An Extravagant Journey To Nowhere?

If you'd asked me this time last year if I was interested in paying $40 for a couple of years unrestricted access to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, I'd have answered "Hell, yeah!". I've said a number of times in various comments here and there over the decade or so since the game was first announced that I'd be willing to pay the same for access to the test builds as I paid for Landmark and that cost me a lot more than forty dollars

I bought in to Landmark at the earliest opportunity, the paid alpha that started at the beginning of February, nearly eleven years ago. From memory, I think it cost around a hundred dollars for the Founder's Pack. I bought one for me and another for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present; a couple of hundred dollars in total. 

As I said in that very first post after the NDA dropped, something that happened almost immediately, presumably because SOE didn't fancy trying to police the whole thing for a moment longer than they had to, "That officially makes my Founder's Pack purchase worthwhile right there."

I was referring to the blogging possibilities but in the end, I very much felt I got my money's worth out of Landmark from the gameplay as well as a source of material for posts. I spent a great number of happy hours there over the three years the game lasted.

Two of those years were in testing; just one as a live game. As a commercial product, Landmark was an abject failure, surviving barely a year after its launch in 2016. I'm sure there were multiple reasons why the game closed down but the main one was because no-one was playing it.

In common with most games developed by Sony Online Entertainment, Landmark had an in-game chat command that let you see how many other people were playing. I was in the habit of checking it every time I played. How many were online when I was? Almost literally no-one. Every time.

These days, there's a positively nauseating amount of faux nostalgia for the game with people praising it to the skies for all kinds of things it never was. If those people loved it so much, I have to wonder, why were none of them playing it at the end? Or pretty much the entire time the game was "live"?

The most irritating part of the whole self-serving love-fest is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Back in 2017, when the closure date was announced, the infinitesimally small part of the internet that gave a damn at all was outraged! Not because of the closure per se but for Landmark's supposed role in the already-announced abandonment of the shibboleth,that was EQNext.

I was no more convinced by that anger then than I am by the suppposed affection now. I spent much of the post I wrote about it at the time railing at "the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark", all of whom were falling over themselves to pour vitriol on Daybreak, whose only real error had been to let the game struggle on as long as it did.

I quoted Tyler F. M. Edwards extensively, along with Feldon at EQ2Wire, as they ripped into both the MMO community and the former SOE management for the endless self-delusion and gaslighting that led to such over-inflated, unachievable expectations in the first place. It's curious that both those links still work. Gaming blogs lasting longer than the games they cover - who'd have imagined?

Landmark, of course, was supposed to be the creative pipeline for John Smedley and Dave Georgeson's surreal and wholly unconvincing EQNext project, a bizarre and from this distant perspective positively deranged plan to have players build the infrastructure of one game while playing another while getting paid for doing it, presumably at pennies on the dollar compared to what it would cost to employ professional artists. 

Thinking about it now, it's like some weird, twisted pre-echo of the crypto/NFT Pay2Earn model, where somehow playing a game earns you money while you have fun, a virtuous circle of back-scratchers, all sitting on each others' laps and taking in each others' washing so no-one needs to buy chairs or do their own laundry ever again. Or something like that.

EQNext, lest we forget, was the pipe-dream successor to EverQuest although, awkwardly, EverQuest already had a successor, EverQuest II, something no-one seemed willing to acknowledge back then. Or now, for that matter.

Even more awkwardly, EQ had already received a much more convincing sequel in the form of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, a game which, for all its well-remarked and rehearsed flaws, very clearly iterated and expanded on the original EverQuest formula, something it was well-placed to do, considering it had at its head the prime visionary responsible for the franchise itself, Brad McQuaid.

For a short while Vanguard fared rather better, commercially, than Landmark but also suffered badly from being pressed upon an eager and receptive public in a painfully unfinished and, for some, wholly unplayable state. As happened with Landmark to a lesser degree, most of those shortcomings were addressed and overcome in live development but by then the damage had been done. There was no-one left to see how much better the games were becoming.

Once again, I bought into Vanguard at my earliest opportunity. I applied for testing and got in a few months before launch, when I found the game would barely run on my PC, something that happened to many testers and later to paying customers. Instead of giving up on the whole thing I did some research on what was needed to get the game to run comfortably. Buy a new PC was the solution.

There was a lot of helpful information on the beta forums concerning which graphics cards and CPUs handled the game most effectively, so before the game launched, I had new PCs built for myself and Mrs Bhagpuss, using components chosen specifically with the aim of running Vanguard reliably. This they did extremely well, meaning that while other players were raging and rage-quitting over the inability of their state-of-the-art rigs to run the game at all, we were both playing quite happily on mid-range PCs with as much facility as we'd ever played any other MMORPG.

I point all of this out to mark the contrast between what I was willing to do ten or fifteen years ago in order to play an MMORPG that really appealed to me and what I'm willing to do today. Back then, not only was I ready to pay a couple of hundred dollars just to get into an alpha, I was willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars buying new PCs to play a new game.

Today it appears I won't even stump up $40 for a game I've been waiting to play for almost a decade. So what changed?

A few things. I'm not going to claim that, like Wilhelm, I've fallen off the MMO path, but I am certainly no longer pounding down that trail, ignoring every turning. I still enjoy MMORPGs. I still play them. But nowadays I play a lot of other games as well and I enjoy them just as much. Maybe more.

At the moment, though, I'm not spending all that much time playing video games at all. Maybe a couple of hours, most days. Often not even that. Sometimes I go a whole day without logging into any games at all! I'm not making any grand claims about being over gaming or anything silly like that. It's just that I seem to have a lot of demands on my time just now and something has to give. Games are an easy place to make the cull.

