REVOKED!

So that was a bit of a surprise. Also very dramatic. I just logged in and BOOM! there it was. A big, black window all over everything. 

My immediate thought was that I'd been banned from something for some reason. Not that I could remember doing anything wrong but then I got suspended from Pinterest a few weeks ago for violating some term of service or other and I don't even use Pinterest. 

I mean, it had to be something bad, didn't it? All that black background. The heavy bronze framing. The stern, sans serif font. Put it all together and it spells "You're in trouble". 

The choice of verb strongly reinforces the messaging that the person receiving the notice must have done something wrong. A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you. It must be your fault! You ungrateful little wretch!

Am I being over-sensitive? Oh, no. No, I am not. 

I don't have many areas of expertise but I do know what subtext is. I didn't spend three years on what was, at the time, broadly acknowledged to be the best undergraduate course in English Literature in the world not to be able to read subtext. What do you think all those practical criticism tutorials were for? Just so we could all sit around drinking sherry and eating cake?!

But if you doubt it, here are the examples Miriam Webster chose to use to illustrate the usage of the word "revoke":

"Your driver's license could be revoked after about three convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol; some people's licenses are even revoked for life. You could get your passport revoked if a judge thought you had violated the terms of your bail and suspected you might skip the country. And if you're out of prison on probation and violate the terms of probation, it will probably be revoked and you'll end up back in the slammer. "

See? If you throw around words like "revoke", those are the kinds of mental images you want to put into someone's head. My head. 

Do I sound pissed? (American usage.) I am, a bit, but that doesn't have much to do with Valve's inability to draft a polite, friendly memo. Mostly it's because it's the hottest day of the year and my PC just broke again and this time I don't think I'm going to magically get it working. Luckily I have Ol' Faithful here, which I was able to bring back into service in literally three minutes, thanks to having done it once already, a month ago. I was going to buy a decent gaming desktop and a gaming laptop this year anyway with my inheritance, when I finally get it, and I'm good on security updates for Windows 10 until October so I'm going to manage as I am until then. I'll strip the failing PC for parts, probably. I can't be bothered to send it back.

That should have been a sidebar, shouldn't it? Oh well, opportunity lost.

I'm not really cross about the Steam notice but, as Mrs Bhagpuss is fed up of hearing me say, some people really need to run their stuff past a decent marketing department before they send it out to the public. Any half-competent marketing person could re-draft that notice in five minutes to make it sound helpful and informative instead of passively-aggressive and vaguely threatening, the way it most definitely does.

They might even be able to do something about the confusion it causes too, although I'm not sure that would be within their competence. The whole situation is inherently confusing to begin with. Look at these two screenshots from Steam for a start.  

Both of those are from my one and only Steam account, the one to which the REVOKED notice was sent. The first, with the 13 hour played time, appears in the Steam Library as "Stars Reach". The second, with just three hours played, is listed as "Stars Reach Playtest". 

Since Stars Reach is and has only ever been in pre-alpha testing, they're both playtests of some sort. The first, which I'm assuming is the one to which my Steam key activation has been REVOKED, is the one I used from when the game first went into testing, which I applied for in the old-fashioned way and for which received first an acceptance and soon after an invitation to the creator program. Those 13 hours represent the testing I did and the research that was needed for the several posts I wrote.

At some point I also backed the Kickstarter and got a key for that. I think I may have even received a third key from somewhere, although I never used it. Maybe that's the one that's been REVOKED? 

Later still, Playable Worlds farmed the awkward business of issuing keys and linking accounts to something called firstlook.GG. I got some confusing instructions about linking accounts and registering keys through them, which I did my best to follow, but I was never sure which account had been linked to what.

I always use a separate email account for anything on Kickstarter and never use that email address for anything else, which does cause problems but I thought I'd gotten those sorted out. Maybe that was too optimistic. I can't say for sure if the Kickstarter pledge I made ever got converted into Steam access, as it was supposed to, since I already had access to the testing anyway.

And I still do! The first thing I did after I learned my access had been REVOKED was to go and see if it was true. It was not. Although a key must have been, I guess.

The notice specifically says, down in the small print and in a much more reasonable tone, that a key has been REVOKED because the test has ended. Only half of that can be true, at most. Unless I've missed something, there's only ever been the one testing program and it's still running. I'm still none the wiser as to what's really going on.

The first account up there, the one that says "Purchase" instead of Play looks like it was still working earlier this year. It says "LAST PLAYED Mar 27." I haven't tried it since then, because the last couple of times I played I made new characters to test the new-new player experience and for that I wanted to use a new account. I had a spare so I used it.

And that one still works. As you can see, I logged it in today. Both my new experience characters were there and I briefly logged them in and ran them around. All the in-game screenshots in the post are from that short session.

What I hope is going on is that my Kickstarter pledge key is attached to the account that still works, my creator/tester key has been REVOKED and my mysterious third key has vanished into the void, never to be seen. (I nearly said "never to be seen again" but as far as I can tell, I never saw it in the first place.)

I don't suppose I'll know for sure until the game goes into Early Access, as it's supposed to this summer. We're in summer now, come to think of it... That will presumably require yet more bureaucratic process and maybe it'll all become clear then. Ha!

I was always expecting that to be a problem anyway. I bet I'll end up having to send someone my Kickstarter pledge details to get into EA without paying twice. Always assuming I can find them.

All this for a game I'm pretty much certain I'll never want to play. At this point, the most fun I get out Stars Reach is trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the admin.

Certainly nothing much seems to be going on in the game itself. Once again, when I got in to the game today, I appeared to be the only person there. I probably was. I just checked the Steam charts and there are two people online right now. The 24-hour peak was 18.

The UI looked a bit different and the whole thing felt tidier but that good impression was counteracted by the very awkward character animations and the inordinate time it took to zone through a space portal to a planet. I had time to read nearly a dozen of those not very helpful tips they put up to keep you from being bored while you wait.

Worst of all, when I did finally arrive planet-side, I zoned in dead. Nothing killed me. I was just dead. I re-lifed and reappeared about five meters away. No corpse to retrieve. No clue what had happened. Not the greatest first impression.

Assuming I still have a Steam key that hasn't been REVOKED, I'll take another look when Early Access arrives. It's going to be very interesting to see how many other people turn up. And how long they stay.

Three Down, Three To Go

No point hanging about. I ripped through two of the six, chosen Next Fest demos last night and knocked off a third this morning. My speed run was helped by the fact that my PC crashed after each of them, twice when I was just re-logging . That's an issue with the machine, not the games, but it gives me a great reason to stop where I'd normally have carried on until I'd finished the whole thing.

