Neverwinter Redux

So I'm playing Neverwinter now. How did that happen?

A couple of reasons.  Firstly, it's a game that keeps cropping up in blog posts and comments. It never seems to be anyone's main MMORPG but everyone who mentions it seems to be having a reasonably good time. And it looks quite nice in screenshots.

I've played a little Neverwinter over the years. I tried it when it launched. I took a look at Tipa's re-creations  of classic EverQuest dungeons back when The Foundry was still a thing and I've dipped in and out a few times to check this and that.

I was aware the whole game had undergone something of a revamp not so long ago, particularly the new player experience. Two or three people wrote something about it with varying degrees of enthusiasm. I'd been curious for a while to take a look at what might have changed.

The second reason was that I'd been playing a lot of EverQuest II but almost none of my gameplay involved anything you'd call adventuring. Mostly what I do is send minions on missions, catch familiars, engage in asynchronous economic warfare via the Broker and gather crafting materials. I think I've done more gathering in the last two months than the last five years.

Then, in Guild Wars 2, although I log in every day, all I do is dailies and a bit of desultory World vs World. Again, nothing remotely close to adventuring other than that session or two every three months when the latest Living World instalment drops.

Sometimes it's hard to remember the reason I got into this thing in the first place was so I could have thrilling, vicarious adventures in richly-imagined worlds. I didn't imagine, two decades later, it would have turned into several hours a day, every day, spent filling virtual shopping lists.

I was ripe for something a bit more adventurous but the options seemed limited. I thought a return to Dark Age of Camelot might be compelling in the way going back to the good old days on EverQuest progression servers or World of Warcraft Classic had been but no such luck.

Low level gameplay in DAOC seems very old indeed. The game looks better than EQ but it plays much, much more ponderously. It always did. I remember now that we all commented back around launch on how slow combat was compared to EQ. I'd forgotten that.

More offputtingly, the zones don't seem to be very similar to how I remember them. Things aren't in the same place. Distances are different, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. I find the disparity between my memories and reality disorienting. I don't know if the game has changed or my memories are muddled or both.

I thought about trying something new but there aren't a lot of MMORPGs left that I both haven't tried and would like to. I considered Astellia, current holder of the allcomers "Eh, it's okay, I guess" title. Did I really want to pay £23.79 for competent mediocrity, though? Maybe if I'd known it was produced by the same people who gave us Bong Joon Ho's Parasite...

Astellia may still get a run. I don't usually wait on sales but I might make an exception. Nothing else really caught my eye (suggestions welcome) so I looked at the welter of icons idling on my desktop and out of the pack rose Neverwinter.

I just kind of fancied it. I remember it being a knockabout romp let down by a lot of very tedious running about in confusing zones and one of the most cluttered inventory systems outside of Lord of the Rings Online. It ought to be good for an hour or two until the ennui set in again.

Only it turned out to be a lot better than that. I understand that the big revamp hasn't pleased every regular player (when do they ever?) but if the intended result was a sharper, cleaner, clearer introduction to the game for the new player then Cryptic have hit the target square on.

My old log on details worked first time. Free players get just two character slots but you can tell my enthusiasm for the game until now by the fact that I still had one free. The other was filled by a Level 13 Cleric (formerly Devoted Cleric, now, like all the weirdly named classes, thankfully simplified to the traditional single word title).

I decided to take a leaf out of Syp's book and start over from scratch. That way I could assess the changes to the starter zones, the tutorial and the general introduction to the new gameplay. Looking at the races and classes available to a free player I went with Halfling Warlock.

Generally, I try to avoid Halflings. They're usually ugly to look at and involve a bunch of quasi-Tolkeinian tropes that I find the exact wrong kind of twee. Neverwinter halflings look quite dashing and their lore appears to be refreshingly free of the usual pie and pipe cliches. Not to mention that being a warlock seems to be about the least halfling thing imagineable, even before I discovered that my halfling gets her eldritch abilities by way of a pact with Belial, Lord of the Fourth Plane of the Nine Hells.

From the moment she stepped out into the tumultuous hub city of Everdeep, my new Warlock found herself having a much better time than her clerical predecessor ever did. For one thing she always knew exactly where to go. A sparkling trail led her from questgiver to instance to hand-in. It felt a little on rails, to be sure, but compared to the miserable hours I recall from previous visits, running round and round trying to find NPCs and doors and getting really quite cross, I'll take a bit of over-enthusaistic handholding any day.

