Oh My Ears And Tail!

Today saw the opening of character creation for the revamped/retro/classic version of Blade&Soul - Blade&Soul Neo. NCSoft are really working the publicity levers for this one. Anyone would think it was a new game, not just a reskinned old one.

I love character creators, easpecially the newer, super-duper, glitzy ones with the sliders and the lighting and all. It has crossed my mind occasionally to wonder whether an enterprising studio might not do quite well with a game that was pretty much nothing but character creation, a cosmetic cash shop and a few multiplayer locations where people could parade around, showing off. If it was glam enough, I'm not at all sure you'd need an actual game to go with it...

The original Blade&Soul's character creator was probably one of the earlier tweak-heavy models I tried although certainly not the first.I was a little late to that party. B&S came out in 2012 but I didn't try it until four years later, when it launched in the West. 

By then I'd seen plenty of fancy character creation suites but I was still quite impressed:

"Character Creation is equally well-designed. Very easy to follow, plenty of choice, lots of presets, no sliders. Classes seem to be locked to races. Didn't notice if they're also locked to gender. I went Summoner because That Cat which means I am the cute, small race. Win!"

That's what I said first time around. No sliders, I notice. I didn't like sliders back then. Luckily I'm softer on them now because the new character creation options have plenty.

 

Classes are still locked to races, something I'm broadly in favor of, unfashionable though it may be. Of course, I'd probably think differently if the class I wanted to play was locked to a race I didn't like. Gender-locking classes would be a lot less acceptable but it's not happening so forget I mentioned it. Then again, one of the races is gender locked to all-female...

There are four races in B&S but I'd have to look them up to tell you what they are. I do remember they all have very short, one-syllable names but that's about it. I didn't spend much time on them because, as far as I could see, there were three flavors of vanilla human (Can you have flavors of vanilla?) and one human-with-animal-attributes.

In 2016, I chose the least-obviously human option and it won't surprise anyone to hear I just did the same again. There is a slightly different-than-expected reason for that. I mean, yes, if a race has ears and a tail I'm always going to favor it, that's a given, but in this case only the Lyn (That's the name of the animal-inflected race.) can be Summoners and Summoners are the only ones who get combat pets. 

I was sure I wanted to play a Summoner, even if it meant I'd be replicating my character from the old game. I could literally have cloned her - I still have the saved file from character creation nine years ago. I didn't find that out until the end, though, by which time I was emotionally committed to the new character I'd just created.

I might still use the clone option for one of the two remaining character slots, just for the appearance, not the class. You get three slots but only one can be filled pre-launch. Since the old game isn't going away, though, and since I still have my existing character there, I'll probably just play her there, if I feel like seeing her again.

 

When B&SNeo arrives next Tuesday (On the same day the Stars Reach Kickstarter goes live - I wonder which debut will draw the more interest?) I plan on starting over from the beginning. I haven't even taken the option to skip the three-level tutorial. If I'm going to play again, I'd like to refresh my memory of the plot, which I seem to remember has a fairly complicated opening.

Following on from the notes I gave myself at the end of yesterday's post. I'm not at all convinced the Summoner is the best class I could have chosen. Pet classes have historically been preferred for soloing, it's true, but the guidance you get in character creation clearly points to this one being best-suited as a support character. That strongly suggests it's intended for group play and there's not much chance I'll be engaging in any of that.

Maybe I'll make something else when the game starts. On the other hand, I seem to remember doing just fine with the Summoner last time. If it ain't broke, as they say...

As far as looks go, there have been comments, as there often are with "imported" MMORPGs, that the character models and outfits are over-sexualised. This is hard to deny when you first enter character creation. The default appearances are somewhat risqué and that's not even mentioning the "jiggle-physics". 

I'm happy to say that's a feature mercifully absent from the diminutive Lyn, although their childlike appearance brings up awkward issues of its own. Fortunately, if you use the "Outfit" toggle, you'll find that just about every clothing set on offer is perfectly respectable. Once properly dressed, as they are in the illustrations for this post, I'd say the characters almost qualify as "demure". 

I'm not sure if I'll end up with the same look when I log into the game for the first time. A lot of MMORPGs have a nasty habit of showing your character wearing clothes in character creation that they won't see in game for a long time. I think most of the outfits in B&S were tied to storyline or quest progression. Looking back at my old posts, though, my character seems to be decently covered-up in pretty much every shot, so it should be fine.

I was actually a lot more concerned about her ears and tail, anyway. And her hairstyle. There are so many great choices. I found it very hard to settle on just one. It does seem a shame to have such a huge variety of looks available but then to be limited to a mximum of three character slots to make the most of them.

Presumably there's some sort of in-game option to change looks but I always have an existential problem altering anything other than my characters' hair, clothes, accessories or make-up. Swapping body parts is a step too far for my suspension of disbelief, even in a magic-rich world so I'll be stuck with the ears and tail I started with.

Or maybe not. We'll see. I'm increasingly of the opinion that I need to get over myself on some of these self-imposed rules, many of which date back to old, unchallenged assumptions from my pen-and-paper roleplaying days. Those, scary though it is to think it, ended almost forty years ago. It's probably time I moved on.

The real benefit of making a character now, other than being able to get straight on with playing the game the moment it arrives, is that character creation also allows you to reserve your name. It's a bit of a moot point for me since I'll lay good odds no-one would have thought of the one I've gone with anyway. I very rarely have any problems getting the names I want for the very simple reason no-one else wants them.

It's done now, anyway. Should I want to hit the ground running on Tuesday, I can. I won't, of course, if only for the very good reason that I'm working Tuesday and I probably won't play any games at all, not even in the evening. And then on Wednesday I have something else on so maybe not then, either.

Thursday, though... that might be the day!

Neoclassical - Giving Blade&Soul Another Go

 I don't, by and large, suffer from FOMO. I can let all kinds of things slide without worrying about it. I do, however, have something of a curiosity problem. I can't keep my nose out of things that don't really concern me.

