Cost Benefit Analysis

Redbeard at Parallel Context has a thought-provoking post up, poking away at that hoary old flogging-horse, fun. Wilhelm at TAGN, meanwhile, has a weapons-grade, mad as hell and not taking it any more rant aimed squarely at everyone's least-favorite spaceman, Lord British.

At first read, the two posts don't seem to have all that much in common but I was struck by the way they both reveal a little of the darkness that lies in "giving people want they want". Or should that be what they think they want?

Looking back to the dying days of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King era, Redbeard brings back some of the mixed emotions aroused by the fast-moving changes Blizzard brought to what has always been a slippery and ever-shifting genre. The surprise, if there was one, should have been that we didn't see it coming. 

The myth about sharks is that they'll drown if they ever stop moving forward. Mmorpgs are the same.

I was almost done playing WoW, my first time through, when Blizzard introduced the earliest iteration of the automated group-making tool. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing for just over six months by then and we'd both seen about as much of the game as we cared to. She'd already stopped logging in. I think she'd gone back to EverQuest II. 

I hung on a little bit longer. I was waiting for the patch that introduced the Group Finder. I was very curious to see how it would work. I wasn't expecting it to change anything for me, personally. At that point I'd never pugged a dungeon in WoW. I'd barely even been in a dungeon in WoW and I had no plans to start. I was waiting to see how the innovation would change the game itself and by implication the genre.

In the event it took me just three runs to decide that a) the LFG tool was a clever and useful addition to the game and b) I had no interest in ever using it again. I could also see that it was a genie that would be very hard to cork.

For someone who had already just about had enough of Azeroth for the time being, far from opening up a whole new era of possibility, what it did was confirm my feeling that it was about time I found somewhere else to be. I moved on but I was very well aware that no matter how far or fast I was moving I wouldn't be able to outrun history. You can't unhave ideas. Automated group-making had been loosed upon the virtual world. Nothing would be the same ever again.

The Sparkle Pony, as Redbeard goes on to say, marked another turning point. At this remove I can't remember (Or be bothered to check.) if Blizzard was the first major player to introduce paid-for mounts into a Subscription game. I know Sony Online Entertainment did the same because I was there when it happened but whether that was before or after The Ensparkling I don't recall.

And it doesn't matter. Whoever did it first, soon everyone was doing it. And why wouldn't they? It turns out people like spending money on stuff that doesn't exist, even if they have to pay an entrance fee to get into the store. If you were making games to make money wouldn't you do the same? If people want to pay you twice, why not let them? 

Well, I guess one good reason would be if those same people ended up losing faith in your game's ability to entertain and amuse them and took their custom elsewhere. That didn't happen even though many said it would. 

Oh, I'm sure there were people who stopped playing and claimed it was because of all the shiny ponies sparkling up the streets and maybe sometimes it was even true. I mean, I left EQII's live servers for the tumbleweed emptiness of the Test server mostly because I got into a snit about the flying carpets that came with the Desert of Flames expansion. Or I said I did.

It was a factor, just like the coming of the LFG tool to WoW was a factor in my leaving that game. It just wasn't the main reason I left. It was, as these things so often are, a handy excuse to do something I'd been wanting to do anyway. 

It was also not forever. It so rarely is. Not for me, anyway. The plethora of retro and restart servers everywhere you look these days, coupled with the endless marketing drives to bring back former players to just about every mmorpg there ever was, suggests my yo-yoing loyalties are anything but unique.

Observational and anecdotal evidence suggests the membrane holding players inside or outside the current bubble of any mmorpg is becoming ever more permeable. The whole business model used to rely on locking paying customers down. Now it's increasingly about keeping the leash loose enough so they don't feel the tie until you tug.

Every barrier that comes down weakens the next, too. Those sparkle ponies seem almost quaint now. Strike the almost. Crowded places in just about every mmorpg I play (And most I don't, I imagine.) look more like carnival parades than whatever they're intended to suggest. As recreations of fantasy cities they bear about as much resemblance to even an imaginary reality as Disneyland's Main Street USA does to any American town you can actually drive through in your own car.

It's easy enough to see it all as a degradation of some kind of preternatural authenticity that existed before but is it? Was there ever anything more to the experience than what we brought to it? Aren't we just bringing different things, now? 

It's another of those "You say you want it but you don't" moments, only this time it's "You say you don't want it but you do." Money talks, as the saying goes, and what it's saying is "I want a Pony!"

Or a spaceship. In castigating erstwhile elder now turned pantomime villain, Lord British, Wilhelm brings in another rockstar dev, Chris Roberts, as a point of reference:

"I am not a fan of Star Citizen, but this announcement has made Chris Roberts palatable by comparison.  I don’t believe CR will ever be able to deliver on all, or even most, of the promises he has made, but he is selling a dream and has something tangible in alpha and has managed not to get bored and wander off mid-project.  If you were to ask me if you should buy a spaceship in Star Citizen or give money to Lord British, I’d say knock yourself out with the spaceship."

This really struck me as a crucial paragraph. A lot of people don't like Chris Roberts and his Star Citizen money press, largely on the grounds that the game he's been promising to make for years can and will never become a reality. I have always thought that misses the point.

Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a showroom for imaginary spaceships. There probably are people genuinely still waiting for a full-function mmorpg to emerge from the endless development process over at Cloud Imperium but I would hazard my best guess they aren't any kind of majority. 

Star Citizen is a toyshop. People buy shiny spaceships there and go Vroom! Vroom! in their minds. Space Sparkle Ponies if you like. And people do like. They like very much, which is why Star Citizen keeps making more money. 

