Bless Me! Are You Playing That Old Thing Again?

It's Friday! Why not make it Log Back In To Games You Haven't Played For A While Day? Might need a catchier title...

Seriously, though. So many games, right? Hard to keep up. Just this week I saw posts or press releases about updates or content drops or free giveaways in DCUO, Lord of the Rings Online, AdventureQuest 3D, EverQuest II, Once Human, Palworld, Blade and Soul, Bless Unleashed...

Hang on a mo... what was that last one? Bless Unleashed? Is that still going? Didn't it sunset like... years ago?

No, actually. It did not. Bless did. Which was a different game. Kind of.

Then Bless Unleashed went through some crypto/NFT nonsense that meant anyone who ever cared about it even a tiny bit wrote it off as might-as-well-be-dead, just like Riders of Icarus and some other games I can't even remember that went down the same blind alley. 

But then crypto crashed and NFTs turned into just one of those things like deely-boppers and shag-pile carpets that turn up on "Weren't Your Parents' Generation Crazy? shows a couple of decades down the line and the games that jumped that bandwagon jumped right off again pretty darn smartly and carried on rolling along as though none of that ever happened.

As I may have mentioned before (Just kidding. I know I mention it all the time.) Bless Unleashed is still in the top row of my Most Played Games on Steam. It is just hanging on now at #6 , having been pushed out of the top five earlier this year when I was on a run with Nightingale (Oh, hey, another game I need to patch up...) but Steam defaults to six games per row so BU hasn't technically "dropped" yet, although Once Human is breathing down it's neck so its only a matter of time. 

Okay, that was a dumb thing to say. It's a list ordered by hours played so what else could it be a matter of?

Anyways up (Is there such a thing as regional appropriation?) the point is, I somehow managed to play eighty-one hours of Bless Unleashed. I think there may be some padding in there, where I left it running while I was doing something else once or twice, but it's true I did play it a lot for a while. And enjoyed it. 

No, really. I swear!

I must have because I managed to get to level 29 when the cap was 45 although now I think it might be as high as 100. And now, as of last night, I'm level 30!

Oh, yes. I did it! I not only logged in, I played! Not for long but that eighty-one hours is now eighty-one and a half. So I played for half an hour. Could just have said that. No need to be so dramatic.

Ah, but there was a bit more too it than that. Back when all that crypto crap was happening I was running short of disk space and searching for things I could do without. It seemed plain I wasn't going to play Bless Unleashed again, not now it had turned to the dark side, so I uninstalled it and moved on.

Except that I'd been playing it on Steam and Steam doesn't like you to get rid of anything. Even though I didn't have the client on my hard drive any more, I still kept getting the notices about updates. And the game still sat there in my list, looking at me and smiling enigmatically, once in a while.

For a long time all that was no more than a curiosity. I always glance at the news items that scroll past on the top of the screen when I enter The Library and I had noticed that Bless Unleashed had mostly stopped getting what you might call real updates, just server restarts and the occasional cash shop deal. I figured the crypto swerve had dealt the death blow and now the game was just waiting to expire.

Then yesterday I happened to see this. To save you the click, it's The Battle for the Western Prairies: Rise of the Harpy Queen. An actual event, albeit one that piggy-backs off an existing fight. 

 "The Western Prairies are in grave danger! The Harpy Queen has unleashed her minions in a massive invasion, attacking farms, capturing villagers, and disrupting trade routes. Driven by an insatiable thirst for power, she poses a significant threat to our lands.

The people cry out for help, and we must answer their call. Brave adventurers, it’s time to take up arms against the Harpy Queen's tyranny. Unite with fellow heroes, devise strategies to counter her abilities, and prepare for an epic battle that will determine the fate of the Western Prairies."

Doesn't that sound dramatic? I believe the Harpy Queen is a world boss that, back when I was playing, tended not to get beaten very often. As I read it, this is an attempt to rectify that, a one-off, live affair to which all are invited, although whether it's being organized by players or devs is unclear:

"Event Date: August 31, 2024

• EU: 7:00 PM to 8:00PM CEST (UTC+2)
  
• NA: 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM PDT (UTC-7)
  

Location: Navarra's Western Prairie (Harpy Queen's Nest)"

I guess it's going to be a big one because

"Victory will require skill, teamwork, and a commitment to protect our home. Together, we can end the Harpy Queen's reign of terror. Who among you will rise to become the heroes of the Western Prairies?"

