Across The Desert By Track And Shrine: Notes On New World's Brimstone Sands.

Belghast put up a long, post today, detailing some of the major ways New World has changed since its fall from grace last year. He knows the game far better than I do, having not only engaged extensively with the previous endgame mechanics that I completely ignored, but also having levelled to sixty under both the old and new regimes, so I don't plan on elaborating on anything he's covered.

I did, however, already have a vague plan to post a bullet point list of a few things specific to Brimstone Sands that I'd noticed since I came back to the game, things that seemed like improvements to me. I even went to the trouble of jotting down a few notes, so rather than waste them, here they are.

• Brimstone Sands Is New World's First Expansion
  

It's not been billed as one and Amazon haven't taken any money for it but after a week playing it I can't see it as anything less. To be specific, it reminds me surprisingly strongly of the kind of expansion I'm used to from EverQuest II. 

There's a central questline that leads you through the new zone, which feels like it could be about the size of the three or four EQII zones that make up the average expansion these days. There's the new hub city, the new mob models, the new crafting materials and recipes, and the wealth of upgrades that almost immediately invalidate what you came in wearing. It all feels very familiar.

My first Legendary weapon. Shame I don't know how to use it.

It feels like it's going to be about the same length, too, at least as far as the storyline goes. I've been following the main questline pretty slavishly and so far I've opened just over half the zone. I'm guessing that means I'm about halfway through but I haven't looked ahead to check. 

It might be a bit less. So far I've had six Legendary weapons from quest rewards. I'm assuming all fifteen types are coming - it would be a bit unfair if anyone got right to the end of the chain and found their weapon had been left out.Of course, they may not be distributed evenly. I'm pretty sure I got at least one from a side quest. Either way, there's plenty still left to do.

• They Don't Call It The Empty Quarter For Nothing.
  

The changes to fast travel that make it almost as easy to teleport around Aeternum as it used to be in Tyria, before ArenaNet decided they'd rather people used mounts, presumably because you can't sell skins for waypoints. This morning I was jogging across the dunes on my way to a quest objective, when I decided to take a detour to open a Spirit Shrine, the game's version of a waypoint. When I got there, I could see another Shrine so close by I was able to open it as I ran back without taking a detour. 

There's no shortage of jump-offs, then, but the problem hasn't only been one of availability. (Or cost, for that matter, another non-issue now it's been reduced to almost nothing.) Part of the difficulty with Shrines has always been ease of access - or rather lack of it. Travel doesn't really feel all that instant if you have to fight your way through hordes of wolves to get to the bus stop. Too much of my time in New World has been spent either fighting or running away from endless guards, undead and wildlife, all of which seemed hell-bent on chasing down and killing anything in a hundred meter radius. It certainly put me off using the Shrines that weren't right on the roadways, which hardly any ever were.

Got the place to myself again, I see.

In Brimstone Sands you can hike for miles across the desert trails without coming into aggro range of so much as a single scorpion. Mob density throughout is exceptionally light. If you go off-track and head out into the scrubland you'll be very unlucky to meet much more than the odd jackal. Even when you start poking around the many ruins and collonades that litter the landscape, you'll find their forgotten treasures largely unguarded.

It makes exploring a genuine pleasure. I have to make a detour when I want to kill something, which makes me feel like I have agency, rather than as though I'm only in the gameworld on sufference. One can only hope for a similar sanity pass across the rest of Aeternum.

• Sneaky Sneaky Dodgy Guardy
  

Whereas the vast tracts you need to cross to get to quest locations are largely devoid of annoying interruptions, the larger temples, crypts and complexes that form your primary loci of interest very definitely are not. They're well-guarded and daunting to explore, as they should be.

Let's see any of 'em catch me up here!

That doesn't mean you have to hack your way through a score of mobs to get to every checkpoint. I mean, you can, if that's your thing, but if you want to play it smart there's often a sneaky approach that'll get you to your quest objective without a weapon being drawn.

