Come On, Irene!

I wasn't going to bother doing an Amazon Gaming post this month. The games are getting less and less interesting, while the weekly release cadence makes a monthly post feel less purposeful. 

It is crazy hot, though, and I don't have the energy for anything complicated, so here it is, more than a week after I got the memo, my handy guide to September's free games on the platform. Ignore it as usual. It deserves no better. 

September 7: Football Manager 2023 - I think this is the big ticket number for the month, god help us all. It's not even available directly from Amazon. You have to go through the Epic Games Store to claim it. Also, if you live in Brazil (Or, more accurately, have a Brazilian IP address.) you can forget it:   

"Please note: Football Manager 2023 is not available in Brazil."

That was actually the most interesting thing about the game for me so I thought I might ask Bard what the issues were:

 "Football Manager 2023 is not available in Brazil due to licensing restrictions. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) has not granted Sports Interactive, the developer of Football Manager, the necessary licenses to use the names, logos, and other intellectual property of Brazilian clubs and players.

In the past, Sports Interactive has been able to reach licensing agreements with the CBF, but these agreements have lapsed. The CBF has been demanding higher licensing fees in recent years, which has made it difficult for Sports Interactive to reach an agreement.

The lack of licensing in Brazil has led to a number of workarounds. For example, there are a number of mods available that add the Brazilian leagues and clubs to the game. However, these mods are not officially supported by Sports Interactive and can be difficult to install.

Another workaround is to purchase a copy of the game from a region where it is available, such as the United States or Europe. However, this can be expensive and may not be legal in Brazil."

I haven't checked any of that but it's pretty much what I imagined so I'm happy to accept it, unlike Brazilian gamers, who I imagine are probably quite cross. They're welcome to my copy. I won't be using it. Pass.

September 14: Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim - Another one you have to go somewhere other than Prime Gaming to get, in this case GOG. I'm starting to wonder if Amazon are really committed to the Prime Gaming platform any more. 

I have no interest in these kinds of sims, which have always seemed to me like the kind of thing itinerant accountants might play on their laptops, alone in their generic hotel rooms, as they while away the dead hours of the evening. Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec would love it, I'm sure. Good storytellers like Wilhelm do a stellar job of making these things sound a lot more interesting than I suspect they really are so I'm occasionally tempted but I always manage to resist. Pass.

September 14: Absolute Tactics: Daughters of Mercy - A turn-based tactical rpg with a "mixed" rating on Steam. Hold me back, someone...

I'm not sure I've ever actually played turn-based tactical rpg. I've read plenty about the genre, not least from Tipa, who once again makes them sound like they could be fun. Just not fun for me, I'm pretty certain. 

There is a dog in it, which tempts me slightly, and it is native to Prime, which is a definite plus but... nope, I think not. Pass.

September 21: Dexter Stardust: Adventures in Outer Space - Finally! Something to interest me. This is a "classic point and click adventure" in which "taco-loving Dexter Stardust... and his good friend Aurora, go on the greatest adventure of their lives and discover the mystery of the Robot from the Planet X!" 

Saves me having to buy Starfield, I guess. Which, obviously, I wasn't going to do anyway. Remind me why I bought that new graphics card again, because apparently the kind of games I get excited about  would run on perfectly well on the PC I took to the recycling center two years ago. Claimed (Or it would be if I didn't have to wait another two weeks...)

September 21: Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate - Say what, now? The elevator pitch for this is "Chess, but you replace your entire army with a royal shotgun". Ever get the feeling some people just have too much time to think about stuff? Also, crowbarring "royal" into that tagline really loses the impact. Just sayin'.

I can play chess (Badly, of course.) but I don't like to. I've never found that gussying the game up with fancy graphics or larding it with whimsy made it seem any less tedious. This one doesn't even have the fancy graphics going for it. The funniest thing on the game's Steam page are the minimum specs:

System Requirements

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 7
  
• Processor: yes, you should have one
  
• Graphics: you'll need a screen
  
• Storage: 80 MB available space
  
• Sound Card: if your computer can play sound, you should be good
  
• Additional Notes: in theory, if your computer can run Windows, it can run Shotgun King

Is this really what they expect us to pay a Prime subscription for nowadays? Pass.

 

 

September 28: Unsolved Case: Murderous Script Collector’s Edition  - Another bloody Legacy Games hidden object "game". PASS in ALL CAPS!

 

September 28: Hundred Days — Winemaking Simulator - Seriously? You're just trying to get a rise out of me now, right? I realise there is literally nothing someone won't simulate these days but wine and video games seem like a really poor match. 

I watched the trailer until the painfully awkward voiceover told me "I failed and failed again until I got better", entirely without irony. Someone wrote that. Hard to believe, I know. Then someone had to read it aloud without laughing. I wonder how many takes it took? Pass.

And that's the lot. Not very impressive although I guess I should be satisified there's even one game I quite fancy. As for free loot in games I play or used to play or might play, I found a few worth grabbing.

I took the New Journey Pack for Blade and Soul. I had to have it - there was a hat. A beret, in fact. I really will play again one day. Honest! 

There was a hat in the Guild Wars 2 bundle as well but it was a fuzzy quaggan hat and I already have one of those. Probably. I have some fuzzy hat with bobbles, anyway. Doesn't mean I don't want another.

And finally there was the not at all creepy [Storage Maid] Fairy Irene for Black Desert Online. Giving away people isn't weird, is it? In fact it's an employment contract to hire her they're handing out, although I'm betting I don't have to pay her, so "employment" is something of a euphemism for "slavery".

Muddy as the ethical waters might be, Irene sounds just too handy to turn down:

"Moving items between storage has never been easier with Irene, your trusty storage maid that's available whenever, and wherever. Irene can move your item(s) of choice to and from the storage of the major city of the territory your character is located in."

I remember storage being a bit of a nightmare in BDO so anything that makes it more user-friendly is a must-have. You know there are going to be AI rights one day and NPCs are going to be striking over stuff like this. Enjoy it while it lasts.

And that was my lot for this month. This could well be the last of these posts. I guess it depends how short of things to write about I get and how many heatwaves we have...

