At It LIke Rabbits - Again

Once again, news of a festival brings me back to a game I wasn't planning on playing. This time it's Guild Wars 2. 

A few years ago, I recall complaining about the paucity of holiday events in GW2, which at the time had only three or four annual celebrations in its calendar. It's entirely possible I didn't know when we were well off.

These days, it still only has half a dozen but as a glance at the schedule on the wiki reveals, they still manage to take up most of the year:

• Lunar New Year - Late January to Early February
• Super Adventure Festival - Late March to Mid April
• Dragon Bash - Early to Late June
• Festival of the Four Winds - Late July to Early August
• Halloween - Mid October to Early November
• Wintersday - Mid December to Early January

All mmorpg festivals can be enervating but Tyrian celebrations sometimes feel more exhausting than most. 

When you're playing regularly it's easy to ignore the incipient insanity of repeating the same activities dozens, hundreds or even thousands of times, just to be able to put a line of text under your name that tells people you've done it. It's possible to tell yourself it makes sense to spend hour after hour earning special currencies to buy costumes you'll wear for a few days at most, then never want to see again. It somehow makes sense to open parcel after parcel in the vaguest hope that, just once, there might be something worth having inside.

When you take a break and come back, though, it's harder to pretend that any of what you're doing is reasonable, let alone rational. Take the holiday of the moment; Lunar New Year.

I've always liked this one. It's probably my favorite. It's certainly the one I've put the most consistent effort into over the years. 

 

I log in all three of my accounts and buy my daily allotment of eight lucky envelopes for each of them. I spend a while buffing one character up to the highest level of Luck I can manage, raiding my banks for food and boosters, setting off fireworks, trailing round the likeliest busy areas in search of Community Bonfires; all the little tricks and wrinkles that come with having played a game for a decade.

Then I pass all the envelopes to that one character, who opens them all in the expectation of turning a small a profit and the hope of finding one of the season's rarities. I could easily make more money by selling the envelopes on the Trading Post, where they start out somewhere around 1.75 face value and almost never drop much below 1.3. 

If I did that, though, I'd do myself out of the fun of anticipation. It's the second before you open the envelope that counts; that fleeting, Schrödinger moment, when there could be anything inside. It's not, after all, that there's ever anything in there I'm actually going to use. I just want the warm thrill of knowing I bucked the odds and got the prize. The prize itself is just another piece of clutter.

Things would be very different if ArenaNet ever gave away anything worth having but there's precious little chance of that. They are, without any question, the most abstemious of gifters among mmorpg developers. Every other game I've played has better freebies.

Like the process itself, though, the prizes come to seem acceptable through a process of acclimatization. You could call it Stockholm Syndrome. Stick with the program long enough and even a truly horrible back item that clips through every character model somehow acquires Must-Have status.

Speaking of which, I hesitate to make the assertion without all the evidence but preliminary findings suggest that, for the first time ever, this year's lantern backpack might just eschew the worst of the traditional excrescences to display almost normally. I got one out of an envelope today and in the Dressing Room view, at least, it looks subdued, neat and balanced. 

It barely clips with my staff at all. Even if it does look as though I've threaded the staff between the rabbits and the frame, that's at least something I can imagine having done on purpose. 

Of course, that's just the regular version. The Grand Rabbit Lantern, no doubt, will have some dangly bits. The big ones always do, else how would you know they're better? I'll wait until I get one of those before I adjudge the thing fit to wear.

And I will get one. I only logged in today to refresh my memory on the event. I told myself I would, for sure, not fall back into the habit of cycling all my accounts every day for a few weeks just to maximize my envelope-opening potential. At most, I decided, I'd keep it to a single account.

That lasted all of five minutes. The best compromise I reached with myself was that I wouldn't spend ages trying to squeeze the last few percentage points out of my Luck stat by setting up a dedicated envelope opener. I'm going to open everything on my regular character, my primary Elementalist, and if she's a few points short then so be it.

Even so, things don't bode well. The brief time I'd marked out for the project stretched from a few minutes to nearly an hour. The lines I'd draw for myself became blurred then wore away completely. I did the mount race around Divinity's Reach on all three accounts and since I had them all on I started opening their mail as well.

That's how I found a very unexpected and rather exciting surprise. It may even be a bug. I'm really not
sure.

Back in October, ANet ran a promotion to encourage opt-ins to their official Newsletter. The bribe was a 24-slot bag, something really quite desirable. I checked all my accounts to make sure they were signed up to the newsletter, which they all already were. I was covered but there was going to be a wait. The offer warned "please allow several weeks for delivery."

Well, several weeks have passed. I haven't been logging in much - or at all in the case of two of the three accounts - and I'd completely forgotten about the bag so it was a nice surprise to find one waiting in each of the three mailboxes. And an even nicer surprise to discover one of the accounts had been sent two of them.

It was on the account I'm least likely to play but that's also the account most likely to benefit. I have people on the other two who can craft large bags, albeit at horrific cost, should I ever feel the need.

However it's fallen out, the feeling of getting double something for nothing is very warming on a cold, January day. Maybe it's something I shouldn't have or maybe it's a bona fide bonus for reasons I don't understand but either way it's mine now and I'm keeping it.

If ANet would give stuff this good away all the time, I would probably never have left. Until that happy day comes, though, I guess I'm in for a few weeks, just to open my envelopes. Perhaps I'll get lucky.

Oh, wait a minute... I see it now...

Wherever I Make My Bag, That's My Home.

Time for a quick progress report on New World. Just on my own progress, that is, not on how the game itself is coming along. For that you could do a lot worse than check out Belghast's detailed and insightful overview of the problems Amazon have ahead of them if they want to keep anyone once Endwalker arrives.

It's interesting to see how expectations have changed. It's long been the received wisdom that the imminent arrival of a World of Warcraft expansion was likely to spell slow times for every other mmorpg but I'm not sure I can remember many instances of expansions for any other game signalling a similar slump, or not in any mmorpg I was playing at the time, anyway. It usually took the launch of a much-anticipated new triple-A title to pull enough attention to notice, not a mere expansion to one that was out there already. 

It shows how far Final Fantasy XIV has come in this last year. We all know some of the reasons why it's happened but it also marks Square Enix's game out for the second time as something exceptional in the history of the genre. Not only is it one of the very few mmorpgs ever to come back from a truly disastrous launch, not just to survive but to prosper, but it may be the only one since WoW to have experienced consistent growth thereafter, to the point that interest is in the game is still rising at the launch of its fourth expansion.

In fact, when it comes to Western mmorpgs, the only two I can think of that have done anything similar are WoW itself and EverQuest, which was on its seventh expansion and still growing when Blizzard came along to steal its lunch money. 

Sunrise over the gasworks.

