Across The Desert By Track And Shrine: Notes On New World's Brimstone Sands.

Belghast put up a long, post today, detailing some of the major ways New World has changed since its fall from grace last year. He knows the game far better than I do, having not only engaged extensively with the previous endgame mechanics that I completely ignored, but also having levelled to sixty under both the old and new regimes, so I don't plan on elaborating on anything he's covered.

I did, however, already have a vague plan to post a bullet point list of a few things specific to Brimstone Sands that I'd noticed since I came back to the game, things that seemed like improvements to me. I even went to the trouble of jotting down a few notes, so rather than waste them, here they are.

• Brimstone Sands Is New World's First Expansion
  

It's not been billed as one and Amazon haven't taken any money for it but after a week playing it I can't see it as anything less. To be specific, it reminds me surprisingly strongly of the kind of expansion I'm used to from EverQuest II. 

There's a central questline that leads you through the new zone, which feels like it could be about the size of the three or four EQII zones that make up the average expansion these days. There's the new hub city, the new mob models, the new crafting materials and recipes, and the wealth of upgrades that almost immediately invalidate what you came in wearing. It all feels very familiar.

My first Legendary weapon. Shame I don't know how to use it.

It feels like it's going to be about the same length, too, at least as far as the storyline goes. I've been following the main questline pretty slavishly and so far I've opened just over half the zone. I'm guessing that means I'm about halfway through but I haven't looked ahead to check. 

It might be a bit less. So far I've had six Legendary weapons from quest rewards. I'm assuming all fifteen types are coming - it would be a bit unfair if anyone got right to the end of the chain and found their weapon had been left out.Of course, they may not be distributed evenly. I'm pretty sure I got at least one from a side quest. Either way, there's plenty still left to do.

• They Don't Call It The Empty Quarter For Nothing.
  

The changes to fast travel that make it almost as easy to teleport around Aeternum as it used to be in Tyria, before ArenaNet decided they'd rather people used mounts, presumably because you can't sell skins for waypoints. This morning I was jogging across the dunes on my way to a quest objective, when I decided to take a detour to open a Spirit Shrine, the game's version of a waypoint. When I got there, I could see another Shrine so close by I was able to open it as I ran back without taking a detour. 

There's no shortage of jump-offs, then, but the problem hasn't only been one of availability. (Or cost, for that matter, another non-issue now it's been reduced to almost nothing.) Part of the difficulty with Shrines has always been ease of access - or rather lack of it. Travel doesn't really feel all that instant if you have to fight your way through hordes of wolves to get to the bus stop. Too much of my time in New World has been spent either fighting or running away from endless guards, undead and wildlife, all of which seemed hell-bent on chasing down and killing anything in a hundred meter radius. It certainly put me off using the Shrines that weren't right on the roadways, which hardly any ever were.

Got the place to myself again, I see.

In Brimstone Sands you can hike for miles across the desert trails without coming into aggro range of so much as a single scorpion. Mob density throughout is exceptionally light. If you go off-track and head out into the scrubland you'll be very unlucky to meet much more than the odd jackal. Even when you start poking around the many ruins and collonades that litter the landscape, you'll find their forgotten treasures largely unguarded.

It makes exploring a genuine pleasure. I have to make a detour when I want to kill something, which makes me feel like I have agency, rather than as though I'm only in the gameworld on sufference. One can only hope for a similar sanity pass across the rest of Aeternum.

• Sneaky Sneaky Dodgy Guardy
  

Whereas the vast tracts you need to cross to get to quest locations are largely devoid of annoying interruptions, the larger temples, crypts and complexes that form your primary loci of interest very definitely are not. They're well-guarded and daunting to explore, as they should be.

Let's see any of 'em catch me up here!

That doesn't mean you have to hack your way through a score of mobs to get to every checkpoint. I mean, you can, if that's your thing, but if you want to play it smart there's often a sneaky approach that'll get you to your quest objective without a weapon being drawn.

I've had as much fun working out covert routes to glyphs and chests, sneaking behind pillars, climbing up broken walls and shinning along aquaducts as I've had going full berserker on the sentries on gate duty. It adds a welcome degree of puzzle gameplay to even out all that combat and I find it just plain fun.

• You Call Them "Jumping Puzzles", I Call Them "Vistas"

I saw a certain degree of nervousness expressed in some quarters over Amazon Games' stated intention to add a little variety to questing in the form of "Jumping Puzzles". I suppose people were imagining something along the lines of the often challenging set-piece content in other games, for example Guild Wars 2. 

