Time Capsule

 

FHX:Restoration is an emulator project that's hoping to bring back not one, not two, but three supposedly extinct mmorpgs: Ferentus, Herrcot and Xiones. Those were names of the localized versions of a game that originated in Korea in 2004, then spreading first to North America and later to Germany before finally looping back around to Korea once again.

If you're interested in the convoluted history of the game, and it's an intriguing story, there's a timeline with plenty of explanatory detail in this video:

I first played the game, as Ferentus, in one of its North American beta releases, probably some time around 2006. I remember it as being quite rough and unfinished but it had some indefinable... something, because even though I probably spent no more than a handful of hours there, I never forgot it.

Now I've had the chance to compare my no doubt rose-tinted recollections with the grim reality and... it's even better than I remembered! I've only managed to drag myself away because I know this is a very short (three day) test and there's really no point spending hours and hours on a character I may never see again (although characters are being saved between tests so maybe there is a point after all).

What's so good about an ancient game that's already failed, several times, to hold an audience? That's not so hard to explain.

First off, it's a dikuMUD inspired mmorpg. Kind of. It's not a purebred clone but it's close enough. You can make a character, jog out of the city gates and start killing wolves and things pretty much tick along from there. That already puts it ahead of the pack for me.

Because of its history, though, it straddles two major development phases of the genre. It looks and plays something like a prettier EverQuest but it has some of the user-friendly features of EQ's vastly more popular successor, World of Warcraft. NPCs have punctuation marks over their heads, there's a functional quest journal, melee classes can solo...

Well, I say they can solo. Of course, I have literally no idea what the game is like beyond the starting levels. It might turn into a hardcore nightmare for all I know. I don't remember exactly how far I got back in 2006 but I doubt I made it into double figures.

Leveling in almost all mmorpgs back then was a lot slower than you'd expect to find in almost any game nowadays. Even the first few levels would typically take a few hours, not a few minutes and once you hit double figures you'd expect things to slow down considerably. 

This morning in FHX I got to level five in a couple of hours, but I was lucky. Well, eventually. Things got off to a bit of a false start, when I broke my longstanding rule of always making either a fighter or a pet class when starting out in a new mmorpg.

I don't know why. I did that. Okay, yes I do. As you'd expect in a game of its age and type, classes in FHX are locked to specific races. And there are only three races. And they're all ones I don't like. I mean, come on, Barbarian, High Elf or Wood Elf? That's a choice?

I looked at the class/race combos and I nearly went with a Wood Elf archer. If I have to play an elf then a wood elf ranger is one of the least offensive options. But I had a vague memory of playing one of those the first time round and of it not going well. 

So I looked at what else wood elves could do and apparently they can be wizards. I rarely play wizards and wood elves are almost never given the opportunity to put on the pointy hat. It sounded like it might be fun.

 

Yeah, well, it wasn't, really. It wasn't terrible but despite the question marks hanging over questgivers heads, FHX isn't WoW. If you chain-cast fireballs at level one you run out of mana. Often before the thing you're throwing them at is dead.

It took me a while to get the spells set up and find out I had to spend points to upgrade them. Progression is kind of hybrid between levels and skill based, which I'd have realized if I'd read the very extensive and detailed in-game help guide that opens automatically when you log in, only I'd closed that before I got out of the city because I was impatient to start setting the wildlife on fire.

I pushed on with the wizard for a while. She got to level two but she was struggling to handle even cons. She died a couple of times and because I'd selected "windowed" in the options, the bottom few millimeters of the screen were inaccessible, including the chat line. I wasn't planning on chatting but I needed to be able to enter text I could type in /revive, which is what you have to do to recover from a death, if you don't happen to have a cleric with you or a resurrection scroll in your bag.

After going to character select a few times after a death, just so I could log back in and wake up in the town square, it occured to me that maybe, since I was there anyway, I might as well make a new character. I decided to suck it up and make a Barbarian warrior on the grounds that at least that way I wouldn't run out of mana.

I've never liked barbarians. First of, who wants to be a barbarian? Is that an aspiration? I don't think so. It's more of an insult, isn't it? Secondly, who wants to look like a barbarian? Build like a carnival strongman, decked out in rancid furs, hollowed-out skull for a hat? And don't even get me started on the kilts...

Only FHX barbarians aren't exactly like that. I made a female barbarian and she looked... kinda cool. Athletic build, funky boots, clean, shiny hair, cute vest, shorts... she looked more like a sports instructor at summer camp than a barbarian.

The good first impression translated into an even better second one. I picked up a couple of quests the wizard hadn't managed to finish and took the barbarian out to kill some wolves and spiders. She tore through them with barely any downtime. Even the lack of any form of self-healing didn't slow her down. (I'd gone with Knight as a class - I guess I could have picked Paladin for the heals but paladin is the elf of classes...).

