Mixed Messages

 

In the vague hope of finding something to post about tonight I logged into Steam to see if anything had happened in Lost Ark since last I looked. I thought I might even play a little, do some more levelling there. It is on my To Do list, although I'd have to say it's slipping further down every day.

The first thing I saw was an absolutely massive "Message from the Team".  It's a few days old and it's been reported elsewhere so I don't propose to go into it in the way I did with the Guild Wars 2 Studio Update yesterday. If I'm honest, my main reason for not digging into the detail isn't so much that it's old news as that I didn't understand most of it.

I had a quick scan through the whole thing, then I went back and read it all more carefully. When I'd finished I knew two things: Amazon and Smilegate are giving us a big present and I have absolutely no clue what the hell Lost Ark is supposed to be.

A large chunk of the Message revolves around two things: end game content and "honing". It seems quite a few of us have been slacking and haven't gotten to the endgame as quickly as expected. Instead, we've been "progressing at your own speed and enjoying horizontal content such as exploration, collectibles, quests, and more." 

Don't worry, though. There won't be detention. Apparently it's fine because "Our goal has always been for players to progress at whatever pace they see fit". I have to say that's jolly decent of them. 

I could go on at considerable length about the implications of this. God knows, whoever wrote the Message certainly did. There are reams and reams of apologetic explanations, excuses, justifications and elaborations on how, why and when endgame content should have, will be or has been added to the game. My main problem wasn't with the whys and wherfores so much as the whats.

I don't get what the endgame in this context is. By that, I don't mean I don't understand it intellectually. That's straightforward enough. I mean, as the hippies used to say, I don't grok the endgame, man! 

It's not just Lost Ark, either. There seem to be a bunch of mmorpgs these days where the whole point and purpose of playing seems to be to spend inordinate amounts of time repeating harder and harder versions of the same content so as to get gear that allows you to grind harder and harder versions of the same content. Why would you want to? That's the part I don't get.

Most mmorpgs do it to some extent, although the ones I like better hide it more convincingly. I generally manage to ignore it quite effectively in those games. The more recent trend, which makes it harder to ignore even at a more casual, non-endgame-focused level, involves some variant of the process that Lost Ark calls "honing".

I am not going to pretend to understand what "honing" is beyond the absolute basics. I'm fairly confident, however, that it's one of those systems where you grind or buy materials that you use to try to systematically improve the quality or rating of your gear. All these systems have certain things in common: ever-escalating costs, heavy reliance on RNG and some means of spending real money to avoid the worst of the pain.

As the Message poetically puts it, "We know that for every triumphant yell as a player succeeds a low percentage hone, there are other players frustrated with their attempt failing, leaving them without enough materials to try again." In many games that's exactly the intention. It's why other players' successes are broadcast to the general population, so as to create a sense that other people are succeeding where you failed. That's how you get cash shop sales. 

For various reasons, not least a glut of bots drivng material prices through the roof, Amazon/Smilegate would like to assure players that honing isn't always going to be a completely miserable experience so they're "supplying more progression materials for players to earn through fun in-game events" and "injecting more gold into the mid to end-game" as well as, naturally, "continuing our hard stance against bots."

Which is all very nice, only from my point of view it doesn't really address the central issue, which is who thought "honing" or any of the myriad systems across the genre it replicates were ever likely to be fun in the first place? I know everyone uses them. There's not really any choice if you want to keep progressing through the "vertical" content. The question is, does anyone enjoy it?

Yes. I did. The first time. My initiation into the eternal upgrade path by way of mat grinding and random number generation came courtesy of one of my favorite mmorpgs of all time, City of Steam. 

That game was revamped several times over a number of years, something I recorded here on this blog as it happened. One of the later iterations, after CoS became a wholly Chinese-operated enterprise, involved a good deal of "honing" or whatever term was in use back then. I didn't even notice it at first. It wasn't until the game was under sentence of execution and I was playing as hard and fast as I could to see as much of the content before the servers went dark that I began to push the gear upgrade boulder up the hill in earnest.

The surprise to me was that I enjoyed it. It helped enormously that it was a very simple system and the materials needed were both generously available through login rewards and obtainable directly from normal gameplay. Even then, I could never get enough but also I never managed to get far enough up the ladder to hit the really steep part of the curve. The game closed down before I even got close.

After that I ran into the same kind of mechanics in Blade and Soul and Black Desert, just to name a couple of games where I made at least a token effort to improve my gear. Once again, I found it amusing enough so long as it cost me nothing and I mostly succeeded. As soon as it began to feel either expensive or annoying, however, my response wasn't to throw money at the problem - it was to stop doing it altogether.

All those games and many others puzzle me greatly. They all appear to have lots and lots of really enjoyable content, mostly the "horizontal" stuff, aka everything in the game that's actually fun to do for its own sake. More often than not, that's the part of the game everyone gets to enjoy for free.

The part of the game that's supposed to be the most appealing, the mythical "endgame", that gets tucked behind a virtual paywall by way of "gameplay" so frustrating and unnerving people are more than willing to pay to avoid having to do it at all - or at least to make it less likely to blow up in their faces when they do.

I'm really not at all surprised Lost Ark players have been slacking off, doing all that pesky exploring and collecting and questing. Can you blame them?

What does surprise me is the nature of some the presents we're getting to commemorate the Western launch of the game. It's almost all fun fluff stuff and I find it really hard to equate with what sounds like an incredibly hardcore endgame. There are pets and mounts, a big globe thingy, appearance change tickets and songs to play on your jukebox "when Jukebox content is released in the future."

Most surprising of all is the "New Animal Skin Collection Chest". From the image provided, reproduced at the top of this post, it seems we're going to be able to dress our characters in a variety of furry onesies. I can't wait!

Actually, I couldn't wait. I logged in to get mine right away, only it wasn't there. Too soon. Apparently we get the whole  "Thank You" pack "the week of March 21, after our weekly update and maintenance". It's the 23rd today but I guess we haven't been updated and maintained just yet.