In some ways, not having a real game to go with them makes the whole thing more fun. It's like me when I played Riders of Icarus. All I really wanted to do was log in, get my next amazing mount, ride it around the city for a while, take a few screenshots and log out. The fact that I knew there was an actual game there just put me under pressure to stop having fun and do some damn work. Go and do some levelling. Play the actual game. That, among other things, was what led to me drifting away.

In that sense, you might think that Lord British's titanic vagueness over what game, exactly, he intends to make "on the blockchain" shouldn't be all that much of a red flag. It is, though.

Here's the difference, as I see it, between Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott: Chris Roberts really likes spaceships; Lord British really likes money.

Which is not to say Roberts doesn't like money, too. Of course he does. We all like money. But he's pretty clear on what he's selling. If you pay him for an imaginary spaceship that's what you get. If you buy an NFT of a spaceship, as Tipa's been wondering, just what exactly does that get you that any mmorpg or cash shop can't sell you already?

I'm assuming here that NFTs are involved in Lord British's plans somewhere down the line, along with Play to Earn and all the rest of the buzzwords. 

The single, obvious advantage of selling sparkle ponies and spaceships "on the blockchain" rather through a regular cash shop is, as it seems to me, the license that gives you to charge orders of magnitude more money for them. I can see why that's attractive to some people. Mainly the people doing the selling but also those who think a thing's value lies in how much it costs. There are names for people who think that way. None of them are kind.

Given the lead time required to make a new mmorpg, there's every chance all this will be over by the game comes out, if it ever does. I guess that won't matter much. By then the last drips will have been squeezed from the low-hanging fruit and the whole caravan will have moved on to the next mirage, taking Lord British with it, likely as not.

Leaving us all to play happily with our ponies and our spaceships in the actual games that take actual money for imaginary toys. And even if some of those games are still just sketches of a promise of a dream, they'll still be more real than anything "on the blockchain".

Fun is where you find it and we already know where to look.

Spaced Out

 

After twenty years and what must be close to a couple of hundred mmo(rpg)s, I still can't resist the lure of something new. Even when I know for absolute certain I'm not going to enjoy it.

It used to be a lot easier back in the days when subscriptions were the norm. I'd apply for just about any beta I heard about but I often wouldn't get in. If I didn't, I'd have to wait for release to decide whether to risk my money. There weren't too many open betas or free trials in the first few years. 

Once World of Warcraft took off and more and more companies clambered onto the bandwagon, or at least chased despairingly after it as it disappeared over the horizon, it started to get easier and easier to try before you buyed. Bought. Damn these irregular past particples.

Even before the free to play revolution got going there was an ever-increasing range of options to satisfy your idle curiosity. Most live games added some kind of trial, usually a couple of weeks, which was plenty long enough to make your mind up whether to pay or walk. 

 

Pre-launch trials of some kind or other became the standard means of promotion. There were beta key giveaways, competitions, trial weekends, open betas. Then before long we were into the era of Kickstarter launches and Early Access, where somehow companies managed to convince us all to pay to test their unfinished games or to give them money before they'd even started making them.

Meanwhile, subscriptions were dying out. Former sub games were converting to hybrid or free to play and almost all new games, no matter their origin, required no more than a registration and a download to play. If you wanted to take a game for a drive around the block you were more than welcome.

Now even that seems old hat. As megacorps compete to control not only the product but the supply chain the battle of the platforms sees triple-A games being handed out like candy at a children's party, with similarly satisfying results.

I have never had even the slightest interest in trying Elite: Dangerous. I already know I cannot stand flight simulators, regardless of the skin. Air, space, water, I don't care. I can't even drive an imaginary car (never could finish the tutorial in The Crew) so what are the chances of me flying a spaceship?

 

Added to that, even if I could manage the controls, computerized space is really boring. Seriously, come on, it is. Does it ever look like anything but a bunch of glowing dots on a computer monitor? I'm a huge advocate of real-life space exploration but no-one ever claimed the bit where you get from one solar system to another would be fun. 

In space it's the objects that are interesting, not the emptiness they float in. All those great screenshots from EVE Online have planets and stars and spaceships in them, not blackness and a few, distant, barely-twinkling points of light.

So, naturally, as soon as I read that Epic were giving the game away for free I had to try it. I knew I wouldn't like it. I knew I'd never play it. But I had to have it!

 

Okay, it wasn't such a ridiculous idea. I thought much the same about Star Citizen but then I did try it and I liked it. I somehow got to grips with the basic controls. The space station and planet environments were genuinely immersive. Even flying the ship was fun, for a while.

I'd read that E:D has some ground-based content. I thought maybe that at least might be worth a look. Of course, first I'd have to get there...

I'm not going to try and  build up any suspense. I didn't get there. Not even close. And this time it very much was for the want of trying. I had a rush of good sense after a couple of hours and logged out before I could drive myself completely insane.

Those two hours I did spend with the game, they were all in the tutorial. I didn't finish it. 

I nearly did, which surprised me. I got to the very last part. I know that because the annoyingly patronizing examiner, who kept telling me it wasn't a race and I could take as long as I wanted, then nagged at me to go faster every time I slowed down, he told me I was on the final test. 

All he wanted me to do before he'd pass me was blow up an armed drone that could fight back. I'd managed to fly the ship through a twenty-one stage obstacle course, engage the ftl drive, target and destroy some barrels on a space-hulk and even chase down and explode an unarmed drone but I fell at the last hurdle. I couldn't prove I could defend myself.

Technically I didn't fail the tutorial. I just declined to finish it. Unlike The Crew, which I paid money for and still have never played, because completing the tutorial is mandatory and I can't do it, in Elite:Dangerous you do at least get the option to Skip Tutorial.

