Never Forever

Yesterday it was a music Grab Bag, today it's games. Once again, I don't have anything particularly substantial to offer but you do the best you can with what you have. 

How Long Is Forever, Anyway? 

I'll start with the news everyone already knows, which is that Fortnite isn't all it used to be. Given that it used to be pretty much everything, that still leaves a lot of territory to cover so let's not go writing the game off just yet but maybe the writing is on the wall.

Fortnite isn't a game so much as a phenomenon. Lots of games blow up out of nowhere to dominate the sales charts and the gaming news cycle for a while but few hold that kind of attention for more than a few months. Fads happen and keep on happening and will always happen.

More rarely, a game will break out of the gaming silo to make an impact in the mainstream media. Animal Crossing: New Horizons did it a few years back and World of Warcraft a long time before that. The number of games that establish a seemingly permanent foothold in the wider culture, though? Still very small.

Fortnite was one of those. Still is, I guess, although it's probably more a part of the infrastructure now, like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or FIFA. Games that get referenced a lot when journalists write color pieces about what sporting heroes or pop stars do in their time off. Not a lot different to playing golf, really. Just indoors.

Fortnite, though, like Second Life before it, made it out of the lifestyle pages into what passes for cultural analysis in the popular press. I read a number of articles about how Fortnite was changing the way a generation thought and behaved, how it was replacing the village pump, the water-cooler or the Junior Common Room. There was a school of thought that believed nothing would ever be the same again, now the kids had a virtual clubhouse the adults couldn't chaperone.

Epic Games believed it and still does, apparently. I was pretty sold on it, too. I wrote some posts about it during the pandemic, when it did seem like meeting up and going to gigs in a video game might be the future. Still did, too, not so long ago. Like a lot of people, I'm too easily swayed by the science fiction I've read, although most days now it does seem disturbingly likely we'll all get to live in Phil Dick's world if we live long enough. Mercer help us. 

It wasn't just excitable journalists and eager bloggers who got swept up in the Fortnite feeding frenzy. As GamesIndustry reports, as with WoW before it, a swathe of the gaming industry did, too. Just as we had a decade of companies making WoW-Killers that went on to fail in the marketplace, so Fortnite has left behind it a comet-trail of burned out Forever Games. We have Fortnite to thank for the largely failed or failing Live Service model, at least in part.

With hindsight, it seems obvious. Not so much the grandiose claims of Fortnite-as-Metaverse, which turned out to be fairly accurate at least in a technical sense. More the idea that people en masse would want to keep logging in to the same virtual space "forever".

People, by and large, just aren't that interested in going to the same places over and over again. They lose their mystique, their thrill, their attraction. For everything there is a season, as Roger McGuinn liked to say. (Alright! It was Pete Seeger! No-one likes a smart alec.) 

More prosaically, look at your local high street or shopping mall. That's if you even still have one. Not only have most of the names over the stores changed since you first went there but these days even the idea of going to one place to find everything feels out of fashion.

And with games, particularly zeitgeisty ones like Fortnite that spring up out of nowhere overnight, there's always the Older Sibling Problem. Everyone knows most kids over the age of eight or nine think pretty much everything their parents like is either incomprehensible or embarrassing but there's a similar vibe to the media most loved by older brothers and sisters, except the younger kids do understand it and want no part of it.

Fortnite has been around for a decade now. A decade is literally a lifetime for a ten year-old. Is it surprising there's some resistance creeping in? Fortnite might be too new to feel retro but it's also too old to feel fresh. 

It's not like the game is going away, of course. It's robust. It works. It has many, many millions of ex-players. But is it ever going to be cool again? Magic 8-Ball says Very Doubtful.

I guess the upside is that now game developers are going to have to find a new high to chase. The downside is it'll probably be something a lot less interesting than Fortnite looked for a while as if it might be.

Never Is Closer Than Ever

Less than a month! Neverness to Everness, the game I'm most looking forward to this year (Sorry, EverQuest Legends.) has a launch date. It's April 29th.

You can pre-register now. It takes about five seconds - an email address and a couple of clicks. If you do, you'll be joining more than thirty million people so far. The current target is 35 million although I imagine if they hit it the ticker will move along to reveal the 40 million milestone. 

So far, pre-registrants get 30,000 Beetle Coins, 20 Elite Hunter Guides, 5 Fabricated Dice and A character called Haniel. What any of that actually means I have absolutely no idea but I'm sure it's something very important.

The reward for getting to 35 million pre-registrants seems a bit lame. It's just another 15 Fabricated Dice. But then, maybe Fabricated Dice are a big deal in Hetherau. I wouldn't know because they never let me into the beta. Not that I'm bitter... 

There's also a Social Media target. That's a lot lower at just five million Official Account Followers and so far the game hasn't managed it, which is probably a data point that means something. If that many people sign up before launch they get a Whisker Glider Skin. Or maybe we all do. It's unclear.

