A Little Appreciation Now And Then Would Be Nice...

Today sees the start of Creator Appreciation Week in Blaugust. This used to be a separate event, back when it was known as Developer Appreciation Week, a name that clearly reflects Blaugust's origins in the gaming community. 

Now the net is cast wide to catch... well, anything. And anyone. Artists, musicians, writers, coders, streamers, social media gurus, the company that makes those cute shoes you really, really like...

And bloggers, I guess. Why not?

One notable thing for me about this year's Blaugust, compared to previous events, has been the number of posts I've bookmarked because they contained factual information or links I thought might come in handy later. We seem to have attracted an above average number of people who make web resources or collect and distribute information about those who do. 

Among this year's Blaugustinians whose posts have caught my attention in this way are a couple I've already mentioned in previous posts - Nick Simson, who put me onto an excellent overview of the current and potential future state of AI/LLM usage posted by Ben Werdmuller and Tara Calishain of Calishat, who created both Attention Junction and MiniGladys, which I immediately bookmarked and then, of course, haven't used. But they look really useful!

I also bookmarked my Favorite Radio Stations, a post by The Virtual Moose. 

There was a time when I listened to the radio a lot while playing MMORPGs. As I've always said, I find the in-game sounds and music an integral part of almost all games (The exceptions being the handful where I find it literally unlistenable but those are vanishingly rare, thankfully.) so I always have both on and turned up loud enough to hear clearly. 

I've always been quite comfortable having two or three sound sources playing simultaneously and though I'm very poor at paying attention to more than one of them at a time, I'm quite good at shifting my attention from one to another as appropriate, whenever something interesting or important crops up. 

They do need to be different kinds of sounds - two pieces of music playing at the same time is a cacophony - but ambient and combat sounds from a video game, music and speech all seem to use different processing channels in my brain so they barely clash at all. 

In the olden days, when few MMORPGs used much in the way of voice acting, I was able to have speech radio on while I played but that ceased to be a viable option a long time ago, now almost everything is voiced. 

As game developers leaned into voice acting, so website developers pulled back from it. Remember the days when you'd go to a website and tinny machine music would start playing immediately? No-one wanted that and now you hardly ever hear it. Which means web-browsing and blog-reading is perfect for having music on in the background.

I used to listen to Canadian and Australian and American ultra-local stations, mostly on Sundays, as they interviewed local "celebrities" , people unknown to anyone fifty miles outside of town, or went through the local events calendar in excruciating detail. I found it very relaxing.

To find them, I used a website (No-one called them "apps" then.) called Radio Garden. I haven't tried  it for a long time but it's still there. It spins a globe and you can travel anywhere and listen to any radio station in the world.

Well, unless you live where I do. It seems that for the last couple of years the UK has become a Radio Walled Garden, with anything from outside the borders of the four nations being blocked for "licensing reasons" related to "copyright and neighboring rights-related matters". Another good reason to use a VPN, I'm sure.

I also used to pick on college radio stations to hear the eclectic and peculiar mix of music they'd program. The Virtual Moose post reminded me how much fun that used to be and made me think of doing it again, and I'm happy to say all their links work just fine, so how that figures with the supposed copyright issues is anyone's guess. 

My appreciation to all the actors involved, from the blogger who reconnected me with my previous self, the creators and maintainers of the app that makes listening to radio from all over the world not just possible but simple, provided you don't happen to live in the UK of course, and to the people at the radio stations themselves, who keep the medium itself alive. 

When I was thinking about what I'd do for CAW, I considered making it an all-AI edition, with links to the numerous sources I now rely on to do pretty much anything here. I might still do that but if I do I'll probably get side-tracked by trying to decide what is and isn't "AI". The label gets slapped onto anything and everything now and I'm pretty sure half the apps I'm using would just have been called "algorithms" five years ago.  

I'll leave that for another post as I stick to my theme of shouting out Blaugustinians, in which context I particularly want to mention ribo.zone, where today's post is all about dithering. I potter and I ramble but I don't often dither but it turns out not being able to make your mind up isn't what the post is about.

Dithering is the term for the pointillist visuals used throughout the Ribo Zone. It's one of the more attractive aesthetics on display in this year's Blaugust and I absolutely will steal some of that look if I can. Luckily, I don't need to resort to burglary because Loren, the person behind the blog, is happy to give it away. 

They linked to an app called Dithermark, which I immediately bookmarked and then started playing around with. You can see some examples in the post and I feel certain there will be more, so my appreciation to both Loren and whoever 's behind the app.

And finally, some music. This Blaugust has been notable for being the first I can remember in which several of the blogs are mainly or wholly about music. I'm not sure whose social media outreach brought them in but they're a very welcome addition.

I've learned a couple of things from following the various musical bloggers these past couple of weeks. Firstly, my fantasy of having a blog where I post a new tune every day is probably viable. One song a day, I mean. More than that is too much. And secondly, if you're going to make your blog a discovery-point for music, you probably ought to supply links to a variety of platforms where readers can hear it.

I am 100% guilty of not doing this myself and I'm probably not going to change but if you only link to, say, YouTube, as I do, you're making an assumption that everyone uses that platform. And they do, don't they? Just like everyone uses Spotify. Except I don't use Spotify, so I never click links that go there. And Spotify is most definitely not being appreciated by me, not today or any at other time.

Soundcloud I very much do appreciate but unfortunately, whenever I click on links to songs hosted there, the volume is earsplitting and there never seems to be any way to change it, so I've learned through operant conditioning not to do it. Bandcamp, which I also appreciate, is fine but fiddly, which means I tend not to bother with them, either. 

