You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.

RIP ROE : Rubies of Eventide

Today, Justin "Syp" Olivetti covered one of my favorite MMOs of all time in his Game Archeologist column over at Massively.

Rubies of Eventide was a charming, quirky, delightful game that embodied many of the things I most desire in an MMO. An open world that begged to be explored, a wide range of things to do beyond mass slaughter and best of all, unimpeachable internal logic.

It's that consistency of imagination that turns a three-dimensional game into a convincing virtual world. True, the entire world of Rubies of Eventide would fit inside a county the size of Rutland but it felt more like a real place than MMOs a hundred times its size.

I played RoE many times, on and off, over its six-year run. I struggled through beta, when my PC found Rubies far more of a challenge to render than Everquest. Mrs Bhagpuss and I enjoyed a solid run there for several weeks once, establishing some fairly well-developed characters that were later lost in a server merge that happened unbeknownst to us. The character in the screenshot at the top is the Dwarf I made to start over again after that unpleasant surprise.

I never played as much Rubies as I'd like to have done. It was a game I thought I'd always come back to but seldom did. The odd late-night session, an hour or two when my MMO du jour was patching. Then one day I got the urge, went to log in and found it gone.

From what I read on the forums the original and current owner has put the source code out of reach and intends to keep it that way. It's a crying shame. Even today, Rubies of Eventide has more to offer than most MMOs, at least in the things it did best. Maybe one day it will return. I doubt it but then, who ever though we'd see AC2 again?

Don't Bury Me 'cos I'm Not Dead Yet : AC2

Weirdest MMO news I heard all year, or possibly ever:

Asheron's Call 2 rises from the grave

Good trick! Now bring back Rubies of Eventide!

I never played AC2 during it's three-year run. Those were the days when you paid a sub or you weren't coming in and I was already subbing to two other MMOs at the time. Also I'd played AC1 and didn't get on with it so I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the sequel.

I do seem to remember that people were both surprised and upset when AC2 closed. Anyone play it and remember what it was like? Just out of sheer nosiness I may well re-sub to Asheron's Call just to take a look at Asheron's Call 2.

What's that you say? Subscribe to AC1? That ancient game that no-one in the MMO blogosphere ever mentions, even when they're desperately trying to remember MMOs that still require a subscription? Why would you want to do that? Well, because if I want to take a look at the zombie resurrection of its slightly less-ancient spawn I have to be a subscriber in good standing of AC1. Even though this utterly unexpected reincarnation is officially a beta.

Pay to play the beta of a game that went out of business well over half a decade ago; that sounds like a good idea. I'll probably do that, then. Do I need to buy the client again too? I still have my original Asheron's Call box...wonder if my characters are still there...

Better the Beta You Know: GW2, EQ2

I bought Guild Wars 2 this week, a game that doesn't yet exist. Spinks think this demonstrates poor organizational skills on my part. Ravious put his hand in his pocket but he's a little concerned about where we might end up if a precedent is set. Just to give a little perspective, I was chatting with someone at work yesterday who told me that he and his girlfriend are going to see Michael MacIntyre in August. They bought the tickets last August. Paying for things that don't yet exist is not something ArenaNet just invented.

As I've said before, how we pay for MMOs is quite possibly the single least interesting aspect of the entire MMO phenomenon. We're all adults. We can spend our money how we like (although if it genuinely makes a meaningful difference to your household economy whether you spend £50 on a video game this month or in three month's time it's entirely possible you shouldn't be spending it on a video game in the first place, but then, hey, I'm not your dad so knock yourself out!). No, the part of the discussion that spun out of this which interested me was whether or not beta access counts a "benefit" to players.

So, crabs again?

I've done a lot of MMO betas. My first was Anarchy Online, for which they sent me the client in the post, on CDRom. I still have it somewhere. I spent most of a week trying to install it. Never got it to run but that didn't stop me buying the game when it came out, when it still didn't run. Anarchy Online remains the benchmark for the worst MMO launch ever. I think it was three months before they actually charged anyone a subscription because that's how long it took before the game was playable.

From then on I applied for pretty much every MMO beta and got into plenty. A surprising number of my fondest, most lapidary memories of a dozen years spent trekking through virtual worlds come from betas. The thrill of using a jet-pack in Endless Ages (still the best flight experience I've had in an MMO); seeing the Capryni scatter as they scented a prowling Gingo in Ryzom;  riding into Lomshir for the first time in Vanguard.

And the bugs. My god, the bugs. Pushing through a gap in geometry to break into someone's house in Endless Ages and not being able to get out again (that was a re-roll). Falling for fatal damage every time I even passed close to a griffin tower in EQ2.  The plain unplayable lag in Rubies of Eventide, Horizons, EQ2, Vanguard... well, every beta ever at some point, come to think of it.

Waiting for the end of the world

This is where I should make a confession. I really like bugs in MMOs. I see them as content. I've probably had almost as much fun out of bugs over the years as gameplay, which is partly why EQ2 Test was my home server for more than five years. I like finding bugs and I like reporting them. I've had everything up to and including all my characters vanishing from bugs and while I get as annoyed as anyone would when I can't do what I was planning, dealing with a funny, odd or flat-out game-breaking bug sometimes turns out to be a lot more involving and thought-provoking than whatever I had in mind. It's true dynamic content.

 A huge part of the interest in playing MMOs for me has always come from trying to understand how they work. It's one reason I don't like tutorials much. I like to observe, gather data and test hypotheses while playing. I like it best of all if I'm never quite sure, even after extensive research, what the hell is going on. Bugs open up the cover so you can see the gears whirr and betas pull back the curtain so you can see backstage. More than that, you can chat to the stage manager, the make-up artist and the props team. A good beta will offer multiple channels of communication with the developers, from ad hoc in game chats through organized content testing to lengthy forum discussions. It's not one-way traffic, either. In a good beta you have a real chance to influence the detail, even the direction of the game you eventually hope to play. I've seen countless changes made in good betas as a result of player feedback (and countless more ignored but, hey...)