Look At The Teeth On That Horse! Amazon Prime Gaming Giveaways For October

As promised, here's a little something about Amazon Games' free offer for October - and for a while it looked as though it was going to be a very little something indeed. When I opened the app, there were just three new games: 

• Horace
• Hero's Hour
• Loom

In order to asses just how generous the offers are, I like to benchmark against another platform wherever possible. Horace is £10.99 on Steam right now, making it a decent shout for a freebie. According to the publisher's website, as quoted verbatim by Amazon, "Horace is a story-driven, platform game peppered with nostalgic, popular culture references which will bring a smile to any gamer who enjoys the 8 and 16 bit era." Not me, then. Not only did I not enjoy that era, I barely noticed it. I have no nostalgia to be tapped and I actively dislike the aesthetic. 

I'm also extremely wary of any game that claims to offer "Eccentric British humour", which almost always turns out to be a limp imitation of a style that hasn't aged at all well. I really don't need to sit through another Python/Hitchhikers/Discworld pastiche ever, ever again. Hard pass.

Hero's Hour (£14.99 on Steam.) also has graphics I don't much like the look of. It's "an accessible, yet-deep and content-rich Strategy Roleplaying Game", apparently. It looks like an ugly, pain-in-the-ass waste of time to me. I guess I'm not the target market. Even harder pass.

Loom is the only one of the three I'd heard of. It's this month's guaranteed LucasArts point & click adventure, currently retailing for just £4.79 on Steam, which is quite possibly more than it's worth because it's old. 

Originally released in 1990, the Amazon Games blurb claims it has "Stunning, high-resolution, 3D landscapes", a claim I suspect to have been lifted directly from the original thirty-year old press release. If the screenshots provided are anything to go by, I think we're going to need new dictionary definitions for "stunning", "high resolution" and "3D" and quite possibly for "landscapes", too.

I claimed it anyway. It's a point and click adventure. I might run out of good ones some day.

So much for this month's games. But wait! Of course there are more. Tucked away on the Prime Gaming website (Fka "Twitch") there are three more games new to the platform, although not to anywhere else.

1. Fallout 76: The PITT
2. Total War: Warhammer II
3. Glass Masquerade

These are the games for which you need to link your Prime account to a third party - or more accurately three third parties: Microsoft, Epic and Legacy Games. I'm getting the hang of how this works at last. I already have my Prime account linked to Epic and Legacy so I was able to claim the Warhammer title and Glass Masquerade immediately. 

Total War: Warhammer II is a full-price title on Steam. It'll cost you £39.99 there as I write this. It's the same price on the Epic Store. I guess that counts as a bargain, then. Described as "a strategy game of titanic proportions" and wreathed in compliments from critics and players alike, I have to say it does look impressive, even if it's not really my sort of thing. I do have a fondness for the Warhammer universe, though, so it's not impossible I might give it a try one day. Claimed.

Glass Masquerade is an odd one. It's "an artistic puzzle game inspired by Art Deco & stained glass artisans of the 20th century", which is, I have to admit, not a sales pitch you hear every day. As far as I can tell, it's a kind of digital jigsaw. I'm not entirely opposed to the concept of jigsaws although I can think of better ways of inching closer to death and this is undeniably pretty to look at. At £3.99 on Steam and with an estimated 3-4 hours gameplay, it's a bit of a barrel-scraper but why not? Claimed.

And finally, Fallout 76: The PITT. I was a bit confused by this one. Was it the Fallout game I've been reading about for a couple of years on blogs like Bio Break? The kinda-sorta mmo one? I didn't recall that having a colon and a subtitle.

I had to look it up. It is that game but the newest version including the recent DLC that opens the world out a bit. This Amazon freebie version includes "the full Fallout 76 game" but not " any deluxe, paid or additional content related to Fallout 76". So that's clear.

In order to download and play the thing you have to link your Prime account to a Microsoft account. I've spent the last six years, since I bought this PC, resisting and refusing all of Microsoft's many attempts to co-erce me into signing up. So far I've managed to keep myself clean but it's not been easy.

It is tempting, all the same. I'm no fan of the Fallout series but I am curious to try the mmoish version. It's currently £34.99 on Steam so there's no chance I'm going to pay for it. On the other hand, there's a free week coming up to celebrate the franchise's 25th anniversary so I could just try it then. I'm still thinking about it. I have until the end of the month to decide. In the meantime, claimed, just in case.

That just leaves the in-game freebies, of which there are almost none for games I even vaguely pretend to play. Just three, in fact.

• Black Desert
• Elder Scrolls Online
• Guild Wars 2

The Black Desert freebie is "a box with a class-specific outfit". There's a non-trivial chance I might one day play the game again and new outfits are always welcome. Claimed.

For Elder Scrolls Online you get a couple of mounts, which I confess I thought I'd already claimed. Maybe they've come around again. I know I didn't log in to redeem them last time so if it's a second chance it's very welcome. Maybe I'll even use it this time. Claimed.

And finally, Guild Wars 2. There's only a week left to run on this offer so I must have missed it when it first appeared. It's a "Gift Finisher and Mail Delivery Carrier" and in the blurry illustration it looks very much like the Wintersday one I already have, although that's from a consumable item and I guess this is permanent? Seems a bit of a thin offer all the same but what the heck. Claimed.

There's another GW2 in-game offer "Coming Soon" so I'd better keep my eyes open. I'd hate to miss out on any of these highly desirable items.

And that's that for another month. More games to stack on the "Never gonna play" pile and that's after I've triaged the offer and thrown out the real clunkers! What a wonderful world we do live in, eh?

Tomorrow it's on to another bunch of free handouts - Steam's latest Next Fest. I spent too long looking through the options last night but so far I've only found four I'm willing to spend time with. I'll try and add a couple to the list today to make it a nice, round half-dozen and I'll preview those tomorrow. 

Or I won't. No promises. (I probably will, though. It's not like I'm going to come up with a better idea by then.)

We Were On A Break!

 I came home tonight to the following email from Pearl Abyss:  

I can't remember the last time any game sent me a notice like this. A year seems like a very short period to be flagged "inactive" for an mmorpg these days. Just because I'm not playing Black Desert at the moment doesn't mean I'm never going to play it again.

