I Love LA

The second instalment of Guild Wars 2's revised, revamped, restored, Unlimited Edition of Living World, Season One, Chapter who-the-hell-knows? dropped in today's regular Tuesday update. ArenaNet gave it a title: Sky Pirates. Maybe I should just have called it that.

The first and last time we saw this content was the best part of a decade ago, so forgive me if I can't remember if it was called "Sky Pirates" the first time around. It wasn't, though. Possibly a part of it might have been. It's a portmanteau of the original version, several bi-weekly episodes welded together with all the loose, awkward bits lopped off.

Or I guess it is. I've only played the first part. That also has a name. A weird name. I mean, if you were sitting around a table or in a bean bag or hanging over the divider of your cubicle or however they do it at ANet Towers, a bunch of you blueskying ideas on what to call to call your opening act, would you have come up with this?

"Ceremony and Acrimony." Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Okay, yes, well, maybe it does, meliflously-speaking. It has mouth feel, I'll give you that. But it reeks of academia. Is that the first impression you want to make? 

And subtitling it "Memorials on the Pyre"? That just makes the whole thing sound even more like an essay title you'd be unreasoningly proud of until your tutor trotted out that line about killing your babies.

Whatev. I played through it. Took me, I don't know, fifteen minutes? I wasn't counting. 

I remembered it very well, once it got going. It's the one where you get invited to the inaugural Dragon Bash in Lion's Arch and get to stand there like Magnus's spare prosthetic while the one-eyed pirate introduces all his pirate pals and makes some piratical jokes that are about as funny as you'd expect. 

Then all the minor races or whatever now-unacceptable phrase we used to use back in the Personal Story waddle or stride or slither forward (No, come to think of it, no-one invited the Krait.) to throw their memorials onto the pyres.

I always found that part a little strange. I don't think you get any idea what the "memorials" are. I couldn't see them but then I was having a lot of lag. Gendaran Fields was a slideshow, thanks to everyone standing about pointlessly just outside the gate to LA. and my PC was still struggling to recover for a while even when I got into the instance.

As soon as the pyres catch fire, a whole load of pinky-purple lightning shoots out and zaps everyone. It was quite a shock the first time around but I was expecting it this time. As I said, I could remember nearly everything, much to my surprise. 

At the time it seemed like everyone either got zapped into the air or ran away or fell over but I see from the above shot that really all that happened was everyone stood there gawping as if it was all part of the show. Probably the most realistic thing in the entire episode, then.

After that there's a whole load of yelling, all of it by Ellen Kiel, at this time still some kind of officer in the Lion Guard, I think. I won't spoil the plot and tell you what happens to her later but it was one of my favorite parts of Season One... other than the result. Vote Evon!

Eventually a dolyak turns up, towing what looks like a scout tent fitted with anti-grav. You, the Commander, get drafted for escort duty as the hairy yak plods across the big bridge that goes to... dammit, I should know this... some part of the Old Lions Arch I used to visit all the time... no, it's no good, it's gone.

The main reason I was hyped to play this right away was the rumor I heard that we'd get to see the old Lion's Arch again. Not the original original, the one that was damaged by the Karka Invasion. That's gone for good, I think. This would be the one after that, with the lighthouse still in ruins and some of the wooden temporary bridges still in place.

I never thought we'd get  a free run at the whole city but I did think we might get to see the Lion Fountain again. I wasn't sure about that, either. It got destroyed at least twice and rebuilt at least once but I couldn't tell you without looking it up what state it was in when Dragon Bash came along.

Wouldn't have made any difference if I could because the Captain's Council had the thing replaced by a hologram projector for the festival anyway. I remembered that as soon as I saw the ugly Asuran contraption. (You can see it in the picture at the top of the post, if you really want to.)

You can see from the above map exactly how much and which part of Lion's Arch you get to reminisce over. From the Grand Plaza to Fort Mariner. Fort Mariner! That's the bunny! Geez, my memory...

It's not much but it gives you the sweet taste. It's a tease to be able to see the rest of the city, just out of reach. Clearly they could give us back the whole thing if they wanted. Maybe in another chapter. I seem to remember Dragon Bash itself took place right across the city.

Of course, they'll have to bring back the entire map if they plan on doing Scarlet's attack on Lion's Arch and I don't see how they could conceivably run Season One without it. By then, though, half the city's a smoking ruin so it'll hardly be the same.