None of these demos require completion for judgment, anyway. It's very clear with all of them after just a few minutes what the game is trying to be and how successful it is at being it. And since none of the three is trying to do anything new, other than cross-breed a couple of genres that don't usually sit together, they're all a pretty easy read.

On with the micro-reviews.

Over The Hill (23 minutes - Not wishlisted)

I could just refer everyone to Nimgimli's comment on yesterday's post for this one and save myself the trouble. Here, I'll quote him so you don't even need to click through: "It is almost EXACTLY Snowrunner with worse graphics, right down to the controls for the Winch and stuff being exactly the same."

I haven't played the game Over The Hill is trying to emulate so I'll take Nimgimli's word for the similarities. What I can say, with confidence, from personal experience is that, while it looks quite a lot like the game I was comparing it to, Outbound, the way it plays is completely different.

In Outbound, you drive around some lovely scenery in a camper van, doing some extremely simple tasks and occasionally stopping to remove the odd obstacle, like a fallen tree, or to fix something, like a collapsed bridge. It's a relaxing, chill experience - too much so for many, judging from the reviews. In Over The Hill it's all obstacles and no roads. Getting from A to B is the gameplay.

Over The Hill is not, as I thought it would be, a driving game. It's a puzzler. The driving, such as it is, is incidental to the puzzle of getting your vehicle past an endless succession of obstructions - mud, water, rubble, loose sand - just so you can drive for fifty yards before you have to do it again. 

The inducement to keep moving seems to be to reach various marked points on the map and see what's there. It could be something you can add to your vehicle - I found an antenna - or a fast travel point. I imagine it could be all sorts of things but I'll never know because by the time I'd reached the end of the tutorial I'd had more than enough. 

At that point the demo tells you you've acquired the ability to choose where you'd like to start from the Main Menu but when I went back to do that the game crashed and I felt no inclination to try again. I'm still in the market for a relaxing, easy driving game with a lot of pretty scenery but this isn't it.

Spirit Vale (50 Minutes - Not wishlisted)

The one MMORPG on the list this time, Spirit Vale is less than a month away from an Early Access release on Steam. Is it ready? Hard to be sure after less than an hour but, yes, I'd say it probably is.

It's going to be a very familiar experience for anyone who's played any traditional MMORPG before, too. You're not going to need much instruction getting to grips with this one. The art style is about the only mild surprise. 

As I said yesterday, the humanoid characters look disturbingly like babies. Ok, toddlers. If they had the license for the IP, it could be Rugrats: The MMO. 

Character creation is pretty good. There are seven classes, all of which can specialize. It's the usual suspects - Ranger, Warrior, Mage and so on. I picked the Summoner, who can become a Necromancer when they grow up, mostly because they get a cat for a pet. (It turns out they also get a dog and an angel. I'm not complaining)

There are a lot of hairstyles, colors, eyebrow options, eye shapes and so on, laid out in a grid so you can click through them and immediately see what your character would look like. That was fun. 

I can't remember if you get to choose gender or body type. If I did I don't remember it. I suspect the classes might be gender locked. It's a bit of a moot point anyway, given the character models. That was why grandmothers used to knit pink or blue booties, wasn't it? They'd need more colors of wool these days, of course.

Once you're through with character creation it's out into the world. You start in town and you get pretty much no instruction on what to do there. It's OK. You don't need any. It took  me about thirty seconds to figure out where the 1-5 starting zone was and thirty more to go there so I could start killing things. 

And that's where it gets really old school.  Oh boy, have they gone all-in on the dopamine hits! XP flies in, levels rack up, mobs drop clothes and weapons and runes and potions and everything has a ton of stats you can read and compare. If grinding mobs for xp and loot is your thing you'll be in murder hobo heaven!

If there are quests, I didn't get any. I didn't need any. I didn't want any. I got myself a sword and pair of pants, worked out how to sit to heal, spent some points on spells so I could summon all three pets and then I ran around killing anything that moved. 

Combat felt more like an ARPG than an MMORPG. Most of the time I was surrounded by hordes of mobs, me and my dog, killing as fast as we could go. The mobs were supposed to be "Neutral" but sometimes they attacked us anyway, which was fair because most of the time my dog attacked them without either being provoked or told to do it. 

Sometimes one or other of us got overwhelmed and died. If it was my dog, I just resummoned him. If it was me, I respawned in town and ran back. If there was a death penalty, I didn't notice it at my low level so it didn't seem to matter.

I did that for a while until I was too high for the first zone and then I moved to the second. There's a map that makes the place look huge but the zones are tiny. As for levels, they've got them marked as high as 135 on the map, although that would be a weird place to cap. 

I got to Level 10/Job Level 7 before I stopped, by which time I could easily kill Level 16 mobs. Job Level drives your points allocation for new spells and abilities. I spent lots of points on spells, not all of which I figured out how to use. I did work out that you can upgrade your pets. My dog started out as a puppy and ended up looking like a werewolf. I wasn't convinced it was an improvement. 

The whole thing was ridiculously enjoyable. It's like an MMORPG from the early 2000s on fast-forward. It reminded me particularly of one of the earlier imported titles I used to enjoy, Eden Eternal, which I'm amazed to see is available on Steam now. I might have to take a look.

And I might still be playing Spirit Vale now, if I hadn't somehow bugged the game taking a screenshot. I toggled the UI off and nothing I could do would get it to come back on, so I logged out to see if that would fix it, which caused my PC to crash because that's what it does with all games now, until I add the executable to Windows Defender's exclusion list, which I'm too lazy to do for demos.

That broke the spell and I have had the sense and self-discipline not to go back and start again. So far. I have also not wishlisted the game because the last thing I need is to start playing another addictive, old-school MMORPG. If you still want to play like it was 1999, only with prettier pictures, you could do a lot worse.

Hawthorn (44 Minutes - Wishlisted and signed up on website)

If you look this one up, you'll find it widely described as a cross between Stardew Valley and Skyrim. That probably tells most people everything they need to know. Unfortunately, those are two games I've never played so it doesn't do much for me.

The demo is what the developers, NEARstudios, describe as a "Proof of Concept" build. It's what they... but no, why paraphrase? Let them explain:

Considering the provenance, there's a lot here already. I only played for about three-quarters of an hour because I had to stop so we could go pick up Beryl from the dog-groomer but I was clearly nowhere near the end. Had I not needed to do something else, I'd happily have carried on. If this is Proof of Concept, I'd say the concept is very firmly proven.