Still, I absolutely will make time for something that interests or intrigues me. Play-testing Stars Reach, for example, has been quite awkward but I've made the effort and intend to continue. 

Tellingly, in some ways Stars Reach, whose development team includes one Dave Georgeson, is very much the spiritual successor to the game EQNext was supposed to be, only this time it's being developed without most of the hubris and bluster with a far more grounded idea of the time and effort involved. And, of course, with the benefit of another decade of technological development, which I suspect is where the magic sauce that seems to be making the whole thing work this time has come from.

Pantheon Early Access, being available 24/7, is immeasurably more convenient for me to play than Stars Reach with its two-hour tests so, especially given I've been itching to play it for years, what's holding me back? Surely it can't just be that $40 tag? It is a bit steep for an EA game, true, but given that VR, until very recently, was planning not only on charging for the game itself but also piling a monthly subscription on top, $40 for at least two years play seems like a decent deal.

(The subscription, by the way, is no longer a certainty. The notes on the EA launch on the game's Steam page include the following fudge: "originally, we contemplated on following a sub model, but are still evaluating our options and will be using the Early Access phase to open that dialogue with players."  The ground is clearly being softened for a more accessible payment model.)

No, it's neither lack of time nor lack of money that's keeping me from playing Pantheon right away. It's experience. Personal experience. Granted, there was only about an hour of it but it was more than enough. 

I was very eager to get a hands-on with the game when Visionary Realms somewhat unexpectedly opened the doors briefly for any interested parties to wander in and take a look. There was - and presumably still is - an NDA on that, so I'm not going into any detail, but I don't think any NDA can reasonably prevent me saying how I felt while I was playing . I can sum it up in a word: bored.

I can forgive games in development a great deal. They can be buggy, glitched, laggy and nowhere even close to being finished and I'll still happily spend time with them and give them good word of mouth, so long as I'm engaged, interested, amused or entertained. Boring me, though? That's unforgivable.

And I'm quite hard to bore. I'm very easily pleased. I can and do play through the starting areas of countless MMORPGs with pleasure, even when I have no intention of carrying on. I love early-game play and I particularly love diku-MUD-inspired leveling. For a game with that heritage to fail to grip me even for as long as it takes to get out of the starting zone is almost unheard of but Pantheon managed it.

Obviously, without being able to discuss the reasons for that in any shape or form, my boredom stands entirely as a description of my state of mind. It tells you nothing about the game itself, other than that I didn't manage to become engaged, let alone enthralled by it.

I didn't, for whatever reason, which is why I'm loathe to drop forty dollars to see if it gets better, later. Maybe it does. It would certainly need to.

It would also seem that I'm no longer willing to spend real-life money just to have something new to write about. For that, I don't even need to enjoy the game. Negatively critical posts are often easier to write than positive ones and they can be more entertaining to read, too, provided you get the tone right. The problem is, I'd still have find something to do in the game that wasn't as boring to read about as it was to do and I'm not sure what that might be.

For the time being, then, a combination of factors prevents me from adding Pantheon to my Steam account. It's a bit pricey for what they're offering and I find it hard to imagine wanting to play it or write about it rather than any of my many other options. I mean, it's hard enough right now to get myself to log into games I like. Honestly, if I can't persuade myself to spend time with games I'm enjoying, what chance is there for a game that makes me feel bored just thinking about it?

And yet, for all of that, I almost certainly will buy into Pantheon's Early Access, eventually. Probably sooner rather than later, too. The New Year should see a substantial drop in demands on my time and very likely there'll also be a significant deterioration in the weather, both of which should mean more time to play video games. I don't expect to be able to resist the temptation to "just take a look" for too much longer.

If and when I do, you can be sure I'll give some account of what I find. There's no NDA on Early Access, although I'm sure someone will try it one day. Let's just hope I can summon up enough enthusiasm to get out of the starting area next time.

The Stars Her Destination

Following yesterday's post I surprised myself by going ahead and doing what I said I should be doing for once. I uninstalled both Atlas and Phantasy Star Online 2: New Generation. That emptied some space in my Steam folder, which I'm currently re-filling with Lost Ark as I write.

With luck I'll have plenty of time to try it out today and tomorrow. Most of the blog posts I've read about the early game make a point of how "on rails" the opening stages are, something Naithin re-iterates in the comments. Bearing that in mind, it would seem prudent to hold off from posting about it until I've had time to get to the part where the game opens out. (Although when did that ever stop me before?)

More to the point, I already had something brewing about Chimeraland that I bumped from the schedule (Schedule? What schedule?) in favor of complaining about games putting on weight. I even used one of the screenshots from the unwritten post as the opening image for yesterday's semi-rant because it was ready to hand and seemed to fit.

Rather than try to rush through the opening stages of Lost Ark so I can slap some kind of post together, I thought I'd write about something else while I wait for it to download. That means, when I log in, I can settle back and take my time working out all the important stuff, like how to take screenshots, without feeling the heavy breath of a deadline on the back of my neck.

I don't want to build this thing up too much. It's not as if the post I had in mind was anything special. It was just something I ran across while I was out exploring that I thought might be worth sharing. So here it is.

Chimeraland is a sandbox game, a term that can mean a number of different things. A sandbox can be a place where you jump about, screaming and kicking sand in all directions, or it can be somewhere you sit quietly on your own, humming to yourself as you construct castles of the mind. I imagine there's plenty of kicking and screaming going on over on the free-for-all PvP continent but where I live it's all about being constructive. 

