It's The End Of New World As We Knew It

I imagine everyone reading this has already heard the news about about New World. If not, brace yourselves.

The final curtain falls on 31 January 2027. At that point the servers will be closed, never to re-open. If you own the game, you're welcome to carry on playing until then. If you never got around to buying it, well you're too late now. It went off sale yesterday.

I'm not going to do an obituary post or any kind of elegy. There's still over twelve months left to go and it's very likely I'll play some more before then. Plenty of time to for a final tour and some screenshots to remember things by.

If you want a full and accurate rundown of how things got to this sorry pass, Wilhelm has an excellent overview. I'm just going to post a few pictures for now.

I'd have liked to post some older shots. Maybe even some of the ones I took in the first closed beta and was never allowed to share. I don't imagine anyone's going to be chasing me down for breaking that NDA now. Unfortunately, everything older than a couple of months is on one of the hard drives in my old computer so that will have to wait. 

For now, here are a few pictures of Aeternum as it is and will be for the rest of this year. And the beginning of the next. And then never again.

It took three of us to kite that giant turkey. I wonder if there will even be three people left by next Thanksgiving? 

One thing I do plan on doing before the final year is out is upgrading from a wolf to a lion. Or is it a tiger? Some kind of cat, anyway...

If there's one thing I won't miss about the game it's probably the clothes. I understand the aesthetic but I never liked it. 

The environments, though, and the countryside: those I will miss.

Of course, there's always the very slim chance Amazon might relent and sell the game to someone else. Unfortunately, they don't need the small change any of the likely buyers would be able to offer. Or, for that matter, the big bucks, were anyone to come with a real proposal. 

I strongly suspect they'd prefer the game to disappear altogether, not hang around like some kind of revenant, calling into question the company's poor decision-making and inability to come up with even a single, successful game.

For the same reason, they might not be quite as amenable to an emulator as many game developers. Still, a year is a long time to leave the game running. Plenty of time for people to data-mine everything necessary to clone it after it's gone.

My guess is that we won't see a working version after the official servers go dark but I'd be very happy to see myself proved wrong. New World was and still is a pretty good MMORPG. It deserved better. 

Bless Me Padre, For I Have Killed You. A Dozen Levels Too Late But Who's Counting?

I wouldn't normally be posting on a Sunday. I'd be at work. It's coming up Christmas, though, and my work pattern has been shunted around a little, so here I am. I thought I might do a little catch-up on where I am with New World.

Still playing, for a start. Every day, almost. Longer sessions than I've been used to lately, too, although that still only means a couple of hours, most days. 

It's an incredibly comfortable game, New World. Cozy, almost. It shouldn't be, given the bleak lore, heavy focus on combat and over-saturated mob density, all things that usually make a game feel enervating after a while. And yet, somehow, it's always felt like a pleasant place to pass some time.

It has for me, anyway. Even back in pre-alpha, when Amazon Games still thought they were making a PvP sandbox, I remember trotting around the beautiful countryside, taking screenshots no-one but me would ever see, thanks to the very strict NDA, and generally enjoying the peaceful vibe.

Yes, there are zombies everywhere (Not what they like to call them but it's what they are, all the same.) but they move slowly and don't react until you're past them. Everything's a bit that way, slow on the uptake, except maybe some of the animals. Boars and big cats are particularly quick to engage and you really, really don't want to tangle with the bears.

But mostly you don't have to. There's an excellent road system. If you stick to the highways you won't run into much trouble. Not until you have to cross one of the many bridges, that is. They all seem to be positively infested with skeletons. And there are some checkpoints, gates, tollbooths and the like. They might need a detour through the shrubbery.

It's hard not to keep veering off the road, though. The pickings are so good. There's stuff just lying around everywhere for the taking. It's a kleptomaniac's paradise. There are chests and boxes and stashes of all kinds in and around every building. Not just the ruins. The intact homes, too. Go into someone's house and, provided they've been corrupted or tainted or whatever the hell it is, you can kill them and steal their stuff. It's not just socially acceptable, it's positively encouraged.

 

What with the sightseeing, the stealing, the murdering and the foraging (Did I not mention the endless supply of herbs, ores, skins and timber?) it's easy to while away hours without really doing anything much. That's mostly how I played on my first post-launch run, a couple of hundred hours, with sessions that lasted twice or three times as long as they do now.

Back then, I did somehow find the time to follow the main storyline as well. And do a bunch of side quests. But it was a rare session when I didn't lose track of the plot as I veered off course to see what I could fill my bags with. That, plus the crafting and the rep grind to buy a house and then decorating it... it all made for a slow meander to the level cap.

I must have been weeks, months, behind the bubble. In the end I did get there somehow but by then the game was out of fashion and I'd had enough for a while, so I moved on. And now I'm back, of course, the cap has gone up. 

One of the perks of maintenance mode is that returning players only have to play catch-up once, I guess. I can't count the number of times I've had to do it in some MMORPGs that had the nerve to keep on adding content every time I took a break.

This time it didn't seem to matter much. I got all wrapped up in the mount questline, which didn't appear to care what level I was. Actually, that's not entirely true. It does give you a recommended level for each stage but I don't think it's hard-locked. In any case, at Level 60, I was well over the height limit.

Well, for a while. A few days ago, though, I finished the last of the wolf-riding races and the woman who set the courses told me I ought to go to Brimstone Sands to speak to the next race organizer. Brimstone Sands is that big zone they added a while back, the one before Nighthaven and it's designed for levels 60 plus. (I think when it was added 60 was still the cap, so it's probably all doable at sixty. Not easily, though.)

So now I'm back to doing "at level" content, or I will be if I do the next set of time trials. Which would be fine if I didn't have to fight anything. The races themselves are strictly non-combat but they frequently take you right through the middle of those thick clusters of mobs at gates and on bridges. 

