Same Same But Different

I was going to take (another) day off from posting because I was out for much of the day and I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to talk about but then I was idly scrolling through all the Amazon Prime Gaming and Steam games I haven't played (or installed) yet and I happened to notice two or three occurrences that looked like they might tie together into a quick post. So here we are.

It's something of a follow-on, thematically at least, from the post I wrote on Monday about playing the gaming field and not staying loyal to a single game, a topic and a concept I'm still mulling. With Solasta out of the way, I've been in search of a game to fill that pause-friendly, tactics-heavy, somewhat cerebral slot and I was browsing the possibilities to see if I already had something that would fit the bill or whether I'd need to find something to buy.

To forestall the inevitable suggestion, obviously the best choice would be Baldur's Gate 3 but I'm definitely not spending that much money. I may see if I can get someone to give it me for my birthday or Christmas although if there's one major downside to  digital distribution it's that it renders video games entirely unsuitable as gift recommendations for aging relatives. Until then it'll have to be something on a budget or preferably free.

While I was dithering, I took a side-turn and started playing Crowns and Pawns, a classic point & click adventure I bought on sale earlier this year. It ticks the pause and brain boxes but as I discovered, after an hour of mostly enjoyable puzzle-solving, it does absolutely nothing to scratch that tactical itch. I'll definitely keep on with it because it seems like a really good game - just not the game I'm looking for right now.

I also tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall, a tactical rpg I picked up at 90% off recently, which ought to have been exactly what I was after but very much wasn't. While it absolutely nailed the tactical elements as well as being fully pausable, it failed to engage my interest in either the characters or the plot. The minute size of the characters and the lack of anything much in the way of visual effects had the unfortunate effect of making the combat seem perfunctory, even though it probably has at least as much going on as the games I'm comparing it with unfavorably. I might give it another go but I suspect I won't.

With nothing meeting my exacting standards, I found myself idly scanning the news along the top of the Steam screen, which was where I was reminded of a couple of items I'd read earlier, along with some new news I hadn't seen before. Two games I'm kinda-sorta still playing are on the cusp of turning themselves inside out in the hope of attracting interest and players and it occurred to me that, if I wanted to see how that went, I'd probably have to start both of them over from the beginning.

Starting over seems to be a recurring theme just now. I wrote recently that I'm on hiatus from Once Human because I haven't quite decided if I want to start afresh on a Seasonal server, either right now or as soon as a different scenario becomes available. Now it seems I can add both Nightingale and New World to that decision tree.

I hadn't really considered the quasi-relaunch of New World, under the New World: Aeternum brand to be something that would necessitate a clean start. I suppose it doesn't, per se, but having read Tyler Edwards' piece on his experience of the press version of the upcoming beta it seems fairly clear that there's at least an opportunity to begin again anew.

The Nightingale marketing department, meanwhile, is urgently attempting to explain to worried punters that that the upcoming Realms Rebuilt update, a rewrite so extensive I have seen it described as a relaunch, will allow players to clone their current online characters to the offline version of the game. 

This, apparently, will take place in something called Legacy Mode, the explanation for engaging with which requires a very complicated FAQ, which I have skimmed but don't yet fully understand. It appears that as of tomorrow, when I next log into Nightingale, all my character slots will be empty but somehow I will be able to recover my "old" characters and play them offline, even if I haven't done anything to prepare for the wipe.

I have to say all of this came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't even realise the update constituted a full character wipe. If I was currently playing Nightingale I might have been a tad miffed. Since I'm not, though, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity to start the game again from the beginning.

But is it an opportunity I want to take? I enjoyed both New World (Almost 250 hours played.) and Nightingale (Over 100.) but do I want to do it all over again, slightly differently? 

I certainly didn't get much value out of My Time At Sandrock, which I bought at a very early stage, while it was still in early development, then ended up hardly playing at all. I jumped on it because I'd really enjoyed My Time At Portia but it transpired that playing what turned out to be a very similar game (At least at that early stage of development.) didn't light the same fires.

Now I see that the My Time crew are trailing a Kickstarter for a third game in the series, My Time At Evershine and for no good reason whatsoever I find myself quite excited by the prospect all over again. I have at least learned my lesson. I won't be pledging or buying in to Early Access. Even so, when the game finally arrives in a full-featured, launch version, I wouldn't bet against me buying it anyway

A few years ago - okay quite a few years ago - starting over in games and playing through the same content only slightly differently was pretty much standard operating procedure for me. As my EQ25 series is more than amply demonstrating, I used to make a lot of characters in the same MMORPGs, especially when there were different starting areas.

Yeebo posted today about the attraction of all those very different class stories in Star Wars: the Old Republic. I commented to say that the sheer number of stories had actually put me off the game and it did to an extent but I'm sure it would have the opposite effect had the game been around back in my EverQuest days. I'd have taken it as an opportunity to play lots of characters without having to go through the exact same content every time.