When  it comes to construction, Chimeraland's no Landmark. For all its flaws, Landmark did allow players with sufficient skill and talent to build some absolutely astonishing edifices, many of which I was fortunate enough to see for myself and none of which are shown in the illustrations for this article, which chooses instead to focus on how they were made.

In praising the flexibility and potential Landmark's toolkit offered the imaginative and capable player, that piece also unintentionally puts its finger on the game's big problem. (Okay, one of the big problems. If only there'd just been the one, eh?) "The tools you were given to build with were also much better than most games of this type. It took a bit to really master the controls but those controls offered incredible flexibility once you did."

We should probably inject a dose of pragmatism here. It didn't take "a bit" to master those controls. It took a lot. There was math involved. I'm willing to bet that most of the players who built the truly amazing, almost photo-realist palaces and castles and the recreations of scenes from the movies, had either a professional or an academic background in digital design. The bare minimum entry level would have been "serious hobbyist".

It was a trope of the game that Landmark's own developers didn't fully understand how to use the toolset they'd given to the players. As the linked post explains, "The community changed a core aspect of the creation tools..." Boy, did they ever! After that, a handful of players, writing and distributing "How To" guides via the forums and YouTube, took the ball from the devs and ran with it. Those poor devs never really caught up, let alone got their ball back.

That's not the case with Chimeraland. Not only are there no sophisticated tools, there aren't even any basic building blocks. You can readily take on a far more original, individual, imaginative construction project in Valheim, where you can terraform the landscape or EverQuest 2, where you can build brick by brick, than you can in Chimeraland, where you're basically working with the virtual world equivalent of self-assembly furniture.

In Chimeraland you snap pre-made parts together and place them on the immutable terrain. That makes the whole thing much more accessible but also much more limited. The strong upside is that it opens construction up to people with ideas and vision even if they lack the technical skills required by games that expect a higher level of expertise, not to mention commitment . It's a lot easier to build your dream home when it comes in prefabricated sections.

Other than that kind of user-friendliness, where Chimeraland really comes into its own, compared to other construction-led games I've played, is in the complete lack of interest the developers have paid to the laws of physics. If there's an object in the world that has collision, it's almost certain you can attach a floor or a wall to it and go from there. You can build in trees, off the side of cliffs, on top of boulders, underwater, anywhere you want. Even in the sky. 

I don't mean you can build houses that fly. At least I don't think you can although I wouldn't bet against it. What you can do is build up. And I do mean up.

In her travels across her home continent, Floradyne has seen a number of towers and skyscrapers but the construction she came upon by chance the other day made all of them look like bungalows by comparison. Whatever the thing was (She couldn't quite make it out) it caught her eye from a long way off. Something thin, skeletal, stretching into the sky. She spurred her vultura into the air and skimmed over the fields to take a closer look.

It appeared someone had tried to build a stairway to heaven. It looked as though they might just have done it, too. In a right-angled, corkscrewing spiral, vanishing into a vortex of perspective, sections of stairs had been clipped together, heading to the stars. Looking straight up, Flora could just about make out some kind of platform at the zenith.

I thought about it for a minute. Another of the many peculiar design decisions in Chimeraland is the way all players have open access to each other's homes. The default message when you approach someone's place is an invitation to come inside and make yourself at home. I guess if NPCs can do it, why not players? 

There's even a mechanism for setting fees for strangers to use the crafting tables and other devices in your home. Mostly I just lie down on the bed and have a rest, which costs nothing. Given that level of access, there was clearly no custom or etiquette preventing me from climbing the stairs to see what might be at the top. That wasn't what made me think twice. I was scared of falling off. 

I don't suffer from a fear of heights in real life but then I generally don't go climbing hundreds, thousands of feet into the air on an open staircase with no guardrails. It was fine for a while but as the ground got further and further away, vertigo began to set in. The higher Flora went, each sharp turn, each small landing, felt more exposed, more precarious. 

I began to take more care, then more care still. I was worried a finger-twitch on the keyboard could send Flora plummeting to... well, not her doom because there's no death for player-characters in Chimeraland and possibly no falling damage either. Still, I didn't want to take the fall.

The higher Flora climbed, the stronger and louder the winds blew. Wisps and tatters of cloud occasionally blocked the view and the sound of the air rushing past made me worry whether there was a chance she'd be snatched up and swept into the sky.

Fortunately that didn't happen, although it would have made from some great screenshots. I think the buffetting I felt was in my imagination but I'm not absolutely sure. Chimeraland has an active weather system and that includes wind. She's been taken up in a tornado before now.

The stairs seemed to go on forever, climbing higher than the peaks of the snow-capped mountains in the distance. It was evening when I began the climb but as Flora neared the end, night had fallen and the stars were out.

And how! Chimeraland has the most intense night sky I have ever seen in any game. Deep midnight blues, actinic whites, stars, moons, planets, meteorites, nebulae... It's like someone designed a planetarium show after a chewing on a handful of peyote buttons.

Nighttime in Chimeraland is spectacular enough from the ground. When you're eight miles high it's overwhelming. Someone evidently decided they'd like to see it that way every night.

At the top of the stairs was a huge platform, open to the endless drop on all sides. Around the edge were crafting stations and other facilities as well as an aquarium or two. Above, accessed by a short set of stone steps, a second floor offered rest and relaxation with a bed and a few seats, a cloud lounge, somewhere to sit back and stare into the void, while hoping it wasn't staring back at you.

I spent some considerable time there, taking selfies and screenshots, trying to frame something of the vertiginous, sprawling majesty of the setting and failing. I did the best I could but really, you had to be there.

When the sun came up I looked to the horizon and the snowcapped mountains. I called Flora's trusty vultura to her side, took them both to the highest point, mounted up and jumped off the edge. From that height everything looked like a map below us as we cruised slowly down (Yes, down...) to the peaks below.

