Who Will Look After The Mounts?

Yesterday brought some gaming news that should have been at least mildly upsetting but somehow felt more confusing than emotional. The game in question is Riders of Icarus, which I played for a good few months back in...

... hang on a moment. 

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a technical announcement. It appears there's now some kind of limit to the number of Labels that Blogger can list at the foot of a post. 

For many years I've been used to skimming down the ever-growing list to find the Label I want. Until today that list has always gone all the way to the end of the alphabet. Now it only goes as far as "E". 

To ESO, to be precise. Then it just says "Analytics" and stops. I checked the maximum number of Labels per blog allowed by Blogger and it's 5,000. Even I'm nowhere near that. A quick check shows nothing has changed in the Layout and a google search doesn't find anyone else complaining about it so I have no idea what's happened. 

Whatever it is, I hope it sorts itself out soon because I use that function a lot to check how frequently topics have appeared here. I can still find out what I wrote by using the Search facility but I'm damned if I'm going to go through and count all the posts individually.

We'll have to take it on faith, then, that I did post about Riders of Icarus quite a few times. It was back around the time of the pandemic or maybe just before that I spent the most time with the game. I liked it and said so. I wouldn't claim it was a great MMORPG in any way but it was pretty to look at, fun to play and seemed particularly generous with its giveaways.

You'll remember the USP was flight. Unlike all those games that added flight as an afterthought or because everyone else was doing it, only to find it caused all kinds of problems, RoI was built around the idea that you'd be flying everywhere right from the start. Lots of locations were only accessible from the air and aerial combat was a big part of the gameplay.

There were plenty of flying mounts to collect, some of them quite spectacular. I had a skywhale with a gondola that I liked for posing, although for practical purposes I preferred my various birds or my flying inflatable dolphin. There were plenty of nice-looking ground mounts too. It was a very mount-oriented game.

Character design was solid and there were lots of cosmetic options you didn't need to pay real money for. I spent quite a while playing dress-up, which was more fun than the questing or the combat, at least for the most part. I have fond memories of the game, to which I returned several times for short runs but by the time I stopped playing I'd pretty much done as much as I wanted there.

The game had a very checkered development and ownership history. I remember losing access to it completely for several months when it changed hands although I did eventually get my account back. There was some nonsense abut it becoming a "Pay-to-Earn" title with some crypto-blockchain baggage attached but by that time I wasn't really paying close attention any more. 

A week or two back, I read that there were going to be server merges, then that those had been cancelled. Now the sad news is that the game will sunset on 15 May. 

I say "sad" and I'm sure it will be for the relatively small number of people still playing (Around a hundred at peak on Steam these days but I'm not at all sure most players would be going through Steam. I wasn't.) but I can't say it's making me feel anything stronger than mild disappointment.

Puzzled, too. MMOBomb reports that at almost the same time Valofe were announcing the end of the game they were also sending out press releases and trailers for new content. That seems about par for the course with this game, whose messaging has been chaotic for several years.

I have no idea whether Riders of Icarus has the kind of fans who would be likely to respond to this kind of existential threat by setting up some kind of emulator or private server but I do think the game deserves it. It's exactly the sort of MMORPG that could potentially improve under collective administration by people who play it. It would certainly be hard for a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to be worse custodians than the professionals who ran it into the ground.

It's not that unlikely an outcome, either. The game had over a million players once. That's easily a big enough pool of former players to justify and support an afterlife in the grey space of the emulation world. Twin Saga managed it so I see no reason why RoI shouldn't.

Even if it happens, it's still unlikely I'd play again. Or, I should say, it's unlikely I'd play in any way that could be called "serious", even in the context of casual gameplay. I have plenty of better games I'm not playing seriously before I'd get to this one.

It is, however, entirely possible - likely, even - that I might make the effort to re-install the game and give it a final fly-by before the servers shut down for good. There are a few farewell events scheduled. Those might be fun.

It would depend on whether I could get my old characters back. As I said, I never played through Steam. I imagine I have my old login details somewhere but I've uninstalled the original client. It is still downloadable from the website but who knows how long that will last? If I'm going to bother, I guess I should get on with it.

The thing is, whereas once the news of a game I once enjoyed closing down would have disturbed me more than somewhat, these days I barely feel a frisson of anxiety. I think it's experience rather than ennui. This sort of thing has happened a lot in the quarter of a century I've been playing MMORPGs. It doesn't feel shocking any more. It barely feels worrisome at all.

I was thinking about it the other day and I couldn't think of a single game that I'd be truly upset over not being able to play any more. Not in the way I was disturbed by the disappearance of Vanguard or City of Steam or Rubies of Eventide, all games I still sometimes miss even now. 

Partly it's because experience suggests almost every MMORPG above a certain size (And a fair few a lot smaller, too.) will still be playable in some form long after the legal owners shut them down. There are exceptions, like Wildstar, but nearly every game you can remember closing probably has an emulator running somewhere.

Mostly, though, it's that I don't play MMORPGs in the serially-obsessive way I used to. My days are no longer structured around those sessions. If I couldn't play any of them, I'd find other things to do.

Mostly, I'd miss my characters. I would have some issues if I couldn't drop in on them and see how they're getting along, whenever the mood takes me. 

Even there, though, it's something I think about doing far more often than actually doing it. I have all those characters in Guild Wars 2 that I lived with daily for a decade and I haven't popped by to check on a single one of them since I dropped the game three years ago.

I'd have to say I think it's a healthier outlook. I can remember that feeling, when you learn a game you love is going to close down. It's disproportionately unpleasant when considered objectively. Playing games shouldn't be that important, should it? Especially not playing specific games.

We'll see how sanguine I am about it when EG7 goes down the pan and all the Daybreak titles close down overnight. That'll be a test of emotional separation, alright.

Until then, I'm sorry to see Riders of Icarus go. The game deserved better than Valofe gave it. They weren't good custodians. Maybe something better lies ahead for the game in someone else's care. Let's hope so.

Seriously, Who Moves House In January?

When I logged into Steam last night, hoping to get back to my saved game of Secret Files: Tunguska, something I'd abandoned back in September because I had other things to do - better things - not at all because I'd gotten completely stuck and given up, it turned out I'd made a mistake.

Not in choosing to try and finish the story, even if I did have to lean pretty heavily on a walkthrough for some of the less than intuitive final puzzles. No, that all went fine. Eventually.