I've had as much fun working out covert routes to glyphs and chests, sneaking behind pillars, climbing up broken walls and shinning along aquaducts as I've had going full berserker on the sentries on gate duty. It adds a welcome degree of puzzle gameplay to even out all that combat and I find it just plain fun.

• You Call Them "Jumping Puzzles", I Call Them "Vistas"

I saw a certain degree of nervousness expressed in some quarters over Amazon Games' stated intention to add a little variety to questing in the form of "Jumping Puzzles". I suppose people were imagining something along the lines of the often challenging set-piece content in other games, for example Guild Wars 2. 

I've taken several quests so far that required me to climb to the top of something to open a box or read a glyph but thankfully none of them have been any more difficult than an average vista in GW2. Easier, really, since New World comes with a degree of automated parkour baked in., "Climbing" is mostly a case of positioning your character and letting the game engine do the rest. 

Getting up here was easy enough. It's getting down that's the problem.

As for jumping, if you don't quite make it across a gap, your character will often grab on to something and haul themselves up rather than plummet to their death. It turns what could have been a stressful, frustrating experience into something of a jolly romp, something which is beginning to sound like a fair description of New World itself.

• A Busy Map Is A Happy Map
  

As has been widely reported, New World's population, having bottomed out at around 1% of its former peak, has rebounded vigorously of late. The addition of Fresh Start servers have taken concurrency back into six figures for the first time in a long while.

The starting regions of those new servers must be heaving but where I'm playing the focus seems to be very much on Brimstone Sands. New Corsica, the full-service capital of the zone feels lively as a busy city should but even in the far-flung corners of the parched desert you can't go more than a few yards without crossing paths with another adventurer.

Thanks! I can take it from here!

As I discovered many years ago, when mmorpg designers began to move away from individual ownership towards a more collectivist approach, other players doing the same quest as you are always welcome. There's no longer any need to party up, although you can if you want to be sociable. Either way, you can fight side by side as you push forward through the ruins or follow in the slipstream of someone more powerful as they blaze a path towards your mutual objective. I like to take it in turns, leapfrogging from mob to mob, allowing  each player to kill half as many mobs as they would alone, while moving considerably faster towards the goal.

• Risk vs Reward... But Mostly Reward.

I'm not a big fan of risk vs reward. I like the reward part well enough. I'm just not so fond of the risk. 

In Brimstone Sands, the balance seems to have tipped very much in my favor. There's treasure everywhere. Epic items drop from jackals and scorpions at a rate that seems much more generous than I remember from other parts of the game and as for chests, their ever-repleneshing contents remind me of EQII's paradoxical pandas, the ones who boast of never leaving their homeland and yet somehow manage to find an  infinite supply of powerful gear to give away to anyone who wants it.

As for quest rewards, in addition to the aforementioned Legendary weapons there's a torrent of mats needed for their upgrades plus a steady trickle of the sought-after gypsum orbs used to craft yet more epics. My only real issue is that I don't yet fully understand how those systems work. When I've done my research, though, I should have plenty of resources to put my learning into practice right away.

• Brimstone Sands: More To See Than Just Sand!
  

This might be the biggest surprise of all. I've seen a lot of desert zones in mmorpgs and while I like them well enough, I wouldn't claim they're the most diverse of environments. Brimstone Sands makes a strong case for variety, while somehow managing to stay consistent with its theme.

It does help that one of the big threats in the region turns out to be the Angry Earth, Aeternum's druidic/elemental race. Everywhere the Angry Earth go, flowers bloom, something that seems to hold true as much in the arid desert as in the temperate zones from which they come.

Yep. Still in the desert.

Oases add a burst of welcome color but the real variety comes from the built environment. Graeco-Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids battle for attention with flickering science-fantasy engines straight out of the pulps. Aeternum has always offered a grab-bag of architectural styles but here the range extends well beyond the historical and into the phantasmal.

