What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

Imperfect Is The New Perfect: Secondhand Lands

I thought I'd post a few screenshots of Secondhand Lands today. Last time I wrote about the game, Jeromai described the visuals in a comment as "the blob graphics of yesteryear". A reviewer on Steam, one who was otherwise very positive, went much further: "Its graphics were not impressive in 2008 or 2009, and time hasn't made it look any better. So if graphics matter very heavily to you, I will honestly suggest you don't try this game".

I really can't see it. Or, rather I can. I can see something rather charming and quite delightful.

Starting with the lighting, someone clearly has the same love for supersaturation as I do. When I'm posting screenshots here I often tweak the saturation a few notches to make the colors pop. Not going to need to do that for this game.

Sunsets and sunrises are spectacularly colorful. I've had to stop playing just to watch the sky change. At night it gets very dark. The stars come out in a glorious wash of distant nebulae. The moon is vast and ghostly.

Trees tower above the tiny characters. They seem lost in an enormous forest, as they should. It's a fairy tale. Ferns and grasses cover the forest floor. Half-forgotten tracks lead into the depths.

The limited field of view only adds to the sense of enclosure, mirroring that odd sense of outdoor claustrophobia so familiar from early EverQuest. It's by no means the only similarity between the two games. I'm well aware that much of my affection for Secondhand Lands derives from emotional connections to experiences I've had and cherished elsewhere but plenty of games have tried to stike those chimes and failed.

There's such character in these graphics. They pulse with personality. The animations on my Scrapper are joyous and yet his foxy features often ache with melancholy. He's so filled with life it makes me smile to watch him. I want to create one of every creature a Scrapper can be just to see if they're all the same or whether each has an internal life of their own.

I particularly love the way his idling animations include a cheery wave to the camera. In every other MMORPG I've ever played this would be an emote triggered by the player. Here it's the character, waving at me. Somehow that makes me feel included and him seem real.

Then there are the clothes. I love the clothes. So far I've found a hat, a back item and some shoes. I like all of them more than just about anything I own in Guild Wars 2, supposedly the apogee of dress-up in the entire genre.

The shoes are easy to see in the shot above. The game describes them as "claws" but they display as metal flip-flops with spikes. They suit my Scrapper well. Spikes are a bit of a theme for him right now. The back item he found comes in the shape of porcupine quills. They look so much better than a cape.

On his head in the picture above is the baseball cap he was given in the starter pack. I figured out how to use a kit to dye items so now it's red and blue with a plaid pattern. It looks jaunty in contrast to his wistful expression. This is a fox with issues he's doing his best to hide.

The makeover and dye kits you start with have a rubric that says they're single use but a tip elsewhere in game tells you they can be used over and over again, which is true. I played around with mine for a while. The options are many and varied. Now I just need  more clothes.

Yesterday I finished up the final quest in Cat Village and Puss in Boots sent me to see Mother Goose with a delivery of mittens. Mother Goose has her own eponymous village at the end of the cobbled road. I ran all the way, excited about what I might find. I wasn't disappointed.

Mother Goose Village, according to the wiki, is Secondhand Lands hub city. Some people call it the game's capital. It's the place to go to craft or just to hang out. It even has a stage and a dance floor for Catgirls to provide buffs that last much longer than usual, reminiscent of the way, I believe, cantinas worked in the original Star Wars Galaxies.

The entire place was deserted. It made my fox sad. You can see it in his face. The tragedy of Secondhand Lands is that no-one plays. One reviewer on Steam said "Its a decent game with a major problem, especially for a MMORPG and that is population. Over the last week or so I have logged in for a couple hours, even left the game idle and rechecking /who commands to see how many are online. I did some in the morning, afternoon and night time as well. The pop never went over 3 people. The only burst of activity was on a saturday where I seen 10".

That made me think. Firstly about how much work Reese Lansangan still has to do, then about the /who command. Those used to be common in MMORPGs. You could tell how busy things were with a few key-presses. It's so long since I've played a game that allowed it I'd almost forgotten. I just logged in to test it in Secondhand Lands and the result was dispiriting: "There is one player in this reality".

It makes me feel I shouold play as much of the game as I can right now. Who knows how much longer I have? It already closed down once. It's been back for two years and still no-one's playing. No time to lose....

