Another Of Those Thrown-Together At The Last Minute Music Posts Everyone Hates (But They're So Easy And So Much Fun To Do You Might As Well Just Get Used To Them)

I neglected to prepare anything ahead of time for today so I guess this would be the ideal opportunity to miss a post and break that run like I said I was going to do. Only it's harder than you'd think. Maybe another time. I'll just toss out a few tunes I happened across recently, in the spirit of sharing. And a screenshot or two, seeing it's IntPiPoMo. 

That oughta do it.

Ah, the deliriously lo-fi and exceptionally hard to search for Sales. Seriously, they'd be ten times as famous if they'd called themselves something that's actually like, y'know, a band name. Here with the lyrics in Spanish because that way there's at least something moving on screen. Also it is quite funny that someone thought to put up a Spanish translation lyric video for a song that literally only has one line and that's the title.

Another lyric video but at least this time there are some. Frances Forever is best known for Space Girl, I believe, but I like this a lot more. I love twentysomething nostalgia for teenhood, which makes me pretty spoilt for choice these days. Also, the second song in this post with people talking in the background, another thing I really like.

I'm sure no-one here would use the last song to make snide remarks about young people today but just in case, here's Pete Shelley in 1978, wishing he was sixteen again. I remember shouting along to this when I was all of maybe nineteen and feeling every word of it. Time goes by so fast, however old you are.

Back when I was a young punk rocker we put huge value on brevity. Songs ought to be short. Two and a half minutes seemed more than enough, the Ramones taught us that. It's a bit rich to hear old people moaning because young people have no attention spans. Old people have bloody awful memories of what it was like to be young, more like.  Pinkpantheress, one of the latest in a flood of TikTok breakout stars, makes her point and leaves, which is just how it should be. I do wish people wouldn't just toss tarantulas into videos without any trigger warnings, though.

If anyone was wondering what Darren Cross from Gerling might be up to these days, I can tell you he has a new album out. It's called Distorder and I will get it but I haven't yet. Reminds me a little of Gary Shearston. Not sure how Darren would feel about that.

The Golden Horde are one of those bands you feel you probably should have heard of but somehow haven't. I only found out about them last week. This breaks just about every rule I've been talking about so far - it's way too long, it revels in being the kind of thing old people say they like even while it's parodying the most tedious of those tropes and the first time I watched it I nearly clicked it off halfway through because it seemed like it was going on way too long. I didn't and I suggest you don't, either. Stay 'til the end. It's perfectly paced and it proves that sometimes you need those extra two minutes after all.

And finally, just in case that put you in the mood, here's Bristol's finest, Idles, on their American network tv debut, somehow managing to sound like an unholy cross between the Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Otis Redding. Someone I work with is mates with this lot or used to be. I imagine he doesn't see them much now they're world-famous (ish).

Okay. That should hold us for a week or so. Let's finish with another selection from my extensive, unpublished gallery of shots from extinct mmorpgs. Wildstar, again. Always looked good in screenshots, that one.

Take Five

Five years ago I posted a list entitled "All The MMOs I Have Ever Played (And Then Some) Pt 1". Running alphabetically from Aika to Guild Wars 2, it covered forty-five titles. At the time that represented considerably less than half of all the MMORPGs I'd played in the fifteen years since I bought EverQuest in 1999.

I was planning on a a Pt. 2 and very possibly a Pt. 3. As I remember it, there were more than a hundred and twenty titles on the full list. I can't be sure exactly how many because the file seems to have gone missing. If I did a recount now, going up to the present day, I'm sure it would pass a hundred and fifty.

The reason I'm mentioning it today is that I never did get around to the second, let alone the third and final instalment, a failing I don't intend to repeat with my gloss on PC Gamer's list of twenty-five dead post-WoW titles. Parts One and Two are done. Now for Part Three. (Incidentally, I just noticed that link, which I filched from Paeroka's post, where I originally learned about the piece, goes to the Australian edition of PC Gamer. Curious...).

Telon always looks lived-in. Even untidy.

So, without further padding, let's get to it: the Final Five aka The Ones I Really Played.

 Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Depending on my mood, this is either my first, second or third favorite MMORPG of all time. The top three hasn't changed in a decade - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Vanguard. The order changes all the time.

The recent sad and unexpected death of Brad McQuaid reminded me yet again how invaluable his contribution to the genre has been. I have a rule of thumb for collective enterprises like gaming, music and film: if I like a whole lot of things and there's a common factor, it's probably not a co-incidence. I may never know exactly what it was that Brad did but whatever it was it worked for me.

