Knowing Where You're Going

The plan for today was a music post but they take a while and the weather's turned warm and fine so that's not happening. The garden won't tidy itself, more's the pity.

Instead, how about another Friday grab-bag? I think I have enough bookmarks for one of those...

Is it, Though?

The headline on the news report at MMOBomb trumpets "The World Of Pantheon: Rise Of The Fallen Is Looking Much Better With The New Lighting Update". News Editor Troy Blackburn seems really impressed: 

"...the most impressive thing they have implemented into Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is the improved lighting.... The video does a fantastic job of highlighting the changes to the lighting system and it's amazing how much of a difference it makes."

I was curious to see it after that build-up. I'm broadly in favor of the new graphic style Visionary Realms have chosen and it's looked pretty good in the videos they've put out so far to promote it. This one? Not so much.

The video wasn't produced by VR themselves but by a YouTuber called Redbeardflynn (No relation to our own Redbeard, at least I'm assuming...). The video itself is perfectly fine. It's what it shows that bothers me.

These things are always a matter of taste but to my eye, many of the Befores in that video look more atmospheric and characterful than the largely bland and over-illuminated Afters. It's not that I think the new lighting is in any way bad. I just can't see it as much of an improvement. By and large, I prefer it the way it was. 

It does, I suppose, have the merit of making it easier to see everything, which seems to be in keeping with the direction the game is heading. I'm beginning to think that, when and if it ever reaches an official launch state, Pantheon won't look much like Brad's original vision at all. 

That may or may not be a bad thing. By then the whole retro scene might almost be ready for a revival of its own, it's been going on so long now. I'm not entirely sure who the target demographic is any more, anyway. People who plan on playing video games when they retire? If so, maybe it makes sense to make everything easier to see.

Maybe they should include a magnifying glass in the Collector's Edition.

Anyone Got A Map?

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about the latest EverQuest II update, Darkpaw Rising. Attentive readers may have noticed a throwaway line in which I described it as "excellent, awkward and frustrating". It's all of that and what's more it's meant to be.

The new instance is based on, although by no means the same as, the sprawling dungeon included with the old Splitpaw Saga Adventure Pack from June 2005, a time when the EQII development team at SOE was still taking no prisoners when it came to accessibility. Almost two decades later, someone at Darkpaw clearly thinks the time has come to revisit that aesthetic. 

The new update is... challenging. What it mostly challenges is your patience. If you're the kind of person who yells "Yippee!" when they realise the quest they're on is sending them deep into a maze or someone who keeps a pad of graph paper and a mapping pen always to hand in the fervent hope a cartographic opportunity may arise, you're going to love this update.

If you're everyone else, you're going to tab out after ten minutes and start searching for help. I did and found nothing so I gritted my loins, girded my teeth and got on with it. 

In a couple of hours or so I'd killed every last gnoll in the place, as well as all the bats, snakes, mushroom-men, earth elementals and any damn thing that moved. I'd bought some tracking scrolls in the cash shop so I could find my quest targets and now there was literally nothing on track. Not a living or undead thing left in the place and yet I still had plenty of unfinished quests, some of them asking me to kill mobs I'd not seen at all.

That was working as intended. The dungeon is meant to take more than one run to complete. It has multiple levels with some areas inaccessible without the use of crafted devices such as ladders or teleport crystals. I knew all that. I'd even stopped to do the tradeskill instance so I could make the items I needed. The problem was, I couldn't figure out where I was meant to use them.

In the end I decided to do some proper research, which eventually paid off.  Searching for all kinds of variations on Darkpaw Dungeon/Instance/Warren got me nowhere but when I googled Darkpaw Maps I finally got some hits. In case anyone reading this is thinking of giving the new content a look, I'm very happy to share what I found.

There's a page on the wiki but it's tucked away under the heading Darkpaw Warrens Maps. It has several links to some maps made in beta by a player called Taled, along with a fairly comprehensive quest walkthrough.

Taled says he's not planning on uploading the maps to EQ2Maps (Although now I check he has at least posted them on the forums there so someone else can do it.) so you'll have to install them yourself. Luckily for the less technically-minded among us, he's included comprehensive instructions, which I followed and can attest work perfectly. There are also some PoIs you can add to the maps, which is an even fiddlier process but if I can manage it, anyone can.

Thanks for the maps, Taled! I'd be lost without them. Literally.

Ever Wish You Hadn't Bothered?

Remember those two posts back in March, where I went through every act on the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition longlist and gave my thoughts on all of them? Well, that was a waste of time!

Yesterday, the organisers announced the eight names that made it through to the shortlist. No mention of my favorites, of course. I wasn't all that surprised. There wasn't a lot that interested or impressed me on the long list and I was fairly sure the few I did like wouldn't make the cut. 

That said, I did think George Houston would make it onto the shortlist. He looks like a star already. But nope. No sign of him, or of the wonderful Chloe Slater - who, to be fair, may only have that one, great song...oh, wait...

Of the eight, most seem like solid, musicianly picks. I guess it's in keeping with the way Glastonbury is these days - slick, professional, polished and more than a little dull. I guess they didn't call it Worthy Farm for nothing. Not like the old days, although god knows the old days weren't all that great, either. 

Anyway, for completion's sake, the eight shortlisters are The Ayoub Sisters, Bryte, Caleb Kunle, JayaHadADream, KID 12, Nadia Kadek, Olivia Nelson, and Problem Patterns. If you want links, you can find them in the aforementioned posts. 

I'm kidding!I know no-one here cares!

End With A Tune

I did say I wanted to do a music post today. I guess I'm halfway there. I've been bookmarking a lot of stuff to share of late but on review I'm not wholly convinced it's all up to the mark. I mean, I like all of it but a lot doesn't really stand out from the pack the way it probably should if I'm going to pull it out for special attention.

