It's All In The DNA - Duet Night Abyss, That Is...

I read an article at MMOBomb yesterday, speculating about the potential impact on the industry of a change to the monetization model of an upcoming action RPG. I found it interesting in a number of ways, not least that the game in question, Duet Night Abyss, was about to launch on Steam in just a couple of days and I'd never heard of it.

I suppose, on the face of it, there's no reason why I should have. There are a lot of new action RPGs or open world RPGs coming out all the time in this post-Genshin Impact world. It's like a virtual gold rush sometimes.

Usually, though, something filters through about them long before they're due to release. In some cases, like Neverness To Everness, for which it feels like I've been waiting at least as long as I expect to wait for a new MMORPG, although it's really been barely half as long, the problem isn't so much failing to hear about them as it is having to wait so long that all my enthusiasm and excitement has long since drained away by the time I get to play them.

Not that it matters. Anime-inflected acion RPGs and MMOs, most of them cross-platform or ported from mobile, come so thick and fast these days there's no longer the remotest chance of keeping up with all of them in any meaningful fashion. If you were to take the idea of playing them seriously, you might possibly have time for a couple, three at the outside, but even if you plan on merely dabbling, you'll still struggle to paddle along in the shallows of more than a small selection.

In theory, I'm currently playing three and that's at least one too many. In practice, I'm not playing any. As I'm frequently to be found whining, Wuthering Waves is just too good to waste anything less than my full attention on, which means I don't play it at all. Crystal of Atlan and Blue Protocol: Star Resonance are a lot easier to take lightly but they still each require more commitment than I'm willing to give them, at least if I'm going to see much more than the first couple of chapters of their storylines.

And they keep coming. And I keep wanting to see them all. Mostly it's out of comfortable curiosity. I do love a new thing that's almost the same as an old thing. Then there's the blogging opportunities every new game offers. Those First Impressions posts all but write themselves.

 

The problem is, every new game pushes the rest out of the way. It's how it's always been, only the timescale used to be measured in months or even years, not weeks, much less days. I look back on Keen, complaining bitterly about the mayfly attention span of the three-month cycle and his concern seems quaint. 

Three months! When did I last play a new game, exclusively, for a whole three months?! When did you?

Anyway, that's all a little off topic. The point I was making was that Duet Night Abyss had managed to creep up behind me unseen, somehow, and now it was about to sprint off into the distance before I'd even taken a quick look at it. So I took one.

Well, I tried to. The website for some reason does not want to display properly on my makeshift PC. I can see the static images and read the text (The lore is extraordinarily dense.) but any video just doesn't run. Or rather the images don't. The sound plays, which is really weird.  

The launch trailer worked perfectly on YouTube, though, so I watched it there. I think it was the same one I would have been watching on the website if it had played properly because it has a very distinctive and unlikely jazz soundtrack. 

And I mean jazz. Actual jazz. Not jazz-rock or jazzed-up pop. There's this thing I keep reading about how GenZ love jazz. I guess it might even be true if this is what they think is going to sell a mobile port nowadays.

The music I liked. The rest of the video didn't do much for me. It's all fights. Here, take a look for yourself and see what you make of it.

That's the 1.0 launch trailer. There are several more promos on YouTube, going back to the first reveal two years ago. I skimmed them all and none of them look very interesting. I'm used to seeing a lot of world-building and non-combat gameplay in promotional material for these kinds of games. That's always what gets my attention. I'm not seeing much of any of that here.

Which, honestly, is a good thing. It means I don't feel tempted to download DNA (Nice acronym for the Marketing Dept. there.) . It is on Steam, which would make it very easy to give it a try when the servers open tomorrow but I'm not planning on it. (I still might anyway, of course.)

So, if I'd never heard of it and I don't intend to play it, why am I even mentioning it? Mostly because of the other interesting thing about that MMOBomb piece, which is that apparently, until a few weeks ago, DNA was going to be a gacha game. Now it's not.

The developers, Hero Games, changed course late in development, following feedback from two closed betas. They decided to make all characters and weapons free, where previously they had used a gacha system for both. They also removed a stamina system designed to throttle progress.

MMOBomb describe the changes as shifting to something more like the model used by Warframe. I think this is supposed to be seen as a positive move because Warframe has long been held up as an exemplar of how to do F2P properly for a Western audience. 

It doesn't quite have that effect on me because, while I did briefly play Warframe and didn't exactly hate it, I didn't much like it either. That, it should be said, had a lot more to do with how it looked than how it played. I certainly never got far enough in the game for the payment model to become an issue , one way or the other.

In trying to explain why the change to a single new game might have repercussions for an entire genre, the article went on to attempt to codify three types of gacha-game players:

1. Min-maxers, looking to build the perfect team and willing to spend as much as it takes.
2. Gamblers, getting a thrill out of the gacha rolls for their own sake
3. Audience members, wanting to follow the plot and enjoy their favorite characters.

I'm guessing the argument would be that Type 1 will spend a lot of money under any system and there are a lot more of Type 3 than Type 2, so catering to Type 3 should compensate for losing the gambling dollars. Or something. I wasn't paying that close attention.