I did still get a present for logging in, an entirely unexpected one. I'd already written off the current event, the Arkesia Grand Prix, which runs until April 14 because I'd read that you need a character with a minimum level of fifty to take part. And that's true but what I hadn't appreciated is that you also get a hefty chest full of the event currency just for logging in. 

If there's any kind of level restriction attached to that then my character exceeds it. I opened my chest and found three thousand Arkesia Coins inside. Of course, I had no idea if that was a fortune or a pittance. 

The tooltip suggested I find the Event Exchange Merchant if I wanted to spend them but nothing told me where that person might be. Fortunately, Lost Ark being very popular right now, I had no trouble looking it up. I found my answer here but there's a much more comprehensive guide to the whole affair here.

Having looked at what I can afford, it seems three thousand coins is a decent chunk of pocket change. There's nothing I couldn't buy, although a lot of the items are consumables you'd probably want to buy in bulk. I can get the hat, which is what matters!

None of which actually makes me want to play the game. Log in and get free stuff, sure, I'll keep doing that. Try it on, strut around town posing, take selfies, write posts about it? Yep, all of those. Other than that, I'm not sure I see the point. But then, I never did.

I'm still going to get a boat but only because I said I would. As for honing and the endgame, whatever it is, I think I'll carry on with the horizontal progression if that's okay with you, Amazon and Smilegate. I mean, you did say you were fine with us progressing at whatever pace we see fit, right? 

I just think maybe you didn't realize just how lazy some people can be.

You Know Faepunk Is Already A Thing, Right?

Unlike many people, no doubt, I didn't watch The Game Awards last night. I imagine I was fast asleep. I didn't check the times but this sort of thing generally happens after I've gone to bed.

Let's be honest. Even if it had been held in London at 8pm I wouldn't have stopped playing EverQuest II to watch it. These things tend towards the tedious even when you're invested, something I'm definitely not. Most of the games revealed are likely to be things I wouldn't play even if they turned up free on Amazon Prime or Epic, as some of them almost inevitably will, one day.

There's always a chance, though, isn't there? Something might punch through the wall of indifference. A few years back I got so excited when I saw the promo for We Happy Few I ended up following it all the way through development. I posted about it a couple of times and even added the lead writer's blog to my blog roll, where it sits to this day, although I stopped reading it a while ago.

And then, when the game finally released, I found I'd all but lost interest. That's the problem with long lead times. Developers need to build a following, work on name recognition, generate and sustain some kind of buzz but doing all of that, successfully, for the years it takes to bring a game to market, seems an increasingly large ask. It's no wonder so many rush into some form of Early Access. There are reasons other than fading finances for going short instead of long. 

I'm not sure there any good choices these days. New World was five years in the making. When Amazon kept delaying for one more round of polish a lot of people thought it was uneccessary. Nerves, most likely, following the studio's other failures. And now, just a few months later, most commentators would probably say they went too soon.  

Crowfall is in trouble, to no-one's surprise. Artcraft dithered and drifted and finally had to pull the switch and where are they now? Working on a new project because for sure the last one's failed. Two examples of teams who released before they were ready. One has the resources to pull out of the dive and rebuild to sustained success. The other is Crowfall.

But what's the alternative? Living death in a never-ending Early Access beta that sucks all life out of the game and the ever-diminishing number of players who still, occasionally, log in? That's where many projects end up. It's neither failure nor success but at least it's an existence, until it's not. 

Of course, there's the ever-popular option of never really releasing in any quantifiable form, while still having servers and sales and open days and who knows what-all. Is Star Citizen out yet? I know you can play it. I know people do play it. I have played it. Technically, though, it's still unreleased.

Or Camelot: Unchained? I seem to remember reading reports of battles, so someone's fighting someone... or maybe I just imagined it. Maybe we're all imagining it. Would it really make any difference if we were?

There are certain projects where my interest and enthusiasm stays high - Pantheon would be one - but they're few and far between and getting fewer and farther all the time. I kickstarted Ashes of Creation, twice in fact, one for me and one for Mrs. Bhagpuss, but that was so long ago she no longer even recognizes the name when I mention it and I no longer recall why I thought it was worth paying for in the first place. If it ever does launch it doesn't seem all that likely I'll be interested in playing it, other than for the traditional first impressions pieces I might write. Or it might be brilliant. 

I thought of it at the time as a pre-order but even though I like the concept of paying up front even I don't need to plan my spending years in advance. I've pretty much sworn off kickstarting mmorpgs for that very reason. They take so long to arrive, if they ever even do, it's hard to remember why you cared. 

Not that it's going to be a problem for much longer. Kickstarter's sudden decision to lash their fortunes to the blockchain for reasons described by Gamesindustry.biz as "vague" means I'll be having nothing to do with anyone who tries to get my attention through that particular platform. I might even delte my Kickstarter account, assuming I have one. I should probably check that.

With all that in mind, it was always unlikely I was going to find myself getting worked up over anything that happened in last night's Game Awards. And yet.

That pushes a lot of buttons. There's the Fae for a start. I wouldn't say I have a thing for the Fae but I do feel it's a strand of fantasy that's rarely been well-handled in this gamespace. I'd love to see someone get it right.

The duplicitous, alien amorality of the Fae, siphoned out of celtic legend into so many pop-culture standards, from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files to the Shadowhunters adaptation of Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments, always seems to add a certain, wilding edge. I'd struggle to come up with an example of where it's been well-used in an mmorpg. 

The Secret World looked like it might be going somewhere in that direction but then it stopped going anywhere at all so it doesn't count. Rift used the imagery and the symbolism and did nothing in the least, tiny part interesting with any of it. New World seems to be playing with some of the tropes but to what end is opaque, as yet. All the others that come to mind can't seem to tell the difference between vampires, ghouls, fairies and elves. It's like they're all just there to give us something to kill when we go out murdering. It's not just not enough, it's not anything at all.

Then there's steampunk. We're still waiting for the first, good steampunk mmorpg. Know what the best thing about that trailer is? It doesn't mention steampunk once. Or any other kind of punk. It goes for the less triggering option - Victoriana. That's steampunk without either the steam or the punk. They have my respect just for that.

