Welcome To Our New Cash Grab... Shop! I Meant Cash Shop! No, Wait... Game! That's It! Welcome To Our New Game!

It would be disingenuous of me to claim that I was excited when I read yesterday that Blade & Soul NEO was about to launch on Steam, but I did feel a slight frisson of interest. I already have the revamped version of B&S installed via NCSoft's proprietary Purple launcher but I have now largely been assimilated into the Steam hive mind and, like all the other drones, I prefer to have all my logins in the same folder.

Of course, I haven't played any B&SNeo since the day I installed it around the end of February. That doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the game or lack thereof, more the plain fact that for the last three months almost the whole of my available free time has been spent on Suno. 

Making music with AI has effectively replaced playing games as my core leisure activity and seems likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm putting almost as much time into it now as I used to put into MMORPGs ten or fifteen years ago, although that's still nothing close to the time I would have spent in virtual worlds a decade before. 

But for that, I like to think I would at least have given B&SNEO a few sessions and written a few blog posts about it. I really like the original game, into which I must have put a few hundred hours over the years, and I was curious to see how the updated and supposedly improved version might stack up. Not curious enough to actually play it to find out, though, apparently.

It seemed at least a possibility that, if I had the thing on Steam, I might get around to playing it once in a while. I'm in my Steam library every day, looking for something or other, so anything that's there gets brought to my attention a lot more effectively than if it's sitting in the forest of icons on my desktop, especially if it's something I've played recently. There's a cruel synergy in the way Steam displays recently-played games that means the more I play something, the more likely it is to get played again, while the games I neglect slip further and further down the stack, probably never to be played again.

I didn't get around to doing anything about it yesterday, what with babysitting my Overseer missions in EverQuest II and spending eight hours working on one song on Suno (And still not getting a final version I was completely happy with...) but this morning almost the first thing I did was fire up Steam and go to the B&SNEO store page, where I was greeted with this:

I've highlighted the relevant line to make it stand out a bit more but it was already quite prominent enough to catch my eye the moment I saw the page: Mostly Negative. I don't generally treat the overall Steam review rating of any game as a flawless arbiter of quality or desirability but it is a useful indicator of general sentiment and a particularly good or bad rating will often send me to the individual reviews so I can get a reading of why people are choosing to rate it or slate it.

In the case of Blade & Soul NEO, the reason for the downvoting is very clear. People think it's a rip-off: 

Extreme Pay-to-Win: if you don’t swipe, you don’t play.

The cash shop’s so predatory it makes casino slot machines blush 

AVOID this clear cash grab and play something else

This game is the largest pay2win dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. 

Some of the reviewers get quite eloquent about the game's predatory tendencies:

Costs a paycheck to get enough gear for content that's 1 patch behind and a brand new car to almost do the current content

You can only like this game if you want to try fent4nyl, while being in an abusive relationship with someone that empties your credit cards, hits and mistreates you, giving you nothing back but misery

I hope you have a solid job and no family, no debt, no vacations planned so that this game can become your second, third, and fourth job. 

They're also very articulate in explaining exactly why. So much so, in fact, that in some cases the detailed analyses of just what NCSoft did wrong when they gutted the original to pump and dump NEO run to more than a thousand words. 

 Someone did a nice list though:

10 reasons to not play and quit Blade & Soul Neo

1) DDOS or just sh!t servers
2) Bots everywhere
3) P2W/Whales
4) Useless Devs (No real fixes or bans)
5) TP Cost/Channel Change Cost/Lack of Gold
6) Cheating (Xml modifications already available)
7) Boring & Repetitive (Same sh!t everyday)
8) Time consuming (Ritual/Boss Timer sucks)
9) RNG (Loot/Skillbooks/Fusion/Enhancing...)
10) No arenas No Costumes (too expensive) 

The tl:dr of all of them is 

this is a giant nostalgia bait cash grab, very heavily monetized and falsely advertised as a classic experience that plays nothing like the original release

and 

Everything in the game is RNG! Even RNG is RNG, so RNG is the game, and thats no joke. 