I've taken several quests so far that required me to climb to the top of something to open a box or read a glyph but thankfully none of them have been any more difficult than an average vista in GW2. Easier, really, since New World comes with a degree of automated parkour baked in., "Climbing" is mostly a case of positioning your character and letting the game engine do the rest. 

Getting up here was easy enough. It's getting down that's the problem.

As for jumping, if you don't quite make it across a gap, your character will often grab on to something and haul themselves up rather than plummet to their death. It turns what could have been a stressful, frustrating experience into something of a jolly romp, something which is beginning to sound like a fair description of New World itself.

• A Busy Map Is A Happy Map
  

As has been widely reported, New World's population, having bottomed out at around 1% of its former peak, has rebounded vigorously of late. The addition of Fresh Start servers have taken concurrency back into six figures for the first time in a long while.

The starting regions of those new servers must be heaving but where I'm playing the focus seems to be very much on Brimstone Sands. New Corsica, the full-service capital of the zone feels lively as a busy city should but even in the far-flung corners of the parched desert you can't go more than a few yards without crossing paths with another adventurer.

Thanks! I can take it from here!

As I discovered many years ago, when mmorpg designers began to move away from individual ownership towards a more collectivist approach, other players doing the same quest as you are always welcome. There's no longer any need to party up, although you can if you want to be sociable. Either way, you can fight side by side as you push forward through the ruins or follow in the slipstream of someone more powerful as they blaze a path towards your mutual objective. I like to take it in turns, leapfrogging from mob to mob, allowing  each player to kill half as many mobs as they would alone, while moving considerably faster towards the goal.

• Risk vs Reward... But Mostly Reward.

I'm not a big fan of risk vs reward. I like the reward part well enough. I'm just not so fond of the risk. 

In Brimstone Sands, the balance seems to have tipped very much in my favor. There's treasure everywhere. Epic items drop from jackals and scorpions at a rate that seems much more generous than I remember from other parts of the game and as for chests, their ever-repleneshing contents remind me of EQII's paradoxical pandas, the ones who boast of never leaving their homeland and yet somehow manage to find an  infinite supply of powerful gear to give away to anyone who wants it.

As for quest rewards, in addition to the aforementioned Legendary weapons there's a torrent of mats needed for their upgrades plus a steady trickle of the sought-after gypsum orbs used to craft yet more epics. My only real issue is that I don't yet fully understand how those systems work. When I've done my research, though, I should have plenty of resources to put my learning into practice right away.

• Brimstone Sands: More To See Than Just Sand!
  

This might be the biggest surprise of all. I've seen a lot of desert zones in mmorpgs and while I like them well enough, I wouldn't claim they're the most diverse of environments. Brimstone Sands makes a strong case for variety, while somehow managing to stay consistent with its theme.

It does help that one of the big threats in the region turns out to be the Angry Earth, Aeternum's druidic/elemental race. Everywhere the Angry Earth go, flowers bloom, something that seems to hold true as much in the arid desert as in the temperate zones from which they come.

Yep. Still in the desert.

Oases add a burst of welcome color but the real variety comes from the built environment. Graeco-Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids battle for attention with flickering science-fantasy engines straight out of the pulps. Aeternum has always offered a grab-bag of architectural styles but here the range extends well beyond the historical and into the phantasmal.

The natural world more than holds its own, creatively. Blistering pools of acid hiss and bubble, sending out clouds of bilious, olive mists. Wind-carved spires of sandstone stretch upwards from the sand like the deformed fingers of giants. And then there's the sky. The endless, sweeping, overwhelming desert sky, roseate at dawn, glaring at midday, subtle pastels at sunset, shimmering starfields by night. I do love me a good skybox.

I'm sure there's much more I haven't yet discovered. Brimstone Sands is deep with content and all of New World these days is a cornucopia of entertainment. As Belghast puts it "What You Know about New World is Wrong". 

Unless, of course, what you know is that New World's a very good mmorpg. In my opinion it always has been but now I think it's better than ever. Who said there are no second acts in mmos?

Up Above The Roofs And Houses : GW2

I was on Reddit last night reading the leaked/faked (delete as applicable) upcoming patch notes that supposedly reveal details of ANet's plans for server merges and other "fixes" for World vs World's many problems, when quite by chance I came across a thread entitled "Thank you ANet, for polishing Black Citadel. It's beautiful."

