. After the expansion launches and I've worked my way through the storyline, which probably won't take long, that's almost certainly where I'll end up once more. Assuming I'm still playing at all, that is.

Indeed, from my perspective, perhaps the most important part of next weekend's beta and the best reason I have for giving it a fair trial is the chance to experience and evaluate the proposed incentives for continuing to play in "Old World" maps: the unfortunately-named Map Bonus Reward System. Call me idealistic but I thought the reward came from the pleasure, even joy, of being in that world. What do I know?

I very much hope that a week from now I'm back here, publicly eating both my hat and humble pie, and gosh-wowing about how great it all is and how wrong I was to be so cynical and downbeat. Place your bets now.

With One Bound He Was Free: FFXIV

I was running around Ul`Dah this evening, just trying to find the Thaumaturge Guild, when something in chat made me have a moment. "Full NDA on this beta, I take it?" I asked.

"Nope. Just video and audio" someone replied. A short discussion ensued. I went and checked the Forums. It's true. FFXIV A Realm Reborn Beta Phase 3 permits open discussion and use of screenshots on blogs. So I'm discussing it. Openly. With illustrations.

I spent an hour in Character Creation. I was in a hurry.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say, even now, that I was in Beta Phase 2. I was though. I am definitely not allowed to show any of the screenshots I took then, which is a shame because they were gorgeous. Square take these things very seriously though so I am keeping them to myself. Sorry.

Don't be a worrywart! It'll go right over me!

Even SE wouldn't complain if I told you that I was so impressed with Beta Phase 2 that I decided there and then that I'd be getting the game when it released. I tested the original FFXIV two years ago and the current version is very definitely the MMO it should have been from the start.

I so can jump!

Not going to say much about it now. It's one of those Weekend betas, this is the first weekend, I missed a day and it ends tomorrow and all I've done so far is make two characters and get to Level 3. In one class. Leveling is weird in Final Fantasy MMOs. I got as far as Level 15 Archer in the last beta though. And loved every minute of it.

Just tell me how high!

Call this a placeholder post. Marking out the territory. Miqo'te do that. Probably. Lalafell not so much. More to follow. Now I'm going back to level up while the servers are still running.

See ya!

The bit I have to put in so I don't get in trouble

Copyright (C) 2010 - 2013 SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. All Rights Reserved. (US Version - I'm on a US server)

FINAL FANTASY XIV (C) 2010 - 2013 Square Enix Co., Ltd. FINAL FANTASY is a registered trademark of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. All material used under license. (EU version - that's where I live).

Neverwinter, A Nose-Poking.

So inevitably I cracked and grabbed a key for the (final?) Neverwinter beta weekend. I spent three hours with it this morning and these are my very loose, unsorted first impressions:

Character creation seems a bit lacking. I was expecting more from Cryptic. Then again, I made a dwarf and dwarves in every MMO tend to look somewhat undifferentiated. Reserving judgement until I see the sliders in action on someone that doesn't look like Brian Blessed squashed into a dustbin.

I don't like the control system but I knew that would be the case. I find all these forced mouselook, keyboard shortcut, no auto-attack, click-click-clicky UIs clumsy and awkward in the extreme. Just give me a hotbar and full access to my mouse pointer and let me get on with it, can't you? That said, the controls are entirely playable and nothing like annoying enough enough to put me off playing, any more than they were in DCUO.

Ye gods but it's orange! I was hoping it would just be the first area but other than in the city of Neverwinter itself it's a festival of rust and tangerine as far as the eye can see.

The tutorial is excellent. That's something I don't often get to say. Apart from a very, very short "press this key to go forward" part right at the start, the whole thing is seamlessly integrated into the same world where you're going to be playing your character. So much so that it was only when I tried to access a Forge mission in Neverwinter and got the message that I had to finish the tutorial first that I knew I was even still in the tutorial!

The city of Neverwinter is spectacular. It looks, sounds and feels just like a large high-fantasy city should. It's sprawling, detailed and confusing. And gorgeous. It bodes well for the prospect of exploring whatever might lie beyond its gates.

The fighting areas I've seen so far aren't bad. Typical low-level tombs, sewers, taverns and slums but what else would they be? It's D&D after all. Detailing is reasonably varied although you really couldn't say anything rose much above the generic. Still, not bad at all.

Way too much fiddly clicking to get basic things done. Lots of actions seem to have a secondary confirmation after it should already be clear to the system that your choice has been made. I felt the game was constantly asking me "are you sure about this? Are you really sure?". And sometimes even "Are you sure you're sure?"

Too much voice acting and not good voice acting either. The combination of cookie-cutter questing, run-of-the-mill dialog and baseline adequate line readings is quite wearing. I can filter two out of three but all together it's just too much. The voice-over can be set to stop as soon as you close the dialog (if you don't do this a disembodied voice follows you remorselessly, making you feel as though you're having an excruciatingly dull psychotic interlude) but there doesn't seem to be any way to switch it off completely, which is what I wanted to do after about ten minutes.

At ultra-low level combat seems very easy. I had a couple of tight fights on the final quest bosses but I logged out at level six not having died once. Well, not in combat...

You can fall off high places, something the city abounds in. I wondered if you could, so I tried and I did and I died. I liked that.

Campfires are annoying. This MMO fudge for D&D's rest system just does not work. I didn't think it worked in DDO and here it's even sillier. Having fixed points in dungeons at which you can recover to full health in seconds just means that after every fight you trudge back to the last campsite, heal up, turn round and trudge back to where you were. All it does is add a pointless, aggravating delay timer to auto-healing. With this mechanism I don't see what is supposed to be gained in realism, authenticity or immersion over standard MMO out-of-combat health regeneration or old school sit&rest. It certainly adds nothing to the gameplay.

Foundry missions look very intriguing. The one I did had livelier dialog than any of the official quests (although a good editor would have taken out the odd incongruous  "cool" and "man" that gave it an odd Bill&Ted tonal quality). I was surprised and very impressed that the opening part all took place in Neverwinter itself, using NPCs standing there in what seemed to be plain sight. Very convincing. The dungeon part was basic but functional. It certainly encouraged me to think I'd like to have a go at writing some of these when it goes live, which is just as well since that's what interested me about the game in the first place.

Overall I liked it well enough. As others have said, it really is quite reminiscent of DDO although I think I would say even at this early stage that I prefer Neverwinter. It also reminded me of City of Steam, what with the whole sprawling central city with dungeons spinning off the edges thing going on. Not to mention the bulletin boards.

Whether I will get to spend much time in Neverwinter depends more on what I have on my plate elsewhere, I suspect. It certainly didn't strike me as unmissable, as Guild Wars 2 did right from the first beta weekend. Neither is it sufficiently unusual or original to make me feel I ought to make time for it, which is what I thought about The Secret World right from the first time I played it.

Neverwinter looks like the sort of thing I might dip into when I haven't really got much else planned. If a subscription was involved, there'd be no question of paying it and I am not sure I'd even stump up a one-time fee for a box. But since it's free...