It's Begining To Feel A Lot Like... Anything But Christmas!

I guess it's probably time I posted something other than Christmas songs and first impressions of Once Human. Good thing it's Friday, eh? Where shall we begin... oh, I know...

Reign of Guilds Extended Playtest.

As I write this, I'm downloading the 43gb client for "classic MMORPG" Reign of Guilds. I'd heard of this one before but for some reason I don't seem to have paid any attention to it whatsoever until today, when I saw on MMO Bomb that there was an open playtest on Steam. 

All you have to do is click the button asking for access and you're in. I've done that and I soon will be, only I have to take Beryl for her walk first, so I won't be able to try the game out until we get back. I'm writing this in the expectation I'll be able to plump it up with a couple of screenshots and a few observations later on.

From what I can see on the Steam store page, it doesn't look quite as "classic" as all that. It looks like a first-person, action MMO with a gritty, grimy, medieval - not to say feudal - vibe. It also seems to have a realm vs realm aspect that makes me think the classic mmorpg they have in mind might be Dark Ages of Camelot.

All of that will no doubt come into better focus when I get in and make a character. What's really puzzling me and the reason I'm writing about it now rather than waiting until I have hands-on experience, is that I can't quite figure out why I haven't mentioned it on the blog before.

It's been in development a while. This isn't even the first open playtest. There was one in September and a bunch of closed tests before that. I had heard of it but I don't seem ever to have paid any attention to what it was or what it was doing. A search of the blog doesn't find a single mention and I can't even recall hearing anyone else say anything about it.

It does seem to me sometimes that, whereas a few years ago we seemed to be concerned that the MMORPG was in steep decline, with no-one wanting to make those kinds of games any more, or at least to admit the games they were making were part of the same genre, now we seem to be back in surfeit. There are so many in development or early access or in some kind of beta, not to mention the ones that have launched in the last twelve months or so, mostly unsuccessfully, it no longer seems feasible to keep up with all of them. 

As Yeebo said in a comment on Tipa's excellent post on Pantheon's current round of closed alpha testing, "whatever audience they are aiming for seems unlikely to materialize in financially viable numbers". I think that applies to a lot of these games, maybe most of them. It's almost like the old WoW clone era, except on a very much tighter budget.

Anyway, Reign of Guilds shows a very imminent Q1 2024 launch date on Steam and does appear to be in the final stages of testing, so I guess we'll find out how much interest there is in this particular entry to the canon soon enough.

[SPOILER - I won't be there for the launch. I've played for three-quarters of an hour now. I completed the tutorial, saw a little of the starter island and I already feel like I've seen enough. I'll likely get one post out of the experience, if I find time to write it, then I'll be uninstalling the game. I know, if I don't, I'll probably end up playing it some more and I really don't want to. I'm aware of the insidious nature of the systems it employs and I'd rather not let them get their hooks into me, not when there are other games, using much the same methods, that appeal to me a lot more.]

Revelation Offline

When I saw the news at MassivelyOP that Revelation Online was going to close its doors in March of next year, my first thought was "Oh, that's a shame. Didn't I used to play that?", closely followed by "Hang on, what game was it, exactly?", then "Do I still have it installed?" and "Should I play it again before it disappears?"

The answers to those questions, in order, are "Yes", "I don't really remember", "No" and "Definitely not." I certainly did play RO for a brief while - it has a tag here and there are eight posts either about it or which refer to it. The last was over six years ago, in April 2017, when I included it in a round-up of my gaming habits of the time, under the sub-heading "What I thought I'd be playing". 

I summed the game up then as "Similar to Aion although I thought it had a quirkier style and certainly better looks. Not a game I need to play in any way whatsoever but one that could always fill an idle moment." It appears, when I referred earlier to a time of glut for the mmorpg genre, I was probably talking about 2017 because I went on to say "I expected to get a few weeks out of it, like I did with ArcheAge, Black Desert and Blade and Soul." 

Looking back at my posts about the game, what it mostly makes me realise is that if I didn't have a blog I'd have no memory of most of my gaming history at all. Well, I'd vaguely recall the names of games I played, as I did with this one, but that would be as far as it would go. I wouldn't have been able to pick Revelation Online out of a line-up of imported MMORPGs unless it was by a process of elimination and I wouldn't give very good odds even on that.

Looking at the screenshots in those posts, though, a couple of which I've re-used here (Because, seriously, who's going to remember having seen them before?) a little does come back to me, albeit faintly, through a haze. I certainly don't remember RO nearly as well as, say, Bless, a much-vilified game that I rather enjoyed in at least two of its many incarnations, let alone Blade & Soul, to which Revelation Online was frequently and always unfavorably compared. 

