Comings And Goings

It's Friday! I have a bunch of things bookmarked that won't make posts of their own. Guess what that means!

Oh, and when I said "It's Friday!" I meant it was Friday when I wrote this. I imagine it's Saturday now, if you're reading it the day I published it. Or if not, well, it could be any day. Even Friday. Just... a different Friday.

Anyway, now we've gotten that all cleared up...

A Little Bit Country...

Let's start with Lana. And Beyoncé. Always the bridesmaids, never the brides, eh? Well, apparently. I keep reading about how both of them are being perpetually snubbed by the Grammys, although with thirty-two wins out of eighty-eight nominations, you could hardly say Beyoncé has been ignored. She just has never won the Big One, Album of the Year. 

Lana, on the other hand, has only been nominated eleven times, out of which she's won precisely no Grammys. I think we have a clear winner! Or maybe I mean loser.

Anyway, that's not the connection between the two icons, idols and (super)stars I came here to talk about. No, it's something a lot odder than that. According to various sources, they both plan on going Country for their next album. 

Lana, it's definite. She said so herself. The album even has a name: Lasso. You can't get more country than that. And it's not even all that surprising. She's guested with country singers, covered country songs and according to Lana even her breakout hit, Video Games, was "kind of country". 

I think Lana's definition of "country" might just shade over into Americana, though. Lana is definitely Americana in spirit even though rarely if ever in sound.

Beyoncé, however, is not an artist I've ever associated with any stripe of country music - country&western, country rock, alt-country, Americana, whatever. That said, as I have repeatedly apologized, I am nowhere near as familiar with her work as I ought to be. 

It does seem she has more form in the field than I would have guessed; she submitted a song - Daddy Lessons from  Lemonade - for consideration in the "Country" category. It was not accepted but I'm listening to it now and it sure sounds country to me.

The main reason people are saying her next album will be all country, all the way though, seems to be that she wore a cowboy hat to this year's award ceremony. I'm not sure headgear is always a solid indication of musical direction although it does hold true for Tom Waits. And Noddy Holder, for that matter. 

I kinda hope it's true in this case, though. Maybe that'll be my way in.

Going, Going...

Some video-game-sad news that's barely been reported: one of the weirdest, wildest, least-easily-pigeon-holed games of the last few years, Chimeraland, is about to close its few remaining Western servers at the end of March. Apparently there are Chinese servers that will carry on but as far as I can tell, both the Steam version of the game and the earlier SEA version with servers based (I believe.) in Singapore, will go down. They might be one and the same for all I know.

As anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will remember, I was big into Chimeraland for a while. There are more than thirty posts with the Chimeraland tag here but the last time I logged in was six months ago and that was only for a look-see. 

Knowing the game wouldn't be around much longer, I thought I should probably take one last chance to say goodbye to my characters and take a few final photos of my houses for keepsakes. Unfortunately, I'd already left it too late.

Oh, the servers are still up. I was able to log into the SEA version just fine. Only I'd forgotten that my original character there had already been deleted. As I wrote in that post last September, if you stop playing the game for too long, you can wave your characters goodbye: "You get three months' grace. If you don't log in after that, your characters are wiped." 

Or they were. Mine was. The one I played for several months, when the game first went Live. The Level 2 I made at the time of that post five months ago, though, she's still there. I guess there's no point clearing space for people to make new characters any more.

As for my Steam, it wanted to download a 4GB update, which seemed weird under the circumstances. I let it go ahead but the update stalled after a few minutes and rather than fiddle around with it, I uninstalled the game instead.

I found it all very instructive. A few years back, even the thought of certain MMORPGs shutting down literally brought me out in a cold sweat. When Vanguard shuttered I thought I might need therapy, until the emulator project came along to throw out a lifeline. 

Now, though, I'm not sure I care all that much. I really liked Chimeraland but I still hadn't played it for a long time. If finding out the game was about to sunset wasn't even enough to remind me I'd already lost everything on my original account, I think it would be a little ridiculous to pretend I'm heartbroken.

The slightly uncomfortable fact is that I don't play any MMORPG "seriously" any more. There isn't a single one that currently acts as a tent-pole for my entertainment life, much less the rest of my life, the way half a dozen or more games did in the past. Right now, I think maybe the only potential sunset that would affect me emotionally would be EverQuest II and even there I'd have to factor in the ease with which I get distracted from what I'm doing there, the sporadic way I choose to log in to pursue any goals I do have and the knowledge I already have the icon for an emulator client on my desktop. 

The ever-increasing prevalence of emulators and fan projects for what feels like the majority of supposedly obsolete MMORPGs certainly means an official notice of closure doesn't hold the horror it once did. The ironic comments I used to make about certain games probably outliving me seems less like irony and more like a simple statement of fact with every day that passes.

It's a great shame Chimeraland won't be around for much longer but not because it means I won't be able to play it any more. It's a shame because it was a really good MMORPG with a lot more going for it than many that have lasted much longer. It was fun, original and entertaining but none of those things has ever been enough. So much comes down to luck, timing and marketing. In another reality, Chimeraland could easily have been Palworld, a game it resembles in a number of key ways. If only the developers had thought to make their monsters cuter and give them funnier names...

Gone.

While I was attempting to update Chimeraland, I noticed there was also an update pending for the Once Human closed beta. That seemed odd. I thought the test ended back in January.