Obviously, there are more types of player than that but I think those three do probably cover a lot of ground. I don't feel like I fall neatly into any of them, although clearly the last one comes closest to the way I approach most games these days. 

Even so, I feel there ought to be a fourth group:

4. Freeloaders and tourists, happy to take whatever's going for free but never becoming sufficiently invested to spend any money at all and always being half-ready to move on to another game.

Those would be my people and I suspect we might be in the majority. Other than boosting the figures to make the game look like it's popular and successful (All those "5m pre-registrations!" press releases...) I'm not sure what companies get out of us but there's not much they can do to stop us tagging along even supposing they wanted to try. 

As far as I can remember, I've never paid a penny to any game to which I wasn't also subscribed. Mostly that's because I'm not willing to give them my payment details but it's also because they rarely have much to sell me that I want and nothing at all that I need.  

Free to Play, to me, means exactly that. In gacha games, it also means I don't have much chance of building a specific team. I have to work with whatever characters or weapons I happen to get from whatever free pulls the developers see fit to give me. 

I'm guessing that to anyone in any of the first three categories, that's going to sound like a problem. Maybe a big enough problem to make the games not worth playing. I mean, in some ways it's the main point of the game. 

To me, it's a bonus. The thing is, I don't like building teams. At best I find it a tedious necessity, sitting somewhere below sorting my inventory. (Quite a long way below it, actually. I like sorting inventory or at least I used to. I am kind of over it now though. Guild Wars 2 pretty much killed inventory management for me.) At worst, building teams is something I dislike doing enough to avoid it, even if that's to my own detriment.

Sometimes i can get into it but on balance I would probably prefer the game do it for me. In some games I'd be happy with pressing a single button to have some algorithm check all the characters and gear I have available and put together the best available combination. And then a second press to go apply all the available upgrades, too.

I know. It's dangerously close to asking the game to play itself. Throw in auto-pathing, auto-questing and auto-battling, all of which I'm broadly in favor of, and the very valid question even I'd ask myself is "Why are you even bothering to "play" this game at all?" 

It's a question that would be harder to answer if I hadn't just started playing another game, one with an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam from almost five thousand reviews and a Metacritic rating of 87, in which I'm doing even less than that. I played it for almost forty minutes yesterday and I did literally nothing other than press LMB to keep the dialog flowing. 

The game is Steins;Gate. It's a visual novel so this is apples and oranges but then again, given the extreme quantity of narrative content in some mobile ports I've been playing of late, maybe not.  

After my first session of S;G ended, I googled to see if anything you might call "gameplay" ever came into it. It does not. It's clicking LMB all the way down.

So, clearly, you can have games where the player doesn't really play. And now you can have gacha games where there's no gacha. In the reverse of Wilhelm's Dictum, which is that there's no feature so bad that someone won't claim it's their favorite part of the game if you take it away from them, there's probably nothing in any game you couldn't strip out without make the game feel like it just got more fun for someone.One person's tedium is another person's thrill. One player's motivation is another player's frustration. Et cetera.

If I'm going to be completely honest, I think the Steins;Gate approach leans quite a bit too far towards dis-involvement for my comfort. The reason I googled to see if it ever changed wasn't wholly unconnected with boredom. Now I know that it's going to stay that way, I might just forget about the game and watch the reportedly excellent anime instead. That way I at least won't end up with a sore mouse finger.

I guess I don't want to see my action RPGs and MMOs ending up like visual novels but I wouldn't be sad to see all that obsession with team builds and upgrades shunted off to AI. The good AI, that is. The old kind.

As for the gacha pulls, I'd miss my free ones. I do love me a bit of RNG. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to play the characters I want rather the ones I get. I may not be much for building the teams but I do like to collect the people.

On that basis, I think I'd give a qualified nod of approval to the possibility that  Duet Night Abyss might be the harbinger of change for the format. It's not going to happen, though, I feel fairly confident in saying. It'll need a bigger, better game than this to shift the needle.

Or so I reckon, knowing nothing more than I saw in those trailers. Maybe I will download it and try it tomorrow, after all, just to see if there's anything in it... 

Crystal Of Atlan: Further First Impressions

As you might surmise from the picture above, I have been making some progress in Crystal Of Atlan. I'm Level 27 now. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone. I didn't expect to be playing the game much at all after downloading it on a whim, especially since I'm currently not doing a lot of gaming. And anyway, if I was going to pick the pace back up, wouldn't there be a whole load of games more deserving of my time than this one? 

Well, yes, probably. For a start, Wuthering Waves is far more nuanced, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying and don't I keep going on about how good the story is there? That game is getting a huge content drop in a few days and I haven't even started the storyline from the last one yet.

So, why am I playing CoA instead of WW? I don't think there's a very straightforward answer to that. It's new, of course, which always helps. It's linear and straightforward, which could be a problem later on but which, at the start, makes the game very accessible and easy to follow. 

It's pretty to look at at and while the visual style says anime, the writing feels a lot like a good old Saturday morning cartoon series. The story skips along cheerily and the characters are broadly drawn but with plenty of personality. 

The witch of the mines. She's a baddie. Or is she?

