Honey Trap : Ashes of Creation

When I opened my inbox this morning, I was surprised to find not one but three emails from Intrepid Studios, developers of Ashes of Creation.  All identical, all headed "Want to help us test Alpha Zero?".

There's no easy answer to that question. Wilhelm and I had a brief discussion on the subject of alphas and betas in the comments section at TAGN just yesterday. He'd received an invitation to alpha test the upcoming WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth, an invitation he intended to decline, saying "I long ago discovered my own problems with alpha and beta access.  Nothing diminishes my desire to play a game once it goes live than playing it before it goes live".

He also observed that pre-launch testing by definition means that what you experience at launch isn't new, leading in turn to the oft-expressed complaint that "it was better in beta". I've been known to make that claim myself and I completely agree that unwrapping the present before the birthday can lead to disillusionment and ennui.

That's why I'm much more circumspect about seeking or accepting alpha and beta offers than I would have been a few years ago. Other than a swift visit to get a few screenshots and a blog post, I'm no longer interested in the least part in testing expansions for MMOs I'm already playing. That does seem to be something almost guaranteed to lead to disappointment.

I'm also not particularly keen on testing new MMOs at an extremely early stage of development, even though I have had some very good experiences doing so in the past. It's always interesting, because most MMOs undergo enormous changes in development, to the point where different builds seem almost like different games, but it can weigh heavily against your appreciation of the final product.

I wrote a good deal about City of Steam, which I played in all its various stages from the Sneak Peak through alphas and betas into release and eventual sunset. It was scarcely the same game twice and, much as I enjoyed what it eventually became, I would unreservedly claim that it was at its very best in the early days.

Rift, famously, was considered by many to have been at its best in late beta. I had fun in every iteration of Landmark, another "MMO" that went through some very significant revamps without ever finding either a true direction or an audience, but I had the most fun in the first few months of "pre-alpha".

In all those cases my preference for the earlier versions rests on the gameplay rather than the novelty. All those MMOs changed in development in ways I'd have preferred they hadn't. I enjoyed them after launch but it was always with the knowledge that, had they not changed direction, I would have enjoyed them more.


Vanguard, on the contrary, kept improving throughout. Of course, I only saw it from late beta onwards. I'm sure there are plenty of veterans of the earlier stages who could make a case for the game having been better back then.

My Vanguard beta experience was much more similar to my time in the late beta weekends for The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. I came to those at a point when what was changing was more a matter of detail and emphasis than ethos or philosophy.

Those experiences, with what was almost a finished product, at a time close to launch, had the effect of stimulating my appetite for more. I found myself waiting impatiently for the day when I could throw all my energy and enthusiasm behind a permanent character. When the time came, far from feeling jaded from having seen it all before I was thrilled to see the gates flung open and the world revealed for me to explore.

Then there were the betas that acted as a warning. Testing the original FFXIV was a surreal experience. There was a strict NDA, so it felt like watching a huge juggernaut heading towards a cliff edge, with no way to warn anyone of the impending disaster. The Horizons beta had something of the same atmosphere.

With all that in mind, whether or not to try an MMO before launch is a tricky decision. Over the past few years that decision has often been taken out of my hands by the increasing willingness of developers to let anyone and everyone "play" the game while they're making it.

With so many flavors of pre-alpha, alpha, beta, open beta and early access available either for free or at a price the decision on when to start "playing" is problematic. It certainly seems unlikely that I would still have the same enthusiasm for an MMO at "launch" that I might have had when I first began "testing" it anything up to three years earlier.

As a blogger I also have the issue of whether to poke my head through the curtain at various stages so I can take a few pictures, make a few notes and get a blog out of it. I have to try to balance quasi-journalistic curiosity with not spoiling my own fun.

These days I try to limit any intense involvement to the period directly before launch. If I can achieve the anticipatory escape velocity I experienced before Vanguard or GW2 then I know launch-day will be joyous.


