Demos 'n Betas And Stuff

It seems like only a short time ago I was scratching around for new games to try. Not any more. They're coming in clumps now. Too many to keep up with. Just this last few days I've turned down two, tried and failed with another and spent an enjoyable hour in a fourth. And I'm positive there were a couple more I read about but didn't even get round to bookmarking. I'm finding it tough to keep up.

Beginning with one of the two I chose not to bother with, does anyone actually remember Infantry Online, because I certainly don't. I thought I at least knew the names of all the games in the Sony Online Entertainment portfolio back when EverQuest was the pack leader there - I even tried Tanarus once, I think - but I have absolutely no memory of this one at all.

Some people do. It's back on Steam with an even less evocative name, something I'd have would be next to impossible. It's called Freeinfantry, a name not made cooler or more edgy by running the two words together. Whatever it's called, though, there are people who just love it:

"Awesome game."

"My favorite game of all time."

"Best game ever made."

"Outshines games from the last two decades."

And there are plenty more superlatives where those came from, the Steam Store, where Freeinfantry currently enjoys a Very Positive rating from 92% of reviewers. 

As seems to be standard for the era, the game has a very convoluted history, which you can learn about on its Wikipedia page, like I just did. Then you can immediately forget it, like I'm about to. The part that interests me is the way even now, a quarter of a century later, no-one really seems to agree on what the historical facts mean.

Some longtime players think of it as an SOE title, others as an independent gobbled up by a corporate. Some hate SOE for ruining it, "milking" it and/or abandoning it, others are grateful to them for returning it to the players, even though it has apparently been running continuously in some kind of emulator mode since SOE shuttered it over a decade ago.

The MMOBomb report, which was where I heard about it in the first place, places the game squarely in the SOE/Daybreak timeline, while making it clear the current Steam version "operates under a license agreement similar to that of "Project 1999". Presumably DBG picked it up as part of the job lot when they bought SOE. 

It's worth noting the P99 agreement itself only happened after the buyout. Any credit Sony is getting for any of this would seem to be misplaced. The blame for exploiting it then cancelling it in the first place though? That's still theirs.

There's no chance whatsoever I'll ever play any version of Infantry Online. Neither the setting nor the gameplay have the slightest appeal for me. The same cannot be said for another game even more tangentially connected to SOE, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, the game once thought of as the spiritual successor to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, itself occasionally referred to informally as EverQuest 2.5.

Today, a few yeara afer the untimely death of its creative force, Brad McQuaid, the man with a vision™ that, arguably, should always have been prefaced by the word "tunnel", Pantheon is just another crowdfunded wannabe-retro MMORPG but I'd still like to give it a go. I just don't want to pay the required access fee, even though the cost has been somewhat reduced of late with the addition of the "one week every couple of months" option. 

I was, then, more than a little excited to read at MassivelyOP of an opportunity to piggyback into the game for a few days on the back of a code given out for watching streamer Cohhcarnage. I wasn't going to watch the stream, of course, but MOP were kind enough to publish the code so I gave it a try.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. It had already been cancelled by the time I got there and I was quite fast, too. Credit to the Visionary Realms PR department for closing the loophole so quickly, although obviously they must have been the ones who opened it in the first place.

My first visit to whatever the name of the world Pantheon takes place in ( I can never remember.) will have to wait. Fair enough. I've been waiting years already. I've gone right off the boil, anyway.

It is odd how these games bubble up and then just go on simmering, seemingly forever. I can't recall when I first read about the whimsically, if somewhat incoherently-named Swords 'n' Magic and Stuff (Why abbreviate one conjunction but not the other?) but it must have been a few years ago.

If I've thought about it at all since then, which I kind of doubt, it would have been to wonder when it might reach some kind of publicly accessible build. Apparently that happened a while back. As in five years ago. It's on Steam with a release date of 2020. Who knew? 

A lot of people, apparently, because like Freeinfantry, SNMAS (No, not gonna work.) has a Very Positive rating, only this one's from almost a thousand reviews as opposed to FI's 60 or so. It's still in Early Access but given a) that I definitely knew about it as a game in development and b) it's "a cozy, cooperative, open world RPG centered around the joy of discovery", a description which makes it sound almost tailor-made for me, I'm at a loss to explain why not only had I never realised it was available but also why there's not even a tag for it on the blog. Have I really never mentioned it at all?

I've played it now. There's a new demo that lets you go through the very early tutorial, up to the point where you jump off a cliff. I did that. I managed to get my glider working before I crashed to my death but as I landed on the beach next to the starting town, a big banner unfurled in front of me, thanking me for my interest and suggesting I should stop freeloading and get my wallet out.

And I might, too. The game is currently on half-price offer, making it quite an attractive purchase at £10.49. In fact, looking at it more closely, the offer ends in just over five hours as I write, meaning if you're reading this it's probably already ended. I guess I'd better make up my mind. Or wait for the inevitable next sale.

From what I saw, Swords, which is what I think I'm going to shorten it to (I toyed with SnM but, well, y'know...) is a jolly romp of a game with plenty of good ideas but perhaps still some work to do on some of the details. The look is Minecraft-meets-Lego-Minifigures, which I have to say is not one of my favorites, but they do more with it than you might expect. I found it pleasant enough to look at although I can't say any of the scenery made me giddy. Then again, it was only a tutorial.

There's a mildly unusual selection of races including fauns, dryads, orcs, elves and the ubiquitous humans. The potentially divisive and difficult gender issue is handled very simply by not having any. You are you and that's that. I picked a Faun for no reason - they all look much the same and the game doesn't give any indication of practical differences between them.

There are a few customization opportunities - skin tone, hairstyle, facial hair - but none seem very distinctive. They are at least charmingly described, particularly the Face options, which include a whole range of "Cute" looks, many of which come with freckles. It only took me a few minutes to settle on something I was happy with and then it was into the game, where I found myself in the virtual equivalent of an escape room. 

Although this isn't an especially egregious example of the species, I could happily never see another introduction like this. Locked in a cell with nothing but the clothes you stand up and a disturbing inability to remember anything about your circumstances, personal background or even how you got there, your one and only job is to get out.