I really like Once Human. I stopped playing the beta not because I'd had enough of it but because I was sure I'd be buying it at launch and I didn't want to burn out before then. I thought I'd miss it but as it happened, Palworld came along almost immediately to scratch my survival itch, so I barely even noticed I wasn't playing Once Human any more.

I was curious as to why there might still be a humongous patch waiting to download. I thought maybe they might have extended the beta or even started a new one. I hadn't heard anything but then there seems to be very little coverage of the game anyhere. It wouldn't surprise me if any change of plans had gone unreported.

I downloaded the 5GB patch and logged in. My login still worked. The Enter button was there. There just weren't any servers to log in to.

After some checking, I was able to establish a few things for certain. The beta has ended. No new beta has begun. None has been announced. There is still no launch date.

It is unusual for a closed beta client to keep working after the beta has ended but maybe there are plans to re-use it in the future. Or maybe they just forgot to take it down. Either way, I'm leaving mine where it is... just in case.

Also Gone But Not For Long

I also still have the Nightingale Stress Test client installed. I'm hoping it will be re-useable - with an update, of course - for the upcoming Early Access launch in less than two weeks. Anything to avoid another hefty download. I've searched for information on that but so far I haven't been able to find anything. 

I have, however, seen Inflexion Games' debrief on how the stress test went. It raises a couple of concerns.

Firstly, they seem pleased to have had just under fifty thousand players (Or "unique users" as they put it.) in the test. It even seems that was more people than they expected. Given that Palworld sold millions of copies on the first day and currently has more than nineteen million players, fifty thousand seems either incredibly unambitious or incredibly unlikely to provide adequate testing for launch day. 

It's not just Palworld, either. Enshrouded hit a million players in the first four days and reportedly continues to grow. Palworld and Enshrouded are in the exact, same genre as Nightingale and Nightingale has probably enjoyed considerably more press attention and hype than either. It's going to be very interesting to see whether it can match their sales. Not that anyone's expecting another Palworld but if they don't even manage to match Enshrouded's success, questions will be asked.

The other, mildly concerning statistic from the long list provided is the number of traditional fantasy MMORPG wild animals killed by those fifty thousand players. Nearly three hundred thousand boars and more than a quarter of a million wolves. That's six boars and five wolves for every single player!

To that you can add almost half a million "Bound", which I think were the zombie-like creatures I mentioned in my post. I made a snarky comment at the time about how I might as well have been playing WoW. I think these numbers make that point for me.

I'm sure a lot of it is just a side-effect of dumping everyone in the middle of some woodland filled with bears, wolves and zombies. The actual game is going to be waaaay more original than that. Right?

I guess we'll all find out in a week or so. I know I will. Boars or no boars, I'll be there.

Is This Good News?

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is moving to a six-weekly, seasonal testing schedule. According to the report on MassivelyOP, this means new content every six weeks. 

So far, so ho-hum. The big change, though, isn't the cadence of the updates but who gets to test them. Or play them, if we're going to be honest about it. 

Until now, only the very highest-tier backers have had regular access to the testing process, something that meant an investment in the long-overdue game in the order of a thousand dollars. From the next update, which arrives in barely over a week, on February 17, all backers will get a chance to test each season. Big investors get to play the full six weeks, middling backers get two weeks and bottom-feeders with just a fifty dollar stake get a single week.

I did say, a long time ago, that if they ever started selling access to the game for $50, I'd be in. That, though, was years ago, when Pantheon looked like the most exciting prospect among a clutch of would-be retro-MMORPGs. It was also when Brad McQuaid was still alive to dictate the direction of travel.

I am still interested and fifty dollars for what would, if they stick to their word, be at least two months Pantheon-time per year, doesn't seem like a terrible deal. I would certainly want to be sure there was no NDA because if I can't blog about it I'm not interested. Given that, though...

I still probably won't go for it... yet. Pantheon is interesting, yes, but as this post makes clear, there's a lot going on in the field right now. I'm already going to have to juggle Palworld and Nightingale from the middle of this month and  Once Human and Tarisland are both likely to arrive sooner rather than later. I'm already having trouble fitting the games I have into anything like a schedule. Having to drop everything for a week of Pantheon every other month could be more of an imposition than an opportunity, right now.

Pantheon is, however, quite possibly the only new game Mrs Bhagpuss might want to play. She does occasionally express a mild interest in playing another MMORPG and she has always been curious about this one. Maybe I'll talk to her about it...

And Finally...

It's traditional to end these posts with a song, although we did have one earlier.

Oh, hell. Who am I to break with tradition?

You may remember the last music post ended with me having to choose between Blu DeTiger and Bratty and I chose Blu DeTiger. 

Bratty - you're up!

La Última Vez - Bratty

Chimeraland: Still There, Still Weird

I saw a "Whatever Happened To...? post about Chimeraland on MassivelyOP yesterday and it made me wonder... whatever did happen to Chimeraland? 

I played it quite happily, even a little obsessively, for a while a couple of years ago, when it was only avialable on servers in South East Asia. I stopped for a bit and then after a while the game launched "globally" through Steam.

I ummed an aahed over whether to start afresh before deciding that yes, I would, because Steam is so convenient. I played my new character for a while but doing everything over again wasn't quite as compelling as doing it for the first time and I soon drifted away.