I vaguely remembered the questline involving the peculiarly named "Nasher" gang. The story beats seemed much the same but the whole thing, which I remember as ponderous and fiddly, postively zipped along. Combat was fast and fun. About all I did was spam left mouse with occasional taps on right. Everything fell over and my warlock stayed upright so that was good. I seem to remember having a lot more trouble as a Cleric but whether that's due to the class or the revamp I can't say.

Even on named quest targets and bosses I could barely hit 1 to spawn my combat pet before it was all over. There were special attacks on other keys but I never needed to use them.

There was a nice flow of new gear but absolutely none of the annoying bag clutter I remembered. In fact, other than coin and a few orc tokens, not much dropped off anything other than bosses. Normally I like drops but this felt about right, given the pace.

My first session lasted under an hour and my warlock was Level 10 when I stopped. She could have been higher but there's a lot of reading to do in Neverwinter. Reading and listening. 

Most of the questgivers are very fond of the sound of their own voices. They all seem to feel they have to make a speech every time they ask you to do something. The voice acting, about which I was highly critical back in  2013, is competent, no better than that. I'm not sure if it's been redone or whether my standards have slipped. It still sounds very much like professional voice actors not being paricularly engaged with the work but I didn't hear any of the dodgy accents I was complaining about back then.

Speaking to Sergeant Knox, one of the prime questgivers in the early levels, it's very apparent that at least some new dialog has been added. It's very clearly a different voice actor and the effect is quite jarring. I wondered if that had happened during the recent revamp, when maybe new quests had been added to improve the flow.

There is also a library of lore to find. I clicked on every sparkle I spotted in the instances and most of them added entries to my journal, all of which I read. The writing seems more than decent for the genre. I'm not sure why I was down on it before, when I said "I've seen more leaden prose although fortunately not often". Reading it does slow things down in the middle of an instance run, though. It would probably be better to scoop the entries up and read everything at the end of the session.

I've played two more sessions since, an hour or two each time. My Warlock is now Level 17, flying past the old Cleric, who probably took twice as long to get to four levels below. She has a horse and supposedly a Companion, although after I'd bought my pocket healer I couldn't find her, so that might need some research.

And I'm enjoying myself. I'm not doing much more than following the main storyline but it feels enough like adventuring to scratch that itch. I don't think I'm likely to get drawn in much beyond the surface and no doubt I'll wander off again to some other game soon enough, but as far as a revamp goes I'd have to say this one looks pretty successful from where I'm standing.

Step Into A New World

Last week's reveal of an approximate launch date for Amazon's New World (now confirmed as May 26 2020) got me thinking about the future as it relates to MMORPGs. Specifically, the games I'm vaguely looking forward to playing sometime, if and when they ever get their act together.

I'm going to do this from memory, without a lot of preparatory research, in the hope of clarifying what I'm actually interested in, rather than what I could all too easily make myself get over-excited about if I worked at it. That said, I'm fairly hopeless at remembering stuff like this so I'll probably miss some things I'll end up jumping all over when they appear.

Let's start with New World. Without a doubt this is now at the top of my wants list, moving above Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen by dint of having an imminent release date.  It's also backed by one of the biggest companies in the world so I have no worries over whether it will actually happen.

Of course, I'm still vastly more interested in Brad McQuaid's legacy MMORPG as a game that might become a long-term home for both me and Mrs Bhagpuss. It's as close to the model I prefer as I'm likely to get. I'm just not expecting to get it any time soon, although a beta buy-in for $100 or so wuld be more than tempting.

On paper, New World doesn't look like something I'd enjoy but personal experience trumps speculation. Like a lot of people, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the alpha. It wasn't a particularly exclusive event. I did, however, get in right at the start, which meant I saw the way the game changed and developed over many months.

The New World Alpha Test has a fairly strict NDA (albeit nothing on the scale of the one Belghast recalls from Guild Wars 2's testing process) and as far as I know it's still in force. That means I can't really say much about either the game or the testing process.

I will say that it was a real alpha, in which systems and gameplay elements were frequently changed with the specific intent of seeing how various approaches worked. This was done with great communication from the developers, including reasons and expectations for the changes.

My experiences in the Alpha made me a lot less surprised than some comentators when I read about the changes the game has apparently undergone since it was taken back behind closed doors. An increased focus on the fantastical elements of the setting and on player versus environment content is nothing more than I would have expected.

What I wasn't expecting was a move towards what looks as though it could be fully optional PvP. Game Director Scott Lane is quoted at Massively:OP, saying of the PvP aspect "“If you don’t care about this stuff as a player, you can have a huge, massive experience without any of it.”" There's a lot of meat missing from the bones of this statement, like how that will actually work, but even if it ends up being a hybrid PvPvE system such as those we're familiar with from Allods, ArcheAge, Black Desert and many others, that's fine with me.