It didn't matter when the mobs were in the thirties and forties. If I had to, I could just hop off and slaughter them all. When the archers (And there are no shortage of archers in this game. And snipers.) took pot-shots at me as I rode through, they either missed me or did very little damage. I certainly never fell off my pony. Or my wolf.

In Brimstone Sands it's different. Arrows, bullets and musket balls hit hard enough to dismount me and you can't remount until you're out of combat. Killing the mobs takes a while. Running away on foot until they leash takes even longer. Get knocked off your mount more than once and there's no chance you'll finish the race before the timer runs out.

Time to get back on the treadmill, I guess. Gear and levels both. 

One good thing that always happens when you've been away a while in many MMORPGs is that all the stuff you couldn't afford to buy on the auction house last time you were there is suddenly on sale at a fraction of the price. No-one wants gear for ten or fifteen levels below the cap.

Except me, of course. What is the cap now, anyway? 70? Let me check... yes, it went to seventy with the Angry Earth expansion that I didn't buy, which explains why I stopped at sixty. And now they're giving that expansion away for free, I have another ten levels to do.

Or, more to the point, I have another two levels to do right away, because gear in New World has level requirements and from browsing the traders last night it looks like there's a big step-change at Level 62. I ended up buying a load of very cheap upgrades with a minimum level of 56 or 57 just to be going on with but I'll be replacing those as soon as I do another level and a half.

I did go test it to see if the new gear was sufficient to make Brimstone Sands as easy as I'd like. It wasn't. It's fine, I could do it, but I'd have to take the fights seriously and I have no desire whatever to do anything of the kind.  

Instead, I thought I'd go clear up my quest journal. I have a ton of old quests in there I can go finish up in lower zones. Mid-40s quests give decent xp and they're pleasantly unchallenging. Except for one.

Padre Nuñez. I hate Padre Nuñez! He's a Level 48 boss and I've needed him for a quest since... I don't know... it must be years now. I got the quest when I was in the mid-40s and I've tried to do it easily a dozen times. 

Sometimes I can't find the bastard at all. He wanders along the roads on his estate but half the time I go there he's nowhere to be found. Those are the lucky times.

When I do find him, he kicks my ass. He pretty much one-shot me when I was the same level as him and it's barely gotten any better since I've outleveled him. He's one of those gravedigger mobs that walks around with a coffin strapped to his back, which means you have to break the damn box before you can hurt him if he turns his back on you. 

That's bad enough but he also heals himself and drops some weird spinning scythe thing made out of light that whirls around and takes huge chunks off your health if you don't get out of its way. Which would be fine, except if you try to back off he pulls you to him somehow and if you manage to resist and get out of range he often breaks combat, goes into "Retreating" mode, runs away and heals to full health.

So he's fun...

Still, I thought at Level 60, with the best gear I could find for my level on the Trading Post, surely I'd be able to get the better of him. 

Nope. I found him (Eventually.) and launched a full-on frontal assault. Shock and awe tactics. It was a lot closer than usual but when it came down to the wire and we had about 5% health each, he outlasted me and I died. 

I was not happy. When it's that close, you know it's just a matter of either luck or slightly better tactics so I tried again. And this time, for the first time ever in all the times I've visited his estate, I discovered  he has a fixed spawn at some kind of outdoor shrine or altar. 

Well, he is a priest...

How I never saw it before I can't explain. I also don't recall ever seeing it mentioned in any walk-through I read. There he was, though, with two guards. He had his back to me. I think he was praying.

Having learned nothing from all the other times, I launched myself at him from behind. I killed his two guards and backed off as he dropped his stupid blue lights. And this time, for whatever reason, he followed me without reeling me in or breaking combat. His health was dropping fast! And he didn't self-heal! Or turn around so his coffin would protect him!

He just fought like a regular person, face to face, no tricks and I kicked the crap out of him. It was super easy. Barely an inconvenience!

Maybe that's how you're meant to do it. Fight him at his altar. Maybe he buffs himself there and I caught him before he had time to finish. Maybe the leashing is more generous in that area. Maybe I just got lucky.

Don't know. Don't care. Never have to see him again. Well, unless I ever level up another character but I don't think there's much chance of that...

What with that quest and a few others much less stressful, I made it about two-thirds of the way through Level 60. I can't say it feels quick but it's certainly enjoyable. My plan now is to trundle steadily through a bunch of mid-40s/low-50s quests until I ding 62, then buy a whole new set of gear and get back to the races.

Looks like I'm playing New World again. For a while, anyway.

Ride Your Pony, New World Style

I'll resist the temptation to moan on yet again about how I don't have time to do anything these days. Except I just did exactly that so I guess I failed the resistance check.

Anyway, I really don't have much time left for blogging today so I'll keep this short. It's just going to be one of those "What I've Been Playing" posts and since all I have been playing is New World and EverQuest II, that's not going to take long.

When I say I've been playing EQII, that's not strictly true. I did manage to get in one good session while the huge Extra Life xp buff was running. I decided not to bother grinding through the last five levels on anyone, on the very valid grounds that it wouldn't be much of a laugh. Instead I logged in Mitsi, my Level 67 Swashbuckler on a different server, and spent a very happy couple of hours taking her to 80 in Kylong Plains.

She drank a two-hour 100% xp potion and with the server bonus she was getting +375%. If they hadn't somehow borked the bonus for having multiple max level characters that would have been 425% but it was plenty anyway. By the time I finished, most things in the first part of the zone had gone green. (They were orange when she got there.)

I did plan to move her to a more suitable area and carry on but the opportunity never arose and now the bonus is gone so that's the end of that. Fun while it lasted, though.

The other very satisfying thing I did was copy all of my character files across from the old PC. I looked up what was needed but in the end I just copied every .txt and .ini file and let the game sort it all out, which it did perfectly. When I logged in, all my hotbars were back and correctly populated and all the weird tweaks to the UI I've made over the years were in force again. Everything just as it should be!