I just subscribed to the official YouTube channel so I guess that means I'll get the glider either way, so long as 4,999,999 other people sign up as well. I actually thought I was already subbed to that channel. Maybe it was on my other YouTube account. If it was, would that count twice? 

I don't have any qualms about the quality of NTE. I'm certain it'll be as good as it looks. What I'm a lot less sure about is whether I’ll make time to play it, no matter how good it is. By all accounts, Wuthering Waves continues to be every bit as good as I kept saying it was, which was very good indeed. 

And yet I haven't played WW for months, not least because it got to be too good. I seem to have developed a quality ceiling for video games beyond which I find it ever harder to rise. Somewhere in my psyche, a fail-safe is tripping, preventing me from becoming too engaged. If it feels as immersive a movie, it gets treated like a movie and movies require a level of commitment at least an order of magnitude higher than games. 

It's a weird Catch 22. Don't get too good or I won't be able to play you. And I fear Neverness to Everness might just be too good.

Sunnydale Forever, Doubters Never!

I meant to mention the bad news that the Buffy revival has been canceled before it even got started but I never found a spot to fit it in and it turns out I'm glad I didn't because now there's this to talk about as well. I heard about it from NME, my ever-unlikely source of gaming news that doesn't get covered in the general gaming media.

There is - because of course there is - a campaign to reverse the decision or to reboot the reboot or to free the rights so someone else can take a run at it or something. I haven't virtually signed it or indeed read it. My feeling is that the Buffy IP is so strong, someone will do something with it it eventually but it won't be because Buffy fans ask nicely. It'll be because someone thinks they've figured out how to make money off it.

Meanwhile, as well as all the original seven seasons, the comics, the novelizations and the spin-offs (I'm halfway through Season Two of Angel now and boy does that take a left turn...) we now have a game. It's called Welcome To New Sunnydale. It's text-only. It plays in a Browser. And it was made by a fan.

And it looks interesting. I've only played around with it so far. I haven't played it. It isn't really my sort of thing or not any more although there was a time when it might have been. I don't have the patience for these kinds of textual puzzles any more. 

I know a few other bloggers around these parts do, though, and a lot of people like a bit of Buffy, so I offer the link above as something of a public service. I very much doubt the game will do anything to change the minds of anyone that matters but it's nice that people are trying.

And that's all I've got. I suppose I'd better find an actual topic for tomorrow's post. My Grab Bag pile's empty.  

Names From The Past, Names For The Future

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, otherwise known as the 1980s, I used to write an opinion column for the comics fanzine I co-created and that column was called "Scattershot". It's mildly unsettling that my original opening line for this post was going to start with "A few scattershot topics I've been wondering about...".  Seems like some things haven't changed as much as I like to tell myself.

The thing is, though, "Scattershot" was always a good name for a column. Maybe I should start using it again. In fact, maybe I should start thinking more in terms of columns and features with names and set topics. It would add a much-needed sense of structure. Maybe I'll do that, although now I think about it I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about it in Blogger.

Blogger is pretty inflexible when it come to layout, or or so it's always seemed to me, but then that has a lot to do with the decision I made, not long after I started, to use a custom template that isn't officially supported. I don't dare change anything now in case it breaks the whole blog, which is the main reason everything here has stayed almost exactly the same, at least visually, for more than a decade. I imagine it's only because Google has pretty much forgotten Blogger exists that I've been able to get away with it this long.

Still, at least it's not WordPress, right? They break things all the time from what I hear. Wilhelm was complaining again the other day about something else WordPress had broken. 

I made accounts with both platforms before I decided to go with Blogger. The main reason I went that way was that Blogger seemed less technical. Now I wonder if it even that's really true. Wilhelm was describing how awkward it is to add urls in WP these days. Blogger has an HTML editor as standard. I toggle between the regular word-processor screen and the HTML window all the time to fiddle around with the code. Can you do that in WP now?

I am curious, I admit. It's a constant background worry that one day Google will remember they own a blogging platform and decide they don't want one. If that happens I might have to consider WP as an alternative so, since I already have an account there, I am toying with the idea of starting a WP blog just as an experiment. Maybe I should call that one Scattershot. It's a good name.

So much for the introduction. On to the topics.

Back To Camp

I became unreasonably excited last week, when I read a post at Kay Talks Games about how Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was coming back as an offline title. The online version shut down last year and even though it had been a long time since I'd played and I hadn't been thinking of starting again, I was somewhat miffed to know I wouldn't be able to go back and play some more if I happened to get the urge.

If we're honest about it, I imagine that's how most people feel when they hear that games they once played are closing down. It's not that anyone really wants to play them again, it's just that no-one likes being told they can't. 