Well, yes indeed. Who? You may well ask. As a well-known Google search term might put it, does anyone still play Bless Unleashed?

Thanks to the ever-popular Steam Charts (Popular with me, at least, for the actual, factual, undisputed population data they provide.) I can confirm that, yes they do. Not as many as a year ago, sure, but still an average concurrency somewhere around five hundred, which may not sound like a lot but is plenty better than many MMORPGs and probably enough to keep the servers up in maintenance mode for a while longer.

Being a big fan of one-time, be there or miss out, live events in MMORPGs, I thought I might at least take a look. I mean, I'm probably going to forget to log in and even if I remember I'm probably not going to be able to find the spot where it all happens and even if I somehow manage to get there on time I'm sure there won't be anything a lowly level 30 will be able to do, especially one being played by someone who can't even remember which button does what.

Still, I thought I might make the effort. That's actually about as convenient a time as I could ask for - six in the evening on a Saturday. It'd be rude not to at least think about it. I'll see what I can do.

So there we go. Another game no-one cares about and that even I don't pretend to be playing any more that I've posted about and might post about again, although if we're realistic, probably won't. As Wilhelm so cogently inquired yesterday, who even reads this stuff?

Well, you just did!

What's Going On

Steam has several primary functions. It's a store-front, where you can buy games. It's a platform, from which you can access and launch them. It also acts as a kind of social network for players and it provides a virtual fairground for games companies and developers, with its endless parade of special interest events, such as next month's NextFest or next week's Open World Survival Crafting Fest.

All of which is very helpful and useful and so on but there's another aspect of Steam's service I'm only now beginning to appreciate. It's a great place to get gaming news.

You'd think there'd be enough of those around already but I've always found it unecessarily hard to find the kind of news I wanted, presented in the way I wanted to receive it. Many, maybe most, gaming sites seem to be more interested in being entertaining than informative.

I used to complain quite frequently that what I wanted from MMO news sites like MassivelyOP was a lot less editorial and opinion and a lot more straight news reporting. I fully appreciate that just recycling PR handouts doesn't bring the eyeballs and pay the bills like snark, sarcasm and clickbait headlines but it's a plain fact that the posts I read all the way through at MOP are the ones that stick most closely to the information handed them by games developers. 

I realize it's hypocritical of me to complain about other people doing exactly what I do here all the time, namely using publicity material as a springboard for a string of self-indulgent dad jokes. My justification is that this is a personal blog, not a professional website. My one and only brief is to keep myself amused. If in doing so I happen to amuse anyone else, that's gravy.

I hate gravy, by the way. Who wants wet food? How did that ever get to be the benchmark?

See? That's the sort of self-indulgence I'm talking about. And so is this. Do you really want that sort of nonsense in your news reporting? I don't, which is why I'm constantly on the verge of removing MOP from my news feeds. 

And yet somehow it never happens. The problem is, no-one else covers the industry segment that interests me as fully and accurately as they do. MassivelyOP doesn't catch every development in the genre but it nets more than anyone else I've found and frequently tells me things I didn't know about games I play or introduces me to games I hadn't heard of. I have other MMO news sites in my Feedly, notably MMOBomb, whose coverage tends to be a lot straighter than MOP, if still prone to the occasional, unsolicited opinion, but it's rare for any of them to scoop Bree and her team.

Still, what I would really like is a true news aggregator for the genre. Something that just collates and distributes the press releases sent out by gaming companies and links them, unedited and unfiltered, under simple, declarative headings. That would allow me to skim them, read the ones that interest me and then do my own research to see how accurate or otherwise I feel the information promulgated by the marketing departments might be. I do love to do my own research.

It's taken me a long time to realize it but in a way that's what I already have with Steam. 

I tend to use Steam mainly from the Library page. Along the top is a band called What's New. For a long time I ignored it completely. It was only when I started to notice that information about a game I thought was all but dead was appearing almost daily that I started to pay attention. 