The new PC is also running EQII like a dream. Loading times are much shorter and everything moves like butter. Does butter move? Oh, you know what I mean.  

As for Overseer, which is mostly all I do at the moment, I'm a level and a half from dinging into the current tier, which I believe must be Tier 7. I might just about get there by the time the expansion arrives, at which point I'll need to do another ten levels to get to the new current tier. It never fricken ends!

Assuming there is another tier, that is. I don't see Overseer mentioned in the promotional material for Rage of Churath. Maybe it's going to become a legacy feature. I'm not sure if I'd be sad or happy about that...

Other than that, most of my gaming time - no, all of my gaming time -  has been spent playing New World. Or New World : Aeternum if you prefer. Not sure anyone does.

And again, I'm not sure "playing" really describes what I've been doing there. I've been doing time trials. Pretty much just those. 

I mentioned before that I'd finished the basic mount quest and acquired a horse. And that I'd done the first five races. They call them "races" but in my book a race requires someone to race against. Racing against the clock is a time trial so that's what I'm calling them.

The NPC who gives the first set claims they're difficult but they really aren't. I'm playing on the U.S. East Coast server, which is suffering some very bad lag, so I've been stopping dead and even rubber-banding backwards a fair bit and yet I've only failed one trial so far and that was in the second lot, which are supposedly even harder. The timers seem to be pretty generous.

When you complete all five of the first batch, the horse guy says there's no more he can teach you and sends you on to another guy, like they always do in these games. He warns you the next guy is weird and sketchy and that he likes to set really tough races but so far the second guy seems exactly as weird and sketchy as the first guy and the "races" seem no harder.

I've done three of those now and honestly I could keep doing these time trials for ages. I always enjoy races in MMORPGs although usually I'm racing against someone, which I always thought was kind of the point. I like time trials too, though, so this suits me just as well. 

One thing I've noticed is that I seem to have a huge number of talent points or whatever the game calls them left to spend. Like almost 250. And another 60 or so of some other kind of points. I'm guessing there must have been a reset at some stage while I was away.

None of it seems relevant to the content I'm doing, i.e. riding along roads on a horse and avoiding anything that looks like it might give me a fight, so I haven't done anything about it yet. I suppose I'll have to at some point but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.

New World is certainly holding my attention for now, anyway. It also runs extremely smoothly on the new machine, the only issues being the terrible ping to the servers. I initially blamed that on our ISP, Virgin Media, always a likely source of any problems of that kind, but apparently it's due to some wider issues at the server end. I certainly never used to have such a poor connection to the East Coast last time I played so I hope they fix it soon.

It doesn't make the game unplayable, though, or even particularly annoying. I've played through far, far worse. 

I plan on re-installing Once Human on the new PC soon and I already have Blue Protocol on an external drive but until I have time for one or both of them I'll just carry on with the riding lessons.

And when those come to an end, I think I'll go take a look at Nighthaven. I'll be way under level for it but when has that ever stopped me before? 

A Quick Technical Update

There wouldn't normally be a post here on a Sunday because for me that's always a work day. Except when I'm on holiday. Which I am. 

But there still wasn't going to be a post today because a) I had two separate things to do in two other towns and b) when I got back I had my new computer to set up. 

There wasn't an awful lot to it. I bought an off-the-shelf machine from Dr. Memory via Amazon, where I paid less for it than that link shows. Either way, it's the cheapest "gaming computer" they do. It wouldn't qualify as any kind of gaming machine by most gamers' standards but these days I don't really qualify as much of a gamer, either.

It's a curious device. It has one of those new-fangled CPUs with its own graphics chip. It's alleged to be able to run modern games on its own and there are YouTube videos and benchmarks to suggest that, if you're not all that fussy about framerates and resolutions, it pretty much can. 

That's nice but I already have a halfway-decent graphics card that I paid nearly as much for a couple of years ago as I just paid for this computer, so I checked before buying it that the motherboard would accept it, that it would fit in the case, that the PSU could cope with it and that it wouldn't clash with the CPU graphics. 

All of that, so far, seems to be true. It was a bit of task getting it set up because the clever people who put the thing together hid all the internal power connectors so tidily away I thought for a while there weren't any. Once I'd found where they'd hidden them, though, it was all quite straigtforward.

Everything seems to be working now but because I always like to treat every new PC as a complete fresh start and never allow it to sync with any of my old ones, the next few days (And weeks.) are going to involve a lot of downloading stuff and signing in to accounts. 

The idea is that by doing it that way, the new machine will only have stuff on it that I actually still use, not ten years of kipple and clutter. It's a really annoying process and the "clean machine" era won't last long but it will at least give me breathing space for a while.

I do have some stuff on external drives I can connect via USB, so that will save some time. I've been playing games on those for a few years now and I can't tell any difference in performance from the ones I have installed on internal drives. 

I have a few Steam games immediately available that way, including Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, but right now, I'm downloading New World: Aeternum. That should make for a good test of how well the new PC performs. I really want to give it another try anyway, now they made all the content available for free.

When I get everything running how I like it, I'll probably report back on how well it's going. It'll be interesting to see how viable it is to play the games I play on a really cheap-ass rig. 

And that's all for now, I think.

Back to the downloading. 

New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company at all. It never was. 

Wishing You All A Very...

First of all

Merry Christmas!

Second of all, I just happened to be on Amazon this Christmas Day morning, buying a gift card to send to someone by email because, when I tried to do it earlier in the week, it all went horribly wrong. 

Amazon Customer Service was excellent but even they couldn't fix my mistake so I had to put an "I.O.U. 1 (One.) Amazon Gift Card to be delivered on Christmas Day" note inside the card and, rather than having it go horribly wrong a second time through me messing up the delivery timer, as would almost invitably have happened, I chose to do it in real time instead. 