In the case of Ashes of Creation, I bought into the Kickstarter at the level that guarantees access to the final, closed beta. By then the game should be close to its finished form. If it's going to be my next Big MMO, I'll be able to tell.

Having made that choice, should I throw away all caution and restraint and jump into the AoC pre-alpha just because I can? Well, fortunately that's a decision I don't have to make. On close inspection, the whole thing turns out to be a tease:

We are introducing a new opportunity for our Glorious Ashes Community to gain additional entries into our Alpha Zero raffles! From this point forward, all social media followers will gain added entries into our raffles.

For each social media account you subscribe or follow, you will gain an additional chance to help us test our Pre-Alpha builds!  All you need to do is subscribe or follow our official YouTube, Twitch, Twitter or Facebook.

It's just a marketing gimmick. Good. That means I can forget about it. Which is just as well, because I don't know whether I'd have had the willpower to resist, had the email contained an actual pre-alpha key.

The Long Lost Shores: GW2

In a comment to a recent post by Syp at Bio Break, Telwyn said

"Guild Wars 2 makes me sad, it’s a game I loved for a year or so after launch and played with close friends and family. As you said in your post, I didn’t feel like the game was catering to my sort of player anymore, especially with Living Story season 2. I doubt they’ll come back to what the game was at launch, why would they? But that’s the game I wanted to play."

This is a sentiment often expressed, both by ex-players and some who still play. I've said much the same myself, often. I wonder, though, how true is it, really?

For quite a while, years, the infamous Manifesto would get dragged out and waved about like a torn and bloodied flag. That happens less now, although it's been linked and excerpted several times on this very blog, mostly when I wanted to rail against some betrayal of faith or hold some errant dev to account.

If the brave claims and promises of that proud document were ever enacted in the game itself, though, it was only briefly. People talk about the second Living Story marking a step-change for the game, the moment when most of the lore action moved to instances that could be packaged for cash shop sale, but the first and so far only expansion, Heart of Thorns, seems to be the tipping point most commonly defined.

My contention has always been that if GW2 did lose its way, the turn from the righteous path was taken long, long before any of that. The only version of GW2 that resembled the vision so energetically promoted in dev blogs and PR promos throughout the long march to launch was the one we saw in the six beta weekends and in the game's first three months. Everything since then has been ANet's New Game Experience.

Forever Ascalon

GW2's short-lived Golden Age ended with the catastrophic release of the game's first major live event, The Lost Shores, on November 16th 2012. With a prescience they could hardly have predicted, the ANet PR department trailed the update with the tagline "a massive one-time world event that will change Tyria forever!"

And it did. Player feedback was so virulent, so corrosive, the entire direction of the game changed as a result. The fundamental conception of the GW2 project, that there would be a dynamic, unpredictable, ever-changing world that players could affect and be affected by, was abandoned almost overnight.

From then until now the direction of development has been focused on making as certain as possible that no-one can say they didn't have at least a fair chance to do everything. If it isn't exactly "all must win prizes" it's certainly "all must have an equal opportunity to win prizes". And, failing that, buy them.

Maybe I did buy my hat in the Gem Shop. What's it to you, pal?

The result has been a relentless slide towards predictability. Everything happens on a schedule. There is always a tick list. Some things have a limited duration, it's true, but the limit is measured in weeks. Any sense of event or surprise is meticulously excised. There must never be any suggestion that anyone might miss out on anything.

It took a long time and many of ANet's famous iterations before these processes were sufficiently codified, tested and confirmed. The first season of the Living Story failed to take replayable accessibility into account, an error that means it cannot now, years later, be offered to those who missed it, tied up in neat Gem Shop bundles the way Seasons Two and Three have been. There are still plaintive posts about that on the forums now and again.

Once the revisionist steamroller began to pick up pace, though, it flattened everything. Megaserver tech removed variations between worlds, annihilating server cultures and collapsing alternate timelines. No more guesting to find a version of Tyria where the battle against Zhaitan's Risen was succeeding when it had failed in your own.