Why we can't just start in the village or town, with full knowledge of who we are and where we live, beats me. Still, you play the hand you're dealt, so I spent much of the next hour trying to work my way through a series of cells, rooms, caves and caverns in search of natural daylight.

During my time in an orc dungeon (For that is where I found myself.) I learned that resources respawn infinitely, not just mining or logging nodes but obstacles you'd imagine were only meant to be removed once. I had recourse to double back on myself a couple of times (The route out is far from obvious.) and each time I had to break the same crates that I'd broken before to clear my passage. 

I also got loot each time, suggesting you could easily spend the rest of your life just looting the same chests if you were so inclined. They can drop different items as well, which is both exciting and disturbing. Imagine if you missed out on an ultra-rare and could never go back to the tutorial once you'd left.

Sorry. Just messing with you. I have no firm evidence the game has "ultra-rares", let alone that there are any in the tutorial. But there might be...

The writing is uniformly solid. Good sentence structure, grammatically correct, idomatic. I imagine the real quests, once you get to them, might be pretty good. There's also a light puzzle element to the gameplay, although not so light it didn't completely stump me at one point. I couldn't figure out how to open a door so I had to watch someone do it on YouTube, where I learned how important it is to look up now and again, even underground.

There's some fighting, mostly (Entirely?) against dim-witted orc trainees and their teachers. I had four weapons by the end of the tutorial - a limp stick, a two-handed branch, a bow and a magic staff. The bow never runs out of ammo for the basic atack but you can also find all kinds of special arrows that do different damage, like setting things on fire. The staff sets things on fire too, or heals people, depending which magic book you're holding in your other hand. It looks like an interesting combat system; clunky but fun.

Worthwhile, too. There's lots of loot. Really, a lot. Mobs drop stuff, there are chests, you can smash vases and crates... I imagine there's a limit to how much you can carry but I didn't hit it and I picked up everything.

Eventually I found my way up and out into daylight, where I was able to meet my friend Sen, who'd escaped before me. He promptly ran off, telling me to meet him in town, leaving me to kill more orcs and generally goof around until I met the guy with the glider who told me to jump off the cliff and here we are back where we began. 

I've been thinking about it as I write the post and I'm not going to buy the game just now. Not because it doesn't look good, just because I have other things to do and I probably wouldn't play it much. I will wishlist it, though, so I can reconsider next time it goes on sale. 

All things considered, it seems like a very nice game to potter around in, especially impressive given it's all the work of a single developer. Why it doesn't get more attention when so many similar titles get more than they deserve I have no clue but at least it's firmly on my radar now so I guess the demo did its job.

And finally, the other game I opted against downloading, a decision that isn't any kind of negative criticism of the game so much as an observation on just how cluttered the field for open-world, sandbox survival games feels at the moment. It's called Soulmask and it's available on Steam in open beta format right now. 

If you're interested, you have another four days to sign up and join in. There's also a demo that's been on Steam since the start of the year, so that may still be available after the beta, although the proposed release date for the game is Q2 2024, otherwise known as "now", so maybe not. 

The screenshots look very appealing. I'm getting a pre-Columbian, North American vibe although, possibly through someone having learned from Amazon's missteps with marketing New World, I don't think that's overtly mentioned. The detailed description on the Steam store page makes the game sound amazing, too, so if it lives up to its own hype I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more about it. 

As yet, there's not a single review, so either no-one's playing or there's some kind of block due to it being in beta. I'm not sure how that works on Steam. Either way, it doesn't entirely imbue me with confidence. There are still a few days left so maybe I will try the beta before it ends. I've kind of intrigued myself now just by writing about it.

Of course, before I get around to doing anything, some new game will probably have thrust itself into the spotlight, demanding my attention. There are altogether too many of these things to give every remotely interesting game a fair examination.

I guess it's better that way around than the reverse, although some days I do wish there was some sort of pre-registration process you could sign up for, where someone would winnow out the chaff for me and just leave the good stuff. 

Oh, wait, that would be what I'm doing now, wouldn't it...?

I Only Asked For A Trim!

I said I'd consider playing World of Warcraft again once Blizzard had shifted over to Microsoft but that happened a while back and until today I'd never done anything about it. It's not surprising. I've always had the loosest of connections with WoW. It wasn't like I was desperate to get back to Azeroth. I'd go there when I was good and ready.

It seems I'm ready now, although I'd be lying if I said it was much more than a whim. Mostly it was the buzz building for Cataclysm Classic bumping up against a distinct lack of ideas for anything to post about today.

Whatever the reason, this morning I clicked on the desktop icon for WoW and waited to see what would happen. This being Blizzard, it all went very smoothly, at least in comparison with some other publishers I could mention.

Battlenet recognized my login details and updated itself very briefly before showing me a smorgasbord of titles I could be playing. I had no intention of playing any of them, of course. Neither did I wish to "upgrade" my WoW account, buy the last expansion or pre-order the next. I did not, in point of fact, wish to give Blizzard or Microsoft any money at all.

Luckily for me, you can still play WoW for nothing. There's a small notice somewhere on the Battlenet landing page offering you the opportunity to Play WoW for Free, by which they mean the so-called Endless Free Trial that lets you get to Level 20 before your character is listed as "Inactive". Orwell would be proud of the way language has been wrangled. Or maybe Lewis Carroll.

I'd been away long enough that some of my own characters appeaed as strangers to me. I gave the list of names a brief glance and one stood out: Snapperhead. 

Now that is a great name. I hasten to explain I didn't come up with it. I stole it, like I steal most of the names I use in most of the games I play. In the unlikely event that anyone's interested in its origins, "Snapperhead" is a mildish insult frequently tossed around by Flora, (Full name Flora Nemain Fydraaca ov Fydraaca.) the protagonist of Ysabeau S. Wilce's magnificent and barely describable trilogy, from which I draw many of my character names, in the absolute certainty no-one is ever going to recognize any of them. 

It's a perfect name for a Goblin, which is what my Snapperhead is. I had little-to-no memory of creating her but there she was, Level 12 and ready to go, so I woke her up and set her running.