By the time she dinged level three her bags were full. Inventory in FHX uses the grid/size method. Each item takes up a certain amount of space and you can carry as much as you can fit into the squares. Which isn't a lot. 

I'd already found the bank when I was playing the wizard so I went back there to stash the loot I didn't want to sell. To my surprise it appears bank storage is by account, not character. All the wizard's stuff was in there. That's a mixed blessing. It's very convenient but it also mitigates against bank muling later on. 

As I was banking something very old school happened. I got drive-by buffs. Really good ones. The kind a high-level gives you that last ages and turn you into a kind of entry-level god. It's such a familiar experience from the golden age of mmorpgs and something that almost never happens in modern ones. Can't happen, usually, because the capacity for doing it has been designed out altogether.

When you get buffs like that you don't waste them. I thanked the buffer and legged it out of the city gates in search of something significantly higher level than me to bully. Over a hill I came across some level five wolves and past them a camp of level six bandits. The buffs lasted around an hour and I spent most of it grinding.

It was glorious. Because I was in absolutely no danger (my hit points had jumped from around five hundred to two and a half thousand, my armor class had gone up accordingly and I was regenning so fast the rare hits I did take didn't even make a blip on my health bar) I had time to admire the combat animations and visual effects. 

 

They're really excellent. Simple but elegant. I think it shows in the screenshots, most of which look almost posed. The accompanying sounds work equally well, all of which makes grinding mobs an aesthetically satisfying proposition. It feels smooth. Really smooth.

As for the mobs, they all dropped useable loot - armor, weapons, crafting patterns - which is exactly how I like it. Well, I have a minor issue with wolves and spiders dropping boots and tunics but that ship sailed decades ago. 

The main problems were lack of inventory space (what could be more traditional?) and the peculiar design choice of making almost everything that dropped require level five to use/equip, even when it came off a level one mob. All that did was make me more determined than ever to ding five, though, so maybe someone knew what they were doing after all.

Even with the buffs progress wasn't fast by modern standards. Of course, the one classic power-levelling buff I was missing was a damage shield. Get one of those and all you have to do is collect as many mobs as you can find and wait for them to beat themselves to death on your spikes. My barbarian had to do it the hard way and her sword didn't hit much harder even with the strength buff she'd received.

In the end the timing worked out just right. The last of the buffs were wearing off just as she dinged five. Then it was back to the bank to sort through the loot and get dressed. No more short shorts and bare midriff: on with the leggings and tunic. It did make her look considerably more like a barbarian, albeit one with access to a loom.

And that was where I left it. I had a great time. If this was an open beta or a launch I'd be adding FHX to my "currently playing" list. If I had one. Which I don't. But the principle stands. As it is, I'm putting it on my "watch with interest and play when possible" list. I do in fact have one of those. 

I'm not sure at what stage of development the FHX Restoration team consider the game to be at right now, but in the starter levels it feels pretty solid. I had a few disconnects from the server and there was that one issue with the incorrect resizing of the windowed display option but other than that everything played perfectly.

It's interesting to compare FHX to Reign of Darkness, which I posted about the other day. They have a very similar aesthetic. I enjoyed both dipping a toe in both of them. FHX, though, still has that mysterious something about it that's kept it in the back of my mind all these years. It's a feels thing: hard to pin down but you know it when you... well, when you feel it.

I look forward to seeing where things go from here for FHX. I have the website bookmarked and the game installed and I look forward to the next test, when, with luck, I'll have more time to play. It'd be nice to see what's out there, beyond the woods and fields that ring the city walls.

Weekend Pass

 

Just an extremely quick post to say that the Ferentus emulator I mentioned a short while back is holding an open test this weekend. It's already started and it runs until late on Sunday. 

 

I've just had time to make a character and log in but I won't have time to play until Saturday and by the time I get around to posting about what I find there the test will be over so I thought I'd better bang out a couple of paragraphs and a few screenshots just in case anyone else fancies giving it a go.

And now I'm off to bed to watch the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

The Real Thing

Because I have about as much self-discipline as a squirrel with a Red Bull habit, I have a list of unsorted bookmarks descending to the right of my browser that goes on for about three or four screens. When I'm idling, as I was last night as I waited for the next boss to spawn in Icecrown (Blizzard cut the timer in half but that still leaves plenty of time for staring into space with your mind in neutral), I sometimes scan down the list and click on things I don't recognize to pass the time.

There are plenty to choose from because I always leave whatever default title Firefox comes up with. Renaming them to something meaningful would be far too organized.

