Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

A while back, Tipa posted one of her occasional overviews of the State of the Genre as revealed by Google Trends, in which it becomes immediately obvious that the mmorpgs people are asking Google for information about tend to be... how to put it politely... really old. 

More recently, James Crosby, aka MMOFolklorist, attempted to explain the "MMO Hype Vacuum", the sense he has that no-one really gets revved up by the prospect of a new mmorpg the way they used to.  In another post, he observes that Tarisland,  Tencent's upcoming riposte to World of Warcraft's departure from the Chinese market, potentially one of the biggest global mmorpg launches of recent years, left him hovering "somewhere between apathy and despair".

In the same post, James gives his thoughts on the imminent closedown of Sword of Legend Online, an mmorpg that only launched a couple of years ago. He also mentions Elyon, which launched around the same time and has already drifted off into the sunset. He concludes that, while they "both looked pretty, and they played at least as solidly as any other medium-profile entry into the genre", that simply wasn't enough, the implication being that mmorpg gamers these days demand more of their games than competence, professionalism, sound gameplay and good graphics.

The implication is that every game should be not just good but great. Otherwise they're doomed to fail. 

This morning I read a post by Mailvatar that mentions in passing a sentiment I've heard numerous times, namely a sense of disappointment in what were probably the two most commercially sucessful mmorpg launches of recent times, New World and Lost Ark. Both games very definitely enjoyed a great deal of hype in the run-up to launch, being received almost ecstatically at first, before enthusiasm bled out just as quickly.

Unlike SOLO and Elyon, New World and Lost Ark carry on but with a tiny fraction of their original audience. According to the Steam Charts, in this case an atypically accurate measure, New World has lost 98% of the players it had at peak; Lost Ark has done a little better, only losing 97%.

In terms of news coverage, New World far outranks Lost Ark, about which I struggle to remember when I last heard anything. By contrast, New World continues to feature regularly in multiple news feeds I follow, including some that aren't primarlily gaming-focused. 

Tipa's tally puts both in the same Tier 3 bucket alongside Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Citizen, suggesting those games might also have audiences of similar size. As we know, guessing the population of almost all mmorpgs is a mug's game, so I'm not going to draw any hasty conclusions.

My concern here isn't, for once, the prospective health of the individual games or the genre as a whole as evidenced by the number of people who log in to play each day. It's more of an existential question: if games as relatively well-made and well-received as New World, Lost Ark, Sword of Legends Online or Elyon either aren't good enough to attract an audience to begin with, or to hold the attention of more than a tiny fraction of the audience that they do manage to find, just what is going to be enough to satisfy the current mmorpg player?

Tarisland, when it appears, which would seem to be likely to be sooner rather than later, may indeed turn out to be a complete flop in the West. Certainly, if the quality of the translation evident in the trailers is anything to go by, Tencent don't seem particularly bothered about spending much time or effort on localization. 

Would such a commercial failure tell us more about the cynical way the game might have been conceived and developed or would it just be more evidence to support something we may already suspect about the expectations of the audience, namely that nothing is ever going to be good enough?

As Tipa says about WoW, FFXIV and Old School Runescape, the top three mmorpgs on Google Trends by a very large margin, "These three MMOs are far and away the most popular MMOs in the USA, according to Google Trends, and they have been that way for years. Sometimes one is on top, sometimes another one is, but it’s always one of these three."

Stepping past the always-intriguing question of why this part of the blogosphere barely nods towards any version of Runescape, it's hard to argue against the idea that the mmorpg market, at least in the west, is all but impenetrable to new entrants. New World and Lost Ark have done very well to make it to Tier 3 alongside all those decade old games (And that decade-old alpha.). The massive hype they enjoyed in the build up to launch didn't boost them to glory but I guess we have to acknowledge that still being here two years later is some kind of success in itself.

As for games like Sword of Legends Online and Elyon, widely accepted at launch as being not at all bad and pretty solid for new releases, what chance did they have? I remember there was a glut of new releases around then, including Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Crowfall, Bless Unleashed and more. Just how many players for these types of games are there meant to be, anyway, that half a dozen or more can hope to release in close proximity and still prosper?

This summer doesn't appear to have anything like that crush of new launches but there are a bunch of big titles there or thereabouts on the horizon, from big hitters like Blue Protocol, Throne and Liberty and the aforementioned Tarisland to plucky indies like Palia and Wayfinder. I'm looking forward to trying all of them but do I honestly expect to settle down and play even one for any meanigful amount of time?

In the post I linked earlier, Mailvatar talks very positively about Black Desert Online and Genshin Impact, two games I played and enjoyed when they came out and often think about playing again. They're both successful games by most metrics - they're still running, they get new content regularly, people still talk about them. 

When they were new, though, everyone was talking about them; everyone tried them. How many of those people are still, like Malvatar, playing and enjoying them? How many bloggers are writing about them?

More than play or write about Swords of Legend Online now, that's for sure. More than played or wrote about Elyon before it closed down. More than play or write about PSO2:NG (Although there are some very interesting developments there that deserve attention.)

I feel slightly uncomfortable about the fate of SOLO. The developers issued a very forthright statement outlining the reason the game failed, explaining almost wistfully "The MMO market is fiercely competitive, and despite our best efforts – including the release of the 2.0 update, making the game free to play, as well as further content patches along the way – we’ve found that the player numbers simply aren’t strong enough to sustain the game".

I liked the game quite a lot but I didn't manage to find time to play it even after it went free-to-play. I wanted to. I meant to. I just kept putting it off, thinking I'd get to it one day, when I had time. That day never came and now the game is going away. 

It's not a great loss. If I'd really wanted to play it,I'd have found the time. The thing that makes me uncomfortable isn't any sense of guilt over not supporting a decent mmorpg. It's the worry that no new mmorpg is ever going to be special enough to prise me away from the games I already know and love. Or, indeed, the ones I quite like and am used to.

Worse, I fear the same may be true for a lot more potential players than just myself. I wonder whether all these developers are fooling themselves, believing the audience they're hoping to attract even exists. With the exception of FFXIV, itself an aging game now, how many mmorpgs have successfully been able to poach players from existing titles in the last few years, let alone attract new players to the genre and keep them? ESO, maybe, but that game had a pre-existing single-player audience to draw on.

It would make me wonder why so many developers keep on making mmorpgs except I know why they do it: it's because mmorpgs take upwards of five years to develop and keep a lot of people in work. Provided you can keep raising the investment capital, making mmos is a sustainable business. Running mmorpgs as a live service for years after launch? That's a much bigger gamble.

Nosy Gamer, in his recent review of the Uprising expansion for EVE Online, rates it a success, since it at least stemmed the flow of players leaving the twenty year-old game, but concludes by saying "at the beginning of EVE Online's third decade of operation, staunching the bleeding is not enough. CCP needs to build on the success of Uprising and attempt to grow the game once again". Is this a reasonable - or even a rational - expectation?