This does, though.

 I LUV IT feat. Playboi Carti - Camillo Cabello

She's a pop star, apparently. I hadn't heard of her but that means nothing. Pop's changed, hasn't it? For the better. 

A lot of things I've liked lately seem to have had Playboi Carti somewhere around them, too.

Also, I love that video, particularly the very last shot with the bloodstain slowly spreading and that wonderful expression she pulls...

And we're done. Real music post soon, weather permitting.

Don't Mind Me! Just Passing Through! I VIsit Every Territory On Aeternum And Live To Talk About It.

Once I'd cooled off on the idea of buying that three-story yellow house in Everfall, it seemed like it might be an idea to go take a look at all of my options - or at least as many as I could get to at Level 35. That meant poking my nose into places I wasn't supposed to know about. Fun!

I've kind of gotten out of the habit of taking low-level characters to high-level zones. I used to do it all the time up until a few years ago. It's a good way to get the feel of a new game. It tells you a lot about how the developers were thinking when they were putting it all together. 

In some mmorpgs it feels as though the devs want us to take the game as seriously as they do. There are rules and they're there to be followed. Sometimes you get the impression anything less might be taken as a personal insult.

Those are the games where mobs have faultless radar that locks onto any character more than a certain number of levels beneath them. You've barely set foot in a new zone when everything in a five-hundred meter radius comes barrelling out of the bushes, snarling and spitting and howling for your blood. 

Instant death follows, of course, because those are the same games that ramp mob damage up exponentially against lower-level targets. One hit is all it takes and since all your defenses are automatically negated as soon as you set foot anywhere you're not meant to go, every attack does hit.

 

When I run into something like that, it tells me the whole game is going to be very much an on-rails experience. The devs will tell you where you should be and when you should be there and don't even think about having any ideas of your own.

I haven't run into all that many mmorpgs quite that bad and of those that come close I've purged the memories. I tend not to stick around where my preferred playstyle isn't just unsupported but actively discouraged. Of the games I have played for a while, the one that sticks in my mind as being a little like that is World of Warcraft, although I suspect it falls more into the next category.

These are the games that use some kind of sliding scale to decide how far you're allowed to push your luck. There's not the same kind of cliff-edge you get with the really harsh mechanics of the first category but there's a pretty treacherous slope all the same. 

In zones above your intended range you get some leeway as aggro ranges increase and mobs get more vicious but you can edge past if you're careful and you might survive a few hits. If you keep on testing the waters, though, you will eventually find yourself in over your head. When your level is sufficiently far below the intended level for the zone the devs take away the safety net and it's back to one-shot kills and nowhere to run.

The third category doesn't much care what you do. Aggro ranges might vary by mob type but level has nothing to do with it. A tiger in a starting zone has the same aggro range as a tiger in the endgame. Hits get harder but incrementally not exponentially. Exploring in those worlds is purely a matter of watching where you're going. Don't bump into anything and you'll be fine. Probably.

 

There are, of course, infinite gradations and variations. So many factors come into play: aggro range but also run speed, line of sight, ranged attacks, crowd control effects, visibility, terrain... Even in games that don't differentiate at all by level, some zones are easy to cross while others are all but impossible for any number of valid and less than valid reasons.

In all the time I've played mmorpgs I can't remember a single game where any of this has ever been overtly explained. Usually, about the best you can hope for are a couple of indicators on the mobs themselves (A death's head or a grinning skull is generally a bad sign.) and a note on the map telling you what the intended level might be.

The only game I can bring to mind that marks the exact aggro range of every mob on the map is Guild Wars, where I have to say I always found it intensely irritating. It turned exploring into a peculiarly geometric affair, where you stare at a series of circles on the mini-map and maneuver yours in such a way that it never intersects with any of the others. I'm sure someone enjoyed it but I can see why no other game copied it.

A more common system that I've seen a few times is a radar ping on a mini map or a heads-up display that notes when some mob has noticed you trying to sneak past. You get a small window of opportunity to pull back or freeze or go into stealth, whatever seems appropriate, before the creature launches itself at you. That I also find quite irritating.

When we get right down to it, I don't like any mechanics that make looking at a map or a HUD the optimal way to travel through dangerous territory. I like to look intensely into the screen and feel myself there, in the world. 

 

I like visual triggers, mobs stopping what they're doing, looking up or casting around, as if for a scent. The more that's done with animation or sound, the better but I'll also settle for a big exclamation point appearing over a mob's head to show it's thinking about something. At least it's in my field of view. 

In every new mmorpg, learning the local rules, the physics of the world, the various behaviors of the different mobs and the trigger cues is one of the best parts. Then the next best part after that is learning how to play them to your advantage.

How well all those myriad factors balance and especially how fair it feels is one of the defining factors in how much fun exploring can be in any given mmorpg. Some, Guild Wars 2 for example, are so permissive there's virtually no thrill in exploration at all (Although in GW2's case, the stellar work of the art department often makes it a glorious pleasure, all the same.) Others (I thought Phantasy Star Online 2 was one, from the little I saw while I was briefly there.) are so restrictive there's no point even trying to explore.

After several hours travelling the highways, byeways and unmarked dirt tracks of Aeternum today, I would tentatively describe New World as both fair and exciting when it comes to going where you're not supposed to go. The main reason I'm slightly cautious is that my character at 35 might be a little too high for a real test. Somewhere in the mid-teens would probably have been more conclusive. 

I'm not rolling a new character and levelling them up just to find out, though, so we'll have to make do with what I learned today. Which was that most but not all of the non-elite open world map is accessible to a determined explorer, provided they don't want to go too far off-road and always keep their eyes very firmly open.

