I've Got My Glasses On My Face

Anyone remember Flyff? I wrote about it in June last year, when the seventeen-year old game was being re-launched as Flyff Universe. At the time, the U.K. was in the grip of a heatwave and my main reason for mentioning it was the attraction of being able to play it in a browser, thereby reducing the risk of my PC bursting into flames. 

The weather cooled off and I stopped playing. I haven't thought about the game since. Until this morning, when I received an email. No introductions or greetings, just this massive flyer.

Mmorpgs don't really let you forget about them any more. Not if they have your socials. They send you emails and tweets and probably ask your mother on Facebook how you're doing these days. (I really don't know how Facebook works.)

I used to be largely immune to this sort of passive-aggressive marketing. I used throwaway email addresses to sign up for games I was trying out and then never looked at those email addresses again. In recent years, though, as I've found myself returning to any number of old games, either out of curiosity, nostalgia or in the hope of finding something to post about, I've fallen into the habit of linking those dusty email addresses to the one I look at every day. 

I'm not sure what that does to my security levels but it certainly means I don't miss out on as many "Please come back! We really miss you!" campaigns and their associated freebies, handouts and outright bribes. 

It works, too. I can see why they all do it. I can't resist a freebie at the best of times and they make it seem so easy. Sometimes it even is.

Coming back to Flyff really could not have been any easier. All I had to do was find my old login details. The game runs in a browser so there was no downloading or updating. When I logged in, the first thing I noticed was a gift. It was right there on my hotbar, waiting for me.

I jumped to the conclusion that it was the welcome back for lapsed players because, as you can tell, I hadn't actually bothered to read the email in any detail. As I crop and edit the screenshots for this post, I realize it wasn't that at all. It was a "Global Launch Gift". I was under the impression the global launch had already happened back when I made an account last June but I'm happy to be corrected if it means more free stuff.

I wasn't a hundred percent sure what to do with the thing so I clicked it and it vanished. At that point I might have welcomed a little more information but I am a veteran of these giveaways, after all. I knew enough to look in my inventory to see if it had magically moved itself there. It had.

I opened it up to see what was inside. There was a lot of stuff. You can see it all listed out there, over to the right.   Most of it was the usual boosts and buffs, very welcome for anyone planing on taking the game seriously but not much more than inventory clutter to the casual visitor.  But there were two very interesting items at the head of the list that caught my eye right away; wings and glasses. 

What is it about glasses in mmorpgs? In real life, a set of frames balanced on the bridge of your nose rarely adds to a person's mystique but in games they're cool as hell. I love a good pair of glasses. As for wings... I don't think any more needs to be said.

I clicked on the Lucky Black Glasses Box and another window popped up. The game really seemed to be taking this thing seriously. At first sight the meaning of the list wasn't immediately clear. I glanced at it and didn't grasp the full implications. All the glasses are black. All the glasses are slatted. There are percentages that presumably represent your chance of winning each of them. 

And there are some numbers followed by an ellipsis, suggesting something has been left out or cut off. It was only after I'd hit the "Open" button and received my pair that I began to understand what it was.

The glasses I received were time-limitted to seven days use after first use. Those are the ones you have a 20% chance of receiving. It could have been worse. I could have had glasses for three days (30% chance) or just a single day (34%).

I guess I should be happy to get even a week's wear out of them but I'm not. I don't like time-limited items in mmorpgs. The whole concept seems mean-spirited. I realize it's a way to bring in some steady income in a F2P title that can't rely on monthly subscription income but I still find the whole thing annoying. 

I would never pay money for a loaner, even though logically it makes as much sense as paying a sub. Getting one for free is acceptable but still, somehow, disappointing.That said, they look great. And it's not even as though I'm going to be playing the game long enough for them to expire whie I'm using them. I probaly won't even log in again after today, at least not until they send me another email telling me I can get something else for free.

On the other hand, had I been one of the one-percenters who got a set of black slatted glasses for permanent use, I know I'd have been quite unreasonably smug about it, so I really have no moral high ground to stand on here. I'm just complaining for the sake of it, which is the prerogative of the blogger, is it not?

After the glasses I moved on to the wings. Those, I'm pleased to say, are yours to keep for as long as the game lasts. Which, given it's coming up to its eighteenth anniversary, could yet be a while.

