Ride Your Pony - The Equinox Homecoming Demo

Apologies for the expected interruption to normal posting. Predictable real life issues. Situation likely to continue, at least for a while.

Without that, Monday would have seen a post about which demos I'd chosen for the current Steam Next Fest. Unfortunately, as yet, I haven't picked any. I did have a browse through the list yesterday on Tuesday (This post having been delayed a further day due to more hospital visiting.) but I was on my laptop, sitting in a side-room at the hospital as I waited for my mother to go through various scans, so it was a bit hard to concentrate.

Fortunately for the blog, on Monday I did manage to spend some time with a demo that came out just before Next Fest, the intriguing "horse mystery" mmorpg Equinox Homecoming. I didn't quite finish the demo but Steam says I played for 86 minutes, which certainly seems like enough to form some kind of judgment.

And that judgment, to pre-empt the entire post, would be largely favorable. I really enjoyed my hour and almost-a-half with the game, which ran well, looked good and seemed like a lot of fun, at least as far as it went, which wasn't all that far.

The demo would appear to be the opening of the game, the tutorial mostly, although there doesn't seem to be anything to stop you just riding around the island, exploring, if you want. I didn't because I was mostly following the quest prompts but I did get lost a few times, wandering through the woods and it all looked very pretty.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start where all good MMORPGs begin, with character creation. It's fairly basic as these things go. You pick a feature from a list rather than fiddle with an infinite number of sliders. But that's fine. 

 

More than fine, actually. I was able to get a character I felt comfortable with very easily. Sliders are overrated in my opinion, especially in games where you effectively spend 95% of your time staring at the back of your character's head, although to be fair to this one, you get to see plenty of your character's face in the many cut scenes.

Once you've settled on your character's appearance and given them a name, you need to do the same for your horse. The equine appearance options are more limited but there's still a good choice. Assuming you care about what your horse looks like, of course, which it's probably safe to assume most people laying down £25 for the full game definitely will.

And so to the game itself, where one of the oddest things is that the name you gave your character never gets used in the game itself. I named my character Flora and the avatar I was looking at was definitely the one I made but every dialog, voice and text, called her Alex.

That would be fine if it was an RPG but it doesn't make a lot of sense for an MMO. It looks as though your personalized character identity applies to you as a player, in chat and when grouping (Assuming there is grouping - I didn't see or do any.) but all the player-characters are the same person for narrative purposes.

Can that be right? It does seem weird. I guess I ought to go go into the game and check... Nope. That's not right, either. It might be what happens from someone else's perspective - no-one spoke in general chat while I was testing it - but when I spoke, whatever I said was attributed to the generic "You". 

Minor point, perhaps, but it does bring up the question of why Equinox Homecoming needs to be an MMORPG in the first place. The developers are adamant that's what it is, to the point where they removed the "single player" tag from the Steam description to avoid confusion.

 

Except it feels a lot more like a single-player game in the demo. It has a central narrative driven by quests that focus entirely on Alex, as would be typical of a solo RPG. There's no indication you can group up for these and if you could, it would make no sense. Everyone would be the same person.

In other MMOs that might not matter so much. Grouping would revolve around fighting enemies that need  more than one person to defeat. Only there's no combat in this game, none at all. 

Unless there are multi-person puzzles, like the ones some games have where require several people to stand on separate pressure-plates at the same time, there wouldn't be any need to group up with other players.

There are lots of races but, in the demo at least, they're all time trials. You don't compete directly with other players, just with yourself or to climb the leader board. There are guilds called Riding Clubs but what they do I have no idea. The multiplayer element to the game seems nominal at best. 

I just did a little bit of mild research on all of the above points and it seems most have been contentious for a while. There are Steam threads questioning the rationale behind the naming convention and wondering if and why the game is an MMORPG. 

The devs who have answered have mostly offered some variation on "Because that's how it is." There's even a suggestion from a developer that anyone who wants to play the game as a single-player game can just select an empty server and play on their own, although they don't guarantee there will always be empty servers. It makes me wonder why they have so many servers in the first place if some of them are always empty.

I've side-tracked myself a little, focusing on these odd inconsistencies, which makes it sound as though I didn't enjoy my time with the demo. The opposite is true. I thought the world looked very attractive and felt like it would be a pleasure to explore, albeit not so much of a pleasure as to make me go and do that right away. 

 

I found the plot interesting, the writing engaging, the mechanics solid and the gameplay entertaining. I also thought the voice acting was good. Naturalistic. Convincing. Not overdone. 