What FFXIV is doing is reframing a narrative that hasn't really changed in fifteen years. It's not a game that suits my tastes but I do find its developmental and commercial arc intriguing. It's going to be very interesting to see what the medium and long term effect of both FFXIV's extended commercial success and New World's demonstration that an audience still exists for the right new entrant into the market means for future development within the genre.

In the short term I think we can feel fairly safe in saying there will be a general downturn in interest in everything that isn't Endwalker. New World will slip back into the pack of also-rans as server merges take whatever headlines the game gets. Focus will shift to shoring up the kind of issues Bel was highlighting in his post, in the hope of winning back some ground when the new expansion shine eventually fades from Square's flagship moneymaker.

Which is all very well but what about me? Didn't I say I was only going to report on my own progress? Yes, I did, what there is of it. It isn't all that much. 

Not because I haven't been playing. I have, every day, usually for at least three or four hours. Steam tells me I've racked up nearly 165 hours since launch although these days all of them are via the truly excellent GeForce Now, which has completely altered, for the better, my New World experience.

Ten days ago, when I gave my last update, I was level 46 after 142 hours played. Twenty-three hours more has gained me a whole three levels. I'm now level 49. Over seven hours a level. That is slow.

I also still don't have a house, although I've had all the necessary requirements to buy one in most of the towns I could bear to live in for quite a while. So what have I been doing with all that time?

It keeps me fit, at least.

Mostly getting my Armorsmithing to 100 so I could make one bag to fill the extra bag slot I got at level 40. Yes, it's taken me almost ten levels and probably about thirty-six hours just to make a bag. 

The good news is, tonight I finished it! I spent all evening on the last part, getting the final mats I needed after I dinged 100 Armorsmith. It took me three hours, about half of which was running from one town to another. 

I'd estimate that "running from one town to another" accounts for at least a third of my played time, with "running from one quest marker to another" taking up perhaps another third. It would not be entirely unfair to characterise New World as an orienteering simulator. Most of my time is spent opening and closing a map and running from one marker to another, veering off course every few yards to go and check out something interesting.

I can readily see why this isn't to everyone's taste but it suits me. I spent most of this evening jogging up and down the roads between Brightwood, which has tier four and five crafting stations and Weaver's Fen and Restless Shore, which don't but which are where I have a lot of bulk crafting mats in storage. 

In something of a faux-Catch 22, I couldn't carry all the mats at once because the mats I needed were the ones to make the bag that would expand my carrying capacity sufficently to carry all the mats I needed. So I had to make a few trips. 

I also had to cut a lot of hemp and skin a lot of animals along the way for some different mats I also needed and that inevitably led me into areas where I found other mats I didn't need right now but knew I'd need another day so I had to grab those too, which meant I didn't have room for the ones I was planning on moving from one town to another...

Fingers crossed...

And so on and so on. Every session for the last week or so has been a bit like that. And I have to say I've enjoyed it. I had the Cricket World T20 on the radio a lot of the time and when there wasn't a game on I sometimes had a drama or comedy from Radio 4 Extra in the background. I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an afternoon. 

It was getting to the point where I really wanted that bag, though, so I was very happy when, about an hour ago, I stood in front of the Outfitting Station in Brightwood and clicked Craft. I was even happier when I saw the result. 

I got probably the best version of the bag I could have made. I'd used the best resources I had available so I 'd done all I could but there's a hefty helping of luck in New World's crafting so you never quite know. Rng rolled me a nice Rare quality result but better yet it rolled me the two best random perks - Extra Pockets and Luck.

A while ago a bag like that would have sold for quite a bit. I wasn't going to sell mine but I was curious what it might go for so I checked the Trading Post. In Brightwood, a bag like that sells for around 2,000 coin. It sounds like a lot, when you consider that I only have 20k after all these weeks, but the rune you need to make this bag costs 1500 coin on its own so there's only about 500 coin profit in it for the crafter.

The days of getting rich making bags are long gone but at least I can make upgrades for the ones I'm using. If I can make a couple more like the one I just made I should be able to get my carrying capacity to more than 1,000, which seems like a lot although I'm sure I'll soon fill it up.

Yay!!

According to this helpful video, the maximum carrying capacity currently possible is 1,665 but I'll worry about that when I'm sixty. Or more likely I won't. The whole "max your gear score" endgame does not appeal.

With the bag in the bag I can get back to working on my Mourningdale standing, something that's slipped down the agenda of late. I'm still determined to buy my first, half-price house there, although as time goes on I'm starting to wonder if I should. 

I'm about to ding fifty and I can already see quest markers popping up in Ebonscale. Maybe that would make a better use of my one discounted ticket. And then there was the huge surprise I got today when I logged in and opened the map.

Every day, when I get into the game the first thing I do is check which faction owns which territory. It makes no practical difference to me but I like to keep up to date. At least, it hasn't made any practical difference for weeks. 

The last time anything material to my gameplay occured was when territory trading gave my faction, Marauders, their second territory, Restless Shore. Since the only other place we owned was the extremely high level and positively repulsive Reekwater, any synergies were entirely notional. I do spend some time in Restless Shore but it makes no difference to me whther we own it or not and I haven't been to Reekwater since the one visit I made weeks ago just to see if it was as bad I imagined. (It was worse.)

Yes, but who'll own it tomorrow?

Today, when I opened my map, I was stunned to see three green splodges instead of the regular two. Overnight we'd taken a third territory and this time it wasn't some outlier no-one else wanted. It was Brightwood.  

Brightwood is a decent territory. It's central and close to the three non-player-owned higher-level areas in the North. It also has a plethora of high-tier crafting stations because it's been well-cared for by the previous owners. Lots of people go there to trade and craft. It's not as popular as Everfall or Windsward but it's no hick town.

I have no idea whether we took it by force or whether there was some kind of deal but the fact that my faction owns Brightwood means I need to rethink my housing plans. I definitely don't plan to make it my personal home but if we're likely to keep it for a while then it wiuld be very useful to have one of my three permitted houses there.

All of which means I have to keep my money in my pocket for now. I have the funds to buy two houses and the standing to live in any of the towns that interest me right now. Except Ebonscale. I'd have to start from scratch there.

If it wasn't for the "50% off first purchase" deal I'd just buy a cheap place in Brightwood but because of that one-time offer I can't in good conscience do that. I almost wish the half-price starter home leg-up had never been put in the game in the first place.

How ungrateful is that? Honestly, there's no pleasing some people. I don't know how the developers put up with us, sometimes. No wonder they make us run everywhere. It's no more than we deserve.

Pick It Up And Pack It In

For weeks now I've been nothing but positive about Valheim. It's probably past time I mentioned something I don't like. The inventory.

I count myself something of an afficionado, if not an expert, on lugging stuff about in games. I consider inventory management to be a significant gameplay element in its own right. I'm on record as someone who spends whole Sundays sorting their banks and loves it.

