The Real Thing

Because I have about as much self-discipline as a squirrel with a Red Bull habit, I have a list of unsorted bookmarks descending to the right of my browser that goes on for about three or four screens. When I'm idling, as I was last night as I waited for the next boss to spawn in Icecrown (Blizzard cut the timer in half but that still leaves plenty of time for staring into space with your mind in neutral), I sometimes scan down the list and click on things I don't recognize to pass the time.

There are plenty to choose from because I always leave whatever default title Firefox comes up with. Renaming them to something meaningful would be far too organized.

I was doing that, tidying up a bit, deleting a few bookmarks I thought I'd never need again, or hoped I wouldn't, when I came across one called FHX Restoration. It could have meant just about anythingbut it turned out (as anyone who followed the link will already know) to be the home of  "A community project to bring back the game FHX".

FHX? There was a game called FHX? Well, no, there wasn't. FHX is an acronym for Ferentus, Herrcot, Xiones, the three names the game in question traded under in different territories. When I played it in beta I knew it as Ferentus and I was oddly fond of it although I'd be hard pressed to explain why.

I guess I have some kind of excuse for not recognizing it but then again I did write about it under that acronym in some detail, less than a year ago, which shows you just how bad my memory is. I'd add "these days", only my memory has never been up to much.

 

I won't rehash the little I know about the game again. It's all in the the linked post, where I also mention how the team behind the project opened the servers a couple of times in 2019 for people to try it out. Back then, I wrote "I'm keeping an eye open for the next" and then never thought to look at the website again. Until now. When I'd just missed another test by less than a week.

In fact, since writing that post, I've missed getting on for a dozen opportunities to log in and see how things are going, the first of them barely a month later. It's ironic in that I check almost every week to see if there's been any progress on another game I'm interested in, Antilia, even though there almost never is but it takes me a year to notice another game's been running open tests every few weeks for the best part of twelve months.

This is where we come back around to that discussion that was sparking some sharp disagreements a while back, the one on whether Discord is a good thing or not. It's clear that most development teams theses days, from megacorps to kitchen table operations, prefer to use Discord as the main channel of communication. If I'd been in the FHX Discord I'd have known what was going on as soon as anyone. 

For all the reasons that were so heatedly discussed last time, I'm probably not going to do that. What I am going to do, though, is collate all the bookmarks for the games/emulators/projects I'm supposed to be following into one group and stick them at the top of the stack. For me, that counts as getting my act together. It's a low bar, I know.

Of course, there are a whole load of excellent, accessible, functional mmorpg emulators out there already, some of them very well known. The days when it seemed risky, even dangerous, to venture into the grey legal hinterland of community-based revivals of supposedly dead games are long over. 

I think the turning point was Sony Online Entertainment's formal acknowledgment of Project 1999's right to exist. Before that there was something of a feeling that emulators were motivated at least in part by something dubious. Some kind of desire to avoid having to pay for the service or a disinclination to follow the rules. Maybe both. Once P99 got the cautious green light from The Man, though, emulator projects began to look a little more like earnest preservation than exploitation. 

These days it's not always easy to tell the difference between a regular commercial mmorpg and a community-based enterprise. Some, like Return of Reckoning, the Warhammer Online emu, City of Heroes: Homecoming and the various Star Wars Galaxies servers, feel like they might as well be live games in active development.

It occured to me today, when I logged into my own favorite, that the Vanguard Emulator (aka New Telon) has now been online for almost as long as the original game. Given the determination of the volunteer teams behind these recreations and the dedication of the fans who play them, it won't be long before we have a whole raft of unofficial servers with more authority than the originals. If the "Live" version only lasted five or six years but the revival hits ten (or fifteen, or twenty), which one is the "real" game?

For me, in the end, it's not about the authority or even the legality. It's about the playability. I pop in to any number of games, old and new, for novelty, nostalgia, curiosity or a blog post or two but for regular entertainment, year on year, I keep plugging away at the same, very short, list of titles. All of which are still officially up and running.

If any of the titles I do play regularly were to go under, though, then it might be a different story. The chances of anything I like as well coming along to replace them seems slimmer each passing year. Maybe then I would move to an emulator for my primary game. 

I guess a lot of people hit that point a while ago, which is why the mmorpg emulator scene is so active and vibrant. A lot more so than its commercial counterpart, some might say...

Common People

I should probably begin this post with an apology. I wrote it in response to Redbeard's thoughts about the importance of NPCs to our game worlds. There are two distinctly separate threads in Redbeard's post and I've allowed them to get horribly tangled in my reply.

The first is how important NPCs are to making the world feel inhabited, lived-in, convincing, real. It's something Bethesda found out the hard way in Fallout 76. Even when they realized their mistake it was far too late for some people.