The question I'm asking myself, as I look at the revamps of New World and Nightingale and the possibility of a third My Time game, is whether I still find the prospect of rolling a new character in the same game as appealing as it once was. It's a question that applies, not equally but to a significant degree, to my search for a suitable replacement for the turn-based, tactical combat titles I'm craving.

To some extent, every return to a familiar genre or style of game could be said to be tantamount to playing the same content with a different skin. It's just a matter of degree. There's a considerable appeal to the familiar and the more I think about starting over, the more I remember how much I used to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll take the opportunity to see if any of that enjoyment is still there to be had. I could even give SW:tOR another run. 

Okay, let's not get carried away...

Spring Cleaning In Reverse

There's just one more day left for New World's Springtide festival, after which any event currency left unspent will melt away like the morning mist. So I thought I'd better get on and use mine, while I still had the chance. No sense leaving right to the last minute then forgetting about it.

Of course, there was the slight problem of what to buy with the fifty or so tokens I'd collected. I'd been logging in to grab them most days while the event was going on but I didn't really stop to ask myself why. Free stuff, y'know?

I did take a quick look at the holiday vendor right at the start and I could see there were a lot of armor skins, plenty of house items and some consumables but I didn't bother to look much further than that. I figured, when the time came, there'd be something I could buy. I mean, clothes and furniture are always welcome, right?

Well, the clothing was all pretty horrible. New World has some very odd aesthetics when it comes to appearance gear. I used to think it was because the good stuff was in the cash shop but now I think there just isn't much good stuff at all. 

The heavy armor looks like armor, which is just not how it's done in MMORPGs, while the medium and light look like someone had a lot of old curtains and sofa covers lying around and thought they might as well make something out of them.

Too-bright light, slightly scary plant.

The Spring Collection includes a Beekeeper's outfit, which appears to be historically accurate, more's the pity, plus a Springtide set that might do service for a touring company production of Julius Caesar.  There's an in-game Preview feature that lets you see what you'd look like wearing this stuff and I'd include some screenshots, only it uses a peculiar mechanic I couldn't get to grips with.

Instead of showing a separate image in a window, like almost every other game, New World shows you wherever you happened to be when you used it, only now you're wearing the item you selected. Since I had to be at the vendor to see the gear, that's where the Preview put me. The problem was, every time I tried, someone came and stood right on top of me, obviously also using the vendor.

What with that, the terrible lighting and no way I could find to move from the spot I was on, I pretty soon gave up trying to get a good shot. I couldn't even see the gear well enough to decide if I liked it or not. I had to tab out and look it up online to find out I didn't want it.

As well as the skins, you can buy patterns with which to make your own gear, the real thing, with stats. For ten tokens a pop you can get a pattern to make 700GS items, which would be great if I could wear them. Since I'd have to buy the expansion to be able to equip anything that high, I didn't bother.

Aerial Pinwheel. How does it stay up? Magic!

I did grab a few of last year's patterns, which make 600GS gear. Those were very much cheaper and most of my gear is well below 600, so it would be a decent upgrade. Of course, I'd need to be playing the game properly for that to matter but still. It could happen.

The consumables I didn't really look at. I'd been getting a ton of them from the daily gifts anyway and once again they weren't going to be much use if I wasn't out there fighting Corrupted and Lost and the rest of the crew. There were also a few one-off items but I didn't know what they were for and I couldn't imagine I'd ever find out so I struck them off the list, too.

And that just left housing items. Fortunately I love decorating so that was just fine with me. The only problem was going to be where to put them all.

I bought a big, four-poster bed and a chaise-longue, which were clearly going to take up a lot of space. There was a surprisingly wide range of lighting, wall and ceiling lights, table and standard lamps, more than one kind of each. I bought all of them. 

Naturally there were baskets of flowers. There were also a couple of oddities, like some large bags of "pigments" and a hovering device called a Pinwheel. I loaded up on those too.

I can't help thinking these would look better in a palace. Or a cat-house.

I think the only house items I didn't buy were one of the flower baskets and a banner. I thought the banner would be a wall hanging but my next-door neighbor in Mourningdale has something on their porch that I think might be one and it's actually a big pole with banner at the top and some flowers growing up it. It looks good. I wished I'd bought one once I saw it. might do one more round of the camps before the event ends tomorrow so I can get one for myself.

By the time I'd finished placing everything I could barely get up and down the stairs. My bedroom looks particularly cramped, even after I took out one of the beds that was already there.

I know I complained last time about the size of the rooms but it's not so much that - it's more that I seem to have acquired a hell of a lot of furniture for someone who hasn't actively played the game since a few months after launch. It's partly because Amazon keep giving house items away with the Prime Gaming deals but mostly because the one thing I keep coming back for are holiday events and New World seems to have those pretty regularly.

In an irritable report on a recent Q&A with the devs, MMO Bomb revealed that "Going forward, the focus will be less on Seasonal narrative content". At first I misunderstood that to mean less holiday content and I actually felt mildly relieved. It doesn't mean that, of course. It's not that kind of seasonal content they're talking about.

Flowers in barrel from this event. Other flowers... not sure.