Most companies like to make it as hard as possible for you to delete your details. ArenaNet pretty much require a doctor's note before they'll scrub your name from their files. It's not that unusual for me to log back into games I haven't played for a decade and find the account still works just fine.

It did occur to me it might be a scam so I navigated my own way to the official Pearl Abyss website but once I got there I couldn't find any way to log in. I took another look at the provencance of the email. It looked legit enough. 

After thinking about it, I decided it wouldn't make all that much difference either way. I never re-use passwords and I have dozens of email addresses of which this is a fairly minor one. If someone did steal my Pearl Abyss login details I'm not sure what good it would do them. 

In fact, I'm not sure this is even my main BDO account. It might just be the one I made for BDO Mobile. That one I almost certainly will never play again. If anyone wants to carry on from where I left off after one session, good luck to them.

I went ahead and followed the links, logged in, changed my password. It all looked legit but I guess we'll see. Or not.

I had nothing else to post about tonight so thanks, PA, for giving me an excuse to put up some old Black Desert pictures and waffle on about nothing for a few paragraphs. Otherwise I might finally have missed a day.

It was looking bad until now!

First Impressions, Second Chances

As I was reading back yesterday's Lost Ark post it occured to me that I often finish ""First Impressions" by making some bold statement about whether I'm likely to go on playing the game and if so for how long. I started to wonder just how accurate predictions like that tend to be and whether you can really tell from the first session whether you'll play a game for days, weeks, months or years.

Luckily, for once I don't have to guess. I can go back and check. That's one reason for having a blog.

I've been reporting my opinions on new mmorpgs since the blog started in 2011 but it appears I first started using the "First Impressions" tag about six years ago, when I posted about my experiences in Blade and Soul. I've used it for expansions and game updates as well as full games but for the purposes of this excercise I'm limiting my research to new mmorpgs (Or games that have been widely treated as though they were mmorpgs.). Most of the conclusions were drawn from release builds but there are a handful of betas and early access reviews in there as well.

I expect I missed one or two but I think this is most of them. Almost thirty titles. For most of those I seem to have restrained myself to a single first impressions post, which I've linked. Some, Star Wars: the Old Republic and Atlas, for example, I seem to have managed to turn into "first impressions: the mini-series". For those I've linked to the post from which I took the quote.

Here, then, in reverse chronological order, is what I concluded about the games, often with a promise or a prediction about how likely I was to go on playing them. I've followed that with a few words saying whether I actually did. I'm curious to know if it reveals anything that might make me consider how to approach these posts in the future. Let's find out.

Chimeraland - January 11 2022 - "I can guarantee this won't be the last post about Chimeraland. I don't imagine for a moment it's going to be something I play the hell out of for years but equally I can already see it's going to keep me amused for at least as long as it take me to figure out what the hell is going on, which could be a while. " 

I think we all know which way that went. For a few weeks immediately after that post, Inventory Full became the unofficial home of the Chimeraland Fan Club or it certainly felt that way. There are seventeen posts tagged "Chimeraland" here already and that count is going to keep on climbing. I may not play for years but I also have no plans to stop.

Elyon - November 5 2021 - "Whether I'll log in again remains to be seen. I wouldn't say, as I did with Tera, "Thirty minutes is more than enough." but I have too many other, more appealing options right now. Maybe one day."

I don't think I ever did log in again. I remembered absolutely nothing about the game until I looked at the screenshots in the post and even then I couldn't remember much, not even if I still had it installed.. Turns out I played it via GeForce Now, which does at least mean I could log in on a whim at any time. I have no plans to do that, though.

Bless Unleashed - August 11 2021 - "I like Bless Unleashed and that's my first impression. What my last impression will be, who can say? But no-one ever does Last Impressions posts, do they?"

No, they don't. Maybe I should start but if I do it won't be with Bless Unleashed because I'm not done with it yet. Last summer I played it most days for a few weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it. I logged in for the winter holiday event and I often think of dropping in again. If it had a control system I liked better, I'd still be playing it regularly but it's too far towards the "action" end of the action mmo spectrum for me ever to feel really comfortable.

New World (Second Open Beta) - July 21 2021 - "It does feel as though Amazon might have got this one right. I guess we'll know for sure come September."

We sure did! Quoted for irony. 

Swords of Legends Online - June 20 2021 - "Chances are I won't buy Swords of Legend Online right away but chances also are I will buy it, sometime."

Hmm. This one's interesting. To me, anyway. Until I re-read this, I'd actually forgotten how much I enjoyed the game when I played it. I did almost pay the full box price, too. The only reason I held back was that, as you can see from the cluster of "First Impressions" posts dated June and July, there was a lot of competition last summer. I really need to install this and try it again, now it's gone free to play. And I would, if only there wasn't still too much else going on.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Generation - June 12 2021 - "I can't imagine I'll be devoting much time to this one. I'll probably give it a couple more goes then put it quietly away. Don't let that put anyone else off, though. This is definitely the right game for someone. Just not for me".

And that's almost exactly what happened. It's a decent mmorpg but I don't like the controls and the exploration is too restricted. I gave it a fair shot but it didn't stick. I've uninstalled it now.

Crowfall (Open Beta) - June 4 2021 - "With the beta set to run for another couple of weeks it's quite likely I'll spend a fair few hours as a Crow. I wasn't anticipating that when I downloaded the game but I'm always happy to be pleasantly surprised by the confounding of my misapprehensions."

I played until I hit the level cap and posted about my experiences in the game several times. I was still playing, on and off, as long as the beta lasted but after I hit the cap there wasn't really much to do. I never saw anyone do any PvP the whole time I was there. I followed the desultory reports of its sputtering launch for a week or two and then forgot all about it.

Elteria Adventures -  June 2 2021 - "For an alpha this looks solid. I'll be more confident about that when I've seen more but it's a convincing start. "

I went back and played a few times but I ran out of new things to do and stopped. Development seems to have stalled. The Steam page says "There's no recent activity from the developers of this title..." I might look into that later.

