Working With Fire And Steel

In the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, about Guild Wars 2's then-upcoming Visions of the Past, I noted 
"I reserve the right to be grudgingly impressed, should the occasion arise." It arose. I am.

Late night I ran the first of two parts, Forging Steel, in which you get to play a raw recruit in the Steel Warband, as Rytlock's son Ryland Steelcatcher, newly-promoted to Centurion, leads them on what seems very much like a random treasure hunt. If there was some great, political plan behind what they're doing I confess I missed it.

This morning I followed up with part two, Darkrime Delve, where you play Ryland himself as he attempts to smarm his way to would-be charr emperor Bangar Ruinbringer's favor but ends up learning a hard lesson about climbing the greasy pole. Okay, that's not how Ryland sees it but I tend to side with his sire on this one.

As promised, this is one of those "play as someone other than yourself" deals so beloved of bored games developers. The surprise is you actually get to play as yourself playing someone else, by which I mean that, although you look and talk like some random charr in the first mission and a specific storyline NPC in the second, you retain all of your normal class abilities and the whole thing feels like playing your regular character.

In the first mission that's perfectly understandable. You're some no-rep charr looking to join a famous warband and they're trying you out. You could quite rationally be any class. In the second, where you're playing a well-established character, it's rather harder to reconcile the sudden career-swerve.

In practice, though, you'll probably end up playing "in character" for that one anyway because a very early mechanic requires you to use Ryland's fiery chainsword and once you get your paws on it you most likely won't want to give it up. The Flamesaw hacks through Icebrood like... well, like a flaming chainsaw through flesh, melting breakbars in a single hit and making the whole thing go a lot faster than if you'd used your own abilities.

Crucially, though, if you prefer to use them regardless, you can. It seems like a good solution to a problem that has tripped up many a dev over the years, not least in previous chapters of the Living Story.

As far as story here goes, we're talking background and character stuff. Both missions are retrospectives, showing you a little more about how certain things happened and quite a lot about why. Characters that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere when the Icebrood Saga began get the chance to develop a little substance. It's nothing essential but it's done quite well.

Even so, there are a few plot points I won't reveal because spoilers. There's one odd development I will mention, if only because it confused the merry heck out of me. As far as I understand it, a major element of the GW2 timeline includes the departure of all dwarves, either dead or gone underground to wage a desperate, unending batle to hold back one of the elder dragons. We've even had extended conversations with the supposed last of them.

It was a surprise, then, to find as the main opponents in the first mission a seemingly endless supply of Stone Summit dwarves. The charr warband comment on it but toffer no explanation. I note the wiki has recently been updated and now reads "It remains unclear how many dwarves survive in the present day." On this evidence, quite a few, although a lot less since I got my claws into them.

So much for the story and lore. What about the gameplay? Ah, now that's a bit of a puzzler, that is.

There's a thread on the forums, quite lively and occasionally quite heated, discussing ArenaNet's decision to make the first mission available only for group play, with no solo option. That would be a problem if it was true. Only, as I commented on the thread, "I did part one solo last night and part two solo this morning. Until I came here and read this thread I had no idea either was intended to be group content. I thought there was a problem with the in-game description."

When I got to the Scrying Pool I saw two options, one marked "Public" and the other "Squad". A footnote to both reads "Recommended Players 5-10". That certainly does suggest no solo option.

I went into the Public version first, where I spent ten minutes running around doing a couple of gathering events in the starting area while listening to confused people talking in map chat. No-one knew what to do or where to go and nothing seemed to be happening so I zoned out and tried the other option instead, hoping to be put into  squad automatically.

That didn't happen. Instead, I found myself alone in an instance which appeared to function exactly like any other Living World/Icebrood Saga solo instance. I followed the prompts, did the things, killed the mobs, helped the NPCs and everything went very smoothly and pleasantly.

All the way to the final boss. That was a bit of a nightmare but only in the same way many Living World instanced bosses have always been. It took me nearly an hour to down the boss, of which perhaps half was figuring out the mechanics and half executing them. It was tedious but I've seen worse. It did occur to me that it would probably be easier with a few more players but it was by no means out of the run of typical ANet "solo" content from previous chapters.

That was last night. This morning I did the second part, again solo. It was even easier than 90% of part one had been. Very straightforward, very well tuned for solo play. The final boss was a lot easier. Basically tank and spank. There was an awful lot of floor spam but I've learned that in the current iteration of the storyline most of that is purely for effect. I stood in the red throughout and nothing bad happened.

On exiting to the new lobby map, the refurbished Eye of the North, I found myself in a discussion in map chat over whether the chapter was or was not available solo. Since I'd just finished soloing it I was pretty certain it was but then someone said something that gave me pause.

