Knowing Where You're Going

The plan for today was a music post but they take a while and the weather's turned warm and fine so that's not happening. The garden won't tidy itself, more's the pity.

Instead, how about another Friday grab-bag? I think I have enough bookmarks for one of those...

Is it, Though?

The headline on the news report at MMOBomb trumpets "The World Of Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Is Looking Much Better With The New Lighting Update". News Editor Troy Blackburn seems really impressed: 

"...the most impressive thing they have implemented into Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is the improved lighting.... The video does a fantastic job of highlighting the changes to the lighting system and it's amazing how much of a difference it makes."

I was curious to see it after that build-up. I'm broadly in favor of the new graphic style Visionary Realms have chosen and it's looked pretty good in the videos they've put out so far to promote it. This one? Not so much.

The video wasn't produced by VR themselves but by a YouTuber called Redbeardflynn (No relation to our own Redbeard, at least I'm assuming...). The video itself is perfectly fine. It's what it shows that bothers me.

These things are always a matter of taste but to my eye, many of the Befores in that video look more atmospheric and characterful than the largely bland and over-illuminated Afters. It's not that I think the new lighting is in any way bad. I just can't see it as much of an improvement. By and large, I prefer it the way it was. 

It does, I suppose, have the merit of making it easier to see everything, which seems to be in keeping with the direction the game is heading. I'm beginning to think that, when and if it ever reaches an official launch state, Pantheon won't look much like Brad's original vision at all. 

That may or may not be a bad thing. By then the whole retro scene might almost be ready for a revival of its own, it's been going on so long now. I'm not entirely sure who the target demographic is any more, anyway. People who plan on playing video games when they retire? If so, maybe it makes sense to make everything easier to see.

Maybe they should include a magnifying glass in the Collector's Edition.

Anyone Got A Map?

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about the latest EverQuest II update, Darkpaw Rising. Attentive readers may have noticed a throwaway line in which I described it as "excellent, awkward and frustrating". It's all of that and what's more it's meant to be.

The new instance is based on, although by no means the same as, the sprawling dungeon included with the old Splitpaw Saga Adventure Pack from June 2005, a time when the EQII development team at SOE was still taking no prisoners when it came to accessibility. Almost two decades later, someone at Darkpaw clearly thinks the time has come to revisit that aesthetic. 

The new update is... challenging. What it mostly challenges is your patience. If you're the kind of person who yells "Yippee!" when they realise the quest they're on is sending them deep into a maze or someone who keeps a pad of graph paper and a mapping pen always to hand in the fervent hope a cartographic opportunity may arise, you're going to love this update.

If you're everyone else, you're going to tab out after ten minutes and start searching for help. I did and found nothing so I gritted my loins, girded my teeth and got on with it. 

In a couple of hours or so I'd killed every last gnoll in the place, as well as all the bats, snakes, mushroom-men, earth elementals and any damn thing that moved. I'd bought some tracking scrolls in the cash shop so I could find my quest targets and now there was literally nothing on track. Not a living or undead thing left in the place and yet I still had plenty of unfinished quests, some of them asking me to kill mobs I'd not seen at all.

That was working as intended. The dungeon is meant to take more than one run to complete. It has multiple levels with some areas inaccessible without the use of crafted devices such as ladders or teleport crystals. I knew all that. I'd even stopped to do the tradeskill instance so I could make the items I needed. The problem was, I couldn't figure out where I was meant to use them.

In the end I decided to do some proper research, which eventually paid off.  Searching for all kinds of variations on Darkpaw Dungeon/Instance/Warren got me nowhere but when I googled Darkpaw Maps I finally got some hits. In case anyone reading this is thinking of giving the new content a look, I'm very happy to share what I found.

There's a page on the wiki but it's tucked away under the heading Darkpaw Warrens Maps. It has several links to some maps made in beta by a player called Taled, along with a fairly comprehensive quest walkthrough.

Taled says he's not planning on uploading the maps to EQ2Maps (Although now I check he has at least posted them on the forums there so someone else can do it.) so you'll have to install them yourself. Luckily for the less technically-minded among us, he's included comprehensive instructions, which I followed and can attest work perfectly. There are also some PoIs you can add to the maps, which is an even fiddlier process but if I can manage it, anyone can.

Thanks for the maps, Taled! I'd be lost without them. Literally.

Ever Wish You Hadn't Bothered?