Of the many MMORPGs imported to the West by hopeful developers in South East Asia back before the pandemic, very few established any kind of hold. The most successful was probably Black Desert, which seems still to be performing reasonably well, while my own personal favorite would certanly be Blade & Soul, a game I frequently think about playing again and do occasionally log into, before feeling overwhelmed and logging out to play something I don't have to relearn from scratch.

Knowing a game is going to go dark forever (Although "forever" in this context frequently turns out to mean something considerably less final than you'd think, given the genre's penchant for revivals and emulators.) I confess that ,even as I write this, I'm contemplating re-istalling Revelation Online for "just one last look". 

It could go in the hard drive space Reign of Guilds won't be using. It's not like it would need to be there for long...

There's More To Life Than Video Games

Music, for a start. And TV shows. And the inexorable march ot technology. I have plenty of ideas for posts about all of them, just waiting to be written.

The TV shows very definitely need to get a post and sooner rather than later. It's disturbing how quickly media-driven enthusiasm shifts from "This is the best show I've ever seen! I have to tell everyone about it!" to "I guess I ought to put something together about that show before I forget everything about it. What was it called, again...?"

On the other hand, leaving a good long gap between watching a show and writing about it does sort those with lasting value from the regular, hi-impact, sugar-rush of the new thrill. What does tend to go out of my mind for all shows, though, regardless of any other factor, are the names of the characters. I have to look those up even for shows I'm in the middle of watching.

For example, I can remember plenty about Beastars, which I finished watching weeks ago. I could write my long-promised post about it right now without having to go look up anything at all - except it would be full of sentences beginning "The little rabbit-girl who..." and "The big fox guy that..." - and those are two of the leads!

You know who used to have this problem? Andy Warhol, that's who. Lou Reed and John Cale wrote a song about it after he died. It's on Songs for Drella, which is a great album, just in case you haven't heard it. 

 

 "Drella" was a nickname Warhol Superstar Ondine invented for the great pop artist, film director and all-round genius; a contraction of Dracula and Cinderella, whose twin characteristics the actor felt Warhol embodied. I knew that without having to look it up, although I'm not claiming I remembered it was specifically Ondine who came up with it. 

The lyric refers to Warhol's self-professed difficulty in remembering either faces or names:

"Faces and names, I wish they were the same
Faces and names only cause trouble for me"

Yeah, no it doesn't. I could go on pretending it did and I might get away with it but I can find no evidence he suffered from either prosopagnosia (AKA "face blindness") or nominal aphasia. As far as I can tell, the song is about Andy's issues with fame and narcissism, not his non-existent inability to recall the name of some actor in some show he watched, once.

I wonder if there's a name for the psychological condition that has you going off the point all the time because I certainly seem to have that one. What I was going to say in this section was that, thanks to posting a song every day for Advent, I now have a large backlog of new tunes for the What I've Been Listening To Lately feature (Although if I'm honest, most of what I've been listening to lately has been Christmas songs...) and a bunch of ideas for posts on AI.

The trouble is, I don't really feel I can do a full music post, not while I'm also posting a tune a day, and I also haven't found the right moment to gush and gabble about yet more developments in AI, given I'm already posting a daily AI-generated image and I've had complaints about that. I know it's my blog and I can write about what I like here but I am at least somewhat sensitive to the knowledge that I have readers and at least a few of them actively dislike either music or AI or both being featured here so regularly. Also I've lost about 3% of my Feedly followers in the last month and I can take a hint.

Anyway, just take this as a warning. There will be some kind of public self-review process about how the Advent Calendar went and it will include both the musical choices and the imagery, as well as what part AI played in the whole thing and how useful I found it - or otherwise. And there will certainly be at least one catch-up, non-Christmas, music post as well. Plus AI isn't going away any time soon and nor is my interest in it. 

I might think about using header categories again - I did that for years so it wouldn't be anything new for the blog. At least then people can skip the ones they don't want to read like I do with anything Tobold posts that's not about games.

There's something to look forward to. Or not. Oh, and I will get that blasted anime/TV post done if it fricken' kills me. I guess that can stand as a New Year's resolution! Is it too early for those?

New Year? What About Last Year?

I got my Steam stats. They were really uninteresting. 

Above are all the games I played on Steam in 2023. Below is how much I used Steam each month.

The smaller Spring and Autumn spikes are NextFests. The huge pink pillars in August and September are all Dawnlands. 

 

Other than that, I didn't really use Steam even as much as I would have guessed. This month, until I downloaded Reign of Guilds this morning, it looks as though I haven't logged into Steam at all. 

I guess that might change next year, at least for the early months. There are quite a few titles on my wishlist with steep discounts in the Winter Sale. I'm almost bound to pick up at least a couple of them. Of course, then I'd have to find time to play them... 