Is there any more inspiring sight in MMORPGs than your very own ship?

A vast amount has been written about Vanguard, no little of it by me, so I won't re-hash the details. I'll just say that the first year after launch was one of the best times I've had in MMORPGs and there have been plenty more good times since.

Thanks to the emulator project, which I can't plug too often, those good times didn't end when Smed pulled the plug. I don't blame him or SOE for that; as an obscure division of a less-than mindful multicorp they'd been able to pull off more than their fair share of pro-bono archival preservation but it couldn't go on forever. I have other axes to grind with Smed without blaming him for killing Vanguard.

Having given Brad credit for the worldmaking I should add a caveat, one that may (or, now that he's gone, may not) speak to Pantheon. Vanguard was a somewhat unforgivingly group-based game in the early days, as Pantheon proposes to be. It was only after he'd left, when SOE were trying to remake and remodel the game to fit their portfolio and regain an audience that it began to offer some of the best solo and, especially, duo gameplay in the genre.

Or better yet, two of them. A bug in Vanguard? Surely not!

Although I always loved Vanguard, starting with the open beta, the first time I had a PC capable of playing it, it was that long period in the middle, after the difficulty was toned down and before it was tweaked back up, when it really hit my sweet spot. That was the time when my Disciple felt immortal and we all had a reindeer that flew. I loved it.

Even if the emulator project ever completes and the full game comes back, those golden days are gone forever. Every MMORPG is a river. We have to accept it and move on.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

What is it with the colons? No-one ever calls these games by their full names. Why even bother with the subtitle? Presumably, in this case, just so they could use the acronym WAR.

My experience with Warhammer is a curious tale. It has close similarities to my relationship with World of Warcraft, which is both ironic and appropriate given the two games' quantum entanglement.

My second-favorite MMO class of all time (so far). Vanguard's Disciple is #1.

When WoW was generating the biggest buzz the genre ever knew, I barely noticed. From what I've read, excitement over Warhammer fueled a boom in MMO blogging the like of which we can now only dream. I missed that entirely, too.

I was barely aware Warhammer was a thing until long after it wasn't any more. I'm too old to have grown up with Games Workshop although I did run a Warhammer RPG tabletop campaign in the 1980s. It was a good system, if a little over-complicated.

That didn't generate enough affection for the I.P. to grab my attention when the MMORPG was announced. I also can't recall noticing that Mark Jacobs, the driving force behind Dark Age of Camelot, a game with which I have considerable history, not all of it good, was involved. I never even saw the infamous "Bears Bears Bears" video until many years later.

Warhammer was one of the games Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried in our wilderness years, when we'd run out of steam in the old games and there weren't any new ones on the horizon. We ran through a bunch of also-rans and rejects we'd not paid much attention to until we got desperate. WoW was one (actually, the last one, I think. We were that wary of it). Warhammer was another.

These shots are from the emulator. I seem to have lost all my originals.

I'm not sure how long we played Warhammer. My memory wants to say three or four months but I've found that, when I can find actual supporting evidence for this kind of thing, my memory usually underestimates so it was probably more like half a year.

I know we did an awful lot of Battlegrounds, or whatever they were called in WAR. I always found it felt like eating a bag of boiled sweets: delicious at first but eat too many and you end up with a sore mouth and a sick, empty feeling. I found battlegrounds enervating. I always ended up playing too many matches and it made me wrung out and nervy. And yet the next day I'd do it again.

Partly it was because WAR had one of my favorite classes in the entire genre, the Squig Herder. I played mine in Battlegrounds, specifically for the opportunity to blast people off of walls. Sometimes I'd go a whole session without getting a victim lined up just right. That was frustrating. But when it worked it was just about the funnest thing ever. I positively hooted.

The PvE game I liked. It had some depth and the world-making was excellent. The classes and races were varied - so much so I hardly scratched the surface of what was available. I loved the Greenskins. Mostly I played Orcs and Goblins.

Wot? Me, Sarge?

The capital cities, notoriously culled from six to two before launch, were awful, though. Some of the worst I've seen. So was the dismal crafting. The UI wasn't up to much, either and the textures were weirdly gritty. I used to finish a session of Warhammer feeling as though I needed a shower.

Open world RvR, the game's supposed U.S.P., was great when it happened. By the time we played that wasn't very often. Just like in DAOC, I spent a lot more time running around looking for action than I ever did having any.