At this point, coming back to an old MMORPG, I'd normally just log in to wherever the heck I was two or three years ago, take a moment to orient myself, look through my bags and find them full, look at my quests and have no idea what any of them were about, then set off in a random direction, looking for something to kill. After about an hour I'd probably find myself more confused than when I started and either swap to another character or log out altogether to go play something else.

WoW is generally an easy game to come back to, as these things go. I'm usually somewhere I've been before and I generally have bank space, at least, so I can clear a bag or two. As for quests, most of them just ask you to follow an arrow on the mini-map and click on someone with punctuation over their head, so it's not a lot to cope with as you ease yourself back in. 

This time, things went a little differently. I remembered Wilhelm saying something about a new option that had been added for returning players. You can now let the game reset a few things so as to make coming back less of a challenge. I thought I could see a button for that so I clicked it and up popped a "Gear Update" window.

I had another think. New gear and bags sounded good. Clearing my quest log I wasn't quite so sure about. As for my home city, I couldn't even remember which one it was. 

In the end I decided for the sake of science to say yes to everything. A second window popped to let me change my Specialization, if I felt so inclined, but I thought that might be pushing my luck. Also, Beast Mastery just sounds so much cooler than the other two.

The next thing I knew, the game had given me an extreme makeover and very much not in a good way. At the top of the post you can see a picture of the sassy, stylish young woman who stepped into the changing booth, followed by the grim, faceless cipher that stepped out the other side. I was, to put it very mildly, Not Impressed.

Still, helmets can be hidden and gear transmogrified. I mean, it's a pity I have to take the time doing it just to get back the look I was happy with in the first place but it's not like the wind changed and left me stuck like this. I hope...

I hate this city. I hate my clothes. I hate my life!

Leaving that for later, I logged in to see where I was. Oggrimar, apparently. Standing right next to Chromie, which I took to be a hint. Things did not go well for a while after that.

The best part was my inventory; filled with new bags, all huge and almost entirely empty. I'm sure I would have had plenty of clutter in the old ones, so what happened to all of my stuff I have no idea. Maybe it's in escrow somewhere or maybe the game just did me a mercy and binned it all. Either way, I don't want it back.

My quest journal was, as promised, entirely empty. Since I was standing next to Chromie and since I vaguely remembered hearing something about a special event involving Pandaria (I don't really read WoW news very closely.) I thought I might as well take that path. 

Here's where I diverge from the oft-touted idea that Blizzard somehow does these things more professionally than other developers. As has happened all too often before, I found myself confuddled and confused by quests auto-scribing themselves into my book the moment I entered certain areas, while cut scenes unrelated to the quest I thought I was on started to play. I found myself somehow engaged in the main storylines from three separate expansions within minutes of arriving in the game, despite having specifically asked to be given just the one.

It certainly didn't help that Ogrimmar is one of the least-nagivable of cities or that the quest markers on the mini map take absolutely no account of the z-axis. Also, sending someone who's just arrived in town on a quest whose very first step requires locating and using an unmarked elevator is not the friendliest piece of design, in my estimation.

I love my bags, though.

In the end I decided to manually reset myself back to where I'd begun. I abandoned every quest in my Journal and re-traced my steps to Chromie, who greeted me as though she'd never seen me before. This time, after I'd asked for a ticket for the Pandaria bus, I scrupulously avoided going in any buildings or speaking to anyone until I found my way to the airship.

Once on board, everything happened on rails. I did just as I was told, spoke to who I was supposed to speak to, fired my cannon in the direction it was already facing, rapelled down the ropes in front of me and basically acted like a good little soldier until about half an hour in I dinged 14 and decided I'd had enough.

I like Pandaria but it is one of the expansions I've done a fair bit of before. Even though it was a while ago, I could remember much of the opening sequence quite clearly. Also, there wasn't any special event going on, which is hardly surprising since, as I found when I looked it up later, it hasn't started yet.

It's due in update 10,2.7, whenever that is. Soon, I imagine, but not now.

The good news is that, according to the press release, WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is open to players on the Endless Free Trial so, when it finally arrives, I can join if I want to. The less good news is that I'll probably be able to play the new event for about five minutes before the game locks me out.

It took me no more than half an hour to do two levels and I wasn't even trying to go fast. You need to be at least Level 10 to start the remix, one of the key selling points of which is that it offers "Accelerated Leveling". Since Free Trial characters have to go into involuntary hibernation at the end of Level 20, I reckon that should give me a maximum of an hour's play and very probably a lot less.

If I choose to do it anyway, it won't be Snapperhead who has the problem of trying to go slow in the fast lane. I found the details in the FAQ a little fuzzy but I think you have to create a dedicated character for the event:  "a new WoW Remix character, beginning at level 10, which will only be able to play with characters taking part in the event."

It sounds like a lark. I'll almost certainly give it a try. If it's fun, I might even sub for a month or two, which would also lead nicely into Cataclysm Classic. I did say I'd like to take a look at that one, too.

I'm not promising anything but it's possible this might not be the last post about WoW for another couple of years.

Maybe Some Day

I gave myself the day off blogging yesterday to play Nightingale. I think I'm circling in on the primary reason why I'm finding it so compelling but I'll let that percolate a while longer. In the meantime, I thought I'd make good on a promises I made in a previous post.

I started writing about games Palworld and Nightingale had stopped me from playing but then ended up writing about just one of them, Allods, which I actually had played, a little, somewhat defeating my own argument. I said then I'd do post something about the rest later and here we are. It's later already!

Games I'm Not Playing

Obviously, that could be an extremely long list. If you want to be literal about it, it would be all games ever made except Nightingale. That would be kind of a lengthy post even for me, though, so I'll stick to the handful I quite possibly would have been playing, if it hadn't been for (Insert ironically struck-through reference to meme from ancient Hanna-Barbera cartoon old people still somehow expect anyone who didn't grow up watching Saturday Morning Cartoons to get and then shake their heads wearily when they don't here.) two survival games on Steam.

I'm not even going to bother listing the obvious ones, the ones I was already playing before I got de-railed or, more accurately, ran my own train off the tracks, like both EverQuest titles or the many single-player games I'm in the middle of on Steam. This is just a short list of games I have bookmarked, meaning to try, added over the last few weeks either because they looked interesting or because I thought I might get a post out of them. More likely both.