Maybe the Once Human beta will be over by then.

And Finally - A Song

Because it's tradition. Also one less I'll have to have to consider for the next real music post...

We Kick Around - Princess Chelsea

They have some really good T-shirts in the store. Just sayin'.

A note about AI used in this post.

Just the spot illo. It was generated by DALL-E 3 via Microsoft's Image Creator from the prompt "Someone who really doesn't enjoy reading about AI, reading about AI. Cartoon." I haven't figured out if you can see the exact weights and so on using that portal, yet.

Making Plans

Spring came in with a bit of a rush around here. Seven posts in the first five days of April! Good going but it seems to have tapped my inspiration dry.

Scratching around for ideas I thought of all those posts I keep reading where people say what they did last month and what they plan to do next month. I've always wondered how they know. I rarely have a clue what I'm going to be doing half an hour from now, much less next week.

It would be useful, though, having a record. Maybe not of what I plan to do but what I'd like to do or even what I am doing instead of what I expected I would be. So in that vein...


What I'm Playing

Guild Wars 2.

Coming up five years this summer. Five years right now, if you count from the beta weekends. Sometimes I think I'm mostly playing because Mrs Bhagpuss plays but the plain fact is I still turn to GW2 first most days, whether Mrs Bhagpuss happens to be playing or not.

Doing my dailies is quite literally part of my daily routine now. I do them for three accounts every. single. day. Without fail. I like to knock a couple of accounts off between breakfast and going to work and then do the third in the evening. I am trying to resist adding the free account to the list. There have to be limits.

WvW is dire these days and yet still ridiculously entertaining more often than not. ArenaNet seem to have literally no idea what to do with the game mode. They fiddled with it 'til it broke. Now they're whistling and looking in the other direction.

Any point or purpose the "competition" ever had is currently in freefall since the combined body-blows of the systematic destruction of Server Identity and the hamfisted manual adjustments to scoring. Nevertheless the day to day, or more particularly hour to hour, engagements remain as compulsively exciting as ever.

Somehow World Bosses are back on my menu. I've been doing Tequatl every day, twice if I can fit it in. I generally manage a Frozen Maw and a Claw of Jormag most evenings. I'm not quite sure how that happened or why, other than it's fun.

Overall, GW2 is just incredibly comfortable and easy to play. Especially after a long day at work it's about as relaxing as a nice, warm bath and frequently about as much excitement as I can manage.

Lord of the Rings Online.

Completely unexpected. Never had the slightest intention of revisiting Middle Earth this spring, let alone leveling up two characters. It's become that game, the one I play at the end of the evening. Mostly I just do tasks, wander about, kill whatever gets in my way, do some exploring.

The zones are enormous. I remembered they were big but not how big. It takes forever to get anywhere, not just because of the distance from one end to the other but also the incredible topological complexity. Everything is layered and there's frequently no quick way from A to B. You have to go up and around and down and through and back again.

I've found lots of new nooks and crannies in zones I thought I knew. Not having quests to lead me by the nose means I go off the beaten track a lot and there's a lot of wilderness out there. I say not having quests - there are some. I can't work out why some are allowed for free, or not always. I do them if I find them but mostly I'm my own boss. It's refreshing.

Final Fantasy XIV

If the return to LotRO was a surprise this is more of a stunning blow. I pretty much thought I'd never play FFXIV again. I've logged in most days and sometimes I've played for a few hours. The free trial has turned FFXIV into something not unlike the game I thought it might be for a week or two back when I bought it.

Not sure if this will last but I imagine I'll dip in and out indefinitely from now on.

EQ2

This was my late night MMO until LotRO rudely pushed it aside. It's still hanging in there. I log in a couple or three times a week.

EQ2 will always be in play, though. I'll always drop in for the holidays. I even did quite a bit this year for Bristlebane Day and that's about my least favorite of the big ticket events. Any major update is going to pull me back in; expansions generally mean four to six weeks of playing full sessions most days. Here for the long run.

Everquest

I did play a little last month. Did a bubble and a half of 92 (or is it 93?) on my Magician. Another MMO I'll play as long as I'm able, although it tends to be in small doses these days.

What I Thought I'd Be Playing

Aion

I was enjoying Aion. It seemed like a solid, oldish school MMO with enough character, polish and content to hold my attention for a fair while. Only other MMOS have more of all of those things and something was always going to come along to distract me. I just didn't expect it to be an old something.

I will probably come back to this one. Maybe.