Valheim - February 11 2021 - "I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again. It's going to be one of the two, I bet. I just can't tell which, yet."

Three hundred and eighty-one hours played and counting. Mmmm! Delicious words. Eat them all up! The game I didn't want to play and didn't like much when I did turned out to be the thing that took up almost all my free time for a couple of months. I haven't played much since but the upcoming update looks interesting enough to get me back for a few sessions.

Genshin Impact - October 2 2020 -  "Since the game is free to play and genuinely so as far as I can tell, I can't see any reason not to give it a try."

Another one I really didn't expect to like but which grabbed me by the scruff and wouldn't let go. I gave it a good run at launch and I've been back a couple of times. I had screenshots from GI rotating as my desktop background all the way up to last week, when I swapped the folder for Chimeraland. I'm not done with Genshin Impact yet but as always it's finding the time.

New World (First Open Beta) - "I like New World a lot. At the risk of breaking that earlier NDA I'll confirm I always did. It doesn't do anything you won't have seen before but everything it does, it does well. It's solid, entertaining, accessible and polished. What more do you want?"

It's fascinating how most of my posts about New World's various betas emphasize how solid, stable and polished it is. I wasn't alone in thinking that at the time. What the hell happened? Despite all the bugs and breakdowns and foot-shootings I played for several hundred hours and I will certainly add to that over the next year or two, always provided Amazon don't throw in the towel.

Black Desert Mobile - December 16 2019 - "I may be back. I may not."

I was not.

WoW Classic - August 27 2019 - "When I finish this post I'm going to log in and carry on so I guess I must be enjoying myself. I might do my Guild Wars 2 dailies first, though. And log in to Riders of Icarus. Oh, and go do the first of the new Panda quests in EverQuest II. I don't think there's anything going on in WoW Classic that can't wait."

I found this very surprising on a re-read. I'd forgotten how lukewarm I was about the whole WoW Classic project. I only played at all because everyone else was writing about it and I wanted to get a few posts out of it too. Then I found myself completely drawn in and played almost nothing else for a couple of months. Never did get to sixty, though. I might go back for WotLK Classic, if it happens and if Blizzard looks like a tenable proposition to give money to by then. I still wouldn't play one of their games at the moment but the day is obviously getting closer.

Secondhand Lands - July 3 2019 -  "It is, after all, exactly the sort of quirky, original take on the established format that many lovers of the genre have been asking for for years, while roundly ignoring its existence. It would be shame, having found it at last, to let it slip through my fingers simply because of a lack of patience on my part."

Yes, it would, wouldn't it? Do I feel ashamed? Yes, I do a little. I have been back several times but I think I finally need to accept that things that were fun twenty years ago may not be fun forever. No fault of the game, just recognizing an uncomfortable reality.

Star Wars :the Old Republic - April 22 2019 - "I have already decided to subscribe to TOR for a single month to bump my account up to "Preferred" status."

I played the hell out of SW:tOR for a couple of months and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's WoW in space, what's not to like? I didn't mean to stop, either. Something else was happening and I put it aside for a moment and never went back. I often think about logging in again and carrying on from where I left off but - broken record time - there's just too much happening in the genre right now to look back.

Atlas - January 5 2019 -  "I've enjoyed learning what Atlas is trying to be, but as a PvE MMO, right now it's pretty much a bust. It's still a co-op survival game under the hood and that's a genre that's never appealed to me, no matter how fancy the paint job."

Astonishingly, to me anyway, Steam says I only played Atlas for six hours. I got a lot of posts out of that short time and in my memory it feels like it was a lot longer. For a long time I thought about trying again but last week I finally accepted it was never going to happen. Uninstalled.

Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse - December 16 2018 - "As a taster for the eventual MMORPG I'm not sure it really tells us much (it doesn't even feature the "hybrid" combat I wanted to see) but at least it doesn't raise any red flags...yet."

OMG! Remember this one? The standalone AoC spinoff Intrepid spun up out of nowhere in the heat of the Battle Royale craze. That got them yelled at. A lot. I quite liked it. I played it several times, more than I've played any other Battle Royale game, and I would have played it more if anyone else had. I remember logging in one weekend for some fragging fun and finding literally no-one else there to kill or be killed by. Then it closed down and we all pretended it had never happened. Still waiting for my Kickstarter-pledged beta access to Ashes itself, of course. How many years is it now?

Bless Online - August 21 2018 -  "Bless is in no way going to change anyone's mind about anything. If you didn't like previous Korean MMOs you're not going to like this one... If you're easily amused, like me, though, it's definitely worth giving Bless a go. I'm sure there are a good few more hours in it for me and the odd blog post, too."

There were. I played for a couple of weeks and got my character into the mid-teens. Then I lost interest and stopped. Then the game shut down. I did like Bless but I like Bless Unleashed a lot more. I hope it lasts a lot longer.

 Legends of Aria - July 13 2018 - "Let's give it the benefit of the doubt for now. Open beta is due sometime later this year. I might take another look then. Or I might just skip it. I don't think it's really my sort of thing. Might be someone's, though."

Completely forgot I ever played this. I did not try the beta. I did skip it. I can't remember what happened to the game after that... Ah, I just checked and it's on Steam, free to play, with a "Mixed" reviw rating. I'm happy with my decision to pass.

 Warframe - July 19 2018 - "I do quite like it so far..."

A more honest reading would be "I tried to like it..." Warframe is obviously an excellent mmo and several people whose opinions I respect absolutely love it. I just found it awkward and often annoying, plus the character models are absolutely hideous. I gave up after half a dozen sessions. I don't expect to play again.

 Auteria - April 16 2018 - "I may well be back..." 

I was but only a couple of times. I still check in on the website occasionally to see if anything new's happening. It never is. It's still running, though. And I still have it installed.

Stash - January 9 2018 - "I don't know whether I'm going to find the time to invest in this one that it certainly requires and possibly deserves but it's tempting. It may look funny but it's a proper, real MMORPG and that's not nothing, not nowadays."