I was doing that, tidying up a bit, deleting a few bookmarks I thought I'd never need again, or hoped I wouldn't, when I came across one called FHX Restoration. It could have meant just about anythingbut it turned out (as anyone who followed the link will already know) to be the home of  "A community project to bring back the game FHX".

FHX? There was a game called FHX? Well, no, there wasn't. FHX is an acronym for Ferentus, Herrcot, Xiones, the three names the game in question traded under in different territories. When I played it in beta I knew it as Ferentus and I was oddly fond of it although I'd be hard pressed to explain why.

I guess I have some kind of excuse for not recognizing it but then again I did write about it under that acronym in some detail, less than a year ago, which shows you just how bad my memory is. I'd add "these days", only my memory has never been up to much.

 

I won't rehash the little I know about the game again. It's all in the the linked post, where I also mention how the team behind the project opened the servers a couple of times in 2019 for people to try it out. Back then, I wrote "I'm keeping an eye open for the next" and then never thought to look at the website again. Until now. When I'd just missed another test by less than a week.

In fact, since writing that post, I've missed getting on for a dozen opportunities to log in and see how things are going, the first of them barely a month later. It's ironic in that I check almost every week to see if there's been any progress on another game I'm interested in, Antilia, even though there almost never is but it takes me a year to notice another game's been running open tests every few weeks for the best part of twelve months.

This is where we come back around to that discussion that was sparking some sharp disagreements a while back, the one on whether Discord is a good thing or not. It's clear that most development teams theses days, from megacorps to kitchen table operations, prefer to use Discord as the main channel of communication. If I'd been in the FHX Discord I'd have known what was going on as soon as anyone. 

For all the reasons that were so heatedly discussed last time, I'm probably not going to do that. What I am going to do, though, is collate all the bookmarks for the games/emulators/projects I'm supposed to be following into one group and stick them at the top of the stack. For me, that counts as getting my act together. It's a low bar, I know.

Of course, there are a whole load of excellent, accessible, functional mmorpg emulators out there already, some of them very well known. The days when it seemed risky, even dangerous, to venture into the grey legal hinterland of community-based revivals of supposedly dead games are long over. 

I think the turning point was Sony Online Entertainment's formal acknowledgment of Project 1999's right to exist. Before that there was something of a feeling that emulators were motivated at least in part by something dubious. Some kind of desire to avoid having to pay for the service or a disinclination to follow the rules. Maybe both. Once P99 got the cautious green light from The Man, though, emulator projects began to look a little more like earnest preservation than exploitation. 

These days it's not always easy to tell the difference between a regular commercial mmorpg and a community-based enterprise. Some, like Return of Reckoning, the Warhammer Online emu, City of Heroes: Homecoming and the various Star Wars Galaxies servers, feel like they might as well be live games in active development.

It occured to me today, when I logged into my own favorite, that the Vanguard Emulator (aka New Telon) has now been online for almost as long as the original game. Given the determination of the volunteer teams behind these recreations and the dedication of the fans who play them, it won't be long before we have a whole raft of unofficial servers with more authority than the originals. If the "Live" version only lasted five or six years but the revival hits ten (or fifteen, or twenty), which one is the "real" game?

For me, in the end, it's not about the authority or even the legality. It's about the playability. I pop in to any number of games, old and new, for novelty, nostalgia, curiosity or a blog post or two but for regular entertainment, year on year, I keep plugging away at the same, very short, list of titles. All of which are still officially up and running.

If any of the titles I do play regularly were to go under, though, then it might be a different story. The chances of anything I like as well coming along to replace them seems slimmer each passing year. Maybe then I would move to an emulator for my primary game. 

I guess a lot of people hit that point a while ago, which is why the mmorpg emulator scene is so active and vibrant. A lot more so than its commercial counterpart, some might say...

Step Into A New World

Last week's reveal of an approximate launch date for Amazon's New World (now confirmed as May 26 2020) got me thinking about the future as it relates to MMORPGs. Specifically, the games I'm vaguely looking forward to playing sometime, if and when they ever get their act together.

I'm going to do this from memory, without a lot of preparatory research, in the hope of clarifying what I'm actually interested in, rather than what I could all too easily make myself get over-excited about if I worked at it. That said, I'm fairly hopeless at remembering stuff like this so I'll probably miss some things I'll end up jumping all over when they appear.

Let's start with New World. Without a doubt this is now at the top of my wants list, moving above Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen by dint of having an imminent release date.  It's also backed by one of the biggest companies in the world so I have no worries over whether it will actually happen.