Because of all that, most of which is entirely my own fault, the musical blog this Blaugust that I've spent most time on has been the African Music Forum. I know next to nothing about African music. I saw Prince Nico Mbarga play live at the first ever WOMAD festival and later I saw Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba at the Ashton Court Free Festival but that's about the extent of my experience.

It's been fun to be exposed to what feels like a random sampling of a vast warehouse of musical treasure every day. I don't listen to all of the selections but the ones I've cherry-picked have been great. Favorites so far have been Dr. Footswitch and Black Disco. 

AMF is exemplary in including multiple options for listening but it also always leads with a video from YouTube, which is why I've had so much fun with it. I'm so lazy!

And finally, since we're being musical, I just want to shout out a final Blaugust contributor, Wavelengths. I don't generally listen to podcasts and I haven't been listening to this one but I do read podcast blogs and this is a good one. 

I enjoyed the post on the PSP, a device I always wished I'd owned when it was in vogue and which, having read this, I still would like to try, but mostly I would like to thank them for bringing to my attention the existence of a full-length album by Ninajirachi. She turned up on one of my What I've Been Listening To Lately posts not that long ago but I don't believe I'm currently subscribed to her YouTube channel, so the release of her album "I Love My Computer" had passed me by. 

I'm sure I'd have caught up with it sooner or later but thanks to Wavelengths it was sooner. I listened to the whole thing yesterday and it's great. It almost fills that gap left by the unexplained disappearance of Superorganism. Whatever did happen to them, anyway?

That's my round of applause for Blaugust bloggers done for now but it might only be round one. This has been a very good Blaugust for me in terms of finding new voices to listen to, by no means all of which have I mentioned here today. I'm saving that for the final "Lessons Learned" week. 

Normally I find lists of which blogs people liked best in Blaugust a little uncomfortable - you just know everyone who reads them is looking for their own name and feeling at least a little disappointed when they don't find it - but this time I do have several clear favorites, who I will definitely be continuing to follow after the event ends, so it seems a bit ingenuous not to admit it.

I may also do another CAW post on a few non-blogging favorites, too, if only to prove there is a world outside Blaugust. 

Sometimes it's hard to remember. 

Us Weirdos Have To Stick Together

For the final day of Blaugust's Creator Appreciation Week, I want to talk about two things: firstly, a TV show I've just finished watching and secondly, the website where I watched it. The show is The Owl House and the website is The Owl Club.

Regular readers may remember I wrote about The Owl House back in July, when I went into some detail about how I was watching it. It was streaming on Disney+ but I didn't want to subscribe at that time. I wanted to buy it on DVD but it wasn't available. 

In the end, I found the first two seasons at the Internet Archive and that's where I watched Season One. I expressed some surprise that offering TV shows, while they were still available on streaming services, would be part of their remit or even legal. It turns out it may be neither. 

Only yesterday I read a piece about the music industry, as represented by megacorps Sony, UMG and Capitol, suing the Archive over copyright, something the big publishing houses have already done. I suspect there's only going to be one winner in that fight.

The iniquity of copyright is a whole, other post so let's set it aside for now. I only mention it because almost immediately after I finished Season One of The Owl House, both it and Season Two were removed from the Internet Archive with the following explanation:

This item is no longer available.

Items may be taken down for various reasons, including by decision of the uploader or due to a violation of our Terms of Use.

I thought that was going to be it for my time with Luz and her friends, at least until I was ready to subscribe to Disney+. something that will eventually happen, I'm sure. Happily, that turned out not to be the case.

I can't now recall just how I came across The Owl Club. I might have been googling to see if the show was available somewhere else or it might just have appered in a link when I was reading about it. However it happened, it was a lucky break.

I'm not exactly clear on just what The Owl Club is, let alone who operates it, other than it seems to exist purely to make the show available to fans, particularly Spanish-speaking fans. There's a Patreon and a page on the website explaining other ways to contribute to keep the project going, which includes telling everyone about it, using the hashtag #SaveTheOwlClub and showing the Owl Club watermark in images taken from the site.

I'm taking it on trust that this is a genuine, fan project, created and run by people who just love the show. It's certainly very professionally made and presented. Watching Seasons Two and Three there went a lot more smoothly than watching Season One at the Archive. Just like watching a regular streaming service.

How long it will stay up is another matter. I imagine one day either the cost of keeping the club going will become too much or, ironically, success in raising funds by raising the profile will draw the attention of lawyers. Until that unhappy day, let's celebrate The Owl Club and the people who made it happen.

So much for the platform. What about the show?

Oh, it's wonderful. It's everything people say it is. 

• 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.  
  

• "Flipping brilliant" - Polygon 

• "...one of Disney’s best animated series in recent years, if not ever" - Gizmodo 

• "The Owl House is going to be one of those shows people talk about for years to come." - Starburst

If you decide to give it a try - and you should - then be aware it takes a while to get going. The first season, particularly the first half, doesn't feel like much more than a pretty good fantasy show for tweens and young teens. 

It takes a good while for the central narrative to establish itself, with each episode feeling quite individuated. It also very much revolves around the concerns and conceits of high school students, albeit demonic ones. 

Those last two paragraphs, you'll notice, could do stand in work as a description of the first season of Buffy. It's an appropriate comparison. Just as Buffy grew from a monster-of-the-week comedy-drama into a complex, disturbing, challenging exploration of grief, growth and redemption, so the Owl House quickly develops its own, unique chiaroscuro of ecstasy and despair. 

Of the three seasons, I found the second the most intense and involving but the third, structured as three 45-50 minute specials and written in the knowledge the show would not be renewed, is probably the most satisfying. To begin at the end, as with Titans, it's amazing just how much difference it makes to the cancellation of a show when the writers have time to prepare for it.