The natural world more than holds its own, creatively. Blistering pools of acid hiss and bubble, sending out clouds of bilious, olive mists. Wind-carved spires of sandstone stretch upwards from the sand like the deformed fingers of giants. And then there's the sky. The endless, sweeping, overwhelming desert sky, roseate at dawn, glaring at midday, subtle pastels at sunset, shimmering starfields by night. I do love me a good skybox.

I'm sure there's much more I haven't yet discovered. Brimstone Sands is deep with content and all of New World these days is a cornucopia of entertainment. As Belghast puts it "What You Know about New World is Wrong". 

Unless, of course, what you know is that New World's a very good mmorpg. In my opinion it always has been but now I think it's better than ever. Who said there are no second acts in mmos?

Goodbye, Path of Fire. Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out.

I spent most of today playing Guild Wars 2, which isn't all that unusual. What was different from a run of the mill day off work was that I spent pretty much the whole time in the new content that came with yesterday's Living World update.

I think the last time that happened was probably Season Three, Episode Five, Flashpoint, the one that introduced us to Draconis Mons. I liked that map. I spent a good while completing it and generally goofing around there.

That was all the way back in May 2017 but most significantly it was before the release of the last expansion. The long and the short of it is that I don't much like anything about Path of Fire, and that very much includes the entirety of the Living World/Story Season associated with it. I don't like the look and feel, the mechanics, the plot, the characters and I very especially don't like the mounts.

Perhaps the best thing about LS4.4, A Star To Guide Us, is that it feels, if not like the end of an era, then at least like the beginning of the end. I'm more than ready.

I guess the real beginning of the end actually came in the last episode, when Palawa Joko, one of the most tedious, cliched, derivative villains I've ever had the misfortune to have to sit and listen to, died. Really died, as in gone for good, never coming back. In case anyone's in doubt or denial (and many seem to be) the permanence of his departure gets some heavy emphasis in the narrative this time around. 

Of course, as anyone who has ever read a comic or played a video game knows, no-one ever really dies. It's kind of a feature. What's more, in this very episode, the one in which several people, my own character among them, state with absolute certainty that Joko won't be coming back... well, I'd better not say any more.

Even so, I think we're free of the pest for a while. There's a distinct feeling of decks being cleared and pages being turned. The new map feels quite significantly different to all the others that came with the PoF expansion or the previous chapters of this Sesson. It may be connected geographically but it seems existentially separate.

As I was playing today, at one point I caught myself wondering whether this was the last episode in the Season. It can't be, of course. There would have been an announcement if it was.

Still, it's mid-September. They're going to have to go some to fit another one in between Halloween and Wintersday, although last year, if I remember correctly they did allow a Living World release to overlap the midwinter festival.

Whether we get Episode Five at the end of this year or the start of the next, either way I would bet on the next one being the climax of Season Four. I think it will set up the announcement for the third expansion, which will arrive sometime in Summer 2019. There will be no Living Story Season Five until after that beds in, so probably around October/November next year.

Or I guess they could wait another year. I don't think the finances will stand that, though. You can see from the financials each quarter how heavily they rely on the uptick from expansions.

I know there was a lot of brave talk in the first couple of years about never having any expansions ever but we saw how well that worked out for them. The game is on the expansion treadmill now and it won't be getting off until it follows the original Guild Wars into maintenance mode.

ArenaNet also once claimed they weren't going to make any more MMOs after GW2, the game they planned to operate and update indefinitely. It's been running for six years now and it probably has at least as long again to go, but some players are starting to get itchy feet. I've noticed an increasing number of in-game comments lately speculating on "Guild Wars 3".

There's even a thread about it on the forum - it was on the first page for a while but the flurry of posts following the update have pushed it on to page two. I wonder if the OP there is on to something when they say "...if ArenaNet does reach the point it can develop and maintain another MMO without having to send GW2 to the curb, I believe they should start up a new story entirely. Guild Wars was great, Guild Wars 2 is great...Guild Wars 3 would be too much."

Anyway, for now and the foreseeable, GW2 is what we have and as of this update it feels surprisingly fresh again. I am even more frustrated now than I was yesterday about not being able to discuss the story here. There's a lot to discuss. Maybe I'll get back to it when a few weeks have passed. Problem is, by then we'll all be on to something new and it won't seem as urgent.

