Don't Go, Kitty, Kitty

The PC Gamer post-WoW roll-call of births and deaths I was discussing yesterday includes eleven MMORPGs I could reasonably claim to have played plus one that no-one ever did. They break down into three categories: games I took seriously, games I dabbled with and games I merely glanced at.

Of the twelve, there are two that shouldn't even be on the list in the first place: EQNext and City of Heroes. I'll get to EQN later. First, let's think about City of Heroes.

Did no-one fact-check the copy? The title of the piece is "25 MMOS that lived and died since World of Warcraft launched" but the North American launch of CoH pre-dates WoW's by a full six months. It says so right there in the article! I believe I may have played it in beta as early as late 2003.

CoH looked, on paper, like something I'd really enjoy. I've been a superhero fan since before I learned to read. My mother, in her late eighties, still occasionally complains about how she had to read those speech bubbles out loud to me when I was four years old. At the time the game was announced I was deep into EverQuest and the MMORPG genre - it looked as though it could have been made for me.

It wasn't. Not even close. What always appealed to me most about superhero comics, even as a child, was the soap opera. The fighting? Not so much. CoH, in beta at least, seemed to be nothing but an endless conveyor belt of  meaningless battles, most of them in featureless offices and warehouses or bland city lots.

I played the beta in a desultory fashion for a few weeks, on and off. It was deeply disappointing. When the game launched I didn't buy it and during its eight year run I never once considered giving it a go. For my money there has never been a good superhero MMO. DCUO is the best I've played but that's more for the glorious movement controls, the well-realised cityscapes and the housing than anything to do with the combat or the story.

When City of Heroes miraculously re-appeared earlier this year (in true superhero "I was never really dead" style, I might add) I gave it a try and enjoyed it a lot more than I had back in 2003/4. Just not enough to keep logging in after the initial rush.

Moving on from the game that shouldn't be on the list at all, we come to the ones I tried just to say I had. Chief among those is Hello Kitty Online. I played HKO maybe two or three times. I downloaded it because people insisted on using it as a pejorative in general chat in MMORPGs I did play and that irritated me.

What's not to love?

My feeling was that none of the people using the fashion-challenged feline as a stick to beat their supposed inferiors with would actually have played the game. If I wanted to be able to call them out on that I had to have some basic experience myself.

Also, I do like Hello Kitty, with whom I have a little history. I remember the first time I happened upon a display of HK merchandize in real life, in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona sometime in the early '90s. I was so amazed I bought a couple of items, one of which I later gave to someone I worked with as a leaving present, when they went back to the U.S.

I can remember all of that but almost nothing about Hello Kitty Online, except that it was a lot less casual than I'd imagined. I know I used that as a deflating counter-argument in chat battles a few times, although finding Hello Kitty Online more challenging than I expected was perhaps not exactly the argument-clincher I was looking for.

Speaking of memory and its failings, this is where I offer a practical dmonstration. I thought I'd played Mythos, which is why it's in this section instead of in yesterday's post, where it should have been. Turns out, on fuirther investigation, I never played it at all.

There was a brief period when a clutch of online games using Greek and Roman mythology as a backdrop appeared at around the same time. I played at least two of them and I thought Mythos was one of those but, looking at some reviews and screenshots, it clearly wasn't.

The game I was thinking of, which I remember playing quite a few times, was Mytheon not Mythos. It's still running. You can get it on Steam. Looking at the screenshots, Mythos looks like a more interesting title. I kind of wish I'd played that instead.

Moving swiftly on, we come to games I played a fair bit, on and off, but which never made it into the majors. Minions of Mirth is almost the poster child for my personal minor leagues. (Way to go there, Bhagpuss! A mixed metaphor combining two cultural touchstones, neither of which form any part of your own immediate culture. Some kind of a record, I think. Plus now you're talking about yourself in the second person...)

Someone exploring much further into Minions of Mirth than I ever managed.

MoM was unusual in that it could be played either as a full MMORPG or as a single-player game. That seemed like a great idea back in 2005 and it still seems like one now. Wouldn't it solve all kinds of problems? And if an obscure indie like Prairie Games could do it, what's stopping the big guns?

Minions of Mirth was an EQ-inspired game with graphics that looked more dated than EQ's even in 2005. I must have played through the starting area four or five times over the years but I never really got much farther than the equivalent of Qeynos Hills. The MMORPG closed its gates a couple of years back but the single-player version is still available. I even have it installed although I doubt I'll ever play it again.

Marvel Heroes is an odd one. I played it quite a few times and read about it a lot more because several bloggers I followed seemed to be very into it indeed. For me, the game doubled down on two things I really don't like at all: the Diablo-style lootfest and the aforementioned superhero action mode.

I grew up with the Marvel characters, although I was (and remain) a DC fan at heart. Marvel Heroes seemed to me to strip away virtually everything that had made Marvel the most successful comics publisher of the late twentieth century and which went on to make it one of the most profitable and worshipped global brands of the early twenty-first.

It seemed to me like a game designed by people whose only knowledge of the characters came from a short conversation with a six-year old child. Costumes? Check! Powers? Check! Personality, motivation, backstory, depth? I dunno what those things are, mister. It was the MMORPG equivalent of smashing action figures together and shouting "Bam!", something I didn't even do when I was six years old.