A suggestion (Or demand...) that often comes up at such times is for the game to be somehow converted into an offline version, so people can at least go on playing on their own, but the response from developers is almost always that it would be too expensive or that technical reasons make it impossible.

Nintendo, though, will always be Nintendo. They do what they want not what other companies do and apparently what they want is an offline version of ACPC, so now there is one. 

It's very expensive for a mobile game. The full price will be $20 but for the rest of this month you can get it for just half that. Ten dollars is still a lot for a phone game, all the same.

And yet I am almost certainly going to buy it. ACPC is the mobile game I've played the most. I have a Label for it on the blog with eleven entries, many of which are full posts. I started playing in lockdown, when everyone else was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch and then I kept playing almost every day for months, long after people stopped gosh-wowing about New Horizons.

At the time, I played the game on my Kindle Fire but as it happens I have just bought a new phone. It's a budget phone but a good one. It's a Samsung Galaxy A16 and supposedly it can play Genshin Impact, albeit at low settings, although I haven't tried it yet and won't believe it until I do. If it can run GI, though, it certainly ought to be able to manage Pocket Camp. 

As well as Kay's post, I read a long and helpful review of the offline version at Eurogamer and just reading about it made me feel nostalgic for the many hours I wasted, talking to peculiar animals about their utterly pointless obsessions. 

I could do that again. I think I will. It'll be £10 well spent, I'm sure.

Free At Last?

On a thematically-related topic, there was a news item on MassivelyOP recently about another somewhat twee game I used to play and would quite like to play again: Free Realms. FR went under in the Great SOE Purge of 2014 but ever since there's been a bubbling, roiling, mumbling demand for some kind of return for the game that apparently everyone loved but no-one wanted to spend money on, something John "Smed" Smedley blamed on the players being mostly kids, although that never seemed to hold Runescape or Roblox back much.

For most of the last decade, the only runner in the Free Realms emulator race has been FR Sunrise, a project that began almost as soon as the game shut down and which has made many promises and released several videos but has so far produced nothing whatsoever of interest to anyone outside the walled garden in which it's supposedly growing.

Now, though, there's competition in the form of an open-source project described as "a reversed engineered walking emulator", meaning that so far all you can do is wander around an empty theme park, imagining the fun you'd have if the rides were switched on. 

I'm a little unclear on the exact timing behind this new initiative, which has been up and running for a good few months now, but the apparent lack of clarity over who actually owns the Free Realms IP these days might have something to do with it. That and the inability or unwillingness of the FRSunrise crew to get a functioning build to market, I guess.

The team behind the open-source project is looking for help to try to rebuild the content so feel free to pile on if you have the skills. I'll join you when there's a working game and I'll lay odds that will happen before we see any kind of publicly playable release from FRSunrise, whose beta sign-ups opened four years ago, which was when I signed up, but whose actual testing program, as far as I can tell, has yet to begin.

Metaversion

Here's a 21st century koan for you: if a virtual popstar performs in a virtual world, do they make a sound? Well, now's your chance to find out because Hatsune Miku is currently appearing in Fortnite Festival Season 7. She'll be there, for whatever value you care to assign to "be" and "there", until 8 April.

Three or four years ago, that news would have made me very excited. I'd have patched up Fortnite to log in and check it out and I'd have taken a bunch of screenshots and written a whole post about it. I will most likely get around to taking a look by way of Amazon Luna - I should really have done that before I wrote the post - but these vague, occluded hints of our true future no longer make my blood rush the way they once did.

And that's a good thing. It means that, just as I predicted, the real metaverse is already building itself around us as we ignore it. All the lunatic, self-serving, self-aggrandizing claims of the money-is-all cult have predictably come to nothing, while the infrastructure seeds and replicates with no external plan or purpose. 

The downside, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness has found to her irritation, is that early adopters attracted to the quirkiness and unpredictability of the tools now find themselves bored and uninterested by the much more consistent and reliable output of their successors. I find myself, as she says, "uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing", which is why you may have noticed a lot less discussion about it here of late. 

What applies to GenAI applies equally to the metaverse. Still, I do like Hatsune Miku and I do find the idea of her "performing" inside a video game attractively irreal. We are slowly getting to where I want us to go even if we don't always notice it's happening.

Get Weird On Me, Baby

Since I've mentioned AIWeirdness and video games in the same paragraph, I ought to link to Janelle's latest post, especially since I'm about to cannibalize it for my own purposes. She rarely finds anything weird enough to comment on these days but she made an exception for a "generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else."

Never having played Minecraft, it's not something I feel I need to see for myself, which is just as well because it doesn't want to run on my laptop.  If you'd like to take a look, here's the link. It's called Oasis, it only runs in Chrome, and it's supposedly "the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model". 