The problem was, like every adventure gamer, I started out looking in the wrong place. It turns out I don't own that particular series on Steam after all. It's one of the many point and click adventures I got free with Amazon Prime last year, a deluge that eventually included all the Secret Files games and no fewer than six Tales of Monkey Island.

I've never seen the appeal of the Monkey Island games. I have a boxed copy of one somewhere. I must have bought it back in the '90s. I have only the vaguest recollection of playing it. I know I didn't get far. My main impressions of the series are that the humor is puerile and irritating and the gameplay tedious. Makes me wonder why I bothered to grab the rest of them even for free.

A lot of catching up to do.

While I was hunting through my Steam library, looking for a game that wasn't there, I noticed a couple of new notifications for one that was, namely Bless Unleashed.

Ah, Bless! I was happily playing and posting about Bless Unleashed from the day it launched until New World appeared, at which point I dropped it like a radioactive potato. Even so, I always intended to get back to it at some point. I liked my character, I liked the world, the story was borderline interesting and the gameplay was passable.

Given all of that, I was a little disconcerted to find that Bless Unleashed was about to find itself under new management. One of the two very recent news flashes on the game's Steam page was an almost grovellingly apologetic announcement that as of January 26th next year, "game services" for BU would be moving from developers NeoWiz to Valofe. 

The article describes Valofe as "a global game company that handles development, publishing and operation". I remember them as the bunch that botched the transfer of Riders of Icarus, interrupted my flow there, left me unable to access my account for several months and effectively ended my engagement with that game.

Needless to say, I wasn't best pleased with the news. Reading through the details was a little more reassuring. It seems that, unlike the England cricket team, Valofe have proved capable of learning from their mistakes. I remember there being a whole lot of re-registration nonsense with RoI even for those who played the game through Steam but this time around Steam users should be unaffected by the handover of power:

"As the game data and account/payment information related to the game are based in the Steam platform, a transfer of them will not be performed...The current character data will remain the same and players can still continue playing the game even after the service transfer."

Apparently all we'll have to do is accept a new EULA on first login after the twenty-sixth and everything should carry on as if nothing had happened. I guess we'll see.

As to why the game needs to change hands in the first place, Neowiz don't care to say but it's probably fair to assume a 90% loss of players in six months has something to do with it. Back when the game launched it was averaging around 40k concurrency on Steam. Now it's bumping along nearer 4k.

And that's not really all that bad. If anything, it seems to be par for the course for new mmorpgs that
launched on Steam in 2021. Phantasy Star Online 2, which launched around the same time, has fallen from an average concurrency around 16k to 3k. Swords of Legends Online went from 7.5k to around 800. 

The biggest of them all, New World, which broke records as it peaked around 900k in October, is now down to 90k. It does look as though a drop-off of nearly everyone who joined at launch within just a few months is par for the course. 

It makes you wonder whether some of these companies really expect to develop and grow the games over years or if the whole point is to rake in the cash from the excitable hordes in the first few weeks before either selling the whole thing on to an aggregator like Valofe or Gamigo or just shunting it into maintenance for a while before shutting it down for good.

Clearly, Amazon want to make a long-term go of New World and with a property that's still in Steam's top ten (Just about.) even after losing nine-tenths of its players they undoubtedly have a viable product. With figures like SOLO's, though, you'd have to hope the game has other sources of revenue than just what we're seeing on Steam.

Valofe don't appear to have a very good name in the genre but then, realistically, who does? The list of developers and publishers that don't raise a cynical eyebrow or an angry fist these days is vanishingly small. It's unlikely Bless Unleashed will prosper under its new owners but at least it's still there. Maintenance mode is better than closedown.

They're all mine! You can't have any!

As for new content, I wouldn't hold out any great hopes. Once mmorpgs go down this route the best we can often expect is refreshed holiday events and some new, promotional "Seasons". 

At least Bless Unleashed leaves Neowiz with a twinkle. The other announcement was news of the Feywinter Festival, a refreshingly well-named seasonal celebration that kicked off on December 22nd and continues until January 12th.

It's the usual collection of free gifts, monster-bashing and a new holiday currency to spend at special holiday vendors. If I was going to be cynical I'd say it looks like a cut and past of BU's halloween event but the rewards do look good so I'm not complaining.

The festival is based out of a square in the Noble District in the city of Sperios. I took the trouble to log in after an 18GB update (!) and port down there to see it. It looks very pretty. I would have thought the devs could have cloned it and popped copies down in the other main cities for our convenience but I guess it would have looked out of place just about everywhere other than where it is.

Oh, alright. You can have that little green one.
No! Not the one with the bow! The little one!

I grabbed a free present but I doubt I'll be logging in to do much more of the event. As I'm discovering as I try to juggle Frostfell, Wintersday and Winter Convergence, it's not really practical to pursue more than a couple of these major festivals at once. 

Other than the stated intent of giving everyone a fun time over the holidays, all of these festivals, by design, involve a goodly amount of grind. They exist as much as anything to keep people logging in at a time when players have a lot of free time on their hands and developers are taking a well-earned break.

It's a shame, in a way. The midwinter events often offer some of the most attractive rewards. The iconography of the season, with its color palette of blues and blue-whites and plethora of snowy imagery, appeals to me a lot more than Halloween's garish black and orange and clownish costume antics. Plus, I'm always in the market for a reindeer mount.

At least I didn't have to go to any websites and fill in any forms. For that alone I'm willing to look favorably on this unexpected move. Now it's all down to waiting on the new landlord to see how they perform.

Mark your calendar for Jan. 26th and we'll see how it goes.

Thirty-Six Hours

Thirty-six hours. That's how long Steam tells me I've spent playing Bless Unleashed so far. Three dozen hours gets you a level 22 and a bank mule. That's what it got me, anyway.

I know this moment. This is where I start to feel I might be hanging around for a while. I almost never do.

A few mmorpgs from the top of my mind where that happened, in no order:

• Twin Saga
  
• Black Desert Online 
• Archeage
• Riders of Icarus
• Blade and Soul
  

All games I wrote about in a tone and with an enthusiasm that suggested I was digging in. All of them faded, all for different reasons. 

Twin Saga got too hard. That was a surprise. I played one character into the fifties. Experience began to crawl. I had quests I couldn't do. I died too much. It got tough. It stopped being fun. I walked away. I came back occasionaly to see if anything had gotten easier. It hadn't. Then the game closed down.

