EverQuest Legends, Stars Reach And Valheim Battle It Out. GW3 Watches From The Sidelines.

There's been a flurry of announcements concerning Games Of Interest of late and I haven't found time to talk about most of them yet. Today's the day! Here's a Grab Bag of upcoming launches and what-not.

EverQuest Legends

Last to be announced, first to market. We're so used to hype cycles lasting years that a four-month arc from the opening announcement to the game going live seems almost indecent. 

To recap, this is the version of EverQuest you can solo. There's more to it but that's the USP. It was clearly inspired by the success of an unsanctioned, rogue EverQuest server by the name of The Heroes Journey whose USP was... ah, you guessed!

That one was so successful it made the mistake of making money so EG7/Daybreak took the developers to court, where a $3.5m settlement was agreed. The THJ devs toddled off to make their own game, Hollowed Oath, without the borrowed IP and assets and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, having pulled in $166k on a Kickstarter .

Meanwhile, Daybreak farmed the idea out to a company called Game Jawn, which I believe is run by some of the people behind the Officially Sanctioned, Not A Rogue Server At All legacy project, Quarm.  With the whole thing neatly formalized and codified under the catchy, if recycled, title EverQuest Legends, everyone who would have liked to play on The Heroes Journey but felt too uncomfortable about the dubious provenance can now feel happy they're giving their money to the right people. 

EQL, as I'm sure we'll end up calling it, is a bit more than just a retro server. Although it will start back in 1999, the devs, who are entirely different people from those currently running and writing for EQ itself, promise "it will evolve separately with its own lore and timeline...have its own spin on classic zones and will also add never-before-seen content.”

 The game will be on Steam and you can have it for an upfront payment of  $19.99, followed by $10 a month in subs. You do, of course, get the first month in that box fee but sadly, since Game Jawn is entirely separate from Daybreak, your All Access sub won't get you in. 

You can give Game Jawn your money right now, if you want. The game goes live on July 28 but you can pre-order. 

That gets you guaranteed access to the beta "on or about July 1", which puzzles me a little. The beta will close on July 21 so pre-ordering gives you just three weeks to try out the game, after which your character and all your progress will be wiped and you'll have to start over from scratch another week later. 

For regular MMORPGs, where there's some form of competitive raid structure, some people find this sort of thing an attractive prospect so they can learn the strats and get ahead of everyone else come launch day. For a game that's selling itself on its solo-friendliness, though, one where "even a solo player can build a character strong enough to take on the toughest challenges and acquire the most epic gear in the game", those three weeks seem like a bit of a waste of time and effort. 

I guess there will be achievements, maybe? World firsts and that sort of thing. Although it won't be very authentically old-school EQ if there are. Still, it's supposed to be a modern take on the old game...

I'm still undecided about whether to bother with EQL. I don't want to play it. I don't have time to play it. I've already seen just about all there is to see in the first half-dozen expansions so until they start adding new, original zones, there wouldn't be a lot of point. 

On the other hand, I feel I ought at least to check it out and so I can write about it a little. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Rather the opposite, in fact, for both the playing and the writing. If I do, it'll be more out of a sense of duty than with any enthusiasm, although duty to what or whom, I couldn't say. 

And I very definitely don't want to pay a sub for it, that's for damn sure. A one-off box price of $20 I can rationalize but an ongoing, monthly subscription? I think not. It'll be one month and out, if at all.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds' sandbox MMORPG set in space is coming to Early Access "this summer". A bit vague, I know, but at least they have a window. They also have a trailer. Want to see it?

It's... alright. Not terrible. The character animations look wonky but it's pretty enough. Doesn't make the game look very exciting, though, does it? Or interesting. Or new. 

It looks as though Early Access will be free to play although you can, of course, buy supporter packs. Or will be able to. Wilhelm has all the details. In fact, he has everything you need to know about the whole thing so I suggest you pop over to his place and get yourself up to speed there, if you need to.

All I'm going to do here is editorialize. I've played some Stars Reach. It's okay if you like that sort of thing although I'm pretty sure there are better options. No Man's Sky gets brought up a lot in conversations but I haven't played that so I can't comment on the similarities.  

What I can say is that Stars Reach is dull. It all works but none of it is much fun. "Worthy" is a word that keeps popping into my head when I try to write about it. "Bored" is the one that pops up when I play. 

There's not much of a game there, that's the biggest problem. It's a fairly pure sandbox so you need to make your own entertainment and the tools for that are limited. It could use some kind of spine like all the crafting/survival games have and it hasn't got one. Without one, it kind of flops around, limply. As it would.

There's been some speculation about why they're going public just now. Money drying up is one obvious possibility but my suspicion is that they just can't get enough people through the doors any other way to maintain a meaningful test population. 

That's not guesswork. HeartlessGamer said in the comments at TAGN that Playable Worlds has admitted as much on reddit. There's numerical evidence, too. The only way you can play the Stars Reach alpha has always been through Steam so we have exact numbers and concurrent population has been in single figures for months. 

The peak player count this year was 32. Average concurrency peaked at 7 in March and now it's less than half that. No-one wants to play any more. Actually, if you look back, hardly anyone ever did. The all-time peak was well below 200 players online at the same time.

I asked yesterday who Neverness To Everness was for. That game had thirty million pre-registrations. Stars Reach has one person online as I write and a 24-hour peak of four. 

Who is Stars Reach for? I guess we'll find out this summer.

Guild Wars 3

Here's an announcement I did find the time to cover. I'm not going over all that again but I will say something about how the news affects the other Guild Wars titles and particularly Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, like Daybreak, is in an interesting and somewhat fortunate position. They've been through this before. They've seen what happens to an existing playerbase when you launch a second title in direct competition with yourself. They each have that experience to draw on, now they come to launch a third. (Or in Daybreak's case a fourth. Never forget EQOA.)

First time around, the two companies took very different tacks. ANet mothballed Guild Wars the moment GW2 arrived. They shunted it straight to maintenance mode and stopped developing it at all. Daybreak (Or SOE as it was at the time, of course.) did the exact opposite, running EQ and EQII in tandem, continuing to develop them both pretty much equally.

ANet now seem to believe that was the better choice, although Colin Johansen inexplicably spins the idea that they're going to support new and old titles as "not the norm" whereas I'd say deciding not to was the exception.They've already begun to take GW1 out of mothballs and they're promising development will continue on GW2 as before. They know they need to get out there and assure the people paying their bills right now that it's worth carrying on for the next couple of years because a lot of them, like Azuriel, will be questioning whether it's likely to be worth it. 

Colin Johanson is suggesting it's just a blip. There'll be a short hiatus in new content as they go back and tidy up all the bugs, then everything will get back to normal, with annual  expansions and whatever else it is they've been doing since I last played a few years ago.

I am, to be polite, skeptical. In the decade I played GW2, one of ANet's defining features was a complete inability to establish either a cadence or a pipeline for supplying content. They kept chopping and changing. They rarely stuck to any of their plans long enough to see if they worked although in most cases it was blindingly obvious they weren't going to, so I suppose they should actually get some credit for dropping them as fast as they did. Just none for coming up with them in the first place.