The gameplay loop as as seen in the demo ought to be easy to describe but now I try to pin it down it feels a bit more slippery than that. It's a segment taken from somewhere in the middle of the game, apparently, and it certainly has that in media res feel to it. 

There's a big feast coming and you, playing an anthropomorphic but quite realistically envisioned woodland animal, seem to be the facilitator. Animals keep coming up to you and making suggestions, which you follow but only to set things up. You decide where things like the feast table and the chairs go, choose the menu and generally make sure all the basics are in place. Then the other animals do all the gathering and the building to pull whole the thing together.

Before any of this starts, there's some chatter about some animal who's about to leave town and all the time you're trying to get the feast organized, animals keep running up to you and offering suggestions or just wanting to "have a word". It's like Animal Crossing Pocket Camp only with somewhat more realistic graphics. 

Frequently, I found myself talking to a new animal before I'd had a chance to do whatever the last one wanted but none of them seemed to remember what they'd asked me for, anyway. They'd often come back before I'd even started with another idea they wanted to try out. 

The Owl wanted to take me fishing, which I'd have liked to try, since he said we'd do it with me riding on his back and him swooping low over the lake so I could grab the fish out of the water. That never happened but I did go to tea at his house. It was only after I'd accepted that it occurred to me an Owl inviting a Mouse for a meal might have unpleasant connotations but I needn't have worried. It's not that  sort of game. 

Oh, yes, I didn't mention I was playing a Mouse, did I? The options in the demo are Mouse, Owl or Otter. Each has a unique specialty - mice are tool-users, otters can swim and fish, owls can fly and be ridden by other characters as mounts - but you also get to choose Traits and Quirks at character creation to personalize your character. 

Traits are useful abilities like being fitter (More hit points) or being able to carry more (Larger inventory) and Quirks are disadvantages like being dainty (Fewer hit points) or being scared of mushrooms. (I took that one.) You get one Trait for free but if you want more you have to take a Quirk for each one as a counterbalance. 

There's housing, too. Really lovely, characterful, delightful housing. My Mouse must be pretty important. Her house is the biggest in the village. It's fricken huge! You can decorate but I didn't figure out how. 

The whole game looks gorgeous, especially for something at this early stage of development. It also played very smoothly for me. Character movement was fluid, the UI was intuitive and even with very little instruction, it was easy to figure out what to do and how to do it. 

The writing is good. All the animals have personalities that come across clearly in the way they express themselves as well as in what they want to talk to you about or what they tell you about themselves. They gossip about each other all the time, too. It feels very much like a village.

I'm guessing the presence of stats and particularly the way there are both hit points and a trait to increase them means there's some kind of combat in the game, although there was no hint of it in the parts of the demo I saw. I don't know how big the world is or what's out there, though there are hints in the conversations. One character talks about having lived in the city, for example, but whether that's somewhere you can visit I have no idea.

I'd love to find out. I have high hopes for this one. It's immediately enjoyable and it has a very obvious potential market. "What if Stardew Valley but Skyrim?" is an irresistible elevator pitch.

The problem would seem to be whether it will ever get the funding it needs. There was a successful Kickstarter last year, when the total came in at double the ask, but that's still only $400k. And according to an update in February, the team only includes five full-time devs. Is that enough money and/or enough people?

I hope so but I guess we'll find out. 

Shark: Got. Bee: Got. Supergirl: Want

Hey! I did something I said I was going to do! That makes a nice change.

This morning I downloaded and installed DCUO again. The client's a svelte 38GB, positively slimline by today's standards. Still took about an hour. Daybreak doesn't have the pipes, I guess. 

It's always interesting, coming back to an MMORPG you haven't played for a while. Since I have a blog (Oh, you noticed!) I can often check back to see when I last played something. Chances are I blogged about it and those chances are especially high when it's DCUO .

A long time ago, I fell into a pattern with the game. I haven't played it seriously since... well, ever. But not even half-seriously for years. What I have done, fairly consistently, is keep an eye on the freebies Digital Ink hands out, so I can log in when there's a good pet or a base decoration or maybe a cape I want. Then I patch up, log in and grab it.

The thing about that is, there's often a long enough gap between freebies that enough has changed in the meantime to make coming back slightly disorienting. (Disorientating? Never know which of those is right.)

Since I was last there, which was towards the end of August last year according to the record, the whole UI seems to have undergone an overhaul. It looks like a new font to me, a lot thinner and tighter. Some of the menus seem easier to follow. And the conversations with NPCs are now shown in social media style, extremely similarly to how they appear in Bagel in Neverness To Everness. Everyone got to be modern, don't they?

It's an improvement all round, although that's not saying a lot. I love DCUO, even though I only ever futz around there, but boy, is it showing its age. Visually, that is. Especially the faces and the animations. They weren't great fifteen years ago and they have not aged well. And yes, before you ask, for once I have the graphics jacked up about as far as they'll go. 

If you look at my character up there, Nini Mo her name is, (Why, I'll explain in a moment. In a Sidebar. I really like sidebars now. So much better than footnotes. I can do footnotes, you know. It's just way too much trouble and footnotes are intrinsically more disruptive than having the information in the body of the post. I'm not writing a sodding dissertation! Also, I could have put this in a sidebar, now I come to think of it...) you'll see it looks like she's wearing a mask. She is not. That's her face. 

Most characters, player or NPC, look like they're wearing kabuki masks to me. And nothing in anyone's features ever moves, It's like we're all playing china dolls.

Sidebar: Nini Mo, since no-one asked, is named after Flora Fyrdraaca's idol and role model. She's "the Coyote Queen, greatest ranger ever" and Flora thinks she's just a character in a book until they meet. Flora, as all regular readers ought to know, since I must have name-checked her here almost as many times as Lana del Rey, is the titular heroine of the trilogy by the frustratingly inactive Ysabeau S Wilce. Write a book, Ysabeau!

All her old books are either out of print or will be soon, by the way. Prices are rising. If you haven't taken the hint the last ten times I dropped it, now's the time. You can get them on Kindle...

Once I'd sorted myself out and figured out how to use the refreshed controls, I had a chat with Supergirl, who inevitably had a job for me. The DCUO superverse is a weird place like that. You can be the absolute newest hero on the block, barely able to handle a street mugging without referring to the Hero Handbook, and you'll still get a call from some megastar telling you your powers somehow fit the exact requirements needed to face down some intergalactic overlord or other.