Structurally, there's just enough choice to make it feel as though you have some agency but really it's a straight through-line you're happy to follow. Everything progresses through a series of "dungeons" that a helpful bot teleports you to on request. There's no traveling as such but you can wander around the fairly large and very attractive non-combat areas to get a sense that you're somewhere with substance.

I'm not entirely sure that there isn't some kind of open-world element to the game, anyway. I was wandering around the city the other day, when I bumped into a zone line that popped up a warning about the next area being some kind of combat-enabled area. It made it sound as if there was an open-world area beyond, where PvP might happen, but I was too chicken to go through and find out. 

I could google it but for the moment I'm in that honeymoon phase, where I want everything to surprise me, so I haven't. That's always a sign of a well-designed game and CoA is nothing if not well-designed.

The most significant reason I find myself wanting to log into this game at the moment, rather than any of the dozen or more others I could be playing, is the torrent of new systems and mechanics that just keep on coming. This is true of most games and accounts for a great deal of the excitement and enthusiasm I have for starting over in new ones all the time. 

Classic example; the game told me how to change my appearance and I did but then I still looked the same after. Now I have to figure out how it works, which is my idea of a good time.

It's absolutely an Explorer Archetype thing and if there was ever any doubt that that's my segment of the pie chart, this blog, with its never-ending drip-feed of First Impressions and game reports from the early and mid-levels of games I never go on to play at endgame, proves it. 

I'm sure the exact same aspects of this and many other games, the long introductions where you learn how the game works and what you have to do to survive and prosper in the world that's being revealed, are the very parts that drive so many new players to give up and log out, never to return. A lot of people just want to get on and play the damn game, not fiddle-faddle about with ninety-seven different ways to do stuff they don't care about and never will but for me it's like unwrapping a huge pile of presents under the tree.

And modern F2P titles really do go nuts with the things they give you to do. After a while it does indeed become too much and I'm noticing almost as many burnout stories cropping up in blog posts over there being just too damn many things to do in games these days as there used to be about how much of our lives had to be given over to getting to the point where we could do anything much at all.

The big difference I see between the two eras is that for the most part, the filler developers use to keep us busy these days is far more avoidable than it used to be. The open-world RPGs that are broadly replacing MMOs scarcely seem to respect our time any more than EverQuest or the rest ever did but they also seem a lot more amenable to casual play. You can spend a ton of time and money on them, sure, but you can entertain yourself very nicely in short bursts for free, too.

Building up your vinyl collection: A lot cheaper here than in real life.

How long that will persist in Crystal of Atlan I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons I'm so positive about Wuthering Waves is that so far it's proved not just possible but quite easy to keep up with the main storyline simply by... playing through the main storyline. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, generally acknowledged as the founder of and trend-setter for the genre, a game I liked but had to give up after a few weeks because the fights just got too hard, or even Noah's Heart, where I lasted a lot longer but eventually fell off the main story for the same reason, combat in storyline instances in Wuthering Waves has actually gotten easier as time's gone on. I don't know how long that can last, especially given that the whole business model presumably relies on players wanting to get the latest Resonators for some practical purpose, not just to fill out their collections, but I'm very much there for it so long as it does.

In Crystal of Atlan, though, I can already see the fights becoming more challenging and requiring more skill and I'm not even out of the introductory phase just yet. I wouldn't say I was still in the tutorial but the lessons are still coming even though the story is fully engaged. 

NuVerse make a big thing of how their game isn't a Gacha but of course it is. The swerve is that you don't roll for characters to do the fighting for you, so in that respect I do think it's quite likely the impact of increased difficulty will fall on players' skill instead of  their wallets. 

I know it looks like one but that's not a skill tree. It's the gear progression table and there's a screen like that for every slot on the paper-doll. I mean... why??

Unfortunately for me, I don't have much in the way of skill when it comes to action RPGs and perhaps worse I have a very low tolerance indeed for skill trees, builds and all that kind of nonsense. I never liked it much but the longer I've had to put up with it, the more I'm beginning to see it in much the same way other players see slow leveling or lengthy travel or long blocks of quest text or endless cut scenes: an annoying waste of my time that I should be able to click through or that the game should just take over and do for me.

It's more than just a lack of interest or enthusiasm on my part. I actively dislike having to read skill descriptions and I really, really hate having to try and figure out which one has synergy with which other one. I just want to hit stuff with a big stick or shoot it with a gun and leave it at that. 

So long as I can get away with button-mashing I'll put up with it but once I have to start thinkiong about sequences and putting combos together it all starts to become work. And if I'm going to do work, I either want to get paid for it or have something solid to show for it at the end. 

Beating a boss, just so I can go on to beat the next boss, doesn't motivate me in the same way painting the kitchen wall does. I really don't want to paint the kitchen wall either but at least when I've done it I have a better-looking kitchen and the comfortable knowledge that I won't have to do it again for a few years.

Never mix it with the maid.

Given the way Crystal of Atlan is constructed, I would imagine my time with it will be short for that reason alone. I'm guessing that when the time comes that I can't beat a boss in a storyline dungeon my ability to progress will be put on hold until I figure out how to do it, which I won't because I'll just stop and play something else instead.

Or maybe that won't happen. Maybe I'm negatively projecting. Maybe the devs have already thought about that. There was this odd thing the other day when I was playing...