I took that option gladly but it was pretty obvious to me that if I couldn't even finish the kindergarten stage I wouldn't be getting much further. I was hoping at least to see the E:D version of Star Citizen's very impressive space station but no such luck. There doesn't seem to be one. It looks as though everything happens in the UI. 

 

I got as far as accepting a mission and auto-launching my ship. There I was, staring itno the black, speckled depths of flat, two-dimensional, monitor-space, when I had something of an epiphany: this is not for me.

I'd still like to see the planet-based part of the game, if indeed there is one, but not so much that I'm prepared to learn how fly a spaceship to get there. It's a bit much to ask, isn't it? I mean, when I go on holiday, no-one asks me to fly the plane. 

I guess that's why the game's called Elite:Dangerous not Space Tourist. Shame. Space Tourist sounds like a game I might even pay money for.

Complaints (It's My Department)

I've complained about this before but that's not going to stop me complaining about it again. For some very effable reasons (colder weather, daylight vanishing, people staying indoors) game developers always seem to start throwing freebies around and launching new product just when I find myself with the least time to enjoy it all.

This year it's even more ironic in that I spent the entire summer at home, free (at least when I wasn't hospitalized) to devote as much time as I wanted to playing video games and writing about them (not least because my medication made me extremely sensitive to sunlight so I had to stay indoors even when I was feeling pretty good).

And now I'm back at work so off they go again.

Astellia (which, as you will see if you follow the link (which is where you end up if you right-click the name in text and select "search google for "Astellia"" like I did) has possibly the most annoying landing screen since web site designers stopped using rinkydink music you couldn't switch off; almost as annoying, in fact, as this heavily over-parenthesized and scarcely readable sentence) just had a free weekend.

I only found out about it halfway through, too late to make time to take advantage of their generosity. There's a second chance to try out this new, supposedly oldish school MMORPG, without forking out for a "box" (that doesn't exist) or taking the we're-so-old-school-we-even-even-have-a-subscription option. That's next weekend, when I will almost certainly still not be able to find time to try it out.

Not that I was especially interested in Astellia anyway. As I mentioned somewhere once, it seems to instill apathy in all who've tried it. Still, I hate to miss out on an opportunity to post ill-informed snap judgments on new games based on blink-and-you'll-miss-it exposure to their charms, if any. Especially when it doesn't cost me anything.

Then there's The Outer Worlds, another game I never had the least interest in playing until loads of people started talking about it. I hate to be left out. Such a joiner, me.

It wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't that, apparently, you can play this brand new, high-profile, "exclusive" release for the princely sum of one dollar. That's if you join the beta for the XBox Game Pass for PC (I hope that's a working title. It's informative, sure, but it's hardly snappy, now, is it?) XBGPfPC, as no-one is calling it, has a confusing pricing structure. On full release it will run you $9.99 per month but you can get in for just $4.99 with the Introductory Offer Not sure if there are dates for either of those yet but you could be beta testing it right now for a buck. What's stopping you?

It's a pretty good deal even at the $4.99. There are some well-reviewed games in there. Now that I seem to be dabbling more in non-MMORPG titles there are several I wouldn't mind trying. It would have been great three months ago. Now?  Not sure I'd get round to using it.

Still, I might give them that dollar anyway. I probably ought to be able to get a blog post or three out of it, at least. That would be money well spent.

Finally, at least until the next Autumn Promo lands, there's an entire week of free flying in Star Citizen. Actually, more like free mining, given that's the tentpole feature of the new build. I did get as far as finding my login details and updating the client (an 8GB download) for this one.

I had a very surprisingly good time in the last Free Fly, back in the spring and I wouldn't mind another go. Unfortunately, while my details work fine and my account is still valid, my character has vanished into the void. I made a new character this evening and managed to get as far as finding my ship and launching into space but I was tabbing in and out so much, trying to refresh my memory on how to play the damn game, it crashed and I lost the will to carry on.

Maybe I'll get back to it before the hangar doors clang shut for another six months. Probably not.

And there we have it. Suddenly I have loads of ideas of things to do that will generate things to write about and I don't have the time to carry them through.

I would quite like to take another look at ArcheAge in its F2P version now that the Buy to Play version is making such a splash. There are supposed to be some quality of life improvements in Star Wars: The Old Republic that I really should check out. Anything that empties my overstuffed storage bays has to be worth a log-in. Occupy White Walls had another update. I always get a mild twinge of guilt when that happens and I let it pass...

No doubt there's more I've missed and more to come. Oh well, at least it gives me something to complain about.

Something In The Air: Star Citizen

I've always been fond of mass transit systems in MMORPGs. I think the first I ever saw was the underground train line in NeoSteam. As I recall, that one was nothing more than a loading screen but it still impressed me enough that I remember it even now.

The best-known is probably the Deeprun Tram that runs between Stormwind and Ironforge in World of Warcraft. That's a proper train (it really isn't a tram, whatever the gnomes say). It travels through a tunnel and gives you a good sensation of movement before pulling up in another station in a different city.

The metro in Lorville is like that only more so. The station serving Teasa Spaceport is clean, well-lit and orderly, as it should be considering the extraordinary number of heavily armed guards Hurston Dynamics employs. Digital boards announce arrivals and departures and everywhere civic posters and murals exhort responsible behavior with a scarcely concealed "or else".

As an introduction to the prevailing corporate culture it's worrisome. Hurston is a private planet, owned by a corporation of some kind. There's a quasi-military air to the place that smacks of despotism.