They frequently floated grandiose frameworks for large-scale changes to the game, changes they then discussed literally for years without implementing any of them, during which time most of the key individuals would move departments or leave the company. If and when any of these plans did finally make it to the game, they'd look nothing like the promises and they'd often wither away and be forgotten almost immediately. World vs World suffered particularly badly in this respect but it hit all parts of the game at times.

And yet, somehow, the game muddled along. It rarely prospered but it didn't fail. GW2 players became inured to frequent content droughts combined with constant churn in all kinds of systems and mechanics and learned to put up with it, albeit very grudgingly. Either that or they left. 

If that's what Colin Johanson means by business as usual (Not the phrase he used but it's the implication.) then I'm willing to believe him. The game was always a shambles when I played. I'm sure it can carry on being a shambles for a bit longer.

The idea that the company that struggled so hard to maintain a steady content flow for a single game will somehow now be able to manage it smoothly and efficiently or three titles is fantasy, though. Unless, I guess, they're planing on hugely expanding the workforce. Are they doing that? And even then, I very much doubt it would help. It'd just be more daft ideas and discussion document than ever.

We'll see how it all pans out in a couple of years time, I guess. My feeling is that if GW3 is a success, GW2 will end up being like GW1 is now, a comfortable niche title that people like enough to feel nostalgic about but mostly don't play. It could still get more content but it might not even need it. GW1 pottered along for a decade and more without any and a few people still played it.

If GW3 bombs or just under-performs, though, we might end up with an EQ/EQII scenario, where the older game holds most of its current audience, while the new one fails to attract another. At that point, I suspect ANet's promises of triple-game development might fall apart quite quickly. 

By then, though, I'll be too old to care. 

Valheim

Valheim is my most-played game on Steam at 385 hours but the last time I logged in was over two years ago. When the game finally leaves Early Access on September 9, will I return? Doubtful.

The further we get from the pandemic, the more certain I am that this was one of the artifacts of that strange time. We all had more hours in the day than we knew what to do with and we weren't always even allowed out of the house. Valheim filled a need.

It also introduced me - and many others, I'm sure - to a whole new genre, the crafting/survival game. I've played a few since and most of them have been better in objective terms than Valheim, which is kind of barebones when you look at it hard.

It was my first, though, and you're always still a little bit in love with your first, aren't you? I'd like to get to the end of Valheim but the the last two biomes were so radically un-enjoyable I don't have much hope for the last one, the Deep North. I imagine it'll be a miserable experience for anyone other than gaming masochists.

At most, I might set all the controls to as easy as possible and have a quick tour around the end zone like I did with the Ashlands. At the moment, though, I can't say I'm even motivated to do that. Valheim was a game of its time and that time has gone.

And that's my bag filled for the day, I think. I have a feeling there may have been some other announcements I was going to attend to (Edit: Like this one.) but I can't remember what they were and I didn't bookmark anything so I think we're done. 

For now. 

There's Something In The Water! There, In The Distance! I can Just Make It Out! It's... It's GW3!

There were other things I had in mind for today's post, things I'm a lot more interested in and that I'd certainly enjoy writing about a lot more, but I suppose I have to write about this now. ArenaNet officially announced Guild Wars 3 at this year's Summer Games Fest. There was a pre-event puff that told us they were going to announce something and some people thought that might be GW3. I was not one of those people. 

Then again, I was also not one of those people who cared all that much what they were going to announce. I was mildly curious but I assumed it would be some new thing for one of the two existing Guild Wars games, neither of which I play and neither of which I plan on playing, either now or in the near or distant future. 

I find myself in a very uncomfortable relationship with the Guild Wars franchise these days, particularly GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played both games together and had some good times over a number of years but, while I remember the original fondly enough, the sequel is problematic. 

We played the original Guild Wars for maybe less than two months, back when it was new. We started a few weeks after launch because at first, like a lot of people, we thought it was a pure PvP game. ArenaNet's soon to become familiar misleading marketing making its presence felt, probably, since that was how it was reported until it launched, when players found out there was a massive PvE component, too.

Six or eight weeks was long enough to complete the original campaign, after which there didn't seem much point staying so we left. I've returned to GW1 a few times since, finished another of the campaigns, seen something of the rest and generally disported myself in an increasingly desultory fashion until I finally lost interest altogether. Mrs Bhagpuss has never gone back.

When Guild Wars 2 was announced, name recognition was enough to have both of us sign up and participate in the beta weekends. The game turned out to be radically different from anything else around at the time and it suited us both very well. We ended up playing for about ten years without a break, from launch in 2012 until after the pandemic. It was Mrs. Bhagpuss's only MMORPG and my main one and it formed the bulk of the content here at Inventory Full for many years. There are more than seven hundred posts here labeled "GW2".

Until today, there was only one post labeled "GW3". Now, I suppose, there will be a lot more. And I'm not very happy about it.

 Mrs Bhagpuss stopped playing GW2 a few years a go. It was her last MMORPG. She still plays video games, just not that kind. I gave it a few more weeks but, as I suspected, the only reason I'd been playing GW2 at all by then was because she did. As a game, I'd been done with it for a while.

I come away from most MMORPGs I've played for any length of time with warm feelings and an occasional desire to pop back in, see my old characters and catch up with what's been happening in the game. Not so GW2. I'm not quite the cliche bitter burnout, who wants to badmouth the game they used to love at every opportunity. It's a good game and I had good times in it. I wish it well.

At least, that's my rational, objective reaction. Emotionally, if I think about my time in the game at all, which I rarely do unless prompted by something like yesterday's announcement, it's with the kind of feelings I imagine people who've escaped from cults experience. Relief at being out. Anger at all that time and emotion wasted. A sense of grievance at having been used. And a dread of being somehow sucked back in.

Okay, that's over-dramatizing it. A little. I feel a bit niggled at the way ArenaNet consistently faffed and fudged and promised far more than they could fulfill. The way for years there was always jam tomorrow but never jam today. The countless revamps and revisions to cadence. The endless promises made and broken. The history of the development of the game is a litany of lurches and swerves, a directionless leadership forever searching for a path that leads somewhere and rarely, if ever, finding one.

My biggest complaint is with the story. For a franchise that claims to be built on lore and narrative, the stories were always thin, sparse and fragmented. Delivery was unreliable and sporadic and when we did get something it was never anything much. Even at the time, because I played other MMORPGs, I knew how meager the pickings were but at the time I did at least believe there was some quality there. 

That was mostly ignorance. Being locked as I was inside the MMORPG ecosystem, all my judgments were necessarily relative. The writing in GW2 was pretty decent - for an MMORPG. Unfortunately, what I wasn't entirely aware of was how degraded the genre is compared to others when it comes to storytelling.

Shouldn't I have known? Well, maybe. The thing is, until around about the time of the pandemic or maybe a bit later, I actively disliked getting any story in my MMORPGs. My motivations for playing are very well described in this post of Yeebo's. Narrative is the least of my concerns. 

In fact, it's something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible. One of the early posts about GW2 here on this blog bemoans ANet's insistence of making everything about the story. Especially about my character's "Personal Story". I really didn't like that concept, not in GW2 or Star Wars: the Old Republic or in any MMORPG that tries it on. To this day, with thousands of hours played in GW2, I have only ever completed the Personal Story on one character and that only under duress. 

The Personal Story wasn't the only core aspect of GW2 that meant nothing to me. The whole Legendary system was something I always loathed, too as was 100% map completion. 