Few people reading this probably remember Bless Unleashed. Even fewer care what happened to it. I imagine most people who recognize the name assume it either closed down or went into maintenance mode long ago.

That's about what I thought, too. I did have a vague recollection of some half-assed conversion to NFTs or blockchain, back when those were the scam-du-jour, but so many fading, failing games tried jumping that bandwagon, none of the details really stuck with me. 

I still don't really have any clue how Bless Unleashed is doing. I uninstalled it a while back to free up some hard drive space so I can't log in to check for myself. I can tell you that according to the Steam charts it has a 30-day average of just under 500 players, which isn't a lot, although it's better than many MMOs on Steam. Lord of the Rings Online, for example, only has about a hundred more Steam players than that. MMOs often have multiple points of access, so Steam charts don't tell the whole story.

As for Bless Unleashed drifting dead in the water, belly-up in the oil slick of maintenance mode, thanks to Steam's What's New strip rolling along the top of my screen, I can confidently say it's not. As I write, news of updates for Bless Unleashed takes up much of the row. The game patched twice on May 17 and again on May 22. It also required an Emergency Update on the 20th and on the 22nd. An activity called "Ordo Chess" was added, along with half a dozen quality-of-life adjustments and the inevitable cash shop offers.

It's nothing major in itself but having played many similar MMORPGs, where even minimal updates like these dried up completely with no word at all from the developers for months on end, it definitely shows the game remains a going concern for the publisher and that there's still someone being paid to work on it.

Steam's What's New is how I heard about the bizarre bee competition in Rift. Like Valofe, who publish Bless Unleashed these days, Gamigo pump out a stream of "updates" I only know about from the news squibs. Granted, almost all of them are re-runs of events Trion originated but even that shows a kind of active engagement missing from games in true maintenance mode.

As a promotional tactic, it works. Better than you'd imagine. I still have Rift installed and I do occasionally log in as a result of reading something in that strip across the top of my screen. I did the quiz and I don't even want the prize. If I'd read about it in a quip-filled paragraph on a gaming website, I doubt I'd have bothered. 

I find  information presented this way, unmediated and without commentary, more engaging and involving than most of what I read after it's been filtered through the observations and interpretations of a third party and there's good reason for that. It's how I was brought up by print journalism.

Back in the day, when I got all my music news from the inkies, there was a very clear division between news and opinion. The first few pages were filled with news, which was presented entirely without comment, just the bald facts. Once past that, opinions ruled. Interviews, editorial, reviews, columns - it was a free-for-all filled with irony, ridicule, posturing, pretension and pontification and I loved it. 

Even now, most of the music websites I follow operate under roughly the same rule: news up front, no commentary; opinion in the back and give 'em hell! I'd love it if I could get my gaming news the same way but so far I've yet to find a site that covers the games that interest me in the way I'd like, which is why I'm so pleased to have identified a possible alternative.

The limiting factor for Steam's What's New, of course, is that it only feeds me information about games I have registered with the platform. And it seems as though only a subset of developers choose to send that information to the channel. 

I hear a lot about Bless Unleashed and Rift. I read plenty on AdventureQuest 3D (Did you know they're about to remove level scaling from the game almost completely? That's worth a post of its own.). Palworld, Nightingale, New World and Palia all keep me up to date with everything they're doing. I even hear from Legend of Edda occasionally, although that one sends me emails more often than it posts updates.

Other games on my roster remain silent, which might lead me to think they'd died, if it wasn't for another benefit of having them on Steam: the Community Hub. The hub is not, in my opinion, as good as the What's New feed for the simple reason I have to go looking for it. I have to think of the game, wonder what's going on with it, find it in my Library and click through to the Community page before I can see any news there might be.

I just did that with two MMORPGs I play - or at least used to play - through Steam. Both of them used to post regular updates in the news feed but neither of them has appeared there for a while. Having made the effort to catch up with them both, I can now tell you Dawnlands hasn't issued any kind of update or news since just before Christmas but Dragon Nest has been putting out a solid four notifications per month all year, none of which I have seen.