The last time I remember having this much trouble with my bags was in the Allods beta. Even the stingiest free to play titles, the ones that rely on bag sales in the cash shop to keep the servers up, don't stint on space the way Valheim does.

Thirty-two slots is all you get. It's possible there are games with fewer but I'm willing to bet that in none of those games does every piece of armor you're wearing and every weapon you're weilding take up one of your valuable slots. 

Let's look at what's in my bags right now. I haven't prepared this. I just logged in, took a screenshot of what was there and logged out again. 

Top row: 

Slot 1 - Poison Resist Mead. Absolutely essential to have on a hot key if you're venturing into the swamp. You do not want to be opening your inventory and scrabbling around looking for a potion just as the last one runs out and an ooze appears out of the gloom right next to you.

Slot 2 - Bow - Arguably you might manage without hot-keying the bow since it's situational but I like to have mine handy so I can take down trolls and drakes as soon as they attack. I also like to pop every deer that doesn't see me coming, since I can never get enough meat (ironic, since I've not eaten meat in real life since the late 1980s).

Slot 3 - Mace - This is one I could swap for something more useful. I made it to fight Bonemass but then I never used it. And I've never used it since, either. 

Slot 4 - Axe - Until I made the Silver Sword, the axe was my main weapon. Even now it's almost as good and of course it also cuts down trees. I'm always going to need my axe close at hand.

Slot 5 - Hammer - It has to go there because that's where it goes. Same applies to the axe and the pick. I've played so many hours of Valheim I have strong muscle memory for the tools and weapons I use most. If I try putting them inside the pack I just keep pressing the old keys before I'm consciously aware I'm going to do it and whatever's in those slots gets used instead. Which is very annoying if it happens to be a consumable.

Slot 6 - Silver Sword - I was loathe to stop using the axe but when you move from iron to silver there's no new axe recipe, or not that I've found. When I looked at the sword and saw it did the same damage at level one as the iron axe does at level four, plus extra "spirit" damage on top, I knew I'd have to make one and learn how to use it. 

The main problem was where to put it. Until then slot six had always belonged to my hoe. I still end up waving my sword about when all I mean to do is flatten some ground. It's infuriating.

Slot 7 - Pickaxe - See Slot 5.

Slot 8 - Iron Sledge - This is a slight indulgence. I could probably get away with having the sledge deeper in the pack because once again it's situational. The thing is, it's also fun to use, extremely effective on skeletons and blobs, highly efficient on gangs of greydwarves and good for clearing brushwood and small trees. If I put it away I'd only keep getting it out again.

Second row:

Slot 1 - Obsidian arrows - If you're going to use a bow you're going to need to carry arrows. Highlighted in blue because I've selected them as the ones I want to use.

Slot 2 - More obsidian arrows - Usually I only carry one stack but I'd just made some new ones and these were left over.

Slots 3 - 7 - Free space!

Slot 8 - Medium Health Mead - Always carry some of these. If for any reason I get out of my depth or a blob jumps me in the meadows (it happens) one of these can save my life. And has. Many times.

I would, obviously, prefer to have my health potions on a hot key but when I did I kept drinking them by mistake. I used to keep them in the top row, slot three, where the mace is now, but my fat fingers would sometimes start me glugging when I was aiming to grab my axe or my bow, so I reluctantly had to put them deeper in the pack. I always keep them in the current position so I don't have to waste a moment searching for them in an emergency.

Third row:

Slot 1 - The miner's helmet thing. I forget the Norse name for it. I was using it constantly in the swamp but not so much now I'm mostly in the mountains. Still not going to go anywhere without it, obviously.

Slot 2 - Wishbone. I thought I'd only need this when I went looking for silver. Then I found out you can find sunken chests with it in the meadows and iron in the swamp. I'm at the annoying stage where if I'm not wearing it I feel like I might be walking right over something. Even though what's in the chests isn't all that interesting I'm not ready to give it up just yet.

Slot 3 - Sausages - Always need sausages. Nuff said.

Slot 4 - Cooked Meat - See Slot 3.

(At this point I should mention that both those meat products are in the wrong place. I usually keep whatever three foods I'm using in the bottom row on the right, where the raspberries are. I must have moved them for some reason. I'll put them back where they should be when I log in).

Slot 5 -6 - More free space!

Slot 7 - Cultivator. I'd really prefer to hotkey this. I use it a lot and it's very annoying to have inside the pack. I have to open inventory, select the cultivator, close inventory, then right-click to select function to use it. Then to stop using it I either have to select another tool (even if I don't need to use one) or re-open inventory and de-select the cultivator. It gets on my nerves.

Slot 8 - Hoe. See slot 7.

Bottom row:

Slots 1 - 4 - Armor. Never not going to need that.

Slot 5 - Strength belt. I always used to have this selected. Then I got the wishbone. You can only use one magical doodad at a time so it's a choice between the two of them. I tend to have the wishbone on until I hit the three hundred weight limit then swap to the belt. 

Slot 6 - Raspberries. My third food. Just happens to be raspberries because I was exploring and that's what I was able to forage along the way. 

Slot 7 - Coal. The one thing in this snapshot that totally should not be there. I imagine I happened to walk in range of the kiln at some point and some coal flipped itself into my bag without me noticing. Or I burned some meat and didn't spot it when I picked it up. Or maybe I killed a surtling somewhere. Whatever, it shouldn't be in my bags.

Slot 8 - Crypt Key. Essential during the iron age for getting the gates open on sunken crypts. Arguably I could keep it in a chest somewhere now I'm on silver but it's surprising how many times I end up in a swamp without meaning to. It would be very awkward to run into a crypt to escape a horde of draugr and find I couldn't get the gate open.

So there it is. Out of thirty-two possible slots I'm carrying twenty items I'd consider to be essential and a couple more I'd really rather hang onto, thanks. It means I'm operating at all time with an effective free inventory of just ten slots.

In almost any other game I've played, all my armor, my trinkets, the weapons I was using and any ammunition they needed would be stored on my character doll, not in my inventory. In many games there would be dedicated, non-general-inventory slots for crafting tools, potions and food as well.

And yet, even if we had all of that in Valheim, the game would still have the meanest space allocation I've ever seen! Thirty-two slots! Even if more than half of them weren't being taken up with things that should never be there in the first place, that's pathetic!

I might (might...) accept it if it was done as a point of principle. If there was some gameplay intent behind it, like the way Darkfall supposedly made players rummage through their inventory so as to add tension to PvP. Or if it was in the service of "realism", as in those games where objects have both weight and size and you have to fiddle around trying to get them all to fit.

But Valheim doesn't do any of that. You can walk around with enough wood to build a couple of decent-sized houses and a longboat if you want. Or enough stone to build a tower. Realism has absolutely nothing to do with it.

I think it's just bad design, pure and simple. The game needs a proper paper doll for the character and it needs more basic inventory space. 