One thing I will say is that the final instance is brutal, but in an entirely different way to usual. There's no awful, dragged-out boss fight. Instead there's a timed jump puzzle that has to be done on a mount. It's also currently very badly bugged, to the point of unplayability, which is traditional.

Nevertheless, I did manage to complete it, by means of a combination of workarounds, multiple deaths and brute force. Even though it was unfair and infuriating, I enjoyed it. I don't think I could honestly say that about any Episode finale since the Living Story moved to instanced content.

What's more, the penultimate instance is also brutal and unfair and I enjoyed that one too. For the first time in a very long time I am seriously considering taking a second character through the story for my own amusement and to see how it plays with a different class.

A Star To Guide Us isn't perfect, not by a wide margin, but it's a major improvement on what we've been used to over the past year and for that we can be thankful. If it's also laying down a marker for the future tenor and direction of the game, well, no-one will be happier about that than me.

Climbing Wizard's Altar : Black Desert

I didn't have any plans for a post tonight but there's something about playing Black Desert that just makes me want to share. Not sure why that is.

It's likely I wouldn't have been playing Black Desert tonight at all if Landmark's big pre-launch update had gone better but between the server coming up and my patching the game the server had come down again so that was that plan scuppered.

BDO had a patch too. We're having an Easter event it seems. I didn't pay much attention to that. With just an hour or so in hand I thought I'd go take a look at the Wizard's Altar since it happens to be very close to my new home on Goat Mountain. I can see it from my front door.

There were two quests in my book for the Altar, both level 18 and at least one came from the pesky Black Spirit, which means it's part of what appears to be the main quest line. That makes me nervous.

I was expecting a big fight. I was also expecting to have a tough time of it. At this point anyone who's planning on doing the quest themselves might want to look away because this is something of a spoiler...

Okay...warning over...last chance to leave...

Top Of The World! : GW2

Gnashblade probably supplies the Ballot Boxes. Just sayin'

Achievements aside (and boy, what a worm-can that turned out to be) I really like the current episode of GW2's Living Story. Not that there seems to be all that much of a story to it. Is it my imagination or are the conversation and the cut-scene between Ellen Kiel and Magnus in the wrong order? She seems to be talking to him about what he's asked her to do before he asks her to do it. And what exactly is her job, anyway? Is she a soldier, a policewoman, a diplomat, a trade delegate or just some kind of Pirate Superwoman?

Next week we get to vote her onto the Lion's Arch Captain's Council so it's just as well she's added Ship's Captain to her already-impressive C.V. Magnus is going to have to haul back on the sarcasm when he uses her honorific or people might begin to suspect she's not a Captain at all. I'm voting Gnashblade, anyway. I hope we get campaign buttons.

Les Dawson! I thought I recognized you!

Labyrinthine Cliffs is an astonishing place, absolutely on a par with the original five cities in terms of detail, complexity and exploreworthiness (yes it's a word). At first I thought it was another island like Southsun but it seems to be the extreme south-western tip of the otherwise inaccessible Deldrimor Front peninsula. It had been mooted that, while the Zephyr Sanctum airship would certainly be departing at the end of this event, the landmass to which it was anchored, the Labyrinthine Cliffs map itself, might stay with us. No such luck, according to the Dulfyc Oracle.

Ironic foreshadowing, folk-club style

It seems almost immoral to create something this beautiful and just to throw it away, although I guess it's more "put it back in the cupboard" than "chuck it in the bin". No doubt the Bazaar will open again some day but then again maybe it won't so best make the most of it while it's here.

There's a lot more to do than lollygawp like a tourist and take a thousand photos, not that that isn't what I did for the first few hours. No, there are Sky Crystals to be parkoured, races to be run, unholy writ to be read backwards, shows to be seen, trades to be made, recipes to be scribed...the whole place is as filled with opportunity as, well as a Bazaar.