They said, quite categorically, that they could see no private squad option. Another player said they could but they had a "pin", which is GW2 slang for the Commander tag that costs 300 gold and allows you to start your own squad.

The account on which I'd just done the missions has a pin. Maybe that's why I got the option. I would test it with another account that doesn't have one but the Catch 22 is that neither of my non-pin accounts has Path of Fire, which definitely is required to do the new missions.

Accordingly, as of now, I'm not sure if the chapter is or is not intended to be soloed. But I soloed it. So there's that.

There's a good bit more to the update, including the four replayable missions brought back from Season One. There's a quest or a collect or some such to do before those open up. I'll probably post about that when I've done it.

The old version of Eye of the North, the one that doubled as The Hall of Monuments, is now a separate instance, presumably the upgradeable one we were told was coming. Again, I have yet to look into that so maybe more later.

For now, though, I am predisposed to give Visions of the Past the thumbs up. I'd like to do the first mission as a public group to see how it goes. It looks like it could be fun. I'd certainly be a lot more willing to run other characters through these two missions than anything from the previous two seasons.

All in all I am, indeed, grudgingly impressed. The new ArenaNet seem to have a better handle on difficulty and engagement than most of the previous iterations. Or, perhaps I should say, this team has a vision that's a little closer to mine than I've been used to seeing for a while.

I am very cautiously optimistic for the third expansion but a lot could change before then. Always assuming we're here to see it and they're here to sell it to us. Probably best not to look too far ahead right now.

When I Feel Heavy Metal (Woo-Hoo): GW2

When I read that there was going to be a Charr metal band in Bound By Blood, all guitars, drums, bass and heavy amplification, I was skeptical in the extreme but at least I could see that it wasn't one hundred per cent out of context. Half the Charr NPCs in Black Citadel already sound as though they've wrecked their vocal cords throwing up into a bucket singing in grindcore or death metal outfits.

It's not as though Tyria doesn't have the technology to support rock and roll. It's too easy to think of most of these settings, from Azeroth to Eorzea, Norrath to Tyria, as classical high-medieaval fantasy but about the only one I can think of that fits that bill is Lord of the Rings Online.

The rest are either magitech or science fantasy. Every one of them has at least one technologically advanced race, usually standing about three feet high, whose devices and inventions far outstrip anything 21st century Earth could match.

Technological capacity aside, some MMORPGs just don't sport a culture that could accomodate something as brash and specific as heavy metal. I can't really see it fitting comfortably into EverQuest, for example.

If you were to design a race with the specific intention of housing a burgeoning hard rock and metal scene, though, you couldn't do much better than the Charr. Their entire capital city is made of metal. They have an Iron Legion that does nothing but make heavy metal machinery. They're big, loud and boisterous and everything they do involves either shouting or growling.

I can't say I've seen many hints of specific musical tastes among the Charr until now but if they're going to enjoy any kind of music it seems as likely to be metal as anything else. Now I think about it, I imagine the Norn favoring drinking songs, chanting and quite possibly prog rock, the Asura techno, EDM and math rock, the Sylvari folk, ambient and chillwave and Humans just about anything at all.

Charr most likely go for anything on the spectrum that ranges from Classic Rock at one end to Black Metal at the other. I really don't know enough about the intracacies of the genre to make an accurate assessment of the exact sub-genre of metal performed by Metal Legion, but it sounds to me somewhere around the late thrash metal period, something like Metallica.

I'm no metal fan and haven't been since I was about fourteen but if I'm going to listen to anything along those lines it might as well be something like this. About the only current band widely akcnowledged as "metal" that I genuinely like is Rammstein. Metal Legion are no Rammstein but they know how to ride a riff and chant a chorus which is plenty good enough.

Mrs. Bhagpuss attended the concert event in Grothmar Valley yesterday then came in after it ended to tell me how good it was and how it had made her laugh out loud. She's no metal fan either so I took that as a strong recommendation.

This morning, after I'd done my dailies, I made a point of going to see for myself. I had to look up the exact location (even though it turned out I'd already been there when I was exploring the map). I was somewhat surprised to find the stage was Blood Legion property and that Metal Legion's affiliation was also Blood. I'd just assumed they'd be Iron from the obvious metal link and the fact that it's Iron who are in love with technology.

The concert begins every day at sundown. I had no idea what time it was when I got there so I settled down in the bleachers to clear my bags and sell on the exchange, something that can easily occupy an idle half-hour. And that was about as long as it took. 

