Deceptively Spacious

This was going to be the post where I showed off the newly-decorated interior of my house in Villagers and Heroes. Things are never as simple as you think they're going to be, are they?

Even though I posted about it back when it was announced and even tipped the news to MassivelyOP, I still managed to miss the arrival of real housing in the game by a week. The long-awaited update finally dropped on 15 May. Well, almost. Given the update's called Homestead Part One, I'm guessing it's still a work in progress, even now.

Let's not carp. It's a very substantial upgrade to the existing housing system, which was perhaps unique in the genre in that you could own a house that you couldn't enter. You had to be content with admiring it from the garden, where you were free to tend crops and raise animals. 

You can still do those things, of course, but now, when you've finished your day's work, you can open the front door and step inside for a well-earned rest, on your bed or in your fireside chair. Or you will be able to, once you've bought or crafted yourself some furniture. 

Needs updating. No mention of interior design.

And that's where this falls down. I'd forgotten I'd only just started my character on the Steam version of Villagers and Heroes. At Level 3, getting hold of any furniture at all proved a lot harder than I was expecting.

I used to have a character who was in the twenties or thereabouts. She had a house, a garden, some sheep and who knows what-all. She probably also had the skills to gather materials and craft the furniture as well, not to mention enough money to buy the recipes and maybe some vendored furnishings as well. .Sadly, I've long since lost the account details needed to log her in.  

My current character didn't have any of those advantages. Fortunately, you don't need any of that to "buy" a basic house in V&H. All you have to do is ask. 

First, you have to choose which village you want to live in. 

How is Agartha Spanish, exactly? Remind me...

 

Without reading up on it (Again.) I can't recall the exact mechanics of how Villages are created but there are lots of them, some run by some kind of player council, others by Guilds. I picked one I liked the name of - Agartha Hamlet - because it reminded me of The Agartha in The Secret World. 

It turned out to be named after the ancient ruins of the mythical Spanish city of the same name. I'm guessing it's run by a Spanish-speaking village council. That'll be handy for practicing my very basic tourist Spanish in the unlikely event I ever have to speak to anyone.

I found a decent spot and clicked on the "To Let" board. There are plenty of options for various sizes and styles of building but only one I could afford - the one that costs absolutely nothing:  the Rustic. It's a wonky-looking structure, with a crooked chimney and a bowed roof but it's by no means unattractive, especially for no money down and a monthly rent of bugger all.

That chimney's never up to code.

Even though there's no rent to pay, you can't just sign the lease and forget about it. If you don't want to come back and find yourself homeless you have to make sure to log into the game at least once a fortnight. What happens to your stuff if you don't, I have no idea. 

And for the moment I don't much care, either, because I have no stuff. The inside of my new house is delightfully minimalist right now. Nothing but bare boards and whitewash. 

When I took possession and opened the door, I found just a single, windowless room but I wasn't at all disappointed. It's a big room with a very high ceiling and some quite impressive beams. Like the TARDIS, it's bigger on the inside than the out.

Pretty sure you could put four of my house inside my house.

Once I'd taken stock of the amenities (There are none.) I thought I'd go see what the housing vendors had to offer me. I'd read in the update notes that there were two new NPCs:

• Lazy Susan - ‘Housing Expert’ located in villages
• Supellex Copia - ‘Housing Vendor’ located in villages, Ardent City, and Summer’s Hollow

The quotation marks around "Housing Expert" were a little concerning, but although Lazy Susan seemed like a bit of a smartass, she did at least know what she was talking about. She explained the various ways I could furnish my house - buy stuff from vendors in the game, find it while exploring or get a few choice pieces from the cash shop - but her recommendation was that I craft my own.

Sarcastic Susan, more like.

 

That seemed like sound advice. She even gave me a starter quest to make a very basic stool, which sounded like something I ought to be able to do. 

Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

It took me a little while to find the recipe and when I did I barely had enough cash to buy it, even though it had clearly been priced at what was meant to be an absolute giveaway price. It brought home to me just how very new and unpayed my character was and how I was almost certainly going to be in over my head very quickly indeed unless I went and did some seriousl levelling.

I bought the recipe for one silver piece. That left me with two. Then I checked the map and found the woodworking station. I went there and opened the interface, only to find I couldn't even scribe the recipe I'd bought until I had a Woodworking skill of 15. Mine was zero.

At least I was able to see what mats I needed: 240 logs. Seems like an awful lot of wood for one small stool but who am I to judge, me with a woodworking skill of zero? Off to chop trees I went!