What we found there is a story for another day. Well, it probably would have been if I hadn't tried to catch a Condor minutes after we landed and gotten everyone killed. 

And now, in considerably less than the time it took to write all that, Lost Ark has downloaded and installed itself. Onwards and, yes, in a manner of speaking, upwards! If I get any stories out of Lost Ark even half as good as the ones I'm getting almost every session in Chimeraland, well I won't have time to tell them all.

Nah, just kidding. Of course I'll have the time!

Thirty Days

In a shocking development that's going to surprise absolutely no-one, having posted my highly skeptical first impressions of Valheim, in which I made it quite clear the game had failed to impress, much less hook me, I spent so long playing it yesterday I didn't have time to post my second impressions.

Steam tells me I've now spent 12.7 hours in the viking afterlife simulator and if it hadn't been for the lure of red envelopes in Guild Wars 2's lunar new year (four accounts takes a while) that could easily be fifteen. Or more.

It's not that I've decided Valheim is a good game, you understand. I have no idea whether it's good, bad or indifferent. I haven't seen enough of it to tell. What I have seen are a lot of trees. Many of which I have chopped down. Very many.

I cannot tell a lie.

 

At one point I spent three straight game days chopping down trees around the architect's nightmare I laughingly call my house. I didn't need the wood. I just can't stop chopping down trees. The way they fall. The way they bounce and roll. The damage they can do. It's compelling.

With the basic stone axe or the slightly better flint upgrade, the only trees around my homestead that I can fell are beeches. Birch and oak, the other two broadleafed varieties that make up the deciduous forest, return a message indicating they're "too hard". 

Maybe I can't cut them down. I can still knock them down.

Damn you, silver birch! I'll get you if it's the last thing I do!

 

Trees handily lose all their branches when they fall, leaving a neat cylindrical trunk. That in turn splits into two when chopped, before finally shattering into the generic "wood" pieces you can pick up and use. I discovered early on that you can roll these large logs around just by by pushing on them.

I had a plan to fill the pond next to my house with logs in the hope of rendering it uninhabitable for the annoying amphibian "necks". That didn't really work but while I was pushing logs down the slope I noticed anything they hit took damage. 

I say "damage". Large rocks took "0" damage. It registered but meant nothing. Birches, however, gave up actual numbers. I pushed the beech trunks back up the slope and let them roll back down. After four or five tries the birch snapped off at the base and fell into the lake.

That was immensely satisfying until I realised it left me with a stump I couldn't remove because it was, predictably, "too hard". Also not many birch trees are considerate enough to grow at the bottom of a convenient slope. 

If I can just roll another twenty or thirty of these in here...

 

This, by and large, is how I spent the day. I also played with the hoe for a long while. It can raise or lower the ground. That seemed straightforward enough. I cleared a lovely flat yard all around my house. It was only when I went inside I realized I'd buried half the floorboards in dirt.

I raised the land under a gap in the wooden barricade I'd built around the house only to find that now, when I open the gate, I fall into the pond. I took the roof on and off about half a dozen times. I built a tower and tore it down. I moved the fire to somewhere it wouldn't set me alight every time I used the back door, only then it was too far away from my bedroom and I couldn't get to sleep.

Things went on like that for a long time. I won't bore you with the details except to say that soon one house wasn't enough for me. I started refurbishing any structure I happened to pass. I was out searching for stones which seemed to be remarkably hard to find where I was living and I kept happening across ruins that looked like they could be made perfectly habitable with a little work. I mean, I couldn't just leave them, could I?

At one point Mrs. Bhagpuss came in to ask if I wanted a coffee. She looked over my shoulder and observed that I appeared to be playing some kind of hobo sim set in the Appalachian mountains. She asked if I was living in a pile of cardboard boxes. It did look like that way, I couldn't deny it.

I'd say "hobo" was a tad harsh. How about "outdoor type"?

She also opined that I had very noisy neighbors. This is true. At all times of day and night I can hear yelling and banging around my homestead. I've tried to find out what's causing it but so far it remains a mystery. Some of the noises sound like words, others like explosions. It sometimes feels more like living in an urban jungle than a forest.

As for the attacks and home invasions others have described, I've now seen one. Just the one. I was on the roof hammering some nails into the thatch (not really - construction in Valheim doesn't have that nit-picking level of detail, I'm happy to say) when a message came up across the screen. 

It was too quick and unexpected to catch the details but the gist seemed to be that I'd angered the forest god and he was rallying the animals to the attack. I waited. Nothing happened. 

Eventually I noticed two or three deer and couple of boars hanging out in the undergrowth beyond my perimeter pallisade. They didn't seem to be doing anything. After a while longer another message appeared, telling me the animals were calming down. Well, that was certainly... nothing.

Take a glance to your left, bird. What d'you think I've been doing all this time since you last popped your head out?

 

Hugin the Raven turned up then. I hadn't seen him for so long I'd forgotten he was part of the game. I went to speak to him and he told me I ought to build a strong defence to protect myself against incidents like this. Thanks for that, Hugin. Waaaaay ahead of you, pal.

"Excitement" over, I went back to my home improvements. This all might have gone on indefinitely only for some reason I got it into my head I ought to build a raft. 

I didn't have anywhere to go or any reason to go there but if you know you can build a raft, eventually you're going to build one. It's kind of a given. So I built my raft and got on. Across the bay I could see what looked like the spot where the giant tree that looms overhead might touch the ground. Good a destination as any.

