Lost In The Dark

An update on where I am with EverQuest Online Adventures. I wish I knew! This may be the darkest game I've ever played. Not dark as in edgy and unsettling. Dark is in I can't see where the heck I'm going nearly all of the time.

At first I thought it was just at night. Then the sun came up and it barely made a difference. This is outdoors I'm talking about, by the way. Out in Steamfont. Or Steamfont Mountains if you prefer. Sometimes people call it that although given most of it is flat as a pool table, I'm not sure why. 

At least, that's what they call it in the Norrath I know but then, this isn't that Norrath. Here, the gnomish capital is called Klik`Anon not Klak'Anon so who knows what the locals call the countryside. Maybe it's just the gnomish accent.

Anyway, can you even call it a capital when there's just the one city? I guess that'd be a city-state and those don't have capital cities by definition. Come to think of it, most nations in most MMORPGs are city-states, aren't they? How many have more than one city? Freeport and Qeynos are supposed to be the centers of empires but apart from a few villages and trading posts, what other towns and cities do they control? 

Dragging myself back to the point, Klik itself isn't too bad. It's underground so it's not exactly sunny but at least there's decent street-lighting. Not to mention the glow from the lava pool. 

There's another thing. When did the gnomish homeland turn into an offshoot of Lavastorm?  There must be an active volcano somewhere in the area, judging from the burning embers constantly falling from the sky. 

That's outside, obviously. Inside the city there's just this great pool of seething lava. It's not even cordoned off but then gnomes never were big on health and safety.

The same screenshot from the top of the post, with the black borders removed and the rest "auto-leveled" to show what it would look like without the filters. I'd take this version any day. Or night.

 

After several hours running around the tunnels, mostly looking for merchants who aren't even there, I have a vague sense of the size and layout of the city although, if I'm honest, I wouldn't even have that much if it wasn't for the Prima Guide. 

Remember those? I could never see the point of them back when EverQuest was a big enough success to attract third-party publishing. They only told you what you could already read in the manual or get for free from online resources like EQAtlas and Allakhazam. 

Well, I'm glad of them now, I can tell you. Online resources decay fast when a game ceases to be as popular as it used to be and if that game shuts down altogether...

So it's very helpful of Project Return Home to have posted a PDF of the entire Prima Guide to EQOA.  I've been making much use of it, especially the maps, without which I'd probably still be wandering around the Magicians' Guild, which turns out to be stuck right at the back.

I wish I'd consulted it sooner last night. It might have saved me an hour of fruitless searching through the byways of Klik for the merchant who sells copper springs. He's called Merchant Samwe, which I know from looking up the details of the quest on the EQOA wiki, another resource without which I would be both figuratively and literally lost because the game itself tells you nothing.

There's no map, neither full screen nor mini. There's only the most basic quest journal that gives you minimal, static information and doesn't update as you progress. The NPCs do talk quite a bit when you get the quests from them but you can't go back over the dialog so if they offer any hints you'd best not miss them and, if your memory is like mine, better write them down as well. Which obviously I haven't been doing.

So far I have completed precisely three quests. The starting quests you get as a Gnome Magician. Here they are, as detailed in the Wiki, with notes from me appended:

Lvl 01
Starting NPC: Werlib Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
You need to go get a Student's uniform from Tailor Nokar (it's free).

Could not find Nokar at all until I got the map from Prima. Even then it took ages.

Lvl 02
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to Spiritmaster Lacy, who binds you and sends you to Coachman Rizkar.

This would have foxed me because Rizkar is outside the city and Quackook doesn't think to mention it. By sheer chance, I'd already bumped into the Coachman when I was exploring so I at least knew he wasn't in Klik. I still had a lot of trouble finding him again, all the same.

Lvl 03
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to out of town to kill rats, return with two strands of rat fur.

Again, I'd seen rats as I was wandering around outside. And this time Quackook does mention they're common outside the city. What he doesn't tell you, and what you'd never believe if he did, is that rat fur is rare on a rat. I had to kill half a dozen before I got my first strand. 

As you can see, you get one quest at each level. I am now Level 5 and still stuck on Starting Quest #4:

Lvl 04
Starting NPC: Professor Dandersoft
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Dandersoft will make you a new staff if you bring him the following items: A Copper Spring - Purchase from Merchant Samwe, Bottle - Purchase from Grocer Guzzlewugs, Snake fang, Ant Chitin 

Again, I happened to have seen Guzzlewugs already, although in the event I bought an empty bottle off some other merchant because several of them seem to sell them. I was most likely just lucky that the first snake I killed dropped a fang. As for the chitin and the spring... read on.

