EverQuest Legends, Stars Reach And Valheim Battle It Out. GW3 Watches From The Sidelines.

There's been a flurry of announcements concerning Games Of Interest of late and I haven't found time to talk about most of them yet. Today's the day! Here's a Grab Bag of upcoming launches and what-not.

EverQuest Legends

Last to be announced, first to market. We're so used to hype cycles lasting years that a four-month arc from the opening announcement to the game going live seems almost indecent. 

To recap, this is the version of EverQuest you can solo. There's more to it but that's the USP. It was clearly inspired by the success of an unsanctioned, rogue EverQuest server by the name of The Heroes Journey whose USP was... ah, you guessed!

That one was so successful it made the mistake of making money so EG7/Daybreak took the developers to court, where a $3.5m settlement was agreed. The THJ devs toddled off to make their own game, Hollowed Oath, without the borrowed IP and assets and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, having pulled in $166k on a Kickstarter .

Meanwhile, Daybreak farmed the idea out to a company called Game Jawn, which I believe is run by some of the people behind the Officially Sanctioned, Not A Rogue Server At All legacy project, Quarm.  With the whole thing neatly formalized and codified under the catchy, if recycled, title EverQuest Legends, everyone who would have liked to play on The Heroes Journey but felt too uncomfortable about the dubious provenance can now feel happy they're giving their money to the right people. 

EQL, as I'm sure we'll end up calling it, is a bit more than just a retro server. Although it will start back in 1999, the devs, who are entirely different people from those currently running and writing for EQ itself, promise "it will evolve separately with its own lore and timeline...have its own spin on classic zones and will also add never-before-seen content.”

 The game will be on Steam and you can have it for an upfront payment of  $19.99, followed by $10 a month in subs. You do, of course, get the first month in that box fee but sadly, since Game Jawn is entirely separate from Daybreak, your All Access sub won't get you in. 

You can give Game Jawn your money right now, if you want. The game goes live on July 28 but you can pre-order. 

That gets you guaranteed access to the beta "on or about July 1", which puzzles me a little. The beta will close on July 21 so pre-ordering gives you just three weeks to try out the game, after which your character and all your progress will be wiped and you'll have to start over from scratch another week later. 

For regular MMORPGs, where there's some form of competitive raid structure, some people find this sort of thing an attractive prospect so they can learn the strats and get ahead of everyone else come launch day. For a game that's selling itself on its solo-friendliness, though, one where "even a solo player can build a character strong enough to take on the toughest challenges and acquire the most epic gear in the game", those three weeks seem like a bit of a waste of time and effort. 

I guess there will be achievements, maybe? World firsts and that sort of thing. Although it won't be very authentically old-school EQ if there are. Still, it's supposed to be a modern take on the old game...

I'm still undecided about whether to bother with EQL. I don't want to play it. I don't have time to play it. I've already seen just about all there is to see in the first half-dozen expansions so until they start adding new, original zones, there wouldn't be a lot of point. 

On the other hand, I feel I ought at least to check it out and so I can write about it a little. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Rather the opposite, in fact, for both the playing and the writing. If I do, it'll be more out of a sense of duty than with any enthusiasm, although duty to what or whom, I couldn't say. 

And I very definitely don't want to pay a sub for it, that's for damn sure. A one-off box price of $20 I can rationalize but an ongoing, monthly subscription? I think not. It'll be one month and out, if at all.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds' sandbox MMORPG set in space is coming to Early Access "this summer". A bit vague, I know, but at least they have a window. They also have a trailer. Want to see it?

It's... alright. Not terrible. The character animations look wonky but it's pretty enough. Doesn't make the game look very exciting, though, does it? Or interesting. Or new. 

It looks as though Early Access will be free to play although you can, of course, buy supporter packs. Or will be able to. Wilhelm has all the details. In fact, he has everything you need to know about the whole thing so I suggest you pop over to his place and get yourself up to speed there, if you need to.

All I'm going to do here is editorialize. I've played some Stars Reach. It's okay if you like that sort of thing although I'm pretty sure there are better options. No Man's Sky gets brought up a lot in conversations but I haven't played that so I can't comment on the similarities.  

What I can say is that Stars Reach is dull. It all works but none of it is much fun. "Worthy" is a word that keeps popping into my head when I try to write about it. "Bored" is the one that pops up when I play. 

There's not much of a game there, that's the biggest problem. It's a fairly pure sandbox so you need to make your own entertainment and the tools for that are limited. It could use some kind of spine like all the crafting/survival games have and it hasn't got one. Without one, it kind of flops around, limply. As it would.

There's been some speculation about why they're going public just now. Money drying up is one obvious possibility but my suspicion is that they just can't get enough people through the doors any other way to maintain a meaningful test population. 

That's not guesswork. HeartlessGamer said in the comments at TAGN that Playable Worlds has admitted as much on reddit. There's numerical evidence, too. The only way you can play the Stars Reach alpha has always been through Steam so we have exact numbers and concurrent population has been in single figures for months. 

The peak player count this year was 32. Average concurrency peaked at 7 in March and now it's less than half that. No-one wants to play any more. Actually, if you look back, hardly anyone ever did. The all-time peak was well below 200 players online at the same time.

I asked yesterday who Neverness To Everness was for. That game had thirty million pre-registrations. Stars Reach has one person online as I write and a 24-hour peak of four. 

Who is Stars Reach for? I guess we'll find out this summer.

Guild Wars 3

Here's an announcement I did find the time to cover. I'm not going over all that again but I will say something about how the news affects the other Guild Wars titles and particularly Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, like Daybreak, is in an interesting and somewhat fortunate position. They've been through this before. They've seen what happens to an existing playerbase when you launch a second title in direct competition with yourself. They each have that experience to draw on, now they come to launch a third. (Or in Daybreak's case a fourth. Never forget EQOA.)

First time around, the two companies took very different tacks. ANet mothballed Guild Wars the moment GW2 arrived. They shunted it straight to maintenance mode and stopped developing it at all. Daybreak (Or SOE as it was at the time, of course.) did the exact opposite, running EQ and EQII in tandem, continuing to develop them both pretty much equally.