We never fell out of like with Warhammer. We just ran out of steam and moved on. There's an emulator that's supposed to be fairly well-regarded. I tried it but the spark didn't flare. I'm happy to leave WAR in the past.

Free Realms

Free Realms was always an odd duck. Made at the peak (well, one of the peaks) of SOE's hubris, it was extraordinarily heavily hyped. I remember a series of post-launch press releases lauding ever-increasing take-up figures to confirm the game's runaway success.

Most of my Free Realms shots seem to be M.I.A. too. Not sure how these survived.

It was the first of SOE's free-to-play titles, hence the name, and it heralded the company's transition to a new business model for the entire portfolio. Ironically, despite its undeniable popularity, Free Realms eventually closed because "Kids don’t spend money" (a quote from a Smed interview I am no longer able to find online, although it's referenced in both an MMOGames piece and a reddit thread).

I liked Free Realms. I played a fair bit of it although I don't appear to have posted about it here. I had a character around Level 20 as I recall. I did some crafting, trained a pet, quested quite a bit, explored the world. Played it like a regular MMORPG, really.

The people who really loved Free Realms, though, were the intended age group. I think it's called Middle School in the U.S.  For them it was social media before that became something everyone did. It was the virtual equivalent of the treehouse in the woods, a telephone made out of two tin cans and a length of string. Smed's twelve-year old daughter played it twenty hours a week.

Not a great subject. Some barrels that sparkle. But you should see the ones I didn't use. Or not. Yes, let's not.

You can see the impact it had on peoples' lives from comments on the forums at the emulator website (because of course there's an emulator. There's always an emulator). Or you could, when the forums existed.

The Free Realms emulator project, Free Realms Sunrise, is as odd a duck as the game it plans to revive. The developers run a tighter ship than many official alphas. Access is strictly controlled and they must have a very effective NDA because information never leaks. When they do post progress it's impressive but updates are few and far between. The most recent was back in April.

If the emulator ever comes online for anyone to play I'll definitely dabble. It was never going to be a game I played extensively but it was fun while it lasted. I'd be happy to go round again.

Wildstar

Wildstar is perhaps the classic example of an MMORPG that was less than the sum of its parts. I was reasonably pumped for it during the lead-up to launch. Carbine released some very strong videos and much that I read about the game sounded appealing.

Wildstar looks utterly stunning in screenshots. In game, not so much, I found.

There were warning flags - the ludicrous "twitter" questing and the gleeful focus on hardcore mechanics -  but I took all that with a pinch of salt. When the game finally appeared, though, I wasn't sufficiently interested to buy a copy.

I can't recall why, exactly. Fortunately, by the time WildStar came along in June 2014 I had a blog so I don't have to rely on memory. It seems I was away on holiday for the actual launch. When I came back I found my feed full of posts about the new hotness.

From my post I see I played the beta (don't remember that at all) but I didn't "have time to play another MMO, at least not enough to make the box+sub cost worthwhile". I concluded the post with a cynical throwaway line that would prove prophetic: "Maybe I'll get a second bite at that cherry with the F2P conversion".

I take a lot of shots with my character as far from the camera as possible. Wildstar loves that.

That conversion came just over a year later on 29 September 2015, by which time I was deep in the Heart of Thorns. I was playing Wildstar in mid-October, but not with much conviction. The Halloween event was on but I wasn't committed: "Shade's Eve will have to fall in line behind Norrath's Nights of the Dead and Tyria's Shadow of the Mad King on my personal holiday calendar."

And that was pretty much where Wildstar always stood for me - behind a whole bunch of games that did much the same thing but quite a lot better. Combat in Wildstar was on the taxing-yet-tedious end of the spectrum, with a lengthy time to kill and a lot of makework jumping about (which I completely ignored, probably extending my TTK even further). Questing was lacklustre. I think there may have been some kind of overarching narrative but if so I forget what it was.

Syp was always a big fan of the housing but I felt that was only because he's never really appreciated the options available in EQII, of which WS's housing always felt like a mediocre copy. At least when Rift copied EQII's housing offer, Trion did a good job of it, in everything other than the monetization, that is. That was outrageous.

Grass you could cut yourself on.

My real problem with Wildstar, though, was something quite unexpected. I found the textures and the soundscape unbearable for more than a short session. It's one of the few games that both made my eyes hurt and left me with a ringing in my ears. Okay, not literally but metaphysically. I found the color palette and the ambient sounds teeth-grittingly jarring after an hour or so. It's strange, because the game looks fantastic in screenshots but as a real-time environment it was painful.