In fact, there were probably more things about GW2 that I disliked than that I liked for the whole time I was there. It's a fiddly, nitpicking, pettifogging, mean-spirited game in so many ways, with check-lists that do their damnedest to bleed all the spontaneity out of exploring and systems cynically designed around making things just awkward enough that players will pay for convenience but not quite so irritating that they'll stop playing altogether.

Many people who've bounced off the game make these kinds of accusations. It has a reputation in that regard. But it has always been able to get by on the things it does well; a huge, exciting, vibrant open world that demands and rewards exploration; superb art direction; free and flowing movement in three dimensions; best-in-genre hot-join group combat... 

Things like that make it an exceptionally easy and rewarding game for in-the-moment play. If you go with the flow and don't let the game dictate to you, you can log in and find yourself effortlessly entertained for hours. It's only when you start to look for direction that it all falls apart. GW2 has some of them most unappealing, linear progression I've trudged through and much of that is down to the turgid, tedious story and the way what little of interest there is in it has to be stretched to make it last as long as possible by way of an interminable series of pointless set-piece fights.

Several years of modern, open-world games with all of GW2's benefits and few if any of its disadvantages, boss fights that last a fun couple of minutes instead of a miserable half an hour chief among them, have painfully demonstrated to me just how limited my horizons were while I was playing ANet's game all those years. I neither deny nor regret the many good times I had there, particularly in World Vs World, an area of the game gloriously free of all narrative structure, but the payoff for the effort involved seems poor.

And so to Guild Wars 3, which is coming in about eighteen months. Or rather the beta is. You can sign up for it now. I have, of course. 

That it's beta they're trumpeting and a long time from now is interesting in itself. No pre-alpha sign-ups. No alpha. And, I'll bet, no Early Access, either. Just a good old-fashioned beta, followed, if precedent serves, by a few open beta weekends and then launch. That'll be refreshing, at least. You can wishlist it on Steam, too, which I've also done because if it's on Steam from the get-go, that's where I'm going to play it. 

And yes I suppose I will play it although I'm very far from keen. It would seem churlish not to at least take a look. I'd say unprofessional only no-one's paying me. 

Since it's coming, like it or not, at this point I could go on to talk about the game itself, speculate what it might be like, start that conversation. But I won't, for a couple of reasons.

The first is we don't actually know anything yet. There's one video and some screenshots, all taken from that same video, which is apparently shot using the engine on which the game will run. There's also an extremely generic mission statement that makes it sound like they're making GW2 again only with modern action combat and a bit of parkour movement thrown in. 

This they call "a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." It sounds like the gacha games we're playing now, to me. 

How fresh that'll seem in 2028, probably the earliest GW3 will go live, remains to be seen. It will probably be a shock to many MMORPG players, those who've stayed inside the stockade these last few years, just like GW2 was a shock back in 2012. That game genuinely did feel so different back then that Anet had to jump in quick to fix it up to feel more familiar for the many curious WoW players that were bouncing off it within minutes of poking their heads in to see what this strange new MMO was all about.

The real reason I'm not going to go into speculation mode, though (You can probably sense me trying to stop myself doing it right now.) is that we've got a sodding year and a half of this ahead of us and I don't want to contribute to the feeding frenzy. All that arguing over things no-one knows. All the fantasies and wishes that turn into promises that were broken before they were even made. It's going to be exhausting.

And I'll be very nearly seventy when the damn game comes out! What if it turns out to be good? What If I end up playing it for as long as I played GW2 and then I find out it really wasn't all that good all along but I just didn't realize because playing it blurred my perspective? Then I'd be eighty and I'd have wasted another decade on a game that was pretty good at times but often not very good at all. 

That doesn't sound like the best use of whatever time I have left, now, does it? Do I really want GW3 to be my last chance at a good MMORPG? If so, the omens aren't good. Just look at the record.

But then, I don't imagine ANet is making games with the gray gaming market in mind. Millennials and GenZ are the target, I'd imagine, since GenAlpha famously doesn't play traditional video games at all. Grab your share of the shrinking market while it's there. It's never going to get any bigger.

And now I need to stop because I'm already slipping into the swamp of speculation. There's going to be a Guild Wars 3 but it's not until next Fall so let's all agree to forget about it until then.

Promise? 

The Legends Of EverQuest - or - Third Time's The Charm?

Has everyone seen Daybreak's Big Announcement? I feel I pretty much have to post something about it, even though I haven't really got much to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

 I guess we should run over what it is first. 

"EverQuest Legends™ (EQL) is a newly reimagined version of classic EverQuest from its original release in 1999. Featuring all the fun magic and nostalgia of the original game, EQL is also packed with tons of new features and quality of life enhancements."

As you would know if you clicked through the link. I'm not really adding much here, am I? That's because there's not much to add. The press release goes on to explain everything in some detail. I can't really do any better than to reproduce the full text. And then maybe I'll nitpick it after. That's kind of what I do here, after all.

 

Let's start with that name: EverQuest Legends. I wonder if anyone involved in the naming process even remembers their history? Once upon a time, in the deep, dark past, there was a server by the name of EverQuest Legends. It was the elite server, where you paid a higher subscription for full-time GM services and some other perks. 

It's extremely difficult to find detailed information on the decades-defunct Legends server today, a task very much not helped by the current frenzy of discussion on the new project that stole shares its name, but with the help of Calishat's invaluable TimeCake app and some creative googling of my own, I eventually managed to track down an interview about it with John "Smed" Smedley from GameSpot in 2002.

Then there was the much better-remembered and hugely easier to research Legends of Norrath, the virtual TCG spin-off that ran for just shy of a decade before closing down for good in 2017. With a legacy of two failed projects using the name, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to lumber the latest with the same burden but then, hey, it's not like the target market is going to be people who played EverQuest back in the day, right?

No, the target market is very clearly the people who used to play on The Hero's Journey emulator, until Daybreak took the operators to court and put them out of business. Plus, of course, the presumably orders of magnitude larger number of potential customers who might very well have played on THJ if they hadn't been too chicken to give their bank details to the people behind what was, at the most favorable interpretation, a gray-market operation. As the MassivelyOP news report suggests, the new Legends service certainly explains why that lawsuit had to happen.

In essence, EverQuest Legends is what a lot of people have been saying they wanted for almost as long as the game has existed: a solo version. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it's taken so long although, with the current fad for ersatz mmorpgs like Erenshor, games that simulate the entire milieu, other players included, maybe the time has finally come.

Thinking of Erenshor does make me wonder why EverQuest Legends needs to be an MMORPG at all. If grouping is entirely optional and group size is limited to four, it seems like it would work equally well as  a co-op game. It wouldn't even have to be online.

That might make it harder to collect a subscription, though. And EverQuest Legends is going to be a subscription game.  I guess if the idea is to re-create the original experience to some degree, a monthly sub would be part of it. 

The first thing I thought, when I saw a sub was required, was whether it would be included in the All Access deal. That's since been clarified and the answer is no. 

It's a completely separate game, running on different servers, operated by a different company, a third-party developer by the name of Game Jawn. (Really, really bad name, by the way. It may fly in Philly but for everyone else it just makes you think "Game Yawn" Not quite the image you'd want to put into the mind of a potential customer.)  

