Let's Get Ready To... No, I Can't. I Just Can't. Warcraft Rumble First Impressions

After I finished writing yesterday's post I did indeed go take a look at Blizzard's newest venture, a mobile game called Warcraft Rumble. As you might expect from the name, it's set in the world of Azeroth and stuffed with characters the developers are clearly hoping you'll recognize from World of Warcraft or the rest of the franchise.

The cute wrinkle this time is that the characters aren't the original NPCs but their "Minis". I wasn't aware minis were a thing in WoW. I associate the term wholly and solely with Guild Wars 2, where no-one is anyone without a whole entourage of tiny clones of mobs and NPCs trailing along behind them like an unruly school outing. 

Actually, plausible though that sounds, it's not remotely accurate. You'd think an AI had written this. Sadly, you can only have one mini out at a time in GW2. I wish you could have more but there you go. We don't always get what we want, even when it's something trivial.

Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes, Warcraft Rumble. So, the idea seems to be that you control an army of NPCs...

...No, wait, we'll have to stop again. I'm not entirely sure who "you" is in that last sentence. It's not explained in the game or if it was I missed it. 

There's no "Player Character". It could just be you, the Player, but that seems a little shaky as a peg to hang the whole thing on. There is a framing device that alleges the game is being played by NPCs in inns and taverns inside the gameworld itself: "Throughout Azeroth people can’t get enough of this mysterious new machine. A new strategic sensation has swept the land..." so I guess it could be your WoW character in the game, in an inn, playing Warcraft Rumble on a gnometech arcade machine...

It's all a bit meta, frankly, which naturally I liked. Or I may be overthinking it. It's probably that.

Going back to the "army"of NPCs I mentioned, that is literally what it's called in the game: your Army. There's no explanation of whose army it is, either. It looks like a random bunch of NPCs and monsters to me...

Okay, I'm definitely overthinking this...

Your army fights... other minis. Not another Army as far as I can see. Villains, maybe. Bad guys? Whoever gets in their way. 

Honestly, I feel like it would have been more realistic to give your "Army" some sort of superhero style team name. The Azerothian Avengers, maybe, although I guess that might have caused some copyright issues. 

They certainly seem to act more like a bunch of superheroes than an army. They all act independently of each other for a start and most of their fights seem to be duels and skirmishes rather than formal battles. Then again, I guess modern warfare can be a bit like that. 

I withdraw my earlier objection. "Army" it is.

The gameplay is described as "mobile action strategy" by Blizzard, who ought to know. They also call it "frantic" and sum the whole thing up as "joyful chaos". Having played for about half an hour, I can't fault the language. It's non-stop, crazy action. You can have that if you want, Blizz.

It goes without saying I don't have any hand-held devices capable of playing Warcraft Rumble. Mobile games these days require the kind of processing power that would have put Neil Armstong on the moon five years earlier, had NASA had it in the 60s. 

That's a ludicrous analogy that bears no scrutiny whatsoever, by the way. Please don't scrutinize it. 

The point I'm trying to make is, I can't run any modern mobile games on my Kindle Fire or my aging and faulty phone and don't expect to. That's fine because I don't much enjoy playing mobile games on phones or tablets anyway. I'd rather play them on PC, which is what I did with Warcraft Rumble.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to run. I tried Bluestacks first. It took three goes to get it started and then it crashed during the opening cinematic. I swapped to Nox, which wouldn't run it at all. I went back to Bluestacks and that time it worked on the second attempt, after which it ran flawlessly for as long as I wanted to play, which ended up being about half an hour.

The game is formatted for a phone in portrait mode. It seems most people use their phones in vertical alignment, which mystifies me. I've seen a few GenZ jokes about old people (That's anyone over 25.) using phones in landscape mode so it seems to be an age thing but to me it just seems counter to the way eyes work. 

Either way, as with YouTube Shorts or TikTok, the portrait form factor looks very wrong on a PC monitor. And yet I got used to it surprisingly quickly. It took about five minutes before I forgot about it altogether. Well, almost.

The one reason I wasn't quite able to forget about it completely was the need to scroll up to see the full playing-field. The only time I lost a round was when I was concentrating on the top of the screen without scrolling down to see what was happening at the bottom and my harpoon gun blew up.

Remember when I said there's no Player Character? That might not be strictly true. The harpoon gun is you, basically. It has hit points and when they reach zero, you lose. It has its icon at the top of the screen opposite your opponent. I think that makes it your avatar.

Why they picked an inanimate object as the PC I have no idea. It seems very uncommercial. Wouldn't it have been better to have a little person you could dress and buy expensive cosmetics for in the Cash Shop? 

Gameplay consists of defending your harpoon gun, while trying to kill whoever's at the top of the screen, sending minis down to destroy it. Sometimes they also have a harpoon gun. Sometimes they don't.

There's a tutorial of sorts and although it's mostly tips and suggestions it's enough to get you started. The mechanics are very simple. You pick minis off the bench at the foot of the screen and drop them onto a blue area where they spawn into the gamefield. They then march or fly or waddle off to do whatever it is they do and that's just about the end of your control over them. There are some switches you can flick to get them to change direction but that's it. There may be more options later but I only completed the first zone and that's all I saw.

Minis do a lot of different things. There are melee minis, ranged minis, flying minis, mining minis. There are also Effects like Chain Lightning and minis like the S.A.F.E. Pilot, either of which you can aim at any part of the playing field without them having to travel there first.

There are Meeting Stones you can take control of to allow minis to spawn in at forward staging zones, and the aforementioned switches to send your minis going in different directions. Your melees and ranged minis fight while your miners dig up gold that you use to... I didn't get that part. You need gold though. Of course you do.

Your supply of minis is infinite although sometimes all of them are greyed out. That might be what the gold is for. Not sure. All of them level up and get different abilities and there are points to spend doing that and you can buy more and different types of minis for your army in the store and swap them in and out and the whole thing started out slowly but by the time I got to the end of the first zone there was so much going on at once I felt like my head was going to explode.

Frantic? Chaos? Yes!

Joyful? Not sure. Maybe. 

It was fun but the kind of fun that makes me nervous. I kept wishing there was a pause button so I could stop and consider strategy. In the absence of that I just kept throwing minis at other minis and as I did it I could feel a rhythm building. I can see how gameplay could become both intuitive and addictive. 