A case in point is the current Stars Reach pre-alpha. I've been fairly convinced from the moment I first heard about the project that it wasn't likely to be a game for me and very little I've heard, seen or read about it since, including a dozen hours hands-on with what there is of the game so far, has given me cause to change my mind. I think it's very likely to turn into something a lot of people will enjoy and I  hope for their sakes (And the developers, of course.) that it does but I can't see any real likelihood I'll be spending much time there.

And yet I still applied to test it and, having been accepted, have tried to do my best to log in and give my feedback, on the rare occasions I've been able. Granted, I always had in mind the potential the testing program offered for blog posts, so it wasn't entirely out of idle curiosity that I filled out the application, but although it's given me something new to write abnout, since I've been posting about the progress of the pre-alpha and the Kickstarter I've seen precious little sign that more than one or two people who read this blog are particularly interested. Indeed, the few comments I've had have come from people also in the test or who applied and didn't get in.

This wasn't going to be (And still isn't.) a post about Stars Reach but since the Kickstarter has come up, let's talk about that for a moment. What is going with it? I tend to think it's some smart marketing but it could certainly be read as something a lot less favorable. Panic, even.

There's a trick to building anticipation and my estimation is that for now Playable Worlds have just about managed to stay on the right side of the line. Sentiment towards there even being a Kickstarter was weak when it was first announced but by leveraging the whole thing to turn it into a kind of loyalty test with pre-alpha access as a reward it does seem most of the negativity has been replaced with a puppyish eagerness to be included.

Whether that will translate to dollars in ther bank when the actual Pledges are finally revealed, which may or may not be sometime next week, is the part I find the most interesting right now. At one point I was very curious to see what the rewards on offer would be but we have a kind of idea about that after last week's press release so the big question is whether it will be enough. It certainly didn't sound appealing to me but then, as I've said, I really am not the target market.

That's just an aside to the main subject of this post, though, which is why am I sitting here, typing this while Blade & Soul Neo downloads in the background? Or, I should say, fails to download but I'll get to that later.

I should begin by saying that I like the original Blade & Soul quite a lot. There are twenty-eight posts here tagged "Blade and Soul" (Or "Blade&Soul", because I can never remember which way NCSoft style it.) I played it a for a few weeks when it launched in "Western Territories" in 2016 and I've had several shorter runs at it since. It's on the longish list of games I often think about going back to but mostly don't.

When I read that NCSoft was repackaging the whole thing under a new name - more accurately the old name with "Neo" stuck on the end - I was interested enough to follow the news to see what it meant. What I learned surprised me a little. 

If you haven't been keeping up with the story, B&SNeo is neither a sequel nor a relaunch. It's kind of a "Classic" version that's starting over at the beginning but it's also a bit like what happened to The Secret World when Funcom decided to try to give it more popular appeal by streamlining, modernizing and re-promoting it as Secret World Legends.  

NCSoft, luckily, are handling the whole thing a lot better than Funcom did. When Neo opens for business in just under two weeks on 25 February, Blade & Soul will simply carry on as before. You'll still be able to play it and as far as I know you'll still be able to start playing it as well. The two games will continue in parallel, although I wouldn't like to say how much onward development the original will get, if the revamped version is a success.

Who'd have thought it'd be NCSoft that would be caught doing the right thing, eh? I guess maybe they learned something from the City of Heroes debacle after all. I'm pretty sure Funcom haven't learned anything from SWL, although I suppose they haven't shuttered anything else since and TSW is technically still playable - I think. I haven't tried to log in for a long time.

Getting back to the point, when I read all of this, my original feeling was that it might push me to patch up B&S and have another go but I had no interest in Neo, which looked like it was just going to be a graphical update with a few tweaks. I always found B&S to be a very good-looking game with an aesthetic that's aged well so I wasn't feeling the need for a visual upgrade.

Then I read this piece by Michael Byrne at MMOBomb in which he goes into some detail about just what's different about the new game. He focuses mostly on the monetization, something that never really affected me since I didn't play long enough to hit any of the pay walls, but he also mentions several changes to things like cosmetics and outfits being available not only through the cash shop but through gameplay and a revision of the really annoying weapon upgrade system to make it much more straightforward.

Those were two of the things that I didn't much like about B&S so the thought of being able to play dress-up and not have to upgrade all my gear seven hundred thousand times does carry some weight. 

On the other hand, Neo will follow exactly the same storyline, which might be a problem. Believe it or not, I can actually remember quite a lot of the story, even though it's been a few years since I played. That speaks well in favor of its quality but it also means I might not want to go through it all over again.  

If I'm realistic about it, it's not likely to become much of a problem. The chances of my getting anywhere close to where I was when I stopped is minimal. I may not have been at the level cap - not even the original one - but I was in the thirties or forties somewhere and it took me quite while to get that far. I don't imagine I'll be doing it again.

Still, when I got an email from NCSoft this morning, inviting me to pre-download the new client, I thought "Why not?" The thought of starting over is at least as attractive as going back to my old character, who was somewhat bogged down in a part of the story that she was having a little trouble getting past. And as has been discussed many times around this part of the blogosphere, going back to MMORPGs after a long lay-off comes with all kinds of problems of its own. If nothing else, starting afresh would certainly be less of a hassle.

So that's what I'm planning to do. NCSoft has made it relatively easy although, as Michael Byrne points out, they're doing themselves no favors by insisting on the use of their own portal, the oddly-named Purple, rather than adding the game to an existing one like Steam or Epic. 

At least the Purple launcher is easy to install. NCSoft offer a host of options to link it to other services. I used my old Gmail account that I have the original B&S tied to so with a bit of luck I'll be able to use Purple to swap between them, should I ever want to. Which I won't.