Maybe. Although most indicators would seem to suggest the best an mmorpg can hope for is a long, slow decline, populations do ebb and flow. Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars 2 reported spurts of growth recently and Runescape in its various iterations seems to operate entirely by rules of its own, so it's not impossible to imagine player numbers going up in any established title - for a while.

To expect any of them to stay up or even to keep adding new players at a sufficient rate to replace attrition seems a big ask, all the same. And if they were able to manage it, what would it say for the prospects of all those new games coming down the assembly line? While it's not a zero sum game, neither is there an unlimited pool of mmorpg players out there, ready and willing to populate the starting, mid-level and end game zones of every half-decent mmo willing to accomodate them.

As the SOLO devs said, "The MMO market is fiercely competitive". Too competetive for most. What they didn't say but probably were thinking is that the MMO player is too fussy, too fickle and just plain too hard to please. Also spoiled for choice and pampered like some indigent, overgrown princeling, surrounded by barely-touched delicacies and still calling for more.

I wish now I'd played more Swords of Legend Online but, with the best will in the world, I can't play them all. No-one can. And if you're talking about playing them meaningfully, no-one can play more than a handful.  

These days, competition isn't even limited to other mmorpgs, either. Belghast, describing what he calls the "live service dystopia", suggests "a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.". It used to be commonly believed that playing an mmorpg meant you'd not have time for other mmorpgs but now it looks like playing any online game means you won't have time for any other online game, not when those games all have Battle Passes and Seasons and DLC and Expansions that require your full attention, all year round.

None of which is going to stop people making new mmorpgs, if only for the reason that investors and players still seem more than happy to keep throwing money at them - until they actually launch. It's only when the time comes to play the damn things that everyone suddenly loses interest. 

Designing and developing mmorpgs may very well be a sustainable business model. Star Citizen, Ashes of Creation, Pantheon or Camelot Unchained would certainly seem to support that thesis. Maintaining, running, even playing mmorpgs, though? Is there a future in any of that? 

For anyone?

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet...

This was going to be a post about hunting rabbits. It kind of still is. Only not really.

When Wilhelm posted yesterday about having drifted away from Lost Ark, even though he didn't think it was a bad game, just not really the right game for him at the moment, it made me think "Oh, yeah! Lost Ark! That's a game that exists!"

Then it reminded me of another game I was playing a while ago, namely New World, and I remembered I'd been enjoying it quite a lot, so I logged in and played that for a while.  I might get back to Lost Ark some time. I did say I was going to get that boat and I still expect to, too. Not right this minute, though.

When I logged into New World I was confronted with the screen above. I'd completely forgotten the rabbit event. The rewards are hardly must-haves - well, the storage chest would be if it wasn't ultra-rare - but I fancied having a bash at some bunnies anyway. Get a post out of it, maybe.

And I might have, too, if I could have found any. Granted I got distracted immediately by the fact that the Main Quest I had in my journal had vanished, which I thought (Hoped!) might mean it had been given a solo option like some other Expedition steps on the MQ. I went all the way to the questgiver to see if there was a choice now but he just tried to give me the same old one that had gone from my journal.

I declined it, so as of now I have no Main Quest at all. I'm only just shy of one level from the cap, so I don't imagine it matters.It's not like I need the xp and any rewards are going to be way below my level. I suppose I ought to get the upgraded Azoth staff but then it's not like I ever use the one I have...

I ran around doing a bunch more quests to level up and if the puppy hadn't decided to go completely nuts I might well have hit fifty-nine last night. As it is I still have about a level and a quarter to go before my leveling journey ends.

Towards the end of the evening I remembered the rabbits I was supposed to be hunting and went looking for some. I hadn't happened on any by chance and things didn't go any better when I was trying. Usually they're all over the place so either they're hiding or they're being killed as soon as they appear.

That's not impossible because the other thing I discovered when I logged in was that my server has finally been merged. We've been the host server for several previous merges and it never seemed to make any noticeable difference but now we've been amalgamated with another server as the junior partner and it's like launch week all over again.

Seriously, I haven't seen crowds like this for months. There were people everywhere, chat was buzzing and at one point I even ran across a bunch of people using the game's inbuilt, open voice chat, something I have never seen, or I should say heard, before.

I didn't even realise New World had open voice, let alone that it was on by default. I don't know who thought that was a good idea. Mine stayed on precisely as long as it took for me to find out where the off switch was.

I'm in two minds about the larger population. It certainly helps the economy but I was rather enjoying New World as a sparsely populated wilderness. It seemed somehow more in keeping with the milieu than the current party atmosphere. It was late evening on a holiday, though. I imagine it'll be quiet enough mid-morning on a weekday.

While I had Steam open I thought I'd check the comparative popularity of Amazon's two mmorpgs. New World isn't doing badly by normal standards. It's #35 as I write this, putting it in amongst popular titles like No Man's Sky, Terraria, 7 Days to Die and Valheim. Using the old rule of three, a game with a concurrency of 30-35k  probably has about a hundred thousand players, which is very decent for an average mmorpg.

Lost Ark, however, is #3 on Steam's charts, with a concurrency, as I write, of 458k. Of course, Lost Ark is free to play, so you can't really nail down a number for who "could" be playing. I'm not sure the old rule of three really applies. Even so, it's fair to assume if nearly half a million people are playing Lost Ark all at once, a lot of different people will be playing it earlier or later the same day.

I still like New World a lot more than Lost Ark, even if it's not the popular kid in the Amazon playground any more. It's just really good fun to run around in and the combat is massively more appealing to me, especially when I'm fighting things much lower level than I am and they're still giving me very good xp. Not like the miserly 2xp per kill Lost Ark doles out. That makes me begrudge every mob I have to kill beyond the bare minimum to get a quest done, whereas in New World I run around picking fights all over the place for the sheer hell of it.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble now and I've already padded this out way more than I ever thought I'd be able to get away with. Just wait until I actually find some rabbits to kill! The posting then will be epic!

Short Stories

For the first time in several weeks, I did actually play some Lost Ark last night. Played as opposed to just logged in to collect free gifts, that is.

"Playing" Lost Ark is a somewhat nebulous concept, something that's been a warm topic of late around this part of the blogosphere. I've commented repeatedly that I really don't understand what sort of a game Lost Ark is meant to be but now I'm starting to get the impression not many other people do, either. 

If I'm ever going to find out, I guess I'll have to rely on other people's reports. My own experience is too limited to make even an educated guess. Steam tells me I've racked up twenty-seven hours so far but that's only taken me as far as Level 34. By the measure of most mmorpgs, I might as well still be in the starting zone.

