Lifting The Veil On New World's Halloween Holiday

Halloween, as I'm sure I must have mentioned many times, is not my favorite holiday. Just calling it a "holiday" seems weird. No-one gets time off from work to celebrate, do they, except maybe witches and warlocks. Except isn't it their busiest work day?

I guess we could do with a new word for these sorts of quasi-historical affairs that have been hijacked by the manufacturers of cheap plastic tat. Festival, celebration, plain old event... none of the regular labels quite fit any more.

Where I come from, Halloween didn't really become much of holiday (I'm sticking with that for now.) until I was an adult out of college, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say I never saw anyone celebrate it until then. It certainly existed before that as a cultural moment, not just an archaic throwback. There was a xenophobic attempt to deny it as an American import following the success of E.T., but that movie didn't even introduce trick or treating to these shores, let alone the rest of it.

I had heard of Halloween before I grew up. I think I first came across the concept in an Agatha Christie novel I read when I was in my early teens (I forget which one but it was written in the 1950 or '60s.) and I vaguely remember someone in my primary class having a Halloween party, to which I don't believe I went. I just didn't know it as anything anyone paid much mind.

When I was a child, it was mostly our local holiday, Guy Fawkes Day that was an absolutely huge deal around that time of year. Second only to Christmas in anticipation and excitement and falling on November 5th as it does, it tended to eclipse Halloween to the point of invisibility. Over the decades, the two adjacent celebrations seem to have equalled out to a large degree, with Halloween taking over as the smaller, more personal option, all parties and kids out with their families after dark, while the myriad back garden bonfires of my childhood have retreated to municipal parks and sports grounds for organized displays, taking with them most of the intimacy with danger that made bonfire night so thrilling in the first place.

Elsewhere, Halloween rules unchallenged and supreme. Every mmorpg has to have its own version, often the biggest in-game holiday of the year, almost always at least the second-biggest, after whatever they call Christmas in imagineland.

I've done most of them to death by now, EverQuest II's "Nights of the Dead" and Guild Wars 2's "Shadow of the Mad King" especially. I'm not saying I no longer have any interest in them at all but I certainly don't feel any stirring desire to log in and run through the card all over again.

I'm always up for a new take on the old themes, though, so when I logged into New World and saw the orange, autumn leaves, drifted into piles in all the corners of the town, along with the inevitable, obligatory carved pumpkins carefully placed in prominent positions, I knew I'd have to take a closer look. Then Tyler Edwards dropped by the comments to let me know there was a Halloween World Boss and people were zerging it, which put the witch's cap on things for me.

I logged in for an hour last night to figure out how things might work in Nightveil Hallow. I was quite optimistic. Amazon Games seem to have a good handle on how to do seasonal and holiday events. The last couple I've visited have been well-designed - fun to play and rewarding as well.

This one appears to buck the genre trend in that it's relatively small and compact. Unless I've missed something, it consists of a single, introductory quest, which isn't even mandatory, and the aforementioned World Boss, the demonic "Baalphazu, Marquis of Terror".

Baalphazu spawns, repeatedly and quickly if last night is anything to go by, in any one of half a dozen mid-high level zones, Brightwood, Ebonscale Reach, Weaver's Fren, Great Cleave, Edengrove, and Mourningdale. I only saw him in Ebonscale, where he's confined to a specific, partly enclosed area. I imagine it's much the same in every zone where he appears, making the fight quite localized and unlikely to disturb people going about their regular business.

This guide recommends grouping up and people were forming parties in general chat but there's no requirement to do so. I picked up the quest from Salvatore, standing next to the giant, bubbling green cauldron in town, then watched the map until I saw the icon appear to say Baalphazu had landed.

It took me a while to get to him. Fast travel is trivially cheap now but the locations are still fixed and not always convenient to where you need to be in a hurry. The fight lasts a few minutes, though, so there's time to get there before it's all over. 

My first time, there weren't that many people. Those who were there seemed nervous to begin but after a bit we got started on the supporting cast, pumpkinites of various kinds and strengths. Killing a bunch of those seemed to agravate their Lord, who materialised in the center of the clearing and launched into whoever was closest.