There's an emulator project in the works called NexusForever. I know nothing about it but this video was posted on YouTube just a couple of months ago. Could be awhile before we get to play it, I'm guessing. That's okay. I can wait. Forever, if necessary.

Landmark

And so we come to the end. Landmark. Aka EQNext/Landmark. If Free Realms was an odd duck, what do we call this one? Howard?

I wish I could say I built that tower but it was a pre-made, something SOE added late on.

As with Vanguard, I've written plenty about Landmark already. The short version is this: I bought the $99.99 Trailblazer Pack for Mrs Bhagpuss's birthday and the $59.99 Explorer version for myself. She really enjoyed playing for a couple of months, which made the purchase considerably better value than some birthday presents I've come up with. Then she stopped and I carried on, after a fashion, until the game finally closed down in 2017.

I have always considered it money very well spent. I never really understood the criticism in terms of value. A lot of people felt burned because they thought they were buying access to EQNext, apparently, to which I can only wonder whether they actually bothered to read what they were signing up for.

As this PC Gamer article clearly explains, and as all the promotional literature I ever saw made very clear, EQNext and Landmark were separate enterprises. Yes, there was that whole thing about stuff you built in Landmark potentially making it into the landscape of EQN, but that was something you did in Landmark. It didn't mean you got to play EQN right away!

Water was wonderful in Landmark. Even in stills you can see the roiling motion of those waves.

I spent an inordinate amount of time building my clifftop Thomas Crowne Affair spy hideaway. Much of that time was spent mining rocks, chopping trees and learning how to use the unintuitive UI and the incalcitrant building tools. It was clear to me from an early stage that even the developers could barely control the tools. The only useful guides I ever read were written by players, some of whom clearly worked in the industry and had more skills than the people being paid to make the game.

As is clear from many of my posts here, I liked Landmark a lot. It was a toy, not a game and it should have stayed that way. It could have been a very good toy indeed.

Unfortunately, Landmark arrived at the zenith (pr should that be nadir?) of SOE's hubristic period. Astonishing, sweeping claims were made, by people who showed little evidence of being able to turn those pipe-dreams into reality. Landmark was going to be a fully-fledged MMO in its own right, we were told. A huge amount of effort was wasted trying to make that happen. It never even came close to succeeding.

Did Landmark really need combat? If it did, it definitely didn't need the kind of combat it got.

When Landmark closed just three years after that hundred dollar pre-alpha buy-in I did feel it was a shame. The "game" was never going to get much further but it was still a lot of fun for what it was. The fact, though, was that almost no-one was interested any more.

For all the outpourings of anger when it ended, the servers had been all but empty for a long time. The map was littered with abandoned building projects, many of them quite astounding in scale, detail and brio. It is a minor tragedy that all that work was lost but that's what happens when you build castles in the sand.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the talents and skill sets of many of its players, there's no Landmark emulator. There doesn't really need to be one. There are plenty of building apps and games, after all, and it was probably always easier to teach yourself 3D modelling from scratch than to learn to use Landmark's tools.

Anyway, I'm very happy with my memories, my posts and my screenshots. I don't need to spend any more evenings trying to line up bricks -just- so. I appreciate having my life back.

I guess I could draw a comparison there with the whole MMORPG genre. Best not go there...

Shutterbuggin' : IntPiPoMo

It's that time of year again. November. When everyone suddenly decides to prove they really do have a novel in them.

Except me. If I have a novel in me I plan on making sure it stays exactly where it is. I let a couple of half-grown ones escape back in the 90s and they're still prowling around, somewhere, just outside the firelight.

How fortunate that I just discovered a huge stash of forgotten screenies!

Oh, maybe when I retire and the days hang long I might give it a try. Until then I'll stick to something a good deal easier.

IntPiPoMo is pretty much shooting into an open goal full of fish. The aim is to post fifty original images you've created  - paintings, drawings, photographs or, as it will be in my case, screenshots, during the calendar month of November.

For a whole load of different MMORPGs

I post more than that every month. Oh, wait! Except last month I didn't. It was a short posting month, because we went away for nearly two weeks, so I only managed ten posts. And several of those were odd in that I was writing about things I don't play or do play but can't talk about, so I used an unusually high number of images I didn't take myself.

I only posted thirty-four original screenshots in October and several of those barely count, since they were just sections of my characters' stat panels. You can hardly call that a picture, can you?

I'm pretty sure I've never posted any of these before.

