PSA - Islands Of Insight Is Free On Steam Until 1PM EST On 27 June

Thanks to MMOBomb for the heads up. I'm downloading the game as I type this.

I knew about Islands of Insight already but I hadn't really considered playing it, even though it does look quite interesting. Puzzle games and platformers aren't generally my thing but it's nominally an MMO, which means I probably should at least take a look at it - and it does look pretty. 

There was already a demo and the game will be 50% off in the Steam Summer Sale but between now and then it's free and free is a price point I really like. As for what the game is all about, here's the Steam thumbnail description:

Welcome to Islands of Insight: a sublime shared-world puzzle game set in a fantasy realm of ancient wonders and natural beauty. Brimming with mysterious puzzles to solve, secrets to uncover, and vibrant landscapes to explore, this peaceful world of floating islands is the perfect place to unwind. Embark on a puzzle adventure of your choice, all at your own pace.

That sounds okay. It also has a Very Positive rating from over a thousand reviews. What's not to like?

Having to play with other people, did I hear someone say? Apparently a lot of people did express that opinion because the game is also getting an offline mode, so you can puzzle away without anyone chipping in to tell you you're doing it wrong and "helpfully" giving you the solution. 

Although they couldn't have done that anyway because apparently the MMO version (Which you can still play if you prefer.) doesn't have chat. What kind of MMO doesn't let people talk to each other? 

Don't answer that!

D.A.I.S.Y. Age?

This morning I received a typically busy and garish email from DAISY, the A.I. from art MMO Occupy White Walls. For an artificial intelligence devoted to aesthetics her personal style certainly does remind me of a particularly intense Geocities homepage circa 1997.

OWW (suggested pronounciation, according to the website, "Owouawwouaw") is still in Early Access on Steam. Or maybe it's alpha. I'm not sure there's a difference. On the website, developer StikiPixels defines Early Access as "the game is mostly stable but under heavy development", the exact phrase they were using for the alpha, when I first wrote about it back in 2018.

They're not kidding about the heavy development, either. In two years the "game", if game it is or ever was, has changed almost out of recognition.

When I first tried it I was quite excited, particularly for the building possibilties. I saw it as a potential replacement for Landmark or, conceivably, "the hipster Minecraft".

I was also eager to test the proposition that DAISY could educate me in art history and help me expand my tastes by leading me to new artists whose work I'd enjoy. She seemed to be quite capable of it. As I wrote at the time "Within a few minutes the artworks she was suggesting were beginning to pique my interest and stimulate my pleasure centers... After a dozen or so iterations... the problem was stopping myself from buying everything she put in front of me. I loved it all".

Sadly, that promise went largely unfulfilled. Each time I dropped in to see how the project was progressing I found it moving further from what I'd imagined it would become. Over time focus began to shift, away from what I'd seen as primarily an educative tool for dabblers in art history and towards an alternative means of self-expression and self-promotion for living artists.

I began to find DAISY less and less useful as she suggested contemporary artists in preference to old masters. It didn't seem as though she was learning my tastes, more like ignoring them.

As for building and decorating, even as the range of options and the quality of the tools improved, the possibilities shrank. Each account was limited to a single gallery. I made mine and was happy with it. I'd have liked to start again on another but to do that I'd have had to tear the old one down. 

I wasn't prepared to do that so that was the end of my adventure in architecture. What's the point of a building game that doesn't let you build?

Unsurprisingly, I haven't logged in much as the game's developed from there. In fact, Steam claims I've only ever played for 7.3 hours, which seems exceedingly low. I definitely haven't logged in for a long time. There didn't seem much point.

Not until today, that is, when DAISY's email arrived, bringing news of a couple of very significant changes. One of them opens fresh possibilities for exciting gameplay, the other makes me curious to see where the game is going next. 

Multiple galleries! That was the specific change I suggested in a recent feedback survey would be needed to get me back and playing once again. It's only two more slots but, as the email says, that's a 200% increase. More than enough to keep me amused for a few more hours. 

I'm not going to jump straight in and not only because you need to be level 20 to get the second gallery, 30 for the third. (I'm currently level 10). It's more that I find OWW suits the darker days. 

Putting a gallery together is a very enjoyable way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon. Right now, with the sun shining and the sky full blue it doesn't feel like quite the thing but when the rain comes maybe I'll start another project.

The other major development doesn't impact me directly but it's highly significant for the future of OWW: you can now upload your own art for a one time fee of $9.00. Per picture.

It seems a bit steep to me. The fee places the submission in DAISY's database and also on the Kultura website, where it remains for as long as the game and website persist, or so I assume from the assurance "Once your artwork is in, it’s in".

There doesn't seem to be any way of capitalizing on the investment directly, as yet. The FAQ mentions "sales" when making the point that no commission is charged but it seems to be a reference only to such sales as the artist and buyer may arrange outside of the game itself: "OWW is designed to drive traffic to social media and/or other sites. Many artists are contacted by fans (who discover them in OWW) over social media and in several cases, people bought artworks in the ‘real world’ "

The drive and direction seem clearer, at least. Occupy White Walls never seemed all that much like a game although it undoubtedly contains gamelike elements. For someone like me it's a toy and the addition of two more building slots makes it a much better toy than it was. The real thrust, though, is an ambitious assault on the established art market.

That's quite a manifesto. The various comparisons with Napster and Spotify that pop up elsewhere in the narrative make StikiPixels' ambition plain.

Whether there's a demand for such an open-access, global clearing house for artwork and, if there is, whether OWW is up to the job remains to be seen. Not being an artist I can afford to sit back and watch (although if I were an artist I think I'd still want to sit back and watch for a while before I started stumping up $9.00 a punt to test the market).

