Car's Outside, Engine's Running

It's going to be quiet around here for a week or so while Mrs Bhagpuss and I go exploring in real life. If you call driving a hire car from comfortable hotel to comfortable hotel "exploring", that is. Which I do, at least when it involves going to places I haven't been to before and seeing things I haven't already seen .

Of course, these days I often have seen places I'm going to even before I've been there. The main reason there haven't been many posts on actual gaming this last week or so is that I've been roaming around backwater towns and villages on Google Maps and Street View. That's taken up almost all the time I would normally devote to playing games.

I once left a comment on SynCaine's blog suggesting that Google Street view would offer a perfectly acceptable alternative to MMOs for explorer types. I can't recall the context but I do remember he wasn't impressed.

These days I'd go further. I think that, with the addition of a few million P.O.I.s and an experience system, Google Maps could be turned into an actual game. Throw in an Achievements and levels and it would make a pretty ARG along the lines of Pokemon Go or Ingress, without the nuisance of actually having to leave the house.

Anyway, when I get back I won't be doing any more of that for a while - not until the Autumn, anyway - so things here should get back to what passes for normal. There's an outside chance I might post something while I'm away but the weather forecast is excellent and it's light until after 10pm this time of year so I don't expect to be indoors fiddling with my tablet any more than I have to.

Have fun and try not to break anything while I'm gone!

Where Is Everyone?: GW2

Guild Wars 2 is currently suffering what has been perceived to be the worst content drought in the four years since launch. The situation is so dire that even head cheerleader Mike O'Brien felt compelled to acknowledge it in his recent "Don't give up hope" forum post.

Thanks for your patience through the recent content draught. 

Well, I assume he meant "drought" although since the spelling error has gone uncorrected for nearly a week, who knows for sure?

I'm very familiar from my working life with managerial doublethink. People who used to be in charge of something turn around and rubbish the way it was managed even though they were largely responsible either for the decisions or the implementation or both. It seems that changing seats is often enough to absolve a person of any responsibility, at least in their own minds.

Even so, it's not often a senior official will openly acknowledge the failings of the company that pays their mortgage. Not to the customers, anyway. MO, as he is generally referred to nowadays, seems to want to make a virtue out of hair-shirting.

The post itself is vague and ill-defined but that seems to rest more on hasty construction than any intent to obfuscate. Even as the post was acquiring a comet-tail of speculation and conspiracy theory the first broadside of hard information hit the official website.

The first episode of Living World Season 3 is coming to Guild Wars 2 on July 26

This was followed by two crowd-pleasing Lore pieces featuring journal entries from probably the only major character from Season 2 to have acquired something akin to a fan following - Taimi.

Someone is clearly working hard on both damage limitation and rebuilding trust. In addition to fine words and promises the game has actually received quite a lot of low-key hydration over the past few weeks. A connected and accretive series of open world events backed up by Achievements have kept some of us reasonably busy and passably entertained, while WvW has actually seen more attention and alteration than at almost any time since launch.

These things don't count for much among many. For most MMO players it seems that the definition of "content" is quite rigid: new explorable areas, new classes, new races, new quests (or in GW2's case quest-like activities), new plots and storylines and anything that makes their characters significantly more powerful. And Festivals.

For some reason, recurring festivals, even if they're almost identical to the previous year, count as content to a lot of people. ArenaNet have been absurdly unwilling to capitalize on this easy win. For four years the only highlights on the Calendar have been Halloween, Wintersday and Lunar New Year.

Super Adventure Box, following years in the wilderness, was re-instated as the fourth annual holiday a few months ago. Dragon Bash, Queen's Gauntlet and Bazaar of the Four Winds, all of which are eminently suitable for an annual appearance (and I could write the lore get-out for Bazaar in ten minutes) languish in limbo.

In nine days the second of what MO has already chosen to stop calling "Quarterly Updates" will drop. In keeping with the new mode of "show, don't tell" we probably won't have much idea what it contains until it arrives. It apparently includes "content and quality-of-life updates for several other game modes" but the big ticket item will be the first episode of Living Story 3.