It shouldn't be too hard. I'm enjoying the gameplay more as I go along. I'll get to that in detail in another post but before then I need to push on and see how things develop. For now, I'm just happy to be there, enjoying the beauty all around me.

Jeromai, who once opend my eyes to the beauty of Orr, was entranced by GW2's latest map, Dragonfall. I found it over-familiar and a little dull. For me, Secondhand Land's blurry, aging, lo-fi graphics snap synapses ANet's top-of-the-line art team no longer seem able to access.

We all see what we want to see. The important thing is to keep on looking.

Today Was A Fairytale: Secondhand Lands

Because I clearly have no self-control at all, on Monday I decided it was time I tried a new MMORPG. You might think that there weren't many left that I haven't at least looked at but you would be wrong.

MMORPG.com lists sixty-five MMOs beginning with with the letter "A" alone. I tried to count the rest to get a grand total but I lost patience somewhere in the "Ds". I was already well past two hundred by then, which is the sum total of all the MMOs listed on the Wikipedia list of massively multiplayer games. Clearly the exact number is in some dispute.

If you're just looking for something new to play, it's easy to narrow the choice to a more manageable number. Plenty of the titles listed closed long ago. Others are still to launch. Some are region-locked or only available on specific platforms.

Cometh the hour, cometh the catgirl...

I also rule out virtually everything with isometric or top-down graphics for the simple reason that I don't enjoy playing them. Given that I have, over the last twenty years or so, downloaded something like a couple of hundred MMOs, that doesn't leave a whole lot that I haven't tried.

Somehow, though, there always seems to be just one more cookie in the jar. Enter Secondhand Lands.

The name wasn't entirely unknown to me. I'd vaguely heard of it, or at least I think I had. I remember reading something once about some MMORPG that was based on fairy tales. I think this must have been it.

...cometh the catnip. And that was the last we saw of her.

On Monday I just played the thing. Today I did a bit of research. The more I learn about the game, the more astonishing it seems that I haven't tried it before. Even more surprising, I don't recall anyone else talking about it either, although I'm sure Xyzzysqrl must have at least mentioned it at some point.

Given that I had to excise several paragraphs from yesterday's post because I was describing - as if completely new to me - something I'd actually posted about in considerable detail less than a month ago, it's entirely possible someone's going to pop up and tell me they've not only written extensively about the game but quote my comments on it from their comments column. As Wilhelm once did with Project:Gorgon.

On the face of it, there certainly seems to have been plenty of time for that to have happened and for me to have forgotten it. Secondhand Lands launched in January 2009. As this piece from GamesIndustry.biz (a very interesting website I really should look at regularly) describes it it, the game sounds right up my street. You'd think I might have found occasion to play it at least once if it's been running for a decade.

Let's try a Wolf instead.

Except it hasn't. Secondhand Lands, the creation of indie dev Bobby Thurman,  ran for just three years as part of the Pixel Mines Games launcher (something else I've never heard of), closing in 2012 due to "having  a miniscule playerbase".

And that, you would imagine, was that. Another opportunity missed. Except, as we are coming to understand, MMORPGs are about as good at  surviving supposed extinction events as cockroaches are the apocalypse. In 2017, Secondhand Lands rose from the dead, lurching back to life courtesy of Steam's Greenlight project.

Steam was where I ran across it as I was idly browsing the catalog on Monday. It had a "Mixed" rating but the screenshots looked intriguing and the first few reviews piqued my interest so I thought I'd give it a go. The download was incredibly quick - a matter of seconds. A minute or two after having the whim to try it I was in game and playing.

He's got his hackles up already. That can't be good...

Character creation was fascinating. There are no classes, just four races: Sheep, Wolves, Scrappers and Catgirls. The descriptions of each were fascinating, indicating that choice of race had huge gameplay implications. After some consideration I chose "Wolf" for my first character:

"Led by the dark-natured Little Red Riding Hood, Wolves embrace a philosophy based upon strength. Survival of the Fittest is more than a mantra - it's a state of being. Lone Wolves easily make the strongest fighters, and they are also the fastest on foot. A retreating Wolf is hard to track down, and fights with Wolves are rarely fair".

There's more on the wiki, where Sheep are described as having " a strong sense of order" and "amazing jumping abilities, special ramming attacks, and downright baa-zar flocking bonuses". Scrappers are "a motley bunch not very interested in battle" with "a lot of different looks such as skunk, dragon, lizard, sheep, wolf, bear, cat, squirrel, etc"while Catgirls can either "act quite human" or "give in to their more feral inclinations".