Revelation Online

Similar to Aion although I thought it had a quirkier style and it certainly better looks. Not a game I need to play in any way whatsoever but one that could always fill an idle moment. I expected to get a few weeks out of it, like I did with ArcheAge, Black Desert and Blade and Soul. Didn't happen. Law of diminishing returns, I guess.

What I Ought To Be Playing

World of Warcraft 

I got Legion for my birthday and that was six months ago. I really ought to use it before the next expansion arrives.

DCUO

This one's not really my fault. I was playing and enjoying it and then Daybreak trailed the complete combat and leveling revamp so I thought I'd pause it and wait for that...and I'm still waiting. Just do it, already!

Project: Gorgon

I kickstarted it but so far I don't believe I've even linked my account or replied to the email or whatever it is that I'm supposed to do. It was meant to go onto Steam Early Access, what, a year ago? Supposedly when that happens I won't be able to log in with my old details but since I haven't logged in for a year anyway that's not going to be a problem. I guess I'll wait until something actually happens and work it out then.


Dragon Nest

I get the feeling this one might not be around much longer so saying "I'll get back to it one day" probably isn't a solid game-plan. It's a really fun game and I was making good progress. It'd be a shame if I finally got round to making time for a session and found it wasn't there any more.

What I Could Be Playing

Rift, Allods, Black Desert, ArchAge, Blade and Soul...

They're all installed and the icons are there on the desktop. Probably about all I'm going to see of them for the foreseeable future but then a month ago I would have said the same about LotRO and FFXIV.



What I'm Going To Be Playing

Secret World Legends

Mostly out of curiosity and because everyone else will be. Unless it turns out to be very substantially easier, faster and more casual-friendly than TSW, though, I struggle to see why I'd play it over the original. Which I'm not playing. At least there's bound to be a blog post or several in it.

What I Wish I Was Playing

The freaking second GW2 expansion!

How much longer, ANet? How much longer? At least start the PR machine rolling so we can speculate. I googled for leaks or guesses about it yesterday and the very few I could find were mostly over a year old. I come from an SOE/DBG background, not Blizzard. I can't cope with these 2-3 year expansion schedules. Bash 'em out! Quantity over quality every time! You can fix it up as we play - it's the MMO way!

That'll do for now and I didn't even mention the mobile and non-mmo stuff. I'll save that for next time I can't think of anything to write about.

Open Beta, Hidden Players: Revelation Online

These are strange days for the MMO scene. The whole genre seems to be in a malaise, with no new Western Triple-A MMORPGs scheduled for this year, while most of those that launched in the last half decade seem either to be treading water or sinking. On the other hand, there seems to be no shortage of flashy imports, plucky indies and optimistic new developers entering the market.

Which, among the slew of possibles, gains traction with the public or the media seems almost random. For a while, a year or so ago, Black Desert Online seemed to be just about all anyone could talk about while Blade and Soul scarcely got a mention. The announcement that imaginary MMO EQNext was never going to happen spurred some positively bizarre outpourings of emotion while the arrival of a global giant like Amazon onto the field was met with not much more than a collective "meh".

Meanwhile, almost every day brings news squibs almost too odd to process - WildStar still running giving away free, fully equipped max level characters just for logging in, Project Gorgon, not even in Early Access or Open Beta yet and being developed by a grand total of two people, asking for help testing a "HUGE level 70 group dungeon", The Secret World "relaunching"...

Revelation Online splash-landed in this fascinating, ever-changing sea of contradictions this week with scarcely a ripple. I think in this corner of the blogosphere, other than me, only Kaozz is playing and writing about it. Perhaps there has been something of the little boy crying wolf about the whole thing - all those buy-in "Closed" Betas leading to Early Access and now Open Beta - who can even tell when these things start any more?

Muroc? You sure you spelled that right?

Well, someone must have been paying attention because when I logged in last night four of the six available servers were either "Busy" or "Packed" and by the time I woke up this morning MY.com had added two more, one in Europe and one in North America, to cope with the demand.

It would seem not much has changed since the final Closed Beta. It took no more than the tiniest of patches to update my CB client, although even that managed to crash my router somehow. Once I got that sorted I was able to pick a region (North America) and a Server (Snowpine). I always play NA from cultural preference and even though Snowpine was "Busy" I wasn't about to play on a server called "Muroc" just because it had more room. Of course it had more room!

Adventuring is srs bsns

I spent half an hour or so in Character Creation trying to reeplicate my closed beta character. It didn't help that I couldn't remember what she looked like but comparing screenshots I seem to have come pretty close. Once in, it was a flurry of Press F, Press Space, Autorun as I tried to get back to where I'd left off.

The first session took me to the low teens and this morning I upped that to just shy of level twenty. I would have carried on but the game crashed when I entered the first solo dungeon and I took the hint. By then I'd been playing for nearly four hours in total, an hour last night and three this morning. The time was positively flying by.

