Christmas Post

Surprising things keep surfacing in my email. I guess that's what happens when you sign up to dozens -  scores - of games and services over the years. Suits me. I like getting mail.

Today's was about a game I'm very fond of but which I haven't played for quite a while: Dragon Nest. I've commented before, more than once, on the title's confusing history; the number of times it's changed publishers; the numerous variant versions with their differing gameplay; the problems I've had accessing my characters after changes of ownership ; the impostion of regional IP checks...

It's hardly surprising I'm frequently confused about which version I'm supposedly playing but last time I checked I think it was Dragon Nest: Origins. That's who sent me the email, anyway.

The big news is a huge update coming at the end of the month, raising the level cap to 70 and adding a whole raft of new content. The full patch notes are extensive. As well as numerous quality of life improvements and tweaks, some of the highlights include

• a new class - Assassin 
• a new zone - Anu Arundel
  
• three new dungeons - Golden Meadow, Bronze Crescent Forest & Valley of Eclipse
• a new game mode - Chaos
• a new Nest - Guardian Nest

The capital, Saint's Haven, gets a graphical makeover and there are updates to character models and hairstyles. There's even a trailer on YouTube.

It's all very impressive and even more so when you realize Dragon Nest: Origins is a private server. I'd either forgotten that or, more likely, given the checkered history of the game, I hadn't even realised.

There's also a Christmas event going on right now. I have no idea what it is but when I logged in someone was recruiting a group for "Santa", snow lay thick on the ground in Saint Haven and there were decorations and presents all over the central square. 

There was also a continual soundtrack of Christmas music; some very familiar and recognizeable tunes like Jingle Bells and Silent Night, all in a louche, lounge-jazz style. Quite possibly the best seasonal musical accompaniment I've heard in an mmorpg this year.

The email rather charmingly exhorted lapsed players like myself to jump back into the game, aknowledging that "We understand that life can get in the way of gaming, but we hope this patch will entice you to jump back into the world of DNOrigins. Our community is friendly and welcoming, and we'd love to see you in-game again." 

I'm happy to take them up on that encouragement. I'm always saying I want to get back to Dragon Nest. Even though, at level twenty-nine, I'm unlikely to see most of the new content, I'm very keen to find out what the revamped Saint's Haven looks like.

Maybe I'll even try the new Assassin class. I do have fourteen of my sixteen character slots still available, after all..

Look, Ma! Both Hands!

It's possible, although I don't really think it's likely, that you might remember me saying earlier this week, that I'd bought an XBox-style gamepad. Ostensibly it was because my swerve away from all-mmos-all-the-time to more of a mixed gaming economy had me running into more and more games that support keyboard and mouse grudgingly at best. That was my excuse, anyway, although the real reason was the Prime sale was on and I really wanted to buy something... anything... fun because it sometimes seems like all I ever buy on Amazon are necessities.

The game that prompted my purchase was Ikonei Island, which did indeed turn out to be even more enjoyable when played with a controller. Unfortunately, open beta ended the very next day, so I only got to play once, very briefly, using the superior control system. Grrr. Gnash.

Brevity aside, I enjoyed the experience so much I started looking around for other games to try with the pad. I was under the impression I had quite a few but once I started looking, I couldn't find any. Hardly surprising, really. Most of the games I've bought or played over the last year or two have been some variation of point&click adventure, walking simulator or visual novel, none of which seems especially suited to the controller, although I'm sure there are plenty that use it anyway.

As for my staple diet, mmorpgs, of late, I've rather fallen off that wagon. I think I must have played fewer hours per week these last few months than at any time since the turn of the millennium, although that has more to do with external factors (New dog plus extended run of great spring/summer weather.) than any loss of interest or affection for the genre.

Mmorpgs, being very much a PC genre by historical development, tend not to be optimized for or even playable with gamepads but there are some notable exceptions. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what they were off the top of my head so I had to do a bit of googling.

Among many others, I came across this list, which looked good, even though I didn't find it all that helpful or indeed trustworthy, what with Tera (Closed down) and Valiance (Not yet up.) along with a few titles that aren't mmos at all, let alone mmorpgs, plus a bunch I'd never heard of (Steambirds Alliance, anyone? KurtzPel?) Still, it was somewhere to start.