I was right in the middle of a very hectic fight in a dungeon when Beryl came bouncing in, barking and jumping up at me and instead of carrying on with the fight I stopped and took her out to play. When I came back, my character had died (I literally abandoned her in the middle of a fight so it would have been very odd if she hadn't.).

It was the first time I'd died in the game so I wasn't sure what would happen but I figured at least I'd have to start the instance over from the last save point. Instead, I just ended up back at the questgiver, who congratulated me on a job well done, as though I'd finished the whole dungeon, and the story just carried on. I haven't deliberately gotten myself killed again to test it but wouldn't it be nice if the game just patted you on the head every time you died and gave you a pass to the next stage?

Spoiler: She's down but she's not going to stay down.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen. I think the way it's supposed to go is that you start engaging with all the many improvement and enhancement mechanics they've been introuducing you to over the first twenty-five levels and learn to git gud.

I've been shown how to upgrade my armor with spare parts I can get by dis-assembling my old stuff. I've been shown how to socket circuits to make it more powerful. I've been shown how to spend points in the many talent trees. I've been tested to see which Class specialization I'd like to take up and given a whole new skill tree for that. 

I've been introduced to the idea of hiring pets to help me. Pets who have their own stats and skill trees and the whole shebang. You can collect pets and you can have two up at once. And then there are the "cosmetic" clothes, the outfits and what-not. Those turn out to have stats, too. And you can collect those as well. At least they don't seem to have talent trees.

Hmm. "Fleets"? I seem to have missed that one...

It's early days and there's a lot I don't understand yet but it does appear to me that the whole "We don't do Gacha" thing falls apart quite fast when you spot that both pets and costumes, for both of which there most definitely is a gacha mechanic, directly affect your combat-worthiness. Not that I care, since I won't be paying for pulls, but it does seem a tad shifty.

Then again, maybe if you can actually play the game - if you have the knowledge and motivation to figure out a good build and the speed and dexterity to use it effectively - the added boost from pets and cosmetics is just icing on the I Know What I'm Doing cake.

I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I'm having plenty of fun all the same. We'll see how long that lasts.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Baby!

 

With the Steam Game Festival due to end in a couple of days I thought I'd better get on and check out the remaining demos I downloaded back at the start. That meant finishing up Nine Noir Lives and playing through Ring of Fire: Search for a Killer and Kathy Rain: Director's Cut. 

I also said I'd re-download the Frozen Flame demo and give it another try. It surely couldn't be that short on purpose, could it? I must have been bugged, right?

This afternoon I did all of that and it took me... well, it's hard to say, exactly. I can say for sure it wasn't long. Probably about an hour, all told.

In theory I ought to be able to come up with an exact figure. Steam keeps tabs on how long you spend playing, after all. According to the records on my account I spent ten minutes playing Ring of Fire, twenty on Kathy Rain and eleven minutes taking a second run at Frozen Flame. 

That all seems clear enough. The problem comes when I look at the time Steam has down for my full playthrough of Nine Noir Lives. 

When I first posted about the game I mentioned my opening session had lasted seventy minutes. I can clearly remember seeing that number on Steam when I logged out. What's more, it's about how long I would have guessed I'd been playing. I know roughly what time it was when I started and when I stopped.

Coming back to it today, there turned out not to be so much distance left in the demo as I'd thought. It ends when you manage to talk your way into the first real crime scene, the Knitty Kitty Club. 

Before you can do that, though, there's quite a lot of banter between your character, Cuddles Nutterbutter P.I. and Officer Krakowski, the by-the-book cop guarding the door. Before he'll let you in you have to show him your Private Investigator badge and a form from police headquarters authorizing you to work on the case. 

Since Nutterbutter would clearly forget his tail if it wasn't glued on, this means a trip back to the office to find the missing credentials. This in turn leads to yet more banter, this time with Tabby, Nutterbutter's long-suffering assistant and so the dance goes on.

A little light gameplay comes next , in the shape of a search for the badge (Spoiler: it's under the cushion on the sofa. Took me a little while to find it) and finally a phone call to the gravel-voiced form-faxer down at the cop shop. All of this takes quite a while. I'd guess it took me at least twenty minutes.

In fact, I think I can prove it. You can follow most of the action in the second half of this twenty-eight minute playthrough on YouTube. The player who posted it, Cryptic Hybrid, must already have made the phone call because he just gets a copy from Tabby. It took me an extra four or five minutes to learn how to use the phone (cats don't use numbers) and to sweet talk the gorgon on the other end of the line.

And yet somehow Steam now shows my total time spent in the Nine Noir Lives demo as... sixty-five minutes. I somehow lost five minutes getting from where I left off to the end!

Okay, alright, never mind about that. The point is, however long it took me, the Nine Noir Lives demo is a solid, entertaining introduction to what looks like it should be a very enjoyable game. I was quite disappointed when it ended abruptly, just as I saw the first dead body on the floor. I would definitely have gone on playing if I could. I've added it to my wishlist. 

Nine Noir Lives: Recommended!

The demo for Kathy Rain: Director's Cut almost had the opposite effect. Not because it doesn't show the game off to good effect. It starts at the scene at the graveside during Kathy's grandfather's burial, where Kathy meets her grandmother for the first time since she was a child, and carries on from there just as it does in the full game.