The most interesting thing about Marvel Heroes for me was the bizarre way it ended. Made no sense at all. Just like the game.

Stolen from my own blog.

But then, what happened to Marvel Heroes at the end happened to Firefall time and time again, while it was still running. Was there ever a game that changed direction so many times? Or suffered so many public disputes among its developers?

I played it in a couple of its variants. It wasn't the sort of game that seemed likely to appeal to me - I'm not mad keen on shooters and I don't have a lot of time or affection for mech-suits - but a couple of bloggers kept writing interesting stories about it so I thought I'd give it a try.

I enjoyed it much more than I expected, even though I was absolutely terrible at playing it. I liked the environments and the jetpack movement. It also looked great in screenshots, which always helps, particularly since, by this time, I had a blog to put them in.

The thing about opinions on Firefall is this: they depends entirely which version the opinion-holder played. Each major revision was so radical Red5 might as well have re-marketed them as new games. I liked the version with the public quests based around thumping. That one would have made for a solid MMORPG experience, I think. When they took that out I liked it a lot less. It felt more like a single-player game the last time I logged in.

That's the last of the also-rans. looks like this is shaping up to be to be a trilogy. Part three will get to the games I played for long enough to have something of substance to say about them. Or so we may hope.

Except there's one anomaly to dispose of first. The game I mentioned at the top of the post. The one that really has no reason being on PC Gamer's list at all. Not because someone can't read a calendar but because someone apparently can't read reality.

Much though some would like to believe otherwise, EQNext never existed. There was no game, ever. All there was were some videos, a lot of concept art and a few minutes of faked gameplay put together for a convention.

Blurry and out of focus. How appropriate.

It's quite hard to dig that little fact out of the welter of "Oh noes! My beloved EQNext is no more!" eulogies that clog the filters of a google search but as Feldon explains in an incendiary demolition of the entire EQNext debacle at EQ2Wire, "The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

It wasn't just the demo; the entire EQNext project was smoke and mirrors. There was no game. There never had been a game. There never would be a game. It has no place on a list of MMORPGs that lived and died because it never did either of those things. I'd say good riddance to it but even that gives its existence more credence than it deserves.

Landmark definitely did exist, though, and I'll get to it next time, along with Vanguard, Warhammer, Free Realms and Wildstar. I'll even bring my own screenshots!

If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge... : Warframe

I have no reason to be playing Warframe. For starters, it's a space-based shooter, a two-for-one combo that misses me coming and going. And anyway, isn't it five years old or something? I've managed to live without it until now. You'd think I could just carry on the same way.

It's not even as though Warframe had slipped under my radar somehow and I was just now discovering it. Several bloggers I read have mentioned it in passing. One or two have posted on it extensively.

Over the last few years I've skim-read a lot of impenetrable detail on the game, most of which I neither understood nor tried to. I've looked at endless dull screenshots of suits of armor, each indistinguishable from the next. Glanced at pages of incomprehensible statistics, briefly, then moved on.

If you'd asked me, which why would you, since I've never even mentioned the game, I'd have said, vaguely, that I thought it was some niche, indie thing that hadn't found an audience. I'd have been wrong. Often am.

Hi! My name's Generic Alien Overlord #179. You may remember me from, well, pretty much anything.

A week or two ago I read somewhere that Warframe is very popular. Like really popular. It surprised me. Keen apparently read the same thing and it surprised him, too, because yesterday he asked "Why Do People Play Warframe?".

Supposedly they do. It's not Fortnite but it's popular enough to have its own convention, Tennocon. I don't think any MMOs I play do that, not any more.

In the comment thread to Keen's post, several people whose names I know and whose opinions on gaming I respect popped up to praise Warframe. One of them was Jeromai, who also posted on his own blog, Why I Game, to reveal he was up at six a.m. on a Sunday to get a Warframe freebie from Twitch.

So I downloaded the thing. I mean, what the hell, why not? If it's worth waking up at 5.30am for... And anyway, it looked as if it might be a bit like Firefall and I liked Firefall, even if I never really got that far with it. Warframe is F2P, after all. Even if I download It's not like I have to play it.

Making an account was quick and painless. The worst I can say is they did seem a bit over-zealous in getting me to re-enter the password at every opportunity. Well, three times. Maybe it was twice. Okay, probably not worth mentioning.

To quote Darren and Emma, "Look at what you can't have now"

I was surprised to find a full set of Beta terms to sign up to. Five years and still in beta? Is that right? I scanned the text. It seemed okay so I accepted it. Then there was an EULA. Skim-read that. Seemed standard, clicked it.

The download took about twenty-five minutes. I passed the time doing some quests in EQ2. When the PLAY button lit up it was really time I should have been heading to bed but I don't work Mondays so I logged in.

Making a character took a minute, if that. Nothing to do but pick one of three choices as a starting Frame. No appearance to ponder, not even a color scheme. One of the choices was flagged perfect for a new player so I went with that.

From there it was straight into an all-action Tutorial that reminded me very much of the original DCUO introduction. Run through tunnels and rooms with disembodied voices either yelling at you or cajoling you. Click on this, shoot that, crouch, jump, fumble. That last one was just me.

Yeah, y'think so? Or maybe just not bother?