What did surprise me was the mention of personal housing outside guild-based territorial warfare. I didn't see that coming and it adds a huge potential value to the game for me. If I can potter around in safety in low/mid level areas, gathering materials and crafting stuff to build my own little wilderness home, that will suit me very well. It's a lot like what I was hoping for from Atlas and didn't get.

About the only thing I don't much look forward to is the "focus and very skill based ... moment to moment game play". I'm too old for that kind of thing. That said, PvE combat in the alpha was fine. Not my favorite kind of fighting but perfectly manageable for an incompetent button-masher. And I only played a melee character. I'm guessing ranged will be easier on the hands.

I'm not convinced New World will be something I'd recognize as an MMORPG but it doesn't claim to be one so that's not a problem. I am expecting a gorgeous, rich and fascinating world with immense exploration potential and that's more than enough. I pre-ordered the game today, which gives me guaranteed access to the Closed Beta, whenever that starts. I imagine it will also have a strict NDA. Looking forward to dropping a lot of veiled hints when the time comes.

Camelot Unchained does claim to be an MMORPG; the spiritual successor to Dark Age Of Camelot, no less. We've been waiting a long time for CU. The Kickstarter was getting on for seven years ago. The first phase of beta, expected in 2015, arrived three years later and that's the phase we're still in.

As Wilhelm observed "It is starting to make Star Citizen look positively progressive in getting test content to users". I've played Star Citizen on "Free Roam" and I'm not any kind of backer. I'd love the option to do that with Camelot Unchained, a game I'm far more interested in, but as far as I can tell it's still a $60 buy-in to get Beta 1 access.

The underlying concept of CU still appeals to me. Realm vs Realm is the best kind of PvP I've played - when it works. It often doesn't. This would be the first game to make it the be-all and end-all and I'm interested to see how that pans out. Also, Mrs Bhagpuss loves RvR so she'd almost certainly be on board.

How long does anyone want to wait to play a video game, though? CU has been "in development" since 2013 and it's only in the first stage of beta with a "lengthy" second phase planned. At this rate it's not going to go Live this side of 2021-2022. Does any game really need that long in the oven?

While we've been waiting for Mark Jacobs to get CU out the door, Broadsword have taken almost as long to get around to making DAOC free to play. They did finally manage it a little while ago and I've been meaning to download the game and revisit my old stamping grounds in Midgard and Albion.

So far I haven't been able to make the time but it's a virtual certainty that I'll be re-playing DAOC long before I ever set foot in its sequel. That's a straw in the wind for something that's becoming an increasing theme of MMORPG hobbyism for many: the past is more inviting than the future.

2019 saw two huge MMORPG news stories involving games coming back from the dead: WoW Classic and City of Heroes. In both cases, games long since abandoned or dismantled by their creators came back to an astonishing response.

Games developers as a species are never slow to jump a passing bandwagon, provided it passes by with all the alarms blaring and lights blazing, but they're ridiculously late on any trend that doesn't fit their ironclad pre-conceptions. If they'd had an ear to the ground they'd have heard the rumble that's been building for many years.

In the blogosphere, we've often talked about the dearth of new titles and reminisced about the good old days. It should surprise no-one that a good old 'un beats a lackluster newbie every time and yet it seems to have taken the industry a long time to cotton on.

The cumulative success of projects like Classic, Homecoming, Old School Runescape and P99 make it very hard to ignore the untapped demand for games that have supposedly run their course. The uncomfortable fact that for some of the mainstays of the industry it's five or ten year old games that still feed the bottom line is belatedly being re-shaped into a narrative the suits can understand.

The latest buzzword is "ongoing games", now an Award category in its own right. We're already moving past "games as a service" into the sunny uplands of forever gaming. Why make and market expensive new products when you can just re-furbish old ones? Getting new players has always been a gamble - why bother, when you can just hang on to the ones you've got?

On the back of that, some of my most eagerly-anticipated "new" games aren't anything of the kind. They're emulated versions of old games I either played and miss or missed playing when they were around.

Even I'm surprised by how many emulator projects I now have bookmarked. There's the Vanguard Emulator, obviously. I log into that every month or two and post about it occasionally. There are several more I'm looking forward to more than I'm looking forward to most official product.

Top of the list is Project: Return Home. It's a bold attempt not only to bring back a much-missed MMORPG but to port it to a new platform. If it comes off I'll be able to realize a long-held dream, one which I thought would have to remain a fantasy: I'll be able to play the EQ game I missed out on because I didn't own a PS2.