Even in the days of the Megaserver a very late map can give you that 3-man Maw experience you crave.

World bosses lost their power to surprise, weak as it was. Instead of a somewhat randomized "window" in which they might appear they were all issued with a strict schedule. Every quarter of an hour, to the second, a specific major threat would step out from behind the curtain, make a short speech and wait to die. There's a timetable.. More than that, there's a train.

I could go on. For four and a half years, beginning immediately after the perceived failure of the Karka Invasion of Lion's Arch, GW2 has stumbled towards order. The game that exists now, the game many ex-players dislike and avoid, is merely the later stage of the process that has been with us almost from the start.

Like the apocryphal frog who never notices the warming water it may be that those of us who stayed don't realize the trouble we're in. That's not quite how I see it. More likely, I think, the changes most widely reported and condemned seem more onerous, more divisive, less optional, when seen from the outside, than they really are.

Yes, I heard you the last seven hundred times.

Raids, for example, are entirely ignorable in exactly the same way raids have been entirely ignorable in every MMO I have ever played. No-one needs to raid. Most MMO players never raid. Raids stand to core GW2 play as sPvP used to and still does stand. If you played GW2 in 2012 and never felt like you "had" to do sPvP then you can equally play GW2 in 2017 and never feel like you "have" to raid.

Fractals, that infinite hamster wheel of achievement, are equally avoidable. What happens in Fractals stays in Fractals. Don't do them and you will never need to do them.

Ascended armor, the once controversial extra gear tier ANet either said they'd never add or always said they'd add depending who you believe, is a useful but absolutely optional addition. If you do choose to raid you'll need it because raiding is about marginal efficiency. If you WvW it's better to have it than not but only if you WvW seriously, with the whole VOIP and guild-build nine yards.

If you're raiding or WvWing in that manner then getting good is part of the deal you accepted. Everyone else - just chill! There is nothing anywhere else in the game you can't do in Exotics. Frankly, I doubt there's much you can't do in Rares. And you absolutely can WvW in Rares - I have characters doing it all the time - when there's a map call and I'm at the bank in Citadel I go with whoever I happen to be. You don't have to wear pink to fire an Arrow Cart or fix a gate.

Map calls know no color.

Heart of Thorns is an issue. Not having that flag on your account is a limiter, there's no denying. There's still a lot you can do without HoT but ANet's clear intent is to tie most new content to ownership of the expansion even when the content doesn't happen there.

After nearly five years, though, it hardly seems unreasonable to ask people who want to do anything more than dabble in the game to pony up just once more. Or, indeed, just once if it really is the first time.

And contrary to what you may have heard, Heart of Thorns is good. It's beautiful, it's content rich, it's varied and above all it's fun. It never was anywhere even close to being as "challenging" as the reviews suggested but what little added difficulty it ever offered has long since been nerfed into history.

I've been wearing this outfit since 2012 and I see no reason to change.

Masteries are mostly soloable and enjoyable to collect. The big events mostly run regularly and successfully even now, something that still surprises me. If you prefer to potter and wander and explore, though, then the Heart of Maguuma is your playground. And gliding in Verdant Brink is worth the price of entry on its own.

So, the game absolutely isn't what it was, or what they promised it would be, but then, when was it? That time was so short it seems like a dream. If I hadn't recorded how it was back then I'd scarcely believe it ever happened.

All MMOs change, at least while they live. GW2 has changed, for the worse and for the better. Whether it's shifted further, either way, than any other MMO I've played I somewhat doubt, although, maybe, it stumbled and lurched a little more along the way, trying to get there. I'm pretty sure it did that.

I wouldn't let what it's become stop me enjoying what remains of what it used to be, though. There's plenty left. And more besides.