Now, to be very fair, the game has only just arrived on Steam and there are only about 160 reviews so far, but I've read over half of them and they all tell the same story: former B&S players came back to try the game out of very fond feelings for the original and found their beautiful old home burned to the ground with a gaudy, tasteless shopping mall and casino built on top of it. 

Even the "Mostly Negative" rating is doing game a favor. Several of the positive reviews are actually ironic negatives like this:

I love this game. Been playing everyday since the launch in february.
I also like being in an abusive relationship where my partner doesnt listen to anything I say and just takes my money so i can stay with my partner <3

Ah, where do I even begin? This game is truly something special! I’ve never felt so empowered by random chance before. The RNG system is a masterclass in how to keep things exciting - and by exciting, I mean completely out of your control. Every time I want to get a new skill, I love the suspense of knowing that my 20% chance is definitely going to work out. It really keeps you on the edge of your seat, and who doesn’t love a little uncertainty in their life?

Or they're from people so worn down by the process they can't even bring themselves to complain any more:

The negative reviews are valid. The game is a massive cash cow, but its NCSoft.. All NC games are cash cows, it's always been that way, always will be.

Remember that this is a Korean MMO. Its going to favor p2w heavily as well as have some rng systems added into it. I've seen this in most Korean MMOs.

I played the original Blade and Soul about 10 years ago. It was my formal intro to the most savage form of gacha p2w that I've ever seen.

Interestingly, that last one is from a player who makes a point that, I suspect, I might be making myself if I was actively playing and enjoying this new version of the game, namely that if you "Just play your game and have fun, leave the card in your wallet", you could probably do a lot worse than Blade & Soul NEO.

I enjoyed reading the reviews this morning. I was saying to someone at work the other day that video games have an undeserved reputation for fostering illiteracy, just as comics did when I was growing up. Anyone who spends any time on the forums or message boards or comment threads or review pages for either medium will find themselves disabused of that notion very quickly indeed. 

Whether I'll take any notice of any of the complaints and accusations is another matter. In common with almost every online game I've played in the last decade and more, I'd be very surprised if any of the P2W or RNG or Gacha mechanics had much of an impact on my natural playstyle, just as very few of the issues that so concerned players back in the Golden Age of MMORPGs - camping, waiting hours in LFG, the endless grind - had much relevance for me. 

When it comes to F2P, if you aren't interested in endgame activities or competitive PVP or leaderboards, most of the levers devs like to pull to get you to give them money don't have anything like the power often assigned to them. Or, to put it another way, no-one baits a hook for bottom-feeders.

Even so, the time I spent reading the reviews made me think again about installing the game on Steam. There's no realistic chance I'm going to start over in B&SNEO yet again and level up yet another new character. If I want a nostalgia hit and a quick run-around in the truly gorgeous world, the old, non-NEO servers are still up and running and I have a character in the mid-40s and another in the 60s, both just waiting for a chance to grab another level or two.

Instead of adding another version of Blade and Soul to the two I already have, I patched up the old one and I'm logging in right now to take some screen shots for the post. Probably going to be the only time I log in for a while but nostalgia, like Stamina in B&SNEO, (From what I read, anyway.) takes a while to regenerate.

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.

You're Not Making It Easy To Come Back, Blade & Soul.

It took the best part of two days but I did finally get Blade & Soul to run. I don't know what NCSoft did to make the new launcher so pernickety but I'd have to say I preferred the old one. It just worked. 

Anyway, after downloading something like 250GB of data to get a final install of 66GB I was eventually able to press play and actually have the game start but even then the wait wasn't over. Logging in seemed to take forever. It was probably only about five minutes but in the context of getting into an online game that is forever. 