Each of these ultra-basic starting quests has taken me about an hour, almost all of it trying to find the relevant NPCs. Without the Prima Guide I'd still be looking, mainly because the NPCs who hand out the quests never bother to mention if one of the people they want you to visit is outside the city. 

Even without all the aimless searching it would take a while because when someone sends you get ant chitin they not only don't tell you where the ants are, they also don't mention there are considerably fewer ants than you'd expect, or that most ants do not drop any chitin when you kill them.

I spent about an hour last night just trying to find an ant that would give me what I wanted. I made numerous circuits of the starting area outside the gates of Klik without seeing any ants at all so I followed a path - in the pitch black night - to who knows where until I finally found a couple, who of course didn't give me what I was after. 

In the course of an hour or so, I managed to find about half a dozen more and they dropped all kinds of body parts - legs, antennae, eyes - but not chitin. Eventually, out of frustration, I went through a guarded gate in the wall and wandered about in what I now know must be a higher-level part of Steamfont. It was too dark to see much but luckily hammering the Right Button targets nearby creatures so I was able to track down an ant, which finally gave me the chitin I was looking for.

And then a bigger ant ran up and killed me in one hit. Luckily, not before I'd looted his buddy. 

That gave me a handy ranger port home to Klik anyway so I was happy enough. No XP debt at level 5, either, which is the level my magician is now. 

XP comes in huge chunks. Handing a quest has dinged me every time so far but just killing mobs as I explore brings in a ton of XP, too. I'm not sure if that's how it always was or if the server admins have jacked up the gain. I'm very happy with it either way. I'm sure it won't last.

Since I was back in town and I had all the other bits and pieces the Prof wanted, I thought I'd just quickly find Merchant Samwe and get the spring, do the hand in and then quit for the night. Hah!

I did a couple of circuits of Klik, tapping RB to bring him up on target. No luck. I went round again, more carefully, stopping to cycle through everyone and going into all the buildings. Still no luck.

I went to the Prima Guide and looked at the map of Klik. Every NPC is listed and numbered with their location marked. Samwe is not one of them. He isn't in the fricking city at all.

Even in Klik it gets ridiculously dark away the main drag.

After some time searching online and in the guide I finally figured out he's somewhere in Steamfont, near the lake. I found him on a map and went to look for him. 

I'm still looking. I couldn't find him anywhere and it got so late I had to give up.

I did find the spot on the map where he was meant to be, or I thought I did. He wasn't there. Neither was the guy who sells low-level mage spells in the guild when I looked for him, which is why at Level 5 I still only have three spells and no pet. Which is a problem. Magicians get pets at Level One. It's kind of the point of the class...

The problem is, I don't know if my information is out-of-date or just plain wrong or if, this being an emulator, the merchants I'm looking for just don't exist. I find it unlikely an emu would be as functional and stable and well-populated as it is (Chat is like any live MMORPG - busy all the time, people trying to form groups or get rezzed...) yet still missing the most basic starter content like spell vendors but who knows?

What is plain to me is that EQOA is very old-school in its design  - much more so than modern EverQuest - and yet the old hooks that made EQ so infamously addictive in its day still work. I'm not remotely suggesting the gameplay I've been describing hasn't been frustrating - it very definitely has - but also weirdly compelling. 

I do wish I'd started in a city with some daylight, though. Maybe Freeport. The Deserts of Ro are usually glaring by day and starlit by night. That would be a big improvement on dark all the bloody time.

I'm considering making another character for that reason alone but there's every chance I'll end up making a character of each race anyway, just to see all the different starting cities. The not-exactly-nostalgia factor is very high with this one.

That's EQOA then: not the MMORPG I was expecting to be playing but the one I am. And may be for a while. 

Sifting Through The Embers

It's been a while since I was last enthused or excited about the imminent launch of a new mmorpg. Thinking about it, I wonder if it's happened at all since Guild Wars 2 a decade ago. I could check back through the blog but the very fact that nothing comes immediately to mind tells its own story.

That's not to say there hasn't been a steady procession of new games I've been interested in or enjoyed - there most certainly has - but it's been much more "Oh, that looks like it might be worth a try" than "When's it coming out? I can't wait!". As I was musing the other day, I'm not one hundred percent convinced that, did I not have a blog to write, I would be playing new mmorpgs at all. I'd more likely just be ditzing around in the same old ones, quite contentedly.

With that in mind, it's perhaps not surprising I completely missed the (surprisingly smooth) launch of a relatively significant title this weekend. The first I really knew about it was this morning, when a couple of news items caught my eye. It was only when I came to do the research so I could write this post that I realized not only had I failed to notice the game had gone live, I'd been wholly mistaken about the kind of game it was, pretty much from the moment the Indiegogo campaign that introduced it to the world began.