Just as well IntPiPoMo doesn't run in October, then, isn't it? In November I have another ten days off work (don't I get a lot of holiday?) but this time I'm not going anywhere. That usually means more posts than average for the month and now I have a great excuse to make them more screenshot-heavy than ever!

Anyway, I heartily recommend everyone who likes to make or take pictures to visit Gamer Girl Confessions and sign up. I linked the page with all the details in the third paragraph but here it is again in, case you missed it.

At least I hope not!

There are even prizes! To quote Chestnut, who runs this thing : 

...your overall prize is the satisfaction that you completed the challenge! However, I am offering a few prizes (again) this year.

• Grand Prize – Of all participants who complete 50 images, I will be using a RNG (random.org) to draw a winner for a game up to $15 on Steam (game time for an MMO can be worked out if preferred)!
• Three Other Prizes – Of all participants who complete 25+ images (up to and including those who make it to 50), I will be using a RNG (random.org) to draw three winners for a game up to $10 on Steam!

I certainly wouldn't want to cheat!

 Last year  I won a prize, which I used to buy Early Access to Bless Online, which I then posted about, including plenty of screenshots. The circle is unbroken!

IntPiPoMo is a Jolly Good Thing. Thanks to Chestnut for hosting it once again. Let the cameras roll!

Days Like This

It's been one of those days, hasn't it?

I came home from work this evening, chatted with Mrs Bhagpuss, had my tea, then down at the PC to see what Feedly had for me. The first thing I saw was this:

"EVE Online developer CCP Games bought by Black Desert Online studio Pearl Abyss"

As MassivelyOP so astutely put it "I bet that’s not a headline you expected to wake up to!" No, nor come home to, either.

I have never played EVE but I've read a lot about it, mostly at The Ancient Gaming Noob. Wilhelm has the full details and links to the many people talking about this surprising turn of fortune.

As I said in the comments there, it could be worse. Pearl Abyss don't have a particularly bad reputation, despite the accusations that they favor Pay to Win mechanics, and Black Desert Online has been one of the more popular, successful and accepted transitions from East to West of recent years.

Al the same, I would bet most EVE players would rather CCP had remained independent and I would be surprised if there's much of a shift in that feeling over the next year or two. MMO players don't like change, even when it's objectively in their own best interests.

The EVE buyout was such a huge story it eclipsed another piece of news that would have been a main headline on another day:

"THQ Nordic has bought up the rights to 38 Studios’ Project Copernicus and Kingdoms of Amalur"

I'd all but forgotten Curt Schilling's ill-fated attempt to re-create his EverQuest raiding days by funding his own MMORPG. If you build it they will come, perhaps. Only he never did build it.

Instead the whole thing turned into what MassivelyOP describes as "one of the biggest messes the MMORPG genre – and gaming itself – has ever seen". I don't imagine anyone ever expected to see Project Copernicus return in a playable form after that and maybe we still never will, but THQ Nordic (no, me neither) must have bought the assets for something so who knows?

After all that I needed a bit of a change of pace so I went and watched Eggheads for half an hour. I am old. Don't mock me.

I came back, glanced at Feedly before logging in to EQ2 and stap me if I didn't see this:

"WildStar and Carbine are shutting down"

What are we doing? Playing MMO Industry Bingo? One buyout, one acquisition, one closedown - HOUSE!

WildStar, of course, has been living on borrowed time while drinking at the last chance saloon for years now. Many pundits have pondered over NCSoft's apparent unwillingness to pull the switch on this failed experiment in hardcore gaming.

Was it fear of a backlash after the desperately badly-received decision to close the then-profitable City of Heroes just because it wasn't profitable enough? Or had they simply forgotten WildStar even existed? God knows that would have been easy enough to do - most of us managed it years ago.

I never entirely got on with WildStar. It was too brash and too jarring to be relaxing, something its cuddly anhropomorphic characters seemed to suggest it should be. Still, I had some good times there, on and off. I don't suppose I would ever have played it again but I'm sorry to see it go.

I hope WildStar gets another chance in that grey zone where emulators operate. If Earth Eternal can do it, anyone can. Although I imagine EE's code is a lot less complex than WildStar's.

However you want to paint it, that's a lot of news for one day. I scarcely dare check Feedly again. I've been typing this for half an hour - who knows what MMO might have closed down or changed hands since I last looked?

Wilhelm and I have been corresponding recently on those rumors about Daybreak Games' future plans. As he pointed out, some of them have already happened. Come to think of it, there was some talk once about Daybreak or SOE acquiring CCP, wan't there? I did say it could have been worse!