Reading this again was surreal. I remember Stash by name but if you'd asked me what kind of a game it was I'd have said some kind of tile-based puzzle title. I'd forgotten it was any kind of mmorpg, let alone a "proper, real" one. It's vaguely coming back to me now. I did play a few more times but not for long. I seem to remember it being quite difficult. And slow. That would tie in with the old school mmo thing, I guess. Maybe I should take another look.

Secret World Legends - June 26 2017 -  "I don't like it. The overarching impression I was left with was one of disrespect. The Secret World was a unique and original creation: this is just another bash 'em slash 'em F2P MMO. What a shame."

I might not have liked it but that didn't stop me playing it. I've played SWL plenty of times since then. I got as far as Egypt, I think. Certainly well into Blue Mountain. I also ended up preferring both the slightly-easier combat and the somewhat simpler mechanics of SWL over those of The Secret World, although I can't really say I felt the diference was as great as all that. Still always on the table, both of them, although I don't suppose I'll ever do more in either than play the odd session and take some screenshots. Best costume designs in any mmorpg, ever. Worth logging in just to change outfits.

Shroud of the Avatar - May 13 2017 - "Even after nearly three years in Early Access this does feel like an alpha not a beta. Pre-alpha might be over-egging it but it definitely feels like there's a long way to go."

It was rough. I wonder what it's like now? Not planning on finding out.

Revelation Online (Closed Beta 3) - January 2 2017 - "It's a step up from Riders of Icarus, on a par with Blade and Soul, and definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing. If you don't like this sort of thing though I wouldn't bother. It's not going to change your mind"

What!? Have I been hacked? Revelation Online is better than Riders of Icarus and as good as Blade and Soul? Who says so? Me!? If so, why did I play both of those near-daily for months at a time but RO only for a handful of sessions when it launched? Okay, I can at least remember playing Revelation Online but I couldn't tell you anything about it, whereas I could chew your ear off with tales from RoI and B&S. 

Riders of Icarus - July 10 2016 - "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul."

Then again, this was 2016. It seems I've changed more in the last six years than I realised. These were my first impressions of Riders at launch and I didn't cotton much to it. When I came back for a second look a few years later I had a much better time. As I've said before, I might still be playing it now if it hadn't been for all that kerfuffle when the game changed hands and I got locked out for months. I am starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to go back for another look at all the mmorpgs I said I didn't like, first time around. Not that there are many of them. I do seem to be very easily pleased.

Black Desert Online - March 8 2016 - "The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying.... 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".

I did. And then some. I've played a lot of Black Desert, on and off and I'm far from done with it yet. I often think of BD, when I'm playing other games that remind me of it and wonder why I'm not playing BD instead. Black Desert doesn't need my recommendation, though. It's done rather well for itself.

Blade and Soul - February 1 2016 - "I don't get the feeling this is an MMO I'll pursue for long but I've thought that about a few Eastern conversions and ended up pottering around in them for a good while so who knows?"

Not me, obviously. For a while, probably right after I said I wouldn't be playing it for long, became my main back-up game, the one I played when I wasn't playing Guild Wars 2. I still play, occasionally. I have a character I like, I'm slowly leveling her up and it's only because other games keep interrupting that I never get very far. I still think Blade and Soul is one of the best of the imports and I've never really understood why it isn't more popular in the West.

And there we have it. All the first impressions from the last six years. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn, other than if I say I don't much like a game it probably means I'll end up playing it for months. 

On that basis, I guess we should expect a lot more posts about Lost Ark.

Thirty-Six Hours

Thirty-six hours. That's how long Steam tells me I've spent playing Bless Unleashed so far. Three dozen hours gets you a level 22 and a bank mule. That's what it got me, anyway.

I know this moment. This is where I start to feel I might be hanging around for a while. I almost never do.

A few mmorpgs from the top of my mind where that happened, in no order:

• Twin Saga
  
• Black Desert Online 
• Archeage
• Riders of Icarus
• Blade and Soul
  

All games I wrote about in a tone and with an enthusiasm that suggested I was digging in. All of them faded, all for different reasons. 

Twin Saga got too hard. That was a surprise. I played one character into the fifties. Experience began to crawl. I had quests I couldn't do. I died too much. It got tough. It stopped being fun. I walked away. I came back occasionaly to see if anything had gotten easier. It hadn't. Then the game closed down.

Black Desert Online began in a rush, turned into a game where it took too long to get nothing done. I got into the thirties on one character, had a couple of other characters in single figures, stopped. I came back when the Shai arrived, got into the twenties, stopped again.  Playing properly was a full-time job, playing casually was a riding sim. Even at the start the complexity was numbing and I could feel it getting bigger and deeper around me. I go back now and again but only as a tourist.

ArcheAge was strange. A very straightforward theme-park mmorpg if you played it a certain way, the way I played it. It was before all the shenanigans that damaged its rep. I was making good progress on a single character. I forget how far I got. The twenties at least, maybe thirties. I was having fun, nothing was wrong, then one day I wasn't playing any more. I forget why. It wasn't a decision. I imagine something happened, a holiday, another game, something broke my routine was all it took. All it ever takes, really. I thought about trying again, several times, but the moment has passed.

 

Riders of Icarus I enjoyed for a summer. It was familiar and a little unusual, too. There was a lot of fighting in the air on flying mounts, which took some getting used to but was at least semi-original. And they gave you stuff just for logging in that was actually good - better than stuff I've gotten for playing other games properly. I had (have) one character, I think in the twenties now. I didn't mean to stop playing but the company changed hands and they fluffed the transition and I couldn't log in for months. I can now but I don't, mostly.

Blade and Soul, more of a success story. I think I've only ever had one character. She's I don't know what level, mid-something. Half way to whatever it is. I want to say forties? I drove through the story at the start, got invested, then began to find the gameplay a little challenging. Too much finger-twiddling. Mine, not the character's. I drifted away but when I came back I found it easier, somehow. Recently I was playing most days until Bless Unleashed appeared.

That's just a smattering of similar, familiar stories. I play a lot of mmorpgs. I like most of them. I never met an mmorpg I didn't like, that's the saying, isn't it? Not entirely true but close. 