The first zone is Elwynn Forest. There are five missions, beginning with Goldtooth and ending with Hogger. I imagine you can see what the idea is already. 

The second zone is Westfall. Now you know for sure!

Even as a WoW casual I can see the appeal here. It's a trip through Azeroth, zone by zone, meeting all your favorites and whacking them in the head, just like in the real game. There's no pretense at a plot or a narrative or any of that dumb stuff that gets in the way of fun. Just pure name recognition and non-stop clicking. It's the Haribo Family Fun Multipack of the Warcraft franchise.

I really enjoyed it. I'm definitely going to play some more. It's frenetic and exhausting but you get rewards win or lose and anyway I only lost once. The final mission in the first zone, the one with Hogger, is flagged "Hard", as you might expect but it wasn't hard at all. I don't know if the game does get genuinely hard later. I don't even know what "genuinely hard" in the context of a mobile game like this would mean.

There's a full PvE campaign involving 70 zones. There are dungeons and raids. You can play solo or co-op. There's PvP. It's basically WoW without all of the stuff that makes WoW meaningful or significant, assuming you think it is or was. 

If I had a phone that could play modern mobile games and if I was minded to play modern mobile games on my phone at all, I might very well play Warcraft Rumble. Then again, if all of that were true, I might play any number of games and I'm not sure I'd pick this one over dozens of others. 

If it was on Steam, I'd play it for sure. A PC port would be nice. I might need a lie down after a few missions but that's okay. My reaction time could use a good work-out, once in a while. 

All told, it looks like a pretty good game if you know the characters and the locations. I'm not convinced it would stand out if you didn't but that's probably not going to be an issue. I don't imagine anyone other than Warcraft fans are going to be playing it. 

You Wait All Year For An Expansion And Then Three Come Along At Once

Now that the dust has settled on Blizzcon '23, I thought I might have a bit of a potter through the various headline announcements. I did kind of pre-empt myself with my post on Tarisland but since that was written before the actual event I think a revisit is justified.

Of course, when I say "headline announcements" I really mean what they said about World of Warcraft. I have never played any other Blizzard games and I don't even know much about them other than what I've read on various blogs over the years. The thing about Blizzard, though, unlike other major players in the online multiplayer gamespace such as NCSoft or Tencent, is that it's very hard to avoid knowing about their games even if you're not particularly interested in them. I can give a precis of the Diablo franchise or Overwatch or Hearthstone even though I've never played any of them. 

Don't ask me about Heroes of the Storm, though. What even is that?

Blizzard, unlike other developers, penetrates the cultural consciousness to an extent not often enjoyed by gaming companies. It's become evident over the past couple of years, as the Blizzard name has become a byword for deceit and depravity, that a large number of people had far more invested in the reputation of the company than would seem rational or predictable to anyone outside the bubble. For many, it seems, Blizzard wasn't just a company that had made some very successful video games; it was some kind of role-model or exemplar.

I'm not sure I was even aware a lot of people felt that way until the roof began falling in. I knew the games were popular because I kept reading people talking about them but people talk about playing things like The Sims and Civilization all the time, too. There's a fairly small set of games that crop up over and over again, in the same way certain TV shows or movies are reference points for everyone of a certain age. You don't have to have watched them to know something about them. I didn't have to have played Diablo to know what it was but I didn't realize it represented the end product of a myth-making process that extended far past the game itself.

It was only when the seemingly endless stream of dire revelations began to spew out of Blizzard like a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment that I began to appreciate the deep, emotional connection the company maintained with with many of its customers. It did seem a little unsettling, even to someone with an arguably unhealthy tendency towards brand loyalty like myself.

As the pile-up of distressing revelations continued, I learned a few things, some of the more interesting of which were the explanations people gave for their deep connection with the company. As is common in other forms of popular media, growing up with certain activities and entertainments forms an associative bond. The things that surround you as you go through formative life experiences for the first time become inextricably linked with the intense feelings created by those experiences.

I'd like to say that being in my twenties when I first started playing video games inoculated me against anything like that but I was forty when I started playing EverQuest and look how that went. What I definitely would say is that at no time did I ever translate my affection - let's not say obsession - with the game into an idolization of the company that produced it. I mean, I knew SoE was my favorite MMORPG developer for a while but I never thought it went any further than their design choices matching my gameplay preferences. It was a marriage of convenience not a love match.

Back in the 2000s, I remember reading with something approaching incredulity the reports of conventions and fan events dedicated to specific games or publishers, SOE's Fan Faire included. For some reason, even though by then I'd spent the better part of two decades going to comics conventions, where I'd sit in a side room or an auditorium listening to writers, artists and editors repeating well-worn anecdotes from glory years spanning the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies, it seemed bizarre to imagine anyone might want to do the same with video games. 

After all, the people who made those were just technicians and administrators, weren't they? It'd be like going to a convention to meet the people who'd designed and built your refrigerator. (Even as I type, it occurs to me there are probably people who do exactly that...)

Eventually I either came to a more nuanced understanding of the factors involved or became assimilated into the gamer hive-mind. Still not sure which. The concept of video game expos and cons and fan gatherings shifted from "weird and a bit scary, if I'm honest" to "no stranger than traction engine meets or renaissance fairs". Which, I admit, is still weird and a bit scary but in a much more ordinary way.

I still wouldn't want to go to one and I don't even want to sit at home and watch a livestream but I do find myself being drawn towards the comfortable thrill of mild anticipation arising from the possibility of hints of things to come. Which is really about as solid as most of this stuff ever gets, making this year's Blizzcon somewhat unusual in that respect.

We didn't just get to learn the name of the next WoW expansion. We got to hear the names of the next three! It's a brave move that I imagine has more to do with setting a marker than with any fundamental change of practice or principle. 

Given the last couple of years, it looks as though the plan is to establish the new Microsoft-owned company as a solid, dependable and even predictable supplier of quality product, to be delivered in a timely and reliable manner. Announcing a trilogy of themed expansions with an explicit but finite narrative arc makes a clear statement of commitment to the game and its players. 

It says we're going to be here for the foreseeable future so you can feel safe to start making your plans with WoW again. We've got you covered for MMORPG entertainment for the next five years, minimum. No need to start looking around. 