Why those have stopped appearing in my feed I have no clue but I wish they hadn't. I don't care that i'm not playing the game any more. I don't even care that I maybe can't play it, thanks to the endless fuck-ups with regionalization Dragon Nest has always been subject to. I would still like to read about what's going on there even if I can't join in.

I was a tardy and reluctant adopter when it came to Steam and since I caved and began using it I've treated it grudgingly and with bad grace. No more. I'm beginning to see more advantages than drawbacks in using the platform and I plan on making more of the opportunities it offers in future.

If I can't get what I want from the gaming press, perhaps I can get it from Valve. Or from Microsoft, if rumors are to be believed.

I didn't read that on Steam, though, and I doubt I ever will, at least until it's a done deal. 

I guess I won't be removing those gaming sites from my Feedly after all.

Take Me To The River

I seem to be starting a lot of posts I don't finish at the moment. Just did it again. I get a few hundred words in before I realise even I'm not interested in hearing what I have to say next. So I stop, send it to draft and start over. One day I'll be desperate enough for something to write about that even these turgid screeds will seem worth resurrecting. Fear that day!

Instead, here's something very weird I thought I'd share. I just spotted it on Steam and had to click through to find out if it was real.

Remember Rift? It was an MMORPG a lot of people had high hopes for, myself among them. I had a great time there for a few months and I still drop in now and then for a bit of a run around.

Long ago I linked my original account with Steam, so I get to see all the updates flagged along the top of the screen every time I log in. By far the most prolific sources of news on my Steam page are Bless Unleashed, New World, Valheim and Rift. New World and Valheim generally offer substantive information about significant changes to their games. Bless Unleashed and Rift... not so much.

Bless Unleashed seems to do a lot of "server maintenance" and "emergency updates", few of which contain new content. It actually works quite well as a form of subliminal advertising because I'm always thinking of re-installing and giving the game another try. I liked most things about it except for the combat.

Rift, under its current Gamigo ownership, does a lot of "events". Nearly all of these are rehashes of things that happened before Gamigo took over. MassivelyOP likes to report them while making ironic comments, most of which seem well deserved for once.

I rarely even think about joining in to try and get some bizarre mount or other, which is usually the reward. It was rainbow-colored unicorns last time, presumably because Gamigo's target market for the game is six year-old girls.

There's often speculation among the few who still care about just what Gamigo think they're doing with the game they bought in Trion's fire sale half a decade ago. I offer this as evidence that whatever it is, it's too weird to second-guess.

I don't know if that link works but it goes to a World Rivers Day quiz. Did you know it was World Rivers Day? I didn't but Gamigo did and they want to celebrate.

Given you can just Google all the answers, I think it's more of a lottery than a quiz. Then again, you're probably not going to need Google's help with the likes of questions like these:

Which of these famous tourist attractions was not created by a river?

• The Grand Canyon
• The Nile Delta
• Niagara Falls
• The Louvre

Or 

Rivers can carry rocks and mud called sediment for many miles. Sediment is often droppen when the river reaches the sea where it forms what feature?

• Alpha
• Beta
• Delta
• Archipelago

If you're interested, there's a whole week left to work on your answers. The top three highest scorers, drawn out of a hat because that'll be everyone, win 3,000 Credits. Not much use unless you play Rift. Also not much use to me since I have about 20,000 left from when they converted to F2P a decade ago. Never found any reason to spend those so I don't really need more.

As for what this tells us about Gamigo's long term plans for the game, maybe they could make that into an essay question. It'd be a lot harder to answer than anything in the quiz, that's for sure.

First Impressions, Second Chances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We sure did! Quoted for irony. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Desert Online - March 8 2016 - "The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying.... At this early stage it's impossible to judge the stickiness but I think I'll get the box price out of this one, at least".

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

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

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

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

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

Ring Out The Old

Now the holidays are over, it's time to get back to normality - or at least what passes for it these days. Although, are the holidays over quite yet? 

Guild Wars 2's Wintersday finishes this afternoon, or maybe this evening, my time. (Edit: I literally don't know what day of the week it is! I thought it was Tuesday. Make that "tomorrow afternoon".) I didn't do all that much this year. I didn't even attempt the annual meta-achievement. I gave it a quick once-over at the start, wasn't feeling it and forgot all about it for a couple of weeks. 