It is steampunk, though, isn't it? Look at that city at 1:36. That's the Nexus out of City of Steam, that is, the mmorpg that probably came as close to being steampunk as anything we've seen so far. Not that that's saying much. 

I did love City of Steam, though. Still do. Anything that reminds me of it has its thumb on one of those buttons I mentioned.

The voiceover's right out of City of Steam, too. It has that exact same elegaic, fin de siecle, everything just fell apart and we wish it was a week last Sunday feel to it. The whispersoft asmr tone and the RADA elocution don't damage the case it's making, either.

It looks great but of course it does. All trailers make all games look great. Well, most of them. It looks great in the right way, though. The costumes are delicious, the poses are dramatic, the scenery is fantastical. Best of all, the way the lead character holds that lantern high makes me want to go out and buy a litre of lantern oil. I have a lantern like that hanging up in the kitchen.

Anyone can make a game look good in a trailer but this one does have some gameplay footage as well. Pre-alpha footage, which is getting your excuses in first, only I'm not sure they needed to. The bits where players are doing stuff look... okay. I mean, they don't look amazing but they look solid enough. 

The mob designs stand out as not exactly the same as everything we've ever seen before, so that's a good place to start. I'm not sure what those things are they're using for heads but at least it piques my interest. Maybe we'll get to wear some of them as hats.

The setup sounds promising: a transport system collapses, leaving travellers stranded far from home. It's too dangerous to stay but no-one has a clue where to go. It's explore or die or, since it's an mmorpg, more likely it's explore and die, over and over and over again. That's pretty much what I usually do anyway, so it'll be nice to know I'm meant to be doing it, for once.

Is it an mmorpg, though? No-one's claiming that, are they? What they are calling it is a "Shared World" in which "You can play... solo or with friends and other players who you meet across the realms." Let's not split hairs. That makes it as much an mmo as any number of other things we've hung that bell on in the past. In my book, if you can play online, meet, talk to and group with other people there, who you've previously never met, it's an mmo. 

Judging by those gameplay shots with a whacking great shotgun in the center, it's also an FPS. MMOFPS is a thing, right? Maybe it's one of those. Not my favorite combat system but I think I'm over my pickiness about that kind of thing. Certainly it's not enough to put me off when so much else is pulling me in.

Oh, I just realised I haven't actually mentioned what it's called yet. How remiss of me. Just as well I'm only writing a blog post about it, not a press release, eh?

It's called Nightingale. I think that's a very good name. It means something and yet it means nothing all at the same time. Also easy to remember and to pronounce, which always helps.

The developers behind Nightingale are Inflexion Games, a new one on me. They're based in Edmonton, which is in Alberta, Canada and they say their purpose is "to create places". They have one of the more intriguing mission statements I've seen. It's worth a read.

Whether they can make a game that meets their somewhat ambitious standards is something I guess we'll have to wait to find out although not for too long if what they hope for comes true. The FAQ asks "When will Nightingale launch?" and answers "We're working hard to bring you Nightingale in 2022."

That sounds wildly over-optimistic, which puts it in line with just about every other predicted launch window offered by every mmo developer ever. Probably more convincing is the timescale for some form of public testing, whch is also "set to begin in 2022."

You can register on the website to express an interest in taking part when it happens. I have. If I get in and if the NDA allows, I'll be sure to report back on what I find.

If A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words, Why Can't I Shut Up?

On the opening day of IntPiPoMo I thought it would be nice to do an all screenshot post. Also, it saves me having to write a whole lot of words, which means more time to play New World. As you'll see, even though I did my damnedest to keep it short, things didn't go entirely to plan.

But first, what pictures? I take an unconscionable number of screenshots so finding half a dozen I haven't used before was never likely to be a problem. Choosing which might be.

The first thing that caught my eye as I opened my jumbled directory of images was the folder named "New World Alpha". I took a lot of shots back in those very early days but the strict NDA made it hard to use any of them. Impossible, actually.

It would be very interesting to compare what I saw then with what I'm seeing now. Looking at the old screens, there are more differences than I remembered. Some of the images are striking in ways I'd fogotten the game could be.

I toyed with the idea of a post based around that but the NDA never ended. It's still in force. I'm probably breaking it just by alluding to it. And the screenshots are all very thoroughly stamped with the ID of the account that took them. I could crop around some of that but it wouldn't leave much of an image and anyway I'm paranoid enough to wonder if there's some other tag there that can't be seen.

Yeah. No one cares. I know. I probably read too much science fiction. No coincidence the book I'm reading right now revolves around the use and abuse of just this kind of invasive monitoring tech by global megacorps and amoral billionaires. This how paranoia begins. (It's not.)

Next I looked through a folder I'd helpfully named Fraps Screenshots. There's all sorts in there, mostly from games where I'd had issues using the screenshot function provided or where I couldn't find one at all.

The filename Fraps creates for each game varies wildly but mostly there's a strong clue to what it would have been. Some have the full name of the game - Istaria, Nine Lives, The Crew, Villagers and Heroes, Wildstar - and some have an abbreviated version of it - AO (for Allods Online), VGClient (for Vanguard).

Some, though, have completely opaque labels like WindowsPlayer (That's Project: Gorgon) or javaw (which turns out to be Dinostorm). And then there's the astonishingly uninformative plugin-container. Care to take a guess what that is?

Okay, it's a trick question. I've been using pictures taken from plugin-container all through this post. It's one of the handful of sunset mmorpgs I truly wish could return from video game heaven the way Fallen Earth just did. It's City of Steam, of course.

I'm not going to write yet another mournful post eulogizing just how good this game was and how no-one, least of all me, appreciated it when it was around. I'm not going whine about how much I wished I'd paid attention to the story while I was playing or how it's the exception that proves the rule about story mattering in an mmorpg. I'm not even going to rehash what an exemplary job the developers did with everything from class and race to setting and theme.

I will repeat how City of Steam has the best soundtrack of any mmorpg I've ever played and how it's the only one with music I've ever wanted to own and listen to separately from the game itself. I'll also take this opportunity to wonder what happened to Mechanist Games, the company behind CoS.