I can cite a few mitigating circumstances to explain, if not excuse, my series of errors. For a start, I stopped following development of the a long time ago. I crossed the game off of my mental checklist a few years back, mostly thanks to some tetchy dev responses I'd seen in comment threads. It seemed for a while as though even mentioning the game unfavorably in passing would result in a visitation so I avoided mentioning it here at all, an embargo that snowballed into avoiding reading about it and eventually into forgetting it even existed.

Before I stopped paying attention altogether, I did read a particular series of marketing and PR releases that skewed my understanding of the game altogether. There was a moment when Saga of Lucimia, as the game was then called, was making a big deal of how dark it was going to be. That's not dark as in horror-inflected. They meant literally dark as in "can't see your hand in front of your face".

The video that showed all the things you wouldn't be able to see is no longer available but as the  article on MassivelyOP explained, "Players won’t be able to use torches in battle, but the darkness will still be there, meaning that players will need to have someone in the group holding a lantern or torch so that you can see what’s going on."

Somehow I got it into my head that the entire game was going to be like this all the time. Until about an hour ago, I did genuinely believe the original plan for Saga of Lucimia was for a world perpetually shrouded in darkness, where you'd never see anything that wasn't illuminated by an artificial light source and in which one spot in every group would always have to be taken by someone who did nothing but hold a torch.

In retrospect, that never seemed likely to work, let alone be popular, even with hardcore, old school mmorpg vets and indeed no-one was expecting that it would be. I'd simply missed the point.  Night-time and some dungeons would be very dark but the world itself would have normal day/night cycles and no-one was being asked to carry a torch outdoors, when the sun was up. 

Another thing I hadn't really taken on board were the many comparisons with original EverQuest and Vanguard, both reference points that would normally have piqued my interest. I had registered the extremely strong commitment to group-centered gameplay - the original pitch specifies "Zero solo content" - but my conception of early EQ, from the perspective of someone who'd been there at the time, was of a very solo-friendly game. The supposed connection between EQ, Vanguard and "group content only" was lost on me. Still is, for that matter.

About the last thing I remember hearing about the game was when an internal implosion within the development team resulted in a change of name. Unfortunately, when the new name, Embers Adrift, began to appear in news items, I confused it with another, extremely similar name, Worlds Adrift, a now-shuttered mmorpg, whose main focus was steampunk airships. Every time I saw an article about how Embers Adrift was coming along, I mistakenly thought it was talking about another game entirely.

Given all of that, it would have been a miracle if I'd spotted the open beta in time to take a look for myself. I didn't, which was a shame. It was only three days, so I didn't miss much, but I would have liked to have popped in and taken a look around.

That was my one chance to see the game for free but of course, now it's launched, I could pay and play any time. Having had a quick flick through the information available on the website, I have to say I'm significantly more interested in that possibility than I ever imagined I might be.

The general tone of the website is far more welcoming than I remember from the game's earlier iteration. It reads very much like the other would-be "old school" mmorpgs, Pantheon, Camelot Unchained and the rest - very much focused on the tastes and expectations of people who enjoyed playing these kinds of games nearly a quarter of a century ago but recognizing that times have changed and not always for the worse.

Most specifically, gone are the boasts that the game features no solo content whatsoever or that absolutely nothing can be achieved without a group. Instead, as the FAQ puts it, "Grouping is not required in Embers Adrift, but it is highly recommended. With a group you'll be able to get to locations that you never could reach on your own." 

An article at MMO Haven has a detailed, bullet-point list of features that seems to have been written with the more curious, less already-committed potential player in mind. It claims the game has "Adventure content designed for solo players, small groups, and full 6-person groups for levels 1-50" and "Vast overland zones and non-linear dungeons with escape routes". 

All of that makes the game sound considerably more like the EverQuest I remember, rather than the peculiar "uphill in the snow both ways" miserable experience that seems to have become the mantra of a certain kind of reverse-rose-colored-glasses demographic. The promotional material mentions a number of features that appeal to me, among them being able to gain xp purely by killing mobs and traditional tab-targetting combat.

At this point I might very well be thinking of making an account, downloading the game and giving it a try. Granted, there's absolutely no chance I'm going to be settling back into the kind of forty hour a week grind that so enraptured me back at the turn of the millennium. I'm confident that will never happen again and I wouldn't want it to. 