It was one of those tutorials where you can't fail, I think. Or die. I was about as deft on the keys as a gannet playing the clavinet but I got through somehow. It  didn't feel like it took all that long but I didn't enjoy any of it.

Several times I had that familiar feeling of anger against the game, where what I most wanted to do was hit Escape, log out and uninstall. I often get that in new games, though, especialy when the controls are unfamiliar. I know to ride it out.

I came closer to quitting for real in the peace and quiet of my own ship. There were precisely two interactable items in the closed and locked craft and I wasn't able to interact with either of them. If I suffered from claustrophobia (as many gamers do) I would have quit there and then. Would have had to.

Instead I tabbed out and googled for a solution. Some results suggested I'd run into a known bug (well, it  is Beta, after all). Nothing suggested an answer to my problem. I tabbed back in and tried again. Still nothing.

If at first you don't succeed, hit it with a hammer.

And then by sheer luck, as I tried the same thing that hadn't worked the last twenty times, I happened to do it differently. When the game says "X Install Segment" in that specific location, apparently it doesn't mean "Press and Hold X", which is what you do earlier in the Tutorial (and as I discovered later in the Missions). Oh no!  It means "Lightly tap X and then get your finger the hell away from the key as fast as possible".

Once I did that it all started happening. With Communications up and running I was able to set out on the next stage of my great adventure. I looked longingly at the planetary options. Jeromai quite correctly surmised I'd have been happier trying the newly-announced "open world" content but one doesn't just stroll into Venus.

Instead I did Missions. Starter Missions. Choice of one. Did that. Then another. Did that. More running through tunnels. More shooting people, more being yelled at.

I ran and got a thing and ran back and stuck it in my ship. I broke a guy out of jail and he gave me a blueprint for another thing and told me to make it. I haven't worked out how to do that yet. There's a lot of plot and it's staggeringly unoriginal but it rocks along. There's a lot of voice acting and it's equally unoriginal but it's also kinda rockin'. Not bad at all. My own character seems flavorless in the extreme but the NPCs have style.

Insert "What a Cat Hears" meme here.

I'm not sure if this is still the Tutorial. I think it must be. It seems almost infinitely forgiving. I still have no idea what I'm doing but I didn't seem to be anywhere close to failing either of the missions. My boss/operator/owner/fan club keeps telling me to do things a certain way - don't get seen, don't trip the alarms - and I ignore her and rush in like a berserk robot and it still seems to go my way. The bad guy keeps threatning me. I ignore him. Ditto.

Thus far I would not say that Warframe isn't fun. It is fun. It isn't my kind of fun but it's the kind of fun I can recognize when I see it. I might even be able to have some fun like that - in very small doses.

I thought Warframe might be a bit like Firefall and it is. Actually it isn't. It's a lot like Firefall. I liked Firefall. Well, I liked some versions of Firefall. The problem with Firefall was that it was never the same game two log-ins running. Red5 kept changing it and mostly they made it worse.

Jeromai says of Warframe "It’s been improved since it first launched...it’s gone through a number of layered iterations..." so maybe it's the anti-Firefall. A game that gets better the more the devs work on it? I guess it could happen.

Fade to cyan

Anyway, I haven't unistalled Warframe and I'm not going to. I'm past the "I don't know how to do this and it's frightening me, Mummy, make it stop!" stage. Now I'm in the "I don't know how to do this but I reckon I can wing it" stage. If I keep playing, which is unlikely, I'll eventually hit the "Y'know, I really should learn how you're supposed to do this properly" stage at which point I'll be pretty nearly hooked.

I think what I need is a Frame or a build that lets me use nothing more than WASD, Left/Right Mouse and maybe two other keys, preferably F and X. That's about the limit of my action gaming skills. Okay, maybe Number Keys 1-4 for special attacks provided all they do is extra DPS so I can just hit them randomly in a panic once in a while.

That, in a nutshell, is how I play DCUO. If I could play Warframe that way I might indeed play Warframe. Now and again. Once in a while.

I do quite like it so far...

Musings On A Wet Monday Morning

A little while ago Azuriel posted some thought-provoking observations on the inherent structural problems facing the MMORPG genre. These boil down to the slipperiness of definitions and the willingness of the audience to be satisfied.

That post, which I found myself mulling over yesterday, after the sad and arguably unnecessary demise of City of Steam, was prompted by another from SynCaine, that infamous pillar of the Axis of Blogging Evil.  The Evil One was bouncing off yet another post, this time from Wilhelm at TAGN, which itself derived from what was probably no more than a routine space-filler for a slow starting year at PCGamer.

So the circle turns. Often lambasted for negativity, SynCaine is more an agent provocateur, a satirist even. Like Keen, who professed rather bizarrely only yesterday that "there’s nothing out right now except for EverQuest that comes even close to satisfying a TRUE MMORPG experience", the register is often closer to disappointment than contempt.

Theirs are the voices of gamers who are not easily satisfied. As Azuriel explains, that makes them a bad fit for MMORPGs in the first place: "I’d wager that most people that stick with the MMO genre long-term generally find one game and settle in. And why wouldn’t you?"

Sometimes you just have to find a new home.

SynCaine, in common with many other long-time bloggers and commenters and countless millions of players who choose not to share their opinions with the world, has drifted away from the genre altogether. Keen, after many, many attempts to find a home elsewhere, has ended up back where he began, or as close as he can get.