Probably smelled the catgirl. Which has to be an album title...

There's a lot more detail and nuance than a few excerpts can offer. One of the reviews on Steam suggested playing through the main storyline on all four options to get a very different experience each time. 

Choosing your race is about all there is to Character Creation, at least right now. The most recent developer note, posted in April this year on the official website, talks in detail about giving the game "a face lift" focusing particularly on "player customization". It talks about eventually giving players the tools to create and upload textures to sell to other players for "ingame compensation", thereby creating "an economy based on talent".

For a game that reportedly still has almost no players, there seems to be a lot of work going on. One of the first things I was presented with when my new character had loaded into the world was a pop-up window with extensive and detailed patch notes from May. Character customization is already available in game via makeup kits. You get one in your inventory although I missd it first time around.

The default option is "Boring Fox". Really.

My wolf began in Cat Village. That's not my description - it's what the game calls it. I just made a Scrapper and a Catgirl to check and they all started in the same place. I'm not making a sheep but I'd bet they do too.

Gameplay at the start is exactly as GamesIndustry.biz describes: "the vanilla game systems of standard MMOs". I took some quests from various cats, foxes and wolves I found standing around waiting for me and the promised "rofl-worthy world" made itself known immediately.

Humor in MMORPGs can sometimes be quite heavy going. This has a fairly light touch and a hefty dose of whimsy. The very first quest, the one that introduces combat, has you fighting wind-up clockwork rats and the next, featuring real rats, is called "Save 10 Cats". I didn't rofl but I did smile.

I only noticed the second time through this quest that the wind-up rat says something
about having his own quest to kill ten players.

In short order my wolf had acquired some gear. It wasn't quite the regular medieaval armor. There was a cloak, a baseball cap and a tie. I equipped them and to my surprise they displayed. The effect was positively surreal.

Mama Catt (yes, there's a Mommas and the Poppas joke) tasked me with retrieving her kittens missing mittens. I don't remember the part in the nursery rhyme where the mittens are stolen by a gang of strange young ducks so they could wear them as hats but apparently that's what happened.

While I was in Mama Catt's hut I couldn't help but notice an impressive fishbowl, complete with swimming fish. I took a couple of screenshots and realised it was interactable so I clicked on it. That's how I found myself with a quest to retrieve fishfood from a bunch of Hijacking Rabbits. And that Puss in Boots has a drinking problem.

There's a hole in Mama's bowl where all the water goes. Except it stays in, somehow. Game physics ftw!

As far as the writing goes, I'm sold. I would happily play through the main storyline for more of this silliness. I also like the graphics a lot. They're elderly, for sure, but they have oodles of style.

I'm also more than satisfied with the basic gameplay loop. In that respect, Secondhand Lands plays exactly as you'd expect from a "classic" MMORPG. The problem, and it's a significant one, is the pacing.

I played long enough (a couple of hours at least) for my Wolf to level up several times, acquire some skill points and add some special attacks to his hotbar. Even so, every single fight seemed to take forever. The cooldowns were slow, the animations minimal. It wasn't exactly what you'd call a thrill-ride.

Who are you calling strange, weirdo?

I could live with that. It certainly wasn't any slower or more ponderous than the early levels in classic EverQuest. I never had a problem with those. The real issue for me is the way the quest demands ramp up. The first wanted me to kill three mobs, then it was ten and then a dozen. When I arrived on the rabbit island and realized I was expected to kill twenty of them for the fishfood I'd had enough.

It's too soon to say whether those pacing problems are enough to sink what would otherwise be a very promising addition to my library. It's entirely possible that as my characters level and gear up combat will get faster. Maybe future questgivers won't be so demanding. Perhaps the more craft-oriented Scrapper will side-step the pacing issues by avoiding combat.

The game's strengths and attractions are such that I will persevere. For a while, at least. An awful lot of work, imagination and affection have clearly gone into this game and it deserves some respect and some effort on my part.

I think I'll take the rest of the day off.

It is, after all, exactly the sort of quirky, original take on the established format that many lovers of the genre have been asking for for years, while roundly ignoring its existence. It would be shame, having found it at last, to let it slip through my fingers simply because of a lack of patience on my part.

Also, you can be a fox. I'd put up with a lot just for that.