I wanted to keep moving. It felt like a bad place to loiter. I was feeling very conspicuous in my spacesuit. Everyone around me was breathing normally so I took it off.

As Pete mentioned in the comments, the street signs in Star Citizen  tell you, accurately, where to go. I followed them. Soon I was standing on the platform, waiting for a train.

A digital timer ticked down, indicating when the next was due. I'd picked the Commerce Line, which goes to Leavesden by way of Central. I figured there might be a shopping mall. I never found out. Something bad happened.

As the train arrived I heard myself start to cough. I stepped into the carriage and turned around to watch the view out of the window but as the doors began to close I coughed again. I think some warnings may have popped up but I didn't have time to read them. I keeled over and the screen went black.

I woke up confused. I had no idea where I was. In some kind of room. Hospital, maybe?

I sat up. I was lying on a bed, fully dressed. Around me I could see all kinds of things - a chair, a screen, something that looked like a refrigerator. There were bottles and books and utensils scattered around as though someone lived here. Someone none too tidy.

Out of bed I wandered around, picking things up and failing to put things down. Star Citizen seems a long way from simulating realistic interactions with objects, yet. After a while it dawned on me who lived there: I did.

Reconstructing what happened later, when I had a little more information, I realised I had, in game terms, "died" in the train carriage. That coughing fit wasn't ambient soundscaping; I was choking to death.

There are warnings all over Lorville, advising citizens to "wear respiratory protection". They aren't just flavor. I remember reading something about Hurston on my mobiGlas before I flew there. It said the planet was heavily polluted. Seems they weren't kidding.

Just as, when you die in space near Olisar, you wake up in your pod, in Lorville you wake up in your Hab. I didn't know I had a Hab but it seems I do. It's a big step up from the pod, with good headroom, a full-length bed and room to swing a cat. Not that I have a cat. No pets in space, not that I've seen.

Once I understood where I was, naturally I wanted to leave. I opened the door and stepped into somewhere very different from the Lorville I thought I knew.

My Hab was one of many on a filthy, litter-strewn corridor.  Outside my door was a pile of junk: a plastic crate, a broken monitor, a yellow mop. Trash lay everywhere, piled in corners or against the walls. The air was filled with a miasma of dust.

From the window at the end of the corridor I could see Teasa Spaceport. Recalling how I'd never been able to find my pod on Olisar after I left it, I made a note of my Hab number: C2. Then I set off to explore.

The Habs are in the Workers District. Conditions there are a very far cry indeed from the austere sterility of the Spaceport and the station. Everything is worn, used, uncared for. Torn posters and graffitti mar the walls.

People stand around, or sit, looking bored, defeated, lost. In rec rooms off-duty workers play pool, drink or just stare aimlessly ahead. One massive digital display stutters and cracks with static. No-one pays it any mind.

In the smarter part of town I saw wall commercials offering jobs. I guess this is where you get to live if you take one. Or, as I've discovered, even if you don't.

Like everything I've seen on Hurston so far it's convincing, authentic and depressing. If this is the future I'll pass, thanks. Or maybe I won't. I wouldn't want to live here but what was it the man said? Cheap holidays in other people's misery.

Wandering the hallways taking snapshots of the locals, eventually I came upon signs for the metro, which was when I demonstrated that I learn nothing from experience. Not the first time, anyway.

I was waiting for the train when I finally remembered the signs I'd seen about the condition of the air.
The train pulled up, I got on and began to cough. History repeating. I don't know if it was co-incidence, whether I'd been exposed for the same length of time, or whether the arrival of the train triggered a response. I knew what was going to happen, though.

My brilliant idea to stop myself from waking up in my Hab again was to grab for my mobiGlas and try to stuff myself into my undersuit before I coughed myself to death. Predictably, as the train moved off and I frenziedly issued commands, everything slowed to a slideshow and the game crashed.

I can't remember where I was when I got back in. It was either on the platform or the train. I also wasn't in my spacesuit but I wasn't choking and I wasn't back in the Hab so at least I hadn't died. 

I rode the train to the Business District and got out. It was just another part of the city but it could have been a different world. Golden statues thirty meters tall, pristine, shining surfaces, smartly-dressed men in suits. There were even plants.

No air quality monitors, though. Not needed. No exhortations, no veiled threats glaring from the walls, only motivational quotations from the Founders. Everything was rich and pure. But mostly rich. 

It was worse than the workers' slums. Far worse. I'd seen enough of Lorville to know I'd never want to live there.

Too tired to train it back to my Hab I settled on a seat in the atrium and stared out of the vast plexiglass windows at the skyline. Somewhere out there, beyond the city, I'd heard there was a real world.

Maybe I'd find it. I'd come this far, after all. Why stop now?

Four Stars Out Of Five (Such An Easy Flight) : Star Citizen

Sometimes you just have to admit you were wrong. I said yesterday that Star Citizen didn't interest me. It didn't. Now it does.

All the reasons I gave in the opening paragraphs of yesterday's post stand. I don't like space sims. I don't like complex vehicle controls. I don't want to build a trade empire. All those justified reservations burned away on the journey from Olisar to Lorville.

Immersion is a buzzword we toss around all the time, here in the MMORPG community. In recent years it's slipped its genre moorings, drifted into the mainstream. No-one entirely knows what it means but the one constant everyone agrees on is this: you know it when you feel it.

I felt it, flying free in Star Citizen. Immersed in the complexity of the project, the minutiae of the settings, the aesthetics, the detail, the solidity. Without any doubt, this is a brave attempt at the thing we used to say we wanted: a virtual world.