They look pretty good, too. I'm happy with them, although it's a pity "you can't fly with them" as the description explains. Given that Flyff is literally a game built around flying - the very name is an acronym for Fly-For-Free - it does seem a bit churlish to be giving away dud wings.

Moan, moan, moan! That's all you do. And yes, there's some truth in that. Mostly, though, I'm just pleased to get stuff handed to me for doing nothing. Even if I'm never going to make much use of any of it.

That said, I do still have a vague ambition to get far enough into Flyff one day to be able to fly. It seems weird that it's not something you can do right from the start. I think I might have to look into it to see just how long it takes and how difficult is to get there.

For all its modernization as it morphs from plain old Flyff to Flyff Universe, with a revamp due some time very soon for yet another makeover to Flyff Universe Reborn  (Pre-register now if you want yet more freebies!), Flyff is a pretty traditional, old-school game. I found that out this morning as I was trotting through the trees looking for ambulating mushrooms to complete a quest.

 

I'm not talking so much here about the mechanics, although those would feel very familiar to any player newly arrived in a time machine from 2005, but the way players approach them. It's a good old while since I last received a throrough overbuffing from a passing stranger but it happened to me this morning within minutes. I remember it happening to me in Rose Online, another retro title of similar vintage last year, too.

It used to be the thing to do back in the early noughties. High level players would hang out in starter areas, blessing lesser levels with their powerful damage shields and regens. A good buffing could turn a newbie into an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction. Some people got so addicted to the feeling of power they wouldn't leave the village until they'd been buffed up to a diamond-hard glare.

It wasn't as simple as handing out a couple of buffs and moving on, either. There used to be all kinds of etiquette associated with the process. You could as easily get yelled at in tells as receive a grateful bow. The whole thing might be worth a post of its own, some day, if I can bring myself to write it.

I was generally in favor of the practice, although there were times when it could be disruptive or unwelcome, but the one thing I really didn't appreciate were the self-appointed guardian angels, who buffed you  then hung around to make sure you made good use of their largesse. As a new player, the last thing I wanted as I familiarised myself with my class was someone following five paces behind, watching every damn thing I did.

The person who buffed me this morning was one of those. In retrospect, my mistake was probably saying "Thanks!". I should have just stayed silent, as if I hadn't even noticed. At the very least I shouldn't have added that cheery exclamation mark. 

Thanks to the extremely overpowering buffage, I finished my quest in seconds, one-shotting everything. It was fun and I would have carried on but the person who'd buffed me, who now seemed to have me on auto-follow, ran behind me all the way to the questgiver as I went to do my hand-in and then stood around waiting to see what I was going to do next.

What I did was log out, which was exactly what I used to do back in the day when something like this happened. I'm all for a quick conversation, a friendly wave and a name to add to my friends list but if you want to avoid acquiring a stalker it's best to be ruthless and act decisively. Get it wrong and next thing you know you're changing servers. Or games.

It is, as they say, all part of life's rich pageant. Like a lot of annoying things, when they're not there you find yourself kind of wishing they were. I'd rather have to ghost an over-enthusiastic player or two, now and then, than move through a world filled with nothing but ghosts, players who never acknowledge your existence in any way at all.

As for the game itself, I imagine I'll be back, sometime. History suggests it. One day I might even learn to fly. Me and the pigs, both. Plus, I guess I'll have to log in again if I want those daily Welcome Back rewards. It would be plain rude to turn them down, wouldn't it?

If You Can't Stand The Heat, Get Into In The Kitchen

At the weekend, the Meteorological Office issued the UK's first ever Red Warning for extreme heat, covering London and much of central England. Today, for the first time since records began, the recorded temperature exceeded forty degrees Celsius, which I'm sure sounds like a balmy spring day to someone reading this but is quite literally unheard of here.

Over in the west of the country, where I live, we're only under an Amber Warning. Yesterday was our really hot day. I measured the temperature in the shade in our back garden at thirty-seven Celsius or 98.6 in the old money. Ironically, today feels hotter, even though it's not. 

When I was growing up I lived with my grandparents and my grandfather was very interested in metereology. He had a barometer and also one of those dual thermometers that not only tells you what the temperature is when you look at it, like all thermometers do, but also records the highest and lowest temperatures it reached when you weren't watching.

I have a very clear memory of that thermometer telling us the temperature had hit one hundred degrees Fahrenheit one summer but of course a) memory is fiction b) who knows if the thermometer was accurate and c) was that temperature shade or sun? 

