How Hard Is Too Hard?

I really don't have anything much to talk about today, or nothing most people reading are likely to be interested in, anyway. More like actively annoyed by, I would guess. I left a comment on one of Tipa's posts the other day, to the effect that I'd rather write about AI than gaming most days and I'll add now that I'd rather write about music than either.

When I do write about games here, which I think is still easily the majority of the time, it tends not to be about MMORPGs. Belghast has a thought piece up today that goes some way towards explaining why that might be. 

The idea that MMO developers pay too much attention to the hardcore is far from new, of course. I remember discussions and arguments about it often on blogs like Spouse Aggro and Hardcore Casual, well before I had a blog of my own and I've been blogging since 2011. 

Has it gotten worse, I wonder? I'm not sure. It's easy to forget the pattern of these things.

There was a long period, measured in years, when there seemed to be more complaints within the blogosphere about MMORPGs getting easier than the other way around. The hardcore perspective back then seemed to be that they were fighting a mostly-losing battle against the dumbing-down of the genre, with filthy casuals swarming over the battlements to parade up and down the castle walls, showing off their vanity pets and fancy mounts, rather than learning their rotations and parsing their DPS like real players should.

All of that got muddled up with the Free-to-Play revolution, too, the theory being that if you let anyone in without proving they owned a credit card and were willing to use it, the whole thing would fall apart. Of course, at the same time, the exact same people were complaining bitterly that the F2P hordes were all-too-willing to whip out their credit cards to buy power and advantage in the cash shop...

None of it made much sense then and it makes even less with the benefit of hindsight. But of course, we all see things through our own lens or from the inside of our own silos. Assuming you can see anything out of a silo, that is, which would, were it true, break the metaphor.

Scopique points out in the comment thread to Belghast's post that "there’s the potential that such not-so-hardcore MMOs exist, but they aren’t on your radar for one reason or another". This is a very valid observation, one made all too rarely in my opinion, as we all tend to write as though our experience is somehow universal, something of which I'm as guilty as anyone.

Kay of Kay Talks Games, another blog I believe I picked up in last year's Blaugust (Or possibly an earlier one...) and still read with enjoyment, even though I rarely find cause to mention it here, wrote a very good piece about the problem a while ago. I've been meaning to say something about it ever since but haven't found the opportunity until today

The post is called Gaming Bubbles, which is self-explanatory and I found it particularly interesting since it comes from someone who knows of the genre but generally doesn't play many MMORPGs. I found it particularly telling that she says, of Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, "Those games have accumulated 26 million and 23 million players, respectively, yet I never really hear about them online unless it’s someone bringing up how disastrous the Fallout 76 launch was."

It's all too easy to assume everyone else is talking abut the same issues we focus on but it's long been my impression that, in what we loosely and not entirely accurately call "the West", very few self-identifying gamers would be able to name more than a handful of MMORPGs, let alone claim to have played any of them. (And if they had, it would inevitably be World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.)

If you cast the net outside the self-proclaimed "gaming community", I'd bet the question would be met with a blank stare. Both the movie and the infamous South Park episode were so long ago now, I doubt many non-gamers remember WoW exists.

In that context, whether the developers' assumed focus on the hardcore part of the audience is misguided or merely an act of increasingly desperate self-preservation becomes much harder to judge. It's very tempting to think that, were the barriers to entry lowered and the obsession with endgame abandoned, currently uninterested casual gamers would come flocking in but I suspect the result might be somewhat less heart-warming. Or commercially desirable.

There might be little or no increase in interest from the casuals but some of the disgruntled hardcore might leave. Probably for one of the gazillion games that likes to describe itself as "Souls-like". The success of Dark Souls certainly added some fuel to the hardcore argument that everyone wants challenging content as well as giving those who actually do somewhere to go to find it.