Or, to be more precise, a virtual universe, because if Chris Roberts has one overriding charactersistic it has to be not knowing when to stop. You can only wonder what Roberts Space Industries could have done if they'd restricted themselves to the construction of a single planetary future instead of trying to build a galaxy.

Picking up where I left off yesterday, as the lengthy exchange between myself and Pete in the comments suggests, I had wanderlust and I meant to sate it. The Olisar space station was impressive but I knew there was so much more to see.

I may not have been following Star Citizen closely but I have bloggers in my feed who write about it often. Alysianah of Mystic Worlds has made a second career out of reporting SC's progress. Scopique at Levelcapped writes about playing the game as though it were already live. From them and others I'd learned that SC has explorable cities and planets. I wanted to see some.

The problem was how to get there. Star Citizen has game but is sim. You don't just open a map and click an icon to be insta-magicked where you want to go.

Except you kind of do. That's sort of how the Starmap works, only first you have to get your ship moved to the launch pad, find it on foot, work out how to get inside (a lot harder than you might imagine), bring all the systems online, manually lift off and position yourself in space. Then you can click on a map, select a target, set a route and travel.

That simple. Yeah, right. I went through four of my five ships trying. The first time I ended up in the passenger seat and couldn't reach the controls. I gave up on that one. The next two made it into space but the Quantum Drive defeated me. I could spool but it wouldn't engage. The game crashed on me while I was trying to figure out the controls, probably because I have half the recommended available ram and far too much going on at once.

Each time I re-started I tried a new ship. Just getting inside the fourth, the big cargo hauler/fighter, Cutlass Black, stumped me for a while. The side doors opened easily enough but I couldn't clamber or jump high enough to get in. Eventually I gave up and went to YouTube, where I watched someone open a massive rear ramp that I'd somehow completely failed to see.

By this time I'd also watched the video Pete linked in the comments and I thought I knew what I'd been doing wrong with the Quantum Drive. I hadn't been aligning with the target correctly so the navigation computer could calibrate the route. Working out how to do that took a while, much of it with my ship spinning drunkenly as I tried to spot the right icon on the HUD.

It turned out to be a small yellow circle that looked nothing like anything in any of the videos I'd watched. Alphas, huh? I successfully aligned and calibrated, spooled up and held "B" to engage the Quantum Drive. And it worked!

I was trying to get to a planet called Hurston because I vaguely remembered one of the most recently-added cities, Lorville, was there. I wanted to walk around a proper city, not just a spaceport.

Hurston is a long way from Olisar Space Station. It took me a good while to find it on the star map but travelling there took a lot longer. Fifteen minutes, maybe, during which time all I could do was sit in the pilot seat and watch quantum colors blur past. I guess I could have fiddled with my mobiGlas or tabbed out but I was petrified of crashing the game so I just sat and waited.

The ship came out of Quantum space in orbit around Hurston. I opened the star map again, found Lorville on the surface, set the route, aligned, calibrated, spooled and let the drive take me around the curvature in a few seconds. And that was all the help I was going to get.

Somehow I had to fly down to the surface, find the city and land without crashing. Big ask. I put my foot down on the accelerator (aka spinning the mouse wheel) and took her in.

To say my approach was cautious would be to undersell the entire concept of caution. Think Reginald Molehusband reverse parking. I didn't care how long it took, I just wanted to get down in one piece. I couldn't see anything that looked like a city so I aimed for a road, figuring all roads would lead to Lorville.

To my astonishment and fist-pumping delight I got the Cutlass down onto the red desert sand in one piece. I opened the door, checking first I was wearing my undersuit, and stepped out.

The sun was setting because I always arrive everywhere at night. I looked around. There were buildings in the distance so I started to jog towards them. It took me a while and when I got there I found nothing but some deserted industrial caissons and towers. No sign of life. Definitely no city.

The sun was almost down. I looked back to my ship. A handy indicator on the HUD told me it was around 300m away. Jogging that far had taken me almost exactly the same time as it would take me to jog it in real life.

I figured if I couldn't see Lorville from where I was there was no chance of getting there on foot before my air supply ran out. Although maybe the atmosphere was breathable. I wasn't about to test it by taking my helmet off. I jogged back to the Cutlass and climbed in.

After consulting the starmap on my mobiGlas I had a distance and direction for Lorville. 37 kilometers. Good thing I didn't try to walk it. I got the ship off the ground and headed for the city.

Oh, boy! If I'd had a hairy old time of it trying to get from orbit to surface it was a stroll to the corner store compared to what came next. The Cutlass Black is not designed for low altitude, in-atmosphere travel.

I spent as much time upside down as the right way up. The computer thought I wanted to use the Quantum Drive and kept telling me I was too close to do that but I was just using the marker to navigate so I ignored it. I kept the ship at around 3000m above the surface, low enough to navigate by sight but high enough not to hit anything. Unless I ran into a mountain.

After ten or fifteen minutes of veering and yawing the desert began to turn industrial. I flew over yards and factories and refineries. Then the lights of skyscrapers filled the viewfield, green and purple and red. I gained a little height and slowed to a crawl. Now what?

I'd landed successfully in the desert so I thought I'd look for a big, flat space in the city. A park, a parking lot, a rooftop. And I could see plenty of options, only every time I came down to skyscraper level I got a "Restricted Area" warning. If I kept going the screen filled with orange hexes, then went orange altogether.

I tried that a few times and pulled back at the last moment. As I learned later I was seconds away from being fried by the city's defence grid. Microseconds, according to some. I come out in a sweat thinking about how close I came.

By this time, though, I had seen some huge signs for the Teasa Spaceport. I figured that must be where I was meant to land but every time I approached I got the same  "Restricted" warnings. My mobiGlas wasn't telling me anything so I went to Google.