 

The map, when used for planning, is trully excellent. Possibly the best I've ever used in an mmorpg. Not only are all the roads and trails clearly and accurately marked but you can see quite plainly where a road goes through a village, town, hamlet or ruin and also when the road itself breaks up and becomes impassable. 

That is crucial for safe travelling because although the larger roads are mostly safe, almost any settlement other than a player-town will be crawling with aggressive mobs, many of which will spill onto the road as it goes through. Bridges, especially the huge, partially-ruined ones, are also always swarming with undead. It's essential to know when you need to come off the paved highway and cut across country to avoid murder-gauntlets like those.

The map also makes it very clear which areas are impassable. The shading and color even tells you if the obstacle is a mountain or a cliff or deep water. Again, invaluable when planing a route.

As far as mob aggro goes, I think there's a sliding scale. I found it hard to be sure. My feeling is that there's a static upper radius that attaches to mobs your own level and all those above, meaning no mob spots you from further away just because it's higher level than you. The reverse, though, affects mobs as you level past them. The higher above them you get, the less notice they take of you, until eventually you all but have to push them out of the way to get their attention.

I would stress I'm not entirely sure about that. I have a suspicion predators may work differently. In the whole time I was travelling, it was always either wolves or cats that seemed to attack from a greater distance. Especially wolves. Bloody, sodding wolves. I hate wolves! Oh, and alligators, too. 

 

Run speed seems to be identical for everything, players and all mobs, although once again, I felt wolves seemed to be able to catch me up when nothing else could. I think that's because of a particular lunge attack they do, though, rather than any specific speed buff. I don't think wolves get Spirit of Wolf in Aeternum and I certainly don't see why they should, when no-one else does.

There seem to be few mobs that use crowd control effects or maybe I was just lucky. I did get killed once when I tried to run through half a dozen humanoid mobs and got chain-stunned but only once and it was in Shattered Mountain, which is a 50-60 zone. I probably should have expected it.

Shattered  Mountain was one of only two of the fourteen zones in which I failed in my mission to visit  all the marked player hubs in the game. Both were zones meant for players between 50 and 60. More importantly, I think, they also have no real player towns. They aren't, as far as I can see, included in the territorial PvP set-up and there's no housing available there. 

Those two zones, along with Great Cleave, which I was able to explore, only have "Outposts" for players to craft and bank and sell. The other eleven territories all have Settlements, one per zone, largeish villages or small towns, filled with activity of all kinds. These three each have two Outposts, which very much resembe those in the original alpha. Just a fort with the basic facilities inside, nothing else. 

I did manage to get to both of the Outposts in Great Cleave and one of the two in Edengrove but Shattered Mountain proved too tough, mainly because of the "mountain" part, which meant I couldn't cut around obstacles without getting trapped against a rockface. Even though none of the Outposts had housing, something I didn't realize until I got there, it was still well worth the trip. Now I have fast travel options and respawn points for all of them.

I had no major issues getting to the player hubs in the other very high level Territories. I'd already been to Reekwater, which is supposedly the highest zone in the current game. Mourningdale and Restless Shores are technically within my level range, although only just. 

I had a bit of trouble with some goats outside of Mourningdale, which would have been a very embarrassing way to get killed, but I made it past in one piece. Restless Shores saw me arrive at the gates with four or five slavering withered chasing me in the traditional Benny Hill manner but they were never close to catching me.

The nearest I came to disaster in sight of the safety of the city was coming up the road into Ebonscale Reach, a zone intended for 55-60. It was so close my Berserker death save kicked in so technically I did die but I didn't fall down. Somehow I kept going and got away. 

It was my first visit to Ebonscale Reach, the zone Belghast compared to somewhere in Mists of Pandaria and for very good reason. I'm planning a post on which towns I'd most and least like to own houses in so I'll probably say more about Ebonscale then but for now I'll just say I did not expect anything like that!

On my run I took about eighty screenshots. I would have taken a lot more. There were plenty of times when I wanted to but couldn't stop for fear of near-certain death. 

 

Mostly I only saw what you can see from a road but it very much looked as though Kaylriene's critical observation about the very limited range of mob models in New World remains true right to the cap. I saw the same mobs just about everywhere, occasionally with slightly different skins. 

I don't think it matters. In a way it makes the place feel more convincing. And convincing is the word for much of Aeternum, although possibly not all of it. The nordic forests of Great Cleave are some of the best I've ever seen in an mmorpg but what's going on with all the tropical flowers in Edengrove, right next door, I have no idea. It must be magic.

All in all it was a lot of fun, exciting, involving, immersive and of great practical benefit. I now have fast travel options across the entire map (almost) and a pretty good idea where I want to live. 

All I need to do is grab another four or five levels and start working on my Standing in yet another Settlement. Which one? That's a different post but I'll give you a clue. You can see the house I want to live in somewhere on this page.

Size Isn't Everything: Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet have problems. The recent introduction of the much-ballyhooed "Build" system has been received extremely poorly by its target audience. The only demographic that appears to have anything pleasant to say about it are those, like me, who never had any interest in builds in the first place. And even I'm not as happy about it as I was, now I've had a chance to experience some of the drawbacks for myself.

ANet have retreated behind the barricades to think again. Not for the first time, a structural change to the game has had a destabilizing and demoralizing effect.

Never mind, though. Here comes the first full instalment of the revamped Living Story/World, rebranded this season as The Icebrood Saga. That'll take our minds off the build crisis. But wait! What's that? There it goes! Did you miss it? Well, you shouldn't have blinked, should you?

The shortness of episodes has been something of an issue for many years. The average time to complete the story part of any update in Seasons Two, Three and Four has been around four hours or so. Not impressive for a quarterly delivery.