I'm just happy for the opportunity to build a couple more galleries. I'll see if I can't be a bit more forward-thinking this time, too. Last time I had no idea what I was building until I'd finished.

Before I can do that, though, I suppose I'll have to get leveling. I guess it is an MMO after all...

Like An Animal Crossing Or, If You Will, A Crossing For Animals

When I was a boy, if I did something stupid because all my friends were doing it, which was often because I was a boy and my friends were boys, or at least the ones who did stupid things were, my grandmother would ask me "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?". It never seemed to me to be much of a reason not to keep doing whatever it was I'd been doing, especially when what I'd been doing, as it sometimes quite literally was, had been jumping off a bridge.

Actually, I don't know if my grandmother ever did ask me that. It's one of those things you read about grandmothers saying and after a while you remember your own grandmother saying, whether she said it or not. I know for certain she did tell me that if I swallowed gum it would wind round my heart and kill me and that if I cut myself between my thumb and index finger I'd get lockjaw and die.

Those seemed like good reasons not to pay attention to anything she told me or at least not if it was going to end in a fatality. Anyway, my grandmother sadly met her own end (not from gum) in the late 1970s, so she's not around to pass an opinion on whether I should jump off the latest bridge and start playing Animal Crossing.

The universal language of obsessive hoarding.

To be honest, it seemed like a bit of a moot point. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game that's sweeping not just the nation but the world right now is, as far as I can gather, a Switch exclusive. I don't own a Switch.

The last console I personally owned was an Atari 2600 and the last one I had access to was, I think, the NES - possibly the SNES. The kids had one when they were quite small. I played a Mario game on it a few times, as I recall.

The youngest is now married and expecting a baby in May so it's been a while since there was a games console in this house. I certainly don't plan on buying a Switch just so I can find out what I'm missing.

No, I thought I'd just ride this one out, like I have almost every other gaming craze of the last few years, from Minecraft to Pokemon Go to Fortnite. It's a bit like grandmother lore - I end up reading so much about these things it feels like I played them anyway.

And then I read this post at The Book of Jen, where Jen says "I don’t have a Switch, so I’m playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp instead. It works on my phone." Hmm. A phone is another thing I don't have. Well, not true... I do have a phone and it is a smartphone but for months all I see when I power it up is static. Works fine as a phone so I've done nothing about it and most likely won't.

But I do have a Kindle Fire. And you can play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on that. So last night when I got into bed, instead of going straight to Virgin Prime to watch the last couple of episodes of the excellent Doom Patrol, I downloaded AC:PC.

Here's something no-one tells you about Animal Crossing. It has the most annoying character voices in the history of gaming. Why does no-one ever mention that? Is there some kind of pact of silence? If so, God knows, I wish the bloody characters would sign it!

Apparently not everyone finds the high-pitched, glitchy yelping as intensely irritating as I do. In this excellent and highly informative video essay from Polygon the (unnamed) presenter describes it as "warm and familiar", "adorable baby talk" and "cute".

Yeah, no. Or at least not on my Kindle. It may be that this is a particular issue with AC:PC. In the course of researching this post I listened to a few clips of various versions of Animal Crossing on YouTube and I have to say that none of them is as teeth-grindingly horrible as what I'm hearing.

The upshot of all this is that as yet I don't have too much to offer on Animal Crossing because I spent the first half hour googling ways to turn the sound off. Not all the sound. Obviously I could just turn the sound down on the Kindle if that's all I wanted.

The trouble is, I like the music. It's pretty good. And the ambient sound is fine. It's just those screeching, squalling voices. I want to mute them and leave the rest but that doesn't seem to be an option.

Oh, wait... Yes it is! I just found it when I was taking screenshots for the post. It's not ideal, because it also mutes the ambient sound but it does leave the music on. I can work with that.

Freya's a fox, which means I have to invite her to my campsite. Going to be playing until that happens at least, I guess.

Visually, things seem much better, even if the camp itself is a surprisngly awkward and cluttered starting point. I couldn't figure out how to move around it, either. I just seemed to be standing outside peering in over the non-existent fence.

Moving around the world outside the camp is slick as butter, though and the gameplay feels natural and intuitive. I ran through the tutorial last night. Shook some trees, picked up some fruit, traded with Apollo (I think he's an eagle?), got him to check out my camp. Isabelle seemed nice, if a little organizing. She kept telling me I was in charge and then she'd tell me what to do. I was glad when she went off to do her own job somewhere else. Perhaps I can get on with mine now.

I can already see how the game could be relaxing. It has that vibe about it. I'd guess that, being a mobile app, AC:PC is probably faster-moving and more goal-oriented than the console versions. Gotta drive those microtransaction sales after all. Even so, it feels pretty laid back.

Psssst! Wanna buy a butterfly?

Chances are I won't play much. Not because of the annoying voices. I was already beginning to become desensitized by the end of the first session and anyway now I know how to switch them off. It's just that if I have my Kindle in hand I'm far more likely to start playing music or video than games.

But at least now I can say I've played an Animal Crossing game. Even if it was only for about an hour.

Aaaaand.... In the course of taking screenshots for this post I ended up going to the beach and learning how to fish. And picking some pears and collecting some shells. And basically playing for about twenty minutes. And levelling up and getting a fox called Freya added to my contacts list. So maybe I will be playing some more after all.

I do like fishing in MMORPGs. Which raises the question of whether AC:PC is an MMO, let alone an MMORPG. I didn't for a think it was either until I clicked on a girl standing by the jetty and she turned out to be a player. I bought a butterfly from her just so it would look like I'd known that all the time. I'm sure someone I meet will want a butterfly...