Game Jawn (Seriously? It hurts just to type it out...) is the brainchild of several people who used to code and run EQ emulators. Poachers turned gamekeepers, I guess. Or maybe turned gatekeepers, now they have the official seal of approval. I imagine starting new emulators with hefty rules modifications is going to be a little bit riskier now.

These guys were in the emulator business in the first place because they used to play EQ and didn't like the way it was going, I guess. Now, it appears, they see merit in the progressive relaxation of restrictions that's led to the much easier version of the game that's on the live servers today. Only they're going even further, setting things up so the game can be fully experienced the way lot of people always wished it could - alone.

For once, there's not going to be a long wait to see how it all turns out. Nor will there be a prolonged purgatory of Early Access. EverQuest Legends is set to launch in July and you can send in your application for closed beta right now. 

I just did. I wasn't going to, at least not yet, because I wanted to know if there was an NDA first. I hate being in testing programs I can't talk about here on the blog. But then I clicked the button to get the link for this post and it was literally two or three more clicks to sign up, so what the hell...

That brings up the Really Big Question, namely do I even want to play EverQuest Legends in the first place? Not would I like to blog about it or would I like to check it out but would I want to play it? As in every day, for weeks or months...

Hmm. If this was ten or fifteen years ago then sure, I would. I would have loved a fully soloable version of EverQuest back then. The timing would have been perfect. Now, though? Unlike Stargrace, I'm not so sure.

For one thing, this is going to be Classic EverQuest, albeit with some massive tweaks. It's pre-Kunark, even if you will be able to play an Iksar (Or a Kerran or a Froglok.) right from the start. The thing is, I can already solo that era, on a regular server. 

Anyone can. You just need a mercenary. It's easy and it's fun. I've done it several times. I'm not sure I want to do it again with the twist being no mercenary but a souped-up, multi-classed character and a difficulty slider instead. I mean, sure, yes, I'd want to play around with that for a while but would I want to bed down and take it seriously? 

I kind of doubt it. I suspect that's more likely to appeal to all the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who haven't actually played EQ since it got easy. And even if I did want to play it for more than a minute, would I want to pay for it? 

Maybe the promo trailer will help me decide...
 

Yeah, that's not doing it for me. I'm not sure I want to play that game. It doesn't look great, compared to the other options, does it?

I guess we'll have to wait and see. And I, personally, might have to wait a bit longer, because summer really isn't a great time for gaming in my book. Not unless we get a really bad summer, anyway. I'd rather be outside than sitting indoors in front of a screen. January always seems like the best time to launch a game to me but that's an outlying opinion, based on the evidence.

If I was in the market for an old school, diku-MUD-inspired MMORPG around about then, it most likely wouldn't be a re-tread of an old one, anyway. It'd be more likely to be something like, oh, I don't know, Monsters & Memories, scheduled to go into Early Access in June.

Except, of course, they had problems of their own even before they learned about EQLegends, which must have come as a very unpleasant surprise. The two games would look to be tapping into the same pool of players but Legends clearly has the advantage of huge press coverage and a massive backwash of ex-EverQuest players, most of whom have probably never heard of M&M.

Then again, there's that group thing... Maybe that'll work in M&M's favor...

Remember how everyone always says the reason they keep playing their MMORPG of choice is the community? It's their guild, their friends, the people they've met along the way. That's been the received wisdom for decades. Monsters & Memories, like Pantheon and all the other retro-mmorpgs have been riding that horse into the ground for years. Where does this leave them?

If it really is all about the friends you make, why is everyone apparently so excited about being able to to play the game without any? Or, as several news sites, GameSpot among them, chose to phrase it "No Time Or Friends For An MMO? EverQuest Legends Has A Solution".

If nothing else, it's going to be an interesting test case. Is the gameplay of a classic MMORPG sufficient in itself to sustain long-term interest even without the social bonds that come from forced grouping? And if it is, will people want to pay a monthly fee for that, when so many very similar options exist without one?

Because, without the need for other people, what, really, is the difference between an MMORPG and any open world rpg or survival game?

Well, in EverQuest Legend's case it's immediate access to a pipeline of two and a half decades of proven, tested content, not to mention a semi-installed base running into millions and instant access to gaming news channels merely on mention of your name. More than twenty years after EQ could last claim to have been a big dog, all Daybreak needs to do is bark and the journos come running: PCGamer, Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Rock Paper Shotgun... all of them covered it yesterday, along with many more.

I hope it all pays off for Daybreak. I suspect it will. As Wilhelm pointed out the other day, the front-runner in their financials these days is Palia. It would be nice to see EverQuest back at the top. 

Even if it is on someone else's servers.

Cool Kids Club

Anyone remember when it felt really exciting to get into a beta for an MMORPG? When you had to fill out all kinds of application forms and promise to be a good tester and then you waited and hoped you'd get picked but you knew you probably wouldn't?

I think the first one I ever signed up for must have been Anarchy Online. It was so long ago I had to apply by post. My application was accepted but there was no instant access to testing. They had to mail me the client on CD. I guess I must still have it lying around somewhere, although I haven't seen it for years. No, make that decades.

It was a thrill to make the cut but unfortunately the beta itself was all but unplayable. Then the game launched and I bought it and it was still unplayable. 

It was an infamously bad launch. For a long while, it was the benchmark for how not to launch an MMO but there have been some real stinkers since then so it's probably been forgotten now, if not forgiven.

I was thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. Ashes of Creation and Stars Reach both recently sent me questionnaires to fill out. Short ones mostly asking what I thought of the way the game was going and whether I'd recommend it to friends.

My answers to both were broadly similar, something along the lines of "I think your game is fine. It's just not for me."  The main difference between the two responses was mostly that I told Intrepid Ashes would definitely have been a game I would have played and enjoyed, had it come out seven or eight years ago, when it was supposed to, whereas I told Playable Worlds Stars Reach was most likely never going to be the kind of game I was likely to want to play, or at least not for long.

My motivations for signing up for the two testing programs were very different. I pledged AoC in the Kickstarter because I did want to play it and I picked beta as the earliest affordable entry point. It was going to be the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. 

It took so long to arrive, even in a half-finished form, that by the time they opened the doors, neither of us was interested any more. When I was given entry in Early Access, I played it a bit and quite enjoyed it but I couldn't see much point carrying on. So many other games suit my tastes better these days. I haven't really thought about it since.

For Stars Reach, on the other hand, I only applied to join the alpha because I wanted to write some blog posts about it. I got in. I wrote some posts. It was fun for a short while, as a novelty, but it quickly became repetitive to play and I ran out of things I wanted to say about it. If there was any disappointment involved, it was that I didn't find it as blogworthy as I'd expected.

In both cases I didn't - and don't - feel any motivation to keep logging in to see how things might be developing. I wasn't all that interested and neither, it seemed, were many people who follow this blog. It seemed a bit pointless to keep logging in just to write much the same posts that wouldn't be of any great interest to anybody.

Neither do I feel any obligation to keep on testing. In both cases I paid for access through a Kickstarter so there's not even a moral lien on my time. It's true that I did get into the Stars Reach alpha by application and subsequently got added to the Creator program but I did a reasonable amount of testing and reporting in the closed phase, so I feel like I've done my bit.