Which was when I happened to notice an entirely unexpected animated Gift Card option. It was this:

I don't know why you would want to but if you feel like sending someone an animated New World-themed Amazon gift card, now you can! I mean, it's not a very good one but at least it shows Amazon Corporate is really behind the game now, right? Or that's one interpretation.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the good news to all New World fans on this Christmas Day. I guess there must be some, still. Somewhere.

Also, there would have been a New World Winter Convergence screenshot at the top of the post but updating the game made my PC cry and I had to unplug the external drive New World is on before it would even boot up again, so Nightingale it is.

Any Color You Like So Long As It's Black. And On Fire.

I was hoping for something quick to post about today, seeing as how I was forced to spend most of the morning and some of the afternoon fighting with my PC, after it woke up this morning and decided the last three years must have been a dream. It's done this before and I have no idea why. It suddenly reverts to a previous profile and loads everything as if it was 2021. 

Once I'd gotten that sorted out (Whether the fix will stick is another matter.) it was time to take Beryl for a walk and by the time I got to think about what to post about it was almost tea-time. Luckily, right around then I received an email from Amazon Prime telling me there was a gift waiting for me in New World.

Sorry. New World Aeternum. Keep forgetting that part. And it's important, too, because that's why we're getting presents. Amazon still trying to drum up interest.

There is also an event on, the annual repeat of the Winter Convergence festival, about which I've posted before. That was fun the first couple of times but I don't think I'd have bothered to log in for it again this year. Free stuff, though...

Except it isn't really anything I want. It's appearance armor, which is fine, but it's big, clunky, clanky armor, the kind I never like to see any of my characters wearing, in any game. 

It's black, too. Possibly there's fire coming out of it. There is in the video. It looks like it was designed by a fourteen year-old boy and for all I know, perhaps it was, but more likely that's who the designers think mostly plays New World Aeternum these days.

And they may be right. I wouldn't know. 

I do know that the armor in question is modeled on the stuff Arnold Schwarzenegger wears in the New World Aeternum (I'd abbreviate it but then it'd be NWA, which is something entirely different...) segment of that new Prime Video show, Secret Level. When he's wearing anything at all, that is. Mostly he poses with his shirt off.

I nearly said "episode" there, too, but I'm not convinced a fourteen minute standalone counts as an "episode" of anything. It's a short, at best.

It's quite good, though, for what it is. I just watched it. Didn't take long. Fourteen minutes, in fact. As I said.

The animation is slick and stylish, especially the faces, which look pretty much like live footage of actual people. Not sure that's the best direction for animation but it's impressive all the same. Some of the movement is a little video-gamey, especially in long shot, but by and large it's all very convincing. 

The story concerns a character I've met in the game itself. Everyone who's played the new version of New World will have met him. He's the main quest-giver in the starting area. Sound choice for recognition value.

He's also a fairly memorable character in the game for his personality and humor, much of which makes the transition to the TV screen. Arnie does an excellent job of voicing King Aelstrom (For it is he.), playing him with an understated, affectionate irony that comes across very well. 

There are, I think, only three other speaking parts, one of whom only gets a handful of lines and another who speaks only in... I want to say Latin? Not sure. It needs subtitles, anyway.

Arnie's sidekick is played by Steven Pacey, of all people. He was Tarrant in the third and fourth seasons of Blake's Seven but I don't remember him having a west country accent back then. Of course, that was more than forty years ago. Maybe he moved to Devon. A lot of people retire there and he must be of an age.

The plot, such as it is, is engaging enough and quite amusing but, more importantly, it does a very good job of contextualizing the absloute basics of New World and indeed all MMORPG gameplay, namely that you die over and over and over and over again and only by dying repeatedly do you ever progress. Apart from that, the scenery looks like Aeternum and...

No, that's it. Other than that it doesn't really have much to do with the game at all. Well, there's a bit at the very beginning where a load of soldiers dressed up like conquistadors are on a sailing ship and it sinks. That happens in the game. But then everyone forgets all about it because it's embarassing and so they do in the video, too.

I would have included some screen grabs from the show but Prime is extremely determined no-one shoud do that. All you get is a black screen if you try. There are ways to get around it but I can't be bothered. If they don't want the free publicity, sod 'em.

Instead, I was going to use a few shots of my character in game, wearing the new armor. I went to log in and ended up downloading the entire game all over again, What is it with games on Steam these days, that they have to re-install the whole thing every time there's a patch. It's starting to tick me off.

After it downloaded it had to "install" and that failed at 50% so now it's doing the whole 73GB again and I have lost whatever patience with it I ever had so there will be no in-game pictures. So there!

As for Secret Level, I find myself mildly encouraged. I wasn't going to bother watching any of it but now I might, if I find myself with a quarter of an hour free and nothing better to do. 

They can put that on the posters, if they like.

Just Like Starting Over: New World Aeternum X Once Human: The Way Of Winter

After yesterday's extended diversion it's time to play catch-up. Two of the bigger gaming stories of the week were the relaunch/rebranding of New World as New World Aeternum and a new season for Once Human. And as it happens I've played enough of both to have some first impressions, so here they are.

The first thing I want to say applies to both of them: these are two highly playable games that give me very little of that familiar disconnect we've all felt when coming back after a layoff. Granted, it hasn't been all that long since I last played either of them but the core gameplay loop and the functional mechanics of each is so clear and clean it's hard to imagine it would be much different, coming back after a much longer time away.

Then again, in both cases the latest updates do strongly encourage, if not mandate, a restart. It's always easier  if you come in at the beginning instead of halfway through.

While the gameplay in each may be extremely easy to pick back up, I very much cannot say the same for the look and feel in the case of one of the pair. I spent more time - considerably more time - fiddling with the settings in New World Aeternum than I did playing the game itself, trying to make it look like the game I remembered or even just a game I was willing to spend more than thirty seeconds in. 

Here we are at last!