The problem is, most everything I read other bloggers saying about the game just confuses me even more. Apparently everyone finds the levelling tedious, no-one rates the storyline and the side-quests barely even qualify as filler. The only thing that carries people through all of that is the prospect of some kind of golden sunlit uplands at endgame and the fact that the combat is fun.

There was a time when people seemed to be praising Lost Ark for the wide range of non-combat activities and the breadth of horizontal progression it offered but none of that gets much of a mention any more. All the talk is of how long it might take to get to that fabled endgame and whether it will be worth all the time and effort when they do.

Mailvaltar, Naithin and Wilhelm have all posted about some or all of the issues above. Most of the other people who were talking about the game don't mention it at all. 

Naithin has a very interesting and revealing graph comparing the progress of Lost Ark and New World as represented by Steam's concurrency data. It's not a pretty picture if you're an Amazon Games exec. No wonder vice president Mike Frazzini is stepping down. 

Of all the bloggers I read who've written about the game, the only one who actually knows what the endgame is like from personal experience is Naithin. Even as an advocate for the game, he doesn't make it sound very much fun. 

Mailvaltar, who posted about his own uncertainty about the game, popped into Naithin's comment thread looking for reassurance. I don't think he got much. Naithin described Chaos Dungeons as "braindead" and said that, although they're available for groups, "you essentially have to solo" if you're trying to get the most out of them. Even the better Guardian raids and Abyss dungeons, which he did think were fun for groups, Naithin caveated by saying "you will typically only have one guardian raid and one set of abyss dungeons relevant to where you are and that’s it."

Wilhelm, meanwhile, gave us another very funny Carbot Animation ragging on the relentless questing that precedes any of the endgame content. It got a recognition laugh out of me even though it doesn't really reflect my own experience all that closely.

The thing is, the questing everyone else hates is probably the thing I like best about Lost Ark. I don't hammer the "G" key to get through the text as fast as possible. I think I can say with almost no exaggeration at all that I've listened to every word of spoken dialog and read every word of written quest text I've seen. Maybe that's why it's taken me twenty-seven hours to get to level thirty-four.

I quite like the questing in Lost Ark. I find it intriguingly abstract. It's as though someone decided to break traditional mmorpg questing down to its basic building blocks and then line them up in the most linear way possible. 

Every side quest has a plot but it's a plot that's stated, executed and concluded in a matter of moments. A guard will want to give flowers to a girl  he likes. He'll tell you he likes a girl and he'd like to give her flowers. He'll ask you to get the flowers and give them to the girl. 

The flowers will be ten seconds away from where you met him. You'll click the flowers and pick them up then you'll trot over to the girl. She'll be ten seconds from the guard in another direction. You'll give her the flowers. She'll tell you she likes the guard or doesn't like the guard. The quest will either end or point you to another NPC, where the cycle will begin over again.

Most of the side quests are like that. I think it works quite well. I definitely prefer it to the long drawn-out versions with more travelling over greater distances that are the norm in so many mmorpgs. I also find, over time, it builds up quite a convincing picture of the way these people live. I suspect I may be bringing some of thiin myself, rather than finding it already there but I also wonder whether there's not some kind of sophisticated, intentional, accretive storytelling going on. I like to think there is. 

The main quest differs mostly in that some characters make much longer, much more dramatic speeches and all the main and supporting characters constantly use you, the player-character, as an unpaid messenger service. I find that strangely enjoyable but other people seem to find it at best ridiculous, if not downright insulting.

Conversely, people who aren't me insist the game's saving grace is that the combat is good. I still don't get why. I find the combat every bit as dull as people keep implying I ought to find the questing. 

When there isn't much fighting to do, though, I can occasionally almost convince myself I like Lost Ark. Last night I played for over an hour, levelled from 32 to 34, did a lot of the kind of quests I just described, barely fought anything at all and I would rate it as one of the most enjoyable sessions I've had in the game. Jogging from NPC to NPC, hearing what they have to say, occasionally picking up an object and putting it down somewhere else is a very pleasant, relaxing way to unwind after a long work day.

It probably helps that my preferred genres outside of mmorpgs these days are point and click adventures and visual novels. I'll be honest. Lost Ark would make a poor showing against even a mediocre entry from either of those categories. I'm certainly not saying the stories are page-turners. The mechanics, though, are extremely similar and the stories aren't terrible. They're bland and conventional but as I suggested earlier, thre is a cumulative effect that weighs on the mind after a while. And some of them are quite funny.

If, that is, you read the text. Obviously, if all people are doing is hitting the G for "Get on with it!" key as fast as possible, any literary merit the quests might have is going to be moot.

If you factor in the off the hook levels of weirdness as evidenced in my recent post about cat cosplay, it really is extremely hard to work out just who Lost Ark is for. It seems as if all the parts are working in opposition rather than harmony and as Naithin's graph so ably demonstrates, the modern mmo player is hardly known for patience or longsightedness.

It's going to be interesting to see whether Lost Ark does indeed drift down over the course of several months to finish up bumping along the bottom of Steam's concurrency charts the way New World has. If that is indeed what happens, I think there will be as many questions to be asked about the attitudes and expectations of the people who choose to jump on these gaming bandwagons as there are of those who make them.

If Lost Ark and New World end up being judged failures, what exactly are we calling a hit these days?

Feline Weird In Lost Ark

Here are some screenshots. I think they sum up just what a freakishly weird game Lost Ark is better than anything I could put into in words.

A six-foot tall, black and white cat, an unnerving, yellow sparkle in its eye, a gold bell on its crimson collar, sprawls in the middle of a cobbled city street. The cat leans back in a disturbingly human pose. Beside the cat sits a large, white rabbit. Strapped to the bunny's back are a pair of ornate leather panniers and a scroll case as though it were a beast of burden. Behind the unnatural pair an imposing, high-renaissance ceremonial arch reaches towards the blue sky. Heroic statues salute. Guards stand at attention. Children with wooden swords play at being soldiers. No-one seems to find anything about the scene remotely unusual.

Now the cat is standing up. From somewhere (Who knows where?) it has produced a pistol. It stands in a dueling pose, the gun in front of the eye that doesn't sparkle, the other arm (Hand? Paw?) concealed behind its back. The rabbit, unconcerned, seems to be playing with something on the ground.

The pistol vanishes. The cat begins to dance. The cat has moves. The cat wants you to know about them. The rabbit pays the cat no mind. Neither does anyone else.

As if concealing a weapon while naked isn't enough, the cat brings out a six-foot hoverboard. From where, again, who can say? The board, vividly illustrated, is decorated with, among other things, an embossed head. Whose head? Of what creature? That, at least, can be explained.

Although there is no photographic evidence to prove it, that is the image of a known associate of the cat, a small, teardrop-shaped entity with appendages that could as easily be leaves as ears. The cat has been seen walking the streets with the leaf-headed creature by its side. Where the creature is now is as much a mystery as where the hoverboard came from.