The second is whether the ever-spiralling importance and significance of the player character in relation to events that shape the imaginary world serves to distance the player from the game. I should really have posted about the two things separately. I may well do that another time. For now, consider this a broad introduction to both topics.

On the first I wouldn't imagine there would be a huge degree of dissent. If you're interested in immersion, role-playing, narrative or lore, NPCs are absolutely essential. Even if all you care about are stats, gear, progression and glory, complete and total disinterest in the imaginary world that provide them would be difficult to maintain. If you really felt no need for any of that, chances are you'd be playing another kind of game entirely.

Anthropomorhic animals have a head start when it comes to emotional engagement.

Something like a battle royale, perhaps. As Mrrx explains in an excellent post on the game that's supposedly every parent's nightmare (tm The Daily Mail), there are plenty of ways to engage players without using NPCs. Just not in an MMORPG. Although maybe Fortnite is an MMORPG. I might wait until I've played it before I leap to any conclusions on that.

The extent to which NPCs matter varies from gameworld to gameworld. In games with strong, linear narrative structures like FFXIV there are times (quite a lot of times in my limited experience) when it seems as though the main reason players are even allowed into the game is to facilitate the stories of the NPCs.

In the kind of MMORPGs I prefer, the NPCs take something of a more democratic stance. They live there, you live there (well, your characters live there and you through them), you'd all just better try to get along.

In the original EverQuest, World Warcraft or EverQuest II, in Guild Wars 2 and most especially in the exemplary Vanguard, I never felt my characters were substantively different to the townsfolk, farmers and guards, who handed out jobs that felt like the kind of things Steinbeck would have had the Joads do, had they lived in Norrath not the Dust Bowl. The threats may have been wasps the size of turkeys or ratmen stealing apples but the reason they had to be stopped was so the crops could be brought in safely and merchants could bring them to market.

All of those games did have detailed and epic narratives but they took place somewhere high above the mortal perceptions of my humble characters. In some cases quite literally, away in other planes of existence.

EverQuest is one of the rare games I've played where even non-speaking NPCs seem to have personalities.

The practice then was to tell those stories only in raids. And by most estimates of the period only something like ten per cent of players raided. The rest of us picked up fragments, rumors, scattered news from the ethereal front lines.

It reminded me of warfare before modern telecommunications, where everyone knew something was going on, something that might change their entire way of existence, but it was all happening a long way away, somewhere across the water. If the war ever came to you, by the time you heard about it, it would be too late to do anything - as if you even could - so why worry? Meanwhile gnolls were stealing babies and orcs were in the woods and someone better do something about it and the someone might as well be you.

I used to feel very strongly about this kind of thing. Long before there were any MMORPGs I played a little Dungeons and Dragons. The group I was in played a bunch of different tabletop rpgs over five years or so in the mid-eighties but our first campaign was AD&D, first edition, and it set the pattern for all the others.

No-one was interested in fighting gods. We drew our line at trans-dimensional travel. Small dragons terrorizing market towns we might deal with if we felt no one else was going to do it The occasional minor demon lordling, at a pinch. By the time we hit level eight, though, our suspension of disbelief was shot.

That's why we kept starting over and over in new campaigns and new systems. Well, that and the insatiable curiosity for novelty among some of the group, plus the almost pathological passivity of the rest.

GW2 balances the very large with the very small rather well. Figuratively and literally.

When I transferred my roleplaying affections to online games I kept that mindset. Or tried. For many years I remained uncomfortable with extraplanar excursions and battles with demi-gods. I played so many characters partly so I could keep going back to the beginning, the leveling game, where the enemies were mortal and the stakes small.

As Redbeard says, "MMOs present a conundrum: you need to keep people interested by showing off "more" and "better" and "cooler" with each new expac". As characters get stronger so must their opponents and you can't sell your third, fourth, fifth expansion with a marketing campaign based on "yet more farmers with beetle problems in the lower fields, only this time the beetles are really big".

Developers seem to have two fundamental solutions to the problem of how to keep the players from noticing they just bought the same game for the umpteenth time: spectacular visuals and extremely big numbers. The new cities and zones become more fantastical, more other-worldly, more alien. The mobs become bigger and tougher and louder. All the numbers go up.

In many MMORPGs, higher levels turn into a dadaist fever dream, where you find yourself fighting woodland animals that could easily solo the raid bosses your guild took months to master a couple of years ago. Instead of battling ancient lich-lords you're back to beating up badgers because handing ten of their skins to a gate guard gets you a bracer better than the one the elder dragon dropped at the end of the last expansion.

My berserker in EQII now has 166 million hit points self-buffed. In solo instances the bolstering system bumps that to over half a billion. I upgraded one of his Ascension spells to Expert yesterday. It hits for between 86,340,040 and 178,114,878. The numbers are so big I can't read them without punctuation. That spell can be upgraded three more times.

Gnomes, eh? What you can do? Well, punt them, obviously.