The plot, which as many reviews on Steam make a point of mentioning, is unusual for a horse game and probably not suitable for a very young audience, involves the central character, Alex, as she returns to the island where she grew up to try and find out what could have happened to her eccentric mother, now missing for reasons unknown. 

Alex, who I would guess to be in her very late teens or possibly her very early twenties, left after a blow-out with her mom over the bizarre way they'd been living. Inconveniently, Alex runs out the door right at the moment when her mother is offering to tell her everything, which at least alerts us to the fact that there's something to be told. 

Alex hasn't been back since. Until now. Oh, and let's not forget  a girl has been found dead in the woods and a bunch of wild animals have been killed and mutilated, too. It's a mystery, as Toyah would say, and a spooky, disturbing one, too. It's lucky Alex's mom trained her in survival techniques by leaving her alone in the woods overnight when she was ten years old...

So, this is not exactly a cosy game where you look after your horse and ride around in some beautiful countryside, although it is that too. You need to groom and feed and care for your horse, which is how your horse levels up, because this is an MMORPG for reasons, so of course there are levels. 

Also, you want to look after your horse, don't you? Otherwise why are you even here?

 

Except you don't have to look after your horse at all. Or rather, you do if you want your horse to level up but the game tells you not to worry if you forget or can't be bothered because not looking after your horse has no gameplay implications. Again, weird design choice.

It's clear even from the demo that Equinox Homecoming incorporates many of the standard tropes of the genre. The MMO genre, that is. I wouldn't know what the tropes of the horse riding genre would be. 

There are plenty of NPCs and as usual they'd like you to go do the little jobs they don't have time for, mostly in a  quid pro quo fashion, where they give you goods or services you can't afford because you seem to have come home from wherever it is you ran away to with no money. Most of those same NPCs also collect something for some reason and they're keen for you to find lots of whatever it is they're after and bring it to them for some benefit as yet undisclosed, since I didn't do it.

That employs the standard "pick stuff up off the ground" mechanic we're all familiar with - plants, flowers, feathers, all the regular litter. It leads me to suspect there may also be crafting but I didn't see any sign of it in the demo. 

Once you have your horse (A loaner from your friend.) and have everything you need (Like a saddle.) and the game has made sure you know how to stay on and turn corners without falling off, it's on with the mystery. Investigation, for me at least, mostly involved following prompts. It seemed very linear but it is only the tutorial phase so I wouldn't read too much into that.

There's quite a sizeable town on the island, which I found it a lot easier to explore on foot rather than on horseback. It looked pretty good to me but there are plenty of complaints in the reviews of the demo on Steam that claim the game is made up of standard UE5 assets. Even if that's true, they've been employed effectively enough, so I don't quite get what the objection would be.

 

There are also complaints that the game uses generative AI, something the developers have categorically refuted. Accusing games of using AI is becoming a problem, not least because allegations often seem to rely on nothing more than someone thinking an image looks like it was done by AI. There was plenty of bad art in games before generative AI was ever thought of and plenty of humans couldn't agree on whether art made by other humans was any good or not anyway, so saying something is "obviously AI" isn't really a convincing argument.

More concerning is the announcement, flagged on the opening splash screen of the demo, that the game is leaving Early Access and launching for real in barely a week's time, on 5 March. In EA, Equinox Homecoming has a Very Positive rating on Steam from over 700 reviews (The demo, separately rated, is Mixed but from just twenty-five.) but many of those positive reviews specifically talk about the game being "promising", having "potential" or being in a good state "for an Early Access title".

From what I've seen in the demo, the game would appear to be mostly complete and free of major bugs but as I said at the start, the demo isn't much more than the tutorial. Tutorials and the first few hours of MMORPGs are frequently far more polished than the rest of the game at launch. I have no way of knowing if that's the case here and neither will anyone else who plays the demo.

With that caveat, if the full release lives up to the demo and if the developer, Blue Scarab Entertainment, continues to add content and update the game in the manner of an MMORPG, then it might be a pretty good game. 

Whether it will be a pretty good MMORPG is another matter. I still can't really see why it needs to be one at all.   

Coming In In All Directions...

Considering how badly most new MMORPGs seem to do when they hit Early Access or even launch, it's surprising how many keep getting made. Sometimes it feels like there are more of the things coming out now than back in the heat of the boom after World of Warcraft changed the rules. Or, rather, after a lot of people mistakenly believed it had.

For a long time, I made it my business at least to take a look at every new entry to the genre I heard about. I was willing - happy, even - to go to a good deal of trouble just to get my hands on any new MMORPG. I'd apply for testing, fill out applications, make accounts, download launchers and generally do whatever was necessary to get onto the servers. I even paid money, sometimes.

