Pale Lilac Snow: Elder Scrolls Online

Yesterday evening saw my return to Elder Scrolls Online, a little over a year since the last login, when I stuck my head around the door of my free inn room, saw how dark and pokey it was and promptly logged out again.

In all the time I've played the game (can't be more than a few hours in a few years) I've only ever tasted a single race and class, Khajiit Dragonknight, levelled, painfully, slowly, sporadically to level twelve. All I've seen of the game is the starting area for that combo.

Or maybe it is. Hard to remember. ESO hasn't made much of an impact. About all I recall are some caves, a bit of woodland, a rocky island where some orcs live. Oh, and a beach. Maybe I might have seen a strip of desert once, on a boat trip.

To be honest, it's all a bit of a blur. I do know I haven't seen any snow before, though, so the place I found myself in last night has to be new.

With cat-people off the menu, the options that faced me at character creation weren't doing much. There seemed to be a lot of elves, never a happy omen. Some rather ordinary-looking humans. One of those viking/barbarian types.

Nothing really bit. The faux-authentic gear wasn't helping.

I don't know, time was when what I wanted from a high-medieval MMORPG was armor looking like the artist sketched it through dusty glass at a down-at-heel market town museum in some central European backwater but I've been spoiled. These days I'd rather come on like the sugared-up second cousin of a Ruritanian princess, tricked out for a tour with a favorite band of glam-folk troubadours, on the run from that day job in the circus.

I like a bit of color, in other words. Not getting much of that here.

So I chose the lizard. If you can't dress exotic, be exotic, right? And they get frills on their heads. Or punk rock spikes. I went with the spikes.

It looked good in character create but in most MMORPGs no character design survives contact with the game engine. The screenshots tell the old story here. Ninety minutes of play, I really only got a good look at my character once.

That was the oddly blurred shot above. I'm not even sure how it happened. Must have hit some chance combination of keys. It's the only shot where you can - just about - see the character's face. Not that a lizard shows much expression. And the face markings and head-spikes are hidden under the rough cloth cowl.

ESO is one of those games where the graphics look better in screenshots. It's funny how often that happens. Or the other way round. I was only saying the other day how The Hammers End looks better than the screenshots suggest.

It must be something to do with settings. I confess that's something I almost never pay any attention to in any game, although given the ridiculous number of screenshots I take I almost certainly should. I tend to shy away from getting involved too closely with things like that, for my own safety. The last thing I need is discovering something like Black Desert's super-sophisticated in-game photo options. No-one needs a virtual David Bailey.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking at my character. I was looking at the snow. It was pretty good snow and I'm something of an afficionado. Snowficcionado. It's a word, now. I once wrote a piece on Good Snow Art for a comics fanzine. I may have done something similar here, on this blog.

Snow does make everything look better. There's all that blue in the palette. I know humans can recognize more shades of green than any other color but green in games tends towards the bland, except in jungles. Blue has much more resonance.

Blue, white, red. Winter landscapes, there's sometimes a surprising amount of red, bleeding into the blue, leeching pale lavenders and mauves. All these shots drip with it. It makes the cold seem so warm.

Which is probably just as well because, lizard. Cold-blooded, yes? Unless Tamriel evolution is very different, which of course it may be because, magic.

Anyway, I was surprised to find my lizard, whose descriptive background had mentioned something about swampland, waking up in a log cabin somewhere in the frozen north. A quick conversation with the nearest person confirmed no more than I'd expected: shipwreck, washed ashore, unconscious, found by villagers, now pressed into service against imminent threat. Yadda yadda and like that.

Could there be a more generic opening? Well, I guess. I mean, lizard in the snow, that's a twist. Explanation as to why or even how any of it happened, though? Not forthcoming.

Of course, I did opt to skip the tutorial. Maybe it was in there. But the game helpfully told me I'd done it before on another character so I didn't have to go through it again and I took the offer, gladly. No matter it was half a dozen years ago and all forgotten now.  No matter I'd been a tiger, then, in another place. Let's press on.

Out of the cabin I ran around some. It was daytime, for a wonder. In the time I played, night never fell. It did get a bit less bright for a while, one time. It helped a lot, the sun on the snow, the brightness. I'm losing patience with spending half my playtime in thick twilight let alone deep night. It was nice, being able to see, for once.

I grabbed some quests as I happened across them. I didn't seek them out or linger. I don't like either the font or the background. Harsh. Dark. Abrasive. These things affect my enjoyment strongly. I have these issues with print, too. There are novels I just won't read because of the way the text lies on the page.

If it's good, you'd make the effort but the writing in ESO is ponderous. No, that's maybe not the world. Ponderous suggests uncertainty and quest text here is far from uncertain. Too confident, if anything. Portentous, that could be the word I'm groping for. Or pretentious, though usually I like that. No, it's portentous, all right. Portentous and leaden. Lies heavy on the line. A common failing of fantasy, transcribed here faithfully from those endless series that stretch an author's career across decades.

Although... let's be fair. The few quests I did last night weren't all that bad. Better, or at least, less wearing to read than those I remembered from the other starting area. More perfunctory, less long-winded. Mostly "go find this guy" and, when I found him, "go do this thing".

At one point I almost felt a sense of urgency. A ship sighted, an invasion anticipated. Danger blowing in on the wind. You wouldn't know it from the voice acting, of course, still as first table-reading as ever. I have a theory about this. It applies to video game voice acting in general, not just to ESO. I don't know enough about the process to begin pontificating. Yet.

I didn't do a lot of questing, anyway. Mostly I ran around in the snow, taking snapshots, killing stuff. I ran into a bandit camp early on. Expected to die, being only level two or three. Tried to con the bandits, couldn't figure out how, so I blasted one to see what would happen. What happened was I killed him.

So I killed some more. Quite a few. Got a hat, put it on. Burned some supplies, freed a captive. Bandit Camp 101. I dinged. It occurred to me this must be the famous equalization. One zone for all.. Makes you wonder why levels at all except I guess without them there'd be none of that drip drip drip, progress. I suppose now I can go anywhere, kill anyone, like in that old joke, the one about the army. 