They take a long time, though, and they go on. They keep going on. It's not like the games you download from Steam, with a beginning and an end and if you're lucky something inbetween. Much as I'd like to keep playing all these good, great and just perfectly fine mmorpgs it's not remotely possible. 

I often used to say I preferred the low levels to the high, the levelling process to the end game. Sometimes I wonder if it's true or whether it's post hoc rationalization justifying extant reality. I have to like the starting game to the mid-levels because it's all I ever see.

Not strictly true, of course. There are games that stick, where I hit the cap and don't stop. EverQuest, EverQuest II, Rift, Vanguard, Guild Wars 2. Probably a few more. Others where I might not have capped but got close, maybe with several characters. Close enough to see the finish line and know what comes after. Dark Age of Camelot, Wizard 101, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World, World of Warcraft.

 

But mostly, with all but four or five in twenty years, I bailed at the top. Not for me, I could see that. With exceptions, sure, but on the whole that expressed preference for the early/mid game holds up.

So, Bless Unleashed. Where does the future lie? Almost certainly with all the other games I left behind even while I was supposedly invested and involved. I get so far and then I stop and sometimes I couldn't even tell you why. 

All of which is a lead-up to explain why I think it is I might be feeling the need to keep justifying my time spent playing, to qualify my enthusiasm, to make it clear that, yes, I'm having a lot of fun (really a lot) but that's not any kind of endorsement or recommendation because tomorrow or next week I might drop Bless Unleahed and not mention it again for a year.

It's a heavy responsibilty, having a blog. No, it's not. Of course it's not. But it could be if you let it get to you that way. 

In the particular case of Bless Unleashed, though, there is something else going on. The game has a history that means it has more to prove than most. I forget the unhappy details but the original Bless crashed and burned in some fashion still remembered with anger and resentment by people with better memories than mine.

Other mmorpgs have had to re-launch or reinvent themselves, most famously Final Fantasy XIV  but also the aforementioned ArcheAge. It can go either way. 

 

The connection between Bless and Bless Unleashed is something I have not researched and don't intend to but I've picked up a little. It's the same setting, I think. Looking at my posts from the first game I'd say it uses some of the same art assets. It might have the same lore. I can't remember anything about the story in the old version so I wouldn't know.

Other than that it seems like a completely different game. The controls are different, the systems and mechanics are new, the zones, the cities, the world - nothing about any of it rings any bells with me. It's also heaving with players in a way I definitely don't remember about the original. Everywhere feels bustling, busy, alive.

Or does it? At twenty-two I'm just about in the bubble, I think, albeit bumping along. Most of the people I see around me are in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties and there are plenty of them. 

They lounge around the soul fires, soaking up the health-restoring heat, snarfing down the shared food. They cluster around the marketplace and the warehouse so thickly it's hard to see the NPCs. Every quest I take ends up with me fighting mobs with other people doing the same, a very good thing for all of us.

 

It gives the strong impression of a vibrant, successful game and by the standards of most mmorpg launches I think it probably is, but...

Yesterday I had cause to go back to the first, big city and quest hub, Navarra. When I was last there you could barely get through the streets for people. Now it's empty. The wide boulevards and plazas bake in the sun but no-one's there to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city. Only the ever-present NPCs.

Okay, there were a few people on the streets. Half a dozen, maybe. It was nice, actually. Quiet. I could get to things without having to push. It does suggest the influx of new players has slowed to a trickle, though, if that. When I log in, instead of Crowded it says Average.

It's too soon for most players to be making alts, other than the necessary bank mules, I guess, and levelling content doesn't scale the way it does in some mmorpgs, so once you're through a region, you're done. There's rep, of course, and it's tied cleverly to appearance gear among other things, so there are reasons to come back around but it's early days for that for most people. 

There is another factor that could keep the lower-level regions in play. Bless Unleashed, like many imported mmorpgs that start out looking like PvE themeparks, turns into a PvP game later on. I'd say exactly when only there seems to be some confusion on the precise moment. I've read twenty and I've read thirty.

 

At twenty you can certainly opt in to killing other players. I got the pop up. I've been seeing characters with blood-red names all around me for a good while now. What I'm less clear on is when those of us who choose not to attack others become fair game to be attacked ourselves, regardless. 

All I can say with certainty is that so far no-one's attacked me and I haven't seen anyone else fighting each other either. I've been in a couple of contested zones but they both had mobs in the thirties so I came out again pretty quickly. Based on all that I'm going to say I think it's probably at thirty when I'll need to start watching my back. At the speed I'm levelling that's still a while off.

I could keep playing and avoid PvP altogether. In the uncontested areas it's not permitted. That leaves a fairly extensive sweep of country to explore and things like the rep vendors and a number of resources found there mean a peacable player could likely find satisfaction for quite a while, either playing alts or just mooching around gathering, fishing, killing world bosses.

For now, though, it feels as though all the interest for most players lies in the path ahead. I'm with them. I'm finding the storyline unexpectedly involving and the main quest does a great job of nudging me ever onwards. I've been meaning to post about the quality of the writing in Bless Unleashed for a while now. Maybe one of these days I'll finally get to it.

 

Or perhaps I'll wake up one day and I won't be playing any more. That's the thing. Based on what's become long experience I really couldn't say. Bless Unleashed might be the game to nudge GW2 off the rotation. It's already pushed EQII out of the daily queue. I haven't seen Norrath for a week, the first time that's happened this year.

If I was to make a prediction, though, it wouldn't be that. I'd put my money on BU dropping back into the pack of favored also-rans, the games I really like but never quite find the time or inclination to commit to playing beyond a certain level. The games where I drop in every few months in a flurry of enthusiasm, stay for a week or two then disappear again.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's an honorable position in my personal gaming pantheon. Minor deities and demi-gods with a statue in an alcove somewhere, the flowers on the last garland fading but not yet dead, to be refreshed one day when interest blooms anew.

I'll get back to it then, shall I? The levelling, the story, the entertainment. It's pretty good as these things go, I'll vouchsafe that much. Next time I talk about it I might even try to explain why.

Don't count on it, though.