That behavior pre-dated my entry into into blogging by some years so I couldn't even claim, as I went on to say many times later on, that my real motivation was to have something new to write about. No, I just wanted to try out every possible variation on the already well-established format, not so much in the hope of finding something different as in getting another fix of the familiar.

I'm not sure when that urge started to fade but it's been quite a while since I felt the need to grab onto any and every proto-MMORPG that stumbles into open alpha, as if to miss even one would be some kind of sin of omission. I think my first sign of recovery was an increasing reluctance to fill out any more damn forms or make any more accounts.

These days, if getting a look at a new game requires anything more from me than an email address, chances are I'm going to pass. It has to be something I'm really excited about (Looking at you, Neverness to Everness. Not that you ever look back at me...) to make me start handing out personal details and completing questionnaires.

There's certainly no shortage of options, though. I must have skipped a dozen new MMORPGs in the last year alone. It's like a cult. Who are they all supposed to be for? Why do developers insist on making them? 

 

I can't answer that but I can say that the ones that stand out are the handful of exceptions, the oddities aimed at a very specific audience rather than some notional, generic-fantasy-loving demographic that never seems to turn up when the doors open. Even more common but significantly more likely to be successful are the MMO-adjacent survival or creature-catcher knock-offs that never seem to stop coming. 

There's another of those on the way that I'll get to, briefly, later on. First, though, something genuinely original, although not necessarily any more likely to find an audience of any significant size.  

I posted about the "horse mystery" game, Equinox Homecoming, back in May of last year, when it was just going into Early Access on Steam. It ticked all the boxes necessary to make me think it might be worth a look. 

The game has a very unusual and original, not to say bizarre, premise: you ride around the countryside on horseback, solving mysteries like you're in some YA novel from the 1970s. And when you're done you go back to the stable and tend to your horse.

Looking back at that post, apparently I was willing to spend $25 for the privilege of playing a buggy, content-lite version of a game clearly not meant for me. The only thing that stopped me were the minimum specs, which looked like they were out of my reach.

Luckily for me, I've upgraded my PC since then and now there's a demo, which I'm downloading as I type, which means I can take a look for free. The demo's been released as part of the Steam Horse Fest, which is running from now right through until Next Fest takes over on the 23rd.

Did you know there was a Steam Horse Fest? I bet you didn't. (Unless your name is Aywren, in which case you're most probably putting a post together about it right now.) Steam runs an almost never-ending series of events promoting various genres and types of games, almost none of which ever seem to get a mention on any of the gaming sites I follow. Next Fest is very much the exception.

Speaking of Next Fest, it looks as if the upcoming Winter edition (It is Winter, isn't it? They're not going to pretend February is Spring, are they?) looks like it's going to be a good one for MMO fans. I've already spotted a few new-to-me MMORPGs, or games that might at least be genre-adjacent, that either have demos available or will, when the festival begins.

Probably the most interesting is Outbound, a multiplayer "cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future" in which you roam around in what looks suspiciously like a VW Microbus, solving mysteries and exposing fake ghosts scavenging materials to pimp your retro ride. I'd like me some of that action.

Less interesting to me but maybe of interest to someone reading this is the creature-catching survival game Guardians of the Wild Sky. It looks slick, I'll say that for it. I'll probably skip that one, just like I already skipped the solo (Not solo player - solo developer.) Faehnor Online. 

I took a look at that last one after I read about it on MassivelyOP today. Well, I took a look at the screenshots on the Steam Store page, anyway. 

A few years ago I'd have downloaded it without a second thought but this time I read the reviews and decided life's too short, especially at my age. It doesn't look at all bad for a game in early development with just one person working on it but what would be the point? I'm never going to play it and it's not going to be anything I haven't seen before.

Then again, it is in French, which is new. It also has some form of PvP that's not explained on the Store page. I can read French well enough but I don't fancy my chances of following French voice acting, which apparently the game has, particularly when someone is trying to hack my head off. (Edit - Apparently there is  now also a PVE server...)

How it can be fully voiced with just one developer is a curious question, too. Does he do all the voices himself? That would actually make me a bit more interested. But no. I'll still pass.

As for Next Fest, I'm really looking forward to It. I always enjoy it but this time I'm really in the mood for some video-game tapas. Should make for a nice palate-cleanser after my heavy diet of BG3. I will try the MMORPGs I've mentioned but MMO demos always take far longer than any other genre so if any more  turn up I might have to pass. 

Or I might not be able to resist. It's a one day at a time recovery I'm enjoying, not a full cure. A relapse is always on the cards. 

