Other Games Are Available

Not that I'm much of a one for making plans but any vague idea I might have had for keeping to some kind of gaming or blogging schedule this year have been wrecked by the arrival of two survival games, one of which I was eagerly anticipating, the other which I'd barely heard of before it appeared. 

Palworld, now claiming twenty-five million players worldwide, claimed more than forty hours of my time over four weeks, making it a very worthwhile purchase, but still left plenty of time for doing other things. Nightingale, with thirty-three hours played-time in just over a week, hasn't been so accomodating. It's left little time for any other games, including Palworld, which I haven't touched since last Tuesday.

Rather than muse yet again on just why Nightingale should be so compulsive, I thought I'd make a short list of the games I had been thinking of playing and writing about, in the hope that naming them in public might somehow nudge me into playing one or two. It's a long shot but it might be worth a try.

Allods Online

I'll begin with the one (And only.) game I have actually logged into since I downloaded Nightingale. And what a weird choice it is, too. Why would I want to go back to this all but forgotten artifact of the WoW Clone era? The game that promised so much and then broke Keen's heart? (Remember him? What's he up to now, I wonder?)

It all started with something I read a few weeks back. Syp wrote a very brief piece for MassivelyOP, answering the question absolutely no-one was asking: "Whatever happened to Allods Online?" In the third and final paragraph he mentioned how a recent patch had "added the Gibberlings’ homeland of Isa". That caught my attention.

The Gibberlings are one of MMOdom's more unusual playable races. They're sharp-toothed, woodlandish animals, which is nothing unusual for the genre, but they come in packs of three, which certainly is. In the game, you run across single NPC gibberlings occasionally but the PC character is an eternal tryptych; three siblings who do everything together, always.

It's very strange and hard to forget once you've played one. Mrs Bhagpuss, who only ever played Allods Online during the beta, well over a decade ago, still mentions the Gibberlings quite often. I've played the game several times since then, in a few of its many iterations; on US and EU accounts, through MY.Games and GPotato, on PC and on tablet, where it was one of the few full MMORPGs than ran flawlessly for me.

I started out playing a Gibberling character but later I played an Orc and one of the catlike race, the Priden. That last was a mistake. The cats have their own starting island and although I tried to level up far enough to get my invite to the mainland I never quite managed it. 

It pretty much put a stop to my interest in the game. Although the storyline was interesting and the quest dialog well-written and fun to read, the mechanics were even more pedestrian than the rest of the game I'd seen - and Allods is not a particularly thrilling title when it comes to moment-to-moment gameplay at the best of times.

That, though, was my only real complaint. In almost every other respect, AO seems to me to be something of an undiscovered - or at least wilfully ignored - gem. I would love to get further and see more than I have so far. Ironically, the furthest I ever got was in beta, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together and got as far as the first of the non-consensual PvP zones, which came in somewhere around Level 30, if I remember right.

I would very much like to see the ancestral homeland of the Gibberlings, long thought lost but recently re-discovered. When I played one (Er... three...) they started off in the Bavarianesque starting area where one of the human races begin. Well, after the dramatic in media res beginning on an exploding space rock, followed by an enforced hiatus on an abandoned Allod, that is. 

Impressed I can remember all that? Well, don't be. I did it all again about an hour ago. It all started after I finished playing Nightingale (Three hours, right after breakfast. What the hell is wrong with me?), when I was thinking about what I could blog about, other than survival games. 

As I mentioned a while ago, I've gotten into the habit of bookmarking things I've seen or read that might make blog posts. I had a flip through those this morning and noticed there were several MMORPGs I'd been thinking, for various reasons, of trying - or trying again. Almost without thinking about it, I googled "Allods Online", just to see who was publishing it now and what I'd have to do to start playing and to my great surprise I found it's available on Steam, where it has a surprising and well-deserved Mostly Positive review rating.

It's entirely possible I haven't played Allods since I started using Steam. It's also entirely possible I've played it on Steam already. I have a terrible memory. Luckily, I also have a blog...

There are eighteen posts here with the Allods Online tag. The first goes all the way back to October 2011, almost the beginning of the blog, when I'd just re-installed the game. My most recent was only a couple of years ago in November 2021, when I was complaining about that damn Priden starting zone and swearing I'd get free of it. I never did.  

In both those posts I said many of the things I've said in this one, which I'm betting won't matter because no-one is going to remember any of it. I can at least confirm that the information about the game being available through Steam is new (Well, new to me...) Back then I was playing on MY.Games own platform.