In gameplay terms it would also benefit hugely from character inventory being included in progression. We should be able to make packs that increase our carrying capacity the way we can already make bigger chests to increase static storage.

I imagine all of this will come in time. Valheim seems so finished, so feature-complete, it's very easy to forget it's not just in Early Access but that even Early Access has only just started.

There are plenty of things about Valheim I don't look forward to seeing change as the demands of more and more players mean compromises are made but I do look forward to having more room in my bags. 

That can't come soon enough.

Tested By Research: EverQuest

Storage space. It's always been an issue in EverQuest, hasn't it? Not so much in your bank. These days vault space is positively generous. On your character. That's where it's a problem.

Remember all those stories from the early days? Enterprising low-levels hanging around the entrances to dungeons, offering to carry your loot back to town and sell it, for a fee? That really happened. Small bags filled up fast with stuff that didn't stack. Going to a vendor took too big a chunk out of the time you had to hunt. Worse, if you were the healer or the tank, everyone else had to stop until you got back.

Over the years things haven't got much better. Oh, there's more loot that stacks now, for sure, but plenty still that doesn't. And quest items and crafting mats, they must have grown by orders of magnitude. EQ's industry-standard loot window makes deciding what to pick up and what to leave so much easier but the old problem still remains. Those bags just fill so fast.

It's why one of the key features of every Collector's Edition these days is a capacious 100% weight reduction bag. Forty slots seems to be the current gold standard. You can buy them in the cash shop, too., although they're not cheap and there are restrictions on how many you can have.

I've never really made much of an effort to upgrade my inventory in EverQuest. Mostly I just buy the cheap ten-slot tinker's toolkits, the so-called Deluxe Toolbox, but last time I took a serious run at leveling my Magician I did try to do something to avoid that endless series of Sophie's choices between making xp or making money.

The mage was already off to a flying start with the two twenty-four slot Heroic Satchels of the Adventurer that came with the free boost to 85 she got when Heroic Characters were added to the game. I'd also invested in a couple of gigantic, player-made thirty-two slot Extraplanar Trade Satchels for her. There's always someone selling those in the Bazaar for a very reasonable price. Even though they only hold items flagged "tradeskill", there are a lot of those and some of them sell for plenty, so I like to scoop them all up as I go.

There's more in there than just the bags but face it, that's what you're paying for.

The rest of her bag slots were filled with a variety of ten-slot containers and one twelve-slotter. In total she had one hundred and seventy-four inventory slots - and they were all full. Time to do something about it.

Except, of course, in EverQuest you can't just do something as simple as buy bigger bags.

Well, okay, fine. That's exactly what you can do, if you have the money. But bags, as I've already suggested, don't come cheap, either in or out of game. And even if you have the money and are willing to spend it, it's still not that simple. Really. Nothing in Norrath ever is.

I looked at the Bazaar to see what was on offer. Various crafters can make bags of diferent sizes and there were plenty up for sale. Bottom of the line, a few 12-slots at around 4k plat. My price range but a couple of extra slots here and there weren't going to make much difference.

Then there were the tailormade expandable bags. Those were all twelve slots too but you could make them biger, somehow. I vaguely remembered it from the last time, when I decided it was all too complicated to be bothering with.

How it works is this: a tailor with very high skill makes a bag that has twelve slots. There are a whole bunch of them with fancy names - Legendary, Supreme, Flawless, Transcendent - but they all have just the twelve slots. These bags are both tradeable and expandable. Anyone, regardless of crafting skill, can buy one and combine it with a vendor-sold reagent to create a No Trade 14, 16, 18 or 20 slot bag.

This will make sense later. Maybe.

Yes, it's already sounding complicated but there's more. When I said anyone could do the combine I should have said "anyone who's bought and read the correct book on how to do it". Or scribed the necessary recipe, if you prefer to be less lore about it.

I must have spent at least an hour researching how to do it. Not nearly long enough, as it turned out. First I read a couple of guides on the general principles, Fanra's being the clearest of them. Then I had to investigate the source of all the necessary books and reagents, most of which seemed to have been introduced at different times and in different expansions.

There didn't seem to be much point buying the smaller bags. The reagent seemed to be the same for all of them. Someone was selling the Transcendent, which expands to twenty slots, for 10,500 plat each, while the rest were between six and eight thousand. Anything but the biggest seemed like a false economy.

Naturally, by the time I'd decided on the biggest bag, the person selling it for ten and a half grand had logged off, so I ended up paying twelve thousand instead. By this time I'd also realized I had an unexpanded Supreme bag in my inventory already. That goes to sixteen slots. The reagents cost more than two thousand five hundred platinum each so I was already getting close to twenty grand for two bags. I only had around 90k in total, earned over several years, and I had spells to buy, too. Two bags it was, at least for now.

Buying the reagent was easy. A vendor in Plane of Knowledge sold that one. One of the recipe books was on another vendor nearby but according to a couple of guides I'd read, for the other I'd need to go to somewhere called Shards Landing. I'd never even heard of it but some further research sugested I could get there by way of the Befallen dungeon in the Commonlands. At least I knew where that was.

Looking back, I think I was lulled into a false sense of security by the familiar names, the very low-level entry point and the knowledge that the vendor I was looking for was in the service hub of some expansion or other. The due diligence I failed to apply was which expansion, what level cap and whether the overland/underground route I was proposing to take had been the normal entry point at the time.

Had I taken the trouble to read it up, I would have discovered that Shard's Landing was introduced as part of the Rain of Fear expansion in 2012, when the level cap was raised to one hundred. It's a zone intended for levels 95 to 97. More significantly, the zone through which I meant to travel to get there, the Chapterhouse of the Fallen, was a dungeon, recommended for characters at level 100. By which, of course, they meant groups.

That looks new. Let's poke it and see what happens.

I got to Befallen and saw a great, blue stone outside the entrance. You could hardly miss it but I'd never seen it before, which strongly suggests it's been more than eight years since I last visited Befallen on a Live server. I've been there plenty of times on various Progression and TLE servers, as well as Tipa's recreation of the dungeon in Neverwinter, but evidently it's been nearly a decade since I last visited the original.

I clicked on the crystal because who wouldn't? In I zoned. It was dark. Very dark. I was so taken with just how dark it was, I stopped to take a selfie, because I have a post brewing about how infuriating dark zones are and how developers seem to be in love with them in a way I'm convinced players are not.

I took a few steps down the first corridor and spotted a couple of undead mobs of some description barrelling towards me. I just had time to con them and see they were dark blue (dark blue for danger is the motto these days) before I found myself flat on my back, dead.

It was at this point I remembered I'd suspended my cleric mercenary a couple of hours back so she wouldn't keep charging me money just for standing around. Not that I think she could have done much to keep me up but at least I might have got a rez , assuming they didn't kill her, too.