One MMORPG company that gets - often grudging - approval these days for being able to hold and serve an audience is Daybreak, particularly in relation to EverQuest, which is still objectively successful, albeit on a small scale, after more than a quarter of a century. It's also frequently cited as a benchmark for difficulty in the genre, even if it isn't anything like as difficult as it once was. 

I don't play much EQ these days but I do play EverQuest II and there you can see the devs trying to balance on a slack rope over a ravine as they attempt to appease the voluble and volatile hardcore, the people who presumably pay most of their bills, while trying to ameliorate the situation for the softer-core crafters, decorators and general casuals, who pay the rest. With the game almost certainly teetering on a financial knife-edge, they really can't afford to piss off any significant demographic to the point where money stops changing hands.

To a greater or lesser extent, I imagine many MMO companies are in similar situations. That explains some of the decision-making, although I also think that game devs en masse are almost bound to be more hardcore than the overwhelming majority of their potential customers. It would be hard for them not to be, really. Wilhelm makes that point in some detail in Bel's comment thread.

And, as has been demonstrated countless times, developers think the broad mass of players in their games are going to find content easier than they do. Also proved by experience is the way the cutting edge of the playerbase will always either find new content too easy or work out some way to trivialize it the developers never imagined.

As Muspel says in the same thread, multiple difficulty settings are always an option. EQII has done a great job of that by literally making every new dungeon come in several flavors, with the same content available for solo and two grades of group, if not raids too. 

That's a welcome approach that I certainly appreciate but it does tend to push players even deeper into their own, ever smaller silos. While it's true that every motorist is also a pedestrian, it's not always true that every raider is a soloist, so not everyone is going to appreciate the effort that's been made to satisfy all tastes.

I don't have a solution for any of this. I don't think anyone does. If they did, they'd presumably be running the biggest, most popular MMORPG out there right now. 

And maybe they are, at that. Looping back to the idea that we don't really look far outside our own comfort zones, I'm occasionally reminded that almost no-one I read ever blogs about some of the biggest MMOs, like Old School Runescape or whichever version of Lineage is in favor these days. For all I know, someone in one of those may be thinking of all of this as a solved problem already.

I kind of doubt it, though. I suspect it falls under the rubric “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. Abraham Lincoln used to get the credit for saying that, which would mean the problem has been around for quite a while, but these days it seems to be accepted that it was first said by John Lydgate, who died in 1451, so we've known about it for a lot longer.

And I fear we're probably stuck with it.

Church, State And Family In Rinascita Today

Having said only yesterday that I find it hard to play more than a session of Wuthering Waves every few days, of course I immediately found myself playing for two days in a row. In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances, mainly involving me being woken up at 5.30am by Mrs. Bhagpuss and Beryl, both of whom wanted to let me know we'd caught a mouse in the live trap under the sink and also what was I going to do about it? 

That led to me sitting down at the PC just after seven, having already had breakfast and walked Beryl for an hour. Even so, and with all the day ahead of me and not much else to do with it, after an hour in Wuthering Waves I was, once again, sated with story. 

In the time I spent there, the plot moved on apace. There was much skullduggery and several twists as well as  the expected confirmation that what's rotten in the church-state of Rinascita is mostly the church. This is turning out to be a highly anti-clerical episode.

The actor playing Priest Alessio is determined to make sure everyone knows just who the bad guys are. He plays the arch-villain card so hard I can almost see him there in the sound booth, twirling an imaginary mustache. 

To be fair, the corruption of the church hierarchy has hardly been a close-kept secret up to now, which is why I'm not handing out spoiler warnings. It was telegraphed pretty clearly the moment a church official asked Rover to show her papers before she'd even shaken the sea-spray from her silk stockings as she stepped onto the dock. 

If I recall correctly, that official was Phoebe, now about to become one of the latest additions to the Resonator team in the new update. The normally tempered and even-handed Chris Neal  unfairly and inaccurately labelled her a "walking devoted priestess trope " in an unnecessarily snide news item at MassivelyOP yesterday, making me feel he had to be working purely from press releases and promotional videos. No-one who'd actually played the game could dismiss the complex and nuanced Phoebe, a lifelong believer, now forced to confront the hollow sham of her faith, as a "trope". 

