You're No Pal Of Mine!

As the title of yesterday's post made painfully clear, I blew all my saved-up ideas in one unnecessarily lengthy Grab Bag with the predictable consequence that today I have nothing to write about. 

Okay, "nothing" is a strong word. Also not remotely accurate. I have a whole slew of things I could write about but none of them is suitable for the hour or two I have available to put something together. 

So I'm not going to bother. I'm going to say one thing about a gaming event, get AI to make me a header image, stick a song on the tail-end and call it done. Pathetic, isn't it?

Let's start with the gaming thing. One of the games I'm theoretically but not actually still playing is Once Human. I went on and on about how much better it'd be if they'd just give us permanent servers where we could settle down like it was a regular MMORPG and then they did and I pretty much never logged in again.

I still have OH installed and, I think, updated, so I could go back at any moment. I just need a push. And now I have one. Or I will have, in about a month's time.

Once Human is hosting a collaboration with... Palworld. I know! It sounds nuts, doesn't it? Until you think about it.

Apart from one looking like it was designed by a sugared-up eight-year old and the other by a teenage techno-goth, the two games are really quite similar. They're both open world survival games with a large building component and most importantly they both rely very heavily on capturing creatures and putting them to work.

In Palworld it's Pals. In Once Human it's Deviants. Pals roam around your home. Deviants roam around your home. Pals come with you and fight stuff. Deviants come with you and fight stuff. Pals let you do things you couldn't otherwise do. Deviants...

You get the idea. The mechanics are really very similar indeed and so are the results. Luckily for Starry, the studio behind Once Human, they didn't make it so you have you catch Deviants by throwing small spheres at them from a distance. No, you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand, which is entirely different.

I'm not clear on whether the  event is a one-way deal, with Pals appearing in Once Human but not the other way around, or whether Deviants will also be popping up in Palworld. Even if it's the latter, I doubt very much it would be enough to induce me to go back, even for a visit. Palworld is the open world survival game I liked the least of all the ones I've played, although even then I liked it more than that suggests. It was fun. Just not as much fun as all the others. 

I also very much doubt a brief return to check out this event will get me to spend much time in Once Human. I seem to be finding it very hard to stick at any games just now. There does seem to be a lot going on in OH, though, what with this, a new scenario and some more Vision Wheel shenanigans, so who knows? With all of that, something might click.

Another game I'm eyeing up just now is Erenshor, the solo MMORPG. I played the demo and enjoyed it but I never followed it up. It's been in Early Access for a while and there's supposed to be a big patch today that changes a whole lot of systems and mechanics so this might be a good time to start. 

I'm wondering if I might do better with something like this than with an actual MMORPG right now. I'm assuming Erenshor, unlike an actual MMO, allows you to pause or stop at a moment's notice, which is one of the main things that puts me off playing most of the games I usually enjoy. I'm wary of starting anything that can't be easily interrupted these days. 

What I really should be doing, gaming-wise, is getting back to Wuthering Waves, of course. There's yet another content drop coming. I could have embedded that video too and the one before but I haven't watched either of them for fear of spoilers. I took all that trouble to catch up and the moment I got there, I stopped playing and fell behind again. I should probably prioritize that instead of starting anything new.

That's about all I have for today and it's more than I thought I had. 

Let's finish with a song. Not one of mine. Still pondering how best to present those. Ihave more than a hundred now, which is a problem all of its own. 

How about an old favorite I'm not sure we've had on the blog before.

Blurry Moon - Charlotte Gainsbourg

That's Charlotte Gainsbourg's first new song since 2018, which predates the appearance of regular music features on IF, explaining why she's not appeared here before. (Actually, I just checked and she kind of has but only as the featured artist on Jim Jarmusch's band SQÜRL's John Ashberry Takes A Walk, on which she speaks and doesn't sing.)

And also, of course, in that whole post I did about Merci La Vie.

 Pretentious? Moi?

Time to stop before I say something embarassing about post-structuralism.

 

AI used in this post.

Just the header image, which was generated at NightCafe using the very annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Dev. What is it with that vertical downstroke I always have to peer at my keyboard to find? 