ANet now seem to believe that was the better choice, although Colin Johansen inexplicably spins the idea that they're going to support new and old titles as "not the norm" whereas I'd say deciding not to was the exception.They've already begun to take GW1 out of mothballs and they're promising development will continue on GW2 as before. They know they need to get out there and assure the people paying their bills right now that it's worth carrying on for the next couple of years because a lot of them, like Azuriel, will be questioning whether it's likely to be worth it. 

Colin Johanson is suggesting it's just a blip. There'll be a short hiatus in new content as they go back and tidy up all the bugs, then everything will get back to normal, with annual  expansions and whatever else it is they've been doing since I last played a few years ago.

I am, to be polite, skeptical. In the decade I played GW2, one of ANet's defining features was a complete inability to establish either a cadence or a pipeline for supplying content. They kept chopping and changing. They rarely stuck to any of their plans long enough to see if they worked although in most cases it was blindingly obvious they weren't going to, so I suppose they should actually get some credit for dropping them as fast as they did. Just none for coming up with them in the first place.

They frequently floated grandiose frameworks for large-scale changes to the game, changes they then discussed literally for years without implementing any of them, during which time most of the key individuals would move departments or leave the company. If and when any of these plans did finally make it to the game, they'd look nothing like the promises and they'd often wither away and be forgotten almost immediately. World vs World suffered particularly badly in this respect but it hit all parts of the game at times.

And yet, somehow, the game muddled along. It rarely prospered but it didn't fail. GW2 players became inured to frequent content droughts combined with constant churn in all kinds of systems and mechanics and learned to put up with it, albeit very grudgingly. Either that or they left. 

If that's what Colin Johanson means by business as usual (Not the phrase he used but it's the implication.) then I'm willing to believe him. The game was always a shambles when I played. I'm sure it can carry on being a shambles for a bit longer.

The idea that the company that struggled so hard to maintain a steady content flow for a single game will somehow now be able to manage it smoothly and efficiently or three titles is fantasy, though. Unless, I guess, they're planing on hugely expanding the workforce. Are they doing that? And even then, I very much doubt it would help. It'd just be more daft ideas and discussion document than ever.

We'll see how it all pans out in a couple of years time, I guess. My feeling is that if GW3 is a success, GW2 will end up being like GW1 is now, a comfortable niche title that people like enough to feel nostalgic about but mostly don't play. It could still get more content but it might not even need it. GW1 pottered along for a decade and more without any and a few people still played it.

If GW3 bombs or just under-performs, though, we might end up with an EQ/EQII scenario, where the older game holds most of its current audience, while the new one fails to attract another. At that point, I suspect ANet's promises of triple-game development might fall apart quite quickly. 

By then, though, I'll be too old to care. 

Valheim

Valheim is my most-played game on Steam at 385 hours but the last time I logged in was over two years ago. When the game finally leaves Early Access on September 9, will I return? Doubtful.

The further we get from the pandemic, the more certain I am that this was one of the artifacts of that strange time. We all had more hours in the day than we knew what to do with and we weren't always even allowed out of the house. Valheim filled a need.

It also introduced me - and many others, I'm sure - to a whole new genre, the crafting/survival game. I've played a few since and most of them have been better in objective terms than Valheim, which is kind of barebones when you look at it hard.

It was my first, though, and you're always still a little bit in love with your first, aren't you? I'd like to get to the end of Valheim but the the last two biomes were so radically un-enjoyable I don't have much hope for the last one, the Deep North. I imagine it'll be a miserable experience for anyone other than gaming masochists.

At most, I might set all the controls to as easy as possible and have a quick tour around the end zone like I did with the Ashlands. At the moment, though, I can't say I'm even motivated to do that. Valheim was a game of its time and that time has gone.

And that's my bag filled for the day, I think. I have a feeling there may have been some other announcements I was going to attend to (Edit: Like this one.) but I can't remember what they were and I didn't bookmark anything so I think we're done. 

For now. 

There's Something In The Water! There, In The Distance! I can Just Make It Out! It's... It's GW3!

There were other things I had in mind for today's post, things I'm a lot more interested in and that I'd certainly enjoy writing about a lot more, but I suppose I have to write about this now. ArenaNet officially announced Guild Wars 3 at this year's Summer Games Fest. There was a pre-event puff that told us they were going to announce something and some people thought that might be GW3. I was not one of those people. 

Then again, I was also not one of those people who cared all that much what they were going to announce. I was mildly curious but I assumed it would be some new thing for one of the two existing Guild Wars games, neither of which I play and neither of which I plan on playing, either now or in the near or distant future. 

I find myself in a very uncomfortable relationship with the Guild Wars franchise these days, particularly GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played both games together and had some good times over a number of years but, while I remember the original fondly enough, the sequel is problematic. 

We played the original Guild Wars for maybe less than two months, back when it was new. We started a few weeks after launch because at first, like a lot of people, we thought it was a pure PvP game. ArenaNet's soon to become familiar misleading marketing making its presence felt, probably, since that was how it was reported until it launched, when players found out there was a massive PvE component, too.

Six or eight weeks was long enough to complete the original campaign, after which there didn't seem much point staying so we left. I've returned to GW1 a few times since, finished another of the campaigns, seen something of the rest and generally disported myself in an increasingly desultory fashion until I finally lost interest altogether. Mrs Bhagpuss has never gone back.

When Guild Wars 2 was announced, name recognition was enough to have both of us sign up and participate in the beta weekends. The game turned out to be radically different from anything else around at the time and it suited us both very well. We ended up playing for about ten years without a break, from launch in 2012 until after the pandemic. It was Mrs. Bhagpuss's only MMORPG and my main one and it formed the bulk of the content here at Inventory Full for many years. There are more than seven hundred posts here labeled "GW2".

Until today, there was only one post labeled "GW3". Now, I suppose, there will be a lot more. And I'm not very happy about it.