I dropped back in once or twice but mostly I forgot about the game. If I thought about it all, it was with a vague idea I might go back to the SEA server, where my character was a lot higher in level and I had a pretty nice house. Really, though, I had no particular plans to play again.

When I read the MOP piece, which all but says the game is in maintenance mode, I got a whiff of nostalgia that made me think I probably ought to stop by the old place one more time before it was too late. I didn't want to get the urge some day and find out I'd missed my chance. Been there, done that, got the emotional scar tissue to prove it.

This morning I jumped through the usual hoops (Resetting my password, patching the game, finding it still didn't work, uninstalling and re-installing, resetting my password a second time...) before I could log into the SEA servers. When I got there I was greeted with a very long message about a new version of the game, complete with extensive patch notes.

I wasn't entirely sure at first whether it was new information or legacy "news" from last year, when I knew there had been a major update that added a whole new continent. If the game was really in maintenance mode it wouldn't be surprising if no-one had bothered to change the login messages for twelve months.

As I scanned the details it became clear that no, this wasn't outdated information. There is a huge update coming and it arrives tomorrow! Here for your delight and approval are the full patch notes because I'm blowed if I can find them anywhere other than the in-game launcher.  The official website hasn't had an update since January and the Steam page hasn't been updated for nearly a year!

And that's where the notes end... right in the middle of a sentence. I'm guessing they were too massive for the buffer to handle. 

We'll get the rest of them tomorrow, when the update lands, no doubt. There's a downtime of just a couple of hous, after which you'll need to install the update to log in because "the old version will be discontinued".

The instructions only mention the iOS and Android versions but since the game is fully cross-play enabled and I just cut and pasted the notes from the Steam installation (That was fun, let me tell you...) I'm as confident as I can be that it will apply to the PC version as well.

I think it's safe to say that developer PixelSoft have not abandoned Chimeraland and that the game is not about to enter maintenance mode. As for whether anyone is still playing... as always with cross-platform games it's extremely hard to tell. 

There certainly aren't many people playing on Steam. Population has been in steady decline ever since the game arrived on the platform, with August seeing an average monthly population of around ninety. That sounds very small but the all-time high was only 2252. 

With a 30-day peak of 143, the game has lost about 93% of its audience, which honestly makes it much the same as New World, except that no-one's playing New World anywhere other than Steam, whereas you can play Chimerland on any number of devices.

With a big update coming, it would be a good time to return to Chimeraland. I might have done it myself if my characters had still been there. Unfortunately they're not.

I'm so used to MMORPGs never deleting characters that I never even thought to check what Chimeraland's policy on dormant accounts might be. You get three months' grace. If you don't log in after that, your characters are wiped. I hadn't logged into either Steam or my LevelInfinite account on the SEA cluster for a lot longer than three months so my characters on both platforms are long gone.

Surprisingly, I really don't mind. I had no plans to start playing again and I wasn't particularly attached to either of the characters I had. If I want to relive my adventures with them I can just read the many blog posts I wrote at the time. That will bring back fond memories far better than logging in to a game I no longer remember how to play.

What I might do is make a new character just to have a look at the two continents I've never seen. I'm more motivated by the thought of starting afresh than I would be to run an existing character around. 

Probably, though, I won't bother. Time moves on and I feel Chimeraland has had its turn. I have plenty of new games to tinker with. I'd rather go forwards than back.

Still, it's very good to see that the game hasn't been abandoned after all. It's a strange game. I've not played anything quite like it. It would be a shame to see it disappear. 

And even if I'm not playing any more I hope someone's enjoying it. I mean, where else can you play an adolescent jellyfish with legs, grafted onto the back end of a giraffe?

May Shrink Or Leak While In Use

My inner hipster quirks an approving eyebrow every time I add another obscure mmorpg to my portfolio but there are certain caveats that come with choosing to play the games others ignore. Yesterday brought a couple more yellow flags.

I logged into Noah's Heart to a bittersweet welcome in the mail: five hundred diamonds, compensation for another server merge. I'd heard nothing ahead of time. From my perspective, the server where I play seemed as busy as ever. It came as a complete surprise to me.

It took a bit of searching before I could track down the details.

After this week’s maintenance, we’ll conduct server merge among the following servers:
AM Server: S1-Fairy Spring & S6-Elegy Tomb
EU Server: S1-Avant-Garde & S4-Greepersia
S8-Divine Valley & S14-Canan & S16-Star

The first server in the group is the main server and the rest servers will be merged into the first one.

I found the announcement on the game's Facebook page. Facebook's not a place I generally go for game news. I'm inured to having to check Discord to find out what's going on but I have my limits.

It would seem the game's down to three servers now: one in North America, one in Europe and one... somewhere else. Asia? South America? Mars?

 

I play on Fairy Spring, which probably explains why the game has always seemed well-populated to me. The server has been the host for at least one previous merger so I'm guessing it's always been the busiest, even more so as it keeps picking up refugees from all the others.

 

New content still coming in. That has to be a positive.

I was bullish about the game's prospects last time this happened but that was only a month ago. It's hard not to see this latest contraction as a warning. At the rate things are going, pencilling in a celebratory post for the game's first anniversary next summer probably wouldn't be the wisest plan.

 

I'm not too bothered. It feels as though I might be running out of steam with Noah's Heart, anyway. I'm still logging in every day but only for the time it takes to fulfill my guild obligations and rack up my 200 activity points. I bank my three tokens towards the next stage of the current Season then I log out.