The cat, justifiably proud of its ability to dance while standing on a hoverboard, performs for its own amusement. No-one watches. No-one cares. The city has only recently avoided being destroyed by fire during a demonic invasion. The entire nation is locked in an existential struggle with the forces of darkness. A cat on a hoverboard doesn't merit a second glance.

As I said in a comment to Aywren, who posted pictures of her character in Lost Ark, dressed as a mouse "I was already having trouble trying to work out just what sort of game Lost Ark was trying to be but now these costumes are part of it I think I’ll just give up trying. Clearly, whoever’s behind it just doesn’t care, so why should we?"

Mixed Messages

 

In the vague hope of finding something to post about tonight I logged into Steam to see if anything had happened in Lost Ark since last I looked. I thought I might even play a little, do some more levelling there. It is on my To Do list, although I'd have to say it's slipping further down every day.

The first thing I saw was an absolutely massive "Message from the Team".  It's a few days old and it's been reported elsewhere so I don't propose to go into it in the way I did with the Guild Wars 2 Studio Update yesterday. If I'm honest, my main reason for not digging into the detail isn't so much that it's old news as that I didn't understand most of it.

I had a quick scan through the whole thing, then I went back and read it all more carefully. When I'd finished I knew two things: Amazon and Smilegate are giving us a big present and I have absolutely no clue what the hell Lost Ark is supposed to be.

A large chunk of the Message revolves around two things: end game content and "honing". It seems quite a few of us have been slacking and haven't gotten to the endgame as quickly as expected. Instead, we've been "progressing at your own speed and enjoying horizontal content such as exploration, collectibles, quests, and more." 

Don't worry, though. There won't be detention. Apparently it's fine because "Our goal has always been for players to progress at whatever pace they see fit". I have to say that's jolly decent of them. 

I could go on at considerable length about the implications of this. God knows, whoever wrote the Message certainly did. There are reams and reams of apologetic explanations, excuses, justifications and elaborations on how, why and when endgame content should have, will be or has been added to the game. My main problem wasn't with the whys and wherfores so much as the whats.

I don't get what the endgame in this context is. By that, I don't mean I don't understand it intellectually. That's straightforward enough. I mean, as the hippies used to say, I don't grok the endgame, man! 

It's not just Lost Ark, either. There seem to be a bunch of mmorpgs these days where the whole point and purpose of playing seems to be to spend inordinate amounts of time repeating harder and harder versions of the same content so as to get gear that allows you to grind harder and harder versions of the same content. Why would you want to? That's the part I don't get.

Most mmorpgs do it to some extent, although the ones I like better hide it more convincingly. I generally manage to ignore it quite effectively in those games. The more recent trend, which makes it harder to ignore even at a more casual, non-endgame-focused level, involves some variant of the process that Lost Ark calls "honing".

I am not going to pretend to understand what "honing" is beyond the absolute basics. I'm fairly confident, however, that it's one of those systems where you grind or buy materials that you use to try to systematically improve the quality or rating of your gear. All these systems have certain things in common: ever-escalating costs, heavy reliance on RNG and some means of spending real money to avoid the worst of the pain.

As the Message poetically puts it, "We know that for every triumphant yell as a player succeeds a low percentage hone, there are other players frustrated with their attempt failing, leaving them without enough materials to try again." In many games that's exactly the intention. It's why other players' successes are broadcast to the general population, so as to create a sense that other people are succeeding where you failed. That's how you get cash shop sales. 

For various reasons, not least a glut of bots drivng material prices through the roof, Amazon/Smilegate would like to assure players that honing isn't always going to be a completely miserable experience so they're "supplying more progression materials for players to earn through fun in-game events" and "injecting more gold into the mid to end-game" as well as, naturally, "continuing our hard stance against bots."

Which is all very nice, only from my point of view it doesn't really address the central issue, which is who thought "honing" or any of the myriad systems across the genre it replicates were ever likely to be fun in the first place? I know everyone uses them. There's not really any choice if you want to keep progressing through the "vertical" content. The question is, does anyone enjoy it?

Yes. I did. The first time. My initiation into the eternal upgrade path by way of mat grinding and random number generation came courtesy of one of my favorite mmorpgs of all time, City of Steam. 

That game was revamped several times over a number of years, something I recorded here on this blog as it happened. One of the later iterations, after CoS became a wholly Chinese-operated enterprise, involved a good deal of "honing" or whatever term was in use back then. I didn't even notice it at first. It wasn't until the game was under sentence of execution and I was playing as hard and fast as I could to see as much of the content before the servers went dark that I began to push the gear upgrade boulder up the hill in earnest.

The surprise to me was that I enjoyed it. It helped enormously that it was a very simple system and the materials needed were both generously available through login rewards and obtainable directly from normal gameplay. Even then, I could never get enough but also I never managed to get far enough up the ladder to hit the really steep part of the curve. The game closed down before I even got close.

After that I ran into the same kind of mechanics in Blade and Soul and Black Desert, just to name a couple of games where I made at least a token effort to improve my gear. Once again, I found it amusing enough so long as it cost me nothing and I mostly succeeded. As soon as it began to feel either expensive or annoying, however, my response wasn't to throw money at the problem - it was to stop doing it altogether.

All those games and many others puzzle me greatly. They all appear to have lots and lots of really enjoyable content, mostly the "horizontal" stuff, aka everything in the game that's actually fun to do for its own sake. More often than not, that's the part of the game everyone gets to enjoy for free.

The part of the game that's supposed to be the most appealing, the mythical "endgame", that gets tucked behind a virtual paywall by way of "gameplay" so frustrating and unnerving people are more than willing to pay to avoid having to do it at all - or at least to make it less likely to blow up in their faces when they do.

I'm really not at all surprised Lost Ark players have been slacking off, doing all that pesky exploring and collecting and questing. Can you blame them?

What does surprise me is the nature of some the presents we're getting to commemorate the Western launch of the game. It's almost all fun fluff stuff and I find it really hard to equate with what sounds like an incredibly hardcore endgame. There are pets and mounts, a big globe thingy, appearance change tickets and songs to play on your jukebox "when Jukebox content is released in the future."

Most surprising of all is the "New Animal Skin Collection Chest". From the image provided, reproduced at the top of this post, it seems we're going to be able to dress our characters in a variety of furry onesies. I can't wait!

Actually, I couldn't wait. I logged in to get mine right away, only it wasn't there. Too soon. Apparently we get the whole  "Thank You" pack "the week of March 21, after our weekly update and maintenance". It's the 23rd today but I guess we haven't been updated and maintained just yet.

I did still get a present for logging in, an entirely unexpected one. I'd already written off the current event, the Arkesia Grand Prix, which runs until April 14 because I'd read that you need a character with a minimum level of fifty to take part. And that's true but what I hadn't appreciated is that you also get a hefty chest full of the event currency just for logging in. 