As Janelle suggests, it's also ultimately pointless. As it stands it's a curiosity precisely because of how little it reassembles an actual, functioning game but if it ever manages to become one, "this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run." Now, if they could get generative AI to replicate Free Realms, then we'd be getting somewhere...

And that'll do for now. There's more but when isn't there? You have to stop somewhere.

I guess we'll end with a song because that's traditional around here. So, what d'you reckon the chances are of there being a song called "Scattershot"? And if there is, of it being any good?

I'll take it.

 

Notes on AI used in this post. 

Ironically, having gone on about not bothering much with AI any more, I immediately realized AI would be ideal for the header image. It's a great example of how un-weird the apps have become and thereby how useful but also not really worth talking about any more.

I wanted a picture of Hatsune Miku in Pocket Camp so I just typed in "Hatsune Miko in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp" and that's what I got. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?

The model I used was Flux Schnell at NightCafe.

It's All In The Report

I skipped posting the last couple of days partly because I had other things going on but mostly because I didn't have anything much that I wanted to post about. It goes like that, sometimes. One week I have half a dozen ideas; the next, none.

Actually, it's not strictly true to say I don't have anything I'd like to showcase here. There's plenty more I'd like to say about Noah's Heart, for example, but unless I can come up with some penetrating insight that feeds into an observation on the genre as a whole, I think it's probably best I ration myself to one or two posts a week on that one.

I can always do music posts, of course. Putting one of those together isn't much more than an excuse to play a bunch of songs I like and watch the videos on YouTube, a very acceptable way to spend an afternoon. On the other hand, I could just watch the videos and not write the post and the experience would probably be much the same - maybe even better.

There's always something about the other media - TV, movies, books and the rest - bubbling around in the back of my mind but the problem there is writing about stuff like that is quite a lot of work. It pretty much comes down to writing the kinds of essays media studies students have to do as course work, only without any prospect of getting a grade. I have to confess the bit when you got the essay back and saw what grade you'd got was always my favorite part. Without that validation the whole thing can seem a little hollow.

Then there are the posts that begin like this one; posts about the process of posting. Again, I find writing those easy and reflexively entertaining but even though I also enjoy reading other bloggers extemporizing on the topic of their process, I can't but feel it's a tad self-indulgent, a subject of limited interest to most.

Then again, I'm not here to entertain. Or educate. Or inform. Those are incidental benefits that may or may not, on occasion, attache themselves to my real purpose, which is self-expression and self-reflection. Just be glad I'm not asking you to read my poetry or hear about that one really weird dream I had the other night... 

What does any of that have to do with the picture at the top of the post? Frankly, not a lot. It's more in the way of a five finger excercise as I warm up for the post itself, another example of the process in action. What I came here to talk about today is a report published by IFPI "The voice of the recording industry worldwide"

IFPI stands for The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry although I had to go to Wikipedia to find that out; they don't explain it on their website. The organization has just released its annual report on music engagement, something I learned from a news item at NME, under the enticing tagline "Music fans are listening to more music than ever before".

That surprised me a little. I'd been under the impression engagement with music had been on the decline for many years. It had certainly been my belief, based partly on things I'd read but also on experiential evidence, that music - specifically popular music - no longer held the dominant cultural role it had enjoyed prior to - let's say - the turn of the millennium.

Of course, it would be very much in the interest of any organization representing the interests of the music industry to gainsay such a defeatist viewpoint. As you can see from the screenshot, however, this particular report does seem to be based on a good deal of well-sourced and properly weighted research. 

It's also very interesting and extremely accessibly presented. I have no intention of analysing, critiquing or paraphrasing the contents. Rather, I suggest anyone even the least bit curious clicks through and reads it for themselves. 

It'll only take a few minutes. Although the website offers the option of downloading either the Full Report or a Highlights Infographic, in fact both long and short form options are presented in the infographic format. 

They're really good infographics but I confess I was a tad disappointed not to get a traditional text report as well. There are pull-out quotes that make me wish I could find out more, like the one that reveals respondents cited more than five hundred musical genres, when describing the kinds of music they listen to. 

I was looking forward to plugging some of those unfamiliar genres into a search engine and thereby opening my musical horizons a little wider. I like hearing things I've never heard before. So, it seems, do most people. I find it heartening to learn that the number of genres people report listening to averages out to eight. That suggests a significantly more open-minded attitude than I would have expected. 

On the other hand, it's less than encouraging (and somewhat weird) to learn that "in those people most engaged with music such as people who subscribe to audio streaming and those who buy vinyl" the number of genres listed goes up just one, to "9 genres on average." It doesn't immediately stand out as a great improvement, does it?

Moving on to a subsection perhaps of more immediate interest to the readership of what at least used to be a gaming blog, we come to the section on music in video games. Or, more accurately, I probably should say the brief mention of same.