The prompt, taken directly from the text, was ""you walk up to the Deviant, which is already inside a larger sphere, and you catch it by holding up your hand", line art, color, retro". Default settings. 

I then trimmed the top and bottom because I forgot to change the format to 4:3. And then I ran it through Dithermark just for the hell of it.

Close observers will have noticed the hand has six fingers. I thought the good image generators were past all that now but obviously not. Then again, it isn't clear the hand is human, so there's a get-out if needed. 

 

Long Story Short(ish)

I'm always saying I'd like to do shorter posts. Turns out all I needed to do was not play any games and it happens naturally.

EverQuest II

Okay, it's not strictly true to say I haven't played any games. I have played a little EverQuest II. 

I logged in yesterday and finished another of Qho's supremely irritating gathering quests. That leaves just one more in the first set. Then it all starts up again, although from what I remember the second questline follows a different format and can be quite entertaining at times. Well, by comparison to the first, that is. But then it would pretty much have to be.

There's a lot going on in Norrath just now. Even though the Chronoportal event still has a few days to run, Brewday has already started. This is one of the busiest times of the year for holiday events. There are so many they start to overlap. 

I might do some more time-traveling with my Necromancer. I ought at least to take her to visit the vendors so she can spend her Ancient Coins. Not much point earnig them if you don't buy anything with them. 

Brewday, which I suppose comes in March to co-incide with St. Patrick's Day, although I can't recall ever seeing that connection made explicit, has never been a favorite of mine but there's a new tradeskill quest this year, so I'll definitely take a look at that.

It is interesting that the two quests I've seen added so far this year have both been crafting ones. I missed Erollisi Day completely, though. I wonder if there was a new tradeskill quest for that as well. Hold on and I'll check... no, there wasn't. 

I'm guessing the reason for the focus on crafting is either that these events were light on tradeskill content (Other than the inevitable new items that get added to the recipe list year on year.) or that Niami Denmother just really likes writing crafting quests. Both, probably.

The Chronoportal one is super-easy and very enjoyable, if you like very easy quests, which I do. All you have to do is go through a bunch of portals (Eight, I think it was. Might have been nine...) and pick up an item somewhere very near the entrance. All of them are in safe locations with no aggressive mobs nearby, so even crafters with a total aversion to combat can do it easily.

Then you just have to combine some of them to make sub-combines and combine those to make the final result, Grobb Liquidized Meat. It's a disgusting drink, enjoyed by trolls in the original EverQuest, which gives the quest its holiday-appropriate theme. You then trade the drink to a troll in exchange for Sir Fluffykins, the kidnapped cat. The troll hasn't been able to eat Sir Fluffykins because he has toothache and can't manage solids. The troll, that is. Not the cat.

Par for the course with tradeskill quests, really. Most of them are very light-hearted and generally very easy. They can be long and fiddly but they're rarely what you'd call challenging other than to your patience. 

Or they haven't been for a long time, anyway. There was that period when crafting "raids" were a thing and those were quite a performance, what with all the timers and the organization and a serious chance you'd fail. But that was a loooong time ago. I wonder if anyone still does those? I know you can easily solo them now because I've done it but does anyone actually get a team together and do them as they were intended? I bet someone does.

Another thing I hadn't particularly considered until I was summarizing the plot of the Chronoportal
quest just now is how very twee a lot of the crafting quests are. I don't think that was so much the case back in Domino's day, although even then many of them were far from serious. 

Raffik's quests, for example, which I tend to think of now as a jolly romp, are quite sad, what with him having been orphaned and shipwrecked and being close to starving to death when you first meet him. 

He's a great character, always cheerful, even though nothing ever seems to go quite right for him. Over the years, he changes from a lost adolescent to a confident, successful adult but even in the latest expansion, where he plays a small but significant role as the captain of the ship that takes you to Western Wastes, his ship gets destroyed, leaving him once again having to start over from scratch.

That, though, is part of an adventure questline and in adventures things do sometimes go badly wrong. In crafting quests they pretty much never do. You get asked to make something, you go get the materials, you put them together, you give the thing you've made to the person who asked for it and there you are. Sometimes you have to repair something but the experience is much the same.