Of course, I'm still vastly more interested in Brad McQuaid's legacy MMORPG as a game that might become a long-term home for both me and Mrs Bhagpuss. It's as close to the model I prefer as I'm likely to get. I'm just not expecting to get it any time soon, although a beta buy-in for $100 or so wuld be more than tempting.

On paper, New World doesn't look like something I'd enjoy but personal experience trumps speculation. Like a lot of people, I was lucky enough to get an invite to the alpha. It wasn't a particularly exclusive event. I did, however, get in right at the start, which meant I saw the way the game changed and developed over many months.

The New World Alpha Test has a fairly strict NDA (albeit nothing on the scale of the one Belghast recalls from Guild Wars 2's testing process) and as far as I know it's still in force. That means I can't really say much about either the game or the testing process.

I will say that it was a real alpha, in which systems and gameplay elements were frequently changed with the specific intent of seeing how various approaches worked. This was done with great communication from the developers, including reasons and expectations for the changes.

My experiences in the Alpha made me a lot less surprised than some comentators when I read about the changes the game has apparently undergone since it was taken back behind closed doors. An increased focus on the fantastical elements of the setting and on player versus environment content is nothing more than I would have expected.

What I wasn't expecting was a move towards what looks as though it could be fully optional PvP. Game Director Scott Lane is quoted at Massively:OP, saying of the PvP aspect "“If you don’t care about this stuff as a player, you can have a huge, massive experience without any of it.”" There's a lot of meat missing from the bones of this statement, like how that will actually work, but even if it ends up being a hybrid PvPvE system such as those we're familiar with from Allods, ArcheAge, Black Desert and many others, that's fine with me.

What did surprise me was the mention of personal housing outside guild-based territorial warfare. I didn't see that coming and it adds a huge potential value to the game for me. If I can potter around in safety in low/mid level areas, gathering materials and crafting stuff to build my own little wilderness home, that will suit me very well. It's a lot like what I was hoping for from Atlas and didn't get.

About the only thing I don't much look forward to is the "focus and very skill based ... moment to moment game play". I'm too old for that kind of thing. That said, PvE combat in the alpha was fine. Not my favorite kind of fighting but perfectly manageable for an incompetent button-masher. And I only played a melee character. I'm guessing ranged will be easier on the hands.

I'm not convinced New World will be something I'd recognize as an MMORPG but it doesn't claim to be one so that's not a problem. I am expecting a gorgeous, rich and fascinating world with immense exploration potential and that's more than enough. I pre-ordered the game today, which gives me guaranteed access to the Closed Beta, whenever that starts. I imagine it will also have a strict NDA. Looking forward to dropping a lot of veiled hints when the time comes.

Camelot Unchained does claim to be an MMORPG; the spiritual successor to Dark Age Of Camelot, no less. We've been waiting a long time for CU. The Kickstarter was getting on for seven years ago. The first phase of beta, expected in 2015, arrived three years later and that's the phase we're still in.

As Wilhelm observed "It is starting to make Star Citizen look positively progressive in getting test content to users". I've played Star Citizen on "Free Roam" and I'm not any kind of backer. I'd love the option to do that with Camelot Unchained, a game I'm far more interested in, but as far as I can tell it's still a $60 buy-in to get Beta 1 access.

The underlying concept of CU still appeals to me. Realm vs Realm is the best kind of PvP I've played - when it works. It often doesn't. This would be the first game to make it the be-all and end-all and I'm interested to see how that pans out. Also, Mrs Bhagpuss loves RvR so she'd almost certainly be on board.

How long does anyone want to wait to play a video game, though? CU has been "in development" since 2013 and it's only in the first stage of beta with a "lengthy" second phase planned. At this rate it's not going to go Live this side of 2021-2022. Does any game really need that long in the oven?

While we've been waiting for Mark Jacobs to get CU out the door, Broadsword have taken almost as long to get around to making DAOC free to play. They did finally manage it a little while ago and I've been meaning to download the game and revisit my old stamping grounds in Midgard and Albion.

So far I haven't been able to make the time but it's a virtual certainty that I'll be re-playing DAOC long before I ever set foot in its sequel. That's a straw in the wind for something that's becoming an increasing theme of MMORPG hobbyism for many: the past is more inviting than the future.

2019 saw two huge MMORPG news stories involving games coming back from the dead: WoW Classic and City of Heroes. In both cases, games long since abandoned or dismantled by their creators came back to an astonishing response.

Games developers as a species are never slow to jump a passing bandwagon, provided it passes by with all the alarms blaring and lights blazing, but they're ridiculously late on any trend that doesn't fit their ironclad pre-conceptions. If they'd had an ear to the ground they'd have heard the rumble that's been building for many years.