The second game they produced, Heroes of SkyRealm, was fun but shallow by comparison. It was a mobile game and although it looked great it had little of the gritty charm of its predecessor. It closed down some time ago and it's been a while since I last did a search to see what, if anything, might be coming next. So as I was drafting this I thought I'd better check.

It didn't go the way I imagined. The old City of Steam website still exists although all that's there is an epitaph with the promise that CoS is "Resting, Not Retiring." The page concludes with a confident assurance: "So as we look toward whatever the future brings, we give you Heroes of SkyRealm and say "see you soon" to our dear City of Steam." but the link to the new game now goes to a completely unrelated site that has nothing to do with gaming at all, or indeed Mechanist Games. The same link on the Steam page for City of Steam brings up a malware warning and it looks very much as though whatever address it once used has been reacquired and repurposed by a bad actor of some kind.

Mechanist Games, however, very much still exists. They have their own web page on which you can find details of the five games they operate, which apparently include Heroes of SkyRealm still. I imagine it's running in some territory or other, most likely China, where Mechanist games are and always were based, even though the origins of City of Steam itself are here in the United Kingdom.

None of the games on offer are mmorpgs of any kind. The graphics, always one of Mechanist Games strengths, do look gorgeous but the games themselves look like fairly standard takes on various mobile gaming staples. Nothing I'd be interested in playing. 

If you scroll to the bottom of the Timeline section on the About page, though, you eventually come to a panoramic picture of races and classes from City of Steam, here badged as the latterday "Arkadia" revamp. Whoever runs Mechanist Games now still remembers their roots: "May 2013, Mechanist launched its first 3D web browser-based game, City of Steam. It featured in Forbes as one of 2013's most-anticipated games and placed in the Top 10 for the first ever Unity Game Design Competition."

Not much of a brag, is it? I wonder who owns the IP rights these days. If it's Mechanist Games ("Established in the city of Xiamen April 2011 Xiamen, China") I wouldn't hold out much hope of ever seeing the promised return of this flawed gem.

If it's whoever's maintaining that tenuous, single-page web presence at www.cityofsteam.com, though, there still may just be a chance.

I'm In A Film Of Personal Soundtrack

A couple of days ago I ran through a few music-related ideas I was considering for posts. One of them involved songs based on video games or video game characters. I haven't done any prep work on that one yet but I'm willing to bet there are plenty to choose from.

What I didn't suggest was posting any music from the games themselves.

I find myself in a strange place when it comes to video game scores. Judging by countless comments I've read over the years, many players, quite possibly most, don't listen to in-game music at all. They prefer to have their own music or other audio running in the background. I always let the game music play.

These days the in-game music tends to be all I have playing. I don't often listen to anything other than the game and even if I do it won't be music. And if I have speech radio or a podcast on, I still don't turn the game music off. I just turn it down a little.

In that way, it does look as though I ought to count myself an admirer of video game music, but I'm not. Not at all. I barely listen to it. In fact, one of the reasons I always have it on is that half the time I don't even hear it.

I think music in games is important and necessary but I see music of this kind as almost purely functional. Like film music, it sets mood, creates atmosphere and directs emotion but if it's doing its job well, it does all that without you noticing. If you do find yourself paying attention to the music in a movie or a game then something's gone badly wrong.

Of course, games are different to movies and MMORPGs are very different. Movies are linear; MMORPGs are cyclical. In a movie, the score moves with the narrative. It can lead or it can follow but it always moves forwards. In an MMORPG it just has to hang there, biding its time while you kill your ten rats or wait for the rare spawn to appear. For as long as it takes. A minute, an hour, all day.

There's a whole art to composing music that loops infinitely without becoming annoying or even noticeable. I've heard a couple of composers talk about it in interviews. I imagine its a skill that most musicians would prefer not to have to acquire, although clearly it has any number of resonances with certain strands of compositional theory from the 20th century. Steve Reich and Philip Glass could probably have written some amazing video game scores. Or Brian Eno, come to that.

Those are all composers for whose work I have plenty of time so it's a little surprising, even to me, that I find listening to video game music outside of the games such an unappealing prospect. But I feel exactly the same about most film scores.

I know there are people who really enjoy film music for its own sake. I used to work with someone whose hobby was collecting film scores. He knew a huge amount about the composers and the musicians but he wasn't all that interested in the films. I never really got that. Without the images for which the music was specifically composed, what do you have? Something broken.

In this community we have Syp and Aywren (and Steff, who I don't actually "know" even in the context of knowing people via what they post online) whose long-running Battle Bards podcast "reviews and discusses the soundtrack of MMORPGs". And I confess I have never listened to a single episode.

I've thought about it, a few times, because I very much enjoy reading their written posts. If they were writing about video game music I'd definitely read whatever they had to say about game scores. I just don't want to listen to any.

Some of my lack of enthusiasm comes from the nature of the music itself. As well as having the aforementioned goal of being infinitely repeatable without becoming annoying, which, if achieved, is bound to tend towards unmemorability, if not outright blandness, the huge majority of all MMORPG music I've heard could be roughly be described as "orchestral".

I'm not a big fan of orchestral music, whether it's performed by an actual orchestra or emulated on a synthesizer. That thing where certain instruments and arrangements are said to evoke specific images and emotions? It never quite works for me. Occasionally I might just about be able to make out an allusion to a season or a color but anything much subtler misses my ears by a mile. I imagine it's like wine-tasting: you need to train your palette. Who has the time?

On the other hand, on the odd occasion I've happened across an MMORPG that employs a non-orchestral score, it's become apparent all too quickly why so few break with the tradition. Other forms and styles are a great deal more intrusive. It's pretty hard to come up with a two and a half minute heavy metal loop that doesn't grate on the ears after about, oh, two and a half seconds, in my case.

What started me thinking about all this was a post I saw over at The EverQuest Show this morning. Darkpaw Games have just re-issued the 20th Anniversary remaster of the EQ OST. It's been available digitally for a while but now you can buy it on vinyl.