 Mrs Bhagpuss stopped playing GW2 a few years a go. It was her last MMORPG. She still plays video games, just not that kind. I gave it a few more weeks but, as I suspected, the only reason I'd been playing GW2 at all by then was because she did. As a game, I'd been done with it for a while.

I come away from most MMORPGs I've played for any length of time with warm feelings and an occasional desire to pop back in, see my old characters and catch up with what's been happening in the game. Not so GW2. I'm not quite the cliche bitter burnout, who wants to badmouth the game they used to love at every opportunity. It's a good game and I had good times in it. I wish it well.

At least, that's my rational, objective reaction. Emotionally, if I think about my time in the game at all, which I rarely do unless prompted by something like yesterday's announcement, it's with the kind of feelings I imagine people who've escaped from cults experience. Relief at being out. Anger at all that time and emotion wasted. A sense of grievance at having been used. And a dread of being somehow sucked back in.

Okay, that's over-dramatizing it. A little. I feel a bit niggled at the way ArenaNet consistently faffed and fudged and promised far more than they could fulfill. The way for years there was always jam tomorrow but never jam today. The countless revamps and revisions to cadence. The endless promises made and broken. The history of the development of the game is a litany of lurches and swerves, a directionless leadership forever searching for a path that leads somewhere and rarely, if ever, finding one.

My biggest complaint is with the story. For a franchise that claims to be built on lore and narrative, the stories were always thin, sparse and fragmented. Delivery was unreliable and sporadic and when we did get something it was never anything much. Even at the time, because I played other MMORPGs, I knew how meager the pickings were but at the time I did at least believe there was some quality there. 

That was mostly ignorance. Being locked as I was inside the MMORPG ecosystem, all my judgments were necessarily relative. The writing in GW2 was pretty decent - for an MMORPG. Unfortunately, what I wasn't entirely aware of was how degraded the genre is compared to others when it comes to storytelling.

Shouldn't I have known? Well, maybe. The thing is, until around about the time of the pandemic or maybe a bit later, I actively disliked getting any story in my MMORPGs. My motivations for playing are very well described in this post of Yeebo's. Narrative is the least of my concerns. 

In fact, it's something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible. One of the early posts about GW2 here on this blog bemoans ANet's insistence of making everything about the story. Especially about my character's "Personal Story". I really didn't like that concept, not in GW2 or Star Wars: the Old Republic or in any MMORPG that tries it on. To this day, with thousands of hours played in GW2, I have only ever completed the Personal Story on one character and that only under duress. 

The Personal Story wasn't the only core aspect of GW2 that meant nothing to me. The whole Legendary system was something I always loathed, too as was 100% map completion. 

In fact, there were probably more things about GW2 that I disliked than that I liked for the whole time I was there. It's a fiddly, nitpicking, pettifogging, mean-spirited game in so many ways, with check-lists that do their damnedest to bleed all the spontaneity out of exploring and systems cynically designed around making things just awkward enough that players will pay for convenience but not quite so irritating that they'll stop playing altogether.

Many people who've bounced off the game make these kinds of accusations. It has a reputation in that regard. But it has always been able to get by on the things it does well; a huge, exciting, vibrant open world that demands and rewards exploration; superb art direction; free and flowing movement in three dimensions; best-in-genre hot-join group combat... 

Things like that make it an exceptionally easy and rewarding game for in-the-moment play. If you go with the flow and don't let the game dictate to you, you can log in and find yourself effortlessly entertained for hours. It's only when you start to look for direction that it all falls apart. GW2 has some of them most unappealing, linear progression I've trudged through and much of that is down to the turgid, tedious story and the way what little of interest there is in it has to be stretched to make it last as long as possible by way of an interminable series of pointless set-piece fights.

Several years of modern, open-world games with all of GW2's benefits and few if any of its disadvantages, boss fights that last a fun couple of minutes instead of a miserable half an hour chief among them, have painfully demonstrated to me just how limited my horizons were while I was playing ANet's game all those years. I neither deny nor regret the many good times I had there, particularly in World Vs World, an area of the game gloriously free of all narrative structure, but the payoff for the effort involved seems poor.

And so to Guild Wars 3, which is coming in about eighteen months. Or rather the beta is. You can sign up for it now. I have, of course. 

That it's beta they're trumpeting and a long time from now is interesting in itself. No pre-alpha sign-ups. No alpha. And, I'll bet, no Early Access, either. Just a good old-fashioned beta, followed, if precedent serves, by a few open beta weekends and then launch. That'll be refreshing, at least. You can wishlist it on Steam, too, which I've also done because if it's on Steam from the get-go, that's where I'm going to play it. 

And yes I suppose I will play it although I'm very far from keen. It would seem churlish not to at least take a look. I'd say unprofessional only no-one's paying me. 

Since it's coming, like it or not, at this point I could go on to talk about the game itself, speculate what it might be like, start that conversation. But I won't, for a couple of reasons.

The first is we don't actually know anything yet. There's one video and some screenshots, all taken from that same video, which is apparently shot using the engine on which the game will run. There's also an extremely generic mission statement that makes it sound like they're making GW2 again only with modern action combat and a bit of parkour movement thrown in. 

This they call "a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." It sounds like the gacha games we're playing now, to me. 

How fresh that'll seem in 2028, probably the earliest GW3 will go live, remains to be seen. It will probably be a shock to many MMORPG players, those who've stayed inside the stockade these last few years, just like GW2 was a shock back in 2012. That game genuinely did feel so different back then that Anet had to jump in quick to fix it up to feel more familiar for the many curious WoW players that were bouncing off it within minutes of poking their heads in to see what this strange new MMO was all about.

The real reason I'm not going to go into speculation mode, though (You can probably sense me trying to stop myself doing it right now.) is that we've got a sodding year and a half of this ahead of us and I don't want to contribute to the feeding frenzy. All that arguing over things no-one knows. All the fantasies and wishes that turn into promises that were broken before they were even made. It's going to be exhausting.

And I'll be very nearly seventy when the damn game comes out! What if it turns out to be good? What If I end up playing it for as long as I played GW2 and then I find out it really wasn't all that good all along but I just didn't realize because playing it blurred my perspective? Then I'd be eighty and I'd have wasted another decade on a game that was pretty good at times but often not very good at all. 