Do you know how many things I can think of in five minutes that I need to do more than I need to play an old video game , NCSoft? You really don't want to give me that much time to reconsider my choices.

I stuck it out. I mean, I'd given the thing hours already. What's another five minutes? 

When I got in I did not find myself where I expected I'd be. Usually, when I log out of an MMORPG - or an RPG for that matter -  I try to leave the character I was playing in a comfortable spot. If they have a home, my first choice is to take them there. Otherwise I like to leave them in a town or city where they can carry on with normal life.

No room to claim this one.

If I have to leave them wherever they were adventuring, either because it would be too much trouble to get them back there next time or because I had to log out suddenly and unexpectedly, I at least try to leave them in a safe place that looks reasonably sheltered from inclement weather. It seems like the least I could do.

When I logged in Meldra Mye, my main character in Blade & Soul, she woke up in a bush. I couldn't even see her for leaves. I must have been in a real hurry when I logged out, however long ago that was.

I say "Main". I could almost say "only". I do have one other character but I only made her to try out a max-level buff I got for free. As you might expect, getting a max level character that way does not also instantly grant you the ability or knowledge to play one, something I remember people complaining about in EverQuest as far back as the turn of the millennium, when one of the worst insults you could hurl at someone was to accuse them of having bought their character on EBay.

Of course, after more than a year away, I have no idea how to play my regular character either, which was why, the moment I got into the game, I was pleased - and impressed -  to see a link to a New and Returning Player Guide.  Unfortunately, I was a lot less impressed after I'd finished reading it.

As a guide, I'd have to say it's both barebones and overly specific. It tells you a lot of things that are extremely obvious just by looking at your character, such as what "type" your equipment is. A "weapon" is a "weapon", you may be surprised to learn, while a ring or a necklace is an "accessory". 

I could probably have figured that out for myself, along with what kind of stats each slot supports, just by mousing over them and reading the tool-tips. Conversely, telling me a type of item "enhances the ability of certain skills" doesn't really tell me anything at all.

At the other extreme, the guide seems determined to portray the entire game as a series of instanced dungeons and raids, all of which it lists by name and required group size, along with a detailed account of what loot you can get there. I'm not saying that's not meaningful information but it's extremely reductive. Of all the time I've played Blade & Soul I doubt more than ten percent has been spent in dungeons. There's a huge, fascinating open world to explore. Why would I want to go inside?

There's a hugely more comprehensive and wide-ranging guide on the forums, written by a player called HungiBungi. It's fairly up-to-date, having been written at the end of last year, and yet the OP still needed to post a second guide six months later because there'd been a substantive change to the gear upgrade path. Such is the way of online games but at least the currency of the updates and commentary on them suggests a game that's still in active development, with an equally active playerbase.

In the moderately unlikley event I end up playing Blade & Soul "seriously" again (I use the word almost ironically - I have never played B&S in a way anyone in their right mind would call "serious". What I mean, I guess, is "regularly", although even that would be pushing it...) then I'll defnitely be referring to Hungi's guide. 

It's much more likely that I'll just log in a few times, claim all the stuff that's waiting for me (It's a lot!), try on any new clothes, summon any new pets, take some screenshots and call it a day for another few months. That tends to be the way it goes in just about every MMORPG I used to play, don't play any more but still haven't quite given up on.

In the case of Blade & Soul, though, there is a slightly enhanced possibility of my doing a little more than the bare minimum. The world, as I said earlier, is vast and quite beautiful. My character is full of personality and charm. There's a plot that I was quite enjoying back when I could remember what it was and the combat isn't bad for an action MMO. 

All of that works in the game's favor. What works against it is the precipitous re-learning curve common to almost all MMORPGs but also the aforementioned lengthy log-in time, which does put me off firing the game up unless I'm also willing to put in a good session to make the effort worthwhile. 

And then there's the almost Norrathian time it takes to get from one place to another.