As far as c) goes, I also have a memory of the same thermometer going to the very top of its scale, which I recall being around 115F, when I put it in direct sunlight on a hot summer's day. That suggests the 100F reading probably wasn't due to being it being baked in the heat of the open sun.   

If it did ever hit 100F, though, that would have been higher than the UK record at the time so I think we can discount my childhood memory, other than to say we did sometimes have hot days in the summer back then. Now it seems we're going to get them all the time. 

But you didn't come here to read about the weather. I imagine you came here to read about mmorpgs. Luckily, the two are connected.

Like almost all British homes, the house in which Mrs Bhagpuss and I live with our dog, Beryl, is not designed for prolonged spells of hot, sunny weather. We don't have air conditioning and although it takes a fair old while for the inside of the house to heat up, once it does, it takes even longer to cool down again. That's why, as I said, it feels hotter today than it did yesterday, even though the mercury has actually fallen.

Beryl, being a wooly kind of dog, does not do well in the heat. She's been flat out in a stupor from just after breakfast until just before dusk. Mrs Bhagpuss bought her a couple of gel-filled cool mats and a dog paddling pool, all of which have been very well-used.

I generally do better in the heat than Beryl, but these last couple of days it's been so hot inside the house, particularly in my upstairs study, which, with it's south-easterly exposure, gets the full glare of the sun for much of the day, that I've had to spend considerable time either in the kitchen, ironically the coolest room in the house, or outside in the back garden, where we have an enormous, shady apple tree.

Beryl also likes, if not needs, to sleep on her cool mat in the corner of the kitchen but she's not happy being downstairs on her own, which is somewhat problematic given our normal pattern of spending almost all our time upstairs, where both computers, my study and Mrs Bhagpuss's craft room are.

That's two reasons for me to spend more time in the kitchen and the back garden than usual and since I am normally attached to my PC by a virtual umbilical cord, I've found myself making full use of my Splashtop account. I've had it for a very long time, over a decade I believe. I downloaded the free trial out of curiosity and was so impressed I paid the one-time license fee as soon as the trial ended, imagining I'd use it all the time but until now I've logged in so infrequently that a couple of years ago I got an email asking if they could delete my account since I clearly had no use for it. Luckily I had the foresight to ask them not to do that and now I'm reaping the rewards.

I have an ancient Dell XPS laptop, probably getting on for fifteen years old, which still works perfectly well, at least after I replaced the HDD, but which isn't capable of running anything much made in the last five to ten years. It is, however, perfectly comfortable running the Splashtop app, which means I can use it just as though I was sitting at my desktop.

Consequently I've been able to sit in the relatively cooler part of the house and play games through Steam, play EverQuest II, play whatever I want. There's no appreciable extra lag or latency and everything looks and plays great. I haven't yet tried playing New World via GeForce Now via Splahstop to see what happens at two degrees of separation but now I've thought of it you can bet I'm going to.

Even so, there's another problem. I may be downstairs in the cool but my desktop, which is doing all the work, is still up there in the hottest room in the house. I'm slightly concerned that I might be downstairs, happily fragging some boss, while upstairs my PC is melting.

If this hot weather's going to last  - and according to predictions it probably is, if not at quite the same intensity - it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a couple of games I could play directly through the laptop itself. Older games would probably work but I'd have to download and install them, something I'm not all that keen to do. The laptop has a single, small HDD that's currently admirably clean due to the re-install and I'd really like to keep it that way.

There's an obvious solution: browser games. If a game plays in a browser it will presumably play on any machine that the browser will support. My laptop has both Firefox and Chrome installed so that's the first hurdle cleared.

Are there any good browser mmorpgs, though? Well, yes, there are. I can immediately think of two that I've played: Villagers and Heroes and AdventureQuest 3D, although both need a client download so maybe they aren't pure browser games after all. Others I've tried in the past include Drakensang, Eldevin and of course Runescape but I don't see myself going back to any of those. 

I certainly never imagined I go back to Flyff, either. Flyff launched all the way back in 2005 and since I seem to remember participating in some kind of open beta or trial it may well have been the first free to play title I ever played. I remember having a tough time with it due to lag but generally quite enjoying it.