It seems most long-time MMO fans don't do that. They settle in. They settle down. They never leave.

The frenzied years of WoW tourism left us with a different impression: MMO players as a vast swarm, filling the virtual skies, whirring and scrabbling as it descends on each new, bright hope, stripping it clean and wheeling away, leaving the bones to bleach and crumble.

It happened. It still happens. Look at Blade and Soul. Game developers even expect and plan for it. People do like a new shiny. But when the swarm moves on do those bones really lie still and forgotten?

Another road to take.

It seems not. Mostly those MMOs pick themselves up and go on. Remember the hype trains of the last half-decade and change? Allods, Aion, Rift, SW:ToR, ESO, just to name a handful. All still with us. MMOs are very hard to kill (although Trion seems always to be working on new ways to test the boundaries of extinction).

Those that drop seem often to have been culled rather than to have met a natural end. Rubies of Eventide sits in someone's wardrobe, a ball taken home. Tabula Rasa and Helgate:London lost their nerve. Star Wars Galaxies didn't fit the portfolio. City of Heroes was making good money, well-populated and popular, just not enough for corporate targets. City of Steam was scuppered by technology and poor decisions.

WildStar may be the next big beast to fall. It probably won't make it, so everyone says. Missed its market, misjudged its targets, mismanaged its way to the cliff's edge. Take your pick. It's not gone yet, though. Nor is Firefall, another of those MMOs you wonder just who plays and which underwent many of the same trials and still does.

I played it for a while. I might again. I never gave Red 5 any money, though, because I am the problem not the solution. I pay money every month to Daybreak Games, whose games I don't play all that often because I'm busy playing every MMO that catches my attention for free. That great long list of installed MMOs I have, growing week by week, earns no-one anything much. I'm not a rational consumer. Don't survey me.

It's no good looking back.

And yet someone must be paying, somewhere. As I was thinking about this yesterday I remembered a few MMOs I played long ago. With sunsets in mind I thought perhaps I ought to revisit a few before the chance was past. Perhaps the chance was already past. That's happened to me before.

Not this time. Anyone remember Eden Eternal? I doubt it. I mostly remember it because it let me play a giant cartoon mouse. Well, it's still there if I feel like doing that again. It's only five years old though, a mere stripling. What about Regnum? Once also known as Realms Online and now known as Champions of Regnum but still the same game. I had a short and happy frolic there and look, here it is. Next year it will have been running for a decade. It's even on Steam.

Ah yes, Steam. There, perhaps, is a partial explanation for this fountain of youth the genre seems to have found. Only partial, of course. The core reason for the insane longevity of even the most apparently unappealing MMOs is surely, as Azuriel says, that some people never leave. Even so, attrition must wear them all down over time. An infusion of new blood is necessary if the corpse is to keep on shambling.

Even when it seems you're all alone.

I'm new to Steam but I'm fast beginning to see its attractions, both to players and producers alike. My Library, which stood at no games at all for years, then one for twelve months, now has three. Thanks to SynCaine (him again) I downloaded Sunless Sea, which is not an MMO, even by the broadest definition. Its predecessor, Echo Bazaar (later known as Fallen London), which I played for a while and for which I made my Twitter account, something then required, arguably was. Is. It, of course, is also still running.

I played 19 minutes. By the time I got around to playing again my free weekend pass had expired. I'm not sure I'll play Sunless Sea again - it's a bit more of a "game" than interests me and a bit less of a story - but I'm sold on the ease of access.

One of the annoying things about trying new MMOs is all the form filling, the registering, the passwords and so forth. Steam circumvents much of that and if for no other reason I will likely end up using it as a portal for MMOs that use it. Like, perhaps, Knight Online, a game I have never before considered trying, a game that launched in the same year as WoW but which has only arrived on Steam in 2016, a dozen years later.

And your past glories mean nothing.

This isn't going anywhere in particular. I'm just talking out loud, working things through. We'll come back to this, over and again, I'm sure.

There are all these MMOs, you see. Some people start playing them and never stop so the games keep rolling along and as they go they pick up more players as others drop off. Meanwhile game companies look at them, see them there, keeping on going, and think "we'd like some of that" and make more. And people start playing those and some of them keep playing...

There are a lot of people in the world. The internet is endlessly accommodating. There is no clear reason why any of this would stop unless the critical mass of people interested in playing this type of game falls below a viable threshold and who knows what that threshold might be? It's clearly not very large if Istaria and Ryzom can survive and even prosper.

There's always a new dawn just over that hill.

The whole thing clearly isn't going to come to an end just because a lot of people lose interest, get bored or disenchanted and wander off. There are, after all, as noted, a lot of people in the world, more every day, and most of them haven't even had the chance yet to be bored by an MMO. They still have that life-experience ahead of them.

So, yes, some MMOs will go under. As the years wear on more ghosts will walk. Changes in fashion, taste, technology and definition may slow the flow of newcomers from production and consumption both but will the stream be dammed entire? I wouldn't bet on that.

I'm thinking the trick is to attach to the genre and not become overly infatuated with the individual games but that, of course, is impossible. It's always going to hurt when one you love falls. It's comforting to know there are so many but there's always that one, isn't there?  Not to love isn't a response.

The more I consider this the less I understand. It's magic, after all. One morning I'll wake and like fairy gold it will all be gone. Until then, we're rich. Let's enjoy it.