At one point I was strongly tempted to log back into my old (Now legacy.) character to check if I was misremembering how uncluttered the screen used to look. I have a vision in my head of New World as a clean, virtual world experience, not a jabbering mess of disconnected words and images but maybe that was beta. Whatever and whenever it was, I'm pretty sure the game never looked as chaotic and disorganized as this.

Some of it is personal preference, of course. I have a very strong dislike of seeing names and numbers bobbing about on screen so my first act in many new games is to go into the settings and turn off almost everything that displays over players' heads - names, guilds, titles - all the cruft no-one but the person playing the character ought to give a toss about. 

Then I do the same for NPCs, stripping out all the on-screen identifiers unless removing them fundementally breaks gameplay. Ideally, I like to have all information appear on mouse-over or, failing that, on a click. I want to be the one who decides what displays when, not the developer. 

I also switch off all floating damage and healing numbers, on myself and on the mobs. I can see that information far less obtrusively elsewhere on the screen or I should be able to, if the designers have done their jobs.

It took me far, far longer to get rid of all that crap in NWA (Unfortunate acronym, that, isn't it?) than it ought to have done. Far longer than it does in most games and, to my memory, longer than it used to in this one, too. Not everything I wanted to switch off had a toggle and it was a lot harder than it needed to be to find the off button for those that did.

At one point I even tried playing with the HUD off. Great for immersion but hardly practical.

In the end, even after I'd literally checked every single entry on every menu, I couldn't find any way to switch off player names,something that I have long considered to be a basic option in any multiplayer title. In a game with which I felt less investment, this alone would be enough to make me give up and play something else. Now I'm wondering whether New World ever let you switch the names off or if it was always this way and I was just too excited to care at the beginning, while later on there weren't enough other players around to make it feel like a problem.

The problem with names is, of course, always far worse when a game is new and popular. I don't know how popular NWA is going to stay but certainly when I played it was absolutely heaving. There was a huge crowd milling around the starting area and chat was a nest of vipers, spitting venom about platforms.

NWA is Amazon's attempt to launch New World as a console game and the new servers (Standard Servers as they're called.) all facilitate cross-play between console and PC gamers. That sounds very friendly and inclusive, on paper. In practice, not so much. 

I was surprised and irritated to find the acrimonious rivalry between these groups lives on. I thought it died out years ago. It seems no, sadly. A bit of friendly ribbing is one thing but this felt like a the supporters of a couple of rival sports teams taking it outside for a knock-down brawl.

It reminded me of the old days in MMORPGs, when every new game launched to the background of an ill-tempered debate in General on whether it was better than World of Warcraft. Back then it sometimes felt as though Blizzard stans bought new games as they appeared just so they could log in on launch day and tell everyone what suckers they were for playing and how they should all uninstall and go play WoW instead.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice this is the same screenshot I cropped for yesterday's post.

I prefer to have chat on but not when it's nothing but an endless argument between people with fixed opinions and others taking sides for the sake of an argument. That's no more entertaining when the sides are PC vs Playstation vs XBox than when it's game vs game.

It was, once again, a lot harder to work out how to dull that racket than it should have been. AS I say, I prefer to have chat on when possible, so first I tried some milder solutions, like limiting chat to only players on the same platform as me, an option whose very existence seemed like an admission of defeat by the developers, or dropping out of General. 

And that did largely alleviate the platform wars problem but only long enough to reveal a more fundemantal issue. Chat continued to scroll endlessly, filled with various invites and requests to join this or do that. There seemed to be a lot of links people wanted everyone to click.

For some reason I can't quite explain, but which has to relate to the font or the colors or both, even with the chat box safely tucked away in the lower-left corner of the screen, I just could not ignore it. Every time I looked elsewhere on the screen, something would flicker in my peripheral vision, low down on the left and I'd glance at it and lose focus on what I was doing. It was unmanageably distracting so in the end I caved and switched chat off altogether. This is not ideal in an MMORPG and it's something I hardly ever do or feel I need to do but I couldn't figure out any way around it.

It's instructive to compare that with my experience playing Once Human the next night. Even though the server I played on there was listed as "Nearly Full" when I joined it and it was only a few hours since the new Season had become playable, I had absolutely no problems with chat. Not only were people not behaving like nine-year olds in the schoolyard but the chat box itself, even though it was the same size and in the same location on screen, posed no distraction whatsoever, even when plenty of people were talking.

I didn't take any pictures of the horrible UI so here's one from a cut scene instead. Although, come to think of it, if anyone can tell me what that stupid timer thing at the bottom is and how to get rid of it, I'd be vey grateful. I couldn't shift the damn thing and it kept coming back.

This is a design issue more than anything. I notice it in various games. Sometimes chat imposes itself on the game, sometimes it sits back. Usually you can tweak it to push that one way or the other but in NWA it seems determined to be in your face, all the time, no matter what. Or not there at all, which is where it is for me now and where it's likely to stay. Amazon wanted to pretend the game wasn't an MMO so I'm meeting them halfway.

That's a lot of talk about the UI but it represents the amount of time and attention I felt I had to give it in the game to make it baseline playable. Once I'd finally managed to get that done, I was able to start enjoying myself. And I did.

New World has given us several cinematic introductions in its short life and now it has another to show off. They're always fun to watch, although I'm not necessarily a huge fan of mini-movies at the beginning of video games. The new one blends some of what was there before with some fresh scenes and does, I think, make more sense overall.

Indeed, the whole introduction, including the short tutorial section, is much tighter and cleaner now although I suspect that may only because someone at Amazon finally decided to sit down and work out what the game was going to be about. Probably about time that happened.

Character creation is still embedded in the introduction, which was always a nice touch. There are some new looks. It's a relatively limited selection by modern standards but that's fine. I know from long experience that if I make a character more than a few degrees outside my established preferences I'll fail to bond with them and not want to play them, so as long as I can make someone who looks there and thereabouts like all my other characters, I'm good.