The same sentiment is contained in the commitment to only adding mechanics that will hold value over more than a single expansion cycle and the increase in systems that benefit the whole account rather than a single character. These are moves designed to foster a self-sustaining ecosystem, where players feel too comfortable, committed and embedded to find it easy to pick up and move elsewhere. 

The only thing that's hard to understand about such a change of emphasis is how the hell it took them this long to come up with it. Every other MMORPG developer figured out years ago that you need to get players so enmeshed it's harder to leave than it is to stay. Meanwhile, Blizzard has been fostering a culture around expansions that, coupled with one of the slowest development cycles in the genre, actively mitigates against the kind of loyalty and retention they used to be famous for. 

Everyone knows you can just skip the content droughts or even the bad expansions and come back later. Or not come back at all. It's not like you'll miss anything that matters. Every new expansion is a full reset.

The three expansions themselves sound interesting enough, as far as the information available goes. They revolve around known areas of the existing world, not excursions into unknown realms, which is a solid play towards the installed base and that great mass of lapsed players, many of whom, on reading a news item somewhere, will think to themselves "Oh, I remember having some good times there!" and think about maybe coming back to see what's going on.

None of that is going to work on me because I don't have the necessary nostalgia for such an announcement to trigger in the first place. I like WoW but I don't feel closely connected to it. With the Microsoft buyout in place, however, I have given myself permission to revisit Azeroth, and I would certainly not rule out trying one or more of these expansions at some point. Of course, I'd have to re-install the game first...

The widely-expected confirmation of Cataclysm Classic interests me more. As I've said on several occasions, I know just enough about the areas that were disrupted by the original Cataclysm expansion to be curious to see how they've changed, without the significant emotional attachment to the originals that would make me feel disturbed or angry when I find out what's been done to them. And since I mostly never bothered to investigate any of the post-Cataclysm zones when I had the chance, it would all largely be new content for me.

It's always nice to jump into these things along with everyone else, so there's a not-insignificant chance I might resubscribe for a month or two when CataClassic arrives, presumably sometime next spring. I'm fairly curious about the new "Season of Discovery" that's coming to regular Classic much sooner as well, although I'm not sure the timing works for me to join in right away. 

As I commented on Shintar's WoW blog "Priest Without A Cause", this really does seem like Holly Longdale making her influence known. Sony Online Entertainment began the idea of the rolling nostalgia circus as far back as 2008 but it was under Holly at Daybreak that the operation really took off. 

For years now, it's been the practice at EverQuest and latterly at EQII to fire up new nostalgia servers at least once a year, almost always with slightly different rulesets. Go back far enough and it was generally assumed these servers would stay up, if not permanently, then at least until there weren't enough players left on them to justify their continued existence. In more recent times, there's been a much clearer expectation and understanding that they'll only run for a couple of years or so before being merged into a more recent or a more stable server.

Much of that predates now-familiar online gaming concept of "Seasons", a more elegant solution to the concept of shaking things up to keep people interested than booting up whole new servers every five minutes. The Blizzard way of doing things is marrying up nicely with the Daybreak experience, potentially creating a more flexible model for endless experimentation within a fairly fixed framework. It's presumably just what they wanted when they made Holly an offer she couldn't and didn't refuse.

It is ironic that, in both games, the supposedly most traditional part of the game, the nostalgia-driven servers where time, if it doesn't exactly stand still, certainly travels in a closed loop, is also the place where the companies feel most free to experiment. If you tried these kinds of shenanigans on Live or Retail there'd be uproar. It makes me wonder sometimes who the true traditionalists really are.

All in all, I'd say things are looking good for the immediate future of WoW. Certainly a lot better than it seemed they might a year or two back. The last expansion, Dragonflight, while reportedly no resounding success, was certainly no disaster, either. People seemed generally affable towards it and largely still do which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a win for Blizzard. 

Responses to the announcements at Blizzcon '23 also seem generally favorable. No-one's jumping up and down, waving a flag or claiming the glory days are back, or at least not that I've seen, but the tone of the reporting has largely been optimistic and positive, if occasionally grudgingly so. 

Equally, I don't think many are claiming the myriad problems of the past have all miraculously gone away but there's only so long most people can retain a sense of outrage and frankly there are a lot more serious things to be outraged about right now than what happened at a video company a few years ago. The company changing hands may well not fix all or even most of the underlying problems but at least, until and unless evidence of new or ongoing malpractice surfaces, it'll be convenient for many of us to act as though it has.

Finally, there was one announcement at Blizzcon this year that took my fancy. Warcraft Rumble, the new, free-to-play mobile title, is already up and running. I think I might go take a look. After all, it's not every day Blizzard gives us something for nothing. Well, not anything we might actually want, anyway.

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A note on AI images used in this post.

The header is by DreamShaper XL alpha2  with Prompt and Refiner Weights both at 50. The prompt used was "Firiona Vie from EverQuest as a character in World of Warcraft". I used Uncrop to reformat the image to fit the space and it mostly added some foliage. Firiona has dyed her hair for some reason and seems to have grown a second belly-button somehow but otherwise it kind of works.

The second image uses the same source and settings. The prompt was "a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment World of Warcraft". I tried it without the WoW suffix but either way it just gives a volcano. I was kind of hoping for some personifcations of abstract ideas but no such luck.

Tarisland: Round Two

I enjoyed the first closed beta for Tarisland. At the end of the test, I described the game as "bright, cheerful, well-made and fun" but "not original or profound or ground-breaking". I summed it up as "a mainstream MMORPG, aimed at the existing MMO audience" and I thought "it ought to meet most reasonable expectations".

I also mentioned that one one reason I was interested in Tarisland in the first place was as a potential replacement for the disgraced World of Warcraft. The irony of replacing a game I wasn't prepared to play because of the unacceptable moral standards of the company behind it with one tacitly sanctioned by an considerably more questionable government was not lost on me but you have to pick your battles.

The issue has been made moot by the long-delayed completion of Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard. Once again, I'm not going to pretend I believe the change of corporate masthead washes the company as white as the snows suggested by its name but I said I'd be willing to draw a line under the affair if the takeover happened and it has, so I will.