Wonder if woodworkers get a scratching-post recipe?

That's a good beta. A bad beta is one where nothing you say, nothing anyone says, seems to be getting through to anyone that cares. Where feedback is ignored, issues glossed over or there's always a "miracle patch" just round the corner. I'd name names but the NDAs for betas like that never end. (The only genuine miracle patch I ever saw was in the final week or thereabouts of EQ2 beta when, after a month of game-breaking, unplayable rubber-banding lag and innumerable fiddle-faddling changes to changes to changes that had just about everyone playing believing the launch should be delayed at least another three months, we logged in one day to a lag-free, reasonably smooth, certainly fit-for-launch MMO. They said they had one last patch that would fix most of the major problems and they really did. Of course it didn't address any of the gaping holes in the underlying design - Scott Hartsman had to come in and start on that six months later, but you can't have everything. At least it ran! )

Mandatory letterbox format preserved for disbelieving future generations

Then there's the opportunity to say "I was there", although that can be a very bittersweet experience. Some MMOs I've beta tested have been more to my taste at some point before launch than they ever managed afterwards. It can be a little galling to remember that the game you're playing not only could have been better but was. I'd rather know, though, than not know.

And finally there's the end. The day it all stops. Sometimes the server just closes and re-opens as "Open Beta" the next day and it's all a bit of an anticlimax, but often there's a big party, or an apocalypse. My favorite beta memory ever comes from EQ2. Everyone gathered at the Claymore in Antonica for a party before the world came down but right at the very end, just before the countdown started, I decided to go into the great dark in my own Inn room, just me and my cat. I just made it back in time to sit on my bed and then the world ended. You just can't buy that.

Boom, out go the lights.

Oh, wait, now you can! That's where we came in. Will GW2 beta weekends have any of the benefits I'm gushing over? You wouldn't think so. They will be totally nonexclusive, open to all for the payment of a fee. They'll be isolated weekends, not a continuum. It's unlikely that a community will have a chance to develop (a beta community can be a very different beast from a Live one). Above all, people will have paid to be there and will have entitlement issues off the scale compared to those normally seen in betas (not that those aren't often ridiculous in themselves).

These weekends will probably be much more like the marketing-led Open Betas MMOs throw out like chum to bring in the fish they hope to land at launch. But maybe not. Rift's beta weekends were proper betas, even at the end when they were letting everyone in. Every single Rift beta weekend was arguably more entertaining than any weekend post-launch. Any way up, I'm happy to have the opportunity, even if I did have to pay for it. It's money I would have spent in any event and it will buy fun I otherwise wouldn't have had.

I'd have preferred to have gotten into the closed beta, all the same.

Where's My Tiger? : Neo Steam

In theory I play a lot of MMOs. I have nearly two dozen on my desktop and a few more tucked away out of sight. I say in theory because as you may have noticed there are only so many hours in the day and much though I'd like to spend all of those hours playing games there's working and sleeping and eating and what-all to fit in somewhere.

I have my focus games, usually just two or three at most. Currently that would be EQ2X, Rift and Allods. Then I have my background games, where I have characters I'm still interested in developing. LotRO, Fallen Earth, Everquest, Vanguard or Ryzom all fit in there. I try to pop in every few days for at least a short session here or there just to keep the plates spinning.

No boars? That can't be right.

Beyond that comes a whole raft of titles that I'm either pretty much done with, never really got started on or just haven't gotten around to yet. And right at the end of the list is a small group of MMOs that I only ever play last thing at night, when I finish a session on my focus game but don't quite feel ready to stop altogether.

Eden Eternal and Dragon Nest are my current go-to late-nighters but last night I got the urge to pop into NeoSteam, a game I've played on and off for years. Apparently it's been quite a while since I last got the urge because it turns out NeoSteam isn't there any more. The server closed down last May. I don't remember reading anything about that on Massively.

It was the third time it's happened to me. Two other MMOs I played sporadically decided to shut their doors while I had my back turned: Rubies of Eventide and Ferentus. They and NeoSteam were all MMOs I had a great deal of time for. Metaphorically. Unfortunately.

Small dwarf, big world

Rubies is the one I miss the most. It was a  first-class MMO with tons of potential and I did put in quite a few hours there over the years. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it regularly for a while. I'd play it still if I could. We both played Ferentus for quite a time too and although it never came out of beta it was more finished than a lot of games I've payed to play.

NeoSteam was the oddest of the three. It was nominally Steampunk in setting but it seemed more like a dreamscape. My character was a giant tiger who carried a hammer bigger than he was. Something that looked like a flying turnip used to follow him around offering advice. I never saw much of the world. Mostly I ran around enjoying the music and marveling at all the bizarre creatures. I think I only got to level 10 but I wasn't finished yet, dammit!.

I knew I shouldn't have kicked that puffball

The most galling thing of all is that NeoSteam is still online in the U.S.A. where by all accounts it has been much better managed and developed by Atlus. The rights for Europe including the U.K. went to Gamigo, who never seemed to do anything with it at all. I can't remember ever having to patch when I logged in and nothing ever seemed to change.

So, NeoSteam joins the list of lost MMOs. It also joins the shorter but infinitely more annoying list of MMOs lost specifically to me due to I.P. blocking or regionalization. EQOA keeps it company there. Will I learn the lesson this time and remember to log into the games I like more often? Probably not.