And I probably still am, behind the curtain. I installed the game via Steam this morning but when you hit Play it takes you to an external launcher. The important part though is having the first button on Steam. I'm increasingly coming to see why people like that. It's just so convenient. No wonder all the publishers want to be represented there.

I wasn't planning on playing Allods today, just setting it up so I could play some other time, but I had to test the login ptocess to make sure it worked and then wouldn't you know I ended up doing the basic Tutorial and some starter quests. When I logged out I was Level 5.

As I said in that post a couple of years back "Allods is fun. Always was. I might keep playing." I probably will - sporadically - but if history is any guide I won't get any further than I ever have. My Priden is still on that damn island and lord only knows where the Orc is now. 

To my considerable surprise and delight, though, the quest relating to the Gibberling homeland that was added in a patch last July begins in a low-level zone and has no level restrictions. I was sure it would be some endgame content I'd never see. 

Surely, between marathon Nightingale sessions, I can at least make it far enough in Allods this time to get the quest, even if I never finish it! Place your bets now.

And speaking of Nightingale, I'm afraid the temptation is too strong. All those other games I was going to talk about, the ones I'd like to be playing and posting about if I wasn't in the grips of this unealthy obsession? They're going to have to wait some more even for a mention. 

Also, it gives me something else to post about another time. Never waste valuable resources. That's all that survival game training paying off, right there!

Off To The Races

When I checked my Feedly this morning the first thing I saw was this question from Keen:


What’s Your Favorite MMORPG Race and Why?


I immediately thought of the Lunar New Year's race through Divinity's Reach in GW2. I did that over and over and really enjoyed it. Did I enjoy it more than the aerial races organized by EQ2's gnomes for every City Festival, though? Or the many races around Metropolis and Gotham in DCUO? And what about that all-time classic, EverQuest's Naked Gnome Race from Ak'Anon to Freeport?

Then I read Keen's post and realized he didn't mean that kind of race at all. He meant the kind of race you choose at Character Creation. The one that decides whether you're short or tall, hated or admired, a genius or a dimwit. Whether you're covered in fur or scales, have a tail or wings. All that good stuff.

The term "Race", of course, is a bit of a misnomer as it's generally applied in MMORPGs. Sometimes it can be an accurate description, as in Vanguard, which has four "races" with the subtitle "Human", but usually it means Species. Then again, the species boundary gets very blurry in fantasy.

We tend to think of Humans, Elves and Orcs as genuinely disparate, separate species but that can hardly be the case when they can interbreed to give us Half-Orcs and Half Elves. Not to mention Half-Giants. The line fades to the point of invisibility when magic comes into the picture with races like EverQuest's Drakkin, "a human race" with "a touch of dragon blood...scaly skin, marking, hair and sometimes horns that mirror the dragon that gifted them their heritage".

Exactly how a dragon  "gifts" such a heritage is - probably wisely - left to the imagination. The more you ponder on all this, the less sense it seems to make. Why are there so many half elves but no "half-humans"? Is that just a naming convention or are the Elven parent's genes always dominant? If Elves and Humans can interbreed successfully, why not Gnomes and Dwarves? Or can they, but they just don't, for cultural reasons?

At first blush MMORPGs - particularly those with a fantasy setting - appear to offer a multiplicity of racial options but they tend to narrow down to a handful once you look at them closely. For a start, almost every Player Race in every MMO is bipedal. Istaria famously lets you play as a (four-legged) dragon, which was the game's primary USP back when it launched as Horizons. Project: Gorgon's Cows are another notable exception, although even there you can't actually roll a cow (!) at character creation. You have to become one by magic in game.

GW2's Charr are highly unusual in that, while bipedal in combat, they drop to all fours when running. It's one of the features that make them so appealing as a racial choice for me even though they are definitely on the larger end of the scale. I do cleave to the smaller races as a rule.

Many Western MMOs have a handful of options that at least attempt to add some variation to the "Short human", "tall human", "human with horns", "human with tail", "human with wings" palette seen in so many imports from the East. WoW has Bulls, Wolves, Goats, Pandas and Undead, all of which walk upright on two legs and look like humans dressed up for Mardi Gras.  

Allods, which modelled a deal of its visual appearance on WoW, took things a stage further with Gibberlings, who come in packs of three and are a lot closer to "animals dressed up as humans" than the other way round. Indeed, Gibberlings probably rest at the cusp of Fantasy and Anime, or Fantasy and Cartoon if you want to be Western about it, which is where the real non-human races come into their own.