Blade & Soul does have some kind of instant travel, at least I seem to remember something to do with map-clicking, but how it works is something I need to re-learn. This time, when I found I didn't have enough bag space to claim most of the stuff that was waiting for me, I could neither remember where the nearest bank was not how to get there if I did.

No room for this pet, either.

If there's anything that acts as a bigger drag anchor on enthusiasm for returning to a former MMORPG than full bags you have no idea how to empty, I don't know what it is. Icons you no longer know the meaning of and combat skills you no longer remember how to use are bad, sure, but if I can't get my bags sorted I'm probably never going to get far enough to need to know how to hit anything anyway.

In this case, I'd only really come back to try on my new gear and take some pictures and I haven't even been able to do that yet. I managed to put on one new outfit, the one at the head of the post, but the rest I could only look at in the dressing-room.

I didn't help myself. I somehow managed to claim one complete outfit twice on the same character despite a clear warning about it requiring some currency I didn't recognize to transfer to other characters on the account. That was how I filled up most of my minimal free inventory slots. It's also why I wanted to find the bank so urgently.

When I work out where the bank is and how to get there (Always assuming Blade & Soul is a game that has a vault system. They don't all, you know.) and I've had time and opportunity to get myself sorted, perhaps I'll be in a position to post a proper fashion show. Until then, this is going to have to do.

Also maybe I'll finally write something about the actual game. I maintain Blade & Soul is a lot better than it ever seems to get credit for being and would almost certainly be more to the taste of many Western MMO gamers than the average import, if only anyone noticed it existed.

Then again, maybe it's just that I like having a giant cartoon cat that follows me about. I mean, it's living the dream, isn't it?

Friday, Saturday, Who Knows Any More?

When I started writing this, it was going to be one of those Friday Grab-Bags again. And on an actual Friday, too! Then stuff happened and now it's Saturday. Not interesting stuff, either. Just downloads and dogs, which could be the name of the least interesting tabletop role-playing game ever...

The Dungeon of What, Now?

I wasn't planning on a portmanteau post anyway. I had it in mind to write something about the new-to-me game I just got free from Amazon Prime Gaming. It's called The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos, gawd help it, although since it's a parody, I imagine the name is supposed to be faintly ridiculous. It's a "tactical RPG", which seems to mean some kind of ultra slowed-down version of an actual RPG like Baldur's Gate. 

Of course, I'd rather be playing Baldur's Gate - specifically Baldur's Gate 3 - but even though my PC now passes the Can I Play It? test, after I bought my spiffy new graphics card a couple of months back, even Black Friday hasn't tempted Larian to drop the price and I'm not paying fifty quid for it so here we are.

Unfortunately, when I came to write the post I'd planned, I just couldn't find a way in. I'd played the game for close on two hours by then and when I stopped for lunch I was still in the Tutorial. About all I can say about it so far is it looks pretty, the humor isn't as irritating I as I expected and there's a heck of a lot to learn. 

There's so much micro-management. So many things to check. You don't just move, you have to choose an orientation or you'll end up facing away from the orc you want to clout. Mobs aren't just melees or ranged or healers or magic-users - they have strengths and weaknesses and conditions you need to study on mousover. There's cover and partial cover and friendly fire and who knows what else to consider even before you begin.

When the fight ends there are levels and talent trees and gear to deal with and there's a storyline and a narrator and all the members of your party talk and bicker all the time and everything just takes forever. The reason I had to abandon the post I started about the game was that I found myself extemporizing on the existential crisis of spending literally the length of a movie just getting through the Tutorial - and not even finishing that - when I can't seem to find the time to watch any actual movies. 

I mean, what does that say about my choices? What am I doing with my time? Or my life?

I was making myself depressed, just writing the damn thing. I couldn't expect anyone to read it. So I junked the whole thing and...

It's Still Patching... No, Seriously, It Really Is...

... decided to download Blade & Soul instead. Because displacement activity rocks!