I would happily have carried on with the next chapter but Beryl the Dog chose then to go completely crazy and I had to spend half an hour throwing things for her in the garden until she calmed down. It's a puppy thing. I'm working tomorrow so it'll probably be Thursday before I get to carry on.

Here's hoping we get to see more of the Old Lion's Arch, while it's still almost in one piece.

Center Of The Social Scene

There was a post at Massively:OP last week that I confess I didn't read in full. It was something about whether it would be a good idea to replace mmorpg social hubs with a menu system. It was so obviously clickbait I didn't read any more than the couple of sentences that showed up in Feedly but oddly enough I'd been thinking for a while about a post of my own on social hubs.

This is that post, such as it is. It's going to be short, for once.

What started me thinking was the visit I made a week or two back to the Eye of the North in Guild Wars 2. I was there for one reason only: it's where the latest chapter of the Icebrood Saga begins. I think I'm right in saying it's where every chapter of the Icebrood Saga begins. 

Ostensibly that's for lore reasons. Jormag's stronghold is in the far north. The various Charr factions were contending for control of regions to the North of the Eye. Most importantly of all, Aurene has chosen to make it her home.

All of that make sense from a narrative perspective, although I can no longer remember why Aurene picked a frozen cavern to live in. She's a dragon. She can fly. She could live anywhere. Why there? She's not even an ice dragon. I'm sure there was a reason. I've just forgotten what it was.

The real reason we're all stuck with the Eye, however, seems to have a lot more to do with giving people something to do. Anet has form on this sort of thing.

Over the lifetime of the game there has always been a dominant social hub. A place where players gather in numbers to get their chores done and shoot the breeze while they're doing them. It's where the bank and the trading post, the crafting stations and all the important vendors can be found, all within a convenient distance of each other.

Even though GW2 began with five very impressive, fully-functional starting cities, all of which had every facility, from early days players chose the one major non-racial metropolis, Lion's Arch, as their hub of choice. Dedicated WvW players tended to use their own team's citadel and sPvP players had a cramped little mini-hub of their own but L.A. was the undisputed gathering place for just about everyone else.

I honestly have no idea if this is a real thing or just fan service.

Whether by co-incidence or design (it was obviously by design) Lion's Arch was famously disaster-prone. It had already been destroyed and rebuilt between the original game and the sequel and within weeks of launch it was overrun by giant crabs, the karka, who knocked down the lighthouse

After the Karka came Scarlet and her armies. They knocked down the replacement lighthouse and went on to do a much more thorough job of destruction, leaving more than half the city a smouldering ruin.

While repairs went on, which took a couple of years as I recall, the social center of the game moved to the human starting city, Divinity's Reach. Again from memory I seem to remember this beganas a player choice that was swiftly taken up by the developers.

Even though Lion's Arch was eventually rebuilt in a glossy new version that ressembles nothing so much as an out-of-town business park, it never really regained its pre-eminence as a social hub. Partly it was that people didn't really like it as much as the funky pirate port it replaced. Partly it was the way ANet insisted on making Divinity's Reach the fun capital of Tyria.

If you choose to host nearly all your major holiday events in a single city it's going to tip the scales. In lore terms, Queen Jennah has run a gloriously successful hearts and minds campaign to raise her city-state's profile above all her regional competitors. Where the money comes from it's probably better not to ask.

It did seem we were set to keep Divinity's Reach as the game's de facto grand plaza. And then something shifted. Most of the holidays still happen there and every time the calendar rolls around to a new one the place fills up to bursting. When there are no festivities scheduled, though, it's a very different story.

I have to pay to use the gates and now you want me to pay to build them?

All of the racial cities except D.R. are close to dead most of the year round. Rata Sum fills up for Super Adventure Box and there's one festival that happens in Hoelbrak (I forget which one) but other than that you can pretty much count on having the streets to yourself.

And it's much the same in Divinity's Reach now, too. There are more people around the bank and the mystic forge in Lion's Arch again than you'll see in Queen Jennah's city. But you'll probably see even more in the Eye of the North. 

It's a weird place. There's nothing there apart from a plethora of vendors. It's a hole in the ice. What's more, if you want to use anything more than the basic facilities you'll have to pay.