Black Desert Online began in a rush, turned into a game where it took too long to get nothing done. I got into the thirties on one character, had a couple of other characters in single figures, stopped. I came back when the Shai arrived, got into the twenties, stopped again.  Playing properly was a full-time job, playing casually was a riding sim. Even at the start the complexity was numbing and I could feel it getting bigger and deeper around me. I go back now and again but only as a tourist.

ArcheAge was strange. A very straightforward theme-park mmorpg if you played it a certain way, the way I played it. It was before all the shenanigans that damaged its rep. I was making good progress on a single character. I forget how far I got. The twenties at least, maybe thirties. I was having fun, nothing was wrong, then one day I wasn't playing any more. I forget why. It wasn't a decision. I imagine something happened, a holiday, another game, something broke my routine was all it took. All it ever takes, really. I thought about trying again, several times, but the moment has passed.

 

Riders of Icarus I enjoyed for a summer. It was familiar and a little unusual, too. There was a lot of fighting in the air on flying mounts, which took some getting used to but was at least semi-original. And they gave you stuff just for logging in that was actually good - better than stuff I've gotten for playing other games properly. I had (have) one character, I think in the twenties now. I didn't mean to stop playing but the company changed hands and they fluffed the transition and I couldn't log in for months. I can now but I don't, mostly.

Blade and Soul, more of a success story. I think I've only ever had one character. She's I don't know what level, mid-something. Half way to whatever it is. I want to say forties? I drove through the story at the start, got invested, then began to find the gameplay a little challenging. Too much finger-twiddling. Mine, not the character's. I drifted away but when I came back I found it easier, somehow. Recently I was playing most days until Bless Unleashed appeared.

That's just a smattering of similar, familiar stories. I play a lot of mmorpgs. I like most of them. I never met an mmorpg I didn't like, that's the saying, isn't it? Not entirely true but close. 

They take a long time, though, and they go on. They keep going on. It's not like the games you download from Steam, with a beginning and an end and if you're lucky something inbetween. Much as I'd like to keep playing all these good, great and just perfectly fine mmorpgs it's not remotely possible. 

I often used to say I preferred the low levels to the high, the levelling process to the end game. Sometimes I wonder if it's true or whether it's post hoc rationalization justifying extant reality. I have to like the starting game to the mid-levels because it's all I ever see.

Not strictly true, of course. There are games that stick, where I hit the cap and don't stop. EverQuest, EverQuest II, Rift, Vanguard, Guild Wars 2. Probably a few more. Others where I might not have capped but got close, maybe with several characters. Close enough to see the finish line and know what comes after. Dark Age of Camelot, Wizard 101, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World, World of Warcraft.

 

But mostly, with all but four or five in twenty years, I bailed at the top. Not for me, I could see that. With exceptions, sure, but on the whole that expressed preference for the early/mid game holds up.

So, Bless Unleashed. Where does the future lie? Almost certainly with all the other games I left behind even while I was supposedly invested and involved. I get so far and then I stop and sometimes I couldn't even tell you why. 

All of which is a lead-up to explain why I think it is I might be feeling the need to keep justifying my time spent playing, to qualify my enthusiasm, to make it clear that, yes, I'm having a lot of fun (really a lot) but that's not any kind of endorsement or recommendation because tomorrow or next week I might drop Bless Unleahed and not mention it again for a year.

It's a heavy responsibilty, having a blog. No, it's not. Of course it's not. But it could be if you let it get to you that way. 

In the particular case of Bless Unleashed, though, there is something else going on. The game has a history that means it has more to prove than most. I forget the unhappy details but the original Bless crashed and burned in some fashion still remembered with anger and resentment by people with better memories than mine.

Other mmorpgs have had to re-launch or reinvent themselves, most famously Final Fantasy XIV  but also the aforementioned ArcheAge. It can go either way. 

 

The connection between Bless and Bless Unleashed is something I have not researched and don't intend to but I've picked up a little. It's the same setting, I think. Looking at my posts from the first game I'd say it uses some of the same art assets. It might have the same lore. I can't remember anything about the story in the old version so I wouldn't know.

Other than that it seems like a completely different game. The controls are different, the systems and mechanics are new, the zones, the cities, the world - nothing about any of it rings any bells with me. It's also heaving with players in a way I definitely don't remember about the original. Everywhere feels bustling, busy, alive.

Or does it? At twenty-two I'm just about in the bubble, I think, albeit bumping along. Most of the people I see around me are in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties and there are plenty of them. 

They lounge around the soul fires, soaking up the health-restoring heat, snarfing down the shared food. They cluster around the marketplace and the warehouse so thickly it's hard to see the NPCs. Every quest I take ends up with me fighting mobs with other people doing the same, a very good thing for all of us.

 

It gives the strong impression of a vibrant, successful game and by the standards of most mmorpg launches I think it probably is, but...

Yesterday I had cause to go back to the first, big city and quest hub, Navarra. When I was last there you could barely get through the streets for people. Now it's empty. The wide boulevards and plazas bake in the sun but no-one's there to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city. Only the ever-present NPCs.

Okay, there were a few people on the streets. Half a dozen, maybe. It was nice, actually. Quiet. I could get to things without having to push. It does suggest the influx of new players has slowed to a trickle, though, if that. When I log in, instead of Crowded it says Average.

It's too soon for most players to be making alts, other than the necessary bank mules, I guess, and levelling content doesn't scale the way it does in some mmorpgs, so once you're through a region, you're done. There's rep, of course, and it's tied cleverly to appearance gear among other things, so there are reasons to come back around but it's early days for that for most people. 

There is another factor that could keep the lower-level regions in play. Bless Unleashed, like many imported mmorpgs that start out looking like PvE themeparks, turns into a PvP game later on. I'd say exactly when only there seems to be some confusion on the precise moment. I've read twenty and I've read thirty.

 

At twenty you can certainly opt in to killing other players. I got the pop up. I've been seeing characters with blood-red names all around me for a good while now. What I'm less clear on is when those of us who choose not to attack others become fair game to be attacked ourselves, regardless. 

All I can say with certainty is that so far no-one's attacked me and I haven't seen anyone else fighting each other either. I've been in a couple of contested zones but they both had mobs in the thirties so I came out again pretty quickly. Based on all that I'm going to say I think it's probably at thirty when I'll need to start watching my back. At the speed I'm levelling that's still a while off.

