Fat Tuesday : Neverwinter, EQ2, GW2

Sitting here drinking a coffee waiting for the Neverwinter gates to open in just over an hour's time, wondering why everything always has to start on a Tuesday.

For as long as I can remember Tuesday has been the weekly server-reset day for SoE but they're going one better than a mere reset today, landing GU66 aka Scars of the Awakened, which if I remember rightly is the third installment of EQ2's Velious saga. Somewhat to my surprise and much to my great pleasure this includes substantial new overland content accessible from Level 90.

I'd been assuming it would be aimed at the folks who bought the Chains of Eternity expansion, which I didn't. Haven't. Yet. But no, apparently that was just a little holiday from the seemingly endless revision of Velious and now we pick up where we left off a year or so ago. I foresee a return to Norrath in the near future.

ArenaNet doesn't take servers down the way SoE and most other MMO companies do. They have some clever way of patching on the fly. Even so the servers start to creak a little after a week and Tuesday's the day they get reset. Things tend to get glitchy after a while, events bug, rewards don't always register. Today there's yet another major issue with the Guild window. It definitely feels like the batteries need changing. Add to that it's the end of the month so there's the third and final part of Flame and Frost on the way too .

As I was finishing dailies on my second account a few minutes ago the big yellow "new build" notice was flashing on the screen. Normally I'd be raring to get started, especially since the new dungeon is supposedly only with us until the 12th of May, which should create some frenzied pugging. If only Cryptic/PWE weren't Tuesday's Children too.

In a three-way death-match between a major update, a minor update and a new game the winner is so obvious no bookie would take the bet. Of course it isn't a death-match. More like a running order. I'll get to all of them eventually. It would have been a lot better if they hadn't all arrived at once, and especially if they hadn't all arrived on Tuesday. Tuesday's a work day, y'know. Okay, I'm not at work but that's hardly the point.

Presumably the reason these things happen on Tuesdays is precisely that, though. The Devs are at work and so, largely, are the players. That way the log in servers don't catch fire and when the inevitable emergency patches follow there's the rest of the day, and the week, to write and apply them. And by the weekend everything's running smoothly, the players can play and the devs can play golf and go to the opera. I assume that's what they do in their spare time...

Okay, that killed an hour. Time to log in!

Nostalgia in Reverse

It's Spring (though you might not believe it if you lived where I do) and new shoots are pushing up all over MMOland.

Neverwinter announced the start date for Open Beta. It's April 30th. Oh no, wait, it's April 27th. No, no it's April 25th! Make your mind up! There are no character wipes past the 25th, so this is an old school F2P soft launch. I'll be passing on the paid options and coming in with the Great Freeloader Horde on the thirtieth. I was mightily impressed by the city itself and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on The Foundry but how sticky Neverwinter will be I'm not so sure. Find out in a month or two, I guess.

Jostling Neverwinter at the gates of May comes City of Steam, which seems to have been in development forever although it's actually only just over a year since I first wrote about it. The official website now has a prominent, taunting "PLAY" button, frustratingly greyed-out and Cogfather Dave Lindsay commented in a recent forum thread titled "When can I play City of Steam?" "It shouldn't be too long now. Probably about a month, maybe less. And we'll start with some exclusive access as normal"

I love City of Steam. I'll certainly be playing it regularly just as soon as I can make a character that persists, be that Open Beta or Official Launch. Still not feeling the need to pay up front for access, though. I'm not that impatient and anyway there's plenty of other stuff going on keep me busy. Too much, indeed. And then I have this teeny-tiny voice whispering in my ear, telling me maybe I liked City of Steam the best back in its very first iteration, the Sneak Peak. It's gotten a lot slicker and more polished, become much more the full service lobby MMO but is that really where it needed to go? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 EQ2, which I actually played twice this last week, has a beta going on too. These days they beta Game Updates over there just like they were real expansions. Back when I played on Test as my main server that was kind of what we were supposed to be doing only there were never enough of us. Then they added a second Test server called Test Copy, where you could copy your Live character instead of having to level one up by playing it the old-fashioned way and eventually Test Copy sort of morphed into a general Beta server for Betaing things that don't need an NDA. Or something. No-one really knows.

The current Beta is for GU66 Scars of the Awakened and it looks pretty darned interesting. Cobalt Scar was always one of my favorite Velious zones and I spent an awful lot of time farming Molkors and Walruses (Walrii?) in Siren's Grotto, a zone everyone loved to hate. Thanks to GW2 taking up all our time, we haven't bought the last EQ2 expansion, Chains of Eternity and therefore don't have any characters over level 92. The current cap is 95 with the expansion. What level will the two new zones be tuned for? Will we be able to do anything there or use any of the drops at 92? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 So much for Open Betas. Those at least we can talk about. I was also fortunate enough to get a couple of invites to closed betas recently, both of which came with fairly draconian NDAs. Do I have anything to say about those? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 One MMO actually launched this week - real launch, not a beta! I missed it completely until it started popping up in news items. Given my interest in and enjoyment of Rift it's surprising that I haven't payed much attention to Trion's second entry into the MMO marketplace, Defiance, an MMO/Shooter hybrid whose U.S.P. is a real-time development link with a new TV show of the same name on the SyFy channel.

Since I haven't watched television this century I wasn't even aware we had the SyFy channel in the UK but apparently we do and the Defiance show premieres here on April 16th. If the experience of Chris at Game By Night is anything to go by it will take at least that long for Trion to get the servers into a playable state. This appears to have been a traditional MMO launch - half-finished, half-working, lots of potential and not much polish. Will Trion right the ship in time or will it be yet another MMO already holed below the waterline as it slides down the slipway? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

There's more. A bunch of supposed Sandbox MMOs are in some kind of beta; Earthrise, Pathfinder, The Repopulation, Origins of Malu to name but a few of them. I've picked one of those pretty much at random to have a look at but where's the time going to come from? I had invites for all the Firefall beta weekends and never managed to get to one. I don't regret that particularly. Firefall's another one where you can buy into beta if you're that fussed. I'm not.

I do regret missing Otherland, in which I certainly was interested. Again I had beta weekend invites that I didn't take up and now the game looks on the verge of extinction before it's even been born so I may have missed the only chance I was ever going to get to walk in Tad Williams's world. Oh well, I guess that frees up some notional time somewhere in the future, or maybe Gamigo will find a way to keep the game alive. Find out in a month or two, I guess.

Enough talk. Let's go play.