In this case it's some arch-villain going by the extremely unimpressive name of Kryb. I assume she's in the comics but I have never heard of her. Then again, I didn't know we had Blue Lanterns and there was one of those standing right next to the Girl of Steel. 

Sidebar: I just checked and there are now eleven colors of Lantern in the DC Universe! Eleven!  Green, Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue , Indigo, Violet, Black, Grey, White and Ultraviolet.

Kryb has been doing unspeakable experiments on children. No details (Or "deets" as Supergirl extremely unconvincingly puts it. Would Kara ever say "deets"? No, she would not.) but I'm betting it involves turning them into some kind of monsters so she can weaponize them. It's almost always that. 

Kryb has the Blue Lantern's niece. (She has a name but I've already forgotten it. The Blue Lantern that is. Not sure about the niece. I mean, I'm sure she has a name, just not that we get to know it yet.) I assume we'd be going after Kryb regardless but the family connection adds a little frisson.

Niece or no niece, (Now there's a game show...) I had absolutely no plans on doing the new chapter but it takes place in a version of Argo City that's somehow on the floor of the ocean and I wanted to see if we had underwater content now. We never had any before. 

And we don't have any now, either. I guess Argo's in a bubble. But then, Argo's always in a bubble . In space, underwater, what's the diff?

Anyway, I got sucked into all of that and ended up spending the morning kicking Kryptonian robot ass, which is less fun than it sounds but still some fun. I was in a group for a while, too, which always seems to happen in DCUO. It's about the last game I play where I get group invites. No-one ever says much and I generally don't know what's going on but it's easier to accept than refuse so I join. 

I don't know how to play my character and Nini Mo's not even level 30 yet, which as I always say is Basic Tutorial Level in the game, so I don't contribute much but no-one ever seems to care. I think it's just one of those "If we're grouped we all share credit" things. The xp certainly flowed. I dinged 29.

People came and went and I died a bunch of times because don't know what I'm doing and eventually I was on my own again. I kept going. Supergirl whistled up Krypto, which led to my character making a sarcastic comment that I found quite amusing. You're bringing your dog in now?

Well, yes, of course she is because the superdog is the superstar these days. Except Krypto in DCUO is Original Krypto, the short-haired kind-of-a-Labrador, not the super-cute tousled terrier from the movies.

Come to that, DCUO Supergirl isn't the one from the movies, either. Or the TV show. Or, as far as I can tell, the comics.

As a DC fan, albeit an out-of-date one, I rarely recognize any of the heroes in DCUO as the same people I know from the comics or the TV and movie spin-offs. They look like them but they don't talk like them. Or act like them. 

Or sound like them, if you have a particular voice actor in mind. All the voice acting in the game is generic and always has been. Competent but unconvincing. Then again, you try being convincing, reading some of that dialog.

So that was all fun but by the time we reached the underboss, Annihilus...  no, wait, not him... Atrocitus, that's it... I'd had enough. I'd have had to stop and relearn my skills for him and I didn't feel like it. Instead, I warped out to my base and started hanging some posters. Base building is the real endgame.

Before all of that, though, I popped into Metropolis to visit the Pride Parade and pick up my free flying shark. They've made an effort for the event as usual. Lots of balloons, flags, music, dancing...

I was curious to see which heroes were staffing the thing this year. Ha! I say "heroes"... Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were there, of course. And Aqualad. I cannot get used to the American pronunciation of his name, by the way. Him and Aquaman. That long first "a" is just weird. 

Batwoman was there, too. And a few others I've forgotten. I'm guessing all of them have some established gender identity in the comics but I'm out of that loop. When I start my DC Universe Infinite subscription, maybe I'll get caught up.

The shark is as great, as I knew it would be and I also got a bee. Haven't flown that one yet but it looks good in the preview. I'm guessing it's from last year. I must have missed it.

 

That was more than I'd planned on doing so I felt pretty pleased with myself. About the only other thing I might do for this Chapter is try to pick up Supergirl as an Ally. 

To get her for free I'd have to log in just about every day for a a month and actually do something so that's not going to happen but there's a peculiar system in DCUO, where you can chip away at the monthly Chapter rewards by doing a little every day or you can just buy them for Daybreak Cash. The price is on a sliding scale. The Buyout is 4K DBC but one session this morning knocked 200DBC off the total and it only took a few minutes to get the update. 

You can do that once a day while the event runs. After you trigger it each day, it makes no difference how long you keep on doing the content, you won't get any more credit. There's a 24 hour time gate so grinding isn't an option.

I think that's good? Hard to tell. It's a tax on impatience, basically, which I'm fine with. Then again, I would be. I have a lot more DBC than I know what to do with. I might just buy Supergirl's loyalty for cash money.

And that's about all I have to say about it for now. DCUO: it's always there and I always have fun whenever I play. For an hour or two. Then I've had enough for a month. 

Still, I might drop in a few more times before the event comes to an end,. Drive the price down a little but also fly around a little, show off my shark and my bee. 

If you got 'em, flaunt 'em, right?

Gnomes, Pandas And Flying Sharks - It Can Only Be Summer At Daybreak

I've been out and about doing stuff today so this is a bit of a cobbled together at the last minute post. It's also one of those "Here are some things I'm going to do that I haven't actually done yet" affair, by which I mean I've taken a few press releases and made a post out of them.

Which, yes I know, is cheap. So sue me. You think I get paid for this?

In all cases it's Daybreak I'm talking about. We're just about to hit the big summer festival season in EverQuest II and Niami Denmother has a couple of articles up at EQ2 Traders about it. The first is about Tinkerfest, which she describes as the "annual gnomish (including honorary gnomes) celebration".  Ratongas like to tinker, too, but gnomes don't like to talk about that much. Don't like the competition.

I used to take this one quite seriously. Well, as seriously as you can take anything involving gnomes. I played a few of them (And Ratongas, too.) and at least one of my gnomes had a suitably gnomish residence (See how I resisted saying gnome-home there?) full of the kind of widgets and cogs that make any self-respecting gnome happy.

And, let's face it, all gnomes are self-respecting. A bit too much so for some people. Have you ever met a gnome with an inferiority complex? Or a gnome suffering from imposter syndrome? No, they're all hyper-confident megalomaniacs with delusions of grandeur. It's compensation for their obvious deficiencies in other departments, I imagine, although I'm no expert in gnomish psychology. Thankfully.