The report doesn't seem to concern itself with music made specifically for video games, although that may very well be one or more of those 500+ genres we didn't get to see listed in full. What it does want to highlight, to my own very great interest, is the use of video games as a platform for the distribution of non-video game music and/or as a venue for its performance. 

According to the report a truly astonishing 44% of "gamers" claimed to have "watched a virtual concert on a gaming platform in the last 3 months". Less astonishing is the statistic concerning the age demographic, almost half falling in the youngest bracket, 16-24.

The development of virtual performance and particularly the role of games as a platform for it, as regular readers will no doubt remember, has been an interest of mine at least since the begining of the pandemic. The only reason I have either Roblox or Fortnite installed on my hard drives is so I can visit them to watch singers, bands or movies on their in-game stages and screens.

Back when we were all banged up under viral house arrest, I predicted a bright future for these kinds of virtual shows. Given the kinds of unrelenting pressures currently threatening to crush the last remaining breath from the gasping live music industry, coupled with the relentless push of technology and the growing willingness of rights owners to join in with the fun, the road to a digital future for "live" music is looking wider and clearer than ever.

Anyway, as I said, I don't plan on picking the report to pieces or riffing on the dozens of themes it suggests. I just thought I'd mention it as something worth a few minutes of your day.

You're welcome!

Trailer For The Future

As I write this I'm downloading Fortnite. How did that happen? Like this...

I have a terrible habit of flicking between things as I wait for loading screens. It's pathetic. These days most MMORPGs take a minute or two to log in, seconds to swap from zone to zone. It's time that doesn't need to be monkey-filled with chatter. Just let it flow.

Good advice I don't listen to. If there's a loading screen that lasts more than three seconds I'm off, alt-tabbing out, rabbitting through the favorites scrolling down the left. Except, insanely long as the list is, there's not much on it I actually care to look at, most days.

This morning I'd swapped between EverQuest and EverQuest II, setting Overseer quests and missions. By the time I'd been through the various stages, swapping characters a couple of times, I'd exhausted Feedly, my blog roll, the weather, the news, and matchup reports for World vs World in Guild Wars 2.

I was about to log in to GW2 to do dailies but as I exited EQII, in the thirty seconds it takes to camp out (because I always log out properly instead of just quitting, because I remember when closing an MMORPG too quickly could lead you to miss a character save and lose a few seconds of progress - or at least some people believed it could and why take the risk?) my eye cast around for distraction and found it in the shape of Box Office Pro.

I have five movie sites bookmarked from back when TAGN Movie Obsession was still a thing. Remember that? Of the five, two (Cinemascore, Theater Counts) are completely dormant for obvious reasons and one, Box Office Report, might as well be.

The remaining pair struggle on. The Numbers has turned into what feels like a personal blog about DVD/Blue Ray and Streaming releases. Box Office Pro, true to its name, has concentrated on interviews with cinema professionals and think pieces on what might happen to the industry in months to come. Today they ran this report, which opens with the news that

"The new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated Tenet has debuted online via the video game Fortnite and on YouTube."

Say what again? It happened last night while I was asleep and as far as I can tell wasn't trailed anywhere much earlier than that. The big video game sites had the story around eleven, my time, by when I was tucked up in bed playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp and watching Season Two of Community on Amazon Prime.

I read the piece on Box Office Pro. Then I googled around and read a couple more reports on Kotaku and The Verge. The Kotaku piece has a magnificent clickbait headline which neatly sums up the reason I have Fortnite downloading in the background right now:

"New Tenet Trailer Premieres In Fortnite, Which Is No Longer A Video Game"

Isn't that fantastic? Give that sub-editor a donut!

I'd read about Fortnite's new Party Royale peace-out bliss mode, of course. I knew it was a non-combat area where Fortnite players could do what many of them have always done, namely hang out and chill, only without the buzzkill of imminent apocalypse. I also knew about Epic's propensity for using the game as a backdrop for major music and pop-culture events. Oddly, I hadn't quite put the two things together.

The Verge had:

"There’s an outdoor movie theater and a club with towering holographic dancers, alongside race courses and other points of interest like a pirate ship and soccer field. Epic describes it as an “evolving space,” so we’ll likely see more activities and events added in the future. Both of these updates point to Fortnite’s likely future"

The Travis Scott event, which made global headlines in the non-gaming press, took place inside the game itself - the Battle Royale - but there's already been a major concert in Party Royale, featuring Dillon Francis, Steve Aoki, and Deadmau5. Even I know Deadmau5.

As the Kotaku report on that one puts it "The show made Fortnite feel like a world". Yes, like the real world.

Because that's where this is heading: towards fulfilment of the promises made and never met by Second Life. Or, more pertinently, made by a mainstream media fooled into believing Second Life was William Gibson's cyberspace and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash all rolled into one.