I thought I'd make a shortlist of mmorpgs with controller support that I a) already know b) have played and enjoyed and c) still have installed. From the two dozen on the list, that left four - five if you include another from the concluding section, headed "Best MMORPG with Controller Support", in which they bizarrely boil the choice down to four games, two of which they haven't even bothered to include in the main part of the article.

The games I ended up with were

• DC Universe Online
• Dragon Nest
• Final Fantasy XIV
• Lost Ark
• Elder Scrolls Online

I also considered Final Fantasy XI, a game I once tried very hard to enjoy despite it having hands-down the worst mouse/keyboard controls of any game ever. I wasn't going to subscribe just to give the controller a test run, though, and sadly, even after all this time there is no free-to-play option, although it does have a fourteen-day free trial. 

AThere's another consideration. After more than a decade I'm still traumatised from my struggles with Square Enix's infamous PlayOnline registration process. I don't think I want to go through all that again just for an hour or two's play and a blog post. Never say never, though...

ArcheAge might be a possibility in that I liked it quite a bit but it also played really well with keyboard and mouse. Like any other mmorpg, in fact. There doesn't seem a lot of point in re-installing a game that almost certainly won't feel more enjoyable on a gamepad than if I just played it in the regular way. If I want to mess around with something like that, I think Guild Wars 2 has some kind of controller support.

Trove was another theoretical possibility but I never really got on with Trove. I can't say I want to try again. For the purposes of the experiment, five games ought to be plenty, anyway, and it's fair to say that, while I've enjoyed playing all of them, four out of the five do feel like they weren't originally intended to be played on PC. There's a reasonable chance my experience might be improved with a controller.

The exception would be FFXIV, which I always felt played immaculately with traditional PC controls, but I've heard that it's also the best-implemented of all mmorpgs when it comes to gamepad support. Comba did feel a little off, now I come to think of it.... That might well feel a little smoother and more natural with a gamepad. Worth a try, anyway.

DCUO is a game I've always loved despite the control system clearly being designed for consoles. I would have made it my first stop, only I couldn't remember where it was. I haven't played since my hard drives all swapped themselves around and the icon has gone from my desktop. Obviously I could have gone looking for it but all the rest were there, staring at me, so DCUO shuffled off to the back of the line. 

It'd be funny if you could understand it.

 

I began with Dragon Nest. Things did not go well. 

I may have mentioned before just how many versions of Dragon Nest there are. I have played more than half a dozen of them over the years, including the original (Just called Dragon Nest although maybe we should call it Dragon Nest Classic now), Dragon Nest EU, Dragon Nest Oracle, Dragon Nest Origins, Dragon Nest 2019 and Dragon Nest Worlds. 

I have all of those except Classic still installed although Worlds is actually the mobile title and it recently closed down (Wipe away those tears! There's a Dragon Nest Worlds 2 on the way.). The icon on my desktop turned out to be for Dragon Nest 2019, which in turn turned out to be what I'd named the foder for Dragon Nest NA.

DNNA has an excellent opening cut scene with barely comprehensible captions but what the game itself is like I can't tell you because once you get past that it's solidly IP blocked. As the website explains, they only have the USA, Canadian and Oceanic rights. 

The EU servers closed a while back, when whoever it was that had them lost the rights and no-one else wanted to take over. Still, I was fairly sure there was some UK-accessible iteration of Dragon Nest still out there and I was right: Dragon Nest Origins.

I got that patched up, which didn't take too long. My old login details worked and it was wonderful to reacquaint myself with my highest-level DN character, Dora. I'd forgotten how far I'd gotten with her. She's level 27 (Out of seventy, I think.)

I fiddled about looking for the controller options but when I found them they were horrifically complicated, to the point where I closed the window in terror. I was so shocked I didn't even think to take a screenshot. I'd log in and do it now but I can't because Zenimax won't let me. Explanation follows.

I tried using the controller without the instructions. Some things were intuitive - movement, speaking to NPCs, jumping... Others weren't - scrolling through lists, selecting options, turning around.... I'm going to have to take a proper look at the enormous list of commands before I try and do anything more challenging than walk around town but since I always found DN fairly comfortable to play with the regular PC controls, I can't really summon up the willpower just now.