If there's any kind of level restriction attached to that then my character exceeds it. I opened my chest and found three thousand Arkesia Coins inside. Of course, I had no idea if that was a fortune or a pittance. 

The tooltip suggested I find the Event Exchange Merchant if I wanted to spend them but nothing told me where that person might be. Fortunately, Lost Ark being very popular right now, I had no trouble looking it up. I found my answer here but there's a much more comprehensive guide to the whole affair here.

Having looked at what I can afford, it seems three thousand coins is a decent chunk of pocket change. There's nothing I couldn't buy, although a lot of the items are consumables you'd probably want to buy in bulk. I can get the hat, which is what matters!

None of which actually makes me want to play the game. Log in and get free stuff, sure, I'll keep doing that. Try it on, strut around town posing, take selfies, write posts about it? Yep, all of those. Other than that, I'm not sure I see the point. But then, I never did.

I'm still going to get a boat but only because I said I would. As for honing and the endgame, whatever it is, I think I'll carry on with the horizontal progression if that's okay with you, Amazon and Smilegate. I mean, you did say you were fine with us progressing at whatever pace we see fit, right? 

I just think maybe you didn't realize just how lazy some people can be.

Chuchu! Egg Coming Through!

It took me a few months but I am now pretty much in the habit of checking my free games from Amazon Prime at the start of every month. As a result, I am starting to build up the kind of backlog everyone else is always complaining about. My days of being able to post smugly about how "I simply don't do backlogs, dahling!" are firmly in the past.

This month I even went so far as to play one of the games I'd claimed, the awkwardly-named SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's one of those card-based battlers I keep reading about on various blogs. It has a peculiar hybrid steampunk/medieaval setting, charming graphics, likeable characters, a moderately amusing plot and at first it was fun for a short session at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately, it's fast becoming too tough for me on Normal difficulty, so its time as charming little divertissement may well be about to come to an end. I could reset the difficulty to Easy or I could go back and replay earlier chapters to overlevel the content but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently commited to do either.

Although I've been able to keep up with the flow of new, free games, I've done a much worse job with the trickle of free stuff for games I already play. Every month sees Amazon toss out a slew of freebies for dozens of titles like a befuddled old lady casting handfuls of grain to a clutch of club-footed street pigeons. Like that familiar scenario, it's not necessarily something you'd want to encourage but when it's games you play...

The thing that got me to pay attention this month was the unexpected appearance of Guild Wars 2 in the list. I can't recall the game ever having appeared in the hand-out line before but this month you can pick up a pack of five Heroic Boosters in honor of the release of End of Dragons. Boosters aren't the most exciting of gifts but I have to say they will come in very handy in my quest for the large amount of experience required to complete the numerous Masteries I'm working on.

I can't see the expiry date for the offer on my account any more but I think it runs until the end of the month. I imagine most of them do. I note with interest that the Amazon Games/GW2 page has two more "Coming Soon" panels currently greyed out. I look forward with interest to finding out what we're getting next month and the month after that.

There are giveaways for no fewer than forty-eight different games in the March offer. There are several mmos, among them RuneScape, World of Warships, Black Desert Mobile, Lineage II, and Warframe. I don't play any of those so I let them pass but as well as GW2 I spotted three mmorpgs I do play, as well as another for which the freebie seemed too desirable to ignore.

When I briefly dabbled with Roblox a few weeks ago, I mentioned how having nothing but the basic, default avatar made me feel more conspicuous than if I was togged up in fancy-dress. Now, next time some enterprising hyperpopstar chooses Roblox as the venue for their first, faltering step into the metaverse, I will at least be able to greet them wearing a ridiculous "Mardi Gras Steampunk Hat."

None of the updates to New World since the rather good Winter Convergence festival have piqued my interest sufficiently to get me to log in but give me a free outfit and I'm there. The game has an annoying appearance system in that good-looking gear drops all the time but hardly any of it can be converted to a look you can keep.

Full outfits, however, the ones Amazon would like you to buy from the cash shop, are permanent and can be easily and conveniently applied from the paper doll - once you've navigated the arcane combination of mouse-clicks and menus required, that is.

They're not at all bad, either. When I logged her in, my character was
wearing the very cosy, fur-trimmed greatcoat from the winter event and most impressive it looked, too. Now she looks equally warm but considerably less formal in her free Cloaked Charlatan get-up, which from the front looks uncannily like an anorak I had when I was about nine years old.

From the back it looks rather different, with a knee-length, hooded green cloak that Robin Hood would have admired. The cloak moves curiously convincingly as she runs, occasionally folding into itself as though caught by a fierce gust of wind. It goes rather nicely with her shield, too.

For Lost Ark, another game whose pull I'd been managing to resist without too much trouble until I saw I could get free stuff, the lure is a pet. We'd all log in for a free pet, right? There's also five days of Crystaline Aura, the premium membership buff, and some Amethyst Shards, a currency you can spend at an NPC, always assuming you can find him.

I already had some Amethyst Shards. Apparently you get five hundred just for joining or forming a guild, something I did a while ago. I generally make a branch of the guild Mrs Bhagpuss and I created way back in EverQuest II over a decade ago in every game that will allow one person to be their own club. 

Lost Ark was happy for me to set up my shingle alone although the extremely restrictive naming rules meant I had to go with a severely truncated version of the name. Given how easy it was, not to mention that there's a tutorial quest that points you to it, I was very surprised to see that the Steam achievement I got says only just over a fifth of players have joined a guild at all.

The free pet turned out to be an egg on legs. Very small, spindly legs. I'm used to eggs following me around from EQII but they're not usually quite as creepy as these. They come in a choice of colors, each of which denotes a different buff or resistance. Since I had no clear idea what those did, I just went with the color I liked best, blue.

The eggs all have names - Bouncy, Chuchu and Bonbon. My pet blue egg is called Chuchu. I swear, sometimes I can't believe I'm typing this stuff. I got him (Her? Them? It?) out and ran around town for a while taking selfies then I put him away and got my trusty bunny back. The bunny, which as far as I know everyone gets as part of the tutorial, has all the same abilities as the egg but also a 10% crit bonus so the free gift is worth about what you paid for it, I guess.

The last Amazon freebie I claimed was for Blade and Soul. It looks to be the least interesting of them all, a collection of various upgrade materials used in some of the game's abstruse systems and I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't that I've been itching to get back to B&S for a while, anyway. I don't know why but there it is. 

I'd include a picture of what I got there  only I haven't been able to get my hands on it yet. When I went to log in I realised there had been some big shift a while back, when the game converted to Unreal Engine 4. It's a 41GB download and it's been grumbling away behind the scenes the whole time I've been writing this post. So far it's managed just over 17GB so it's got a while to go yet.