People began to filter in and sit on the benches or stand in front of the stage. After about a quarter of an hour someone arrived sporting a Commander tag and announced to general chat that he'd be hosting a full PoF/HoT achievement run. He asked everyone interested to join his squad and meet at the stage in thirteen minutes, when the gig was due to begin.

And so it did. The band, four Charr, one each on guitar, bass, drums and vocals, took their places, gave shout-outs to all four Legions in the audience, thanked the Imperator for the opportunity to play and then launched into their three-song set.

From start to finish the event was a joyous and atmospheric pleasure. All three of the songs were pretty good. The riffing was bodacious as Bill and Ted, who would have loved every minute, might  have said.

There were a host of mini-games and events throughout, all of which were intuitive and fun. The crowd was in constant, fervent motion. There was much moshing. My druid pogoed. A lot. 

The light show was psychadelic, the flames roared, the pyrotechnics got predictably out of control  towards the end and had to be extinguished by the audience. Many achievements were completed without even trying and there were presents at the end.

The whole thing was ten times better than I had expected when first I heard about it, although once it had received Mrs. Bhagpuss's seal of approval I knew it was going to be a good time.

Once again, whichever ANet team was responsible for Bound By Blood knocked it out of the park. If they carry on like this the game will be on its soundest footing since Season One.

Metal Legion! One Charr! Where do I get the T-shirt?

It's All Good: GW2

This morning was... surprising. I logged in after breakfast with no particular plan in mind. My mouse pointer dithered over the EverQuest II icon for a moment as I thought about doing the new panda quest, then moved on.

What I wanted to do was play WoW Classic but if I knew if I started before nine in the morning I might end up playing for twelve hours straight and I wouldn't want Tobold to worry. I considered getting a blog post out before playing anything but the ones I have in mind are likely to be epics and I wasn't quite ready for that level of effort.

As I often do at this point, I decided to run my Guild Wars 2 dailies while I let my thoughts settle. GW2 dailies are predictable and generally quick, plus I hate to miss out on that two gold per account per day.

I logged my primary account in and found the dailies were exceptionally easy. I'd finished all three in not much more than five minutes. Since I was on the account that had opened the new map I was raving about the other day, I thought I might as well go and have a wander around.

Four and a half hours later I logged out for a belated lunch, having completed the entirety of the Bound by Blood Prologue. It's too early for any kind of detailed review because spoilers but my capsule review is this:

Best "Living World" episode for as long as I can remember.

I really have almost nothing negative to say about it at all. Let's have some bullet points about why that is, without spoiling the extremely good plot.

• It's paced very well


• There are absolutely no horrible, tedious extended fights.


• At no time do you have to learn a set of fatuous new skills that replace your real ones.


• Nothing requires you to do a thing, then do it again, then do it a third time to be absolutely sure.


• The story is genuinely interesting, especially if you like the Charr race and their politics.


• Not only is it interesting but it's coherent and it makes sense!


• A couple of regular cast members make a long overdue reappearance.


• At no point (that I noticed) does anyone say anything wildly out of character.


• The voice acting is good to very good.


• The dialog is significantly better than it used to be (although it has generally been improving since the big shake up last year).


• There are a bunch of new characters, all of whom appear to have actual personalities.


• Every location is visually sumptuous. I know GW2's Art Dept. always knock it out of the park but this time that tired re-used assets feel is wholly absent.


• The new map doesn't just look good - it plays well. It doesn't have the stale "Only here for the Meta" feel of so many recent LS maps.


• There are two dozen Events and they vary widely in style and kind. You can easily complete the number necessary for the story by doing only the ones you like.

Other than the sudden leap in quality, perhaps the most surprising thing about Bound By Blood is that, despite being promoted as a "prologue" to the real first instalment of the "Icebrood Saga", it seems to have more content and take longer to play through than many recent Living World full episodes. I did take a lot of screenshots (over 60 this morning, most of which I can't use because of spoilers) and did a fair bit of exploring, but even so I'm absolutely certain Bound By Blood is at the very least no shorter than the average LS4 entry.

I'm aware that my enthusiasm is in part driven by the change of location and focus. I find Ascalon and The Shiverpeaks a clear order of magnitude more appealing than anywhere we've been sent since before Heart of Thorns four years ago. I also find the Charr the most interesting of all the races. Only the Asura come close and they are definitely in second place.

Bound By Blood (a very clever title, as it turns out) goes all in on Charr politics with a hefty side-order of Charr culture. I loved it. Rytlock, my favorite GW2 character, has a starring role and, as always, makes the most of it, but all the other Charr with speaking parts are memorable characters too.