The download itself seems very slow, something not helped by the way it didn't save progress when my internet briefly hiccupped just after I started writing this post. If it makes me restart every time that happens I'll never get to play because my ISP is going through a flaky stage just now.  

With luck and a following wind I'll get the whole thing downloaded and installed before the twenty-fifth. All I'll have to do then is find time to play. I noticed when I was registering with Purple that NCSoft has its own cloud gaming service through the platform, which might be interesting. If I can play Neo in the cloud on my laptop that would seriously increase the chances of my playing it at all.

We'll see at the end of the month. If I do end up playing, you can guarantee I'll be posting about it.

Stranger Danger

That's my Blade and Soul character up there, showing of the new outfit Jeff Bezos gave her. Generous Jeff we call him around here, as well we should. 

Jeff handed out a bunch of stuff today. There was the Velvet Rope outfit on the left, suitable for any red carpet premiere event, especially when accessorized by the Velvet Rope Accessory on the right. He threw in a whole bunch of upgrade materials and buffs and suchlike, too, although I think those may have been from last month. I have nearly two dozen unclaimed gift packs in my mailbox, most of which I daren't open for fear of overwhelming my inventory.

On that thorny and hoary topic, as I was checking just how much space I had, I was surprised to find I could buy several more rows of inventory for a small amount of in-game currency, eight slots for just six silver, then another eight for a further twenty-four. 

I'm fairly sure this is new for the simple reason that I would have already bought them if wasn't. If there's one thing I never begrudge paying imaginary money for it's bag slots. I'm just sorry I had to stop at two rows. The cost ramped up heavily at the third, jumping from a few silver to over a gold. Since I've only managed to accumulate a couple of gold in all the time I've been playing that seemed like an offer I ought to refuse. For now.

I was less impressed with what Jeff had for me in Guild Wars 2, although I'm sure many would find it useful. Even the name sounds utilitarian: Convenience Set. After a bit of a struggle I got it open and out popped a whole bunch of the kind of things that already take up space in my bank. Too useful to throw away, not useful enough to, y'know, use.

Those were just the mini-gifts, anyway. Fluff and fancies. The trinkets that fly out of the cracker before you get down to the serious present-opening. Only at Jeff's house it's Christmas every month.

This April, Amazon Prime has five games to give away. I took four of them and politely declined the fifth. Whether I'll ever install them, let alone play them, is another matter. 

The one I was certain I'd never need (Or want.) was something called Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. Every single thing about that title raises red flags for me. Turnips are not amusing vegetables and anyone who thinks they are does not have a sense of humor. "Turnip Boy" is not an amusing parody of a superhero name and ditto. Tax Evasion is morally reprehensible. 

Other opinions are available but I refuse to be swayed. As the extraneous "u" in the claim that "this is a very specific brand of humour" suggests, it's a humo[u]r that appeals to a particular, self-identifying group. They know who they are and I know I am not one of them. 

Okay, I realize my having included a Bonzos' track from the mid-60s in yesterday's post severely undermines my authority here but dammit I am not one of those people!

Moving swiftly on, the other four games are three flavors of RPG ("Turn-based", "Puzzle" and "Indie".) and yet another bloody Monkey Island adventure. Seriously, how many of these things did they make? However many it was, I assume Amazon plan to throw the lot at us. I guess I'll keep taking them but I don't expect to play all of them. Or possibly any.

This one ("Monkey Island 2 Special Edition".) does at least look newer than the rest. Maybe it's a remake or whatever they call it. The others (Guild of Ascension, NanoTale -Typing Chronicles and Galaxy of Pen and Paper.) all look considerably more interesting. They're also all meta in one way or another. I do like a bit of thematic unity. I might actually try all three of them, one day.

And that's it. Except it's not.

If I hadn't happened to have read it somewhere (I think it was on NME.com.) I might have missed this month's Big Ticket Feature. It's not even mentioned on my Amazon Games page. It only appears if you click through to the "In-game content" section where all the stuff at the start of the post lives.

This month, if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can have The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for free. I know it's been around a while and eveyone who ever wanted it probably has it already but still, you'd think they might have made a bit more of it.

Then again, it does only cost £4.49 at GOG.com, which is where the link takes you if you decide to have it. Given that the cheapest of the other games this month clock in at three times that much, I guess it's not that big a deal after all.

I don't own it, though, and I've never played it. I don't like Elder Scrolls games much. Even for free, I
probably wouldn't have bothered making a GOG account just for this but as it happens I already have one... and it still works. So now, I, too, own Oblivion, like every other person who'll ever read this.

That means I have 91 games in my Amazon Games Library. That's fifteen more than I own on Steam, where, paradoxically, I own two more Amazon titles, New World and Lost Ark. There was a time when Sony Online Entertainment catered for nearly all of my gaming needs. If things go on like this, pretty soon that'll be Amazon.

I bet that's just what Jeff wants, too. One minute you're petting the puppies, the next you're in the van. That's an analogy, by the way. I'm not sugesting there really is a van. Or any puppies for that matter. There are never any puppies.

D'you know what? I have a personal anecdote about that and this post's running a bit short so I'm going to share. When I was maybe nine or ten years old, I was at a village fete not too far from where I lived. I was wandering around with my cousin (I think it was.) and we were on our own because it was the 1960s and no-one cared about stuff like that back then.

Some guy came up to us and asked us if we wanted to see some puppies. We were nine (Or ten.) Of course we wanted to see some puppies. He said to come with him so we did. 

He led us off towards the trees at the edge of the field, out of sight behind some parked vehicles. He had a van there.

And some puppies. He really did have puppies. He was trying to sell them. We played with them for a while, then we went back and found whatever adults we were nominally with and said there was a man who had some puppies in a van and could we? 

No we couldn't. And that was that. No-one told us we'd done anything we shouldn't have done. No-one ever mentioned it again. 

I told you. It was the sixties. No-one cared.

It taught me one thing that I've always remembered, though. 

Sometimes there really are puppies.