Have Jetpack, Will Travel: Firefall

Last night I went exploring in New Eden. Okay, that's confusing already. Why did Red5 choose the same name for the setting of Firefall that CCP have been using for the EVE universe for the last decade and more? Beats me. Anyway, it was Firefall I was playing. Internet spaceships don't really do it for me.

TWOC that sucker to death

Internet jet-packs, however, have been one of my favorite things since I first crash-landed on a treetop in Endless Ages back at the start of the twenty-first century. Internet motorbikes aren't too shabby either. Firefall has both.

It also has what must be one of the longest day/night cycles I've ever seen in an MMO and nighttime gets really dark. Pitch, if you happen to be in jungle, of which there is plenty. There's also a severe shortage of roads, and my bike is a loaner, which makes hopping across the landscape like a broken-winged sparrow in a hurricane my preferred method of transport for now.

It gets darker.

Firefall exemplifies much of what's needed to satisfy the explorer archetype. The world is extensive, geographically complex, rich and detailed in both sight and sound and sufficiently intriguing to invite and reward investigation for it's own sake.

I was thinking more along the lines of a
custom paint job.

The controls for movement are fluid and intuitive, very easy to learn while requiring a satisfying degree of attention to use effectively.If you can see something you can get to it. There are few if any invisible walls or barriers.

Things don't constantly try to kill you as you explore but there are dangerous areas and hazards to surprise you and keep you alert.

It's the little things...

There's just about enough information in the rather good tutorial to prevent frustration but after that it's mostly down to you. Progress by experimentation, trial and error or blind luck as you prefer.

For a couple of hours I jetpacked around with no better plan than to open up the map. Firefall has a very slick map interface and it uses that system that I love in MMOs, where you have a large, blacked-out map that fills in only as you travel. You also get an NPC partner who makes brief suggestions in delightfully accented tones across a crackly coms-link, something I found remarkably involving. At her mild urging I made it a priority to sync with each SIN uplink tower as it came in range.

Why? Not quite sure. I think it's the equivalent of biding to an Aetheryte in FFXIV, maybe.

Comes with a prize!

Anyway, I'm sure there's some good reason for it. Not knowing what that reason is, well, that's kind of the point. Right now it's more about pure research than practical application and in these early stages of exploration there's just so much to discover.

Some highlights from last night's session:

• A brief glimpse of a Melding Tornado. Arrived right at the end, just in time to loose off a few shots for whatever good that might do - bullets into a whirlwind.

• Found and explored Sunken Harbor, a larger and more impressive settlement than Copacabana. Took many screenshots.

Armorments. That's a word now?



• Got challenged to a race by some wannabe Mexican wrestler by the name of El Terremoto, who lent me an LGV that took me about twenty minutes to figure out how to use. Once I worked it out I ignored his challenge and went exploring at high speed until it he lost patience and exploded the bike underneath me. Fun times!

He's all talk. I think...

• Fell down a hole and landed behind a waterfall. Spent a while trying to jetpack out but didn't have enough ooomph. Was wondering whether going through the waterfall would kill me (deep water is instant death in a Battleframe, which makes sense) when I spotted an odd, square panel jutting out of the water. Landing on it boosted me high into the air and, after a couple of wild, flailing, failed attempts, onto a rock high enough to jetpack out.

OK, this time...

• Picked up something off the ground that turned out to be an audio log. Simple idea, very atmospheric. First indication that Firefall has a collect mechanic for Lore similar to The Secret World.

• Found and explored Shanty Town. Creepy. Very creepy. Especially in the dark, seen by the light of the flashlight that I somehow turned on without ever finding out how I'd done it.

Nooo! Don't go in the cellar!

This can't go on forever. The more I explore, the more I'll find, the more I find, the more I'll know, the more I know, the more I'll understand. Eventually balance will tip from discovery to use, from how to do things to how to do things better. At that point it may begin to become clear whether Firefall is fun because it's fun or just fun because it's fresh. I note it has all the usual MMO baggage in place and waiting. I found the Achievement panel last night. And the Dailies.

But for now, it is fresh, none of the problematic stuff is foregrounded and it feels like a world worth exploring. So that's what I'm going to do. That and take a ridiculous amount of screenshots, because, hey, I've been there!

Easy Mode

Keen, with whom I find myself agreeing on a disturbingly regular basis these days, had a post up a few days back commenting on one of Mark Kern's many pronouncements. Mark Kern's the man behind the soon-come MMOFPS Firefall, which I mentioned briefly last month and which J3w3l has covered extensively throughout its patchy beta progress, most recently here where she explains, as the game heads into Open Beta on July 9th, why she likes it.

Someone mention a Road-map?

Mark Kern's a busy man, what with heading Red5 Studios as they bring their big project to market but he still finds time to pen a series of columns for MMORPG.com, telling us How MMOs Should Be. (That's not the name of it, by the way, although it might as well be). The diatribe Keen quotes was actually entitled "Have MMOs Become Too Easy?", to which semi-rhetorical question the author's answer appears to be "Yes, when they aren't called Firefall".