Except I didn't have the skill to chop wood either, or not in the woods around my village, anyway. The lowest level tree in Agartha Hamlet is Level 30 and my skill was five. I chopped and chopped but not a splinter could I make. I had to go back into Summer's Hollow, the starting town, to the portal for the lowest level area I could find, which turned out to be somewhere called Gandymeade Grove.

There I found not only trees my level but trainers of all kinds, willing to give instruction on how to chop wood, mine ore and similar essentials. As I tracked down the nodes I needed I was frequently set up on by the local wildlife, wargs and the like, all of which I handily dispatched, earning myself a couple of adventure levels and pretty much a full set of Hunter's leathers in the process. 

I was having such a good time, I did the full circuit of the Grove, hunting down and slaying all the named creatures marked on the map. In V&H you get to kill each of them once a day for a big XP bonus and an enhanced chance at their good loot. It's a nice version of the traditional daily quest.

After all that, I was still only Level 10 at Plant Lore, the gathering skill that covers the cutting down of trees. As for woodworking, I hadn't even started.

At this rate it's going to be weeks before I can come here and post proud pictures of my tastefully-decorated country cottage. I did try to cheat by going into someone else's house and getting some screenshots of their furnishings but although the default setting is Open Access for All, just about everyone in Agartha Hamlet has changed that to Private. The only houses I found that were admitting visitors were as bare inside as my own.

Consider this a work in progress, then. Much like the Homestead feature itself. A good start but with more to come. If I remember to log in, that is. If not, I guess I'll find out the hard way what happens to your funiture when you don't.

You've Never Still Got Your Deccies Up? You Have! What Are You Like?!

When I exited the tutorial in Villagers and Heroes on Tuesday and arrived in the starting city, I was surprised, especially given its name - Summer Hollow - to find the Christmas event still in progress. There was a portal just off the town square leading to somewhere ominously labelled "Grinchta's Lair", through which I could just about make out some tinsel-decked firs and a flurry of snowflakes.

January 23rd certainly seemed late for celebrations. I was curious but also pushed for time so I took the risk that the event would last another day and moved on to other things. On Wednesday I tried to go back to take a look inside the Lair but found myself thwarted, not by the inevitable and overdue end of the season but by Steam refusing to run the game at all.

I spent a while searching for fixes and applying them. Apparently it's been an issue on and off for a few years although, judging by the comments I saw, not one most players have experienced, thankfully. None of the fixes had any effect and once again I didn't have time to keep fiddling with things so I put it off for yet another day.

I was fairly sure the problem had started with some of the graphic settings I'd changed while I was inside the game. It's a problem I've come across a few times in mmorpgs, when there's a conflict between the screen resolution the game's trying to set and the default demanded by whatever platform it's running on. Sometimes you can reset things from the launcher or by digging around in the preference files but in this case none of that was working so I went for the nuclear option of uninstalling and reinstalling the entire game.

One thing you have to say about Steam - it's fast. The estimated time for the 3GB download was eight minutes but it was all over in half that. I hit Play and this time everything worked perfectly. Resisting the temptation to change the graphic settings yet again, I left everything on default and headed over to see if the portal to Christmas was still up.

It was. It is. For how much longer I can't say but I can tell you it's been there since 14 December. That's forty-three days and counting. Six weeks! It may be the longest I can remember seeing for a holiday event. Someone call the Guinness guys. They seem very comfortable adjudicating on pop culture these days.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect inside the "lair". It might have been one room with a boss but it turned out to be a whole zone and not a small one, either. It has a frickin' mountain in the middle of it. It also has a massive range of towering peaks all around, looming in the middle distance, while the Northern Lights flicker eerily overhead. There are stands of fir trees, some of them surrounded by piles of presents and, of course, snow everywhere. 

There are paths leading in all directions, lit by brightly-colored lanterns. The whole thing looks jolly as hell. I wandered around for a bit, not sure what to do next. After a while I caught sight of someone wearing the traditional questgivers punctuation headgear so I jogged over to find out what he wanted.

He had a present he wanted me to give to his brother (Boy, don't get me started on how that turned out...) but before I could work out where he was I ran into a whole gang of elves, all just waiting to hand out tasks to passers-by, because naturally no-one can do anything for themselves in one of these places.

I introduced myself to each of them in turn, found out what they wanted and told them I'd do it. I won't, of course. Some of the quests are clearly flagged as requiring a group, others need crafting skills I don't have. Still, easier to grab the lot and do what I can than think about it.

There was a Kill Ten Rats that was actually a Kill Eleven Rangers and a "Find My Fairy" that I realise now I forgot to finish. I also picked up a bunch of stolen presents and killed umpteen guards and snowmen for crafting mats that are still going to be in my bags when the event ends - whenever that is.