Now that I think about it, EQII is a very twee game all round. The pure adventure side isn't, so much, although it does tend very much towards the Gods, Dragons and Faerie Queens end of the fantasy spectrum, rather than the blood, gore and bits of goblin flying everywhere kind. Everything else, though, crafting, housing, familiars, vanity pets, mounts, holiday events and most especially all the fancy dressing-up, does often have something of the six-year old girl's birthday party about it.

That suits my sensibilities fairly well but I've also been boiled in the EQII water for so long I barely notice how pink I'm getting. I'm wondering now if the high tweeness quotient might be a contributory factor to so many people bouncing off the game when they try it.

By contrast, there's that huge part of the game I never see (And neither do those new players who give up quite quickly.). Heroic/Heroic II dungeons and Raiding, from everything I read, are really serious business, to the point that most of the commentary I've been seeing for years on that end of the game is about how it's 100% Pay-to-Win because of how impossible it is to keep up with the required gearing needed to handle the difficulty if you don't get your wallet out.

For me, that might just as well be a different game entirely. My EQII has no Pay-to-Win features at all. The opposite, really. I find it hard to spend the Daybreak Cash I already have before more comes in.

Like most older MMORPGs, EQII isn't just two games any more. The old Casual/Serious Player split is there still and so is the Leveling/Endgame divide but the game fractures into many more pieces than that these days. It's entirely possible to play full time in any one of a variety of playstyles and hardly come into contact with the others at all.

Lord of the Rings Online

The really odd thing about all these older MMORPGs is how hard it is to get away from them. EverQuest is twenty-six years old this year and tens of thousands of people still play it. Lord of the Rings Online turns eighteen next month and the MMO news sites have been full of stories this week about how Standing Stone Games radically underestimated the demand for the new 64-bit servers. 

More than a million characters have been transferred apparently. Or, rather, have requested transfers. The actual number moved is presumably far smaller since the whole thing has been quite a debacle. I was going to log in this morning and see if I could at least press the Transfer button, just so I'd have a screenshot of me doing it for this post. 

What I'd forgotten was that I took one of my hard drives out last week, when I was trying to fix some issue with Mrs Bhagpuss's PC and I haven't gotten around to putting it back in yet. I don't feel like doing it right now, either, so my characters will have to wait a little longer. Probably a good idea, all things considered.

That does suggest the question "Why even bother transferring if you're not going to play the game?" and there, right there, that's the nub of it. I didn't have any desire to play LotRO again but then everyone started going on about it and Wilhelm revealed his plan to create a new character and take them all the way to Mordor and that started me thinking about how I've never gotten past the end of the original game - or even to the end for that matter - and suddenly the thought of playing again began to seem oddly appealing.

Would that it were so simple

And that's how they get you, every time. All these older games. It's not FOMO so much as familiarity. They sunk their claws in years ago and they hang on. You think you're free of them but they can always come back. Like malaria or relatives.

I had another thought, too, while I was considering whether I really wanted to give the game another chance. If so many people are fleeing the existing servers for the sunlit uplands of 64-bit Middle Earth, doesn't that mean the old 32-bit servers will be under a great deal less strain? Will that reduce or even remove all the lag problems and so on that everyone has long been complaining about?

Maybe the smart move would be to stay put. The FAQ says 

"At this time we do not intend to close our 32-bit game worlds. Eventually, we would like players to experience the game on our 64-bit game worlds, but as long as the populations of our 32-bit game worlds remain healthy we intend to keep these worlds open." 

I'm sure the last thing they'll want to do after this round of self-inflicted chaos is to rush headlong into another potential disaster so I'd guess it'll be later rather than sooner before any forced migration of the stay-at-homes kicks off.

As for low population levels, one of the given reasons why people wanted to move in the first place, I've always had a liking for low-pop servers. If you mostly solo, the fewer people around the better, generally speaking. 

Maybe I'll leave my existing characters where they are and re-roll on one of the shiny, new servers. That might be fun. And that way I could have my choice of quiet or busy, depending on my mood.