I could keep playing and avoid PvP altogether. In the uncontested areas it's not permitted. That leaves a fairly extensive sweep of country to explore and things like the rep vendors and a number of resources found there mean a peacable player could likely find satisfaction for quite a while, either playing alts or just mooching around gathering, fishing, killing world bosses.

For now, though, it feels as though all the interest for most players lies in the path ahead. I'm with them. I'm finding the storyline unexpectedly involving and the main quest does a great job of nudging me ever onwards. I've been meaning to post about the quality of the writing in Bless Unleashed for a while now. Maybe one of these days I'll finally get to it.

 

Or perhaps I'll wake up one day and I won't be playing any more. That's the thing. Based on what's become long experience I really couldn't say. Bless Unleashed might be the game to nudge GW2 off the rotation. It's already pushed EQII out of the daily queue. I haven't seen Norrath for a week, the first time that's happened this year.

If I was to make a prediction, though, it wouldn't be that. I'd put my money on BU dropping back into the pack of favored also-rans, the games I really like but never quite find the time or inclination to commit to playing beyond a certain level. The games where I drop in every few months in a flurry of enthusiasm, stay for a week or two then disappear again.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's an honorable position in my personal gaming pantheon. Minor deities and demi-gods with a statue in an alcove somewhere, the flowers on the last garland fading but not yet dead, to be refreshed one day when interest blooms anew.

I'll get back to it then, shall I? The levelling, the story, the entertainment. It's pretty good as these things go, I'll vouchsafe that much. Next time I talk about it I might even try to explain why.

Don't count on it, though.

Footprints

Mmorpgs are so big, aren't they? Not the worlds, all that travel, vast distances across plains, over oceans, all those hours on horseback, in hot air balloons. Not the trail of footprints in the snow, the desert sand, glazing into the shimmering distance. 

Not those. The other footprints. The ones on your hard drive.

I have most, if by no means all, of my mmorpgs stashed on my third internal drive, the E: Drive. They're in a folder cannily called "MMOs". It's a 2TB mechanical drive and that one folder takes up almost half of it: 982GB of data, which breaks down as follows:

Auteria - 643Mb

Black Desert Online - 39.3GB

Blade & Soul - 58.8GB

City of Heroes - 4.45GB

Crowns of Power - 1.65GB

Dino Storm - 194MB

Dragon Nest 2019 - 18.2GB

Dragon Nest EU - 434MB

Dragon Nest Oracle - 224MB

Dragon Nest Origins - 9.74GB

EverQuest - 15.5GB

Fallen Earth - 6.67GB

Fortnite - 34.2GB

Genshin Impact - 25.0GB

Glyph (for ArcheAge) - 27.0GB

Guild Wars - 3.86GB

GW2 - 50.0GB

Icarus Online - 44.4GB

Kingsisle Entertainment (for Wizard 101 and Pirate 101) - 9,44GB

NCSoft (for Aion) - 28.2GB

Neverwinter - 26.3GB

Portalarium (for Shroud of the Avatar) - 8.14GB

Vanguard - 38.8GB

Secret World Legends - 50.5GB

Square Enix (for FFXIV and FFXIV:ARR, separately) - 47.1GB

Star Citizen -  51.0GB

Star Trek Online - 13.7GB

Star Wars - The Old Republic - 40.9GB

Test EverQuest - 15.8GB

The Hammers End - 1.05GB

The Lord of the Rings Online - 30.6GB

Villagers and Heroes - 4.72GB

Warhammer Redux - 20GB

Wildstar - 12.6GB

World of Warcraft - 101GB

Saving the biggest for last, there. Also, it doesn't add up to what I said, if anyone was nuts enough to check, because inevitably I have let things get in there that I shouldn't have. I didn't list those.

 

Other things that might ought to be there... aren't. Anything I originally installed via Steam is going to be in one of my three Steam directories, for a start. I have no idea what's in which. That's why I have Steam in the first place, to take care of the boring details. I just made three to spread the load.

Some notable exceptions you'll have spotted, no doubt, include EverQuest II, currently sitting on the C: Drive for no particularly good reason and weighing in at 42.6GB. Elder Scrolls Online, on my D: Drive, that's another 71.9GB. 

DCUO is in its default folder, the path being an abstruse C:/Users/Public/Daybreak Game Company/Installed Games, where it is in fact the only game installed. Never let mmorpgs put themselves where they want to go is my advice. Not if you ever want to find them again.

There's another installation of WoW on the D: Drive, too. Must be an old one. It's half the size at 52.GB. Oh, wait, I bet one has Classic in and the other doesn't. I don't suppose I need two versions of Retail. I should probably do something about that. But I probably won't.

The thing is, when I clean house, uninstall the mmorpgs I haven't played for years, delete the ones that have gone out of business and will never be playable again, next thing I know there's some free offer or comeback deal or someone's made an emulator that requires an original installation and off I go again. It's easier to buy new storage, frankly.

I was prompted to make this tedious list for several reasons:

1. I promised myself I was going to do more List posts. There should be more List posts. Everyone should do list posts. List posts are great! I have a plan to do more that I'm mulling over but I thought doing this one would help me get back in practice.
2. I'm patching Riders of Icarus as I type. I have a good cable connection and the download is flying along but I've still had time to write all this and there's about twenty minutes to go. I am, naturally, patching up because I heard there was free stuff for returnees. Given the sheer amount of free stuff RoI gives away as standard I felt I had to see what extra bribes they'd come up with this time.
   
3. It's too hot to write a post where I have to think much. Yes, I know other people have it this hot and hotter for months at a stretch but you have air conditioning and houses that are designed for temperatures in the 30s. We don't.
4. I think there was another reason but I forget what it was. See reason #3.

Oh yes, I remember the last reason. Tomorrow, all being well, I should get an invite to the New World closed beta. I've had a pre-order since last December. I'm working tomorrow but I have the following two days free so I ought to be able to give it a run, see how much has changed. I suspect it's going to be everything.

But first I'll have to download the thing. I did at least remember to uninstall last year's alpha, on the grounds that it might screw something up if I didn't. I wonder how big the finished thing is going to be. Bloody huge, I bet. 

I might have to delete that spare copy of World of Warcraft after all.

Let's Play Musical Chairs (Black Desert Edition)

 

I imagine most people who read Inventory Full also read Time To Loot, but just in case anyone missed it , I'm repeating Naithin's Public Service Announcement concerning Black Desert Online.