The raft turned out to be one of the easier vessels to navigate that I've run across in gaming. I had it moving in a few seconds. There was some tool tip that said it was safest to sit down when you ride a raft so I sat. The waves were rolling, the simulation was impressive, I was enjoying the trip out to sea.

I think I'll name her the Surprisingly Seaworthy.

 

Then the sea turned into ocean. There was a message telling me so. The light got darker, the waves got bigger, the raft began to buck. I was soaked in seconds. Any sensible viking would have turned around and headed back to shallower waters.

I am not a sensible viking. Well, perhaps I am, a little bit. Before I set out I'd put most of my valuables (Hah! Valuables! That's a good one!) in chests in my house. I'd already decided I'd better only take what I could afford to lose because you leave all your stuff where you drop and if I died at sea I didn't foresee getting any of it back.

(Funny story. I'd died in the water once already so I knew what I was getting into. I was hunting deer along the shore and after I wounded one it ran into the sea and I foolishly swam after it to finish it off. It seems even badly-wounded deer have more stamina than vikings because I ran out of energy and drowned before I could catch it. My corpse was in the shallows but only just barely in swimming range. If there hadn't been an underwater rock I was able to climb on to get my breath back I'd never have gotten my stuf back at all. So you can see what my prospects of a corpse recovery in the deep ocean were likely to be).

Oh, no. This can't be good.

 

Despite the wallowing and inundation, I kept on going. I could see a shore not that far away. If the raft didn't founder I thought I could make it still. And then the serpent appeared.

I actually said, out loud, "You have got to be kidding me!". It wasn't a big sea serpent. Maybe twelve, fifteen feet long. And purple. With the classic ridged back. It swam around me in circles, occasionally lunging forward to take a bite out of the raft. Really. I saw it do it.

The raft sank lower and lower in the water until finally it broke up. I got out my knife and prepared to go down fighting. Then I drowned. Or it ate me. One or the other. I was dead, either way.

Just make it quick, okay?

 

I woke up back in bed, in my underwear. I'd put a lot of stuff in the chests but I only had one tunic and one pair of pants and now they were at the bottom of the ocean. And staying there.

Priority number one became getting some new clothes. That meant getting some leather scraps and/or some deer hide and that meant hunting boars or deer or both. Didn't seem like it was going to be too much of a problem. There were always animals around and about and while deer were hard to catch, boars were easy.

Only there's never a boar around when you want one, is there? I mean, the entire genre runs on them and yet if you need them, where are they? Not in my part of the forest, that's for sure. Not this time. 

Okay, now we're getting those Scandi feels.

 

That's how I ended up a long way from home in a part of the map I hadn't visited, which became the moment I realized I'd barely been anywhere, seen anything, done anything. Valheim has one of those fog of war maps that opens up as you travel. Mine was almost completely fogged over still and I'd been playing for almost a month, game time.

It occurred to me that I was letting down the archetype I frequently claim to represent. Dr. Bartle will be asking for my Explorer card back if this goes on. And just about then the scenery began to change. Instead of dense forests studded with lakes and meadows the ground became rockier, more uneven. I very nearly fell down a ravine.

Looking up to the skyline along the ridge above me I saw evergreens. Firs, to be precise. Ahead of me, above a steep bank over a river, stood a deserted house, weathered but with all of the roof and most of the walls intact. It was getting late. It was a long run back. 

Raspberries: Blessing or Curse? Discuss. (Hint: depends if you plant them in a doorway or not).

 

Okay, so I own a second home. Don't hate. I spent a couple of days fixing up the new place. It was a lot less chaotic than my old home or at least it was until I got at it. 

There were some raspberry bushes in the doorway and in trying to move them I somehow raised the floor so high I couldn't get in, so I had to replace the door with a bigger one. Then I had a run-in with two Grey Dwarves in amongst the firs so I thought I'd better get some defences up and in doing that I managed to destroy three workbenches. Seems if the land shifts beneath them they implode or something. Still figuring out how that goes.

Eventually it got to being really late. I'd already passed on posting, only my second missed day this year. I had plenty to write about (here's some of it) but I didn't want to stop just to talk about what I'd been doing. I wanted to go on doing it.

That's not happened in a while. I'm  not surprised, though. This is Landmark all over again. I've written before about how building stuff can get to me and also about how undecided I am about whether I like it or not. It has all the harmarks of a bad habit if not an addiction. I'm very wary of indulging.

Here's a tip. If you put a section of roof on slightly crooked, it keeps the rain from putting your fire out while still venting the smoke. Cosy!

 

At the moment it's not like there's a whole lot else I have to do, though, so if I'm going to blow a week or several hacking down imaginary trees to build imaginary backwoods shacks I guess this is as good a time as any. Better.

What I definitely can't say yet is whether any of this makes Valheim a good game. I'd go so far as to say it's a good toy. I'm certainly having a lot of fun playing with it. But whether there's more than that I'm still waiting to find out.

One thing I really am impressed by is how little the designers seem to be botherd by what I think about their game. When I logged out last night I was on Day 30. Hugin has all but given up on me. The deer god doesn't seem to care any more. Other games would be badgering me to get on with the plot by now, sending me passive-aggressive reminders of my duties and responsibilites. 

Okay, Maslow, that's Physiological and Safety done. What's next? Belongingness and Love? Hmm. Can I get those with a flint axe?

 

In Valheim, I get the impression I could just set up home in the forest and live there forever, doing my own thing and that would be just fine with everyone. And right now that's pretty much what I plan on doing.

So if you'll excuse me, I'll get right back to it. Those trees aren't going to fell themselves.