The fight was a bit of a blur. I was trying to take screenshots - always a mistake - and as a melee character I had no option but to get in close. I didn't actually die but I had to retreat out of range far more often than I closed in to attack, to the point that when the boss finally fell I got no credit.

I wasn't bothered. It was just a recce to see how things worked. The next time Baalphazu arrived I was much more aware of his attacks and the need to dodge them but more importantly someone was putting out an impressive amount of AE healing, meaning I didn't have to rely on my health potions and their lengthy cooldowns.

I wouldn't say the fight was fun, exactly. It was a typical world boss zerg battle - a couple of dozen players in a scrum at the feet of a giant creature you could barely see for the light show. I like those kinds of fights so it suited me. It lasted about eight minutes, something I can say with a certain precision because it just so happened I got the ten minute warning from GeForce Now just after it began. 

It certainly added another layer of tension, knowing I was going to be forcibly excluded from the server when the on-screen timer reached zero. Fortunately, we had our target on the ground with a couple of minutes to spare. I just had time to check that, this time, my quest had updated and then I was back at desktop.

I left it at that for the night but this morning I logged back in and did the hand-in. The rewards were crafting patterns, gold and event currency, but also  - much to my surprise - all of the reputation required to buy anything in the event store. I was expecting to have to grind that rep out somehow, something that's been a longstanding feature of the game, including previous holiday events, but apparently rep grind is another thing we don't have to worry about in Aeternum any more.

I was also very surprised to see how affordable pretty much everything in the store is. It's true, you'd need to kill a lot of Baalphazus to earn the tokens to buy everything but after just the quest and one kill I already have enough to buy literally any one of the things on sale. 

There's some good stuff in there, too - GS 600 weapon patterns that would be a huge upgrade for me, for a start, plus some striking outfits and a house pet I'd quite like. Enough to persuade me to zerg the boss a few times more before the event ends, for sure, although it's true I never need much persuasion to join a zerg.

The real problem, as I found out when I went to make a hatchet from one of the patterns I got out of the loot chest, is that you need 150 skill in the relevant crafting discipline. Mine's nine. Bit of work to do there, then.

What I'll most likely do is buy the patterns I want and stash them. I did the same for the winter event. One thing I'm not short of in Aeternum is storage so hording is always an attractive option. Then, if I ever get back to playing regularly, I'll have a handy, moderately achievable goal to work towards in raising my crafting skills.

Whether I ever will play regularly again is a matter that's largely out of the hands of the Amazon Games development team. It's going to have a lot more to do with how much time I can find for any games at all. Free time seems to be at a ridiculous premium right now for someone who only works a couple of days a week but that's how its.

All in all, though, Nightveil Hallow looks like another good holiday event for New World and another solid Halloween effort for the genre. In other New World news, I also completed the access quest for the new zone, Brimstone Sands (It only takes a few minutes.) so that's where I'll be going next.

Read all about it here, I imagine, but not until next week. I'm taking the weekend off  blogging because, sadly, I'll be working instead.

School's Out : GW2

As we walked through some local woodland this morning, enjoying the welcome, warm summer sunshine after yesterday's storms, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were chatting about the current glut of activities on offer in Guild Wars 2. She was of the opinion that games companies like to try to get the attention of bored kids on their summer break from school, whereas I wasn't so convinced that kids are interested in the kind of games we play.

Since almost no games companies like to release demographics, all evidence is necessarily anecdotal or observational, so take that as a warning, but it's my impression that school-age players are a vanishingly-small  minority in most of the online games I play. GW2 does probably skew as young as any but even there it seems as though anyone under college age stands out as the exception.

I was more of the opinion that interest in gaming drops off during the summer, when better weather, vacation time and the competing attractions of outdoor activities from kayaking to barbecues draw players away from the keyboard and into the great outdoors. Or at least the back yard. The plethora of events, I contended, is designed to mitigate that loss, to claw back some ground, dissuade people from putting their subscriptions on hold, keep the cash shop registers ringing.

This year, of  course, is about as atypical as it could get (we hope). You might expect some extra activity. But it happens every year. Summer comes and every MMORPG lights up like the carnival's come to town, which in some games it literally has.