We're still waiting on any news about this Autumn's EverQuest and EQ2 expansions, beyond the bald assertion that they will happen. I am now braced to hear that they will also be the last.

Whether that means the end of a chapter or the closing of the book remains to be seen. After a day like today I'm not going to make any predictions about anything.

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.

You Know Jack: WildStar

Any good intentions I may have had about giving WildStar:Reloaded a fair shake seem to have fallen under a bus. So far all I've managed is a daily log-in to click through the reward screen. That much I have at least managed diligently because the instant rewards are rather good, particularly the ones you get each ten-day, which include pets, mounts and skies for your house.

For the first few days, as soon as I'd bagged the prize I made the hundred meter dash to my house so I could log out on my bed. Then I realized that every time I log back in I find myself standing outdoors by the teleporter so there didn't seem to be much point trying to get comfortable any more. I usually just log out where I'm standing meaning the entire visit takes less than a minute. Last night, though, for the first time I found myself sticking around for over an hour.

The reason? Shade's End. I've always been something of a sucker for MMORPG Holidays and while Halloween is by no means my favorite real-life festival (I doubt it would make the top twenty) I'm keenly aware that game developers take it very seriously and pull out all the stops.

On first impressions I'd say Shade's End is a fairly typical example of the subgenre. Its strongest suits by far are the visuals and the storylines. I am a total ingenue when it comes to Nexus lore so I can't make a meaningful judgment on whether pumpkins and candles make or break internal logic but I can say that they look fantastic. The artists have done a bang-up job decorating the place, and while the tale of Angel and Jack Shade may not win any prizes for originality, it's well-told and mildly poignant.

Of course, being a dirty Dommie, I only got to see Thayd, which is a badly-lit maze of ill-favored backstreets at the best of times. One real issue I do have with WildStar is just how dark and cluttered it is everywhere, not just in the city but in all the adventure zones too. I can't remember ever playing an MMO where the "open world" zones felt quite so claustrophobic. The art direction is very good but it could do with the editorial hand of restraint here and there. Less really can be more; I think that was firmly established long ago.

With that in mind it must have taken some brainstorming to come up with a way to pile on more pressure and make things feel even more shut-in. The new Quiet Downs instance certainly manages it. The instance starts in pitch darkness with a quasi-survival mini-game in which you have to navigate a dark forest using a very limited supply of torches.

The torches cast light no further than your arm can reach and run out in about fifteen seconds so you can imagine how much fun that is. Luckily the dense undergrowth is ridden with Shadelings who quickly make you One Of Them and Shadelings can see in the dark. Once I'd been converted I just hung around in Shadeling form until I could see where to go and headed in the right general direction. I'm not sure it's the intended method but it worked well enough.

The storyline, as I said, is unoriginal but enjoyable, at least as far as I was able to follow it. It does rely on some fighting and that proved to be a problem. The Expedition instance boosted my Level 19 Warrior to 50, which worked well enough until she needed to beat the Keyholder, the first Superior-rated mob. The scaling seemed off at that point and I wasn't able to solo it. By all accounts it's easy enough as a genuine fifty and/or in a duo or larger group so it hardly counts as a roadblock but as an only mildly intrigued casual visitor it was enough to send me back to Thayd to see what else was on offer.

Ye gods, but Thayd was busy! All the new content is housed in, or begins from, a small area and it was teeming with people. So much so that I had real trouble finding the questgivers among the crowds. Eventually I loaded up with what turned out to be a very typical smorgasbord of MMO holiday fare. The handy Reddit thread on the event sums the selection up very well: "The quests involve simple tasks like picking up stuff around town or interacting with citizens." Yep, that about covers it.

I knocked most of them off in a few minutes, which left me with enough of the event currency, Shade Silver, to buy a few not very interesting housing items. I resisted the temptation to spend what I'd got right away because the options available for a few silver more are much more appealing. Appealing enough, indeed, that it's odds on I'll be back to jump through a few more wisps and egg a few more hooligans over the next few days.

The one innovation that Carbine have brought to the tradition is an attempt at an actual implementation of trick-or-treating that somewhat resembles what goes on out of game on October 31st. Syp has a good account of how that works but the gist is you put out bowls of treats on your housing plot and other players come and take them. Not seen that done before. I hope DBG, Trion, Square and all the other developers with visitable player housing are paying attention.

All in all I thought it was a darn good effort. If WildStar was my focus game I'd certainly be grinding out those Shade Silvers. That full Jack Shade costume looks very tempting for one thing and I could do with a Gothic Gate - couldn't everyone? As it is Shade's Eve will have to fall in line behind Norrath's Nights of the Dead and Tyria's Shadow of the Mad King on my personal holiday calendar. There are things I want from those too and there are only so many fluff hours in the fluff day.