After I'd knocked a few quests out I went back for the hand-ins and to see what I could buy with the two Christmas currencies I got as a reward. The event is specifically a Christmas one, by the way, not Winter or Snow or anything named after a local deity. I always find that a bit unsettling. It's best not to think about the implications.

A couple of reindeer handle the two sets of merchandise on offer for either Yuletide Joy or Yuletide Spirit. The goods on offer are quality; Epic gear as well as the usual holiday-themed costumes. The prices are on the hefty side but some of the quests are repeatable daily and with the event running this long, there's little to stop a dedicated, regular player getting everything they want.

There are also several bosses loitering around the lair and every so often their bosses turn out to challenge all-comers in an open raid. One of those kicked off while I was playing but unfortunately I was otherwise engaged at the time, busy getting repeatedly killed inside a lair-within-a-lair, the hideout of the evil wizard who'd fooled me into taking a bomb to his "brother". It's a long story. I won't go into it now.

In a nice touch I don't recall seeing in other games, the names of everyone involved in the two raids were broadcast to the zone. There were maybe twenty people in each. There were also plenty of other players running around the zone, doing the quests and checking the vendors. At lunchtime on a weekday in a holiday zone that's been running for six weeks, it seemed like a sign of robust health for the game although the Steam charts would tend to disagree. Maybe everyone from all platforms is on the same server after all?

However under-the-radar popular the game might or might not be, I am not about to claim I'm going to drop everything to start playing Villagers and Heroes full-time. As Josh Strife Hayes found out, V&H is broad but not deep. 

He says, "It feels like someone's made a paint by numbers MMO".  I think that's a bit harsh but then I think almost everything Josh says about games is a bit harsh, mainly because I think he has much higher expectations than I do. Also, like a lot of people, he seems to believe that "Good enough" doesn't mean exactly what it says, an interpretation that confuses me. Still, I don't think he's necessarily wrong, either. It was certainly my experience, last time I played, that I ran out of enthusiasm for Villagers and Heroes after a few sessions, largely because the game feels tiresomely flat after a while.

Nevertheless, if I was thinking about giving the game another run, this would certainly seem to be the time to do it. On the website there's a truly huge edition of The Ardent Ledger newsletter discussing, among many other things, what's on the agenda for 2023. There's plenty and some of it's big news: 

"The most exciting new feature to arrive in the early months of 2023 is the one you’ve all been waiting the longest for.  (Some of you have waited over a decade!)  Rumors and whispers of its impending approach have circulated for months.  Strange messages began appearing in-game.  Was it a bug, wondered baffled players who happened to click on their house doors and were told: “Your house is currently under renovation.”  No, it’s not a bug, and yes, the rumors are true: the single most requested feature by VH players of all time, that which the Otters gave you brief glimpses of in long ago livestreams and tantalized you with images of its creation process, is at last soon to be a reality: interior housing and the ability to customize your own homes is coming to Villagers & Heroes in early 2023! "

Villagers and Heroes has always been odd in that you get a house but you can't go inside. You can grow crops and keep animals in the garden but that's all. Until now. Housing you can decorate always scores highly on my favorite feature list so this automatically raises my interest several notches. Enough to check it out when it arrives, for sure.

Until then, I imagine I'll probably find some more flavorsome game to occupy my time, although I do want to go back and find that runaway fairy. I wonder if the Christmas event will still be running if I log in tomorrow?

Only one way to find out.

Oh, I Remember This One! Well, Sort Of...

Spring is supposed to be the time for having a clear-out, isn't it? When it comes to house and garden I'm no bucker of that trend but it's the very beginning of the year that often finds me sorting through my virtual cupboards, searching for things I'm sure I remember enjoying, once. I blame all those end-of-year round-ups for sowing the seeds of doubt, making me feel there might be something, somewhere, I might have overlooked; that I could be having even more fun if only I made a little more effort.

Honestly, it's probably for the better most of these things stay locked away in the past, dimly remembered, safe in their rose-tinted, nostalgic haze. Does anyone really need to revisit a game they haven't played since the Obama administration, just because a desktop icon happened to catch the eye for the first time in years? If you find a forgotten .exe while cleaning up your hard drive, instead of sending it straight to the recycling bin, should you really decide instead to find out whether the game is still running?

Nope. Pretty sure not but does that stop anyone? I doubt it. Certainly never stops me.

As recorded, I've already patched up and logged into Final Fantasy XIV again, a game I never had, or most likely will have, any intention of playing in anything but the most casual of fashions. I've also expressed a desire to revisit Elder Scrolls Online, a game I've never been felt than lukewarm about at best. It can only be a matter of days before that, too, gets updated, posted about and forgotten. Until next time.