You can read the full details there but the short version is Pearl Abyss are reclaiming full control of the game from outgoing publisher Kakao. All previous logins will cease to be valid at the end of May 2021.

If you have an existing account, whether directly with Kakao or by way of Steam, if you want to carry on playing those characters from June onwards you'll need to migrate your account to Pearl Abyss. There are separate processes for the two platforms. Make sure you take the right one.

Anyone who's spent any signifcant time playing imported mmorpgs (or anything from any producer other than the very biggest, really, I guess) will be all too familiar with this sort of thing. I've lost track of how many times I've had to move various accounts over the years. It's always annoying but usually it goes reasonably smoothly. 

Usually, but not always. One of the worst I can remember was the Riders of Icarus move a couple of years ago. That went so badly many players couldn't log in at all for many months even after following the rules and moving their accounts in good time. I was one of them.

Numerous hotfixes and workarounds failed. Things dragged on and on. Eventually the new publisher, Valofe, did get it fixed but by then I'd lost interest. Before the switch I was logging in every day because Riders of Icarus has some of the best daily log-in rewards I've seen anywhere but the enforced hiatus broke that habit . I haven't been back since.

Worst of all is when the acquiring publisher can't or won't service the game in all of the same regions as the outgoing one. That's happened to me a few times, most frustratingly with a game I would very much like to still be able to play, Dragon Nest. 

I think I moved with that game, successfully, three times. It might have been four, although at least once my account didn't come with me and I had to start over from scratch. Finally I ran out of stepping stones and that was that. 

Most gallingly, Dragon Nest is still running somewhere - Malaysia, I think - but whoever's keeping that last version up has robust region locking in place. I've several times considered using a VPN but I haven't gone that far...yet.

So changing publishers is a risk both for the developer and the player. We could lose our characters or our access to the game. They could lose our custom or our money.

I'm very pleased to say that, in keeping with just about everything else about Black Desert, the transfer process seems extremely professional. Clear, well-explained and robust. 

I took Naithan's link to the official Black Desert Online Game Data Transfer page and followed the instructions. It took me about ten or fifteen minutes but most of that was me, looking for the login details of the obscure email address I'd used for the original account, trying to come up with a new username and password... When you never use the same details twice and you sign up for hundreds of things, it can take a while.

The whole thing was about as painless as something like this can ever be. I was particularly impressed both by the friendly tone and the detailed confirmatory feedback at every step. I'm not heavily invested in Black Desert but I know moves like this can be quite stressful for those who are. 

I especially liked the final stage, when you're presented not just with affirmation of the name of the account you're about to transfer, but a list of all your characters, their levels and other salient facts, just so you can be certain all your people are coming with you.

Of course, the final proof won't come until I try to log in after the first cut-off date of February 24th. That's when the Kakao logins cease to be valid and you'll have to have a Pearl Abyss account to play. You'll have a couple of months' grace to get one before your characters are pitched into the great void but until you do you won't be able see them.

With Riders of Icarus, it wasn't until I reached that point that I found out the transfer had problems. It had all seemed good until then. I'll hold off giving Pearl Abyss the final thumbs up until I see my characters in game after the transfer takes effect but I have to say everything the company has done since I was introduced to their existence, when BDO launched in the West several years ago, has done nothing but inspire confidence. 

They do seem to know what they're doing although I guess that could have been Kakao. I guess we're going to find out.

I hope it all goes well. It's a fine mmorpg, Black Desert Online. I may not play it often but I'd hate to lose the chance.

Harvest For The World

Yesterday's post highlighted just how vague and inaccurate memories can be. I've mentioned numerous times over the years how the way memory works - or, rather, doesn't - fascinates me. I've read a fair bit on the topic. The more I learn, the lower my confidence in anything I or anyone else claims to remember.

I treat most memories as little more than fiction these days unless they come scaffolded by contemporary evidence. Often not even then, since accounts recorded within hours of an event have been shown to bear little ressemblance to objective reality, more often than not.

It's one thing to be taken by surprise. You might imagine repetitive processes, carried out thousands of times over hundreds of hours, might leave more of a groove in the mind. I would. Then again, maybe not. The brain tunes out anything it considers meaningless noise, after all. Why would it lay down records of such trivial, unimportant behavior?

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind this morning, when I read Telwyn's post on gathering. I wondered whether my memories of doing that in the same games I mentioned yesterday would be any more accurate. After all, I really enjoy gathering in almost all MMORPGs. I'd put it very high on any list of things I like about the genre and I spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. I ought to be able to remember something about it, shouldn't I?

We're about to find out. Let's see if anything's made a lasting impression.

WoW Classic -

• Should be on safe ground here. I spent a lot of time gathering in Classic just a few months ago. My memories feel fresh. 
• Gathering comes in the form of several skills. There's a limit, shared with crafting, on how many gathering skills each character can have.
• You can see nodes on the mini-map provided you have a particular level of skill.
• Nodes are relatively rare and often not in safe places. 
• Gathering is competitive. 
• Distribution follows a semi-logical pattern. 
• There are few pulls per node.
• Respawn time is substantial. 
• I believe certain nodes, specifically herbs, have some other nuances but I can't remember what they are. 
• For some whole classes of materials, e.g. cloth, "gathering" takes the form of combat. I spent a great deal of time killing mobs for various types of silk last year. 
• A lot of rare or special materials can be gathered from mobs.
• When I say "gathered from" I mean "looted from their dead and broken bodies".
• For some materials (skins come to mind) mobs are the only source and you also require the relevant gathering skill.

World of Warcraft -

• My gut feeling is that gathering in WoW Retail hasn't changed all that much. When I played during Wrath of the Lich King it was about the same as Classic is now. When I've been on the sub-20 endless free trial I haven't noticed any significant changes. What it's like at endgame levels, though, I have no clue.

EverQuest -

• Hmm. This is a poser. Let me think. Does EQ even have gathering? 
• Whether it does or not it sure has crafting materials. There are so many mats it quickly becomes overwhelming.
• I remember, right back at the beginning, there were a few what we used to call "ground spawns". Iron oxide, russet oxide, some sort of mushrooms...
• The vast majority of crafting materials were dropped by mobs, when you killed them. Our guild used to form up specifically to kill clockworks in Plane of Innovation so our resident Tinker could get mats. Does that really count as "gathering"?
• Given the way my Magician's bags fill up with crafting mats every time she goes on a killing spree, I imagine drops are still the main source of mats.
• She has special, huge bags that only take craft mats. They auto-fill with mats she loots, so there's some element of gathering gear involved. 
• And that's about all I can remember. Not much for twenty years, is it?