In the blogosphere, we've often talked about the dearth of new titles and reminisced about the good old days. It should surprise no-one that a good old 'un beats a lackluster newbie every time and yet it seems to have taken the industry a long time to cotton on.

The cumulative success of projects like Classic, Homecoming, Old School Runescape and P99 make it very hard to ignore the untapped demand for games that have supposedly run their course. The uncomfortable fact that for some of the mainstays of the industry it's five or ten year old games that still feed the bottom line is belatedly being re-shaped into a narrative the suits can understand.

The latest buzzword is "ongoing games", now an Award category in its own right. We're already moving past "games as a service" into the sunny uplands of forever gaming. Why make and market expensive new products when you can just re-furbish old ones? Getting new players has always been a gamble - why bother, when you can just hang on to the ones you've got?

On the back of that, some of my most eagerly-anticipated "new" games aren't anything of the kind. They're emulated versions of old games I either played and miss or missed playing when they were around.

Even I'm surprised by how many emulator projects I now have bookmarked. There's the Vanguard Emulator, obviously. I log into that every month or two and post about it occasionally. There are several more I'm looking forward to more than I'm looking forward to most official product.

Top of the list is Project: Return Home. It's a bold attempt not only to bring back a much-missed MMORPG but to port it to a new platform. If it comes off I'll be able to realize a long-held dream, one which I thought would have to remain a fantasy: I'll be able to play the EQ game I missed out on because I didn't own a PS2.

Return Home plans to make EverQuest Online Adventures available for the PC. If the team behind the project manage to pull it off there's a good chance I might have found a new home for months. Short of an actual new EverQuest game from Daybreak (and where's that "big news" that was coming in November, Holly?) Return Home might be the last "new" game set in Norrath I ever play.

Then there's Free Realms: Sunrise, about which I have written a few times. The folks behind that don't seem to be in much of a hurry so I'm not holding my breath. I'd still bet on getting an open beta before Camelot Unchained goes live.

A real left-field entry to my watchlist is FHX Restoration, a project aiming to bring back a barely-remembered MMORPG that operated under several names in various territories. It's the game known to some as Hercot or Xiones. I knew it as Ferentus.

When I played, Ferentus was in beta. I don't recall it ever going Live in this territory. I only ever saw the first zone or two and I can't really say why it's stuck in my mind the way it has but I've never forgotten it. Apparently there was a whole game there at one time, one which people paid for, played and enjoyed. I'd be very happy to take a look at what was on the menu after the taster I tried all those years ago.

As with most emulator projects, details on progress are hard to come by but there have been two brief opportunities to step into the world and see what's been achieved so far. Both of which I missed, because I only found about the project after they'd happened.

The first was a single day over a year ago. The second was two days in August. I'm keeping an eye open for the next. Maybe that'll be a whole three-dayer!

Games I was looking forward to, now not so much, include Ashes of Creation and Crowfall. Both of them have passed that point where they've been in development so long that all my intitial enthusiasm has burned away.

I was never all that keen on Crowfall to begin with. The early PR releases got my back up with all their talk about how they were going to save the genre. I didn't (and still don't) think it needs saving. As time went on, though, I began to think ArtCraft had some neat ideas on how to solve some longstanding issues, including payment models and PvP vs PvE.

Sadly, whatever it looked like they might do has become moot due to the length of time they've taken doing it. A lot of the things that seemed like problems then don't seem to be all that pressing now and I wonder if anyone really cares any more.  I know I don't,, although no doubt I'll give Crowfall a look - if it ever makes it out of buy-in testing.

I was a lot more invested in Ashes of Creation to the point that I pledged for both myself and Mrs Bhagpuss during the Kickstarter. If the game ever happens we'll get copies and I'll definitely play it and write about it here.

When they put up the first version of the Battle Royale spin-off, Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse, I enjoyed it well enough, considering what it was, but by the time they got to the latest version I couldn't be bothered. And neither could anyone else. The current Steam Chart stats show the average number of players online in the last thirty days was 8.5. Good luck getting a Battle Royale going, guys. Maybe you could invite the three people still playing Planetside:Arena.

And that's about it. I'm sure there are plenty of upcoming MMORPGs I'd be curious to try should I happen to come across them but I can't bring any to mind. I'd welcome any suggestions!

East Goes West

If playing Bless last month had any impact on me at all, it was to make me feel nostalgic for other Eastern MMOs I've tried. Over the years I've played quite a few. Most of them I've enjoyed but none of them have I stuck with for more than a couple of months at most.

Let's see how many I can remember off the top of my head...

The first must have been Silk Road Online. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta and I remember being quite excited that we were seeing something we'd never seen before - an MMORPG made by and for people from a culture significantly different from our own. I wasn't all that struck with it but Mrs Bhagpuss liked it enough to mention it fondly for a few years afterwards, whenever the topic of imported MMOs came up.