I'd be fooling myself if I didn't admit that half the attraction is the possibility of finding something fresh to write about, even if what passes for fresh in this context is nothing more than rehashed leftovers, a description that applies equally to both the games themselves and whatever it is I find to say about them. If I ever had anything of substance to recount concerning FFXIV or ESO, you can be certain I exhausted those insights years ago, but don't think that'll stop me trying again.

It's perhaps one thing to return to a well-known, popular mmorpg, looking to find out if and how it's changed before reporting back with the perspective of distance. By definition, people play popular games. Someone might be interested. Re-visiting titles that few knew or cared about the first time I wrote about them with any expectation that they'll draw more interest now they're older and even less well-known would seem to be the very definition of a futile waste of everyone's time. 

All the more reason to do it, then! It's with that attitude in mind I give you my second (Or is it third by now?) First Impressions of Villagers and Heroes! 

In case anyone's forgotten (Form an orderly line...) V&H is the game originally known as A Mystical Land. The creation of the marvelously named Mad Otter Games, AML originally appeared in 2011, when it was playable in a web browser and boasted "full Facebook integration". It changed its name to Villagers and Heroes in... well, I don't know exactly when, but before November 2013, which is when I posted about the game, observing with a touch of sarcasm "At some point in the recent past Mad Otter, the company behind A Mystical Land, must have decided having the blandest name in MMOdom did them no favors in the 'getting attention' stakes so they changed it to Villagers and Heroes, which frankly isn't that much of a zinger either."

Name aside, the game must have something going for it. It's still here a dozen years later and judging by the new characters running through the tutorial and starting zone alongside me an hour ago, it's still getting that attention, somehow.

Being on Steam has to help. When I had the notion to take another glance at the game this afernoon it was purely because I was going through the icons on my desktop, tidying them up, when I spotted one for "A Mystical Land". Had it been there since the game was actually called that? Surely not...

However the it got there, seeing the name again made me curious to know if the game was still running. I clicked on the little picture of a shield to see if anything would happen.

The launcher still worked but it couldn't find a connection to the server. I went into the folder and found two other options, neither of which could find a connection either, but somewhere in the nest of failure screens that appeared while they tried I spotted a mention of Steam. Surprised to find the game might be available through that platform I checked and sure enough, there it was. 

From there it was a simple 3GB download and I there I was, back at character creation. Playing through Steam meant starting over but it seemed like a small price to pay for the convenience, not to mention I'd made precious little progress the last time I played. It wasn't as though I had a lot to lose.

I'm very glad I did re-roll. Had I been able to recover my dormant character, I'd not have had the pleasure of what surely must be one of the most impressive character creation processes in all mmorpgs. It really deserves a whole post of its own but to save trying everyone's patience I'll try to shoehorn it in here.

Firstly, the character creation screens look gorgeous. Significantly more impressive, it has to be said, than the game itself, even though V&H looks reasonably attractive for its vintage. Character creation, though, employs a highly successful storybook design that marries clarity with subtlety in delightful fashion. It doesn't look dated at all.

Better yet, it feels great to use. Not only is the whole process of making a characer tactile and intuitive, it's imaginative and evocative as well. As you proceed, you make choices from lists that combine to define not just the usual gender, class, appearance and skills but also the emotional timbre and cultural background of the character. You even get to pick the style of house you'll live in.

There's a lot of choice and much of it appears to be meaningful, although to what extent, if any, it affects gameplay is unclear. Taking apparently detrimental personality traits like "Shy" or "Fearful" does feel like a risk without that knowledge. 

Then there are the regional or ethnic bonuses. There are half a dozen or so heritages to choose from and each comes with its own set of traits, something I didn't realise until I'd picked mine. At that point I could still have gone back, checked all of them and chosen again, but on the grounds I'd probably never play enough for a mistake at character creation to matter, I pressed on.

As you make your various choices, a detailed narrative appears. It's well-written and lengthy enough to scroll right off the screen by the time you're done. There's also a quality voiceover to keep you amused as you consider your options. All told, it's a very impressive introduction.

I ended up with a "cool, laidback hunter" from the heavily forested province of Greenhaven. She has an affinity for finding plants and bugs and she's handy with a saw and a chisel. It's probably the most detailed resume any character of mine has had since the launch of Guild Wars 2, another game that attempts to send you into its world with a fully fleshed-out backstory, whether you wanted one or not.

Based on my thousands of hours in GW2, the chances of any characters I play ever conforming to the narrative prepared for them by someone else are negligible but I appreciate the effort. It makes me want to go back and create a bunch more characters just to see how they turn out.