If there are players in the world that I can communicate with and they're people from around the world who I've never met and there are, potentially, many of them, does that mean it's an MMO? If not, why not? Discuss.

So here we are. Or here I am. Playing an Animal Crossing game. It's kinda looking like my sort of thing, too, just a bit. If it wasn't on mobile this might be a runner. Maybe I should re-install Nox, which I appear to have uninstalled without meanming to when I removed it from start-up.

Aaaand... I'm just rambling now. Bye!

New World Coming

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that their upcoming MMO, New World, will no longer feature free for all player versus player combat. FFA PvP for short.

Stripped of the unmelodious jargon of the genre, this means players who don't choose to fight other players don't have to. It also means players who do want to fight other players will have to wait until they meet someone of like mind before getting down to it.

Self-evidently, this is a decision with winners and losers. Pacifists win. Aggressors lose. The reverse of the most probable outcome, should an actual fight ensue.

Hey! Say! JUMP Brand New World (Karaoke version)

It's also a radical re-envisioning of the game, from one where "You'll probably be murdered in New World... players will be able to freely kill other players" (ex-Studio Director Patrick Gilmore) to one where you'll "experience PvP by opting into Faction conflicts and Wars for territory ownership", as the latest dev blog puts it. 

It's not the only fundamental re-positioning for the game. All of the original promotional material focused on a setting relatively new to the online space the game hoped to occupy: the colonial era of the seventeenth century, albeit with added supernatural elements. The very name of the game reflects that choice.

But colonial adventurism no longer enjoys the swashbuckling image that once made it the staple of Boys' Own adventure stories. Invasion, exploitation and slavery make a poor backdrop for fun and games. Particularly so if we, the players, find ourselves cast as the invaders, exploiters and slavers rather than the invaded, exploited and enslaved or their defenders.

Nina Simone New World Coming

Beyond the look of the armor we'll be wearing and the sailing ships that take us there, the New World we'll all be able to explore when the game launches in May 2020 won't bear much resemblance to South America in the 1600s. It's now set to be something much closer to the generic fantasy we've become so familiar with, we no longer even notice its more unsavory implications. We'll be fighting undead and monsters as usual. The "New World" even has a fantasy name: Aeternum.

Predictably, these changes arrived to a mixed response. News of the revamped setting was met mostly with a shrug. There were some grumbles at the loss of a potentially original-for-genre option, a few catcalls from the usual suspects over the supposed caving to political correctness, but for most the change probably represented the most trivial of course corrections. After all, the gameworld, even in closed alpha, was already awash with restless dead and supernatural artifacts. It didn't seem much like our world to begin with.

The complete and unapologetic removal of what was for many the whole point of the game, though? That has not passed unnoticed. The news was met with the expected howl of anguish from that section of the potential audience which considered itself, not unreasonably, to be the intended core demographic.

Nas New World

And why not? For them it must feel as though teacher has taken the toy out of their hands, passing it to Timmy, saying "If you can't play nicely then you don't get to play at all". And Timmy, picking himself up from the floor, clutches teacher's skirts and grins. Smugly.

It's a truism that the only people who like ganking are the ones doing it and yet it's a truth that every developer seems determined to prove for themselves. Never take anyone's word for it. Never trust the evidence without testing it. To destruction. As the astonished tone of the recent Amazon dev blog has it:

"One of the problems we observed with this system was that some high level players were killing low level players, A LOT. Sometimes exclusively. This often led to solo or group griefing scenarios that created a toxic environment for many players."

 Gosh! Really? Who'd have thought? 

"We set out to build a compelling world full of danger and opportunity that begs to be explored. The intended design was never to allow a small group of players to bully other players."

It's so plaintive it's heartbreaking. But the good news, the really very good news, the news that reinforces my belief that Amazon come to this process like the grown-ups in the room, is that New World didn't have to launch and fail in flames like so many other "the players will police themselves" pipe dreams for the lesson to be learned. 

Sophie Whole New World

The closed alpha was one of the most professionally run and certainly one of the most purposeful and focused I have ever been a part of. It always felt as though information was not only being gathered but account was being taken. It never felt, as many alphas do, that the tracks had already been laid, the train was running and the only change likely to be made was to the livery on the carriages. 

Speculation now moves to whether Amazon can add sufficient PvE content and tune the new, more formalized territorial PvP in the scant few months before the late-Spring launch. It does look tight. Then again, Amazon have considerably more resources at their disposal than the average MMO developer.

The closed alpha took place under a rigorous NDA, which has been breached considerably less than is usual with these things, but as we move into the next phase, lips are loosening. It's been interesting to read the experiences of those who participated, not least because some of them seem to differ so significantly from my own.

Curtis Mayfield New World Order

I wasn't repeatedly ganked. The opposite, really. I can only remember getting into one fight, somewhere out in the wilds, which started with some wary circling before the stranger decided to rush me. I just stood there and let him get on with it. Then I respawned and carried on with my business.

Other than that, every encounter with another player outside the safe zones ended either with the two of us waving as we passed or simply ignoring each other altogether. Some fool did once attack me in a safe camp. I just carried on sorting my storage and since he'd flagged himself by attacking me, someone else standing nearby killed him. 

None of that particularly added anything to my enjoyment. I'm very happy to see it gone. I imagine almost everyone else will be, too. If people want to fight, they can fight. If they don't, they can get on with whatever it is they do want to do, unmolested. Seems like a sound commercial decision to me.

Anna Tsuchiya Step Into The New World

I'm less convinced by the proposed "50 versus 50 PvP battles by appointment". This sound a little over-optimistic to me and also somewhat arid. "Companies will declare War on territories they wish to take over, draft a roster of 50 combatants, and agree on timing for the battle"sounds like quite a big commitment in organization. It's like PvP Raiding, isn't it? 