For non-Charr fans, there's quite a lot of Braham, mostly in his comedy sidekick persona rather than his spoiled brat mode. He's arguably a little over-used but I enjoyed his routines. Gorrik has a smaller but also quite funny supporting role, with a key scene that had me genuinely worried for his safety - not to say survival. Fortunately the "kill a much-loved character" trope, over-use of which by previous writers has drawn a good deal of criticism in the past, stays in the locker this time. I guess that's a spoiler. Sorry!

By the time the prologue came to its unexpected conclusion I found myself very much on board with the new direction. For the first time since... well I can't remember exactly when, but it could conceivably be as far back as the death of Scarlet... I find myself actively looking forward to finding out what happens next.

My only worry is that Bound By Blood is so good compared to most LW episodes precisely because it's a "prologue". That the writers have deliberately slowed the pacing and concentrated on the lore and the characters rather than the set-piece boss fights (which I loathe) only as a beat before a return to relentless, mindless "action".

I'm going to choose to believe that's not the case. That lessons have finally been learned. That we at last have a writing team that knows how to write and developers who know how to fit the necessary action to the limited skills of what is probably the most casual playerbase in major MMORPGS.

How long we have to wait to find out very much remains to be seen. ANet are keeping their cards very close to their breastplates this time. No talk of bi-weekly updates like Season One or three month cadences like Season 4. This time we get a "saga", not chapters or episodes. That could be any format - or none.

I just hope when the next content drop arrives I can come back here and be as positive about it as have been today.

Hope Is A Dangerous Thing: GW2

It's been a while since I had anything very nice to say about Guild Wars 2. The direction the game took with the second expansion, Path of Fire, steered it so far away from just about everything that I loved about Core and Heart of Thorns that, had it been a new MMORPG I was trying for the first time, I'd probably have given it a week or two then moved on to something more suited to my tastes.

There's a certain inertia that builds up over seven years, though, especially when your other half is still playing, albeit sporadically. I'm still plugging away, logging in most days, doing my dailies, hanging around for an hour or so if anything's happening in World vs World, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, is still reasonably lively most days, even in Tier 4.

I also try to at least look at anything new ArenaNet manage to get out. It's not like there's much of it. The last season of Living Story was moderately awful but blessedly short. The story wasn't terrible but it would be more satisfying to watch as a YouTube compilation than to play through. The maps that were added, while beautiful, had zero replayability for me. Most of them weren't even interesting enough to explore.

In August, when ANet rented a theater to promote the next stage of their Secret Master Plan to haul their fading flagship around and set it on a course for relevance and recovery, then hyped the reveal with a countdown timer, I was expecting to be disappointed. I wasn't disappointed.

The pathetic travesty of a re-launch sputtered out on the stage at PaxWest. Reddit and the official forums exploded. ANet became the butt of in-genre snark for a few days until the status quo ante was restored and everyone forgot about GW2 again.

After all that, it would be a gross understatement to say I wasn't expecting much from yesterday's Icebrood Saga Prequel, Bound by Blood. The screamingly inappropriate trailer, confusingly released simultaneously with the update, certainly wouldn't have changed my mind, had I watched it before I'd seen the new map for myself.

Ah, the new map. Grothmar Valley. Forget the story and the gameplay - this is what it's all about! And it's only right that I should give credit where credit's due. For the first time in what feels like years, I'm able to say something unequivocally positive about new content in GW2: I love the new map!

I have barely begun to explore it but already I feel about it much as Jeromai felt about the last one, the one that came with the final episode of LS4, a map that interested me so much I can't even remember what it was called. All of the LS4 maps blur into one for me. I visited most of them only once or twice, in the few days following the release, then never thought of them again.

Grothmar Valley is not that map. Last night I heaved myself reluctantly away from WoW Classic to check out the new content. Even given the appallingly botched build-up I was still keener to see it than anything from LS4 simply beacuase I knew it centered on Rytlock, my favorite character, and took place somewhere in the Charr homelands, my favorite setting.

The opening sequence offered more entetainment than I've been used to getting from these things. The dialog was solid. Rytlock sounded wonderfully world-weary and put-upon. He has history with several of the new Charr characters (well, they were new to me but I'm hardly a lorekeeper), history that was alluded to and hinted at rather than outright infodumped.

So far, so not too bad. The first new area was nicely done. It looked as though it could be some festival ground adjacent to The Black Citadel although a glance at the world map showed it to be deeper into the Charr homelands than we'd been before.

There were some speeches, one fight - an easy and enjoyable one - and that was the end of part one. Then that loading screen appeared. Loading between maps in GW2 is excruciatingly slow. Slower than EverQuest was at the turn of the millennium - on dial-up. I had plenty of time to look, slack-jawed, at the psychedelic finger-painting someone's talented, precocious child had apparently uploaded when no-one was looking.