I would, though, be very happy to have a new game using those old mechanics that I could potter around in for a while, seeing the sights in the lower-level areas, putting in a few hours here and there, now and then, as the mood takes me, killing rats, kobolds, goblins or whatever the local farmers feel they can't handle (Although the FAQ does point out that farmers in Embers aren't quite as helpless as we've become used to seeing in other games: "While some NPCs wouldn't mind a hand around the farm...they typically handle their smaller problems on their own").

I might even have been curious and tempted enough to lay out the $29.99 they're asking. It's an introductory price, set to rise to $39.99 in November. Thirty dollars isn't an unreasonable price to pay for a buy-to-play mmorpg, even one from an unproven, indie studio, although I feel $40 might be pushing it a little.

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. In keeping with its traditionalist values, Embers Adrift also comes with a $9.99 monthly subscription, a price that's also set to rise after an introductory period, this time to $14.99 in the New Year. Once again, I don't think that's necessarily an unreasonable ask. If the company wants to keep entirely clear of all kinds of cash shop shennigans as it claims, foregoing both lockboxes cash shop with the commitment that it "will never have micro transactions", the money to keep the servers up is going to haveto come from somewhere.

It just isn't going to come from me. And, frankly, I remain to be convinced it's going to come from enough people to keep Embers Adrift  viable in the medium to long term. The game probably doesn't need a huge number of people to sign up to meet the minimum commercial threshold for continued existence but there's very little understanding of just how big (or small) the potential market for these old-school titles is likely to be.

$40 for the "box" and $15 every month for as long as you want to play seems like a very significant barrier to entry in the current market. I'm very well aware from numerous conversations in the general chat channels of various older games that a hefty proportion of veteran gamers have enough disposable income to see these kinds of sums as trivial but those players also tend to be the most settled in their ways and the least likely to jump ship from the games they've already been playing for much of their lives. 

Whether a newcomer can prize enough of them away from EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot or WoW Classic or P99 or any of the myriad other emulator projects, most of which are either free to play or vastly better-known or both and most of which offer a combination of familiarity and novelty as they continue to build on established foundations, remains to be seen.

I hope they can. From all accounts I've seen so far, Embers Adrift is a solid attempt at providing a satisfying experience for a specific audience. That's a lot more than can be said of many of the crash-and-burn projects that have plagued the mmorpg gamespace in recent years. 

For me, it's probably not quite the right fit and also about a decade too late. I'm not saying I'll never pay a subscription for a new game of this kind - I'll probably stump up for Pantheon, if it ever arrives - but for now I'm happy enough with what I have.

What I most certainly will do, however, is take the opportunity to kick the wheels and inspect the teeth, should Embers Adrift ever decided to throw open the doors for a "free weekend" or offer some kind of  "free trial". I imagine it will have to, eventually, and I imagine those few days will probably be enough for me.

A Change In The Weather: WoW Classic

When it rains itn Loch Modan, boy, does it rain! Following Friday's post, which Kaylriene followed up today, I was trying to take some comparison shots with the graphics turned up to the max but the weather wasn't having any of it.

I love weather in MMORPGs. It can make a huge difference, not just to the feel of things but also to the gameplay. When I first played EverQuest in late 1999, rain closed down the field of view to such an extent it was dangerous to carry on roaming. It was imperative that you be able to see potential threats before they came into aggro range and in a rainstorm you couldn't.

If it happened to come on to rain at night, forget it. Night-time in EQ was difficult enough under moonlight but once the cloud cover filled in and the rain began you might as well just find the nearest shelter and wait it out.

Not that being indoors meant you were safe. I once spent the entire game night huddling in a hut in West Commonlands, only to be attacked through the walls by something I never saw. I managed to kill it but it wasn't until daylight that I found I'd been fighting a bear. It was dead, slumped against the stone wall, through which it had somehow managed to claw and bite me.

I guess that outfit has a certain practicality in conditions like this. Those pants are going to rust, though.

In retrospect, the game must have told me in chat what I was fighting. EQ records every last detail of gameplay in the chat log. I was so in the moment that I never even glanced at it. It was immersion of the deepest order.

By the time Kunark arrived, with its heavy jungles that already limited visibilty to a few yards, rain spelled almost certain death in some zones. It was fine on the flat plains of Lake of Ill Omen, but once you zoned into neighboring Firiona Vie you were spider bait for the hideous Drachnids that lurked in the sodden foliage. I used to wait at the zone line until the rain stopped, even if it took twenty minutes. A death would take far longer than to recoup.

Over the years a lot of that difficulty got smoothed over, even as the visuals improved by orders of magnitude. Bad weather became something to appreciate aesthetically rather than react to with frustration or fear. Final Fantasy XIV has some truly gorgeous weather effects, particularly the way wind and sand interact in Thanalan. Thunderstorms in Elder Scrolls Online are so spectacular I once spent most of a session trying to get a screenshot that did them justice.