Are We Nearly There Yet? : GW2, EQ2

The final Heart of Thorns beta arrives this coming weekend. I'll be skipping it for several  reasons. Firstly I'm working all day Saturday and flying to Bilbao on Sunday morning so I don't have time. Secondly, "due to large back-end changes to core systems that have corrupted some of the beta data" we will have to make new characters.

Well, they can forget that. Making a character in this beta test is a pain. Not only do you have to go through the entire regular character creation process, you have to unpack reams of equipment that fill your bags and then sort it all out along with your traits and skills and so on. I did it once but once was enough, which is why so far the only elite class specialization I've seen is the Elementalist.

Even if you were able to summon up the willpower to push through that barrier there's another right behind it: "Beta characters will begin by playing through a brief shared battle in the Silverwastes that leads into the expansion jungle region, followed by the intro story step of the expansion." That puts a very final cap on any passing fancy I might have had about trying, say, the new Druid elite spec.

I've done it once already, during the first beta weekend, and although it was not actively unpleasant I wouldn't call it fun. It was an obstacle placed in my way before I could get on with what I wanted to do. Leave aside the sheer futility of doing the thing a second time for a two-day beta that I could, at most, log into for no more than a few hours, I'm not looking forward, at all, to doing that first personal story step for a second time even when the expansion finally rolls around.  Again, once was more than enough.

It isn't that I'm unwilling to follow the storyline or that I'm not interested in what's happening to Destiny's Edge and the rest of The Pact as they make a Bay of Pigs Ear of dealing with Mordremoth. I just want control of my characters, freedom of action and the ability to make my own choices about how to spend my time when I log into the game. Don't make me jump through hoops just to get started.

Contrary to my usual position, which is that everything is better when it's character-based, I really hope the "personal story" turns out to be account-based this time around. It's bad enough when an MMORPG like FFXIV locks every progression step behind compulsory story arcs and cut scenes but at least there you can play every class on the same character so most people will only need to do it all once.

GW2 is a game of alts, much more so than most MMOs I've played. My guess is that most people have several characters that they play regularly. Just sticking to the account that's HoT-enabled and adding in the Revenant to come, I have nine characters on the go. Imagine having to play through the whole Personal Story nine times just to get through the four new maps! Not saying that's for sure what will happen but it's my worst-case, nightmare scenario.

I'll gladly forego seeing any minor narrative deviations based on class or race just to get the thing out of the way in a single run. Really, at the very least there should be a "skip this stage" button. I'd happily accept no rewards for eight of my team in return for the option to opt out of doing the whole thing nine times.

The presence of the new Personal Story is interesting in itself. People in map chat yesterday were confidently discussing what might happen in Living Story 3 but as far as I can tell no-one at ArenaNet has confirmed there is even going to be a third season. Other than the aforementioned intent to fix WvW, the developers' attention post-HoT appears to be focused firmly on producing Raids.

Ravious, in his overview of the weekend's Twitch streams, reports that it was suggested ANet "could get up to 6 raid wings a year", and there is certainly some suggestion that Raids are where the ongoing storyline will progress. With that and the set storyline taking place in the new Personal Story is there even room (or resource) for another narrative arc on a biweekly cadence?

My enthusiasm for Heart of thorns waxes and wanes. I like the look of some of the class elites. I enjoyed what little I tried of gliding. The Mastery system looks familiar and the mechanics fall well within my comfort zone. New maps to explore are always better than no new maps to explore even if there aren't as many as I'd like, they're not my choice of biome and they're awkward to navigate. The changes to WvW look ok on paper although I would like to have had the chance to experience them in person.

All in all I feel confident there's more than enough to justify buying the thing and giving it a few weeks of my time. On the other hand, there looks to be a lot of slog or grind or busy-work; choose your label. The process for crafting Precursors for Legendary Weapons, for example, follows the now-familiar "it goes to 11" approach to questing (and yes, call them what you will, these are quests). I've been opting out of Epic Weapon quests almost as long as I've been playing MMOs and I see nothing here that's likely to make me re-assess that policy now.

