Jogging Round The Park In New World

As I was playing New World this afternoon, I wondered what I might find to write about later. It didn't seem that a lot had happened. Certainly nothing I hadn't commented on before, in my posts on the various alphas and betas these last few years. 

I'd done a lot of gathering, of course. Fought a lot of animals and undead. I'd been shopping at the Trading Post. I'd spent a lot of skill points or mastery points, whatever they call them. Both, probably.

What I'd done more of than anything, though, was jog. I'm not a great fan of jogging, in life or in games. If you're going to run, run.  I kept trying to, but none of the usual keys made me sprint and although I kept meaning to open the Settings menu and check if there was go faster key, somehow I always forgot when I got to a safe spot.

Photobombed by a Norland Nanny as I teleported.

New World does have some form of instant transport, possibly more than one. I found one location I could reliably teleport back to but only one. Other places said I could but I couldn't seem to manage it. One quest made a big, big deal of how I'd be able to teleport back at the end but I couldn't. 

None of this had anything to do with bugs or glitches, of which I've seen remarkably few. It had a lot more to do with me not paying attention because I was squirrelling. 

As others have said, there's an awful lot to do in New World. At low levels, at least, you'll never be stuck for something to fill your time. Another thing I was thinking about as the kilometers ticked by was how I'd define a "sandpark" mmorpg, which is what New World is, probably. 

Oh, hey, that looks interesting!

 

I decided it's when there are more organized activities provided than you can reasonably expect to finish but it really doesn't much matter which of them you do or in what order. 

• A sandbox doesn't have much in the way of prepared entertainment at all. It relies on your imagination and your energy and if you don't have enough of either to keep yourself entertained then that's your problem.  
• A theme park hands you a program of set pieces and asks you to follow the signs and enjoy them all in the right order and gets awkward about it if you try to jump the lines or go round the wrong way.  
• A sandpark just shoves everything in front of you at once and says "Look at all the stuff we've got for you to do! Off you go! Have fun!" There's no right or wrong way to approach things. It's all going to be there when you get to it and you can do it in whatever order you want.

Okay, there are certain rules and barriers but the rules are vague and the barriers are low. If you want to focus on your skills or your stats or your gear you can do that. If you want to get right on with grabbing territory and having small wars you can do that. If you want to make money to buy a home you can do that.

Try not to focus on what I'm wearing. I know it's difficult but try.

 

That's something else I was thinking as I trotted across the map. Making some money to buy a house.

One thing that annoyed me in the last beta I was in was that there was housing in the game but I couldn't find any way to see what it looked like from the inside. Other mmorpgs have a "Tour" or "Visit" option. It seems like you'd need it for such a big purchase. Who'd want to buy a house sight unseen?

Of course there may have been an option and I just didn't see it. Very likely. Doesn't matter now. What does matter is whether you can look around your potential new home now the game is live and I'm happy to say you can.

I found out the way I'm finding out everything in New World at the moment. I was bumbling around and something came up on the screen and I clicked on it. Suddenly I could access a Housing Menu, which allowed me to visit friends (If I had any.) or enter an "Empty House." I tried it and there I was, inside.

The Show Home. They always look immaculate.

 

I'm happy to report that, as I'd hoped, New World's housing works much the way housing does in Black Desert Online. I think BDO has about the best mechanics I've seen for instanced housing in that you can see the outside from the inside. It removes all the problems of urban blight that arise from letting people build wherever they want. It avoids the suburbanism of instanced neighborhoods and it neatly sidesteps the issue of everyone being siloed in their own pocket housing universe.

In BDO and now as I found in New World, you can stand at the window of your instenced home and look out into the street, where you can see other players running past or using the crafting stations or standing around aimlessly. The windows in the starter home were a bit poky for a decent view but the principle's the thing. I imagine more expensive properties have a better prospect.

There's something else I liked. The price. The starter home in Windsward is only 5,000 gold. I had over a thousand gold by level ten just from quest rewards and mob drops. It makes the whole thing seem eminently affordable.

Purple and green should never be seen. Oh, look who's talking...

 

It also helps to give me at least the beginning of an idea on whare to focus my efforts, something I could definitely use after nine hours of running around semi-aimlessly, doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that and a lot of not very much in particular. As a short term goal I'm going to try and save up my five grand and get my foot on the housing ladder.

How you make money in New World is another question. One way would be to stop spending it, I guess. 