Eventually, I came back around and did a few odds and ends but I never even got so far as stepping into the instances for Toypocalypse or the rest. I went round the racecourse a few times and paid my three gold to get the Dolyak started but mostly I just stuck to doing the Bell Choir event.  

I enjoy the mini-game itself and I've always found it an extremely reliable way to get presents. You don't even need to be any good at it although I'm not bad. When there's a full roster of a dozen people playing I generally come in the top half, quite often fourth or fifth. 

Once or twice I've even topped the table but only when there hasn't been one of those infallible robots playing, the ones who score maximum points every single round and never make even one, tiny little error. I assume those are either outright bots or players running some kind of illegal third-party app. I hope so, anyway. I'd hate to think anyone could be that robotic and not be cheating. 

As an active World vs World player, I have a much easier and more reliable source of Wintersday presents anyway. All year long I pile up hundreds and hundreds of those little green flasks, the "Potions of WvW Rewards." It takes about eighty of those to complete a WvW reward track and I have fifteen hundred in the bank - and that's after I used several hundred on this year's Wintersday.

I haven't counted exactly how many Wintersday Presents you get for a full track but it's at least a stack of two hundred and fifty. What with that and the hundred or so I got each time I did three or four rounds of bell-ringing, I've been able to open to as many as I wanted. I know that's literally true because I still have a thousand in the bank and I don't want to open those. 

Like most supposedly fun things in GW2, too much can be a soul-destroying experience. The entire premise of the game's reward system is founded on opening industrial quantities of containers in the hope of finding insanely rare objects. Along the way you rack up thousands and thousands of lesser items, some virtually worthless, most worth selling in bulk, a handful actually interesting, valuable or useable.

The sheer volume leeches all the fun out of the unboxing process, which quickly becomes just another housekeeping chore. It's an odd way to run a game and an economy although after a decade I think we'd all have to accept that it works. Some people even seem to like it.

I didn't get anything much worth having in my Wintersday presents this year. I made a few gold selling the overspill and I have one or two things stashed that would sell for decent money if I was willing to part with them. It was fun but not that much fun.

Over in EverQuest II the approach couldn't be more different. At Frostfell you get proper presents every day. Santa Glug hands them out and they're always worth having. They do repeat after you've been doing it for a while but even then, since a lot of them are housing items, you can still make good use of them.

There are always some new ones although since I only do the event sporadically I'm never really sure whether something I haven't seen before is genuinely new, making a comeback or just one I don't happen to have been given yet. Some years I've been quite diligent about parking characters in Frostfell Village and getting as many presents as I can but this year I haven't put in much of an effort in that direction, preferring to concentrate on questing instead.

I did log in my character on the TLE server, Kaladim, where most of the holiday content is now active. Naturally, I immediately received a petamorph wand that was new to me and which I would certainly have used on my Necromancer. Not much use to a dirge!

Frostfell also ends today, so unless I'm freakishly lucky I won't be repeating that win on my main server, Skyfire. On the other hand, the wands are tradeable and usually very cheap so I could just buy one. Somehow, though, that takes all the fun out of it.

As I anticipated, I haven't gone back to Bless Unleashed for the Feywinter event but it still has a few days to run so it's not too late. It finishes on January 12th. I could dig into it once the two I've been doing are packed up and put away.

I won't, though. Much more likely is a renewed focus on New World's Winter Convergence, which I've let slide in the knowledge that it goes on a lot longer than the rest. The snow in Aeternum won't melt until January 14th, which gives me another ten days to make some money, build my reputation and buy the house items I still want. 

One thing I won't be doing is finishing the questline. I've done most of it. All I have left to do is kill the final yeti in the first set of three. I was anticipating a bit more after that, given the yetis in question are only level 25, but I read through the incredibly extensive guide at Vulkk.com this morning and it seems the quest jumps straight from those easy kills to an impossible-to-solo at my level bunch of Level 61-65 Elites.