Putting aside my mental image of a team of ANet developers in community service fatigues hanging from the girders of The black Citadel on bucket-chairs wielding mops and dusters, I read on to learn that, as a direct result of the addition of gliding to Core Tyria, someone had taken the time and trouble to "polish up, rework the newly accessible areas a bit" and sort out "invisible walls, low res props without collision, etc that needed fixing".

The Black Citadel has always been my favorite Tyrian city. I've sung its praises before, more than once. Over the years I've poked my whiskers into its many back alleys and wild places. But I've never seen it from the air.

This evening I spent an hour exploring the old place. Honestly, I couldn't with any certainty say what parts were or weren't newly accessible. The place always was a maze. For example, I'd have said the whole perimeter of the Great Imperial Smelter would have been unreachable without a glider but as I made my way back on foot from the far side I found myself next to a vendor and next to him was a ramp going up, so maybe you always could take that tour.

It's also not impossible that you might have been able to jump down onto the jury-rigged, flat, riveted rooftop of the Gladium Canton, although I rather doubt it. In places the collision is still touch and go - I fell through what looked like a sheet of solid boiler plate steel while I was gawping at the sunset.

I purely love rooftops. There's a famous romance to the world above the houses that's been celebrated in many a book and film from Mary Poppins to Rooftoppers. As a teenager I used to take every chance I could get to climb out of a window or up a wall and sit on a roof ridge or a parapet.

I'm getting a tad past that now but my characters aren't. The roof over Gladium is a joy, although it's also an architectural disaster. I really hope no Asura "geniuses" ever happen to see it, but for atmospherics and mood it can't be beat.

There were two places I managed to reach that I'm certain weren't on the tourist trail before gliding came to Tyria. To the South of the Gladium Canton there's a sector from which the map's fog never clears because no-one was ever meant to go there.

It was scenery. Now it's a picnic spot. There's not much there except trees and grass but it makes a great staging post to swoop down on that tricky vista.

Most satisfying of all, though, was the flight I took from the ledge of the Asura Gate to Lion's Arch all the way across to the ruins of the Great Northern Wall. Those fragments of archway have taunted me for years, granite ghosts of a past that won't fade. Landing on their ledges and sitting in their shade made an old Charr feel the war was finally over.

So, yes, thank you Justin of ANet, for going above and beyond the call of duty and adding yet another paragraph to the palimpsest of The Black Citadel, the greatest city in Tyria. May her steel always shine and her roadways never rust.

Climbing Wizard's Altar : Black Desert

I didn't have any plans for a post tonight but there's something about playing Black Desert that just makes me want to share. Not sure why that is.

It's likely I wouldn't have been playing Black Desert tonight at all if Landmark's big pre-launch update had gone better but between the server coming up and my patching the game the server had come down again so that was that plan scuppered.

BDO had a patch too. We're having an Easter event it seems. I didn't pay much attention to that. With just an hour or so in hand I thought I'd go take a look at the Wizard's Altar since it happens to be very close to my new home on Goat Mountain. I can see it from my front door.

There were two quests in my book for the Altar, both level 18 and at least one came from the pesky Black Spirit, which means it's part of what appears to be the main quest line. That makes me nervous.

I was expecting a big fight. I was also expecting to have a tough time of it. At this point anyone who's planning on doing the quest themselves might want to look away because this is something of a spoiler...

Okay...warning over...last chance to leave...

Run That One By Me Again? : GW2

The Game Update Notes for the Fall Feature Pack that arrived last week bordered on the epic. I fancy myself an aficionado of the form; someone who, not infrequently, visits websites to research and ponder upon the classics; a veteran of the glory days of Everquest, when we'd pore over each enigmatic entry with the focus of a haruspex examining the entrails of a freshly-slaughtered sheep. Even I, however, balked at this Gilgamesh of game changes.

As if the initial torrent wasn't sufficient to drown us in confusion (and map chat and the forums certainly suggest it was) ANet saw fit to shake the fire-hose no fewer than nine more times. Every day is patch day this September.

Each of these patchlets naturally spawned notes of its own but I confess that, in the heat of the intense competition of this first week of the WvW Fall Season, I had been lax in tracking them down. Last night when, during a lull, I finally found a moment to catch up with the ongoing erasing and re-writing of the rules I found this:

• Fixed a bug that prevented some accounts from having vistas now unlock on an account-wide basis rather than a per-character basis.

•  Skill challenges now unlock on an account-wide basis rather than a per-character basis as originally intended.