Account based systems just confuse matters further. All my characters in Guild Wars 2 have senior military rank. Everyone who's anyone recognizes them on sight, even though most of them have never done anything more adventurous than some dailies and a few holiday events. It's disorienting. At least my EQII characters had to finish a few quests before people started addressing them as Mortal Champion or Drakinvess.

At some point it really ceases to matter whether opponents are the avatars of gods or overgrown domestic pests. Trying to hold the line on suspension of disbelief in the face of numbers that big would be fatuous and self-indulgent. It's a game now. The only question is whether it's a good one.

As the explosions get larger, the stakes higher (We have to save the world! What? Again?) and the numbers bigger, immersion and emotional involvement, for me at least, retreat into a dark corner and sulk. NPCs, though, they just keep on trucking.

Each new hub city, each forward camp and outpost, needs to be populated with people for whom all this is normal life. Or life, anyway. Often the NPCs I find myself working with seem almost at a loss to understand how they got there. Particularly the gnomes. The number of quests I end up taking on for gnomes who've somehow found themselves out of their depth in dangeorus waters yet again would fill a large volume of my virtual memoirs.

Social distancing in Khal bank.

I don't mind the gnomes. Their confusion and ineptitude does, at least, make some attempt at grounding the insane enterprises in which we engage. I'm in no doubt what I'd prefer, though.

Nothing beats recognizeable, human-scale cities and villages, their streets filled with murmuring shopkeepers and the hum of daily life. Bree in Lord of the Rings Online, as Redbeard suggests, or my favorites, Ahgram and Khal in Vanguard. It's ironic the full name of that game is Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It always felt so much more like Vanguard: Tales of Ordinary Folk.

But Vanguard enjoyed the luxury of failure. There was never even a first expansion to shunt us into the Planes or back to the alien homeworlds from which several of the playable races supposedly came. It's easy to stay true to your roots if you never leave home.

I suspect incompetent NPCs, battles with demigods and vastly inflated numbers will be the best MMORPG players can expect for the foreseeable future. Better that than maintenance mode and closure, I guess.

Might as well just accept it and play on.

Checking In On Vanguard

It's been a while since I checked in with the Vanguard Emulator. I like to take a look every few months to see how it's coming along. The danger is that once I log in I end up playing just as though it was a Live game.

And really, it might as well be. Every time I've logged in over the last five years (Has it really been five years since the sunset? Yes it has.) the server has been up and stable. As far as I can tell it's available pretty much 24/7/365.

The team have a spiffy new website at vgoemulator.net and a Discord server too. You're no-one without a Discord server these days. The current feature set is impressive. All of the listed features are currently implemented and working to some extent.

It includes things I'd completely forgotten, like Brotherhoods and Caravans.  Brotherhood was supposed to allow players leveling together to keep in range despite differing play hours but I vaguely remember trying it not long after launch and finding it slowed my leveling down. Caravans were a means of getting players to their group across Telon's vast landscape. Not sure I ever rode in one.

Vanguard was very much what you'd call a "feature-rich" MMORPG. It had quite a few tricks I didn't always remember until I saw them pop up in-game. And still does. As I was riding across Thestra this morning a series of updates flashed across the screen for a skill I didn't know I had: Awareness.  I didn't know what it did and even after doing a little research I still don't!

As far as I can tell, Crafting isn't in yet. Nor Harvesting. I could be wrong but neither is listed in the features and I couldn't find anyone willing to get me started. The trainers are there but they just say they have nothing to teach me. Could be me doing it wrong, of course.

I started looking for them because I logged in at a guard post outside Tursh and immediately noticed I had a chicken in my backpack. As it happened, the guard right next to me wanted it so I handed it over and he gave me a couple more things to do.

He wanted me to kill a bunch of frogs and also thin out the local boar population a little. Guards in these places always seem to have a down on the local wildlife. 

I was over-level for the area but the quests and kills still gave xp so I ran around hacking up frogs and pigs for a while. Both creatures were skinnable and I love skinning my kills. Unfortunately my Disciple didn't have the skinning skill, which is how I found myself spending the next hour riding all over Thestra in search of a trainer.

Didn't find one. Instead I took a load of screenshots and wound up having diplomatic relations with half the people I met.

Diplomacy, one of the many jewels in Vanguard's crown, is implemented. Well, Civic Diplomacy is. I don't think the Diplomacy quests are in but you can have endless oddly formal conversations with just about every NPC.

I'm not sure if the Levers are operational yet. That was the system whereby Diplomats could add buffs to an area by winning arguments with NPCs. It was an innovative and fascinating way to add a layer of social activity to the game that didn't actually involve anyone having to speak to other players.

Mrs Bhagpuss used to do a lot of it. People would ask in chat if someone could add a particular buff to an outpost and Diplomats would happily comply. Sometimes there were diplomatic incidents when several players were trying to pull different levers in the same outpost. I've certainly seen nothing like it any other MMORPG.


