Embarassment Of Riches

An actual Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday! Can it possibly be true?!

Yes, it can. As we cruise towards the end of Blaugust I have a couple of completed posts in the bank and no work to get in the way because I'm home for two weeks recuperating from my recent minor op. Consequently, I feel quite confident in throwing away a few ideas I could potentially have blown up into whole posts. 

First I Look At The Purse

Case in point: I spent half an hour last night cobbling together this awkward composite of my currency window in EverQuest II. I had it in mind to write a piece about how out of hand these special currencies can get in long-running games.

That's a lot of tokens, tickets, coins and crystals. Seventy-four, to be exact. I very much doubt I could tell you what more than half of them are for without looking it up. Whether they're even valid any more, whether the vendors who take them are still in game or whether, if they aren't, they'll be back again next year, are all questions about which I have even less of a clue.

I was thinking about it because I logged into EQII last night in the hope of doing the new quest that got added for Oceansfull this year, only to find the event finished on Tuesday. I'd been so wrapped up in Dawnlands I forgot all about it.

The end of Oceansfull also marks the end of the Summer Jubilee but the vendors are still up until the end of the month, in case you want to spend whatever tokens you still have left. I was going to do that, which is how I came to be looking at my currency window in the first place.

It occured to me that, more than most MMORPGs I can think of, EQII thrives on excess. In other games a panel like this might be considered an embarrassment; in EQII it's more of an endorsement. This, after all, is the game where damage numbers are quantified in the quadrillions. Blizzard might feel the need to squish big numbers; Daybreak just changes the notation.

The current EQII playerbase just dotes on really big numbers and vast amounts of cruft. It's absolutely alienating to incomers but who cares about them? Fortunately, as with most MMORPGs, if you don't go looking for the hidden nine-tenths of the game, you'll never even know it's there, lurking in the deep, dark waters down below. 

Speaking of which...

It's in the trees! It's coming!

Not having to deal with a huge bunch of outdated content is one reason we all gravitate towards shiny, new MMORPGs, right? It's not that they're any easier to understand but at least we can all be ignorant together. 

Once I'm in, it doesn't take much more than the lure of some new systems and mechanics to get me started but there are a lot of new games these days. In what is fast becoming a looser, sloppier genre as boundaries between MMORPGs, survival and crafting games shift and blur, there just isn't time to try all of them.

When you see a trailer like that one, though...

I imagine everyone's getting Secret World vibes but looking into it further it would seem to be a mash-up of TSW and Fallen Earth. I was a little surprised NetEase would want to go there. I mean, the whole post-apocalyptic "all the nightmares came today" routine hasn't exactly set the genre alight thus far.

The website looks slick but isn't as encouraging as you'd hope when you take a closer look. Yet again, the translation lets the whole thing down. It really is starting to bug me, the way even major players in the market seem incapable of finishing the job when it comes to editing the text. I'm pretty sure no-one would let an artist get away with a six-fingered hand so why is it okay to sign off on mismatched grammatical numeracies like these?

Build home, create team and fight monsters...

Plant, animal and human infected by Stardust will transform into disfigured monsters called Aberrant.

It's like no-one knows the differrence between singular and plural - or that there even is a difference. 

Other than a dodgy translation (And when has that ever stopped me playing anything?) the main strike against Once Human is that it seems to be a shooter. I am not keen on shooters although at least it's a third-person shooter which, if I have to, I prefer. 

The official gameplay trailer that came out a few days ago makes the whole thing look a lot less inviting than the one I embedded. It's way too dark and most of it seems to be cut-scenes not gameplay anyway but I've pre-registered and wishlisted it on Steam, anyway. We'll see what happens. 

No Secrets

For the first time since the game launched back in 2012 I declined to pre-order the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. It went live yesterday and I still haven't bought it. 

I was very amused by Paeroka's admission that she had to look up the name of the expansion before she could write her post about it. When I first heard what ArenaNet had chosen to call it, I thought it was a truly terrible name for an expansion and it really hasn't grown on me since. 

Being charitable, it sounds more like a parody than anything, but I very much doubt ANet are playing meta games with their livelihood. That leaves the distinct possibility that someone genuinely thinks "Secrets of the Obscure" is an awesome thing to call a game. If that's true, I really hope that someone is about fourteen because if they're any older it would be really embarassing...