EverQuest II - 

• If I don't know this one I may as well put myself into sheltered accomodation right now. I've always gathered extensively in EQII and I've been spending quite literally hours every day gathering in Blood of Luclin zones for the last three or four months. 
• Gathering in EQII expanded under Domino's watch to become a full career path. She added multiple questlines, several of which could justifiably be called "Signature" if not "Epic". 
• Gathering has AAs, gear, buffs, you name it. 
• It even has companion NPCs that gather for you, something you rarely find in Western MMORPGs. 
• Any character can gather from any node regardless of class or level. There were both level and skill restrictions for many years but they were all removed, not that long ago. 
• The remaining restriction is that without the right level of skill you can only get commons. Rares still use the old skill floors.
• With sufficient skill (or maybe it's an AA) you get the ability to track nodes.
• Nodes are competitive but they're so prevalent and widespread it's almost never an issue.
• As in WoW, different types follow an approximately logical distribution so you can usually work out where to look for what, even in an unfamiliar zone. 
• What's actually inside a node can sometimes be less than logical, though, particularly in later zones. 
• There are uncommon and rare pulls from most nodes.
•  BoL introduced Shadow Nodes that can only be gathered using a special buff rewarded by the crafting Signature quest. 
• It's entirely possible to spend whole sessions gathering in EQII and I could write several posts on it with ease.

  
Guild Wars 2 - 

• Another game in which I gather every day, if only because there's a daily for it and it's one of the easiest. 
• Yet again, gathering nodes in GW2 follow a fairly logical distribution, although I would say slightly less consistently so than either WoW or EQII. 
• GW2 was possibly the first major MMORPG to introduce non-competitive gathering as the norm.
• Even if it wasn't, you definitely would think it was if you'd heard ArenaNet crowing about it.
• It may have been why the game suffered from an appalling harvest-bot problem in the first few months. 
• Nodes can be seen on the mini-map. No skill required. (That could be GW2's tag line).
• Anyone can gather anything provided they have the right gathering tool. 
• Gathering from nodes requires a range of node-specific consumables (tools) available from NPCs. A wide range of highly advantageous (and highly visually game-disrupting) non-consumable versions of these can be purchased from the Gem store for eye-watering prices.
• You can acquire gathering nodes of all kinds to place in your "Personal Instance" (aka really crappy housing) either through gameplay or via the Gem store. 
• I have never seen the point of this, given the extreme ease and simplicity of open-map gathering, but people seem to like it and often invite others in to gather from their personal node collection.
• GW2 also follows WoW in having cloth drop from mobs. The reasoning behind this (in either case) escapes me. What makes cloth so different?
•  There are other buffs and items available but I can't remember much about any of them. Crafting in GW2 ceased to be of any real interest to me sometime around 2013 and I haven't paid attention to much that's been added in the last six or seven years. 
• In common with probably 90% of players my main interest in gathering is how much money I can sell the mats for on the Trading Post.

Rift -

• Hmm. Does Rift have gathering? 
• It has crafting. When this blog was new I posted about it, saying "I like the crafting in Rift. It's generally simple, straightforward and satisfying." You'd think I'd remember how I got the mats. 
• Well, I don't.
• I do know cloth is dropped by mobs, same as in WoW and GW2. I remember farming undead in Stillmoor for some kind of silk. I have no recollection at all of any kind of gathering or any kind of nodes, though. 
• Nope... without looking this one up I have to admit defeat. Other than the cloth, no memories at all.

Neverwinter -

• Absolutely no clue. 
• Oh, wait, there was that bit where you get some NPCs to set up some kind of sweatshop. That had something to do with crafting. I think I posted about it earlier this year. I vaguely recall having to get some mats or something so the NPCs could craft but if it involved gathering anything I've completely blanked it from my mind.

Lord of the Rings Online - 

• This one I do remember, even though I haven't gathered or crafted there in years. 
• Nodes appear in the landscape in a way almost identical to WoW. 
• You can see them on the mini-map. 
• Probably need a specific level of skill, though. 
• I remember there was more to it than that but that's all I do remember.

Final Fantasy XIV - 

• I'm fairly sure FFXIV is on a par with EQII in terms of having turned gathering into a full-blown game mode. 
• I think there's gear and progression and all that sort of thing but I couldn't tell you any specifics. 
• I tried it waaaaaay back in the original release and it was so mindbendingly irritating I never even looked at it when the Realm got Reborn.  
• FFXIV has really good fishing but fishing is not gathering. Fishing is a topic all its own.

Vanguard Emulator - 

• Vanguard had the best gathering of any MMORPG I've played, bar none. It didn't count as a full game mode like Adventuring, Crafting and Diplomacy but it wasn't far behind. 
• There was gear and progression, separate tabs in the UI, all the good stuff. 
• Nodes had skill requirements and were both competitive and co-operative.
• You could gather solo but if you grouped everyone could share and the pulls were bigger and better.
• Grouping also allowed lower-skill characters to gather from nodes above their skill ceiling by sharing the skill level of their groupmates.
• There was a quality system inherant in the nodes themselves, making rare pulls more than just rng-luck or a direct function of improved gear. I only have a vague memory of how that worked, though.
•  Most mats could both be gathered both from nodes and also from the corpses of mobs, allowing you to choose between pure gathering or gathering via adventuring. 
• As an adventurer, you couldn't just kill stuff and loot the mats. You still had to have the gathering gear and skills to gather from the corpse.
• You had to think more about what you were doing while gathering in Vanguard than in any other game I've played.
• That's probably why I liked it so much.
• I hope the Emu manages to implement the full version. I'm sure it will.
  

Riders of Icarus - 

• I have literally no idea. Or memory. Maybe there isn't any. Or maybe there is but I never tried it. Or maybe there is and I did and I just can't remember. Or maybe I don't care.

Secret World Legends -

• I don't think either SWL or The Secret World before it has any kind of gathering. 
• Crafting was that weird shape-making mini-game. I think that used mob drops but I wouldn't describe anything about the process as "gathering".
• If there was more than that I remember nothing whatsoever about it.