Horse Latitudes

I had a great plan for today's post.... okay, a good plan... well, a plan, anyway. I was going to stump up my $25 (£20.99) for the weird horse-mystery MMORPG Equinox: Homecoming. It's going into Early Access on Steam today. Then I was going to play it for a couple of hours and write a First Impressions piece. Those are always fun and easy to do.

It seemed like a good idea to buy the thing anyway, not only because of the blogging opportunities it offers, always a major consideration these days, when I'm writing about games a lot more than I really play them, (And just how long can that go on, eh? Eh??) but because of that too-good-to-be true "Lifetime Subscription With Every Early Access Purchase" offer. 

As a blogger, even if the game tanks, $25 would be a fair price to pay, just to there for the drama. Lots to write about in a crash-and-burn. And if it turns into a success, $25 for permanent subscription-level perks is an insane bargain. Anything in-between would just be par for the course for an EA buy-in so it seemed like a no-lose scenario.

I was all set to Add To Cart when something caught my eye:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
Processor: i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8 Core
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce RTX 2070
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 20 GB available space

Wait? What? i9?

This is going to sound very strange to a lot of people reading this, I know, but I can't recall ever even seeing a spec for a game I've been interested in that had an i9 requirement as a minimum. In fact, and you'll laugh when you hear this, I wasn't aware there was an i9.

I think the highest I've noticed before was i7. My PC runs on an i5. 

I have been looking at upgrades, although only because my desktop, which is nine (!) years old, isn't eligible for Windows 11 so I'm going to have to make some kind of decision about what that means in a few months, when Microsoft switch off support for Windows 10. All I need to do to make it acceptable, though, is to enable Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 in the BIOS, which I could do quite easily, and swap the CPU for one on MS's approved list.

The thing is, it's not the i-number that's the issue there. My laptop, which is already running W11, has an i5. In fact, Windows 11 runs on an i3. There are plenty of them on the Approved list. So, when I've been looking at possible processor upgrades, I haven't been thinking about how much more powerful they are, or how much newer; only how cheap. And there are plenty of relatively cheap CPUs that Windows 11 approves of.

Then there's the question of functionality, aka "if it ain't broke...". The reason my PC is nine years old, by far the longest I've ever gone without buying a new box, is that it runs everything I'm interested in without any noticeable problems. 

I have upgraded it a few times. Most recently, I doubled the Ram a  few years back. Still only 16GB, which I realize is nothing these days, but more than adequate for anything I'm asking it to do. 

I also bought a decent video card (GeForce RTX4070) in the summer of 2023, which made a big difference to my gaming then, although I'm so used to it now I don't think about it any more. I've been doing a lot of video editing recently and that's been painless and comfortable. I haven't run into any games I wanted to play but couldn't up to now. Other than the W11 issue, there hasn't seemed  to be any point thinking about further upgrades, let alone replacing the whole machine.

I'm still not sure there is but even if I did decide to swap out the CPU, I'd only be looking at going up to an i7 because my motherboard, a Gigabyte z170 Gaming K3, can't accept anything higher. The incentive to upgrade isn't really there, either. I've looked into it before and the difference between my i5, which has always bench-marked as faster than expected, and the i7s I've considered isn't all that great. If you can't see the difference, what's the point?

If I did decide to go further than that, it would mean changing the motherboard and while I'm okay with a certain amount of fiddling about inside the case that's where I draw the line, so it would mean a new PC. And I am not about to buy a new PC just so I can play an Early Access game where I ride around on horseback solving mysteries.

I could just buy the game and try it to see if it runs anyway. It might. I've played a few games before, where my PC didn't meet minimum spec and they've worked fine. I've never refunded a Steam game but I believe you get a couple of hours grace. Plenty of time to see if it would run acceptably. Or at all.

So, I suppose I might do that. At the moment, though, I'm kind of disposed not to bother. It'd be nice to be in at the beginning but I'll lay odds Equinox:Homecoming will be in Early Access for a year or two so there's no hurry. Also, give it a few months and we'll all have a better idea of whether it's going to be worth our time or not.

Right now, I'm thinking more along the lines of whether I might want to replace my PC later in the year after all. Maybe the i9 minimum for the horse game is a straw in the wind. After all, that processor generation, for all that I didn't even know it existed, is itself about five years old now. If I'm going to carry on playing new games into my retirement, I guess I'll have to get a new machine eventually. Maybe now's the time.

No rush. No need for snap decisions. I might start looking, though. See what's around. Given the volatile nature of both the global economy right now and of computer hardware in general, it's always hard to know when is or isn't a good time to buy. It's always fun window-shopping though.