Leaving aside the name, there's nothing much in the package that calls to me. I quite like the sound of the rifts, even if it is a feature we've seen in multiple mmorpgs already. I'm mildly curious to see what's inside the floating wizard tower. The easier access to a flying mount is overdue but welcome.

Watching the launch trailer, what really surprised me is how old the game looks. It really seems to hark back to another era. I'm so used now to cleaner, flatter surfaces with less clutter. All the extraneous detail I used to think exemplified the art team's stellar reputation now reminds me of those long, instrumental passages in prog rock epics.

GW2 looks like a very adolescent game from a team with a very adolescent outlook is what I think I'm saying. I never really noticed it while I was playing but it's hard to miss now I've had a lengthy break. Sometimes you need to go away and come back before you can see what's right in front of you. 

Tell 'Em Eda Sent You

Singularity Six certainly aren't sitting back and letting things ride since Palia's reasonably successful and passably well-received launch earlier in the month. I was quite surprised to hear about the game's first holiday event, Maji Market, which begins in just a few days. 

On the face of it, the event looks lore-appopriate, accessible and entertaining, which is pretty much all you could hope for from something like this. I hadn't been planning on going back to Palia quite yet. It's altogether too similar in some important ways to Dawnlands, which I much prefer, and also to Valheim, which would probably have been next on my list of games to revisit, following the long-awaited (By me, anyway) Hildir's Request update (Of which more later. Although not a lot more...)

I was going to wait until I heard something definite about the squashing of the "You just lost all your progress" bug, which is kind of off-putting, but this little affair looks like fun so I might risk it. The event runs for almost the whole of September, so there's no rush. 

If It Wasn't For Bad Timing I'd Have No Timing At All

Had Dawnlands not happened along, this is what I'd almost certainly be playing right now. From the moment I heard Iron Crown planned to hand control of challenge and difficulty in Valheim over to the players, I had it in mind to start a new playthrough. Later, when I recklessly charged into the Mistlands and lost not one but two corpses there, along with my best and second-best armor, I made a back-up plan to reset my original world when the update arrived, should that prove to be possible.

Now, it ought to be said that Valheim has always allowed players to get their hands on the controls the devs use. There are console commands that let you change the game in all kinds of ways. Using those is a bit like delving into regedit, though; not for the faint-hearted or fat-fingered.

The new version should be much simpler and more straightforward. Whether I have the interest or the will to start over, especially now I'm basically playing Valheim with an anime skin in Dawnlands anyway, very much remains to be seen. Valheim does strike me as one of those games you're never really quite done with so I wouldn't discount the possibility. Not going to happen for a while, though.

I would have confirmed a few more of the details on this entry only Steam seems to have choked on the download and it's looking as if I might need to uninstall and reinstall Valheim before I can check it out for myself. That's definitely not happening today.

At this point, which is the end of the post, traditionally I'd slip in a music video. As it happens, one of those stashed Blaugust posts I mentioned right at the top is my latest "What I've Been Listening To Lately" collection and I pretty much threw everything good in there. 

Give me a minute. I'm sure I can come up with something... ah, ok, here... how about...

Real Life - Art School Girlfriend

That should do it. All good now? Okay, then.

Bye!

Guild Wars 2 And The Telaran Takeover

I'd be overstating things if I suggested I'd been in two minds whether or not to buy Secrets of the Obscure, the upcoming Guild Wars 2 expansion, when it releases on 22 August. I really haven't been thinking about it at all. 

I played GW2 pretty much without a break for more than a decade, from launch until early this year, when I finally drifted away but I can honestly say I haven't missed the game since I stopped. I get the ocasional email from ArenaNet telling me what's going on but I don't bother opening most of them. I see news items about the game on various websites but I rarely read past the headlines.

I did pay a bit more attention to the news there was going to be an expansion this summer, following the previously-announced change of emphasis on content delivery as it transitioned from free Living Story updates to regular paid DLC. I wasn't expecting anything to come of it quite so soon. I thought I'd have at least until the autumn to build up a sufficient degree of nostalgic fondness to make me consider coming back.

In the event, the new expansion is arriving before I've had the chance to start missing the game and it certainly doesn't help that what's been advertised looks like a relatively small-scale affair largely made up of scraps, for which we'll be asked to pay almost as much as we did for a full-scale expansion. The ridiculous name didn't do much to build any enthusiasm, either.