And there we go. It must be obvious I can remember far, far more about gathering than I could about the mechanics of casting in the same games even though in most if not all I must have spent more time casting. I'm also perpared to bet that much, if not all, of what I've said is reasonably accurate. And I'm remembering more all the time, as I write.

I guess that's not too surprising. Gathering, while it may be repetitive, is a primary activity for the time you're doing it. Casting and moving are both just background things you do in combat.

There's also the distinct possibility that I like gathering as much as, if not more than fighting. Or crafting, for that matter. I can't deny that in plenty of MMORPGs I gather materials for which I have no immediate use just because I find the act of gathering amusing, entertaining, soothing, relaxing or satisfying. Sometimes all of those at once.

I'd be very interested in playing a fully-fledged triple-A MMORPG in which the core gameplay loop revolved around gathering. One in which the crafting was secondary and the combat mostly an optional extra.

Or is that Animal Crossing?

All The Tired Horses

Shintar posted this week on her World of Warcraft Blog, Priest With A Cause, that she was Level 40 with a mount. She'd posted a while earlier about how she planned to raise the cash, which is considerable, to make that happen.

I found myself commenting somewhat testily on both posts. There's something about mounts in MMORPGs that gets my goat these days. Not that I have a goat. Although I could, seeing as how I play a dwarf in both WoW Classic and Lord of the Rings Online. Theoretically, that is. I don't have the money in the first or the levels in the second but it could happen.

Do I really see myself astride a goat, though? It's fantastical, sure, but it's not a fantasy I've ever entertained. Not that I've never fantasized about riding.

When I was a child I went through a peculiar pony phase. I made my mother promise that if she won the Football Pools (the 1960s version of a lottery that would require a lot more explanation for the uninitiated than I'm prepared to get into here - just think Terry Pratchett and you're half way there...) she'd buy me a pony. I even knew what it would look like - black with a white blaze on its brow.

Motorbikin', motorbikin', motorbikin'

I grew up surrounded by horses. There were a couple stabled in the field above my house and several more running loose in the field next to our orchard. Yes, I had that kind of childhood. I liked them but I was wary. Horses have a wicked sense of humor. They're not to be trusted.

I sat on a horse exactly once. It was loose on the common outside my school, just standing there. I was with some friends. There were girls there. I ran at the horse and vaulted onto it. It let me. It barely moved, just carried on standing there. Once I was up I had nothing. I slid off and that was that.

Lucky it didn't bolt or turn around and bite me or throw me and kick me I guess, but that was how we rolled back then. Eight years old and no adults between breakfast and tea. Half Huck Finn, half Just William with a smidgeon of Lord of the Flies to keep us honest. The past isn't just a different country, it's a different universe.

Other beasts I have bestrode include donkeys at the seaside when I was tiny(ish) and a camel when I was full grown. I can't say any were expreiences I wanted to repeat. I've been on the back of a motorbike a few times. Never wanted to own one.

If you gotta go, go, gotta go motorbike ridin'

When it comes to games my views on mounts have changed. Are changing even now.

The first I remember were in EverQuest. Norrath didn't have any mounts when I arrived nor for some while afterwards. If you wanted to travel you got on Shanks's Pony as my grandfather used to say.

I don't remember when horses were introduced but it must have been fairly late on. I know they came before the Legends of Ykesha expansion in 2003 because that was when we got Drogs. Drogs (real name Drogmor) are large, lizardy creatures you can buy at the Lighthouse in The Gulf of Gunthak, a place where I've spent many hours and a good deal of platinum across the years. I wanted one for my Ogre Shadowknight because an ogre looks silly on a horse.

By the time LoY appeared my Gnome Cleric had been riding his own, tiny, horse for a while. For him, at the time, having a horse was far more important than having his "Epic", something all clerics were supposedly obligated to own but which he never bothered with and never missed.

The thing about having a mount in EQ was this: it wasn't primarily a means of transport. In most MMORPGs mounts are visually aggressive run speed buffs. In EverQuest their primary function, particularly for casters, was as mana batteries and aggro reducers. Still is, at least when I play.

A bug briefly brings Fallen Earth to EverQuest

In those days both mana and aggro management were key gameplay components. Casters had to sit to meditate to regain mana at an increased rate but the very act of sitting radically increased mob aggro. A healer who sat down mid-fight to regain enough mana to cast a vital heal would often find the mob peeling off the tank to come beat on an apparently helpless target.

If you had a horse, all that went away. On a horse, the game treated you as though you were simultaneously standing and sitting. You could cast freely but you regained mana at the seated rate. Mobs perceived you as standing so your aggro stayed low.

Also, as an added bonus, if I'm remembering correctly, you didn't suffer from encumbrance while mounted. Yes, you did go a bit faster as well - there were different grades of horse to improve your travel speed -  but that was the least of it.

In other MMORPGs, Fallen Earth springs immediately to mind, mounts operate as mobile inventory. They have saddlebags. That's a more interesting proposition to me than just going faster.

The real thing

Fallen Earth, of course, had the best implementation of mounts that I've experienced. There, your horse was an individual entity in the world. You couldn't fold it up and put it in your backpack or wish it away to some nether-dimensional no-space.

If you wanted to get off your horse in Fallen Earth you had to dismount and there it would be, standing next to you. If you wandered off and forgot about your mount, predators could attack and kill it. I left my horse by the side of the road once and came back to find it half-eaten by giant ants. If you wanted to leave it safely you had to find a stable and arrange for room and board.

Over the years I've seen a huge variety of mounts, from the quasi-realistic versions in Fallen Earth and Lord of the Rings Online to the extremes of whimsy in Riders of Icarus. The trend over the last decade or so has definitely been towards the spectacular and the ludicrous.

Right

Retail World of Warcraft offers a mindbending melange of creatures and vehicles, some of which seat several players and come equipped with NPC services. EverQuest II long abandoned even a hat-tip to sanity, seating its characters on everything from distorted cats to full-size dragons, flying discs and leaping lizards.

As the decades pass, the frog of my suspended disbelief has slowly boiled dry. The last drops of my patience turned to steam with the introduction of mounts to Guild Wars 2 (and here I am running very much against the herd because there are many who feel ArenaNet's implementation of mounts represents some kind of gold standard for the genre).