And what does that mean, precisely? MO mentions in his forum post that "nine or ten releases" from 2013 equate to something "that we’d today call a Living World episode". 2013, of course, was the year of Living Story 1, the cadence that began with a series of open world updates that, at the time, were perceived to be very low in content indeed

Even so, nine or ten releases? Really? That would mean the July 26th update would have to contain as much Living Story content as we got from January to July of 2013

Flame and Frost: Prelude - January 28, 2013
Flame and Frost: The Gathering Storm - February 26, 2013
Flame and Frost: The Razing - March 26, 2013
Flame & Frost: Retribution - April 30, 2013
The Secret of Southsun - May 14, 2013
Last Stand at Southsun - May 28, 2013
Dragon Bash - June 11th, 2013
Sky Pirates of Tyria June - 25th, 2013
Bazaar of the Four Winds - July 9th , 2013
Cutthroat Politics - July 23rd, 2013

Full details here.

If that's true then I'll be very impressed. And surprised. Even if we do get a drop of equivalent scale, however, I can almost guarantee that players will have burned through the entire thing in a lot less than the proposed three months before the next one lands. No wonder MO hopes to get the engine ticking over a little faster:

we may be able to increase the pace, ramping from four bundled releases per year towards six

You'll need to. You'll need to get more Festivals in place to tentpole those releases too. And information about that second expansion needs to come out from under the cloak of invisibility pronto. Presumably we're looking at a 2017 release date at best.

At the moment there is a lot happening in the world of MMOs and MMO-like experiences. The firehose of Western WoW-alikes dribbled to a trickle a while ago and now appears to have dried up completely but the torrent of Eastern imports continues unabated. Meanwhile the genre has opened out to include action-oriented and fps iterations, transcended the console barrier and is presently colonizing the mobile space.

With the beyond WoW-level success of Pokemon GO, hailed by one of the founders of the form as "just a virtual world, an MMO", we may be on the verge of a paradigm shift for the hobby. Existing MMORPGs that want to retain market share are going to have pedal really, really fast to keep up with the vanishing MMO event horizon.

So. Living Story 3.

It better be good.

Why I'm Not Playing Pokemon Go (Like I Have To Have A Reason...)

Ravanel has a post up this morning about how much she wants to be playing Pokemon Go right now. At the end of the post she asks a couple of questions that started me thinking:

Did you grow up with Pokémon? And are you playing Pokémon Go?

Well, no I didn't. No, I'm not. Just like I'm neither interested in nor excited by news of yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers movie, the mere invocation of the Pokemon brand presses none of my buttons. Well, none of the appropriate ones.

You might assume that was an age thing, what with the fairly imminent approach of my sixtieth birthday, and to some extent it is. I was, after all, nearing forty years old when the first Pokemon appeared in 1995. There's more to it than that, though.

Not only does the franchise form no part of my personal lexicon of childhood or adolescent experiences but I can honestly say I barely even noticed it at the time. Yet it's not as though I wasn't culturally exposed, open even, to such things as they were happening.

Not a Pokemon

During the 1990s I was living day-to-day alongside three children, who were aged somewhere between five and thirteen when the game first appeared. I knew who Mario was. I actually saw the movie at the cinema. There was a SNES in the living room. I bought and played FFVII. Still, I have no memory of anyone I knew ever playing, wanting to play or even mentioning Pokemon.

For a long time I had it filed away in the back of my mind as something associated with Tamagochis, which were a big thing in our house for a while. And Furbys. We had both of those and I played with them and understood them. Pokemon - nothing.

I would have pretty much forgotten Pokemon even existed if it hadn't been for Wilhelm. Over the last few years reading TAGN has told me more about about Pokemon than I ever imagined I'd know. In the same way that reading countless reports on Minecraft has left me feeling I must have played the game in some other life, I have a ghostly, vestigial pseudo-memory of catching brightly colored cartoon creatures and setting them against others in fights that come freighted with queasily uncomfortable socio-historic subtext.

Mulling this over it seems to me that, while age has something to do with the extent and the specifics of involvement, which cultural phenomenon gets to sink its hooks into which person depends a lot more on personal experience than the number of candles on a birthday cake. My childhood was mainly in the 1960s and my adolescence in the 1970s but for some reason, although many of the cultural shibboleths and touchstones of those decades resonate strongly still, in my late fifties the decade whose cultural artifacts affect me most sentimentally in recall is probably the 1980s, the time when I became an independent adult.