Remember those two posts back in March, where I went through every act on the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition longlist and gave my thoughts on all of them? Well, that was a waste of time!

Yesterday, the organisers announced the eight names that made it through to the shortlist. No mention of my favorites, of course. I wasn't all that surprised. There wasn't a lot that interested or impressed me on the long list and I was fairly sure the few I did like wouldn't make the cut. 

That said, I did think George Houston would make it onto the shortlist. He looks like a star already. But nope. No sign of him, or of the wonderful Chloe Slater - who, to be fair, may only have that one, great song...oh, wait...

Of the eight, most seem like solid, musicianly picks. I guess it's in keeping with the way Glastonbury is these days - slick, professional, polished and more than a little dull. I guess they didn't call it Worthy Farm for nothing. Not like the old days, although god knows the old days weren't all that great, either. 

Anyway, for completion's sake, the eight shortlisters are The Ayoub Sisters, Bryte, Caleb Kunle, JayaHadADream, KID 12, Nadia Kadek, Olivia Nelson, and Problem Patterns. If you want links, you can find them in the aforementioned posts. 

I'm kidding!I know no-one here cares!

End With A Tune

I did say I wanted to do a music post today. I guess I'm halfway there. I've been bookmarking a lot of stuff to share of late but on review I'm not wholly convinced it's all up to the mark. I mean, I like all of it but a lot doesn't really stand out from the pack the way it probably should if I'm going to pull it out for special attention.

This does, though.

 I LUV IT feat. Playboi Carti - Camillo Cabello

She's a pop star, apparently. I hadn't heard of her but that means nothing. Pop's changed, hasn't it? For the better. 

A lot of things I've liked lately seem to have had Playboi Carti somewhere around them, too.

Also, I love that video, particularly the very last shot with the bloodstain slowly spreading and that wonderful expression she pulls...

And we're done. Real music post soon, weather permitting.

It's Like That And That's The Way It Is

When I went to log into EverQuest II this morning so I could carry on with the new, excellent, awkward and frustrating Darkpaw Rising update, I spotted a link in the launcher to the transcript of a recent AMA by the EQII team on the new, excellent, not at all awkward or frustrating forums. I thought I'd have a quck look at it while the game loaded so here I am, nearly an hour later, not having played at all.

It's a long and very interesting read although much of that interest applies only to people who might actually play the game. A few of the topics and answers, though, I felt had some wider resonance so I've pulled them out for consideration here. I recommend anyone who currently plays the game, or used to and still cares about it, take a glance at the whole thing but for everyone else, this will probably be more than enough.

Since I can't keep my opinions to myself, I've added my thoughts as well. It's my blog so I can! 

 Q: Is there a possibility of opening up some art assets for community contributions as well?
Caith: Nope.The player studio project that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources (hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the same work.

The thing I like most about this AMA is the way no-one balks at giving the real reasons for why things are done the way they are. Answer after answer comes down to some combination of not enough people, not enough time, much more complicated than it sounds, causes more problems than it solves or players didn't like it. Almost nothing is sugar-coated. It's like there was no marketing rep guiding the conversation and the Head of Studio, who was, actually wanted players to understand how game development works.

That said, I imagine the part Caith left out was that under SOE's ownership a whole load of projects were greenlighted that clearly couldn't have been profitable. They were presumably underwritten by Sony, a company that has long seemed quite comfortable with losing huge amounts of money. Perks of being a rounding error on the account sheet of a global multinational I guess.

Cut to the chase. You want me to kill 'em, right?

Q: Are there any plans or discussions involving a game wide stat/number squish? Is it just too much work for the team you have now or is it something that may possibly happen in the future?
Caith: There has been much discussion, but there are no plans for a game wide stat reduction for a variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons it is unlikely to happen is how content is designed in the game. EverQuest 2 was designed in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom in how they implement content, which allows them to make the content more flexible and unique. The downside of this is that developers can implement things in innumerable ways, and any rebalance of that content would be a manual process. So in short, a stat reduction would require hand tuning of almost every encounter in the game.

It might have worked for WoW, although the jury is still out on that, but it will never work for EQII. The part Caith left out is that EQII players fricken' love their big numbers. There'd be an outcry if DPS wasn't measured in trillions per second. 