As usual, I quickly found myself engaged in quests well over my level but instead of stepping back and doing the things I was fit for I decided to buy my way out of my problems. I'd heard that the economy was currently favoring buyers rather than sellers so I took a look at the Trading Post and managed to buy myself a whole bunch of upgrades for only about a fifth of my liquid capital.

Recovering on the ledge, the only place adds wouldn't keep spawning on me.

 

I'm curious - and skeptical - about how the player-only economy is going to work long term. Are there any mmorpgs, other than EVE Online, that don't have any way whatsoever for players to make money by selling items to NPCs? It's been a staple of every game I've played for decades and I find it quite hard to imagine.

For now, though, it's working just fine. My new gear let me cruise through the roadblocks. At one point I found myself at level 11 fighting a level 16 quest mob with three level 16 adds in a confined space at the top of a tower and I killed them all. Granted I was at 2% health at the end but they were down and I was up so who cares if it was messy? A win's a win.

The downside of buying a random selection of gear off the TP is that I look like a drama student who lost a drunken bet and had to dress themselves by pulling random items from a box marked "Pantomime rejects - Do Not Use." 

There's a town crier somewhere missing his shoes and a sewer-worker looking for his rubber gloves.

 

Seriously, just look at me! What is that pink petticoat I'm wearing supposed to be? Heavy armor, apparently. It looks like something Lucille Ball might have worn in a bedroom scene with Desi (Twin beds, three feet apart, naturally.) with one of Jean-Paul Gautier's rejected designs for Madonna's bustier slapped over the top. It's beyond hideous and believe it or not someone crafted it. No wonder they were selling it at a rock-bottom price.

When I was wearing all quest drops they were both understated and thematically appropriate. Now I look like I shouldn't be allowed out on my own. If I knew how the appearance system worked, or the dyes, maybe I could do something about it. Another goal to work on, I guess.

That picture was taken in Windsward, by the way, the place where I looked at the house, is very nice. Twee, even. So much so, there are in-game jokes about it. I might settle there. I'm mostly doing stuff for Monarch Bluffs right now, though.

You say twee, I say picturesque.

 

That's another thing I like about New World, the geographical delineation. Each settlement has its own politics and social structure and there's a whole progression element attached. You could focus on one and cap everything, the way people clear or finish zones and maps in other games, or you could just wander around and do stuff for everyone and let it all fill in behind you. You can guess which way I'm going.

I do like progression, it has to be said. I don't go all that much on linear narratives or on-rails levelling but equally I'm not crazy about everything flattening out so much it never seems you're getting anywhere. I think one of the reasons New World has such traction at the early stages is that there's a continual fizz and pop of numbers getting bigger and it feels exciting. 

EverQuest used to be great at that in the old days, when skills all went up with use and every level mattered and there were hundreds of factions to work on. It's something a lot of games seem to have tried to get away from in recent years, possibly to try and avoid players getting confused or overwhelmed. New World doesn't seem to care much about that.

Does anyone know if flax is addictive? I think it might be... (This gag would have been ten times funnier if I'd remembered that plant is hemp not flax.)

 

There are going to be guides telling you the "best" or the "quickest" route through all this, soon enough. Actually, I'm sure there are already. I haven't looked. The strength of the sandpark format, especially when it's done as well as this, is that there isn't really a wrong way to do anything. In the end you're going to want to have done it all so you may as well do some of it whenever you can. Any of it.

That's my excuse, anyway. I suppose I might come to regret not having more of a focus - wouldn't be the first time - but I doubt it. For now, though, I have no particular plans.

Well, except for my house. And some decent clothes. 

Clothes first, I think. Can't keep walking around looking like that.

Drive, She Said

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

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

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

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

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

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

My brain in an action rpg.

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

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

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

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

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

It's all so much easier in the sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Little Knowledge : Black Desert

I'd love to do one of those "10 Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started" posts about Black Desert. Unfortunately, although I spot plenty of things while I'm playing that would be useful to pass on, if I don't write them down right away, then after I've stopped I can never remember what they were. And I never write anything down.

So, I'm not going to do one of those posts. Instead here are a few random observations, things that have stuck with me, useful or otherwise.

There's not a lot of point spending hours and hours in Black Desert's insanely detailed character creation suite, tweaking every last muscle group to perfection. Once you get into the game a lot of that fine detail seems to disappear. Anyway, as with all MMOs, you spend 95% of your time looking at the back of your head...