Troy Blackburn at MMO Bomb also transmitted the apparent annoyance of the NW player-base with Amazon Games' constant harping on about the much-hyped "June Announcement". Even as a casual observer - and even more casual player - I have to agree that whatever it is they're keeping secret, it's going to have to be something truly spectacular now, just to justify the fuss they've been making over it.

Most of the speculation I've seen revolves around either a Console port or conversion to some sort of Free To Play business model, neither of which seems worth waiting months to announce. I guess either would potentially bring in a surge of new players, which seems to be one of the main expectations everyone has for the change, whatever it turns out to be, but plenty of other MMORPGs have either added a console client or gone F2P but none I remember ever chose to make a big secret of it like this.

If it's not that, though, I don't know what it might be, unless they're going to announce that Amazon's next big in-house video project is going to be a New World TV show. That would be a big deal and it would make a great setting for one, too. 

I doubt it's that, though. What I do think is that when we find out, pretty much everyone is going to be disappointed. I'll be happy to be proved wrong but I think it's a safe bet I won't be.

Failing some amazing development that none of us has even thought of, then, I expect my next visit to New World will be for whatever the holiday after Springtide might be. When it comes, I just hope there's something to get other than furniture. My character lives alone and she already has four beds...

Jumpstyle Is Not A Crime

Since I ran up against the buffers in Nightingale I've been game-hopping like crazy. Typically, when I was spending all my time in one game, I complained about feeling trapped. Now I'm back to jumping between half a dozen games it's giving me the jitters. There's no pleasing some people.

The games I'm "playing" just now (Although that's a very fancy word for what I'm actually doing when I log into some of them.) are:

• New World
• AdventureQuest 3D
• Once Human Closed Beta 3
• EverQuest II
• Nightingale
• The Dungeon of Nahalbeuk: Amulet of Chaos

I don't have one of those fancy apps that tallies exactly how much time I spend in each of them but I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it isn't a lot. I doubt it's more than a couple of hours altogether most days.

As well as those six, I have a mental list of about twice as many games I feel I ought to be playing - or could be playing - or was in the middle of playing before I stopped for no good reason. Those include:

• Valheim
• Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
• Tales Noir Preludes
• Imposter Factory
• Lake
• My Time At Sandrock

There are more - potentially a lot more - but that's a round dozen so I'll call it there, just so I have time to give a little gloss on each of them, starting with the ones I'm at least managing to log into once in a while:

New World - I came back for the Spring event and kind of hung around. I've been logging in most days to do the rounds of the settlements and festival camps so I can pick up my freebies, especially the tokens. I've bought some of the furniture I wanted and I have a couple more days to get the rest. I need to remember to spend everything I've earned because the event currency vanishes along with the event itself a tthe end of April.

Other than that, I've done a few quests and I feel like I might carry on and do a few more, just for the fun of it. Questing in New World is generally entertaining and I see new quest markers everywhere I go. Unfortunately, I'd need to buy the expansion to level any further and I think it's a bit steep at £25.  I'm somewhat discouraged to do too much questing while the xp goes nowhere so I'll probably shelve this one soon in anticipation of whatever the Big Announcement in June might be. Maybe that will make it feel like it's worth buying the DLC.

AdventureQuest 3D - I log in every day just to collect my three daily chests. There are two reasons I keep doing it: 1) The first chest always gives some cash shop currency and I want some for housing items and 2) AQ3D has by far the fastest login process I've ever seen. 

Seriously, it's like lightning. I wish every MMORPG was even half as fast. I just timed it and it took 28 seconds from Pressing "Play" in Steam to looking at my character in game. I can log in, get my chests and be back in Steam in under a minute although I don't usually go quite that fast. Of course, I'm not actually playing the game but there's certainly nothing being put in my way if I wanted to, which is more than I can say about a lot of games - *cough* Lord of the Rings *cough*

Once Human CB3 - I logged into this one for the first time in a couple of weeks last night and my house was gone! That was a shock. It turned out to be more of a feature than a glitch, though. It seems that if you don't log in for a while (I don't know what the time-limit is.) your house automatically gets copied and stored using the system designed for moving home. 

All you have to do to restore it is find a new spot and put down the blueprint and it magically reappears, just as it was, with all the furniture in the right place. It seems like a very ingenious solution to the endless problem all games with open-world housing have, namely absentee homeowners. This way, no-one has to look at hundreds of abandoned homes and all the best building spots can be taken by people who are going to use them.

Once Human has a lot of clever design features like that. Yesterday I ran across the game's ingenious solution to that other annoying trope of so many F2P MMORPGs, player-owned strip malls. You must have seen them; dozens, scores, hundreds of stalls put up by players to sell their goods, all crammed together in a particularly ugly form of urban blight.

In OH, players sell from pick-up trucks on which they place vending machines. These fit so well into the post-apocalyptic environment, already littered as it is with broken-down vehicles and machinery, it took me a good while to realize what they were. They also have the benefit of all being different. I haven't found out how you get one yet but it looks as though once you have one, you can furnish and decorate it like a room in your house. I wonder if you can also drive about in it? There are vehicles in the game, so I don't see why not.