She Really Shake You Donkey Up

Before Valheim appeared out of nowhere back in February, I'd been spending a fair amount of time in Black Desert Online. I'd updated all my details in preparation for the switch from Kakao to Pearl Abyss and I'd been running around somewhat aimlessly with my Shai, doing a bit of levelling here, a bit of exploring there...

It was fun. I wasn't planning on stopping. And then I stopped.

I kept meaning to get back to whatever it was I thought I was doing there but it never happened. The handover came and went and I still didn't log in. Then, eventually, the viking stranglehold began to lose its grip. And I saw this:

Who could resist the lure of a flying donkey? Well, I could, apparently, at least for a while. The event began on March 31st but it wasn't until today that I finally got around to taking a look at it.

But first I had to patch. Because of course I had to patch. Black Desert's an mmorpg. It couldn't possibly go a couple of months without adding a few gigabytes of data to my overloaded hard drive, could it? 4.27GB to be precise.

Seriously, that's four Valheims. What did they add? I have no clue.

As you can see, the counter didn't work. It sat determinedly at 1% the entire time and then the Patching button flipped to Play and in I went. Gives you confidence in the new owners, doesn't it?

The first thing that greeted me was a screenful of login rewards and other freebies. I'm starting to think I may be past the point of appreciating these. It was less than a couple of years ago that I was praising Riders of Icarus for its incredibly generous login bonuses and I do still very much enjoy a good freebie, but that old saw about it being possible to have too much of a good thing is starting to sound a little less ridiculous to me than it once did.

Other than that, Black Desert isn't the worst mmorpg to come back to after a break and I had only been away for a matter of weeks. All the same, it still took me a good while to get to grips with the UI and the controls again. 

It's as fussy-looking a game as I can remember on the fornt end. Did you know that the default UI has thirty-seven non-combat icons? Well, mine does. Thirty-seven! And doing anything seems to take more keys than feels reasonable. It's a game for octopuses. Octopi. Octopodes. Squid.

Enough of all that. On with the main event. Flying donkeys!

The event I'd come for requires you to play your Shai character and that your Shai character be riding her donkey. The first part was easy enough. She's my main character anyway. The second part turned out to be a little more problematic.

For some reason that I can't even begin to imagine, last time I played I ran her all the way out to Trent. Maybe I needed something out of the bank there? I don't know. Oh, it seems I can imagine it after all... Anyway, it was a fifteen-minute run back to Velia, which was where she'd parked the donkey.

BDO has some big distances to cover but it's a pleasure to do them if you're in the mood. I just set the route on the map, hit "T" for autotravel (once I'd looked up which key it was), switched the UI off and sat back. It's like watching a travel video. Very relaxing.

At the stable I got my donkey back and climbed on. It took me a minute to remember how to get him moving but once we were going at a canter I hit space to see him glide. He sprouted wings and a shower of stars flew out. It was like he was the main event at a six-year old princess's birthday party.

And did he glide? Not he did not!

He juddered along like... well, like a donkey with a pair of papier-mache wings strapped to his back and a box of cheap fireworks exploding in his saddlebags. It was inelegant to say the least.

I ran along the road like that for a while, failing to get airborne. I took a bunch of screenshots, all from behind. It wasn't getting me anywhere, figuratively or literally.

I'd read there was a series of quests to go with the event so I looked that up. It starts at Casta Farm. It wasn't far so I set a route on the map and tried to autopath there, only I would keep trying to make him glide so of course the pathing broke. I nearly ended up in the sea at one point.

I have to say, the screenshots make the whole thing look far more amazing than it was. It looks almost magical here but at the time it felt more like riding a faulty ride-on mower over a field full of rocks.

I got there in the end, somehow. You have to be mounted on a donkey to get the quest or the NPC won't even speak to you. That was a challenge in itself. Donkeys have momentum, inertia and a mind of their own.

The quest is a time trial in which you run from Herar the questgiver to... Herar the questgiver. How he gets from where he is to where you find him I have no idea. I assume he has a teleporter. I wish I did.

On the first run I drowned my donkey in a river. I wasn't expecting to succeed that time. I was pretty pleased with myself just for working out where I had to go. 

Since the whole point of the event was having a flying (okay, gliding) donkey I figured I'd go as the crow flies rather than following the road and just glide over anything in the way. When I came out of a stand of trees and found myself hurtling over a cliff I didn't panic. I hit the space-bar twice to double jump and "E" to glide just like I'd seen in the instructions. 

My donkey and my shai cruised gently over the river, right into the cliffs opposite. They hit about two-thirds of the way up and fell into the water. The donkey went under and vanished. My shai managed to struggle to shore although it was a close call.  

I ran her all the way back to the stables in Velia, paid the stable guy a hundred thousand silver to recover the donkey and set off to try again. The route back had taken me past the point where the quest would have ended and even with the donkey dead in a ditch I'd only missed the timer by a few seconds so I was optimistic for the second attempt.

And rightly so. This time I stuck to the road, crossed the river by bridge and made it with thirty seconds to spare. Which was just as well because it took me nearly that long to manoeuver the donkey into talking distance for the hand-in.

I nearly called it a day right then. I don't like timed quests much and I didn't want to push my luck. In the end I thought I might as well give it a go so I took the second quest and found it wasn't on a timer at all. I  was able to meander over to where Herar had magically transported himself at my own pace.

I found him, looking like a member of an elven Killing Joke tribute band, all mohawk, pointy ears and pantaloons, standing next to a couple of mountain goats on the edge of a high escarpment. Okay, I know what's going on here, I thought to myself. He expects me to ride my donkey off the bloody cliff. Well, more fool him. I've already done that!

So I took the quest and rode my donkey off the cliff. Why the hell not? And to my utter amazement I managed to get the creature to glide, after a fashion, all the way down without either of us dying. 

I would not say it was thrilling or exhillarating or a magical experience of any kind. Okay, alright, a donkey with wings is de facto magical. I guess you have to give them that. 

Compared to gliding in... well... in any other game I have ever played that had gliding in it, though, this was clunky and daft. But then, it is an April Fools event. What did I expect?

It did, however, work. I carried on in a bee line for the marker. There were a couple more small dips. We glided down those. There were several walls and fences. We glided over them. The quest allowed two minutes and we did it with time to spare.