I'm not displeased about that. It means I will finish all the available, non-repeatable content in my level range, which is more than I expected. For the first iteration of what will presumably become a long-running, annual event, I thought Amazon made a pretty fair fist of it.

And that, I think, will be my final Christmas/New Year post for the season, although since this wasn't even the post I was planning on writing today, I guess I shouldn't be making any promises.

I'll finish up with one final New Year's gift, the third single from Let's Eat Grandma's forthcoming third album. It's most appropriately called Happy New Year. And here it is.

With a bit of luck this year might be better than the last two. At least we can hope!

Seriously, Who Moves House In January?

When I logged into Steam last night, hoping to get back to my saved game of Secret Files: Tunguska, something I'd abandoned back in September because I had other things to do - better things - not at all because I'd gotten completely stuck and given up, it turned out I'd made a mistake.

Not in choosing to try and finish the story, even if I did have to lean pretty heavily on a walkthrough for some of the less than intuitive final puzzles. No, that all went fine. Eventually.

The problem was, like every adventure gamer, I started out looking in the wrong place. It turns out I don't own that particular series on Steam after all. It's one of the many point and click adventures I got free with Amazon Prime last year, a deluge that eventually included all the Secret Files games and no fewer than six Tales of Monkey Island.

I've never seen the appeal of the Monkey Island games. I have a boxed copy of one somewhere. I must have bought it back in the '90s. I have only the vaguest recollection of playing it. I know I didn't get far. My main impressions of the series are that the humor is puerile and irritating and the gameplay tedious. Makes me wonder why I bothered to grab the rest of them even for free.

A lot of catching up to do.

While I was hunting through my Steam library, looking for a game that wasn't there, I noticed a couple of new notifications for one that was, namely Bless Unleashed.

Ah, Bless! I was happily playing and posting about Bless Unleashed from the day it launched until New World appeared, at which point I dropped it like a radioactive potato. Even so, I always intended to get back to it at some point. I liked my character, I liked the world, the story was borderline interesting and the gameplay was passable.

Given all of that, I was a little disconcerted to find that Bless Unleashed was about to find itself under new management. One of the two very recent news flashes on the game's Steam page was an almost grovellingly apologetic announcement that as of January 26th next year, "game services" for BU would be moving from developers NeoWiz to Valofe. 

The article describes Valofe as "a global game company that handles development, publishing and operation". I remember them as the bunch that botched the transfer of Riders of Icarus, interrupted my flow there, left me unable to access my account for several months and effectively ended my engagement with that game.

Needless to say, I wasn't best pleased with the news. Reading through the details was a little more reassuring. It seems that, unlike the England cricket team, Valofe have proved capable of learning from their mistakes. I remember there being a whole lot of re-registration nonsense with RoI even for those who played the game through Steam but this time around Steam users should be unaffected by the handover of power:

"As the game data and account/payment information related to the game are based in the Steam platform, a transfer of them will not be performed...The current character data will remain the same and players can still continue playing the game even after the service transfer."

Apparently all we'll have to do is accept a new EULA on first login after the twenty-sixth and everything should carry on as if nothing had happened. I guess we'll see.

As to why the game needs to change hands in the first place, Neowiz don't care to say but it's probably fair to assume a 90% loss of players in six months has something to do with it. Back when the game launched it was averaging around 40k concurrency on Steam. Now it's bumping along nearer 4k.

And that's not really all that bad. If anything, it seems to be par for the course for new mmorpgs that
launched on Steam in 2021. Phantasy Star Online 2, which launched around the same time, has fallen from an average concurrency around 16k to 3k. Swords of Legends Online went from 7.5k to around 800. 

The biggest of them all, New World, which broke records as it peaked around 900k in October, is now down to 90k. It does look as though a drop-off of nearly everyone who joined at launch within just a few months is par for the course. 

It makes you wonder whether some of these companies really expect to develop and grow the games over years or if the whole point is to rake in the cash from the excitable hordes in the first few weeks before either selling the whole thing on to an aggregator like Valofe or Gamigo or just shunting it into maintenance for a while before shutting it down for good.