I want to do at least one more full post about Once Human soonish, so I'll leave it at that for now. I don't plan on playing much more of CB3 but that's only because I want to save my enthusiasm for when the game goes live. I did do some exploring yesterday, though, which is where all the pictures in this post came from. It's fun just driving around on my motorcycle, looking at the scenery. I might do some more of that before the beta ends.

EverQuest II - I'm in and out of this one as usual. This morning I finished the Signature Questline from the current expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, which would normally be a big moment. Instead it turned out to be something of an anti-climax. 

For one thing, it's the first expansion for a long time where finishing the Sig hasn't also put me at the level cap. My Berserker is still only half way through Level 128. For another, there isn't a big, explosive ending to the storyline - just a regular fight with a named mob I wouldn't even call a Boss, followed by a hand-in, at which point you get a pop-up telling you the Sig line is finished.

It transpires there's a reason for that. The Signature Quest might have stopped but the quest faucet is still jammed full on. Other NPCs nearby immediately sprout feathers over their heads and everything carries on as before. I looked ahead on the wiki and there are tons more quests of all sorts in the expansion, many in direct line of sequence from the Sig. 

I'm not sure why they've done it this way although no doubt there are reasons. It's fine with me, anyway. Now I can just carry on chipping away until I eventually hit 130. I'd like to get it done before the Anashti Sul server arrives in June. That shouldn't be too hard...

Nightingale - As I said the other day, the changes they've made aren't significant enough to get me back playing regularly again. I would like to re-visit all the vendors so I can buy stuff directly from the UI in future, though. That would be a project in itself.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos - The wild card on this list, being both the only game that's both solo and offline. It's also the one I've been playing the most. I've had a session most evenings, usually lasting a couple of hours, which is sometimes as long as it takes to finish a single battle.

I really like the gameplay. It's one of those XCom-style, turn-based, tactical group combat games, only with a high-fantasy skin. Lots of setting people on fire, knocking them down and hiding behind things until someone blows them up. All of that.

It's also - loosely - a parody and I was wary of what that might mean in the way of "humor" but it's largely okay. The voice acting is just the right side of amateurish and the jokes rise just above embarrassingly cliched. I wouldn't call it witty or original but it raises the odd smile and the characters... have character.

The game also seems to go on forever. I feel like I've been playing it for months. I know I'm doing all the side quests but I feel if I wasn't my party wouldn't be tough enough to handle the main quest so it doesn't feel like that's much of an option. Anyway, I'm enjoying it and I hope one day I might even finish it.

And now the ones I'm thinking - but not doing much - about...

Valheim  - Wilhelm writing about this one again reminds  me I ought to go back and at least take a look at the Mistlands. I had a terrible start with that biome, although from what Wilhelm says that was likely the developers' intention. 

I'm not even going to bother trying to play the game properly any more but luckily I don't need to because I've switched all the mobs to Passive, meaning I can go explore without fear of being jumpd on by a spider the size of an elephant, moving as fast as a cheetah. I mean, does that sound like fun to anyone?

I was tempted to go back and have a wander around yesterday but then I thought about the final biome, Ashlands, which is in testing now and should be going live in a matter of weeks. It probably makes more sense to wait for that and then explore both biomes together. If I do, I won't be switching mob aggro on for that either, I'll tell you that for nothing!

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit - I bought this in January. Haven't even logged in yet. Every time I see it in my Steam Library I feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll start on it as soon as I finish Naheulbeuk.

Tales Noir Preludes  - I bought this around the same time and played it right away. I was really enjoying it but then I stopped, for no reason I can recall. I keep meaning to carry on from where I left off but somehow I never do. Must try harder.

Imposter Factory - Much the same story for this one, although I got further before I stopped.

Lake - And this one! I have no idea why this keeps happening. I have a post in mind to write about Lake, too. Something very odd happens in it. Twice, in fact. 

I thought I might already have posted about that but search suggests I haven't. I guess I could tell you what the Odd Thing is now but there's still the outside possibility it might happen more than twice, so I really ought to finish the game first, just in case.

My Time At Sandrock - Will I ever play this damn game? I very much doubt it. 

I almost wish I hadn't bought it, now. I feel like its whole schtick has been done by so many other games, I can't really see the point. Then again, the My Time At... games probably do it better than most of them, so why play any of those, when I already have this one installed? 

And there we have it. Not so much a post, more of a to-do list. Maybe putting it all down on paper will even inspire me to get some of it done.

I kinda doubt it but you have to try something, don't you?

Spring Is Here, The Flowers Is Riz

New World has always looked gorgeous, even at lower fidelity, but with the much more powerful video card I bought last summer now able to run it at the higher settings, it's more stunning than ever. That was readily apparent the moment I logged in after a 13GB patch today to take a look at the Springtime Bloom event that just began.

The game generally does holidays well, with events that are accessible, entertaining and visually spectacular, although if there's a "but..." it's that they do tend to stick to a formula. I missed the first Springtime Bloom last year but the current one still felt very familiar, being formally almost identical to the Winter Convergence festival, which I've visited a couple of times.   