Not in the way you've always had to pay for the elite clubs of Tyria, the luxury lounges that hide behind armed guards and literal velvet ropes or in luxuriant airships that hover high overhead. You can buy tickets for those in the gem shop and sometimes you get them as rewards for anniversaries and events. I tried one once, on a freebie, but it was so cramped and claustrophobic I never went back.

No, the Eye of the North employs a peculiar new form of "content", where the player has to earn credit and spend various currencies to install facilities like banking or crafting for their personal use. It's not a unique idea - I had to run a couple of quests in EverQuest II before I could use the bank in the Bazaar, for example - but I can't recall seeing it implemented as ferociously as this before.

I don't object to it in principle. It's just another of the myriad time-fillers mmorpgs like to throw into the mix to keep people busy. It does make me wonder just what ANet think they're up to, though.

Developers often seem nervous of players gathering in large groups. Over the years I've seen such gatherings moved on many times.

Yak's Bend Citadel - supplying all my banking needs since 2012.

In EverQuest the social hubs used to be North Freeport, Greater Feydark and the East Commons Tunnel, all chosen by players. Then SOE added the Nexus, Shadowhaven and the Bazaar with the Shadows of Luclin expansion and after that Plane of Knowledge in Planes of Power and all activity moved to each of those in turn.

Why devs always seem to feel the need to centralize services in a place of their choice rather than let players find their own gathering spaces I'm not sure but they certainly do. It might have some technical benefit of which we're not aware, I suppose. It might be genuinely intended to improve the overall experience for customers. Or, as I suspect, as with most things, someone just can't leave well enough alone.

Whatever the reason, you can pretty much guarantee that when Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons, finally appears the Eye of the North will become a ghost town. Oh, sorry, ghost cave. Because if there's one thing it's not it's a town.

I suppose there's an outside chance the expansion could use EoN as a hub but it's looking very much as though we'll be done with Jormag before then. The caravan will move on, I'd bet on it.

So I don't think I'm going to bother filling out all those gaps on my service card. I bought the basics - the vendor, the bank, the things I could pay for out of pocket without making a dent in my savings. The rest I can do without.

I'll keep doing my banking in World vs World and my crafting in the Black Citadel. In a game with instant travel it seems pointless to worry about a couple of extra clicks.

I do miss the chatter in the background but it hasn't really been the same since Scarlet came. Lion's Arch chat really was a social scene. Nothing since has come close.

Everyone Loves A Parade : GW2

It wasn't long after I began playing EverQuest, seventeen years ago this November, that I stumbled upon a community-organized event. Not specifically something by or for the then-substantial role-playing community, although there were many of those; something looser, more inclusive, with which anyone could join, in or out of character.

The one I remember  most vividly from those very early days was Talent Contest held on The Stage, an open-air theater on the west side of the much-missed original Freeport. Mrs Bhagpuss and I just happened to be passing by when we heard the event being announced in /ooc so we went to see what was happening.

We ended up sitting on the dusty Freeport ground for a couple of hours, watching mostly inept and amateurish performers take the stage to recite poetry or act out barely comprehensible skits. It felt like being in a true alternate reality. It was magical.

Over the years I've seen countless similar community events, from ad hoc improvs that drew a crowd
to huge, organized extravaganzas that took weeks of planning and were trailed across the interwebs months in advance. There have been mass protests and sit-ins, marches for and against all kinds of causes or outrages, demonstrations and celebrations of every stripe and kind.

The biggest and best known can require detailed rules of conduct for the audience like Weatherstock in LotRO or dire warnings for innocent bystanders like Burn Jita, which even managed to break into the real-world global news agenda, because EVE.

The best community events, though, are always the ones you just happen upon. I was in Citadel sorting through my banks as usual on Sunday when someone in guild chat mentioned they'd just seen a whole load of Quaggans marching through Lions Arch.

Quaggan Parades are a thing in GW2 and have been for a while. If you google you'll find a whole load of links to YouTube videos going back several years. Here's a small and annoying one from 2013 or a somewhat larger, better-organized and certainly better-shot version from the year after.

I can't say I've ever shared the widespread affection for Quaggans. I prefer to make jokes about their culinary potential rather than coo over their supposed cuteness but it can't be denied that to catch a whole gaggle of Quaggies toddling along is a bit of cultural milestone in Tyria. Kind of like naked gnome races in EverQuest and about as ethnically sensitive.