Ten minutes later I knew all about requesting permission to land from the local authorities. I opened the comms channel and got my slot. Problem was, I couldn't see anything to tell me where it was. All I had was a distance counter measured in meters on the dashboard display.


So I used that. Like using a /loc to navigate in EverQuest, I trial-and-errored my way across the city, hanging just above the defence grid so I could try to get a visual on my landing pad. I was four kilometers away when I started. I'd watched a video that suggested it would be highlighted in green and eventually, when I came within less than 500m of my target, I saw it.

The landing pad looked miniscule, barely bigger than the ship. Also, as I got closer I could see it was down a hole. I despaired of being able to thread that needle but I figured if I crashed at least I might wake up in Lorville rather than back in my pod on Olisar. Anyway, what else was I going to do?

With even greater astonishment than when I successfully landed in the desert, I manoeuvered the Cutlass into place. I had the landing gear down and the wheels were all but on the ground when a voice warning sounded, telling me my landing space had been "re-allocated to another customer". You what now?!

I paniced. I swore and cursed but it was too late to do anything but land. Stuff the other guy, whoever he was. I'll take the fine or whatever. Once I'm down, I'm down. They aren't going to shoot me for a parking violation, are they? Are they??

They didn't. The ship touched down safely and I got another loud, insistent warning, telling me it was going to be moved into store and I shouldn't be inside when that happened. 

I was still trying to get the door open and scramble out when the game took back control. There was a brief loading screen and then I was standing in the landing bay. Not dead! Alive in Lorville! I'd done it.

The sense of satisfaction (and relief) was immense. I had no idea how long the whole thing had taken because I'd completely lost track of time. In fact, apart from when I'd had to go research mechanics on the web, I'd forgotten I was playing a game. I was just there, in my ship, trying to stay alive and get to my destination in one piece.

I collected my thoughts, looked around, noted the significant presence of armed guards in battle suits, and decided to make myself scarce. I found the sign for the rapid transit system and made my way down the echoing corridors to the metro station.

What happened next? Well, that's a tale for another day.

Floating In A Most Peculiar Way : Star Citizen

Star Citizen does not interest me. Not the simulation, not the game, not the financials. Okay, the drama is mildly amusing, I'll give Chris Roberts that.

Despite having been a Science Fiction fan for five decades I have no affection for spaceflight sims. I never played any of Chris Roberts other games. I tried Elite in the 1980s and hated it. I thought it would be exciting, exhillarating, evocative and thrilling. It was none of those things.

I tried other space sims. They were as bad or worse. They all appeared to have beeen made by people who loved spreadsheets for people who really loved spreadsheets. Worse, they were made for people who live to do things by hand that software does a trillion times better. A more egregious mismatch between concept and execution would be difficult to conceive.

The core problem with space sims is that they have nothing to do with space other than using it as a backdrop. "Space" sims are really a combination of vehicle sims and trading emulators. I'm not crazy about simulators of any kind but vehicle sims are the worst. I do not want to learn all those controls. If there's a vehicle in a game I want to press one button and have it take me where I want to go. At a push I might steer but that's it.

As for trading, I don't mind a dabble, now and again, but I do not want to make a career out of it. I want to be entertained, not stupefied.

Suits you, Madam.

As far as I can gather, the basic gameplay loop in most space sims consists of  first learning to operate imaginary vehicles, most of which seem to function like analog-era airplanes, then using your acquired "skills" to make an imaginary fortune, either by running a mind-numbingly repetetive mining operation or an equally tedious import/export business.

The idea that any of this happens in space is irrelevant. The whole thing could as easily involve container ships or trucks. Okay, there might be guns and pirates and explosions because these are video games, after all. It's just more backdrop, though. In the end all that matters is learning those keybinds and parsing those spreadsheets.

With all that in mind - absolutely no interest in Star Citizen and a longstanding antipathy for the genre it represents - naturally, the moment I happened to hear there was a week-long "Free Fly" I immediately dropped everything, made an account and downloaded the game.

It's not about enjoying yourself, is it? Sometimes you have to do these things. For science.

I won't go over the registration and installation process other than to say it was easy and efficient. The final footprint came to 48GB and I went to bed while it was downloading.

There's really not much I can say about this that isn't going to get me into trouble...

This morning I logged in and made a character. Female avatars have just been added so I made a Spacewoman. Gender differentiation is clearly a work in process, something pointed up by the choice in hairdos: all the styles for women were modelled by men.

The final result looked androgynous but it turned out to be something of a moot point because Star Citizen plays by default in first person and even in third person view (F4 to toggle) I couldn't turn the camera to see myself from the front. Doesn't really matter what you look like if you can't see yourself.

I woke up in a prison cell EZHab pod. There are real-life hotels like this. Don't stay in one if you have claustrophobia. Or a morbid fear of waking up with concussion.

I pottered around in my pod for a while, using "F" on everything. I picked up stuff. I dropped stuff. I picked it up again and put it back where I found it. I felt like I was playing a point-and-click adventure. This would make a good engine for one.

Take washcloth. Use washcloth on mug.

The controls were intuitive. WASD to move, F to interact. Didn't really need much else. I looked at the keybind menu, laid out on a virtual keyboard, presumably so you can print it out and stick it to your monitor like we did in 1987. I pressed F on the door and stepped outside.

The space station is very well done. The scaling is perfect, something that almost never happens in MMORPGs. The detail is good, too. I was disappointed I couldn't interact with the vending machines, especially since the introductory pamphlet I found in my pod suggested I would be able to feed myself at Big Benny's. Grab Eat!