It wasn't entirely random. I've been meaning to get back to B&S for a long time but I also had this crazy idea I could get a very quick post out of some screenshots of the free stuff I've claimed there from Prime. I think it might be quite a lot of stuff. I seem to remember claiming something most months and I haven't logged in for at least a year.

I thought I remembered having uninstalled B&S a while back, when I was rationalizing my hard drive space. I couldn't see the icon on my desktop so I went straight to the NCSoft website and downloaded the patcher. 

That was easy enough. I still had my login details. I signed in and got started on the 57GB download.

It stuck at about 25% with a message about some file it couldn't download that had an name so long I couldn't remember it. I couldn't copy it from the pop-up window either. I googled but no-one else seemed to be having a problem with the patcher. I spent a good while messing around, restarting the download, running the File Check from the launcher and getting nowhere until eventually I found some useful advice on reddit that had me digging through the partial installation, deleting files. 

I say "useful" but it still didn't solve my problem so I decided to uninstall and start again, which was when I discovered I did actually still have the game installed after all. It was just on another drive. In fact, I still had the old version too, the one from back before the game was ported to Unreal4.

I cleared all the deadwood out and tried to save myself some time by patching up the installed game only to have the launcher tell me I didn't have it, even though I could see the files right there in front of me. It started downloading the entire thing into the same directory alongside the 56GB of files already there. I tried to fool it by moving the new install into the folder of the old one, a trick which always used to work for EverQuest, but times have moved on. 

This went on for some time. The corrupted file issue didn't recur but instead every time the download and installation ended, as soon as I tried to launch the actual game the whole process started over. By ten in the evening I had three full versions of Blade & Soul and not one of them worked so I deleted the lot and went to bed. 

That's why I'm posting this on Saturday even though it's a Friday Grab-Bag. Also because inbetween all of that I had to play with Beryl for an hour, take her out, feed her, then play with her again. She tends to sleep all day and get manic when the sun goes down. Or when the moon comes up. She's probably a weredog.

As I write this, the game is downloading for the fourth or fifth time. I forget how many it's been. If it doesn't work this time, I'm done with it. If it does, expect a post about how great I look in my new clothes sometime soon. Assuming it was clothes I got. I have no idea what it was.

247 - All Switch And No Bait

Since this seems to be mostly a grab-bag of gripes, let me throw in another entitled complaint, this time about Pantheon. Remember the kerfuffle when Visionary Games announced out of the blue they were putting development on hold to work on a survival extraction spin-off called 247? Well, that's not happening any more.

Predictably, the players being extremely invested in the game they thought VG was making (Some of them to the tune of $1000, which is what it costs to get a pre-alpha spot in Pantheon.) not in some fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants knock-off moneygrab (As they would see it.) raised a ruckus, at which point the developers faced the exact same fork in the road as every other in-development game that's tried this malarkey, namely carry on down the new road, leaving most of the people paying the bills waving their pitchforks in the dust behind them or pull a screeching, bootlegger turn back to the non-existent safety of a game they already know is making them bankrupt, all the while wringing their hands and begging for forgiveness. 

(That's all one sentence, you know. Good luck picking your way through the clauses.) 

 

It's a no-win scenario. I'm sure VG wouldn't have opted to make a second game before they'd finished the first if they hadn't been desperate. I mean, I guess they could just have been bored with dusty old Pantheon and thought it'd be fun to work on something cooler but I doubt it. 

Whatever the secret reasons behind the decision, they lost their nerve and 247 is now 007. Er, no, not that. I mean it's dead. Which is kind of a shame. I was looking forward to seeing it. 

I'm not as disappointed as I might have been because although for a while I was looking forward to playing it, I soon found out it was going to be nearly as expensive to opt into 247 as it is to Pantheon, which to my way of thinking kind of undermines the entire point of doing the thing at all. 

Did they really think the same people were all going to stump up a few hundred dollars more just to play a sawn-off version of the game they really wanted? That's delusional. If they weren't going for a much wider audience, why even bother?