Proof of Concept

On to the next, which for entirely arbitrary reasons, I decided should be ESO. Big mistake. 

I knew there'd be some updating to do. It's been a while since I last played. I started patching at around midday and the damn thing was still going until about twenty minutes ago. It's nearly half-past six! 

For some reason the patcher kept downloading massive multi-gigabyte files and installing them even though I already had over 70GB of files in the folder. When I eventually checked the size of the finished installation it wasn't much more than 10GB larger even though it seemed like ten times that had to have come down the pipe.

Not only that but for a couple of hours the patching, installing and verifying was so intense it made my entire PC come close to locking up. I couldn't do anything more taxing than look at phones on Amazon and even that was a struggle. 

Eventually I went to lunch, leaving the patcher running, hoping it would fniish while I was gone. I came back an hour and a half later, just in time to see the PC shut down and restart. Whether that was something demanded by the patching process or the poor thing had just given up and rolled over I couldn't tell.

Another couple of hours later and the PLAY button is finally ready to click. I suppose I'd better go give it a try. It's a lot of work for a game I don't even care for al that much but I've started so I guess I'll finish.

Whatever happens when I get in is going to have to wait for another post so I guess this is going to turn into a series whether I want it to or not. I hope the rest of the entries end up a lot more interesting than this one but I have a worrying feeling they won't. There's only so many ways you can say "I tried it but I didn't much like it and now I feel like I've wasted my day".

Take My Money

With Valheim on hiatus pending the Hearth and Home update, my daily gaming round these days mostly consists of Guild Wars 2, EverQuest II and Dragon Nest Origins. I've pushed further into the Dragon Nest world (not to be confused with World of Dragon Nest, which is another game entirely) than I've ever gone before. 

Dora is closing in on level 29. Progress seems comfortable. An enjoyable two-hour session might get me one level in the mid-20s. Something doesn't add up, though. According to the website, xp has been set at three times the regular rate and the estimated leveling time from creation to cap should be no more than ten to twelve hours.

I'm probably doing something wrong. I usually am. There's a lot about the game I don't understand. Most of it, in fact. Even though I've played Dragon Nest on and off for over a decade it's never been anything I've taken very seriously. Or at all seriously.

Any mmorpg played hyper-casually, in fits and starts, is going to remain opaque but Dragon Nest, being both somewhat silly and highly hyper-kinetic, is probably easier to underestimate than most. I've tended to find it quite engaging enough just running around blowing things up with my unfeasibly large gun and chortling at the badly-translated quest dialog without trying to figure out how to play properly.

Thinking back, that approach did begin to falter last time I got into the twenties. It's not so easy to mow through everything when most of your gear hasn't seen an upgrade for a dozen levels. The game gradually introduces more and more systems and options, various kinds of crafting, different difficulty levels, all kinds of special events and instances, until the time comes when you really do have to stop and take some time to work out just what the heck is going on. Or give up.

Last time this happened the decision was taken out of my hands. Before I could re-adjust my attitude the game underwent one of its periodic shifts of ownership and shook me off like a flea from a dog. I'm uncomfortably aware of the equally perilous situation I find myself in now, playing on a server of unknown provenance and unknowable security.

Still, play I do and learn I must, if I'm to progress. The first step was to think about getting some better gear and the second was to take my first look at the broker. It's a nice, straightforward post-and-sell system, very similar to EQII's. There were some good upgrades there for a few gold each so I bought a new offhand weapon and some gloves. Orange quality ("Epic" if you prefer). Never seen any before.

Buying gear will only get you so far in any mmorpg. It's no use if you don't go out and use it. The web page Guide advises "For Leveling we would recommend doing the main quest, since the Main Quest has increased Exp and Gold." Yep. Doing that. And I've taken on board the warning that "You should also pick up Side Quests, otherwise you will have to grind dungeons at some point to continue the Main Quest." 

I would love to see this game translated properly.

I haven't, however, been following the suggestion that "Taking the Board Quest close to a dungeon entrance, if the dungeons offers one, is also a good idea". I tried it but I got muddled so I stopped. Dragon Nest Origins operates a recursive structure of instances, where towns, acting as quest hubs, lead to staging points, also acting as quest hubs, which lead to instances and dungeons that themselves splinter off to others inside them. 