Then there's the "housing". The personal version would need another buttock to make it to half-arsed but Guild Halls look to have a bit more to them. We still haven't heard much in the way of hard detail on how they'll work though. I'm particularly interested, not to say concerned, over how small guilds fit into the picture. As the co-leader of a guild with three active members, one of whom plays regularly but only for two or three hours a week, I find it hard to imagine the format can be stretched sufficiently widely to include us. It would be nice to be proved wrong but I'm not counting on it.

Add in raids and that's three quite significant paths through the Heart of Thorns journey that I'm unlikely to find myself traveling. Still, that's not far from par for the course when it comes to MMO expansions. It's been a long while since I used more than half of the content in any of them - if indeed I ever have.

I didn't actually sit down this afternoon to write about HoT. I was going to explore a little of the pre-expansion content for EQ2, which I've been very much enjoying these last few days. The full reveal for that as-yet unnamed addition to the game comes on Thursday. It won't be until then that I'll be able to judge just how much of it will be useful to me but I have already decided to pre-order it, sight unseen.

One thing SOE/DBG have done with the last few expansions is open out all content to everyone. Rather than lock the storyline behind full-group dungeons or raids they've created a full range of options, using the same zones and story in solo, duo, group and raid settings. It's an excellent solution for an aging game with a smaller, more fractured population but really, why wait until then? A little bit more accessibility wouldn't hurt sales even in a flourishing MMO, I'd have thought.

As it stands right now I'm considerably more excited about the EQ2 expansion than Heart of Thorns, for reasons I might get around to discussing tomorrow. That might all change, when we learn more about what's in it, just as learning a lot more detail of what's coming with HoT slowly warmed me up to that one.

In the end, though, as Syp was saying a while back, I'm just glad expansions are back in fashion. Good, bad or indifferent, I'd always rather have one than not.

Better the Beta You Know: GW2, EQ2

I bought Guild Wars 2 this week, a game that doesn't yet exist. Spinks think this demonstrates poor organizational skills on my part. Ravious put his hand in his pocket but he's a little concerned about where we might end up if a precedent is set. Just to give a little perspective, I was chatting with someone at work yesterday who told me that he and his girlfriend are going to see Michael MacIntyre in August. They bought the tickets last August. Paying for things that don't yet exist is not something ArenaNet just invented.

As I've said before, how we pay for MMOs is quite possibly the single least interesting aspect of the entire MMO phenomenon. We're all adults. We can spend our money how we like (although if it genuinely makes a meaningful difference to your household economy whether you spend £50 on a video game this month or in three month's time it's entirely possible you shouldn't be spending it on a video game in the first place, but then, hey, I'm not your dad so knock yourself out!). No, the part of the discussion that spun out of this which interested me was whether or not beta access counts a "benefit" to players.

So, crabs again?

I've done a lot of MMO betas. My first was Anarchy Online, for which they sent me the client in the post, on CDRom. I still have it somewhere. I spent most of a week trying to install it. Never got it to run but that didn't stop me buying the game when it came out, when it still didn't run. Anarchy Online remains the benchmark for the worst MMO launch ever. I think it was three months before they actually charged anyone a subscription because that's how long it took before the game was playable.

From then on I applied for pretty much every MMO beta and got into plenty. A surprising number of my fondest, most lapidary memories of a dozen years spent trekking through virtual worlds come from betas. The thrill of using a jet-pack in Endless Ages (still the best flight experience I've had in an MMO); seeing the Capryni scatter as they scented a prowling Gingo in Ryzom;  riding into Lomshir for the first time in Vanguard.

And the bugs. My god, the bugs. Pushing through a gap in geometry to break into someone's house in Endless Ages and not being able to get out again (that was a re-roll). Falling for fatal damage every time I even passed close to a griffin tower in EQ2.  The plain unplayable lag in Rubies of Eventide, Horizons, EQ2, Vanguard... well, every beta ever at some point, come to think of it.