When I was in Tursh today I had a look at the Broker to see if anything was up for sale. One of the devs had added a whole lot of items for testing purposes, all at the very attractive price of no money at all. I bought some gloves that were an upgrade but what excited me were several ships - a sloop and a couple of caravels.

I only ever had a sloop in the Live game. Mrs Bhagpuss had a caravel. I grabbed the larger ship off the broker and got on my horse to ride down to the coast. That took a while. About half an hour in fact. Telon is huge.

You might be wondering why there's no picture of my Disciple sailing his caravel. That's because sailing doesn't appear to have been implemented yet. But when it is, I'll be ready!

When I first logged in it was the middle of the night. It always is. By the time I finally quit it was night again. I'd been through one whole day/night cycle and into the next. I tend to lose time in Vanguard that way.

It gets very dark out in the countryside at night. There was a fantastic full moon but in among the trees it was too dark to see much. I kept to the road and did my best to avoid the spiders and bears as they went up in level from easy greens to scary reds to instant-death purples.

By the time I got to Lakeview the mobs were more than double my level. It was such a nostalgic ride. Vanguard uses signposts more effectively than most MMORPGs and I read the fingerposts at every junction. So many names of places where I used to hunt. It made me want to level up so I could hunt there again.

I rode past a graveyard and had a flashback to an afternoon Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent there, grouped with a passing stranger, killing very tough undead for a quest. I remembered it as clearly as though it had been real, which of course it was. As I used to say, often, when people talked about "real life" as though it was something different to gaming, "I only have the one life. Everything I do in it is real".

You can get on peoples' nerves, saying things like that, so I stopped. True, though.

I thought I remembered there being a teleport obelisk in Lakeview but then I'd thought there was one in Tursh and I'd been wrong. I was right about Lakeview, though.

I ported over to Khal, the capital city of Qalia, Telon's desert continent. I always preferred Qalia to Thestra, mostly because it doesn't rain much there but also because of the underplayed middle-eastern accents of the NPCs. Even  now I sometimes say "Always pray for rain" in that clipped, cool fashion, with the half-pause after the first word.

Another brief and unsuccessful search for a crafting or skinning trainer and it was time to stop. I'd been "playing" for almost three hours by then.

I might start logging in more often and leveling up more seriously. There hasn't been a wipe in years and as I said the server's up as reliably as any Live game.

Vanguard on the Emulator isn't an MMORPG at the moment because for that it would need more then three or four people to log in at the same time. It is, however, an almost fully-functional single-player RPG and one of the highest quality.

If anyone's looking for something along those lines they could do far worse.

If You Squint It Looks The Same

This week's top MMORPG news story was undoubtedly the revelation that a City of Heroes emulator has been running in secret for six years. The story first surfaced on YouTube, when a renegade invitee to the elite club, estimated to comprise around three thousand players, broke ranks to confirm the truth of what had long thought to be no more than a tin-foil hat conspiracy.

PCGamer has an overview of the story, crediting Massively OP for much of the subsequent  investigative work that teased out the detail. MOP itself has been on fire with extended commenary all week, although the frenzy there pales in comparison to the firestorm raging on Reddit.

In the aftermath of the reveal the source code to the game was released, a publicly available server came online then vanished, following supposed legal threats that turned out to be figmentary. Death threats and worse (!) were issued. Meanwhile negotiations apparently continue with NCSoft in the hope of bringing some degree of legality - and sanity - to the situation.

A story that got far less attention was the progress update on the project to bring back Free Realms, SOE's MMORPG for kids, which closed just over five years ago. I was mildly peeved when I spotted the Massively OP post, not because I'm wasn't delighted to see progress being made but because I was in hospital at the time and couldn't respond.

I've been following the Free Realms Sunrise project for a long time. On a scale between the black ops, NDA-protected secrecy of the COH server and the open access, everyone welcome approach of the team behind the magnificent Vanguard Emulator, FRS sits somewhere in the middle.

It's a very professional-looking project. There's a slick website but core communication happens on Discord. Access to the alpha, when it was running, was by invitation only although active participation on the forums allowed sufficiently motivated applicants a way in.

The alpha has now ended but, as the ever-cagey devs explain, "this doesn't mean we're entering beta". Instead they plan to carry on working on bringing the game back to life, while "posting update videos to our YouTube channel on either a weekly or bi-weekly basis".

Based on the one video we've seen so far, huge progress has been made. The game they're showing looks more sophisticated than I remember the real Free Realms ever being. I certainly don't recall seeing any juggling octopuses on any of my sporadic visits.

I liked Free Realms a lot. When it launched in 2009 it marked the start of Sony Online Entertainment's flirtation with the Free to Play business model, a flirtation that went on to become a full-blown love affair.