All my lovely raid buffs, gone, along with my pet and his buffs, his weapons and his armor. Once, that would have been a blow but these days it's just a matter of letting the game idle in the background while I play something else until the sleet of MGBs fills it all back up again. As for the lost xp, its just a case of paying an NPC in the Guild Lobby to summon my corpse and wait for my Merc to give me a 90% rez. One Overseer quest is going to replace that tenfold.

The lost time, though, that you never get back. Also, at 101 a summoning stone now costs over a thousand plat. Dying may not be the shock of ice water it once was but it's still something you very much want to avoid if at all possible. And that was an extremely avoidable death.

Seriously, does anyone enjoy playing in the dark?

Chastened, needing to wait to let my buffs build back up, I turned to more research. And guess what? It turns out that if I'd been paying attention I'd not only have realized the route I was planning was a suicide run but I'd have found out I didn't need to go to Shard's Landing at all!

The bloody vendor who sold me the first recipe book also sells the other one! It was there in front of me if I'd only scrolled down. And I only found that out after another unecessary, if unfatal, side-trip to the housing district, Sunset Hills, where I mistakenly thought yet another vendor might be able to hook me up. He did have a bag-expanding recipe book, just not the one I wanted. I bought it anyway. Might as well cover all the options.

Eventually I had everything I needed: the unexpanded bags, the reagents and the scribed recipes. I turned to the loom, standing handily beside the vendor, and made the first combo. It worked! Twenty slot bag!

I swapped some stuff around to empty the other unexpanded bag. I searched for the recipe, hit "Combine" and... it didn't work! No sixteen slot bag! Why? No idea. I checked everything, all the names. Just as it should be. The reagent was outlined in green, showing it was right, but the bag itself was rimmed in red, meaning it wasn't. Why? I don't frickin' know!

At this point I could have done some more research. Or I could have asked in game. People love to show how clever they are. If I'd made and obvious error someone would have been delighted to point it out to me. Instead, I noticed the loom has an "Experiment" option. It lets you put any combination of items inside and see if they make something. In the old days, if they didn't, everything you had in there would be destroyed but they'd changed that long ago. Or I hoped they had.

Clearly having learned nothing from my trip to the Chapterhouse, I manually moved the reagent and the bag into the loom and pressed Combine again, because why prep? And this time it worked. Why? No more idea than before. Don't know and, quite frankly, don't care. Sixteen slot bag, baby!

They look so lovely, empty.

So now I had eighteen more slots than I started with but I knew I could do better. In the course of my research I'd spotted that one of the options available on the loyalty vendor is a sixteen slot box.

The loyalty system is yet another thing I've never really paid much attention to in EQ. Like everything else in the game it's unfeasibly complex and confusing and I could probably fill a whole post trying to explain how it works it but for the time being let's just say I've accrued a lot of tokens and never spent any of them.

The box is about the most expensive thing on the vendor and normally I'd balk at blowing such a big chunk of my resources on something as basic as a bag that only gives me an extra four slots above what I already have, but...

The thing I never knew about the Loyalty system is, you keep getting get tokens even when you're free to play.And you get more tokens than F2P players if you're account is flagged "Silver", meaning you paid your five dollars for the upgrade, back when that was an option, which I did. So I've been building up my tokens all this time even though I didn't know it.

Except, I haven't, because the other thing I never knew about the loyalty system is that there's a cap! You can't have more than 5760 tokens no matter what your account status might be. And guess how many I had? Well, actually I had 5772. I don't know how that happened.

Never mind how! Now I have a new sixteen slot box and 4044 loyalty tokens. That'll teach me not to pay attention to the small print. I probably ought to log in all the other accounts and check those, now I come to think of it. It's like a license to spend money!

In game, they expand perfectly. On the blog, not so much.

Last of all, I went out to finish up a very long quest I had in my journal. I must have started it five years ago, when it was level-appropriate solo content and hard work but after the magician's recent growth spurt it looked like a nice, relaxing toddle to the end of the session. The final reward was a twelve-slot bag. Not much of an upgrade but twelve has always been bigger then ten.

Another half-hour and there I was, two dozen inventory slots better off than when I began. It had only taken me most of the day and cost me about twenty thousand plat.

I was in the groove, though, so I figured I might as well carry on and get the new level 101 Air pet spell, seeing as how my old one had snuffed it, along with all the buffs I'd gotten him.

I'll spare us all the painful details of how I paid for a teleport stone to the wrong Katta Castellum and spent twenty minutes running around the zone, looking for a spell vendor who wasn't there. Or the time I wasted sailing the wrong way on the wrong boat through Buried Sea, trying to find the Tempest Temple, and how eventually I had to swim there. No one died and its all a bit embarassing and we've all done it, haven't we? Let's move on...

It was around eight in the evening when I swapped over to Guild Wars 2 to do my dailies, leaving magician, new pet and merc to soak up buffage in the background. EQ plays very nicely in a closed window. You can leave it up all day and scarcely know it was there.

I'd been playing for about eight hours, on and off, all day really, mostly reading stuff and running about, the longest EQ session I can remember. It was great! I had a fantastic time. Can't wait to do it again, only this time I'm going to go somewhere very easy and make some fast money. I know some spots where the mobs carry high-value gems and my new pet will all but one-shot them.

I'll have that 30k I spent back in no time if everything goes to plan. And if there's one thing I know about EverQuest, it's that everything always goes exactly to plan...

So Stick Around : Neverwinter

Time was when games didn't care whether you came or went. If you were foolish enough to let your subscription lapse they'd make you jump through a few hoops before letting you back in and you'd feel lucky your characters were still there. If they were.

Not any more. Not for a long time. There's a farmer somewhere making a killing on fatted calves.

Even by modern standards, Cryptic's welcome mat is primped. Log in after a layoff, there's your name in lights. And "Neverwinter rejoices at your return!"

Yeah, right. Sure it does. Just give me the stuff. You know that's why I came.

It's not even been that long since I last played. The logon screen handily displays the last played date for every character. My last visit was back in March. It may have only been three months or so but I've already forgotten just about everything about the game. These things don't stick.

Doesn't matter. I didn't come to play. I came to claim those valuables. Didn't I just say so? Cryptic's twentieth is the celebration, apparently. I would have missed it only I saw Shintar flag up the freebies a few days back. I didn't want to miss out.

This is what you get:

There are similar offers in Star Trek Online and Champions Online. I could grab those too but even I balk at reinstalling a game just to get free stuff. Although I may still have STO, somewhere, even if it has to be more than five years since I last logged in. As for Champions, I did play once, very briefly, a long time ago, but it's never going to happen again.

It wasn't any of the listed goodies that got me logging in to Neverwinter again, anyway. It was something Shintar mentioned about bag space. She wrote "I was pleased to find... that my character's default bag had been increased by 12 slots". I'm all about the bag space, as is well known.