ArenaNet were slow to cotton on to the pattern but now they've twigged they seem keen to make up for lost time. There are currently no fewer than four major events running concurrently.

In World vs World we 're enjoying the return of the popular-with-many, loathed-by-some No Downed State.  This is a switch-flick event whereby ANet turn off whatever flag it is that lets your character fall to the ground and twitch like a swatted wasp for anything up to half a minute while your enemies try to put you out of your misery.

This has all kinds of implications, some of which apply to most everyone, others which only affect individual classes. I won't go into details or we'll be here until long after the week-long event has ended.  Suffice to say, some people like it because it makes clashes between large groups fast, furious and above all decisive, three things they usually are not. It also makes ganking people a lot more efficient, if less fun for the ganker, since a favorite tactic has always been to make the downed victim squirm for as long as possible before finally administering the coup de grace.

It's hard to say exactly how popular No Downed State really is because every time ANet employ this crowd-pleaser they accompany it with a bunch of bonuses. This time we're getting

• 25% bonus to reward-track progress
• Gain double WXP
• Receive a 50% bonus to magic find

All of which bring the PvXers in by the coachload. On reset night there was reportedly a queue or almost 200 to get in to Eternal Battlegrounds in my Tier 4 match. By the time I got to play over the weekend that was down to around fifty and during the week it's sometimes dipped as low as half  a dozen. All of those are way higher than normal.

That event's going well, then, but it pales into total insignificance compared to the return of another of ANet's favorites, the PvE juggernaut known as World Boss Rush.

This is a gimme by anyone's standards. It involves no changes to the game at all other than the addition of some bonus rewards. If you're in on a World Boss kill you get some extra boxes to open and that's it. Oh, and there's a series of  "Community Goals", whereby the server keeps track of... erm... something... it's never been clear to me what... and when the event ends everyone gets a care package based on how well the "community" did. Or something. It's vague.

But it's evidently quite clear enough to bring in the crowds. I got swept up in the Rush yesterday and ended up doing a whole bunch of World Bosses. I just missed the Frozen Maw when I logged in but I caught it on it's next pop so that was a straight two hours.

I did Modniir, Fire Elemental, Golem Mk II, Great Jungle Wurm, Claw of Jormag, Shadow Behemoth, then I skipped Taidha so I could empty my bags before finishing up back at the Maw. There were so many people that most of the fights presented as a slide-show and I failed to get credit at FE altogether because my screen froze completely. By the time I had contol of my character again the caravan had moved on to Jormag.

It's a popular event, then. Only, you can do it every day, all year, every year. Those same bosses spawn at those same times forever. On any given day, any month, there's always  a "boss train" running. This event is literally "what we do every day" and the bonus rewards are literally "more of the same things we always get".

For me, the attraction is the crowds. Obviously I don't love screen-freezes but I do love being in zergs so big they cause screen-freezes. To me, GW2's USP is a huge, chaotic, disorderly rabble charging across the countryside in an explosion of neon fireworks. That's what I don't pay my money for. So I'm happy.

I also really like the third event on the card, the Queen's Pavillion. This is a double-header holiday event in which Divinity's Reach is twinned with Labyrinthine Cliffs, of which (not very much) more later.

There are three attractions in the Queen's Pavilion. One is a mount race. I hate mounts but I love mount races. Don't call me on it or I'll bring that quote out again.

The second is Queen's Gauntlet, a series of one-on-one cage fights between your character and a named NPC. I did that the first year it appeared and got as far as the penulitimate opponent. Couldn't beat the very last one. Haven't really bothered with it since other than to tick off one of the easy round one challenges for the daily.

Third and by far the most enjoyable in my book is Boss Blitz, a round-robin event in which you have to defeat six Legendary bosses in a set time. This one has all the things I like about group events in GW2 - it takes tactics, organization, communication and discipline. If you use the LFG tool to get into an organized squad it can go like clockwork. If you just pug it in a random map it can be anything from a hysterical clownshow to a name-calling debacle. Fun for all the foul-mouthed family!