Once I knew who I was, it was into the game itself and quickly through a very brief tutorial that I don't remember seeing before. It's a fairly traditional checklist of some usual rpg tropes although I have to say it is unusual for the very first task you're given to be catching a minnow. I know we all like a bit of fishing in our mmorpgs but that seems a tad outré.

As it happens, it also seems more than a tad irrelevant because I got attacked before I even reached the river and things moved on apace from there. I never caught my minnow and no-one seemed to care.

The tutorial also appears to be atypical in that it features some moderately amusing dialog and charming voice acting. Also in that you can die before you get to the end of it. I didn't but the player in front of me did. I watched him drop. Stood well back while it was happening, too!

The final, boss-like fight that finished him off is peculiarly challenging for a tutorial. I was forewarned by having watched the other guy fail so I was ready to kite the Ghost of Mallok all around the harbor, plunking him with poison arrows and waiting for his hefty health pool to tick down. Even so, it was a damn close thing. I was on about 3% health when he finally gave up the ghost. So to speak.

With him out of the way it was on to the boat that takes you to the game proper, at which point I found myself on familiar ground once again. Since I've written about that before and it doesn't seem to have changed all that much, I'll finish there for now.

Whether I post about the game again remains to be seen but I will say that Villagers and Heroes is another cross-platform game, meaning I could in theory play it on this mythical armchair gaming device I still don't own. Then again, even if, as the website boasts, " Crossplay is seamless between mobile and PC! Unlike other crossplay games." (Their emphasis.) I don't imagine the Android or iOS versions allow crossplay with Steam's walled garden. There's a standalone PC client. I bet you'd need to use that, which would presumably also allow me to retrieve my old account and character.

I guess I'd better not make too much progress on Steam just in case...

What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

Keep Taking The Tablets

The list of MMOs that I like to imagine I'm still playing that was included in Saturday's post, stopped at a nice, round dozen. The thirteenth seat at the table could have been taken by a number of other titles but the front runners might easily have been Allods or Villagers and Heroes.

Allods is a game I have never given as much time as I would have liked. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it in beta and enjoyed it a great deal. For a while it was effectively the main MMO we were playing. We each had several characters and we leveled into the mid-thirties, far enough to see some dungeons and take part in the mid-game's open world, non-consensual PvP.

Those characters, of course, were all wiped when the beta ended. We re-rolled for launch but second time around we didn't last long. As I remember, it wasn't the infamous cash-shop shenanigans that put us off, just the usual "I just did all this last month" beta-tester's ennui.

That was Mrs Bhagpuss's last run at Allods but I've been back twice more. The first time was to take a look at the soviet-inspired Empire side of the fence, having always played League before. The second was both to try the new race and its starter area and to test out the viability of playing a full scale MMO on my new 10" Windows tablet.

The concept of playing MMOs on mobile devices has fascinated me for a long time. I first blogged about it back in 2012, when I was playing Pocket Legends and Elemental Knights on my iPod Touch. I'm still using that iPod to listen to music and podcasts and I even occasionally watch YouTube but I stopped gaming on it not long after I wrote that post.

At the time I thought it was the combination of small screen size and not particularly interesting games that made playing an MMO a less-than attractive option for lunch-times and commutes. That explanation didn't hold up very well when I got a tablet capable of playing full-scale MMORPGs like Allods and even WoW.

Of course, MMOs made for the PC aren't generally optimized for touch-screen gaming. WoW plays smoothly on my tablet, which is easily powerful enough to run it, but to play normally I need to attach a mouse and keyboard, by which point I am effectively playing on a netbook.

There are apps that you can install to emulate mobile controls for PC games and I have tried a couple but although they work to a degree the whole process feels awkward. Allods turned out to be the most enjoyable of the MMOs I tried on the tablet because all the innate PC controls that allow for click-to-move or click-to-use seem to respond perfectly as touch-to-move or touch-to-use.

So, I could play Allods comfortably on my tablet, it looked great and I like the game. And yet I only played it a couple of times then forgot all about it. It seems that I don't really want to play MMOS, or any other games, during those short periods of free time I have during the working day, after all. Turns out I'd rather read a book or web-browse.

I only thought about gaming on the go again this weekend for two reasons: the first was when MassivelyOP reported that another MMO I like and wish I'd found time to play more of, Villagers and Heroes, is getting a full port to the Android platform. The other was I dropped my tablet and broke it.

The damage isn't as bad as when I was vigorously cleaning the screen of my first ever tablet and snapped the glass in two. This time it's only the digitizer that's busted. That can be replaced although I probably won't bother. The tablet still has a useful life ahead of it if I simply attach it to a monitor with an HDMI cable. I might set it up like that in the kitchen. There are certainly enough spare monitors lying around this house...