The fact is, I don't play any Blizzard games other than WoW and I play that only sporadically. It's not as though I was making any great personal sacrifice by leaving my account untouched these last couple of years. Still, as is often the case, the bare fact that I "couldn't" play has made me keener to revisit my old characters than I might otherwise have been, although I have to say that now my self-imposed time-out has ended, I haven't actually done anything about it.

As I write, BlizzCon is due to begin in a few hours, at which point we'll probably learn a couple of things that will be pertinent to when and if I resubscribe. Wilhelm gave his predictions yesterday and the two possibilities that interest me are Cataclysm Classic and the next Retail expansion.

I'm just familiar enough with WoW to find the changes made to Azeroth by Cataclysm intriguing but not upsetting. I've seen some of the revamped zones but by no means all of them and although I could obviously explore them in Retail, doing so in something closer to their original context is considerably more appealing.

looks like we get to summon Scooby Doo!

I'm also curious to see if Cataclysm-era WoW is a sweeter spot in terms of gameplay than the current version, which does seem somewhat overcooked. I know just about everyone who isn't married to 2004 seems to believe WoW hit its perfect stride during Wrath of the Lich King but that's when I first played and I thought it kind of fell between two stools at times; a little too easy to feel authentic but a little too awkward to feel cosy. 

I suspect the true sweet spot for me might be Mists of Pandaria but I'm happy to give Cataclysm the benefit of the doubt. Wilhelm predicts an early spring launch, which would suit me nicely. I guess by the time this posts we'll already know if he was right.

Surprisingly, when I got the email from the Tarisland Team this afternoon, telling me about the second Closed Beta Test, I was considerably more excited about the news than I was when the Microsoft deal went through. Tarisland may not be anything groundbreaking but it does have novelty value and I'm very curious to see how it's changed in response to the feedback and metrics from the first test.

I haven't been keeping close tabs on the details but I have seen several press releases, all of which give the impression that most of the alterations they've made have been designed to make the game easier. That seems a little surprising. It certainly didn't stike me as difficult but then I only saw the low end of the open world. I never even set foot in a dungeon.

Changes to PvE, described by the developers as "core gameplay", include making player characters stronger and dungeon bosses weaker. Raids and dungeons are getting some form of specialised loot and there will be selectable difficulty levels for both. There's also a dungeon-finder style "random matching system" intended to "help new players get familiar with the game more quickly and free those who would like to challenge elite dungeons repeatedly from concerns about teaming up."

Of more interest to me is the "Dark Invasion", a recurring open-world event that brings corruption to different parts of the map on a rolling three-day schedule. I'm not clear whether that's three game days or three actual days. I think it must be the latter. Or maybe, as in WoW, they're one and the same. I really ought to remember but I don't.

There are a whole set of separate quests and events that only happen in areas of the map that have been "invaded" and the whole thing reminds me of both Rift and the pre-expansion events in WoW that heralded the coming of Legion. If the Dark Invasion is anything close to either of those it ought to be a good time.

Separate to the invasions are World Bosses, described as "apex predators" and "highly territorial" which is probably as good a lore explanation of why these things stand around, ready to fight anyone who looks at them, as I've ever seen in an MMORPG. Sometimes the simple explanation is the best.

The CBT also brings some new, as yet unspecified, classes and some changes to existing ones. Rangers, who recently got a whole post to themselves on the official website, can look forward to a shake-up to pet taming, something which interests me since that was the class I played last time. Of course, we'll all be starting over from scratch again so maybe I'll play something else next go round.

Always assuming I get an invite, that is. Inclusion in the first beta test does not guarantee or even increase your chances of inclusion in the second. I've signed up again so fingers crossed. If nothing else, betas for big games always make for plenty of ideas for posts.

If anyone feels like joining in, here's the sign-up page and here's the FAQ. See you in beta. Maybe.

Intertextuality Friday

Super-quick Friday Grab-Bag because I wrote most of a longer post this morning before realizing it was going nowhere and now I don't have time to do much of anything. But I'm working tomorrow and we're going away for a couple of days next week - yes, actually "away", although not so far away we won't be able to drive there in a morning - so there probably won't be any posts for a bit, unless I take my laptop, except some of the keys aren't working and I don't particularly fancy posting some experimental piece that doesn't use the letter "B".

Enough drivel. Let's get on.

When Do I Get To Play WoW?

I said I wouldn't until either Blizzard got better or Microsoft bought them. I see from today's news that the last brick in the wall is about to topple. The CMA has provisionally approved the buyout. "Residual concerns" remain but apparently Microsoft is already "offering remedies" to calm any remaining qualms. I guess there could still be a twist in this never-ending tale but it seems a lot more likely things will now proceed in a stately manner to a resolution that suits everyone. Well, almost everyone. 

I don't know why I care, really. I don't play WoW all that much. I subscribe occasionally for a month or two but mostly I just futz around on the endless free trial. It's not like I've been jonesing for Azeroth ("Jonesing", for younger readers, used to be a slang term for addiction, specifically drug addiction, although later any kind of craving. Oh, who am I kidding? I don't have any younger readers.)

I would quite like to have a go at Cataclysm Classic, if and when it arrives. Most of it would be new content to me and I've heard that if you don't have prior attachments to the originals, some of the do-over zones are pretty good.

Started three consecutive paragraphs with "I" there. My old deputy headmaster would have his red pen out by now.

Words and Music

I was intrigued to read two reports this week about the very different approaches taken by the publishing and music industries to the looming threat to their business models posed by so-called AI. The music industry or at least the UK arm of that global monolith (Can a monolith have arms? I very much doubt it.) released "five fundemental rules" for engagement with our new digital overlords;

At a glance, those seem surprisingly reasonable and pragmatic. I'm very encouraged to see the would-be gatekeepers acknowledge that at least some of the people they're meant to be protecting might actually want to engage with this sort of thing.

Personally, I'd love to start messing around with the tech but I'd also like to feel comfortable putting the results on my YouTube channel and linking to them here and right now I'm definitely not going to be doing that. If they work out some copperplate licensing agreement with Google, though, I'm in there!

Meanwhile, George R R Martin, John Grisham, Jodie Picoult and fourteen more authors have filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infingement. That's not actually news. It happened a couple of months ago. I had heard about it before and tried to pay it no mind but yesterday I saw this at NME and the close-up of George in that hat and waistcoat was just too much to ignore.