Of course, that's exactly what I used to do, back in the old days, when I had characters on multiple servers in several MMORPGs and somehow managed to find time to play most of them. These days I struggle to play even one character in one game with any consistency so all this is probably idle speculation. Fun, though.

Erenshor

And finally, in this short round up of things I might do in games I might play, there was yesterday's announcement that Erenshor is going into Early Access on Steam next month. 

Erenshor, you may remember, is the single-player MMORPG. Or, as the Steam Store description puts it "A fully simulated MMORPG". I played the demo during a Next Fest in 2023 and wrote about it here, when I found it very odd indeed. I concluded by saying "Whether Erenshor turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two."

We know now! Or we don't, because what I was really referring to there wasn't whether the game would get anywhere but the potential it suggested for the use of generative AI in MMORPG game design. 

As it happens, though, Erenshor doesn't even use that kind of AI. When it says the NPCs are "AI-driven" it means the old-school AI we've always had, just a more up-to-date, sophisticated version:

"Note that SimPlayers do not use LLM or any other emerging AI model. They are run by a mixture of state machines and decision trees."

If you want to know more about it, Tipa has been part of the testing program for a while and she's posted about the game several times. (I applied but I never heard back. It's too late now!)  She found it both very enjoyable and extremely redolent of the traditional EverQuest experience. If anyone knows how that feels, it's Tipa so you can take her word for it.

Erenshor has been on my wishlist since I played the demo and I will definitely be buying it as soon as hits Early Access. As always, the question is what I'll do about it after I've bought it. I suspect I might actually play it, in which case you'll hear about it here, whether you like it or not!

And that's all for now. Was that even a shorter post? I'm not sure it was. It was shorter to write, though, and that's what I wanted. 

Op success, then, I guess. I obviously should spend less time playing games.

Is There Anybody There?

I thought I might just pop up a few screenshots of this little oddity in case I don't get around to doing a full First Impressions post for a while. In case anyone missed it on MassivelyOP, which was the only place I saw it reported, Burgee Media, developer of Erenshor, the "single player MMORPG"  has very bravely made a free pre-alpha demo available through Steam.

I downloaded it yesterday and played for about half an hour. It was a very weird experience.

Not because of the gameplay, which will be extremely familiar to anyone who's ever made a character in EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot or any MMOPRG from around the turn of the millenium. Nor for the very basic graphics, which ressemble those of many a pre-alpha.

No, the disconcerting thing about Erenshor is that even though you know you're the only one there, chat is filled with people trying to sell stuff, asking questions, having arguments and giving their ill-informed opinions on the game. Just like in every MMORPG ever.

It's freakishly convincing. In the half hour I played I didn't notice much, if any repetition, other than the sales pitches, which of course you'd expect to hear over and over again. 

It reminded me of the Heroes Festival instance in EverQuest II that lets you recreate the classic EverQuest rite of passage that was camping the Ancient Cyclops. That had simulated player chat but only as a set routine. In Erenshore it seems to go on and on. 

As if the disembodied voices weren't strange enough, the whole thing reaches another level when you spot the characters who are yelling in /shout, running around town. I hailed one of them and she answered me, which was surreal.

Even harder to process was the time I got killed trying to solo a young wolf. I resurrected and ran back, only to find two of the "players" about to pull the same mob. I joined in and the three of us finished it off, after which I was able to loot it. Well, I would have been if it had had any loot.

The idea for the game is that eventually you'll be able to party up, join guilds and even raid, all with your not-so-imaginary friends. You can apparently already form groups and trade even in the demo although I haven't tried it yet.

As proof of concept for a "single player MMORPG" it works but the thing that interests me most is that if you were looking for a test case for the valid use of generative AI in gaming, this would absolutely fit the bill. Imagine the endless chatter in general, guild, group...

I might elaborate on that thought another time but for now I'll just leave it there to settle a while. As far as I can tell, the demo is going to stay up until there's a newer, improved version of the game available, so if you want to try it out it'll be waiting. Whether Erenshor it turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two.

I kind of hope it's the second but then I also kind of believe my toys come alive at night so probably best not to listen to me...