 Following the life/lemons/lemonade principle I used the accident as an opportunity to upgrade. I found something with a much better display, a more powerful cpu and graphics and more memory for almost exactly what the tablet I dropped cost a year ago. That's technology for you.

Best of all, the replacement comes with a dual-boot option, Android and Windows, already installed. That should give me the fullest access to whatever the next couple of years holds for mobile gaming, short of anything that releases as an iPad exclusive.

It will be interesting to see what the new tablet can cope with. Black Desert, for example, could be an ideal mobile MMO with its extensive range of automated options and afk processes. Then there's GW2, which has a highly paternalistic patcher that refuses to run if it finds your system doesn't meet its exacting standards. The old tablet couldn't pass the examination but if the new one can it would be handy to be able to log in at work if just to be able to chat in guild.

Having both Android and Windows on the same tablet gives me carte blanche to play just about anything. Several titles I've looked at over the last year, but which were only available for Android and iOS, might come into play. I'll definitely install V&H when the mobile version becomes available and if Nexon ever release the FFXI mobile port they are supposedly working on for Square, I'll definitely be trying that. (All the cool kids are into FFXI right now, didn't you know?)

In the end, though, I suspect that, no matter how good the choice of MMOs becomes, how powerful and affordable the hardware gets, however smoothly and efficiently everything runs, I'll always end up choosing to use my tablet for something other than gaming. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, it's also nice to have a choice. It seems like, after a number of false starts and failed promises, the age of the Mobile MMO might be here at last. I'd rather be able to play MMOs on my tablet and not want to than want to and not be able.

Conspicuous non-consumption! it's the post-capitalist way!

Bringing Things Up To Date

Having thought about doing it yesterday, today I bit the bullet and began patching all the MMORPGs on my desktop. What fun!

First up was Allods. That was neither alphabetical nor random. It was because, while I was choosing screenshots for yesterday's post, I came across a bunch of shots and it reminded me just how beautiful a game it is. With such great art design, rich with visual wit and flourish, plus very solid gameplay, unusual and appealing races, interesting classes and an all-round high level of polish I'm at a loss to explain either why Allods hasn't been more successful or indeed why I haven't played it more than I have.

I'm in a bit of a mess with Allods as it happens. I can't recall my old account details so I'm stuck with just the fresh account I set up to try the new starting zone. That I mostly played on my Windows 10 Tablet, where it works very well, but I very soon realized I don't want to play games in my lunch-break. I'd much rather read.

That's probably why, rather than just patch, the MY.com Games launcher decided to download the entire game to my PC. I didn't specifically use the launcher but it decided to get in on the act anyway.

This trend towards Launchers that supposedly manage updates for a company's full portfolio of games is very trying. SOE spent many years fiddling around with the concept and it never really worked better than just patching the games individually. Daybreak Games seem to have loosened up on that somewhat. There is still some kind of underlying unified launcher but I have all the individual game icons on my desktop and clicking those seems to start the update and log-in process just fine.

Trion has Glyph. What used to be Perfect World (and for all I know may still be Perfect World to the financial regulators) has ARC. Blizzard has BattleNet and so on. If it's supposed to make things easier...well it doesn't.

After Allods I patched WildStar, which went very smoothly, and then A Mystical Land aka Villagers and Heroes. That also took just a few minutes. I see from their launcher that they've had a level cap rise and added a new zone among other things. I wonder how my sheep is. Dead, probably.

From there I moved to Project : Gorgon but I actually updated that a couple of weeks back and apparently Eric hasn't added anything since then so it was playable immediately. I didn't play it. Instead I patched The Secret World and then EverQuest.

There was a time earlier this year when I was playing EQ quite regularly. Then I changed my All Access membership to the account where my EQ2 Berserker lives and that left the EQ character I was working on, my Magician, stranded on F2P. Well, legacy Silver, but it still locked her out of all the Double XP weekends that would have motivated me to log her in.

At least she's patched up and ready should a window of opportunity arise. I still harbor a theoretical desire to get her to 100 some day, even though the cap has moved past even that landmark now. And speaking of Landmark...

That's what I patched next. I'd been thinking about good old Landmark even before Tipa jogged my memory but I probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Given the total radio silence on the game for most of this year I didn't really expect it would need to patch but it downloaded almost 2GB of something. That sent me to the forums to check the Update Notes but I couldn't see that anything new had been added.

I did, however, find this news posted by Darrin "Talisker" McPherson just a week ago. Well, I call it "news". It's more like news that there might be news.

I'll get the details out to you all soon, but expect some new initiatives, team-up builds and changes to the adventuring side of things. Lets build some content together!

I have no idea what that means but at least it's some sign of life.