The spectacle of vested (Hah!) interests clashing in this way is unattractive enough without framing the whole thing as some kind of battle for the soul of literature, when we all know it's about the money. George R R was a SciFi writer once upon a time, too, which somehow makes it even worse.

FFinger-Lickin' Good

If you want another example of how in the end it's always all about the money, Square Enix have you covered. I first saw this at MMOBomb under the headline "WTF IS Colonel Sanders Doing In Final Fantasy XIV?", which is exactly what I was thinking. 

I ate some KFC chicken once. It was in the early 'eighties, before I gave up eating meat altogether. I wouldn't say the Colonel's secret recipe (I'm guessing it's secret. If not, it should be.) turned me into a vegetarian but it sure didn't help. 

The most disgusting thing I've ever eaten was a brawn sandwich (Aka head cheese, which should tell you all you need to know. I'd link to the recipe but it would literally make you vomit just to read it.) It was handed out free on darts night in the pub where my college pals and I used to hang out in the even earlier 'eighties. That bucket of KFC chicken ran it a close second.

Maybe fried chocobo will taste better.

I So Don't Want It To End

Carole and Tuesday, that is. One more episode to go. Pretty sure I know what the seven minute miracle that saved Mars is now. Just have to watch it happen.

There will be a full review but for now let me say the second season is as good as the first, maybe better. The theme and opening sequence is going to be an all-time favorite. I could watch it over and over and I already have.

I've been looking at Carole and Tuesday merch. There are a number of large wall posters but none of the ones I've seen feature any of the scenes from the Season 2 intro, which seems like madness. Literally every shot is a poster waiting to happen.

Don't take my word for it. See for yourself.

I googled the lyrics to see if I could figure out what the song's about. It doesn't seem to relate to anything in the show unless it's in the final episode and I haven't seen yet. Maybe it's a hat-tip to P.J. Harvey. The show does name-check a lot of 20th century artists so it's not that unlikely.

Whatever, I love it. Been singing it in my head (And out loud.) for days. Carole and Tuesday has a lot to say about AI and music, by the way. I could iterate on that in the light of the aforementioned five fundemental rules but I'll save it for the review.

Last Of The Gang To Die

Crossing the streams, a zeitgeist game I never played spawned an anime I really loved when Edgerunners appeared as a post-launch prequel to Cyberpunk 2077. Without getting too spoilery, the series pretty much ran as a one-and-done, the ending leaving little room for a second season, the final episode being one of the more conclusive and downbeat resolutions I've seen for a while.

It was good to hear that the legacy of the show lives on in the game itself in the form of a lore-appropriate memorial. I've got T-shirts featuring both Rebecca and Lucy on my wishlist. That'll be my tribute although I guess playing the game might be a better one.

There's Something To Being Human After All

When I posted a video by yeule last week I said "We'll be hearing from her again. And again, I'm pretty sure." Oh boy. Ironic foreshadowing. Also misgendering, for which I can only apologise. I did not do my due diligence.

I also knew pretty much nothing about the post-human phenomenon that is yeule. I didn't know they were from Singapore, for a start. I don't know a lot about Singapore other than that my mother thought it was very clean when she went there. I guess when you beat people for dropping chewing gum that'll happen. 

Anyway, it's not the kind of environment you'd expect to foster teen rebellion or then again maybe it's exactly that. Either way, according to Pitchfork's review of their third (!) album, sofstscars, yeule "first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, “This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.”"

The first two albums are variously described as ambient, glitch and "Asian post-pop".  Also vaporwave, I've seen, which tracks. yeule, who's name as I'm sure someone who isn't me will have realised long ago, comes from the Final Fantasy franchise, leaned heavily into post-humanism for their persona but the third album sways the other way, embracing the soft, messy reality of being human.

I don't know why it's taken me this long to notice them. I'm ashamed of myself, sometimes. I'm busy right now going through their back catalog. Here's one yeule made earlier. It seems relevant, somehow.

And finally...

Speaking of pronouns, on the always-reliable recommendation of Xyzzysqrl, I downloaded the demo for Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain on Steam. I played it, enjoyed it, wishlisted it. I'll wait for a sale to buy it, though. It's cheap but I'm even cheaper.

I wouldn't have mentioned it only it has by far the most impressive choice of pronouns at character creation I've ever seen. I took a screenshot.

I remember a really long time ago, long before the current on-trend gender awareness set in, reading a long list of possible pronouns and what they implied. It must have been a long time ago because I know I was at work and it's been a decade and a half since I had the good fortune to be able to web-surf and educate myself on the company dime.

Given the level of debate over the use of "they", I'd almost allowed myself to believe there were only the three choices left. I mean, I know that's not true. I was watching or reading something recently where someone's preferred pronouns were I/I... hmm, what was that? 

Anyway, even though I was theoretically aware other pronouns were still in play, it's nice to be reminded. I almost feel sorry I'm stuck with boring old he/him although I guess if I was that sorry I wouldn't be. Stuck with it, I mean.

And now, I think it's bedtime, which means the finale of Carole and Tuesday. Conflicted doesn't begin to cover my feelings about that...

Work Night Grab Bag

Title says it all. Let's start with a couple of updates on the MicroBlizzard story. It's playing as "Microsoft buys Blizzard" in this part of the blogosphere because no-one around here much cares about Call of Duty or Candy Crush. Some coverage I've read from sources not obsessed with mmos, however, seems to think it was mainly King that Microsoft wanted, to further their penetration into both non-PC and console markets, not to mention China.

If so, it seems at least that the never-ending shenanigans at Blizzard opened the door for the opportunity Microsoft had been waiting for. An article at NME, a surprisingly reliable source of information on gaming these days, claims "Activision Blizzard misconduct allegations allegedly led to Microsoft acquisition."

The thing that seems to be excercising people more than anything about this whole affair is what's going to happen to Bobby Kotick. The obsession with the man seems positively unhealthy. I find it weird to think that a year or two ago I'd never even heard of him and now I'm seeing his face and hearing his name every single day. It'll be nice when that stops. Thanks to Syl for the link to the Twitter feed that claims Bobby's done for but no-one seems to agree when he'll be going, only that, as Wilhelm puts it, "he will get to walk away dragging a giant sack of money like the goblin he is."

