Summer Fun : GW2, WoW,

Over these last few weeks it seemed as though I was settling into the kind of gaming routine I'd been hoping for, juggling half a dozen MMOs and pottering around from one to another at whim. A few things have conspired to obstruct that happy state of affairs but not in a bad way.

For one thing I have been playing slightly less overall. It is summer, after all, and the weather has finally decided to admit it. It's not quite as tempting to sit in all day playing games when the sun is streaming through the window. Plus I've been working late most days this week so that cuts into the available gaming time.

Then comes the choice of which games to play. Factors to be considered include an increased attendance and interest in GW2 from Mrs Bhagpuss, who added Heart of Thorns to her second account and is now busy gearing up a whole new set of characters, a much better WvW match than we've had for a while and some very enjoyable new content that came with the Out of the Shadows update.

The upshot has been a week of nothing much but GW2. Even the pre-Legion fun over in Azeroth hasn't managed to pull me away although I do want to get to it at some point before it's all over, if only to try out the "Dark Whispers" fun Tyler mentioned in the comments.

I also need to log both the All Access accounts into Legends of Norrath one last time before the shutters go down for the final time on the seventeenth. Contrary to what was expected it seems there was a final stipend at the beginning of the month so I still have a last hand to collect.

At least I don't have to worry over whether or not to fork out for No Man's Sky. This could have been the summer of non-MMO gaming for me, with We Happy Few entering early access and NMS launching, but it seems both aren't ready for PC prime-time quite yet. Going to wait until the bugs are all ironed out and the gameplay's plumped up before I lay down any money for either, I think.

In the meantime GW2 is doing a surprisingly good job of keeping me entertained despite what can at best be described as a thin period for new content. Although the Summer Update, which is officially all we are getting in the way of New Stuff for at least two months, only really took a matter of days to run through it has more lasting appeal for me. I really like the new map and for once I want the items you can acquire by grinding playing there.

Better yet, the "Current Event" that came with the following bi-weekly update is a good one. Well, I'm enjoying it although I know that's not a universally-held opinion. The way in which ANet are able to turn excitement into frustration is depressingly predictable. As seems to happen more often than not some poorly-designed mechanics left players first puzzled then annoyed as large groups gathered and stood around waiting for anything up to three hours for events that didn't happen.

It's clear that the people designing these events still don't have a handle on the psychology of the players who they are designing them for even after four years of seeing how they react every. single. time. If you create an event with rewards or achievements a huge proportion of players will try to complete those achievements and gain those rewards in the minimum number of attempts at the fastest pace.

If that means standing around doing nothing for literally hours waiting on 30 seconds of action then that's what they will do. They won't like it. They won't enjoy it. They will complain about it. But they will do it. What they won't do is carry on playing normally and allow the achievements to fill themselves out over time and the rewards to arrive whenever.

Repeatedly designing events that expect behavior that the playerbase as a whole has never exhibited throughout the lifetime of the game is either incredibly stubborn or incredibly unobservant. Or maybe it's pure wishful thinking; "They'll get it this time, won't they?"

Well, no they won't. And it doesn't help when you give them something to click that tells them the opposite of what they think it's telling them, either. At least it only took a day or so to hot-fix that - an improvement on the days of denial we've suffered over similar design flaws in the past.

Despite all that I had a good time chasing down my Bloodstone Sightings and Bloodstone-Crazed Creatures. I had them all in a couple of sessions and the longest I waited around was about an hour, during which there was good party going on with fun boxes and fireworks.

I still have to find all the Bloodstone Slivers but that's the easy part. I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I am the kind of dilettante, whim-driven player the devs apparently wish they were making this stuff to entertain.

I did collect my 5,000 unbound magic and earn my 200 blood rubies to buy the Ascended back item although I have yet to decide who gets to use it. I'm currently stockpiling more for the jewellery although I may not spend it just yet. I believe these currencies will be in play for the whole of Living Story 3 so there may be better things to buy later. That_shaman knows but I prefer not to spoil my fun by peeking ahead.

Looking ahead I'm hoping to return to something of a more balanced MMO diet as the summer wears down and we head into autumn. The long-delayed arrival of Project Gorgon on Steam is supposedly due "soon" so there's that. Again, I might opt to wait a little longer and glean the benefit of the promised optimization and graphical improvements before wading in.

P:G is one of the few upcoming MMOs that eschew the action/console controls for traditional hotbar and tab target, a very strong selling point for me. The other one I have my eye on is AdventureQuest 3D. AQ3D, like P:G seems to be another MMO with a very quirky, humorous approach led by a strong, individual personality, but it has a considerably larger team with an established track record so I'm expecting great things. Or things, anyway.

It seems I've been saying this every year for the lifetime of this blog but despite the never-ending pronouncements of doom and gloom for the entire MMO genre, there is always far more on the table than I am ever going to be able to consume. If this is a dying hobby then god forbid I ever move to one that's on the up.

Chilling At Ground Zero : GW2

Jeromai has an excellent post up analyzing the attractions of GW2's new map, Bloodstone Fen and the way it plays to an entirely different demographic than the raid content ANet have been pumping out for the rest of this year. He neatly outlines the attitudes and expectations of two major playstyles - Low and High Energy - both which should be immediately recognizable to anyone who's played MMORPGs over the last fifteen or twenty years.

If you browse the official forums you can easily spot the two demographics as they give feedback on Bloodstone Fen. The high energy crowd are complaining the map is small, boring, has nothing worth getting and anyway they've already finished it in a just a session or two. The low energy folks are praising it to the skies, saying what a great time they're having, how they have their freedoms back and how this is what the game is meant to be.