Still, to cut off a show with such potential in its absolute prime has to be counted a tragedy. To cite Buffy again, by the end of Season Three that show was just begining to hit its stride. So was The Owl House. 

Buffy, of course, didn't end when the show did. The story continued in a long run of really excellent comics. I hope some similar future exists for The Owl House. It may. Characters and concepts as strong as these rarely disappear forever.

The show's strength doesn't reside only in the well-realised and consistent characterisation or the frequently-cited and exceptionally welcome social messaging. A big part of the show's impact comes from the unusually detailed and sustained world-building. 

Apart from the first episode of Season Three, which takes place in the human realm (Or Earth, as we call it.) every episode is set primarily in The Boiling Isles. Built on the bones of a Titan, the Boiling Isles are home to an indescribable mix of weird and wonderful creatures, from Tinella (Basically a nose on legs.) to Barcus (Fonzie as a dog.)

The level of detail is mindbending. Every scene is literally playing blink-and-you-missed-it. It's the kind of show where you want to go back and watch it in freeze-frame, an absolute visual delight.

The writing is sharp, funny and poignant and the voice acting is up to bringing out every nuance. What's more, you hear the characters change and grow, not just as they age but also as they assimilate and process experiences both typical of any teenager and exclusive to a fantasy world.

In short, there's pretty much nothing about The Owl House I don't love except the fact that it's over. As with all great TV shows, it's a collaborative enterprise, so picking out individuals for particular praise doesn't always feel appropriate. Still, it's clear from everything I've read about the show that it wouldn't exist in its precise form were it not for the inspiration and influence of creator and showrunner, Dana Terrace.

According to an interview she gave to Vanity Fair, Dana was determined not to compromise her vision for The Owl House, even though it was deemed inappropriate by her bosses and could have cost her her job:

“I was sat down in a conference room and told that I could not, by any means, have any kind of gay storyline among the main characters. I let myself get mad, to absolutely blow up, and storm out of the room. Life is short and I don’t have time for cowardice, I was ready to move on to greener pastures if need be. The stubbornness paid off and a week or two later I was given the all-clear. Luckily, the executives I directly work with have given me nothing but support.”

The unfortunate corollary seems to have been that by making a show that broke with the conventions of the genre within which she was working to such a marked degree, Dana attracted an audience outside the remit of the channel on which it was being shown. Supposedly the main reason for the cancellation was that too many adults tuned in to watch it.

At least by watching it on Internet Archive and The Owl Club I can say I wasn't one of them so my conscience is clear! If you want to watch it, though, the damage has already been done, so go ahead and watch it on Disney+ or Apple TV or even YouTube, since for some reason the whole of Season Three is available for free on Disney's YouTube channel as a two-and-a-half hour movie.

I'm holding out for the DVD box set. I want a copy to keep.

Don't Applaud. Just Throw Money.

What with all the other exciting new games, betas and demos flying around of late, I feel I've been neglecting the only game I pay a subscription for: EverQuest II. Okay, technically the All Access Membership isn't a "subscription" as such and it also applies to EverQuest, DCUO and Planetside 2 but even on the odd occasions I play any of those other games, I don't take advantage of my membership perks. I pretty much only use those in EQII.

I haven't forgotten about the old game entirely, though. Towards the end of last month, just before Blaugust began, I managed to creep a little further towards the end of the Signature Adventure questline from last year's expansion. I finished two more instances and a couple of open-world segments. I think I have maybe four more instances left and I'm reasonably confident I'll get them done before the next expansion arrives.

Even though I haven't done much to upgrade my gear this year, what with the current season of Overseer rewards being very much less overpowered than in previous years, I still found the instances significantly easier than I was expecting. Even the small, incremental increase in power afforded by the gear I've received from doing holiday content made quite a difference.

It was so much easier, in fact, that I was able to ignore most of the bosses' special attacks and just stand there pummeling them. That is absolutely my preferred combat style. There was a fair amount of being thrown up in the air but I use one of my cloaks with the Featherfall effect if I suspect I'm going to get kicked around and it works wonders.

I was enjoying myself and making progress, which is always a heady combo, so I might have expected to do a little more but these days I have to limit my serious game-playing to the times when I can guarantee I won't be interrupted by a small dog jumping up and battering at my mouse-hand with her paws.

Beryl has an almost supernatural ability to be fast asleep for hours until the precise moment when I begin doing something that can't easily be interrupted, whereupon she seems to teleport to my side and begin her "You must come NOW!! It can't WAIT!!" routine. It's a strong contributory factor to my current preference for low-stakes gameplay that can be dropped at a moment's notice, although I admit it was pushing at an already open door.

For the same reason, I thought at first I'd have some difficulty fitting in the required minimum ten runs through the Summer Jubilee dungeon to get my new Plume but luckily I discovered early on that you can cheese the whole thing by mentoring down. Even so, I still didn't manage to get it done during the first two holidays, Tinkerfest and Scorched Skies. 

The third and final holiday of the summer, Oceansfull, was my last chance so when I saw this morning that it had started I thought I'd better waste no time and get on with it. I couldn't remember how many runs I'd done already. I guessed it had been at least three in each festival, maybe four, so I was expecting to have to do it two or possibly three more times.

It turned out to be just the once! I was very surprised when Meldrath's battle-suit thingy crumpled at the end on my first try today and the "A Jubilee For You And Me" achievement popped. I didn't even realize what it was for a moment but then I saw the plume and realised I was done.