What I take from this experience is that giving away free stuff is a very effective way to get people to look at your game again but not necessarily to get them to stick around. It took me longer to claim the freebies, patch the games and collect my gifts than I spent doing anything in the games themselves. In fact, all I did was take screenshots and I wouldn't even have done that if I hadn't been planning to blog about it.

I very much doubt if any of this is going to make me more likely to play any of the games. My overiding feeling on logging back in to both New World and Lost Ark was "I can't remember what I was doing last time and I really don't feel like trying." I think there's a better chance I'll play a bit of Blade and Soul because I already felt like going back to that one and yet it's the one game of the five for which I wouldn't have bothered to log in to get the free gifts at all.

It goes to show. You bribe people all you want and they'll happily let you - you just can't trust them to stay bribed.

Waiting For The End

The third expansion for Guild Wars 2, End of Dragons, is due to drop sometime today. Actually, now I come to think about it, it might be here already. I haven't tried logging in to find out. I suppose I should do that, just to be sure.

Yeah, nope. Back to what I was saying.

It's difficult to say how much of an impact on my gaming priorities EoD might have. In spite of all the negative things I say about it, GW2 is still the mmorpg I play most often. Every day, in fact. It holds its place mostly by being an astonishingly comfortable gaming experience, particularly in a purely physical sense. 

I don't believe I've ever played any game where the basic act of controlling the characters felt so autonomic. There's so little distance between thought and action as my GW2 characters move around their world. The facility of it, alone, makes it my game of choice whenever I just want to play without having to think about playing.

Contrast that with Chimeraland or Lost Ark, where I regularly have to look at the keyboard to see where my fingers ought to be. No matter how much I may enjoy those games, there's always a meniscus between my world and theirs, one which doesn't seem to exist in other games, not only GW2 but also EverQuest, EverQuest II, World of Warcraft, Rift, really any number of older titles I could list, all of which have similar control systems.

That gives End of Dragons a running start. How far I get, how long I stay and especially how i feel about it all will likely depend more on what gets in my way rather than what there is to see and do. That was the problem with Path of Fire. It wasn't so much that the content was poor, although I did find some of it quite unappealing; it was much more the way in which it was delivered.

Whereas Heart of Thorns, which I loved, seemed to be built around a series of easily-understood progression mechanics that came smoothly together to form a gestalt, Path of Fire always felt to me like a whole bunch of unrelated ideas loosely bolted together and trying their damnedest to come apart. I never really knew what I was doing or why. Often as not, I still didn't, even after I'd done it.

Much worse than the fragmented approach were the endless obstacles that seemed to block my way at every turn. It was just impossible to relax or have fun anywhere, at any time. That can work in concentrated sessions but it doesn't make for good entertainment over the course of weeks and months of gaming.

I haven't been following the promotion for EoD all that closely but what I have seen does look to have a more laid-back feel than the desperate, frenetic Path of Fire. PoF came at the end of a narrative arc that was clearly leading towards some kind of violent conclusion. End of Dragons, by contrast, arrives in a comparative lull. I'm not convinced anyone even knows why we're going to Cantha, other than "Because it's there".

In a few hours the gates will open and we'll be able to see for ourselves. Good or bad, fun or frustrating, I can all but guarantee I'll be spending most of my time there for a while. It'll give me something to write about, if nothing else.

In the meantime, while I wait for the starting gun, I've been passing the time by playing some more Lost Ark. I ran through some quests this morning, one of which I found very entertaining, the other a lot less so. My enjoyment of each ran in inverse proportion to their relative significance to the overarching plot, emphasizing once again where I feel such strengths as the game has might lie.

The one I liked was a linked series of half a dozen or so quests in Castle Luterra, not a single one of which seemed remotely appropriate to my character's exalted status as King's Knight. I spent half a session jogging around the vast fortress, delivering flowers, talking to chefs, sneaking peaks inside women's handbags and generally acting like some kind of low-level amanuensis to a self-centered, delusional brat.

Some of the dialog was hilarious, freighted with irony and entirely deliberately so, it seemed, considering some other aspects of Lost Ark's design. I wish I'd taken some screenshots other than just the one above. Normally I would have snapped a picture of all the best lines but I was planning on writing a completely different post today so you'll just have to take my word for it - it was well-written, sharp and funny.

It was also fun, relaxing and very easy, only one of which I can also say about the big quest I did immediately afterwards. That one was clearly intended to be a big, set-piece finish to a major story arc in the MSQ. For those who've already done it, I'm talking about the King's Tomb sequence, a very lengthy segment culminating in the acquisition of the first of the titular lost arks.

My god, it was tedious! I've done some very dull, boring instances in my time, almost all of them in GW2's Living World,  especially during Seasons Three and Four, but this was right up there with any of them. If there's one thing I absolutely detest in these kind of instances, it's when you have to repeat the same set of actions again and again, presumably in the mistaken belief that what all players really want to do is emulate water wearing away stone.

In this case that didn't just mean the usual industrial-scale slaughter of grunt mobs interspersed with annoyingly resilient mini-bosses, although of course there was all of that as well. The really boring part came at the end, where you're tasked with going round and round and round a spiral staircase, fighting the same blasted demon at every landing, flipping the same lever, jumping the same gap then meeting him on the next level for yet another go.

It felt like it took several days although the clock said it was only about a quarter of an hour. At no point was any of it exciting, thrilling, involving, entertaining or even mildly interesting. The only thing I will say in its favor was it was gloriously easy. That alone made it bearable. ArenaNet could learn some lessons there. 

By the end of it my character was Level 32 and the structure of the rest of the levelling game had been made clear: you found one ark, now go find five more, all over the world. It's a framework, I'll give them that. I just hope the rest of the arks are hidden somewhere more interesting than at the top of a never-ending set of steps.

Harking back to the observation I made at the start of the post about the intrinsically intuitive, fluid way GW2 lets me to control my characters, I spent a good deal of time in Lost Ark frantically trying to close pop-up windows I'd opened by mistake mid-fight. That happens often. Pressing a lot of keys in a hurry tends to result in fat finger errors.

In Guild Wars 2 I could use the keyboard for combat if I wanted but I choose not to. Using the mouse pointer and hotbars feels so much more natural. One thing that galls me about Lost Ark is that it has both hot bars and a free cursor but it won't let me use them together. Even out of combat, when you can click on icons and see them respond, they don't actually do anything. I'd enjoy the game a whole lot more and fight a whole lot better if they did.

Other than playing Lost Ark, I spent the rest of the morning running through another of the Next Fest demos. It was a short one. It only took me forty minutes and I spent at least ten of them trying to figure out how to take screenshots. 

I was going to review it today but somehow I wrote this instead. If I end up posting about it tomorrow that'll probably tell you everything you need to know about End of Dragons and none of it will be good. Here's hoping it doesn't happen.

Who Wears Short Shorts?