Finally, dragging my thoughts away from the personal, what does this i9 minimum spec mean for the game itself? According to Games Radar, Colin Cragg, CEO of Blue Scarab, the developer behind Equinox:Homecoming, is aiming for an audience of "horse girls", described evocatively by Ashley Bardhan, who wrote the piece, as

 "Graceless, American; rough hands, and breath that smells of apple pie – the stereotypical female horse enthusiast, or horse girl".

Cragg used to be CEO of Star Stable, the well-established long-running horse-based MMO (What? You didn't know there were more?). It's a successful game: "$35 million of recurring revenue every year". 

Star Stable, though, has much lower minimum specs than Equinox: Homecoming. My nine-year old PC would have no problems running it. In fact, even my laptop meets the requirements, integrated graphics and all. 

The interview and especially Ashley's commentary is full of entirely appropriate and very welcome observations about the need to address the "52% of the world population" currently being ignored by conventional AAA game design, while at the same time making them feel like they're being "catered to" and not infantalized: 

"characters say "fuck" like the teenagers they're meant to be, rather than speak in My Little Pony talking points about friendship and magic"

I'm not entirely sure all these points connect, exactly. I'm not a major My Little Pony fan but I never really thought of it as an IP that appealed much to teenagers in the first place, sweary or otherwise. And I don't believe either friendship or magic come pre-gendered. 

More importantly, I wonder how many Star Stable players have hardware capable of running Equinox:Homecoming? I don't and my ageing set-up generally falls around average in those Steam surveys, which I'm guessing are already somewhat biased towards both males and hobbyists.

I wish I could run it, though. The more I hear about the game, the more interesting it sounds. I look forward to reading someone else's First Impressions. Sadly, my own will have to wait, for now.

Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses Coming In In All Directions

At about half-past one this afternoon I decided to log in to Lord of the Rings Online to claim my free horse and whatever else Standing Stone was giving away out of embarassment after the 64-bit server debacle. As I type this, I still have no horse. It's ten past four and the damn thing hasn't patched yet.

It's not even as though I haven't updated recently. I did it when they announced the compensation package a couple of weeks ago, or at least I think I did. I can't remember if I actually logged in. Even if I didn't get that far, though, you wouldn't think it would take another two or three hours to get everything up to date.

What I'd been thinking of doing after I chose my horse was to ride around on it for a while, take a few screenshots and cobble some kind of post together from that. Now I don't imagine I'll have time. Even if the thing is done patching in, say, half an hour, which frankly I wouldn't bet on, by then it'll be time for tea and we have to go out after that to vote in the stupid election for the ridiculous regional mayor, that fantasy position one of the delusional administrations of recent times decided would make life in 21st Century Britain feel more like living in the Ruritania of their dreams. Or more likely their old nanny's dreams.

Okay, I suppose we don't have to vote. When the polling cards (Which no longer even do anything since they mandated photo-identitifcation at time of voting, so why they still print and post them is beyond me...) dropped through the letter-box, I said I had no intention of wasting my time on it. But Beryl needs a walk and she likes to go to the polling station because it means going somewhere she's been often enough to remember it but not so often it's well-known to her and that sort of thing gets her very excited, so I guess we may as well. Not to mention that, when you're of a certain age, voting becomes just something you do because it's time to do it, not because you want to or because you care about the result

That said, even though I have neither respect for nor interest in the office, know nothing about any of the candidates and feel confident whoever is elected will make no material difference to anything, I still have my tribal loyalties to enact. It's been quite a while since I was in the happy position of being able to cast a vote expectantly and excitedly in favor of a candidate or a party but I sure have cast plenty as spoilers against people and policies I wanted no part of, so why stop now?

That's five dense paragraphs about something completely irrelevant, not to say inappropriate, given the normal scope and range of this blog, and LotRO is still patching. I think it's past three hours now. I wonder if it stopped when I went to have a lie down after lunch?

I don't usually nap in the afternoons. I'm not that old. It's just that I've had really bad hay-fever this week and it's left me feeling unusually tired and sleepy in the day, mostly because it's made it hard to sleep at night when I'm supposed to.

I lay down and fell asleep for half an hour and then, when I woke up, I stayed there because there was a very good adaptation of H. G. Wells' Ann-Veronica on the radio, with Bill Nighy as Wells and I like both Wells' social histories and Nighy's soothing radio voice, so I stayed to listen to the whole thing. Akso because Beryl came in half way through and asked to get up on the bed and then went straight to sleep and I didn't want to disturb her.