It took a bit of effort to find the amphibian posse. The first instance of LA didn't have them so I whispered my guildmate, partied up with him and zapped across to his map, where I found the Quaggan horde trundling through the east side of the city.

Arriving in a rush I hadn't thought to grab my own Endless Quaggan Tonic from the bank, where it waits, hopelessly, not having seen use for a very long time if, indeed, ever. Even if I'd had one on me I still wouldn't have blended in because I only have the Black and Blue versions and almost every Quaggan in this particular parade was red.

It was a very well-organized event, with two Commanders leading the way and everyone following at walking pace. Large turnout too. There was some mention of  charity involvement but in the fifteen minutes or so that I spent following the Quaggs no-one rattled a bucket or linked to a website so I remain none the wiser on what we were supposedly supporting.

Eventually the conga line arrived at the portal to Lornar's Pass and all the Quaggans passed through into the snowfields beyond, where, in a marvelous piece of theater, most of them turned blue. We all hung around for a few minutes while the organizers started to sort out advanced parties of non-Quaggans to head out along the proposed route and clear it of hostiles.

Around then I made my excuses and left. A parade is one thing but this was starting to look like a recreation of the Long March. How many Quaggans made it and where they eventually made it to is going to have to remain a mystery.

This minor, meaningless, serendipitous happenstance is a very small example of what's spoiled offline RPGs for me forever. No matter how brilliantly written and realized, no matter how finely-tuned the AI, with current technology there is simply no chance that you'll ever experience anything like this in any virtual world that isn't populated at least in part by other people.

Maybe one day we'll have algorithms or even sentient AIs that can provide the same level of found fun-making on the fly although the recent example of No Man's Sky suggests that day could be a long time coming. In the mean time I'll just carry on enjoying every new online gaming day as it comes - freighted with the unexpected courtesy of my fellow players.

Another Chance To See: GW2

When the Mad King burst out of the fountain in the plaza in Lion's Arch for the first time I was concerned that the damage shouldn't be permanent. It took a while but eventually the statue and the dancing fountains were restored to their full glory.

Then Scarlet came along and flattened them again along with the rest of the city. By the time the all-new, pirate-free, slick Vegas Hotel version arrived it seemed people were so glad just to have bridges you didn't fall through and all the services up and running again that no-one really seemed all that bothered about the landmarks that had vanished forever.

Only, as I discovered today, when my original, oldest character idly picked up his Personal Story where he'd left it at The Battle of Claw Island two years ago, Old Lion's Arch hasn't completely vanished after all.

It's only a smallish section but it's the part I remember the best. The Lion Statue is just out of reach behind the warning that you're going to be kicked for leaving the instance but it's close enough to watch the fountains play. The Bank and the Mystic Forge are fully accessible although not in the least part useable. All of Canal Ward is free to explore, at least until you finish the chapter.

Of course the whole place is teeming with Risen (the fancy Tyrian name for undead) and all the citizens are cowering or running or fighting back, but who cares about that when there are photo opportunities to be had? It made me wonder whether there are any other examples of MMO makeovers that didn't 100% take.

There must be plenty. That's the wonder of having static storylines, told in instanced zones, woven through a living, changing online world. It leaves great chunks of the past embedded in the present, unchanging, unable to be changed except at unreasonable effort and expense.

With the stated aim being to move all future content development to Heart of Thorns maps and, by implication, content beyond that to the next expansion and so on, it does make me wonder how the original Personal Story, Lion's Arch itself and, for that matter, the racial home cities are going to fare. Every successful MMO runs into problems keeping old areas relevant but ANet seem to be going out of their way to make things difficult for themselves.

That will all resolve itself in due time no doubt. Meanwhile at least I know that if I ever want a stroll round Ye Olde Lionne's Arche all I have to do is grind through another Personal Story. One day I might even finish one.

She's Filled With Secrets : GW2

Lion's Arch continues to fascinate. There's a tour you can take but with amazing timing I joined the group just as the guide went on her break. She sent us all through the portal to Gendarran Fields and said she'd meet us on the other side. Then she stalked off in the opposite direction.