I find it very difficult to get a close look at my character in Lost Ark. To be honest, that's not all that unusual for an mmorpg, even one with three dimensional graphics and a fully maneuverable camera, but it's more awkward in LA than in most.

Fortunately there is a "Selfie" function that's clearly designed to make the purchase of cosmetic outfits in the cash shop more appealing. At least I'm guessing that's what it's for - I haven't actually looked at the cash shop yet. They do sell fancy outfits there, don't they?

The Selfie system itself isn't nearly as user-friendly as it could be. No-one seems to have seen fit to add it to the otherwise exhaustive tutorial, although since my character's still getting regular tutorial tips in her thirties I can't say for sure a lesson on posing for the camera isn't coming. 

I could probably use one. It was only last night that I noticed a large pull-out panel on the right side of the screen. It offers a whole range of options, including zoom and panoramic views as well as toggles for mobs, NPCs, other characters, their pets and all names including your own. If I'd spotted that sooner I wouldn't have had to use Paint.net's blur to hide my character's name in the two older shots in this post.

The camera is still sluggish and it only rotates in something like a 180 degree arc. Even more annoying, your character can't move at all other than to rotate in place. You can slide the frame from left to right or up and down but if you want to stand somewhere else because, as happened to me this evening, you're being photobombed by a gigantic blade of grass, you have to close the Selfie function to move your character, then start again, whereupon, likely as not, you'll find something else has put itself in the way. 

The reason I was fiddling about with the thing in the first place was because, at half-way through level twenty-nine, my character finally got a pair of long pants! That seriously felt like a moment worth recording and I am not being ironic.

As it happens, I'd taken a couple of selfies of her previous look, which hasn't changed an awful lot since the day she arrived. I'm no expert on this, having only created a single character so far, but it's my understanding that each class has a look that doesn't change a whole lot for quite a while, if at all. 

That was certainly the case for my... I want to say Gunner but I realize I don't actually know the name of the class I'm playing for sure. That might say something about my levels of engagement but I think it probably says more about my memory. I can barely remember the names of the classes in Guild Wars 2 and I've been looking at them for a decade.

Whatever her class is called, its official uniform seems to be early 1970s Hot Pants. I don't particularly mind short shorts as an option (As discussed in a previous post, it's more the ludicrously inappropriate footwear and the obnoxious way the high-heeled catwalk strut has been implemented that's the problem.) but it would be nice to be given some kind of choice. 

In nearly thirty levels I must have had a couple of dozen items drop for the leg slot and every single one looked almost identical. I did eventually get something that, bizarrely, added knee-length boots to the look. It made a change, but the shorts stayed short.

I'd managed somehow to acquire a top that included a shirt, waistcoat and belt combo. I was happy enough with that. I thought my character looked pretty good from the waist up. From the waist down, though, she looked ridiculous, especially when the King insisted on presenting her to court.

Then, finally, gloriously, astoundingly, an item dropped that, when equipped, turned out to be a pair of 1970s-style leather-look loons! They cling skin-tight to the thighs, then flare wildly from the knee.

It's a look not everyone could carry off but she rocks it. I thought I did too, back when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I had two pairs of loons just like hers, only mine were a lot flashier. One pair was bright red and the other bright yellow. As far as I know, no pictures exist. At least, I hope they don't...

She's beginning to look something like the version shown in the cut scenes at the start of the game. Not as stylish and svelte, more's the pity, but a recognizable approximation. 

I just hope this is a permanent change. If I start getting shorts again I don't think I'll be able to persuade her to put them on, no matter how much of an upgrade the stats might be. 

From the minimal research I've done, there doesn't seem to be any kind of wardrobe or transmog system in Lost Ark, which frankly beggars belief. If you think gender locking is archaic, what would you call that? 

If there was a way to do it, I'd keep the look she has now as a default "acceptable" appearance in lieu of something better turning up. As it is, I guess I'd better just enjoy it while it lasts. It'll probably be shorts season again soon enough.

Lost Ark: The Story So Far

To listen to me, you'd think I really didn't like Lost Ark at all but, if that was true, I'd have to be some kind of masochist. I downloaded it on Friday morning and by the middle of Tuesday afternoon I'd played for more than fourteen hours. There are mmorpgs I've praised that never saw that much of me.

Since I installed it I have, in fact, played far more Lost Ark than anything else. I've done my dailies in Guild Wars 2, I logged into EverQuest II on Saturday for about half an hour to look at the Erolisi day stuff and I pottered around a bit in Chimeraland but apart from that it's been Lost Ark all the way. 

Clearly I can't be having such a bad time as I've been making out, can I? So what is it that keeps me logging in? Perhaps its about time I made a list of the things I like about the game. There must be something.

And there is but I warn you, it's a controversial pick. I like the questing. And not just the Main Story Quest, either. I enjoy the side quests, too.

The general consensus seems to be that Lost Ark barely pays lip service to narrative. Kaylriene called the story "pretty dreadful". He also described the voice acting as "abysmally bad". Wilhelm was a little more generous. He thought the story was "kind of goofy", something that sounds vaguely acceptable, at least in my book but, like Kaylriene, he also had issues with the voice acting, which he found "stilted and awkward". 

Even Naithin, almost certainly Lost Ark's strongest advocate in this corner of the blogosphere, couldn't offer much in the way of praise for the game's story, settling for an eminently neutral "It exists. It’s… there. Doing vaguely story-like things from time to time."

If only the whole game was in Selfie Mode.

I have seen a couple of people stand up for Lost Ark's quest content, one of them being Aywren. She ends her First Impressions post with a lengthy section on "Story" and I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything she says, for example

"Lost Ark is a good few steps above many translated games that I’ve played in terms of localization."

"Lost Ark’s localization is fairly well done."

"The story has recurring characters that I remember when I see them."

Then there was Krikket, who had some positive thoughts to offer on Lost Ark's side quests:

"Lost Ark does have some pretty compelling zone stories"

I realize that amounts to some fairly faint and qualified praise so I'll elaborate just a little. I'd like to take on the question of the voice acting and whether it's any good or not first.

I've played a lot of localized, translated, imported mmorpgs. Not infrequently the words spoken by the actors do not match those on screen. Sometimes they don't even mean the same thing. It's not at all unusual for the line readings to emphasize the wrong words and sometimes it feels like the actors don't even understand what the words mean.

In a disturbing number of these kinds of titles it's all too easy to believe the voice work was given to unpaid interns, devs who didn't have anything else to do that day or pretty much anyone who happened to walk past the sound studio on the day of recording. Lost Ark doesn't suffer from any of these shortcomings.

I'll say it. If there are dwarves in the game, why can't I be one?

It's true that many of the performances are quite "back". Everyone underacts to a degree, even when the events are supposed to be momentous. I consider that a strength. Not to have to listen to actors who apparently inhale from helium balloons or gargle with broken glass before yodelling every line is a positive pleasure.