This is one of the many things I really appreciate about the game. It's melodrama, sure, but it's top-class melodrama. The baddies aren't pantomime villains; they're properly sinister. A palpable air of entitled arrogance surrounds most of them like a funk. Equally, the good guys aren't just cardboard cut-outs, either. Most of them are quite scary, too.

Carlotta, the Morelli Family's "Executor" certainly is. She offers a great line in understated menace, lending her official job title a distinctly razor-like edge. The fact that she appears to have forgotten to change out of her nightdress before coming to work, along with the soft-spoken way she somehow manages to make even the most innocuous observation sound like a veiled threat, just adds to a sense of gleeful violence, barely contained, that accompanies almost everything she says and does. 

Wuthering Waves is a rare game in that I find I like almost every character I meet there. Much of the visual design seems highly original to me and also frequently wildly idiosyncratic. I already talked about the Resonator who ends every fight hanging from a sex swing. Now we meet one who spends most of her time willingly locked inside a box!

Of course, when I say I like them, I don't always like them. I find them entertaining.  I certainly don't actually like all of the bad guys, especially not the religious fascists, but some of them can be quite persuasive. There are a few highly engaging bad boys and girls who make a pretty good case for changing sides, something I thought, at one point, might be genuinely be on the cards for Rover. 

That seems unlikely now. The Fractsidus, whoever they are, now appear to be the actual master-villains behind most of the really bad stuff that happens not, as I once suspected, merely a very cool gang of impetuous and irresponsible rebels. The plot twists and turns so wickedly, though, I still wouldn't be entirely surprised if they turned out to be not quite so dastardly after all at some point down the line.

The story is a joy but it has its drawbacks, the main one being that following it exclusively makes 90% of the game disappear. Before I became hell-bent on catching up to the current content, I spent a great deal of time wandering around the gorgeous world, opening up the huge maps and glorying in the amazingly beautiful scenery. Now I find myself sprinting through landscapes I would dearly love to stop and savor, barely taking the time to register the broad sweep of the aesthetic, far less take in the exquisite detail. 

When I do, finally, get myself up to current content, something that can't now be too far off, seeing I'm now in the final act of what came before, I plan on stepping away from the main questline for a while to go exploring. Played that way, Wuthering Waves should revert to being a game I can relax and kick back in, rather than one where I have to lean forward to give it my full attention. 

I might also take some time and make some effort to acquire a couple of the newer Resonators. I can't help but notice how very much more powerful the new characters seem, compared to my own team, when they join them as "Guests". The difference is every bit as pronounced as it is between my Berseker and Necromancer in EverQuest II, something I discussed in some detail yesterday. 

I'm thinking this might be a path I could usefully follow in a number of games, now it's belatedly occurred to me. I do have to wonder to what extent I've been making things harder for myself by side-stepping upgrade paths and ignoring specific abilities and aptitudes of different classes or characters. Maybe just barrelling ahead with whatever character I happen to start with, while never really learning what it is that they do or even bothering to look at their gear, until they start to feel unsatisfying to play, might not quite be the low-effort strategy I took it for.

Something to think about, at least. 

Palworld: First Impressions

With more than six million people playing Palworld, almost two million of them literally playing as I write, I imagine the last thing the world needs right now is a First Impressions piece from someone who hasn't even finished the tutorial. Well, tough, That's what's coming.

I will at least try to keep it brief and to the point. To the bullet point, in fact.

Connectivity, Bugs, Practicalities.

Playing solo with multiplayer not enabled as I have been, the game has performed flawlessly so far. There's been no lag and I've not seen a glitch or a bug in just under five hours. Exiting and re-entering the game is swift, saves are automatic and it all feels very competent and clean, especially for an Early Access title. Of course, I may just have been lucky...