As for the cachet of getting into a testing phase for an MMORPG, that whole concept feels very dated now. True, there are hot new games in closed testing that a lot of people would love to have access to but anything really special always has an NDA so you can't - or shouldn't - tell anyone you're in, which makes it hard to bask in the reflected glory. 

Stars Reach had a whiff of that but only a whiff. The circle of people who cared was so small it would have been a very humble brag indeed to boast about getting in. 

The last testing program I remember getting into that felt like something genuinely special, something people would be envious of if they knew about it, was the first round of alpha testing for New World. Unfortunately there was a very strict NDA so I couldn't say anything, not even to let anyone know I was in. Technically, I probably still can't.

I found that exhilarating but also very frustrating. The game itself was like nothing I'd played before (And nothing like the game that eventually launched, for that matter.) and I would have loved to blog about it. By the time I was able to talk about it openly, everyone else was playing it too.

If the allure of testing unreleased games has faded, though, and gaining access has become almost trivial, there are exceptions. It's sod's law that when there's a test I'd really like to get into, for a game I'm very excited about, that's the one that won't have me.

I've applied to every round of testing for Neverness To Everness with no success so far. I strongly suspect the reason is my age. I've filled out each of the lengthy application forms with scrupulous accuracy but when I enter my age the form questions it. 

"You have entered your age as 67. Are you sure that's correct?"

The highest age on the drop-down menu is, if I remember correctly, forty. I am very clearly not the target market for the game and I imagine Hotta isn't all that interested in the opinions of pensioners on how their anime-influenced supernatural urban open-world RPG is coming along.

Ah, well. Never mind. They can't stop me playing it when it comes out. And I bet it'll be finished well before either Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach anyway. 

Dirty Old Town

EverQuest II's Origins/Anashti Sul beta began yesterday. This morning I took a very quick look at it. I'm not intending to spend much time there but I couldn't resist the temptation to remind myself what  Freeport used to be like. Having spent half an hour or so walking the streets of the old city I can sum it up in a couple of words: shabby and inconvenient.

Before I get to the details, I'd just like to complement Darkpaw on the beta process itself, which is exemplary. I haven't bothered with an EQII beta in a long time, one of the reasons being that it used to be something of a pain installing the client. I remember it involved a lot of fiddling around to get it working and that switching back and forth between beta and Live could be awkward. 

Not any more. It could scarcely be simpler. There's a drop-down menu on the launcher. You just open it, select the server "Version" you want from a choice of four (US English, EU English, Beta, Public Test), apply your selection and that's it. The patcher sets up a separate installation in your EQII folder. It holds the unique data and it uses the same common data as your regular install, so there's no need for an entire duplicate client, which was one of the things that used to put me off. 

When you want to switch from one version to another, you just re-select your preference and everything is done for you. It's flawless and fast.

Am I the first to arrive?

The same can't quite be said for my trip to Freeport but it wasn't too much of an inconvenience. First I had to make a character. That didn't take long. I knew I wouldn't be playing her for long so there was no point in trying to make her look perfect. And ratongas tend to look pretty decent whatever you do with them, anyway. Unlike gnomes. Or most other races in EQII, come to that.

Speaking of gnomes, the captain of the Far Journey can't tell the difference between gnomes and ratongas. All "shorties" look alike to him, apparently, although he doesn't exactly come right out and say it. It's a weird moment, presumably unintentional, possibly related to the game not recognizing player races correctly and it would most likely have gone unremarked in 2004 but it struck me as quite uncomfortable in 2024. 

Of course, the Far Journey Tutorial was re-instated in the live game several years ago, so this may not even be anything specific to the Origins project. I don't think I'm quite curious enough to make a new ratonga on Live and see if it happens there, too, but I might submit a feedback report to the beta team.

I didn't really want to play through the tutorial yet again but by the time it occured to me to wonder if there was a way to skip it, I was in the middle of it anyway so I just carried on. Fortunately, the Origins build does allow you to opt out of all the Isle of Refuge content, something I'm pretty sure you couldn't do at release. I'm not sure when that option was added so I can't say if it's authentic to the 2006 game.

That doesn't look safe...

If not, then I'm very surprised it got left in. The rule of thumb for the upcoming server would appear to be: if it counts as a "Quality of Life" improvement, take it out. After a while it became so obvious that was what they'd done, I started to think more generally about how these retro servers work. 

It's bizarre, once you look at it objectively. The PR for every Old School or Vanilla or Classic server in every MMORPG always goes hard on authenticity, the idea being that by playing there you'll somehow come closer to the ur-version of the game: clean, pure, unsullied by commerce, undiluted by compromise, somehow real in a way the modern game can never be.

What that generally translates to in practice is the removal of most of the changes that players, specifically those who played during the era that's being - faultily - replicated, lobbied long and hard to bring to the game in the first place. While devs often make changes players didn't ask for, those rarely involve things like adding more convenient travel options or reducing loading times.

Old East Freeport. Unfriendly and unkempt.

New East Freeport: Urban renewal and civic pride.

As I was walking around Freeport, looking at but not really admiring the city the way it used to be, I kept running up against things that made my progress slower, more awkward, less fluent. The most striking example was the return of closed gates between each district. Not just the Neighborhoods, which have always required a zone transition, but the cardinal quarters of the city itself.

Each of those districts is now a separate zone once more but the inconvenience goes further. I'd forgotten that none of the internal "Bells", like the one you can click on in West Freeport to go to North Freeport, for example, existed in the original game. I don't know when they were added but it must have been after 2006. 

Even the spiral staircase that takes you from North Freeport to the East Freeport docks has been seamlessly removed. I ran down there, looking to take a short cut, and found myself staring at a dead end. Now that I cast my mind back, I have a vague memory of that stairwell being added at some stage and having to learn to remember to use it. Now I guess I'll have to learn not to.

Other missing conveniences I noticed included missing vendors all over the place. The woman who stands in the corner of the East Freeport bank, to whom I always sell my status items, for example, is nowhere to be seen. Then again, neither is the banker. There is no bank in  East Freeport any more.

I was somewhat surprised to find all the crafting tables are still in the above-ground crafting building in West Freeport. I half-expected we'd be sent back down underground to the crafting instance in the basement. Things don't seem to have gone quite that far but I suspect that's where everyone will end up anyway because there's no broker or anyone to hand out writs or even sell fuel upstairs now.

In fact, if there's any convenience you've become used to in the last ten or fifteen years, I recommend you forget it. It's not going to be there. It feels surreally ironic to realise that the new server will require a subscription to play but for your money you'll be denied access not just to all the in-game conveniences but also to some of the best perks the sub is meant to give you, like instant travel to any portal on the map. 

Old North Freeport - more gargoyles, more firepots, more water-damage

New North Freeport: more mages, more gilt, better paving.

If you think about the popularity of both Classic and Hardcore servers, where more and more options are removed to make the experience more compelling, maybe the ultimate in authenticity would be a server where you'd pay money not to be allowed to log in at all. The terrifying thing is, you know if any developer added something like that, even as a joke, someone would pay for it. And then complain that they hadn't got their money's worth because they could still see the server's name in the list.

I can't really make fun of such people. I mean, I re-subscribed to World of Warcraft just to play Classic and I will surely be making a character to play on Anashti Sul, as soon as the doors open in June. I can't say, though, that the appeal for me lies in the removal of all those basic improvements we were so pleased to see added to the game in the first place.