 

I like to try to follow the narratives of these weird, sometimes incomprehensible storylines but the time-gating has increased to the stage where it now takes a full week to build up the points needed to move the story forward. It used to be three days. 

When I do get to open the next chapter, it rarely takes more than fifteen or twenty minutes to finish. Major set piece action segments and crafted cut scenes are things of the past. Now it's always a sequence of talking tableaux and a lot of silent movie style intertitles. The approach certainly has its charm but it doesn't occupy a great deal of time.

After more than twenty years, I get a feeling for when my interest in a game is begining to flag and I suspect that time may be approaching for Noah's Heart. Still, if it ends up being six months, that's a very strong run. I didn't play Chimeraland, a game that very arguably has a lot more going for it, for as long as that.

Of course, Chimeraland is another at-risk title, having suffered similar shrinkage to Noah's Heart. The bizarre, monster-smushing game does have a higher profile, at least with MassivelyOP, where several writers seem amused that it even exists, a sentiment I can readily appreciate, having played it. Whether the attention will help keep the servers up any longer than the already all-but-forgotten Noah's Heart, though, I have to have my doubts.

 

The other odd title I picked up recently, ROSE Online, has, as far as I can tell, just the one server, which at least means merges aren't likely to be an issue. It's also extremely busy as of now, which has to be a good sign.

A lot less re-assuring was the email I received yesterday. I won't quote the whole thing... or shall I? Yes, why not?

A data breach is never good news but props to Rednim for the detailed explanation. It looks concerning at first sight but if I'm reading it correctly, all it really amounts to is a small chance that someone might have been able to see an email address and an even smaller chance they'd also have had a shot at a few characters of the password.

I suppose if you were lucky enough to have a very short email address and lazy enough to have chosen a very short password, a curious prodder might have been able to log into your ROSE Online account but even then, unless you're one of those peculiarly shortsighted people who use the same email address and password for everything, the damage would be limited to loss of your progress and character in a free to play mmorpg still in the first week of early access. It's hardly the Brink' s Mat robbery.

 

I changed my password just to be on the safe side, although I never re-use passwords nor even follow any particular convention or format when creating them. I literally make up something random, stream-of-consciousness style, every time. 

As for email addresses, I'm not quite sure what the logic behind keeping them secret is in the first place. They exist so people can use them to contact each other, don't they? Or maybe that's archaic. 

Anyway, I make up almost as many email addresses as I do passwords, and most of them get used just once, to reply to the email that validates them. After that they just lie there, gathering virtual dust. 

Thinking about it, that might explain why the first I hear about things like server merges is when I log into the game. I might be getting dozens of  notifications I never see.

I do maintain ongoing access to the email adress I used for ROSE Online. It's one of several I use when creating accounts for games I don't expect to play for long. Only, as must be self-evident by now, I'm not the greatest predictor of my own behavior when it comes to new mmorpgs. I often end up bedding down for weeks or months in titles I expected to last no more than a session or two.

If there's one thing the whole free-to-play revolution has taught me it's that mmorpgs are like busses. If you miss one, there'll be another along in a minute. Although now I come to think about it, that's the kind of analogy only someone who doesn't use public transport would make.

Maybe what I mean is that mmorpgs are like pets. You love them while they're around but you always know they won't be with you forever. Hmm. No. That's not it. That's really bleak.

Okay, I don't have a neat moral to this tale I can wrap up in a tidy cliche. I guess the takeaway is that mmorpgs can be fragile so it doesn't pay to lean on them too heavily. Seriously, I can keep this up all day...

But I won't. I have games to play. Or I do while they last.

Dude, Where's My House?

Chimeraland is one of the many, many titles on the ever-growing list of mmorpgs I mean to go back to someday but, since I only just bought the new mini-expansion for another game on that list, Lord of the Rings Online, a couple of days ago, that day wasn't supposed to be today.

When I came to log into LotRO, though, it was down for a scheduled update. Isn't it always the way? As it happened, only a few minutes earlier I'd read a news item on MassivelyOP about the latest update to Chimeraland and it sounded intriguing so I thought I might as well go take a look at that while I waited.

There were a couple of things in the update I was curious to see, particularly the Nine-tailed Fox. My character is a fox already but she only has the one tail. I'd be up for eight more.

The "Child Beasts" sounded interesting, too, if more than a little creepy. I thought I might go have a look for some of those, always assuming I could figure out what and where they were, never a given in Chimeraland..

In the event, neither of those headline items took up much of my time after I'd patched and logged in. What did was something I'd barely noticed in the announcement, buried as it was in the small print; the merger of another pair of servers, one of which appears to be mine.

At least, I'm assuming that's the reason I found myself standing on the doorstep of a large and impressive castle when I finally got into the game. Last I remember, I logged out in my house several weeks ago, having taken the trouble to register my presence prior to the last merger round. This time I'd been unaware further contractions were planned so it looks like my claim on the plot has been gazumped by someone who actually plays the game.

Fair enough. I really can't complain. Use it or lose it, as the saying goes. And I have to admit the structure now standing where my half-built shack used to be is a lot more impressive. 

Not only that but the whole area seems to have undergone some sort of gentrification as a result of the merger. Where mine used to be one of the few homes in the area and even one of the more developed, now there are towers and mansions in all directions. I guess whichever server was merged into Moonbeam Bay had a lot more going on around the waterfall. I always thought it was an underappreciated locale.