Return Home plans to make EverQuest Online Adventures available for the PC. If the team behind the project manage to pull it off there's a good chance I might have found a new home for months. Short of an actual new EverQuest game from Daybreak (and where's that "big news" that was coming in November, Holly?) Return Home might be the last "new" game set in Norrath I ever play.

Then there's Free Realms: Sunrise, about which I have written a few times. The folks behind that don't seem to be in much of a hurry so I'm not holding my breath. I'd still bet on getting an open beta before Camelot Unchained goes live.

A real left-field entry to my watchlist is FHX Restoration, a project aiming to bring back a barely-remembered MMORPG that operated under several names in various territories. It's the game known to some as Hercot or Xiones. I knew it as Ferentus.

When I played, Ferentus was in beta. I don't recall it ever going Live in this territory. I only ever saw the first zone or two and I can't really say why it's stuck in my mind the way it has but I've never forgotten it. Apparently there was a whole game there at one time, one which people paid for, played and enjoyed. I'd be very happy to take a look at what was on the menu after the taster I tried all those years ago.

As with most emulator projects, details on progress are hard to come by but there have been two brief opportunities to step into the world and see what's been achieved so far. Both of which I missed, because I only found about the project after they'd happened.

The first was a single day over a year ago. The second was two days in August. I'm keeping an eye open for the next. Maybe that'll be a whole three-dayer!

Games I was looking forward to, now not so much, include Ashes of Creation and Crowfall. Both of them have passed that point where they've been in development so long that all my intitial enthusiasm has burned away.

I was never all that keen on Crowfall to begin with. The early PR releases got my back up with all their talk about how they were going to save the genre. I didn't (and still don't) think it needs saving. As time went on, though, I began to think ArtCraft had some neat ideas on how to solve some longstanding issues, including payment models and PvP vs PvE.

Sadly, whatever it looked like they might do has become moot due to the length of time they've taken doing it. A lot of the things that seemed like problems then don't seem to be all that pressing now and I wonder if anyone really cares any more.  I know I don't,, although no doubt I'll give Crowfall a look - if it ever makes it out of buy-in testing.

I was a lot more invested in Ashes of Creation to the point that I pledged for both myself and Mrs Bhagpuss during the Kickstarter. If the game ever happens we'll get copies and I'll definitely play it and write about it here.

When they put up the first version of the Battle Royale spin-off, Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse, I enjoyed it well enough, considering what it was, but by the time they got to the latest version I couldn't be bothered. And neither could anyone else. The current Steam Chart stats show the average number of players online in the last thirty days was 8.5. Good luck getting a Battle Royale going, guys. Maybe you could invite the three people still playing Planetside:Arena.

And that's about it. I'm sure there are plenty of upcoming MMORPGs I'd be curious to try should I happen to come across them but I can't bring any to mind. I'd welcome any suggestions!

A New Career In A New Town

Every so often I get the urge to start a character and level up for the sheer fun of it. It could be in a game I've played for years or it could be somewhere completely new. When the mood strikes I'm not that fussy.

Well, perhaps I am. In the back of my mind I always have a template and it's drawn directly from the DIKU-MUD playbook. I want to goof around at low level in a western fantasy, quasi-medieaval setting. I want to fill XP bars by killing monsters and kit out my new characters in gear those monsters drop or that NPCs give me for killing them.

That's the minimum entry requirement. For bonus credit I also want to be able to play someone three feet tall or less, preferably with fur and/or a tail.

I have a mental list of games that work: EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Allods Online, Rift... The problem with those, though, is I already have established characters in all of them. After a whle I start to feel that perhaps I should "work" on those instead, make some "meaningful progress", push into the higher echelons of the game, see new zones, spend my time "profitably"...  stop goofing around, basically, forgetting that goofing around was the reason I rolled a new character in the first place.

That's one reason "New Start" servers work so well. I can start over on a brand new server and feel like my efforts are meaningful, even though I'm doing something I've done many times before in the exact same place I did it every other time.

Anarchy Online has a New Start server called Rubi-Ka up and running right now. I have some small nostalgia for AO. I was in the closed beta, for which I received an installation CD in the mail. At the turn of the Millennium, no-one could be expected to download an entire MMORPG through a 56K modem. If you even had a 56K...

I never played in that beta, though: I couldn't get it to run. Didn't stop me buying the game when it launched but I couldn't play it then either. It was one of the first, worst MMO launches. It set standards of unplayability seldom matched since, although hardly for want of trying.

Eventually, Funcom got that sorted. It took them a couple of months as I recall, during which time subscription charges were waived. When they started the subscription clock running I played on until the end of the thirty days that came with the box and then stopped. I liked the game but not enough to pay $14.99 a month on top of my EverQuest sub.