I think Ferentus was the first game where I saw player-placed street vendors.

Then there was Ferentus, a beta for a long-forgotten MMO (also known in some territories as Xiones or Herrcot) that never went Live. Ferentus was the opposite of Silk Road in that it was almost indistinguishable from a Western MMO of the time. We both really liked it even though it was very rough and unpolished. Almost unbelievably, it still has an active Reddit ,where ex-players still hope for some kind of emulator, one day.

Runes of Magic, on which Wilhelm occasionally reports, was the first successful Eastern attempt to play the West at its own game. It was also one of the first generic WoW clones and the standard bearer for the Free to Play payment model. Once again, Mrs Bhagpuss and I beta-tested it and found it lacking, although a decade later I find I can remember it in surprising detail.

After that, the flood gates opened and playing imported MMOs became just something I did rather than something worthy of comment. Back then, I used to be in the habit of playing a number of MMOs super-casually, usually for an hour or so at the very end of the evening, right before going to bed.

That was in the days before I had a Tablet. These days I lie in bed watching American sitcoms or searching for ever more obscure bands on YouTube. I'm not convinced that's progress.

I did take some screenshots of NeoSteam but I have no idea what happened to them. I think I saw this thing once, though.

NeoSteam filled the late-night MMO slot for quite a while. I really liked that game. I was a seven foot tall tiger with a giant hammer - what's not to like? Neo-Steam was around for a good few years and had quite a following at one time. There were a lot of levels and zones but I never saw much more than the first few of either. I'd play it now if it was still running.

I also liked Argo, which arrived a few years later. That one came and went and came back and then vanished. Surprising how often that happens. Argo didn't have much to recommend it but it did have that indefinable vibe that made it feel like a place. Hard to describe but I always know it when I feel it.

Before that, there was the one whose name I always get muddled up with another, Western, title. Earth Eternal? No, it's no good, I'll have to google it...

And this is why we fact-check!  No, it wasn't Earth Eternal. Earth Eternal was the all-animal MMO originally produced by an American indie called Sparkplay Media. Mrs Bhagpuss and I betaed that one too and although we both liked it we found it a tad slow and repetitive.

After Earth Eternal failed in the West (twice) it had a run in Japan, where it was known as Ikimonogatari. According to wikipedia, no version ever made it further than Open Beta bit it still picked up a strong following.

I also have no screenshots of my time in Earth Eternal. Nor did I ever play a frog.

As if to prove that nothing on the internet ever goes away, I am astounded and delighted to discover that there is an Earth Eternal emulator! Now known as The Anubian War, it's even had an expansion, Valkal's Shadow, and the game is still up and running. I'm downloading it as I type!

Getting back to the topic at hand, the Eastern MMO I was thinking of was Eden Eternal. A natural mistake, even more so when you consider that in EE I played a mouse. A large mouse, I'll grant you, but a mouse all the same.

Eden Eternal was probably the first Eastern anime-influenced MMO I tried. It's bright and bouncy and not at all serious, which should please Wolfy and Jeromai. It was also, I think, the first time I came across the wonderful auto-quest feature, something I wish all MMOs would adopt.

Eden Eternal is still up and running. It even has a Back to School event on right now, which tells you something about the demographic that plays there. I don't think I'm going to download it again but it's an Aeria game and I have their launcher on my desktop...more on which later.

Blurry when stretched. Then again, aren't we all?

Then came Zentia, probably the best Eastern MMORPG I ever played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I downloaded the beta one Saturday on a whim and neither of us played anything else all weekend. The game had a unique style - cheerful, whimsical, lighthearted - that was exemplified by the giant dragon mount that players could hop on as it passed by, like boarding a bus. You could even do trivia quizzes in the central square of the main town.

The whole gameworld had an upbeat, happy atmosphere that was mood-elevating just to be around but it was also a very solid MMORPG, with traditional questing and combat that felt solid and satisfying. It's a game that deserves to be revived but sadly no-one seems to have bothered.

I think most of those games pre-date this blog, although I did write about Argo back in 2012. I also played, and briefly wrote about the oddly (and inaccurately, given how little time I spent there) named Loong, one of many games tipped by Kaozz of ECTmmo. She finds and plays even more obscure MMOS than I do, although currently she's with the crowd in WoW.

Almost the definition of Generic Eastern Import, Loong appears still to be available from Gamigo under the name of Loong Dragonblood

Since Inventory Full arrived, most of the Eastern imports have been relatively big news. In no particular order (least of all chronological) there's been Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online, Revelation Online, Aion, Riders of somewhere-or-other, that one about Dragons that SOE licensed and of course Final Fantasy XIV, which is a whole different story.