Only I couldn't find any bigger bags or bag expanders waiting for me. There's nothing listed on the claim screen and reading Shintar's comments carefully I realize she never said there would be. Looking at the wiki, it says the default bag, the Adventurer's Satchel, has 30 slots. My Warlock's has 42 and more than thirty of them already had stuff in when I looked. I guess she already got the upgrade.

I claimed the beholder pet and popped him out. He looked pretty good. I pawed through the various goodie bags. The free outfit looked spiffy so I thought I'd put it on.

The gear came in a Platinum Adornments Fashion Box. For some reason I had two of them. I opened one and looked for my new dress, hat and pants. Nothing. I checked everything in case they were in yet another box. Nope.

I checked all the tabs. Nada.

There's some sort of appearance system in Neverwinter. I vaguely remember it. I found the tab for that and clicked everything in there. No luck.

Well, I had another Fashion Box. I checked what was in it to be sure it was the same. It was. I double-clicked it, this time with my bags open so I could see where anything went. Nothing went anywhere except the Fashion Box, which vanished. Nothing took its place.

The gear's gone somewhere, I bet. I just don't happen to know where it is. Oh well, never mind. Easy come...

At this point I could have logged out. I'd achieved or failed to achieve everything I came for, after all. Only I didn't. I started fiddling about in my bags, opening this and that to see what was in it. For once I had plenty of bag space so it seemed like a good time to try. Although where I got that Greater Bag of Holding from I have no idea...

I spent a good while comparing insignia then working out how to apply them. I found a couple of upgrades sitting in my bags and put them on. After that it felt churlish not to go try them out.

I ended up doing two levels. XP seems to come fast in Neverwinter, not least because one of the insignia I slotted is a 62% xp buff. Also, because Neverwinter is fun. It really is.

Comparing Neverwinter to Elder Scrolls Online, from my perspective gameplay feels really similar. Upgrading is arcane but questing and combat are simplicity itself. All I do in both is click on an NPC and read some dialog while an actor reads it out loud. Then I follow a directional prompt across the map to an objective.

When I get there I hold down LMB until enough mobs die and/or I've picked up enough quest items. Occasionally RMB. If things look rough I hammer some number keys or Q, R or Tab, depending on game, all pretty much at random. That always does the trick.

Then I follow another prompt back, read and listen some more, get the goodies. Rinse and as they say repeat, ad infinitum.

The difference is in the entertainment value. ESO's quests, the ones I've seen, are dour, dull and tedious. Neverwinter's are sparky, sharp and frequently funny. The dialog is better-written, more naturalistic, with a lighter, defter touch and a more immediately engaging prose style. The voicework is livelier and lighter, more enthusiastic, more playful.

The atmosphere rings with adventure, excitement and intrigue. The action, the plots, they're much the same - evil cults, wicked necromancers, imminent threats -  but everything feels more Indiana Jones, less Apocalypse Now.

Every time I play Neverwinter I have fun. I don't know why I keep forgetting to log in. I expect I'll get a few more levels, miss a day or two, drift away once more. But I'll drift back.

And I'll always be sure of a warm welcome when I do.

That's A Big Bag : GW2

Yesterday I was looking back at some old, unfinished plans. Today I went out and finished one. Didn't happen to be one of the ones on my list but, hey, you can't have everything.

My intention was to knock off what I thought had to be the easiest - the ranger pets. I got as far as looking up twhere to find them on the wiki. I had the page open, ready. Then I logged in.

As some general, a Charr no doubt, once said, no plan survives contact with the login screen. The ranger I'd picked was camped out in Wayfarer Foothills, in Krenek's Lodge to be precise. As he zoned back into the world he found there was some excitement going on.

Someone had dumped a load of banquet food on the ground along with a Hero banner, a sure sign of something about to happen. People tend only to do that when they expect a gathering to form. And there were indeed plenty of people all around.

As he set upon the free lunch, someone asked in general chat where they needed to be and got the reply "It happens all over the zone". That gave me a good idea what was about to happen.

This time last year we were all a bit sideswiped by the unexpected return of Dragon Bash, a Tyrian holiday missing in action since 2013. Along with a host of events and entertainments in the Norn capital of Hoelbrak, Dragon Bash brings with it an open-world rumble known as the Dragon Bash Hologram Stampede.

This little zergfest cycles around the four snow-covered zones surrounding Hoelbrak on a fifteen minute rotation. I just happened to have logged in as the carnival arrived in mine.

I love open-world zerg events in any MMORPG but they're especially enjoyable in Guild Wars 2, which was designed from the ground up to accomodate them. Any zerg is a good zerg in my book but the very aptly named Stampede isn't one of my favorites for several reasons.

Mounts are pretty much obligatory if you want to travel with the tag and even then you might struggle to get a fireball off before it's time to jump back on your not-a-horse and head for the next target. The mobs that spawn are highly likely to die in microseconds as soon as the zerg arrives.

As I discovered last year, if you want to get credit, grab some loot and finish the achievements, it's better to move away from the zerg and trigger a few of the spawns yourself. All you have to do is go to one of the many markers on the map and click on the hologram you'll find there. That's not ideal zerg -play. Rather the opposite.

But there wasn't time for any of that kind of smart thinking. I'd barely remembered what the event was before it began. The zerg was already half a snowfield away. I hopped on my roller beetle to catch them up.

The whole event only lasts a few minutes. The Asurans organizing it can't hang around. They have to be in the next zone setting up in a quarter of an hour. It lasted long enough to completely disrupt my ranger's pet plans, though.

He stopped to look at the loot that he'd got and inevitably noticed his bags were almost full and that got me thinking. Specifically, it got me thinking that I'd missed something off yesterday's To Do list, namely craft some bigger bags.

For years the largest bag you could have in GW2 was a twenty-slotter. That changed sometime in 2017, when recipes for 24, 28 and 32 slot bags were introduced. More were added, including a free one you could get by way of an achievement, with the March 2018 Living World episode A Bug in the System but as I said then, "A 32 slot bag comes in somewhere close to 250 gold, which in GW2 is a very great deal of money. I haven't been able to bring myself to make one yet."

Changes in the economy have brought that eye-watering ticket price down to around 200 gold but that's still a bit rich for my blood. A twenty-eight slot bag, on the other hand, can now be had for not much more than fifty gold, which these days seems quite reasonable.

So I made myself a couple. It was very simple - once I stopped reading the wiki and just got on with it. GW2 has one of the most comprehensive, detailed and exhaustive wikis I've seen for any game but sometimes that very exhaustivity can be... exhausting.  

I spent half an hour looking at all the various oversized bags you can make. I drilled down into the detail to discover the provenance all the unfamiliar materials. I read up on the events and zones and achievements that you could do to get the more expensive items for free or at least shave a little off the cost. I even bought a couple of items off the Trading Post to open a collection that seemed like it might be a shortcut...