Eterspire

Syp did a short piece on this one for MassivelyOP back in January and I thought it looked interesting enough to bookmark for possible further investigation. It's a mobile title, available for Android and iOS, which self-describes as "the best mobile MMORPG in the history of the universe!!" Look, they even bolded "best" so it must be true!

Really, when you see a claim like that, you have to check it out, don't you? And there's more...

"With engaging combat, tons of rare items to collect, and no overly complicated systems to slow you down, Eterspire cuts through the fluff and takes you straight to the action."

Good, 'cos I really hate being slowed down by those darn overly complicated systems. That's why I've played fifty-five hours of Nightingale these last two weeks. 

Looking at the screenshots and taking the temperature of the extensive patch notes, I get the feeling this is something along the lines of AdventureQuest 3D. I like AQ3D a lot but I still hardly ever play it, so why I'd think I needed another like it beats me. I'd have to play it through BlueStacks or Nox, too, which is another hurdle it will probably never pass but even so it's on the "Maybe One Day" list now. 

Hello Kitty Around The World

I can't now recall where or why I was reading about this. I didn't bookmark my original source, only the Bluestacks entry for the game, which was as far as I got in my attempt to play it. I do remember seeing something that suggested this was an important title for some reason. If I knew what was important about it, I'd tell you. 

Oh, wait, maybe Google knows...

Aha! Now I remember! Or at least, I remember what started it all. It was something I read at NME, because of course a music site was going to be my go-to for important news about Hello Kitty games.

From the NME, I learned that 2024 is Hello Kitty's fiftieth birthday. She really doesn't look her age, does she? That was how I started looking at at Hello Kitty stuff again, but how I ended up with Around The World specifically, I have no clue. 

It's what I bookmarked, anyway, so I'll have to assume I wanted to check it out for something. Maybe if I ever actually play it I'll find out what it was.

My personal history with Japan's most famous feline (And that's a highly competitive title, let me tell you.) doesn't go back quite as far as half a century but it does stretch all the way to the late 1990s, which is when I bought a Hello Kitty pencil case in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona. A few weeks later, I gave that pencil case to a work colleague as a leaving present, when she decided to go to back to America. 

We were the only two people in the office who knew both who Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and that the show was fit viewing for adults, so a Hello Kitty pencil case seemed to be the obvious choice to give her to remember me by. Plus it was all I happened to have with me at her leaving do in the pub after work. God, remember when we used to do things like that? Another world...

A little bit later, I briefly played the Hello Kitty MMORPG,Hello Kitty Online, mostly out of spite. I wanted to be able to hit back at anyone who used it as a lazy diss to put down any other MMORPG they happened not to like, which was very much a trope of the early 'aughts. 

It's always a more effective put-down if you can open with "Have you actually played HKO? Because I have." 

I don't think I ever did that, by the way, but I always thought I might. I guess it could still happen, but I doubt it. After all, I'm not a hot-tempered kid of forty any more.

Of course, the Hello Kitty game I really want to play is Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which is basically Hello Kitty meets Animal Crosssing as far as I can see. Unfortunately, that one is only available via Apple Arcade, which not only requires an iOS device capable of running the game but also charges a subscription. Never gonna happen.

Embers Adrift

Finally, a game you can play on the PC! Embers Adrift is one of those uphill in the snow both ways, retro "golden age" MMORPGs that were all the rage a few years ago, only it's one that both actually launched and hung around. I'm pretty sure it used to be called something else and there was probably some drama involved at some point but I neither remember the details nor care enough to go look them up.

The important part is that from the start of this month it's getting one of those endless free trials I like. The way I play, those might as well be free games. It's not like I often get much further than the starting zones in most MMORPGs, and anyway those are usually the best bits.

The devs also recently made some changes to the early stages that apparently mean you don't have to get a group before you can even take on a kill ten rats quest any more. Oh, it's still laser-focused on "Group-based Gameplay" with all the usual promises and reasons, but like just about every similar game ever, it has finally occured to someone that players occasionally either want or need to do stuff on their own, if only for the sake of their sanity. 

As the patch notes from a preparatory update for the free trial last month put it "A new solo loop has been added to the Meadowlands' Noxious Bog Ember Vein." Now, doesn't that sound inviting?

MOP reported back in January that the recent changes were just the beginning of a new approach to solo play in the game:

"“One of our primary goals in 2024 is to deliver more structured gameplay for those who begin their adventures alone,” the studio says. “We hope that by providing more tangible goals with meaningful rewards to solo adventurers they will stick around longer increasing the likelihood of forming a group to tackle a dungeon or complete a quest. To start the year off we are launching three new EV solo loops and our new Bulletin Board System!"

Amazing how every new developer has to re-invent the wheel, isn't it?

I don't know how well Embers Adrift is doing but generally these kinds of changes only come in response to either player demand or demographic decline. It seems the old school B2P + Sub payment model was the first thing to give. That would be a really hard sell in 2024. 

It's still $39.99 for the full game but the subscription is now one of those optional deals that give you perks of various kinds. A change like that wouldn't have moved the dial on my interest but the combination of not having to pay $40 plus the prospect of at least some content I might actually be able to see without having to make a whole bunch of new friends I'd never meet again did at least motivate me to bookmark the game to have a look at later. 

Op success for the Marketing Dept. I guess..

Tower of Fantasy

Aka the game I didn't play when everyone else was playing it because I was too busy playing Noah's Heart. So, if I didn't bother then, why would I consider it now?

This is why. The prospect of meeting Asuka, Shinji, Rai and the rest in a game is enticing - although I notice the promo only mentions Asuka by name. I guess she is everyone's favorite...

The crossover event begins on in exactly a week on 12 March but I'm unclear as to whether it will then become permanent content or if there's a date set after which it goes away. 

If it's the latter, I'll probably never get to try it but if it's staying for good then maybe I'll eventually find a window to take a look at a game I probably should have played already, anyway.

And that's all of them for now.  Not counting the games on my Steam wishlist I almost bought or the Prime games I almost downloaded. 