Bless Online is the latest and it's... okay. I wouldn't put it much more strongly than that. As I said at the beginning of the post, Bless's main impact on me has been to remind me of other imported and translated MMOs I like more. Two in particular: Dragon Nest and Twin Saga.

Not that Bless is anything like either of those. It's just that I remembered, while playing Bless and reading about how badly translated it was supposed to be, that there's a particular style of translated quest text that I love. Twin Saga is dripping with it and so is Dragon Nest.

It appears we've crossed out last bridge in Dragomon Hunter.

It's as though they'd found a really articulate, bi-lingual seven-year old, with a vivid imagination, and given them a completely free hand to translate the original quests - without worrying too much about whether the finished version made much (or any) sense. It's almost like naive art.

I tried to find my old installation of Twin Saga yesterday but after booting up several Hard Drives without success I gave up and re-installed it via Steam. As it was downloading I thought to google "Twin Saga", which I probably should have done at the start.

Turns out it's also published by Aeria Games, for whom, as I mentioned above, I have a generic launcher on my desktop. They also published Dragomon Hunter, another quirky import I liked a lot, which has sadly closed. The launcher itself is also dead. You have to download and update directly from the website now - or use Steam.

Following that discovery I was able to find the original installation buried in the Aeria Games folder on my C Drive so now I have the blasted thing twice! I linked my Aeria account to Steam and now I'm up and running with my old character, who turns out to be level 50! Proof that I really did like Twin Saga when I last played.

Best name prefix ever!

Dragon Nest is more problematic. It has a convoluted history of versions and territories. Last time I tried to play I couldn't get it to run. I'm running short of drive space right now so I don't think I'll download it again just yet but I guess I shouldn't wait too long. Grab 'em while they're still alive seems to be the motto for some of the less-celebrated imports.

Anyway, that wasn't the post I sat down to write. I was going to muse over returning to MMOs and how it can vary from impossible to ecstatic. That'll have to wait for another day. This has run far too long and there's double XP in Norrath that won't last forever!

Everything Is Everything Else

As David Byrne once said, well... how did I get here?

I remember I was doing what I do most nights, right before I go to sleep. Typing semi-random words into YouTube. Following whichever link looks interesting. The name of a band. A song title. Something I've never heard. Or heard of.

Nothing like Transvision Vamp. I have heard of Transvision Vamp. I have heard Transvision Vamp. Of course I have. I remember them very well. Early 90s outfit. Fronted by shockheaded blonde Wendy James. Made a thinnish glam racket. Had a couple of minor hits. Media loved to love to hate them.

I never thought much of them at the time. Hadn't thought about them at all in at least twenty years. Still, I clicked, out of some dim nostalgic curiosity.

A couple of things happened.

They were a lot better than I remembered. That thin sound had filled out. It aged well. I watched a few live performances. Wendy James seemed fierce and funny. A good deal more self-aware than I imagined. And then, among the titles that filtered down the right of the screen, one leaped right out and smacked me in the heart.  

Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything

 
There is, sadly, no live take of Hanging Out With Halo Jones on YouTube or anywhere else. As others have said, this will have to do.

Halo Jones is possibly my favorite British comic series of all time. If it's not Alan Moore's best work ever it's damn close and Ian Gibson certainly never drew better. I have the originals in my piles of 2000AD up in the loft and I have the three graphic novels somewhere closer to hand. I'm going to read the whole sequence again although it scares me a little to think about doing it.

So, anyway, here I am at Halo Jones via Transvision Vamp and I'm reading the comments because yes, I am one of the people who not only reads the comments on YouTube but finds them interesting and often revealing.

There aren't many but in the last one someone says "There was a Halo Jones play too." There was? Did I know that? The faintest bell chiming somewhere far away...

Which is how I came across this piece of pure magic:

Eight and a half minutes of utter genius. When I saw it was a fringe performance I didn't expect much. How wrong I was. I just wish someone would post the entire thing. I just wish I'd been there.

I looked for more but that's all there is. Oh, and a few scraps of another production at the Leeds Thought Bubble. They don't have anything of the power of this performance.

And what does this have to do with MMORPGs, anyone still reading may well be asking themselves? Patience. I'm getting there.

I'm getting there but I can't tell you how. All I know is that somehow, from  Transvision Vamp and Halo Jones I found my way to what was lost, by way of the  latest Game Archeologist piece on MassivelyOP. Although it turns out I could just have checked my own back pages...

Syp's piece has absolutely nothing to do with any of this except as a catalyst. It's all about BBS gaming. I never saw a Bulletin Board in my life, much less played a game on one. As I read, though, my mind slipped to which forgotten MMOs might still be out there, waiting for Syp to (dis)cover them.