Chuchu! Egg Coming Through!

It took me a few months but I am now pretty much in the habit of checking my free games from Amazon Prime at the start of every month. As a result, I am starting to build up the kind of backlog everyone else is always complaining about. My days of being able to post smugly about how "I simply don't do backlogs, dahling!" are firmly in the past.

This month I even went so far as to play one of the games I'd claimed, the awkwardly-named SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's one of those card-based battlers I keep reading about on various blogs. It has a peculiar hybrid steampunk/medieaval setting, charming graphics, likeable characters, a moderately amusing plot and at first it was fun for a short session at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately, it's fast becoming too tough for me on Normal difficulty, so its time as charming little divertissement may well be about to come to an end. I could reset the difficulty to Easy or I could go back and replay earlier chapters to overlevel the content but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently commited to do either.

Although I've been able to keep up with the flow of new, free games, I've done a much worse job with the trickle of free stuff for games I already play. Every month sees Amazon toss out a slew of freebies for dozens of titles like a befuddled old lady casting handfuls of grain to a clutch of club-footed street pigeons. Like that familiar scenario, it's not necessarily something you'd want to encourage but when it's games you play...

The thing that got me to pay attention this month was the unexpected appearance of Guild Wars 2 in the list. I can't recall the game ever having appeared in the hand-out line before but this month you can pick up a pack of five Heroic Boosters in honor of the release of End of Dragons. Boosters aren't the most exciting of gifts but I have to say they will come in very handy in my quest for the large amount of experience required to complete the numerous Masteries I'm working on.

I can't see the expiry date for the offer on my account any more but I think it runs until the end of the month. I imagine most of them do. I note with interest that the Amazon Games/GW2 page has two more "Coming Soon" panels currently greyed out. I look forward with interest to finding out what we're getting next month and the month after that.

There are giveaways for no fewer than forty-eight different games in the March offer. There are several mmos, among them RuneScape, World of Warships, Black Desert Mobile, Lineage II, and Warframe. I don't play any of those so I let them pass but as well as GW2 I spotted three mmorpgs I do play, as well as another for which the freebie seemed too desirable to ignore.

When I briefly dabbled with Roblox a few weeks ago, I mentioned how having nothing but the basic, default avatar made me feel more conspicuous than if I was togged up in fancy-dress. Now, next time some enterprising hyperpopstar chooses Roblox as the venue for their first, faltering step into the metaverse, I will at least be able to greet them wearing a ridiculous "Mardi Gras Steampunk Hat."

None of the updates to New World since the rather good Winter Convergence festival have piqued my interest sufficiently to get me to log in but give me a free outfit and I'm there. The game has an annoying appearance system in that good-looking gear drops all the time but hardly any of it can be converted to a look you can keep.

Full outfits, however, the ones Amazon would like you to buy from the cash shop, are permanent and can be easily and conveniently applied from the paper doll - once you've navigated the arcane combination of mouse-clicks and menus required, that is.

They're not at all bad, either. When I logged her in, my character was
wearing the very cosy, fur-trimmed greatcoat from the winter event and most impressive it looked, too. Now she looks equally warm but considerably less formal in her free Cloaked Charlatan get-up, which from the front looks uncannily like an anorak I had when I was about nine years old.

From the back it looks rather different, with a knee-length, hooded green cloak that Robin Hood would have admired. The cloak moves curiously convincingly as she runs, occasionally folding into itself as though caught by a fierce gust of wind. It goes rather nicely with her shield, too.

For Lost Ark, another game whose pull I'd been managing to resist without too much trouble until I saw I could get free stuff, the lure is a pet. We'd all log in for a free pet, right? There's also five days of Crystaline Aura, the premium membership buff, and some Amethyst Shards, a currency you can spend at an NPC, always assuming you can find him.

I already had some Amethyst Shards. Apparently you get five hundred just for joining or forming a guild, something I did a while ago. I generally make a branch of the guild Mrs Bhagpuss and I created way back in EverQuest II over a decade ago in every game that will allow one person to be their own club. 

Lost Ark was happy for me to set up my shingle alone although the extremely restrictive naming rules meant I had to go with a severely truncated version of the name. Given how easy it was, not to mention that there's a tutorial quest that points you to it, I was very surprised to see that the Steam achievement I got says only just over a fifth of players have joined a guild at all.

The free pet turned out to be an egg on legs. Very small, spindly legs. I'm used to eggs following me around from EQII but they're not usually quite as creepy as these. They come in a choice of colors, each of which denotes a different buff or resistance. Since I had no clear idea what those did, I just went with the color I liked best, blue.

The eggs all have names - Bouncy, Chuchu and Bonbon. My pet blue egg is called Chuchu. I swear, sometimes I can't believe I'm typing this stuff. I got him (Her? Them? It?) out and ran around town for a while taking selfies then I put him away and got my trusty bunny back. The bunny, which as far as I know everyone gets as part of the tutorial, has all the same abilities as the egg but also a 10% crit bonus so the free gift is worth about what you paid for it, I guess.

The last Amazon freebie I claimed was for Blade and Soul. It looks to be the least interesting of them all, a collection of various upgrade materials used in some of the game's abstruse systems and I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't that I've been itching to get back to B&S for a while, anyway. I don't know why but there it is. 

I'd include a picture of what I got there  only I haven't been able to get my hands on it yet. When I went to log in I realised there had been some big shift a while back, when the game converted to Unreal Engine 4. It's a 41GB download and it's been grumbling away behind the scenes the whole time I've been writing this post. So far it's managed just over 17GB so it's got a while to go yet.

What I take from this experience is that giving away free stuff is a very effective way to get people to look at your game again but not necessarily to get them to stick around. It took me longer to claim the freebies, patch the games and collect my gifts than I spent doing anything in the games themselves. In fact, all I did was take screenshots and I wouldn't even have done that if I hadn't been planning to blog about it.