Had I stuck purely to questing and leveling I'd most likely have dinged twenty-five or so but once again I decided I wanted to learn how to craft. Instead of just bumbling around in game, talking to NPCs and learning nothing, I was sensible: I asked Dulfy.

At this point I could say that, as usual, Dulfy didn't let me down and that would, in a way, be quite true. She certainly has the most comprehensive guide to crafting in Revelation Online you could hope to find. That's the problem. I read it - well, most of it - and by the end I felt less prepared to start crafting than I was before.

It's not just that crafting in RO appears to be ferociously complicated, although it does. It's that nowhere in Dulfy's guide, or in this fairly approachable overview, or in this YouTube video, does anyone explain clearly how you get started!

Now you tell me!

How do you choose a starting craft or gathering skill? Do you need to speak to an NPC (I can tell you the ones that call themselves "Crafting Trainers" do not train you to craft). Do you need to buy tools (I can tell you you can't equip any of the ones you can buy without raising the skills you're trying to buy them to raise). Is there some book you need to read, some quest you have to do, some skill you have to raise just to get your foot on the first rung of the ladder?

No. Yes. Maybe. I spoke to every NPC who looked like they might know anything. I stared at the Chinese characters in the taunting in-game "Help" window. I opened every tab of every category in my extensive Crafting window and moused over every description. Nothing.

I'll take everything you've got, please.

In the end I resorted to the age old response of the utterly frustrated and started clicking buttons at random. Guess what? That's all you have to do. Click the very first, inert, flat, unhighlighted entry in the tab of your choice and it frickin' lights up and a little window pops out asking if you want to spend twenty of your one hundred available experience points on learning that skill.

Well, duh! Yes I do!

So I did, for all the good it did me. In fact I spent eighty of my hundred points opening Utilty (that's storage to you and me) plus what I took to be three Gathering skills, Botany, Mineralogist and Arborist (and why Botany not Botanist?). Then I asked myself "what next"?

Raptor? Deer are raptors now?

It occurred to me the last quest I'd taken was the one that sends you to the woods outside the city to kill a deer. I vaguely remembered those deer dropping meat and forests have trees, indeed they're famous for it...so off I autoran.

It only took one deer to update the quest but I stayed to slaughter a whole herd just to see if they'd give meat for cooking or hides for tailoring. Venison dropped aplenty and the mouseover tool tip confirmed it as a crafting ingredient. Progress

I didn't get any hides from my cull but I did get something even more useful from a deer - a finished leather tunic that would have been a huge upgrade had it been a) for my class and b) my level. Still, gear drops from wildlife confirmed. Always a positive.

You don't know just how true that is.

Things didn't go so well when it came to chopping down trees although the expedition wasn't a total
bust in that regard. I did manage to find a couple of choppable trees, which stand out from the very many unchoppable ones by dint of a an orange nimbus around the trunk.

As I ran up to it an Action button popped but when I clicked it another window opened to let me know I didn't have what it takes to chop wood. Not an axe, which indeed I did not have and which would have made sense, but "Forebearance" and "Erudition", both of which I would have said I'd more than demonstrated by that point. Oh well, I'll get there in the end. At least I know more now than I did before...

BEFORE F10

As I was choosing my next victim I noticed something odd. Small clusters of deer seemed to be viciously attacking thin air before keeling over, dead. It was puzzling at first until I remembered that while in town I'd pressed F10 to hide the visual clutter of player-run market stalls.

AFTER F10

Revelation Online has a handy feature that effectively turns an MMO into a single player game. Tobold would love it. With a click of F10 you can choose whether to see everyone else, just your party or guild or no-one but your own, sweet self.

Nice kitty..nice kitty...

It's undeniably useful and as someone who favors the use of toggles for everything I can hardly speak against it. The effect it has on combat is decidedly odd, though, and if I'd already been using it when I came to the big city from the starting village I'd have missed a real once-in-a-game-lifetime moment.

I knew Revelation Online had some odd ideas. There's that giant turtle house for a start. Nothing I'd read, however, prepared me for the twenty foot tall housecat someone had chosen to ride down to the docks and park just where it would be the very first thing you saw, getting off the boat. I did, literally, do a double take.

These bushes look very pretty now but wait til level 40.

There's something about Revelation Online that I like and I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. Black Desert has a metric tonne more atmosphere and ambience and Blade and Soul is tighter, sharper, more focused, but RO has a goofy, cheerful playfulness about it that just makes it fun to mess around in.

You should try putting them in a pic-a-nic basket.