AO was one of the first Western MMORPGs to go free to play, as far back as 2004. I've been back a couple of times since but never for long. There's a whole new introduction, tutorial and starting area for F2P and although it's undoubtedly more user-friendly it has zero nostalgia factor for me.

I would quite like to see the original starting grounds again, though, and now I can. In theory. Rubi-Ka features the "classic Arrival Hall and backyards". It also requires a subscription. I don't want to see them that much.

Reading through the FAQ, Funcom's take on the concept of Progression or New Start servers is unusual to say the least. Requiring a subscription is standard practice for milking the nostalgia market but setting the server to last just 12 months and then deleting all the characters on it definitely isn't:

How long will the server be open?

The current plan is to run the server for 12 months- however, if near the end we see the community wants to keep it going, that is an option we are not taking off the table.

If the server closes, what happens to my character?

If the server does end, characters do not carry over from RK2019 to the original server

Other than bringing back the old starting areas, Funcom isn't even paying lip-service to re-creating the original Anarchy Online experience:

What about balance, mechanics, and systems?  Are those being reverted?

We are not reverting any code, systems, or balance changes with the new server.  Existing mechanics and systems such as damage caps, falling damage, XP loss, Improvement Point (IP) menu, profession balance, PvP, etc. will not be reverted from how they currently are.  

The actual "progression" aspect is unusual, too. Firstly, the server begins with a level cap of 10. As I recall, even around launch that wouldn't have taken very long.

What about the level caps and expansions? How will those be handled?

The server starts with no expansions and a low level cap (10)... expansions will be added to the server over time.

If that sounds vague it's because it is. Intentionally so. Funcom appear to be running the whole thing as some kind of democratic social experiment. All the things that other developers wrangle out with the players before launch are going to be decided according to feedback as people actually play:

You’re steering this ship - We’ll be on deck to listen to your feedback and thoughts on when level caps should be raised as well as when expansions would be added to the game.

If it wasn't for the subscription I'd give it a go but I know I wouldn't even last a month so I'm going to save my fifteen dollars. It's not like Anarchy Online is the only New Start in town.

As previously discussed, EverQuest and EQII are each launching not one but two new start servers later this month. I'm still in two minds about those but I'll probably at least roll a character on Kaladim and possibly one on Selo.

Later in the year we have WoW Classic to look forward to, of course. It's odds on I'll resub for that although I imagine that sub won't be renewed. A month is probably two weeks longer than I'll need before my curiosity is satisfied.

There is at least one other upcoming option for some kind of a "fresh start" that hasn't been getting anything like the attention. It's not a new server and it's definitely no kind of time-limited progression: it's the long-postponed transition of Dark Age of Camelot to a Free to Play model.

DAOC must be just about the last subscription-based holdout from the first wave of MMORPGs. It's astonishing it's taken this long to get there but supposedly "early 2019" is the target for the launch of what Broadsword is calling Endless Conquest:

What is Endless Conquest?

Dark Age of Camelot: Endless Conquest is a way for players to experience the core features of Dark Age of Camelot without a paid subscription.

Who is eligible for Endless Conquest?

New accounts are eligible and previously-subscribed accounts that have been closed for at least 120 days can downgrade to Endless Conquest status.

What do I get with Endless Conquest?

Endless Conquest accounts receive complementary access to all Dark Age of Camelot expansions through Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Endless Conquest accounts have access to Dark Age of Camelot’s core features and can enjoy exploring Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia, leveling their character to 50, and fully participating in realm vs realm combat, and much more!

That does sound quite appealing, especially the part about being able to play your old characters. I probably still have my original login and password details lying around somewhere. Or I might just start over from scratch. I always rather liked DAOC's low-level PvE game - it's about the closest anywhere to EverQuest's and unlike EQ's I haven't played through it for about a decade and a half.

At the very least I'd like to take some screenshots. I don't seem to be able to find anything I took in any MMORPG from before about 2004, meaning nothing at all from DAOC.

I wonder who's going to be next on the New Start/Progression bandwagon? Are there even any likely candidates left?

In Praise Of The Zerg: Rift, GW2

When some Ancient from the last century came up with the acronym MMORPG, the first two letters represented the then-astonishing ability of the internet to allow large numbers of individuals around the world to play together in the same game space. Back in those halcyon days, when everyone was making - or talking about making -  Virtual Worlds rather than mere games, to qualify for the double M club it was enough for large numbers simply to share the same imaginary milieu.