We all waited by the bridge for a few minutes. Then I took matters into my own hands. I decided to make up a tour of my own. Well, not entirely my own. While I was exploring I also filled out the formal Map Completion requirements. Map completion was always exploring by numbers but with the addition of the onscreen pointers now it's more like one of those "nature trails" beloved of infant school teachers the world over.

If I was any kind of efficient I'd have taken the trouble to pick up a rifle from Turl Sharptooth and potted a few Karka along the way. Mrs Bhagpuss has already bagged Princess for both of her accounts and I haven't even started. Must get on that before I drown in dragonite.

Reason I didn't bother with the rifle this time is that it'll be no trouble to go round again. Any reason to spend more time in this rich and strange city is welcome. There's so much to see and hear, so much to do, so many secrets to discover.

Oh yes, secrets. Lion's Arch is full of them. Sya has one. To be honest, it's not much of a secret, not any more. There's a twelve-page thread about it on the forums for one thing. If you happen on her, where she stands near Fort Mariner, she'll gladly tell you about it, if you ask.

Her secret. Sya used to have another name. She's changed. And more than just her name. She's not someone I know well, more an acquaintance, really. We met at the refugee camp a while back. He was Symon back then.

Wait, she tells it better than I can:

Tyria is becoming a new kind of world. Maybe having a clear and undeniable enemy helps us to focus on what's important. (The elder dragons. Remember? Big, lizardy, lots of teeth...) Makes it easier to understand what matters and what really doesn't. To make choices. Perhaps that's it.

Old Tyria was big on lines you wouldn't want to cross. Charrs and humans, that was one. Remember the big deal when Rytlock and Logan even got as far as not trying to kill each other on sight? That was progress, then. Now we have Jordyn and Leyah and their Asura Guardian, blurring all the lines.

Of course, those two always had vision. Let me remind you what Leyah told me when we bumped into each other a while back. She said "I'm teaching Jordyn how to be a soldier. She's going to be in my warband, and we're gonna be Ash legion, 'cause we're spooky".

I said I didn't think humans could be in a Legion but she already had that all worked out. She told me "They couldn't be before, but me and Jordyn are gonna change that when we're tribunes. Probably in a couple of years or so."

Grammar is not a high priority in the Fahrar curriculum

The way things are going will it even take that long? Look at Snikk and Scratch. Best friends forever, when they should be natural enemies, or at least experimenter and experiment. All over Lion's Arch you can find multi-racial groups of children at play. Human children and charr cubs seem to have a mutual attraction that rivals the bro-bonding of adult Charr and Norn. Or maybe those are Norn children. Whatever. When these kids grow up everything will change.

Already, though, Tyria in general, Lion's Arch in particular, looks to be in the vanguard of social change. Gender reassignment and sexual orientation (Hi, Jory! Hi, Kas!), racial harmony and who knows what else. It's heartening for sure. But let's not paint too bright a picture. There's a worm in the apple.

I ran into Inspector Lizzi on the beach. She'd found something. Something very bad. The twisted corpse of a sylvari on the sand. I stopped to see if I could help. What she told me brought a bitter chill to the bright day.

Blood speaks to blood as the sap runs thin. There will be an accounting.

Right now, Lion's Arch is at peace, or so it seems. Enjoy it while you can. It won't last. It never does. Remember, we all stand together or we fall.

The Best Apples : GW2

This week's update to GW2 has made me think more about what I want from that game in particular and MMORPGs in general than almost anything in a long while. Which is a surprise, because, in all honesty, I wasn't expecting very much.

The whole thing was flagged up as a Big Deal of course, what with the pages and pages of patch notes and the press releases and so on, and we've been so starved of anything you might reasonably call new content for so long that you couldn't help but feel a frisson of anticipation. Even so, my personal hype meter wasn't registering off the scale anything like the way you'd think it might.

Perhaps that's why I'm so impressed. And make no bones about it, that's what I am. Impressed. And pleased. Impressed and pleased. A happy customer. After all the foot-shooting over the pre-purchase announcement ANet needed a win and they got one. With me, anyway.

Feeling blue?

The two big pillars of the patch were the root and branch revamp to traits, skills and the way the entire combat system works and the reveal of the rebuilt Lion's Arch. Either of those would be difficult enough to pull off separately. Plenty of MMOs have run off the road trying to negotiate tricky corners like changing the way people can play their characters or the look and feel of social hubs. Bundling them in together risked chaos and concern but I think they got away with it.