I explored all the corridors. I went in the shops. I thought about buying a gun but I checked and I already had one so I saved my money. I stared out of the giant windows at the spinning wheels and the striped planet. I thought about when I went to see 2001: A Space Oddyssey in 1968, the year it was released, when I was ten years old, and how every space game since either looks like that or like Blade Runner. Or both.

After about half an hour I found the airlock and worked out how to use it. There was a warning, telling me to be sure I had an undersuit and a helmet. I checked my mobiGlas. Sorted.

I stepped outside. Then I got back in the airlock. Not much to see and I was worried I might fall off the edge. Ironic foreshadowing, much?

Without any great difficulty, I found the terminal where you can call valet parking and have them bring your ship around to the front. I had a choice of five ships. I must be pretty darned successful. Knowing my complete and utter incompetence when it comes to controlling imaginary vehicles I picked the one that looked like it would be the slowest and most sedate, the Aegis Avenger Titan.

The screen told me which Bay to go to so I went and there was my ship. I opened the rear cargo door and walked up the ramp. I couldn't figure out how to shut the door behind me so I left it open. There was another door, which went to the pilot's cabin. I clicked on the flight chair and scanned the controls.

They were surprsingly simple. I switched on the engine, hit the space bar (appropriately) and the ship lifted off. At this point in any space game I usually spin out of control, start to feel nauseous and log out.

Remember this door. You're going to need it later.

That didn't happen. In fact, Star Citizen wins a lot of points from me for what actually came next, which was that I had an adventure. A stupid, dumb, idiotic adventure, created wholly by my own ineptitude and appalling decision-making, yes, but kudos to the game for allowing the whole nightmare pantomime to play out in real time.

I had the ship roughly under control but I had no clue where to take it or what to do next. In a moment of inspiration I started fiddling with the buttons on the dashboard. And I shot myself into space.

It wasn't like I hit the Emergency Eject. I had to select and choose the option. I sort of knew it was a bad idea but it seemed like it might be something to do.

Are you sure you closed the trunk properly? I can hear a knocking sound.

When you're floating in space, fifty meters from a slowly spinning spacecraft, you get to re-evaluate your decision-making skills at leisure. My first thought was "I'm really glad I never shut that cargo bay door". Sometimes it pays to be careless.

Unfortunately, although the ship was turning on its axis quite sedately, it was still spinning too fast for me. I made a few attempts to get through the door but after the ship caught me a good clump, setting off damage warnings and spattering blood across the inside of my helmet, I decided to try something else.

I could see the space station in the distance. I had some form of propulsion in the suit. I figured I could aim for it, find an airlock and get back inside.

Five minutes later the station looked exactly the same. I wasn't even sure I was moving but when I turned to look for my ship it was so small I could hardly see it. If there's one thing Star Citizen nails it's scale.

Objects may be closer than they appear. Or farther away. A lot farther.

I checked my oxygen. It looked fine. I pressed down harder on W and kept going. After another five minutes I could tell I was getting closer but I still had a long way to go. Another fifteen or twenty minutes and my suit began giving me "Oxygen Low" warnings.

I wasn't too worried. There was a timer that told me I had 29 minutes left and by now I was close. The huge station filled my view. I scanned it for doors. Couldn't see any. Carefully I eased down to land on a flat surface, which is when I found that artificial gravity in Star Citizen is a local affair. No walking outside of designated areas.

With the timer ticking down I searched with mounting anxiety for any sign of a way in. I couldn't find one. There were places where I could see corridors inside the structure but no airlocks. Twenty minutes of air left and I was starting to panic.

Then I had an idea. As I was approaching the station I'd seen a spaceship launch and fly away. It must have come from the launch pad where I'd found my own ship, or somewhere very similar. There would be airlocks there. Wouldn't there?

Open the pod bay doors, HAL, I'm coming in!

I stopped searching and started watching. The clock kept ticking. Then I saw it. A small craft spinning up and away from ahead and to the left. I fixed the spot in my mind's eye and started my jets.

In no more than a couple of minutes I came in sight of a familiar flat surface: a launch pad. In the end it wasn't Hollywood close. I had about fourteen minutes of oxygen left when I opened the airlock and stumbled to safety. It was close enough for me, though, that's for sure.

I found the whole experience highly instructive. The trademark Star Citizen "realism", which is what Chris Roberts is shooting for and what many of his staunchest supporters are counting on, is recognizeably present already. It may not be worth $300m but it's not nothing.

I have no clue what happens if your character dies in SC. Maybe you just wake up in the Med Bay, maybe it's permadeath. I do know, though, that even playing a character I had just made, in a limited-time demo, I felt the pressure of the situation. If it had been my regular character in a live game I'd have needed a stiff drink and a lie down.

What, you never took a "Can't believe I did that!" selfie?

That degree of immersion isn't my thing any more but it was once. I can see why people are holding on to such hope for this project. Whether they'll ever get what they're hoping for is another matter but I can't help feeling it would be nice if they did.

Once I was safe in station I tabbed out and read up on how to fly a ship. Also how to land on a planet. There's most of a week left. I'd like to get my feet on solid ground and explore on foot. We'll see how that goes.

Whatever happens, I guarantee I will not be doing any more unscheduled EVAs. One adventure like that was plenty.

Light All The Fires

World of Warcraft is becoming infamous for its content droughts; those long months of blank canvas stretched between the tent-poles of bi- or even tri-annual expansions, when players in their hundreds of thousands lose focus, let their subscriptions lapse and wander off to other realms. GW2, the MMO that started out as the antidote to WoW but which is increasingly growing to resemble it, took its own first stab at the content drought concept this year, letting the game drift in a long, slow arc from the announcement of the expansion that was never meant to happen to the eventual launch of Heart of Thorns last month.