Spring lends itself particularly well to the process, though, what with the focus on floral displays. The holiday is celebrated in the central cities of four of Aeternum's regions - Everfall, Monarch's Bluff, Weaver's Fen and Brightwood - or at least those are the ones that hand out gifts. I'm not sure if the rest also put up decorations and if not, why not.

There are also four Springtime Villages, one in each of the aforementioned areas, which is where you can pick up the event questline, spend your event tokens in the event shop and craft your event quest items on the event crafting tables. It's quite the event!

Each of the eight locations has a free package of holiday goods you can pick up once a day or thereabouts and they all have portals attached so in theory you could log in and zap yourself around the lot in a matter of minutes. I'll be doing that from now on but for this first rotation I had to do a fair bit of travelling to open up the portals I didn't already have, which meant it took me about an hour altogether.

I did also do a couple of the faction events on the way. They involve picking some highly suspicious flowers, which sounds simple enough until you find out every time you go near one a bunch of giant wasps appear and chase you about.

That in itself wouldn't be so bad if you could swat them but these are super-annoying event wasps, almost entirely immune to damage from anything other than event bombs. To kill them you have to lay down traps and lead the wasps into them, whereupon the traps explode, damaging but - annoyingly - not outright killing the wasps. 

It took me about four or five traps each time to finish them all off and I was under half health by the time the last one pegged out so it's not a forgone conclusion you'll survive. Game developers seem to love mechanics like this. I'm forever having to lay traps or lead mobs into objects to kill them because somehow they're magically invulnerable to all other kinds of harm. 

I have to wonder if there's anyone playing who genuinely prefers these kinds of dances to just whacking the damn things with a sword or an axe. Sometimes it gets to feel like there's no point even carting a weapon around, you get so little use out of it. And holiday events seem particularly prone to such shenanigans.

One thing about the plant-picking I did appreciate was the gigantic aerial signpost. Over each field hangs a huge rainbow ring you really can't miss. I didn't even know what it was when I saw it but it was so spectacular I headed over to investigate. That's how you bring people to the party.

As is the way of New World, there are plentiful rewards in the way of consumables along the way but the good stuff is gated both by event currency and event faction. Fortunately, both come fairly readily. I'm glad of that because there's some very nice stuff in the event store. Lots of outfits and some very nice furniture.

While I definitely would like the over-the-top four poster bed and the chaise-longue, as well as several of the flower baskets, I have already claimed a prodigious amount of free furniture from Prime Gaming giveaways and I'm struggling to find anywhere to put it all. I went to my house last time I played, which was only a few days ago, and was a bit surprised by how cramped it felt. 

It's not like I bought the smallest one although I didn't buy the biggest either. Still, you'd think a three-story townhouse with a porch and balcony would be easier to furnish than that. 

Gold is a lot easier to come by in New World than it was, rental costs were slashed to a fraction of what they used to be and I believe you can own more than one house. I might have to look into buying a second home, just to have somewhere to put all my free stuff.

I have no plans to return to New World full-time nor even part-time but it always was and still remains a very good MMORPG. I'll at least be sticking around for the rest of the spring holiday, even if all that amounts to is a quick flip around the festival sites every day or two. 

And who knows what I might get caught up in while I'm there? A lot has certainly happened since the last time I played for any length of time, not least a whole, new expansion. I don't think I'll be buying that but I admit I'm tempted when I see someone cruise past me on the back of a lion, while I have to keep trudging along on foot.

Before I finish, I'll just give a quick thank-you to Heartless Gamer for pointing out the recent change from Alt-H to F10 when you want to hide the UI. F10 has been my go-to for that since EverQuest and muscle memory frequently has me pressing it in games where it's not relevant. I used it a lot today and it felt good.

It's amazing how the little things cheer you up sometimes, isn't it? Not that I wasn't cheery enough to begin with but it's nice to have one less niggle to worry about. It all adds up or counts down, whichever way you prefer to look at it.

Maybe You Just Need To Sleep On It?

Before we get started, some background. This post is emblematic of the problems I was talking about the other day, the kind that can arise when you write posts ahead of publication. I only wrote this yesterday but it's already out of date in some key respects and it would be misleading if I just posted it without an update.

I could have just put the new information in a postscript but that would allow more negativity to accumulate than now seems appropriate, so here's the coda in the preamble. It'll all make sense eventually. Probably.

I logged in to Steam about an hour ago and there was a small update to New World. Once that had processed, I was able to log into the game with no issues at all. I was also able to play completely normally, with no errors or interruptions. 

It looks like most of the problems I was having yesterday related to the big update a couple of days ago. Just my luck to try and come back right after a major content drop. I should have realised. It's not like Amazon don't have a history with this kind of thing.

Everything ran smooth as silk at "High" settings with FPS capped at 60. I didn't try it at "Very High/Unlimited" because it looked and played perfectly well as it was but I'm sure that would have been fine, too. The fans on my new card barely needed to turn. As a test, I can finally say it was extremely successful. I'm very pleased indeed.