The format of the engagement itself, which is basically "Protect the Flag" in an instanced setting, seems a long way from the immersive ownership of land in the world, something which proved highly popular in alpha. It's an attempt to provide riskless territorially-based PvP, I think. It could be interesting. Might need some iteration in beta, I suspect.

As for the enhanced and expanded PvE offer, scheduled to include "new enemy types" and "world events where the ground opens up and erupts with corrupted energy and enemies", that sounds like some welcome fleshing out of what was already a very intriguing gameworld. I've read a few testers complaining that PvE in alpha was lackluster but I think they mean the kind of PvE you find in a theme park MMO. 

Motörhead Brave New World

That gameplay was all but absent, it's true, but there was a wealth of exploration to be enjoyed. I spent hours just wandering through the woods, taking screenshots. When it comes to PvE I guess it depends what you mean by "environment" and what you mean by "versus".

I am curious to see the proposed home invasion mechanic: "Territory owners will need to protect their Forts and withstand an onslaught as waves of enemies attempt to bash theirs gates down and wipe out their Company". I wonder if monsters are required to make a formal application and receive acceptance before setting a time and date for the battle, as PvP invaders do? I somehow doubt it.

Nothing in the latest announcements from the dev team has affected my decision on whether or not to buy the game. I pre-ordered at the first opportunity. That said, I don't expect it to be something I play a lot, let alone for it to become my new forever game. I see it as a dip in, dip out amusement.

80 PAN! Carry A New World

The main reason for that is the skill floor. New World is intended to be a game that rewards player skill, by which they really mean reaction time and manual dexterity. I'm sixty-one years old. I'm not the player that sort of combat is designed to attract. Let's be honest, I wasn't that player when I was twenty-five.

So long as I can wander and explore with reasonable facility, gather resources, craft and maybe build a home (if that's an option outside of a Company) I'm certain I'll get my money's worth. The removal of FFA PvP makes that a certainty, I think. And it will be good to be able to talk about the game in detail, with pictures, at last. It's been very frustrating, having to talk around the edges all the time.

Closed beta comes as a perk of pre-ordering. Looking forward to it. It can't be too far away.
Maybe the NDA won't be quite as ferocious. Let's hope so.

If not, at least there's no shortage of songs with "New World" in the title.

EQ3 Eh? Eh? Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink, Say No More!

Wilhelm sent me a link to an EverQuest site he'd discovered, called The EverQuest Show. I think it was intended primarily as a YouTube channel, which debuted in February this year, but so far there have only been three episodes, while the website has been considerably more active. There was a new post there just today.

I've added The EverQuest Show to the blog roll but it wasn't the site itself that drew me to make this post. As I was flipping through the articles I spotted a link to an AMA with Holly "Windstalker" Longdale and three other Daybreak devs, hosted by Fires of Heaven.

It looks as though the AMA happened in May or June so it's very current. It's also very long. I read the whole thing and it took me a couple of hours. There's plenty of waffle and nonsense but also plenty of tidbits that would interest any EQ fan.

One question that crops up over and over again in different forms is whether Daybreak are working on a new EverQuest game. Holly attempts to keep a poker face on this for a while but as her answers pile up the winks and smiles give the game away, literally. Ok, metaphorically.

I've severely trimmed these but here's some of the "evidence":

Q. Since there have been some rumors going around it, Is there another EQ game in development (other than the Nantworks stuff) by DBG?

Alan VanCouvering (Lead Content Designer): Wouldn't you like to know!

Holly: ….. 

Q. Being the 20th Anniversary, what is the future of the EQ Franchise? Be specific please. Is there another game in developed or at least in the talks of being developed or are we to expect that EQ will just receive expansions and new servers each year? 

Holly: There is a future and I don’t have specifics for you. The specifics will come when we have meaningful news. 

Q. So in 2019 if I’m an old school EQ guy who loves the world (nostalgia is a hell of a drug) but I also don’t want to play 20 year old games, is there a reason to care about the franchise? Are y’all going to surprise launch an early access EQ3 or am I stuck with ignoring a mobile game?

Holly: We have spent a lot of time looking into the future and how we build this franchise up even better than we have in the past. We did some research over a year ago with all ages of gamers. It’s amazing how many young people know the name “EverQuest” because of family and other gamers. We are still relevant and considered an original. Someday soon we hope to take advantage of that global recognition and release something new. Can’t say when. Have no details. 

Q. Will daybreak ever do anything worthwhile with this IP? Specifically getting a green light to do some real development work and create an Everquest remake with the same mechanics as the original plus 2 expansions updated graphically and from an audio perspective with consoles included and cross platform play?

Holly: We will definitely do something with the IP. A strict remake? Probably not. Will it embody the EQ spirit, most likely yes.

Q. With such an iconic IP will we ever see EQ3?

Holly: 😄

Q. Now that Blizzard is showing cracks in the armor, and the MMO space is super-dry, how about you announce right here that EQ3 is in production?

Holly: Another EQ game? 😊

 In an answer to a question on EQNext, Ed Hardin III (Lead Systems Designer) said 

One of the hardest lessons we learned from Landmark/Next was to not start publicity until we are certain the promise of the game can be realized. 

From that I think we can take it we won't be hearing anything about whatever Daybreak has cooking until they're almost ready to take it out of the oven. But something is definitely cooking!

Elsewhere in the AMA there's confirmation that the mobile project NantWorks was supposedly working on, using the EverQuest IP, is still ongoing. The EQ team has some involvement, presumably advisory, but no control over what the game turns out to be.