And then I realized that if i just ignored all the Living Story stuff and stuck to traditional crafting, there's a very basic series of bags you can make that just use regular mats and stuff you can buy for peanuts off the TP.

There's just one expensive component, the Supreme Rune of Holding. Those will run you around ten gold apiece.

You need half a dozen for a twenty-eight slotter but the key thing to hold in mind is that, provided you have a 500 skill Tailor, Leatherworker or Armorsmith and about fifty-five gold in your bank account, you can do the whole thing in thirty seconds in any well-appointed crafting area.

I went to my favorite, Black Citadel, and knocked out a couple of 28-slot Gossamer Saddlebags. They don't do anything clever, like auto-sort particular items, but they have ten slots more apiece than a couple of the bags my Elementalist was using.

Then I rummaged around in my bank vault and dug out that free 32-slot Olmakhan Bandolier I mentioned. The one that came as part of a Living Story achievement I completed a couple of years back. At the time I couldn't decide who should have it so, as I do with most GW2 loot, I just shoved it in the bank and forgot about it.

My Elementalist, the character I play the most, if almost exclusively in World vs World, now has a grand total of two hundred and twenty-two inventory slots, of which a princessly sixty-one are empty as I write. Luxury!

More importantly, I now have the knowledge and experience to bang out a big bag whenever I feel like it. It would be nice to say my inventory woes are over but of course, as we all know, more slots just means more stuff. They'll be full in no time, I'm sure.

Now, about those pets...

Trash (Go Pick It Up)

Telwyn wrote a thoughtful post a week or so back on new uses for junk items. It's one of those perennials that come up periodically in discussions about MMORPGs. I seem to remember arguing about it back on TNZ, the old EverQuest Newbie Zone forums, around the turn of the century.

There's always been a strong body of opinion that believes MMOs should have no "trash drops" . Things with no reason to exist other than to be sold vendors for cash have no reason to exist, period. The lobby for nothing but coin drops existed even back when when dropped coin had weight.

In this post-F2P world there's a conspiracy theory that claims vendor loot has a secret purpose - to create demand for the inventory slots and bag expanders on sale in the cash shop. There may even be a grain of truth in that one.

I recall very clearly how surprised - shocked even - I was by the extremely limited inventory space in one of the earlier F2P titles I played, Allods Online. It did seem that part of the financial plan there included making things awkward enough that you'd want to buy your way out of a bind.

The theory doesn't really hold water, though. Trash drops long predate the F2P concept, let alone the dominance of that particular payment model. What's more, just about every MMORPG I ever played uses inventory space as a form of character, account or guild progression.

Yesterday I wrote about my excitement over having the opportunity to quest for a 32 slot bag. I completed it last night and it was one of the more satisfying things I've done in GW2 for a while. ArenaNet funds itself primarily via cash shop sales (between expansions, at least) but you can't buy bags for gems. You can buy extra inventory slots but if you want big bags to go in them you have to "quest" for them or craft them.

EQ and EQ2, post F2P, both have active cash shops. They'll sell you bags but it's not the best way to get them. Each game has a wealth of baroque and complex in-game paths for both adventurers and crafters to obtain large containers. Bag quests are a staple and a new tier of slightly larger crafted bags and boxes forms a regular, expected and essential part of the offer in any expansion that also comes with a level cap increase.

So, no, I don't believe trash drops are there just to pad cash shop sales. There must be other reasons why they exist. Someone has to sit at a desk and design them all, draw the illustrations, come up with the names, write the little descriptions. It doesn't just fall out of the sky - or out of a wolf's gutted corpse - without a little help from someone being paid good money to make it happen.

I have a vague memory of reading a developer interview once that discussed the use of vendor loot as a social engineering mechanism. By filling your bags with things that have no use other than to be sold to vendors you can ensure that players return periodically to set points, the places where those vendors stand. With the addition of other services like banks and auction houses you can create social hubs where players can meet and bond and the game can come to life.

Something like that did used to happen, back in the day. Still does, in new MMOs, for a short while. Indeed, if you could travel back in time to the dawn of the 3D MMO, you'd find players forming relationships with other players based on transactions that centered purely on trash loot. A whole evening's gameplay might amount to one player waiting just inside a dungeon to buy vendor trash off other players who felt they were too busy to run all the way to the next zone just to sell. There were people who really did want to be known as "that guy that'll sell your crap for you".

Then there's the realism argument. It might be convenient to have every animal drop a few silver coins but where would a wolf keep his wallet? Wouldn't it be a little more convincing for a rat to drop a tail or a set of whiskers rather than 70 copper?

Nice idea, seldom thought through. Clearly someone was thinking along those lines when they designed and created all those animal body parts that have no function other than to be sold to vendors (we'll leave the question of why those vendors want to buy such utterly useless items for another time...).

Unfortunately, someone else must have had oversight of the final loot table because those rats and wolves often ended up dropping weapons and armor and spell components anyway. Depending on the MMO, there might be some attempt at consistency, with gear drops limited to the kind of creature that could use them - bandits, orcs, goblins - but as often as not the drop table seemed to have more to do with the level and the zone than the creature you were killing.

Over time there's also a retro-fitting effect, whereby things that used not have a use acquire one. Sometimes developers will incorporate existing trash drops into new recipes and something that no-one wanted suddenly finds a demand. Mostly, though, trash is trash and stays that way.

Which makes it all the more surprising that someone behind the scenes puts so much effort into it. In many MMOs I've played the tiny spot illustrations for vendor loot have been exquisite. In EQ, back before SOE added housing, I used to hoard some of the more attractive vendor drops just to give my characters the illusion they owned something beautiful.

In GW2 right now, there's someone sitting in an office writing piquant, delicate prose about coffee pots and buckle prongs destined for nothing better than the "Sell Junk" button. I always used to wonder who drew the short straw when it came to writing the "thank you" notes that came in the mail after you completed a Heart. This seems almost a step below that.

It has to be the office junior or the intern, doesn't it? Or maybe someone really just loves doing it. Maybe some dev sits there writing this stuff in his lunch break or begs her boss "it'll only take me a few minutes". Once again, just about every MMO I've ever played is stiff with flavor text. That deserves a whole post of its own.

Whatever the reasons behind its existence I would really miss vendor loot should it ever disappear. It adds granularity and context. Yes, it can be annoying when it fills the last few spaces in your already overfilled bags but without annoyances like that I'd maybe start to feel I was playing a game, not living a virtual life.

I wouldn't be adverse to some of Telwyn's suggestions, all the same. Just because you can't equip something doesn't mean you should have to sell it to a vendor. I'm not wedded to an infinite series of trips to the store for a few silver a time.

What I'd really like is the equivalent of an in-game Panini sticker album, where I could collect all those little icons and captions to browse and enjoy at leisure. Add something like that and suddenly those vendors might find themselves in competition with players willing to pay a whole lot more than a few coppers - for the rare stuff, at least.