Best of all, so far not one single actor has tried out their famous "Scottish" accent, the one that goes down so well at parties after a few drinks and everyone says sounds just like Sean Connery - or is it Sean Bean? Not even the guy playing the Dwarven blacksmith. That alone should win Lost Ark's sound director some kind of award.

Lost Ark does do that thing where only the first line in every dialog gets a sound clip, something I always find distracting, but that seems to be industry standard these days. Voice work is famously expensive so you can see why it happens. I'd prefer either to hear the speech in full or not hear it at all but no-one's asking me what I want. 

So much for the acting. How about the script?

I thought about this one quite a lot. Naithin and I have been having something of a cross-blog conversation about whether or not Lost Ark looks prettier than most games or just pretty enough to get the job done. I said, and I quote, "I think Lost Ark is graphically functional for what it needs to be but to me it very much has the feel of an assembly-line construction, produced to a good standard following very specific, commercial directions."

The quest summaries are worth reading. Some nice lore and scene-setting in there, sometimes.

I do recognize the irony, having used those words to express just how unimpressed I am with what Lost Ark looks like, when I then turn up here trying to explain what's good about the game's writing by using much the same language. The writing in Lost Ark strikes me as solid, professional, commercial work. It's the equivalent of a decent press release or a filler article in a magazine. 

That's not nothing. Plenty of games wish they were that written that well.

It's nothing original, of course. The central plot is eerily similar to the plots of half a dozen imported mmorpgs I've played over the last few years. It's almost spooky how they all follow the same pattern. About the only significant difference this time is that my character doesn't wake up on a beach somewhere with no memory of who they are or how they got there. That probably got left on the cutting room floor with the missing ten levels, as Tyler explained in the comments last time.

Where Lost Ark wins out over several of those, however, is in its admirable clarity of purpose. Some of those other games undoubtedly have more intriguing set-ups with gnarlier plot twists and more surprising reveals but few of them are as clear and easy to follow. At level twenty-eight I can still remember who all the significant characters are, what they're trying to do and why. That's not something I could often say, this far into the story.

I particularly like the end-of-region wrap-ups that send you to say goodbye to some of the people you've helped. I think that might even be an original idea.

What's more, I even care a little. Not a lot, obviously. About as much as I might care about the current story arc in a soap opera I was only watching because I was stuck at home with my leg in a cast. Just enough, in other words, to keep watching to find out if what I think is going to happen next really does.

It's all good, colorful fantasy stuff, too: demons, half-demons, priests, princes, barons and wise women. Now I know there are dwarves in the game it can only be a few more set pieces before a dragon turns up. I could do without all the fights inbetween the speeches but the parts where I just have to go from one person to another passing messages, then sit back and watch some cut scenes, make for some very passable entertainment.

There's a little more to the writing than that, though. So far, at least, it's tonally appropriate to my own sensibilities, something I find more than a tad surprising given some of the observations I was making yesterday about the game's dubious gender politics. 

There's considerably less heroic posturing than I'd have expected, with the two main protagonists being more prone to self-doubt than would usually be the case. It's not just adolescent angst, either, even if both of them do look like they've come straight from an audition for the latest KPop boy band. 

The Nuremberg Defence.

The sequence when the would-be prince refuses to accept the "I was only following orders" defence from the man who just tried to slaughter a whole village worked partiularly well, I thought, especially when he goes on to send the man away for a proper trial to shouts of "Don't let him live!" from the crowd. 

A later sequence, when the prince, accompanied by my character, arrives too late to save the elderly knight, who raised him after his father died and who was "like a grandfather" to him, is unusually moving. Unusually, because the emotional weight is carried not by the dialog (There is none.) but by the animations. The prince stops to look at the body, then walks away, sits down and puts his head in his hands. It's solid writing and it has the intended effect.

There's a lot like this, not just in the main story but in the side quests. As Krikket says, the mechanics of those are very basic; "go here, talk to this guy, kill some beasties" but the quests somehow manage to convey a sense of the character's lives in one or two lines. 

Not going to work here either, buster.

I have a strong aversion to fantasy blockbuster prose, which is one of the reasons I always struggle with the idea that Elder Scrolls Online represents any kind of "good "writing, even for the genre. Lost Ark is much more terse and that suits my taste. 

It's also more demotic. Minor characters sound more like regular people than fantasy archetypes, although it's probably fair to say they still sound like tropes as often as not. I'm not claiming there's much depth but at least the surface is a little scuffed.

At the start, I did say it was the questing I liked, not just the quest writing. When it comes to gameplay, I almost always prefer tasks to quests, so all that going here, talking to this guy, killing some beasties Krikket called out suits me very well. Even better, in Lost Ark it's usually "talk to that guy just over there - he's about fifty yards away" or "kill some beasties, two or three will do. You'll find them about fity yards beyond that guy I asked you to talk to a minute ago".

That's a rhetorical question, right?

When I'm out doing quests like those, Lost Ark does feel like an mmorpg. The fights are small-scale, the mobs are tough enough to take a few hits, I have time to think about what I'm doing, pick my attacks instead of button-mashing and generally play the way I normally like to play. 

Similarly, when I'm doing the various quests that attempt to explain some of the game's myriad systems, I find I'm having a fairly good time. I don't want to learn how to use the systems - God forbid! I just like going from NPC to NPC clicking on things and reading the dialog.

The world of Lost Ark is very compact and very safe. The zones are tiny, there's no fog of war, everything you need is marked on the map, which even comes with a see-through version you can use as a kind of visual Sat-Nav. Even though most mobs are aggressive in theory, in practice you can stand within inches of them without them paying any attention and you can run faster than they can, even on foot. It's supremely easy to just ride through everything in your way, do the quest stuff, then ride back without anything interrupting the flow.

All of this makes for very easy gaming. The story parts are just about interesting enough to keep me awake and the task parts give me something to do with my hands. If Lost Ark was a regular 3D mmorpg, even one with action combat, I'd be saying some quite complimentary things about it instead of sniping and snarking about its flaws.

An unsettlingly moving moment. You had to be there, I guess.

For the sake of journalistic integrity, I should probably also confirm that I'm finding it less boring than I was. It's still not exactly what you call exciting but I will admit that so long as I can find quests to do it passes the time adequately. 

Given that the questing seems to me to be the best thing about Lost Ark, I'm very curious to know what the supposed endgame is, considering every levelling guide I've looked at advises people to do as few quests as possible outside the MSQ and to get through even that as fast as possible. Why? What's waiting at the end that's so great?

I suspect I will never find out. I might make it to the end but I wouldn't count on it. I'm determined to get my boat, at least. I might even want to finish the story to see how it all turns out for the half-demon priest and the diffident prince. And who knows, maybe by then the rest of the game will have grown on me and I won't be able to remember why I ever found it boring in the first place.

I'm getting that damn boat, anyway. After that, we'll see.