Q. Can you give us any details at all on EQ Mobile?

Alan VanCouvering :  I don't know if anyone here knows anything about it, but it's outside our control. 

Ed Hardin III: While we (as a company) will have input into what anyone else does with EverQuest on mobile devices, we (as individuals) aren’t going to be designing it.

Holly: They are in their early days and will tell you when they are ready and confident. We are definitely involved though.

Going back to EQNext and Landmark, the team's answers confirm what I've thought for a very long time were the reasons the game never got anywhere: it was beyond the technical capacity of the company to produce, at least within the budget they had to work with.

Q. Landmark seems like a huge setback (time & financially). I spent a good chunk of time "building" in that world, but once I realized it was overtaking EQ3 production completely, I abandoned it. My drive at the time was the hope of watching EQ3 be built. Is there any regret/animosity toward going the Landmark/Voxel direction?

Alan VanCouvering: Yes, Landmark/Next cost us, but if you don't try you never know what can be done. I don't think we really regret trying, just that it didn't work out.

Q. How much of EQ: Next was real and how much of it was smoke and mirrors?

Holly: EQ Next was real, but a long way from completion when we had to walk away from it. Very tough, but the right decision at the time. There’s mountains of great work that went into that game that won’t go to waste. We aren’t done with this franchise. Not by a long bowshot.

One thing that was asked repeatedly and was shot down in flames every time was the possibility of a "Remastered" version of EverQuest. Too expensive and the resources would be better spent on a new game. Couldn't agree more.

Other topics of note (to me, at least) were:

Reverting the notorious Freeport revamp for the TLE servers (they'd like to but too time-consuming).

What happened to the Quarm special event server? (Not as popular as expected and took more dev resources than the limited interest justified).

Why isn't there a PvP server? (there is and no-one plays on it (as Wilhelm always suspected)).

Why do they keep making expansions for EQ and EQ2 that no-one plays? (Lots of people buy them).

Did the then-team know what a disaster they had on their hands with the Gates of Discord expansion (oh, yes...).

Was Brad McQuaid actually any good as a designer? (He was and remains "a driving force", "an unstoppable force").

And to finish, a couple of short ones that deserve re-quoting in full:

Q. Any thoughts on Legends style TLP servers? Premium fee on top of regular sub, DBG gets additional funding, we get real GMs and regular events? (For those who missed it, Legends was a Premium server with a much higher subscription charge than the regular game)

Alan VanCouvering: Legends was a disaster in all possible ways. I highly doubt that enough people would actually want to pay as much as we would need to ask for to run a server like that.

Holly: What Alan said. Entitlement breeds demands that no dev team could realistically meet. Doesn’t mean we won’t offer premium-type stuff, but that server was super painful as a business model and play experience for a bunch of reasons.

And my favorite of all:

Q. Why does my Clockwork Rhino mount eat all my food?

Alan: There might be a gnome living inside it. 

Ed: I can’t say there isn’t a gnome.

There's a lot more in the full thing. I recommend reading it thoroughly if you have an interest in EQ or, indeed, in how Daybreak operates these days. And thanks again to Wilhelm for steering me in the general direction of this little goldmine. If it was reported or referenced anywhere else I didn't see it.

Some Journey

Naithin has a post up about The Horrible Hundred in FFXIV. As he explains, a hundred or so quests stand between the end of the original main storyline and the start of Heavensward, the first expansion: "It’s a rite of passage. A trial to be passed to earn your way into the much nicer content that follows."

Not surprisingly this prospect doesn't exactly fill Naithin with joy. I doubt it would many people. But he's trying to be a good MMORPG soldier and "love the journey" in the way we're often told we should.

Reading his piece made me stop and think. I've repeated the mantra plenty of times, not least here on this blog: "It's the journey, not the destination". I've repeated it so often, in fact, that I no longer think about what it means, if indeed I ever did. I just trot it out like a truth universally acknowledged.

Thinking about the expression, I see two problems with the way we commonly employ it in relation to MMORPGs. The first is that it's a misquotation. Its origin, widely but inaccurately attributed Emerson, is unclear. There's a revealing breakdown of possible sources on QuoteInvestigator, which points out that the whole thing has become a snowclone.

The root phrase, wherever it originated, crucially involved the word "life", which changes the meaning entirely. "Life is a journey, not a destination" self-evidently expresses a philosophical and religious approach that values an open-ended, open-minded willingness to engage.

Even Aerosmith know that! Check the penultimate verse.  Here's a link to the actual song and if linking to an Aerosmith video isn't the very definition of willingness to engage with what you find by chance along the way then I don't know what is.

The second problem, when it comes to the way the expression is employed in relation to playing MMORPGs, is extreme literalism. Having truncated the phrase to omit the word that gives it its primary meaning, we then compound the error by stripping what's left of any metaphorical nuance whatsoever. The "journey" becomes exactly that: a trip from A to B, whether that means going from city to city, creation to cap or acquisition to completion.

It's bollocks, isn't it? It only takes a moment's thought to see what utter tripe that is. As a short opinion piece on Psychology Today succinctly puts it:

"Arriving in Hawaii is much better than the plane trip there. And being in Hawaii is much better than the plane trip back. The plane trips are tolerable only by anticipating being in Hawaii or good memories of being there".

If what someone wants to do is play the content that came with Heavensward, for example, telling them to enjoy the "journey" that takes them there from the end of ARR is pretty much like asking  someone about to get on a 24 hour flight to Australia to be sure and appreciate the time they spend going through airport security.

Learning to "love the journey" in cases like this is made even more unlikely by the fact that that it's not a journey of your choosing. You haven't, as the mantra imagines, set out with no fixed destination in mind, allowing serendipity to reward you with what you find along the way. You've been given a job of work to do.