I very much doubt if any of this is going to make me more likely to play any of the games. My overiding feeling on logging back in to both New World and Lost Ark was "I can't remember what I was doing last time and I really don't feel like trying." I think there's a better chance I'll play a bit of Blade and Soul because I already felt like going back to that one and yet it's the one game of the five for which I wouldn't have bothered to log in to get the free gifts at all.

It goes to show. You bribe people all you want and they'll happily let you - you just can't trust them to stay bribed.

Updating Blade & Soul To UE4 And Other First-World Problems

 

This is going to be one of those "Isn't modern life wonderful?" posts, steeped, of course, in world-weary irony as such posts always are. I'm typing this in some discomfort, with the receiver of my seldom-used landline awkwardly clenched between my left ear and left shoulder as I listen to half a dozen bars of (admittedly rather pleasant) instrumental music, interspersed every few seconds with a recorded message.

I'm attempting to call my credit card company in response to a letter I just received so I can add an email address and mobile number to my account, at their... I want to say "request" but actually "command" is more like it. If I don't, I won't be able to use my credit card for online transactions any more.

My bank has already asked me to do this, twice. I've been ignoring them because I don't use my bank card to make online transactions. I use my credit card instead because it comes with much better statutory legal safeguards, dating back to the days when even owning a credit card was considered a big deal and people were deemed in need of protection not only from fraudsters and criminals but their own inevitable lack of self-control.

The letter I received only offers one means of adding these details: a phone call. That seems counter-intuitive. You'd have thought it would be available through the website at least as an option. When I called, I expected I'd be keying the details in somehow but apparently not. There was no sign of anything like that in the multiple choice menu so here I am, on hold (about twenty minutes so far, no information on how many ahead of me in the queue, could be here for hours...) 

Meanwhile, my PC is busy downloading almost 50GB of an mmorpg I already have installed. This week Blade and Soul upgraded to Unreal Engine 4 and if I ever... excuse me a sec...

... ah, that's the credit card details updated! Now all I have to do is remember to have my mobile with me when I use the card. And have it charged. And switched on. None of which I do by habit because I have a lifelong aversion to phones, probably due to having grown up in a home where we didn't have any kind of phone (and back then there really was only one kind) until I was in my late teens.

Then again, I did have a full-time job for several years that mostly consisted of talking to people on the telephone for eight hours a day, which is how I became fluent in the NATO alphabet, something I've since found useful only for answering questions on TV game shows (not me being on the shows, you understand, just watching them at home and shouting out the answers, as you do. Well, as I do.)

A seldom-observed fact about the NATO phonetic alphabet, by the way, is that half the words it uses are so unfamiliar to the ear that if you try to use them to people who haven't learned it it causes more confusion than it avoids. I generally revert to using common names like "Simon" or "Fred" rather than peculiar notions like "Sierra" or "Foxtrot".

Given that, and the fact that I'm really very good on the telephone (clear, confident, good telephone voice, all of which come with practice) I probably should have gotten over that aversion by now and I would have, if it wasn't that my actual aversion is not for the mechanics of the process but the "being available to anyone who wants me, whenever they want me" part. 

You might think cell-phone etiquette would suit me perfectly, what with the asynchronous nature of the communication now everyone uses text instead of speech but you still have to reply at some point. It's an obligation I prefer to avoid.

We seem to have wandered some distance from the point, or I have and you've followed along if you're still reading. I was talking about updating Blade and Soul, I think. Let's see how that's coming along. Ah, 45% done. Great. By the time I finish this post it might be almost ready for me to log in and see what havoc the upgrade has wrought, which was what I thought I was going to post about when I started this nonsense an hour ago.

Yes, that was my plan. I was wondering what I could post about today. I worked yesterday and I'm working tomorrow (an unusual circumstance now I'm down to two days a week) so both those days will be Pitchfork #25 posts and I wanted to get a regular post of some kind up inbetween. 

Of course, I could just skip a day, but you know what it's like. Don't want to break a streak. I haven't checked back into July but this is my 41st consecutive day of posting since Blaugust began and I'm at the point where not posting feels weird. 

Probably ought to deliberately break that pattern, as Pete said he was going to do yesterday. Only I notice he has a post up today so it's not as easy as it seems, stopping cold turkey. (What's the vegetarian or vegan equivalent of cold turkey? And anyway, why is it even called "going cold turkey" in the first place? I think I know but if I'm right, why isn't it called "going cold goose"?)

Dragging this thing back to the supposed theme I began with, annoying modern world stuff, why, exactly, do I need to upgrade my installation of Blade and Soul to UE4 in the first place? I was playing B&S regularly before Bless Unleashed arrived and it both ran smoothly and looked great. I play plenty of mmorpgs and Blade and Soul looked as good as most of them and better than plenty. Is a UE4 upgrade supposed to get more people to play?

I wasn't complaining then but, look, here I am, complaining now, and I haven't even got in to find out how badly it runs now and how it looks no different, which I am betting is going to be what I'll find when the downloaad ends. Speaking of which, do we really need to re-downoad the entire game every time any mmorpg has a graphical update? Isn't there some way to patch just the bits that matter? I'm sure it worked that way, once.

Ah, but in those days most customers had very limited data plans with their ISPs and there would have been hell to pay if they'd all had to download another fifty gigs. Now it's assumed everyone can do it without blinking so it keeps happening. Like the confirmation numbers my credit card company plans on sending me to make sure it's really me using my card online, I'm pretty sure all these changes are for the convenience and security of the supplier not the consumer. 

I was fine with my card as it was and I was fine with my game as it was. None of this is being done to help me. It's all to help whoever's creaming off the profits. But then, that's late-period capitalism for you. I guess I should feel grateful they aren't asking me to pay for the changes, too.