Neither am I crazy about returning to the original Freeport, now I've been reminded what it was like. It's not just the inconvenience. It's the way it looks, too. I remember now how often the Overlord's city was criticized for its appearance back in the early days. People complained it was dull and tired and nothing like what you'd expect a tyrant of Lord Lucan's pomp and arrogance to call home.

The problem lies in both the textures and the design. If the intention was to suggest a great city worn down by decades of chaos and war, it hasn't entirely succeeded. It looks more like somewhere that used to be important until the trade routes moved elsewhere and which now can barely raise enough taxes to keep the streets clean. There are even pigs wandering around as if Freeport was some market town that couldn't afford to keep its fences in order, not the greatest seaport in the nation.

If you're gonna eat 'em, don't give 'em names.

By contrast, the Freeport that replaced it looks elegant, austere and foreboding. No-one would doubt its military might or its economic power. It's colorful and almost pleasant in parts. You could imagine Lucan's fraternal despots staying on for a few days after a summit, just to enjoy the sea air and the public executions.

The new Freeport is also much busier. There are people everywhere; no wandering pigs to be seen. In part it's that plenty of NPCs have been added to provide services but there are also more citizens just standing around. The older Freeport looks half-empty by comparison, as though anything worth doing must be happening somewhere else.

And yet, Old Freeport does have an atmosphere, downbeat and depressing as it is. The wandering pigs may make it feel as though the city's glory days are long gone but it's still nice to see Lord Oinkles again. I even thought I heard a few insults I hadn't heard in a long time as I jogged through the backstreets. I wouldn't swap the old for the new but it's good to come back for a visit, if only to see how much better everything is today.

And that's about as much as I'm going to say about it for now. I could go on to talk about the Neighborhoods, several of which I visited today, but I'll save that for when the server goes live in a few weeks. 

I'll also save my thoughts about what it's going to be like to level up in an environment like this for later, too. I'll just throw this out there as something to consider, in case you're thinking of playing: if you'd find it humiliating to be chased out of a zone by a Level 3 spiderling, you might want to re-consider your options...

Anashti Sul or She Who Could Not Be Destroyed

As time creeps forward and the mists begin to clear, Darkpaw's plans for the upcoming EverQuest II "Origins" server are slowly starting to take shape and they're... interesting. Yesterday, an outline schematic appeared on the official website and among the general information you might have expected for any forthcoming special rules server were some unusual and curious details.

Let's start with the beta. Daybreak has long been big on betas for everything from major updates to full expansions, so it's not particularly surprising to hear there's going to be one for the new server. The whole beta process is so routine now, there's a permanent Beta server waiting to be populated with whatever new code needs testing and a relatively straightforward process for players to participate.

What is notable in this case is the extent of the beta. At six weeks, it's edging towards the length normally reserved for annual expansions. That's a serious beta, as the bullet point list acknowledges:

• There will be a 6-week Beta to ensure we cover a wide breadth of testing.

Indeed, serious seems to be the keyword for this event. By far the most unexpected revelation in the announcement is the news that the server will operate on its own "design depot".

That didn't have much of an immediate impact on me because I have never heard the term before and had no idea what it might mean. Google was no help, pointing me towards any number of disparate businesses trading under the name. I suspect it's a piece of purely internal jargon used at Darkpaw or Daybreak or even EG7 but nowhere else.

Luckily, whoever wrote the announcement thought to include a brief but fairly clear gloss:

• It cannot be affected by Live design updates, and vice versa.

It appears a design depot isn't just an offshoot of the Live game running on a separate server with a different ruleset, the way all Time Limited Expansions and special projects have worked until now. It's almost (But crucially not quite.) a standalone game. 

• Code and Art are still across all server types, for a variety of reasons. For example, connections to external or shared resources such as Database, Authentication, etc. have completely changed over the years.

That deserves some unpacking. And a little speculation. Firstly, there's no real reason to provide that much detail in the context of this announcement, other than to try to head off the inevitable complaints that the new server isn't separate enough from the main game. 

EQII players, by and large, tend to be traditionalists but a significant and vocal minority are positively luddite. They tend to think whatever they had before was better, just because it came first. No matter how far the clock rolls back it won't be far enough for some of them, so it makes sense to get the rebuttals out there ahead of the attacks. 

For once, I do wonder if there isn't something more going on behind the upfront explanation than mere defensive positioning. There's just a slight suggestion of frustration in the phrasing, a sense that whoever set this up would have liked to go further but had to stop a little way back from where they wanted because they'd run up against technical issues they weren't able to overcome. 

It makes me wonder whether there might be a few regrets that no-one thought more about the game's past when they were framing its future. Players may not be the only ones who sometimes wish they could go back to their glory days. Assuming EQII ever had any glory days, that is...

Then there's the confirmation that this has never been done before:

• This is the first time for this type of separation for EverQuest II

Doesn't that make you wonder why it's being done now? It does me. If it wasn't deemed necessary to silo the previous TLE servers as securely as this, what's changed? Is it simply a case of the technology having moved on, making this a viable option when perhaps before it would have been too difficult or too expensive? Or is required to sustain a different pattern of development altogether, one that requires more strict segregation to minimize any risk of contamination?

When the project was first announced I somewhat flippantly described it as Darkpaw's response to the success of WoW Classic. Now I think that might actually be what they have in mind.

SOE, followed by Daybreak, pretty much invented the retro-server concept. They iterated on it until it became a major money-maker and a popular success but it took Blizzard, finally caving and copying the format, to show just how big a deal it could be. Classic's success made it clear that sailing as close as possible to the authentic past could grab the attention of literally millions of ex-players. People who used to play WoW "when it was good". 

I get the feeling Darkpaw's new server, which they've tellingly named Anashti Sul, the misunderstood goddess of death and resurrection, is intended to be something much more than just another version of the familiar format. By taking a number of extra steps to recreate as closely as they're able not just the general feel but the very specific ambience and gameplay of the original game, it looks like they're making a bid for more than just the usual suspects, the crowd who turn up for every new TLE server, play for a month or two, then leave.

What I'm suggesting is that this seems like an awful lot of extra work to take on, just for an Anniversary event. It seems a lot more like something you'd do if you were hoping to start a whole, new, separate strand of the business. Something like WoW Classic or Old School Runequest. 

Whether it'll work is another matter. I suspect the demographic that fueled the success of those two retro-spin-offs simply doesn't exist for EQII. It never had the numbers of either of those mega-successful titles and it's more than likely that most people who ever cared to come back to EQII have already done so, probably more than once. 

Even so, I'd lay odds Anashti Sul will have a bigger opening than just about any previous EQII retro-server. It does look like it's going to be genuinely different to anything we've seen before. A number of significant changes that haven't been applied to any previous Progression or TLE server are part of the package this time. 

For example, there's a return to secondary functions for base stats. I'd actually forgotten they ever had them, largely because it's not my kind of thing. Still, I instantly remembered what it used to be like when I read:

• Attributes have restored secondary functionality, agility will help avoid melee attacks, intelligence will increase ability potency, strength will increase melee damage, and wisdom will grant extra resistance.