Why Am I Doing This? : First Impressions Of Valheim

 

After considerable thought, and bearing in mind what Wilhelm said in the comments yesterday, this afternoon I bought Valheim. I'm fairly sure it's going to be a five-minute wonder but it's not like it's the first bandwagon I've jumped. May as well get onboard while it's still rolling. I doubt anyone's going to care much a month from now.

If that sounds lukewarm... well, it is. I played for three and a half hours this afternoon and it was exactly what I expected. Since I've never played Minecraft I won't be making the same comparisons as everybody else. Instead I'll say to me it felt like a cross between New World and Landmark. 

It looks like a very much uglier New World and it plays like a very much less buggy Landmark. In fact, as many people have noted, Valheim doesn't seem to have any bugs at all. I certainly didn't run into even a single, minor glitch in my first session. There were some awkward moments when I couldn't get building pieces to fit where I wanted them but tools not doing what you wish they would isn't the same as them not doing what they're supposed to do.

Is that a mushroom cloud?

 

If don't have any complaints about the build quality I certainly do about the graphics. It's one of those games that looks a lot better in screenshots than it does in game - and as you can see, it doesn't look great in screenshots. 

The environmental art has its moments. The forest can be atmospheric and the lakes and ponds look quite charming in the early morning sunshine. I've only seen one biome (I think) so there may be more joys and splendors ahead.

The character art, though. About that, nothing good can be said. It's one thing to have very limited customization options. It's another altogether for your character to look like a melted waxwork. I saw today that Valheim has sold over a million copies in its first week of release. I sincerely hope some of that windfall goes towards hiring some artists.

The UI needs some work, too. It's clunky, awkward and unintuitive. Fortunately the controls are configurable because some of the defaults are strange. I would make a point about having the secondary attack on the middle mouse button if I'd ever needed to use a secondary attack but I haven't done much fighting yet.

It's a fixer-upper, what can I tell you?

 

That's definitely one of the strong points. The game gives you all the time you need to get comfortable. Or as comfortable as you can be, squatting in a ruined hovel in soaking wet rags. 

In nearly four hours I died three times. The first was in the opening few minutes, when I was heading to the shoreline in the dark to see what was there. Something jumped out of the undergrowth and one-shotted me. I never saw what it was.

The second time three trees fell on me. I was aware of the danger. I'd been careful to stand up-slope of every tree I'd chopped down until then. This time the first tree fell against a second and then the two of them lodged against a couple more. I tried to figure out the dynamics but when the last tree fell the whole lot went every which way, bouncing off each other in all directions. I was caught in the middle and crushed like a bug.

The third time I was killed by bees. I saw a nice hut, raised off the ground, in decent condition. I thought it might make a useful storehouse so I clambered inside to take a look. I didn't see the hive hanging in the rafters until I walked into it and that was that.

Swimming's in. I saw some fish so I guess fishing is, too.

 

Other than those self-inflicted restarts nothing gave me any trouble at all. The most aggressive creatures I met were greylings, who look like little goblins wearing backpacks. I have no idea what they carry in them because every single greyling without exception dropped one glob of resin and nothing at all else. In the end I decided they must be some kind of small, fast treant. 

They seem to be attracted to structures or maybe to fire. There was often one darting about as I was building, feinting in close then jumping back. At first I stopped to kill them but after a while I found it better to carry on as if they weren't there.

I was hoping I could get one trapped inside my shelter so I could get a closer look at it but although they'd come right to the door I couldn't get one to go inside. If I really wanted to catch a specimen, I'm pretty sure I could build a wall around one before it realized what I was up to. They seem dim enough to stand still for it.

There are quite a few boars in the woods. When you approach they back off although a couple of times one atacked me before I saw it coming, then ran away. They have a rubric that tells you they're frightened but they're not so frightened they don't have a go, even though they always lose. 

That's not a visual bug. There really is a giant tree up there. It gets mentioned.

 

Deer are scarcer, at least in my part of the forest. They don't fight back at all, or don't I think they do, although I only managed to catch one. It's not really a meaningful sample.

The last living creature I've seen is some small amphibian going by the unlikely name of a "neck". They look a bit like tadpoles and they're highly aggressive. Also feeble. 

Everything so far has been feeble except for the single skeleton I ran into and those bees. The skeleton was about as tough as your average newbie zone undead and the bees I don't think you can attack at all. They're more of an environmental hazard.

There are a few weather-related dangers but once again they seem very low-key. If you get wet it's some kind of debuff. If you get cold, the same. 

I set myself on fire multiple times after I foolishly placed my campfire between my bed and the door, meaning I had to hop over it every time I wanted to go in or out. There were flames and some warnings but nothing very bad seemed to happen. 

Is it raining or is that a helicopter gunship up there?

 

Smoke inhalation looked like it was going to be more of a problem. I neglected to leave a gap in the roof to let the fumes out and things looked dicey for a moment but then I opened a vent in the ceiling with a quick click of the middle mouse button (it doubles as an eraser for building materials) and that was the end of that.

I did think something bad might happen when I got caught in quite the most spectacular thunderstorm I have ever seen in a video game. It was apocalyptic. More like an orbital bombardment with accompanying laser attack than weather. But all that happened was I got wet.

You can't starve to death, either. You can get hungry but the game makes sure to remind you to eat something and since you can apparently survive quite happily on a diet of raspberries and mushrooms, both of which grow abundantly throughout the forest, there's no real risk of getting the hunger debuff.

All of this is very much to the good in my opinion. I'd far rather have the survival risks trivialized while I'm learning the ropes than suffer a string of frustrating deaths before I've even worked out what's killing me. On the other hand, it does raise the question of why bother with penalties at all? It's almost as if the developers feel these sort of games always have them so theirs should too, even though they couldn't really tell you why.