His latest observation is the rather less snappy "Up to 90% of MMO Real Estate is Wasted". Again, this is apparently an indisputable fact, at least for MMOs other than his own. The ever-frisky MMORPG.com commenteriat takes issue with Mark over a number of details, such as where he gets his figures from, why he doesn't seem to have noticed some major development trends that could be said to invalidate most of his arguments and, most forcefully, why he gets to advertise his upcoming game for free in what's supposed to be an objective feature on game design.

I liked what little I saw of Firefall and I plan on giving it a run when it soft-launches this week. Like many commenters, however, I will be frikkin' amazed if it turns out to be the answer to all the myriad problems against which Mark Kern rails. Problems that, while they may have some basis in reality, arguably exist more in the imaginations of people who no longer play certain MMOs than in the day-to-day experience of those still enjoying them.

Is it me or does that merc look kinda jaded?

I played Everquest yesterday. Not some grey-market, time-warp Golden Age version but the current build. Now fourteen years old, EQ has released 19 Expansions giving Norrath something upward of 375 zones, a handful of which are "Hot". Recently, after more than a year of living with the same Hot Zones, someone decide to swap in a great new set. Since it was also a double XP extravaganza for the 4th of July weekend I thought I'd come home for the holidays.

Looking to ease back in gently after a few months away I picked a mid-30s Enchanter from my large pack of characters. I spoke to Franklin Teek in Plane of Knowledge and he recommended Dawnshroud Peaks, an old favorite where I must have spent many hundreds of hours over the years. I claimed my clockwork merc, summoned my idiot animation and set out for adventure.

It was a simple enough run, first by book to The Nexus then through Netherbian Lair to Dawnshroud. I'd been tasked with killing five Sambata Tribal Gatherers, harmless, inoffensive primitives that, in the way of MMOs in general and EQ in particular, needed to die for no reason other than someone was paying me. All our characters are sociopaths, that's the long and the short of it.

Hi. I'm Franklin Teek. I pick someone's name out of a hat and then you go kill them.
It's all quite official. You let me worry about the paperwork.

I'd forgotten where they were, so on emerging from the tunnels of Netherbian Lair I was standing aimlessly looking around, when I spotted a lightcrawler and thought I'd warm up on him. He clearly had the same idea because a second later my entire screen had gone black. I'd forgotten lightcrawlers blind, which is why, in the old days, we stayed well away from them.

When a mob blinds you in EQ it's not just some flickering color filter around the edge of your screen and a missed auto-attack. Oh no, your entire monitor screen goes black and stays that way until the blindness wears off, which might not be so bad if lightcrawlers couldn't reapply it indefinitely.

As anyone who hasn't played since 2004 will tell you, EQ really has been dumbed down to the point that any toddler can level to cap in a couple of days so I didn't actually die. My animation finished the crawler while my merc kept us both alive (if an animated sword and shield can be said to be alive in the first place).

So, some monkeys died. Just look at that upgrade!

Suitably chastened I set off looking for Sambatas. After a run-in with a Zelniak (alright, I started that one) and a detour into Sanctus Seru to shake the half-dozen or so wolves that fancied a late afternoon Gnome snack I eventually found the Sambata pottering around their rocks outside the entrance to Maiden's Eye. Moving to pull one to what looked like a safe spot I triggered an invisible blood starved wolf, who chased me across the nearby zone line and then hung around outside in case I came back.

Eventually I got set up and successfully killed my five hapless monkey-men. Start to finish it had taken the best part of an hour to travel three zones from Plane of Knowledge and kill seven creatures. Was it easier than Back In The Day? No it flipping well was not. It was exactly the same - time-consuming, awkward, risky and enormously enjoyable. What had changed was the reward for all that effort. Because it was a Hot Zone I netted 8 plat and an extremely nice cloak.

One. More. Level. That's all I ask!

Flushed with this success I then made a foolish and rash decision to do something similar with my highest-level character, an 84th Beastlord. The level 80 Hot Zone is Hills of Shade, another Luclin zone but one largely unknown to me, my only previous acquaintance with it being a handful of nervy runs to a camp in the middle for a FedEx mission I did for a while a year or two back, during my last serious attempt to hit the then-level cap of 85.

I'll spare the details but more than an hour later I logged off having killed precisely nothing, gained exactly no xp, coin or loot and yet counting myself lucky things had gone as well as that. Everquest may not  be "I lost my level and my corpse and everything on it" hard these days but don't let anyone tell you that means it's easy.

Was it fun? Hell yes. Exasperating, frustrating, infuriating, irritating but always fun. Otherwise, after nearly a decade and a half, why would it still have seventeen servers running and general chat channels that scroll so fast you struggle to follow the conversation and fight at the same time?

Oh, and all that wasted real estate? Where I come from we call that a world.

Taking Stock

So many plans, so many good intentions. So many projects. So many new MMOs.

So what happened?

Things I Was Going To Do

• Project 5/5 - That was the Syp-inspired notion of playing ten unfamiliar MMOs in ten days. Several other bloggers picked up on it and there were a few posts. It looks as though Syp ran out of steam at seven. Did anyone actually play and blog about all ten? Not being able to see myself finding the time to join in I whimsically suggested I might try five then promptly forgot about the whole thing. As if I ever intended to go through with it in the first place... Then again, I've almost certainly played at least five new-to-me MMOs already just in the normal run of things.