I have a strong antipathy to visual overhauls of familiar places but I especially dread class balancing, combat rewrites and major overhauls of opt-in points systems like traits and skills. Theorycrafting "builds" is not a part of the hobby that particularly interests me. I'm fine with doing it once, the first time, as I level my characters up, but once I have a build that works I'm more than happy to use it, unchanged, for the next decade or so. I am very firmly in the "good enough is good enough" camp when it comes to that kind of busywork.

Consequently I approach all of these Year Zero moments with a mixture of trepidation and annoyance. I would dearly love just to be able to log in and play and pretend these things weren't happening. And, miracle of miracles, this time that's exactly what I was able to do.

Thank you, Jeeves.

Oh, there was one of those warning pop-ups telling me everything had changed but instead of leaving me with the usual bucket-full of returned points and slew of empty slots it directed me to a new build with everything all filled in and ready to go.  All I had to do was give it the once-over to see if I approved my personal dresser's choices, which, for the most part, I did. I didn't even need to do that much, truth be told. I could have just closed the window and left it at that but curiosity got the better of me and I did mouseover a few things. It all looked fine so that was that.

It helps that the new trait and skill windows are a massive visual improvement on the originals. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the last version and if you'd asked me I'd have said it was fine. It was fine. This is better, though. It's sleeker, simpler, clearer and more intuitive. The flow is much easier to follow and changing from one build to another is simple and elegant.

Apart from the slick new interface there's one great and as far as I can see entirely unheralded improvement; we now get a completely separate WvW build in the way we always had a discrete build for PvP. Unless I've misunderstood something, the traits and skills that you set when you're in any Mists map will lock and persist in all WvW maps until you change them again but when you drop back into a PvE map you'll autoswap to your pre-existing PvE build and vice versa.

Hardly shouting the news from the rooftops, are they?

I couldn't quite believe it when I noticed it, which I only did when I spotted the small text gloss as I looked at my build when I was standing around in Citadel. Surely this is the kind of major innovation everyone would be talking about? Apparently not. There it is, though, and it works. I tested it to be sure.

The thing is, had I not spotted it, it wouldn't have mattered much. ArenaNet managed to transition my old builds into the new system with sufficient accuracy that I was able to play several characters without changing anything. That's a real achievement - 10AP to whoever came up with the idea and 50AP to whoever made it work.

What's more, the new system is so user-friendly I feel confident and even inspired to play around with it to see if I can come up with something that suits me even better. My necromancer is going to need some re-writes, for sure - someone seems to have mistaken her for a Minion Master. That cannot stand.

Did they have to import all this sand?

So, that was the Great Trait Revamp out of the way, for now, at least. The aftershocks rumble on and things will take a while to settle but all's good for the time being. ANet's official position on a number of widely reported unexpected outcomes is that :

1) Conditions seem a bit strong
2) World bosses are currently too easy
3) There are some bugged skills and traits
4) There are some overpowered builds

We won’t fix it all at once but these are four large topics we are talking about.

They seem to be "talking" surprisingly fast because fixes are already coming in flurries but my main attention has been elsewhere.

I was planning to write this morning about the changes to Lion's Arch and the way they have caused me to revise and revisit my whole outlook on MMO gaming but it's too big a topic to rush and I'm still mulling it over so this is the short version, which I can sum up like this: background is more important than foreground. 

There's an argument to be had over whether MMORPGs need a "story" at all. Plenty of people feel they do. There are companies, BioWare being only the most obvious example, that have predicated their entire business model on that belief. On the other side are the people who believe just the opposite; that the only stories that matter in MMORPGs are those told by the players themselves. Again there are businesses set up to cater first and foremost to that audience .

Who Is Data Dog? You may well ask.

I'm not happy with either extreme. I feel story both has its place and should know its place. It's not the be-all and end-all but neither is it entirely dispensable. What I consider to be more important than either is milieu. 

My deep and abiding affection for Norrath, Telon and now Tyria doesn't derive from the great adventures I've had there or the friends I've made, immensely important though those are. It derives from the sense that I've lived there. For a place to feel that real other people have to live there too. Players provide a lot of that life but the bedrock of belief comes from the real residents, the NPCs.