But they sure can tinker. If you want something bolted onto something else, these are your guys. Tinkerfest is one of Norrath's  bigger festivals so after a couple of decades it's acquired a lot of cruft. EQ2 Traders has a neat overview and I'm going to steal it, just to fill the post out a bit:

Is this your first time celebrating this event? Or is your memory fuzzy enough that you need a refresher?

• Gnomeland Security in the Steamfont Mountains is the main hub for this event, with portals from all "celebration" areas sending you back to the main hub in Gnomeland. (Celebrating gnomes, surrounded by harvestable cogs and purple shinies, can be found in all home cities as well as the docks of Thurgadin, the gnome area in Solusek's Eye, and Dropship Landing in the Moors)
• The shiny tinkerfest cogs, used for shopping and for crafting, are harvestable "!" items in all celebration areas. They can also be brought back by an upgraded pack pony (100 per 2-hour run).
• The second purple shiny collection (added in 2016) requires that you have completed (and handed in) the first purple shiny collection. Once you have done so, half of the collection can then be found in the Gnomeland Security area; the other half of the collection will be found in Qeynos and Freeport in the celebration areas.
• You will need to know the gnomish language (from a language trainer if you're not a gnome) in order to obtain some of the quests.
• Vendor Tarly in Gnomeland Security will sell all of the past Tinkerfest recipes and items for you while vendor Myron will sell the current year's recipes and items. You will need some shiny tinkerfest cogs before you can buy the books, so scrounge up a few before you go shopping.
• The quest tracker included in a section below will be a godsend if you are trying to run more than one alt through the event. Quest details for all quests can be found on the wiki's Tinkerfest article.
• During the event, there will be a markable sign in several of the Tinkerfest areas, for the Party Sign! Excellent! achievement for those who missed getting the Tinkerfest update for it last year.
• Protip: if you see an item sold on either Myron or Tarly that costs 2 Shiny Tinkerfest Cog, it usually means that it can also be crafted. (Or is a special achievement unlock.)

That quest breakdown, linked in Niami's piece, is huuuuuge. I'm reasonably confident I've done everything on there at least once, some things many times. and by this stage, I'm pretty much tinkered out so I have no plans on doing any of it again. 

I do generally try to do any new quests that get added, just for the sake of being able to say I've done them all, but by now there's really no need for any more activities in most of the festivals. There's literally more than enough to do already. Technically, there is one new Tinkerfest quest this year but it looks to be nothing more than a repeatable option added to an existing quest. If so, I'll pass, thanks.

Even if you're done with the event itself, though, it's still worth noting down the dates because the special Summer Jubilee dungeon, Triad of Elements, only opens during the big three. 

The three tent-pole attractions are:

Tinkerfest — June 6, 2024 to June 19, 2024

Scorched Sky Celebration — June 28, 2024 to July 11, 2024

Oceansfull Festival — August 8, 2024 to August 21, 2024 

Running Triad of Elements multiple times is the only way to get this year's Plume for your Plume slot. I don't think there are details on stats for those yet but if things follow the usual pattern, it will be better than any of the inferior Plumes crafters can make. 
 
As to how essential Plumes actually are, I'll leave that to someone who does the harder content. I got mine the first year they added them and I haven't bothered since. I'm not a fan of running the same dungeon over and over.

The Summer Jubilee currency, Platinum Medals, can also be earned while the other summer festivals are running, the regularly-scheduled minor festivals that sprawl across the summer months, things like the Moonlit Enchantments and the City Festivals. The full, official write-up for the Jubilee is on the EQII website and EQ2 Traders version is here.

And that's it for EQII for the moment. I am still playing most days, by the way, although by playing I mostly mean logging in to set and collect my Overseer rewards. We'll see if the summer splurge of festive activities draws me back in. I do like me a good festival.

On, then, to DCUO, which I am very much not playing. I'm not playing it to the extent that I haven't even installed it on the "new" PC. It wasn't on the SDD I transferred across so it's languishing on the old machine. 

I am contemplating setting the old one up to be permanently available. The issue is where to put it. Until then, though, if I wanted to play DCUO, I'd have to re-install it. And why would I want to do that?

That's why! Come on! Wouldn't you re-install for that shark? I want that thing!

Daybreak has a very solid record on supporting Pride Month. I haven't mentioned EQII's contribution to the cause yet because I'm incompetent and disorganized but it's moar pandas!

I actually have more multicolored rabbits and red pandas than I know what to do with, which won't stop me collecting these, too. I might hold back on getting them for every character this time, though. It's a lot of bag space. 

That shark, though... with the flag! Gotta have it!

Just to round out the Daybreak news, there's a limited time promo on subscriptions happening. Wilhelm wrote an excellent piece comparing MMORPG subs, in which I thought Daybreak's All Access came out clearly on top. It's going to be an even better deal for a while because they've added some extras. 

100 slot Broker boxes and a 25% boost to what is now arguably the game's primary currency, Status, are  not to be missed. And while they're limited-time offers, the limits are pretty generous - the end of August for quarterly subs and the end of November for six and twelve months. If you were vaguely thinking of subbing, that might swing it for you.

And that's all I have from the Daybreak News Desk for now. I'm off to download DCUO and get my flying shark!  

There's Something In The Water! There, In The Distance! I can Just Make It Out! It's... It's GW3!

There were other things I had in mind for today's post, things I'm a lot more interested in and that I'd certainly enjoy writing about a lot more, but I suppose I have to write about this now. ArenaNet officially announced Guild Wars 3 at this year's Summer Games Fest. There was a pre-event puff that told us they were going to announce something and some people thought that might be GW3. I was not one of those people. 

Then again, I was also not one of those people who cared all that much what they were going to announce. I was mildly curious but I assumed it would be some new thing for one of the two existing Guild Wars games, neither of which I play and neither of which I plan on playing, either now or in the near or distant future. 

I find myself in a very uncomfortable relationship with the Guild Wars franchise these days, particularly GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played both games together and had some good times over a number of years but, while I remember the original fondly enough, the sequel is problematic. 

We played the original Guild Wars for maybe less than two months, back when it was new. We started a few weeks after launch because at first, like a lot of people, we thought it was a pure PvP game. ArenaNet's soon to become familiar misleading marketing making its presence felt, probably, since that was how it was reported until it launched, when players found out there was a massive PvE component, too.

Six or eight weeks was long enough to complete the original campaign, after which there didn't seem much point staying so we left. I've returned to GW1 a few times since, finished another of the campaigns, seen something of the rest and generally disported myself in an increasingly desultory fashion until I finally lost interest altogether. Mrs Bhagpuss has never gone back.