Non-consensual PvP from level 40 onward, as a Reddit thread explains, makes it "impossible to separate PvP from PvE. Everyone must learn to deal with PKers, either by being a good PvPer, or being an excellent runner". The PvE gear grind end game is supposedly "heavily RNG gated, but...can be circumvented via the cash shop". Revelation Online is not an MMO where I'd ever plan on settling down.

It does, however, make for a very intriguing place to visit. And the holiday snaps are stunning.

Get Wings. Wear Wings. Fly. : Revelation Online

Revelation Online continues to mystify and amuse in equal measure. Yesterday I set out once again with the intention of stepping off the moving walkway that passes for questing in this strange game. Having failed to discover how to begin crafting or harvesting and with nothing related to housing anywhere in sight I thought I'd just wander around and take in the sights.

In some ways RO could be an explorer's dream - if you equate exploration with tourism, which I confess I often do. As far as I can tell you can click on just about any icon on the main map - a vendor, for example - and the game will autorun you there.

Doesn't matter if you're on the coast and the target is in the high mountains half a continent away. Doesn't matter if there are rivers or seas between you and your goal. It certainly doesn't matter if you've never been there before and have not the slightest idea how to get there.

At first I had to run but now the game responds to my imperious clicking by having my character produce a blast on a whistle to summon her horse. She then mounts up without any help from me and off she rides. If they come to a body of water the horse vanishes and my character swims like a fish.

Quite literally like a fish, in fact, or a mermaid. All movement from the waist, legs going side to side like a tail, no arm movement at all. Unlike, say, GW2, your character can't automatically breathe underwater but it takes a very long time indeed for her breath to run out. I've done several quests requiring diving that would have drowned someone in EQ2  and I've yet to see her breath bar go under 90%.

Airships look a lot more impressive from the ground.

While riding it seems mobs ignore you completely. I've watched as my Spirit Shaper, sitting serenely, sidesaddle, on her Red Horse, canters through herds of aggressive beasts ten or twenty levels higher than her own. They might as well be rabbits.

I had plenty of time to consider all of this at the start of the first session because I'd idly clicked on one of the many (MANY!) hourly, daily and weekly Events that the game thrusts into your hand the moment you log on. Something about eggs. I was hoping it might be like the egg smashing event I used to love doing in City of Steam or the Joker's Funhouse in DCUO.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I wouldn't know because the place it begins turned out to be a hundred miles to the West. I'd been riding for what seemed like hours but was probably about five minutes, which is still a significant amount of time to be auto-riding a horse in a game, when I got distracted by a city.

Revelation Online is one of those games that seems to think the average NPC is about 75 feet tall. Everything is on a truly gigantic scale. I mean, I've been in some big buildings but you could put a whole cathedral in the atriums of some of these halls and still have room for a train station and couple of grain silos.

It makes the cities somewhat impersonal, I think. Divinity's Reach in GW2 is big, yes, but it's also rich in detail and made up of many small courts and alleys. Here the smallest thoroughfare is an avenue and every square's a parade-ground.

I was lollygagging at the mountains from a high terrace when an airship the size of a small town pulled up alongside me. In seventeen years of MMO gaming I've never knowingly turned down a free voyage on any kind of ship - sea, air or space - so I rode my horse onto the deck and off we went.

Again, the scale was so massive that all sense of "being there" was lost. Unlike the ride in the tiny hot air balloon in 9Lives, for example, which had me tensing my knuckles with vertigo as I craned over the edge for a good view of the rooftops, this had all the thrills of a cross-channel ferry.

On an airship. In case you couldn't tell.

One thing stands out concerning travel in Revelation Online, whether by foot, by horse, by water, by air or via the widespread network of teleport pads: it's free. When GW2 launched and for months afterwards there were grumbling complaints about the few silver it cost to use the waypoint system. In EverQuest, EQ2 and Rift when they were new I vividly recall how I had to scrimp and save to buy even a basic mount.

Getting a good ride has been positively aspirational in most MMOs I've played. In RO they hand them out for doing, well, nothing. Nothing that you notice. I got a choice of horses at the end of one of the never-ending, incomprehensible quest sequences but later I found the same horses for sale on a vendor for a pittance.

Like Aion (and Flyff long, long before that - anyone remember Flyff? Anyone? Bueller?) RO is supposed to be a flying game. There was that part early on that I mentioned in my First Impressions post, where someone lends you his wings so you can see for yourself what you're working towards.

You'd imagine there'd be some kind of ceremony, fireworks perhaps or a fanfare at least, when you acquire a permanent set of wings all your own. Apparently not.

I knew wings came at Level 29. I was level 27 when I jumped back on the quest train (Don't judge me!). I thought I was paying attention but a quarter of an hour later, when I clicked autorun for the millionth time, for once taking a quest step that needed me to travel further than the usual four or five paces, I suddenly found myself enveloped in a cloud of feathers and hurtled skyward.