• Playing GW2 Properly - As in leveling a character to 80 via a linear progression through contiguous maps. That lasted about two weeks until I discovered Asurans don't really have a clear line of progress to follow. They have Rata Sum, Metrica Province and Brisban Wildlands and then the map runs out. My new ranger decided the next logical step would be Lornar's Pass. He completed that and moved on to Dredgehaunt Cliffs but about halfway through one of the Living Story events blew in. He ended up first in Lion's Arch, then in Southsun and eventually, somehow, in the Borderlands upholding the Honor of the Yak in WvW. By then the whole thing was off the rails. He's currently level 64 and spending most of his time doing much the same as all my other characters i.e. aimlessly wandering about doing Dailies, Living Story, Dragon Events and WvW as the mood takes him. Project abandoned, on this character anyway. 

• All Eight GW2 Classes To Level 80 - Nearly there. If it hadn't been for the spare ranger it would have been done by now. The Guardian's sitting at Level 63 and so long as he only ever uses a Greatsword I can imagine playing him even after he tops out. The lack of any real ranged option still rankles and he's a weird mix of indestructible against some things and incapable against others but I've warmed to him.

• Playing GW2 with the UI Switched Off - Still on the drawing board. I want to get to this but I need to make a new character and I don't have a spare slot. 

•  Getting Creative - with Neverwinter's Foundry. That was the plan. See below for how well that went.

MMOs I Said I Was Going To Play 

(and one I said I wasn't)

• Final Fantasy XIV:ARR - The big success story. It came from the back of the pack, half-forgotten, to gallop into a clear lead. So far there's very little about that I don't like and unless something unexpected happens this will most likely be the next MMO I play "seriously", especially if Mrs Bhagpuss comes on board. Her initial impressions were favorable. If housing was in at launch it would be a done deal. 

 

• Neverwinter - There was a moment when this might have been the Next Game, but that moment was before I'd actually played it. Didn't dislike it; just never got going. Made one character, got to about level nine or ten in maybe three or four sessions and then...nothing. Like a great many MMOs Neverwinter would be quite absorbing if it was the only game in town but as one of many it doesn't have the necessary hook. I keep meaning to give it another run - I'd still like a look at The Foundry -  but there's always something else I'd rather do instead. It's noticeable that the flood of blog posts about it that were filling my Feedly for a while have dried up. By all accounts it's doing well but no-one I read seems to be writing about it any more.

•  City of Steam - Playing this regularly despite feeling somewhat let-down by the direction it's taken.That deserves, and may even get, a post of its own. I log in every day for the bribes loyalty rewards, which they tweaked to the point where they are really too tasty to miss. The way they chose to stagger the Open Beta into three phases with the Human races in the first, then the Elves and finally the Greenskins was very irritating. I have a level 15 Heartlander that I'd probably never have made at all had all the races been available at the start. Now he's languishing unplayed while I level the Goblin I wanted all along through the same linear content. Not best pleased.

• Dragons Prophet - Haven't logged in for weeks, a situation unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. DP is another one that would probably have gotten some play in leaner times but was always going to struggle to gain attention in the current MMO glut.  Only having humans as a playable race is a massive disincentive. I can be a human anytime; I don't need to play MMOs for that. 

• The Secret World - Back to playing this sporadically but not infrequently. Got my chainsaw! That was fun. Went to Egypt to do some of the Indiana Jones missions then realized I never bought the pack. Danced with Said. Fought with a bunch of Aten cultists I'd had no trouble with at QL6 and died to them repeatedly at QL10. Either they've got a lot better or I've got a lot worse. Decided I'd enjoy TSW a whole lot more if Funcom took about 90% of the fighting out of it. Or just 90% of the mobs.

• Firefall - Waiting on the upcoming launch because I enjoyed my brief visit a lot. Realistically, though, I imagine I'll putz about for a session or two, write an enthusiastic but ill-informed blog post and then never play it again.

• Dino Storm - Although you never can tell, because against all odds I'm still playing this one, and not just to get my log-in rewards either. It seems to be doing very well. They announced recently that they'd hit three million registrations. It's always busy when I visit, with whomping great dinos stomping round Dinoville and a whole list of well-populated instances popping up as options any time I zone. I love the music, the colors, the ambience. The controls are comfortable. The gameplay is a weird mix - relaxing and stressful at the same time. Simple escort, FedEx and kill ten rats quests in a cartoon setting that allows unrestricted PvP is a very odd combination.  I don't make any great claims for it but it's a fun distraction.

• EQ2 - Still thinking about it every day. Might even get to playing this week. Said that last week. And the week before that.

• Rift - The MMO I had absolutely no plans to play again. And I wouldn't have if it hadn't been for you pesky kids if Trion hadn't filled my pockets with Free Money. Mrs Bhagpuss has been there full-time for the past week or so, spending her 20k credits on Dimensions in a building frenzy. She's also taken to fishing in a big way. I've tried to get back into the game but it's resisting me at every turn. I'm not just finding it hard to like now, I'm struggling to remember why I liked it so much the first time.

For a minute there I contemplated going through the long list of MMOs on the back-burner: Everquest, Vanguard, DCUO, even some that aren't published by SOE, but if life's too short to play an MMO it's surely too short to blog about it. Although I did play EQ last week, come to think of it...