For the longest time even that duration was padded with increasingly tedious and frustrating boss battles and an annoying insistence on adding new skills and tutorial sections for every episode. The very good news is that The Icebrood Saga, so far, has avoided those pitfalls. The less good news is that, without the time-wasting filler, "Whispers in the Dark" takes about two and a half hours to finish.

And that includes map completion of the new zone, the oddly-named Bjora Marshes. Not that map completion is required, per se. Nor are there any of the repeatable "Hearts" that formed such a significant component of releases in the last couple of Seasons, helping to spin out the storyline for an hour or so more.

There is a story requirement to participate in and complete several map events, which feels a lot more organic than the "help the locals" trope Hearts offered. The events are all at least approximately part of the storyline.

Completing those got me so close to having the whole of the map open I thought I might as well finish the job. It was easy because, in keeping with the rest of the episode, the new map has to be one of the smallest we've ever seen.

It's also another glorious tribute to the never-failing strength of ANet's art department, who also contribute some gorgeous interstitials as well as some fabulous, frost-rimed frames. Bjora Marshes, one of the least marshy zones imaginable, is by some margin the most convincing winter landscape yet, in a game that does cold weather exceptionally well.

Most of Tyria's snowy areas feature blinding white snow and a great deal of arctic blue. Bjora Marshes has none of that. The scene is unrelentingly grey. The sky is perpetually overcast, flickering with boreal light. It's a land locked in endless twilight.

When snow falls it feels desultory, hopeless. There's no sense of wonder or delight, just a grim, cold emptiness. The forest is a wasteland of broken, lifeless wood. The snowfields are barren wastes of grey, studded here and there with the ruins of a civilization long ago driven into retreat.

The whole place is one of the most convincing replications of winter I've seen in a game. I have walked through woods that felt like these (minus the Aberrant wildlife, naturally). The quality of the light feels familiar. The eerie, muffled soundscape rings true.

So, I liked the new map as an aesthetic experience. As for the gameplay, I'm not sure I'll ever know what that's like. There are a bunch of events and a meta as always. From what I read it's a short and easy meta, which would fit the rest of the episode perfectly.

There's a new currency and a vendor with stuff I don't care about, like there has been in every new map for years. I haven't spent any significant time in one of the new maps since Season Three. Other than for their brief appearance in the story itself, most of them might as well not exist as far as my time in GW2 goes.

Ah yes, the story. The supposed reason we're here. How's that going? Other than quickly.

It's... okay. If anyone reading this hasn't done it yet and plans to, perhaps it's time to skip ahead. Don't look at the pictures after this, either. There will be spoilers. Come back when you've played through it. You could go do it now. It's not like it'll take you very long...

A good test of how engaging and well-handled the story is could be how much of it I remember. I'm writing this three or four days after I completed the whole thing. Let's see...

It begins with a rather good set-up, a suspiciously distorted call for help from a supposed ally. I thought it had "trap" written all over it but of course we have to go find out for ourselves. There's a brief meeting with the extended "family", in this case Rytlock and Crecia, the ever-bickering exes, Braham, once again slipping into post-adolescent angst, and Marjory, seemingly herself as always. That won't last.

I do like the characters. Affection for them is just about the only thing that carries me through some of the unconvincing, incoherent plot twists. It irks me more than somewhat when the characterization slips.

I can just about cope with Rytlock's conversion to guilt-ridden 90s New Man Charr, emotionally scarrred by relationships past. I'm teeth-grittingly inured to the way Braham lurches from brash, drunken frat boy to viking warrior to emo soul-searcher. The days when I expected continuity and contact with all of my character's extended family are long over.

Even by those standards, Marjory's breakdown in the Labyrinth stands out as poor writing. It happens during the heart of this very short episode, a puzzle-based trip through a maze once used to test potential followers of the Norn Spirit, Raven.

It's a decent segment. The puzzles are intuitive and the Labyrinth limited enough that I was able to move through the whole thing with reasonable facility. There was no point when I even thought of stepping out of the game to look anything up.

Nothing much happens in the spooky corridors that hasn't happened to all of the characters countless times before. Being faced with phantoms from your past is par for the course in Tyria. Why Marjory should react to the spectral sight of her dead sister Belinda with a set of the vapors worthy of a Victorian melodrama beats me.

I've jumped ahead a little, though. Before the Labyrinth comes a very nicely handled horror movie intro in which the crew arrive at the military outpost where they're supposed to meet their contact, only to find it deserted. The grey light and softly falling snow play wonderfully into a sense of impending doom. I thoroughly enjoyed that part.

The camp leads to the new map, the weakest part of the episode in terms of narrative. There's a half-hearted attempt to pad things out by splitting the team up and sending the player character - sorry, The Commander - off to help each party in turn but the effect is ruined by poor design and buggy implementation. I could hear Rytlock and Cre bickering from the other side of the map!

The only other part I remember is the finale, a blessedly short boss fight of the kind that would have been sub-boss #2 back in Season Two. I can't actually remember how we got there but I do recall how the fight went.

There were no pointless new skills to learn, just a single special attack button to press at the appropriate moment with a big on-screen prompt in case you couldn't figure it out for yourself. As for the infamous "the floor's on fire, the air's full of lightning" mechanic so beloved of ANet's fight co-ordinators, there is some of that but it appears to be largely for visual effect only. I didn't bother dodging much, took very little damage. Also, if you want a break you can just back into the corridor for a timeout.

There is one celebrity death, part of the reveal that caps the aforementioned "suspicious call for help" plotline. Anyone who played through Heart of Thorns will surely have figured out the twist at the first hint of a mysterious whisper. Dragons will be dragons.