It certainly suited me, anyway. I had no desire to move. I'm sure there are hundreds of scenic spots where I could relocate but damn it, why should I? I found this place and I plan on keeping it.

So, I just set up across the way from the castle, where a handy rocky outcrop made for a nice central feature. All my furniture and building materials had been neatly stored for me. I pulled out my Spirit Stone, plonked it down to claim the new plot, then started laying down foundations and putting up walls.

I kept on until I hit my housing point limit which, since I'd made it to Housing Level Eight or so when last I played, gave me a decent square-footage. I even remembered to leave some space around the Spirit Stone this time, so for once I won't have to try to get to it from the other side of a wall or by hanging off a staircase.

I had to cut down a couple of trees that were growing in inconvenient places but in half an hour or so I had a considerably better house than the one I'd lost. The view's the same only considerably improved by the elegant castle that stands where my old place used to be, although I can't imagine the castle's owner is going to be thinking the same when they come home and look out from the battlements at the jerry-built fixer-upper that's appeared overnight, right outside their walls.

Whether I'll find the time to do any of that fixing is another question. I'd like to but I suspect it won't happen. Even if I do return to Chimeraland for anything ressembling an extended run, I'm in two minds whether to carry on with the Steam version or go back to my higher level character on the Singaporean server. The Asian servers have had somemmergers, too. I wonder which is likely to be around the longer?

As for the Nine Tailed Fox, I couldn't figure out where it was in the shop, let alone what I needed to do to get one. I didn't have time to go looking for child beasts, either. Maybe next time.

If there is one.

Tuesday Tapas (Does That Work?)

After a run of hefty posts it might be time for a grab-bag, don't you think? Why should Fridays have all the fun? Let's start with the bad news and get that out of the way first.

Chimeraland Server Merges.

It seems the global launch of Level Infinite's excellent creature-crunching mmo/survival mashup hasn't gained the traction the developers might have hoped. We're looking at server merges after just three months.

It's a shame the game hasn't received more attention in the West but for all we like to pretend the genre is in steep decline, there's actually a glut of mmorpgs right now. New additions to the select roster of AAA titles that still dominate the press cycle may be few and far between but new mmorpgs from other territories or independents seem to throw themselves against the cliffs of indifference almost weekly.

I have to admit to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution. I really like Chimeraland but I haven't been playing much. In years gone by I'd have been happy to have made it my focus game. I'd have spent twenty or thirty hours a week playing it, probably for months. I'd have been willing to pay a subscription, too.

These days, the sheer choice on offer makes a commitment like that feel silly. Even so, I still might have bedded down in the game, had I not already put in a stint on the SEA servers and had Chimeraland's global launch not clashed with another new mmorpg, one I hadn't already worn the shine off - Noah's Heart.

Three months later, here I am, still playing Noah's Heart every day. Chimeraland fell out of my rotation very quickly, slipped back in with the "Please Come Back - We Miss You" event, then dropped out for a second time as soon as I'd bled said event dry. 

This sort of thing always makes me a tad anxious for the prospects of the games I enjoy. They're all fragile, dependent on fashion as much as quality. Playing both games over the last few months, despite getting slightly more attention in the specialist media, I'd have to say Chimeraland always looked the more at risk. Although the SEA server I used to play on didn't feel exactly busy, I did see other players most times I logged on. By contrast, on the global server where I occasionally play now, I hardly ever see anyone - and if I think back, I never really have. It's always felt deserted, even at launch.

In practical terms, it makes no difference to me whether Chimeraland has a slew of servers or just the one, so long as there's a place for me. I play solo and never interact with anyone. I don't even know how many servers there were to begin with. I just picked one at random and never looked back.

As for the possibility of losing my house, should someone else's structure be merged onto my plot, that really doesn't matter either. I've barely started working on it. It's one room, a patio and a rooftop viewing area. It would take me a short session to rebuild and I could make a much better job of it.

Even so, server merges are rarely a good sign and Easten imports don't generally have the longevity of local product in the West. I can't help but feel this is a harbinger of worse news to come.

Keeping Busy In Noah's Heart

Noah's Heart, by comparison, seems pretty busy. There are people in all the towns, zipping around on motorcycles and llamas, stacking on top of each other at the crafting stations or just standing around in clumps, doing who knows what.  

The community in Noah's Heart, if you can dignify it with the term, is perforce quite "active". The whole game revolves around something called Activity Points, which monitor and reward your level of engagement with the manifold opportunities available. The very first thing you see each day as you log in is a tally of your activity, although since it's always zeroed at the start of a session I'm not entirely sure why it's there. It would make more sense to have it pop up when you log out.

How busy you keep yourself in the game as an individual is up to you but as I mentioned briefly in a previous post, Guilds are expected to stay on the treadmill. As expected, my previous Greek-speaking guild was forcibly disbanded by the server for inactivity a couple of weeks ago.

I'd found being in a guild surprisingly useful so I immediately began looking for a replacement but every guild with a recruitment drive had strict activity quotas. You can't really blame them, when the penalty for slacking is oblivion.

In the end I decided to go with the method that worked so well the first time, namely doing nothing and waiting to be headhunted. It took a few days but eventually a drive-by invite popped up and I accepted it without a moment's hesitation.