Then I zoned in and found it was all true! Grothmar Valley uses the color palette I loved so much in the core game that I wrote an elegaic post about it way back in October 2012. That post was tellingly titled "This Land Is Our Land" and in it I laid my claim to a homeland I'd long longed for:  "Every step is filled with wonder. The high summer idyll of the pre-Searing has ripened into an eternal Autumn, the fall after The Fall. The colors burnish with copper and gold, red poppies flag against the sunburned grasslands, white clouds mass the bluing sky.".

I was still in love with Ascalon three and a half years later, when I posted the even more emotionally charged picture-post "Why We Fight". In these two posts it's all too easy to see why I can't give this game up and why I feel so betrayed by what's been lost.

Well, with Grothmar Valley I have hope that some of the wonder may just have bene lying dormant. With a return to Ascalon and it's hinterlands, a whole "saga" set there and in the Far Shiverpeaks, my second-favorite region, it's possible... just possible... I might find myself falling in love with GW2 all over again.

If nothing else, in Grothmar Valley I at least have a map I'm certain to explore to the full and to revisit many times. I don't care whehter it's productive or profitable or any of the things both developers and players have been laser-focused on in new maps for the last two or three years. I just care what it looks like and how it feels.

Discovering Grothmar Valley is like finding another room in your house that you didn't know was there. For the first time in a very, very long while I'll be opening access to this map on all three of my acounts. (To my great surprise and joy you only need core game purchase to flag Bound By Blood for the account).

Not, that is, that I'm going to play through the whole thing right away. Classic is still using most of my available gaming synapses. No, I just want Grothmar Valley safe and secure in my pocket, so I can take it out any time I like, look at it, polish it, lose myself in its golden glow.

Grothmar Valley represents hope. And I have it.

Not The End: Guild Wars 2

A few things came up this week around Guild Wars 2, which I am barely playing right now. There was the trailer for the final chapter of the current Living World season, for one.

The promotional trailers ArenaNet create for GW2 vary wildly in both style and quality. This is one of the moody, elegiac ones, a tone poem of sorts. It's not up there with the best they've ever done but it's not at all bad.

The first three characters you see, not co-incidentally I imagine, are Caithe, Zafirah and Rytlock. That's the same line-up that features in the Requiem series of vignettes that followed the previous chapter, All or Nothing.

I'd forgotten about the Requiem stories. I read the first, Rytlock's, when it was published a while back. I didn't like it much. It seemed an awkward retcon of my favorite GW2 character, struggling to turn the cynical, confident Charr warrior into some kind of 90s "New Man" throwback. Uncomfortable and unconvincing.

This morning I read the second and third tales. I'd forgotten who Zafirah was. She's the Deadeye people complained about in the fourth chapter, A Star to Guide Us. Her Requiem read a lot better than Rytlock's.

Caithe's, the last, was published this week. I read that and thought it was the best of all of them. Then I re-read Rytlock's. I still don't like it. I don't like the direction it tries to send the character and I think it's the clumsiest of the three, but in context I understand what it's trying to do; what all the Requiem pieces are doing. They're giving the narrative the context it so badly needs, something it never even comes close to finding within the game itself.

Asmiroth posted recently about Plot vs Character. Most popular fiction that purports to have any lasting value whatsoever cannot afford that false dichotomy. Character is plot is character. That's so ingrained in serial media like comics, tv and prose fiction we barely notice.

It doesn't work so well in MMORPGs. The cadence is far too slow. The delivery mechanisms are incoherent and obstructive. There's far, far too much distraction going on for anyone to concentrate on nuance or subtext.

My feeling about GW2's extended narrative is that it wouldn't work at all without the ramshackle superstructure that supports it from outside the game itself. The good trailers pack more of an emotional impact than the gaming content they promote. The novels, perfunctory and workmanlike as they are, still operate at depths and across breadths the etiolated in-game arcs lack.

The Requiem fragments point up the discrepancy to an almost embarrassing extent. Reading Caithe's memoir today I felt I'd learned more about her in a few minutes than in several years of watching her often incomprehensible actions within the game.

I might not like what the writer is trying to do with Rytlock in his introspective reflections but at no point to do I fail to understand it. That's something I couldn't say about almost anything Rytlock's ever done in the game itself.

There was one other item of note this week. ArenaNet announced there would be a new voice actor for the female Charr player character. In a game where player characters express themselves out loud, that's a non-trivial change to the experience for anyone who plays that race and gender combo.