That doesn't sound like the best use of whatever time I have left, now, does it? Do I really want GW3 to be my last chance at a good MMORPG? If so, the omens aren't good. Just look at the record.

But then, I don't imagine ANet is making games with the gray gaming market in mind. Millennials and GenZ are the target, I'd imagine, since GenAlpha famously doesn't play traditional video games at all. Grab your share of the shrinking market while it's there. It's never going to get any bigger.

And now I need to stop because I'm already slipping into the swamp of speculation. There's going to be a Guild Wars 3 but it's not until next Fall so let's all agree to forget about it until then.

Promise? 

You Say You Want It But... Oh, Hey, I guess You Do.

It's been a while since I last posted twice in one day. I think about it quite often but I hate to cannibalize my own content and anyway I generally prefer to keep a good idea in hand for the next time. 

Once in a while, though, something comes up that I feel just have to jump on right away. This is one such item.

A new Guild Wars 2 expansion. Feh. Big deal. Didn't buy the last one. Haven't logged in this year. Why would I care?

One reason and one reason alone: HOUSING!

Genuine player housing is literally the only feature ArenaNet could have added that would make me consider buying another GW2 expansion. And even then only consider it. I'm very much not sold yet.

I watched the video and the overriding impression it left on me was just how dated and tired the graphics look. All those years when I was playing every day I thought the game looked pretty good. It just shows how hard it it is to see the outside from the inside.

After I waded through the uninspiring footage of more wilderness that looks a lot like the other wildernesses in the game and fights that look like not a lot of fun at all, I was eventually rewarded with a fifteen second coda showing what housing might look like in Tyria.

It looks like the basic housing in EverQuest II's Halas that was added back in 2010, crossed with the wooden viking huts from Valheim, which was developed by a tiny team for an indie developer five years back. I mean, it doesn't look bad but you'd have to hope that's just a sample of what's on offer, not the totality.

I haven't tried to read up on it yet. Knowing ANet they won't be saying much anyway. And the important part isn't the housing content that ships with the expansion. It's that the infrastructure for housing will be in the game and the stubborn, blinkered refusal to admit it's a feature players want is over. They can iterate on the system from there. Iteration is supposed to be their thing, right?

By my count, I think this leaves World of Warcraft as the last Western AAA MMORPG not to provide proper accomodation for its player-characters. Blizzard copied GW2's Skyscale mount to good effect. Let's see if they go for this, too.

As for me, I'm still not committing to buying the expansion, although it is pretty cheap as these things go. There's a lot going on in gaming this summer after all. 

I'll keep it in mind for the slack times that are sure to come.

We'll Grow Sweet Ipomea...

I was a little startled to see this news report from MassivelyOP, when it popped up in my feed this evening. It's all about "a selection of officially licensed GW2 flower seeds based on some of the plants found within Tyria". The MOP piece doesn't specifically say they're for sale but that's the impression I got and it made me think.

I have a garden. I don't like gardening but I have one anyway. It came with the house. It's not small, either. 

When we first moved in, thirty years ago, we used it a lot. Then the kids left home and we mostly forgot about it for a while. When we remembered it was there it took me several years to hack it back into a manageable state. 

It's not at all bad now although it's fortunate fashion has moved on from the manicured perfection of the aughts to a looser, wildlife-friendly feel. Our massive pile of brushwood isn't evidence of neglect any more - it's a hedgehog sanctuary. To prove it we have actual hedgehogs. I've seen them.

I grew up in a home where gardening was a serious enterprise. We had two very large vegetable gardens, an orchard, a couple of lawns and plenty of decorative flowerbeds and shrubs. My main interest in gardening as a child was avoiding it.

About all I'm prepared to do now is trim the hedges, tidy the paths and keep the grass short but I did go so far as to scatter some wildflower seeds a while back. I even watered them occasionally. They grew quite nicely and weren't any trouble so I thought I might get some of these amusing GW2 seeds and have a go with those. It would amuse Mrs. Bhagpuss, at least.

There's a link in the piece so I clicked on that. If I was startled by the news item, I was floored by the website itself. 

For a start, it's so glaring and harsh. Neon on a field of black. It reminds me of a GeoCities home page from the 'nineties. What really set me back, though, was the means through which the various seeds can be acquired.

They aren't for sale after all. They're free but only to selected applicants and when I say "selected" I'm being quite literal. For a chance at the "rare" seeds you need to "Tell us (in a few sentences) why you think you should be sent a rare seed pack and we'll contact you if you've been selected"

I did briefly consider it. I was going to cite my decade playing the game and the hundreds of thousands of words I've written about it. Then I thought I wouldn't after all. There's free and there's free. I'd have happily paid a small sum plus postage for the flax and the passiflora but I'm not writing a begging letter or taking an exam.

It did pique my interest, though, so I did a little digging through the rest of the site to see what the deal was. The affair is backed by The Agency for Nature, an organization comprising creative teams from five UK advertising agencies, each of which is leading a project intended, according to a report in industry journal Creative Review, to get people to "go out and spend more time in nature".

The team behind the GW2 seed packets comes from Wieden+Kennedy, where Aleks Atanasovski and Hannah Young are apparently only "beginning with Guild Wars 2". Since gathering seems to be a part of most games these days, I imagine they'll be spoilt for choice on which MMORPG to tap for inspiration next. 

Behind all of this sit "two non profits - Purpose Disruptors and Glimpse". Purpose Disruptors is on a mission "to catalyse the advertising industry’s climate transition to align with the IPCC’s 1.5 degree global warming target". 

Glimpse is - or perhaps was - "a new collective for creative people who want to use their skills for good." New eight years ago, that is. Its founder, James Turner, posted a valedictory letter last month in which, among other things, he said "I don’t plan on using the Glimpse name or brand in the future."