Anyway, following our example, the PC had also gone to sleep when I came back in to check how the update was going (Actually it never occured to me it wouldn't have finished.) so I suppose patching might have been suspended when that happened. I'm not sure how it works. I'd lay odds no other game's patcher would give up so easily, though. The LotRO patcher seems happy to take any excuse not to let anyone into the game.

How do they get away with it? It has to be one of those situations where most people who play regularly are so inured to the iniquities of the software by now they don't even notice them. It's only people like me, who come and go, that complain about it. It's just as well they have a good game and a great IP or they'd have closed down years ago. And then someone would have put up an emulator, which I bet would have patched a damn sight faster, so maybe that's a mixed blessing.

I think I'm going to have to abandon any notion of posting about that horse for now. Or about the game, either. Maybe another day. Not tomorrow, though. I'm going to do a music post tomorrow, or that's the plan. You've been warned.

 

Since this was going to be a horse-related post, though, I might as well throw in something about that extremely odd horse-mystery MMORPG we heard about not so long ago, Equinox: Homecoming. When I posted about I said it was "in production" but it seems it was a lot further along than anyone knew. According to MassivelyOP it'll be playable to all in exactly a week from now, on 8 May.

It isn't exactly "launching" in the accepted meaning of the word. It's going into Early Access with a $25 buy-in. That upfront payment gets you just "eight to twelve hours gameplay" according to the article, which includes "the first act of its greater grim plot as well as multiplayer activities like races, riding clubs, and more".

It doesn't sound like a lot and I wouldn't have considered it but then it goes on to say the game, when it officially launches, will have a monthly subscription, but EA players can avoid it because the $25 pack comes with a lifetime subscription. The MassivelyOP piece is a bit confusing on that point but the game's Steam page makes it entirely clear: "Anyone who purchases the game during Early Access will get a lifetime subscription with no additional, future subscription costs."

I'm not crazy about virtual horses, either racing them or breeding them, but I do like the mystery element and the setting and twenty-five dollars isn't much of a risk. I very much doubt the game will have a sub, or if it does it won't have one for long, but it most probably will always have some sort of subscription-like perks that Lifetimers will get for free, so if anyone has any interest at all in playing, this seems like the time to pony up. (Can't believe I went there...)

If nothing else, since it's on Steam you'll at least be able to patch the blasted thing and log in in less than an entire afternoon, which is very much not the case with LotRO. It's been at it for about four hours now and it's still going...

Maps, Letters, Videos - It's A Friday Grab-Bag!

It's Friday. End of the working week. For some. Start of mine. Well, tomorrow is. Let's grab our bags and get started. No time to waste chatting.

It's Road Map Season!

Apparently. Everyone's doing them. Here's Pantheon's.

First impression? Ugly damn thing. It's only just beginning to occur to me that one of the reasons I've not gone with Pantheon the way I expected to is the aesthetic. I'm not talking about the once-controversial graphic makeover that removed the grit and replaced it with cute. That's fine. I mean the overall appearance, the scratchy, uncomfortable spreadsheet feel of the whole thing.

It's in full effect in this image. Everyone does Road Map graphics these days and lots of them are really pretty to look at. They make me think "Ooh! I might have to go play that again". This doesn't. It makes me go "Ow! My eyes!" 

Moving on from the look, there seems to be a lot going on this year but I notice none of it expands the world, other than downwards. There are new dungeons "throughout 2025" apparently but we'll have to wait for 2026 before we get "new zones". Well, you will, if you're playing. I don't think I'm likely to be directly involved. 

Given how few zones there are in the game now, 2026 seems a like a bit of a wait. Just about everything on the list falls under the heading of "ongoing development" rather than new content. There're a lot of "improvements" and "enhancements" and "upgrades" in that line-up, along with a few "systems" but precious little adventure. That's all kept for the grey banner along the top - dungeons, raids, boss encounters, POIs. Not sure of the marketing logic there.

I saw an interesting comment yesterday from one of the people behind the Star Wars Galaxies emu, to the effect that they discovered you can't just hang an mmorpg in a steady state and expect people to keep playing. You have to dump new content on them every ninety days or there's a huge drop-off in population. 

I mean, we all know it but it's surprising how many people, players and developers, try to put their fingers in their ears and deny it. In an odd kind of way, it might be easier for games in Early Access to hold attention. If things are going as they should, there'll be a constant drip of new content or at least disruption to what's there already, which is often just as effective. It's when the game is supposedly done that the real content treadmill starts up and with it the inevitable droughts.

By the look of this Road Map, Pantheon's a loooong way from having to worry about that. EA looks like it could take a while. And I didn't even mention the baffling current obsession going on over there with FFA open-world PvP. I do wonder what Brad McQuaid would have had to say about that...