I have several female Charrs but I don't usually do Living World content with any of them. Hearing Mara Junot's vocalization, I might start. I found the short interview very revealing about the process and she impressed me with her take on what it means to be a voiceover specialist.

What the video emphasizes, perhaps more srongly than ANet might realize, is just how important voice acting is in keeping the narrative afloat. GW2 has good voicework, by and large. Together with the equally-reliable musical direction, sound does almost all of the heavy lifting when it comes to telling the story.

ArenaNet's art department is rightly regarded as one of the strongest in the genre but few of those artists strengths are best displayed in the service of story. In most Living World chapters the Player Character either fights (and all fights look much the same) or stands around and listens.

The stunning backdrops of Glint's Lair or the Durmand Priory make for amazing screenshots but they do very little to carry the narrative forward. The art department shine in the new maps but few of those have narrative significance, being remembered, if anything, for the productivity of the farms they intentionally or accidentally encourage.

As I said at the top, I'm not playing much GW2 right now. Yesterday I logged in, did my dailies on three accounts then logged out. I'm down to doing that every few days, if I remember. Even when I was logging in every day I barely did anything more for months.

The prospect of a new Living World chapter does not encourage me to believe that's likely to change. It's been a while since I was excited about another installment. When I was playing regularly and enjoying it, I tended to think of the Living World as a slightly annoying interruption to normal business. Of late I've begun to see it as a bloody nuisance.

It's not that I've lost interest in the plot. I still want to know what happens next. Nor is it that I've fallen out of love with the characters. I'm still very fond of Rytlock and Taimi and increasingly interested in Caithe. And I really want to know what's happened to Zojja.

I'm just beginning to think I'd get all of that and more just from watching edited highlights of the in-game material on YouTube and reading all the ancillary material. I'm not sure what I gain by grinding through the mostly tedious, occasionally deeply annoying, combat.

Of course, I'll end up doing it anyway, just because it's there, but it really is a terrible way to try and tell a story, not just for GW2 but for MMORPGs in general. It barely works in Star Wars: The Old Republic, where it's the entire focus of the game. BioWare had to hide (or remove) the rest of the gameplay to accommodate it.

That last line in the trailer, though. They do know how to set a hook...

What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding? : GW2

Tuesday's patch brought a nice little extra to GW2. Apparently there was some kind of competition to design weapon skins and this week the winning entries were added to the game in the form of three new "collections".

I saw it in the update notes on Tuesday but it wasn't until last night that I got around to checking whether Dulfy had a guide yet. Of course she did. She's Dulfy, isn't she?

The whole thing begins in Lion's Arch,. The first time you zone in you receive an in-game mail asking you to help with some crazed Asura's experiments. This sort of thing happens a lot. Apparently killing a couple of dragons and a god or two puts you on speed-dial with every mad scientist in Rata Sum, which is to say the entire population.

First off you have to slap together some easy-to-find bits and bobs and throw them into the Mystic Toilet Forge, where Zamorros has nothing better to do than hammer them together and spit out the very thing you need - an Ectoplasm-Infused Vision Crystal.

Consuming this lets you see ghosts. Like that's hard. Something that stopped you seeing ghosts would be more like it, especially in Ascalon. Anyway, I did it, then off I went to Fields of Ruin, where I spoke to a ghost called Xeniph.

Because I'd needed to craft a Lesser Vision Crystal for the combine, and because to do that you need to be 500 skill in Leathercraft, Tailoring or Armorcrafting, I happened to be playing my Ranger. He's a max-level Weaponsmith and Leatherworker and also a Charr.

Fields of Ruin, for those who don't play GW2, or who do and don't care to clutter up their brian cells with the convoluted lore and history of Tyria, is a flashpoint for ongoing tension between Charr and Humans. Ebonhawke, the city there, is frequently beset by bomb-throwing human separatists who reject Queen Jennah's treaty with the Charr Empire.

The conversation between Xeniph, who presumably died during the Charr-Human war, and my Charr ranger referred quite particularly not just to the historical context but to the fact that the dead human was now talking to a live Charr. I was somewhat taken aback by the intimacy but it was effective in drawing me into the narrative, something it did more successfully than the Living Story has managed these last few chapters.

It was intriguing enough that I'm curious to see how different the conversations are from a human perspective. And then probably an Asura, just for a control. Lucky I have three accounts.

The collection itself didn't take very long. A lot of people were there doing it, including three people tagged up either as Commanders or Mentors. There were helpful instructions being called in map chat and a mesmer was porting to the only awkward location, a tower in the middle of the map's jumping puzzle.