It was a popular game. In just a year over ten million players had registered to play. By the time John Smedley gave an interview to GamesIndustry.biz in 2011 that number had risen to 17 million. The game had just transferred to the PS3 and Smed was bullish about the prospects for Free Realms future: "I don't see any reason why it can't go to 100 million", he said.

When Free Realms sunsetted four years later it wasn't due to lack of interest; it was, as John Smedley said, because kids don't have money and cost a lot to manage: "Kids don't spend well and it's very difficult to run a kids game. Turns out kids do mean stuff to each other a lot.

City of Heroes famously also didn't go under due to lack of players. When NCSoft decided to pull the plug, COH was making money. Just not enough. The subsequent strange, long death of WildStar suggests that NCSoft felt the PR burn from that cold, financial calculation. Whether the scars still tingle enough to keep them from slamming any would-be COH Emulator with a Cease and Desist order remains to be seen.

The recent farrago over secret servers and entitled elites has knocked a huge hole in the City of Heroes Community Boat. Long touted as one of the cuddliest collectives in MMOdom, the shock of what many have been labeling betrayal has started a civil war uglier than anything seen between Heroes and Villians in the game itself.

People do get emotionally distraught over access to MMORPGs they love. Or loved. I'm not at all sure it happens in other gaming genres. It's not rational but love never is.

When an MMORPG closes it can feel as though someone dropped a bomb on your home. That's traumatic enough but imagine learning, years later, the bomb was mostly noise and smoke. Your home is still standing after all, only someone stole your keys and has been living there ever since.

Emulators have existed almost as long as MMORPGs themselves. Given that gamers and the IT community have a huge overlap that's hardly surprising. The will and the skill combine to make bringing dead games a calling for some, a hobby for others and a lifeboat for the rest of us.

As time passes the focus has shifted perceptibibly from "should we?" to "can we?". Emulators operate in a legal shadowland where nothing is certain until tested by the courts. Euphemistically-named "Private Servers" for MMORPGs still running commercially are clearly dancing on a knife-edge, especially if their operators are foolish and greedy enough to try to charge for access. Community projects that seek only to replicate a game deemed too old, unpopular or uncommercial to bother with by its legal owners are on significantly more solid ground.

Not only is there doubt which way a court might lean, there's also the not-insignificant calculation of relative damage to the brand. Is it going to cost more to protect assets that are never going to be used than would be lost by looking the other way and pretending nothing was happening?

Every time an MMORPG sunsets the brand of the company behind the decision takes a hit. In time that wound heals and most people forget. Why remind them by slamming down the oar on the fingers of the few poor saps still clinging to the wreckage? Is "Corporate Bully" really the look you want?

Daybreak, who inherited the blame for any number of SOE's Public Relations disasters from the botched handling of Star Wars Galaxies' NGE onwards, made a brave stab at turning it all around with one, stellar commercial decision early on. Their handling of the popular and successful Classic EverQuest emulator, Project1999 remains a shining beacon guiding other developers along the tricky path to redemption.

Daybreak didn't just turn a blind eye to P99, they actively engaged with the team behind it, arriving at a mutually acceptable solution which benefitted both parties. It is possible. It can be done.

Whether NCSoft will ever come to such an arrangement with the City of Heroes community remains to be seen. I wouldn't bet on it. I would hope, at least, though, that they have better things to do with their vast resources than pick off minnows in a jar.

I have no particular feeling for City of Heroes, myself. I played it in Beta and found it dull and repetetive. My beta experience convinced me not to buy it when it launched and I pretty much never thought of it again until it closed down.

By most accounts I missed out on a very good MMORPG. It must have changed a lot. Maybe CoH was the exception that proves my "better in beta" rule. If there ever is a stable, reliable emulator, maybe I'll give it a try.

In the meanwhile I'll keep on logging in to the Vanguard Emulator - five years old, developing slowly, utterly wonderful. And waiting on Free Realms Sunrise which will, I predict, be big news when it comes.

We need emulators. The drama, that we can do without.

Work In Progress: VGOE, Project:Gorgon

I'm always slightly nervous of mentioning the VGOEmulator project. It's Telon's last, best hope and I'd hate to do anything to jeopardize the amazing efforts the volunteer team is making to pick up an entire world that fell down. I'm never quite sure whether they welcome the light of publicity or whether they'd rather keep to the shadows.

With the recent legitimization of Project 1999, however, the skies seem bluer than ever before for true labors of love like these. Also, judging by Daybreak President John "Smed" Smedley's generally uncompromising attitude to internet black hats, it seems reasonable to assume that we'd know about it by now if he disapproved.

As far as I can gather from VGOE's forums tentative contact has been made to see if Vanguard can gain some kind of recognition, if not actual endorsement, from its owners and erstwhile operators but so far the response has been silence. No news, sleeping dogs and similar old saws apply.