It won't surprise anyone who reads this blog to know I'm in the latter camp. If I had a motto for gaming it would go something along the lines of "if it's not fun, don't do it". I have no issues about dropping things as soon as I notice I'm not enjoying them. Life is already filled with things we don't want to do but can't avoid. I see no rational reason for dragging that painful inevitability into any voluntary leisure activity as well.

Being able to sort all activities easily into "this is fun" or "this isn't fun" and keeping or discarding as appropriate was one of the key attractions of Guild Wars 2 in the first place. The original game didn't require you to do anything specific at all. The player was given absolute agency.

Take the Personal Story as an example. Most MMOs these days have a core storyline, a narrative that the designers expect players to follow. Star Wars: The Old Republic built the entire game on that "fourth pillar". Final Fantasy XIV gated almost all significant character progression behind steps in the story. World of Warcraft, in Cataclysm, constructed a leveling path that was predicated on completing each quest hub before any new ones would open up.

At launch GW2 had a detailed "Personal Story" with multiple, branching starting points for each race that eventually came together in a unified sequence for everyone that climaxed with the death of an Elder Dragon. After four years and with sixteen max-level characters I have never finished it on any of them. It blocks nothing and not doing it has absolutely no effect on any other aspect of the game.

In the original conception of GW2, everything was optional: dungeons, World vs World, PvP, PvE, storyline - they all existed in glorious isolation. There were some small anomalies, like having to open WvW maps for PvE map completion, but not only were such things the exception. Once pointed out, ANet's response was generally to remove them.

In the run-up to launch there was a lot of talk about flat leveling curves and horizontal progression. There was to be no gear grind. You would be able to level your character by doing literally anything - fighting monsters, following the narrative, exploring, crafting. Even picking up other players after they fell down would give experience.

There would be no quests because, as Mike O'Brien put it, "we’ve all clicked so many exclamation points and accepted so many quests in our lives that we’re pretty immune to quest text". Instead we would get a "Living World". It all sounded amazing. A lot of people bought into the concepts outlined in the now-notorious "Manifesto".

For a while what was promised was, broadly, what we got. I don't remember any occasions where "a centaur wheels a siege machine up to the outskirts of a village" nor has either of my elementalists ever picked up a boulder thrown by a "Stone Elemental" and used that boulder "to create a meteor storm" but hey, things can change in beta. In essence the game we got at launch was the game we were expecting.

The entire conception of GW2 as it was back then seems to have been designed with Jeromai's "Low Energy" gamer in mind. The kind of player who, in his words, wants "to relax, be comfortable and content, be relieved, feel peace". While committing mass murder, arson and wholesale devastation of communities and ecosystems, naturally...

It was too good to last and it didn't. Without rehashing the whole sorry timeline, ANet blinked at the first confrontation with the very audience they'd supposedly rejected - the players who craved a competitive, directed experience with vertical progression, power creep and formal grouping. "High Energy" players, whose primary motivation was achievement and overcoming obstacles, in other words.

From then on the story was one of increasingly desperate appeasement. Beginning with the addition of fractals, ascended gear and achievements, it was a path that led inevitably and, we can but hope, finally, to raids. Like many, most, MMOs before it, GW2 spiraled down the rabbit hole of trying to be all things to all players, with the inevitable result that it ended up being nothing special to most.

Heart of Thorns saw the apogee of that process. Even the raids that have churned out over the succeeding six months are a part of the HoT experiment not an extension from it. GW2's first expansion underperformed both critically and commercially and the narrative ever since has been one of damage limitation and brand reconstruction.

All of which brings us to Bloodstone Fen, a rather small map that, in Jeromai's words once more, "looks like it was cobbled together using a ton of re-used assets"  as it "specifically addresses a number of reaction feedback from HoT" in "a mad iterative stopgap scramble to band-aid fix some issues".

And yet Bloodstone Fen is fantastic. It brings back the complete freedom of action, of player agency, that so many found missing in Heart of Thorns. There are no long "meta" event chains to complete, no map-wide timers, no overarching targets to hit.

Instead there are the small, medium and large Dynamic Events of the kind you'd expect in Core Tyria, the maps that came with launch. There's gathering and exploring and general pottering about to be had. You can set your own pace, come and go as you like. It's a Low Energy map with High Energy graphics.

Oh, it isn't perfect, not by any means. It's genuine "high level" content of a kind the original manifesto suggested GW2 would never have, for one thing. You can't even enter Bloodstone Fen without a level 80 character. Technically, there is still one loophole they haven't closed that would get you in but you won't be having much - or indeed any - fun without a full set of gliding masteries.

As several posters on the forums have complained, there's an absence of the kind of quotidian NPC activity that made the original maps feel so convincingly lived-in. Bloodstone Fen is not a place where you can imagine anyone choosing to settle down. I guess that's hardly surprising given it was Ground Zero for a continent-rocking explosion not a week ago but there's no sign that anyone ever lived there.

Following on from my recent post on the attractions of low-level gaming in MMOs and the appeal of adding new places to begin even as the games mature, it's sad to say I don't see any prospect of that happening in GW2. ANet have wedded themselves to the concept of horizontal progression at the existing cap of 80 and it looks certain that all future content will be constructed with that paradigm in mind.

If so, I hope Bloodstone Fen is a strong indicator of how they'll seek to achieve that goal from now on. It may be missing the depth of detail that make most of the sub-80 maps such a joy to explore but at least it has the Low Energy, endlessly repeatable gameplay I came to GW2 in search of four years ago, and that's something that has become increasingly hard to find in recent times.