My personal favorite is the race. I'm fond of racing in MMOs. It seems a very organic, believable way to include non-combat activities without things getting excessively gamey. That's the theory; implementations vary. This is a good one.

It does have some oddities, such as the way you tend to start your first race entirely on your own with no other competitor in sight. The reason for that becomes clear when you pass your first checkpoint and realize you're running dead last in a race that started without you. Works quite well as an informal tutorial, I found.

There are a bunch of the dreaded Achievements for taking part including one for doing the whole thing 25 times. Suffice it to say I have already done that plus a few for luck. By the time the Zephyr Sanctum casts off my tally may well be nearer 50 than 25. I just like running it, what can I say?

It's certainly not that I'm any good at it, although as with anything practice does make a difference. Early on there seemed no chance whatever of getting the Achievement for coming in the top three, far less the one for winning outright but now I have both. Actually, I came first twice, only in one of those races I was the only person running. It was nice to have the box ticked but I'm very glad I really did win one race later on or I'd feel a bit of a cheat.

I'm no fan of jumping puzzles. I can do them if I have to but I tend to find them stressful not entertaining. I've read a few observations that the new Map is fundamentally one huge jumping puzzle, which didn't have me looking forward to it much. If it had turned out to be true I'd probably have had a very unfun time. It's not and I didn't.

It's alright for you. You've got wings!

The Bazaar of the Four Winds is a settlement that has made some left-field choices in its public transport policy. It reminds me of places I've visited where you ride funiculars and cable-cars to get from one part of the city to another. Apart from one brief segment (the second one) the entire map is navigable with no jumping skills at all (and with the help of a friendly Mesmer even that part can be circumvented). Once done and waypoints opened you're free to enjoy all the fun of the Bazaar at will.

A plan!

Unless, of course, you decide to collect Sky Crystals. I wasn't planning to do that. It's jumping and I don't like jumping, as I said. Well it isn't jumping. It's climbing and that's a cat of a wholly different color.

I love climbing in MMOs and have done since I first went buildering through Felwithe long, long ago. First I started picking up the Crystals I happened to spot as I explored, then I started actively searching for them and in that way half of Sunday disappeared. As I write I'm 33/40 on the Achievement. There are supposedly over fifty of the things but so far the harder part has been finding them not getting to them. I only know of two that I haven't tried for yet.

If I do a handstand
will all the gold fall out my pockets?

So far I have looked up absolutely nothing out of game, which brings me back to the discussion about Achievements. If there wasn't an Achievement for finding Sky Crystals I wouldn't know there were at least five I haven't found. I might stop looking for them having found 35 and think I'd found them all. Would that be bad? Or good? Does it make any difference at all? If I wanted to understand this sort of thing shouldn't I have studied Philosophy instead of English? Should I just stop over-thinking things and play?

Dunno. I just know I'm enjoying this update a lot more than the last one and quite possibly the most of any so far. I'm off to find those last few Crystals then trade some of my crafting overspill for recipes. Then I'm going to go see how this crystal charging thing works.

In Dierdre's Steps : GW2

Summer was just about to leave Mount Maelstrom when she happened to notice there was something happening nearby. The Keepers of the Earth, whoever they were, needed defeating and who better than an Elementalist for a job like that? Also if she failed it would be a fine excuse to waypoint back and save a long walk.

It was a tough fight. Summer called up two Earth Elementals of her own to keep the Keepers back while she scorched them with fire, sleeted them with ice and sent flickers of lightning skittering across their earthen hides. She rolled about in the dirt an awful lot, too. When at last she brushed the dust from her eyes and looked around to see the shattered fragments of her Elementals beside the fast-dissolving bodies of the Keepers she was surprised to find herself the only one left standing.

Not half as surprised as she was to see a Mystical Portal hanging in the air right where the Keepers had been crouching. Keepers. Clue is in the name. No adventurer worthy of the calling can ignore a Portal, even one that asks you "Are you sure?" and then warns you "It might be dangerous..." Especially not one of those.