The impact of the death, which apparently upset some players quite a bit, was muted for me since I couldn't remember having seen the character before this Season. Apparently she was a key figure in Path of Fire but I've evidently blocked most of that farrago from my memory. The further we get from PoF, the more I loathe everything about it. The only good thing about not getting a third expansion is that we've been spared another one as bad.

And that's about it. As far as I can sum it up without fact-checking, Jormag is somewhere under the ice, whispering doubt into everyone's minds while promising some kind of help with some kind of threat. The Charr general and his followers, including Rytlock's son, are somewhere out there doing whatever it is they threatened to do (I've forgotten what that was) and we're no nearer to catching up with them than before.

Marjory's having a nervous breakdown, Taimi, Kas, Cannach and all the rest are off somewhere, doing something about which we don't need to know. Zojja is still missing. No one ever mentions her. She's been in rehab since Heart of Thorns. When and if we'll see any of them again seems almost entirely random.

Despite all the carping, I did enjoy "Whispers in the Dark". It's ludicrously short even by ANet's unimpressive standards, some of the characterization is threadbare, to put it charitably, and the new map is pocket-sized but I'd still take this episode over pretty much anything from Seasons Three and Four, if only for the hugely improved combat sequences, which allow me to use my character's regular abilities while fighting manageable opponents.

Perhaps the strangest thing about "Whispers" is the labelling. Described in the press release as "The first episode of The Icebrood Saga", it's much, much shorter and contains far less content than the "Prologue", "Bound by Blood". I suppose there's no reason the preamble shouldn't be several times the length of the first chapter but it's an unconventional approach.

Looking forward, Wintersday is next up on GW2's calendar. That would usually take us into the New Year. Lunar New Year follows that fairly swiftly. It wouldn't be too much of a surprise to see the second instalment of The Icebrood Saga drop sometime in February, although it could be any time, since the whole point of moving to a saga format was supposed to be flexibility.

A recent interview with a German website, as reported on Massively: OP, confirms there are no immediate plans for new Fractals, Raids or Legendaries. Even new hairstyles are nowhere in sight. None of this affects me personally, since I neither raid, run fractals, craft Legendaries or re-do my characters' coiffures on a regular basis, but all of these are matters of pressing interest to the hardcore GW2 player.

It is now almost impossible to picture ArenaNet as anything other than a studio in difficulties. The entire seven and a half year run of GW2 has been a series of badly mishandled changes of direction evidencing a complete lack of vision. The core game remains strong enough and - absolutely essentially - replayable enough to hold the attention of thousands of players but the increasingly feeble drip drip drip of new content is taking its inevitable toll.

I'll be on board for the whole trip, one way or another, but I foresee a future of sporadic visits, dropping back in for the infrequent updates then moving on to other MMORPGs where stuff actually happens. How long that can remain a viable business model is hard to judge but from waht I read, revenues don't seem to be down all that much, if at all.

Guild Wars 2 was originally conceived as a user-friendly, hyper-casual experience. Perhaps what we're seeing is a return to the game's roots. For all the drawbacks that come with this latest lurch in direction, I think I prefer the way things are going to the last couple of years.



IntPiPoMo runing total 93

Hope Is A Dangerous Thing: GW2

It's been a while since I had anything very nice to say about Guild Wars 2. The direction the game took with the second expansion, Path of Fire, steered it so far away from just about everything that I loved about Core and Heart of Thorns that, had it been a new MMORPG I was trying for the first time, I'd probably have given it a week or two then moved on to something more suited to my tastes.

There's a certain inertia that builds up over seven years, though, especially when your other half is still playing, albeit sporadically. I'm still plugging away, logging in most days, doing my dailies, hanging around for an hour or so if anything's happening in World vs World, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, is still reasonably lively most days, even in Tier 4.

I also try to at least look at anything new ArenaNet manage to get out. It's not like there's much of it. The last season of Living Story was moderately awful but blessedly short. The story wasn't terrible but it would be more satisfying to watch as a YouTube compilation than to play through. The maps that were added, while beautiful, had zero replayability for me. Most of them weren't even interesting enough to explore.

In August, when ANet rented a theater to promote the next stage of their Secret Master Plan to haul their fading flagship around and set it on a course for relevance and recovery, then hyped the reveal with a countdown timer, I was expecting to be disappointed. I wasn't disappointed.

The pathetic travesty of a re-launch sputtered out on the stage at PaxWest. Reddit and the official forums exploded. ANet became the butt of in-genre snark for a few days until the status quo ante was restored and everyone forgot about GW2 again.

After all that, it would be a gross understatement to say I wasn't expecting much from yesterday's Icebrood Saga Prequel, Bound by Blood. The screamingly inappropriate trailer, confusingly released simultaneously with the update, certainly wouldn't have changed my mind, had I watched it before I'd seen the new map for myself.

Ah, the new map. Grothmar Valley. Forget the story and the gameplay - this is what it's all about! And it's only right that I should give credit where credit's due. For the first time in what feels like years, I'm able to say something unequivocally positive about new content in GW2: I love the new map!

I have barely begun to explore it but already I feel about it much as Jeromai felt about the last one, the one that came with the final episode of LS4, a map that interested me so much I can't even remember what it was called. All of the LS4 maps blur into one for me. I visited most of them only once or twice, in the few days following the release, then never thought of them again.

Grothmar Valley is not that map. Last night I heaved myself reluctantly away from WoW Classic to check out the new content. Even given the appallingly botched build-up I was still keener to see it than anything from LS4 simply beacuase I knew it centered on Rytlock, my favorite character, and took place somewhere in the Charr homelands, my favorite setting.