Have I ever steered you wrong? Come on, now, have I?

You don't have to do what the Black Spirit tells you. Honestly, that thing is such a nag. If you don't put your foot down it'll have you spending your first hour on a series of pointless Kill Ten Foozle quests that give you an entirely misleading impression of the world and the gameplay you could be enjoying. There's an option in Options to quieten him down.

There's also an option to filter your quests so that only the kind you like show up. And an option to filter the confusing morass of symbols that clutter the map. And a whole load of options to tweak your graphics and performance. Yes, all MMOs have options but Black Desert has more options than most and they make a more significant difference. Even though you're desperate to get stuck into some killing or crafting, time spent tuning the game to your (and your PC's) preference first is time very well spent.

Be aware that when you make a second character some of the default settings will overwrite some of the changes you made to options first time round. Well, they did for me. Maybe that's a bug. You'd hope so. Watch out for it, whatever, because it's really irritating.

That looks uncannily familiar.

The world is not as vast nor as overwhelming as you think it is. MMO worlds never are, sadly. The trip from Velia to Heidel, which looked so epic and daunting on your second or third session, will soon feel like a stroll to the corner store. Distances that seem outrageous become manageable and then trivial in disturbingly short order. And that's at regular foot speed.

Traveling is safe. Really safe. Very, very safe indeed. So don't be afraid to explore. The roads tend to be free of mobs but even when they aren't it doesn't matter. Most creatures in Black Desert seem to think they're auditioning for a 1960s sitcom. They can't react to anything without doing a five second slow burn first. By the time they've waited for the audience response you'll be well out of aggro range.

So long as you don't stop running, that is. When you explore, never stop running. In common with just about every MMORPG since around 2003, nothing runs faster than a player's basic movement speed. If you keep moving nothing can catch you. Black Desert mobs are a little more persistent than the average, though, so they may not give up quite as soon as you think they will. I recommend swinging the camera to look over your shoulder, not stopping and turning round to see if the six orcs you barged into have gone back to camp yet.

Do we have falling damage?

There are exceptions. Cyclopes (that is the correct plural even though it looks weird), giant boars and all bears have no sense of humor. They don't do double-takes, they just attack. They also hit like a bucketful of bricks. Fortunately they are all big and ugly enough to spot from the next county so just go around them.

Storage is nowhere near as limited as you think it is. All that fuss about the cost of storage in the Cash Shop? You can forget that. You get loads of storage for free. Every city and town has separate storage but you can have stuff from one moved to another for an in-game fee. Plenty of quests add slots, both to your character's inventory and your Warehouse. All vehicles have storage built in. The actual problem is how inconvenient it is, not how much there is of it. It is really inconvenient but that appears to be the intended gameplay. If you don't enjoy being inconvenienced as a form of entertainment then Black Desert may not be the game for you.

Rafts aren't that hard to make but neither are they all that great. You can't really go anywhere on a raft. They move slowly and they seem to remain tethered to whichever wharf you register them at. You can leave them anywhere and pay to have them fetched back for you but only to the wharf where you registered them. I am not entirely sure if there's a way around this and googling it for half an hour has made me little the wiser but on balance I'd say only make a raft for the amusement of making one, not because you'll get any actual use out of it.

Buy the crystal that goes in your boots and makes you jump 25% higher as soon as you get the 30k silver. Then never die. It's great while it lasts but, like all the crystals, it shatters on death and you have to get another. Thirty thousand silver is chump change even at level fifteen though so just replace as required.

These stains are never going to come out.

Remember all the fuss about EQNext's "parkour" movement? Black Desert has that and they didn't even bother to tell anyone. Climbing is more fun in BDO than any MMO I've ever played. The animations are a joy to watch and working out where you can get to and how to do it is a game in itself. Catching lost cats is just the beginning. Gotta catch those cats though...

Speaking of movement modes there are several that aren't immediately apparent. One of the very first quests tells you how to press shift to sprint but if there are tutorials for sidling up to a wall and pressing S to lean against it, or for reversing into a chair and hitting Q to sit down, then I must have missed them. I only discovered that you can go from crouching (Q again, acts as a form of stealth) to crawling by pressing Space while crouched, when I got stuck on geometry in the cave next to Crioville and started hammering all the keys to try and shake myself loose.