It's been a few months since I last logged in to see how things were getting along. The old launcher no longer works. It's been replaced by a smart new one. With it came a wipe of all existing accounts. That's not a big deal at this stage because, as yet, there's no character progression. There is, however, some marked progression in the starting state of the characters themselves and that of the world into which they are reborn.

I don't actually remember these mouse-over windows from the original. Maybe they're new?

When I remade my raki disciple he was able to choose between starting on the Isle of Dawn or his original starting town of Ca'ial Brael. His details also now correctly show his race, class and level and he arrived fully kitted-out with a set of starter armor, most of his spells and skills already on his hotbar and a lunch of fresh berries in his backpack.

The world renders flawlessly - well, as flawlessly as it ever did in the Official Version - and the server is stable. You can explore the whole world at will. NPCs have had default speech clips and a generic "Welcome to Telon" window for a while but now the merchants also have stock and the trainers have skills and spells for sale.

There's some wildlife too but currently there's no real combat system. You can attack and see the animations but even though damage numbers appear your target just stands there unconcerned and unhurt. Combat is still a ways off according to the notes on the forums, where a very impressive list tracks features already implemented.

Personally I'd forego combat entirely if we could just have Diplomacy up and running. A fully-explorable Telon with no aggressive monsters but a full implementation of the unique faction card game would pretty much work as a standalone MMORPG for me. Looking at the determination and enterprise of the folks behind VGOE, though, I don't for a moment believe they'll settle for anything less than the complete, working virtual world we used to have.

They're going to get there, too. Count on it.

Another stubbornly determined, quiet force of nature is Eric Heimberg of Project: Gorgon. The failure of two previous Kickstarters hasn't even slowed him down. The game - and it very much is a game already - has continued to grow all year. It patches often and the content of the game is already quite impressive. There are, for example, fifteen dungeons ranging in level from 1 to 50.

When I logged in today, again for the first time in a good while, I noticed my character's animations seemed a lot more fluid. The world also looks more detailed. There's been a revision of stats, and although I couldn't say what's been revised or how, my character did feel more powerful.

That might have been because I didn't stray far from the starting area but even so I was mobbed on several occasions (mobs in P:G very much follow the "Hey! Get your paws off my buddy!" social etiquette of early Everquest). In previous sessions an add meant death but this time I was able to fend off, albeit by a whisker, several pigs and a trio of spiders (not all at once, although they do seem to have some kind of fraternal inter-species mutual protection pact going on).

Square! Square! Square!

The one thing about P:G I'm not quite so impressed with is the new, harshly angular GUI. It seems more appropriate for a science-fiction setting than a fantasy MMORPG. It's very easy to use though and I'm sure it will change out of all recognition by the time the game finally launches, if that day ever comes. After all, the version we're seeing, for all that it out-performs on a number of fronts quite a few similar efforts that are already taking customers' money, is still only in early alpha.

In terms of playabilty and entertainment value Project: Gorgon is very definitely moving briskly in the right direction. I'm not sure it'll be enough to guarantee success in the proposed third Kickstarter but it deserves to be. I'll be backing it again and I hope this time Eric gets my money.

Both these projects are open to anyone who's interested enough to drop in and check them out. That's something very definitely worth doing. I plan on keeping close tabs on each of them until their considerable promise is fulfilled. Good luck to everyone involved and keep up the good work!

Sailing Into The Sunset : Vanguard

Just a few days now before the curtain comes down on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. When the "sundown" was announced I had a whole load of plans - videos to make, places to re-visit, adventures to have - but in the end it all felt too painful and not much fun at all so not much got done.

I already had all the music downloaded and of course I have a wealth of screenshots and video clips, but when I learned that some of the people behind previous successful MMO emulators had a project going that aimed to preserve Telon itself, well, that did take some of the sting out of situation. When it comes down to it, I'm not obsessed over which Telon survives; just so one does. 

Whether they'll ever get something up and running that can be played as a game I have to wonder. The code for Vanguard was famously unravellable and even now it barely works much of the time. Frankly, though, I don't particularly care how "playable" it gets. Had SOE left a server running Vanguard for another decade or two I don't suppose I'd ever have gone back and played any hours you'd call full-time. I'd have gone on doing what I'd been doing for years, dropping in now and again as the mood took me, knocking out a level on my Sorceror here, another on my Necromancer there, mostly just flying around on my toothpaste-blue griffin, taking screenshots.

If the VGOEMU people can just get the world back up so I can wander around the streets of Khal when I'm of a mind to that'll do me. Oh, and Diplomacy please, guys. That'd be neat. As soon as the official server goes down next week they're going to be taking a break for a few months to assess what they've got but they seem very confident they'll get this horse back in the race. And why shouldn't they be? They've done it before. I'll be watching with interest and cheering them on with enthusiasm.