I say "probably" because these things drift. In the mid-90s, when Pokemon was new, my call-backs were all to the seventies. In that I was dead in tune with the zeitgeist. Pokemon arrived in the white-heat of Britpop, that final spin of the thirteen-year cycle, which sought to magpie the best from the '60s and '70s and mosaic something bright and new out of the scraps. Now, a couple of decades on, the '90s themselves are beginning to acquire a soft, rose-hued glow.

Looks a bit more like one but still not a Pokemon.

Perhaps the nodal point of nostalgia always trails a generation behind. Maybe it takes twenty years to acquire the distance needed for flaws to fade and warmth to grow. maybe it's not so much how old you were then as how many years have passed.

But to trigger a wave of nostalgia or even simple recognition you have to have been paying attention the first time round and Pokemon passed me by. Instead of warm fuzzies I have cool, hard intellectual curiosity. Pokemon Go does look like an enjoyable game. More importantly it appears to be developing into a fascinating and potentially influential cultural phenomena.

There's a chance it could mark a fork in the cultural road the way Twitter or Facebook did. In a year or two Augmented Reality gaming could be as much a part of everyday life as tweeting or updating your profile (two things that once again I know only from hearsay). Or it could be languishing wherever fads like Farmville go to die.

Obviously not the latter. The immense strength of the Pokemon brand will sustain when the fickle attention of the global horde moves on. Pokemon will be with us forever, like every other cultural phenomenon that passes a certain, hard to define, watershed. If the name of Pikachu (still the only Pokemon I can recall with certainty) isn't up there with Dracula and Sherlock Holmes quite yet, it  soon will be.

Okay, these could be Pokemon...

I probably would be playing Pokemon Go along with everyone else right now, just to be part of the buzz, if it wasn't for one other thing: I don't own a mobile phone. Not just not a smart one, like Wilhelm. I don't even own a dumb one.

I have a blind spot about phones. I am fully and happily digitized. I have a houseful of PCs. I have old gaming systems from the 1980s tucked away in cupboards. I have an iPod and half a dozen tablets and use several of them daily but I have never owned a phone. I've never even had a landline in my own name.

And even if I did have a smartphone - and sooner or later I will almost certainly have to get one  because in five or ten years it's going to be next to impossible to function as an adult without one - I would not allow it to track my whereabouts, which as far as I can tell would pretty much drop a rock on the chances of chasing down Pokemons.

I don't have a valid argument for that - it just feels completely wrong so I'm not going to do it. Not until I do, naturally. Consistency, hobgoblin, you know the drill.

So there it is. Another cultural milestone missed. Can't hit 'em all.



All images borrowed from The Internet. Any rights holders unhappy about that just let me know and they're gone.

Got To Catch A Few - Riders Of Icarus

This week it seems at least half the bloggers in my Feedly have been playing a new game. Some of them seem to be having a great time while others aren't completely convinced. And someone I expected to be all over it hasn't even started yet.

I've been playing a new game too. One other person in this quadrant of the blogosphere took the same road less trampled and of course it was Kaozz. Her first impressions piece appeared just after I'd finished my opening session in Riders of Icarus. That was probably just as well because I had been going to put up one of my own but at that stage I hadn't even finished the tutorial.

Since then I've played this newest Eastern import several more times and from the dizzy heights of level 6 I'm ready to agree with Kaozz that it's "a solid game that looks good." Well, almost.

Who has the longer neck?

Let's start at the beginning: character creation. You can be a human or...no, you can be a human. I chose to be a female for a change (stop laughing at the back) but it was a struggle getting anything I imagined I'd be happy to see looking back at me from screenshots.

There are a lot of sliders and styles but the character models are iffy. The proportions seem slightly off, particularly the necks, which all seem to be uncomfortably extended. After a few hours play I still don't feel comfortable with the character I made, which is a strong indicator that I won't be playing long.

In common with most MMOs the default graphic settings appear to be intended for someone who hasn't bought a new PC since the Bush administration. Possibly the first one. I don't know why they do this. First impressions count for an awful lot so why you'd want people to log in for the first time to the wrong screen resolution and a lot of low textures is a puzzle.

I died twice getting this wolf because he kept throwing me off into the rest of his pack.

Things improved rapidly with a few tweaks. It runs on CryEngine 3 but the art design could be from almost any of the dozen or more Korean MMOs I've played over the last few years. Everything is over-scaled and there's an oddly flat quality that seems to leech out depth of field somehow.