My lizard's a sorceror. I thought maybe it would be easier than melee, given the awful, awful controls. It wasn't, actually. If anything it was harder. More keys to press, can't just spam LMB/RMB. But I lived, bandits died. Can't complain.

And it was fun, kind of. As much fun as the horrible controls let it be. I started thinking maybe I should get a controller and use that. Could hardly be worse. I was already thinking about it. I even looked at some on Amazon the other day.  

After the bandits I went to some kind of temple, swarming with skeletons. Again, I lived, they died Or undied. Whatever the verb is. I do like fighting bandits and undead at low levels. Simple pleasures. If these count as low levels, that is.

The game was kind of busy. Really busy, actually. There were players everywhere. It seems ESO etiquette dictates you just pile on when you see someone fighting. People were always "helping" me to kill stuff. I got the loot so that worked out. I didn't reciprocate, though.

I found all my runes, opened the crypt door, looking for the necromancer. If I followed the plot I think I was supposed to kill him but I never even saw him. There was a line. I didn't bother waiting, just spoke to a ghost. He seemed to think I'd done whatever it was I'd come there to do. Fine, then.

I grabbed a bit of paper that said something or other and left. Gave it to the guy who'd sent me. He was waiting right oustside, which saved me a run. He asked me to go back to the village, tell someone what had happened, not that I really knew what that was. I did it anyway and the guy said something bad was going to happen so it would probably be best if we all ran away. More of the supposed realism? Maybe, but it's going to be tough adventuring if all the quests go "check out if something bad's happening and if it is come tell me so we can all run away".

I said I'd tell a few other people and we'd be off but actually all I did was move five feet away and log out. I'm sure he won't mind waiting although on form so far it could be another year or two.

Or maybe not. It was kind of fun. I think ESO may well be another of the growing list of MMORPGs (FFXIV, LotRO) I enjoy the more, the less I quest. Now if I could just figure out a way to make the combat not actively annoying...

Room At The Inn : Elder Scrolls Online

When I re-organized my HDD, one of my vague plans was to take another look at both Black Desert and Elder Scrolls Online. They each have settings that I find visually appealing and to some extent I enjoyed the relatively brief times I spent exploring their worlds.

Of the two, I liked BDO a lot more. The lore may be considerably less developed and the mechanics significantly more gamelike but it always felt much more like a "real" place to me. The various NPCs seemed, somehow, to be "there" in a way they don't in ESO.

It was very easy to imagine life going on in without me in Calpheon or Valencia, whereas in Glenumbra or Betnikh I felt more as if I was walking around a historical re-enactment. It was as though the NPCs were all actors, who'd heave a sigh of relief when I logged out because it meant  they could slip back into their everyday clothes and go home.

The overriding reason I enjoyed BDO more, though, was the mechanics. Both games use a form of mouse-locked, reticule-aimed action combat but in Black Desert that results in a wild, freewheeling romp whereas in ESO it's a jarring, discordant lurch.

Now, this is the kind of place I was thinking of...

Black Desert also benefitted strongly from having excellent personal housing. Property there is plentiful, inexpensive and appealing. The way you can open the windows of your home to look out and see other players passing by, even though your house is instanced, seems more magical than the actual magic in the game.

As I posted, when I'd patched up BDO and recovered my login details, the first thing I did was go back to my house in the hills. I was surprised to find I immediately remembered the way and delighted that everything there was exactly as I'd left it. When I think about persistence in MMORPGs I suppose this is the kind of thing I have in mind.

I'm not quite in Syp's class in believing that all MMOs should have personal housing but I do believe it acts as a very powerful incentive to retention. For that reason alone I find it strange that any developer would resist having it in their game, the way both Blizzard and ArenaNet seem determined to do.

When I briefly played ESO it didn't have housing but it wasn't long before ZeniMax added it to their increasingly impressive offer. I'd read a few things about it that made it sound a bit insipid but I wanted to take a look for myself. Once I'd got the game running and my account working - no short process - I logged in and went to look for somewehere to live.

Sounds interesting.

Okay, that's not strictly accurate. What I really did was log sraight out again and go searching for Add Ons.

I'm the kind of player that generally doesn't bother with third-party programmes for MMOs. I prefer to use the default UI, wherever possible. In ESO it's not. If you stuck with the defaults you'd never know where you were going, what you  were doing or how you were meant to do it. You most likely wouldn't even know what it was that you'd done after you'd done it.

Even with Add Ons giving me a mini-map, an on-screen quest journal, visible hot bars and an inventory with visual iconography I still didn't really know what I was doing. I managed almost two levels and an entire solo dungeon using only auto-attack because I had no idea where any of my weapon skills were or, indeed, if I was meant to have any.

Eventually I got that sorted out, which made killing things about two orders of magnitude faster and easier, at which point, naturally, I decided to stop the slaughter to go look for a house. I'd picked up a quest somewhere that wanted me to go to Daggerfall and speak to someone about an Inn room. I was already in Daggerfall so that seemed like the place to start.

You're really not selling it, Felande.

Whoever wrote the quest dialog for "Room to Spare" must have had their tongue stuck in their cheek so hard it probably left a permanent mark.  The whole thing's so arch you could run a railway over it.

The conceit is that having an adventurer staying at the Inn confers such status it's worth letting the room out for free. The landlady, Felande Demarie, somehow manages to smirk and wink her way through the entire catalog of things you, the player character, can and can't do in your room, including setting up crafting stations, displaying your trophies, housing your assistants and even stabling your mounts, without ever quite breaking the fourth wall.

It sounded like an awful lot to be going on in any Inn room but, when she finally let me see the room she was offering, I began to doubt her sanity. It was, without any question whatsoever, the smallest in-game accomodation I have ever seen. If it was any smaller you'd have to call it a cell. It's so tiny it makes the original single-room accomodation in 2004's EverQuest II look like a penthouse suite!

It also comes with no furnishings at all. None. Nada. Unless you count a single, guttering candle on the floor, which I do not. I stood there, gawping at my new home in dumbfounded amazement. I couldn't even get enough distance to take a screenshot that showed more than one corner at a time. Felande had made a point of telling me the room was too small to permit dueling. She's not kidding! You couldn't swing a rat in there, let alone a greatsword.

Monastic, I believe the term is.

All the same, it's dry and indoors, which puts it two places above anywhere my Khajit Dragonknight has spent the night so far. If he could just lay his hands on a bed...

You would think a bed would come as standard in an Inn room. I mean, I've stayed in all kinds of places, from five-star hotels to the box rooms of private houses, but never have I paid money to stay anywhere that didn't come with some kind of bed. Not in MMOland. There you get neither bed nor breakfast unless you bring your own.

So off I went to do some research on furniture. It seems you can buy the basics - the very basics - from NPC vendors, one of whom plies her trade out of the very same Rosy Lion Inn where I'm now living. You can also quest for a few things and you can either take up carpentry and make furniture or buy it from those who did.

It's motivating. I like furnishing rooms. I certainly like it a lot more than I like following ESO's so far unengaging main storyline or enrolling in the seemingly endless series of dour, downbeat, depressing side-quests and regional narratives that pepper the otherwise charming cities, towns, villages and farmland.

Triple-A Housing

ESO has received some considerable praise for its quest writing. I quickly worked out why back when I was playing before: the people who praise it like it because it's just like the stuff you find in all those endless, by-the-yard, multi-volume fantasy epics. I think of the authors who churn them out as the literary equivalent of the kind of prog rock band that makes a living playing in the middle of the afternoon on the second stage on Sundays at festivals all over Europe, when everyone's either too stoned, too exhausted or too hungover to pay attention.

I remembered that from last time but I hadn't really remembered just how stultifyingly bland the voice acting is. It's not that it's bad, per se. It's not like the astonishingly crass and inept voicework that EQ2 foisted on us a decade and a half ago, when that game promoted itself as the "first fully-voiced MMORPG". It's just flat, inert, lifeless and dull.

It's so bleached of human feeling, in fact, that I found myself wondering whether whoever was directing the recording sessions actively forbade the voice actors to express an emotion. Any emotion. Given that these are clearly professionals, who understand the lines, it's very hard to imagine them throttling back so consistently unless their paycheck depended on it.

After a few minutes I started skipping the spoken dialog. I can read the text in about a quarter of the time it takes the audio to play through so questing began to ressemble listening to FM radio while driving through a series of tunnels. Next time I think I'll switch the dialog off altogether, assuming there's an option for that.

There will be a next time, though. ESO's is a huge world and it seems one very well worth exploring. What's more, I have a home base now, and a prospectus of other places I could hang my hat. If I had a hat. Or a hat stand.

Things are looking up. One of these days, maybe I'll even get myself a bed.

Seasons Come, Seasons Go

As the days drift into summer and I prepare to go back to work after a longish break it occurs to me to take stock of what I'm currently doing and what I might do in the months to come, at least when it comes to playing MMORPGs. For an uncomfortably long time it felt as though just about all I played was GW2 and, while I still play far more of that than anything else, at least it seems now that other games and projects are beginning to push their way in, at last.

GW2

GW2 is still dominant. I have a fanciful idea that if Mrs Bhagpuss wasn't so keen on it I might play less but the fact is I still play a lot of it when I'm home alone and she's out at work. It remains one of the best pick-up-and-play MMOs I've ever enjoyed. There's always something to do or somewhere to go and very little ever gets in the way of going there and doing it.

I think very much of the game's success rests on that incredible ease of access. I've never known any MMO with such an ever-open, revolving door, through which old faces re-appear without fanfare day after week after month after year. I wonder whether the upcoming major revamp of the trait and skill system will affect that negatively? I know that having to redo all my choices after a similar event has all but killed my interest in other games.

As we all twiddle our thumbs as we wait for Heart of Thorns the focus in our house is very much on the War in the Mists. Since Yaks Bend won the third WvW tournament last autumn and rose to the ranks of Tier Two we've been locked in a never-ending grudge match with Fort Aspenwood.

It's important to treat your enemy with respect.

Apparently there were some kind of shenanigans last week while we were away on holiday and this week there is a war of retaliation going on. We woke up on Saturday morning to find that YB had taken control of the whole of FA's borderland and waypointed all their keeps, which is the WvW equivalent of slapping someone in the face with a leather gauntlet. Our crazed and glorious leader, who almost literally never sleeps, then proceeded to stay awake for more than 48 hours making sure we held the lot.

Since then it's been a series of huge battles that never seems to end. All weekend I kept meaning to log out and do something else but there was always an emergency somewhere. As I write this we are still just short of 7k ahead, down from a high of 22k and I'm itching to log in and see what the maps look like.

Enter the Mesmer. Take 2.

I did find time to make my second mesmer, something I've been meaning to do for a while. As we approach HoT I'm trying to consolidate onto a single account for expansion purposes and my only mesmer is on the wrong one. The gold-to-gems exchange rate was as good as I've seen it for a while at the weekend so I dug into my warchest and bought another character slot.

The natural inclination was to go for yet another Asura although my first Mesmer is a human for some reason I forget. Mrs Bhagpuss has a Charr mesmer that she says is very funny to play. In the end though I decided to go for a Sylvari, just because there's an outside chance that race might have some special role in the expansion content and I currently don't have one on the right account.

The next question is whether to level the mesmer normally or boost her with xp and leveling scrolls. Since I like leveling so much chances are it will be the former although I did use one of the Advance Directly To Level 20 scrolls just to get a bit of a running start.

GW2 probably takes up two-thirds to three-quarters of my playtime each day. The rest is split between Everquest, EQ2, Dragon Nest and now Villagers and Heroes.

No Officer, I wasn't begging. My feet were just tired. Yes, I'll move along now.

 

Everquest

EQ at the moment seems to mean Ragefire. My necro dinged nine at the weekend. He's still trudging to Blackburrow and back every session, combining leveling with faction-raising. It sure takes a lot of gnoll teeth to convince that Captain Tillin a gnome's not up to no good.

I'm acutely aware I ought to get some grouping in just for the fun of it but I can't see it happening this side of Kunark. I'd love to do the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen again. Maybe I should start a druid in preparation. Still, I've already played more than I expected and I think there are a few more sessions left in me before I wander off.

When Ragefire peters out I'd like to get back to my Magician who's currently a smidge away from dinging 90. It would be lovely to have a max level character in EQ again but the level cap is now 105 and those 15 levels, solo, even for a mage, the most capable of all solo classes in modern Norrath, would take me a year of Lessons at least.

Remember me? No, apparently not.

 

EQ2

The channeler I started in EQ2 seems to have gone dormant. When I do log in it's mainly to do the Phantom and Tranquil Sea weeklies for the tokens and armor. My Berserker is slowly kitting himself out to a very good standard for a solo character. I skipped the recent Rum Cellar DLC, which seemed mainly suitable for groups, but I will certainly be buying the autumn "Campansion", assuming it has the regulation amount of solo content.

The recently-announced server merges are unlikely to affect my regular characters, all of whom are on Freeport, the second most populated server behind Antonia Bayle. Server merges can spell bad things for an MMO but in this case its something people have been asking for for a long time so its probably good news on balance.

I seem to have gone all pastel crayonny.

 

Wind-Down Games

Dragon Nest has gone unplayed since I got back from Spain last week but only because of lack of time, not interest. There is a risk it might conflict directly with the new shiny, Villagers and Heroes, for the same end-of-day wind-down slot, though.

They aren't really anything at all alike, DN being fast, action-oriented and badly translated while V&H is stately, steady and beautifully written, but somehow they have a similar, light-hearted, ironic humor and a bright, cheerful surface that makes them both ideal to play just before bed. I hope I'll find time to keep playing both, unlike previous candidates like Eldevin or Istaria which seem to have slipped off the table entirely.

 

TSW

The changes to overland solo content difficulty in TSW didn't do much to hold me after I popped in to check it out. They're good changes but, honestly, I never really had much trouble with that part of the game. I soloed all the way to the end of Carpathian Teeth on my original run. It's the instances that I always had trouble with.

I would love to finish the main sequence quest from the original TSW sometime but I am stuck on a fight about three chapters or so from the end (I think) and I can't face doing it again. I'd need to do whatever it takes to overgear myself because it seems to be a DPS issue (as well as an incompetence one, but my experience in MMOs is that you can almost always upgrade your character to compensate for your inability as a player if only you wait long enough). Even the addition of mounts hasn't been enough to lure me to log back in.

He said wait right here, I'll be back soon. But that was months ago!

 

ESO and ArcheAge

ESO and ArcheAge both ended extremely abruptly for me. I was enjoying both of them, playing and blogging, and then I just seemed to hit a complete full stop.

In ArcheAge it was the moment I filled up my work point bar or whatever it's called. It felt like that was what I'd been aiming to do and now I'd done it and I literally never logged in again. Crazy.

In ESO it was the change to F2P. My free 30 days finished, there was a short gap before it went free and that small hiatus was enough to derail me. Again, haven't logged in since.

WildStar

I'd like to get back to both of those sometime but then there are other MMORPGs to consider. Not least WildStar. I looked at the box on Amazon yesterday. I was about to put it in my basket when I noticed the game is Region Locked, something I'd completely forgotten. I really dislike playing on European servers so now I have to think about whether to buy a box from Amazon.com (they will ship them, I checked) so as to get a US server code.

Or maybe when the game goes F2P it won't be region-locked any more. If so, I should maybe just wait. A region-locked F2P would seem very weird unless it was franchised to different companies across the world, which I don't believe WildStar is.

 

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Then there's SW:ToR. It's not a game I ever had any interest in playing but the current change in development direction makes me wonder if the original MMO-proper part of the game will be around for much longer. The upcoming Knights of the Fallen Empire that everyone's making such a big hoo-hah about doesn't sound so much like an expansion to me as a completely different game.

A game that I wouldn't call an MMO at all. With the months of 12X xp leading up to launch and the xpack coming with a free level 60 anyway it looks very much as though BioWare is going out of the MMO business and retrenching back to the single-player/co-op story model on which they built their latter-day reputation.

If that's the plan then SW:ToR would become an instanced lobby game not a real MMORPG. Maybe between now and the coming of KotFE will be the last chance to play the game as a proper MMO. If so I would want at least to give it a look before it goes away because for sure there will be no Original SW:tOR Emulator Project coming along later to satisfy anyone's historical curiosity.

So there's all that, plus a gazillion other possibles like Project: Gorgon and the Pathfinder free trial and Trove and who knows what else. I haven't even finished the main storyline in City of Steam, something I thought I'd have been done with a couple of years ago.

Ah well. To every thing there is a season as they say. Or, in the case of MMOs, a session, at least.

Smelling The Flowers: TESO

I'm still playing TESO. It's a slightly strange experience. Similarities with Vanguard continue to abound, mostly in the look and feel, rather than the gameplay or the content. As Lani mentioned in the comments to a previous post the orc island, Betnikh, shares distinct similarities with the orc starting areas on Telon, although not nearly as much as the previous desert areas did with Qalia.

It's all there in the architecture, the textures and, particularly, the color palette. The music and the ambient sounds also throw some weight behind the associations. And the rain. Always the rain.

I logged in the other evening and the first thing I read in zone chat was someone asking plaintively "Do we always have to fight at night?" Weather and light conditions do seem to play a significant role in Tamriel. I'm not sure what the day/night cycle is, exactly, but I believe it was still night-time when I logged out over two hours later.

The next day, when I logged back in, I found myself in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. I spent the best part of half an hour trying to take screenshots. If there's a more effective way to waste fifteen minutes than trying to hit a key at the exact moment a flash of light appears in a video game I don't want to know about it.

Catch the lightning!

In the end I fired up FRAPS, took a couple of minutes of video footage and pulled the frames out of that. And they still looked terrible. I guess you had to be there. It was a darn good storm! I'd give the oscar for Best Weather Effects in an MMO to FFXIV but these run it close.

Other than trying to photograph lightning I've mostly been questing. Ye gods, but there are a lot of quests here! Kaozz at ECTMMO mentions the exceptionally high quest density in Allods but I can't believe they have more than TESO. I can barely walk five paces without acquiring a new goal in life.

Several people have made representations for the quality of the storyline in TESO but so far it all seems rather generic. Most of the quests seem unoriginal. There's a surfeit of events of earth-shattering importance, especially given the single-figure level range. Also the degree of trust shown in and responsibility given to complete strangers is terrifying. No wonder society is on the verge of collapse.

The writing continues to be, on the whole, rather flat. The voice acting remains, by and large, uninspired. There are exceptions.

Wait, let me guess. Under "Profession" in your passport it says "Loveable Rogue", right?

The lengthy sequence with Captain Kaleen and her crew is quite intriguing. It introduces several moderately memorable characters, some of them even voiced by actors who seem to be awake, and I am beginning to experience something of the "moral dilemma" aspect of the gameplay that I've read about.

Without giving too many spoilers, there are decision points where my character can't, as I as his player would like him to do, tack carefully around the fixed positions of various NPCs and stay on the right side of all of them. Choices have to be made and with those choices, perhaps, enemies.

This is all rather well done. By the time I had to make the choices I felt that I knew enough about the individuals making demands on me, and about the situation, to take a meaningful decision. More importantly,  I had a reasonably clear grasp on how my character felt about several of the NPCs, what his emotional reactions would be and where his loyalties might lie. When it came to the moment there really was no decision to make - I knew he could only act one way and would have to deal with whatever consequences arose.

All of that may be good game design but it's a very poor fit for me as a player. I don't enjoy making difficult decisions in games. I play MMOs in part to get away from having to think about such things, to enter into an environment where any choices I make don't really matter all that much. I'm not especially keen on having my moral compass re-calibrated in the guise of entertainment.

Are you sure this is the best way to get bloodstains out of leather?

As a rule, when I play MMOs, I like to play affable characters who get along well with everyone. If I can avoid bad faction I will go out of my way to do so. Even if the game clearly intends me to pick sides, if I can find a fence to sit on, I'll climb up there and get comfortable. I foresee difficulties for my long-term engagement with an entire game designed around moral choices.

I imagine one solution would be just to go out and kill stuff. While questing is ubiquitous I'm not sure that it's essential. I get the feeling I might progress just as easily by gathering mats, crafting my own gear and killing random monsters, bandits, zombies, cultists and animals for gear drops, gold and xp. It might even be faster.

It's certainly as enjoyable. I haven't played an MMO for a while where random slaughter was so satisfying. Loot is decent and sticking to mobs around or just under my level results in a TTK of around 3-5 seconds. It also completely removes any need to learn how to fight using blocks, dodges or most of the keyboard shortcuts. Three or four swings of my fiery greatsword (well, it was fiery until the enchantment got used up. Must do something about that) and the job's done.

Speaking of the control system and the combat; it's not too bad. I prefer it to NWN's version and possibly to DCUO's as well, both of which are similar. Holding down LMB for a big hit is very simple and straightforward and the fights themselves tend towards the slow and stately, which gives me plenty of time to look at my UI, remember which key I need to press for a particular spell, look at my keyboard, locate it, press it and get back to mouse-clicking, all  before very much has happened.

Come to think of it, that looks more like something you'd find in Halgarad than Martok.

So, combat works, the world is inviting, there's lots going on and all in all I'm having a good time in Tamriel. So why don't I play TESO more? I played a lot more ArcheAge, for example, when that was fresh, even if I did come to a sudden and unexpected dead halt there after just a few weeks.

For some reason I can't yet quite put my finger on I find TESO quite tiring. An hour there feels like three or four hours in other MMOs. After a short session I often feel both satisfied and satiated. It can be several days before I feel ready to go again.

I can't quite figure it out. An hour of TESO is less intense than a single five-minute Dragonball match in GW2 and I sometimes do half a dozen of those back to back. It's not difficult to understand or to play. There are no timers running down or scores mounting up. I have no plan, no agenda, my time is my own and mostly I just potter around. It should be relaxing, it is enjoyable, and yet when I log out I metaphorically wipe my forehead as if I'd just had some kind of a virtual work-out.

If I had to give an explanation I think I'd lay it on the questing and particularly on all that having to make up my mind about stuff. It does feel like playing a single-player RPG sometimes, with the sheer quantity of story-driven, directed content being thrown at me. I probably need to get off that train or at least take a few more station stops.

Overall, though, I'm pleased with how things are going, exhaustion aside. I like the pace and I like the place. My loose goal is to hit level 10 this weekend (dinged 9 last night) so as to be eligible for some three-faction PvP. I hear they have moveable siege engines. I want to see those!

You Talking To Me? Questing In The Elder Scrolls Online

With the tutorial out of the way things began to look up for my soul-shriven Kajiit Darknight but before he was finally free to go his own way there was one more twist to come. When it arrived it did begin to occur to me that the developers might be playing some kind of post-modernist prank; either that or someone had a bet going that they could fit every single MMO cliche into a single incomprehensible and convoluted origin story.

Just about the only box left unchecked by the tutorial itself was the old "pulled unconscious/half-drowned from the sea by a fisherman/sea captain" routine, so naturally that turned out to be exactly what happened when The Prophet and I catapulted ourselves back into Tyria Telon Tamriel. At least, that's what happened to me. The Prophet turned up somewhere else altogether - AkAnon or Mekalia from the description he gave. Could have been The Black Citadel. Somewhere with a lot of clanking machinery and a steampunk vibe anyway.

His astral projection left me with the final thought that if I had nothing better to do I might wander down to the docks and offer my thanks to the ship's captain who'd pulled me out of the drink. I had my own ideas, which mostly consisted of wandering around Daggerfall like a gawping tourist, taking screenshots.

Okay, so that's not actually Daggerfall. The principle holds.

As MMO cities go Daggerfall is quite convincing. There's a bit of an issue of scale, with everything built on heroic proportions, but that, like the townsfolk who seem to have nothing better to do than stand around day and night waiting to start up conversations with strangers, comes with the territory. At least they move about in a purposeful fashion giving the place a pleasantly lived-in feel.

And they really do start conversations. That was the thing that struck me most after a couple of hours play. In TESO you don't find quests - quests find you. I found it quite immersive; almost naturalistic, if only on the Littlest Hobo or A-Team scale of naturalism.

There's clearly some kind of proximity trigger that causes NPCs to react to your character's presence. Guards move you on if you get too close; gardeners comment on the weather and so on. That's a nice touch but where the mechanism really shines is when you pass within range of a potential questgiver.

It was soon after this that I was certified. Not before time some may well think.

Rather than someone running up to you, yelling and waving their arms and demanding you Do Something! as frequently happens around dynamic events in GW2, in TESO you tend to overhear things that might be to your advantage. Or not.

I'd already decided I wasn't going to run straight down to the docks to thank my rescuer. Instead I'd been ambling around getting my bearings. I found a noticeboard that informed me about crafting writs, again in quite an immersive and unobtrusive fashion, and I was pondering on that when I heard someone behind me saying something about the docks.

Before I'd really had time to think about it I'd turned and replied and next thing I knew I had a quest to go speak to the captain who'd saved me from the waves. It all flowed so well I abandoned my crafting aspirations for the while and went down to the harbor to pay my respects.

I never did find a good angle.

That seemed to set a pattern. I played for around three hours last night and most of what I did arose directly and serendipitously out of seemingly chance encounters. At one point a dog ran near me and barked; looking down I noticed I could interact with her so I did. She led me, Lassie-like, to her fallen master and his dropped shopping list and thence began a nefarious plot concerning dark magic, or possibly just very poor cooking skills, that I'm still unraveling.

These beetles only dropped iron armor. Its ludicrous but at least its consistently ludicrous.

While I was exploring along the coast and through the dunes, killing scorpions for fishing bait and beetles for armor upgrades and having a thoroughly fine time, I spotted a statue. Always on the alert for a photo opportunity I headed over and hopped up on the plinth. I was swiveling around trying to get an angle that would include me, the statue and a large lizard, when I heard someone talking to himself.

I hadn't noticed anyone around but the voice seemed to come from below me. I stood up and looked over the small ridge on which the statue stood to find an orc. He turned out to be having a little problem with maternal expectations that I was able to help him resolve. The initial encounter and subsequent quest sequence felt unusually solid, authentic even, which I put down largely to the naturalistic way in which the orc and my character met.


In this respect my early impressions are that TESO has managed a small but significant improvement in the quest acquisition process. Whether the approach will continue beyond the starting areas and cities remains to be seen. It's certainly often the case in MMOs that polish and innovation of this kind tend to fade away as the levels wear on. I hope not. I like it.

The quest text itself is nothing like as innovative. It tends towards the plain and workmanlike, which is no bad thing. The examples I've seen so far don't have the wealth of detail of EQ2 or the delightful archness of FFXIV but neither do they have the odd, slightly off-register tone of WoW.

The voice acting, too, seems understated and restrained. Every quest is voiced in full (indeed all NPCs with or without quests seem to have a spoken line or two in them). The main problem I've encountered questing so far comes with the actors' speed of delivery.

Give a cat a fish...

With the one striking exception of Nicolette, who gabbles out her lines almost too fast for the sense, every single NPC speaks in somnolent tones, as though giving dictation. By the time I'm at the end of the text they are rarely halfway through their oration. Fortunately they don't insist on completing each speech before allowing me to move the dialog on to the next stage.

TESO does follow the longstanding convention of putting icons over the heads of questgivers but these are, once again, rather understated. I'm not quite sure whether they even appear over characters to whom your character hasn't yet spoken or, possibly, who your character hasn't yet heard. Either way, there are no forests of glowing neon question marks and exclamation points, only a sprinkling of dull grey lozenges here and there.

I don't have much to say about the quest journal because as yet I've rarely had cause to refer to it. The quests seem to toddle along quite nicely with no more than the odd nudge from the handy Add-On mini map. There's a huge compass bar that hangs across the high center of the screen that I've only latterly realized acts as a directional marker for all kinds of things, quests included, but I haven't yet fathomed its complexities so I tend to ignore it.

I'm pretty sure this isn't just here to add local color...

All things considered, then, I'm rather enamored of the questing in TESO thus far. It's ever-present yet unobtrusive, interesting, entertaining and easy to follow without being insulting to my or my character's intelligence. I do get a slightly disconcerting feeling that there's a lot going on around me that I'm not being allowed to know about because I haven't hit the correct quest triggers yet but I can live with that.

This morning I ordered a copy of TESO for Mrs Bhagpuss. Our Sundays-only GW2 guildmate, on hearing that the subscription is dropping in March, expressed an interest in joining us, so it looks as though this one might stick, at least for a little while.

Next up: what's with this Vanguard vibe?

The Elder Scrolls Online - Installation, Registration and Tutorial

If you're planning on playing TESO when it goes free to play in March I'd advise you to set aside plenty of prep time. I ordered the game from Amazon last weekend; it turned up on Thursday but I didn't open it right away. I planned on starting on Saturday morning so I'd be able to give it a run of several hours without interruption.

Fortunately I thought I'd get ahead of myself for once so I split the shrink-wrap on Friday night in order to get the thing installed in the background while I played GW2. The first surprise on opening the case was finding four DVDs inside. When did I last buy an MMO that came with that many installation discs? The Secret World and GW2 both come with just two.

The installation process itself went very smoothly. In between swapping discs I made a new email address (always best to use a unique email for each MMO) and went through the lengthy registration process. That took around an hour all told.

I was surprised and mildly miffed to find that you can't play TESO without entering full personal and payment details and agreeing to a monthly payment plan. Since the game comes with 30 days of game time this would have seemed heavy-handed even while the subscription was mandatory but now that the buy to play model has been announced and given a start date less than six weeks away it seems positively ludicrous.

It was sign up or don't play, though, so I grudgingly filled in my details, credit card and all, chose the monthly payment, confirmed all the necessary emails and then cancelled my subscription. Not getting me in the right frame of mind here, Zenimax.

Dressed in rags? Check? In an underground prison? Check.

At this point I looked at the installation footprint; it was 31GB. That seemed big to me. Naturally I expected some patching so I thought I'd best get on with things. Just as well. The first patch was 14GB. That took quite a while and when it was done the patch progress indicator read 2% complete. Hell's bells!

Fortunately, it must be tallying the number of files, rather than the size, because the remaining 98% didn't take as long as the first 2%. Also a lot of the patching presumably overwrote the original installation because instead of ending up with a 50GB plus install the final score was just over 36GB.

By then it was well gone midnight. The whole process had taken over five hours even with our pretty good cable broadband and its decent download speeds. Just as well I hadn't been planning on playing that night.

On Saturday morning I dithered around doing displacement activities before finally firing the thing up. It was apparent there was some subconscious resistance going on. I've never liked Elder Scrolls games much. I kept thinking I'd rather be playing GW2 or EQ2 - or even the Valliance pre-alpha.

In the end I got started only to be informed that as the account had never been logged in from this particular computer before I'd have to reply to a security email before they'd let me play. While I support that method of keeping my account secure it did seem just a tad paranoid, given that this particular account had never been logged in from any computer, ever. You would think the first log-in could be trusted to be valid, wouldn't you?

Pre-order bonuses. For a given value of "Pre"

That was the final bar I had to jump. Up came character creation and here the game seemed to be reading my mind: it presented me with a Khajiit, the cat race that I'd already decided on playing. Just as well. It took me three-quarters of an hour to go through all the sliders and options - imagine how long it would have taken if I'd been tempted by a race that actually has recognizable features to adjust.

I'd done a small amount of advance research, which led me to believe that the penalty for playing a cat-person would be having to pal up with *shudder* elves in the Aldmeiri Dominion faction. Well I dodged that bullet. My Khajiit Dragonknight is a proud if almost completely ignorant member of the Daggerfall Covenant.

How did I pull that trick off? Ah, that brings me to the second surprise I found when I opened the box. As well as the sheet with the registration key there was a slip of paper with another scratch panel. That sheet informed me I was entitled to an Explorer's Pack containing Bonus Treasure Maps, a Scuttler vanity pet and the right to "Play any race in any alliance".

I went to the account page and input the code before making a character and was thanked for having pre-ordered the game. Apparently Amazon UK are sitting on some very old stock. Still, lucky break for me - now I don't have to be dealing with Elves other than at the sharp end of my sword.

The one and only moment of entertainment in the entire dismal tutorial.

From there it was straight into a rather poor cinematic and on to a very annoying tutorial. Even with all my graphics auto-set to "High" by the game I was unimpressed with what I was seeing. It reminded me very much of Neverwinter, with lots of relatively undifferentiated, flat textures and everything blown up to 125% natural scale. That said, it's hard to tell how good the graphics might be when you're dumped in a virtually featureless cave.

The controls were also reminiscent of Neverwinter only even worse. I really loathe not being allowed free and full use of my mouse pointer. I'm perfectly capable of playing games that use that fixed center-screen reticule to aim, mouse to attack and keyboard strokes for everything else system but being able to use a control system and wanting to use it are two very different things.

Consequently, what with the numbingly familiar "you died and now you have no soul and you're trapped in a prison and the prison is in a cave and there's a jailbreak and you are THE ONE and come on come on COME ON!!!" opening and the horrible controls, within five minutes I was simultaneously on the verge of a panic attack and bored out of my mind.

So I logged out and went to do some dailies in GW2 instead. Then I made a coffee, came back an hour later, sat down and tried again. This time it went a lot better. The story was still absolutely terrible and the voice actors seemed to be on some kind of depressant drugs but eventually I made it through to the end of the Tutorial.

I'm making that sound better than it was. The whole affair was still quite horrible. John Cleese's celebrated turn as Cadwell was the sole bright spot. After the third time I was told to go find something I couldn't see on the map I cracked and googled for Add-Ons. I rarely use Add-Ons in any MMO and indeed I largely disapprove of their very existence but there are limits to my patience and it turns out that playing an MMO that launched in the second decade of the 21st Century without even a mini-map goes beyond them.

This! This is what I want to see first time I log in! Flowers! Grass! SHOPS!

Sadly there was no Add-On either to give me Keyboard Turning or to replace the reticule/mouse nonsense with real MMO hotbar combat. There was one that gave me control of the mouse pointer but that doesn't help much when there's nothing to point it at. At least I now have a mini-map.

Quite honestly, I'm surprised I got as far as I did. Had this been a completely F2P MMO and if I hadn't spent a few pounds on the box and invested so much time registering and installing it I doubt I'd have carried on.

Which would have been a shame, because once I finally emerged into the sunlit, cobbled streets of Daggerfall, everything began to improve in a hurry. I'll save my first impressions of what could be called actual gameplay for another time but suffice to say once I got out of that bloody hellhole of a tutorial I did finally begin to enjoy myself.

And there's the takeaway: all tutorials should be optional. It's in everyone's interest. Just imagine how positive I could have felt about the game if I'd been allowed to start in Daggerfall straight out of character creation. This entire post would have had a completely different tone.

If developers wonder why so many people buy their games, log in once, log out ten minutes later and are never seen again, well there's your reason - not just bad tutorials but mandatory bad tutorials. Stop it. Just. Stop.

The Embers Still Glow: Landmark, WildStar, TESO et al

We're not quite at the end of the year yet but several people haven't been able to hold off reviewing their previous prognostications. Wilhelm started it, followed by SynCaine and J3w3l, everyone linking to everyone else as they went. Like I just did.

Well, who am I to buck a trend? I'm not much for predictions but in the very dying embers of last year I did cast the runes for a few of the potential big MMO events of 2014. There were only three possible new partners on my dance card back then: Everquest Landmark, WildStar and The Elder Scrolls Online.

Of Landmark I observed "I think it will confuse and disappoint in equal measure". Pretty much on the money I'd say. I bought the Trailblazer pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present and tagged along myself on an Explorer ticket. How appropriate. We had a lot of fun for a couple of months and I don't regret those purchases at all.

For a while Landmark (with the confusing EQ prefix quietly removed) was a hot topic across the MMO blogosphere. Much of the discussion centered around mystification over what the "game" was trying to be, a mystery which, I think it's fair to say, has yet to be resolved to anyone's great satisfaction.

I enjoyed being a part of that. I also really enjoyed building my Thomas Crown Affair 1960s mountain aerie. Unfortunately I have a suspicion that those first two or three months in "alpha" may well be the most fun I ever have in Landmark.

By June we were in "beta", not that anyone could tell the difference, and I was already calling Landmark "the MMO no-one mentions any more". Wilhelm observed that "Despite being called beta, this is still pre-alpha development" and I can't argue with that. Almost a year on SOE are finally getting around to adding mobs this week, so perhaps by Spring of 2015 we might be somewhere close to a beta build, although I wouldn't bet on it.

TESO arrived next. I passed. I never liked any of the previous Elder Scrolls games and didn't imagine this would be any different. It was, perhaps, a little subjective and over-the-top to extrapolate my disinterest and distaste into a prediction that TESO would "disappoint just about everyone". In the event things didn't go that badly.

Some people certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves at the beginning but it wasn't to last. The positive commentary soon dissipated until literally no-one I read was mentioning TESO any more. I don't even see many news stories about it nowadays.

The console launch, already postponed for six months, has been pushed into next year but, while it hardly sounds like a success story, the game is still running on a subscription and there's no sign of that changing any time soon. TESO would appear to have achieved stability at least. The general feeling seems to be that it's a quiet success although on what evidence other than not having gone F2P or merged servers I'm not quite sure.

WildStar was my pick of the three to go on to fame and fortune but I certainly wasn't sticking my neck out even then, suggesting only that "I wouldn't be that surprised to see it making the best showing of these three in 2014, at least until something better comes along". Faint praise that turned out not to be faint enough. WildStar limped out of the gate to an indifferent welcome and drifted downwards from there.

I wasn't planning on playing it at all. I didn't bother with any of the long series of beta weekends until the very end, when I received a beta key I don't recall applying for. I tried it and I quite liked it. So did a lot of people - for a while. Within a very few weeks, however, interest had dropped almost to nothing.

Carbine swiftly went the now-traditional megaserver route, allowing them to consolidate shrinking server populations without having to announce an embarrassing series of server merges just a few months after launch. They followed that with a hefty cut in the rate of new content development and the abandonment of old-school 40-man raiding, both of which had been core concepts for the game in pre-launch publicity. There was much scuttlebutt doing the rounds about the dire emotional and professional state of the studio too.

And yet WildStar carries on, still charging a subscription, still claiming to have hundreds of thousands of players. Everyone who ever expresses an opinion says the game should go F2P and will go F2P...everyone but Carbine and NCSoft. If it does I'll give it a run. Until then it made its niche and it can sit in it.

So, definitely not a vintage year for much-hyped AAA MMOs. There was one more, which almost no-one, including me, thought to mention: ArcheAge. Trion slipped that one in from leftfield, grabbing a huge amount of attention and goodwill, almost all of which they proceeded to squander. By now their second-hand, refurbished import is beginning to look even more downtrodden than their own, largely ignored and forgotten offerings, Trove and Defiance (remember those? No, thought not).

Leaving aside Bungie's Destiny, about which I know almost nothing, the only other really big deal of 2014 was Warlords of Draenor. I didn't mention that one last year, mostly because I don't pay an awful lot of attention to WoW, but its fair to say its been the MMO success story of the year. Will it lead to another round of MMO companies scrabbling to emulate Blizzard, this time by plunging resources into fan-pleasing, lore-heavy expansions for older MMOs?

I bloody well hope so! 

Catching A Breath

It's one of those annoying weeks where I have time either to play or to post but not both. It says a lot for my current state of satisfaction with the MMO world that I'd much rather play.

It's not at ll that I have nothing I want to write about, either. There's the current State of the Game over at Landmark, now accommodating Wilhelm once again, for a limited time only, and where changes to the FAQ relating to what you get to keep after a wipe have been causing consternation. There's the winding-down WildStar beta, whose luster is wearing off for Jeromai, and the question of just how many rats are jumping off the sinking TESO ship, raised by Keen's "We Quit" post.

There are a couple of burgeoning debates I'd like to get into. Tobold raised some very interesting issues concerning questing, which tie in to something Keen (him again) was saying on the subject, while Azuriel and Zubon have been riffing on the well-worn theme of "it's friends that drive retention", a topic on which I've long had some non-party-line thoughts I've wanted to share.

Excuse me? Is this the line for the Queen's Gauntlet?

Then there's The Tourney, as no-one calls Season 2 of GW2's WvW competition any more, in which very interesting things have been happening, at least in the match I'm in. It could get more interesting yet next week, since, right at the climax, ArenaNet have chosen to open possibly their two most successful Living Story features (apart from Super Adventure Box, of course) from last year. The Bazaar of the Four Winds and the Queen's Gauntlet. Just what that might do to populations on the Borderlands is anyone's guess.

Finally, there's my ongoing investigation into leveling a new character under the twin dooms of the Megaserver and the Trait Revamp (spoiler - I'm still lovin' it). And quite probably a whole load other stuff besides. But it's either write or play and I'm off to do the latter.

With luck I'll get into some of this in detail at the weekend, although chances are by then there'll be a whole new mess o' stuff going on. How anyone can get bored either with MMOs or blogging about them beats me...