Well, not really. If I wanted to do it properly I'd need another ten ticks on my Trial of Elements dance card. That gets you the upgraded version. Given that Oceansfull is here until 23 August and you can do the instance every three hours, obviously I have time to fit it in. I can rip through it in barely a quarter of an hour so it wouldn't take me much more than a couple of hours in total.

It's not very likely I'll bother. Doing it ten times got me three Plumes, one for each of three key combat stats (Crit Bonus, Health and Ability Doublecast.) and also the Plumes of Inspired Jubilation recipe book that lets me make (Inferior.) versions of all three for any of my other characters, should I decide they might need them. It's exceedingly unlikely I'll be doing any content that needs anything better before the next expansion comes out and by then I imagine we'll already be looking at upgrades.

Doing the instances those ten times, plus whatever other holiday content I did, which wasn't much but also wasn't none, I somehow amassed exactly one hundred Silver Jubilation Medals. Since I was at the vendor getting my plumes (Which are free.) anyway, I thought I might as well have a look at what else was on offer.

I'd already bought a couple of odds and ends when I spotted that you can buy this year's silver medals with last year's copper ones - at an exchange rate of three to one. When I saw that I decided it was probably best to spend mine now instead of just hanging on to them in the vague possibility that I might want them for something next year.

I bought some paintings and several potted plants along with another bag of teleportation pads. Those always come in handy. It still left me with plenty of medals so I chucked caution to the wind and bought myself a dog.

The dog, a cosmetic pet, goes by the description of Wire Haired Retriever, which someone with an extremely literal turn of mind felt necessary to correct on the forums, claiming it should really be called an English Setter. My aunt had an English Setter for many years and whatever this dog is meant to be I can guarantee it's not one of those.

It doesn't have to be any recognizeable breed, of course, because this is fricken' Norrath! Have you seen the kind of animals they have there? Why would anyone take issue with a specific breed of dog? Just be glad the thing's not part hell-hound.

I tried to get a decent picture of him but for all the game's many merits, one feature EQII distinctly lacks is one of those in-game photo suites I've come to love. Seriously, if they'd just release a good on as an add-on feature, I'd happily pay Daybreak $20 for it. I'd take it over an expansion, frankly. I know I'd get more use out it, long-term.

Failing that, you'll just have to squint and see if you can make out what my dog looks like. His name is Scruff because he is one. He barks very convincingly, which is probably going to give me even more problems with Beryl at some point.

There's some new content for Oceansfull I'd like to do so I'll try to get another session in before the Othmir pack up their conch-shell caravanserai and move on, taking the Summer Jubilee with them. Next stop on the carousel is probably the expansion prelude, followed by Panda Panda Panda. 

My All Access Membership expires next month. I will be renewing for the nineteenth consecutive year. I may not get as much use out of it as I once did but I'd hate to be without it. 

I guess on that basis we can add this post to the Blaugust Creator's Appreciation Week pile. Thanks again, Daybreak!

Thank-You, Whoever You Are

 

This week it's Creator Appreciation Week in Blaugust. Aka The Week Formerly Known As Developer Appreciation Week.

Back when I first heard of DAW I struggled a little with the concept. At the time it seemed fairly solidly focused on companies rather than individuals and I found the notion that paying customers would line up to sing the praises of large companies quite peculiar. 

I still do, to an extent, although I've been forced to moderate my disdain somewhat when faced with the evidence of my own blog where, not infrequently, I can be found, doling out compliments to the likes of Daybreak or... well, it's mostly just Daybreak and its component studios, really.

Even that feels a bit weird sometimes. If I'm honest, I prefer to maintain a slightly more passive-aggressive relationship with commercial organizations that sell me goods and services. It feels healthier that way. 

It's certainly less cringey, taking ArenaNet to task for their constant and consistent failure to do anything quite the way I wish they'd do it, for example, than to just roll over and accept that, by and large, they've made a pretty good game that's given me a lot of pleasure for a decade.

Even so, it's a lot easier to find something nice to say about a large but familiar company like ANet, among whose hundreds of unknown artists, designers and engineers it is at least possible to identify a handful of names and faces, than it is to come up with heartfelt gratitude for some utterly anonymous, if fancifully-named, corporate entity from a country far away, about whom we know, if not nothing, then very little of meaning.

Let's say I was to raise a glass to the developer behind my latest favorite, Dawnlands, a game with which, it turns out, I'm really smitten. I sat down this morning, after I'd gotten up early just to play the game for an extra couple of hours  (And when was the last time I did that?), only to realise almost immediately that, other than the name, Seasun Games, I knew absolutely nothing about them.

A chance to do some research is something to be relished on a damp, August morning, so I set about informing myself so I could say something nice about these people who'd made something to brighten up a less than lovely summer. And in a very few minutes I knew less than when I began. 

Alright, that's not strictly true. I knew more. It's just that I also knew that most of what I'd thought I knew before was wrong.

The few mentions of the company behind Dawnlands I'd seen all referred to Seasun Games as a Singaporean company. I was also under the impression, although I could scarcely tell you how I'd acquired it, that they were a plucky little independent, bravely venturing out into the big, wide gaming world for the first time. 

I'd seen at least one review on Steam suggesting people calm down, chill out and put the flaming torches and pitchforks away for exactly that reason; they're just a small company, doing their best. Lay off! 

It seems some newer reviewers may have taken that advice to heart. Dawnlands' Steam review rating has now climbed from the nadir of "Very Negative", where it began on launch day, to the comparatively dizzy heights of "Mixed".  Recent reviews are running around 50-50 Posive vs Negative. Filtered to include only reviews by those who have actually played the game for at least an hour, the ratio shifts to two-thirds for, one-third against. 