I love EQ and I love the soundtrack. I should. I've been listening to it for the best part of twenty years. I've probably heard certain parts of it - some of the Karana or Commonlands themes, for example - more times than I've heard any single song in my entire music library. Still doesn't mean I'd want to play it over headphones on my commute, much less sit in a darkened room on a chair postioned just so to listen to it playing on a turntable!

The whole vinyl thing completely mystifies me. I have a thousand vinyl albums downstairs and almost as many vinyl singles. I haven't played any one of them in longer than I've been playing EQ. Vinyl's an awkward, annoying, archaic format that was rightly superceded not just once but several times by superior platforms and yet here it still is, clinging on like some kind of incurable fungal disease. Yecch!

Yeah, I have no nostalgia for vinyl. It amazes me anyone could, although I know people my age who do. I'd kind of give a reluctant pass to someone who was too young to have grown up with vinyl as the dominant music transmission system. I can see how there'd be a weird, retro "so bad it's good" thing going on there, but old people really should know better.

And who could be the target market for EverQuest collectable vinyl other than old people? I'd love to know what the average age of an EQ player is in 2020. I bet it's in the fifties. I guess if you still play EQ, the idea you might also own a hi-fi isn't that much of  stretch. I do.

And yet, I am not going to be buying an EverQuest OST album, for oh so many reasons. Not the “Mez Spell” edition with “pin wheel” blue and gold vinyl and a gatefold sleeve. No, not the “Field of Bone” edition in blood red and bone white vinyl, either. Not even for the Keith Parkinson artwork, which we've all seen a million times.

Which is just as well, because as I type this, three of the four editions are already  >>>

If I do want to hear the music I'll play the game and hear it the way it was intended to be heard, although the chance of my ever getting the notion that I want to hear EQ music when I'm not already playing EQ seems more than a little fanciful.

It might be different if EQ wasn't there to play. For all my ranting about never wanting to listen to video game music outside the games themselves, when Vanguard was about to sunset both I and Mrs Bhagpuss downloaded the entire soundtrack, which was on YouTube at the time. 

Mrs Bhagpuss plays it not infrequenly, sometimes while she's playing other video games, which is oddly meta. I don't think I've ever played the files I downloaded although they're all still on my hard drive, somewhere, But then I've never needed to, thanks to the magnificent Vanguard emulator. I just log in and run around the game when I need a nostalgia fix.

Vanguard is one of two MMORPG soundtracks I own. The other one I actually paid money for. In complete contradiction of almost everything I've said so far, I not only have the complete soundtrack to City of Steam on my iPod but I listen to it about as often as I listen to anything else I have on there.

The Vanguard and City of Steam soundtracks have one thing in common, which I suspect is the reason they're the exceptions. They have vocals. The music's still largely orchestral but occasionally there's a human voice. There aren't any words, or not words I can understand, but it makes all the difference.

Of course, if there was a City of Steam emulator, I wouldn't have to listen to the soundtrack. It's a very poor substitute for playing. In some ways, being able to hear the music makes the sense of loss more acute. I do miss that game.

In time, I suspect my feeling on this subject might alter. Even writing this post has made me evaluate some assumptions. Maybe I'll even give Battle Bards a try.

Meantime, it seems I did make a post featuring video game music, after all.

Head Full Of Steam : City of Steam

I sometimes refer, rather glibly, to "my top five favorite MMOs of all time", which makes it sound as though I keep a list. I don't. I tend to slot things in and out on a whim as the occasion arises, as my mood changes or, as is most often the case, as I remember some game I'd entirely forgotten and succumb to a surge of nostalgic affection.

One such title is City of Steam. I have a lot of history with that unlucky and mostly unloved MMO. There are more than fifty posts tagged for the game here on Inventory Full, starting with my thoughts about the pre-alpha Sneak Peak back in March 2012 and ending with a brief mention in May of this year, when I said  "One of my favorite MMORPGs and definintely one that failed to live up to its full potential".

I also wrote "The original vision for the game was... a real labor of love". What I neglected to mention then, or probably ever, was that the "original vision" was also a published pen and paper roleplaying game.

I vaguely knew it existed. Or once had. The subject came up occasionally on the forums but that provenance was never really pushed as heavily as it might have been. Instead, Nexus seemed to  emerge, fully formed, out of the void, something that was  - and still is - quite common with MMOs.

Nevertheless, it's clear from early promo trailers like Room for Rent that someone knew a backstory we didn't. I felt much the same about WildStar. It's a good way to create interest in an otherwise unfamiliar property.

On a few occasions I've commented that City of Steam was at its very best in its earliest incarnations. It's commonplace to claim that MMOs are better in beta. That's not always objectively true - there are several subjective factors - exclusivity, novelty, camaraderie - that influence opinion - but also it is an indisputable fact that games do often change radically in development.

City of Steam changed many times. The Sneak Peak was perhaps the purest, most distilled version of creator David Lindsay's original vision, while some of the Alphas may have been the most immersive. I called the first Alpha "a disturbingly compulsive experience".

The game changed a lot in beta and in it's various Live iterations, first drifting and then sprinting away from its original conception. The final version, City of Steam: Arcadia, was arguably a better game but it was also as a neon-lit carnival, almost a parody of the dark, brooding, anxiety-inducing retro-future I'd fallen in love with five years before.

City of Steam shuttered in early 2016. There were vague hints that it might not be the end for the concept but Mechanist Games moved on to a new project, Heroes of Skyrealm.

HoS was a mobile game. I've played it. It was quite good, in its way. It almost felt as if it was part of the same world as City of Steam, but much shinier and more upbeat. Yesterday, for arcane reasons I won't go into, I thought of it and went to check the website to see how it was doing.

It's dead. But I didn't know that until this morning.

Heroes of Skyrealm launched in the Spring of 2017 and closed in June 2018, just over a year later. I only learned that five minutes ago as I was fact-checking for this post. The website is still there, frozen in time at the moment before Open Beta began in February last year. The links still go to the Google Play and Apple Store but the game is no longer there. I found the sunset announcement on Facebook.