I do know I didn't stick around long enough to take advantage of the game's signature feature, flight. Flyff is short for Fly For Fun, it being one of the first mmorpgs to offer players a freeform flight option. I've always wished I'd gotten at least that far. 

As luck would have it, MassivelyOP posted an item this morning, retailing the news that Flyff Universe,"the browser-based relaunch of the 2005 MMORPG that arrived this past June", currently has over 800,000 players worldwide. As of a few hours ago, they can add one more to that total.

It took me a matter of moments to get into the game and start playing. I didn't even need to make an account. You can begin playing as a guest and then either trust to your cache to remind the servers who you are or, if that feels too much like high-wire walking without a net after you've gotten a few levels under your belt, convert your guest account to a registered one so you can sleep easy in your bed at night.

I converted at level three. It only took a matter of seconds. Accessibility is the major selling point for browser mmos so there's no percentage in them making it any harder than it needs to be. 

When I logged out after about an hour I was level four and still in the tutorial, albeit thankfully also out in the open world, which was positively heaving with players. I'd had a good time, albeit mostly for reasons of nostalgia. Flyff World may be a remake but it's unabashedly old school. If you want a reminder of what F2P mmorpgs used to be like fifteen years ago, look no further.

It seems unlikely I'll make much progress beyond a few screenshots and maybe a post or two but it's an option for hot days when I'd rather not run the PC. Also, I'd at least like to be able to say I know what it's like to fly in a game called Fly For Fun...

I Can Fly : Riders of Icarus

Before I went on holiday I had a mild disagreement with Jeromai over flying mounts in the comments on his post about Guild Wars 2's Skyscale. The gist is this: I like mounts that operate exactly as though I'm controlling my character directly. I don't like mounts that feel as if I'm controlling my character, while they control another character, one who has independent movement.

Put more simply, I like an extremely gamified version of flying, one with no hint of simulation. I feel the same about all mounts and vehicles in MMORPGs. My feeling is that if I wanted to play a driving game or a flight simulator I'd be playing one, not playing an MMORPG.

That said, I purely love flying mounts. I was very dubious about them before I'd ever tried one. I tended to endorse the idea that free flight would trivialize the worldliness of the setting and lead to shortcuts and exploits that would allow people to avoid conflict.

When I got to fly for the first time, which my ever-unreliable memory tells me would have been in Vanguard, those fears proved to be both true and untrue. Far from trivializing the worlds, flying freely high above them has much the same effect on me as Yann Arthus Bertrand's famous aerial photographs or even the iconic Earthrise.

Seeing the world from above renders it more real, not less. It has the exact opposite effect of trivializing what I see; it adds gravitas. Conversely and paradoxically, my second concern turned out to be both true and no concern at all.

Being able to fly over and thereby avoid conflict in which you would prefer not to engage is liberating. It makes everything about the experience of traveling through a virtual world better. It may harm the game as a game but it enhances and expands the conceit that it's the journey that matters.

With all this in mind, it's perhaps surprising that I haven't paid much attention to those MMORPGs that put flying at the very heart of their worlds. Long, long ago I played Flyff, whose very name is an acronym for "Fly For Fun". I wouldn't know how accurate that acronym is because, as with my run in the later and better-known Aion, another game predicated on flight, I didn't last long enough to get my wings.

I've never felt any desire to try Flyff again. Aion got a fairly recent makeover, which did make me consider returning, but the urge soon passed. But there is one other flight-centric MMORPG I once tried that still lurks in the back of my mind: Riders of Icarus.

I first played Riders of Icarus back in July 2016. I wasn't impressed. I posted about it just once, summing up the experience by comparing it unfavorably to another Eastern import, Dragomon Hunter, concluding "Riders of Icarus is flashier and takes itself more seriously but feels a lot more corporate and bland. Most importantly, though, I actively like my DH character whereas my RoI avatar is a cipher."

Dragomon Hunter lasted a mere seventeen months before closing. Riders of Icarus will be three years old next month. You can play it via Steam, where it has three stars out of five and a 65% favorable rating from over 8000 reviews.

When I posted a list of the MMORPGs I currently have installed on my hard drive(s) a couple of weeks ago, Riders of Icarus was one of them. I annotated the entry with a gnomic observation: "Never underestimate the power of a plush wolf with stars on".

This was a reference to a screenshot at The MMOist. I am highly susceptible to promotions in MMORPGs that appear to have been designed to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of a six-year old. If it has sparkles, stars or rainbows, I want it. If it closely ressembles a cuddly toy, I really want it.