A very bright, non-directional light source directly in front of you is not helpful.

 

I found more than enough to challenge and frustrate me without difficult death penalties. It gets very dark at night and having a flaming torch makes it harder to see where you're going, not easier, just as it would in real life. 

To begin with, I dreaded the coming of darkness. Not because of the danger; because of the tedium. I spent the first night aimlessly wandering through the woods until I got killed by the unseen horror. After that I just waited at spawn until it got light.

By the second night I had a shelter, a ruin I'd found and partially repaired. I'd even made a bed but I couldn't lie in it because you can't sleep without a fire near you and I was two stones short of a fireplace. I foolishly went out into the night to search for some and got lost. It was so dark I couldn't see my house. Once again I had to give up, stand still and wait for dawn. Gallingly, when the sun rose I realized I was about fifty feet from my front door.

On the third night I had a bed and a fire and I made sure I was inside when night fell. At this point darkness went from being an irritating nuisance to a loading screen. Click bed, select sleep, read a couple of lines of text about your dreams, wake up. New day ahead.

In that sleep, what dreams may come?

 

Once again, I have to wonder what the point is. If you can switch night off, why have it at all, other than for the look of the thing? And making it so you have to spend the first couple of nights just twiddling your thumbs seems to be adding insult to injury.

I suppose the idea is that it forces you to make a safe place to return to for fear of being caught out in the dangeous darkness. Doesn't really work if the darkness is just boring, not dangerous, though, does it?

All of this makes it sound like I wasn't very impressed and probably didn't enjoy myself much. Which is kinda, sorta true and yet kinda, sorta not at the same time. It's  a kinda, sorta game on first impressions. 

I do have a pre-existing issue with survival games in that I don't quite get the point of them. What exactly am I surviving for? Of all the genres I've played I don't think I get such a strong sensation that I'm wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere in anything else. 

I can spend literally months of my life doing utterly pointless tasks in mmorpgs without once feeling the slightest compunction to find something more useful to do with my life but half an hour building a hut to spend the night in is enough to make me look at the clock and think about the dailies I could be doing instead.

Thanks Ulf! I was wondering what I was doing wrong.

Valheim clearly addresses all that with a progression path that requires the gathering of various sacrifices to summon a series of boss monsters. It also seems to have some kind of narrative or storyline lurking in the background. I strongly suspect there's a much more structured game in there somewhere than the first few hours suggest.

Whether I'll stick at it for long enough to find out what it is looks iffy right now. It certainly hasn't sunk any claws into me so far. Both New World and Landmark felt positively velcro-like at the same early stage; Valheim is hanging by a thread.

I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again. It's going to be one of the two, I bet. I just can't tell which, yet.

Better Later

Today I almost bought Valheim. It's the game everyone's buying. Supposedly. 

Truth be told, so far the only people talking about it in this corner of the blogosphere seem to be Belghast and Wilhelm, although since Wilhelm heard about it from Ula I imagine we might see a post over at Ulalu in due course. Whether the next few days will see a light dusting of first impressions or a full-on blizzard remains to be seen. 

There's always a tendency for these things to snowball, of course. There's the infamous fear of missing out but also enthusiasm is often contagious. And, boy, are Valheim's boosters enthusiastic!

By comparison with many of the reviews on Steam, Wilhelm and Bel are positively restrained in their warm praise for the game. As I write, Valheim has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating from just under 17,000 reviews. That's seventeen thousand reviews for a game that's only been on Steam for a week.

I nearly wrote "only launched on Steam a week ago" but Valheim hasn't launched, not yet. It's still in Early Access, which makes all of this overwhelming positivity even more extraordinary. Early Access games have a poor reputation, both in general and on Steam, specifically. The EA tag is widely seen as a caveat emptor at best, more commonly a red flag.

Several of the reviews I read went out of their way to stress that Valheim is not your typical Early Access title: "If you're intimidated by "early access" don't be (in this case). This game puts AAA studios to shame, seriously". Others chose to comment on the price point: "Its worth FAR MORE THAN $20." And almost everyone agreed on one thing: "This game has no business being this F****** GOOD!"

When I read Wilhelm's observations and impressions I was mildly interested. Valheim seemed like the kind of thing I'd enjoy messing about with for a while. It sounded as if it might scratch that Landmark itch I was talking about a while back, probably more so than Jeromai's suggestion, Boundless, which I put on my wishlist but probably won't ever buy.

For one thing, Valheim has a northern European fantasy setting, some kind of loose re-working of Norse myth. It's not my favorite trope but it's certainly one that feels familiar and comfortable. For another, even though review after review compares it to Minecraft, Valheim appears to be blessedly free of blocks.

From the screenshots I've seen, it looks like any regular fantasy game, even if the graphics are its acknowledged weak point, perhaps the only one I've seen mentioned several times. Unusually, even the reviewers who draw unfavorable attention to the way it looks tend to forgive the game's aesthetic shortcomings with surprising generosity. 

That's partly because of the Early Access tag but mostly because the game has an astonishingly small footprint. The download's just a single gigabyte, although several reviews record a mere 500MB, possibly referring to some previous beta build.

Whatever the exact size, it's small. It's also cheap. Twenty dollars or, to me, £15.49. And it's been fantastically well-reviewed, with two bloggers whose opinions I trust reporting they've tried it and liked what they've seen so far. 

So why haven't I bought it? And more pertinently, why did I say I almost had?

Allergies. That's why.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I went for a delightful walk in the woods this morning. The U.K.'s  in the middle of a very cold snap but the part where we live remains mercifully free of snow. The sun's been out for most of the day and the threatened bitter easterly winds have not materialized. It was a beautiful day for a walk so we took a long one.