The reason I didn't discover the sad news of the demise of Heroes of Skyrealm yesterday is that as I was following links back to Mechanist Games to see what they were up to I landed on the "About" page, where I read this:

"City of Steam: Arkadia... is based on The New Epoch, a series of table-top game books written by David Lindsay, co-founder of Mechanist Games" 

So I googled "The New Epoch" and found this. Minutes later I was the happy owner of Watermarked PDFs of both The Character Codex and The Adventure Codex for what is to all intents and purposes the roleplaying game edition of City of Steam.

I've written before about how reassuring and comforting it is to have a solid, physical representation of a virtual world. Novels, gamebooks, comics, even soft toys all help shore up confidence against the inevitable day when the last server goes offline.

Best of all, though, is a full set of roleplaying rules that let you feel that you could re-create the entire gameworld on your kitchen table. If you wanted to. You never will, of course, but you could, and that's what counts.

A PDF isn't quite as good as a printed book but it's a darn sight better than nothing. And these PDFs are stylishly designed and lavishly - gorgeously - illustrated in full color.

I haven't had time to read much in depth as yet. I need to transfer the files onto a device I can hold in my hand before I get stuck in to the detail.

Even so, at a skim, I can already tell just how fascinating a read it's going to be. It's not just the pre-cursor to the game I loved - it is that game. Some of the illustrations in the book are even the very same ones that were used in the early promotional videos.

One of my few gaming regrets is that I never finished the storyline in City of Steam or saw all the zones. I can't change that but now I have another chance to dig deeper into the lore and history that was always evident but ever elusive in the game itself.

And, I guess, one day I might even get to tell some stories of my own.

This Used To Be The Future

I was looking through my back pages the other day, searching for anything I might already have said about Pirate 101, when I found something interesting. My first attempt, I think, to list all the upcoming MMORPGs and/or Expansions I was looking forward to playing in the near future.

For a long time posts like that were ten a penny in this corner of the blogosphere. There seemed to be more MMOs in development than most of us were ever likely to have time to play. Which to grab, which to dodge?

The post in question dates from October 2012. The games and expansions I was considering - all of which were yet to launch at the time of writing - were these:

• Pirate 101
• Marvel Heroes
• City of Steam
• FFXIV: A Realm Reborn
• Rift: Storm Legion
• EQ2: Chains of Eternity
• Otherland
• Neverwinter
• Planetside 2

It's an interesting list in and of itself, if only because everything on there did, in fact, launch. I have other, later posts of this nature where that is very much not the case.

In 2012, F2P was still bedding in. The era of Early Access, Kickstarter and pay-to-play Alpha lay ahead of us. By and large, we still expected our MMOs to come from mainstream developers or at least indies with funding already secured. If a game was announced we expected it to launch - probably a little late but certainly not never.

Reading through my brief notes on what I was expecting back then, it's clear I never doubted that all these games would go Live. If I was posting something similar now - assuming I could even come up with nine titles I wanted to play - that certainly wouldn't be the case any more.

Let's look at each in turn, what I said I was going to do, what I actually did and how the game got along, with or without me:

Pirate 101 - " ...the KingsIsle style and try-before-you-buy model makes this a definite"

No, it doesn't. I played the Sneak Peak for about an hour and then waited six years to play the game proper. Turns out it was pretty good after all. It's still running successfully and likely to carry on doing so for a good while longer.

Marvel Heroes - "I really would like a super-hero MMO in my rotation... maybe this is the one."

It wasn't. After taking the trouble to sign up for beta and getting in I played Marvel heroes maybe four or five times. I didn't like it much. The character models were too small to see properly, the gameplay was repetitive and it didn't feel anything like a super-hero game.

MH trucked along very successfully for several years before crashing and burning in spectacular style for reasons that are still somewhat unexplained. An odd and unexpected ending. When it went I sort of wished I'd given it a better run but in the end it probably just wasn't my kind of thing.

City of Steam - "Absolutely love this game... I'll be playing and writing about it."

I did love it. I still do. I played and wrote about it plenty but still not enough. One of my favorite MMORPGs and definintely one that failed to live up to its full potential.

The original vision for the game was, as I wrote, "a real labor of love" but financial issues led to a very poor publishing deal from which the game never fully recovered. Now, sadly, sunset, although the possibility of some kind of revival or revisiting of the IP remains a tantalizing possibility.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - "I'll probably at least try it"

I did. For a month. When the came time to subscribe, I declined.

I had - still have - very mixed feelings about FFXIV. I like the world, the races, the classes, the look and feel. I even like the combat. Most of the gameplay, however, I despise. I find it coercive, restrictive and above all paternalistic. Pottering around at low levels is wonderful but any serious attempt at character progression leads immediately to boredom, swiftly followed by anger.

FFXIV is by far the closest anyone's come to remaking World of Warcraft but in doing so it seems to me to have doubled down on all the worst aspects of that game. Despite  - or more likely because of - that it's been a major success story for the genre, coming at a time when one was badly needed.

Rift: Storm Legion: "I will get this but again mid-November is probably too soon".

Yes I did and yes it was but Trion offered a very enticing 12 month sub with pre-purchase and I fell for it. Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent a desultory week there before returning to GW2. I hated Storm Legion itself; Mrs Bhagpuss barely even set foot in it. A few months later, Trion unexpectedly took Rift F2P, thereby overturning a number of Scott Hartsman's earlier statements and rendering most of our twelve-month sub worthless. We got a "refund" in Rift Funny Money and Mrs Bhagpuss came back long enough to spend it all on decorating Dimensions, after which we left for good.

Since then Rift has limped along, finally resorting this year to a rushed and misfiring attempt to farm a crop of nostalgia that seems barely to have had time to ripen. Storm Legion remains generally unpopular as far as I can tell while Trion itself has made a habit of annoying its own customers. I was merely an early adopter. I suspect Trove, the weird cartoon blockbuilding game, pays most of the bills these days.

EQ2: Chains of Eternity - "...it's unthinkable that we won't eventually get this".

What do you mean, "we", Kemo Sabe? I don't believe Mrs Bhagpuss has set foot in EQ2 since GW2 launched. I do now own Chains of Eternity, mainly because it came free with a later expansion. I did eventually play all the way through the Signature quest line. It was okay but the more recent expansions have been better.