The Good, The Bag and The Ugly : GW2

So, here's the question. Did the latest chapter of GW2's Living Story live up to the promise of that trailer?

Hmm. Yes and no. Leaving aside the inevitable problem of raised expectations, in some respects "A Bug in the System" is certainly one of ArenaNet's better efforts. In others....not so much.

I'm trying to avoid spoilers but the format of these things is so very well established by now - not to say ritualized - that there's not that much to spoil. Some traveling, some banter, a lot of large battles, a couple of boss fights, a new map with a new currency, the whole thing wrapped up in two to three hours. This is also one of the episodes with a lot of "puzzles" and non-combat sections, of which we tend to get one or two each Season.

As Telwyn observes, the Boss fights aren't as awful as they could be. The first boss is incredibly tedious, as about 90% of the comments in the traditional Living Story Boss Fight Complaint Thread confirm. It's just a massive hit point sponge in a confined space most of which is on fire most of the time. The usual, in other words. I thought it had outstayed its welcome after about two minutes but it hung around for a lot longer than that. I didn't find it hard other than on my patience. Mrs Bhagpuss loathed it.

I hesitate to say it but the second boss I almost enjoyed. There was a lot more room to move, we went to several different locations, which helped keep things fresh, and even though everything was on fire all the time again, nothing seemed to burn.

The puzzles were very straightforward. I solved them all quickly without needing to look anything up on Google, which was just as well because no-one had had time to write any guides or post any videos, not even Dulfy.

Most could be brute forced anyway. It seems almost to be expected. One of the puzzles even defaults to an option labeled "Brute Force". In the part where you're supposed to sneak, Mrs Bhagpuss ignored instructions and just killed everything, which earned her an achievement.

The new map is very good. It's possibly my favorite Path of Fire map to date, probably because it looks and feels nothing like one. Geographically, it appears to be something akin to a temperate rain forest, lush, filled with lakes and waterfalls and raining all the time. Really, I've spent maybe four or five hours there now and I don't think I've seen the rain let up once. A Portuguese expatriate thanked Anet effusively on the forums for giving him a nostalgic blast of his home country and it's true that parts of it are eerily familiar to the countryside just in from the coast, south of Lisbon.

I like it enough that I'd probably have spent some time there just enjoying the ambience, but for once there are also things I want. There's one thing in particular I might even say I need: a 32 slot bag.

Large bags are a big deal in GW2. For five years the maximum size was stuck at 20 slots, then sometime last year recipes were added allowing crafters to make 24, 28 and 32 slot versions. Unfortunately, that luxury came at a corresponding cost.  A 32 slot bag comes in somewhere close to 250 gold, which in GW2 is a very great deal of money. I haven't been able to bring myself to make one yet.

A free 32-slotter is well worth making an effort to get but in this case what you have to do to get it is also relatively straightforward and quite good fun. You start with the 20-slot "Bandolier" that comes as one of the rewards for finishing the story. You can then upgrade it three times via a series of what any other MMO would call quests but GW2 calls Collections. Dulfy has the full skinny.

I've already done the first two upgrades. Mostly it was running around talking to people or doing events on the map. In part three I think there's one side trip to Elon Riverlands but apart from that it all happens in situ, doing things you'd most likely be doing already if you were there, like the meta or bounties.

As well as the bag there's another upgradeable reward for finishing the story - a back slot item. I don't particularly need another Ascended backpiece but for once this doesn't look entirely hideous. I might even not hide it if I wore it. I'll probably get that next.

Then there are the usual Ascended trinkets from the new currency vendor and various minis and suchlike from the Heart merchants. The map itself is visually delightful. It's very interesting to explore and for once you can do so in relative peace. There are hardly any of the usual cc-crazy PoF mobs that have kept me out of the rest of the expansion these last few months. It all feels much more like a "normal" map and so much better for it.

I'll keep away from the specifics of the plot for now but I have quite a lot to say about the marked change in tone. I noticed it almost immediately. It reminded me of the jarring lurch that often occurs when a new producer or script editor takes control of a long-running tv show. I don't know if there's been a change of personnel in GW2's story department but it certainly feels like it.

Rox has changed in a very literal fashion: she's played by a new voice actor who sounds absolutely nothing like the old one. This has been mildly controversial. I found it offputting. It's not that I was especially fond of the old Rox but I was used to her. Now she's someone else and it's weird. Apparently the writers want to take her character in a new direction, which kind of assumes someone thought her character had a direction to begin with. There's been precious little evidence of that in years.

Presumably Rox's new direction will involve the hitherto unheard-of tribe of Charr hippies we discover, living a peaceful life of fishing, basketweaving and storm-calling that goes entirely counter to everything previously known about the race. Perhaps she'll settle down and try to teach all those precocious cubs some manners. She was working in a nursery when we first met her, after all...

Braham also appears to have a new direction in mind. He still has the same voice but he seems to have had a bang on the head - one that's knocked some sense into him. Between episodes he's dropped 95% of the deeply unpopular brattishness he acquired at the beginning of LS3.

He makes a couple of passing references to his change of heart but everyone is too busy trying not to die to pick him up on it and the issue is neatly kicked into the long grass. There's some awkward "bonding" at the end and that seems to be that. All back to normal, everything forgiven and forgotten.

Where this leaves his obsession with Jormag I have no idea. In the file marked "bad ideas" I imagine, which seems to be where someone has decided to dump most of the inherited baggage of the last couple of years. I can't wait to see who Jory and Kas come back as. I'm betting it won't be the increasingly bizarre, dysfunctional basket cases they were both fast becoming.

All that's probably, or at least possibly, to the good. Not so the Inquest. The Inquest have always been problematic but in this chapter they cross the line into full-on unacceptable. The practices revealed in Rata Prime and the Inquest Labs come straight from the playbook of Dr. Mengele. 

This would be difficult enough from an outright evil organization but The Inquest have always been played at least partially for laughs and this is no exception. It won't wash. Nazi death camps are not a suitable setting for jokes about beaurocracy recycled from Dilbert.


Even worse, in Blish and Gorrik we have two Asurans who - in the most favorable possible light - have been complicit in nightmarish experiments on captured prisoners. Gorrik, by his own admission, has been actively involved. These two should be heading back to Pact Headquarters to be a) interrogated and b) tried for war crimes.

Instead The Commander (aka the Player Character) sets the two little psychopaths up with their erstwhile college friend and current hand-waving apologist Taimi to do some more experimenting - this time for our team. No! Just No!

I may get into that in more detail when spoilers aren't such an issue. For now, to sum up, I liked the gameplay elements of this episode and the basic plot is moving along nicely but as for all the stuff going on in the background...it's all over the place! And isn't this game still rated PEGI 12? There's more horror in a couple of Inquest asides than the whole five hours of DDLC...