Most of the hate seems to comes from:

• those who haven't been able to get the game to run at all
• those for whom it runs very badly due to latency issues
  
• those who've encountered an unacceptable number of bugs
• those who detest mobile ports and/or cash-shops on a matter of principle

and last but certainly not least 

• those who take issue with one game dressing up in the clothes of another. 

For me, the game runs perfectly, with no lag or latency whatsoever, even though I choose to play on the North American server, rather than take advantage of the much closer European option. I've seen precisely two bugs in over ten hours' play, neither of them serious, both immediately fixed by logging in and out. I have no objections either to mobile ports nor cash shops so those are non-issues for me.

Far from objecting to the porting of mobile games to PC, evidence suggests I might actually prefer it. My favorite new MMORPGs of the last year or two would probably be Chimeraland, Noah's Heart and Dragon Nest 2: Evolution, mobile ports all. As for cash shops, since I almost never use them, I don't find them intrusive and since I'm not remotely competitive I don't care if they sell power or advantage.

When it comes to games copying each other, all I ask is that they do a good job of identifying and replicating the strengths of their role models. It's nicer still if they leave the bad bits behind and make the good bits better. Just because someone did something first doesn't always mean they did it best, after all.

On that basis, I was all set to say some very positive things about the small team that I imagined had made this highly enjoyable game. Although a number of negative reviews refer to a lack of polish, I'd been a little surprised it was as full-featured and finished as I'd found it to be. I was even more surprised by how very lovely it looks. 

Thinking about it some more, though, I remembered Valheim, the game on which Dawlands is so closely, almost slavishly, modelled had also been developed by a small team. Given that team had done all the necessary groundwork, perhaps it didn't seem so suprising another small independent had been able to add some visual sheen and a bunch of quests.

Except they didn't. Oh, it happened, alright. It just wasn't done by a small, independent team. 

It's confusing, as these things often are, but as far as I can tell from the aggregate information gleaned from half a dozen sources, "Amazing Seasun Games", the company behind Dawnlands, which has only been operating since 2022 and has only three other titles listed on its website, is a subsidiary of the much bigger Chinese game developer  "Seasun Games", itself a part of the even bigger Kingsoft Corporation which, almost inevitably, is part-owned by Tencent.

The trail of ownership is confusing and I would rather be playing the game than trying to untangle exactly who owns what. I asked Bard to do it for me and this is what it reported back:

Most of that seems to agree with what I've found out for myself. "Eastward Legend: The Empyrean" is a mobile spin-off from the highly-successful JX series of wuxia mmorpgs, the most recent of which apparently at one time had over three million registered players in China and nearby territories, which goes a long way towards explaining how Dawnlands managed to hit its target for three million pre-registrations, something I got a nice in-game reward for a few days ago.

Without descending into the tedious depths of corporate ownership, my point is that Dawnlands, far from being a labor of love, is much more likely to be a purely commercial endeavor. Its similarities to existing games surely owe more to corporate calculations than any innate desire to iterate on a great idea either for reasons of aristic self-expression or just for the sheer joy of it.

And yet I find I care not a jot. When I discovered the true provenance of this game that I'm enjoying so much, far from souring the taste it merely made it fresher. I'd been wondering just how a small studio with no apparent experience in making games like this had managed to come up with something so sleek and shiny. Now I know.

If the point of Creator Appreciation Week is to recognize those who make the things that give us so much pleasure, I don't see why the plaudits shouldn't go equally to the backroom staff; the invisble workers in the cubicles and offices and yes, even in the boardrooms, without whom none of this would happen at all. 

Later this week I hope to have a post up, giving thanks to some individual creators whose work has made me happy over the years, but today I'd like to express my unironic appreciation for the myriad, anonymous work-made-for-hire contracters, lifers and laborers, who somehow contrive to turn commercial product into art, time and time again.

Dawnlands has no reason to be as good as it is. It ought to be souless and empty and yet it's anything but. Like most of the games we play, even the bad ones, there are constant reminders that someone must have been having a good time turning the pictures in their head into pictures on a screen. 

Now I'm having a good time, too. So thanks, Amazing Seasun and all who work there, for letting me share the visions in your heads and for making me get up an hour earlier this morning than I would have done otherwise. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll get right back to enjoying your fine work some more.

Inconvenience Regretted

This week is Developer Appreciation Week in Blaugust, something that used to be a thing of its own, once upon a time. I found it a bit odd then and, if I'm honest, a little uncomfortable, heaping praise on people I tended to think of primarily as technicians, beauraucrats and functionaries or on companies I knew to be, well, companies. 

Over time, though, I've either changed my mind or had it changed for me by my peer group. It seems that praising game devs and the people who employ them is a thing we do, so who am I to argue? And it fits very nicely with something I was going to post about anyway, so there's that!

It isn't so much a paean of praise to any particular developer or team as it is a general observation. I've noticed a difference in attitude between some of the companies behind what we in the West like to call imports and the way our home-grown game producers tend to operate. 

 

In all the years I've been playing, scheduled interruptions to service (aka maintenance) have been a routine, background hum that everyone accepts, sometimes irritably, usually stoically. Only one mmorpg that I play has managed to do away with downtime altogether and that's Guild Wars 2. The game remains seamlessly available except for the briefest moments, a few minutes at most, when players have to log out to download a patch. Even then, the servers themselves stay up. 

The game uses a megaserver configuration so there's never even a time when individual servers go offline. Everything just keeps chugging along.

Does anyone notice? No. Does anyone think it's unusual or exceptional? No. Players of every other game I can think of have to take enforced breaks but GW2 players can keep playing until their fingers bleed without fear of interruption. I guess that's a good thing? I'll say thank-you ArenaNet for it, anyway.