Elder Scrolls Online came next.  It set off at a furious pace as it downloaded a vast pile of files but it soon ground almost to a halt when I tried to save some time by patching Star Trek Online and Neverwinter on top.

They both use the aforementioned ARC portal these days and that didn't recognize either of my existing passwords. Resetting them was simple and both games patched at blistering speeds, apparently at the expense of ESO, which ground almost to a halt. There were several gigabytes of updates for both STO and NWO but together they were done in a few minutes. ESO is still patching as I write, well over an hour later.

That, really, is how I came to write this post. Something to do while ESO is patching. I thought I'd better not try any more until it finishes. It seems to be having hard enough time as it is.

Still to come I can see Rift and Trove (well, I can see Glyph but same difference), Dragon Nest Oracle, ArcheAge, DinoStorm and Lord of the Rings Online. Dragon Nest I actually do want to get back to playing. I was enjoying that one. Rift I've been having weird pangs over. I thought I was done with it for good but perhaps not quite yet. ArcheAge I always meant to get back to someday and DinoStorm I always do go back to, usually late at night on a whim.

And LotRO? Well it's always there, although some of the numbers Ravanel mentions in her recent post make me wonder for how much longer.  LotRO has always been a nightmare to patch so I'm leaving it til last.

I tried to limit myself to MMOs I have at least a glancing blow's chance of playing in the next month or three, although by "playing" I really mean logging in, looking at my inventory, wandering around the main city for a few minutes and logging off again. That still leaves a few icons on my desktop that go to MMOs I really can't see myself getting back to any time soon - Istaria, Eldevin, Ryzom - although even though as I type those names I can feel interest stirring anew.

There's also City of Steam, which, being browser-based, doesn't need a specific update and whose main storyline I am determined to finish before they finally shut the servers down, assuming they haven't already - I didn't check. Then, naturally, while patching I saw at least two newish MMOs I hadn't previously heard of that I almost began downloading and as I write I've thought of another four or five that I thought I had installed but which don't seem to have desktop presence any more.

Enough! That way madness lies. And ESO is at 75% now. By the time I choose some screenshots and a title it should be done.

Down On The Farm: Dragon Nest:Oracle and Villagers and Heroes

It's been a while since I last logged into Dragon Nest: Oracle. I wouldn't have mentioned it only the game welcomed me back with a hug and a back-slap and a "Where have you been?". The fatted calf was looking nervous.

There was even talk of a "Welcome Home" gift but when I logged my only character in it turned out she didn't qualify. I missed the explanation if there was one. It was late and anyway I just wanted to race around shooting cute, bouncing greebles (not an actual monster) with a BFG.

I was ready to let the whole thing slide but the game wouldn't let it drop. I was still getting anxious reminders to claim my non-existent gift before it vanished when I logged out an hour later. If it hadn't been for that, though, Dora wouldn't have been ferreting around in her various inventory tabs and then she might not have found her other present.

Umm...excuse me, Miss, but could you tell me where I am?

In DN:O, like many F2P MMOs from both East and West, you get regular care packages as you level. They tend to come in advance, a kind of gamer-carrot hung out to encourage you to keep making progress. And to keep logging in, of course, although you get a separate reward just for doing that as well.

Oh yes, I remember.

The level-up packs come every eight levels. Why eight? I have no idea. Perhaps the developers are all spiders. Who cares? It's Free Stuff!

What's more, in DN:O it's good free stuff and that really is a motivator. Inside her gift-wrapped Level 24 box Dora found a full set of costume clothing. That was a surprise. I hadn't even noticed we had a costume tab.

There was this log-in message, though, so maybe it's new:

After lot of work, we are pleased to announce the release of 252 fashions sets.

Next week : wings and other accesories.

It must be next week already because there was a set of wings in the box as well. And a ten-slot Inventory expander. And a 10-slot bank vault expander. Oh, DN:O, you know me so well...although 252 fashion sets and I just have one? Don't set the bar too high, now, will you?

I'm not quite sure about this new ensemble. Do these tiny wings go with my ENORMOUS GUN???

Anyway, it was a great start. Dora slipped into her new outfit, fitted her wings and took a look around. Being as how it had been a while she wasn't quite sure where she was. It looked like a much bigger city than she remembered.

Ah yes, it's all starting to come back. Last time out she fixed that airship and flew to Saint Haven. Wherever that is. Which is how last night we ended up growing pear trees and catching fish and making Red Beard Salad and not shooting anything at all.

No, you don't look creepy at all. I'm totally fine with you breaking down my molecular structure and re-assembling me half a mile away. What could possibly go wrong?