And that was my problem with it. It's a while since I played but as far as I could tell what I was seeing and hearing was identical to what I saw and heard on my original playthrough. The graphics looked the same, the voiceover was as I remembered it, the mechanics, puzzles and dialogs appeared to be unchanged in any way. 

Since I already own Kathy Rain and this is a demo for the Director's Cut edition, I was hoping to see what was different about it, not just to be reminded of what I already knew. I kept on for twenty minutes but eventually I felt as though there were better things I could be doing with my time so I stopped.

I still have the Director's Cut on my wishlist but the main effect of partially playing through the demo has been to convince me I need to see some evidence of the extent and value of the new content before I pay again for what might end up being pretty much the same game I already have. Not quite the result I imagine they were hoping for.

Kathy Rain: Director's Cut: Recommended for anyone who doesn't already have Kathy Rain. Otherwise, maybe wait for the reviews when it comes out to see if it's really worth paying twice.

Next I took a look at the demo for Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer. Did not take me long. I hated it.

About the only thing I didn't actively dislike was the visual aesthetic. It sets a striking, minimalist tone that seems to nod towards pop art and abstract expressionism. I am something of a soft target for stuff like that as some of my previous choices probably suggest. 

It was mostly the look of the the game that made me pick it out of the pack in the first place but I do also like a good police procedural, particularly one that takes place in a near-future Dickian dystopia. Probably haven't been hiding that any too well, either.

What I don't like are supposedly adult characters who cuss and banter like fourteen-year old boys. Neither do I see any point in crowing about game mechanics designed to make the player copy down text from the screen in longhand, just so they can type it back into the game five seconds later. 

If I wanted to make notes with pen and paper I'd get in my time machine and go back twenty years. Or possibly thirty. Either let the game keep track or at least give me an in-game notebook I can record information in, ffs!

What I actually did, of course, was screenshot each piece of text as it appeared and tab back and forth. Arguably more awkward and annoying than writing it down with a pen and paper, I can't deny it. Also probably what made the demo glitch to the point where I couldn't read the dialog any more and had to close it and start over. That's on me. 

Including the restart I lasted ten minutes. If I hadn't known I was going to have to write something about it it would have been five. If even that.

Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer : Not Recommended. 

Last and definitely least in terms of what there is to see and do in the demo, Frozen Flame. I was replaying this because I was convinced I'd done something wrong the first time. As I mentioned, a commenter on Massively:OP had explained there was more to it than the ten minutes I'd spent running across a bridge and watching a gate open. 

And I'm sure there is... in the game. I'm guessing that person had tried the early access version, not the demo. The demo is just the bridge and the gate and that's it. I googled to see if anyone else was confused and found this Reddit thread. 

Well, if you can call it a thread. It's a couple of comments but they both describe the exact same experience I had. And no-one comes on to contradict them, so I'm taking it that's all there is to the demo after all.

The tiny sliver I saw did look interesting. I will certainly give it another look if ever goes into some kind of open beta or free trial. I don't think it's enough of my kind of thing to pay money for but honestly on the little I saw it's hard to be entirely sure.

Frozen Flame: Insufficient Data.

And there we have it. One thing I will say, demos are fun. Too many can leave me feeling a little queasy, like I've filled up on snacks, but somehow there always seems to be room for just one more.

Two days left. Maybe I'll take my plate and go round one more time.

Drive, She Said

Azuriel came up with an interesting analogy that found approval from Gevlon, which might be the first time the two of them have ever agreed about anything. The gist is that "action gaming" is more like driving to see a movie than it is like seeing the movie itself:

"The action of driving somewhere is much more involved than watching the screen – there are thousands of more individual choices and reactions necessary to drive somewhere safely. But is it more engaging? At the end of the night, which do you remember more?"

At first blush I thought this summed up the situation brilliantly. For many people, learning to drive is a complete pain; stressful, difficult and sometimes it seems to take forever before things click into place.

Once they do, however, there's a surprisingly swift and often sudden transition to thoughtless facility. Almost without noticing, you move from concentrating ferociously to the whole thing happening almost automatically. Even more so if you do, in fact, drive an automatic.

It's an appealing metaphor for the experience of learning to play a game that uses "action rpg" controls - usually a combination of hammering left/right mouse button and a handful of Function keys. The more I think about it, though, the less sure I am of its fundamental truth.

I should admit up front that I'm hardly in a position to judge as far as action games are concerned. I have never reached that autonomic stage, where my conscious mind no longer has to deal with the controls. I know exactly how that feels in driving, though. I can even pinpoint the specific moment when the transition occurred.

My brain in an action rpg.

I had two goes at learning to drive. The first time was when I was eighteen. Unlike  many teenagers, I had no interest in driving, but my mother was positively evangelical about it, believing driving to be an essential life skill. I let her pay for me to have lessons, mostly to get her to stop chewing my ear off about it.

I took my test, failed, told her I'd done my bit, then went off to a University whose rules dictated that students were forbidden to own or operate a car anywhere in the city. That suited me fine. I forgot all about learning to drive for a decade.