At least, the folks still playing on the Live servers like it that way. Everyone else long since migrated to TLE, where the numbers are so much smaller and smaller numbers and simpler stats is one of the tentpole features of the upcoming Origins server, so someone at Darkpaw reckons on having cake and eating it too.

Q: Are the "suburbs" ever going to be returned to at launch state?
Caith: This is extremely unlikely to happen on a live server due to the amount of quest and NPC updates that have been made over the years, NPC’s have been moved and quest dialog updated to reflect the move, much less the quests themselves updated to function in the new zones they are in, etc.
Kaitheel: Our newly announced Origins server will allow you to step back in time and experience the cozy neighborhoods and all of the quests they had to offer!

There's some hard information about the upcoming Origins server buried in the AMA. The above answer confirms the long-lost neighborhood quests will be included, which is something I wouldn't have bet on. Elsewhere, it's also strongly suggested the intention is to get as close as possible to the original game as it was at that time and that the motivation for doing the server is to encourage both former players and brand new ones to take a look.

It is odd to think that the best way to get people to consider playing a game in 2024 is to make it look and feel like one from 2006 but I guess WoW Classic is proof that it works. Pretty soon everyone wil be doing it, if they aren't already.

Q: Will you bring back LoN?
JChan: Legends of Norrath was great when it was here, but we have no plans to bring it back currently. Spinning back up a whole new development team or taking away current developers to work on it would put stressors on the team right now that are just plain unhealthy for our long-term future. That being said, there's always the possibility that our situations will change in the future.

The answers to many of the questions boil down to some variation on "We're a small team and we're already at full stretch doing live events, expansions and updates." and that's the context of Jen Chan's answer here but that last sentence is intriguing in a couple of ways. Firstly it hints at a potential change for the better in terms of resources at Darkpaw and I don't see any sign elsewhere in the AMA of general feel-good platitudes so maybe she knows something...

Secondly, it doesn't explicitly rule out a return for Legends of Norrath, the EQ-themed collectable card game that shuttered eight years ago. I only recently deleted the game files from my PC on the final assumption it was gone forever, not that I actually played it when it was around anyway. I wouldn't have thought there was a chance in a billion it would ever return but given that plenty of other questions in the AMA received a firm, unequivocal "No, never", I guess now we can't rule it out.

Watch in amazement as I battle two bosses at the same time!

Q: Finally, when is DBG/DarkPaw going to seriously address tradeskilling. You know how long it has been since there has been new craftable bags or boxes, or totems? Not to mention, at one point in time we could craft the beginning gear and Jewelry needed and make a bit of change. Other than food/drink, spells, not much else anyone wants.
Caith: Bag space is a DB and systems issue, a ton of the functions in the game iterate over every single item that a player has in their inventory, including every bank slot, every house slot, etc. We are, and will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space, because as soon as we do the next question becomes “when are you going to fix lag and decrease loading times”.

Ah, inventory! How we love to hate you and hate to lose you. I'm fairly sure EQII actually has the most generous inventory allocation of any game I've ever played, so clearly Darkpaw's definition of "extremely stingy" is a little different than mine, although I realise Caith here is talking about the parsimonious present and future, not the profligate past.

In general, though, this answer is a great example of the way giving in to the demands of one set of players is always likely to cause problems for another or, in this case, for everyone. Who'd be a game developer, eh?

Q: Could you all please bring back the map help for npcs, quest items and such?
Kaitheel: We have no plans to remove the current map system in game, where the quest givers and quest update conversations are given specific quest icons, but the short-lived blue regions on the maps that give direct locations of quest steps are not something we plan to bring back. They were useful, we agree, but they had some significant downsides. Downsides that outweighed the usefulness.

These blue regions presented every active quest target possible at that moment on your map, naturally drawing your attention to the map. We observed how little attention was being paid to the dialogue, the story, even the characters to fight and the world one was traveling through. It was not helpful for building the world, telling the stories of the world, or your immersion therein. Even I found myself paying more attention to the blue splotches on my map than I was to the quest journals or NPC conversations. The quest I was doing, my motivation, the quest givers – all of it was buried behind the ease of these blue regions on the map. So, coupled with the significant amount of time that they took to create, we chose instead to give more helpful journal text, with more specific points of interest, and labeled sections of the zone on the maps.

Kaitheel is the epitome of the quest guy. He loves writing quests and he wants everyone to appreciate them. Answer after answer in the AMA reflect it, just as answer after answer from Caith suggest he'd really rather be honing his stand-up at an open mic night somewhere. 