From the very early days, though, there was a drive to do more than just parcel the worlds up into pockets and have all the pockets talk to each other at a distance. EverQuest began with no formal raiding structure but players invented one of their own, bringing larger and larger gangs to clear entire zones in a rolling wave of terror. When SOE formalized matters with the Planes of Power expansion the raid size was set at 72, a number that sounds pretty massive even today.

My own first memory of truly huge conglomerations of players comes not from EQ but from Dark Age of Camelot, which debuted in 2001. Realm vs Realm saw the creation of massive forces that came together to siege or defend keeps. My PC could not handle those numbers. My experience of siege-play consisted mainly of extreme close-ups of the stretched and degraded textures of a game engine under stress as I pounded on a wooden door for what seemed like eternity.

For a while it seemed as though technology would fail us. I quit DAOC. EverQuest pared back its ambitious raids from 72 to 54 to 42. World of Warcraft set the bar at 40 and let it decline from there. It looked as though the concept of massiveness itself had been redefined.

I first noticed the tide begin to turn with the arrival of Rift. The early beta weekends were an exhilarating rush as Trion unveiled their USP - endless, rolling incursions and invasions that brought dozens, scores, hundreds of mobs down from the skies, demanding a co-ordinated response by similar numbers of players.

Someone's technology had improved. Ether I had a better PC or Trion had better developers. Whichever way round it was, for the first time I found myself caught up in truly overwhelming fantasy battles, surrounded by an army of allies, facing off against a horde of enemies, with fireworks and explosions detonating endlessly all around - and I could still move!

Rift changed everything. Since then I have felt the tug of massive-scale events like a comet feels the pull of the sun. No matter how far I retreat to my own, isolated solo instances, or potter alone in forgotten zones, the call of the crowd always draws me back to the core.

Apart from technological progress, at the heart of the ongoing, successful integration of very large scale events into the genre is the removal of the requirement for formal organization. Warhammer's Public Quests are usually quoted as Year Zero for the new age of automated socialization but for me it was Rift that set the pattern.

When it comes to reasons not to raid one of the biggest negative factors is the sheer time it takes to get things moving. I always liked the idea of raiding - conceptually. It was the experience as it played out in real time that drove me to find something more interesting to do - like sorting my bank vault or watching paint dry.

Those first beta weekends in Rift were a revelation. Instant raids, no drama! All the fun and none of the tears - of boredom. Instead of competitiveness there was camaraderie - a sense that we were all in it together, at least until we ran into those filthy Defiants/Guardians (delete as applicable).

Over time, for reasons that escape my ability to comprehend but which, no doubt, have their roots in finance, Trion chose to dilute and eventually dismantle the underlying raison d'etre of their flagship game. Instead of the magnificent turmoil of unpredictable, inescapable and never-ending planar invasions we moved to an on-demand service.

First we players were granted the ability to craft lures that allowed us to rip open the skies and bring down the invaders we wanted, when we wanted them and wherever it was most convenient. Then came Instant Adventures. All the action you can handle at the click of a button. 

A few nights ago, back in Rift after a long, long lay-off, fiddling with the UI trying to find out what stuff does, I found myself in a Raid. Just my Rogue and twenty or so of her closest complete friends she's never met before and never will again, throwing themselves like chaff into the blades of godlike creatures in the expectation of certain death, certain loot, certain XP.

I had no clue what I was doing. No-one spoke. Prompts appeared across the screen so I followed them. Hammy, post-modern voiceovers stripped away all conceivable veneers of belief. I died and died and died. Then I died some more. 

My roles had long since been revamped in my absence to the point where almost none of the icons on my hot bars did anything at all. My contribution over half an hour was limited to auto-attacking with a bow. No-one complained. No-one cared. No-one noticed.

As Rift slumped towards self-parody, GW2 snatched the baton and ran. The direction the race was beginning to take was not universally applauded. Many seemed to fear a breaking of bonds between the human beings behind the avatars to be inherent in the move towards a more informal, ad hoc social structure. 

In the event, and with uncomfortable irony, it was the more formal matchmaking mechanisms implemented by MMOs that tried to shore up those failing traditions that led to a sense of increasing alienation. Their structures seemed designed to create groups that never spoke, their ever-shifting places filled and re-filled by strangers who came together in silent purpose, never to meet again. 

It transpired that the hurly-burly of the new ad hoc orthodoxy, counter-intuitively perhaps, fostered an atmosphere much more conducive to a sense of hail-fellow-well-met, we're all in this together goodwill. On a good day, anyway.

As this all played out ArenaNet waxed hot and cold over their own supposedly unique selling point, the dynamic event. The years piled up while they played with the concept, sometimes successfully, often less so. 