When Guild Wars 2 was announced, name recognition was enough to have both of us sign up and participate in the beta weekends. The game turned out to be radically different from anything else around at the time and it suited us both very well. We ended up playing for about ten years without a break, from launch in 2012 until after the pandemic. It was Mrs. Bhagpuss's only MMORPG and my main one and it formed the bulk of the content here at Inventory Full for many years. There are more than seven hundred posts here labeled "GW2".

Until today, there was only one post labeled "GW3". Now, I suppose, there will be a lot more. And I'm not very happy about it.

 Mrs Bhagpuss stopped playing GW2 a few years a go. It was her last MMORPG. She still plays video games, just not that kind. I gave it a few more weeks but, as I suspected, the only reason I'd been playing GW2 at all by then was because she did. As a game, I'd been done with it for a while.

I come away from most MMORPGs I've played for any length of time with warm feelings and an occasional desire to pop back in, see my old characters and catch up with what's been happening in the game. Not so GW2. I'm not quite the cliche bitter burnout, who wants to badmouth the game they used to love at every opportunity. It's a good game and I had good times in it. I wish it well.

At least, that's my rational, objective reaction. Emotionally, if I think about my time in the game at all, which I rarely do unless prompted by something like yesterday's announcement, it's with the kind of feelings I imagine people who've escaped from cults experience. Relief at being out. Anger at all that time and emotion wasted. A sense of grievance at having been used. And a dread of being somehow sucked back in.

Okay, that's over-dramatizing it. A little. I feel a bit niggled at the way ArenaNet consistently faffed and fudged and promised far more than they could fulfill. The way for years there was always jam tomorrow but never jam today. The countless revamps and revisions to cadence. The endless promises made and broken. The history of the development of the game is a litany of lurches and swerves, a directionless leadership forever searching for a path that leads somewhere and rarely, if ever, finding one.

My biggest complaint is with the story. For a franchise that claims to be built on lore and narrative, the stories were always thin, sparse and fragmented. Delivery was unreliable and sporadic and when we did get something it was never anything much. Even at the time, because I played other MMORPGs, I knew how meager the pickings were but at the time I did at least believe there was some quality there. 

That was mostly ignorance. Being locked as I was inside the MMORPG ecosystem, all my judgments were necessarily relative. The writing in GW2 was pretty decent - for an MMORPG. Unfortunately, what I wasn't entirely aware of was how degraded the genre is compared to others when it comes to storytelling.

Shouldn't I have known? Well, maybe. The thing is, until around about the time of the pandemic or maybe a bit later, I actively disliked getting any story in my MMORPGs. My motivations for playing are very well described in this post of Yeebo's. Narrative is the least of my concerns. 

In fact, it's something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible. One of the early posts about GW2 here on this blog bemoans ANet's insistence of making everything about the story. Especially about my character's "Personal Story". I really didn't like that concept, not in GW2 or Star Wars: the Old Republic or in any MMORPG that tries it on. To this day, with thousands of hours played in GW2, I have only ever completed the Personal Story on one character and that only under duress. 

The Personal Story wasn't the only core aspect of GW2 that meant nothing to me. The whole Legendary system was something I always loathed, too as was 100% map completion. 

In fact, there were probably more things about GW2 that I disliked than that I liked for the whole time I was there. It's a fiddly, nitpicking, pettifogging, mean-spirited game in so many ways, with check-lists that do their damnedest to bleed all the spontaneity out of exploring and systems cynically designed around making things just awkward enough that players will pay for convenience but not quite so irritating that they'll stop playing altogether.

Many people who've bounced off the game make these kinds of accusations. It has a reputation in that regard. But it has always been able to get by on the things it does well; a huge, exciting, vibrant open world that demands and rewards exploration; superb art direction; free and flowing movement in three dimensions; best-in-genre hot-join group combat... 

Things like that make it an exceptionally easy and rewarding game for in-the-moment play. If you go with the flow and don't let the game dictate to you, you can log in and find yourself effortlessly entertained for hours. It's only when you start to look for direction that it all falls apart. GW2 has some of them most unappealing, linear progression I've trudged through and much of that is down to the turgid, tedious story and the way what little of interest there is in it has to be stretched to make it last as long as possible by way of an interminable series of pointless set-piece fights.

Several years of modern, open-world games with all of GW2's benefits and few if any of its disadvantages, boss fights that last a fun couple of minutes instead of a miserable half an hour chief among them, have painfully demonstrated to me just how limited my horizons were while I was playing ANet's game all those years. I neither deny nor regret the many good times I had there, particularly in World Vs World, an area of the game gloriously free of all narrative structure, but the payoff for the effort involved seems poor.

And so to Guild Wars 3, which is coming in about eighteen months. Or rather the beta is. You can sign up for it now. I have, of course. 

That it's beta they're trumpeting and a long time from now is interesting in itself. No pre-alpha sign-ups. No alpha. And, I'll bet, no Early Access, either. Just a good old-fashioned beta, followed, if precedent serves, by a few open beta weekends and then launch. That'll be refreshing, at least. You can wishlist it on Steam, too, which I've also done because if it's on Steam from the get-go, that's where I'm going to play it. 

And yes I suppose I will play it although I'm very far from keen. It would seem churlish not to at least take a look. I'd say unprofessional only no-one's paying me. 

Since it's coming, like it or not, at this point I could go on to talk about the game itself, speculate what it might be like, start that conversation. But I won't, for a couple of reasons.

The first is we don't actually know anything yet. There's one video and some screenshots, all taken from that same video, which is apparently shot using the engine on which the game will run. There's also an extremely generic mission statement that makes it sound like they're making GW2 again only with modern action combat and a bit of parkour movement thrown in. 

This they call "a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." It sounds like the gacha games we're playing now, to me. 

How fresh that'll seem in 2028, probably the earliest GW3 will go live, remains to be seen. It will probably be a shock to many MMORPG players, those who've stayed inside the stockade these last few years, just like GW2 was a shock back in 2012. That game genuinely did feel so different back then that Anet had to jump in quick to fix it up to feel more familiar for the many curious WoW players that were bouncing off it within minutes of poking their heads in to see what this strange new MMO was all about.

The real reason I'm not going to go into speculation mode, though (You can probably sense me trying to stop myself doing it right now.) is that we've got a sodding year and a half of this ahead of us and I don't want to contribute to the feeding frenzy. All that arguing over things no-one knows. All the fantasies and wishes that turn into promises that were broken before they were even made. It's going to be exhausting.