As that BBC piece explains "Mentions of Second Life first crept into the UK media mainstream in early 2006... newspapers fell over themselves to cover it, devoting many column inches in their business, technology and lifestyle sections to profiles and trend pieces. "

But just a couple of years later there was silence. Businesses who'd jumped the trend backed off. Stores and embassies closed. The reason was simple. No-one cared:"You could go and open these stores and no-one would turn up...They would have 20 to 30 people there when it opened, and after that no-one would bother going in there again. It just wasn't worth the spend."

Those handfuls have become multitudes. Events in Fortnite reckon their attendances in millions. In tens of millions. These are the jetpacks we were promised.

I'd been kind of meaning to try Fortnite for what feels like a couple of years now. I've read so much positive print about about it. I've played a few Battle Royales, though, and they're not really my thing. Everything that interested me about Fortnite was the not killing each other part. And now, here it is...

... Intermission ...

So, the first thing I do is break Fortnite. It's downloaded and installed. I've made an Epic Games account. Woohoo! Free games for me!. I've logged in and...

Can I find Party Royale? I cannot. I fiddle around for a bit and then tab out to google it. I find what seems to be a seperate download. I download that and install it. It's not the right thing. It's something called Party Hub and it breaks Fortnite good and proper.

After several repairs, a welter of error messages and offers of online support, I finally decide to re-install the whole thing. That, eventually, does the trick.

... End Intermission ...

Turns out, Party Royale is something you select from within Battle Royale. I had to watch a YouTube video before I worked that out. I guess the hundreds of million who already play Fortnite don't need to be told but a signpost for the several billion who don't would be nice.

Then again, Fortnite is still in early access. I'd forgottent that, what with it being one of the most successful video games in the entire world! But no, there it is on the login screen. Early Access. Can't expect anything too polished, I guess.

When I finally stepped out into the mall-like streets of Epic's brave new world, the movie trailer was just about to begin. I could hear someone interviewing the star, John David Washington. Then it started and I could hear that, too, but by the time I'd figured out where the screen was it was all over.

A movie trailer does only last a couple of minutes. If it had been a concert or the promised full Nolan movie to be shown later in the summer, I'd have had plenty of time to get a seat. The trailer's showing on the hour, every hour. Maybe I'll drop back in and take a screenshot or two.

Except you can't. Or I can't. I went through all the in-game options looking for the screenshot key. There isn't one. I fired up FRAPS and it doesn't work with Fortnite. I googled it and watched some YouTube videos and apparently you either take video with the in-game playback feature or you just hit PrtScr and tab out. Which is what I did.

I know static images are so twentieth century but not even having a screenshot function does seem a bit primitive. Feel free to tell me what an idiot I am when you point out it does have one and how to use it in the comments.

Anyway, that's the hard work done. Fortnite is installed and working. I have an Epic Games account. Now I can play the game - all of the games - and drop in to mingle and marvel whenever something culturally significant happens.

I don't think Fortnite is the future. I just think it's a pointer to where the future's going to be. Think of it as MySpace to Second Life's GeoCities.

The next generation's the one. Or maybe the one after that.

Two Weeks In Another Town - or - Raph Breaks The Internet

Tobold is complaining of "game overload" because he has three hundred and fifty five games on his Steam profile and hasn't played two hundred and forty nine of them. Meanwhile, his old Friday blog wars sparring partner SynCaine, talking about MMOs specifically, reports he's played just one in 2018 (Life is Feudal), finding the current global offer so moribund that "nothing else in the genre caught my eye enough to even bother".

On the face of it, these would seem to represent the extreme ends of a curve. On the one side you have the person who buys games by the dozen with no regard to when or even whether they might want to play them; on the other, someone who knows their own tastes so intimately there's hardly anything even worth considering.

I don't really cleave to either of those extremes. I will - not infrequently - buy (or more often download for free) a game I know I'll never play "seriously". If I do show sufficient interest in a game to install it, however, I will almost always at least fire it up and give it a run. Sheer curiosity dictates that much.

What I don't do is stuff my Steam folder full of games just because they're super-cheap or massively discounted. The sum total of all the games on my Steam account is sixteen, all of which I have played at least once.

Nine of the sixteen are MMOs and therefore not eligible for finishing. Of the other seven, I've completed three (all very short) and made substantial progress in two (both single player games that mirror MMO gameplay, which turns out to be not as great a thing as I thought it would be).

The remaining two are some weird alpha I got an invite for (The Skies), which turned out to be unplayable and then vanished, but which I can't delete from my library for some reason, and Broken Sword 5 which I have been waiting several years now to find an opportunity to play through with Mrs Bhagpuss, since we so enjoyed doing that with BS1 and 2 more than twenty years ago.

As for the current state of the MMORPG genre, it would be disingenuous to claim it's in the rudest of health but it sure as heck isn't in terminal decline. And even that moderately downbeat analysis depends entirely on what you think an MMORPG is.