In the meantime, though, I thought it might be appropriate to commemorate the characters that have given me so much pleasure over these last seven-and-a-half years. There's a round dozen of them and here they are:

Rolled on some long-forgotten server one day, when my own server, the much-missed Hilsbury, was down. That was back in the days when Vanguard had more than one server. Explored Mekalia with him a little but never really played him. He came along for the ride when the merges hit because why shouldn't he?

I needed a bank mule and I was determined to have one who wouldn't sneakily worm his way into my affections and end up as a proper character. Hence, halfling. It worked. He never left Tursh.

Goblins are great. Every fantasy MMO should have them as a playable race. Blood Mage, on the other hand, is something of an acquired taste and one I never really managed to acquire, even though I first played one back in beta. This one, like half my people, ended up in New Targonor because when SOE decided Vanguard was a lost cause the first time round, rather than close it down, they began giving away presents by the barrowload and the bottom of the ramp into NT was where the man with the barrow used to stand. No, he didn't really have a barrow...

Another goblin and there's plenty more where he came from. In theory this was a less unusual class than Blood Mage, somewhat resembling an EQ Enchanter, but it still took some getting used to and I never put in the hours for that. The whole Union of Minds thing, where all Psionicists automatically entered a global chat channel for Psionicists only (something no other class had) creeped me out a bit if I'm honest.

Ah, the good old Dwarf. He got played a lot more than his lowly level would suggest because he was my original Diplomat. He spent most of his time mediating in the endless court intrigues of Bordinar's Cleft. Since he was a Paladin he never had much hope of progressing as an adventurer - it's a class I've never enjoyed in any MMO ever. I have no memory of why I chose it when I rolled him although given Vanguard's Class/Race restrictions there probably weren'ta lot of choices for dwarves.

Here come the Rakis. My favorite race in any MMO or RPG ever. This Sorceror was the character I created when the Isle of Dawn was added, which in itself was long after Vanguard had ceased to be my focus game. He finished everything on the island and carried on from there. He got played a lot, mostly in short, late-night sessions. Sorceror turned out to be a really fun class. I don't normally get on with wizards but I got on just fine with him. He'd have made fifty one day - probably sometime around 2025.

Mrs Bhagpuss played a Shaman in the first duo we took to the Level Cap so I had a good idea how they operated. I know they have dogs that bite you all the time even when you're on the same team for one thing, although maybe that was a bug. It was certainly a class that required a lot of choices, anyway, never something that appeals to me. It got simplified some later on but by then it was too late. I already had the best healer ever and I didn't have time for a runner-up.

Like most MMO fantasy worlds, Telon is dominated by humans. They have some great starting areas. The clifftop village that looks down on Khal and the Lomshir horselands are wonderful. Despite that, this is the only one I played and I'm quite surprised he got as far as level twenty. Ranger is one of those classes that always sounds as though it's going to be more interesting than it turns out to be and even Vanguard struggled to buck that trend.

Good old Gnomes. Good old Necros. Can't go far wrong with either. He was a relatively late addition, made long after I'd stopped playing regularly, but he had a good run all the same. I think he had to defer to the Sorceror above as the late-night go-to guy. I remember a lot of messing about with grafts and that's about it. Look at that 'tache though...

Telon has not one but two canine races. Well, to be accurate, it has a Vulpine race, the Raki, and a Lupine one, the Vulmane. This was one of my earliest charaters. I loved the Vulmane starting area and I found the Druid spell-set and gameplay very familiar. Vanguard took an awful lot directly from EQ and one of the things they lifted almost unchanged was the Druid class. He'd probably have made it all the way if Vanguard didn't have some extremely annoying (intentionally I think) issues with tethering and agro. Playing a class that's been given all the tools for kiting but wasn't allowed to use them effectively eventually became just a little too annoying and he took early retirement.

And so we come to the Big Boys. An Orc Dread Knight was my second character to hit the cap back when the cap was fifty. I never went on to 55, which was designed mostly to occupy the time of the small but dedicated hardcore and which therefore took for-frickin'-ever. 

Back when the level cap in Everquest was 60 and subsequently 65 I'd had two characters at cap simultaneously. One was a healer, the other a tank, a pattern I repeated in Vanguard. My EQ tank was a Shadowknight and I thought the Dread Knight would play similarly but I was in for a surprise. Instead of focusing on a single target the way my SK had, the DK's motto is "the more the merrier". This was the class that taught me to love AE, a preference that has stayed with me ever since. There's nothing like being in a massive fight, seeing your health dropping uncomfortably fast and thinking "Crap! I better pull some more mobs, fast!"

I thought about retiring him to the Orclands but he left there so long ago it scarcely feels like home any more. No, he was happiest in the great seaport of Khal and the souks of Ahgram so that's where he's going to stay. I picture him, standing on the dockside, cleaning imaginary specks from the immaculate, enameled inlays of his mace while the colorful cloth awnings overhead flap and crack in the breeze. There he waits, patiently, for the sailors to unload the cargo and the merchants to pack the camel-bags, before he sets out once again, a highly-paid mercenary guard on the Khal-Ahgram run. Bandits beware.