In all my time playing I'd never figured out how all this works in detail. I'd never needed to. I just went somewhere, killed some monsters, came back. Yesterday I finally ran into a problem with that approach.

I've been taking the quests but I can't say I've been finishing them. There are a generous forty pages in DNO's quest journal but yesterday I found I'd filled them all. Rather than renege on promises made I went back to the beginning and began to clear them all out. Only first I had to be sure I was going to the right place. 

The quest markers took me from the city to the staging area to the correct instance but after that I had to learn to check the name of the exact dungeon and find the drop-down list of quests to make sure mine were included. It's been there in front of me all these years and yet somehow I never noticed. It makes a surprising amount of difference, knowing where you're supposed to be going and then using that knowledge to make sure you do actually go there. Who'd have guessed?

Once inside, clearing out old quests went quickly. Dragon Nest is old school in its approach to power. As you level up your character gets stronger while your opponents don't. It was very pleasant for a while to go back and slaughter my way through dungeons far below my level. 

So much of it has to be genuinely funny in the original. This quest revolves around a spoiled NPC with delusions of grandeur. The noise pollution in question is her trying to play dark elf music from sheet music she had me steal from them.

Only I kept getting more quests. I'd go back and hand one in and come away with two. My journal emptied then filled. And it seems the game's not quite as old school as I thought. The new quests, often as not, even though they took me to places I imagined I'd outgrown, came in at my level or thereabouts. It seems my assumptions on that were ill-founded too, like so much else I thought I knew about the game.

And don't get me started on crafting. There's heraldry and enhancement and plates and codes and I have only the shakiest grasp of how any of that works. Then, when you get to nineteen or twenty and travel to the capital, Saint Haven, there's cooking and fishing and farming and a whole new channel with different storage and currencies...

Speaking of currencies, shall we mention the cash shop? Yes, let's. Dragon Nest, the commercial version, has one of the better cash shops I've seen. It's stuffed with very nice things to buy. There are mounts and pets and dozens and dozens of fancy costumes. You can see them all in the display window with your character modelling them and rarely have I felt so tempted to get out my credit card and treat myself.

There's practical stuff, too. Of course there is. DNO isn't terrible about storage space. You get an adequate amount for free. I always want more, though, and looking at tab after tab of locked slots is hard. I'm playing regularly. It's costing me nothing. I'd be willing to drop a few dollars for some bags and maybe a pet and something snazzy to wear around town.

At least he's not a clown

Except I can't. Or maybe I can but I don't know how. As a private server operating on donations there is, rightly, no way to pay real money for in-game currency. And even if there was I certainly wouldn't be handing out my credit card details to whoever's running this thing.

The cash shop is there, though. Tantalizing me. Taunting me. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to use it. I pressed every button on the UI. Nothing. 

Except the button for buying cash did do something. It took me to the website. I couldn't buy anything there but I learned that  "Cash stuff is obtainable ingame, by doing the circus. You can get a total of 196 Coupons alone and 256 a week, when in a Party of 4. Those Coupons can be exchanged for cash items."

Oh. The circus. That thing I've been ignoring since I first saw it many years ago. Why have I been ignoring it? Good question. I don't like circuses? Nope. Not that. Okay, I have no idea. I just never really thought about it. I'm sensing a pattern here...

I spoke to the ringmaster. I went to the circus. It turned out to be several instances with a lot of fighting. I killed three hundred Sparta goblins. That got me six coupons. I did it again. Then I found a bunch of monsters hiding in another instance and killed them, too. After about twenty minutes I had sixteen coupons. I went back to the ringmaster to see what I could buy. Nothing worth having. Nothing I wanted. Definitely no hedgehogs.

I want that hedgehog! And those bunny ears!

As far as I can tell the "Cash stuff" in that system is a) completely different from the commercial cash shop and b) linked to which zone you enter the circus from. So far I can't even get the "Cash Items" tab to come up. I would bet I need to be about level 40 and talking to the ringmaster in in the final hub village for that.