Character Creation

For Early Access, again, there's a very decent amount of choice. Palworld employs the newly-popular, ungendered (Body Type A/B) archetypes, something I always like to see. The default character I got was, almost ironically, I thought, a redhead, but they looked unusually and satisfyingly chunky, which I thought might be making a point of some kind. Then again, maybe the first character you see is random. I haven't tried to make another character yet so I can't say for certain. 

Now I look at the screenshot I took, though, I rather wish I'd stuck with that default option. She looks cheerful and friendly. The character I made looks bad-tempered and a bit sharp-faced. I get the feeling she might not like me all that much. It's lucky I only have to look at the back of her head, most of the time.

For now, I'm stuck with her unless I re-roll and start a new world. There's no cosmetic remodelling available yet. It is on the schedule, though. I think I'll be taking advantage of it, when it arrives. 

Graphics and Animation.

The world and the environments within it, the few I've seen (Meadows, small woods and rivers, a lot of mossy ruins.) look very pretty, if not all that detailed. They've gone for a cartoonish vibe that reminds me of a certain kind of kids TV show; it's a rounded, softened, cartoon-realism that's almost not quite really one thing or the other. I always find the style a bit uncanny valley in a show but it works a lot better in a video game. It certainly works well here. 

The character animations, I like. They're bold, broad and lively with no attempt to mimic real-world practice. You try chopping down a tree by swinging at it left, right, left, right, like the pendulum of a clock. See how far you get. Feels great in a game, though. 

Pals (Every creature you see is a "Pal", as far as I can tell, except maybe the huge, named ones.) are goofy and comic, as expected. Lamballs, for example, are hysterical when you kill them - they just roll and roll like tumbleweed until they hit something that stops them, if it ever does. I haven't watched for long enough to see if Pals exhibit much character beyond the obvious species tropes but I suspect they might. 

UI

I found it both comfortable to use and pleasing to look at. What more can you ask? 

Building uses a radial menu, something I'm generally not pleased to see, but I'm finding this one quite intuitive. 

About the only complaint I have, apart from the almost inevitable one about the lack of screenshot and Hide UI commands, is that I haven't yet found out how to give myself a free cursor. There have been a few moments when there was something on screen I thought I ought to be able to click on (A scroll bar, for example.) but haven't been able to find a way to do it. I suspect I just need to read the Options menus more carefully.

Survival Mechanics

Very simple and familiar, if mildly overtuned for my taste, although there don't seem to be many of them, at least not to begin with. Hunger and cold are the only ones I can remember off-hand and cold just goes away as soon as you make yourself some clothes. Hunger was a nuisance at first but now, at Level 7, it's just slightly annoying. I suspect it will become all but unnoticeable before long.

Pals seem to have more Survival issues than the player, as far as I can see. They need to be fed, kept sane and given somewhere to sleep. You get a running commentary on screen of the various issues they're having but even at this early stage, most of them have fixes that can be handled autonomically, for example by placing a feed dish and filling it with berries so they can go help themselves when they get hungry. 

All the different species have their own strengths and weaknesses, something I assume will form a major part of the gameplay eventually, but so far I've been able to ignore all of that and just let them get on with it. They seem perfectly capable of looking after themselves, most of the time, except for Cativas, who are a right, royal pain in the neck. I only had one and I already regret catching him. I've had to retire him from active service because he wanted more attention than all the others put together. Typical bloody cat.

Difficulty

Just about all of the above, I should stress, is entirely optional. The game comes with three preset difficulty levels - Casual, Normal and Hard -  plus Custom, where you can adjust a wide range of parameters to taste. As I usually do with any new game, I started on "Normal" so I could assess what the developers intentions might have been and I'm finding it very comfortable so far. 

I could happily carry on this way indefinitely. Should I feel like changing anything, though, that option remains permanently available. You can switch difficulties from the main menu at any time, including using the custom settings to tweak things to your precise tastes. I'm curious if you can use that to finesse the difficulty level of Boss fights, without having to create a whole, new, easier world. That would be a very welcome innovation.