Clearly, Amazon want to make a long-term go of New World and with a property that's still in Steam's top ten (Just about.) even after losing nine-tenths of its players they undoubtedly have a viable product. With figures like SOLO's, though, you'd have to hope the game has other sources of revenue than just what we're seeing on Steam.

Valofe don't appear to have a very good name in the genre but then, realistically, who does? The list of developers and publishers that don't raise a cynical eyebrow or an angry fist these days is vanishingly small. It's unlikely Bless Unleashed will prosper under its new owners but at least it's still there. Maintenance mode is better than closedown.

They're all mine! You can't have any!

As for new content, I wouldn't hold out any great hopes. Once mmorpgs go down this route the best we can often expect is refreshed holiday events and some new, promotional "Seasons". 

At least Bless Unleashed leaves Neowiz with a twinkle. The other announcement was news of the Feywinter Festival, a refreshingly well-named seasonal celebration that kicked off on December 22nd and continues until January 12th.

It's the usual collection of free gifts, monster-bashing and a new holiday currency to spend at special holiday vendors. If I was going to be cynical I'd say it looks like a cut and past of BU's halloween event but the rewards do look good so I'm not complaining.

The festival is based out of a square in the Noble District in the city of Sperios. I took the trouble to log in after an 18GB update (!) and port down there to see it. It looks very pretty. I would have thought the devs could have cloned it and popped copies down in the other main cities for our convenience but I guess it would have looked out of place just about everywhere other than where it is.

Oh, alright. You can have that little green one.
No! Not the one with the bow! The little one!

I grabbed a free present but I doubt I'll be logging in to do much more of the event. As I'm discovering as I try to juggle Frostfell, Wintersday and Winter Convergence, it's not really practical to pursue more than a couple of these major festivals at once. 

Other than the stated intent of giving everyone a fun time over the holidays, all of these festivals, by design, involve a goodly amount of grind. They exist as much as anything to keep people logging in at a time when players have a lot of free time on their hands and developers are taking a well-earned break.

It's a shame, in a way. The midwinter events often offer some of the most attractive rewards. The iconography of the season, with its color palette of blues and blue-whites and plethora of snowy imagery, appeals to me a lot more than Halloween's garish black and orange and clownish costume antics. Plus, I'm always in the market for a reindeer mount.

At least I didn't have to go to any websites and fill in any forms. For that alone I'm willing to look favorably on this unexpected move. Now it's all down to waiting on the new landlord to see how they perform.

Mark your calendar for Jan. 26th and we'll see how it goes.

A Very Short Introduction To The Metaphysics Of Immersion

Wilhelm has been running a series on immersion in video games, looking in detail at what makes specific game immersive for him. So far he's covered EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online and EVE Online. 

In the bullet point list of immersive elements in each game, one common factor recurs: "Sense of place". Or "Feeling of place" I think those are the same thing.

I was thinking about that as I was playing Bless Unleashed the other day. There's that mini-game I mentioned before, where chest icons show on your map and you can go find the actual chests and open them to get gold, salvage mats and, most importantly, bag pieces that you hand in, four at a time, to an NPC, who then adds one more slot to your inventory.

You could write a whole thesis on the paradoxes of immersion based solely on that mechanic. It's a seemingly small thing but it adds an almost metaphysical tactility to the game in a way that should feel very familiar to orienteers or geocachers.

I imagine everyone's familiar with the cultural trope "The map is not the territory". It very much applies here but in a virtual world, accessed remotely through a combination of physical and digital processes, extra levels of metatextual nuance apply. 

 

Neither map nor land has physical existence but your keyboard or controller does. They can be touched but your character, who's in the virtual world, can't touch them, just as you can't touch your character, who is not you and yet acts as you would or at least as you intend. 

Your character can't touch the map, which you can see but which there's no apparent evidence your character can, although in some games I've played the character can be seen unrolling and looking at the map inside the game. 

Your character can touch the chests except, naturally, as a non-physical entity, your character cannot "touch" anything. Inside the game, not "naturally", because this is not always the case, but it is the case in Bless Unleashed, they can touch many things; many things have "collision" which means they cannot just be walked through, although other things, which look as though they could not be walked through, can. 