In all those games where the servers do come down periodically, players are generally expected to suck it up and power through, at least so long as there's notice beforehand. Back in the days when subscriptions were the norm I did occasionally see some of the more combative forum warriors suggest there ought to be some kind of extension to their subs if maintenance overran, as it often did, but their complaints would be drowned out by people telling them to grow up and get real.

Only when unforeseen circumstances lead to unplanned downtime is there any meaningful discussion of "compensation". EverQuest II, for example, does sometimes add a day or two to holiday events that have been disrupted by the servers not being up when they should. For anything approaching an actual compensation "package" to appear, though, it takes something like the SOE hack or a hardware failure that leads to unrecoverable rollbacks.

In other territories the culture is different. I've played a few mmorpgs where every time the servers go down, planned or otherwise, something turns up in my in-game mail to compensate for the inconvenience. It's in my mind right now because since I started playing Bless Unleashed I've been making bank on both scheduled and unscheduled interruptions to the service.

This is a game that just launched. Naturally there are some teething problems. Happily for the developers and publishers both, the game seems to have been received with more enthusiasm than they were expecting so there's been some congestion. Not everyone has been able to get onto the server they wanted, when they wanted, all the time. 

Also, unsurprisingly, the influx of players has brought a few hitherto unknown bugs and glitches to light, so a few extra fixes have been needed. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary by genre standards. Indeed, I'd say the game feels remarkably polished and stable for an mmorpg just a few days past launch. 

For all of these issues there have been both apologies and gifts. I've had lots of gold, some resurrection scrolls, a few speed buffs, an extra bag slot and also plenty of promises like this : "We will do our best to provide a better environment for your game play". Or this : "We will always make efforts to provide a stable service of Bless Unleashed PC".

There have been thank-you packages, too. Thanks to the players not just for putting up with the disruption (minimal as it's been) but just for playing the game at all. I've had a costume and I think I got a mount, although I've had so many things in my mailbox I've kind of lost track of where most of them came from.

It's a bit much, actually. I'm not complaining but I'm not sure all of this apologizing and compensating is really necessary. Okay, I'm sure it's not necessary. Free stuff is free stuff, though, so I'll take it.

So, thanks to Round 8 Studios, who make the game, and NEOWIZ, who publish it for the PC. If I had to pick between the radio silence of most developers and your effusively apologetic approach, I guess I'd pick the one where I get given stuff.

I'm not sure how much good it does from the developers and producers perspective. I had to look both of their names up because even though I'm playing Bless Unleashed all the time at the moment, I had no idea who'd made it. Why would I need to? It's on Steam, isn't it?

I suppose that means I ought to thank Valve too, while I'm at it, then. They make the whole experience so seamless and unobtrusive I don't even know whose games it is I'm playing. 

Truly, this is a brave new world we're living in! Oh, wait, that's next month.

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

According to Belghast's schedule for Blaugust, this is Developer Appreciation Week. It used to be a separate event, one I eyed with suspicion.

Who really "develops" MMORPGs, anyway? They're usually built by large teams, sometimes involving hundreds of people. The massive companies that fund them comprise numerous departments, some of which work almost independently, others which have to constantly negotiate and compromise just to get anything done.

Then there's the someone, or several someones, with the unenviable task of wrangling the disparate elements while keeping to a schedule and a budget in the hope of eventually bringing a finished product to market. That, infamously, was the role Sigil Games, makers of Vanguard, lacked.

It's all a bit vague, though, isn't it? In popular music you have the performers, the songwriters and the producer to consider. All their roles are relatively easy to assess. If you're particularly involved you might also look at the engineer or arranger. Literature is even more straightforward: the author and, maybe, very occasionally, the editor.

Movies are probably the closest analogy to video games; huge, collaborative endeavors involving hundreds of individuals. In the early days of cinema, responsibility for quality and success was generally assigned to the Studio, then to the Producer and, of course, the Star.

After Cahiers du Cinema promoted auteur theory, imprimatur shifted to the Director, where it somewhat shakily remained until the recent global trend towards megafranchises nudged focus back to the Studios once again.

For most of the decades I've played video games I couldn't have named anyone who worked on most of them. The exception would have been those idiosyncratic dog-and-pony shows so common in the 1980s, where one individual, coding in his (it was nearly always "his") bedroom, managed to cobble together something that made him a millionaire overnight.

Rather than admire those people I thought of them as bizarre. Rarely did any of them go on to make a second game anyone cared about. I can't remember any of their names and why would I? They were the equivalent of lottery winners.

I played EverQuest for quite a few years before I began to learn the names of the people who created it. The only reason it happened at all was because I was on the official forums all the time and some of the old guard would pop up and post there occasionally.

Also, players would rehash, with incredible lack of consistency, the origins of the game. After a while I got so confused and irritated by the contradictions and misinformation that I started doing some research of my own. From that I slowly began to understand that the games I was playing were created by individual human beings with agendas of their own.

Prior to that I really had never considered how the games came to exist, any more than I would waste mental energy on how my refrigerator was designed and brought to market. A game was a commercial product you bought in a store. It was either good or it wasn't. End of.

As the years went on and I became more and more deeply enmeshed in the culture surrounding MMORPGs, I came to recognize the names of many game developers, particularly the showmen (and they were nearly always men) with the big egos. I didn't think much of most of them.

More than that, I actively disapproved of the cult of personality many of them cultivated and of the fawning adoration expressed by their fans. In my book these people were, at best, technicians. They might be deserving of appreciation and praise by their peers, who could understand the skill sets, but I couldn't see any reason why any player should care, so long as they were competent at their jobs.