At least the credit card update went through smoothly (He says with fingers crossed and hand pressed flat against a wooden table. I got this table as a wedding present from someone I never saw again after the wedding, by the way. I think it's one of only two wedding presents I still own. The wedding was in 1981. The divorce was in 1987. My ex-wife didn't want anything when we split up except her share when i sold the house. Even the lawyer said it was one of the most amicable divorces he'd ever handled. We still exchange Christmas cards thirty-five years later although I did stop sending her birthday presents just after the turn of the Millenium.)

Okay, I'm setting a high bar for digression here. Final attempt to get to the point. I did have one, once.

The UE4 update for B&S did not go through smoothly. Not at first. I began by just clicking the desktop icon to see if it would do everything for me. The launcher popped up, I logged in and the launcher immediately crashed with exception errors.

I tried that a couple more times. Same thing. Tried it with Admin priveliges. Same thing. Tried it from the executable instead of the shortcut. Same thing. 

I googled the error and didn't get much help. I did learn that the new UE4 version of Blade and Soul drops all controller support. Now you have to play the game with mouse and keyboard. People who've been playing it with controllers for six years are not happy about that. I certainly wouldn't be if it had happened the other way around.

One thing that I did pick up while reading was that there should be a new NCSoft launcher to access the download for the upgrade. You might have thought they'd automate that upgrade through the old launcher or at the very least pop up a notification telling you where to go get it. Nope. Neither of those.

I dug around on the NCSoft website and found these installation instructions, which include a link to the download of the new patcher. I downloaded it, made a new folder for the re-installation of the full game, which I knew was coming next, installed the patcher, ran it, successfully this time and here we are. 

Or here I am, waiting for it to finish. 65% done now.

I may or may not get around to a post about how different things are under the new regime. I'm hoping by then I'll have something better to write about. 

I bet you are, too.

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.

Baby, You're Far Too Clean

With all the Blaugust talk and the music stuff it seems quite a while since I wrote anything about gaming. It isn't, of course. Just last week I posted about Neverwinter Online, Guild Wars 2 and DCUO and before that I had something to say about New World, Crowfall and Bless Unleashed. Then there was the World of Warcraft firestorm, about which the less said the better.

In every case, though, I was reacting to something in the news. Mostly structural revamps or launches. Those hooks hang posts. I enjoy writing them but it doesn't quite match up to the organic satisfaction of posting regularly and confidently about a game I'm actively playing.

Remember back in the winter and the early spring, when we were all penning long essays about Valheim? That's the sort of thing I mean. It happens when there's a new game everyone's playing or at least it feels as though everyone's playing. 

It's happening right now. Everyone's jumping on a fresh bandwagon and firing off excited posts about how great it is. It's not Crowfall. No-one's posting about Crowfall. It's not New World, not yet. It might be, come September, but as of now the beta's over and even while it was on, most people seemed happy just to test the waters, pronounce them acceptable, then politely withdraw to wait for the real thing. I know I did.

Oddly, the game of the moment is Final Fantasy XIV. Again. How many bites at the cherry is this thing going to get? For a game that seems to have been around for a very long time, FFXIV somehow manages to come up fresh, over and over.

 

This time it started with the announcement of an Autumn expansion. Interest and attention grew with the arrival of a covy of high-profile WoW streamers seeking a more enticing money-train to ride than the stuttering, sputtering engine of WoW's failing Shadowlands. And finally the trickle turned into a flood, an all-out exodus of refugees streaming out of the Blizzard gates, leaving the 800 pound gorilla bleeding into the dust as the company imploded. 

Here's the thing. I've played FFXIV. Quite a bit. Never got all that far but I quite like it. It's definitely an mmorpg I could play. I could join in the fun now. I wouldn't even have to pay. So much is free there'd be bound to be new games to pull me away long before I got to the end of it.

If I did that, I could post about FFXIV like everyone else. It's a big, feature-filled game with plenty to talk about. And it looks great in screenshots. So, why not?

Yes, well, I've been thinking about that. If I hadn't, I might have slipped into my usual anti-story mode and whinged on yet again about how I don't want my mmorpgs to be centered on pre-written narratives. Or I might have banged on about the paternalistic undertones that creep me out when I read the supposedly supportive and open-handed commentary coming out of Square Enix. I might even have focused fire on the forced grouping required to achieve basic character progression bench-marks.

Really, though, it's none of those, even though they're all actual concerns I have. I'm not making them up. But they're minor problems, by no means unique to FFXIV. I could easily come up with lists of complaints about the way GW2 is set up or how ArenaNet operates. There's plenty wrong with both EverQuest II and Daybreak's custodianship I could get into, if I wanted. Facts are, I tolerate worse elsewhere, willingly.

None of these games, nor the companies that make them, are perfect, not even close. If any of them were, we'd all be playing the same thing. They all have flaws and drawbacks and issues but until and unless the whole thing turns into the kind of meltdown we've seen at WoW these last few weeks, none of it really matters all that much. If we like a game enough we'll play it in spite of its failures.

I just don't like FFXIV enough for that. If I'm brutally honest about why Mrs Bhagpuss and I both stopped playing after our first month all the way back at launch and why I never stick around for long any time I go back it's because FFXIV is a bit... dull. 

No, not dull, exactly. Worthy. that's it. I feel I'm expected to be on my best behavior there, somehow. Have my laces tied and my shirt buttoned. I feel there might be a test, after.

The way it looks matches the way it feels, for me. It's pretty to look at but it's also more than a little bland. The scenery feels stage-managed. The cities are big but the streets and the buildings all look too much the same, too uniform. The countryside is mannered in the way of a country house estate. Eorzea somehow manages to look convincing and artificial at the same time. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there's no there there.

The same over-designed tidiness pervades the whole game or, I should say, the small fraction of the game I've seen. I've never got much past the high 30s. By the time I get that far I feel tired. The sameness wears me out. It's not the famously enervating cross-continental travel. I like long journeys. I spent whole days doing nothing else in Valheim and for less reason. It's just that in FFXIV I never quite feel the journey was worth it and it's rarely fun for itself.