Bear! Where the hell are we? Where the hell are you?

WoW Classic sets a solid balance between appearance and reality. The rain didn't really inconvenience me yesterday, let alone discourage me from adventuring around the Loch, but doing so felt very different from the day before. 

When the weather was fine I'd been stopping every few minutes to take screenshots of the slowly setting sun and gosh-wow over the amazing rose-petal clouds. Now I was hunkering down, pushing on with the task at hand, getting things done despite the inclement weather, just as a true dwarf should, rather than wasting time lollygagging at the pretty view like some species of elf.

It was daytime when the storm set in. I'm not sure how much more inconvenient it would be in the dark. I'm also not all that likely to find out. WoW has a very unusual day/night cycle, one I'm not sure I've seen used anywhere else in the genre.

I love the smell of wet fur in the norning.

In most  MMORPGs day and night have specific lengths. Day is usually considerably longer than night and the whole shebang rolls round in an hour or two. In WoW a day lasts as long as it does in real life. So does night.

It means that if you play on your closest geographical server cluster - EU in my case -  and you start playing at 8am to finish twelve hours later (not that 'Im doing that...yet) you'll play in daylight the entire time. I'm currently seeing maybe a couple of hours of night, at most, before I log out around 10pm.

On the other hand, if you play on a US server, as I did on one of my free trial accounts, you would barely see daylight at all. Perhaps the soft region lock worked in my favor after all.

Now that's what I call a hunter's moon. If only this was a PvP server...

That said, night, like weather, is more about immersion and atmosphere in WoW Classic than it is about inconvenience. I was in Westfall after darkeness fell last night and I was able to roam and quest without any difficulty. Well, without any difficulty caused by the failing light, at least. The hordes of players made finding anything to kill a bit of challenge. These things are much more civilized in the dwarf lands.

The corrupted farmland of Westfall may not have the rugged drama of Loch Modan but the moon coming up over the hills towards the sea was spectacular. There were players silhouetted against the huge orb as though they were auditioning for the poster for E.T.  If this was WoW Live, someone probably would have flown past on a bike.

It looked positively ethereal. As Kaylriene so rightly says, "It doesn’t look realistic because it doesn’t need to – it is a fantasy game creating a fantasy world".

My beard needed a wash anyway. Been a few months.

And it's also a game designed, back in the early 2000s, to be less alarming, less frustrating, more welcoming than its predecessors. The balance Blizzard struck between challenge and difficulty, between inclusion and exclusion, between skill and enthusiasm, worked then and still works now.

By dint of top notch art design and world-building, coupled with a desire to render the gameplay the designers themselves loved more readily accessible to a wider audience, World of Warcraft broke down the walls of a niche genre and opened it out to the world, many millions of whom grabbed it with both hands.

No-one knows why WoW became such an unexpected success. Many have tried to emulate or recreate the magic and all have failed. Evidence suggests Blizzard had no more idea how they bottled lightning than anyone else. They veered away from the formula that had worked so well and the whole genre trailed after them. The rest of the world promptly looked the other way and the walls of the niche stood themselves back up.

And finally it ends. Now all  I need is an ale or three to wash away the taste of all this water.

We are, as they say, where we are, but nothing says we have to stay there. I never played Vanilla WoW so, for me, the emotional impact of Classic is both limited and filtered through a lens formed by my prior and far more formative experiences in EverQuest. Everything in Classic seems both harder (compared with almost any current MMORPG) and easier (compared with EQ circa 1999-2006). It's impossible at this stage to predict how big Classic will get or how long its current boom will last but I tend to agree with SynCaine, when he says

"Classic isn’t just a chance for non-Retail players to enjoy WoW again; its also a live demonstration of all the ways Retail went wrong with WotLK and beyond, as well as the rest of the genre when it copied that version of WoW."

If Classic does continue to be both a popular and a commercial success for some time to come, it could pose problems for Blizzard at corporate level. As someone said (and I have to paraphrase this because I can't remember where I read it or who to credit) Blizzard won't want to have to answer questions at an earnings call about why they wasted ten years going in the wrong direction when they already had the most profitable gameplay in the genre nailed down.

It's obviously not that simple and I don't believe Classic will outstrip WoW Live but there's a seed of truth in there, somewhere. I feel we're at a turning point for the genre, or we could be. If nothing else, Classic's overwhelmingly positive reception must surely give energy and confidence to developers looking to make more complex, nuanced, wordlike MMORPGs like Pantheon or Project: Gorgon.

Perhaps we'll even see a new cycle of Classic clones. That could be... interesting.