EQ2, like Rift, limps on, surviving but having seen better days. After the sale to...erm...I'll get back to you on that one... and the recent layoffs, I'm mostly just glad to see the servers are still up.

Otherland: "The IP has superb potential... going to give it a try. It's F2P so why wouldn't I?"

Why indeed? Perhaps because it was a buggy, unfinished mess that didn't so much fulfil that superb potential as trample it into the mud and jump up and down on it. And yet...I keep going back. I haven't not had a few good sessions there. I did get some blog posts out of it. The potential, trampled underfoot  as it may be, is still there, somewhere.

By far the most amazing thing about Otherland is that it's still up and running. It's been so close to being dead so many times and yet it plugs on. It's even getting new content in significant amounts and as a game it's far more stable and playable than it once was. Don't count it out just yet...

Neverwinter: "I'll be there day one when it goes Live, that's for sure."

I was but I didn't hang around long. Looking back at this list, it's my enthusiasm for Neverwinter that surprises me the most. I don't remember being so fired up for it. I think I must have imagined it as an updated version of NWN2 because I was clearly planning on writing scenarios for it. I never did. I never even opened the scenario tools.

Neverwinter doesn't seem to get a huge amount of press attention any more but as far as I know it remains a successful, well-populated MMORPG. It's certainly been well-reviewed and favorably written up by a number of bloggers I follow. I've dipped in a few times and I might take another look one day. No hurry. I imagine it'll be around for a good while longer.

Planetside 2 : "I've been in beta for a while but I haven't played much...I can use my existing SOE account so it's going to happen".

No it's not. I played maybe three or four short sessions in beta. I had next to no idea what I was doing and I didn't enjoy it much. I might have logged in once or twice since PS2 went Live but if so it would only have been to get a blog out of it.

As for how it's doing, messages seem to be mixed. It certainly has a following and I've read a few blogs and comments that suggest it can be good fun. Whether it makes any money for DBG, who knows? It's still there, though, which counts for something.

So there we have it. Nine hotly-anticipated slices of video game entertainment and I ended up enjoying precisely none of them with the intensity or investment I predicted. As I said, at least they all did materialize, most of them approximately when they were expected, but all of them either turned out to be somewhat underwhelming or just not for me.

Of the nine, the one I'd most like to play right now and the one I'd say I got the most pleasure from over the longest time was City of Steam. Sod's law that's one of the two that's already gone.

At least I've rediscovered Pirate 101 in time to give it a fair shake. Looking good so far...

Honey Trap : Ashes of Creation

When I opened my inbox this morning, I was surprised to find not one but three emails from Intrepid Studios, developers of Ashes of Creation.  All identical, all headed "Want to help us test Alpha Zero?".

There's no easy answer to that question. Wilhelm and I had a brief discussion on the subject of alphas and betas in the comments section at TAGN just yesterday. He'd received an invitation to alpha test the upcoming WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth, an invitation he intended to decline, saying "I long ago discovered my own problems with alpha and beta access.  Nothing diminishes my desire to play a game once it goes live than playing it before it goes live".

He also observed that pre-launch testing by definition means that what you experience at launch isn't new, leading in turn to the oft-expressed complaint that "it was better in beta". I've been known to make that claim myself and I completely agree that unwrapping the present before the birthday can lead to disillusionment and ennui.

That's why I'm much more circumspect about seeking or accepting alpha and beta offers than I would have been a few years ago. Other than a swift visit to get a few screenshots and a blog post, I'm no longer interested in the least part in testing expansions for MMOs I'm already playing. That does seem to be something almost guaranteed to lead to disappointment.

I'm also not particularly keen on testing new MMOs at an extremely early stage of development, even though I have had some very good experiences doing so in the past. It's always interesting, because most MMOs undergo enormous changes in development, to the point where different builds seem almost like different games, but it can weigh heavily against your appreciation of the final product.

I wrote a good deal about City of Steam, which I played in all its various stages from the Sneak Peak through alphas and betas into release and eventual sunset. It was scarcely the same game twice and, much as I enjoyed what it eventually became, I would unreservedly claim that it was at its very best in the early days.

Rift, famously, was considered by many to have been at its best in late beta. I had fun in every iteration of Landmark, another "MMO" that went through some very significant revamps without ever finding either a true direction or an audience, but I had the most fun in the first few months of "pre-alpha".

In all those cases my preference for the earlier versions rests on the gameplay rather than the novelty. All those MMOs changed in development in ways I'd have preferred they hadn't. I enjoyed them after launch but it was always with the knowledge that, had they not changed direction, I would have enjoyed them more.


Vanguard, on the contrary, kept improving throughout. Of course, I only saw it from late beta onwards. I'm sure there are plenty of veterans of the earlier stages who could make a case for the game having been better back then.

My Vanguard beta experience was much more similar to my time in the late beta weekends for The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. I came to those at a point when what was changing was more a matter of detail and emphasis than ethos or philosophy.

Those experiences, with what was almost a finished product, at a time close to launch, had the effect of stimulating my appetite for more. I found myself waiting impatiently for the day when I could throw all my energy and enthusiasm behind a permanent character. When the time came, far from feeling jaded from having seen it all before I was thrilled to see the gates flung open and the world revealed for me to explore.

Then there were the betas that acted as a warning. Testing the original FFXIV was a surreal experience. There was a strict NDA, so it felt like watching a huge juggernaut heading towards a cliff edge, with no way to warn anyone of the impending disaster. The Horizons beta had something of the same atmosphere.

With all that in mind, whether or not to try an MMO before launch is a tricky decision. Over the past few years that decision has often been taken out of my hands by the increasing willingness of developers to let anyone and everyone "play" the game while they're making it.

With so many flavors of pre-alpha, alpha, beta, open beta and early access available either for free or at a price the decision on when to start "playing" is problematic. It certainly seems unlikely that I would still have the same enthusiasm for an MMO at "launch" that I might have had when I first began "testing" it anything up to three years earlier.