If I ever get around to trying any of them, I imagine you'll read about it here. Meanwhile, it's back to Nightingale.

The Eightfold Path

Say what you like about Square Enix but you can't say they don't keep you informed. Sometimes it seems like I get an email from them every day. Of course, it's not that often, really. It's every other day. 

I guess they have a lot to talk about. They seem to produce an astonishing quantity of games. This month alone they've told me about Final Fantasy VII, Life is Strange 2, Tomb Raider Reloaded, Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, Paranormasight and Final Fantasy XI. Just about the only game they haven't mentioned is the one I might actually play, Final Fantasy XIV. I haven't had an email about that one since last year.

The game Square are keenest I should try right now isn't anything I've mentioned. It's the follow-up to a game I've heard a lot about but never thought of playing: Octopath Traveller. The sequel goes by the unimaginative but commercially canny title Octopath Traveller 2. It launches next week and  and they've sent me three emails about it in the last six days.

Okay, now I know what to look for, I guess that could be a tail. I thought it was a pony-tail!

As I say, I very rarely open any correspondence from Square. The most I ever do is scan the title. More often than not I don't even do that. I don't look at any emails I don't think will interest me, which is why I currently have nearly 18,000, unopened, in my Inbox. I almost never delete emails, either. You probably guessed that.

What Square were so keen to tell me is that there's a demo for Octopath Traveller 2 on Steam. As it happens, I already knew. I found out somehow, while I was looking up something for the recent Next Fest. The OT2 demo wasn't part of the event but it got a mention somewhere in despatches.

I probably still wouldn't have bothered downloading it if it hadn't been for one thing; the demo is actually a three hour limited free trial. You can make a character and play the game just as though you'd bought it, within certain restrictions, until Steam registers that you've been playing for a hundred and eighty minutes.

Make your minds up! Is it "Beastling" or "Beasting"? I know which I'd go with.

 

You don't have to do it all at once, either, which is just as well. Three hours is a long time. Most demos I play take less than an hour. Three hours is a whole evening. Anyway, it seemed like an offer worth checking out, so I did. 

At this point, I probably ought to explain that even though I've read quite a few blog posts about Octopath Traveller, I've never had a very clear idea what sort of game it is. People seem remarkably unclear about it when they recount their experiences. I had the sense it was some kind of turn-based card battler, maybe along the lines of Slay the Spire, not that I have much of a clue what that one's about, either. 

If the original is anything like the sequel, I've clearly been under a great misapprehension. About the only thing I got right was the turn-based part. Other than that, it seems to be some kind of open world, story-led RPG, done in pixel graphics. 

All we need now is a little lens-flare.

I'm not going to go into great detail about how the game looks or plays. I've played for just over two hours so far, which is hardly enough for more than a First Impressions piece, if that. What I will say, though, is that the graphics are extremely effective and evocative, the characters charming and delightful and the story well-written, well-acted and involving. On the whole I had a good time.

My big problem - and it's a huge one - is the combat. It's unnutterably tedious. I generally enjoy turn-based combat but it always has the same drawback; it takes forever. When I enjoy the mechanics, as in Wizard 101, for example, that's not much of an issue but when I find them dull beyond description, it really, really is.

I can name three very specific reasons why I didn't get on with the combat in OT2.

1. The icons are far too small and difficult to make out.
2. There's far too little feedback on what's happening.
3.  The menu system is fiddly and annoying.

Literally. Stuff one of these kebabs in your face during a fight and whoosh! Full health.

There's more that I didn't like about it but those were the worst bits. Even then, I could have put up with it if it was just the battles in the storyline and there weren't so many random encounters. The whole concept of an open world becomes moot if you can't go ten paces without something challenging you to a duel.

That's why, despite enjoying the story, liking my character and wanting to know what happens next, I gave up before my three hours were at an end. I just couldn't take another pointless battle. 

I imagine I'll go back at some point to claim my final fifty minutes. I understand the structure involves eight playable characters that eventually come together to form a team (At least I think that's how it goes...) so I might give another a try. You can play any of them in the demo. 

I chose Ochette and Ochette chose Akala. He's a fox so it wasn't really much of a choice. More of a racing certainty.

I picked the Beastling, Ochette for my first run. Surprise, surprise, you might well say but I swear I didn't even know she had a tail when I picked her. I only chose her because I wanted someone who used a bow.

Just selecting a character at all was a major achievement. If there's anything in the demo that tells you you need a controller I missed it so I was flummoxed when the keyboard didn't work at all. I couldn't even use the menus. 

Fortunately, I have a controller plugged in all the time these days so I swapped to that and with a little experimentation soon got to grips with the controls. The game felt very comfortable with a gamepad after just a few minutes, which is a massive plus for someone like me, who rarely uses one.

Not so much the end as the end of the beginning.

After that everything went very smoothly. I liked the rest of the game so much, I'd be very happy to play Octopath Traveller 2 all the way to the end if only there was a version with no combat at all. I'd be more than satisfied to toddle around the neon-lit jungle paths and sail the pixel seas in search of adventure, just so long as I didn't have to fight anything.

Unfortunately, fighting seems to be the main point of it all so I'll have to give this one a miss. Shame, though. It was fun while it lasted.

Can't Leave It Alone, Can You?

I said I would, so I am. Or I will be. It's taking a while. Four hours, apparently, although it's speeded up some since I took the screenshot.

Square's infamously archaic front end gives the strangest first impression, doesn't it? I mean, I realise it's nothing compared to the PlayOnline version FFXI still uses but still...

Even as I typed that, I wondered if it was even true any more. It has to be fifteen years since I last logged into FFXI. Maybe longer. So I typed "PlayOnline" into Google and I'm pleased to say it looks a little less terrifying, albeit much the same as I remember. 

There's a Free Trial, too. I was curious, so I clicked. This is what I got:

Well, that's encouraging. I'm sure it's all perfectly fine, though...

Not that I want to play FFXI, which I remember as being one of the most ferociously solo-unfriendly mmorpgs imaginable, but I was kind of curious to try it with a controller, now I have one. It was the insane PC controls that put me off last time. Apart from that, I quite liked it. Oh, well, maybe later.