Where that leaves Pantheon and Visionary Realms now, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Then again, "wait and see" is all we've ever had from Pantheon so I guess nothing much has changed.

I Think We Used To Play This At School

The Pantheon/247 affair made me realize I have no clear idea what a "survival extraction" game is. I keep seeing the term, or variations that theme, most often in the guise of the "extraction shooter". It seems to have replaced "Battle Royale" as the pot of gold concept for game developers, just like Battle Royale replaced MOBA and MOBA replaced MMO.

I had a vague idea what's involved - running away, mostly, in the hope of getting to a safe zone with whatever you've managed to loot off the corpses of your victims - but how that would dovetail with a retro-revivalist, old school, DikuMUD mmorpg like Pantheon beats me. They seem to be almost antithetical.

I was hoping for a nice Wikipedia article to explain the whole subgenre but there isn't one. It's buried somewhere in the massive "Shooter Game" entry but I wasn't about to plow my way through all of that. The best explanation I found, when I googled "survival extraction game" was, as it so often is, in a reddit thread, this one handily titled "What is an Extraction Shooter?" 

 

The thread is full of people giving their personal interpretations and naturally they all assume the game will be "a shooter", something Pantheon categorically is not. PvP also seems to be a key element, something I don't think is high on Pantheon's feature list, although most of the explanations refer to a PvPvE environment, which can be more of an MMORPG thing.

Group play appears to be strongly encouraged and there's a surprising amount of reference to persistent worlds and even story, too, so I guess it's not such a big leap from Pantheon's underlying principles as I thought.  I came away with a much better idea of what might have been expected, had the game ever manifested itself. 

Even so, it still seems like a very different kind of game. One of the best summations I read was this:

"Simply put, an extraction shooter has a unique gameplay loop, when you die you lose all of your gear and have to perform a "Regain Run" often referred to as a "Zero to Hero Run". This creates Gear Fear and a desire to stay alive for as many runs as possible before your inevitable death. Extraction shooters are unique with exhilarating highs and devastating lows. They're not Battle Royals or looter shooters but the baby they would make."

I was surprised to see one commenter suggest the genre has been around for almost a decade. I can't remember hearing about it until the last year or two but then I don't pay any attention to what's going on in the shooter world. I only really picked up on the term "looter-shooter" a couple of years back.

Anyway, I don't imagine I'm going to playing a lot of extraction games, shooters or otherwise, but it's always good to know what people are talking about when they propose hacking up a game you're interested in and turning it into something else. There's always the chance they might make something you'd like even more so it's never a good idea to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

Always End With A Song

It's a tradition. Although I used to hate it when comedians used to do it in the 1970s. Then again, that was mostly because the songs were terrible. And comedians can't sing.

Well, there are exceptions...

Yes, Syp got there first. Thanks Syp! 

That's Elise Ecklund. Mostly she does short, humorous, satirical or parodical pieces to camera about music and pop culture. Like this:

I love her flat, lack-of-affect delivery. That's what really sells it. She doesn't do a lot of full songs but when she does, they're really good. And not necessarily funny. Like this one.

So I guess some comedians can sing after all. 

And with that, we're done.

Notes on the AI used in this post.

For all of these I just pulled phrases out of the text and added a visual style. All of them were created at NightCafe, using the free model DreamShaper v8, which seems to give results at least as good as the Dreamshaper models that cost credits. The second and third image use the default 50% prompt weight but the first gave me a building on that setting so I upped it to 80% to get the image I used.

The prompts were:

Image #1 : "This download is going on forever. retrofuturism"

Image #2 : "some fly-by-night-and-seat-of-pants knock-off moneygrab . High fantasy." You'll note I changed that phrase in the final edit of the post but that's how it was in the draft.

Image #3 : "What is an Extraction Shooter? hypermodernism"

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...

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.

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.