I didn't stay long. Typically, now the hardware and the software were all co-operating, the connection to the US East server I play on was very poor. Nothing I can do about that other than move to an EU server and that's not happening. It's usually fine, anyway. This was an exception.

I did hang around long enough to visit my house in Mourningdale and pay the outstanding rent. I remember that used to seem quite onerous but now it looks to be trivial. It was about a hundred gold and I have over 33k from doing pretty much nothing. I spent a pleasant few minutes putting all the furniture I'd acquired in appropriate rooms and then I logged out to finish up this post. 

Everything after the next picture is what I wrote yesterday. Once you've finished it, what you just read will make a lot more sense!

I thought I might as well write a post to kill time while I wait for Steam to verify my New World installation for the second time this afternoon. I should say my New World re-installation. Verifying the first installation really didn't help and I don't imagine verifying this one will, either.

Back up. Why am I trying to play New World? Good question. It's not because of the upcoming Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, interesting though it sounds. I don't actually have any particular desire to go back to Aeternum at the moment. I'm more than busy enough in Dawnlands.

No, I just wanted to use New World to test my new graphics card. As I promised (Myself.) I have indeed bought an upgrade to my extremely reliable but even more extremely outdated Zotac GeForce GTX960, the card that came with this PC, when I bought it about six years ago.

Given that it was barely a mid-range card even then, it's astonishing how well it's lasted. Until recently, it ran every game I threw at it and mostly it ran them well, even when the minimum spec said I shouldn't even bother trying. It's still soldiering on. If I was just going to carry on playing the same games I'm playing now, I wouldn't need to change it.

Of late, though, it's becoming obvious that soon newer games won't be an option, even at low settings. I don't tend to play the most graphically intense kinds of games but it's getting to the point where even new MMORPGs and survival games are starting to look like they might be to much for my old card to handle. 

I was aware it might be a waste of time upgrading the card if it just shifted the problem to my equally aging processor, but I ran a few tests and apparently I got lucky there. My CPU over-performs for what's expected of it. If it does need to be replaced at some point, my motherboard can take something quite a bit better but for now it looks as though I can stick with what I have and still get full benefit from a new GPU.

I've been through this upgrade cycle before - swapping out key components mid-cycle before replacing the whole lot with a new machine - but last time I did it, the whole life of that PC, including upgrades, was shorter than this one's already lasted unchanged. If nothing actually fails then, with the overhead for improvement still open to me, I might get a full decade out of it, which would be amazing.

Because it's been so long since I bought it, just about any new card would have been an upgrade. I could have saved myself some money and picked up something from a couple of generations back . Given the above history, though, I thought I'd take the plunge and buy something up-to-date.

Obviously, I'm talking no more than mid-range, at best. Let's not get carried away. I was going to get a GeForce RTX 3060, which would have been a huge upgrade, but I prevaricated for so long, by the time I finally got my wallet out that card had been superceded by the 4060.

I read a bunch of reviews and it seemed that while the 3060 had had a pretty good reputation, the 4060 wasn't seen as a huge step up. It seemed it was a very decent card, just not sufficiently advanced in any way to justify being marketed as the next generation the four-zero prefix implied.

Hah! Who cares? It's the fourth generation of that line after the one I'd be upgrading from! It might only be 15-17% better than 3060 and that might not be enough for someone to consider trading them out but for me it would be like swapping a mule for a moon-rocket! Okay, maybe not quite, but it would be a hell of an upgrade all the same.

The 4060s I was checking out weren't a lot more expensive than the 3060 I'd had my eye on so it made no sense to go for the older one. I also found out that the 4060 was significantly less demanding on power than the 3060, meaning I wouldn't even need to look at upgrading my PSU, and it was smaller, which would mean I wouldn't have to do any fiddling to get it in the case. The 4060 is also optimized for 1080p gaming, which is a real positive in my view. The 3060 is supposedly better for 4k, but I don't have a 4k monitor and I have no intention of getting one. 

I was even enough on the ball to read some specific reviews for the exact makes and models, which led me to buy an "MSI GeForce RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC", for which I paid more than I've ever paid for any computer component in my life. I got it from Amazon because it was easy and convenient and they could deliver it by 1pm the next day but in fact I checked a lot of places and it was pretty much the same price everywhere, give or take a few quid.

It came this morning, complete with a rigmarole where I had to give the delivery guy a six digit code that had been sent to me by email. Since he arrived about five minutes after I'd gotten up, I hadn't even switched my PC on yet, let alone checked my email but he was very patient and waited for me to get myself together.

A new graphics card is just about the easiest component to swap out but I still managed to have to do it twice because I tried to put the fixing screw in backwards. That wasn't a mistake. I thought it would work better that way. It didn't. 

Since my previous card was also a GeForce, the drivers I already had were fine. They were even up to date. The card worked perfectly out of the box. I ran some benchmarks and was very happy to see that my new card was considered more than capable of running pretty much anything currently available. All that remained was to try it out.