Whatever the current status of any or all of these, what's unequivocally clear is that all of them work in advertising or closely-related trades. I worked in marketing for a couple of years back in the 'eighties and I had quite a few friends and contacts in advertising. It would be tempting to say the business must have changed a lot since then but honestly, there was plenty of earnestness on display even back in the age of Greed is Good. I don't find it as surprising as all that.

Neither do I find the queasy garishness of the website particularly out of keeping with the profession. We sell graphic design books and journals where I work and if you want to see some really jarring, abrasive visuals, those are always a good place to start.

Anyway, that's how I've been spending my evening. It's dark so I can't do much gardening anyway. That's my excuse. (I have a million excuses for not doing the gardening. This year, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand of them involve rain.)

If you fancy growing some Tyrian flowers and you live in the UK, which is as far as Seed Saga is prepared to send them, I suggest you get started on your essay right away. 

Good luck. I'm sure the competition will be fierce.

Come On, Irene!

I wasn't going to bother doing an Amazon Gaming post this month. The games are getting less and less interesting, while the weekly release cadence makes a monthly post feel less purposeful. 

It is crazy hot, though, and I don't have the energy for anything complicated, so here it is, more than a week after I got the memo, my handy guide to September's free games on the platform. Ignore it as usual. It deserves no better. 

September 7: Football Manager 2023 - I think this is the big ticket number for the month, god help us all. It's not even available directly from Amazon. You have to go through the Epic Games Store to claim it. Also, if you live in Brazil (Or, more accurately, have a Brazilian IP address.) you can forget it:   

"Please note: Football Manager 2023 is not available in Brazil."

That was actually the most interesting thing about the game for me so I thought I might ask Bard what the issues were:

 "Football Manager 2023 is not available in Brazil due to licensing restrictions. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) has not granted Sports Interactive, the developer of Football Manager, the necessary licenses to use the names, logos, and other intellectual property of Brazilian clubs and players.

In the past, Sports Interactive has been able to reach licensing agreements with the CBF, but these agreements have lapsed. The CBF has been demanding higher licensing fees in recent years, which has made it difficult for Sports Interactive to reach an agreement.

The lack of licensing in Brazil has led to a number of workarounds. For example, there are a number of mods available that add the Brazilian leagues and clubs to the game. However, these mods are not officially supported by Sports Interactive and can be difficult to install.

Another workaround is to purchase a copy of the game from a region where it is available, such as the United States or Europe. However, this can be expensive and may not be legal in Brazil."

I haven't checked any of that but it's pretty much what I imagined so I'm happy to accept it, unlike Brazilian gamers, who I imagine are probably quite cross. They're welcome to my copy. I won't be using it. Pass.

September 14: Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim - Another one you have to go somewhere other than Prime Gaming to get, in this case GOG. I'm starting to wonder if Amazon are really committed to the Prime Gaming platform any more. 

I have no interest in these kinds of sims, which have always seemed to me like the kind of thing itinerant accountants might play on their laptops, alone in their generic hotel rooms, as they while away the dead hours of the evening. Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec would love it, I'm sure. Good storytellers like Wilhelm do a stellar job of making these things sound a lot more interesting than I suspect they really are so I'm occasionally tempted but I always manage to resist. Pass.

September 14: Absolute Tactics: Daughters of Mercy - A turn-based tactical rpg with a "mixed" rating on Steam. Hold me back, someone...

I'm not sure I've ever actually played turn-based tactical rpg. I've read plenty about the genre, not least from Tipa, who once again makes them sound like they could be fun. Just not fun for me, I'm pretty certain. 

There is a dog in it, which tempts me slightly, and it is native to Prime, which is a definite plus but... nope, I think not. Pass.

September 21: Dexter Stardust: Adventures in Outer Space - Finally! Something to interest me. This is a "classic point and click adventure" in which "taco-loving Dexter Stardust... and his good friend Aurora, go on the greatest adventure of their lives and discover the mystery of the Robot from the Planet X!" 

Saves me having to buy Starfield, I guess. Which, obviously, I wasn't going to do anyway. Remind me why I bought that new graphics card again, because apparently the kind of games I get excited about  would run on perfectly well on the PC I took to the recycling center two years ago. Claimed (Or it would be if I didn't have to wait another two weeks...)

September 21: Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate - Say what, now? The elevator pitch for this is "Chess, but you replace your entire army with a royal shotgun". Ever get the feeling some people just have too much time to think about stuff? Also, crowbarring "royal" into that tagline really loses the impact. Just sayin'.

I can play chess (Badly, of course.) but I don't like to. I've never found that gussying the game up with fancy graphics or larding it with whimsy made it seem any less tedious. This one doesn't even have the fancy graphics going for it. The funniest thing on the game's Steam page are the minimum specs:

System Requirements

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 7
  
• Processor: yes, you should have one
  
• Graphics: you'll need a screen
  
• Storage: 80 MB available space
  
• Sound Card: if your computer can play sound, you should be good
  
• Additional Notes: in theory, if your computer can run Windows, it can run Shotgun King

Is this really what they expect us to pay a Prime subscription for nowadays? Pass.

 

 

September 28: Unsolved Case: Murderous Script Collector’s Edition  - Another bloody Legacy Games hidden object "game". PASS in ALL CAPS!

 

September 28: Hundred Days — Winemaking Simulator - Seriously? You're just trying to get a rise out of me now, right? I realise there is literally nothing someone won't simulate these days but wine and video games seem like a really poor match. 

I watched the trailer until the painfully awkward voiceover told me "I failed and failed again until I got better", entirely without irony. Someone wrote that. Hard to believe, I know. Then someone had to read it aloud without laughing. I wonder how many takes it took? Pass.

And that's the lot. Not very impressive although I guess I should be satisified there's even one game I quite fancy. As for free loot in games I play or used to play or might play, I found a few worth grabbing.

I took the New Journey Pack for Blade and Soul. I had to have it - there was a hat. A beret, in fact. I really will play again one day. Honest! 

There was a hat in the Guild Wars 2 bundle as well but it was a fuzzy quaggan hat and I already have one of those. Probably. I have some fuzzy hat with bobbles, anyway. Doesn't mean I don't want another.