My list of most fondly-rememberd MMOs includes several that are no longer running. Vanguard and Free Realms, obviously. Rubies of Eventide, which I often mention. Endless Ages, which was there so early on and broke so much ground (and which appears still to exist in some form or another...I'm on that right now...but one thing at a time).

There's also one that Mrs Bhagpuss and I played in beta and liked a lot for no very good reason. I was under the impression that it never launched. I seem to remember the client just stopped connecting to the server one day and I thought I'd read that whoever was behind it decided not to release it in the West after all.

I haven't been able to come up with the name for a long time. I don't have it in my old log-in records. No-one ever mentions it anywhere to jog my memory. And this is where the chain breaks yet holds.

Somewhere along the way, reading about BBS games, listening to Transvision Vamp, watching Halo Jones, all the  while thinking about dead MMOs and googling all of it, I came across a mention of the Ferengi, those gnomelike aliens from Star Trek. It wasn't even anything about them, really. Just a play or a song that used their name.

I have no clue where or what it was even though it was only a day or two ago. Whatever it was triggered a flash of insight that blanked everything else. The name of the forgotten MMO was Ferentus! 

All the many other times I've seen the Ferengi mentioned, that never happened. It took that particular set of circumstances to create the necessary neural connections. So it seems.

It turns out that Ferentus never did launch but it lived long enough in open beta to develop quite a following all the same. It was known under three different names. Ferentus in North America, Herrcot in Germany and Xiones in South Korea. Even now there are people hoping for an emulator. That's never going to happen but someone has come up with a text-based homage. I played it. It works.

All of which just proves what a wonderful new world it is that we all live in. Any day we can wake up and ask ourselves how we got here and have no idea and it's still all good. As Rodice says, "No matter how far you get, they'll fetch you back here and bust you to pieces".

Pieces are all we're made of. But what pieces!

You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.

Where's My Tiger? : Neo Steam

In theory I play a lot of MMOs. I have nearly two dozen on my desktop and a few more tucked away out of sight. I say in theory because as you may have noticed there are only so many hours in the day and much though I'd like to spend all of those hours playing games there's working and sleeping and eating and what-all to fit in somewhere.

I have my focus games, usually just two or three at most. Currently that would be EQ2X, Rift and Allods. Then I have my background games, where I have characters I'm still interested in developing. LotRO, Fallen Earth, Everquest, Vanguard or Ryzom all fit in there. I try to pop in every few days for at least a short session here or there just to keep the plates spinning.

No boars? That can't be right.

Beyond that comes a whole raft of titles that I'm either pretty much done with, never really got started on or just haven't gotten around to yet. And right at the end of the list is a small group of MMOs that I only ever play last thing at night, when I finish a session on my focus game but don't quite feel ready to stop altogether.

Eden Eternal and Dragon Nest are my current go-to late-nighters but last night I got the urge to pop into NeoSteam, a game I've played on and off for years. Apparently it's been quite a while since I last got the urge because it turns out NeoSteam isn't there any more. The server closed down last May. I don't remember reading anything about that on Massively.

It was the third time it's happened to me. Two other MMOs I played sporadically decided to shut their doors while I had my back turned: Rubies of Eventide and Ferentus. They and NeoSteam were all MMOs I had a great deal of time for. Metaphorically. Unfortunately.

Small dwarf, big world

Rubies is the one I miss the most. It was a  first-class MMO with tons of potential and I did put in quite a few hours there over the years. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it regularly for a while. I'd play it still if I could. We both played Ferentus for quite a time too and although it never came out of beta it was more finished than a lot of games I've payed to play.

NeoSteam was the oddest of the three. It was nominally Steampunk in setting but it seemed more like a dreamscape. My character was a giant tiger who carried a hammer bigger than he was. Something that looked like a flying turnip used to follow him around offering advice. I never saw much of the world. Mostly I ran around enjoying the music and marveling at all the bizarre creatures. I think I only got to level 10 but I wasn't finished yet, dammit!.

I knew I shouldn't have kicked that puffball

The most galling thing of all is that NeoSteam is still online in the U.S.A. where by all accounts it has been much better managed and developed by Atlus. The rights for Europe including the U.K. went to Gamigo, who never seemed to do anything with it at all. I can't remember ever having to patch when I logged in and nothing ever seemed to change.

So, NeoSteam joins the list of lost MMOs. It also joins the shorter but infinitely more annoying list of MMOs lost specifically to me due to I.P. blocking or regionalization. EQOA keeps it company there. Will I learn the lesson this time and remember to log into the games I like more often? Probably not.