Home Again, Home Again

Okay, that's not actually a picture of me and Mrs Bhagpuss on holiday but give it a few years...

Anyway, we're back and we had a fantastic time, thanks for asking. One thing that was very noticeable is how the quality of internet access in hotels is improving. We stayed in a different place every night (explorer archetype in full effect) and even in the most out-of-the-way, backwater locations (one of them at the end of a four kilometer unpaved dirt road) I was able to web-browse with barely any delay.

I took my Windows 10 tablet, which meant that, in theory, I could not only have blogged but even played some MMOs. In the end I did neither, preferring to read (actual paper books) and stare at the scenery. I did manage to keep up with my blog reading to some degree, if only to avoid a repeat of last time, when I came home to a waiting list of more than 250 blog posts in my Feedly.

When it comes to blogging, coming back from a break is always revealing. After hitting an all-time high in July my page-views fell by around 20% in August even though I posted twice as often as I usually do, literally every day. Views in September then promptly fell off a cliff although I returned to exactly the same posting schedule as normal.

Train!

In October they hit the bottom of the cliff and started to dig a hole. Going away and not posting at all actually improved my daily page views, partly thanks to Syp linking me in Massively OP's Global Chat, which always leads to a flurry of visits. It rarely generates any comments (well, not here anyway - I try to avoid reading the comment thread at MOP for reasons that should be obvious) but this time it did lead to one lengthy and thoughtful response.

I'm particularly poor at checking older posts for comments. About the only time I remember is when I come back from holiday. I have had comment moderation set to kick in when a post has been up for more than three weeks but I've just doubled that to six to cover for my appalling inability to go back and see what's caught in the net. I have just noticed that there's a field to set an email address for moderation requests (probably should have spotted that earlier...) so with that enabled perhaps I'll be able to do a better job of fielding them.

Judging by the experiences of a number of bloggers it's just as well I wasn't around for the WildStar F2P launch. It seems to have sorted itself out now and I hope to take a look at how things have changed later this week. There are a few practical considerations to take  into account before that can happen, though.

Hey, is that one of the new ranger pets?

One undocumented change that seems to have rolled up with the change to payment model is the dropping of region restrictions. That complicates matters somewhat because I would prefer to play on a U.S. server but the one character I already have is on an E.U. shard because the digital download I got was locked to that region.

I also have an unopened physical box, which I bought from Amazon U.K. but which arrived from a U.S. shipping address, meaning it was, at that time, presumably, region-locked to American servers. To top it off I have another unused digital code from the same source I got my E.U. one, which I bought so that Mrs Bhagpuss and I could play together if she decides to give WS a go. I might just start again.

It is, of course, less than two weeks until Heart of Thorns lands and chances are that will push most other gaming to one side for a while, anyway. The new information on Tarir, The Golden City, is intriguing. It does suggest that, eventually, there could be a city/service hub in HoT that might replace Lion's Arch and/or Divinity's Reach as the center of gravity for non-combat player activity but only after we, the players, progress the storyline far enough for that to happen. What with that and Guild Halls I wonder whether we will see something of the kind of siloing of populations other MMOs have suffered after expansions?

The first of the EQ2 server merges is going to go through the same week HoT hits if DBG stick to the tentative schedule they've announced. That one only affects my older characters that I rarely play any more so there shouldn't be any friction between the two events as far as I'm concerned. Still needs an eye kept on it, though. Don't want anything going missing.

All in all it's shaping up to be a very busy Autumn. Spring would be better for me but I'm sure I'll manage, somehow.

Pay To Survive : City of Steam, DinoStorm

A funny thing happened while I was playing WildStar today. It made me log out and play two other MMOs instead.

Not because I wasn't enjoying myself. I was enjoying WildStar very much indeed, wandering around Galeras helping the local farmers deal with a poison gas attack, aiding the local mayor in foiling an attempted Chua plot to undermine his town with giant mole machines. As you do.

No, it was the tunes. The extraordinary potency, as The Master might have put it, had he been born a century later, of cheap videogame music. I kept hearing fragments of melodies that reminded me very strongly indeed of the main themes from two games I haven't played for far too long - City of Steam and DinoStorm.