The whole thing took me maybe 45 minutes You could probably do it in half that. The final reward is
an Exotic Longsword with selectable stats. It looked like all the current stat options were available, which makes it very worthwhile for any Level 80 class that uses LS and hasn't got an Ascended version already.

The skin itself is about par for the GW2 course. Ridiculously oversized, ornate to a fault and very glowy. It is a nice blue color, I'll give it that. I might use it on my Mesmer. It definitely looks more suited to a caster than a melee.

The other two weapons are a one-hand sword and a torch. I'll be getting those as well. These short collections are fun and the dialog for this one was interesting. The torch skin is quite peculiar, too. I might use it on a necro.

Once again the amuse-bouche proves more satisfying than the main course.

Off To The Races

When I checked my Feedly this morning the first thing I saw was this question from Keen:


What’s Your Favorite MMORPG Race and Why?


I immediately thought of the Lunar New Year's race through Divinity's Reach in GW2. I did that over and over and really enjoyed it. Did I enjoy it more than the aerial races organized by EQ2's gnomes for every City Festival, though? Or the many races around Metropolis and Gotham in DCUO? And what about that all-time classic, EverQuest's Naked Gnome Race from Ak'Anon to Freeport?

Then I read Keen's post and realized he didn't mean that kind of race at all. He meant the kind of race you choose at Character Creation. The one that decides whether you're short or tall, hated or admired, a genius or a dimwit. Whether you're covered in fur or scales, have a tail or wings. All that good stuff.

The term "Race", of course, is a bit of a misnomer as it's generally applied in MMORPGs. Sometimes it can be an accurate description, as in Vanguard, which has four "races" with the subtitle "Human", but usually it means Species. Then again, the species boundary gets very blurry in fantasy.

We tend to think of Humans, Elves and Orcs as genuinely disparate, separate species but that can hardly be the case when they can interbreed to give us Half-Orcs and Half Elves. Not to mention Half-Giants. The line fades to the point of invisibility when magic comes into the picture with races like EverQuest's Drakkin, "a human race" with "a touch of dragon blood...scaly skin, marking, hair and sometimes horns that mirror the dragon that gifted them their heritage".

Exactly how a dragon  "gifts" such a heritage is - probably wisely - left to the imagination. The more you ponder on all this, the less sense it seems to make. Why are there so many half elves but no "half-humans"? Is that just a naming convention or are the Elven parent's genes always dominant? If Elves and Humans can interbreed successfully, why not Gnomes and Dwarves? Or can they, but they just don't, for cultural reasons?

At first blush MMORPGs - particularly those with a fantasy setting - appear to offer a multiplicity of racial options but they tend to narrow down to a handful once you look at them closely. For a start, almost every Player Race in every MMO is bipedal. Istaria famously lets you play as a (four-legged) dragon, which was the game's primary USP back when it launched as Horizons. Project: Gorgon's Cows are another notable exception, although even there you can't actually roll a cow (!) at character creation. You have to become one by magic in game.

GW2's Charr are highly unusual in that, while bipedal in combat, they drop to all fours when running. It's one of the features that make them so appealing as a racial choice for me even though they are definitely on the larger end of the scale. I do cleave to the smaller races as a rule.

Many Western MMOs have a handful of options that at least attempt to add some variation to the "Short human", "tall human", "human with horns", "human with tail", "human with wings" palette seen in so many imports from the East. WoW has Bulls, Wolves, Goats, Pandas and Undead, all of which walk upright on two legs and look like humans dressed up for Mardi Gras.  

Allods, which modelled a deal of its visual appearance on WoW, took things a stage further with Gibberlings, who come in packs of three and are a lot closer to "animals dressed up as humans" than the other way round. Indeed, Gibberlings probably rest at the cusp of Fantasy and Anime, or Fantasy and Cartoon if you want to be Western about it, which is where the real non-human races come into their own.

There was that one MMO where I played as a rabbit. What was that one called? Eden Eternal, that's it! It's still running, too. There was also the similarly-named and much-missed Earth Eternal, an all-animal MMO I played in beta with some degree of enjoyment. Those animals still stood upright, though, unlike the deer in Endless Forest, a bizarre affair which has, astonishingly, spawned some kind of sub-genre that incudes Meadow and Wolfquest.

Plenty of choice if you cast your MMO net far enough. Closer to home, in the handful of MMOs we all talk about as though they represented the genre, not so much. Which brings me back to Keen's original question. So, what is my favorite MORPG race?

Just for once I can answer that question! In fact, I can list my top ten in order without having to think too hard about it.