There was that one MMO where I played as a rabbit. What was that one called? Eden Eternal, that's it! It's still running, too. There was also the similarly-named and much-missed Earth Eternal, an all-animal MMO I played in beta with some degree of enjoyment. Those animals still stood upright, though, unlike the deer in Endless Forest, a bizarre affair which has, astonishingly, spawned some kind of sub-genre that incudes Meadow and Wolfquest.

Plenty of choice if you cast your MMO net far enough. Closer to home, in the handful of MMOs we all talk about as though they represented the genre, not so much. Which brings me back to Keen's original question. So, what is my favorite MORPG race?

Just for once I can answer that question! In fact, I can list my top ten in order without having to think too hard about it.

1. Raki - Vanguard - Stocky foxes with a great backstory, characterful animations and the happiest faces.

2. Ratonga - EQ2 - Cute rats with another excellent backstory and the most endearing verbal tic in gaming.

3. Gnome - EverQuest - Short, smart, every one kinda likes them and they have the tickingest city in Norrath.

4. Charr - GW2 - Big cats that don't do the "catgirl/catman" thing, run on all fours and have the city Ak'Anon would be if it was a military-industrial complex.

5. Asura - GW2 - They're rats but they won't admit it. Why do you think they're so obsessed with the Skritt (who would totally be on this list if you could play them). Best animations and great voicework, too.

6. Gibberlings - Allods - Three demented gerbils for the price of one. What's not to love?

7. Vah'Shir - EverQuest - Another non-cute cat race. I never really took to the EQ2 version but I played a Vah'Shir Beastlord in EQ for many years and the combination of a tiger-person with a tiger pet is hard to top.

8. Goblin - Warhammer Online - Cowardly, obsequious, disgusting and only they can be the second-best class in any MMO, the Squig-Herder.

9. Dwarf - EverQuest - Just a classic. So solid, so reliable, so predictably gruff. Everything you want a dwarf to be and everything you don't.

 10. Riven - City of Steam - The race I wish I'd played more before the game closed down. Cool, stylish, mysterious, the Riven could have been so much more if only City of Steam had followed its original plan.

Well, that's the top ten today. Ask me tomorrow and it may have changed. Raki is always going to be number one, though. In my heart, anyway.

A Glorious Future Awaits: Allods

Revolutionary Dawn (please to ignore smokestack)

I re-installed two MMOs this weekend. One was Fallen Earth, because it's gone Free to Play and I always liked it. The other was Allods.

I played Allods in beta, like a lot of other people. I was planning on playing it when it went live, but somehow I never did. It wasn't really because of the infamous cash-shop debacle, although that didn't help. It was mostly that the break between beta and Live, which I remember as being a few weeks, just derailed my attention. When the official Allods launch arrived I was playing something else and I just never really got back to it. (That, by the way, shows the importance for a F2P game in allowing open beta characters to carry over to Live. Most F2Ps do that. Allods didn't. It was a mistake).

Those tabs didn't used to be there!

So, why did I decide to have another bash at Allods after all this time? Well, because of this blog. (And no, I don't mean because the full name of Allods ought to be Allods:Inventory Full either, although lack of bag space is probably the defining trope of the game).

When I got this blog up and running at last I was imagining it would mostly be about writing. I've been writing since I was about seven years old. It's pretty much what I do. Only, just like when I had a website many years ago, back in the homepage day, it turns out that I like fiddling with images as much as I like writing. Maybe more.

I've been trawling through my old screenshots as I prepare these posts. I have a lot of them. I was looking for something else when I ran across my Allods beta screenshots. WoW. Erm, no, wait, that's not what I meant... WOW! Allods takes an absolutely stunning screenshot.

Seasonally Appropriate Screenshot

Looking through them a couple of thoughts popped to mind. I'd just done that post mentioning the good/bad bad/good sides in Rift and it occurred to me that Allods has a similar moral set-up. It also occurred to me that it has almost exactly the same Nature/Religion vs Science/Steampunk dichotomy. And it occurred to me that I'd only really experienced one of those sides.

Sweetness and light...

Just as in Rift I began by playing the Nature/Religion faction, so I did in Allods. Almost all my time in Beta was spent as a Gibberling on the League side. Well, three Gibberlings. And a Squirrel. I'd had a brief look at the Empire capital but about all I remembered was the excellent pastiche Constructivist design.

Until their backs are turned

Anyway, after a fair-to-middling nightmare of a battle with the awful Allods patcher, resolved only by manually downloading the patch files and a new type of unzipper to unpack them, and having to remake a new account from scratch since my old one apparently has time-expired, (you have to wonder if gPotato actually want anyone to play this game) eventually I re-entered Allods as an Orc Shaman of The Empire.

Thus far I am extremely impressed. Details will follow.