There would be, wouldn't there? How did we ever manage before reddit?

Right from when I first began playing Everquest I noticed that the world I'd stepped into was alive. Yes, some shopkeepers and guards might be at their posts twenty-four hours a day but a myriad of other characters were out and about, getting on with what appeared to be lives of their own. 

I spent hours in Freeport and Qeynos following NPCs about, trying to work out what they were up to and usually coming away little the wiser. There seemed to be half a dozen or more NPCs who had business between Qeynos Hills and West Karana. I'd see them jog to the zone line and disappear. They're still at it now, most of them. I saw it on Ragefire only the other day and it still puzzles me. What are they up to and how can I find out?

So am I! I was worried about you guys!

When GW2 began one of the most striking and laudable elements of its rich mix was the wealth and depth of quotidian narrative. For a while it was one of the big talking points: not how we could beat the Elder Dragons but how much fun we were having throwing snowballs and picking apples. 

It wasn't so much the vaunted Dynamic Events, whose promised gleam so quickly tarnished, although they certainly added some new texture we hadn't seen before. It was much more the sheer detail of the everyday lives that carried on around them that drew us in and made us feel part of the world. You could have spent many hours in Metrica Province just trying to unravel the Asuran intrigues going on there, without ever lifting a sword or completing an event. I did. I do. You still can. You should.

#charrpriorities

After a while, and really quite a short while at that, the perspective shifted to Orr and What Was Wrong With It and Was Zhaitan Really Dead and all that big picture stuff. All the little things faded into the background. When the first iteration of the Living Story arrived and we were asked to find lost toys in the snow and light fires to keep refugees from freezing there was something of a backlash. 

From then on Story had to come capitalized, in cut scenes and instances and Mysterious Letters, in sweeping sagas of adventure or family strife or social commentary, with Achievements and Rewards and Titles attached. And yet somehow a space was always found around the edge, out of the spotlight, for a score of smaller stories told in lower case. Every episode of the Living Story scattered a few seeds and there were some who cared more about what might spring up where they landed than they did about the latest installment of the Dragon of the Month club.

They better not have brought their bad luck with them.

It's been a long dry spell. I'd forgotten just how much those small stories meant. Since the patch landed I've spent almost all my gaming hours in the magnificent new Lion's Arch, exploring, watching and listening. From the Consortium's new HQ (just who is their mysterious, never-seen leader?) to the Dodgy House (as it's known Chez Bhagpuss) that only opens its doors at night to the spitting gourds that remind us all of lions lost there's a wonder around every corner.

Snikk and Scratch captured my attention first. I tried to follow them but they use the waypoints. And why not? Who's to stop them? With so many adults killed in the battles with Scarlet and her armies Lion's Arch is awash with unruly children. They go where they please. The lucky ones, like Jordyn and Leyah, have found a measure of safety and security but the rest, who can say? I fear some Fagin is already at work and, Lyssa knows, the Lionguard aren't going to do anything to stop him.

Trust me, Edward's slacking is the least of our worries.

As I said, I'm still pondering all this. It's complex and fascinating and it will take a while to process but the return of Lion's Arch has reminded me of what was missing in my gaming world. It had slipped away almost unnoticed under a mass of dailies and achievements and loot runs. It's the wonder or being somewhere rich and strange, surrounded by mysteries you may never unravel; not the epic legends of dragons and gods but the small mysteries of everyday.

I'd like a whole expansion's worth of this stuff please.

L.A. Noir : GW2

Yes, the new Lion's Arch is very pretty and all. But there's something ugly lurking just below that shiny, new surface.

We sent Agent Princess Doll to investigate.

After all, who could doubt such innocence?

 Such a sweet face?

That delightful giggle?

And anyway, who ever pays attention to minis?

 She was wearing a wire of course.

Professional, as always.

She kept her cool as the deal went down.

Sang quietly to herself.

 Dropped a curtsey once in a while.

Just to make things look good.

And then The Boss had to come in, didn't he?

Stomping all over Princess's fine work with his great, clawed size 19s.

How he imagined he wouldn't be recognized... well, let's just say he's not the sharpest card in the Pact.

Hard to imagine how Princess puts up with him really.

Let's just hope he keeps his fat, furry face out of the investigation next time, when we go after the big boys.

Ah, who am I kidding? He's never gonna learn.