And that's where my problems began. For one thing, as I said, my old card had been doing a very good job of playing all the games I wanted to play right now. I was mostly upgrading so I could play new games - games I don't yet have. I logged into a couple of things but naturally I couldn't tell any difference. 

I could have started jacking up the quality to see what happened. I do tend to play a lot of games below the maximum graphical settings. But instead I thought of New World.

My GTX960 could run New World but it really hated doing it. After a while the whole box would heat up and start to make some alarming noises. I had to keep the graphics on a low setting and even then I didn't like to play for much more than an hour at a time. 

That was why I started playing New World on GeForce Now, a solution that allowed me to play at higher settings without my PC bursting into flames, but which involved jumping through an annoying extra set of hoops every time I wanted to play, including sometimes having to wait in a queue for a not insignificant amount of time. It also meant, somewhat ironically, that I could still only play for an hour at a stretch because that's what non-subscribers get and I wasn't about to pay a subscription just to play a free game.

Of course, playing on GeForce Now meant I hadn't needed to update New World on Steam for about a year and a half. When I came to do it today there were more than 36GB of files to download. That took a while.

Once the game was patched I went to log in and... not much happened. It took what seemed like forever but was actually about fifteen minutes before I could even see my character. Since I last played there'd been some server merges but I didn't much care about that. My houses were safe, apparently, apart from any I might have had in First Light, which was now under occupation by the Angry Earth.

As far as I could remember I didn't have a house in First Light so that was okay. I logged my character in and found myself in what was the new area this time last year, Brimstone Sands. I haven't played since November. I turned the graphics up as high as they go and started to move around but unfortunately my PC was having other ideas.

The new card was absolutely fine as far as I could tell. It was bloody Steam messing about, as per usual. I have a lot of issues with Steam acting like a needy child and wanting attention. I've disabled just about every automatic process I can find but it always manages to be up to something I'd rather it wasn't.

Eventually it started to settle down and I was able to begin moving about again. I collected all the presents that had piled up in my Claim window and then I opened them all. Mostly they seemed to contain materials, few of which I had any memory of what to do with, but there was some furniture in there as well. That was a bit more interesting.

I took a couple of screenshots and started to head out of town, whereupon the game popped up a message telling me I was missing a file and that was the end of that. I closed the client and had Steam do a full file check, which found three files absent or corrupted. It assured me these had now been found and installed so I logged in again.

This time I almost made it to the corner of the street before the game told me it suspected I was doing something suspicious and kicked me out again. Apparently this is a common New World error although I've never seen it before.

Checking, it seems the error is usually related to missing files. Since I'd just done a file check and been told all was in order, I decided to do a full re-install. That turned out to be about 66GB and looked like it was going to take quite a while so I went downstairs and prepped a salad and put the topping on the pizza for later.

When I came back, Steam had closed and my whole PC was unuseable. Something had obviously gone wrong. It looked as though the PC was doing some work on itself so I waited for it to finish. And waited. And waited. 

After about a quarter of an hour I lost patience and shut it down. It started up okay so I opened Steam and carried on downloading from where it had crashed, which was about half-way. That took a while, during which I caught up with all the "End of Blaugust" posts I'd missed. Once the re-install had finished I logged in yet again.

It went much faster and more smoothly this time, until I tried to log my character into the world, at which point I was told another file was missing. FFS! I ran the file checker again. This time there were six files missing. Re-installing the whole game had managed to make things twice as bad!

Supposedly the file check had automatically located and installed the missing files but it said that last time. Just to be sure, I ran it again. This time it came up 100% complete.

So I crossed my fingers and went again and guess what? I'm still waiting. This time I got as far as  character log-in but the game has just hung there for fifteen minutes with the HDD whirring away. I'm wondering if it might an issue with the drive. Next plan would be to reinstall New World on a different HDD and see if that makes a difference. 

Or I could just quit while I'm behind and play something that actually works. I've wasted over five hours on this now and all I wanted to do was try out my new card. I'm sure there must be some other game I could use to do that. 

I just got an email telling me Horizon: Zero Dawn is 67% off right now. That was one I thought my PC would balk at. Maybe now's the time to give it a try...

Built To Last Or Built To Fail?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For anyone?

Insert Joke About "One Ring" Here...

This week's big mmorpg news has to be the out-of-the-blue announcement that Amazon's supposedly-abandoned plan to launch a new game based on the Lord of the Rings IP is back on. You could have picked this up anywhere. It was all over the media, from Variety to the Lord of the Rings Online forums, although I think I first spotted it at GamesIndustry.biz, where there was an interview with Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann about it.

Hartmann kind of skates over the reasons why the earlier deal with Tencent fell apart but he has some interesting things to say about the potential clash between the juggernaut he's driving and the horse-drawn haycart that is Standing Stone's LotRO:

"First of all, I have a lot of respect for them to keep it going that long. They have a, not huge, but a very dedicated fanbase. But looking just at the technology, where we're at now, and where we will be in a couple of years, it's just worlds apart. It's a little exaggeration if I say it's going to be like black and white movies to colour, but that's the approach I want to take. It's just a completely different world."