Decades after the term was first coined, I believe we have to accept that the lines defining the genre have blurred almost to the point of invisibility. Many games that once would have felt as though they were outside the purview of an MMORPG fan now fall well within the loop.

Raph Koster recently made the astute point that Fortnite is like an MMO. He was responding to a truly excellent article at Medium.com which I would encourage anyone interested in MMORPGs to read.

As I read it, agreeing silently with almost every point it makes, two things occurred to me. Firstly, Fortnite isn't "like" an MMO. It plainly is one. And secondly, that same article might have been - probably was - written a few years back - about another global phenomenon: Minecraft.

It's all very well for we veterans to look sniffily at the new intake and mither on about the good old days; that's the prerogative of the old, after all. It's fine for developers to cater to our outmoded tastes by producing games that use the same mechanics they tried to discard decades ago. Old people like familiarity and there's nothing wrong with that.

As a culture, though -  a global culture - we don't get the MMOs we want - we get the MMOs we need.The world needed Minecraft and now it needs Fortnite. What it will need next year or the year after that, neither I nor anyone else can tell you but you can be sure whatever it is, it will come.

Whether many of us, here in the aging MMO blogosphere, will be adaptive enough to appreciate it, let alone participate, is another matter. By the time the next global MMOlike phenomenon rolls in to replace Fortnite, I'll most likely have retired.

Given good health though, always the concern, I won't have retired from gaming. Nor blogging. I hope I'll be here, still, complaining about the controls and claiming I don't have the digital dexterity modern games designers expect from their audience of tweens, teens and twenties.

The fact is, I never was any good at gaming. I never did have those twitch reflexes. When my friends and I played "winner stays on" at Galaxians and Asteroids back in college it was never me who got to stay on. The last console I owned was an Atari 2600. Once joysticks evolved to use more than one button I was done.

It doesn't matter that I can't use a controller. It doesn't matter that I have to look at the keyboard every single time to find my Special Action key, even when someone is beating me death while somersaulting back and forth over my head.

All that matters is that I'm still in there, appreciating, enjoying and learning. Not everything new is good but everything new is worth considering to see if it might be good. You don't have to hoover up everything on offer or sit back and wait for the perfect match. You just need to stay alert and open to offers.

I guess I should go download Fortnite now.

Ashes To Ashes: First Impressions Of The Apocalypse

Ashes of Creation is one of the contenders for the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I might play together as a main MMO, the others being Brad McQuaid's Pantheon and Mark Jacobs' Camelot Unchained. To that end, when I kickstarted the game back in the spring of 2017, I made two pledges, one for each of us.

Ashes got the nod partly because it proposes using a form of "hybrid" controls that supposedly meld action and tab-target into a version suitable for fans of either. I'm somewhat skeptical of how that might work but at least they're trying.

Mrs Bhagpuss isn't a fan of action combat and doesn't favor games that lock the mouse. She's tried a few - DCUO and Black Desert to name a couple - but I think it's fair to say she's not keen. I wasn't either, to begin with, and although I've become more accepting of mouse-mashing over time, I still very strongly prefer what's often known as "WoW-style" combat.

Ashes will also offer a great deal of non-combat content, or so the developers claim, so there seems to be a passable chance of the game working for both of us. It is, however, still a long way off and most of the eventual systems and mechanics are shrouded in fog.

That's why I was pleased to see that what had been proposed as a closed alpha test for combat a few months back was going to spin off into a publicly playable mini-game known as Ashes of Creation Apocalypse. Eventually AOCA (now we can use the acronym!) is supposed to include full-scale siege warfare and a PvE Horde Mode but for now, of course, it's a Battle Royale.

There's been a certain amount of huffing about this. Some Kickstarter backers and later adopters  claimed to smell bait and switch. It's true the precedents are alarming. H1Z1 and Fortnite both started out as co-operative PvE projects only to find themselves derailed by the runaway success of their supposedly subsidiary Battle Royale modes.

I don't think there's any doubt that AOCA is intended to provide developers Intrepid with an income stream. It's monetized both via "Legendary Paths", which equate to seasons, and by a robust cash shop seling cosmetics. I understand why alarm bells are ringing for some but for now I'm willing to give Intrepid the benefit of the doubt and believe them when they say the main thrust of their operation is still working towards finishing the MMORPG they promised.

I backed Ashes at close to the lowest level, giving me access sometime in beta. I'm always interested in seeing MMORPGs develop but I'm not so keen on paying for the privelige. Not to say I'd never do it again but it would have to be for a game that appeals to me more than Ashes of Creation.

Low-level though it was, my commitment turned out to be enough to entitle me to an early-doors entry to the Apocalypse. A few days ago I got an email inviting me to stress-test AOCA before the gates open wide on Tuesday.