That's phrasing worthy of SOE at the peak of their powers. The great Abashi himself might have been proud of that convoluted, negatively-inflected, self-footnoted delivery. It takes some parsing but the first entry, if I have the right of it, translates as follows:


There was a bug.
This bug affected some but not all accounts.
The bug prevented Vistas from unlocking for all characters on the account.
Vistas are intended to unlock for all characters on the account.
This is the status quo. (implied).
Vistas formerly unlocked per character.
This was the status quo ante (implied).


The second entry confirms that the same state-change that has already been made to Vistas has also been applied, presumably bug-free, to "skill challenges", which I take to be what are generally known as "skill points" in our house. If they aren't then I have no idea what they could be.

Now, if (and it's a very big "if" because I am far from certain I understand what's going on here) that's what these notes mean, then it would represent a major change to gameplay. Vistas and Skill Points are both intrinsic parts of Map Completion, which has always been "by character", much to the disdain of many, although I don't include myself among their number. I would guess that it would be quite feasible, nevertheless, to transfer vista unlocks to ownership of the Account without upsetting too many people or breaking too many systems.

Skill points, however, are not only required for Map Completion but for direct character development while leveling up and as an important form of currency for a number of late-game activities. Granted most skill points at that later stage come from the ever-rolling level counter and those nifty scrolls that Champs drop but even so to move them from character to account would seem problematic to put it mildly.

Well, it seemed easy enough to test so I tested it.

First I checked two characters on the same account - my most map-completed and my least. Had the latter acquired a hatful of vistas and skill points overnight? He had not. Change not retrospective then.

Next I found two characters neither of whom had done a particular vista, the one by the steam bath in the Norn starting area, Wayfarer Foothills. I climbed the hill and opened the vista on one character then logged in the other to see if he had magically received credit for a view he'd never seen. He had not.

Conclusion: either its still bugged or I have completely misunderstood the patch notes. Having trawled both the official forums and Reddit for comments and opinions on what would be, if it were true, a highly controversial change to the structure of the game and having found absolutely no mention of it whatsoever I have to conclude that it's the latter.

The only grasping-at-straws idea I can come up with is that these are changes somehow related to the NPE and therefore only affect new characters leveling up under those rules. I don't have a new character to hand to test that right now but in any case it seems highly unconvincing as a possibility.

I have to conclude that I'm baffled. If anyone has a clue what's going on perhaps they'd care to explain in the comments.

Vistas of The Black Citadel : GW2

I didn't "do" any vistas in beta. All I knew about them going into Headstart was the very little I'd read. I had the impression they would be fiddly platforming mini-games and therefore not really my thing.

Wrong !!

I love 'em! They are nothing more nor less than pointers suggesting a few places you might like to go free-climbing in the way many have been doing since the earliest days of Everquest, and for all I know longer than that. GW2 zone architecture isn't as clamberable as, say, Vanguard, but you can get to the top of a lot more things than you might imagine and just knowing it can be done is a great spur to giving it a go.
 
I did a fair amount of rock-climbing in beta before Vistas turned up because, well, you have to, don't you? What Vistas add is some structure and a nice way to record your climbs. I'm not much of a completist but when I noticed that Black Citadel, the utterly wonderful Charr home city, has just the five I thought "even I can focus long enough to do that". So I did. And here's how.

1. Gladium Canton

Easy as walking into a room.  Because it's in a room. Not much of a view, unsurprisingly.

 

2. Great Imperial Smelter

Bring water. And asbestos soles. As easy as the first one, it's just up some walkways looking down on the biggest forge you ever saw. What are we building in there? I could tell you but then I'd have to...you know the rest.

 

3. Canton Factorium

Actually between the Factorium crafting area and Memorial Quadrant where the magnificent statues immortalize our heroes. This one looks tough if you try to climb up from below, as I watched a silly human trying and failing to do. It's simple if you just walk up the ramp above it and drop down onto the glass roof. Don't worry, if it can take a Charr's weight it'll take yours. Probably. Great view of the Charr Deathstar from this one.

 

4. Ligacus Notos

First one that requires some actual climbing. Just a few hops up a smallish rock. Nice spot for a picnic at the top and a really lovely view of some bits of Ascalon we didn't knock down when we improved it.

 

5. Ruins of Rin

The only real climb of the five and one that looks extremely intimidating from below. Very high on a ruined wall that looks like a gust of wind might bring it down. Or a light breeze, come to think of it. Ignore the side that looks like convenient steps - they go nowhere. Go up the other side , round the corner, along the ledge then up the two girders. I did it first try - it's much easier than it looks.

There you have it. Five easy Vistas to get you started. Get your hobnails on and get clambering!