The opening sequence offered more entetainment than I've been used to getting from these things. The dialog was solid. Rytlock sounded wonderfully world-weary and put-upon. He has history with several of the new Charr characters (well, they were new to me but I'm hardly a lorekeeper), history that was alluded to and hinted at rather than outright infodumped.

So far, so not too bad. The first new area was nicely done. It looked as though it could be some festival ground adjacent to The Black Citadel although a glance at the world map showed it to be deeper into the Charr homelands than we'd been before.

There were some speeches, one fight - an easy and enjoyable one - and that was the end of part one. Then that loading screen appeared. Loading between maps in GW2 is excruciatingly slow. Slower than EverQuest was at the turn of the millennium - on dial-up. I had plenty of time to look, slack-jawed, at the psychedelic finger-painting someone's talented, precocious child had apparently uploaded when no-one was looking.

Then I zoned in and found it was all true! Grothmar Valley uses the color palette I loved so much in the core game that I wrote an elegaic post about it way back in October 2012. That post was tellingly titled "This Land Is Our Land" and in it I laid my claim to a homeland I'd long longed for:  "Every step is filled with wonder. The high summer idyll of the pre-Searing has ripened into an eternal Autumn, the fall after The Fall. The colors burnish with copper and gold, red poppies flag against the sunburned grasslands, white clouds mass the bluing sky.".

I was still in love with Ascalon three and a half years later, when I posted the even more emotionally charged picture-post "Why We Fight". In these two posts it's all too easy to see why I can't give this game up and why I feel so betrayed by what's been lost.

Well, with Grothmar Valley I have hope that some of the wonder may just have bene lying dormant. With a return to Ascalon and it's hinterlands, a whole "saga" set there and in the Far Shiverpeaks, my second-favorite region, it's possible... just possible... I might find myself falling in love with GW2 all over again.

If nothing else, in Grothmar Valley I at least have a map I'm certain to explore to the full and to revisit many times. I don't care whehter it's productive or profitable or any of the things both developers and players have been laser-focused on in new maps for the last two or three years. I just care what it looks like and how it feels.

Discovering Grothmar Valley is like finding another room in your house that you didn't know was there. For the first time in a very, very long while I'll be opening access to this map on all three of my acounts. (To my great surprise and joy you only need core game purchase to flag Bound By Blood for the account).

Not, that is, that I'm going to play through the whole thing right away. Classic is still using most of my available gaming synapses. No, I just want Grothmar Valley safe and secure in my pocket, so I can take it out any time I like, look at it, polish it, lose myself in its golden glow.

Grothmar Valley represents hope. And I have it.

Never Satisfied: GW2

When I decided to throw a quick post together about Guild Wars 2's latest Living World update (Season Four, Chapter Six for those keeping score), I was going to do the usual thing of avoiding spoilers but when even the name of the new map gives most of the game away it hardly seems worthwhile worrying.

The map's called Dragonfall and Jeromai has some great widescreen shots of it. He's also very enthusiastic about what he's seeing. I'm... less so.

Yes, the art department has done its usual superb job. This is top notch scenery. It's also the same scenery.

It's a bit cavalier to complain about consistency, isn't it?. After all, I'd be just as likely to complain if the pieces didn't fit together, wouldn't I? And isn't one of GW2's strongest suits the way the worldmaking manages to avoid the pitfalls of so many MMORPGs by maintaining coherent and geologically believable transitions? 

That's not really what I mean, anyway. "Consistent" and "same" aren't synonyms. And the new map is beautiful. Stunning, even. I particularly love the verticality that brings back such good memories of Heart of Thorns.

I don't mind the kitchen sink approach that grandfathers in every previous movement system - bouncing mushrooms, lava tubes, whirlwinds, ley lines, updrafts, even those vines that turn you into Spiderman. Although, as I worked my way around the strikingly different subdivisions last night, I did get the distinct impression someone wanted to show off every tool in the box.

And I did enjoy myself. It was fun. It's good work and I appreciate it. I just didn't hear myself go "Wow!" I'm not sure I will, again, not until we go to somewhere truly new. And even then I suspect it will feel surprisingly familiar.

Wherever it is that we end up in Season Five or Expansion Three (if there is one) there'll be places that look as though they were designed by the world's most talented six-year old: sparkles and stars and twinkling lights as far as the eye can see. There will be the areas that look like the covers of prog rock albums from the 1970s, specifically the ones designed by Roger Dean and Rodney Matthews. 

There will be an immense reliance on deep hues that make every screenshot look like something from the Color Field playbook. The rest will be a mix of stuff that's on fire or dragged up out of the sea or frozen solid or baked dry, just like every other MMORPG only with seriously better production values and far more attention to detail than most. I'm finding it something of a challenge to get excited by any of that any more.

For all the technical skill on display, have any maps been added to GW2 over the last seven years that can stand comparison with the greatest cities of the core game, Divinity's Reach, The Black Citadel or Rata Sum? Does anywhere feel as timeless and true as the eternal autumn of fallen Ascalon?

I do love all the maps that came with Heart of Thorns but even I wouldn't claim they're as complex or complete as those that preceded them. A jungle is a jungle in the end, even if most of it does feel more like a forest.

There's no obvious solution to this problem, if it's even a "problem"that exists outside my head. Most MMORPGs end up being more of the same. We've seen the trouble it can cause when they try not to. Having one of the best art teams in the industry with a portfolio of immediately recognizeable signature styles is as likely to emphasize the issue as conceal it.

Oh well. There are plenty of worse problems to have.

Just ask the writers.

New Kind Of Neighborhood

When Daybreak announced that one of the tent-poles for EverQuest's 20th Anniversary celebrations would be yet another round of Timelocked/Progression servers I was underwhelmed. I understand that they're popular and they make money but I felt I'd been round that particular track a time or two too often already to get excited about doing it again.