It's certainly pretty enough to make looking at the world a pleasure and I found no shortage of screenshot opportunities. My first and so far only character is a Berserker, flagged as the "Easy" option. She hits things with a sword that is, predictably, bigger than she is.

The controls are peculiar. The developers get a huge thumbs up from me for offering a choice between tab-target and hotbars or action settings but the traditional version, which naturally was my choice, is awkward to use. Like Dragomon Hunter, you can click the icons on your hotbar with the mouse pointer, as I prefer to do, but you either have to double-click or right-click. Why we can't have the basic single click that MMOs have used for the best part of two decades beats me.

The fiery hawk is a freebie for playing the Open Beta. The thigh-high stiletto-heeled leather boots are not optional. Or practical. Or comfortable, I'd imagine.

Bag space is reasonable. I got an additional bag for a quest around level 5 and it just goes into a slot like it would in WoW or GW2. None of this incrementing the base inventory count by two like Black Desert.

Once you're in there's a short "Escape from Prison" tutorial straight from the "Build Your Own MMO" manual but after you're largely left to get on with things on your own, with further instructions being incorporated into the basic leveling quests.

Progress seems to be linear in the extreme, down to the way maps funnel you in a particular direction, so the chances of you wandering off piste are minimal. What with only one race that's seriously going to limit replayability but that's the nature of these true F2P imports, by and large.

I did laugh out loud at the Kangaroo. It's as amusing to ride as you'd imagine, too.

The translations are excellent. I haven't come across any untranslated text or Korean voiceover yet and there are no more grammatical or spelling errors than in a Western MMO in beta. Did I mention Riders of Icarus is in "Open Beta"? No wipe so  we'll call that "Soft Launch" I think.

The writing is adequate but not much more than that. Unlike Dragomon Hunter, whose often bizarre and surreal dialog occasionally has me laughing out loud, this is quite dry. The quests themselves are cookie cutter and plain cookies at that. They all work though and they are short and tidy. Quality control seems high.

The real meat comes with the gameplay. Riders of Icarus offers two things most MMOs don't - a huge range of tameable pets and mounts and mounted combat. I haven't yet tried the latter but the "gotta catch 'em all" aspect has considerable appeal. Wonder where they got the idea from?

The NPC and monster models are variable. This is the Queen of the local fairies and she looks the part.

It took me several tries to tame my initial mount, a Unicorn. You have to sneak up to it using the taming skill and then hit Space to literally jump onto the creature's back. The first couple of times I missed altogether. When I did get onboard the Unicorn bucked me off but I got back on and just sat there and somehow I ended up with a docile mount.

There is actually more to it than that. Not much more, I'll grant you, but you do have to do something. There are various messages describing how the animal is reacting and these correspond to four keys, bound by default to WASD. Don't worry about interpreting which emotional state matches which action - the key you need lights up. Just press that one.

So far I have the Unicorn, some kind of Wolf, a Turtle and a Kangaroo. In fact I have two Kangaroos. Apparently you can tame multiples of the same creature, which is useful because tamed animals can be either Mounts or Pets but not both. When tamed they are automatically set as Mounts and the process of converting a Mount to a Pet is permanent, so you want spares.

Loading screen with the obligatory "tip". I wasn't aware there were "talent builds". I took the shot because the rabbit in the bottom left corner, who lets you know the zone is still loading, is the most appealing character in the whole enterprise.
I wish I was playing whatever game he comes from.

As Kaozz mentions, there's an annoying stamina bar mechanic for both mounts and pets. As soon as the bar depletes your animal vanishes and you fall off (assuming it was a mount). The bar refills quite fast but it's annoyingly disruptive. I'm guessing you can buy something in the cash shop to circumvent the problem but I haven't bothered to check since there is no chance in this lifetime of me spending a cent on the game.

Weirdly, I seem to have found myself with a choice of "collect all the pets" games and neither of them is the one everyone else is playing. I prefer Dragomon Hunter by several country miles - it's quirky, funny and has a lot of personality. Riders of Icarus is flashier and takes itself more seriously but feels a lot more corporate and bland.

Most importantly, though, I actively like my DH character whereas my RoI avatar is a cipher. That could change over time but I don't expect to be playing long enough to find out. Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul.