No Better Crosswalk : Valliance Online

Today saw the arrival of two more of the items on my list of "things to look forward to in August". By most measures the more significant would be FFXIV's Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal, stretching the free trial to Level 60 and giving all players, paying or not, access to the first expansion, Heavensward.

I'll set that one aside for now, though. It's here to stay so there's no rush. And anyway, I'm more interested in finding out how Valiance Online is getting along. There's a short open beta up right now but only for a few days.

Of the several super-hero MMORPGs that sprang up in the aftermath of City of Heroes' sunset, the one I've always been the most drawn to is Valiance Online. I'm pretty sure that's becasue it has the best name but the fact that it was the first to put up an open alpha didn't hurt.

It was really a tech demo, I guess, but as the guy from Crowfall said, "these terms are almost meaningless anyway and mean different things from company to company." Strictly speaking, it was MassivelyOP said that. For some reason they like to serve up interviews in reported speech rather than using proper quotes.

I've got my TV eye on you, Crowfall.

Oh, and I guess I should mention that Crowfall went into beta today. There's another thing to do in August, providing you signed up and assuming you get an invite. Or you could just pay, of course. $39.99 for the basic Starter Pack gets you immediate access to beta and the Live game, when it arrives, in what ArtCraft calls "Play Now and Forever".

Catchy. Sounds like quite a good deal, too. Especially since the game's supposed to be going with a Buy To Play model and every estimate of the "box" price I've seen is around $50.00. Something to think about.

Meanwhile, though, there's Valiance Online to be getting on with. I'd love to give some first impressions but... oh, heck, I'll just go with what I've got.

In an effort not to bury the lede, let's start with by far the most interesting thing that happened during the hour or so I "played" VO this afternoon. It was so unusual I went to the trouble of making a video.

It's kind of self-explanatory but here's the background. I'd been running around for about an hour without finding anything to do and I'd about had enough. I'd taken a bunch of screenshots already (about which more later) but just before I finished I had an idea for one more.

The beta takes place in a large city called San Cielo. It's all futuristic skyscrapers and highways. There are fast-moving vehicles and a lot of zebra crossings.

And I do I mean a lot. There are stripes across what seems like every junction and plenty more besides, all glowing neon blue. My first thought was to do an Abbey Road shot. Let's face it, it would be everyone's first thought. Hard to pull it off when there's just the one of you, though.

Stike that. Here's a better idea. I thought I might be able to work up an amusing paragraph, taking the mickey out of the game for having all those pedestrian crossings and then letting the cars run you over. I had this plan to stand on the crossing and take a shot of the car going straight through me. I hadn't yet tried it but I was willing to bet there was no collision detection. And if there was and the car just plowed into me and tossed me in the air, well, that would work even better.

Bagsy I be Paul.

So I stood in the path of a moving vehicle with my finger on the screenshot key and waited for a car to appear. I watched it come over the hill and speed straight at me and then... it stopped! I was more stunned than my character would have been if the thing had hit her. Someone had actually programmed the cars to recognize when someone was crossing. Can you believe it?

Well, the proof's up there. And it's the most action I saw in an hour. The only action.

I have to praise the set-up for beta. The download was easy to find and fast to install. The whole thing, from me deciding on a whim to try it to logging in, took maybe ten minutes. It would have been less but I wasted a little while finding my old log-in details from last time. I found them but they didn't work  - hardly surprising, it was 2016 - so I created a new account instead. That was easy.

No hoops to jump through to get in, then. Full marks for that. Character creation was okay, too, although I found quite a lot about it slightly confusing. Maybe confusing is too strong. Unintuitive.

A lot of the options are greyed-out, presumably not yet implemented, which is entirely reasonable in a beta but I found the rotating selection process awkward to navigate and some of the options that were supposedly available didn't seem to do anything. Hard to tell if that's because they're unfinished or if I was bugged in some way.

Now that's some serious bad posture.

Once I'd gotten rid of the slump-shouldered, goose-necked Billy Idol wannabe who inexplicably acts as the default option I did, eventually, manage to make a character I was reasonably happy with. Superhero games live and die by their character creators, of course, so this one clearly has a long way to go, but the basics seem to be there.

I gave her the most obvious fire-based powers and named her Flashburn, which is the kind of name I would never dream of using for a character I was planning to play. Okay, full disclosure: I called her that because I'm watching the incredibly violent Titans series on Netflix at the moment and I had the image of Kory Anders flash-burning anyone who looks at her sideways into charcoal fresh in my mind. Probably gonna post about Titans at some point but I have to watch the whole run first. Also about the fact I finally caved and subbed to a second streaming service...

That was about the limit for things going smoothly. When I went to enter the game the whole thing hung and I had to close it and start again. Lucklily my character was fine and the second login worked.  

It was night-time because of course it was. I know I complain that it's always night-time when I log into a game, especially a new game where I really want to see what I'm looking at, but that's because it always is!

You can have any color shirt you like so long as it's blue. Oh, wait, those are shoes... I said the UI was confusing.

I couldn't see my character's face at all, it was that dark. I looked around and couldn't see any NPCs, either. No tutorial prompts popped. There was a chat box but it was empty and anyway I already knew there was a known issue with chat in the beta so it was never going to work.

With nothing else suggesting itself I started jogging around the streets of San Cielo looking for trouble. Usually a sound move in a super-hero game. You can call it "patrolling" if you like. (Back in the '80s I can remember sitting around several pub tables engaging in heated debate over the concept of superheroes "patrolling". People had some very polarized views on it. It was a strange time. People took stuff like that very seriously. Well, the kind of people I knew...).

Sadly, San Cielo seems to be an astonishingly law-abiding city. I didn't find a single miscreant. More accurately, I didn't find a single person. No villains, no civillians, no ambient wildlife, no other players. Nothing but the driverless hovercars cruising the wide, empty boulevards.

I tried visiting the various landmarks I could see in case something was happening anywhere. It wasn't. There were huge blinking eyes and giant gold statues all over but no-one to talk to. Or flash fry.

Excuse me. Can you direct me to the Radiohead terminal?

On one corner I came across a large machine. It had an acronym hovering above it: M.U.S.E. Promising. A mission terminal, I bet. I clicked on it. Nothing. Maybe it was bugged. Maybe it doesn't work yet. No way to tell.

After a lot of running around I found myself on the edge of town. I could see the sea in the distance. It occured to me to wonder whther the game would allow me to swim. Always an indicator of how far along things are.

It was a mighty long run but I got there in the end and yes, you can swim in Valiance Online. I took some screenshots to prove it. By the time I came out of the water the sun was coming up. Glory be! Daylight!

The lighting effects in VO are quite striking. I spent a few minutes posing in the bright sweeps of sunlight that splashed the sidewalks between the vast buildings. If I stood at a certain angle the light glowed all through my character's body, lighting her up as though she was on fire inside. Given the nature of her powers it seemed both felicitous and appropriate. I took a whole load of pictures. So where are they? You may well ask.

Last thing I remember I was running towards the sea... I'm sorry, Officer, after that's it's all just a blank...

Finally, just as I was about to give up, I saw something move. Something that wasn't a car. It ran past me over the grass and off into the distance but I managed to target it before it diappeared. Another player! The first and only one I saw.

I ran after them in the forlorn hope they might know of somewhere worth going but before I could find out I spotted four humanoid figures. I veered off to see what they were and that was the last I saw of the Running Player.

The four were NPCs. One was a vendor, selling "Enhancements". Another was an "Advancement Trainer". The third was... I have no idea. The last was a Training Dummy.

I tried to communicate with all of them. Well, not the dummy. The dummy I used to try out my powers and take some screenshots. The effects were very good. I was impressed. Took some great shots. (Sensing a theme, here?).

The vendor worked but of course I had no money to spend on whatever she was selling. The Trainer and the other guy responded with blank speech bubbles. As the bubbles faded, just for a moment I could see words. They faded too fast to read the whole thing but I caught the gist: "Not yet implemented".

Don't concern yourself, Citizen. There's a lot of that going around.

That was enough for me. I had all the pictures I needed. I thought I'd log out, write up a fairly unimpressed, mildly sarcastic First Impressions piece and leave it at that. Only, when I checked my FRAPS folder, for some inexplicable reason only the shots I'd taken at night had recorded.

More precisely, only the shots I took before I went into the sea. The swimming shots aren't there, either. I don't know if that's a co-incidence or whether something the game does when you enter the water causes FRAPS to stop working. I've never seen anything like it before. That's betas for you, I guess.

I was minded to just go with what I had but I looked at the night shots and they were a bit samey so I logged back in to take a few daylight scenes. I did that and then I ran into the whole self-driving car scenario we covered at the start, which just goes to show you should never leave on a sour note.

The whole thing, from deciding to give the beta a try to making the video to writing this post has taken most of my afternoon but it's not like I had anything much else to do.

The streets look empty, yet I get the strangest feeling someone's here...

All in all I had a fun time. It's been too long since I made a video. I ought to do more of those. And it's always good to have something different to blog about.

If I wasn't making my own content, though, I'm not sure I'd have been so happy. If you play a super-hero MMORPG you do kind of expect to get to fight some villains. Or at least see some.

Three's A Crowd : City of Heroes

I tried to log in to City of Heroes last night. The queue went 900 deep. Demand was so strong the volunteer team had added a second server so I thought I'd make a character there instead. It was quieter. Only 400 people waiting to get in.

The queue was dropping but slowly. It looked to be a good while before I got in. I decided to leave it. Playing U.K. hours on North American servers, weekend evenings are about the closest I ever come to U.S. Primetime. Not the cleverest time to taste the new hotness.

One of the main reasons I prefer playing on American servers, rather than European, is how it lets me manage population density. Evenings and weekends, any halfway-successful MMORPG feels comfortably busy,  not overcrowded. If I want the place to myself - enjoy rare spawns without competition, say - I just log in between breakfast and afternoon tea on weekdays.

I left CoH to settle. Today, when I tried after lunch, there were no queues at all. Probably helped that there were also two more servers online: four in total. From what I gathered from chat when I got into the game, so many people were trying to play on Sunday, even two servers weren't spreading the load enough. So they brought up two more.

OK, I want you to form an orderly line. There's room for everyone but you have to be patient!

This feels almost like an actual launch. A successful one, too. How long demand will last is uncertain but then isn't it always? Clearly there's a lot of pent-up desire being spent after six years of forced abstinence but against that you'd need to weigh the precarious legal position and the potentially ephemeral nature of any characters or progress being made.

With such an uncertain platform it's quite astonishing just how many players have come out in support. It has to be remembered that, unlike most shuttered MMORPGs, City of Heroes wasn't failing when it closed down. By most accounts it was running at a modest profit, albeit too modest for NCSoft's liking.

Given that CoH was always quite a singular proposition, it's hardly surprising that, in the six years since the sunset, no real alternative has arived to take its place. While tastes do change over time and lives move on, the seemingly perpetual appeal of very elderly MMORPGs like EverQuest, Ultima Online, Lineage, RuneScape and many others does tend to suggest that, if demand existed in 2012, it may very well continue to exist in 2019.

Demand is one thing but, sidestepping the issue of NCSoft's giant cartoon foot, there's also the question of supply. How much does it cost to maintain and operate four servers? And who's paying?

Don't you just hate in-game advertizing?

When you log into the game the very first thing that confronts you is a pop-up window telling you that the server team does not accept donations. I imagine the idea of accepting payment is a very touchy one right now, even if it is entirely and solely for the purpose of defraying expenses.

When I ended my previous post on City of Heroes wondering what the unexpected revenant's impact would have on the multifarious successor projects, Wilhelm suggested in the comments I should have frontloaded that question. I'm sure the teams behind Valiance, Ship of Heroes and City of Titans would agree.

Problem is, I really don't know enough about any of them to hazard a guess at the answer. I played Valiance's tech demo, which I quite liked, but that was more than three years ago. There was a public pre-alpha, which I may have tried (I think I did but I'm not sure). The game is currently back in closed pre-alpha with buy-in access for a minimum of $25. A public alpha will follow "sometime soon depending on how this phase goes".

Ship of Heroes responded to the news of the ghost server with a robust assertion that "Ship of Heroes is developing full-steam, and that we will launch as planned on the schedule we have announced". Prior to the recent revelations the team had already posted a detailed roadmap and confirmed that they were "on track for a solid Beta launch of Ship of Heroes at the end of 2019". So far, so bullish. Don't think anything's been added now the popularity of the revival is in the public domain.

When I said I'd sell my soul for a spot in pre-alpha I didn't mean it literally!

 As for City of Titans,  there's an announcement on its landing page asking backers to check and confirm their email addresses in preparation for the "staged rollout of pre-Alpha", which, I assume, is imminent. I couldn't see any dates.

From the outside it's impossible to tell how far down the track any of these projects has travelled. In my experience, pre-alphas (and even alphas) really don't give away all that much in terms of meaningful insight into either timescales or finished product, fun though they often are to play. If SoH really does make it into "solid beta" by the end of the year then it will be on the home straight, but few are the betas that hit the dates they announce a year in advance.

How things might play out between now and whenever these games come to market is anyone's guess. It's entirely possible that, by the time the first of them hits Open Beta or Early Access, there won't be any competition in the form of  CoH servers, official or otherwise. Or there could be a stable, trusted, NCSoft-sanctioned (or tacitly ignored) permanent City of Heroes server online 24/7, which would certainly obviate the desire of many of the potential audience to up sticks and move again.

The way I see it you're either on the bus or you're not. Or the monorail.

It was always going to be a rough ride for the trio, even without the current local turbulence. Three very similar independent MMORPGs, racing to open their doors to the exact same crowd at there or thereabouts the same time. But none of them could have anticipated having to compete directly with the very game whose absence brought them into being.

There is another possibility. One or more of the trio could turn out to be really good. City of Heroes, for all the affection and esteem in which it's held, is far from perfect. Graphically it's antedeluvian by modern standards and the gameplay loop is not to everyone's taste.

And, as Avengers: Endgame so forcefully demonstrated this weekend, Superheroes hold the core of the culture right now. If the market can sustain dozens, even hundreds of fantasy-themed MMOs, who's to say it can't support multiple capes-and-tights titles?

Before we can find out just what the demand is, though, someone has to make a game. For all their promise and potential, neither Valiance, Ship of Heroes nor City of Titans looks anywhere close to being ready to play.

As I write this, City of Heroes, somewhat astonishingly, is. What's more, for all its grey-market status, it's inarguably the real thing.

Authenticity and availability count for an awful lot.

If I Can't See It, It's Not There

Above is a screenshot of my desktop. Some of my desktop. I cropped four columns - forty icons - from the left-hand side.

Apart from a handful of single-player games - in fact, all the single-player games I currently own - everything that remains is either an MMO, an MMO platform or an application related in some way to playing MMOs.

The background is a screenshot from Guild Wars 2. All my desktop backgrounds in living memory have been shots from MMOs. I have tens of thousands of them so there's plenty of choice.

Obsession is such an ugly word. Then again, so is breezeblock.

As I mentioned in some post or other a while back, I got a 2TB HDD for my birthday but I only got around to installing it after Christmas. That gave me three internal HDDs and four terabytes of onboard storage in total.

This morning I hooked up an external HDD via a USB caddy and moved a bunch of MMOs across. Then I went through all three drives and made sure the icons for all those MMOs were present on the desktop.

Well, I say I went through them. I mostly opened folders in a haphazard fashion and pulled out any launchers or executables that I happened to spot. I am no more organized in filing or ordering my games than I am in playing them. Still, I think I got most of what there was.

This means I currently have thirty-eight MMOs, MMORPGs or limited tests for MMOs immediately available from the screen. Having an active icon on my desktop significantly increases the chances I will actually play any one of these. If I have to go find the game on an external disc, or even go digging around in the files on an internal drive, chances are I'll get distracted and end up doing something else entirely.

That said, not all of those thirty-eight MMOs are playable right now. The icon for Valiance, for example, one of the numerous would-be successors to City of Heroes, used to go to some kind of tech demo or sneak peak. I don't think that's running any more. Hang on, I'll find out... no. it's not.

As for Minions of Mirth, it used to be an MMO but now it's not. I'd forgotten all about until it got a mention on MassivelyOP a while back. The server hosting the MMO died but the offline single-player version still works. I patched it up today, made a new account and logged in to check. I never got very far in MoM the first (or second, or third) time around and I certainly don't plan on trying to get any further in single-player mode but I've confirmed it's there if I want it.

Dino Storm I did used to enjoy playing. I might very well fancy another go. Is that one still running? It didn't work when I tried it a few minutes ago. I thought maybe it had finally died but nope! As it turns out, it's just not on Bigpoint any more. Not that I 'd remembered it was.

Bigpoint decided to get out of the cowboy dinosaur business back in September last year but the game continues under the banner of Splitscreen Games. I just downloaded the new launcher from their website. It let me log in with my old username and my character was waiting for me just as I left him, what must now be several years ago.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many MMOs there are and how long they last. Also how devotedly they retain our data even when we don't seem to have any more interest in using it. Dino Storm was fairly busy when last I played but there seemed to no-one but me around this time.

Auteria, an MMO in comparison with which Dino Storm is World of Warcraft, is also still plugging away. I just logged in and there it was. Why, and for whom? No idea.

Speaking of obscure MMOs that no-one ever talks about, let alone plays, one that's not on the desktop screenshot above is The Hammers End. Actually, it is on the desktop now but I added it after I took the screenshot. I remembered it as I was writing this post si I went to see if it was still around. It is.

The website has been smartened up somewhat. Not only that but the ludicrous payment model I balked at has been replaced with a straightforward F2P/Premium system. I downloaded the game and, yes, my old login still works and my character is still there.

What's more, THE seems to have received some significant quality of life attention, possibly as part of the F2P conversion. If I can find a spare hour or two I'll have a run around, see what's changed and maybe do an update post. It's an interesting little game that deserves more attention that it gets. Well, it would be hard for it to deserve less since it gets approximately none...

The main reason I started all of this wasn't to dig up obscure old titles and see how they're doing. It was to dig up big, successful titles I keep reading about and see how they're doing. The two I specifically would like to look at again are Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert Online.

There's always seem to be plenty of people willing to bang on about how no-one makes proper AAA MMORPGs any more and how the entire genre is doomed and yet there's these two, seemingly doing great business, both popular and successful. Not to mention Warframe. And FFXIV. Just off the top of my head.

I don't think Warframe's ever going to be my sort of thing, mainly because the suits your character has to wear are so unremittingly hideous. I have never seen one single screenshot of the game where the player-character didn't look repulsive. I thought it might be different in the game itself but if anything it was worse.

If Warframe's off the table for reasons of fashion, FFXIV certainly isn't. Characters there are a pleasure to look at. I might play some more of that, some day, seeing as how Square were kind enough to offer the first thirty or so levels for free.

What I really want to do, though, is to visit my old house in BDO. The housing there doesn't get much of a mention but i thought it was pretty spiffy. and maybe see how much ESO has changed.

I might also, finally, get back to Dragon Nest. That turned out to be another icon that didn't work. Dragon Nest has a convoluted history of ownership/publishing/regionalization that I could never keep straight but it seems whatever version I had installed isn't around any more.

Dragon Nest Europe is still available via Steam, though, and I'm patching that up as I type. (Ed. It didn't work. Now I'm downloading it direct from the website). I also have the mobile version on Android. Supposedly it's cross-plattform now. If I could find my old log-in details I'd test that but I have a horrible feeling I might have to start again from scratch.

Anyway, enough of this. I'm just hoping that having all these titles directly to hand, ready to fire up on a whim, might lead to me playing a wider variety of MMOs again. Of late I've been in something of a comfortable rut, doing dailies in GW2 and pottering about in EverQuest II. Very enjoyable it's been, too, but it wouldn't do me any harm to branch out a little.

I am very definitely not going to follow the blogging trend and start setting myself goals or targets, let alone producing some kind of schedule. Heaven forfend! I am hoping, though, that merely seeing the icons in front of me each time I sit down at the keyboard might lead to a little meander across the MMO map.

After all, there's so much out there I haven't seen.

MMOs On The Horizon - 2017

As is traditional, when the number at the end of the date rolls over, lots of people are making predictions, plans and pledges. Those are always fun to read but what really started me thinking were the lists of upcoming MMOs that might, or more likely might not, appear in 2017.

Syp gave us the full rundown of every wannabe WoW killer that managed to throw together a PR release over the last twelve months. The Ancient Gaming Noob and Endgame Viable both offered their thoughts on what we might expect. Or fear.

Wilhelm covers a round dozen, of which I observed in the comments, somewhat hyperbolically, "Seven of those titles I wouldn’t play even if every other MMO in the world closed down. I’d find another hobby first." UltrViolet comes up with no less than thirty-two possibilities, which is actually more than Syp found for his "All the MMORPGs Coming in 2017" article, but even there I struggle to find anything to get especially excited about.

Of the entire collection probably the only two I'm actively interested in are Project: Gorgon and Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. The problem with those two is that I already feel like I've played the first and I wonder if I'll ever get the chance to play the second.

Project:Gorgon I first blogged about back in 2013 when, as you can see from the screenshots, it looked like it might be a very good-looking game. Unfortunately, since then it seems to have undergone a major graphics underhaul and now looks like DAOC circa 2003.

The gameplay is solid and I've spent a good few hours there already. I backed the first, failed, Kickstarter, missed the second entirely and then backed the third, which succeeded. I've yet to do anything about getting the key from that so when the game finally moves to Steam Early Access, which it looks as though it will do very soon, a year later than planned, I'll have to dig through my old emails or else I won't be able to log in any more.

That wouldn't be too traumatic, though, because the last time was probably 2015 and I can't say I've missed it much. I suspect that Project: Gorgon will be one of those MMOs I think about playing but rarely play. There's no shortage of those.

Brad McQuaid's Pantheon, however, looks increasingly like an MMORPG I would actually spend a considerable amount of time with. The graphics may not be spectacular but they look more than serviceable and the art direction looks solid. The world looks...well, it looks like Telon. Or Norrath. The gameplay looks like...well, it looks like EverQuest. Or Vanguard.

Oh, let's not be coy! It's the same bloody game, isn't it? The same MMO Brad made last time and the time before that. He hasn't even bothered to change the names of half the classes or the spells they use. And that's fine by me. The last two MMOs he made are either my first and second favorites ever or they're at least in the top five, depending what mood I'm in.

I like that game. I'd love to play it again with a new skin. The only issue is whether I'll ever get the opportunity.

So, with those two out of the way, what's left? Well, there are a few I will most likely at least kick the tyres and take for a test drive.

Crowfall - I started off loathing this because of the arrogant and aggressive tone their PR took but that has cooled down and I've warmed up. I like the episodic approach they are trying and I'd like to see the game succeed if only so that other developers might steal from it. I also like the sound of the non-combat, permanent housing. It's odds on I will buy this just to futz around in the safe areas.

Camelot Unchained - I do like Realm vs Realm combat. I have some, if not many, good memories of DAOC and more of Warhammer. It's got to be worth a look. On the other hand, I was bored to tears with DAOC in less than six months and the best part of Warhammer was the instanced battlegrounds...

New World - It's Amazon, I trust them to at least make something that works and comes out on time. Plus I have an Amazon account already. We know so little about it it's impossible to guess if it's something I'd want to play long term or not but it's very likely I'll at least give it a go, along with almost everyone reading this, I bet. Of course it won't be coming out in 2017 so I don't know why we're even talking about it.

Revelation Online - This years Black Desert. Or ArcheAge. I liked Black Desert. I liked ArcheAge. Okay, I only lasted a month and a half in each of them but it was a dam' good month and a half. I'm up for doing that again. Plus everyone will try it and I'll get a string of blog posts with great screenshots.

Bless Online - See Revelation Online.

Dark and Light - See Bless Online and Revelation Online. Come to think of it, isn't D&L out already? One of those Early Access package deals maybe? I can't keep up with those.

Shroud of the Avatar - It's a fantasy MMO with housing. That alone gets it onto the watch list. Then again, it looks really dull and nothing I've read or seen from anyone who's actually played it suggests otherwise. A possible but not a probable.

And that's about it. Of the rest, there are some I would actively avoid, some I don't believe will ever launch and some I don't know enough about even to make a call. A few, like Ever, Jane, I wish nothing but success but I can't imagine ever playing them myself. A few more, like Peria Chronicles, I might try out of curiosity. (I mean, I downloaded Twin Saga last week so my standards aren't exactly high...)

The rest look boring beyond belief. Someone, somewhere, presumably, is excited over Gloria Victis, Life is Feudal, the two Darkfall remakes or The Exiled but it isn't anyone I know. I'll try pretty much any MMO but even I have to draw a line somewhere.

Missing from the lists I linked are any of the various City of Heroes remakes and several emulator projects for closed-down MMOs. I have a soft spot for Valiance. I'll probably keep an eye on that one. I'm also still logging into the excellent Vanguard Emu every couple of months for my Telon fix and it's coming along splendidly.

All in all, though, it doesn't look like a bumper year for the genre. 2018 or 2019 should be better. And that's fine. There are literally hundreds of MMOs out there already and I have literally dozens on my hard drive. How many MMOs do you need, anyway?

The coming year may be weird and scary in all kinds of ways but I think it's a safe bet that as far as MMOs go it will look much the same as the last one. I can live with that. Quite happily. 

On Patrol : Valiance Online

Another day, another download. This time it's Valliance Online, one of several contenders for the cape of Spiritual Successor to City of Heroes. I forget the names of the others.

I only remember Valliance because of their open door policy. A while back they had a sneak peak/tech demo up and now there's a pre-alpha build available for any interested parties to test drive.

Unlike the Early Access cash grabs of yesterday's post, this is a genuine "come and help us kick this thing into shape" community effort. There are no "Packages" to buy, no NDA agreements to sign, no application forms to fill out. Just an email address, a password and a download and you're in.

City of Heroes was famous for its immensely flexible and varied character creation system. There were supposedly people who played the game for a fair old while without ever getting any further than the character create screen.

Any would-be successor is going to have to at least attempt to replicate that. Valiance is planning on ninety different power sets. For now, though, choice is fairly straightforward. I went with my basic Super Hero fallback, a fire-flinger.

When it comes to choosing costumes and clothing for a new character I tend towards the blue end of the spectrum but fire powers almost dictate reds and oranges so that's where I went.

It was challenging to choose a look, not because of a lack of options but because nothing I selected actually displayed on the image I was looking at. In the end I just clicked Accept and hoped for the best. I think that's why she has huge thighs and a tiny head. At least the color scheme seems to have worked.

Emerging into the dazzling sunlight  found myself in a city eerily reminiscent of the skyscraper streets I remember, albeit dimly, from the original City of Heroes beta all those however many years ago. My abiding memory of that game, which I beta-tested but declined to buy, is of huge plazas, towering buildings and wide, blank streets populated by an unseemly crowd of muggers and petty criminals all just asking for some rough super-hero justice.

If that's what SilverHelm, the developers, are going for then they're on the right track. The very first, introductory mission had me running off across town in search of an elderly couple who'd just been mugged in broad daylight.

When I say "run" I mean prance like a six-year old who's just watched The Bionic Woman for the first time and realized what she wants to do with the rest of her life. I know it's just a pre-alpha and all these animations will be tweaked and toned to unrecognizability but boy, I wish they'd keep this running anim. It's adorable.

Also, when I say "across town" I mean across town. Maybe the designer had the inevitable plethora of movement powers in mind - super-speed, flight, teleporting - but my poor character just has one small heal and a fireball about the size and potency of a burning paper bag. Don't they even have moving walkways in this vision of the future?

So, getting to the mugged couple took a while. Luckily, like all NPCs, they seemed to have nothing better to do than stand around and tell their story to every passing stranger. They also seemed remarkably unphased by their unpleasant experience, chatty even.

They gave me a good description of the perps.  Not that I needed one because a little marker pops up with each quest to give you both direction and distance to your target. It's amazing anyone bothers to break the law with this kind of infallible surveillance.

Another kilometer jog and I found them. Three ne'er-do-wells loitering on a walkway above what might be a sports stadium someday. I would have laid about them with fiery retribution only that was the point when I realized I didn't have any fiery retribution to hand.

Somewhere on the long jog one of my hotbars must have fallen off. You can see it clearly in the second screenshot, nestled neatly below the other one, but when I came to use it it just wasn't there. All I had was a heal and try as you might you can't heal someone into jail.

So I revived and ran back. That was fun. On the way I fiddled about with the options but wherever my bar had gone it was staying there, out of reach.

In the end I tried casting with the keyboard, which worked, technically, in that I threw some fire at a bad guy. Unfortunately, by the time he was beginning to look a bit singed he and his two pals had put me on the floor again. For the first fight in the starting zone I think this might be a tad overtuned.

For a project "in the Pre-Alpha, but moving towards the Alpha phase" Valiance feels quite solid. Super-hero MMOs have never really done much for me although given my very, very long love affair with the comic book version they really should. I'm very glad they exist, though, and I'd be very happy to see more of them.

Good luck to Valiance and all the other CoH flagwavers. May there always be enough muggers and mad scientists to keep your streets full of screaming citizens and happy players both!