I probably will change the death penalty after a while, so I get to keep all my stuff when I die, instead of having to run back and pick it up, a time-wasting process that just seems fatuous in a single-player game. I might also turn off base raids, a feature I'm not mad keen on in any of these survival games, except the starving Pals who keep attacking my food store do drop some very handy keys that open locked chests. Until and unless I discover an alternative source of keys, I suppose I'll have to put up with the raids.

Combat and Capture

Hmm. Mostly it's very easy, until it isn't. You have to reduce a Pal's health to make it easier to catch, which is safe and simple on lower level Pals... until you discover they're social and every other Pal around piles on. They also have a loooong leash, so running them off when you get too many isn't always a successful strategy. 

As for fighting anything above your level, probably don't bother. I did manage to subdue and catch something a level above me but the captured Pal drops down to your level so there's not much point. There are also some aggressive higher-level mobs wandering about, even in the Tutorial area. It reminded me of the zone-sweepers in early EverQuest. When I got killed by some flying mob, it felt highly reminiscent of being killed by a griffin in West Commonlands. 

In fact, the whole thing feels weirdly everquesty at times. Even the supposedly Pokemonesque capture mechanic reminds me just as much of those many, many quests in EQII, where you have to fight something until it hits about 10% health before using a quest item to capture it and take it back to the questgiver. I've never played a Pokemon game and yet I felt right at home with the process.

Pals

I guess I might as well cover them here, now I've talked about catching them. They are weird. Not what they look like, which is exactly as you'd expect, but what they do, which very definitely is not. 

They bustle around my base, turning their paws to everything. They start off mining, logging and gathering but as soon as I start to do anything, like build a crafting station or some furniture, half a dozen Pals come barrelling up and start hammering away alongside me. It's great! The more Pals, the faster things go. Combines that take a minute to make solo take maybe ten seconds with a pack of Pals.

And it does feel surprisingly good. About an hour and a half in yesterday, I was beginning to regret my purchase. Things were going just fine but it was clearly yet another Survival game like too many I've played lately and I was wondering why I'd thought I needed another one... and then my first Pal, a Lamball, joined in and helped me make a bed. 

It felt... well, it felt pally. My mood changed instantly. I no longer questioned my decision to buy the game, which suddenly felt very different to anything else I'd played. My whole sense of ennui just evaporated.

How long that's going to last we'll find out in due course but after five hours the novelty hasn't started to wear off yet. It still seems amazing to see a Pengullet watering my berry patch or a Lamball trot by with a chunk of stone on her back. The AI seems pretty sophisticated. I assumed I'd have to give them all tasks or at least micro-manage the set-up for each new addition to the team but no, they do it all themselves and they seem to be doing it pretty well so far. I'm not sure they really need me there at all.

Building

Needs work. It's not at all bad but the design aesthetic feels a tad unsophisticated, although that could well just be because of the low-level materials and designs I'm seeing. What certainly doesn't get a pass is the positioning of the click-to-fit sections, which is too often fiddly and awkward. There are always moments with systems like these when you can't get a piece to go exactly where you want but I spent far too long trying to get sloping roof sections to slot into places they were clearly meant to go without any success at all. In the end I took down the few sections I'd managed to place and swapped the whole thing out for a boxy flat-roofed design that looks bad but at least goes up and stays up.

Other than that, which I'm sure is something that will get smoothed out as development progresses, I was happy enough with the options and the mechanics. I didn't have much of a problem finding a suitable, permitted area in which to build and the starter base is a very generous size. I didn't find it too difficult to put stations and flooring in the spots where I wanted them, although getting things to go under stairs was, as usual, more of a problem than it would be in real life, where "under the stairs" is the homeowner's version of the TARDIS. 