My new guild, which I think, from memory, is called Guardians, is almost full and rates "High" on the health meter. Guild chat is quite lively and this time it's even in English. There are no specific activity requirements that I've seen other than making your daily Donations, something I would always do anyway because there is literally a daily for doing it. 

The big crime is inactivity. If you're offline for more than three straight days without a note from the Guild Leader, you're out of the guild. Since I've logged into Noah's Heart every day since launch, that's not a problem for me at the moment. If I take a break at any point I doubt I'll bother to petition for vacation time. I'll just wait to get picked up by another guild when I come back.

Edgerunners and The Last Bus

By utter co-incidence I found myself watching two very different SF series on Netflix side by side. One was the high profile Cyberpunk 2077 spin-off, Edgerunners, about which I posted right before I began. The other was the made-for-Netflix British kids show, The Last Bus.

The first season of each series just happened to consist of ten approximately thirty minute long episodes. For a week and a half I watched an episode of one followed by an episode of the other, which has to be some kind of object lesson in the breadth of field of which the genre is capable.

Everyone's probably familiar with the ultra-violent, foul-mouthed, hyper-sexualized content of Edgerunners but I imagine the homespun, love-is-the-answer, child-friendly The Last Bus has probably passed most of my readers by. Imagine something the Children's Film Foundation or the National Film Board of Canada might have made in the 1970s, give it a very slightly higher budget and update it for the 21st century but not too much. That's about where we're landing. It's almost literally a SciFi re-imagining of Here Come The Double Deckers, ffs.

I really enjoyed it. As some of the surprisingly positive reviews suggest, the characters and the acting are the series' greatest strength. By the end, I came to appreciate every one of the straggling, random selection apocalypse-dodging schoolkids, although god knows Misha made it hard work at times. I did genuinely shout at the screen more than once, when she was doubling down on her paradoxically apathetic sarcasm.

The special effects were generally acceptable, although whoever signed off on the "bus goes over the cliff" scene clearly needs to think seriously about their choice of career. I mean, how hard is it to drive an actual bus off a cliff? The script was decent and the plot solid. The whole thing ends with an unapolagetic lead-in to a second series, which I very much hope Netflix gives them. I'd certainly watch it.

I imagine Netflix would be only too pleased to give Edgerunners another season. The anime's racked up five star reviews across the board from critics and viewers alike. Having watched it to the end, I'm thinking a second season might be somewhat problematic but I can't really even hint as to the reason without giving some massive spoilers, so I'll just stick to what I thought of Season One.

I liked it a lot. I'm tempted to say I loved it but it would be more accurate to say I loved certain scenes and a couple of whole episodes. That's not to say the whole thing isn't good - it is - but some of it is truly excellent. As Naithin said in a comment (Which I forgot to reply to - sorry, Naithin!) last time I mentioned the show, "I wouldn't put it on the masterpiece pedestal." I felt the structure was a little baggy in places and some of the fight scenes were a tad self-indulgent.

As I said in that post, the only reason I came to watch Edgerunners at all was the involvement of Let's Eat Grandma's Rosa Walton on the soundtrack. Her tune, "I Really Want To Stay At Your House", crops up twice, both times to devestating effect. The whole soundtrack is great, especially the song that plays over the end credits, Let You Down by Dawid Podsiadło.

I let the credits run to to the end after all ten episodes just so I could hear that play. The Franz Ferdinand song that backs the intro sequence is pretty damn fine, too. I watched that through about half the time as well.

Perhaps the obvious comparison would be with Cowboy Bebop, although that may just be because it's the only remotely similar anime I happen to have seen. The two series share a number of key elements, though, including but not limited to a corporate dystopian setting, a crew of characters so cool it's physically painful to watch them, an overwhelming sense of ennui laced with hopeless romance and a nested maze of secrets and betrayals. All it's missing is the dog.

Not being quite as good as your influences doesn't invalidate the attempt, of course, or we'd pretty much have no popular culture at all. Edgerunners is very, very good and that's more than enough.

And that's probably more than enough for this post, too. I'll just end by mentioning some

Music News Snippets

I saw this week that Taylor Swift's upcoming album, Midnights (Already topping my Amazon wishlist) features a collab with Lana del Rey. Given they share a co-writer and producer in Jack Antonoff, himself in the news for snapping back at the increasingly unmoored Kanye over his supervillainesque stance on, well, you name it, it probably had to happen sometime. I'm just glad it's now. 

The new track's called "Snow On The Beach" and I only wish I could bring it to you here but since the album's not out for another ten days and for once nothing's leaked, I can't. We'll just have to wait until Friday week. 

Now all we need is a date for Lana's next. It's only been a year but, man, it feels so much longer...

Gained In Translation

Despite having teed up today's post as some kind of in-depth analysis, it will in fact be a few screenshots interleaved with a short paragraph or two in which I state the bleedin' obvious. This is because I spent the day driving to the next city over with Mrs Bhagpuss, sorting out various fiscal matters, having lunch next to a pride of lions (Bronze. Photographs may follow.) then throwing a ball for Beryl next to a ravine (Okay, it's a gorge but "ravine" sounds much more dramatic.) before driving home the long way round. Consequently I don't feel like spending the rest of the evening putting a long post together but equally I don't want to think of anything else and I already have the screenshots, so...

Boy, that's really selling it...

Here's a typical page from the newly revised in-game Encyclopedia. It's clear, concise, detailed and very easy to understand. I think it would be fair to say that most players, having taken the trouble to read it, would know just what to look for when a quest told them to go find a totem and just what to do about it when they found one.