I got into an excellent squad on my first try and knocked off several Gold runs in a row. Yesterday I happened on a random PUG map that was both good-natured and intelligent and we peeled off a string of silvers. I'm waiting for my disaster map. I'm sure it won't be long in coming.

Last and very definitely least in the tetralogy is the aforementioned Labyrinthine Cliffs. Technically both it and the Queen's  Gauntlet are part of the same event, Festival of the Four Winds, but the two share nothing in common other than some daily achievements so I think of them as entirely separate.

And so, it seems does everyone else. Mrs. Bhagpuss was complaining that so far she hasn't been able to find a single group, let alone a squad, advertising on LFG to do anything in the Cliffs. I was there for a few minutes this morning and in that brief time I heard two people complaining in map chat that the zone was dead and no-one was doing any of the events there.

I must say I haven't bothered this year. The Cliffs events tend to be on timers long enough to make hanging around waiting for things to begin feel very annoying. Plus they last quite a long time and the map is very awkward to navigate. Compared to any of the other three all-you-can-kill buffets in the current feeding frenzy, Labyrinthine Cliffs feels creaky and old.

World Boss Rush and No Downed State each last a week, although they started at slighty different times. According to the wiki, Festival of the Four Winds goes on a bit longer than that, until 1 September. Maybe that will give Labyrinthine Cliffs a chance to come into its own for a few days.

I kind of doubt it. We'll be into the Eighth Anniversary celebrations and the underwater mount by then. Remember when we didn't have anything to do in GW2? Remind me. When was that again?

Burning In : GW2

Project Megaserver moves on apace. After the initial announcement (Level 1-15 maps) and the subsequent, fuzzier revision (lower population maps) we now have some actual hard information. This thread lists the maps using the new Asuran technology so far.

Here's the first batch:

• The Grove
• Heart of the Mist
• Black Citadel
• Timberline Falls
• Southsun Cove
• Rata Sum
• Straits of Devastation
• Fields of Ruin
• Brisban Wildlands
• Hoelbrak
• Iron Marches
• Blazeridge Steppes
• Dredgehaunt Cliffs

 Assuming that they did indeed go with the least-populated maps, that's quite an interesting list. All the racial starting cities except Divinity's Reach plus most of the mid-level wilderness maps, suggesting a dearth of interest or activity outside of starting areas, max-level maps and the human heartlands. Just about exactly what you'd expect, given that most of the maps on that list were already sparsely populated three months after launch. And of course no-one in their right mind goes to Southsun if they can avoid it.

The first serving went down well enough that we got seconds very quickly:

• Lion’s Arch
• Lornar’s Pass
• Kessex Hills
• Diessa Plateau
• Metrica Province

It's perhaps surprising that Diessa and Lornar's weren't included on the first pass, but I guess proximity to the alway-busy Wayfarer Foothills, Lion's Arch and now Gendarran Fields have helped keep the numbers up. Having Durmand Priory based there can't have hurt Lornar's either. Seeing Lion's Arch on the list is sad. It really does seem to have lost focus after the Terrible Events. I was skeptical whether Vigil Keep would work as a stand-in hang-out but load times for Gendarran Fields would seem to prove me dead wrong on that one.

See? I told you Diessa wasn't all brown!

Kessex Hills doesn't seem to have benefited much from the makeover it got from the Toxic Alliance. It was always a scrappy map and adding reeking fumes and tough, annoying mobs and events was hardly likely to improve matters.

Metrica, on the other hand, always seemed quite a happening place but then I generally only go there when the Fire Elemental's up, which I guess isn't a representative sample. It's curious that it's the only starter zone to go Mega so far. It's not like you don't see a plethora of Asura skittling about everywhere. I'd have thought Plains of Ashford would be less-used.


Enough theorizing. Time for experiment. Late last night, just coming into NA prime time, I took a jog from Wayfarers Foothills into Diessa Plateau to see if I could see any difference. Diessa has always been one of my favorite maps. I wrote about it during beta, although reading it back now it does suggest my initial reaction was less affectionate than it became later on. I've certainly spent a lot of time there on and off ever since so I must be quite fond of the place.