Ten years later, aged 28, I found myself going out with someone who believed it was a cardinal rule that anyone who rode the bus after age 30 was a failure. It was the 80s - what can I say? I didn't subscribe to that theory, then or now, but I did once again subscribe to not having my ear chewed off if there was something I could do to stop it. I took some more lessons, took my test and this time I passed.

Very soon after that the relationship ended. With no more motivation to drive, the day I took my test was the last time I sat behind the wheel of a car for about five years.

Fast forward to the early 90s and my first ever foreign holiday with Mrs Bhagpuss. For reasons that are now lost in the mists of time we decided to fly to Lisbon and hire a car to drive into Spain. I had, at this point, never driven a car for any other purpose than taking a lesson or a driving test, far less driven a strange car on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country. It was the 90s, what can I say?

It's all so much easier in the sky.

I took a few refresher lessons before we went, just to remind myself where the steering wheel was, and then off we went. It's quite surprising we're still around to tell this story, I guess. Actually, it's quite surprising I got the car out of the airport car park.

What did happen was revelatory. Somewhere on the long, straight, quiet multi-lane highway that runs along the south coast of Portugal into Spain, I became a Driver. I left Lisbon in a sweat of concentration and terror and crossed the border in a state of calm control.

Ever since then I have been able to drive. I'm not recommending it as a method - it's from the "throw them in the deep end and they'll learn to swim" school of thought, I guess - but it worked for me.

My action gaming has never enjoyed such an epiphany. When I play DCUO or Neverwinter I still have to concentrate on the controls. I never get to experience the game directly, only me playing the game. I'm comfortable enough with DCUO in particular that it's not offputting or unpleasant, but it's a good way from Azuriel's "just like with driving, I kind of zone out the experience when I’m killing enemies in Action games."

So, I can't really speak to the accuracy of the analogy from personal experience. But even if I could, I see another flaw: I really, really love driving. From the moment those pieces fell into place back on that Iberian highway I have found the process of controlling and moving a vehicle to be a pure joy.

I'm one of those people who sees every minute behind the wheel as an opportunity for entertainment and pleasure. I drive for the sake of driving. I go the long way just so I can have more of it. Almost every holiday we take is a driving holiday and while the scenery and the exploring are a huge part of the attraction, so is the opportunity to just get out there and drive.

A little trouble with the exhaust on that broom...

I can unironically affirm that for me driving to see a movie is often more engaging than watching the movie itself. It doesn't even have to be a bad movie for me to feel that the best part of the evening was the drive there and the drive back.

Given all that, how can I know how I'd feel about action game controls if I ever mastered them? Maybe, as Azuriel and Gevlon contend, facility would lead to ennui. Or maybe I'd just be so thrilled by the process I'd want to keep doing it and doing it and doing it...

My time with GW2, which is sometimes considered to use a hybrid of traditional and action rpg controls, gives me reason to believe it would be the latter. One of the main reasons I have stuck with GW2 so loyally and so long is the way it feels when I'm driving my characters there.

I find the controls wonderfully fluid and intuitive. I love the constant movement and especially the dodging. I fling my characters around as though I'm driving at speed - all the sensation with none of the danger. (It's also the main reason I so dislike GW2's implementation of mounts. It turns my elite sports cars into clumsy, awkward trucks).

Whether Azuriel's analogy has universal application or not, it's been very useful to consider. I'm now wondering whether, rather than veering away from games with action controls, I should steer into the learning curve instead. If I could push through the membrane that separates thought from action, would I find myself zoning out in boredom or riding the crest of an ever-breaking wave of exhilaration?

Okay, now we've gone surfing. Time to stop. Suffice it to say I recognize that it might be me that's missing out here. Whether I'm even capable of making the transition is another matter. And while we're on the topic of driving, how ironic is it that the one MMORPG whose controls I literally cannot master, even to the minimal level required to finish the tutorial, is The Crew?

All Roads Lead To Home : Heroes of Skyrealm

Exactly a year ago tomorrow one of my favorite MMORPGs closed its doors forever. My affection for the game is well-documented. No fewer than four dozen posts here hold the tag "City of Steam".

I played the game in all of its iterations: from Sneak Peak through alphas and betas, at launch and on to its first seeming demise before its unlikely rebirth; then, finally, down into a future of drifting decline. The posts tell a tale of frustration and disappointment as much as one of joy and delight. All emotions, I'm sure, that must have been shared by its various creators and owners along the way.

When the engine powered down for the final time I did something I've never done before. I bought the soundtrack. City of Steam had a magnificent audioscape, of which the score was just a part, but it was the only part on offer so that's what I got. I've listened to it often, too.

That probably should have been the end of it but there's a coda. Mechanist Games, the ill-fated company that had such high hopes at the start, only to see them thwarted, altered and watered down until what was left must scarcely have seemed recognizeable even to those who helped bring it to the world, didn't fold up their development tent and slink away into the night.

They opted instead to work on a smaller canvas, taking their vision mobile. The second game to emerge under their banner is not an MMO, sadly. The days when those letters suggested a license to print money (a license that few were ever required to produce) ended some time ago.

The captioning in cut scenes could use a little work.