The testing was quite restricted, just a few hours a day, centered on primetime for the U.S. West Coast. There was about an hour or so when I could have feasibly given it a shot but unfortunately the launcher refused to accept my credentials.

I was going to forget about it but then this morning I received another email saying testing had been extended for twelve hours, meaning the servers would be up for much of Sunday. This time, a new launcher installed itself and my login details worked. I spent a couple of hours playing, took a bunch of screenshots, then I logged out to write this post.

With the exception of GW2's Southsun Survival I have never played a Battle Royale game. I've read enough about them to know the basic principle: you drop out of the sky, pick a place to land, grab some gear and weapons, then either hide and hope or search and kill.

I felt I that was enough. It's last man standing in a shrinking ring of fire. How hard can it be to understand? As yet there's no Character Creation (I believe there will be at some point) so I just picked a gender and hit Play...

My very rough first impressions:

• Not impressed by having to wait five minutes in a queue just to get into the lobby. I was begining to wonder if the thing was working at all. Is that a normal wait-time for one of these games? I was under the impression part of the attraction of PUBG/Fortnite et al was instant gratification. Maybe I got that wrong.

• Once in, it's slick. Everything works smoothly. The animations are fluid, movement feels weighted and natural, the UI is intuitive. 

• It needs to be because there are no instructions of any kind. At any point. Anywhere. Okay, there are tooltips and a small pop-up window appears when you pick up a new item to explain what it does but that's your lot. I'm against tutorials but I'm pro instructions. Access to a simple "This is how to play" FAQ while you're waiting in the queue would be handy.

• Graphics are appealing but somehow not quite there yet. Everything has a fuzzy, soft-edged look and although scale is naturalistic there's still an off-kilter "this is just a tad too big" feel to the architecture.  

• Given the small map there's an impressive array of geographical and architectural features. Fields, farms, gardens, rolling hillside, coasts, caves, rivers and waterfalls, villages, mines, castles, towers, lava fields, giant mushrooms... it's as if the designers decided to showcase all the environments in one place. I didn't see any snowfields but I bet they're somewhere.

• The interiors of the buildings are sumptuous and attractive. Bodes well for the housing. 

• The music is generic but the soundscape is decent. Birdsong, water, explosions.

• There's a bewildering array of gear already. Every building is loaded with stuff just waiting to be looted. When you open a chest everything bursts out and scatters around you so you have to pick it all up individually. I'm guessing this is a function of the PvP nature of the Apocalypse, creating ambush opportunities and adding a sense of urgency. It's certainly not going to play as a standard loot mode for PvE.

• Gameplay is addictive. I can easily see why Battle Royale has become so successful so fast. There's a fascination with grabbing free loot combined with a tension caused by the imminence of sudden death that creates an immediate sense of immersion. Death, when it inevitably comes, is swift and sudden, leading to an immediate desire to try again.

• On the other hand... the first two times I was killed by another player I never even saw them. Then in a later match another player and I spent the best part of a minute hacking away at each other with greatswords and axes and literally no injury to either of us. The fight only ended when a third player appeared and shot us both dead with his longbow.

• Suffice to say weapons might need some balancing.

• I don't know if this is a common trope of the Battle Royale sub-genre but I was surprised when, after my first death, my point of view changed to that of the player who'd killed me. I was then able to sit back and watch the game through his eyes - or rather from a few feet behind the back of his head. That's how I learned how deadly the longbow can be.

• As a beta-backer I'm supposedly entitled to the benefits of the first Legendary Path. It's fifty levels (yes, there are levels and xp) of cosmetic rewards that carry over into the eventual MMORPG. I'm interested in that. Sadly, even though I finally managed to rack up some experience points, they disappeared the moment the match ended. I might have to wait until the official launch on Tuesday before I make a real effort. Nothing more annoying than losing progress you thought you'd banked.

• I didn't count how many matches I played but it must have been at least half a dozen. They varied in length from barely a minute (I attacked an obviously well-geared player and he smacked me down in a second) to nearly twenty (I lasted eleven minutes, my best run so far, and then I stayed on in the persona of my killer to see him go on to win the match with the other three in his team). 

• I found there was a real "just one more" bite to the game, although I can also see the impact fading quite quickly once the novelty wears thin. I also found that I was improving a little after each run, which is motivating. I'm certain I'll never be anything anyone would call skilled at this kind of thing but there seems to be enough randomness and luck involved to make it entertaining even so. I just know I'm going to yell out loud the first time I actually kill someone!

The more interesting part of AOCA for me is going to be the sieges and the Hordes, I think. Deathmatches and one-on-one PvP have never been my thing - I'm a lot happier hunting in a pack. As a taster for the eventual MMORPG I'm not sure it really tells us much (it doesn't even feature the "hybrid" combat I wanted to see) but at least it doesn't raise any red flags...yet.