While I'm on the subject, how come you can play the base game and first expansion of FFXIV absolutely free but the ancient and allegedly "in maintenance mode" FFXI still requires a subscription? Is it intended to dissuade people from playing the older game in favor of the newer, in which case, why have a free trial at all? (Yes, I found a link to that page that doesn't kick off a securty alert.)

Arguably odder yet is the exact nature of the "free" version of FFXIV, which as this detailed breakdown explains, is also, technically a "Free Trial" not, as it would first appear, a F2P offer with level limits and restrictions, such as you see in other games like EverQuest, EverQuest II or Star Wars: the Old Republic. 

That's if the information in the article is up to date. It's from 2021 so it may not be. The reason I linked it first, rather than the official web page, is that nothing on Square's site clearly explains that once you convert your "Trial" account, not only do you have to start paying a subscription, which obviously makes sense, but that you can never go back to playing that same account without one. You'll never see your characters again unless you pay up each month, which these days feels almost immoral.

It's why I can play FFXIV on an account I made after the Free Trial was added but can't use the same offer to log in my older characters on my original account. It's also why I will never be able to subscribe to FFXIV for the odd month here and there, as I have done for World of Warcraft and SW:tOR, which does seem an awful lot like that "leaving money on the table" thing companies are supposed to hate. 

I guess Square don't care. After all, they've had a lot more problems of late with too many people wanting to play their flagship title than too few. They really don't need to offer any concessions to bring in the business.

It's no fur off my tail. There's absolutely no chance I'll ever get a character far enough up the level ladder for the restrictions to matter and in any case there are orders of magnitude more content in the free trial than I'll ever see. 

Or want to. Yesterday, Asmiroth at Leo's Life posted a detailed precis of all the things there are to do in the game and it sent a chill through my veins. It doesn't sound so much like a leisure activity as it does a life choice. 

Then again, you could say the same about most mmorpgs. Best taken in small doses, all of them, that's my feeling these days. That's how I intend to take FFXIV, if and when it finally sets itself up, which as I type, should be right around... now!

Let's go see if it works.

Complaints (It's My Department)

I've complained about this before but that's not going to stop me complaining about it again. For some very effable reasons (colder weather, daylight vanishing, people staying indoors) game developers always seem to start throwing freebies around and launching new product just when I find myself with the least time to enjoy it all.

This year it's even more ironic in that I spent the entire summer at home, free (at least when I wasn't hospitalized) to devote as much time as I wanted to playing video games and writing about them (not least because my medication made me extremely sensitive to sunlight so I had to stay indoors even when I was feeling pretty good).

And now I'm back at work so off they go again.

Astellia (which, as you will see if you follow the link (which is where you end up if you right-click the name in text and select "search google for "Astellia"" like I did) has possibly the most annoying landing screen since web site designers stopped using rinkydink music you couldn't switch off; almost as annoying, in fact, as this heavily over-parenthesized and scarcely readable sentence) just had a free weekend.

I only found out about it halfway through, too late to make time to take advantage of their generosity. There's a second chance to try out this new, supposedly oldish school MMORPG, without forking out for a "box" (that doesn't exist) or taking the we're-so-old-school-we-even-even-have-a-subscription option. That's next weekend, when I will almost certainly still not be able to find time to try it out.

Not that I was especially interested in Astellia anyway. As I mentioned somewhere once, it seems to instill apathy in all who've tried it. Still, I hate to miss out on an opportunity to post ill-informed snap judgments on new games based on blink-and-you'll-miss-it exposure to their charms, if any. Especially when it doesn't cost me anything.

Then there's The Outer Worlds, another game I never had the least interest in playing until loads of people started talking about it. I hate to be left out. Such a joiner, me.

It wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't that, apparently, you can play this brand new, high-profile, "exclusive" release for the princely sum of one dollar. That's if you join the beta for the XBox Game Pass for PC (I hope that's a working title. It's informative, sure, but it's hardly snappy, now, is it?) XBGPfPC, as no-one is calling it, has a confusing pricing structure. On full release it will run you $9.99 per month but you can get in for just $4.99 with the Introductory Offer Not sure if there are dates for either of those yet but you could be beta testing it right now for a buck. What's stopping you?

It's a pretty good deal even at the $4.99. There are some well-reviewed games in there. Now that I seem to be dabbling more in non-MMORPG titles there are several I wouldn't mind trying. It would have been great three months ago. Now?  Not sure I'd get round to using it.

Still, I might give them that dollar anyway. I probably ought to be able to get a blog post or three out of it, at least. That would be money well spent.

Finally, at least until the next Autumn Promo lands, there's an entire week of free flying in Star Citizen. Actually, more like free mining, given that's the tentpole feature of the new build. I did get as far as finding my login details and updating the client (an 8GB download) for this one.

I had a very surprisingly good time in the last Free Fly, back in the spring and I wouldn't mind another go. Unfortunately, while my details work fine and my account is still valid, my character has vanished into the void. I made a new character this evening and managed to get as far as finding my ship and launching into space but I was tabbing in and out so much, trying to refresh my memory on how to play the damn game, it crashed and I lost the will to carry on.

Maybe I'll get back to it before the hangar doors clang shut for another six months. Probably not.

And there we have it. Suddenly I have loads of ideas of things to do that will generate things to write about and I don't have the time to carry them through.

I would quite like to take another look at ArcheAge in its F2P version now that the Buy to Play version is making such a splash. There are supposed to be some quality of life improvements in Star Wars: The Old Republic that I really should check out. Anything that empties my overstuffed storage bays has to be worth a log-in. Occupy White Walls had another update. I always get a mild twinge of guilt when that happens and I let it pass...

No doubt there's more I've missed and more to come. Oh well, at least it gives me something to complain about.

Happy Days

As I continue to spend the summer at home, mostly indoors, I'm slipping into a comfortable routine. With Blaugust in full flow I'm enjoying knocking out a post a day, some days two.

With the musical doors open I'm bursting with ideas as I release the pent-up store of topics I've been sitting on for years but since this is and will remain first and foremost an MMORPG blog, I feel almost obligated to put up a gaming-related post to match every time I wax musical..