And I'll be very nearly seventy when the damn game comes out! What if it turns out to be good? What If I end up playing it for as long as I played GW2 and then I find out it really wasn't all that good all along but I just didn't realize because playing it blurred my perspective? Then I'd be eighty and I'd have wasted another decade on a game that was pretty good at times but often not very good at all. 

That doesn't sound like the best use of whatever time I have left, now, does it? Do I really want GW3 to be my last chance at a good MMORPG? If so, the omens aren't good. Just look at the record.

But then, I don't imagine ANet is making games with the gray gaming market in mind. Millennials and GenZ are the target, I'd imagine, since GenAlpha famously doesn't play traditional video games at all. Grab your share of the shrinking market while it's there. It's never going to get any bigger.

And now I need to stop because I'm already slipping into the swamp of speculation. There's going to be a Guild Wars 3 but it's not until next Fall so let's all agree to forget about it until then.

Promise? 

This Is Your Situation

Jack Emmert, CEO of Cryptic and one of the names behind a whole slew of MMORPGs you'll have heard of, if not played, including all his current studio's titles and also City of Heroes and DCUO, gave an interview to GamesIndustry recently that seemed to me to be at one and the same time both clear- and short-sighted. His thesis is that there's a pent-up demand for MMOs that's currently going unmet and his primary evidence for it is the number of people who bought New World, apparently estimated to be a staggering 10 million.

First, ten million? Really? The source quoted by GI is Video Game Insights, whose website comes under the umbrella of something called SensorTower. It seems to offer a service very similar to what SuperData used to trade on so give it whatever credibility you used to give them, I guess?

Ten million sounds like a lot of customers to give up on, though. Impressive chutzpah from Amazon, throwing that many under the bus. Jack's explanation for that is "I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it" although if Amazon don't have the infrastructure, who does? Still, even if it was actually "only" half of what VGI claim, jack's right. That's a lot of players willing to give an MMO a go.

But not to stick with one, obviously. Just like the millions who didn't stick with Lost Ark or any of the other big ticket launches of the last few years.

Jack also cites the continuing millions believed, if not proven, to be playing World of Warcraft and "the Daybreak games, or whatever" as proof the interest is still there. All of which is uncontroversial enough, I guess, although I'm not entirely convinced it means a huge pent-up demand so much as a lot of people stuck in games they used to love, now finding themselves unwilling to move on...

I'm more interested in his analysis of why the demand, if we accept it exists, isn't being met. Apparently it's because the new games are simultaneously empty of meaning even while being overfilled with content.:

 "These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

I think he's talking about what Wilhelm often complains about with games in development - that desire to be everything to everyone rather than sticking to what you're good at. "Feature creep" as it's sometimes called. Jack goes on to explain that when he was designing Neverwinter Online, he had a simple mission statement: "Kill shit and take their loot."

He doubles down: "That was it, over and over again.". Then he adds, almost as an after thought, "And make it fun." The fact that NWO is still running is cited as proof the concept worked. 

A lot of MMOs are still running, though. As has been noted many times, they're harder to kill than cockroaches. I could log into half a dozen I can think of immediately that have been up as long or longer than NWO and I'd lay good odds I'd be one of fewer than a dozen players online in any of them. Persistence is evidence of something but I'm not sure that something is demand.

My real problem with Jack's thesis, though, isn't the existence of a substantial demographic interested in massively multiple online games. Undeniably, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people playing MMOs of various kinds. 

If we assume Jack means the kinds of games he makes and that he's name-checking, though, all of which are MMORPGs, not just MMOs, I'll still allow it. Lots of people do play those, albeit nowhere near as many. And logic does suggest there are orders of magnitude more players, who used to play games like those but don't any more.

Where I diverge from his argument is that what the people, who currently aren't playing MMORPGs but might one day, are impatiently awaiting are games where they can

 "run the same goddamn dungeon a hundred times" 

so they can get better and better loot, progress their character and improve their playing skills, which is what Jack thinks is needed to bring those lost sheep thundering back into the fold.

"It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it. In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do."

I'm happy for Jack. He's like Mark E Smith from the Fall. Well, in one way. They both dig repetition. 

I do, too - in music. In games, not so much. I'm over here, in the camp Jack dismisses as irrelevant:

"But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'.

Oh, god yes. Try to make me do that and I will get bored. And leave. But appraently

"That misunderstands the point."

Sorry? What point was that, again? It was the lack of any need for variety or content in a new MMORPG.

"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't. Running the same dungeon multiple times is perfectly fine at the start, then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new… And once you do that, the players are sold."

Except that the evidence of numerous Steam Charts past is that by the time you get to that first, quarterly content drop, 90% of your players will have left. And few of them are going to come back to see what else is new three months later because by then your game is going to be just some old game they wish they hadn't wasted their money on. The demand may be there but the patience sure as hell is not. 

You may be able to frog-boil WoW vets into running the same content over and over and over at higher and higher difficulty forever and ever but that's a form of conditioning that takes years to induce. It's not going to bed down in a couple of weeks, which is, at the outside, about as long as you'll have before the players get bored and wander off to find  something less tedious.

The two genres that have been eating MMORPGs lunch for half a decade now are Survival-Crafting and Open World RPG Gacha. One of those does indeed exemplify Jack's wish to "focus on economical use of assets and environments" and reliance on repetition, although the repetition in question is rarely if ever multiple dungeon runs. The repetition has more to do with creativity than compliance.

As for the other, it's the total antithesis. Pure entertainment. Also a six-weekly content cadence that leaves players struggling to keep up rather than lost for new things to do. 

What neither of them rely on is running the same goddam dungeon over and over and over until your eyes bleed, just so you can add 0.1% to your Critical Chance stat, if you're lucky. There are people who like doing that, true, but I suspect very, very few of them are actively looking for a new game that will allow them to do it. They're being very well-served already in a number of games that were last truly popular at least a decade and a half ago and most of them are not going to be moving unless that game actually shuts down.

None of which is to say Jack doesn't have a good business plan. He has. It's very realistic. A lot of developers would do well to follow it.

"I'm a niche developer in the grand scheme of things, because I identify... something with a passionate fan base, and then I try my best to create an authentic experience."

There's the future of the genre in a nutshell for you: niche product serving a pre-existing fanbase. I'm not going to argue against it. It'll work and if someone cares to apply the method to an IP I care about, I'll play it, too.

I'm just not sold on the idea that there's some larger, untapped, unsatisfied audience out there, desperately waiting for someone to make an MMORPG that will let them run the same dungeon over and over and over... 