I tend to agree with Kaitheel on this although I did quite like the big, blue splotches when they were around. They were added in the era when all MMORPGs were backpedalling as fast as they could away from the origins and traditions of the genre. In attempting to remove all the obstacles and put in all the labor-saving devices, most of them cut-and-pasted ideas and mechanics from the wave of imports sweeping in from the East. That's when every older game added flying mounts, too. 

We still have those but now we're not allowed to use them until we've been everywhere on foot. So swings the pendulum.

This isn't the time to start another debate about immersion but I'd just mention that I wouldn't be enjoying each new expansion in EQII half as much if I couldn't open the wiki and copy the co-ordinates for every quest target into EQIIMaps to get a glowing trail and a map marker. If Kaitheel believes most players are finding their way by in-game landmarks, he's fooling himself. All that really happened when they took out the in-game quest markers was that the trade passed to a third party provider.

And now with the UI

Q: The exp gain in zimara went from one extreme to the next, could you all please balance that some?
Caith: The experience gain in Zimara is an example of where we would prefer it to be. It takes actual work to level up, and you have multiple routes to obtain experience, some requiring more attention (questing) and giving larger rewards, some requiring little attention (grinding mobs) and giving much lower rewards.

While we're on the subject of old chestnuts and dead horses... Is anyone ever satisfied with the rate of xp or leveling in any MMORPG? I very much doubt it. It's the Goldilocks story without Baby Bear. 

I'm almost at the end of the signature quest line for Ballads of Zimara with my Berserker and he's 10% into 128. I very much doubt he's going to hit the 130 cap before he runs out of quests. He might not even hit 129. I'll have to do repeatables or else try and finish the Collects, if those even give xp any more. 

I'm broadly in favor of relatively slower progress but this puts me right off  levelling another character, even with the suppposed 50% bonus for characters on an account where one character has finished the Sig Line. As for the future, when this becomes a step on the levelling ladder that has to be taken before you get to current content, you can forget it. It was fine having to revisit older expansions when it took a couple of sessions at most to hit the cap but a couple of weeks is too much by a lot. I guess I'll be finding a use for all those level boosts I stashed after all.

Also, how could the phrase "actual work" ever belong in any description of a process in a video game? I fear that, when the act of creating something other people use for entertainment becomes too closely tied to your own sense of identity, it's possible to find yourself losing perspective...

Q: Do you have any plans to reduce the number of spells? we have to use 3rd party addons to get an additional hot bar because of the honestly absurd amount of spells/clickies/buffs some classes have? Maybe allow us to combine some buffs to 1 button?
Caith: We’ve talked about it, and introduced some ways to reduce the amount of spells players need on their hotbar or rotation, but the resulting pushback from the playerbase has always been more negative than positive. Everyone wants less abilities, but not this ability, or that ability, or any of MY classes abilities. Ultimately, with the amount of UI performance degradation, less abilities on hotbars showing cooldowns, etc, the better as far as I am concerned.

As above, here's another great example of how giving in to one group's demands just exacerbates complaints from another. It's akin to Wilhelm's Law, which states that every feature in an MMORPG, no matter how widely despised, will prove to have been someone's favorite when removed.

Personally, I love my ten hotbars, at least six of them filled with spells I might and usually do use in combat. I can't remember what all of them are called - I can't even remember what some of them do - but I wouldn't want to be without any of them.

Q: I know it is impossible to make everyone happy and I love that H3 is difficult and not for everyone. Can we get a raid equivalent?
Caith: It is comparatively easy to find six likeminded players that enjoy an extreme challenge to get them into a challenging heroic dungeon, when compared to the task of finding a raid guild who all agree that they want the same level of challenge, failure, regroup, retry. The larger number of players seem to drastically increase the likelyhood of a player or subset of the players are frustrated and angry and only here because they feel like they have to be, thus leading to overall dissatisfaction with the content.

And finally, a word of pure common sense from Caith. I never liked raiding and never did much of it but when I did, back in EverQuest, raids could have as many as 72 people. Can you imagine the time it took just to get everyone facing the right way? Is it any wonder I decided it wasn't for me?

Stockholm Syndrome doesn't actually exist but if it did it sure would explain why some people say they enjoy raiding.

And on that not at all controversial note, I'm off to do what I meant to do four hours ago, namely play EQII.