A Fleeting FireFall Fly-By

Last night I went futzing around in FireFall. They're having some kind of pre-Open Beta weekend where anyone can play the Closed Beta one last time, which to me sounds uncannily like an Open Beta in itself but what do I know? Anyway, due to having signed up for the closed beta long ago on an email address I rarely remember to check I'd missed every single previous invitation Red5 sent me, so what the hey...

Everything I know about FireFall comes from a series of posts at Healing The Masses. J3w3l made it sound pretty interesting if a little rough around the edges. Having spent all of two hours there last night I am in no position to offer anything other than the firstest of first impressions but I can say this much: it looks good and it feels fun.

Smile when you call me generic.

Graphically it's broad-brush. The look is serious-cartoon. There's a lot of flat matte color swash and something of that old-school hand-drawn tv animation vibe, like the way you might half-remember Johnny Quest looking until you foolishly go watch some on YouTube. Lots of unfussy detailing in the lush environments. It's a winner on visuals.

Character creation is perfunctory to say the least, something that's partially explained when you're introduced to the New You machine during the rather good Tutorial. It appears there are more options; you can change your appearance up to and including your gender at will, only it costs Red Beans and beans means dollars. FireFall's a F2P and funding has to come from somewhere.

Who doesn't like a bit of Barry?

Still, I was perfectly happy with my basic, free look. Well, happy might be going a bit far. The female character model seems to have legs about seven yards long and the at-rest stance of a New Zealand prop doing the Hakka (which is, weirdly, the /dance routine the Charr get in GW2). It was jarring at first but I'd stopped noticing it after a few minutes because the animations otherwise are fluid and satisfying.

Fluid and satisfying describes the basic gameplay; the nuts and bolts of moving, shooting and, especially Thumping. J3w3l covers Thumping extensively in the above-linked posts but in a sentence it amounts to hitting the ground with a very big hammer to locate resources then calling down an air-strike to mine them, something that understandably annoys the local wildlife, leading to large-scale brawling.

Getting ahead of myself. First there are battleframes to choose from in a Tutorial phase very similar to the one in The Secret World where you get to try out all the weapon types. Battleframes equate to classes, effectively, but you aren't locked to any particular one, just one at a time. Obviously. Try wearing two exoskeletons at once, see how far that gets you.

I can heal you. With a gun. Just come a bit closer...

There were five on offer in the Tutorial (there are a lot more to collect as you get further into the game I believe). I picked the Accord BioTech aka Healer on the grounds that it's always good to be able to heal yourself. Although as it turned out I never had the chance. I was either alive or dead with no discernible transition.

Either I must be getting used to these various reticule/mouselook systems or FireFall has a particularly straightforward one because I found the controls very comfortable and natural right from the start. Shooting things was no problem. I did have a little trouble with my Jetpack at first but I soon got the hang of it.

Having too much fun to take a decent screenshot.

Ah, the Jetpack. What a wonderful imaginary invention it is! One of my all-time favorite MMO things. I first encountered jetpacks in that long-forgotten, much missed MMOFPS progenitor Endless Ages which I played a good deal back in beta sometime around 2001-2002. And until last night I believe that was probably the last time I encountered them as well.

More jetpacks please, developers. I need the practice. Mostly I veered about wildly, crashing through the arboreal canopy before descending ignominiously to bounce off some building and land in a heap on the ground. Pro tip: never land in water. Yes it looks soft but you're in a high-tech, electronic rig-out and electricity and water do not play well together. Or at all. Instant death.

Once the novelty of the jetpack wore off (a bit) I tried Thumping. Took me a few goes to understand the UI there but like all the controls I encountered, once understood it was very easy to use. I was somewhat impressed with the UI overall. It's minimalistic, leaving the vast majority of the screen clear, while the bits you do see are elegant, attractive and comprehensible.

Doesn't it look just a little like a rabbit?

Thumping is fun. I found a good spot and called down my Thumper. (Another Pro Tip - don't stand on the spot you just marked for the Calldown gawping up at the incoming Thumper as it arrows down at you from the skies. It's a big chunk of hardware. It will hit you on the head and kill you. Like it did me). Once my Thumper was up and running, making the extremely satisfying noise which may have earned it it's name, two things happened. Various malevolent arthropods emerged from the jungle undergrowth and tried to eat both me and the Thumper and hordes of other players appeared out of the air to help me kill them.

Clubbing. It has two meanings.

Calling down a Thumper in FireFall seems to have about the same effect as whipping out your BeatBox in Free Realms, only with more machine-gun fire and less break dancing. As a game mechanic it really has a lot going for it. I could see plenty of other MMOs borrowing this one.

I filled my first Thumper with nothing but dirt, which earned me a sarcastic comment from the guy in my headset who seems to act as some kind of remote commentator/advisor. (It's worth noting that the voiceovers and dialog that I heard and read were above average throughout. We're not talking TSW here but definitely a cut above basic MMO ham acting and scribbles). On my second attempt I took the trouble to pay attention to the read-outs from my Prospecting hammer, found a better spot and filled my Thumper with some kind of gas. That was unexpectedly satisfying.

And that's where I called it a day. I will be back for Open Beta, time permitting, when maybe I will find out what the game is actually about. If nothing else it seems like a very interesting structure for an MMO, knitting Gathering, Dynamic Events and PvP together in a way that I can't recall seeing before. And it looks gorgeous. Definitely deserves further investigation.