If anyone needs further proof of Bobby's goblinhood, try this for size: as reported in the Wall Street Journal and repeated by Gamesindustry.biz, "Kotick had expressed interest in buying multiple video game press outlets in an attempt to adjust Activision Blizzard's perception in the news." Apparently he had his eye on both Kotaku and PCGamer. That's some serious Lex Luthor, super-villain strategy, right there.

Counter to the "Anyone but Kotick" narrative, I've seen quite a few people bemoaning the loss of their once-favorite developer to the grey, corporate maw that is Microsoft, to which I'd just like to say it could have been a lot worse. As the NME revealed (In the piece linked above.) "Activision apparently looked for other interested parties, including Facebook parent company Meta."

Forget playing World of Warcraft on XBox. How'd you like to have to sign up to Facebook before you log in? To Meta, sorry! Meta! 

Enugh of that. For now, anyway. I'm sure there'll be plenty more for month after month until the deal finally goes through. Which it will.

Time for some pretty pictures. I'm taking way more shots in Chimeraland than I can possibly use even in the long-ass, rambling posts I've been writing about my new favorite game. Here are some I couldn't squeeze in.

I think the idea is you seek out these big beasts and hunt them. They get flagged on the map in various ways. All the ones I've come across so far are non-hostile. It seems a bit off to just kill them because they're BIG. 

One of the huge waterspouts I mentioned yesterday. I'm hoping they suck you up and throw you across the map but as yet I haven't managed to get inside one to find out.

It's hard to tell from this shot but that's a giant sword stuck in a mountain. It makes the Claymore in Antonica look like a toothpick. I climbed all the way up there and someone had built a house next to it. Also, note the flurrying leaves in the foreground. Some of the visual effects in the game are gorgeous.

There are lovely touches all through the game. I keep noticing little details. When my fox plays her lute she floats off the ground. Don't know why, she just does. 

Also, the face of the loot is a reflective surface that acts as a mirror. At least I think that's what's happening in this shot. Or maybe it's painted that way? I'll have to look more closely next time she takes it out for a strum.

And finally, let's close with a couple more from that NME 100 to Watch list or whatever it was called. Essential Emerging Artists, that was it. Makes them sound a lot more important, doesn't it?

Nick Mono singing about how he really wants a girl like Effy Stonem, who's a character in Skins, a show I've never seen because I'm not eighteen any more, sad to say. Whoever wrote the squib for it in the list flags it "for fans of Easy Life and Rex Orange County" which, being quite keen on Rex, is why I picked it out. It sounds nothing like Rex Orange County, does it? More like any number of classic two-chord motoriks from everyone since Jonathan Richman. Reminded me of Brimful of Asha more than anything.

That one was NSFW by the way but no-one plays this stuff at work, do they? I like the guy in the comments with the inevitable "Here before this blows up" line. That was three months ago. It has just under two thousand views. I like it.

Do I detect a bit of a Camera Obscura vibe? I love the sax and I'm generally not much of a saxofan. I made that up, saxofan. Think it'll catch on?

And that'll do for now. Gotta save some for Sunday.

Who Had "Microsoft To Buy Blizzard" In Their Prediction Post For 2022, Then?

I'm going to do a proper post later today but I just came back from lunch to see this and I thought I might mention it...

Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard

Or so GamesIndustry.biz has it. At first it looked like the ink wasn't quite dry on the deal yet, according to the sub-heading...

Sources tell Wall Street Journal a deal is near

but a bit further down in the piece we get confirmation direct from Microsoft...

"This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft's gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse'"

Because of course it's all about the metaverse.

The deal apparently went through at around $70b and makes Microsoft the world's third-largest gaming company, behind TenCent and Sony.

Bobby Kotick carries over...

"Microsoft has said that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will continue to serve in that position, but will report to Spencer after the deal closes"

Right. Sure. Of course he does.

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming, which is going to be, yes you guessed it, more about Chimeraland. All the stories that matter, here on Inventory Full.

If You Stare Too Long Into The Metaverse, Then The Metaverse Stares Back At You

Sunday again and nothing much to show for it as usual. As Bob Dylan once said, lost time is not found again. 

But then, who's looking? And he said it in a song called Odds and Ends, which just about sums up this post. Possibly my favorite song on the Basement Tapes and deliriously short at 1.49. For once it's on YouTube, too. Very rare for a Dylan original. No video but we'll take what we can get.

That's by way of an introuduction to yet another grab bag of fluff. Mrs Bhagpuss, who's all but given up crafting in games in favor of crafting for real, spends much of her time turning fluff into stuff (Needle felting wool, specifically.) but mostly I just settle for picking up the virtual fluff from wherever I find it and plonking it down here. Sort through it, take what you want and leave the rest.

There was a time and it wasn't so very long ago at that, when I was able to strike a pose over pretty much any pop music/metaverse/gaming crossover stories that flittered past. Then, in the first lockdown, they started to come in flurries and now there's a new one almost every day. More than that, sometimes. Can't catch 'em all, to coin a meme.

Here's a story from a week or so ago that I meant to comment on but forgot. It went out of my head because I'd never heard of Zara Larrson and when I made the effort to find out who she was, nothing made me regret I'd not found out sooner. Nice enough mid-20teens pop but not my bag, although nearly three-quarters of a billion views on YouTube would suggest Zara's unlikely to care.

"Roblox Zara Larrsen"

Those numbers also go a long way to explaining how she'd somehow managed to earn more than a million dollars in six months just by selling "in-game items such as hats, backpacks and sunglasses" in popular kids' game Roblox. (Imagine that last sentence being read in the patronizing, patrician voice of a 1960s BBC announcer introducing an item on Liverpudlian beat combo the Beatles.)

Zarra's connection with Roblox goes back to (Guess what?) the pandemic, when she hosted a "virtual dance party" in the game to lauch her then-new album. As the NME article explains, "The in-game event allowed players and fans to watch Larrson perform in-game, hanging out and taking part in an online scavenger hunt." 

A whole bunch of pixel products were on sale inside Roblox while all this was happening and maybe afterwards too for all I know. However long it lasted, Zarra netted a cool million without even knowing it had happened. "I didn’t really think much about it. It wasn’t really the motivation for the concert. I just wanted to connect with fans".