Today I finally saw something that made me think I might want to think about buying the thing when it comes out after all. Realistically, I was always going to buy it eventually. I just imagined I could probably leave it perfectly well until next year. Or the year after.

What changed my mind? Or, I should say, what may have changed my mind, if I've come to a firm decision, which I haven't, yet, and if my mind had been made up to begin with, which it wasn't?

It was the email to the left and the press release on the GW2 Website to which it links that did it.

I've only reproduced part of the email but it's the relevant part, although the news that Zojja's back with Felicia Day voicing her very definitely did not hurt. 

But I already knew that and it hadn't been enough to rekindle my interest sufficiently to change anything. So what, exactly, did?

It was this: in a move so meta-ironic it makes me wonder what decade we're in, GW2 is turning itself into Rift. 

Literally. Don't believe me? Have it direct from the Marketing Dept.'s mouth, then:

        Rift Hunting

"With the help of the Heart of the Obscure, you’ll find nascent rifts across Tyria. Fully opening a rift will reveal Kryptis invaders who were roaming Tyria while hidden from sight. Defeat enough of them, and a more formidable champion will appear for you to face. Taking down the final Kryptis target will allow you to close the rift and will grant you Kryptis essence: powerful material you can use to craft weapons, armor, legendary armor, and bait to lure out deadlier Kryptis from rifts.

At launch, you’ll be able to find rifts in several explorable zones in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure areas, central Tyria, Cantha, and the Crystal Desert. Rift activity in explorable zones not associated with Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure will cycle on a weekly basis. If you use the Heart of the Obscure in maps without active Kryptis rifts, you’ll get pointed to those that have them. In a future update, you’ll be able to progress to even deadlier hunts designed for larger groups of players.

The enemies coming out of a rift scale with the size of the group fighting it. That means that you can party up with friends for rift hunts, weave them into other open-world activities you’re doing, and even help out if you come across a stranger fighting to close a rift in the wild."

That is the exact premise on which Trion originally marketed their 2011 MMORPG "Rift", which came out a year before Guild Wars 2 and which undoubtedly broke ground for GW2's "mould-breaking" hot-join, open world group and zerg playstyle. They haven't even bothered to change what they're calling the damn things. They're rifts ffs!

Rift was a good game in 2011. I played the hell out of it for six months. I wouldn't mind another run. Of course, Rift is still around but it's a Gamigo ghost-world now. Good luck finding enough people running around there to do rifts the way they were meant to be done.

If ArenaNet fancy turning parts of GW2 into a Rift-revival theme park then I don't mind taking a few rides. I'm minded to buy the expansion now just so I can enjoy the frenzy of the first week or two before it all quietens down.

That said, GW2 is far better set to keep content like this active over the medium and long term than most games. I mean, people still do those bandit fights and they haven't been relevant content for more than half a decade. It's also a step back down the road along which I feel GW2 should never have stopped travelling, so I feel kind of honor-bound to support it.

I guess I'll be going back to Tyria towards the end of the month, then. At least for a while. I'm not sure if it's a welcome return or I'm being reeled back in...

Secrets Of The Accounting Department

I suppose I ought to say something about the newly-announced expansion for Guild Wars 2. I can't say I'm itching to get started. I haven't really played the game since, what, January? About all I've done is log in to claim a few freebies from Amazon Prime.

There was an update a while back, I think. Maybe two? Content drops that would have been tagged Living World or Living Story at one point but now come coded as some kind of afterthought to the previous expansion, the name of which I can't quite remember. The Cantha one. I'm sure you know it.

There was a flurry of PR activity a while ago, ArenaNet offering the latest in a seemingly endless series of ideas on cadence. I struggle to think of another MMORPG I've played where so much time and energy has been spent discussing what updates ought to be called and how often they should appear. It's a discussion that began pretty much at launch back in 2012 and has continued, almost without pause, ever since.

I wrote about it at some length a month ago and I don't propose to go over the same ground again. I will say that back in May I certainly wasn't expecting the first new-style expansion to drop just three months later. I would have guessed November or December but the announced release date is August 22.

I guess we could have the trailer about now.

Not much to say about that, is there? It's ominous, alright. Listen to the thudding, doomy theme. Look at all that red and black. And what about that creepy, giant eye?