Or maybe I just hope there isn't. God! that would be depressing...

Free Comic Day At DCUO

I don't really play DCUO any more. It's arguable whether I ever did, really. I leveled to the extremely low cap of 30 a couple of times, which is tantamount to boasting about having completed the tutorial in any other MMO. And even that was many years ago. In recent times, about all I've done is log in when there's some new freebie to collect or if something's going on that I think might make a blog post.

And that's kind of what's happening today. Only this time I don't even need to log in! 

As you may have noticed (If you've been paying attention to anything I've been saying.) there's a new Supergirl movie out this summer. Next month, in fact. June 26 to be precise. I posted about it here and here which, since I'm talking about it again today, makes this three months in a row. DC should be paying me!

It's not so much the movie this time as the opportunity it represents. Digital Ink, the Daybreak sub-studio responsible for DCUO has, unsurprisingly, thrown itself headlong onto what it hopes is going to be the Summer Supergirl Bandwagon. If I had to bet, I'd guess the movie will be an artistic success but a commercial failure but until it comes out, its success or lack thereof is conveniently unsullied by either reviews or box office receipts so why not make the most of it while it lasts?.

There is, naturally, an in-game event based around the movie. There's even a (Not very good...) trailer, which you can watch below, although if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother.

I've completely lost track of how these things work in DCUO any more. There used to be Chapters and then there was some kind of multi-part story set up and now I don't know what they're doing. It must be well over a year since I last logged in and a lot longer than that since I played for more than half an hour before I got bored and logged out again.

Of late, I haven't even bothered to go in and get my free stuff. There's always free stuff but if you're not playing, what are you going to do with it? And I got a bit annoyed when I bought a new Hideout and instead of ending up with two, it lost me the one I already had. Which I never got back. Not that I'm bitter... 

I tried to redecorate the new one but my heart was never in it. Anyway, enough of that. For this summer's Supergirl event there's a freebie you don't have to log in to enjoy. And it's a good one, too. If you like Supergirl and superhero comics, that is. Which, obviously, I do.

To cut to the chase (In the skies above Metropolis, likely as not.) DCUO is "giving away" six issues of Supergirl's comic to promote the new Children of Krypton: Shadows Over Argo event. 

I say "giving away" but it's more like "Giving you a lend of" as we used to say when I was at school. And when I say "comics", I imagine no-one really believes they're going to send you half a dozen printed copies through the mail. No, what they're giving you is limited-duration access to selected digital issues through the DC Universe Infinite portal. You do have to sign up and register an account at DCUI but it just asks for your age and an email and password but it only takes like thirty seconds.

The most interesting part of all this for me was learning that DCUI is now available in the UK. Has been since 2022, in fact. I completely missed the Bat Signal on that one. 

Several times, back in the twenty-teens, I tried to sign up for the service and was repeatedly rebuffed. I wanted to give them my money but they wouldn't take it. I kept checking back to see if they'd expanded into my region and they hadn't but then, some time during the pandemic I think it must have been, I happened upon a website that gave me free access to what seems like every comic ever published and I forgot all about DCUI. 

The six Supergirl comics you can read for nothing right now.

I've used that website, sporadically, whenever there's been something I particularly wanted to read.  I assume it's some sort of pirate operation so won't link it here but really I have no clue what it is. At no point has anyone ever asked for any money or indeed any personal details, You don't even need to provide an email address. It's as easy to access as Wikipedi and as public, which seems a bit of an odd way to do piracy.

Still, I prefer not to pirate if there's a legal alternative. FFS, I don't even like playing pirate-themed games! Pirates of any and all kinds are the antithesis of cool as far as I'm concerned. Bad pirates! Pirates bad!

The upshot of which is that, having been alerted by the DCUO promotion to the fact that DC is now willing to take my money, I will very soon be giving it to them, not least because the monthly subscription is an extremely cost-effective £6.99. For reasons that are anything but rational (Or indeed sane.) I feel it would be foolish to give them that money before I've read my six free issues, so I'll probably start subbing next month. I fancy the idea of reading comics on my tablet in my lunch hour at work. You can download them and read offline with the DC offer so I won't even have to contend with our crappy wi-fi.. 

The one thing that's putting me of a bit is that, having read one of the issues on the DCUI platform this morning, the experience doesn't seem to be anything like as good as it is with the pirate version. I was only saying to someone at work this week that I now find reading comics on a screen considerably more immersive than reading them on paper but that certainly wasn't true of the one I read on DCUI today. I hope there are better ways to display and turn the pages hidden in the UI somewhere because the default option felt really clunky.

The six free issues are mostly very recent, including the first in the current run that's been so highly rated by Anj at Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. Anj's reviews are so incredibly thorough that you could just read them and not bother with the comics at all. I have to skip most of what he says about anything I have any intention of reading. The word "spoiler" doesn't seem to feature in his vocabulary.

340 more Supergirl comics you could read for just £6.99 a month. 

Having read that one, I can confirm it's excellent but also probably of more interest to long-time fans of the character than casual readers. I guess that's likely true of most of the others but I would recommend anyone with more than a passing interest, especially if they have any plans to see the movie, to take the opportunity to read the free copy of  Issue #1 of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, the full graphic novel version of which I wrote about at some length in one of the posts I linked earlier.

Ah, yes. Issue #1 and only Issue #1 for free. That's worth noting because of course the hope is that, having had a taste, you'll crave more and be willing to pay for it next time. Remind me again what profession uses that sales model?

I was curious (Read: suspicious.) that the free Supergirl comics were just the regular free tasters on offer over at DCUI. Well, I was once I remembered that, when I was checking the platform out all those years ago, giving away free issues was a thing there. So I went there directly to check, using a different browser, and they're not. 

Not the same, I mean. There are six free comics anyone can read over there, just not the same six. And none of them feature Supergirl, which seems odd now I come to think of it. Why would they miss a chance at cross-promotion? Free Supergirl comics coming to all in June, I'll bet.

Thinking about that, it occurred to me to wonder just who it is that can access this offer. I got an email but whether that's because I'm a Daybreak All Access customer or because I have a history of playing DCUO so Digital Ink has me email address I couldn't say. Well, I probably could, if I dug into it a bit but I have better things to do with my Saturday afternoon. It's not like I'm a journalist!

In that spirit, I offer the information, for what it's worth, "as seen." If you play DCUO or have played it, maybe you can read six Supergirl comics for free, too. Or maybe not. If you care enough, I imagine you'll go find out, now I've brought it to your attention. 

And if it turns out you can't... well, there are other ways.