You've Got Mail

Over at the home of the game Brad made when he was practicing, Jenn Chan, that most amiable and charming of Producers, has a couple of letters out. Producer's Letters are maybe one down from Road Maps - they don't have the graphics for a start - but they mostly perform the same function: letting players know what to expect next.

Neither of the letters, for EverQuest and EverQuest II, has anything very surprising to say. At this point Darkpaw could pretty much swap out the old SOE mission statement, "You're in Our World Now" for  "Business as Usual".

The only item of real interest in the EQII letter is the upcoming Game Update, Lure of Darkness. It brings back the Void, including a new Void Anchor in Sodden Archipelago. I bet we don't actually get one of the whirling vortexes reaching far into the sky, though. I bet it's just a portal somewhere.  

I had quite a lot of fun in Void instances for a while. There was one I used to run repeatedly for platinum, back before inflation made every in-game source of income other than selling on the Broker entirely irrelevant. 

This one ought to offer me a chance to find out just how much more effective my Necromancer is in new content, when compared with my Berserker. He usually has to wait for GUs to recede into the past before he can make any progress with them. I'm optimistic she'll do better. The Lure of Darkness arrives on the 8th of April but I imagine I won't get around to it right away. I'll get to it before the next one arrives in the summer, though.

The EQ letter is more interesting in that Jenn reveals a few secrets concerning the thinking behind some of the choices the team makes when setting up new ruleset servers. There is, of course, yet another of those coming in June because new ruleset servers are the engine that drives EQ's longevity. To some extent they always have been. The concept goes back pretty much to the dawn of the game.

This one is an "experimental" TLP server. My impression is that Everquest players are more open to experimentation than EQII players, the younger game feeling oddly more old-fashioned now and certainly more conservative than the older. 

I don't get the feeling EQII's time-limited expansion server scene has ever been quite as essential or vibrant as EQ's but it's still clearly vital enough to the continuing health of the game for new editions to be rolled out at least annually. This summer we're getting a PvP Origins server, which I would have thought was limiting the appeal considerably but at least it should keep the ever-angry PvP lobby busy complaining about the ruleset for a while.

Last but very much not least in this round-up of points of interest from the two letters, I was much heartened to see the exact same degree of attention as usual being paid to this year's Pride celebrations, starting at the end of May and running on into June. Given the current unfortunate political climate it might not have been surprising to see some backsliding there but no, the two games remain exemplars of modernity, with Patches of Pride in EQII and Pride Month in EQ each being afforded the same level of attention as any of the many established dates in the packed Norrathian calendar.

That's a deal of game news. Shall we take a short break for some music? Yes, I think we shall.

That Difficult Second Album

Catch These Fists - Wet Leg

Having covered music here for quite a few years now, I find myself in the odd position of having artists and bands I "cover" in much the same way I "cover" games. There's no necessity for it in either case but if you keep up a blog for long enough, after a while you get a feel for what it's about. 

As well as the inevitable "anything that catches my interest", this blog mostly covers games I play, games I might play and games I used to play, along with music I listen to, TV I watch and of late developments in AI as they pertain to everything else I write about. 

As the years go by, there are certain games, shows, creators and performers that come up over and over and after a certain point I start to feel I "should" mention it, when I find something new involving any of them. That's why there's stuff in this post about Pantheon, EQ and EQII and it's also why there's a video of Wet Leg's first single from their upcoming sophomore album, Moisturizer.

Because I was an early adopter and because I went somewhat overboard about the first few singles, Wet Leg have become a band this blog pays attention to, even though I don't quite feel the same attachment to them I did a couple of years ago. I like Catch These Fists well enough but it isn't demanding the same level of attention from me that Chaise Longue, Wet Dream or Too Late Now did.

The band is currently out there, playing live and debuting a whole load of tracks from the new album. I watched audience videos of half a dozen of the new songs and they all sounded good but none of them really wowed me.  

Rhian Teasdale has a definite new look she's really working and the band have what keeps getting described as a punkier sound. It all looks and sounds like it would be a great time in a club or on a festival stage. As something to listen to at home, I'm not so sure. I await the album with interest to see what the songs sound like in their fully produced form. I will be buying it, anyway, or at least putting it on a list so someone else can buy it for me.

Horse Latitudes

Here's the oddest MMORPG story of the week by some margin. Have you ever thought that what the genre really needed was more horseback riding? Or more murder mysteries to solve? No? Well how about more mysteries to solve while you're out horseback riding?