Which isn't a problem. I'm settling into a pattern of playing short sessions of several MMORPGs each day. I log into Riders of Icarus with metronomic regularity but all I do is afk for the thirty minutes required to notch up the daily login rewards. I have my latest minion out, a crab. He's taking his time to level up - he's Level 15 now with ten more to go to match my Trickster's twenty-five.

After that's done I log out and swap to Guild Wars 2 for some dailies. I abandoned the two holiday events, having missed too many days when I was really ill, so it's just the regular dailies for now. That takes anything from twenty minutes to three-quarters of an hour in total on three accounts.

I've dropped the third account for the time being, mostly due to getting a bit burned out on doing so many dailies every day for several years now, although this morning I did log the third account in for the first time in several weeks.

I logged that account in because I wanted to check the report that populations on almost all North American servers had dropped substantially, which turned out to be true. This is only relevant to World vs World but it does, finally, seem to confirm that the game mode is reaching its own endgame.

There could, of course, be any number of reasons, from summer holidays to the upcoming World of Warcraft Classic launch but I'm fairly convinced now that the main reason is simple burnout and boredom with a part of the game that has been ruinously ignored for years.

Pandas really know how to travel in style.

After that I've been moving on to World of Warcraft where I've been having much fun with pandas. I'll probably put in a couple of hours there after tea this evening. It's relaxing and fun.

Another MMORPG that I'm finding very relaxing to play in two-hour sessions is Final Fantasy XIV. Lots of bloggers keep writing about this one and a couple of days ago I felt myself getting the urge to give it another go.

Almost everything I read about the "proper" FFXIV is a complete anathema to me. The idea of doing repeated dungeons or grinding "tomes" or plodding through an endless interrupted T.V. show in the form of the Main Quest sounds about as much fun as root canal surgery.

Playing FFXIV as a sandpark virtual world in the endless free trial, though, is a wonderful alternative. The whole game opens up, begins to feel like a proper place where my character lives and has a normal, fantasy life.

Dance emotes as quest rewards is a nice idea.

I've been wandering about picking up side quests, nibbling away at my class and MQ now and again and generally just being an adventurer for hire. It's been thoroughly enjoyable in a way I never found the game to be when I played it the way it's supposedly meant to played.

I've drifted to Level 32 as an Archer, three levels from the trial cap, but today I added the Bard job, entirely by chance and to my surprise, as I went through my Journal clearing all the quests I'd picked up. I can keep adding jobs for a long, long time and thereby reset my level to keep the free trial going indefinitely.

At Level 32 I have yet to leave Gridania and The Shrouds. When I first played, back at launch, I'd been to all the zones and was way further along on the MQ. That felt like an on-rails grind. Now I feel free.

I'm about done with Gridania for now. I have breadcrumb quests to take me to both of the other regions but I think I'll just ride my Chocobo down to either Thanalan or La Noscea and see what turns up.

Take that, Figgy Pudding!

Any day I might pick another MMORPG and give that a run. EQ2 will come back into play at exactly the same time as WOW Classic. I fancy doing a bit more in Elder Scrolls Online, just to see if the questing is as bad as I remember. I need to get back into Star Wars: the Old Republic at some point and all the talk of DCUO on The Switch has made me think about logging in for some superhero fun (and Lair decoration!).

I'm still playing and enjoying Kingdoms of Amalur, too, although I haven't logged in for a couple of days. I might play some of that later this evening.

All in all I'm I feel like I'm in a good place with my gaming. I wonder if WoW Classic will blow all that out of the water and turn out to be an obsession that sucks up all available play time, or whether it will just fall into place as another two-hour session slot.

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Four Stars Out Of Five (Such An Easy Flight) : Star Citizen

Sometimes you just have to admit you were wrong. I said yesterday that Star Citizen didn't interest me. It didn't. Now it does.

All the reasons I gave in the opening paragraphs of yesterday's post stand. I don't like space sims. I don't like complex vehicle controls. I don't want to build a trade empire. All those justified reservations burned away on the journey from Olisar to Lorville.

Immersion is a buzzword we toss around all the time, here in the MMORPG community. In recent years it's slipped its genre moorings, drifted into the mainstream. No-one entirely knows what it means but the one constant everyone agrees on is this: you know it when you feel it.

I felt it, flying free in Star Citizen. Immersed in the complexity of the project, the minutiae of the settings, the aesthetics, the detail, the solidity. Without any doubt, this is a brave attempt at the thing we used to say we wanted: a virtual world.

Or, to be more precise, a virtual universe, because if Chris Roberts has one overriding charactersistic it has to be not knowing when to stop. You can only wonder what Roberts Space Industries could have done if they'd restricted themselves to the construction of a single planetary future instead of trying to build a galaxy.

Picking up where I left off yesterday, as the lengthy exchange between myself and Pete in the comments suggests, I had wanderlust and I meant to sate it. The Olisar space station was impressive but I knew there was so much more to see.

I may not have been following Star Citizen closely but I have bloggers in my feed who write about it often. Alysianah of Mystic Worlds has made a second career out of reporting SC's progress. Scopique at Levelcapped writes about playing the game as though it were already live. From them and others I'd learned that SC has explorable cities and planets. I wanted to see some.

The problem was how to get there. Star Citizen has game but is sim. You don't just open a map and click an icon to be insta-magicked where you want to go.

Except you kind of do. That's sort of how the Starmap works, only first you have to get your ship moved to the launch pad, find it on foot, work out how to get inside (a lot harder than you might imagine), bring all the systems online, manually lift off and position yourself in space. Then you can click on a map, select a target, set a route and travel.

That simple. Yeah, right. I went through four of my five ships trying. The first time I ended up in the passenger seat and couldn't reach the controls. I gave up on that one. The next two made it into space but the Quantum Drive defeated me. I could spool but it wouldn't engage. The game crashed on me while I was trying to figure out the controls, probably because I have half the recommended available ram and far too much going on at once.

Each time I re-started I tried a new ship. Just getting inside the fourth, the big cargo hauler/fighter, Cutlass Black, stumped me for a while. The side doors opened easily enough but I couldn't clamber or jump high enough to get in. Eventually I gave up and went to YouTube, where I watched someone open a massive rear ramp that I'd somehow completely failed to see.