I loathe them. I detest the hypersaturated bling they bring to what was once one of the best-visualised fantasy worlds in the genre. I condemn the unapologetic, unashamed, crass commerciality of the skin market, something that smacks of both desperation and the abandonment of principle.

More even than their appalling appearance, I abhorr their practical implementation. I detest the way they lurch and jolt and skid and stutter, every nausea-inducing plunge and check. The way each mount comes with a specific movement function turns fantasy role-play into a game of creature-feature mini-golf as you stop, assess the obstacle ahead of you and select the most appropriate "club".

What mounts have done to GW2, other than turning every public gathering into a six-year old's sugar nightmare, is to weaponize one of the most annoying of its original features - jumping puzzles. With mounts there's now no content that can't be reduced to a test of hand-eye co-ordination and keyboard dexterity. Accessibility can go drown in a bucket.

Wrong

I think it's almost entirely down to GW2's doubling-down on all the worst aspects of the concept that has soured me on mounts everywhere else. I used to quite like the silliness and the showing off. I still do in games like Riders of Icarus, where crazy rides are the whole point of the game.

In anything that still feels like it might just have a chance of passing for a virtual world in a dim light, though, I'm not feeling the love for mounts any more. I may have become inured to the merry-go-round in EQ2, where population density at least renders visual pollution no more than a sporadic problem, but it's notable that even there my own choice of mounts tends towards a discreet set of wings that leave my characters looking much the same as if they were on foot, except when they're actually in flight.

That's why I'm not at all bothered that I don't yet have a mount in Classic as I bear down on Level 50. I can't afford one and I don't intend to make any effort to change that. I'd rather spend my gold on things that matter, like better weapons or more inventory space.

I'll get a mount eventually. Probably that goat. Maybe a horse. Nothing flashy. When I have it, I'll use it sparingly. Long before my current discomfort with the concept I already found the constant on-and-off nature of mount implenmentation in many MMORPGs annoying.

One of the main reasons I don't have the same degree of dislike for mounts in EQ2 and Riders of Icarus that I do in other games is that they allow your character to do much the same mounted as dismounted. Either that, or they handle the mounting and dismounting automatically so I don't have to bother with it.

If and when I finally get a mount in Classic I plan on using it for long trips on auto-run and not much else. And I won't be buying one until I have enough money that the initial cost leaves me with at least as much left in the bank as I just spent.

If I'm mounted before I hit sixty I'll be surprised.

Home Is Where, When You Go There, They Have To Take You In. Ha! Lies! : Riders of Icarus

I'm sure absolutely no-one is wondering why I haven't posted anything about Riders of Icarus for a while. Even if athey have, no doubt they're assuming I've forgotten all about it in the slow-time frenzy of WoW Classic.

Actually, no. I'm still keeping up with my dailies in Guild Wars 2, I found time to log into EverQuest II to do the first of Yun Zi's new quests and I would have been logging in to RoI for my daily half-hour afk session too. If I could.

So what's stopping me?

 Error 602. That's what.

A few days ago, after downtime that officially lasted eight hours, Riders of Icarus slipped it's moorings from the safe harbor of Nexon to dock at the mysterious port known as Valofe or VFun. All the passengers who'd pre-registered should have gone along for the ride but quite a lot, including me, seem to have fallen overboard somewhere along the way.

My account transferred correctly as far as I can tell. I can log in to it on the VFun website and I have a Valofe ID. I was able to download the Valofe installer as required and install the full game. (The Steam version still seems to work but it now goes to a blank account with no characters).

The launcher also works but there's a discrepancy between the version I downloaded and the current version the launcher wants to patch. This is a known problem, aknowledged and apologized for by the new publishers, who do seem to be trying to sort things out.

Unfortunately, the fix they have suggested, which involves downloading the corrupted files directly from their website, doesn't work for everybody. Including me, naturally.

The latest advice is to submit a ticket, which I have done this morning. They even put up a template telling you exactly what information they need to try and sort the problem out for you.

It includes your characters' names, something most people presumably have no difficulty in remembering. I only have two characters, one of whom I have been looking at every day for several months. Do you think I could remember either of their names?

This is the downside to making up names off the top of your head in dozens of MMORPGs. Also of getting older. Fortunately, I have a blog.

I am scrupulous about never naming my characters in anything I write and always blurring or cropping their names in any screenshots I use. I have a thing about names and privacy. It's ridiculous but there you go. No chance of finding my characters' names from a post, then.

Very much not how I'm feeling about the move.

Because I illustrate so heavily, though, I take thousands of screenshots. For most of them I hide the UI but often I need some text or a pop-up window to emphasize some point I'm making in a post. I edit the names out of the pictures you see on the blog but I save those as separate files and keep the unedited originals in another folder.

I was confident the names would show up somewhere. It turns out I took a screenshot of the first one at character creation so that was easy. The other, my Trickster, the one with all the good stuff, was harder.

I don't have any shots of her from when I made her and RoI's UI doesn't include the name of the character anywhere. I checked the chat box in some of the shots but the game always refers to the character as "you" so no joy there.

I tried the shots I had of NPC dialog but RoI didn't seem to be one of those games that includes the character name in the quest text. I was starting to think I'd just have to tell VFun her class and level and hope that was enough, when I came across a shot of the her talking to the space cat back in May or June.

For some reason the cat did use her name. Probably because he's from space and doesn't know the local customs. Yay for cultural diversity!

As soon as I saw it I thought "Oh, yes, that's what she's called!" I had an inkling I'd named her after Dora the Explorer and indeed I had, although if I said her name I very much doubt anyone would make the connection.

Anyway, it's done now. All I can do is wait.

 I hope the new publishers can sort out their mess because I'd hate to lose all that great stuff I did absolutely nothing to get and paid absolutely nothing for.

Just You Wait 'Til It's Ripe!: Riders of Icarus

Since I mentioned it the other day, here are a couple of shots of my latest Legendary Mount in Riders of Icarus. I now have five Legendary Mounts and a Legendary fighting Familiar. I also have two Heroic fighters. Every one of those was a freebie from Logins.

My bags and banks are stuffed with items that give huge buffs, I've got fifty gold, approximately ten times the amount I've earned through playing, and I have almost 500 Ellun, one of the two cash shop currencies, having already spent several hundred more. All from login rewards

There are five more Legendary mounts, any one of which I can buy with the tokens I'm collecting from the August login campaign. By Christmas I guess I could have all of them.

 It's a very odd game. I must get back to playing it some day.