Heroes of Skyrealm is described as "a 3D mobile action RPG" for iOS and Android. I've been keeping an eye on it and today I finally got to try it out.

The history of HoS's testing process is confusing to put it mildly. According to the website the sequence, chronologically, runs as follows:

• Closed Alpha June 2016 - iOS only

• Closed Beta August 25 to September 9 2016 - North America Only, Android Only

• Open Beta October 19 - Android Only, Austria, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland Only

An observant reader of this blog might notice that The United Kingdom, the country from which I am writing, doesn't appear on that last list. If it did I would probably have been posting this back in October. I have the website bookmarked and I check it fairly regularly.

A couple of days ago I was doing just that when I noticed that the U.K. had been unceremoniously slipped onto the end of the line-up. The FAQ hasn't been updated and it was sheer chance I spotted it on a link from YouTube.

Today I downloaded the game from the Google Play store, where it has a confidence-inspiring four-star rating. It installed smoothly although the over-zealous virus checker I'm using for Android (AVG - going to swap it for something else as soon as I can be bothered) tried to tell me it was Malware simply because it uses in-app purchases.

This shot was taken in a thunderstorm. The lightning effects and rain were highly atmospheric but unfortunately they haven't reproduced well.

I then ran through the first few chapters of the tutorial, which played beautifully and looked even better. Taking screenshots on my tablet is a hit-and-miss affair so I didn't get the ones I wanted. Still, I think it's clear from the couple of action shots I did manage to take that all the first-rate design aesthetics from City of Steam have transferred seamlessly to Mechanist Games' new baby.

It's also the exact opposite of Revelation Online in that Heroes of Skyrealm looks better in-game than in screenshots. It also sounds fantastic, which isn't surprising when you learn that the score is by the same person who did the score for City of Steam - Daniel Sadowski.

Gameplay-wise I haven't played enough to form much of an opinion. Like just about every mobile RPG I've tried (which isn't a huge number - maybe nine or ten so far) it lacks subtlety. I'm really not the target audience for mobile games of any description, though. If I'm out of the house I'd pretty much always rather read a book or listen to my iPod than play a game, assuming I'm not just people-watching or sight-seeing anyway.

The one thing I would immediately flag up as an issue is the translation. It seems to suffer from exactly the same problems in this respect as City of Steam. The sentences rarely have any rhythm and the dialog feels off somehow. It's not that there are glaring grammatical errors or walls of sheer gibberish, more that everyone talks like someone who has good English but only as a second or third language.

Blame my screenshotting skills (or lack of them) for the unfinished sentence. I clicked while he was still talking. I actually wanted to get a much odder conversation about how a female pirate was "more masculine" than the men but I missed that one completely.

This is odd because the original creators of Mechanist games were English and the first iterations of City of Steam were idiomatically and indeed mellifluously written. Somewhere along the line the task of writing the words must have been handed on. I wish whoever was doing it back when the company was much smaller would take that task back.

Apart from that Heroes of Skyrealm looks like it should be a jolly good wheeze. I hope it does really well, not only because Mechanist Games deserve a hit, but also because if the studio prospers then the prospect of seeing more of the world in which City of Steam was set might come a step or two closer.

Indeed, the demise of that world may not be quite as "forever" as I suggested at the top of the post. The website is still up, defiantly affirming "City of Steam: Resting, Not Retiring". What's more, it seems that Heroes of Skyrealm not only "draws inspiration" from the world of Nexus, it's set in the same world.

At the very start of the game I was offered a choice of three Heroes: Reinhard, Kashiko and...Servo "an outdated wartoiler [who] fled the Nexan Republic...". In a strange way it felt almost like coming home.

Never Say Neverwinter

John Smedley believes user-generated content is the future. He may be right. It certainly has been in the past.

Ten years ago I spent a big chunk of time working on a module for Neverwinter Nights, much of it struggling with BioWare's custom scripting language, something with which I never really came to grips. Eventually the thing was as near to finished as it was ever likely to be and I uploaded it.

In the way of the internet, I was able to find it with only a small amount of effort this morning, still sitting in the IGN Neverwinter Nights Vault ten years on. As the comments clearly show, my scripting skills weren't up to the complexity of the task I'd set myself, although some people managed to enjoy parts of it despite all the things that just didn't work as they should have done.

I enjoyed making the module but once was enough. I didn't even buy NeverWinter Nights 2. When the Neverwinter MMO was announced, to be made by Cryptic and published by Perfect World, my ears perked up then perked right back down again at the dreaded phrase "action MMORPG".

I never really "got" action RPGs. The first and last one I ever bought was Dungeon Siege, which came out just before NWN in March 2002 (which, incidentally, suggests that MMOs had considerably less of a lock-hold on my gaming in 2002 than I would have remembered). I probably played it for three or four hours, tops. It's not that it wasn't fun; it was just too fast and too very obviously pointless.

Since then, "action" as a prefix has acted as a brake to any interest I might otherwise have had, doubly so when attached to "MMO", although since I've played and very much enjoyed Dragon Nest and DCUO, my longstanding ability to believe one thing while doing another clearly remains unimpaired.