Checking my details as I barrel-rolled through the ubiquitous cherry-blossomed skies I saw that yes, I had indeed dinged 29 without noticing. I was, in fact, almost 30. The game, recognizing my graduation from hooves to feathers, now auto-equips my wings instead of my mount whenever I want to travel.

I may be being a tad unfair here. It's entirely possible I got the wings as a quest reward and just clicked through in a daze. I long ago lost any feeling of involvement or control or interest in the questline, whose translation is now so fractured as to be almost Dadaist and whose plot I ceased to follow somewhere in the mid-teens.

Even if I wasn't paying attention, though, I think it's safe to say the game does not make all that much of a fuss about this supposedly seminal moment. It's a shame because the wings themselves are very impressive. If this is the basic starter model I can't even imagine what Raid wings might look like.

I flew around  for a while enjoying the sensation. I really love games that let you fly with wings rather than on a flying mount. I notice there's also a whole new skill bar that appears in flight, suggesting a detailed aerial combat system. I imagine there's a skill tree for that but don't get me started on skill trees in this game...

Closed Beta 3 ends in a few days. I am not sure whether I'm glad about that or not. I find Revelation Online extremely difficult to take seriously but it isn't boring. Or sensible. I do think, every time I play, that if I'm going to play something like this I might as well get my semi-established characters out in Blade & Soul or ArcheAge or Black Desert or even Riders of Icarus, all of which I was enjoying well enough until I dropped them cold.

Truth is, I really like trying new MMOs, even when they aren't very "good". I may spend 90% of my time in old favorites but I crave novelty as much as anyone and trying out crazed imports like these (or Digimon Hunter or Twin Saga) is a great way to get that novelty buzz.

I'll be back for Open Beta, assuming that's next. I don't think I'd go so far as to buy the box, if that turns out to be the payment model, but I wouldn't rule it out. Those wings, after all. Those wings...

Art And Craft : Revelation Online

So, I poked around some more in Revelation Online this morning and I'm more confused than ever. A lot more. To the point where I'm starting to wonder if maybe something closer to a formal tutorial might not be a bad idea after all.

My plan was to try and find out something about crafting and gathering. I noticed one or two nodes while I was auto-running from quest to quest and something at some stage had prompted me to open the crafting window so I knew they both existed but that was the extent of my knowledge.

An hour later it's still the extent of my knowledge. I managed to find a vendor who sold gathering and crafting tools but they all required a level of skill I didn't have. What I couldn't track down was a trainer or a quest that might offer me the opportunity to pick a craft and raise that skill.

Work In Progress

Now, of course, I could have just tabbed out to Dulfy, who has, naturally, a detailed walk-through up already. When we hit Open Beta, assuming I decide to join in, that's exactly what I'll do. Or I could have used the extensive in-game guide...if I could read Mandarin (I'm guessing it's Mandarin...). Or I could click on the little helper icon that auto-tabs to the official website. Any of those.

For now, though, and since this is a Beta Test after all, I thought it might be instructive to try and figure out what was going on just from first principles. After all, how hard could it be?

Too hard for me, that's how hard. First attempt lasted around an hour. I rode my horse around the coastal town where I'd camped for the night in the vague hope there might be a trainer there. There was a "Title Manager", who claimed to be responsible for craft skills and sold the tools but she wouldn't talk to me, so I opened the map and clicked on an icon in the nearest large town.

So you say...

Couldn't find a trainer there, either, but I found the tool vendor again along with a host of other merchants and functionaries. There was also one of those player marketplaces familiar from much older Eastern MMOs, where everyone drops a personal NPC trader in a public square and clutters up the environment. Never liked those.

By this stage I was beginning to feel a little overwhelmed. I mouseovered all the icons along the bottom of the screen to see if one might be the crafting window, only to find that every one of them popped up a context menu with three-to-five more options.

Urban Blight

At this point I panicked and found myself clicking on the auto-complete for my main questline. Boom! Back on the story train!

A dizzying twenty minutes of clicking, autorunning, cut scenes, very brief scuffles and a truly incredible amount of utterly confusing backstory later and I was back where I started only five levels higher. Time to get a grip.

It's all gone sepia - must be a flashback.

My next bright idea was to open the map and mouse over the icons there. I was hoping to find craft trainers marked but I was out of luck. I did, however, spot the Inventory NPC. Revelation Online starts you out with a decent sized inventory and I'd already received three small extension backpacks for it from questing - two four slots and an eight slot.