I'd probably forget about it only in Saint Haven, where everyone hangs out, I can see people parading around, dressed as if they're about to enter the costume parade at Comicon, riding exotic mounts, with even more exotic pets at their heels. There's a way to get these things. I just don't know what it is.

I don't know yet. I will find out. If I have to join the sodding Discord and ask, I will find out! I shall have my giant, pink hedgehog or I'll know the reason why! Or, I guess, I won't.  Know the reason why, that is. That's kind of the problem.

On the upside, I did find out how to take screenshots with the UI off. Dragon Nest is a beautiful game and as I level up I'm getting to see new and ever more spectacular locations. Trying to position the camera just so to get shots I could crop for the blog was getting old so I googled "Dragon Nest Hide UI". That got me some helpful information that turned out to be completely wrong.

Everybody jump!

It was helpful because it started me looking at the Gestures, those little icons you can slot to your hot bar and press to make your character perform various emotes. I'm not much of an emote person. I don't use them a lot in any game. I had noticed the gestures existed but I'd never bothered to play around with them.

Supposedly there was a "Selfie" gesture that would hide the UI and take a screenshot. No there isn't. In some version of Dragon Nest, maybe. Not in the one I'm playing. There is a Gesture with the same icon but it does nothing at all. There's also one called Jump Photo. That one makes you leap into the air but it doesn't take a screenshot of you doing it. 

While I was researching all this, however, I happened to notice someone on a thread explaining that the way you got your UI back after you'd taken a selfie was by pressing Ctr-I-PrtScr all at once. If that was a toggle...

It is a toggle! It's also a blindingly awkward combo but who cares? It works! Now I can take all the fullscreen shots I want. And I looked at all the Gestures and there are some great ones. I'll be able to take some amazing shots of Dora in all kinds of hilarious poses in front of gorgeous backdrops with no visual clutter.

I just have to work out how to get her something more impressive to pose in than shorts and a waistcoat. Plus she needs a pony. And a hedgehog.

Everyone needs a pony and a hedgehog. If that's not the law it damn well ought to be. I guess I'd better find a way to make it happen.

Put It In Books

Think back to when Warhammer: Age of Reckoning was set to become the biggest mmorpg the western market had ever seen. As well as Public Quests and bears that remembered who'd killed them (or something like that) one of the many innovations the game claimed to be bringing to the genre was a virtual book that would keep a record of everything you'd done.

I'm not at all sure the Tome of Knowledge would have been the first such in-game archive. Vanguard, for example, a game which launched a year and a half before WAR, had a wonderful feature that automatically recorded significant events like the first time you entered a new area or discovered a new item. The game took a screenshot when something it considered to be significant happened and fixed it neatly in a scrapbook you could open and enjoy whenever you wanted to look back on your journey so far. 

There may very well have been others before that but even if the Tome wasn't the first I don't think there's much doubt it was the most extensive. Had WAR gone on to be the WoW Killer so many hoped and believed it would be, we'd probably see vast encyclopedias dragging load times down to a crawl in every mmorpg.

 

Sadly, WAR's assault on Blizzard's bastion turned out to be something of a disaster. When the last Bright Wizard had fizzled out and the final goblin gone to meet the great Squig Herder in the sky, other developers quietly appropriated those few of WAR's innovations they could see a use for and left the rest to rot. No-one picked up the Tome.

Which is a shame. I really love in-game journals and albums. I can't see why they're so often relegated to minor sub-systems where few notice them, far less appreciate their many fine qualities.

It's different in single-player games, particularly those in the adventure or visual novel genres. There, where the audience is presumed to be predisposed to reading reams of text and staring fixedly at static images, all kinds of notebooks, albums and journals are the norm. 

Or they have been. I have noticed, of late, a regrettable tendency for such games to adopt a more contemporary solution: mobile phones, laptops, tablets and the like. It makes sense when the setting is a time roughly analagous to our own, of course, and in games set in the (inevitably dystopian and/or cyberpunk) future it would be perverse to have the protagonist record their findings in longhand.

In those games, the medium is less important than the message, anyway. Whatever the carrier device, the conceit is that the player-character is making a record of their thoughts, their theories and the clues and evidence they've uncovered. The journal may look beautiful but its primary function is practical, not aesthetic. 