And finally there was the not at all creepy [Storage Maid] Fairy Irene for Black Desert Online. Giving away people isn't weird, is it? In fact it's an employment contract to hire her they're handing out, although I'm betting I don't have to pay her, so "employment" is something of a euphemism for "slavery".

Muddy as the ethical waters might be, Irene sounds just too handy to turn down:

"Moving items between storage has never been easier with Irene, your trusty storage maid that's available whenever, and wherever. Irene can move your item(s) of choice to and from the storage of the major city of the territory your character is located in."

I remember storage being a bit of a nightmare in BDO so anything that makes it more user-friendly is a must-have. You know there are going to be AI rights one day and NPCs are going to be striking over stuff like this. Enjoy it while it lasts.

And that was my lot for this month. This could well be the last of these posts. I guess it depends how short of things to write about I get and how many heatwaves we have...

Embarassment Of Riches

An actual Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday! Can it possibly be true?!

Yes, it can. As we cruise towards the end of Blaugust I have a couple of completed posts in the bank and no work to get in the way because I'm home for two weeks recuperating from my recent minor op. Consequently, I feel quite confident in throwing away a few ideas I could potentially have blown up into whole posts. 

First I Look At The Purse

Case in point: I spent half an hour last night cobbling together this awkward composite of my currency window in EverQuest II. I had it in mind to write a piece about how out of hand these special currencies can get in long-running games.

That's a lot of tokens, tickets, coins and crystals. Seventy-four, to be exact. I very much doubt I could tell you what more than half of them are for without looking it up. Whether they're even valid any more, whether the vendors who take them are still in game or whether, if they aren't, they'll be back again next year, are all questions about which I have even less of a clue.

I was thinking about it because I logged into EQII last night in the hope of doing the new quest that got added for Oceansfull this year, only to find the event finished on Tuesday. I'd been so wrapped up in Dawnlands I forgot all about it.

The end of Oceansfull also marks the end of the Summer Jubilee but the vendors are still up until the end of the month, in case you want to spend whatever tokens you still have left. I was going to do that, which is how I came to be looking at my currency window in the first place.

It occured to me that, more than most MMORPGs I can think of, EQII thrives on excess. In other games a panel like this might be considered an embarrassment; in EQII it's more of an endorsement. This, after all, is the game where damage numbers are quantified in the quadrillions. Blizzard might feel the need to squish big numbers; Daybreak just changes the notation.

The current EQII playerbase just dotes on really big numbers and vast amounts of cruft. It's absolutely alienating to incomers but who cares about them? Fortunately, as with most MMORPGs, if you don't go looking for the hidden nine-tenths of the game, you'll never even know it's there, lurking in the deep, dark waters down below. 

Speaking of which...

It's in the trees! It's coming!

Not having to deal with a huge bunch of outdated content is one reason we all gravitate towards shiny, new MMORPGs, right? It's not that they're any easier to understand but at least we can all be ignorant together. 

Once I'm in, it doesn't take much more than the lure of some new systems and mechanics to get me started but there are a lot of new games these days. In what is fast becoming a looser, sloppier genre as boundaries between MMORPGs, survival and crafting games shift and blur, there just isn't time to try all of them.

When you see a trailer like that one, though...

I imagine everyone's getting Secret World vibes but looking into it further it would seem to be a mash-up of TSW and Fallen Earth. I was a little surprised NetEase would want to go there. I mean, the whole post-apocalyptic "all the nightmares came today" routine hasn't exactly set the genre alight thus far.

The website looks slick but isn't as encouraging as you'd hope when you take a closer look. Yet again, the translation lets the whole thing down. It really is starting to bug me, the way even major players in the market seem incapable of finishing the job when it comes to editing the text. I'm pretty sure no-one would let an artist get away with a six-fingered hand so why is it okay to sign off on mismatched grammatical numeracies like these?

Build home, create team and fight monsters...

Plant, animal and human infected by Stardust will transform into disfigured monsters called Aberrant.

It's like no-one knows the differrence between singular and plural - or that there even is a difference. 

Other than a dodgy translation (And when has that ever stopped me playing anything?) the main strike against Once Human is that it seems to be a shooter. I am not keen on shooters although at least it's a third-person shooter which, if I have to, I prefer. 

The official gameplay trailer that came out a few days ago makes the whole thing look a lot less inviting than the one I embedded. It's way too dark and most of it seems to be cut-scenes not gameplay anyway but I've pre-registered and wishlisted it on Steam, anyway. We'll see what happens. 

No Secrets

For the first time since the game launched back in 2012 I declined to pre-order the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. It went live yesterday and I still haven't bought it. 

I was very amused by Paeroka's admission that she had to look up the name of the expansion before she could write her post about it. When I first heard what ArenaNet had chosen to call it, I thought it was a truly terrible name for an expansion and it really hasn't grown on me since. 

Being charitable, it sounds more like a parody than anything, but I very much doubt ANet are playing meta games with their livelihood. That leaves the distinct possibility that someone genuinely thinks "Secrets of the Obscure" is an awesome thing to call a game. If that's true, I really hope that someone is about fourteen because if they're any older it would be really embarassing...

Leaving aside the name, there's nothing much in the package that calls to me. I quite like the sound of the rifts, even if it is a feature we've seen in multiple mmorpgs already. I'm mildly curious to see what's inside the floating wizard tower. The easier access to a flying mount is overdue but welcome.

Watching the launch trailer, what really surprised me is how old the game looks. It really seems to hark back to another era. I'm so used now to cleaner, flatter surfaces with less clutter. All the extraneous detail I used to think exemplified the art team's stellar reputation now reminds me of those long, instrumental passages in prog rock epics.

GW2 looks like a very adolescent game from a team with a very adolescent outlook is what I think I'm saying. I never really noticed it while I was playing but it's hard to miss now I've had a lengthy break. Sometimes you need to go away and come back before you can see what's right in front of you. 

Tell 'Em Eda Sent You

Singularity Six certainly aren't sitting back and letting things ride since Palia's reasonably successful and passably well-received launch earlier in the month. I was quite surprised to hear about the game's first holiday event, Maji Market, which begins in just a few days. 