In my original run in Chimeraland I never got the hang of totems. They didn't seem very consistent and I couldn't always figure out which ones I needed or why some didn't seem to do anything. I did read the Encyclopedia page but I don't recall that it made much sense.

If I found totems confusing, I found faction incomprehensible. You have to make a choice at character creation but there's no real explanation of what that choice means or why you'd pick one over another, except for the information about resources.

That carries over to the new version, above, which again is from the Encyclopedia. I haven't yet revisited character creation to see if the description there has also been re-written. What you can now clearly understand is that these are PvP factions not, as I thought, NPC factions. When it says "There are three factions in Chimeraland and they are all enemies" it's telling you that you are only safe on your starting continent. Everywhere else you're going to get killed. By other players.

Just in case you missed the memo, here it is again, in even plainer language. Chimeraland is a PvP game. There is open PvP. As it tells you in another perfectly translated panel, which I forgot to screenshot, you're protected until Level 15 but then it's open season. Clearly, on your own continent you're far less likely to run into players from the other factions, which probably explains why I have so far never been attacked by anyone. I'm sure it'd be a different story if I tried to travel outside my Faction's borders. None of this was clear to me until now.

Here's the page on Fishing. Fishing in Chimeraland is very straightforward and very similar to fishing in many other mmorpgs so I had no trouble figuring it out on my own. There was a certain amount of trial and error all the same. I don't recall if I ever looked it up in the Encyclopedia but if I didn't it was because I already knew the information there would be so garbled it would probably leave me more confused than ever. Very much not the case any more.

Here's my favorite example so far. The rocket into space. Much play was made of this feature in the promotional material from the initial SEA launch. It made a big impression on me at the time because it emphasized the huge amount of XP you could get from riding the rocket. 

That, however, was about the sum of the information I was able to glean from the confusing description back then. One of the first things I did in the game was try to find the rocket but nothing really told me where to look. I did eventually find the spot but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do there and after fiddling around for a while I gave up.

Reading this, it's hardly surprising. The original translation seemed to imply all you had to do was get to the rocket and everything else would happen automatically. In fact, it takes quite a lot of work to get the thing started and even then you have to crawl underneath the damn thng to set it off. It's clear enough now but it sure wasn't then. 

Finally, if only because it's the last screenshot I have, there's the question of all the re-translated quest dialog. Most of this was vaguely comprehensible the first time round but a lot of the finer detail was garbled. I generally got the gist of what Bella, Yenni and the others were trying to tell me but sometimes I just couldn't figure out exactly what they wanted me to do or where they wanted me to go and often I couldn't quite see how one thing connected to something else.

Now it's all beautifully articulated. I haven't been in any doubt about what to do or why I need to do it. What's more, the conversation has a reasonably natural flow, which makes the whole thing feel a lot less like being lectured by an immigration officer and a lot more like being mentored by... well, a mentor.

I'd put up a couple of "Before" shots of the old quest or Encyclopedia text but unfortunately I didn't take any. I realize that means all of this is based on my memory of how it used to be, which is not what you'd call hard evidence but then this isn't a court of law. My impression is that the whole game has been completely and comprehensively re-translated and that whoever did the job did it well.

The question is, does that make the game more or less enjoyable and the answer's not as obvious as you might imagine. It ought to be clear from the many posts I wrote about Chimeraland during my first run that the sheer mystery of the whole thing was one of the key factors driving my engagement with it. 

I loved trying to figure out what was going on. It was like a really interesting puzzle. I got a great sense of satisfaction every time I learned more about how the game worked and it was always a moment when I realised I'd misunderstood something. 

Without that element of confusion, would I ever have become so enmeshed in the game and its world? Didn't the off-kilter translations add to the otherworldly feel of the place? Does it all seem a little more trite, a little less original, now everything's spelled out in good, plain English?

It's very hard to say because with the changes I have the added hook of being able to compare one experience with the other, something that, as this post demonstrates, plays very well with my personal proclivities. I do like to compare and contrast.

Noah's Heart makes a great counterpoint to this argument. The in-game explanations of systems and mechanics, by contrast, are generally clear enough. They could certainly do with some tidying up here and there but a complete re-write wouldn't add that much. There's not a huge amount of enjoyable puzzle-solving to be had by figuring them out so nothing major would be lost with a better gloss. 

Even so, Archosaur should very definitely take a leaf out of Chimeraland's book and get someone to do a proper, accurate, demotic English translation of all the text in the game.That's because Noah's Heart is far more narrative-heavy than Chimeraland. It has reams of story text and dialog, none of which reads well and most of which reads very badly indeed. I would actually pay a modest amount for DLC that rendered the storyline into normal English.

The current  translation varies from barely adequate to barely comprehensible. What that game needs more than anything else, if it ever hopes to be really successful in the West, is the exact same kind of re-translation Chimeraland just received.

I say that with some conviction because I believe players who actually find working stuff out for themselves in mmorpgs make up a fairly small percentage of the playerbase. The demographic that enjoys trying to make sense of badly translated in-game text as a game in itself has to be vanishingly small.

Cheaping out on translation seems to be the norm in imported games and I can't help but think it's one of the reasons so many fail to make much of an impact. Not only are poor translations off-putting to natural English speakers, they have to make playing the game even harder for players trying to pick their way through the explanations using English as a second or third language.