And it's not even as though it's a job you wanted. All too often it can feel like being a courier driver co-erced into working for a psychotic dispatcher. Go here, drop this package, get a signature, kill everyone in the house, steal their stuff. Back in the van, on to the next. Good luck finding the serendipity in that.

It is possible to play MMORPGs by wandering around and doing whatever. I've done it many times in many games and I'd reccommend it in the strongest possible terms. It can be entertaining, amusing, exciting, even revelatory. Most games will allow it and some even encourage it.

When I've urged people to "enjoy the journey" that's what I meant. It's a playstyle, if you like. It is very much not an encouragement to do every quest, look in ever corner, take forever to level up, let alone to have an anxiety attack if you find you missed something.

Indeed, missing out on things can be every bit as important as experiencing them. Your experiences are shaped in part by what's absent. If you went here you didn't go there. Because you went here you did this, not that.

Maybe you'll loop around and come back to "there" and do "that" later and maybe you won't. That's the joy of it. Go where the wind takes you. When it stops blowing, take a look at where you've ended up. Don't think about what you lost; think about what you found.


What Naithin is going through doesn't sound anything like that. He doesn't have a choice and I imagine he barely has freedom of action. He has a to-do list with a hundred items to be checked off before he can get to what he really wants to do.

In a situation like that, it's not so much about enjoying the journey as it is making the best of a bad job. That's not nothing. Far better to take a positive attitude and make the most of something you'd rather not do but know you have to than to complain and drag your feet and make the whole thing even more frustrating and tedious than it already is.

Making the best of it could very well be seen as a key skill for anyone wanting to take up playing MMORPGs as a hobby. Every one of them is chock-full of things we have to do to get things we want but which, given a free choice, we'd skip in a heartbeat. If you want a cliche, maybe "If life gives you lemons..." would suit the situation better.

I'm not at all sure it helps to try and pretend the whole thing is some kind of 19th century romantic journey. When Byron spent years criss-crossing Europe he was following his inclinations, not some itinerary given to him by a stranger on a street corner, who'd prevailed upon him for a favor and to be sure he wouldn't forget had told him "Here, I'll write it in your Journal".

Perhaps we need to be more realistic about the parts of MMORPGs that are there for purely pragmatic reasons. Gussying them up as amazing life experiences isn't necessarily doing us or the games any favors. Sometimes you just have to get on the plane and hope you can find something to keep your mind occupied until the journey's over.

It's something to think about. I'm certainly going to be a little less glib about doling out rote advice I haven't bothered to consider carefully in future. Well, I might be. I'll at least promise to try and feel a little sheepish if I'm called on it.

On Some Faraway Beach: Riders of Icarus

One of the many things I like about Riders of Icarus is the way special events and holidays seem to run continually, even overlapping on occasion. There are so many it's hard to keep up, although since most are clearly aimed at high-level characters it hasn't presented much of a problem for me - yet.

The current event is Summer Festival (aka Summer Event Festival according to the official website). I almost missed it completely. I didn't see anything on the login screen or the Steam page. The main reason I found out about it was that I knew the previous event had ended and there was a patch, so while the game was updating I went to the News section on the website to see if I'd missed anything.

Although there's nothing obvious in-game to let you know the event is happening, most players are going to run into it eventually. It's based, as all events seem to be, in Victory Plaza, the central square in the capital city, Hakanas. The main questline sends you back there periodically and all the special currency vendors are there so it's a hub for everyone.

When I ported in and flew to the plaza I did a comical double-take. The entire square has been flooded and tons of sand imported to make a pop-up beach. It's spectacular and extremely well-done.

I flew around taking screenshots, thematically appropriate in my shades, riding an inflatable porpoise. I particularly appreciated the game not forcing me into beachwear like certain other MMORPGs I could mention (actually, I couldn't, or not with any accuracy, because I can't remember which game did that. I seem to remember it was FFXIV but I'm not sure...).

As far as I can tell, Riders of Icarus doesn't have any underwater content but it does have some of the best swimming I've seen since Landmark. The animations and particularly the splashing are weirdly satisfying. I like the way that front crawl sends frenzied fountains of water in all directions while backstroke is sedate and splashless.

There are bright yellow duckie rings in the water. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to jump on them and sit down in the middle to get a screenshot. Sadly the game considers you to be "jumping" when you're in the the ring so that didn't work. It was fun though.

You can, however, sit on the edge of the ring. I did that and tried to get a decent shot, only to be confounded by the huge Radiant Aquavirios that was swimming nearby. These appear to be tameable although I haven't seen anyone try. You can buy a Mark with Watermelon Slices, the event currency, to make taming the Aquavirios easier but it costs 750 slices, which seems like a lot.

All RoI events seem to involve heavy grinding of special currencies but they also come with some much easier options. Summer Festival has a special login campaign with a reward of one hundred Watermelon Slices. Unfortunately, the rubric to the offer on the website is confusing:

Stay login during this hours 19:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC to receive a Watermelon Slice x100 as a reward from July 17 to July 30. Once login, you will be able to receive the rewards automatically after a minute.

Apart from being poorly translated that's quite confusing. Do you have to stay logged in for three hours or do you get the reward for logging in at any time in the spread? Is it a one-off or can you do it every day?

Since that's 8pm to 11pm my time I can easily test it, and I will. I've already missed three days because I have a habit of logging in to RoI in the mornings but that's easily changed. If it really is a hundred slices per day then I could still collect a thousand, which would buy me both a Heroic and a Legendary mount - and the legendary is a Watermelon Banana Boat!