They're both browser-based games so there was no long patching process even though it's been more than six months since I last logged in to either of them. Okay, that's not strictly true. I did try to play City of Steam on my tablet a couple of months back but it wasn't a particularly successful experiment. Not without connecting a USB mouse and keyboard anyway and by the time you do that you might as well just play on the desktop.

For two MMOs that no-one talks about any more (not that anyone but me has ever talked about DinoStorm, as far as I can remember) they seem to be trundling along quite nicely. CoS has six servers running, three in Europe and three in the USA, although what a "server" means for a browser game I have no idea.

Someone in chat said the game was no longer being developed and there's precious little on the website to suggest it ever will be again as far as actual content is concerned but that doesn't mean there's nothing going on. There have been quite a few changes to the way log-in and playtime rewards work since my last visit and there's currently a large cross-server competetive event in progress. Plenty of people were chatting and chilling in Arkadia although it wasn't as crowded as I've seen it in the past.

My goal remains the same as it has been since ownership and operations reverted to Mechanist Games almost eighteen months ago - level one character far enough to get to the end of the main storyline. I've been stuck on one particular episode for as long as I can remember. It's a long battle through several instances to a boss that I have yet to come close to beating. I realized ages ago that I either needed to get a couple more levels or some better gear to have a good chance of getting past him but leveling is such a grind I haven't had the will to buckle down and get it done.

Then today I had an epiphany. You're not expected to level up by playing at all. That's why it's so dull. You're supposed to stand in the central square, select each activity in turn and let the game autorun you through the boring busywork of fighting. If you really don't want to be bothered even with that there's a button next to every activity that lets you pay to have it marked as "Completed" - you don't need to move!

There's a plethora of daily activities that give Shillings (the in-game currency), Bound Electrum (a version of the cash shop currency earnable in-game), XP, talent points, crafting mats, collectible currencies for buying pets and mounts, appearance gear. Every one of them has a "Finish This For Me - I Can't Be Arsed" button next to it.

You name it, they'll give it to you for doing nothing. Sell it to you, I mean, of course. Oh, you can still go out and get it all the old-fashioned way if you want to but why bother?

All this time I've been ignoring the simple fact that I have a wealth of currency of all kinds accrued from past efforts that could be spent to get me over the hurdles and on to the only thing that interests me - the story. All I need to do is remember to log in every day, cycle through the daily events, do the quick and easy ones, pay the game to do the rest and I'll knock off a level or so a day in about half an hour.

My goblin gunner is level 27. If I remember correctly, although the level cap is fifty, the story only goes to about thirty. It should take a week. Two at the most. I think I'll still have to go and do the story quests in the locations where they actually happen but that's kind of the point. I guess. I might also have to do the access quests for the next zone but that's fine too. I like seeing new places.

Gosh! Finding out I don't actually have to play the game to play the game has really motivated me to play the game! Who knew? All I have to do now is remember to log in. Thanks Carbine! I'd never have done it without your oddly unoriginal choice of background music.

As for DinoStorm I don't think I'm ever going to make any progress there. I doubt they'll miss me. I never gave them any money anyway. Someone must have, though, because the game is still plugging away. What's more, unlike City of Steam, which I think is definitely quietening down, DinoStorm feels busier than ever. There were dino riders all over the place when I was in town collecting my log-in rewards (paltry though they were, compared to City of Steam's).

What's more there were plenty of players out in the badlands. Unlike City of Steam, where almost everything outside the urban hubs happens in instances, DinoStorm is a real MMO with proper zones and everything and they're all set for open PvP. You can quest and level safely for a while in Dinoville but eventually you have to venture out into the badlands if you want to progress.

Despite the warning as you leave town I've never had any trouble. On my little starter dino I probably look too pathetic to kill. Until today. Someone on a hulking great tyrannosaur took exception to me breathing his air and filled me full of lead.

First time I've been killed by another player in DinoStorm. It was a learning experience. Literally.

I learned that you lose some money permanently and drop some more on the ground. I learned you can go back and get the money you dropped (aka corpse recovery) but that you can also buy a Wallet Guard in the store to stop you dropping money next time someone shoots you in the back. Or you can buy a PvP Protection scheme that prevents other players from attacking you altogether - for three hours.

Is this Pay To Win? It's definitely Pay Not To Be Ganked. Does anyone playing these games as their main MMO care? Who are those people anyway? Why are they playing these MMOS and not ones people have heard of? Sometimes I feel we're all living in different worlds and not just virtually either.

You know what? So long as the scenery is worth looking at and the music sounds sweet I don't really care. If I can buy my way to success or safety with imaginary money then I'm already winning. Aren't I?