It's a niche pitch, for sure, but it's happening. The game is called Equinox: Homecoming. Nothing like hanging your entire fortunes on a convoluted pun, is there? As if the concept wasn't high enough already.

It's in production from a company called Blue Scarab, the guiding force behind which is one Craig Morrison, a name that may be familiar from his time at both Blizzard and Funcom. The official website describes the game as a "multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, murder mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay!" 

There's a trailer, which looks a bit janky in the way of most early-development footage, but which also makes me think it might be something worth keeping an eye on. The pitch is for a “unique blend of cozy escapism and true-crime” but I'm getting some Secret World vibes, too.

Morrison goes on to say

"We're very excited to see what people make of Equinox. We’ve had faith throughout development that there is an audience out there for different and interesting experiences... there is definitely a risk, but we're in a position where we can take this shot and try to provide players with a truly unique world and story."

We do all keep saying we want developers to try new things, take some risks and stop copying whatever's just made money. It'll be very interesting to see if this one goes anywhere. NetEase is backing it so it probably will.

Take Me Home

A few months back, James Gunn gave us a first look at his new take on Superman in a short trailer that featured Krypto, the Dog of Steel. The NME keep reporting the reaction to it as "mixed" but I'm pretty sure just about every actual DC fan did that thing where you relax a whole lot of tension in your shoulders you didn't even notice you were carrying. The comment thread on YouTube is that, all through.

Now Gunn's put out an extended, five-minute version with a whole narrative section from the movie and it does not disappoint. For a Superman fan there are all kinds of oddnesses, like Krypto having long fur and the Superman robots not wearing costumes but instead of detracting from the lore those differences feel like an evolution of it.

Put simply, this is Superman, in a way almost no version of the icon since Christopher Reeve really has been. It's also very clearly the work of someone who understands not just the character but the backstory. Like, all of the backstory, not just that tedious bit on Krypton before it blew up, the part that's been done to death about a million times now.

I am more than optimistic about this one. Whether the movie can survive the current resistance to all things super-heroic evident in the wider cinema-going audience is another question but I'm confident the longtime comics fans in that audience are going to be well-served, in the best possible meaning of the phrase.

And On That Blondshell

Much of what I said above about Wet Leg applies here, too, except for the implied part about the dangers of over-exposure. This is the third single from Sabrina Teitelbaum's second album, "If You Asked For A Picture" and once again I'd say it's good but not great, which is pretty much how I felt about the other two as well. I do think this one might be a grower, though. That chorus is sticking.

Where Blondshell differs from Wet Leg in this respect, at least for me, is that Sabrina's sound is a lot more amenable to repeated listening. Wet Leg have the immediacy of a great singles band. A lot of their songs sound like they were made to be heard coming out of car windows or transistor radios. Blondshell is more the sort of thing you play at home on the stereo on a Sunday morning.

For that reason alone I'd bet that, even if the two albums are equally far behind their immediate predecessors in essentiality, it'll be Blondshell's that gets listened to the most in this house and by a margin. That's already the case with their debuts, although I've probably watched the Wet Leg videos more than the Blondshell ones.

Speaking of videos, although I've embedded both of them here, I don't very much like either. The Wet Leg one is okay but feels a bit like they might be trying just a tad too hard for the wacky funster vibe they nailed so effortlessly last time around. 

The Blondshell video, on the other hand, goes right to the opposite extreme. It looks like a bunch of pals goofing around but doing it with a degree of self-consciousness that makes it slightly uncomfortable to watch. Also, they clearly bought the absolute cheapest strollers they could find, just for the purposes of the video, and they bought them as a job lot. It just looks false.

As for the song itself, I love the chorus and the overall Blondshell sound. The words are typically elliptical in that way I love about her writing but the subject matter is a little disturbing. It reminds uncomfortably of "Too Much, Too Young" by the Specials, an unnecessarily harsh and judgmental song I always disliked.

Fortunately, these days you rarely get a new song without a gloss on it from the songwriter and what Sabrina says about the lyrics makes me happier. As per Stereogum  

“The song is partially about being in your twenties and feeling like you’re supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!) yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,” 

That's a much warmer vibe than the words feel like they support. I find this a lot with Blondshell's lyrics. Possibly because they're so pared-down, they often feel harsher than Sabrina's explanation of them suggests they were meant to. It's the good, old intentional fallacy at play again, I guess, although here it's working in my favor.

Anyway, I like "23's A Baby" best of the three singles to date. Looking forward to the album in May.

And with that, I'm off to make some music of my own. There may not be another post here until Wednesday, what with me working and also having something to do on Monday but we'll see.