1. Raki - Vanguard - Stocky foxes with a great backstory, characterful animations and the happiest faces.

2. Ratonga - EQ2 - Cute rats with another excellent backstory and the most endearing verbal tic in gaming.

3. Gnome - EverQuest - Short, smart, every one kinda likes them and they have the tickingest city in Norrath.

4. Charr - GW2 - Big cats that don't do the "catgirl/catman" thing, run on all fours and have the city Ak'Anon would be if it was a military-industrial complex.

5. Asura - GW2 - They're rats but they won't admit it. Why do you think they're so obsessed with the Skritt (who would totally be on this list if you could play them). Best animations and great voicework, too.

6. Gibberlings - Allods - Three demented gerbils for the price of one. What's not to love?

7. Vah'Shir - EverQuest - Another non-cute cat race. I never really took to the EQ2 version but I played a Vah'Shir Beastlord in EQ for many years and the combination of a tiger-person with a tiger pet is hard to top.

8. Goblin - Warhammer Online - Cowardly, obsequious, disgusting and only they can be the second-best class in any MMO, the Squig-Herder.

9. Dwarf - EverQuest - Just a classic. So solid, so reliable, so predictably gruff. Everything you want a dwarf to be and everything you don't.

 10. Riven - City of Steam - The race I wish I'd played more before the game closed down. Cool, stylish, mysterious, the Riven could have been so much more if only City of Steam had followed its original plan.

Well, that's the top ten today. Ask me tomorrow and it may have changed. Raki is always going to be number one, though. In my heart, anyway.

The Good, The Bag and The Ugly : GW2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Did That Thing Just Move? : GW2

Sometimes I catch myself wondering why I still spend 80% and more of my gaming time playing GW2. Especially when there are so many other MMORPGs I want to play.

Surely after almost four years, counting from Beta Weekend One, there can't be anything new to see or do? Not in the Old Lands of the original game, the place we now know as Core or Pact Tyria, anyway.

Well, stuff and nonsense to that. In the first week of this New Year, while standing around rummaging through my bags on various Tyrian street corners where I've rummaged many, many times before, I have been amazed to overhear several NPC conversations that were completely new to me.

Is someone adding these as we go along? Is there some secret team at ANet busily recording fresh small talk and seeding it across Queensdale and The Black Citadel? Or, more likely, are there rare and ultra-rare one-liners and exchanges that fire only when certain events play out to an unusual end?

Speaking of events, I'm still finding new ones even in maps I've completed on multiple characters. Only a couple of days ago I discovered a hidden cave I'd never seen before, complete with trolls and a Veteran Troll with his dynamic event flag proudly flying. I bet he doesn't get much trade.

The real capper, though, happened last night as I was doing the Ascalon Vista daily in Plains of Ashford. As I was standing there, about to click, a flurry of movement in the lake below caught my attention.

It was only the frickin' Charr submarine going on manoeuvres! I have seen that submarine a hundred times if I've seen it once. I first saw it way back in beta. I've done the annoying event involving fighting separatists bound on sabotaging it at least half a dozen times. I have never, not once, until last night, seen that darn thing move!

I was so taken aback it's astonishing I had the presence of mind to snap a couple of screenshots. If I hadn't I'd doubt my own sanity. It makes me wonder how many other apparently static objects may harbor a secret motility. I'd dearly love to be there when those giant Charr war-wagons in Iron Marches roll.

So, in essence, that's why I still play GW2. Anything can happen. Okay, usually it doesn't. Usually the same thing happens. Repeatedly. But it might and that's what matters..

And, in fact, come to think about it, that applies to all MMOs. Which is one of the many reasons I enjoy them so much even after all these years.

Black Citadel Friday : GW2

This is the greatest city in the world. And it's only going to get greater.

 Charr Citizen - Black Citadel

I count myself exceedingly fortunate that my first character in beta was a Charr. Nothing prepared me for the sheer impact of The Black Citadel. It hit like a fist.

The smoke-filled skies stink of sulphur and Armageddon. The polluted air shrieks and groans with the tortured cries of steel.

Every sunrise, every sunset, burns with apocalyptic fire. And it's always sunset or sunrise in The Black Citadel.

The iron walkways echo with the heavy tread of war. The legions spar and banter in the streets while citizens growl and curse. In the fretted shade of the Gladium Canton the lesser races sweat and trade. 

The craft halls of the Factorium whir with the spinning of looms as the smiths' hammers pound. Beyond the plated walls the scholars of the Priory pore over ancient scrolls among the vine-clad ruins of Old Ascalon.

This is The Black Citadel.

It stands.

It will stand.

It must. 

A fit from the House of Phoebe for #intpipomo 2015