Waiting for the end of the world

This is where I should make a confession. I really like bugs in MMOs. I see them as content. I've probably had almost as much fun out of bugs over the years as gameplay, which is partly why EQ2 Test was my home server for more than five years. I like finding bugs and I like reporting them. I've had everything up to and including all my characters vanishing from bugs and while I get as annoyed as anyone would when I can't do what I was planning, dealing with a funny, odd or flat-out game-breaking bug sometimes turns out to be a lot more involving and thought-provoking than whatever I had in mind. It's true dynamic content.

 A huge part of the interest in playing MMOs for me has always come from trying to understand how they work. It's one reason I don't like tutorials much. I like to observe, gather data and test hypotheses while playing. I like it best of all if I'm never quite sure, even after extensive research, what the hell is going on. Bugs open up the cover so you can see the gears whirr and betas pull back the curtain so you can see backstage. More than that, you can chat to the stage manager, the make-up artist and the props team. A good beta will offer multiple channels of communication with the developers, from ad hoc in game chats through organized content testing to lengthy forum discussions. It's not one-way traffic, either. In a good beta you have a real chance to influence the detail, even the direction of the game you eventually hope to play. I've seen countless changes made in good betas as a result of player feedback (and countless more ignored but, hey...)

Wonder if woodworkers get a scratching-post recipe?

That's a good beta. A bad beta is one where nothing you say, nothing anyone says, seems to be getting through to anyone that cares. Where feedback is ignored, issues glossed over or there's always a "miracle patch" just round the corner. I'd name names but the NDAs for betas like that never end. (The only genuine miracle patch I ever saw was in the final week or thereabouts of EQ2 beta when, after a month of game-breaking, unplayable rubber-banding lag and innumerable fiddle-faddling changes to changes to changes that had just about everyone playing believing the launch should be delayed at least another three months, we logged in one day to a lag-free, reasonably smooth, certainly fit-for-launch MMO. They said they had one last patch that would fix most of the major problems and they really did. Of course it didn't address any of the gaping holes in the underlying design - Scott Hartsman had to come in and start on that six months later, but you can't have everything. At least it ran! )

Mandatory letterbox format preserved for disbelieving future generations

Then there's the opportunity to say "I was there", although that can be a very bittersweet experience. Some MMOs I've beta tested have been more to my taste at some point before launch than they ever managed afterwards. It can be a little galling to remember that the game you're playing not only could have been better but was. I'd rather know, though, than not know.

And finally there's the end. The day it all stops. Sometimes the server just closes and re-opens as "Open Beta" the next day and it's all a bit of an anticlimax, but often there's a big party, or an apocalypse. My favorite beta memory ever comes from EQ2. Everyone gathered at the Claymore in Antonica for a party before the world came down but right at the very end, just before the countdown started, I decided to go into the great dark in my own Inn room, just me and my cat. I just made it back in time to sit on my bed and then the world ended. You just can't buy that.

Boom, out go the lights.

Oh, wait, now you can! That's where we came in. Will GW2 beta weekends have any of the benefits I'm gushing over? You wouldn't think so. They will be totally nonexclusive, open to all for the payment of a fee. They'll be isolated weekends, not a continuum. It's unlikely that a community will have a chance to develop (a beta community can be a very different beast from a Live one). Above all, people will have paid to be there and will have entitlement issues off the scale compared to those normally seen in betas (not that those aren't often ridiculous in themselves).

These weekends will probably be much more like the marketing-led Open Betas MMOs throw out like chum to bring in the fish they hope to land at launch. But maybe not. Rift's beta weekends were proper betas, even at the end when they were letting everyone in. Every single Rift beta weekend was arguably more entertaining than any weekend post-launch. Any way up, I'm happy to have the opportunity, even if I did have to pay for it. It's money I would have spent in any event and it will buy fun I otherwise wouldn't have had.

I'd have preferred to have gotten into the closed beta, all the same.