I think that attitude finally began to shift during the protracted and often disturbing collapse of Sigil Games. The detail that came out of that, particularly concerning Brad McQuaid, was both a soap opera and a tragedy. And I had to consider that, for all his very human faults and failings, Brad had made two of the best MMORPGs I had ever played and facilitated some of the most joyous and long-lasting memories of my life.

From then on I began to pay a lot more attention to who was behind the games I liked or didn't. I started to make decisions on what to follow or even buy based on the names behind it. I lost all faith in EQNext quite specifically because of the gurning, grinning, self-aggrandizing crew of supposedly charismatic developers SOE chose to front the PR push. Who could possibly take anything any of those people were doing seriously?

By complete contrast, the handover to DayBreak Games came as a glass of ice water on a burning hot day. The first few weeks and months were worrying but once everyone got their feet under the table and particularly when John Smedley departed, I started to get the strong feeling that the grown-ups were back in charge.

In the years since then I've had little cause to revise that opinion. There may be chaotic maneuvering going on at the corporate and financial levels but down in the engine room, where they make and maintain the games, everything has been humming sweetly.

Holly "Windstalker" Longdale, someone I never really paid much attention to when she was buried in the background of the Dave Georgeson circus, has come very much into her own as the ringmaster in charge of the EverQuest franchise. Under her stewardship there seems to be both clear direction and clear intent as well as the capacity to complete. I have confidence in her.

The nature of the MMORPG marketplace and the obfuscated and often concerning nature of Daybreak's corporate structure means no EQ player can ever feel truly relaxed about the future. Still, I feel better about it now than I did for many years in SOE's decline, when unforgivable debacles like the PSS1 scandal threatened to drive the entire operation onto the rocks.

I also have a modicum of faith in good old Brad McQuaid. There he is, plugging away at Pantheon, the game everyone once dismissed as a con or vaporware. Now, for quite a few, it's the Great Hope for The Future. I believe he really does mean to "make worlds, not games". Whether finances will allow him his dream is less certain but I trust him at least to try.

In the end the developers I appreciate are twofold: the visionaries and the caretakers. We need both if we're to have MMORPGS that delight and last. Here's to Brad and Holly, the past, present and future of the games I want to play. Long may they stick around, doing that thing they do.




*** Unusually, I have borrowed all the images here from the web. If anyone owns one and would rather it wasn't used, please let me know and I'll remove it.***

Here Comes The Train: Blaugust 2019

"And so it goes on with the show
And all I hope, hope all your dreams will come true"

Pavlov's Dog

It's that time of year again. Dust off the keyboard, shake the cobwebs off the mouse, bring out that old lever-arch file filled with ideas you never quite finished...

Blaugust is back!

Ok, not quite yet but it's coming. Belghast says so and he should know. He invented it.

If you hang around this corner of the blogosphere you're going to be hearing about Blaugust a lot. Naithin and Izlain are already talking about it and now so am I. Expect a lot more of this.

Just to summarize, Blaugust is a Festival of Blogging. It started out as a challenge to post every day in August and over time it morphed into something much greater and grander than that.

The modern Blaugust incorporates lapsed celebrations like Developer Appreciation Week and the Newbie Blogger Initiative. It offers opportunities to begin or begin again. It asks you to do no more than you feel but to feel you can do what you want.

For active bloggers Blaugust can be a welcome challenge. Can you hit that mark running, each and every day? For those gone dormant, living in slow-time, it offers a structure, a scaffold, something to haul on as you pull yourself upright. For everyone who sends postcards to the void and wonders if there's anyone out there it brings the noise.

With the incorporation into Blaugust of the NBI this is also the very best time to start that blog you've been thinking about for weeks, for months, for years. Pressing Publish for the first time can be scary but Blaugust has your back.

Bel's even come up with a schedule. As regular readers will know I love a schedule the way a feral cat loves a nice, hot bath with lots of shampoo. But not everything has to be about you, does it, Bhagpuss? And Bel's schedule is so pretty!

If that's not enough belt there's also the braces of Mentorship. A whole bunch of folks who've been at this for a while have volunteered to have themselves tagged on Discord so you can tap them up for advice. I'm one but don't let that put you off. Expect a lot of old war stories you've heard before and advice that works for pretty much no-one but me. (First piece of advice for free, don't go hog wild on the metaphors).

For the full skinny read Belghast's post but for quick here are the links:

Sign-Ups
Discord Invite
Media Kit

I'm likely to be home all August for medical reasons so I have no excuse to miss a day. One serious piece of advice I would throw out there, though, is if you make targets for yourself and miss them that is absolutely fine.

Every year a whole slew of people sign up and some of them we barely hear of ever again. That is okay! Blaugust is about experimenting, trying things out, getting the feel of what blogging is like (if it's new to you) or how it could be different (if you're already in).

If it's not working for you, take a break, try it another way, rethink. If it's stressing you out then, really, stop. This isn't an ironman challenge. It's a co-operative, collaborative social event that's 100% for funzies. (Probably don't say funzies if you're 60 years old like I am, just another freebie I'm throwing out there).

Last year Blaugust saw 88 sign-ups, at least according to my count. I recorded them all in a sidebar called "The Crew", whose derivation I revealed in a post I wrote as recently as this June. Should have called it Rocket 88. Missed a trick there.

In my final piece of mentoristic advice for the day, that post was one of my very favorites of the year so far. I worked really hard on it and it came out even better than I hoped. It got no reaction whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Once before, I built a second post out of how another had failed and Gevlon turned up in the comments to take me to task about it. He'd misunderstood my reason for writing the post but he still had a point.

Blog posts aren't your babies. You don't have to protect them. They're wild. Let them fly free. The best will go unremarked while the ones you toss out in an idle coffee break will live a life of their own that outstrips anything you could have imagined. That's just how it is. Ya gotta ride it out.