Finally in the "get stuff for doing nothing" stakes there's yet another Special Login Event, for which you literally have to do no more than be there. If you manage that for seven of the possible ten days you win a Legendary mount - and the rewards for the daily stages aren't too shabby either.

There are also plenty of quests and tasks that actually require you to play the game. I took a few of those, the easy-looking ones. There's also a "secret" storyline that can be discovered although I have no idea how. All the game has to say about it is "One Summer, Bernadette lost her diary and she wants us to find it. This is her story, Secret within the summer". Good luck with that, Bernadette.

Lots to do, then. Whether I'll manage much more than turning up to collect my freebies I wouldn't like to say, especially since, if I was going to play properly, I'd be miles away in Sea of Hakanas, not in the fields outside the city.

Very nice to have the option, though.

Boxes On Boxes on Boxes on Boxes: Project: Gorgon

Project: Gorgon is both complex and idiosyncratic. These, along with a palpable sense of the genre's past, are its primary selling points. On Steam, where the game currently enjoys an enviable "Very Positive" rating from just over 650 reviews, this would count as typical:

This isn't a hand-holding theme park MMO like many that are out there at the moment and, because of this, it may not appeal to a broad range of gamers.

They aren't kidding. I suspect most people playing MMORPGs these days would hold their hands up in horror and run away screaming from some of the same systems and mechanics its avowedly niche audience praises so highly.

Take storage, for example. I have made something of a speciality of studying storage and inventory options in countless games over a twenty-year period. I have never seen anything like Project: Gorgon.

Here's the breakdown on the wiki. I looked at that for the first time this morning because I didn't want to make any ill-informed suppositions based solely on my very limited experience in the game itself. Reading through the list I can immediately see that a) storage is even more abstruse than I realized and b) the wiki is, as yet, incomplete.

P:G's wiki is an interesting pointer to the community surrounding the game. Wikis often are. EverQuest II, for example, has such a superb wiki, so complete, so accurate and above all so up to the minute, that you would think it had to be a hugely successful game with millions of players.

It's not the size of the audience that makes a wiki; it's the dedication. And also the attitude. No-one is questioning the commitment of Project: Gorgon's players but they are a particular bunch. I have never seen a wiki that opens with an admonishment for using it:

 Even the Secret Worlds Legends wiki doesn't call you out for daring to look things up!

Inventory and storage in Project: Gorgon is the most dislocated and abstruse I have ever seen. At first sight everything looks quite familiar. You start with a "Backpack", as you do in virtually every RPG ever made.

It's one of those notional packs rather than an actual item. About the only obvious option Eric and Sandra seem to have eschewed are bags themselves. Your character has no "bag slots" and crafters don't have an option to make bags (although, as we will see, they can make inventory space).

There's the expected bank storage, too. An NPC called Hulon runs the Vault in the main starting town, Serbule. The Vault is connected to a centralized system, meaning anything you put in there can be accessed from any zone that has a Dilapidated Council Storage Machine, or so the wiki tells me. I haven't field-tested that yet.

Vault space is also extendable by payment of in-game monies. So far, so familiar. Next come some other options I've seen in various games over the years. Individual NPCs will offer storage based on your faction with them. Faction, known as "Favor" in P:G, is an important game mechanic, controlling all kinds of things from the price you get for selling your junk to the recipes you can learn.

Then there are, supposedly, chests just sitting around in the world into which you can place items, something I remember very well from the Baldur's Gate series. There's apparently one on the tutorial/starter island but I can't remember using it.

As far as I can tell, if you put something in one of those it stays where you left it and if you want to get it you have to go back there. That used to dirive me to distraction in BG so I can't say I'm thrilled to see it making a comeback.

Much more welcome is a system I ran into yesterday, when I crossed into the low-level zone of Serbule Hills. I had a conversation there with an NPC, who told me I could sleep in the stables for nothing and use the storage in his Inn.

That storage turned out to be accessable by way of a bookshelf, which seemed weird, but then everything in Project: Gorgon is weird.  Only when I came to read the wiki did I discover that the bookshelf is a "zone access storage point". I think that means that, if I make pals with an NPC in Serbule Hills and they let me leave some stuff with them, I can find and retrieve it from the Inn without having to go back to the NPC.

So far, so complicated. Ah, but we've only just started! Skipping over Shared Storage (account -wide inventory accessed via Transfer Chests in a handful of towns) and Guild Storage (self-explanatory, ditto) we come to clothing.

In Project: Gorgon pockets are a thing. I'm not sure I've ever played an MMORPG with pockets before. If I have I've forgotten it.

I first noticed this one yesterday, when I was in The Bazaar browsing. Ok, in P:G the place where players set up to trade as though they were NPC vendors isn't actually called The Bazaar but it's so incredibly reminiscent of the system introduced to EverQuest with the Shadows of Luclin expansion that I'm always going to think of it that way.

I was looking at a crafted cloth shirt when I noticed it had inventory slots. Twenty of them. That's a lot of storage in a shirt! The shirt was far too expensive for me to buy and test so I don't yet know whether pockets come with any kind of size restrictions. I somewhat doubt it. Project: Gorgon is logical but not in any way realistic.

 According to the wiki, Tailors can add pockets to armor or clothing to increase inventory capacity, which is a very solid option for crafters but that's just the half of it. To increase your inventory by way of gear you don't have to go bespoke.

As the wiki puts it succinctly, "Increased inventory space also appears on many pieces of equipment as a part of the random aspect of equipment drops". Now there's a thing. Inventory space as a gear stat. Again, if I've seen that before I can't recall where. Imagine the dilemma on checking the loot from a dead monster and finding a pair of pants with worse combat stats than the ones you're wearing but an additional twenty inventory slots.