Stepping out of the blue, Summer found herself in perhaps the most lovely place she'd ever seen; a hidden valley, surrounded on all sides by high cliffs reaching up to a haze of sunlit cloud. Plants grew rich and dark above deep, cold pools of clear mountain snowmelt. In the center a jumbled pile of rocks topped by a giant tree almost begged to be climbed.

It was around then that Summer noticed the mosquitos. Bigger than her head? They were bigger than her! And what was rumbling down there beneath her feet in those great fissures? Earth elementals, of course. Suddenly the climb looked less like an invitation, more like an imperative. Summer scrambled.

High above the floor of the valley a Sylvari sat, comfortably reclined under the ancient tree. She introduced herself as Dierdre. These were her Steps. "And what are you doing here, my dear?"

"Searching for treasure", Summer heard herself answer. For heaven's sake! That really doesn't sound good. Alright, it's true but you could at least dress it up a little! Maybe there's something in the clear air that compels honesty or perhaps even a white lie looks too black against such beauty. Either way, it's out now.

"You might want to look in that chest over there, then", said Dierdre. "Only it's locked. You need four Cantles. I'm sure you can manage that, strapping big Norn like you". Summer looked around. There were mushrooms, those big, flat ones that grow out of trees, growing out of the tree. They looked unnervingly like stepping stones.

"Oh I get it", Summer said. "It's one of those."

I'd never heard of Dierdre's Steps. Some research after the fact told me that it was added with the Halloween patch. The full details, together with a video, are here at the invaluable Dulfy site. If you asked me I'd tell you I'm useless at jumping puzzles and hate doing them. That's not entirely true. I'm actually not that bad, probably no worse than average and I do enjoy having done a jumping puzzle. It's the actual doing of them I don't like. It's stressful and I prefer to avoid anything that raises my heart-rate.

Still, you can't not, can you? Not when you're there. And there was a chest. Who knows what might be in there? So up the magic mushroom trail I hopped. It was fairly tricky and very scary. These things are not for acrophobics. Fortunately I'm not scared of heights. Just don't look down. And definitely don't twitch.

Jumping Puzzles in GW2 go a lot better since I learned how to disable double-tap to dodge. That would have got me killed in short  order here. I made it to the top without mishap and picked up the Cantle of Sun. Cantle is a word with which I was previously unfamiliar but there was plenty of opportunity to get to know it better because I still had three of them to get.

As I was pondering how to get down, by sheer chance I happened to spot something at my feet. Diving goggles. Slipped them on and all Summer's clothes fell off, leaving her in an acceptably modest bikini. Over the side, a forward-somersault, splash into the ice-cold water and pop an achievement. Exhillarating.

Next up, Cantle of Earth. Easy one. It's just a quick hop down a hole, dodge the purple-con Veteran Earth Elemental, grab the Cantle and scarper. That left the Cantles of Sea and Sky and I was almost at the top of the climb for the Sky when a spider jumped out and I did that thing I said not to do. Twitched. At least I had the presence of mind to twist as I fell and land in the water, fully dressed this time.

It was at this point that I went and watched Dulfy's video. The thing I really hate about jumping puzzles is having to redo them because I fell. If I can't do it first time I tend not to want another go. It was my suspicion, though, that this valley might not be so easy to find a second time so I thought that if I was going to do it at all I probably ought to get it done while I had the opportunity.

Skipping through the video it certainly seemed the hardest climb was the one I'd already done. Encouraged, I set off again, bounding like a mountain goat up the familiar trail, all the while telling myself not to get overconfident. I got overconfident. Summer slipped on a perfectly straightforward step, clawed desperately at the rock-face and plummeted. This time she did not land in a pool.

There's no waypoint in Dierdre's Steps. Yak's Bend were struggling on the Frontier and I needed my tea. She recalled to Wayfarer Foothills and that was that. I'm still two Cantles short of a Treasure Chest.

To get back in she'll need to do one of the events, assuming she can find one that's up. At least now she has waypoints. She won't have to walk all the way next time. And there will be a next time. Dierdre's treasure shall be mine.