 

Even the interface exhausts me. I was reading Pixel Fairy's post about the FFXIV UI and it made me remember how low-level awkward I always find it when I play.  There's nothing wrong with it, per se. As Adelle says, it's fully customiseable. It ought to be fine. It's not, though.

Enough of that! Believe it or not, I didn't sit down today to write about FFXIV at all, let alone to say bad things about it. I wanted to post about an mmorpg I am playing, not one I'm not. As I thought about it, though, it occured to me to wonder just why I'd made the choice I have and I found myself comparing the two.

The mmorpg I'm playing most right now is Blade and Soul. I only play it for an hour or two each day and sometimes I might spend longer in GW2 or EQII, but it's only in B&S where I'm actively levelling a character and following the intended progression path.

I'm aware of the heavy irony, given my comments on narrative-driven mmorpgs in general and FFXIV in particular. Almost all of my gameplay in B&S consists of slavishly following the Main Story Quest. I talk to NPCs, all fully voiced. I watch frequent cut scenes, some of them lengthy, all of them, again, fully voiced. I read along with the subtitles, all of which are in good, demotic English.

Every session I go where I'm sent and do what I'm told. There's a lot of running back and forth. There are a lot of dungeons. As I finish each Chapter I get massive amounts of xp and that's what drives my levelling. There's xp for killing things, too, but it's largely incidental. The MSQ is essential if you want to progress, not least because it gives you your gear upgrades.

The whole thing is linear. I have little to no freedom of action within the narrative. There are no meaningful choices. Mostly there are no choices, meaningful or otherwise. If I don't welcome that in FFXIV, why do I tolerate it in Blade and Soul? And not just tolerate. Seek it out.

It's not as if the story's even much good. It's generic and thin. FFXIV's is much deeper, much broader, much more complete, even in the much-maligned original ARR. FFXIV's writing is eminently superior to Blade and Soul's. I still enjoy B&S more.

And I enjoy the gameplay more, too, even though it's button-mashing and most things die very quickly except the world bosses, which I can't kill at all. Even though it's supposed to be an mmorpg and yet I rarely see anyone else because everyone's max-level and no-one's doing any of the lower content. Blade and Soul has none of FFXIV's replayability or reusabilty or culture of continual purpose. Start late, you play alone.

I stopped and thought about why I prefer Blade and Soul. It's comfortable and FFXIV isn't. That's the plain truth of it. I can play for a few minutes or a couple of hours and feel relaxed afterwards. If I play FFXIV, I usually end feeling discontented, sometimes enervated, like my nerves have been stretched. It happens even if all I've done is go from one place to another or taken a few screenshots. 

Part of it, a big part, is that Blade and Soul, at the level I'm at, plays one hundred per cent like a single player game. All those dungeons I mentioned are solo instances. At no point has the main quest asked me to go do anything with another player. I could if I wanted. Most of the instances pop up a window when I enter asking me if I want to look for a group. If I don't want to, though, the game is fine with that.

Another part is that the world of Blade and Soul is more interesting to look at. It's not better. It's objectively worse, I think, unnatural, weird. Everything is too bright, too big, too odd. But it's spectacular and strange and it fires off the right receptors in my brain to make me feel engaged. Immersed? I might not go that far but close. 

 

Eorzea doesn't do that. Eorzea looks too... I want to say real. Maybe I mean complete. It's done. It's finished. There are no ragged edges, no messy corners. Everything makes sense. I don't want things to make sense.

None of which is to say I won't start playing FFXIV again today or tomorrow and leave Blade and Soul in the dust, nor that if I do I won't be here posting about what a great time I'm having and how much fun FFXIV can be. I've done that before and I'll bet I'll do it again. It's a good game. It can be fun. That's not the point.

And I'm not nailed on to Blade and Soul. Not even hardly. I can almost guarantee that next week or the week after that I won't be logging in every day or even at all. I pick up and drop mmorpgs all the time these days. I don't even see it as a failing any more. It's a playstyle. 

Bless Unleashed launches on August 8th and unlike most people I was quite impressed by what I saw in open beta. I plan on playing but I very much doubt I'll be playing for long. 

New World is coming, as we know. I've pre-ordered and I'm keen to get started. That one should last a little longer but once again I have no expectation it's going to be my next big mmorpg. I won't be putting in thousands of hours. Maybe a hundred or two if things go well. If I get half the play out of it I got from Valheim, I'll be happy.

Until those arrive I'm sticking with Blade and Soul. With luck I'll hit fifty before I quit. Levels that is, not hours.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than seems entirely reasonable but I don't have a lot to say about it. When all you do is the MSQ, what is there to say? But that's fine. Some mmorpgs are just for playing, not for writing about. When I find the next one that's worth spending the words, we'll all know about it, that's for sure.

Probably best enjoy the quiet, while it lasts.

The Choices We Make

I'm playing Blade & Soul again. I didn't go back for the free Level 60 boost. That was mere serendipity. It happened much more randomly than that.

I was looking for screenshots to illustrate one of my recent non-game-specific posts and I chanced on a folder of shots from B&S. I opened it to see if anything in there might work. I'd forgotten just how good-looking a game Blade & Soul can be.

I'd also forgotten just how much I like my character there. I only have one, a Lyn Summoner, because of course it's a Lyn Summoner. I'm nothing if not predictable. 

The races in B&S are not particularly inspiring. There are only four. A big human, the Gon, a regular
human, the Jin, a race that probably kind of stands in as the elf race, the Yun, who can only be female, and the Lyn. The Lyn is the only obviously non-human race and also the smallest. Two boxes ticked already. They also have huge, fox-like tails and ears, so you can see where this is going.

Classes come with a lot more variety. There are thirteen, although some of them (all of them?) break down into specialist sub-classes at higher levels. They come handily graded for difficulty, both on the website and at character creation. It's a five star grading system and Summoner, the pet class, is rated 2* for Easy. 