I will say the title is quite possibly the worst I've seen for an MMORPG expansion in a couple of decades: "Secrets of the Obscure". Clearly having been chosen purely on the grounds of sonority, it's both tautological and uninformative. It does sound good, though, I'll give it that. Until you think about it, anyway.

Thematically, SotO (Nice acronym. I'll give it that, too.) would have had me salivating eight or nine years ago, when I was deep into the lore of the game. Those were the days of heavy speculation over the import and significance of certain visible but inaccessible parts of Tyria, like the great wall, guarded by those irritating birds, or the floating mage tower that forms the focal point of the trailer.

Unfortunately, for me at least, those mysteries went stale long ago. I was curious then. I'm not now.

The most interesting thing for me is what all of this says about development cycles within the genre as a whole and GW2 in particular. It's becoming apparent that all of these imagined worlds - the successful ones, anyway - have life-cycles measured in decades, rather than the months or years that once would have seemed like a good run.

Like the adventures of comic-book heroes, the storylines of MMORPGs are turning into a responsilbility no one generation of creators can handle. If it isn't true already, it will be soon, that no-presently working on the games will have been there from the start. I'm wondering whether some of the games won't even still be around after everyone who was there at launch, players and developers both, has vanished, although I suspect most will wrap up when the last few original players pass away.

I'm beginning to learn that my own attention span for these things is finite. I don't not care yet, but I don't care as much as I once did and I can foresee the day when I won't care at all.

Do I care enough to buy this expansion? That's the pertinent question.

My immediate reaction, when I clicked through to check the price and found they wanted £21.99 for the Standard Edition was "Hell, no!" Reading the contents list, this doesn't look so much like an expansion as an extremely clever way of rebranding the Living World updates we used to get for free in a fashion that allows ANet to charge for them upfront.

Here's how they've done it. 

"A self-contained story with its own resolution will play out at launch. Later releases will seamlessly pick up where the launch arc concluded and tell the rest of the expansion's story. Additional features and updates across the game are planned for release every quarter."

I'm making an assumption that those "additional features and updates" will require a flag on your account confirming you bought the expansion. If so, that makes it almost literally the same format as the Living World once used, only active players used to get that for free and now they'll have to pay.

As for the rest of what's included, I'm not going to go over it all in the kind of detail I once would have done. If you're interested, it's all in the PR pack and Belghast has a very good analysis of the content. 

I'm more interested in picking out lines like this:

"The story of Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure will play out over installments, with new story content to look forward to at launch and in subsequent releases."

And this:

 "At launch, two new explorable zones will take you to the skies over Tyria; a new map will become available as the story progresses in future releases."

My emphasis.

Pay now, play later. You can't say they aren't being straight about it.

In my case I'm not playing at all, so I can afford to wait. Except, if I don't pre-order, I won't get 

"... an extravagant Arcane Spellweaver's Hat Skin, a weapon of your choice from the Eagle Eye weapon collection, and the Demon Hunter title."

Anet's emphasis. You can see where they want your eye to focus.

And I have to say... it works. There's a hat! It's hard to say to no to a free hat, even one you have to pay for.

So, yes, I might pre-order. Who knows? By the end of August I might be in the mood to go back. Twenty-two quid is a bit steep for what's on offer but it's not a lot in absolute terms. It's not like I'm going to be buying the Deluxe Edition at £43.99 or the Ultimate at £64.99. That would be crazy.

And there is one thing in the expansion that does interest me:

"Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure offers an updated path to unlocking your skyscale mount."

If by "updated" they mean easier and faster then they have my attention. It is described elsewhere in the Press Release as "streamlined", so I guess it will be quicker, at least. 

I don't actually want a Skyscale mount but it's been evident for a while now that all future content is likely to be designed on the assumption that every player has one. If you want to play anything but the oldest content these days you're all but obligated to have access to the key movement features - gliding, mounts and now the almost-flight of the Skyscale. 

The lunatic farrago required to get one fails my personal sanity test so definitively, I long ago decided that if it ever came to a choice between doing it or quitting the game I'd quit without looking back. I'll wait to see the details of the new path but if it's no worse than, say, getting the Griffin, I'll consider it.

I'll take my Arcane Spellweaver's Hat off to whoever at ANet finally figured out a way to monetize the content GW2 ,along with most other MMORPGs, have been giving away for years. I just hope it doesn't start a trend.

Based on the company's long-established inability to follow through or stick to a proposed course of action, I think that could be less of a risk than you might think.