Warhammer's Tome of Knowledge was intended to be highly functional as well as wonderfully decorative. The quest journal, a very specific sub-type of this kind of thing and one for which almost every rpg has to make some kind of accomodation, was, in WAR, merely one of the Tome's many  chapters. 

It's a long time since I played WAR. I can't remember whether I found the Tome a marvelous compendium of wonders or a bloody nuisance. I seem to recall it might have been a bit of both. Over the past couple of weeks, though, I've stumbled across several much less ambitious efforts that I've found wholly delightful.

The Overseer systems in both EverQuest and EverQuest II include something not dissimilar to a virtual cabinet of collectible cards. I spotted the feature in EQ right at the start but it's taken me more than a year to notice the Agent Collection tab in EQII. Or, perhaps I should say, I noticed it long before that but only recently did it occur to me to click on it to see what was in there.

Inside I found nothing I hadn't seen before. Just the same pictures of the agents and the same descriptive text. The difference is purely one of magnitude: the functional icons are almost too small to make out and the tool-tip versions aren't all that much bigger but in the Agent Collection tab they're huge. And they look great.

I love illustration. I was thinking about it after I posted about Scarlet Hollow yesterday. I was wondering just why it is I enjoy games of that kind so much, even when the story might not be anything I haven't read before and the gameplay might be routine (Scarlet Hollow, I should make clear, is both well-written and fun to play). 

The answer is very simple: it's the pictures. It hadn't really struck me before but I genuinely do have a sensual reaction to line illustration that's akin to those I get from eating or drinking or listening to music. It's an almost synesthetic reaction. I can almost, in some indefinable way, feel the textures. 

Or it feels like I can feel them. I'm not a genuine synesthete. I don't see colors when I hear sounds or taste flavors when I touch surfaces. All the same, line art does something to my brain that has an effect analogous to ASMR.

Come to think of it, perhaps it is ASMR. It's easy to forget that phenomenon extends to visual as well as auditory stimuli. Regular ASMR videos and recordings do work on me but not as strongly as they reportedly do on others. 

The sensations I get from line art are milder but unmistakable. Wikipedia describes it as ""the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin"". I don't often get the tingling just from looking at line art but it has happened. The low-grade euphoria, though, that I get often.

By no means all in-game albums produce those kind of effects. It's a bonus if they do. I don't need a quasi-synaesthetic reaction to enjoy them. I almost always enjoy them.

Dragon Nest Origins uses an album to record the way NPCs feel about the player-character. It's a faction list. It could just be a column of names and numbers, the way it is in so many other games with reputation systems. But it isn't.

Someone took the trouble not just to frame a little portrait of every character you can bribe or flatter into liking you but to work up a whole lot of personal details about each of them. Not the kind of details you might expect to find in a game, like their stats or skills. Nothing so mundane.

I think these will turn to color when you reach a certain percentage of favor.

 

Or, perhaps I ought to say, something much more mundane. Deliciously so. Their age, star sign, weight, height and, most bizarrely of all, blood type. Has any other mmorpg ever made a point of revealing an NPC's blood type? I very much doubt it.

As well as the basic facts of life there are entries for Likes and Dislikes that wouldn't look out of place in a 1970s teen magazine. Lady Kayleen likes "The color red, tangy fragrances" and dislikes "Clerics, dragon followers, annoyances". Don't you feel like you know her, now?

 

It seems to me these kind of albums and journals could easily be spun up into something a lot more central, even integral. to gameplay. I'd be far more likely to devote time and effort to the countless collections and achievements that most mmorpgs pump out as a cheap form of content if I could browse my the results in a heavily-illustrated catalog, preferably with extensive curatorial notes.

And how about pets and mounts? Couldn't they all come with breeding histories and certificates and, of course, portraits? There's a long, rich history of animal portraiture, after all. We already get lists of all these things, sometimes with thumbnails. All it would take is some thought to turn them into virtual keepsakes or even minor works of art.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing Raph Koster has in mind when he talks of "Supporting a range of ways to play." If so, I wish he'd get on and make a game. Unfortunately, I doubt a plethora of gorgeously designed and lavishly illustrated virtual scrapbooks is what he has in mind.

It's what I'd like, though. I just don't expect to get it.