For a time they seemed set on huge, seething, surging map-wide brawls, an approach that reached its apogee with the glorious invasions of Scarlet's armies and the epochal Fall of Lion's Arch. That era seemed to end as Living Story 2 was parcelled up in instances, while the chains of timed, tamed events made gameplay in Dry Top and Silverwastes feel as desiccated as the landscapes. 

That trend continued into the dripping jungles of Heart of Thorns. Would the story of Rift repeat itself?

Coming into 2016 it seemed likely that the last remnant of glory would fly in tatters over World versus World, where the long-maligned zergs still roamed like wounded dinosaurs, awaiting the end. And then, once more, the winds changed. 

As we wait in the foyer of Living World 3, the new, post-Johansen GW2 slowly takes shape. A path to the future begins to emerge, picking its way cautiously between the wild chaos of Scarlet and her all-conquering armies and the stately dance of Heart of Thorns. 

The preliminaries began slowly but they are gathering pace. A patchwork of smaller events is building a palimpsest. The bandits, the anomalies, the competing factions, they all arrive without much fanfare but decline to leave. Now we have The Running Man and to a resounding cheer the rolling PvE zerg is back. 

All the new events are neither entirely random nor set to a fixed pattern. They move from map to map at a defined pace but incorporate an element of randomness that sees Commanders hopping waypoints, trailing their squads behind them.

This is the iteration we were looking for. It bodes very well for the still-unannounced, mysterious second expansion, and for the equally unannounced, equally mysterious Living Story 3.

The destiny of the MMORPG lies in each and every direction. The genre's greatest strength and most difficult challenge is and always has been its malleability. More so than any other form of video game, MMOs seek to be all things to all players, all at once.

Well and good. But the true defining trope remains encapsulated in that first initial: M is for massive. Without that sense of scale everything else is a mere collage of identities drawn from elsewhere. 

Let's get bigger. And then bigger still.

Over Here! I Think You Missed One! : Realms Online

In that way things have of coming together sometimes, Zubon at Kill Ten Rats posted something recently about Salem, an MMO known in so far is it is known at all for its aspiration to permadeath. He came to hear of the game via Heartless, who had posted about it along with two other in-development MMOs, Otherlands and Dominus. Heartless headed his piece "The 3 MMOs you ARE NOT paying attention to but should be", somewhat ironically since one of the three, Dominus, had gone dark only a day or two earlier.

Zubon not only hadn't been paying attention to these titles but as he clarified he'd "stopped actively paying attention to game development years ago". Meanwhile, SynCaine had a busy discussion popping under the post he'd evocatively and provocatively titled "I Miss Massively". In the course of that thread Saucelah observed of Massively that " most of their stories are just write-ups of PR releases", an inarguable truism about which I observed that it was precisely as an aggregator of press releases that I found Massively most useful.

I do like to know what's going on. Even if I have no plans ever to play a particular MMO I still like to keep an eye on its progress. For heaven's sake, I still drop in and lurk on the Alganon forums once in a while! Massively's feed sits in my blog reader and I scan the headlines daily. If I spot an MMO that I don't recognize I'll click through and read the whole article. I'd been vaguely following the development of Dominus, Salem and Otherlands that way for months.

I have (had in the case of the now-defunct Dominus) no great interest in the first two but Otherlands is an MMO I mean to play so I sat up when they recently invited applications to alpha-test. I'm broadly in favor of beta-testing MMOs but I'm more ambivalent about alphas. I'm interested in giving feedback on gameplay but not so much in doing unpaid work to ensure the server architecture is solid and the game engine functions.

There are exceptions. I am quite hyped for the upcoming City of Steam alpha, scheduled to begin sometime in July. I'm hoping for an invite to that one not only because I very much like what I've seen of the game so far but also because Mechanist Games' idea of an alpha test looks rather like some other developers' picture of a game that's fit to launch.

There's been much discussion of late on the pros and cons of paying to beta-test. Gamigo, producers of Otherlands, aren't asking for your money yet but they've found another way to twist your arm. They've combined the publicity hype over winning a place in their alpha with an application process that makes it clear that all you'll win is the opportunity to do some serious work for no pay. I read the application form and decided to pass on their generous offer. I'll wait til open beta or launch, thanks all the same.

So I knew about these MMOs and many more from scanning the headlines, which is how I ran across Realms Online. Or Regnum. Same game, two names. When I noticed this news release a couple of weeks back it piqued my interest. Mrs Bhagpuss had been asking if there were any MMOs we hadn't played that have animal races and I hadn't been able to find any. Then up pop these Lamai, looking something like bushbabies waving swords.