Silly me. Since I made characters on Kaladim in EQII and Selo in EQ last night, apart from sleep and eat I've done nothing else. I'm rushing to get this post done so I can get back and play some more and since I don't have to go to work until next Saturday there's a good chance I won't be doing much besides playing EQ/EQII and writing about it for the rest of the week.

Just what is it about starting over on a new server that has this effect? Is it really that MMORPGs - both as games and as worlds - work much better when played in something approximating their original context, where leveling takes time and there are people everywhere you go?

Or is it just nostalgia? The deep thrill of cheating time. We can't grow younger but we can pretend we did.

I spent the morning on Selo, leveling my Bard in Shar Vhal, the Kerran city on the dark side of Luclin, where it's always twilight and Norrath hangs low in the sky like a threat. It was really something to begin there instead of outside the gates of Qeynos or Freeport. I haven't started in Shar Vahl for a decade or more but it all came flooding back.

It took me an hour just to finish the introductory citizenship quest. I remember doing that when Luclin was new. It took me all of a Sunday afternoon, back then. They may have reverted a lot of stuff but I'm convinced it's still easier than it was.

When I'd made enough money killing grimling skeletons in The Pit I went to buy my new songs. Then I broke for lunch. Half an hour later I took a trip forward in time - five years or five hundred, depending how you look at it - to Kaladim and EQII, where I've been dying a lot leveling my Dirge in Sunken City and The Sprawl.

I was having such a hard time I ended up buying a full set of no-stat chain armor from a vendor. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. It was awesome! And it made hardly any difference at all! I still had trouble just trying to get from one questgiver to the next without being eaten by wild dogs.

It was all a much more immersive, involving, satisfying, fun experience than I was expecting. Despite - or possibly because of  - all the being killed, getting lost and generally getting piled on, everything was comfortably exceeding expectations. And then I remembered that DBG had restored the original starting villages for this fresh start.

The villages, when they were around, were something of a mixed blessing. Original EQII began with a lengthy lead-in before you arrived at what you might call the "real game". I don't mean the end game. I mean long before that.

There was the bit on the boat at the start, then the Isle of Refuge, then you had to go to either Qeynos or Freeport and find your racial starting area, where you'd get an inn room and your class quests. I think that's how it went.

The class quests themselves went all the way to Level 20, which took me a couple of weeks first time out. Maybe longer. Most of it happened down in the sewers as I recall. You got into those by way of a drain in your village.

Well, the quests are still missing but the villages are back and so is the drain! I had no idea how much I'd missed them.

Of course, the physical locations never went away. They just got repurposed and repopulated years ago. On Live there are questlines for every race that send you to your racial village every ten levels. Most of those questlines are top notch. I've done quite a few. I probably should do the rest some day.

The problem is, when they did the revamp, Sony Online Entertainment shut off access to the zones for anyone not doing the quests. Since the quests were unique to specific races that meant most characters would never be able to go in most of the villages again and even the right races could only go in when they had the quests active.

What's more, the new storylines put all the villages into a state of conflict. And they scaled with your level, assuming you did the quests as they became available. Even if you could get in, all you'd find was a combat zone. Which was never what any of the villages were about.

And what was that? I'd actually forgotten. They were, like much of the original game, there to tell the tales of ordinary Norrathians, living ordinary lives in an extraordinary world. There were little stories everywhere, vignettes of how it might be, to live cheek by jowl with talking animals, monsters and giants.

The quests are no more but the vignettes and the characters live on. I spent the best part of an hour wandering from village to village, talking to gnomes and ogres and trolls, taking screenshots of cats and pigs and crazy people, like Spezzi the "Street Hag" (we all know what she is...) and Chef Schmenko, psychotic ratonga with a meat cleaver.

These characters may still be running their scripts over on Live, behind the closed doors of the quest instances. Good luck finding out. Here, on Kaladim, you can stroll about in peace, just like we did in the good old days, soaking in the ambience.

What's more, you can bank and shop and craft. All the vendors and utilities have been restored, including the subterranean tradeskill instances. Best of all, you can rent an inn room and settle. Forget your billett at the Jade Tiger's Den in North Freeport (although you have to take a room there too, if you want to complete the starter housing quest). Come back to the village that raised you. Buy yourself a candelabra.

As I was going round I got so excited I felt I had to tell someone. General chat seemed a bit too focused on arguments about leveling speed for the kind of gosh-wow fluffiness I had in mind so I gosh-wowed in the Test channel instead, where fluffiness is a way of life.

Someone promptly sent me a tell asking me if I wouldn't mind going round all the villages in Freeport to run a zone query to get the official map names so he could submit them to EQ2Maps. I was very happy to oblige.

He'd been asking since yesterday and found no takers and I only saw two other players in the villages as I was exploring. My excitement seems original if not unique. Maybe there will be more interest in the restoration project when it finally hits Live. TLE servers do tend to attract the more hardcore end of the playerbase.

Or maybe no-one will care. I didn't think I would. Not until I went there. Now I care enough that I'm going to make another character over in Qeynos so I can see those villages too. Well, I might. I'd have to buy yet another character slot for that. Maybe I'll wait 'til the project comes to the Skyfire server where I already have some Qeynosians.

The one thing that puzzles me is why this is all happening in EQII now, when we're supposed to be celebrating EverQuest's 20th. EQII has its own fifteenth anniversary coming in November. I just hope they've left a little in the tank for that.

The Best-Laid Schemes Of Rats And Gods: EQ2

I'm pleased to report that, from everything I've seen so far, Chaos Descending continues to meet the high standards it set in its opening stages. That may, of course, be because the opening stages are still all I have seen.