By this time I'd also watched the video Pete linked in the comments and I thought I knew what I'd been doing wrong with the Quantum Drive. I hadn't been aligning with the target correctly so the navigation computer could calibrate the route. Working out how to do that took a while, much of it with my ship spinning drunkenly as I tried to spot the right icon on the HUD.

It turned out to be a small yellow circle that looked nothing like anything in any of the videos I'd watched. Alphas, huh? I successfully aligned and calibrated, spooled up and held "B" to engage the Quantum Drive. And it worked!

I was trying to get to a planet called Hurston because I vaguely remembered one of the most recently-added cities, Lorville, was there. I wanted to walk around a proper city, not just a spaceport.

Hurston is a long way from Olisar Space Station. It took me a good while to find it on the star map but travelling there took a lot longer. Fifteen minutes, maybe, during which time all I could do was sit in the pilot seat and watch quantum colors blur past. I guess I could have fiddled with my mobiGlas or tabbed out but I was petrified of crashing the game so I just sat and waited.

The ship came out of Quantum space in orbit around Hurston. I opened the star map again, found Lorville on the surface, set the route, aligned, calibrated, spooled and let the drive take me around the curvature in a few seconds. And that was all the help I was going to get.

Somehow I had to fly down to the surface, find the city and land without crashing. Big ask. I put my foot down on the accelerator (aka spinning the mouse wheel) and took her in.

To say my approach was cautious would be to undersell the entire concept of caution. Think Reginald Molehusband reverse parking. I didn't care how long it took, I just wanted to get down in one piece. I couldn't see anything that looked like a city so I aimed for a road, figuring all roads would lead to Lorville.

To my astonishment and fist-pumping delight I got the Cutlass down onto the red desert sand in one piece. I opened the door, checking first I was wearing my undersuit, and stepped out.

The sun was setting because I always arrive everywhere at night. I looked around. There were buildings in the distance so I started to jog towards them. It took me a while and when I got there I found nothing but some deserted industrial caissons and towers. No sign of life. Definitely no city.

The sun was almost down. I looked back to my ship. A handy indicator on the HUD told me it was around 300m away. Jogging that far had taken me almost exactly the same time as it would take me to jog it in real life.

I figured if I couldn't see Lorville from where I was there was no chance of getting there on foot before my air supply ran out. Although maybe the atmosphere was breathable. I wasn't about to test it by taking my helmet off. I jogged back to the Cutlass and climbed in.

After consulting the starmap on my mobiGlas I had a distance and direction for Lorville. 37 kilometers. Good thing I didn't try to walk it. I got the ship off the ground and headed for the city.

Oh, boy! If I'd had a hairy old time of it trying to get from orbit to surface it was a stroll to the corner store compared to what came next. The Cutlass Black is not designed for low altitude, in-atmosphere travel.

I spent as much time upside down as the right way up. The computer thought I wanted to use the Quantum Drive and kept telling me I was too close to do that but I was just using the marker to navigate so I ignored it. I kept the ship at around 3000m above the surface, low enough to navigate by sight but high enough not to hit anything. Unless I ran into a mountain.

After ten or fifteen minutes of veering and yawing the desert began to turn industrial. I flew over yards and factories and refineries. Then the lights of skyscrapers filled the viewfield, green and purple and red. I gained a little height and slowed to a crawl. Now what?

I'd landed successfully in the desert so I thought I'd look for a big, flat space in the city. A park, a parking lot, a rooftop. And I could see plenty of options, only every time I came down to skyscraper level I got a "Restricted Area" warning. If I kept going the screen filled with orange hexes, then went orange altogether.

I tried that a few times and pulled back at the last moment. As I learned later I was seconds away from being fried by the city's defence grid. Microseconds, according to some. I come out in a sweat thinking about how close I came.

By this time, though, I had seen some huge signs for the Teasa Spaceport. I figured that must be where I was meant to land but every time I approached I got the same  "Restricted" warnings. My mobiGlas wasn't telling me anything so I went to Google.

Ten minutes later I knew all about requesting permission to land from the local authorities. I opened the comms channel and got my slot. Problem was, I couldn't see anything to tell me where it was. All I had was a distance counter measured in meters on the dashboard display.


So I used that. Like using a /loc to navigate in EverQuest, I trial-and-errored my way across the city, hanging just above the defence grid so I could try to get a visual on my landing pad. I was four kilometers away when I started. I'd watched a video that suggested it would be highlighted in green and eventually, when I came within less than 500m of my target, I saw it.

The landing pad looked miniscule, barely bigger than the ship. Also, as I got closer I could see it was down a hole. I despaired of being able to thread that needle but I figured if I crashed at least I might wake up in Lorville rather than back in my pod on Olisar. Anyway, what else was I going to do?

With even greater astonishment than when I successfully landed in the desert, I manoeuvered the Cutlass into place. I had the landing gear down and the wheels were all but on the ground when a voice warning sounded, telling me my landing space had been "re-allocated to another customer". You what now?!

I paniced. I swore and cursed but it was too late to do anything but land. Stuff the other guy, whoever he was. I'll take the fine or whatever. Once I'm down, I'm down. They aren't going to shoot me for a parking violation, are they? Are they??

They didn't. The ship touched down safely and I got another loud, insistent warning, telling me it was going to be moved into store and I shouldn't be inside when that happened. 

I was still trying to get the door open and scramble out when the game took back control. There was a brief loading screen and then I was standing in the landing bay. Not dead! Alive in Lorville! I'd done it.

The sense of satisfaction (and relief) was immense. I had no idea how long the whole thing had taken because I'd completely lost track of time. In fact, apart from when I'd had to go research mechanics on the web, I'd forgotten I was playing a game. I was just there, in my ship, trying to stay alive and get to my destination in one piece.

I collected my thoughts, looked around, noted the significant presence of armed guards in battle suits, and decided to make myself scarce. I found the sign for the rapid transit system and made my way down the echoing corridors to the metro station.

What happened next? Well, that's a tale for another day.