As a blogger I also have the issue of whether to poke my head through the curtain at various stages so I can take a few pictures, make a few notes and get a blog out of it. I have to try to balance quasi-journalistic curiosity with not spoiling my own fun.

These days I try to limit any intense involvement to the period directly before launch. If I can achieve the anticipatory escape velocity I experienced before Vanguard or GW2 then I know launch-day will be joyous.


In the case of Ashes of Creation, I bought into the Kickstarter at the level that guarantees access to the final, closed beta. By then the game should be close to its finished form. If it's going to be my next Big MMO, I'll be able to tell.

Having made that choice, should I throw away all caution and restraint and jump into the AoC pre-alpha just because I can? Well, fortunately that's a decision I don't have to make. On close inspection, the whole thing turns out to be a tease:

We are introducing a new opportunity for our Glorious Ashes Community to gain additional entries into our Alpha Zero raffles! From this point forward, all social media followers will gain added entries into our raffles.

For each social media account you subscribe or follow, you will gain an additional chance to help us test our Pre-Alpha builds!  All you need to do is subscribe or follow our official YouTube, Twitch, Twitter or Facebook.

It's just a marketing gimmick. Good. That means I can forget about it. Which is just as well, because I don't know whether I'd have had the willpower to resist, had the email contained an actual pre-alpha key.

All Roads Lead To Home : Heroes of Skyrealm

Exactly a year ago tomorrow one of my favorite MMORPGs closed its doors forever. My affection for the game is well-documented. No fewer than four dozen posts here hold the tag "City of Steam".

I played the game in all of its iterations: from Sneak Peak through alphas and betas, at launch and on to its first seeming demise before its unlikely rebirth; then, finally, down into a future of drifting decline. The posts tell a tale of frustration and disappointment as much as one of joy and delight. All emotions, I'm sure, that must have been shared by its various creators and owners along the way.

When the engine powered down for the final time I did something I've never done before. I bought the soundtrack. City of Steam had a magnificent audioscape, of which the score was just a part, but it was the only part on offer so that's what I got. I've listened to it often, too.

That probably should have been the end of it but there's a coda. Mechanist Games, the ill-fated company that had such high hopes at the start, only to see them thwarted, altered and watered down until what was left must scarcely have seemed recognizeable even to those who helped bring it to the world, didn't fold up their development tent and slink away into the night.

They opted instead to work on a smaller canvas, taking their vision mobile. The second game to emerge under their banner is not an MMO, sadly. The days when those letters suggested a license to print money (a license that few were ever required to produce) ended some time ago.

The captioning in cut scenes could use a little work.

Heroes of Skyrealm is described as "a 3D mobile action RPG" for iOS and Android. I've been keeping an eye on it and today I finally got to try it out.

The history of HoS's testing process is confusing to put it mildly. According to the website the sequence, chronologically, runs as follows:

• Closed Alpha June 2016 - iOS only

• Closed Beta August 25 to September 9 2016 - North America Only, Android Only

• Open Beta October 19 - Android Only, Austria, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland Only

An observant reader of this blog might notice that The United Kingdom, the country from which I am writing, doesn't appear on that last list. If it did I would probably have been posting this back in October. I have the website bookmarked and I check it fairly regularly.

A couple of days ago I was doing just that when I noticed that the U.K. had been unceremoniously slipped onto the end of the line-up. The FAQ hasn't been updated and it was sheer chance I spotted it on a link from YouTube.

Today I downloaded the game from the Google Play store, where it has a confidence-inspiring four-star rating. It installed smoothly although the over-zealous virus checker I'm using for Android (AVG - going to swap it for something else as soon as I can be bothered) tried to tell me it was Malware simply because it uses in-app purchases.

This shot was taken in a thunderstorm. The lightning effects and rain were highly atmospheric but unfortunately they haven't reproduced well.

I then ran through the first few chapters of the tutorial, which played beautifully and looked even better. Taking screenshots on my tablet is a hit-and-miss affair so I didn't get the ones I wanted. Still, I think it's clear from the couple of action shots I did manage to take that all the first-rate design aesthetics from City of Steam have transferred seamlessly to Mechanist Games' new baby.

It's also the exact opposite of Revelation Online in that Heroes of Skyrealm looks better in-game than in screenshots. It also sounds fantastic, which isn't surprising when you learn that the score is by the same person who did the score for City of Steam - Daniel Sadowski.

Gameplay-wise I haven't played enough to form much of an opinion. Like just about every mobile RPG I've tried (which isn't a huge number - maybe nine or ten so far) it lacks subtlety. I'm really not the target audience for mobile games of any description, though. If I'm out of the house I'd pretty much always rather read a book or listen to my iPod than play a game, assuming I'm not just people-watching or sight-seeing anyway.

The one thing I would immediately flag up as an issue is the translation. It seems to suffer from exactly the same problems in this respect as City of Steam. The sentences rarely have any rhythm and the dialog feels off somehow. It's not that there are glaring grammatical errors or walls of sheer gibberish, more that everyone talks like someone who has good English but only as a second or third language.

Blame my screenshotting skills (or lack of them) for the unfinished sentence. I clicked while he was still talking. I actually wanted to get a much odder conversation about how a female pirate was "more masculine" than the men but I missed that one completely.

This is odd because the original creators of Mechanist games were English and the first iterations of City of Steam were idiomatically and indeed mellifluously written. Somewhere along the line the task of writing the words must have been handed on. I wish whoever was doing it back when the company was much smaller would take that task back.

Apart from that Heroes of Skyrealm looks like it should be a jolly good wheeze. I hope it does really well, not only because Mechanist Games deserve a hit, but also because if the studio prospers then the prospect of seeing more of the world in which City of Steam was set might come a step or two closer.

Indeed, the demise of that world may not be quite as "forever" as I suggested at the top of the post. The website is still up, defiantly affirming "City of Steam: Resting, Not Retiring". What's more, it seems that Heroes of Skyrealm not only "draws inspiration" from the world of Nexus, it's set in the same world.

At the very start of the game I was offered a choice of three Heroes: Reinhard, Kashiko and...Servo "an outdated wartoiler [who] fled the Nexan Republic...". In a strange way it felt almost like coming home.