The pet you get is a cat. There are five cat personalities to choose from, something that happens in game as part of an introductory quest. You can dress your cat in various costumes and change their appearance by visiting a Groomer. 

Seriously, was there ever a chance I'd play anything else?

And I did play her, too. I didn't just futz around in character creation and do the tutorial then walk away. When I logged back in a few days ago, after a five gigabyte patch and some searching through notes for login details (it had been a while) I found I'd left off last time at Level 34. As of this writing I'm Level 37.

Blade & Soul occupies an odd position in the current hierarchy of mmorpgs I hear about. It hardly gets a mention anywhere. What's more, it never did get much attention even when it was new. If anyone else in this part of the blogosphere plays it or has played I couldn't tell you who that might be. 

It's strange. B&S is a bona fide AAA game from a well-known publisher, NCSoft. The same publisher, in fact, as Guild Wars 2 and Aion, both of which get far more press here. Also, it was already a familiar franchise from a Japanese TV show even before the mmorpg arrived.

It's not what you think!

The game has been around for five years now. It gets regular content updates and by most accounts has been commercially successful. A mobile version of the same game, called Blade & Soul Revolution, was released in 2020 and a Blade & Soul 2 is in development with a launch date possibly as soon as this year.

It's fully voiced and translated in good, clear English and it also benefits from a hybrid combat system, meaning it can be played comfortably in either action or classic tab target and hot key mode, making it available to the widest of audiences. There seems no obvious reason it shouldn't be as well-known or as widely reported as, say, Black Desert Online, ArcheAge or it's own stable-mate, Aion, but it just isn't.

I like it, anyway. I keep dipping back into it and I always have a good time when I do. In typically inconsistent fashion, given my recent pontification on the inadvisablity of grafting linear storylines onto open-world mmorpgs, almost all of my time there has been spent slavishly following the main questline. I'm on chapter forty-something now.

It's quite hard to follow a story when you leave gaps of many months between visits but it's the usual tale of possession, displacement, fate and destiny. I kind of know who some of the main characters are, or at least they come back to me when I play ecah time. They all have Anglicized Korean names that don't easily stick in my memory but they also have very distinctive visual signifiers that do, so I can just about keep my scorecard marked.

Charlie's Angels - the re-re-reboot.

 

That's a polite way of saying the game is highly sexualized, by the way, or at least the female characters are. It would be tough not to remember some of these women. I'd have a lot more difficulty with the look of the thing if it wasn't so outrageously, ludicrously, cartoonishly over the top. It's like Russ Meyer made an mmo.

I guess you could also make a case for the powerfulness of the women involved. I mean, I don't think I'd want to stand behind it but it's possible, at least. There are a lot of female leads and they are all badass. They definitely don't need any males to come along and save them, although they quite often turn up and save each other. Or the opposite.

I thought the character I'd been chasing for thirty levels, an arrogant pretty boy, was the main villain until my character and her three female allies roundly thrashed him last night. Then his boss turned up to gave him a highly negative performance review. She's a very scary woman. 

She also casually murdered the other greasy, odious, devious, cheating male who'd been making life difficult for my Summoner for many levels, something I chose to interpret as some kind of broad gesture of solidarity. She's probably just a sociopath but I like to try and see the good in everyone.

Well, my character does. Thankfully, she's positively demure, at least by comparison to everyone else. And she looks great. The attention to detail is fabulous. She's one of my favorite characters in any game as far as looks go although I wouldn't say she's developed much of a personality as yet.

She does get dialog but it's very easy not to notice. The player character isn't one of those silent protagonists some people love and others complain about. There's just no voice acting for the PC and their text dialog appears off to the right, whereas all the rest of the conversation takes place center-screen and in voiceover. Sometimes I don't even notice she's spoken at all.

Of course, the real reason she hasn't made her character known to me is precisely because I've been nailed to the storyline from day one. She won't become a character in her own right without agency and that's something a pre-written storyline never offers, particularly when it doesn't include what we like to call "meaningful choices".

And yet I am sufficiently attached and invested not to want to use that Level 60 boost on her. She's made it to the high 30s on her own and I'm confident she can go all the way. Might take a while but she'll get there. 

Which leaves the question of who I should use it on. As a free player I have three character slots and two of them are still empty. I read through all the classes and races last night but I'm still not sure which way to jump. 

I'm currently favoring the Gunslinger, a ranged class rated Easy. Blade & Soul is almost certainly never going to be a game I play fervently, frequently and seriously. It's going to be one of the extensive roster of mmorpgs I keep coming back to, chipping away at, drifting away from. It makes no sense to play anything that's going to require more than the minimum effort if I'm going to have to keep re-learning everything every time I return.

I know you have a thing for wool but try to keep in check just this once.

 

That's how it's going to be, and yet I also know Blade & Soul is a game I could be playing more. It has the potential to be a focus game. Quite a few mmorpgs do. 

Why we end up playing one rather than another is a question I'd like to have answered but I suspect the motivations, if revealed, might not be all that flattering to my ego. I have a feeling that, collectively, we end up playing mostly the games we see and hear about other people playing. We are, after all, social animals, much though many of us like to deny it.

Add Blade & Soul to the big summer of mmorpgs, then. A free Level 60 and an upcoming major graphical revamp definitely count as a significant promotional move. I can't help wishing these companies would co-ordinate their schedules a bit more sensitively. It might be to their benefit as well as ours.

Much as I'd like to press on and take my Summoner all the way to sixty this summer, I imagine in a week or so there'll be virtual dust on my B&S desktop icon. The New World beta begins next week and Bless Unleashed arrives not too long after. This is Blade & Soul's moment but it won't last.

I guess I'd better get on with it, then. Choose who to use that Level 60 boost on before it goes back into the cupboard for next time. Whenever that might be.