The chests can be touched but they can't be opened except as you, the player, touches the keyboard, whereupon the chests open and can be seen to open and your character can be seen to open them or to make movements that imply an opening action even though the character's hands and the lock on the chest don't necessarily interact or can't be seen to interact. 

The chests, when found, may be standing in the open, plainly visible, sometimes next to NPCs, the notional residents of the gameworld, deemed to have integrity of action and viability of purpose when it comes to scripted interactions and yet missing any and all necessary reaction to independent activity carried out by your character under your instruction. 

Your character can open the chest and take the contents in full view of the ostensible owner or custodian of the chest without any comeback, criticism or complaint. Unless, of course, the chest is near some individual whose aggression is mandated by your character's mere presence, in which case conflict will occur, albeit conflict unrelated to your character's actions, intended or otherwise, regarding the chest or, indeed, anything else.

As you progress deeper into the world of the game the chests become less obvious in that world, more hidden. Their presence on the map becomes an indicator that must be construed. Frequently the chests are obscured by shrubs or foliage, which moves as your character pushes into it, just as plants would if you, the player, pushed past them.

At this happens you may notice a difference between your, the player's, viewpoint and that of your character. You may find your view obscured by branches that are self-evidently out of your character's eyeline. As you move the mouse and press the keys to swing the "camera" (there is no camera although in other games I've played there are sometimes, in fact, cameras that can be seen and moved and used, as cameras, inside the game), the screen that acts a window into this other world (Does it, though?) fills with leaves. 

You turn and twist, trying to find a gap to peer through to find the chest but you don't need to see the chest. Your character can see the chest or sense it, somehow, or so it would seem, because when they stand near enough the letter "F" appears on that screen, a letter, we can only assume, although cannot know, your character cannot see. When you, the player, press the corresponding key on your keyboard (or, no doubt, some icon on the controller, if that's how you're interfacing with the game) your character will open the chest and take the contents.

We won't go into what happens to the contents. That's another layer of reality, a layer too far for this short introduction.

Let's get back to the map. Remember the icon that showed you where the chest would be found? It's gone. Did you remove it? No, you did not. Did your character? No. We established your character doesn't appear to see the map, although since, when the map is open, you cannot see your character, you cannot say with any certainty whether that is true.

However it happened, it happened. The icon is gone. 

Now look at the chest in the world.

You can't. It's gone, too. 

The map is the territory, after all.

But the game world is clearly not our world. If, as is the case with some hand-drawn, published maps I sell in the bookshop where I work, a map has an icon for a sign-post that does, physically, stand in the territory the map represents, and if some map-using prankster, following that map, finds that sign-post in the physical world and pulls it out of the ground and hides it in a hedge (not that I have known people who would do that but I know it has been done) then the icon for the now no longer standing sign will not vanish from the map. The signifier and the signified have diverged. 

In the game world the signifier and the signified converge. At least in this instance. (Not that this
happens in an "instance". Let's not get into instances any more than we got into inventories before.)

From all of this you might well expect immersion, the sensation of being engaged by and taken inside a supposed reality other than your objective own, would fail. And yet this is one of the more immersive systems I have experienced in recent times.

All of these contradictions (and there are many more I could have brought) are somehow stitched together into a patchwork of convenience that covers every gap and tear. How it all works beats the hell out of me but work it does.

There have been times when I've been looking for one of those chests, trying to figure out how I can be standing right on top of the damn icon (I'm not standing on the icon, my character is, and I am not my character, only I am, and my character is not standing on the icon, the icon is on the map and my character is holding the map, only my character is not holding the map or if they are I can't see them holding it...) and still not be able to see the blasted chest (because, as it will turn out, the chest is on a bridge over my head or in a crevice under my feet or stuck halfway up a tree trunk or embedded in a rock...)

At times like that, sometimes, I am so lost in what I see, what my character sees, what the map shows, what my screen shows, there's no space left for any other thought. There's only the map, the chest, my character and me.

And that's immersion. 

Oh, by the way, I lied about the map. The chest icon never appears on the map. Only on the "mini-map", the circle that shows on the heads-up display on your screen. That changes everything, or maybe it doesn't.

We could go there, if you want. Probably best not.