And so we come to the the undisputed champion: best race I've ever played, best class I've ever played, best character I've ever played. Stand up, my Raki Disciple. Oh, you are standing up...

I'd never played anything like him before although I've played a few poor imitations since. A three-foot high whirling bundle of fur and claws with impeccable manners, he was equally at home hurting or healing, but he was at his very best doing both at the same time.

The class went through many changes and refinements. In the early days he seemed as weak as a kitten, later he could comfortably solo mobs intended to challenge a full group. He could Feign Death and, until they changed the way FD affected aggro, his hobby was to run into dungeons, round up everything then fall over and let the monsters fight it out between them as they blamed each other for the trouble he'd started. That never got old.

He wasn't only my favorite character of all time; he was one of the most rounded. He hit the cap as an Adventurer and only stopped a couple of levels short as a Leatherworker because by then there were no more recipes left that he had any use for. He never quite made it to the same levels as a Diplomat but he was making steady progress, working on it until the end.

My memories of him are manifold, his adventures and exploits multifarious, but I like to think of him best sailing his blue sloop Foxglove along the rivers of Qalia, following the shoreline of Abella Cove, where the domed home he built and rebuilt with his own paws stands. He always did like to fish. Now he'll have all the time he needs.

Rest well, old friend. All my old friends. Though the gates are barred to us may your roads roll ever on.

A Dragon In Ahgram: Vanguard

Today is the fifth anniversary of the launch of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, almost certainly the best least-played MMO in the world. For a long while it was my second-favorite MMO of all time. Now I'm not so sure. I think it might be my first.

No point rehashing Vanguard's story all over again. Anyone likely to be reading this already knows it. Did Vanguard start the trend of huge expectation verging on mania before launch followed by crashing disappointment and tidal waves of hatred after? I can't remember. It was a long time ago and now every MMO launch is something like that. All I know is that I loved Telon from the day I first set foot there and I love it still. If I could step through the screen and live there, I would.

Built with my own paws

And yet, how much time do I spend there nowadays? Not much. Not enough. A little diplomacy here, a boat trip there. I visit when I remember. Even my house is packed up and stored away. Telon is so quiet now. Lonely, almost.

So it was a joy to see the Festival Square in Ahgram filled with people for the fifth anniversary party yesterday. Well, it was a joy when I finally found it. I didn't know Ahgram even had a Festival Square. I spent nearly forty minutes running around the dusty sun-drenched streets and flying above the flat, white roofs looking for fireworks and listening for the sounds of people having fun.

What can I say? Even though I've arrived at Ahgram by river many times, I never noticed the dockside gate. I always came in from the Khal side, where the Riftway stands beside the shipbuilders and the bindstone. I thought that was the main entrance. In the end I saw a flaming pegasus spiral down and I followed. I found the party at last but it seemed they were having a bit of a problem...

Kotosoth reacts badly when asked if he brought a bottle

There was a dragon in Ahgram.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a real dragon in Telon. When the highest level a character could reach was fifty I had two of them, a Raki Disciple and an Orc Dread Knight. Now the top level is fifty-five I still have two level fifties. The ultra-grind, raid-focused endgame that SoE chose to go with doesn't appeal to me, although it was probably a sensible choice given the limited resources available and the hardcore residue that remained after the general population boiled out.

I'm under there somewhere

This dragon was Kotosoth, who I believe normally lurks in the Ancient Port Warehouse. My little Raki had a wonderful time kicking the big lizard in the ankle for ten minutes while a slideshow played. Reminded me of beating on a Keep door in Dark Age of Camelot in 2002, only a lot more fun. Finally the dragon fell over and the party started up again.

Your correspondent as a chicken

There were some marvelous party games. We all got turned into chickens. And camels. And skeletons. And ghouls. I went to the bank and got some sparklers and smoke bombs. I even found some snowballs to throw. Several people had invited Slappy the Cool so there was much dancing to actual music. Plenty of people came in fancy dress. I saw someone in the cat illusion from the Shidreth Mines and I wanted to use mine but I couldn't remember where I'd put it. Still, just thinking about the time I got it made me smile.

Evolution took a different path on Telon...

Half an hour after the dragon died the crowd had begun to thin a little. I saddled up Randolph the Controversial Reindeer and flew out, all the way back to EQ2. But a few hours later I was back in Telon, killing rats in Ksaravi Gulch with my level 18 Raki Sorceror. A kill 50 rats quest and I stayed up until one in the morning to finish it and relished every single rat.

So, happy fifth birthday Vanguard and here's wishing you many, many more. And I promise to visit a lot more often than just once a year.