Unsurprisingly, she now thinks events like this could be the future for pop stars, particularly in view of the well-publicized revenue shortcomings of the streaming platforms. What's more, Roblox players visited Zarra's in-game house, met her in game outside of the concert and got to take selfies with her. Try doing that at one of her real-life gigs and see how far you get.

"Activision Blizzard"

Roblox' Global Head of Music, Jonathan Vlassopulos (Take a moment to think about that title.) drops the M-word as he reviews the experience: "Once the penny drops that fans are hanging out for two or three hours a day in the metaverse, I think we’ll see an explosion of artists joining." Too right they will, Jonathan. That and the million dollars they're looking at just for sitting at home with headphones and a mic.

Yes, okay, I'm sure it's more technical than that. Even so, it's still got to be orders of magnitude easier
than playing live. And probably orders of magnitude more profitable, too. 

I'm very much in the camp that believes the metaverse is already forming entirely spontaneously around us. While certain people are talking a good game about what they're going to do to make it happen, others have noticed it's already here and they're busy learning how to use it. 

All of this is happening faster than old-school web and gaming heads can fathom. What hope do they have, when even the people inside it find it hard to track? Zarra Larssen is twenty-three years old and here's how she feels about what happened to her: 

"After my show, I wandered around the world and people were like, ‘Let me take a selfie with you! I didn’t get it at first – but then they just put their avatar really close to mine and took a screenshot and that’s the selfie. That could be hard for my generation to understand but for people who live their lives online and are being social online, it means as much to them as meeting me on the street."

"My generation". She's twenty-three! That's how fast the world is changing. Good luck getting ahead of it if you're a fifty-year old game developer. Or Mark Zuckerberg.

That story fits very nicely with the news that Roblox has overtaken Activision Blizzard as the biggest video game developer in the United States. Or if not the biggest then the "most valuable", which is all that matters, I guess.

Following a recent earnings report, Roblox shares jumped forty per cent, taking the company's valuation to $62 billion. ActiBlizz, meanwhile, slumped to $52 billion on the back of the various horror stories and botched releases that make up the story of their annus horribilis (Thanks, Ma'am.) 

As the NME article snarkily observed "Turns out taking care of workers pays" although I have no way of knowing what working practices or conditions are like inside Roblox and I very much doubt the NME does, either. Still, always kick a megacorp when it's down, that's what I say. For sure, it's going to kick you back when it gets up again.

Finishing up this flurry of pop-videogame-business-media crossover stories, which is the metaverse in a multi-hyphenate, there's this heart-lifting number from Baby Queen. Curiously, she's almost exactly the same age as Zara Larrsen but the video makes her seem from a different generation entirely, albeit one that probably has more interesting ways of killing a slow evening after school than taking selfies with pop stars in Roblox.

I really like Wannabe for all kinds of reasons, not least the layered referentialism, all of which I'm sure has to be intentional. It's smart, funny and stands proudly in a storied tradition that goes back through Beck and Bart to Brando asking "What'ya got?"

So where's the video game conection? Certainly not in the lyric (Chorus: "I guess I'll always be a Wannabe baby, making all the music about the drugs I'm using". Come on, sing along, you know you want to.)

Nope, nothing to do with the song, although if you watch the opening few seconds of the video carefully you'll notice what I just said about BQ's crew having better things to do might not apply to gaming in general. 

Baby Queen self-identifies as "a hardcore gamer". She outs herself as such in the first episode of her BBC podcast "Gameplay with Baby Queen" , which I'm listening to as I write, as she tells us she likes adventure games and puzzles but her favorite genre is horror. You and everyone else these days, BQ.

It does beg the question of how much of a loser you can really be when you have a podcast series on BBC Sounds but there you go. Real losers are the ones we never hear about.

 Perhaps the weirdest thing is that the show comes under the rubric of the BBC's Radio 3 brand, the erstwhile "Classical" station and still the supposed home of "serious" music. Zelda, Red Dead Redemption, Journey, all in the show I'm listening to right now... I guess they are modern classics and Journey, at least, takes itself seriously. They're certainly orchestral, can't argue with that.

And so we come to the end. I didn't know I had a theme when I started but now I see, somewhat ironically (In the Alanis Morisette sense, which is to say unironically. Ironically. I believe I may have made that joke before but no apologies. No-one remembers, anyway.) that one's emerged of its own accord: intertextuality. 

As certain religions would be only to happy to tell you, everything's connected. Plenty of scientists wouldn't disagree. Culturally, though, much of the narrative in recent years has revolved around silos and echo chambers and the way you never have to encounter anything you haven't met already (A bit like New World, then.).

The birth of a self-defining, self-replicating metaverse may have something to say about that. It's looking that way, at least. I hope so, anyway.

Some Things Never Change. Some Do.

By rights I shouldn't even be here. I should be playing New World. I've been wanting to all day but as usual there's been other stuff going on and the time just drifts.

We've had several days of rain where I live but today the forecast was for sunshine and plenty of it, so since I'm technically on holiday I thought we really ought to do something that got me out of the house. We spent the morning at Farleigh Hungerford castle. It's not far from where we live and we've been before but not for a few years. 

I recommend it for a couple of hours on a nice day. The setting is glorious, the ruins are interesting and the family history is like a crazed medieval soap opera. We wandered around, looked at everything, read all the descriptions, then sat in the sunshine eating ice cream. We were almost the only ones there. It was great.

After that we came and had lunch and by then it was two o'clock. There was some nonsense about flu vaccinations I won't bore anyone with that I had to sort out and by then it was two-thirty. I could have logged into New World only Mrs Bhagpuss was in Guild Wars 2 and I knew there was new stuff there...

Yes, it's true! ANet added something to one of the holiday events! I saw it in the patch notes, late in the evening, when I logged in to do my dailies, between writing yesterday's post and getting a final hour of New World in before bed. 

I didn't have time to go look then but Mrs. Bhagpuss told me there were two new bosses in the Labyrinth, which she helpfully described as "a fat blob and another one". I figured I'd probably have to go see for myself and this afternoon I did just that.

It didn't seem like it would take too long so I opted to do it before playing New World rather than after. I also had it in mind that I could get a quick blog post out of it but I promised myself this time I'd hold off on writing it up until last thing in the evening. That way I could play New World up to the time when things start to get too busy for my PC to feel comfortable, generally around nine in the evening.