Speaking of Gevlon, currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file, if you're reading this, have you considered that Blaugust might be the time for a comeback? Now, that would break my irony meter. But go on, you know you want to. I can buy another one.

This is running way longer than planned.  Bit of a trope here.  Let's wrap it up.

Hoping to see an even bigger turnout than last year. Let's see if we can crack the ton this time!

Warm Fuzz - EQ2

It's Developer Appreciation Week and yet again I'm going to praise the same team I always do. As Shintar pointed out in the comments, Ravalation hosted DAW last year and I contributed, expressing the somewhat left-of-center opinion that Daybreak Games, with a much reduced team, had improved considerably on the flailing, directionless chaos we'd come to expect from late-period SOE.

In the year that's followed I'm delighted to say that things haven't changed. Actually, yes they have. They've gotten even better!

I know that's not what everyone thinks. Feldon, when he closed EQ2Wire, made some fairly damning comments about what things were like behind the scenes and I do believe he would have been in a position to know.

I'm not. I have no idea what goes on behind closed doors at Daybreak Towers. All I can judge by is the quality of the games. If you flip through my back pages for the last year or two, pretty much all you'll find about EverQuest and especially EQ2 is post after post where I ramble on about what a great time I'm having, how much I'm enjoying myself and how much better EQ2 is than it used to be. And it was always good (at least after Scott Hartsman saved it).

Over recent updates we've seen the addition of new  familiars, new holidays and new (okay, refurbished) dungeons. We've had a really top-notch new expansion that seems to have been better received than any for years. Even the concerns I had over the loss of the inestimable talents of tradeskill queen Domino proved groundless when the delayed signature crafting quest from Planes of Prophecy finally arrived.

Possibly the warmest, fuzziest character in Norrath.

With what have to be severely reduced and very limited resources compared to the old days under Big Sony, the EQ2 team has consistently provided solid, entertaining content in updates and expansions, punching far above their weight. What's more, they hit their deadlines and the content seems to arrive with fewer bugs.

I play two MMORPGs more than any others these days. I would guess ArenaNet have at least ten times as many developers, designers and coders working on GW2 as DBG have on EQ2 but my satisfaction as a player runs in inverse proportion to those numbers.

As I said, the proof is in the posts I write. I love GW2 but I sometimes despair of both the direction and execution of its content. I'm often sarcastic and snarky about the game. Any appreciation I do offer tends to be directed mainly at the unsung hereoes working on the filler content between big releases - filler that frequently feels more satisfying than the main course.

When I write about EQ2, though, I can't stop gushing. It's so much fun. The current development team seem determined that everyone should have a good time and no-one should be left out. They also understand that there's far - far - more to an MMORPG than endgame content and punching gods in the face.

I'm not going to run on any more.  I've made my point. I've played EQ2 since beta and I've seldom enoyed it more. I just hope that when we get to Developer Appreciation Week in 2019 all I'll need to do is link to this post and say "Again! Again!"

Back On The Horse And How We Got There

We're at the half-way point of Blaugust now and I think it's fair to say it's been an unmitigated triumph. It's an especially impressive performance considering there was no Blaugust in 2017. In his inaugural post in July of this year, announcing Blaugust Reborn, Belghast gave some reasons why we'd skipped a year:

"...the tail end of 2016 and all of 2017 were extremely rough to struggle through.  There were events that happened in the real world and events that happened in gaming that caused people to fear for their own safety and sort of batten down the hatches."

This is true. I could (but won't) name bloggers who stopped blogging altogether around that time, giving exactly those explanations for their blogs going dark. The blogosphere was not a happy place just then.

There was also no New Blogger Initiative in 2017. No-one stepped up to organize it and there would most likely have been little enthusiasm if they had. As for Developer Appreciation Week, I don't actually remember if anyone hosted it last year or not. If they did it was very low-key.

Bel, with the indefatigable enthusiasm and energy he constantly demonstrates, had the genius idea to roll all three events into one. Bringing them back as a package deal was risky but it's a risk that's paid off wonderfully.

The list of blogs officially participating in Blaugust stands just shy of ninety, of which a great many are either entirely new or at least new to me. For the first time in ages there are more posts than I have time to read in a day and I've had to curtail my tendency to comment on anything and everything just to get through them.

The Blaugust Discord is lively and active every day. There are quite a few bloggers and blog-readers there who aren't officially participating but who have come to hang out and give their support. Anyone is welcome - it's not too late to join in. 

Blaugust Reborn has a loose structure, designed by  Belghast, for those who choose to follow it. This week is earmarked for the aforementioned outpouring of thanks and goodwill towards the people who make the games we all enjoy so much - or at least enjoy complaining about.

I was going to post about my ongoing appreciation for the sterling work Daybreak Games has done on the EverQuest MMOs since the dying days of the Smedley administration all but drove the franchise into the ground. I might still get to that later in the week (not that there is much "later" left) but I thought I'd turn things around and offer some much-deserved appreciation for the person who made all this possible in the first place - Belghast.

He may not be a developer but he's an elemental force in this corner of the blogosphere. I knew his name before I ever read his blog because so many bloggers would refer to his ideas and initiatives. Most people would be more than content with curating a single annual event like Blaugust: to curate three at once is going far beyond the call.

I'd like to think that 2017 wasn't missing its summer festival of blogging because of bad vibes. Instead I'd rather think of it as having taken time off to let the grass recover, like Glastonbury. After a year lying fallow it's back, bigger, brighter and more successful than ever and that's entirely thanks to Belghast.

Take a bow, Bel!