We're not done yet. There's more. And weirder. One of your characters primary stats, Endurance, has the effect of expanding the size of your Backpack, presumably by increasing your carrying capacity. This in a game where items appear to have neither size nor weight. I rescind my earlier statement re logic.

Endurance is improved by taking armor damage because of course it is. If you want more bag slots just pick a fight with a monster and let yourself get beaten up. Makes sense, right? About as much as having your storage capacity reduced because you lost a boss fight, anyway.

Oh yes, that's a thing, apparently. I wouldn't know, not having fought any bosses, but P:G does have a unique take on death penalties. When you lose fight to a boss bad things happen including but (I'm guessing) not limited to your head expanding, a spectre pursuing you and your backpack shrinking. Whatever curse you get stays with you until you do the only thing that can cure it - beat the boss that gave it to you.

By this point you might be thinking Eric and Sandra must surely be out of ideas but I saved the best for last. Discovering the Dimensional Folder on an NPC vendor yesterday was what prompted me to write this post.

A lot of MMORPGs have temporary storage options and expanders. Renting inventory space is a prime source of income for many an Eastern import. But even those games don't go so far as to combine temporary purchased storage with RNG.

The Dimensional Folder is a potion you drink that makes your bags bigger for an hour. How much bigger? Try it and see. Oh, and there's a smal but by no means insignificant chance it could make them smaller. And it stacks, so if you don't get the jackpot pull the handle again. And again.

At first it sounds completely crazy. Then I thought of all those times I've been deep in a dungeon or out in the wilderness miles from anywhere, with full bags and loot lying on the ground I couldn't pick up. How handy would it be to take a swig from a flask and add a few slots to my bags? It wouldn't matter that they only lasted an hour. It would be long enough.

I'm sure there are more peculiarities and quirks to be found when it comes to Project: Gorgon's storage solutions. Some of the ones already there may not stick. It's a game that's constantly evolving, partly in line with the whims of its creators and partly in response to feedback from players.

It's very much not a game for people who like things to be neat and tidy and laid out plainly with instructions. Learning how to play is part of the fun. Even when it comes to something as simple as putting your stuff into storage.

Next up, Gameplay. Might have to wait until I've actually played a little more, though. Which doesn't look like it's going to be a problem.

You're Not Going Out Dressed Like That: Project:Gorgon

If you browse through the Steam reviews for Project: Gorgon, one thing comes up over and over again; the graphics. Comments range from the extremely negative ("the graphics are horrifically bad") to the grudgingly accepting: ("Lets get the elephant in the room out of the way first; the graphics could be better, but they're passable."). No-one says they are good.

Which is strange, because the game really doesn't look bad at all, or not to my eyes. The colors are harmonious, the aesthetic is consistent and appropriate, you can tell what everything is just by looking at it. What more do people want?

The thing that has always puzzled me about P:G's graphics isn't so much their basic quality as their mutabilty. The way the game looks has changed a lot over the six years since I first wrote about it but not always in the way you might expect.

Since then I've played it in its various iterations and stages and posted about it a number of times. I've also taken a lot of screenshots, many of them in the same locations. For once I don't have to rely on my memories. I have objective evidence.

Fire at the old mattress factory.

Which is just as well. I started this post planning to talk about how the graphics have improved; about how much better the game looks. That was my first impression when I logged in yesterday, not having played since sometime last Autumn.

Then I started flipping back through some old posts to look something up and I was surprised - shocked, really - to see that many of the older sceenshots looked better than the ones I'd just taken. Or if not better then certainly not worse.

The graphics have changed but I'm not entirely sure they've improved. There are more flowers than ever, which I like, but everything seems slightly blurred. And then there's the lens flare.

Lens flare: the thermonuclear option.

Then I had a thought. Perhaps it's the settings. I don't think I've ever changed the graphics in Project:Gorgon from the default. It's always managed to find the correct screen resolution so I never bothered.

Looking at the settings the game chose for me I saw I was on "Great", number seven on a nine-point scale that runs, in typical P:G tongue-in-cheek fashion, from -2 (Retro-Terrible) to 6 (Ultra). I switched to the highest, Ultra, to see if there was any difference.

There was. Everything looked more abrasive, jagged and darker. Also, the game stuttered, badly. On balance the higher setting looked worse and the performance hit was significant.

I took identical shots on each setting to compare.

Before ("Great")

After ("Ultra")

In the "After" image, taken on Ultra, you can see some extra detail. There are flowers on the bush to the left and the tree sticking up above the rooftops has better-defined leaves. Also, oddly, even though I didn't move the character or the camera, you can see that the flowers at the very bottom edge of the shot are taller. Not surprisingly, I switched back to the lower setting.

If you want to see a really significant difference in graphic quality, how about these two shots, both taken in the main town of Serbule, five-and-a-half years apart:

Serbule December 2013

Serbule July 2019

The level of detail - of definition perhaps I should say - in the older shot is far higher. The skybox is much more realistic. The colors are richer and more authentic and pop more strongly.

Writing about it at the time, I was fulsome in my praise: "The walled, medieval village is one of the best I've seen in a game as far as spurious authenticity goes. I've been in that village several times, in France, in Spain, in Portugal."

I stand by that. It wasn't until Black Desert that I saw another version of the European Medieaval to match Project: Gorgon's. These days, it looks a lot more like any generic fantasy town.

It's all a bit of a puzzle, just like the rest of the game. Back then, P:G was in free to play "pre-alpha" and looked better. Now it's in "Early Access", costs an eye-watering £30.99 and looks worse.

Still looks pretty good to me though. And worth the money.

Next time on Project:Gorgon: Revisited: Revenge of the Colons - Inventory Management.

Now there's something to look forward to!