And I came back sneezing my head off. I don't know what it was but something in the winter woods got right up my nose, literally. For most of the day I've barely been able to see a screen let alone play anything on one. It's about as much as I can do to type.

That's why I spent an hour squinting through streaming eyes at Steam's soothing blue-on-blue text instead of playing games. And by the time I'd finished I was starting to feel I'd be crazy to wait a moment longer.

It was pushing at a half-open door, anyway.  I was already minded to buy Valheim after seeing how much fun Bel and Wilhelm seemed to be having. My main concern was whether I'd be able to find enough time to play to make it worth the purchase. I seem to have picked up rather a lot of gaming commitments lately and I'm enjoying all of them. I'm not sure I have room to expand much further but there's nothing I want to drop to make space. In fact I already have a waitlist.

Then there's the memory of Atlas in the back of my mind. That's a not-dissimilar game I bought on a whim. I enjoyed it for a while and I would have said I'd gotten my money's worth but Steam informs me I only played for six hours in total and I haven't logged in for two years. 

Atlas was always a gamble. I bought it mainly to get a few blog posts out of it, which I did. There was a chance it could have turned into something spectacular and since the developers are adamant they're still working out exactly what it's going to be, I guess there still is. Even so, do I need to do that again?

Valheim looks a lot more solid than Atlas. Not only does it have the huge approval of almost everyone who's tried it but it has a premise that I find a lot more suited to my tastes than piracy on the high seas. I've always liked the idea of Minecraft. It's the look of the thing I can't take. If Valheim ends up being Minecraft without the blocky visuals that might be enough for me.

So I put it on my wishlist. Then I looked at it sitting there and thought "why wait?". It's not going to get any cheaper. In fact, the FAQ suggests the price will go up: 

"Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“No definitive plans here yet, but it is likely that the price will be increased over the course of the Early Access period.”"

Might as well buy it now, then, I guess. I moved it to my basket. 

And then I sneezed and kept on sneezing. When I'd finished I thought about it. It hardly seems fair to the game to make it compete with my near-total inability to concentrate, see or think. Maybe I should wait and see how I feel tomorrow.

These sudden allergic reactions don't often last more than a day or so. Fingers crossed, tomorrow I might be able to go more than five minutes without needing to blow my nose. If so, I'll buy Valheim then. Probably.

Another day isn't going to make any difference. Is it?

And look! I got another post out of not buying a game! That's two days in a row! 

I might be on to something here...

The Way We Were

This afternoon I got an old PC working again and on it I found a few folders of screenshots I hadn't seen for a while. Nothing all that far back, but some half-lost memories all the same. Here's a selection.

The house Mrs Bhagpuss was working on in Landmark way back in very early alpha. It was called Little Qalia in homage to Vanguard's superb open-world housing.

And here's the original, Mrs Bhagpuss's Qalian home on a very stormy day. We had properties on close-by plots along the same beach. I'm hoping the Vanguard emulator team gets around to restoring housing one day. I'd love to build my house again. In the same spot.

While we're on the subject of housing, I think this is from a project Mrs Bhagpuss was working on in Rift. There were a lot of shots of it on the drive I was lifting files from. I'm always very loyal to EverQuest II and Vanguard when it comes to housing but I never really investigated Dimensions in Rift. 

On this evidence it seems I really should have paid more attention. Of course, the way mmorpgs work, I imagine these houses are still sitting there, in stasis. I'm not sure what level of dimensional access you get in Rift on a free account these days. Maybe I should log in and find out.

Finally, just for comparison, here's a shot of a room in one of Mrs Bhagpuss's many, many houses in EQII. It's striking how rough the textures seem compared to any of the other shots in this post. I'm not sure if that's what the game's graphics generally looked like back then or whether the quality had been dialled down for practical purposes, which was sometimes necessary when working on large housing projects. Whatever the reason, EQII looks a lot better these days - on my screen, anyway.

Allods is another game I regularly think about revisiting but never follow through. I don't even have it installed on this PC although I noticed it was there on that old one. Allods would feature high on my list of underappreciated mmorpgs. Visually, it's stunning, paricularly for it's age, and the graphics have aged exceptionally well.

These shots are from beta back in 2009 I think. The PC I was tinkering with was an old one of Mrs Bhagpuss's, as must be obvious by now. We both played gibberlings in the beta and had a great time.  There's no race anywhere in the genre like the gibberlings. Or if there is, I've never been lucky enough to find it.

The images I was most excited to see again were the ones from our time on EQII's Test server. We played there for several years, duoing with a variety of characters but most often with these two: Mrs Bhagpuss tanking as a ratonga Bruiser and me providing dps, off-tanking and heals as a Necromancer. Between the two of us and the pet we could just about make a full group. I loved healing as a necro although it required constant vigilance. I've seen necros main-heal groups in both EverQuest and EQII because necros can turn a claw to anything but a duo is about as far as I'd care to push it.

I even found a handful of shots from Final Fantasy XIV. We came close to sticking with that one after the revamp but in the end we gave it up to go back to Guild Wars 2. Good decision, I think.

If we hadn't, we'd never have seen the things we did. I haven't cropped the UI from this so as to leave the chat box where you can watch Yaks Bend's much-missed superstar commander setting up another of his hallmark golem rushes. This looks like a big one but I've seen bigger!

A golem army's not just for offense, of course. This defensive ring is a prime example of why Yaks Bend was the most-hated server in World vs World for many years. No-one remembers any of that now, it seems. Sic transit gloria mundi.

And that's why we take screenshots. And hope not to lose them.