On the face of it, the event looks lore-appopriate, accessible and entertaining, which is pretty much all you could hope for from something like this. I hadn't been planning on going back to Palia quite yet. It's altogether too similar in some important ways to Dawnlands, which I much prefer, and also to Valheim, which would probably have been next on my list of games to revisit, following the long-awaited (By me, anyway) Hildir's Request update (Of which more later. Although not a lot more...)

I was going to wait until I heard something definite about the squashing of the "You just lost all your progress" bug, which is kind of off-putting, but this little affair looks like fun so I might risk it. The event runs for almost the whole of September, so there's no rush. 

If It Wasn't For Bad Timing I'd Have No Timing At All

Had Dawnlands not happened along, this is what I'd almost certainly be playing right now. From the moment I heard Iron Crown planned to hand control of challenge and difficulty in Valheim over to the players, I had it in mind to start a new playthrough. Later, when I recklessly charged into the Mistlands and lost not one but two corpses there, along with my best and second-best armor, I made a back-up plan to reset my original world when the update arrived, should that prove to be possible.

Now, it ought to be said that Valheim has always allowed players to get their hands on the controls the devs use. There are console commands that let you change the game in all kinds of ways. Using those is a bit like delving into regedit, though; not for the faint-hearted or fat-fingered.

The new version should be much simpler and more straightforward. Whether I have the interest or the will to start over, especially now I'm basically playing Valheim with an anime skin in Dawnlands anyway, very much remains to be seen. Valheim does strike me as one of those games you're never really quite done with so I wouldn't discount the possibility. Not going to happen for a while, though.

I would have confirmed a few more of the details on this entry only Steam seems to have choked on the download and it's looking as if I might need to uninstall and reinstall Valheim before I can check it out for myself. That's definitely not happening today.

At this point, which is the end of the post, traditionally I'd slip in a music video. As it happens, one of those stashed Blaugust posts I mentioned right at the top is my latest "What I've Been Listening To Lately" collection and I pretty much threw everything good in there. 

Give me a minute. I'm sure I can come up with something... ah, ok, here... how about...

Real Life - Art School Girlfriend

That should do it. All good now? Okay, then.

Bye!

Guild Wars 2 And The Telaran Takeover

I'd be overstating things if I suggested I'd been in two minds whether or not to buy Secrets of the Obscure, the upcoming Guild Wars 2 expansion, when it releases on 22 August. I really haven't been thinking about it at all. 

I played GW2 pretty much without a break for more than a decade, from launch until early this year, when I finally drifted away but I can honestly say I haven't missed the game since I stopped. I get the ocasional email from ArenaNet telling me what's going on but I don't bother opening most of them. I see news items about the game on various websites but I rarely read past the headlines.

I did pay a bit more attention to the news there was going to be an expansion this summer, following the previously-announced change of emphasis on content delivery as it transitioned from free Living Story updates to regular paid DLC. I wasn't expecting anything to come of it quite so soon. I thought I'd have at least until the autumn to build up a sufficient degree of nostalgic fondness to make me consider coming back.

In the event, the new expansion is arriving before I've had the chance to start missing the game and it certainly doesn't help that what's been advertised looks like a relatively small-scale affair largely made up of scraps, for which we'll be asked to pay almost as much as we did for a full-scale expansion. The ridiculous name didn't do much to build any enthusiasm, either.

Today I finally saw something that made me think I might want to think about buying the thing when it comes out after all. Realistically, I was always going to buy it eventually. I just imagined I could probably leave it perfectly well until next year. Or the year after.

What changed my mind? Or, I should say, what may have changed my mind, if I've come to a firm decision, which I haven't, yet, and if my mind had been made up to begin with, which it wasn't?

It was the email to the left and the press release on the GW2 Website to which it links that did it.

I've only reproduced part of the email but it's the relevant part, although the news that Zojja's back with Felicia Day voicing her very definitely did not hurt. 

But I already knew that and it hadn't been enough to rekindle my interest sufficiently to change anything. So what, exactly, did?

It was this: in a move so meta-ironic it makes me wonder what decade we're in, GW2 is turning itself into Rift. 

Literally. Don't believe me? Have it direct from the Marketing Dept.'s mouth, then:

        Rift Hunting

"With the help of the Heart of the Obscure, you’ll find nascent rifts across Tyria. Fully opening a rift will reveal Kryptis invaders who were roaming Tyria while hidden from sight. Defeat enough of them, and a more formidable champion will appear for you to face. Taking down the final Kryptis target will allow you to close the rift and will grant you Kryptis essence: powerful material you can use to craft weapons, armor, legendary armor, and bait to lure out deadlier Kryptis from rifts.

At launch, you’ll be able to find rifts in several explorable zones in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure areas, central Tyria, Cantha, and the Crystal Desert. Rift activity in explorable zones not associated with Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure will cycle on a weekly basis. If you use the Heart of the Obscure in maps without active Kryptis rifts, you’ll get pointed to those that have them. In a future update, you’ll be able to progress to even deadlier hunts designed for larger groups of players.

The enemies coming out of a rift scale with the size of the group fighting it. That means that you can party up with friends for rift hunts, weave them into other open-world activities you’re doing, and even help out if you come across a stranger fighting to close a rift in the wild."

That is the exact premise on which Trion originally marketed their 2011 MMORPG "Rift", which came out a year before Guild Wars 2 and which undoubtedly broke ground for GW2's "mould-breaking" hot-join, open world group and zerg playstyle. They haven't even bothered to change what they're calling the damn things. They're rifts ffs!

Rift was a good game in 2011. I played the hell out of it for six months. I wouldn't mind another run. Of course, Rift is still around but it's a Gamigo ghost-world now. Good luck finding enough people running around there to do rifts the way they were meant to be done.

If ArenaNet fancy turning parts of GW2 into a Rift-revival theme park then I don't mind taking a few rides. I'm minded to buy the expansion now just so I can enjoy the frenzy of the first week or two before it all quietens down.