The rewards seemed fair for the effort involved. Food and drink that give ten minute buffs to various kinds of mount experience. I'd have liked a title (Donkey Dropper, maybe) but you can't have everything.

The event runs for another week, finishing on the 14th. It's definitely worth doing if you have a Shai although I don't think I'd go so far as to make one just to do it.

As for flying donkeys as a general mode of transport, I think I'll pass. Just give me an actual glider and we'll call it even.

Moving House

 

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I was playing Black Desert Online. Enjoying it, too. 

As with most things, I hadn't planned it. I just happened to hear that publishing rights were passing from Kakao to Pearl Abyss and I'd have to do something about it sooner or later if I didn't want to lose my characters. 

Even though I hadn't played in quite a while, once my memory had been jogged it occured to me I quite liked my BDO characters, at least the couple I could remember, so I probably ought to make the effort.

I went through the account transfer process. It was relatively painless as these things go. I even got a post out of it. And then, naturally, I had to patch up, log in and take one of my characters out for a spin.

I chose the Shai, since she was the one I'd been playing last. Everything was amazingly confusing, as you'd imagine with a game as peculiar and idiosyncratic as Black Desert, except for the combat. That came back to me in no time. 

Hardly surprising. At low levels there's not a huge amount more to combat than pressing a couple of buttons. Gets a bit more subtle later but no need to worry about that now. 

What was a little more unexpected was how quickly I got back into the routine of logging in every day. The daily log-in rewards had something to do with that, which I'm sure would please whoever designed them, but mostly it was that BDO is just fun to play. 

It's a deep and complex game in many ways but also a very simple one if you want it to be. I just ran around semi-randomly clicking on quests, autopathing to the location, killing whatever needed to be killed then autopathing back. On the way I enjoyed the gorgeous scenery and frequently veered off the pre-set path to go exploring. 

It was all going swimmingly until out of nowhere Valheim appeared and knocked me off the BDO horse. Donkey, to be strictly accurate. No shame on Black Desert. I fell off all the other mmorpg horses too.

Nothing much would have changed only this morning I saw that the transfer had taken place. Kakao are out of the picture, Pearl Abyss are in the driving seat and there are a ton of rewards for logging in under the new regime because of course there are.

I salivate on queue when the correct stimulus is presented and free stuff is about as correct as it gets. Also I was curious to see if the whole operation was going to continue as smoothly as it had so far.

There'd been some overnight issues but those were said to have been resolved so I thought I'd give it a try. I clicked on the icon on my desktop just to see if there'd be some clever handover between the outgoing and incoming owners but all I got was a "thank you for playing, now bugger off" notice from Kakao. 

Something along those lines. I forget the exact wording. I realize belatedly I should have taken a screenshot for illustration purposes but I didn't and it's too late now. I've deleted all the old files.

I did that after I started the up the new patcher. And I did that after I'd googled my way to the Pearl Abyss website and fiddled around until I found the download for their launcher. Maybe if I actually used the email address I'd signed up with I'd have received something telling me where to go for that. I hope so. I'm not logging in to find out now. Due diligence be damned.

In the usual way of these things, even though I directed it to the exact same place I already had the game files installed, the patcher decided it wanted to download all thirty-six gigabytes yet again. I realized before it had got through much more than a couple, so while it chunked away I copied all the files into the new Black Desert folder it had created inside the old one.

I thought that might give it indigestion but it seemed not to notice. Indeed, it was so oblivious it kept on downloading the files and installing them over the top of the ones that were already there. I stopped it and restarted it and then it got the idea.

If I'd done the transfer first the whole thing would probably have taken about ten minutes. As it was it took about twice that. Then I logged in. Or tried to. There was some error or other but I figured maybe it was because I'd been messing about so much I'd confused the thing. I stopped and started over.

Worked fine that time. My new login details were fine. My characters were all fine. When I got into the
game everyone was speaking Korean (the NPCs that is) but someone in chat said all you needed to do was reset the language in options so I did that and then that was fine too.

I thought I'd better pick up my freebies so I started on that but there are so many! It didn't help that I haven't cleared my mailbox in four years. It also didn't help that my inventory was full. And it certainly didn't help that as I took things out or sold them the inventory spaces healed over! I had less space after the clearout than I'd had before I started.

At first I thought that might be some transfer-related bug but then I realized it was much more likely a temporary upgrade had expired. Black Desert is really big on time-limited upgrades and they often feature in the free handouts. Well, sometimes. I don't know about "often".

To cut a long and really not that interesting story a little short, I ended up running all the way to Trent, a town out in the boonies I'd forgotten even existed. First I went to Carpheon to try and unload some stuff to the bank there but I had almost no space left.  

Black Desert's banks are all separate but these days you can at least see what you have where from any of them. And it seemed I had an almost-empty vault in Trent so that's where I went. It was a long run but I tabbed out for most of it and wrote some of this. 

Once I'd cleared some room I started claiming and opening boxes and packs until that started to get out of hand. I'd need about ten bank vaults to store everything if I claimed it all. Those four years of mostly untouched freebies in my mailbox are just the tip of the iceberg.

Once I'd upgraded half my armor and all my jewellery and grabbed a couple of nice titles I felt I'd done about as much as I could stand for one day. There was just one last thing.

According to Massively:OP there's also a coupon you can claim. Why there needs to be one of those on top of everything else I have no idea. I also had no idea how to claim a coupon so I had to google that. 

Seems you can't do it from the game. It involves logging in to your account on the Pearl Abyss website. Maybe that's the point, to make sure you know how that works.

Once you're there you'll find the code doesn't obviously fit into the four boxes. Nothing's ever straightforward, is it?

The code in question, according to M:OP, is 0225 WE ARE THE ONE but what you need to enter on the website is 0225-WEAR-ETHE-ONE! . Reddit told me that and Reddit was right. And don't forget the exclamation point or it won't work.

I've done all of that and now I feel I need a lie down. Nah, who am I trying to fool? I want to go chop trees in Valheim. Black Desert can go back on the bench for a while now I know my characters are safe and have all their stuff.

I will be back, though. Just can't say when.