New World runs amazingly well on my aging rig (Rig? Who says "Rig"?). I can even play with the graphics on "High" without too much complaint if I'm on in the mornings or early afternoons and on "Medium" I'm fine pretty much all the time until early prime-time on the East Coast of America, around ten in the evening over here.

Around then my frame rates start to drop and the fans in my PC rev up to the point I can really hear them, something that almost never happens and which makes me very nervous. I'm starting to realize it makes more sense for me to play first and blog later rather than doing it the other way around.

Of course, having logged into GW2, first I had to my dailies, because you do, don't you? I did them on one account and then logged in the second and did them again. Finally I clicked that handy "Go to all the Holiday events without bothering to do the usual dance" device they gave us a while back and ported my necro into the Lab.

And then I spent the best part of ten minutes trying to find a squad that was in a map that wasn't full. Halloween is a popular holiday in GW2 and the Mad King's Labyrinth may be the most popular event on the schedule. People run it for hour after hour, round and round, hoovering up the endless torrents of loot. You can make a lot of imaginary money at Halloween and some people do nothing else.

All I wanted was to see the two new bosses, get some pictures, log out and play New World for a couple of hours. I wouldn't say I was jonesing for it, not least because a) it's not 1975 and b) no-one ever said "jonesing" even then unless they had a bit-part as a junkie in Starsky and Hutch. But I was getting twitchy.

Twitchy... hmm... that reminds me. Did you see Twitch got hacked? Raided, really. Supposedly the entire source code's been lifted. Advice is to change passwords and activate two-factor authentication. I do have a Twitch account although it's years since I used it for anything. I suppose I'd better get on that right after I finish up here. Just one more thing I have to do before I get to play New World. 

 

Getting back to Tyria, when I finally found a squad I could join it took me another half an hour or so before both new bosses popped. The first, Harrower Veltan seems to be a faster, tougher version of Steve, aka the Labyrinthine Horror, which is what ANet called the skeleton with a chainsword who pops out randomly to gank people. 

Some wag of a player renamed him "Steve" many years ago and it caught on and now no-one calls him anything else. I'm betting the new one gets called something similar pretty quickly because she's basically Steve on crystal meth cut with angel dust (Like I'd know what that would be like...) The squad I was in managed to get both of them at once and it was a bloodbath. 

In the end we got them both down because players always win in the end. They die and come back whereas NPCs just die. After we'd disposed of those two it was a long wait before we came to the door behind which the second new boss waits. 

I recognized immediately it was a new door in a new spot so I was ready for something. What I got was a very big Charr in golden armor. He (I think it was a "he". Hard to tell in all the chaos.) goes by the name Hallowed Gourdbinder (Catchy? I think not.) and likes to throw exploding pumpkins in all directions. 

Seriously, couldn't they just have called him the Pumpkin Bomber or something? The Mad Pumpkin Bomber. That would be thematically appropriate and we could remember it.

 

He also has an aircraft-hangarful of hitpoints. It took forever to whittle him down. I passed the time by asking Mrs Bhagpuss, who was busy doing something in World vs World, if the one she described as "a fat blob" was a charr. "Yes", she said, "a fatipuff charr". That's his nickname in our house now, although we should probably keep it to ourselves.

While all this was going on I also noticed a welcome change in ambience. For years we've had to listen to the same, stale, tired banter between Mad King Thorn and his son, much of which, as I've observed before, seemed ill-advised even in 2012 and downright offensive today.

This year, Prince Edrick, Thorn's usual verbal sparring partner, has vanished. Or at least he was gone when I was there. I hope it's for good. 

He's been replaced by the always-annoying Palawa Joko. Much though I dislike Joko, I have to say his dialog with Kingy is significantly less disturbing and, being new, for the time being at least, less irritating.

Removing offensive NPC dialog in games seems to be a bit of a thing right now. Not before time, in my opinion. It's not so much the innate offense as the crassness of it that I object to. Okay, it's also the innate offensiveness.

Joko, chuntering away in the background.

 

I tried to take some good pictures of the two new bosses but as anyone who's played GW2 in any content that involves a bunch of players will know, you can barely see a thing most of the time. It's all explosions and special effects. 

I got downed three times, trying to get screenshots with the UI hidden. Didn't really get me anywhere. In the end it's only in the shots with the UI still on, the ones where you can see the nameplates, that you can tell who we're fighting. 

I see from the update notes there's some kind of "fact-finding expedition" connected to the new additions, meaning, presumably, some kind of collection or achievement. You have to speak to Magister Tassi of the Durmand Priory in Lion's Arch to get that started. And there's also the second in the collection of holiday-themed books to find.

No hurry to get started on either of those; Halloween will be with us for a long time. Over a month, in fact. It doesn't end until 9th November. I'll do them in my own time.

What I'm going to do now, I thought as I logged out of GW2, is play New World. At last! Only there was a patch so I couldn't. I let the patch download and install.While that was going on I read the patch notes. Also didn't take long. 

Then I logged in and guess what? The servers were still down. There was a note suggesting I visit the forums for more information. That was interesting. Until then I didn't even know New World had any forums. How very old school.

Weird, how my abomination shows up in sillhouette...

A quick visit there told me the servers went down at 11.00am and maintenance was scheduled to last four hours. Well, that's neat! That covers pretty much the middle of the day when I was doing all these other things. So I couldn't have played anyway. I didn't miss anything!

Except as I was reading that it was just gone four in the afternoon. The servers should have been up for an hour already. I read on. A further message apologised for the delay, saying the maintenance was taking longer than expected and the servers would come up at 4pm. That was two minutes ago, by my clock.

I read on. "Unfortunately, we are having some technical difficulties and need to extend the maintenance for two more hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and support!" Oh. Okay. I know how this goes. I've been here before.

Which is how I came to be writing this rambling mess of a post. To kill the time while I wait. Better than staring at the login screen and clicking "Refresh" every thirty seconds. Don't tell me you never did that.

As I write there's another message on the thread. "We are slowly bringing worlds back online. Stay tuned and thanks again for your patience!" And thank you, dear reader, for yours. If you'll excuse me, I'll be off. I have some numbers I need to make go up and they won't do it on their own.