Who says you have to stand well back to fling a fireball?

Diessa was never bustling. The eternal Meatoberfest celebrations in Butcher's Block, right up against the Wayfarers border, always attracted a few visitors but even when the game was relatively new you could cross the map without bumping into much more than the occasional young Charr discovering his heritage. Your chances of getting enough people to down the Champion Giant in Nageling or open the mini-dungeon at Incendio Templum were poor indeed.

Not any more it seems. Within half an hour I'd done three Hearts (with their much-improved completion UI as noted by Syp), several Meatoberfest events, killed the Nageling Giant and even finished the really annoying Dredge event in Bloodcliff Quarry that always used to fail with too few people. In everything I was accompanied by a whole bunch of friends-I-hadn't-met-yet. Didn't see a single name I recognized from Yak's Bend.

Not that I felt out of place. The whole time I was there a Mesmer was porting all-comers to the very difficult vista and skill point at the Breached Wall and map chat was buzzing with cheerful, excited chatter. It was all very jolly if a little bit uncomfortable, a bit like the last day of term when your year tutor lets you bring in games. I wouldn't go as far as to say it was like launch week all over again but it certainly did make the whole map feel alive in a way it hasn't for a very long time.

Rock Solid Work, Name Deleted.
(Not actual name although there must be someone called that)

Today I popped down to Dredgehaunt Cliffs, a great map with some complex event chains that can be very challenging with low numbers, to see if the same magic was working there. There were people around, I can say that much. Not a huge number but enough that every event I tried found me fighting alongside two or three other players. People were constantly calling events and Champions and linking waypoints. It felt a bit less frenetic than Diessa. I liked it.

So, on the basis of those two snapshots and with the weight one should always allocate to anecdotal evidence, my conclusion is that it would seem the Megaserver is doing what it was intended to do. I'm not about to declare it "awesome" like Heartless but my first impressions are definitely positive, more so than I expected.

It's going to take some getting used to, though, and the benefits may be arguable in certain situations. I logged my engineer in earlier. He happened to be in Metrica right next to the Thaumanova Reactor and by chance it was only ten minutes before the Fire Elemental's new two-hourly slot. Crowds were gathering.

Stop shoving at the back!

There were so many people that the pre-events spawned Elites and Champions and I still couldn't get a shot off fast enough to get credit on anything as we walked the Clean 5000 around. The five-minute whirl in the reactor room was purely surreal. There were twenty or thirty of us scudding about trying to shoot things while as many or more lined the walls like the crowd at an arena. Actually, not "like". They were the crowd at an arena.

By the time the Elemental appeared I would estimate there must have been at least sixty players crammed in the room. The timer for the event runs fifteen minutes but I doubt the  "fight" lasted thirty seconds. Overnight FE has changed from a very, very challenging encounter for a few determined individuals to a trivial, challenge-free loot drop for a zerg.

With Megaserver populations that's going to happen to every event with a fixed timer and loot worth having. It risks putting us back almost exactly where we were a year ago when, even after all the difficulty passes, most World Bosses still melted in seconds when a huge zerg arrived. Except this time, with Megaserver technology, a huge zerg will always arrive.

Spectator Sport

I'm not saying that's a bad thing or a good thing but it's certainly a thing. Short of upping the standard World Boss difficulty to at least Karka Queen level, if not Teq/GJW, it's hard to see how it can be prevented. Always assuming someone wanted to prevent it. Honestly, I've done all these bosses so many ways now - easy, hard, small group, zerg, even solo - I really don't care any more. Most of them are mostly fun most ways. I'll just take them however they come.

After FE died, though, it should be noted that there were quite a lot of complaining comments in map chat. Some people couldn't get there before he died, some couldn't do enough damage to get credit, some just thought it was a lot less fun than it had been with a lot fewer people, some wanted to do it on their own servers and not some unnamed overflow, as they saw it. When I left five minutes later the post-match analysis was still going on.

Oh well. Never going to please everyone. At least it works. That alone is more than I was expecting. Looking forward, nervously, to seeing the new tech rolled out to those few maps I actually spend time in. Whichever those are. There must be some other than Wayfarers and WvW...