It's a long story. I'll try to keep it brief. Dora was lost in the big city so, when she spotted the Transfer Wizard right across the square, she naturally went and had a word with her. The name Old Man Mori came up in association with a Farm, which caught Dora's attention and on a whim she asked the Wizard to send her there and that's how we found out about farming and fishing and cooking, none of which I knew existed in DN:O.

Crafting, that I knew. I'd already found the rather terrifying crafting interface and made a decision to stay well clear of it, at least for now. What Old Man Mori had to teach seemed a lot more user-friendly although, as it turns out, a lot more labor-intensive.

 I have wings, you know. I can turn around if you want to see them. Oh, and stop calling me "Young Man". Although I admit it must be hard to tell in this get up.

Unlike Villagers and Heroes you don't get your own house and garden in DN:O. As far as I know, that is, but then take that with a barrel of salt. I didn't know we had a costume tab, remember? Anyway, whether or not there is personal housing somewhere down the line, Dora doesn't have any. She has to use the Public Plots.

There's a whole article waiting to be written about V&H and DN:O's various takes on collective farming, communitarianism and political theory. One day I might even get around to writing it. For now, I was struck by the co-incidence of coming across such superficially similar systems in the two games as well as by how they differ in detail and execution. It's beginning to dawn on me that Estate Management has become an MMO thing almost without anyone noticing.

It's like having an allotment. Only without the shed.

I guess I like it, if only on the same uncommitted, dabbling level I like most things in MMOs. Like almost everything else the genre has to offer I sometimes feel that to take any of it terribly seriously would require far more commitment in time and effort than could possibly be commensurate either with the in-game reward or any objective assessment of sanity. Then again, if you're having fun, your having fun, so why question it too closely?

Best. Achievement. Ever.

Thus far my fun in all the MMOs that allow you to plant seeds and tend crops and raise livestock is limited to the odd drop-in when I'm passing the old homestead. To do more looks like a lot of commitment and responsibility and no-one wants that, obviously. I do tend to like the process, though.

Take planting crops. It has all the attractions of actual gardening without any of the hassle. It doesn't make your back ache, you don't get scratches all up your arms, earwigs don't fall on your head, the neighbors don't come round to remind you of the by-laws on bonfires and best of all you can actually see the plants growing. I can certainly understand the attraction.

Is that thing...throbbing?

It felt weirdly satisfying, watching the plants grow on the public plot in Public Farm Area 2. The Red Beard seeds produce something that look like a large cabbage. Like most things in DN:O it moves a little even when at rest. The pulsing is slightly sinister. As you water it the growth bar moves up while the water bar goes down. If the growth completes before the water runs out there's a POP and the plant has a growth spurt.

If the bars finish their race the other way round your plant dies. I think there's a mini-game here but I haven't worked out how to play it. Yet. Fishing has a mini-game is a lot easier to understand. You just have to use the left mouse button to keep progress in an optimal position to speed things up. It's basic but fun.

It's not often you find yourself trying to stay in the red.

For farming mini-games, so far I like my sheep in V&H best. I used to love the Pet Training mini-game in Free Realms, as I may have mentioned about a thousand times before, and feeding apples to my sheep before playing her a tune on my lute is the nearest thing I've found to it since FR closed up shop. (No-one working on a Free Realms emulator? I guess not.)

I wax and wane on crafting and gathering mini-games. They can be relaxing and entertaining, when that's what you're in the mood for, but they can be an irritating waste of time when all you want to do is get something gathered or crafted for a reason. Ideally I'd like them on a toggle but then Ideally I'd like everything on a toggle and I know that can't happen. If I had to choose I think I'd take the mini-game approach over the WoW or GW2 style of click-to-make.

Oh... ah... diddly diddly diddly diddly diddly diddly diddly diddly...hang on, this isn't a flute..

It's the wealth of options on how to spend your time, all these amusements away from the main rides, that make me believe I could be happy spending a lot more time in either of these games, be they sandparks or themeboxes or whatever the next buzzword happens to be. You think they're going to be little distractions but pretty soon you begin to realize there's depth and breadth you hadn't expected.

Having been rightly taken to task in the comments last time for making unsubstantiated, sweeping generalizations about FFXIV I'm wary of drawing any conclusions from such limited exposure and experience but thus far neither Dragon Nest: Oracle nor Villagers and Heroes has let me down when it comes to either content or execution. Bugs excepted, of course.

More good things around the next corner? I hope so. On we potter. Half the fun is in the discovery. Maybe a lot more than half. And a lack of commitment doesn't mean a lack of interest. No need to panic if I haven't logged in for week or three. I'll keep coming back. You don't have to give me a present every time.

Oh, wait, you didn't, did you?