It's not just a detail, either. It's a signifier. It's flagging up the importance to many players of the necessity for a certain kind of mindful choice in gameplay, while tacitly acknowledging that, while the current Live game may be ferociously complicated in many ways, it isn't necessarily as thoughtfully complex as it once was.

I'm not much of a one for min-maxing stats so the thought of being able to passively dodge some damage by having a few more points of Agility doesn't fire my enthusiasm a whole lot. I'm much more excited by this:

• Freeport and Qeynos are back to old school, in both appearance and functionality. Livable neighborhoods, and their quests, are back!

At one time, this would have been huge news but we already had the Neighborhoods returned to us a while ago, which does blunt a little of the impact. They didn't come with all of the quests, though, and I'm not sure we were able to live in them. That's going to be a trip.

As for the starting city revamps being rolled back, I'd completely forgotten Qeynos ever even had one. I'm curious to know what changed because I have no memory of it at all.

Freeport, though; that I do remember. I even wrote about it here, in the very early days of the blog. That was over a dozen years ago and quite honestly I can't remember what Freeport looked like back then although, reading that post, it's beginning to come back to me. I certainly remember the old Blood Haze Inn as it was in that screenshot.

On the flip side of what's coming back is what's staying the hell away, something that seemed even more important to some folks on the forums as I scanned them yesterday. It's a revealing set of negatives. 

No Krono means no way to buy influence or progress with real money, I suppose. It should also stop inflation from getting out of hand too quickly. Coupled with a "very limited" cash shop, it's probably as close as Accounting will let them get to the authentic in-game economy c. 2006.

No persistent instances means every dungeon run has to be completed in real time (Or at least that's what I think it means...). On Live you get a timer, generally three days, during which the server saves the state of the instance so you can go in and out to resupply or take a break as you feel like it. Now if you leave, all your progress will be lost and you'll have to start over from scratch. I'm a bit vague on why we want that but it's certainly how things worked back in the day.

No spell research means no offline upgrades. If you want the next quality level of a spell you'll have to make, buy or find it and scribe it in game. I hope it also means Adept and Master spell books will drop off mobs again or things could get awkward.

Those are what you might call the "Positive Negatives". Then there are the Negative Negatives, at least one of which I don't quite get.

No weight means coin and items will not cause encumbrance. The interesting thing there is that the devs apparently wanted to bring the mechanic back but weren't able to for technical reasons. It's scary sometimes to think what some people consider fun, isn't it?

No tradeskill combines is a huge positive to me but I've already seen people moaning about it on the forums. There's a borderline-sociopathic subset of EQII vets that considers the game's original crafting set-up to have been near-perfect. I just hope none of them hold office anywhere. 

Luckily, the delusion isn't held by anyone at Darkpaw with authority to make it happen so Anashti Sul will use the crafting system as it was immediately after sub-combines were removed, which was also before the addition of pretty much all the crafting quests. Get ready to spend a lot of time at the tables.

No holiday events. This is the one that puzzles me. I can absolutely see why the purebred server won't want to share current holidays with the mongrel hordes of Live and TLE but surely it's going to want the original holidays as and when they arrive? It's not as though they wouldn't be in keeping with the premise of the server. Anashti Sul is bench-marked as "reflective of the 2006 era" and the first Frostfell was in 2005. 

If we're really not going to get even the original events, I can only imagine it's because they've proved impossible restore to their original form. It's going to make for a pretty bleak experience after a while, though, if there literally aren't any holidays. After all, Norrath pretty much runs on egg nog and pumpkin pie...

There's more but those are the highlights. I confess I'm feeling quite jazzed  for this. It looks like it could be quite an event.

I may even be keen enough to make a beta character, just to see the sights a few weeks early. If so, you can count on a photo essay here, assuming there's no NDA. I'll probably hold off until the official launch in June, though. 

It's not that long to wait. Is it?

 

Note: All screenshots taken on the final day of the original EQII beta in 2004.  Complete with original letterbox framing.

Once Human Beta 3 - First Impressions Plus Comparisons With Beta 2

I've sometimes claimed that one of the big benefits of having a blog is being able to look back and compare my memories with what I actually said at the time.  Now, for once, I'm actually going to do it.

The game I'm revisiting is Once Human, which I started playing during Beta 2, back in December of last year, and which I stopped playing, before the beta ended, in the following January. In that relatively short time, I wrote about it quite extensively, posting my First Impressions on 13 December, with lengthy follow-ups on the 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 21st, 25th (Yes, Christmas Day!) and 28th.

On 1 January, I posted a very positive "Mid-beta Review" in which I said 

"As far as I can tell, the beta has about another three weeks to run, although I've yet to find an official date. I'm torn between carrying on as I have been, spending almost all my gaming time there and making the most of my access while it lasts, or quitting while I'm ahead to avoid bitter disappointment, when the mean devs take my new toy away. 

What I should probably do is wean myself off the beta gradually, reducing my play-time slowly as I simultaneously re-introduce other, much-neglected games to the mix." 

It seems that's what I did because I didn't post about the game again until 10 January, my last substantive post about it until the start of Beta 3. I skimmed through all of those posts last night. It wasn't a quick read by any standards. I didn't run them through a word counter but I'd be amazed if they come to less than twenty thousand words altogether. Might easily be thirty.

I made some notes as I was reading but given that level of verbosity I imagine I missed a lot. Still, I pulled out enough salient points for a short post. Maybe not that short, if precedent's any guide...

Before I get into the details, I have to say it seems like a lot has changed. Starry, the NetEase studio behind Once Human, is clearly engaged in a genuine beta process here, not just a marketing excercise, although inevitably there's plenty of marketing going on, too. I'm always wary of comparing subjective impressions like this but it was only a couple of months ago I was last playing and the feeling of change in the new beta I was already forming is largely supported by the record.

The whole game feels different this time and I'm not convinced it always feels better. Let's have some details.

Communication Breakdown

There's plenty of praise in my posts on the last beta for both the writing and the voice acting. Nothing I read last night mentioned any jankiness or glitching there. This time, as Scopique observed in his post about the current beta, conversations now sometimes repeat when you reach a decision point in the dialog tree. 

There also seems to be some confusion over whether the player character talks or not. Last time I mentioned my character didn't sound quite how I'd imagined she would. This time she seems to have been afflicted with selective mutism. Sometimes she speaks, other times she settles for gestures and facial expressions.

I'm also noticing more variation between the on-screen text and the voice acting than I remember and for the first time I'm seeing translations that aren't wholly convincing. On the plus side, almost all of the untranslated Chinese text has disappared. 

It seems apparent that both translation and voice-over are works in progress. I hope the final versions match the best on display, which would mean a high standard but I worry things might go the way of so many other imported titles, with quality translation at the start and sporadically in key scenes but something less satisfactory elsewhere. Fingers crossed on that.

The Easy Life

This is a tough one. My immediate impression is that everything feels much easier but when I come to examine why and how that might have come about I find myself somewhat at a loss. I can't nail down any specific changes but on an objective level, comparing my progress now with what I recorded in the last beta, it's undeniable that I've progressed much faster and had far fewer difficult moments. 

It's true that back then it was all completely new to me, while now I'm going through the same content for the second time but I really don't think familiarity and foreknowledge can account for the sheer speed with which I'm flying through the storyline. I've only played a handful of sessions, most of them quite short. but I'm already further ahead than I was by the time I stopped playing last time and, as must be evident from those posts, I played a lot.