Off I went to the website to look at this new MMO. Only it isn't. New, that is. Realms Online is about to celebrate its fifth anniversary in less than three weeks' time. So much for me having my finger on the pulse of MMO development. Or indeed my eye on the ball.

More surprising than my ignorance (pretty much anything would be) Realms Online appears to be something a lot of people seem to have been asking for - a Dark Age of Camelot clone. Out for five years, servers on three continents, known under two names, filling a gaping three-way RVR market hole, how did I miss it? Was it just me? Did you all play it years ago and now you've all moved on, leaving me to step out of character creation into the snow just as the servers merge? For the love of Mike, it's Argentina's most successful MMO! Oh, wait a moment...

Anyway, I've found it now. It's downloaded and I've played it and so far I like it. It's very old-school, feels like an MMO from quite a while before WoW and I very much doubt I shall ever give it a shake you'd call fair. Too many MMOs, too little time. Especially if new old ones keep creeping out of the undergrowth to ambush me like this.

Still, whenever I feel the urge to be a viking bushbaby with a sword, Realms Online will be my go-to game. And who among us can honestly say that's an urge they'll never have?

Yak's Bend, Here We Come!: GW2

Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend. Twenty-four hours to go. We've picked Yak's Bend for our temporary home, because reaching it was such a highpoint of the original campaign I still remember it clearly seven years on. It's A U.S. server so with a bit of luck it might be something less than insanely busy at the times we'll be playing.

I've been reading a lot of blog commentary as everyone gets themselves pumped up. The focus on PvP surprises me a tad. World vs World vs World PvP, that is (already being pared down to WvW, thank the lord). I've not heard a single person claiming to be excited about the eSport. Is that even in yet?

Guild Wars is an odd brand. The original was heavily trailed as a PvP game before launch, to the point that almost no-one I knew playing Everquest back then had the slightest interest in trying it. Mrs Bhagpuss and I gave it a shot and had a lot of fun for a few weeks. I think I tried PvP maybe three times. It was so insanely fast  I couldn't even work out what was going on, far less participate.

As I remember it, that view was widespread. I seem to recall ArenaNet confirming that the majority of players were spending most of their time in the PvE instances. Certainly most of the development of the game over the following seven years and four expansions has added PvE content rather than PvP.

For a long time all the news we got on the successor game was about the PvE. The dynamic content, the eighty levels, the massive open world, the races, the classes, the ambient audio, the crafting, the dress design...the PR department seemed determined to hammer home the point that this was a true virtual world MMO. PvP information seemed very sparse in comparison.

Eventually we got the skinny on both the eSport arena ladder PvP, similar to GW1 (as far as I can tell from an extremely superficial glance) and the very much more interesting World vs World vs World. Ah, a three-way! That's why the excitement. There seem to be a lot of Dark Age of Camelot fans manque out there in blog comment land. Warhammer didn't so much drop the ball on the New DAOC front, more stuck a dagger through the ball and hoicked it into the privy. Prime sorry, Dominus isn't anywhere near ready. Looks like WvW got tagged it, at least for now.

I'm up for a bit of turf-holding, keep-taking, supply-disrupting, three-way PvP. As a side dish, though, not a main course. I'm interested in Tyria for its VW cred. I'm hoping for a solid, well-crafted, extensive, immersive fantasy world to explore. One that will occupy my attention for a good long while, years maybe. I wasn't really planning on paying much attention to the Homeworld thing. So we get some buffs or we don't. Is that going to matter?


It can't, can it? Surely the perks of winning can't be so significant that players on the losing worlds feel sufficiently disadvantaged to be annoyed. Because if one thing's been apparent in MMOs for more than a decade it's that while lots of players like to dabble in PvP not all that many like to make it the main thrust of their gaming time.

The set-up doesn't allow for total opt-outs, which is interesting in itself. There won't be any pure PvE worlds that don't participate in WvW. There will be plenty of players who opt out entirely, though. There was an enormous amount of that in Rift, where arguments would frequently break out between players who'd flagged for PvP and those who hadn't and didn't intend to. In Rift, even on the PvE servers, the PvP often came to you, whether you wanted it or not. In GW2 it will be safely parked in a conveniently separate world. Making it very easy to ignore.

I'm open-minded. I'm hoping the PvE will be so good I won't need the WvW to pique my jading interest. I'll settle for just for the occasional pinch of WvW spice late on a Friday or Saturday night. On the other hand, if WvW turns out to be the Wonder-PvP MMOs have been striving for since, well, since always then I won't be turning up my nose.

Either way, I'm not expecting to find out this weekend. I'm expecting to be overwhelmed, confused and quite possibly exhausted. Anything less will be a let-down.