I think on balance even I would prefer solid translations to the dubious thrill of trying to figure out what the original meaning was before it was mangled by a monolingual intern using Google Translate. Chimeraland might not have have seemed quite so bizarre with easy-to-follow instructions but I think it would still have been quite bizarre enough. It is an odd game, after all.

The new translation also gives me an added incentive to carry on playing now I've returned. It doesn't feel quite like walking the exact same path, even though it really is. Things feel just different enough, thanks to the extra clarity, that I might want to get at least as far as I did last time, just to see if there was anything I missed because I couldn't work out what some NPC was trying to say.

I'm pretty sure that must have happened a lot.

There's Coming Back and There's Going Back...

Well... it seems I'm back playing Chimeraland again, at least for the next week or two, so I guess that "Come back, we missed you" offer did just what it was meant to do. I logged in once then logged in the next day and the day after that, but more importantly I didn't just turn up, grab the gifts and leave. I hung around for a while. I was there for couple of hours today.

Some progress was made. Fria, my one and only character in the Steam edition of the game, was in the high teens when I woke her up a couple of days ago. She's in the low twenties now. My house is a bit bigger. I have a pet and an attendant.

I did think about starting over from scratch since I wanted to see how the new player experience and the tutorial had changed but I decided against it - for now. It would hardly have been a big commitment if I'd re-rolled. I only had a couple of hours played time in the new version of the game. 

The hard choice was made when I moved from the SEA server I was on to start over in the Western release. I'm not sure how many hours I had over there but I would imagine it must have been close to three figures. 

I'm still not convinced I'm done with that character, either. I might want to check whether the "Return to Chimeraland" offer applies to all versions of the game. If it does I might just have to go back just for that. 

If I did, it would have to be either a quick drive-by or I'd have to stay there for good. The idea of playing two versions of Chimeraland side-by-side is terrifying, even though it's exactly the kind of thing I would have done without blinking fifteen or twenty years ago.

When I look back at the way I played EverQuest for the first few years, it seems almost ubelievable, not so much that I did it but that I really loved doing it that way and advocated for it as a preferable playstyle. I had characters on something like a dozen servers and I was theoretically levelling them all. And it wasn't even one character per server - I had half a dozen or more on some servers and two or three on most where I played.

A normal evening's play for me would consist of swapping between three or four servers, adding a few per cent of a level to a ranger here, maybe half a bubble to a necromancer there... Is it any wonder it took me over a year, playing forty hours a week, to get my first character to fifty, which wasn't even the level cap any more?

When I think back on it now it seems like a different world and a different me. Reading Wilhelm talking about going back to Wrath of the Lich King, hoping it lives up to his memories of how it felt the first time around makes me wonder if I'll ever have that same desire, or if I even want it.

That's not to imply I'm done with EverQuest, or any of my old favorites. I often get the urge to revisit my old haunts. It happened this morning. 

For some reason I can't explain, unless it was the sudden, unheralded flickering back to life of The EverQuest Show, reminding me of that game's glory days, I woke up with a singular desire to make a fresh gnome in Ak'Anon and run him (Or more probably her.) to Freeport or Qeynos. I was even musing on recording the whole thing and editing the footage into a video to post on my YouTube channel, thereby to be included, of course in a lengthy post here.

As I was turning it over in my mind I started to get flashbacks of all the other times I done the same thing or something very similar - Freeport to Grobb to Qeynos to Highpass to Freeport to Neriak - all the classics in every direction, there and back again, uphill in the rain, pursued by a bear. There are whole sections of runs I did two decades ago that I remember with greater clarity than anything I've done this year. 

And that's the crux of it. I do remember them that clearly. If I want to relive the experience I just have to close my eyes and think about it. Would doing any of it all over again it make it feel any more immediate, any more vital?

Maybe. I'm not going to go and find out, or not right now, anyway. What I also remembered as clearly as anything is how long it takes and how, even in the new, kinder, softer EQ, how many things can go wrong and how frustrating it can be when they do. 

Last time (Or maybe it was the time before last.) I tried to run a gnome necromancer from Ak'Anon to Freeport I couldn't even get the little bugger on the ship! I'd forgotten how kill crazy those bastard dwarf guards are. I do not want to go through that again!

I'm starting to wonder if I'm finally coming out of my old school mmorpg phase. These days I find newer games a lot more intriguing and entertaining. I'd never say never to going back to an old favorite for just one more run but I'm finding it harder to imagine settling down in an older game for an extended stay.

There was WoW Classic three years ago, of course. I had a great time with that one for a couple of months; really bedded down, dug in, played old school hours, made alts, the whole nine yards. If it hadn't been for the big Blizzard blow-up I might have lasted a while longer but even then I'd probably have been gone by Christmas. Still, that would have been four months and four months is a long run these days.

The thing is, I never did play WoW in the early days. WoW Classic was a new game to me. It did have that crucial element of discovery that drives my engagement much more reliably than nostalgia ever could.

All of which brings me back to the post I thought I was going to write tonight, namely whether the big change to Chimeraland since I last played, the re-translation of all the narrative, quest and explanatory text into good, grammatically correct English, has made gameplay there more or less compelling. Is a game more fun when the systems and mechanics are clearly explained or when you have to figure them out for yourself?

Sadly, though, we seem to have run out of time! Hold that thought. I'll come back to it later.

Probably.