How I felt after ten minutes in Torchlight2

All the same, I had been resolutely ignoring Neverwinter until I happened upon Massively's recent mention of the Neverwinter Foundry.  I already knew of Star Trek Online's Foundry. Tipa at West Karana used to write about it sometimes back when she wrote about MMOs not bridges. It always sounded intriguing but it was coupled to a franchise for which I have little affection so it slipped from my mind.

When EQ2's Age of Discovery expansion trundled up with the Dungeon Maker system in tow I was somewhat excited. I'd very much like to be able to tell some stories inside an MMO that I play, especially if I don't have to wrestle with scripts to make it happen. The Dungeon Maker hit the mark for ease-of-use but it worked about as well for telling a story as semaphore did for Wuthering Heights.

You've ruined your own foundry...

There's not much detail on the Neverwinter Foundry yet. Just a brief FAQ and some indistinct screenshots. Enough to pull the game off my MMO slush pile and shove it onto the ever-growing heap marked "Give this a go".

I suspect that if it's going to work for me, this set of dungeon creation tools will need an easy mode. It's not that I think I won't be able to master a more complex set of commands, it's that when it comes down to it I'd rather be playing. Or blogging about playing. I can knock up a dungeon in EQ2 in three or four hours. I'd be happy to double or treble that writing dialog to tell a story but much more and I'm going to get itchy.

When it comes to dungeons I'm probably more of a consumer than a creator. Won't be long before I can put that to the test. Release date for Neverwinter is listed in the FAQ as "4th Quarter of 2012". Even with traditional slippage that ought to see it out before next Easter.

If I do end up making a dungeon, Neverwinter is completely F2P so you're all invited.

Not If You Paid Me: Tera, Diablo 3

Ironically perhaps, given my recent musings on the joys of beta-testing I've decided to forego two fairly major offerings this weekend.

I never played Diablo or Diablo 2. I don't really like Action RPGs. No, that's too weak. There's no "really" about it. The last action RPG I played was Dungeon Siege, which I bought on release back in 2002. I only played it a couple of times. I can see the case on the shelf from here; hasn't been opened in a decade.

Is it the gameplay that doesn't work for me? I don't think so. Dragon Nest is actiony as all get-out and I love that. Run into a pile of mobs, hammer the mouse button, slam them into the air, shoot a bunch of furniture and see it explode...what's not to like? Nor is it the over-the-shoulder three-quarter, third-person perspective or the relatively small characters and mobs. City of Steam has all that and I love it.

It's the pointlessness of it all, I think. I'm very aware that whatever "point" any of this stuff may have has to be self-imposed. I'm not about to argue that there's some ur-significance in playing MMOs that's absent in other forms of video-gaming. And I strongly believe that no leisure activity needs any more "point" than that when you've finished doing it you're glad you did and might even consider doing it again.

No miss, I am not "looking for action"

That's not a feeling I get  when I spend time on an action rpg. The sub-genre seems to strip-mine the larger, slower version (do we call that the Inaction RPG?) for the raw ore of killing stuff and grabbing loot. It's like having an iced bun without the bun.

Maybe I'm doing A-RPGs a disservice. I haven't really played one for a decade, after all. And I'm not going to start with the D3 Beta. I might take a run at Path of Exile though, if only to see how a New Zealand developer's take differs. I don't think I've ever played any kind of RPG from Down Under.

That's D3 out of the running, which leaves Tera as this weekend's possible free preview candidate. Tera is at least an MMO, which makes it inherently interesting, to me at least. I've read plenty about Tera and all its multifarious controversies, from the prurient character modelling to the legal catfights, the in-yer-face advertizing to the contested claims of originality. None of that bothers me enough to put me off giving it a look for free.

The screenshots and videos look attractive. Nice scenery, bright colors, amusing very large monsters. I do like a very large monster. Should be worth a download, no? Well, I got as far as reading the FAQ.  And I got as far down the FAQ as the part about using Alt or Esc to bring up a hotbar to do stuff and only using the mouse to attack. Oh, and "The one tip every TERA player needs to keep in mind is that survivability depends on not standing still." No. Not even No Thanks. Just No.

Big world, small horizons

I'm not interested in having to run about all the time. I'm not roleplaying the frigging Duracell bunny! If I have to dodge when something's coming my way, fine, that I can handle but don't tell me I have to keep moving or I'll move alright, all the way to another game. And don't force me to use the keyboard to open hotbars or menus when you could just put the goddam things onscreen and let me click them with the mouse. FFXIV tried that and look how well it worked out for them.

I'm already sufficiently apprehensive about the GW2 controls and combat. Acid test for that comes in just under a week. I don't need to spend this weekend trying to unlearn twelve years of MMO muscle memory for a couple of sessions in Tera only to have to do it all again only differently in a few days. For Guild Wars 2 I'll make the effort. For Tera? Not going to happen.

Just a boy and his skinned cat looking for adventure

Shame, really, because all SOE's games will be inaccessible for the whole of Monday and I might have given either of these a fair go. Not to worry, plenty more fish in the MMO sea. Maybe I'll take a look at LotRO's fifth anniversary party, explore Loong some more, pick back up where I left off in Allods, do some sub-20 Rifting, try to complete Eye of the North in Guild Wars, see if I can get out of the starting village in Aerrevan...