Facial hair on an otter - it's the new "Lipstick on a pig"

Talk to everyone. Everyone. It's not just about quests nor even about the Lore and the little tidbits of conversation. Don't think talking to random NPCs is something only a roleplayer (heavens forfend!) would do. Talking to NPCs (and when I say "talking" obviously I mean "clicking on") gets you Knowledge and Knowledge represents the cards you need to play the Conversation game. That in turn can earn you Amity, which gets you more Knowledge, opens up quests and acts as a form of currency. It's too complicated to explain but trust me - you want to talk to everyone.

There's more. A lot more. That'll do for now. Perhaps I'll keep a pen and paper handy and jot things down as they occur to me as I play. Or, more likely, I won't.

Taking The Loong View

What a lot of MMOs there are. I downloaded yet another one yesterday. Kaozz's fault. She mentioned that she was playing something called Loong Online. "Smooth as butter and polished", she said. I'd never heard of it, which was provocation enough without the praise on top.

I googled and found it on the Gamigo portal where I had a choice: sign up for Loong alone or make a Gamigo account to play any of their games. They host a lot of MMOs including a few I'd heard of. Fiesta, which certainly gets a lot of advertising, none of which has ever made me consider trying it, King of Kings, which I did once play for about half an hour and Black Prophecy, which crops up on Massively now and again largely to my complete lack of interest. They have several more and others in development. They even have a Golf MMO, and they're welcome to it. Obviously no real point starting a Gamigo account, then.

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

Having made my Gamigo account, when I came to add Loong to my list of games I planned to play on it I noticed a familiar name: Otherland. Otherland is the MMO based on Tad Williams' sprawling, disturbing cyberpunk/fantasy noir. It's an MMO I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, looking forward to giving it a run whenever it appears. Haven't heard much about it for a while, although there was a video recently. I had no idea Gamigo were involved but now I'm signed up. Pre-ordered, I suppose you could say, if you can pre-order a game you don't have to order in the first place. Ah, sweet serendipity.

Gamigo is a German F2P gaming network.  Seems to be the week for those, what with the PSS1 thing and all. There's an awful lot of MMO activity in Germany, now I come to think of it. Bigpoint are another. They host Drakensang and Nadirim, both of which I've tried, and Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't, it being a shooter. Germany is a big, rich country and one where MMOs seem to be very firmly established. Once you factor out the "sold like chattels" part of the PSS1/Sony deal the whole thing begins to look a little less disturbing. If they can get the IP block sorted out and restore freedom of choice, who knows? Maybe something good could come out of the wreckage.

Slot in top of head is not for litter

Leaving that aside for now, pending the supposed SoE/Allaplaya statements due later today, what is Loong like? Well, I only played for an hour or so but it was a good hour. It certainly looks fine. The world is lush and detailed, the views are stunning, the creatures are quirky and that's just in the starting areas.The interface is a bit too gritty for my taste and I can't say I'm keen on the fonts but the functionality is all there. Compared to, say, Eden Eternal, a game I like a lot, Loong appears to be several notches higher in quality. Gameplay, at the starter level, is identical.

Will I play it much? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? There are just so many MMOs. It's all very well downloading them and trying them out, but how often do I get much further than the starting area? Is looking great and playing smoothly enough? Well, no it's not. Even really top-notch gameplay doesn't set the hook deep enough. Zentia, for example, is a first-class game in just about every respect. Gameplay there is as good as any MMO I've played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were on it all weekend when we first found it and we played sporadically for a fair while after that, but in the end we drifted away.

I told you once. Shoo!.

I think, for me at least, it comes down mostly to character. In Loong I can be a good-looking young man or a good-looking young woman and that seems to be about it. It's not like being a giant tiger in NeoSteam, is it? Or even a mouse in Eden Eternal. I just don't find playing good-looking young people very involving. If I can't be an animal, at least let me be a dwarf or a gnome, something with a big, bushy beard. Zentia let me play a fat old man, which may be why I lasted a few weeks there rather than a few hours.

Do my feet even touch the ground?

It's not just how the characters look, either. It's also how they move. My Loong character travels in sudden, fluid leaps and bounds, so slick and fast that he's sometimes on the far side of where I want him to be before I can make him stop. Rift has a very dull selection of races but movement there is stolid, steady, firm. I can feel every footfall and that really does matter. The more solid the character feels, the better I am able to associate.

I'll plug on with Loong for a bit. On and off. Here and there. Now and again. The world very much looks worth exploring. I'll be surprised if I become more than an occasional visitor, but that's fine. There are so many MMOs after all.