Since very, very few six-year olds must actually play any of the MMORPGs in which these promotions appear, I can only assume my predelictions are more commonplace than might be imagined. Most games, even those with 12 or higher PEGI ratings, seem to work on the general principle that a significant proportion of their audience consists of would-be Disney Princesses.

In this case, the plush wolf seems to have been part of a limited-time login event in February, one which also came with several highly-desirable cats. I'm sorry I missed it. As with all good MMORPGs, however, no sooner does one limited-time event end than another begins.

The current RoI initiative involves Cherry Blossom, always popular in games of Eastern origin (cf Black Desert). There don't seem to be any special mounts or pets although the event vendor is a rabbit in a hat.

I picked up a few cherry blossom petals as I wandered around the impressive capital, Hakanas. I'd flown there on my brilliantly-colored parrot, a seven-day, limited duration mount gifted me for... well, for finding my way to the big city, I think.

In the aforementioned list, Riders of Icarus fell into the "Been meaning to play these again for ages" category. When I wrote that I had a strong feeling it would be sooner rather than later and so it proved.

I patched the game up via Steam yesterday, logged in to find my only character idling in a quest hub not far from the starting area. Within a few moments I was questing mindlessly and enjoying it considerably more than I expected. 

The controls felt familiar. Combat, at low levels at least, seemed extraordinarly straightforward. The scenery was attractive, the wildlife was curious, the experience ticked over. I dinged eight, following the questlines without really following them.


A couple of solo instances flicked past. Some NPC gave me a ride on his griffin. Another lent me a parrot. And then I was flying.

It took me a moment to acclimatize to the controls and then I was home, free in the sky. Hakanas looked impressive enough from the ground but from the air it was laid out beneath me like a fascinating puzzle. I swooped and soared and landed and ran. I took breadcrumb quest after breadcrumb quest until I knew every major square and landmark. I met the King. Somewhere along the way I dinged nine.

Two hours had passed. I hadn't tabbed out once. My mind hadn't wandered. I realised I was thirsty and a little stiff from sitting so long in the same position.

Two years ago I summed the game up like this: "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul". Nothing I saw or did yesterday changes that fundamental impression, only sometimes "more soul" isn't exactly what I need.

Sometimes I just want to fly.

Get Wings. Wear Wings. Fly. : Revelation Online

Revelation Online continues to mystify and amuse in equal measure. Yesterday I set out once again with the intention of stepping off the moving walkway that passes for questing in this strange game. Having failed to discover how to begin crafting or harvesting and with nothing related to housing anywhere in sight I thought I'd just wander around and take in the sights.

In some ways RO could be an explorer's dream - if you equate exploration with tourism, which I confess I often do. As far as I can tell you can click on just about any icon on the main map - a vendor, for example - and the game will autorun you there.

Doesn't matter if you're on the coast and the target is in the high mountains half a continent away. Doesn't matter if there are rivers or seas between you and your goal. It certainly doesn't matter if you've never been there before and have not the slightest idea how to get there.

At first I had to run but now the game responds to my imperious clicking by having my character produce a blast on a whistle to summon her horse. She then mounts up without any help from me and off she rides. If they come to a body of water the horse vanishes and my character swims like a fish.

Quite literally like a fish, in fact, or a mermaid. All movement from the waist, legs going side to side like a tail, no arm movement at all. Unlike, say, GW2, your character can't automatically breathe underwater but it takes a very long time indeed for her breath to run out. I've done several quests requiring diving that would have drowned someone in EQ2  and I've yet to see her breath bar go under 90%.

Airships look a lot more impressive from the ground.

While riding it seems mobs ignore you completely. I've watched as my Spirit Shaper, sitting serenely, sidesaddle, on her Red Horse, canters through herds of aggressive beasts ten or twenty levels higher than her own. They might as well be rabbits.

I had plenty of time to consider all of this at the start of the first session because I'd idly clicked on one of the many (MANY!) hourly, daily and weekly Events that the game thrusts into your hand the moment you log on. Something about eggs. I was hoping it might be like the egg smashing event I used to love doing in City of Steam or the Joker's Funhouse in DCUO.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I wouldn't know because the place it begins turned out to be a hundred miles to the West. I'd been riding for what seemed like hours but was probably about five minutes, which is still a significant amount of time to be auto-riding a horse in a game, when I got distracted by a city.