Come on in! The water's lovely!

The basic tutorial tells you how to move and hit things and is extremely visual. There are lots of very bright colors and plenty of explosions. I think it's supposed to be exciting. Then it ends and you get to see the world where you'll be spending time and it feels slightly odd, as though you've come off a ride, back into the busy, bustling theme park itself, all lines and chatter and milling about.

Part two of the tutorial, the part where some very chatty characters give you simple tasks to do and praise you inordinately when you do them, as though you've somehow outpaced all reasonable expectations, takes place on the same beach it always did. The tasks are much the same, too - kill some boars, kill some corrupted sailors, loot some wrecked ships, recover some lost things, find the source of corruption in a cave and destroy it - but the flow is much better and the reasons for doing what you're doing seem a lot clearer than they used to.

Part of that is the dialog and voice acting delivered by the two new NPCs at the campfire, all of which is well above standard. The third NPC, the pirate captain, seems about as I remember her but she's fine, too. Not as good as the "king" and his long-suffering friend but good enough, even if her accent is a bit on the "Oirish" side.. 

I got as far as the first settlement in the one session I've played so far and there seemed to be a fair amount of new dialog, although it's possible it's the same old stuff and I've just forgotten it. Or indeed that it was added in one of the earlier revamps and I never played through it at the time. Whatever, it feels pretty solid; definitely better than I remember.

Yes! I knew it!

As for the physical feel of the thing, it's the same pleasurable experience it always was. New World has one of the best action combat systems I've tried. It feels fluid and natural and intuitive and they don't seem to have changed anything much that I can sense, which is just as well. 

The world looks great as always, there's lots to see and plenty to loot and there's a constant drip of dopamine as skills upgrade on use and new abilities come in. As has generally been the case, once I started playing I didn't want to stop. 

I didn't even feel annoyed by having to start over. It felt like an opportunity more than an imposition although whether I'll ever have the time to get a new character all the way back to where I left the old one is another matter. I wonder if it's safe to assume this will be the last time we're asked to do it?

Perpetual new beginnings is something of a feature in Once Human, where the need to keep re-starting been a major point of contention since launch. The seasonal structure there has met a certain amount of pushback from players and required numerous official statements and explanations from the developers who, if they ever feel they may have made an error of judgment in insisting on it, certainly haven't let that change their minds as they try to impose their vision on the game. 

Like quite a lot of people, even though I wasn't against the seasonal structure per se, I couldn't find the motivation to engage with it for the first reset, where the options were to do the same thing again at higher difficulty or do it again with other players trying to kill me. This time, with a completely new scenario taking place on an entirely new set of maps in a different part of the region, complete with new questlines and plot, though, this feels almost like the game just got an expansion.

Meet the baddies.

That's not such a leap when you think about it. Although The Way of Winter does require you to start over to some degree, so do most MMORPG expansions. You generally need to begin by replacing all your old gear just to be able to handle the new content and that's not much different from what happens here. The new gear you craft to get started may look like the old stuff you used to have but it isn't the same. The old stuff didn't keep you warm. This does. 

Expansions come with new features and that's the expansionesque feature of the new Season in OH. Now you can die of frostbite or heatstroke! What a thrill! In practice, it's just another stat to manage but I quite like it all the same.

I also like the new plot, which involves a really sinister new villain, the head of the Vultures, a criminal gang we've been slaughtering from the get-go. Nice to find out who they are at last and what it is they're up to. 

Their leader, Igna, is written and played with suitable arrogance and snark and I found him genuinely scary. So did Matsuko, the girl with the butterfly stuck to her face, who really doesn't like it when the he projects his image into her supposedly secret pocket-dimensional lair. That's how the new Season begins and I found it engaging and immersive. Once Human has consistently strong writing and voice acting and this is right up to par.

That's not threatening at all...

Things continue to go well after the introduction. There's a choice of starting points - a double choice in fact. You can opt to go into the scenario at a lower level, suitable for newcomers, or enter at a more difficult point, appropriate for experienced players. Obviously I chose the easier one, a choice which then  split into three possible locations on the same map.

I picked the one with the name I liked best and off we went. Once again I had to glide down from a hundred meters in the air, hanging on to the feet of a large hawk. It's a weird way to begin any game but it seems to happen a lot these days. Did it start in Fortnite, this falling from the sky routine? I think that's the first time I saw it. Hard to remember now, it's happened so often since.

Once I reached the ground I started to notice the cold right away. That, I think, was just bad luck. It happened to be just coming on nighttime when I arrived (Didn't I say it's always night when I log in to any game?) and the temperature naturally fell when the sun went down. Since this is an MMORPG, I don't think that time of arrival can have been set for me specifically. I was just unlucky not to get there in the daytime, when it would have been pleasantly warm.

It gave me an introduction to the new temperatue mechanic, anyway. And hypothermia. It gave me that, too. Luckly, hypothermia is just a debuff. It's freezing that kills you. 

I don't know, V. Why don't you tell me? I'm sure you're dying to.

I went straight into survival mode, built myself a camp, killed some deer (Reindeer!), striped their hides and made myself a whole new outfit with a bonus to cold resistance. I would probably have done just that anyway but as it happened it was what V, my glowing bird pal, told me to do because I was still in a sort of extended tutorial. Not surprising, since I had picked the newbie option, after all.

Naturally, by the time I'd gotten myself dressed and protected myself from the cold, the sun came up and it got warm and I didn't need protecting any more. Ho hum. So it was off to the nearest town to see what they had for me to do.

My welcome there wasn't the warmest (Hah!). There was some shouting and gun-pointing until the guard spotted my Mayfly backpack, which as usual worked like some kind of not-so-secret masonic handshake and I was in. Once again, the dialog and the voice acting was strong. It's always a good sign when I find myself wanting to listen to the end even though I've already read ahead and now what they're going to say.