Only the first expansion slot was freely available, though. The tooltips on the bags (everything in RO is extensively and helpfully tooltipped) suggested I needed some crafting mats to make the bags useable, which I could either buy or quest for at the Inventory Attendant - or "Banker" as we'd usually call her.

Are you saying I'm Johnny No Mates?

It's a somewhat convoluted way to increase your storage space but at least I could find the relevant NPC, I had the relevant bags and currency and she was willing to give me the quest. Which turned out to be "kill five deer". Why? You tell me. She certainly wasn't going to.

Autorun out of town, button mash five deer down, autorun back. One more bag slotted but I still had one left. So I asked her for another quest and she told me to make a friend. Come again?

Rare action shot!

It's a thing I've noticed in Eastern MMOs. There's usually a point where you have to make friends with a random stranger just to get some quest over with. Well, someone was standing there, minding his own business using the bank right next to me, so I clicked on him and friended him and he accepted and that was that done. Never spoke. I knew we wouldn't.

It completed the quest but it didn't get me the mats I needed to make the bag. I should have looked at the reward before I wasted a good friending. Never mind, I went off exploring the town, the name of which I forget but which is quite large, and somewhere among the scores of merchants, trainers, faction vendors and questgivers I ran across one who sold what I needed.

Pardon me? Is this the pink broccoli forest?

I'd about run out of steam at that point so I went and had lunch, went for a walk, got my hair cut. When I got back I gave looking for a crafting trainer another go. I didn't find one.

I did find a wild west town surrounded by giant mushrooms and populated by fox-racoons. I saw large and small bears operating heavy machinery, sometimes with their noses. I came across a Hot Springs spa resort staffed by fairies and goosestepping underwear models. I went on a long and wonderful night ride under the most spectacular sea of stars. And I took over seventy screenshots.

Backing away slowly.

I still have no idea how to begin gathering or crafting. I don't know how to get a house, moving or stationary. I blanch just looking at my multiple skill tree windows.

I'm also beginning to get the idea, having been turned away by NPC after NPC for not being Level 49, that maybe the entire game up to that level is the Tutorial. It probably needs to be.
 
The default option here is very much to sit back, left click and watch it all roll by, which makes the whole game seem ludicrously simple. The moment you stop and try to figure where you are and what to do next you realize it is, in fact, ludicrously complicated.

Night rider!

Revelation Online offers a hyperinflated version of what we saw a year ago in  Black Desert. It appears to have at least as many subsystems and mini-games, albeit nothing quite as unfamiliar as those which so confused BDO neophytes for the first few weeks. Both games have a number of odd, idiosyncratic systems and mechanics, all of which you probably will need to learn in detail eventually if you ever want to have any chance of holding your own in what are, in the end, MMOs predicated on player vs player competition.

In Black Desert, you can  (and many players do) postpone learning about any of them by choosing to follow the queasy promptings of the strange, demonic figure that joins you at the very start of the game. I never felt comfortable doing that, largely because of the openly weird suggestions made by the sentient, sibilant inkblot, which was probably the designer's intention.

I hope those are stars not nuclear fallout.

In RO, however, that unsettling doubt is replaced by a pat-on-the-head, doing the right thing feeling that glows warmly inside you as you obediently follow a never-ending series of neutral on-screen prompts. Doing so provides an equally endless dripfeed of dopamine hits as LEVEL UP! flashes across the screen over and over, which makes it a much harder path to step off. Nevertheless, step off you must, if you're going to have any clue what you are doing.

Blade and Soul, the third in this triptych of Eastern imports, also has a number of arcane and counter-intuitive mechanics but takes an entirely different approach. Absolutely everything there is presented in painstaking, sometimes excruciating detail. Quest after quest after quest bangs home the precise process of every system until you feel more as though you're revising for an exam than playing a video game.

Speak for yourself. I liked fox-racoon town better.

Of the three styles I think Black Desert comes out very much the winner. You get to learn just enough before you become overly suspicious of the black demon. Then you want to learn more but at your own pace. At which point it's off to the wiki for some serious research. I get the impression that the people behind BDO knew they were doing something at least somewhat original, whereas the developers of Revelation Online are, probably rightly, confident their core audience has already played many MMOs that work much the same way. (Blade and Soul, on the other hand, is a game by and for control freaks).

What all these MMOs have in common, I think, is an expectation that players will commit. Commit time, effort and energy. They have big, over-complicated mechanics and lots of them and most likely for a reason, that reason being money. I get the impression that life gets a deal less complicated if you don't mind opening your wallet at the cash store.

Is that a fish I see before me?

If you want do it on the cheap you need to be ready to put in the time, not just grinding but reading and learning. If that's something you enjoy then it could be a very good deal indeed.

Or you could just click through the story and watch the scenery go by. It's very pretty scenery.