Revelation Online is one of those games that seems to think the average NPC is about 75 feet tall. Everything is on a truly gigantic scale. I mean, I've been in some big buildings but you could put a whole cathedral in the atriums of some of these halls and still have room for a train station and couple of grain silos.

It makes the cities somewhat impersonal, I think. Divinity's Reach in GW2 is big, yes, but it's also rich in detail and made up of many small courts and alleys. Here the smallest thoroughfare is an avenue and every square's a parade-ground.

I was lollygagging at the mountains from a high terrace when an airship the size of a small town pulled up alongside me. In seventeen years of MMO gaming I've never knowingly turned down a free voyage on any kind of ship - sea, air or space - so I rode my horse onto the deck and off we went.

Again, the scale was so massive that all sense of "being there" was lost. Unlike the ride in the tiny hot air balloon in 9Lives, for example, which had me tensing my knuckles with vertigo as I craned over the edge for a good view of the rooftops, this had all the thrills of a cross-channel ferry.

On an airship. In case you couldn't tell.

One thing stands out concerning travel in Revelation Online, whether by foot, by horse, by water, by air or via the widespread network of teleport pads: it's free. When GW2 launched and for months afterwards there were grumbling complaints about the few silver it cost to use the waypoint system. In EverQuest, EQ2 and Rift when they were new I vividly recall how I had to scrimp and save to buy even a basic mount.

Getting a good ride has been positively aspirational in most MMOs I've played. In RO they hand them out for doing, well, nothing. Nothing that you notice. I got a choice of horses at the end of one of the never-ending, incomprehensible quest sequences but later I found the same horses for sale on a vendor for a pittance.

Like Aion (and Flyff long, long before that - anyone remember Flyff? Anyone? Bueller?) RO is supposed to be a flying game. There was that part early on that I mentioned in my First Impressions post, where someone lends you his wings so you can see for yourself what you're working towards.

You'd imagine there'd be some kind of ceremony, fireworks perhaps or a fanfare at least, when you acquire a permanent set of wings all your own. Apparently not.

I knew wings came at Level 29. I was level 27 when I jumped back on the quest train (Don't judge me!). I thought I was paying attention but a quarter of an hour later, when I clicked autorun for the millionth time, for once taking a quest step that needed me to travel further than the usual four or five paces, I suddenly found myself enveloped in a cloud of feathers and hurtled skyward.

Checking my details as I barrel-rolled through the ubiquitous cherry-blossomed skies I saw that yes, I had indeed dinged 29 without noticing. I was, in fact, almost 30. The game, recognizing my graduation from hooves to feathers, now auto-equips my wings instead of my mount whenever I want to travel.

I may be being a tad unfair here. It's entirely possible I got the wings as a quest reward and just clicked through in a daze. I long ago lost any feeling of involvement or control or interest in the questline, whose translation is now so fractured as to be almost Dadaist and whose plot I ceased to follow somewhere in the mid-teens.

Even if I wasn't paying attention, though, I think it's safe to say the game does not make all that much of a fuss about this supposedly seminal moment. It's a shame because the wings themselves are very impressive. If this is the basic starter model I can't even imagine what Raid wings might look like.

I flew around  for a while enjoying the sensation. I really love games that let you fly with wings rather than on a flying mount. I notice there's also a whole new skill bar that appears in flight, suggesting a detailed aerial combat system. I imagine there's a skill tree for that but don't get me started on skill trees in this game...

Closed Beta 3 ends in a few days. I am not sure whether I'm glad about that or not. I find Revelation Online extremely difficult to take seriously but it isn't boring. Or sensible. I do think, every time I play, that if I'm going to play something like this I might as well get my semi-established characters out in Blade & Soul or ArcheAge or Black Desert or even Riders of Icarus, all of which I was enjoying well enough until I dropped them cold.

Truth is, I really like trying new MMOs, even when they aren't very "good". I may spend 90% of my time in old favorites but I crave novelty as much as anyone and trying out crazed imports like these (or Digimon Hunter or Twin Saga) is a great way to get that novelty buzz.

I'll be back for Open Beta, assuming that's next. I don't think I'd go so far as to buy the box, if that turns out to be the payment model, but I wouldn't rule it out. Those wings, after all. Those wings...