And, also once again, that's where I left it; safely ensconced in the starting town, ready to move on to whatever comes next. I find myself in the happy position of wanting to carry on playing both of these new-old games, my enthusiasm for both seemingly refreshed by the forced re-starts rather than, as it could easily have been, set back.

Maybe because every time someone like you sees them you imagine we're your best mates and you give us the keys your house? Cos that's what keeps happening...

I suspect it's likely I'll get further with Once Human, which has actual new content, than with New World Aeternum, which is only offering a revised version of what was already there. Then again, The Way of Winter is only good for six weeks or so and then I'll have to start again, again, whereas this, hopefully, ought to be the last time I need to start over in New World.

As for which is going to be the more successful overall, at the moment, the clear leader in the relaunch stakes, as far as Steam is concerned, is Once Human. It has almost twice as many people playing as NWA, although there Amazon will be mostly be looking at the console numbers, I'm sure. Still, the PC game has taken a bump, too, so we'll see how that lasts. 

As for which of the approaches will have the greatest success in the longer term, I have no idea how well NWA might do on consoles but on PC I'd back Once Human, whichseems tohave burned fewer bridges and made a better job of hanging on to the players it already has so far.

I plan on playing both, on and off. I don't even mind if I have start over again at some point. Just let's leave it a while, now, eh?

Truth, Time And A Third Word Begining With "T" I Can't Think Of Just Now...

You ever have one of those weeks where everything happens at once? This blog's having one of those right now. 

There's Next Fest, for which I have seven demos to cover, four of which I've already played and one of which I've already reviewed, so that's going about as well as could be expected. Better, really. 

There was also that new, hot game that no-one's talking about that I downloaded the demo for before Next Fest even began. I've played (Some of) that one and posted about it already too, so ditto.

Then there's the launch of a brand-new, highly-anticipated open world RPG that's definitely not an MMO, which has been out for three years now and that millions of people have played, many hundreds or even thousands of them on the same servers at the same time, actually (Oh, stop it!). New World Aeternum, it's called. 

I downloaded that one, with considerable difficulty, yesterday and last night I made a character. She's Level 8 so that's a work in progress, pretty much the same as the game itself, which has been re-envisioned at least three times now to my certain knowledge. Will this be the version that sticks? We'll see soon enough, although whether anyone still cares might be a more appropriate question.

After that comes the second full PvE season in Once Human which, unlike the last two seasons that don't really count because they were just revamped versions of the first season with some bits moved around and some difficulty settings tweaked, brings a huge amount of genuinely new content to the game. 

There's a whole new region with four zones, as we would have called them in the olden days, before everything went seamless. That's an expansion by some people's reckoning. I can think of marketing departments that would be hanging the expansion label on an update like that and charging for it, too.

I read the latest press release for the update yesterday (Version 1.3 - The Way of Winter - that's what it's called.) and it does sound really interesting. Exciting, even. I've had had a really great time playing Once Human for (Checks Steam...) eighty hours so far so I'm looking forward to getting in and seeing all the new stuff. The update went live today and I have it downloading as I write. Now I just have to play it for a while and then post about it. 

I could get right on that today, only late yesterday evening, just as I was about to switch my PC off for the night, I got an email inviting me into a "playtest" for another MMO. I downloaded the client but as yet I haven't checked whether there's an NDA or anything. The email didn't mention one and I haven't signed anything but I probably should double-check before I start rambling on about it in public.

By a conservative estimate, I make that nine posts pending at least, assuming I give all the demos a post of their own, which I'm hoping I won't have to but which experience tells me I probably will. To make it a nice, round ten, I just finished watching two TV shows I want to talk about. At least I can usually portmanteau several of those into one post so I shouldn't have to go to eleven.

I realize I have now spent eight paragraphs basically doing one of those posts about blogging that no-one wants to read but I blame that on Stuart Lee. Mrs Bhagpuss put one of his books on the bathroom book pile and I've been reading the bit where he goes through one of his touring shows as broadcast on the BBC, line by line, with extensive footnotes, talking through his process. I have always had an unfortunate tendency towards unconscious imitation. I think this might be one of those times.

And now I have to go take Beryl for a long walk in the countryside. It's been raining for two days straight and she's barely been outside but today the sun has come out and supposedly it's not going to rain all day so she's more than due. I'll have to pick this up again later. 

At least Once Human has updated now, so that's something off the list, at least.

And now I'm back. 

Is there any point to these "stepping away from the keyboard" sidebars, I'm wondering? It's like when Joanne says she has to go pee in Nobody Wants This. Or, rather, when she does it in the fictional podcast of the same name she co-hosts with her sister, in the hit TV show, also called Nobody Wants This. 

That, what I did there, besides being confusing, thanks to the embedded metafiction, for which I'm not to be held responsible, is called tele-parabalizing. 

Okay, it's not but it kind of is all the same. Douglas Coupland coined the term in his seminal novel Generation X, where he also came up with a whole slew of descriptive terms and labels for quasi-cultural activities that I'm sure he hoped would catch on, making him his generation's answer to Shakespeare. That didn't happen, as the Observer's Christine Smallwood somewhat unkindly pointed out in 2006, fifteen years after the publication of the book itself, but I have a bunch of those definitions in tiny frames on my kitchen wall so I haven't been able to forget them as easily as everyone else.

That's an interesting article, by the way, the one I linked then, although I only skimmed it so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the detail. Still, it is curious how GenX seems to have slipped through the cracks between Boomers and Millennials. Also, what was Generation Y, described in the piece as "the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big"? Anyone remember them?

My feeling has long been that all generations need to be subdivided at least once. The life experiences of children growing up a decade apart are frequently too different to be tidily conflated. We probably should talk about Early and Late for all generations, which I guess would make Gen Y early Millennials. 

I didn't come here to talk about any of that, though. I seem to have gotten myself side-tracked. Again.