Back then, I clearly remember having any number of long, tough fights with regular mobs. There was a lot of running away, healing up and some dying. In one post I mention having to leap out of a window to escape being overwhelmed and in another I talk about being mobbed by wolves while trying to do a quest hand-in. I recall stuff like that happpening pretty much non-stop.

This time there's been nothing like it at all. Everything's been very comfortable, even though in comparison to last beta, my character is far less prepared and not as well-equipped. In fact, I've done almost no prep at all. I've just been winging it with whatever armor and weapons I happen to find. For a while I was even just using whatever ammo I looted from chests although I have now finally made myself some bullets.

I haven't done anything about buffing myself and I haven't looked at any guides or walkthroughs and yet I've somehow managed to beat the first two instance bosses on the first try. Last beta, I didn't even dare take the first of those on until I was four levels above what the game reccomended and I made sure to supply myself with a ton of ammo and healing consumables before I went in. 

This time I rocked up two levels below the suggested minimum, went in with whatever I had on me and won easily, even though I ran out of ammo and had to melee the boss for the last quarter of its health. It felt inevitable I would win and it was fun even though I was totally half-assing it.

As for the second boss, I didn't write about that one last time but as far as I recall I don't think I ever beat it. I remember trying and the attempt being a total pain. No fun at all and it took ages. This time, when I got to to that point in the story I went in to see what would happen and ended up I finishing the instance quite easily, even though the game was throwing a hissy-fit and crashed just after I killed the boss, which unfortunately may have bugged my quest.

I probably need to do a bit more thinking on this but it does seem to me that everything is just a lot easier now and not just the fighting.

No-One Uses Cameras Any More!

Back in December I dedicated much of a post to raving about how great the screesnhot feature in Once Human was. To summarise, at the time you needed to craft an actual, in-game camera before you could take screenshots. Once made, the camera operated like a tool in the game. You had to equip it and point it at things to take pictures. 

I loved it but it seems no-one else did because it's gone. Instead, there's an annoying radial menu you can access immediately. It takes you to the same functionality but all of that immersive granularity has been lost. Or all that irritating busy-work. I guess it depends on your perspective but it's certainly another example of how the game is being simplified.

What's The Driving Age Around Here, These Days?

Acess to everything players consider essesntial seems to have been speeded up. By the time I got a motorbike last time I must have been in my teens. I know I'd already moved house so it must have been a week or two into the game at least. This time I got my driver's permit in my second session. I think I was about level five or six. 

I didn't have to do anything for it, either. An NPC just gave it me. I thought it might be a loaner but I've still got it so I guess it's mine now. I appreciate the convenience but I think I'd rather have built it in my workshop from parts. I'd value it more that way.

Where's The Mayor? ^[1]

In the last beta I didn't post about going to the first town, Deadville, until I'd been playing for five days but I did say I'd already been there a few times so I don't think it can have been that much longer than it was this time. Still, I'm pretty sure I wasn't there in my second session. Both times I didn't go until I was prompted so I think they've bumped a few things up the schedule in the revamped "Journey".

Last time, when I did get to Deadville, it seemed like there was more going on. Claire is still there with her van, offering the same quest but I didn't get any prompts to talk to the Mayor, who used to give the long speech leading into the Keefer Sutherland storyline. I can't imagine that whole sub-plot has been taken out but maybe it's been shifted down the timeline. 

Conversely, I met another guy in Deadville, called Lowe. He's a sharp dresser, who could have come straight out of The Secret World. Was he there before? I'm pretty sure he wasn't but I do seem to recall hearing some of what he has to say, so maybe he's been relocated or his lines have been re-assigned. 

Which leads me to... 

Wow! You've Really Changed Since I Last Saw You!

Don't try to deny it. I have the screenshots to prove it. 

The mysterious girl you meet in the opening cut scenes, who apparently represents the ruined world's best hope for recovery, used to be called Cyo. Now she goes by Mitsuko. Then there's Mary. She used to be a blonde who dressed like a lab assistant on the way to a meeting. Now she's a brunette in Lara Croft's cast-offs.

I'm fairly sure a lot of other NPCs have had a makeover too but I can only prove it for the few whose photos I took.

A Possible Loss Of Whimsy ^[2]

I'm not a hundred per cent certain on this one but I think they may have removed the whole Whim mechanic. If so,  it would be a shame. It was an interesting one. 

The gist of it was that every time you allowed something bad to happen to you, like getting poisoned by polluted water, there'd be some negative effects but you might also gain a "whim", a potentially positive side-effect, like being able to swim further before becoming exhausted. There was a whole theoretical meta-game there, involving taking debuffs to gain specific, situational benefits, that looked like it might be fun. 

I said at the time I thought it would end up being complicated and lead to some awkward choices for min-maxers but it didn't seem like a bad idea altogether. It may still be in the game but I've had a couple of things happen to me that I think would have triggered whims before and nothing's happened. There's been no word of the mechanic in the tutorial yet, either.

I won't write Whims off just yet. They may just have been punted down the timeline or their apparent absence could be a corollary of my moving through content so much faster this time around. Perhaps my whims lie ahead of me still. I hope so, anyway.

In Conclusion...

I could go on but I'm all too aware much of this could resolve itself as I progress and I'd have to come back and explain myself, so I think I'll leave it at that for now. 

What I really wanted to convey is how whole enterprise just feels different, somehow. Specifically, it feels more like a game and less like a virtual world.

I'm not saying it's better or worse. Just different. It's swings and roundabouts, as usual. For every loss of immersion there's an improved quality of life. For each interesting choice that's gone missing, there's one fewer annoying obstacle. If nothing else, I certainly appreciate the less-arduous combat.

At this point I was tempted to invoke the "better-in-beta" argument but I'm beginning to understand that's a more nuanced phenomenon than I've previously allowed. I'm developing a theory that early-mid beta builds tend to include a lot of features that interest developers more than players, which means they tend also to appeal to Explorer archetypes like myself, people who enjoy discovery for its own sake.

In probably too many cases, a lot of those not so user-friendly systems and less-intuitive mechanics, the ones that fascinate those of us who enjoy finding out how things work but which frustrate everyone who just wants to get on with playing a game, get left in for launch and then have to be hastily removed afterwards. It has to be better, commercially and aesthetically, to get all that sanded down in beta but it does explain why I sometimes find the finished product bland and unsatisfying compared to the prototype.

None of which changes my opinion that Once Human is on its way to becoming a pretty good game. What I do anticipate is that when it does launch later this year it won't be quite as weird or wonderful as it could have been. Whether that will harm or enhance its chances of success I guess will depend on just how smoothly Starry are able to handle the transition from the game the developers wanted to make to the one they think players will enjoy. 

At the moment, it looks like they still have some work to do.

[1] - He's still in his room, standing in the dark. He also still has all the dialog that tells you about the area. He just doesn't offer a quest any more, or at least not to me.

[2] - Yeah, this is just wrong. I was misremembering how Whims work. They're caused by decreasing sanity levels, not environmental conditions and they're still in the game. Or the guide explanation for them is, anyway. I haven't gone crazy enough to become whimsical yet.