My plan was to spend much of today playing Everquest 2's new expansion. I thought I'd make sufficient progress on the Signature questline and see enough of the new zones and instances that I'd be able to post something approximating an authoritative "First Impressions" piece. This did not happen.

It's four in the afternoon and so far I've managed just over a couple of hours, almost all of which I spent running around Myrist, The Great Library. I sat down to play right after breakfast but at around eleven I made the cardinal error of logging out to do a couple of chores.

I won't rehash the tedious details of what happened next. Let's just say that what I expected to take me thirty minutes took more like three hours and leave it at that. On the plus side, at least we have a working kitchen sink again.

By then, I really needed my lunch. Then Mrs Bhagpuss got home and we went for a walk in the glorious late-Autumn sunshine. That took me to four o'clock, where we came in. I should be logging in right now, but it's the day after launch, so wouldn't you know it, there's an emergency patch. The servers are due up in an hour or so, which is why I'm here blogging about EQ2 instead of playing it.

A rat can look at a God, as they say.

The two hours I did manage this morning firmly consolidated the positive impression the expansion made on me last night. Myrist isn't just a great library, it's a big one, with a lot going on. And so far very little of it has involved killing anything.

In what must be more than three hours of questing so far I've killed half a dozen mobs in total. I can even remember what they all were - a gardening book, a couple of bookworms and three guards in the jails of the Plane of Justice.

Most of the quests have asked me to find things, fix things, meditate or chat. It's been extraordinarily civilized. I love it. It's so EQ2.

Honestly, I would love to see some imaginative developers make a full-on MMORPG with this sort of core gameplay. I'm positive it would be both possible and, if done well, sustainable. There must be plenty of people out there, looking for a solid, entertaining, largely non-combat MMO with a lot more story and structure than"grow your own cotton, craft your own socks, chat up the miller's daughter".

Oh, no! Not you again!

Speaking of story, so far the narrative throughline in this expansion is rather compelling. For once it manages to be both immediate and understandable. It's true that, yet again, it's all about the affairs of Gods, Demigods and Mortals but the writer has done a great job of working the player-character convincingly into the weave. 

And I can't deny it: my Berserker has been instrumental in changing the path of destiny. He does know gods personally and they do remember who he is - and should. I used to sniff at this sort of thing but the surprising truth is that I don't, not any more.

I've been playing EverQuest and EQ2 for so long now that I'm marinated in the lore like a pickled walnut. I take it seriously, for a given value of seriousness. I feel my characters have paid their dues. They deserve to have the gods take them seriously, too.

I think this must be how those Guild Wars vets feel when ANet drops anchor in the deep oceans of nostalgia as they so frequently do these days. When I find myself talking to Maelin Starpyre the name does more than ring a bell and when conversation turns to Zebuxoruk and his troubles in The Plane of Time I have a fair-to-middling idea of how that turned out. As for that Dark Elf in the cell I still can't unlock, oh yes, I know her alright...

The Scrivener. Someone missed a trick by not calling him Bartleby.

It makes a difference. It makes a big difference, frankly. It's not so much immersion as investment. I've put in so many hours over so many years that this history is my history. And in Chaos Descending it's history curated by custodians who care.

I suspect that most EQ2 vets these days care more about the numbers on thier character sheets than the characters in the story but the same certainly can't be said for the developers, at least not from what I've seen so far, this time around. There's been some sloppy writing in a few of of the more recent holiday and pre-event questlines but standards appear to have been fully raised for the expansion.

I've seen very few solecisms so far and no jarring contemporary slang. Even the usual inappropriate attempts at humor have, thankfully, failed to make their traditional, leaden appearance. If the prose is a tad on the starchy side, well I'll take that and gratefully, too.

Don't you hate people who turn straight to the end to see how it turns out?

Given that the action, such as it is, happens entirely in a library, I'm also happy to confirm the presence of some lengthy and fascinating in-game books. For many years, long before Player Studio and with a lot less administrative fuss, players have been able not only to craft books but to trade them and place them in houses. Much better than that, we've been able to write in them as well.

Someone at DBG has used that facility to author a number of works for the Great Library that are longer than we usually get. I spent a fair while this morning, reading several volumes that ran to more than twenty pages of closely typed text. They were good reads. I hope to find many more.

On the subject of crafting, it looks as though the Signature Tradeskill questline made it in for launch this time. Last year, when the crafters; Sig had to be delayed until a few months after launch, it seemd like a sign that the wheels, if they weren't yet coming off, might at least have a few loose nuts. This time I hadn't heard anything about it but I ran into it for myself while exploring the various Galleries and Wings.

Another feather in Chaos Descending's cap is my complete lack, so far, of any need to look things up. I haven't had even a momentary, fleeting thought to open the Wiki or google anything whatsoever. I haven't even updated EQ2Maps to open up Points of Interest because, for the first time in fourteen years, I'm adding my own POIs to my own map!

Working on my Junior Cartographer badge.

How I've never thought to do this in almost decade and a half is beyond me. Okay, we didn't have EQ2Maps right at the start but I must have been using the add-on for a decade at least and yet it has literally never occured to me to annotate it for myself. When I think of how much time that could have saved me I feel faint. Plus it's fun!

The whole thing is fun. That's my takeaway so far. I get the strong impression that each of the last four expansions has moved significantly further in the direction of "fun" than it's predecessor and we may just be about to reach the sweet spot.

Certainly I have yet to feel roadblocked or even speed-controlled by anything in Chaos Descending. I already have the account keys and quest unlocks for several of the instances and open zones, all of which have popped up merrily as I pottered through the bread and butter quests in Myrist. Maybe that will change when I get to the Elemental Planes proper. I hope not.

I think I'll just go see if the servers are back up. Pardon me if I don't come back right away...