That seems not just fair but, if anything, a polite understatement. Let's assume Amazon's game will take at least three years to launch, although five would probably be more reasonable estimate. In three years, LotRO will be almost twenty years old and to be charitable it was hardly cutting-edge in 2007. As Wilhelm pointed out in a post only yesterday, LotRO is all but unplayable on a 3440×1440 monitor and the official launcher, as I can readily confirm, is one of the worst in the genre.

Aesthetically, LotRO may be a magnificent rendering of Tolkein's vision, holding true to both the spirit and the fact of the lore, but it's also a clunky, awkward video game that's showing its age a good deal more obviously than many of its contemporaries. While I think it's likely that Hartmann will be proved wrong in his belief that "the most likely scenario is… for people just to move over, because the other one is an old game", that's going to have more to do with the stubborn, set-in-their-ways attitude of the current playerbase than the intrinsic merits of the game. Well, that and the inevitable drag factor of sunk cost, fallacious as it may be.

Of course, the preferences of a few thousand LotRO players is most likely going to be neither here nor there. As Hartmann observes, their numbers are "not huge". Then again, are they all that much smaller than those for Amazon's one and only home-grown mmorpg to date, New World? That game sold more than a million copies in a matter of days but now, after all the very well-publicized problems it's had over its first year or so of operation, Steam shows it with an average concurrency of just 15k. 

Of course, when you have fifteen thousand people playing your game at the same time, that probably means at least fifty thousand playing in total. Maybe more, although a multiplier of more than five would seem over-optimistic. Let's say 75k, tops. 

Is that more than LotRO? I'd have thought so but apparently others disagree. MMORPG.gg, posing the question "Is LotRO Worth Playing in 2023?", reckon "The LOTRO population has seen a resurgence over the last year or so and is currently quite healthy with around 100K active players." Other equally unreliable sources talk about daily concurrencies of 30-50k, which sounds, frankly, insane to me.

How they come by any of those figures is anyone's guess but we can at least say for certain that LotRO does still have the potential to attract new or returning players after a decade and a half. As Brightlife reported about a year ago in a YouTube video entitled "LotRO is ALIVE in 2022!", GameSpot recorded the game's highest player count in ten years back in April of last year.

Sounds amazing until you realize that was still only 3,700 peak concurrent players on Steam. Now, given, Steam is very definitely not how most LotRO players access the game - most of them are still using that terrible launcher - but the Steam Charts do at least provide some comparative data. A year later, that average concurrent player count on Steam has fallen back by more than 75% to linger somewhere in the eight-hundreds.

All of which doesn't prove much. It does, however, demonstrate the hardiness of the game Turbine made and that Standing Stone (Or Daybreak, if you prefer the masks-off version.) continue to curate and develop. It's not unlikely that over the course of its lifetime LotRO has seen more players in total than New World or that it currently retains a greater percentage of those players after sixteen years than New World does after a year and a half.

If Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMORPG does put an end to LotRO, I very much doubt it will because of a bleed-over of population. I'd lay odds the huge majority of current players won't move across, just like the huge majority of EverQuest players didn't abandon that game in favor of EverQuest II. Just because two games share the same IP doesn't make them interchangeable.

What would seem to be the  greater threat would be some combination of legal or commercial circumstances outside of the games themselves, limiting or ending Standing Stones' ability to carry on with their version. By some accounts (The ones I believe.) it was something like that which led to the eventual closure of Star Wars Galaxies, when Star Wars: the Old Republic appeared over the event horizon.

I suspect, however, that some kind of "One Country, Two Systems" compromise will be the eventual outcome. Put another way, if Amazon's game is successful, LotRO will be too insignificant to matter and if it's not, no-one will care, anyway. Either way, benign neglect should see the older game through.

From a personal perspective, I'd love to see Amazon's game succeed. The press release makes it sound very appealing: "an open-world MMO adventure in a persistent world set in Middle-earth". I'd play that.

The proposed game will be developed by "Amazon Games Orange County, the studio behind Amazon Games’ open-world MMO game “New World.” That's good. I really like New World. The main reason I don't play any more is because my machine is too old to run it well and I got fed up with the restrictions that come with playing it on GeForce Now.

New World has certainly had its problems but the core game has always been fun to play, the world has always felt convincing and the team behind it has shown dedication, persistence and imagination. It's only reasonable to assume the studio has learned a lot from the experience of building and operating their first, major MMORPG and that that experience will serve them well in developing another.

My main concern is that if it takes five years, as it probably will, I'll be seventy when it arrives. I'm getting to the stage where it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to get too excited about projects that could take years to complete. I mean, imagine if it ended up taking as long as Camelot Unchained or Star Citizen...

On the bright side, if I am in a position to play Amazon's Lord of the Rings when it comes out, at least I should have a PC able to run the game by then. The one I've got isn't going to last another five years, that's for sure.

At my age, you have to take your wins where you can find them.