That said, GW2 is far better set to keep content like this active over the medium and long term than most games. I mean, people still do those bandit fights and they haven't been relevant content for more than half a decade. It's also a step back down the road along which I feel GW2 should never have stopped travelling, so I feel kind of honor-bound to support it.

I guess I'll be going back to Tyria towards the end of the month, then. At least for a while. I'm not sure if it's a welcome return or I'm being reeled back in...

Secrets Of The Accounting Department

I suppose I ought to say something about the newly-announced expansion for Guild Wars 2. I can't say I'm itching to get started. I haven't really played the game since, what, January? About all I've done is log in to claim a few freebies from Amazon Prime.

There was an update a while back, I think. Maybe two? Content drops that would have been tagged Living World or Living Story at one point but now come coded as some kind of afterthought to the previous expansion, the name of which I can't quite remember. The Cantha one. I'm sure you know it.

There was a flurry of PR activity a while ago, ArenaNet offering the latest in a seemingly endless series of ideas on cadence. I struggle to think of another MMORPG I've played where so much time and energy has been spent discussing what updates ought to be called and how often they should appear. It's a discussion that began pretty much at launch back in 2012 and has continued, almost without pause, ever since.

I wrote about it at some length a month ago and I don't propose to go over the same ground again. I will say that back in May I certainly wasn't expecting the first new-style expansion to drop just three months later. I would have guessed November or December but the announced release date is August 22.

I guess we could have the trailer about now.

Not much to say about that, is there? It's ominous, alright. Listen to the thudding, doomy theme. Look at all that red and black. And what about that creepy, giant eye?

I will say the title is quite possibly the worst I've seen for an MMORPG expansion in a couple of decades: "Secrets of the Obscure". Clearly having been chosen purely on the grounds of sonority, it's both tautological and uninformative. It does sound good, though, I'll give it that. Until you think about it, anyway.

Thematically, SotO (Nice acronym. I'll give it that, too.) would have had me salivating eight or nine years ago, when I was deep into the lore of the game. Those were the days of heavy speculation over the import and significance of certain visible but inaccessible parts of Tyria, like the great wall, guarded by those irritating birds, or the floating mage tower that forms the focal point of the trailer.

Unfortunately, for me at least, those mysteries went stale long ago. I was curious then. I'm not now.

The most interesting thing for me is what all of this says about development cycles within the genre as a whole and GW2 in particular. It's becoming apparent that all of these imagined worlds - the successful ones, anyway - have life-cycles measured in decades, rather than the months or years that once would have seemed like a good run.

Like the adventures of comic-book heroes, the storylines of MMORPGs are turning into a responsilbility no one generation of creators can handle. If it isn't true already, it will be soon, that no-presently working on the games will have been there from the start. I'm wondering whether some of the games won't even still be around after everyone who was there at launch, players and developers both, has vanished, although I suspect most will wrap up when the last few original players pass away.

I'm beginning to learn that my own attention span for these things is finite. I don't not care yet, but I don't care as much as I once did and I can foresee the day when I won't care at all.

Do I care enough to buy this expansion? That's the pertinent question.

My immediate reaction, when I clicked through to check the price and found they wanted £21.99 for the Standard Edition was "Hell, no!" Reading the contents list, this doesn't look so much like an expansion as an extremely clever way of rebranding the Living World updates we used to get for free in a fashion that allows ANet to charge for them upfront.

Here's how they've done it. 

"A self-contained story with its own resolution will play out at launch. Later releases will seamlessly pick up where the launch arc concluded and tell the rest of the expansion's story. Additional features and updates across the game are planned for release every quarter."

I'm making an assumption that those "additional features and updates" will require a flag on your account confirming you bought the expansion. If so, that makes it almost literally the same format as the Living World once used, only active players used to get that for free and now they'll have to pay.

As for the rest of what's included, I'm not going to go over it all in the kind of detail I once would have done. If you're interested, it's all in the PR pack and Belghast has a very good analysis of the content. 

I'm more interested in picking out lines like this:

"The story of Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure will play out over installments, with new story content to look forward to at launch and in subsequent releases."

And this:

 "At launch, two new explorable zones will take you to the skies over Tyria; a new map will become available as the story progresses in future releases."

My emphasis.

Pay now, play later. You can't say they aren't being straight about it.

In my case I'm not playing at all, so I can afford to wait. Except, if I don't pre-order, I won't get 

"... an extravagant Arcane Spellweaver's Hat Skin, a weapon of your choice from the Eagle Eye weapon collection, and the Demon Hunter title."

Anet's emphasis. You can see where they want your eye to focus.

And I have to say... it works. There's a hat! It's hard to say to no to a free hat, even one you have to pay for.

So, yes, I might pre-order. Who knows? By the end of August I might be in the mood to go back. Twenty-two quid is a bit steep for what's on offer but it's not a lot in absolute terms. It's not like I'm going to be buying the Deluxe Edition at £43.99 or the Ultimate at £64.99. That would be crazy.

And there is one thing in the expansion that does interest me:

"Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure offers an updated path to unlocking your skyscale mount."

If by "updated" they mean easier and faster then they have my attention. It is described elsewhere in the Press Release as "streamlined", so I guess it will be quicker, at least. 

I don't actually want a Skyscale mount but it's been evident for a while now that all future content is likely to be designed on the assumption that every player has one. If you want to play anything but the oldest content these days you're all but obligated to have access to the key movement features - gliding, mounts and now the almost-flight of the Skyscale. 

The lunatic farrago required to get one fails my personal sanity test so definitively, I long ago decided that if it ever came to a choice between doing it or quitting the game I'd quit without looking back. I'll wait to see the details of the new path but if it's no worse than, say, getting the Griffin, I'll consider it.

I'll take my Arcane Spellweaver's Hat off to whoever at ANet finally figured out a way to monetize the content GW2 ,along with most other MMORPGs, have been giving away for years. I just hope it doesn't start a trend.

Based on the company's long-established inability to follow through or stick to a proposed course of action, I think that could be less of a risk than you might think.