As the glare begins to dim a little on these new lands we have somehow found ourselves calling Magus Falls, light begins to dawn on just why some MMO developers have become so fond of their "cadences";  the drip, drip, drip of content in small packages that we saw exemplified best in ArenaNet's Living Story but which appears throughout the genre in various guises, from EVE's six-weekly "expansion" schedule to EQ2's seemingly inexhaustible calendar of "Holidays". Anything to keep the customer playing and paying.

For some inexplicable reason I began Saturday by reading some of Marc Jacobs' Foundational Principles for Camelot Unchained. CU (working title) is not an MMO to which I have paid much notice in the past and I haven't followed its development with any close interest. I'd never read these principles before.

Several things struck me as I skimmed through the lengthy perambulations. Marc Jacobs is a good communicator and an excellent self-mythologist, that was the main takeaway, but then so many superstar game developers are. It often makes me wonder if they're really in the right business. That aside, it was his apparent willingness to leave money on the table and let dissatisfied or just plain bored customers walk away that got my attention.

The Camelot Unchained website is peppered with bold statements and brave claims to this effect:

"We respect your commitment to a subscription-based game; in return, you won’t see thinly-veiled grabs for more money. Everything you need to succeed in Camelot Unchained requires skill and effort, not an open wallet."

"...we are an RvR-focused game and if you are not feeling it that night and nothing we have interests you, well, it’s time to take a break..."

"I want the freedom to take some risks with this game without enduring sleepless nights as I worry about whether a feature (or lack thereof) will alienate too many players, anger the boss, piss off the investors, etc."

And so on and so on. It's a coherent and rational plan and so far it's raised almost four million dollars. Star Citizen, on the other hand, another game whose development I have barely been following but, if what Derek Smart tells us is true, (don't go there..) is aiming to be quite literally all things to all players, is rounding the final corner on $100m.


As Saylah at Mystic Worlds observes in passing, Chris Roberts' behemoth already has some 900,000 backers signed up and waiting to play. Come launch day (whenever that might be) that number could reasonably be expected to grow into the millions. Mark Jacobs is bullish about the degree to which that isn't likely, necessary or even desirable for his game, which he anticipates "even if successful has no chance of threatening Dark Age of Camelot’s peak subs (250k)".

Saylah is understandably enthused by the chance to live, fully if virtually, in another world or in this case another universe. "It's hard to explain to anyone who's not passionate about gaming, MMOs and/or space sims why people continue to invest so heavily in this project. For many of us, SC has a dream list of features, combined in a way that no company has ever attempted before" she says. She goes on to describe what must be many an MMO player's dream: "The atmosphere, graphics, attention to detail, realism and cinematic soundtrack is breathtaking to behold. No one's pictures will do it justice. The way they knit your introductory experience together, it feels like waking up in a future where man has conquered the stars."

It's what I thought I wanted, once. The chance to lose myself in another reality. To be there. It's a wish, though, that like all magical wishes, comes with a warning. Mercury expresses it well when he writes at Light Falls Gracefully about the freedom that comes from accepting someone else's rules: "There is a certain something that is called into being with the arrival of the holiday events at year’s end when the rules of everyday life are put up on the shelf for a while. As a child, these times were magical: decorations, a festive atmosphere, and a fundamentally different tone to the rhythm of life filled my little body with wondrous awe. Nowadays, the magic lies in pretending that I am not a responsible adult and that these figments of our collective imagination are somehow the real thing."

Heart of Thorns has proved much more involving than I imagined it would be. Before it landed I had arrived at something close to equilibrium in the allocation of my gaming time. I had a stable of titles I was paying some attention to and while GW2 consumed the predator's portion there was still time to flit between half a dozen other MMOs and make something that could, in a poor light, be taken for progress there.

This is a familiar experience. Every time an MMO in which I'm emotionally invested drops a large update it wins focus from all the others. It's a time of great excitement but it comes at a cost. Everything else slides. When several games decide to overlap their major updates time won't stretch to accommodate them. One will win.

And that's how I came to understand that content drought isn't necessarily a bad thing. In a way it's like breathing out. It took ArenaNet's six-months of purdah and pre-expansion crunch to create the space for me to break the pattern of habit and open out my horizons again. I'm actually happy we won't be seeing any more Living Story updates this year and quite probably not before next spring.

I have a long, long list of MMOs that I want to get back to, to re-invest in, to play. Even updating the clients and logging in would be something. There seems to be a lot of that around at the moment - Tipa, reminding me about Landmark, Wilhelm dipping back into LotRO, Stargrace firing up ArcheAge... Plus the conveyor belt never stops. There are already half a dozen new candidates I'd like to give the once-over, although not necessarily the ones on Syp's list of conversation starters.

I'd welcome some downtime just for all that although I know I'll probably have to wait for Wintersday and Frostfell and all the other quasi-Christmas celebrations to pass first.

Mark Jacobs isn't unduly worried about players like me, those who have itchy feet and eyes elsewhere. He says of his avowedly niche, specialist offering: " If on some nights it isn’t what you are looking for, well, that’s okay, your realm’s enemies will be still waiting for you when you get back." And, barring the game going dark for good, they always will.

These days that feels closer to what I want. Not a world that feels more real than the real world, where missing a day feels like a small death; more a room in a mansion filled with rooms, all warm and waiting for my return, with my things all safe where I left them and a small stack of welcome-home gifts waiting on the mantle for me to open.

In the end though I don't get to choose. When the game takes over the game takes over. That's why a little drought sometimes can quench a thirst.