While I'm down this byway I might as well mention that, if you google "tele-parabalizing" to check if indeed it might have caught on more than you thought it had, as I just did, (It hasn't.) you'll find one of my posts, the frankly wonderfully-named Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas, at #4 in Google's list. Now I've mentioned it again I wonder if this post will also appear in future searches for the phrase? 

Probably not because the only reason the other one ranks that high to begin with is because I misspelled "parablizing". Coupland spells it without the second "a" and since he made it up, I guess he knows.

This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the imminent "Death of the Internet" we're all supposed to be worrying about. I mean, just how reliable was the information we were all lapping up before the rise of the AIs anyway?

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading a Stewart Lee book (It's March of the Lemmings in fact, although that's not the cover of the edition currently lying on the floor of our bathroom.) In it, he occasionally refers in considerable detail, often with dates and names, to cultural artefacts that don't exist. Sometimes he then tells the reader he's made them up but mostly he doesn't.

For example, when he mentions "an Essex folk song collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the '50s",  he's referring to a real person but when the sentence carries "from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell" he's making stuff up. Specifically, what he's doing is collating the name of Gary Bushell, a right-wing music journalist and cultural commentator no-one likes with the name of Bushell's old band, The Gonads.

That one's a very obvious joke but "The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980" by Daniel Spicer, which I assumed he'd also invented, turns out to be entirely bona fide, as does Julian Cope's band Brain Donor, a Cope project I was completely unaware of until I read about it in Lee's book. 

At one point, Stewart also quotes a lengthy post by someone purporting to be a stage manager, accusing Lee, in an unsettlingly calm, world-weary tone, of all kinds of behaviors and actions that turn out to be provably untrue. But that's what truth is: anything someone tells you until someone more convincing tells you otherwise.

I was reminded of that when I was in the launderette a couple of hours ago (I took a load of washing round after we got back from walking Beryl. If I was a comedian I guess I might say something like "This is what my life has become" but it's pretty much what my life already was, except now we have a dog...). As the load was in the drier, I was reading a novel called Starling House by Alix E Harrow and I was struck by just how many precise, specific references the author makes to books and songs which I was pretty sure didn't exist, at least not in the form she said they did.

For example, on page 44 the protagonist, Opal, makes a passing reference to "that one Prine song that everybody still hates", which would be largely meaningless and pass mostly unnoticed if it wasn't for a footnote on the same page, in which an unnamed annotater (Definitely another character, not the author.) explains "Opal is referring to John Prine's 1971 song "Paradise" on his debut album".

This is an actual song and that is an actual album and the lyrics do concern the mining industry in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, which is where the novel is set - in a small town called Eden. Prine's father grew up in Paradise, a small mining town in the same county and the song is about his experiences there.

Prine's song does not, however, include the line "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Old Gravely's coal train has hauled it away", as stated in the footnote because Gravely Power is a fictional company invented by the author. What John Prine actually wrote and sang was "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.", which is admittedly very similar but not the same.

According to Wikipedia, the real mining company that strip-mined the real Paradise was called the Peabody Coal Company. The fictional founder of the fictional Gravely Power that did the same to the fictional Eden was John Peabody Gravely. 

This seems to me to be getting extremely close to the kinds of "hallucinations" seen in AI-produced text, albeit here intentional rather than accidental. And being set down in print, it's now in the cultural record as much as anything on the internet. Maybe it even has more authority that way, even though its in a novel. Books have gravitas.

There's more, too. Across the next four pages, Alix E Harrow incorporates the full text of a supposed Wikipedia article on fictional author Eleanor Starling. There's nothing very unusual about writers creating other writers who never existed and filling out their bibliographies as though they did but backfilling fake internet data into a printed book adds a level or two of complexity, not to say confusion. 

Here, once again, the author includes a number of direct and specific references from our non-fictional timeline. They're extrmeley well-done and wholly convincing.

For example, there's a quote attributed to Guillermo del Toro: "the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier but to lay it bare". It sounds like something the director might have said, although clearly he couldn't have said it, as the fictional Wikipedia article suggests, about the equally fictional author Eleanor Starling. I did wonder if it was an actual quote, re-purposed but in fact it's wholly made up. De Toro never said it at all.

Better yet, there's a reference to Josh Witter's third studio album, "Hello Starling", which supposedly includes a song called "Nora Lee and Me" as a hidden track, Nora Lee being the name of the girl in The Underland, the one and only book Eleanor Starling ever wrote. 

Josh Ritter's third album really is called Hello Starling, although presumably for entirely different reasons. Having the song be a "hidden track" on it is a master-stroke because, of course, hidden tracks do exist but are never listed anywhere, so even if an internet search brings up no trace of any song of that name you can never be absolutely sure it doesn't exist. All we need now is for Ritter to read the book and decide to write the song and include it as a hidden track on future editions of the album and reality will have fractured into shards.

All of this suggests that humans are and always have been perfectly capable of muddying the factual waters all on their own, without the help of soi-disant artificial intelligences and lumbering LLMs. The internet, which was always awash with nonsense, may yet become so sodden with falsehood it will sink to the bottom of the data sea and lie there, a rotting wreck filled with misinformation, fantasy and lies but whether that makes it materially different from the recorded corpus of human thought and expression from the previous several millennia is questionable at best.

Did I have a point? If I did, I think I made it. Let's move on.

Actually, let's stop. That took most of the day and now I'm one post further behind where I wanted to be. Result!

I suppose I'd better get on and play another of those demos. Or take a look at that game I'm supposed to be playtesting and see if it has an NDA.

Off I go. Wish me luck. And here's hoping I make a better job of this tomorrow.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the final image, which was generated at NightCafe using Real Cartoon XL v4 from the prompt "Nora Lee and Me starling house the underland line drawing color dark gothic scary". It was the second attempt. the first, where the prompt didn't have the "dark gothic scary" part, turned out way too bright and cheerful, as you'd expect.