Progression

One of the big strengths of the Survival genre has to be clarity of intent. Unlike many MMORPGs, there's rarely much doubt in the mind of a new player on what to do next. That's very much the case in Palworld, where after five hours of pretty concerted, concentrated play, I'm still very much in the Tutorial phase, following instructions. 

There's an on-screen Tutorial check-list in the top right corner at all times, as well as a list of the current Missions to upgrade my base. Between the two, I found myself pretty much permanently busy, to the point that I eventually started to feel a little claustrophobic. That, of course, was my fault. There's absolutely nothing to stop you just running off to explore, which is what I did when all the chores started to feel like I had a full-time job.

The important thing is that I always wanted to progress. You can see well ahead down the Technology line to the recipes that are coming, which is motivating in itself, but also to lots of items with nothing more than a big ? indicating a mystery recipe you won't unlock until you catch a certain kind of Pal. If that doesn't make you want to go exploring, Palworld probably isn't the game you're looking for.

Even without having pitted any of my Pals against a Boss yet, or having seen or heard one word of narrative (There is a story, apparently.), both of those things being what passes for a throughline in this game, I can already feel the tidal pull of the nested progression mechanics. I suspect this is yet another Survival title capable of eating several hundred hours of anyone's life, should they be incautious enough to let it get a grip.

It's probably too late for me. Save yourself, while you still can.

Spiders. Why Did It Have To Be Spiders?

This is just a brief update on my experience with the Hildir's Request patch for Valheim, which got a brief mention in last Friday's grab-bag post. As I suggested then, I had some difficulty getting the patch to download. It kept stopping at 98%. Clearing the cache didn't help at all so in the end I decided to uninstall the whole game and reinstall it from scratch.

That went much better. Weirdly so, in fact. I realise Valheim has a very small footprint for the kind of game it is but I was still very surprised to see Steam re-install the whole thing in a matter of seconds. The Play button was up before I had time to tab out and do anything else. It made me wonder whether Steam had actually uninstalled the thing at all.

I wasn't about to complain either way. Valheim was back and it worked. Before I did anything else, I checked to see if the new difficulty settings could be applied to an existing world and I'm pleased to say they very much can.

I had a quick look at all the options. There are half a dozen pre-sets, five sliders and a four buttons. You can set things up using any combination to meet your particular tastes, from a pure sandbox with no threat and abundant resources to an unforgiving nightmare hellscape.  

I was expecting to have to make several adjustments but in the end it occurred to me that about the only thing I didn't like about Valheim the first time round was having to keep fighting mobs I didn't want to fight, when all I was trying to do was get from one place to another. I never had a problem with the difficulty of the fights (Maybe some of the bosses...) just the frequency.

All I wanted to do was make a quick trip to my tombstones (Plural) in the Mistlands so I could recover my lost gear. If and when I decide to go explore the Mistlands a second time, I want to able to start over and pretend I never ran off and got myself repeatedly killed like someone who only discovered video games last week. 

To that end, I decided the only change I really needed to make was to set all enemies to passive. That's a change I'd dearly love to be able to make in all games. I'm generally fine with having to fight monsters just so long as they're monsters I've chosen to fight. 

For all that EverQuest infamously offered a deadly and unforgiving experience to the unwary adventurer, with vicious, aggressive and extrmely powerful monsters scattered far and wide, the crucial difference was that those monsters were rarely piled right on top of each other along the only route through a zone. 

If you kept your eyes open and paid attention (And used a wide range of magical abilities available to you through spells, potions and magic items, as well as your own natural stealth, if you happened to have any.) it was quite possible to move around with considerable freedom in safety. I much preferred that to more recent standard practice, which is generally to stuff every corner of a map with fairly weak enemies that don't pose that much of a threat and expect players to hack their way past them, coming and going.

Somewhat surprisingly, I not only remembered roughly where I died but also which portal I needed to use to get there. In a couple of minutes I was jogging through the rain along some scraggy stretch of Black Forest coastline, wearing my third-best suit of armor and carrying an iron mace I was dearly hoping I wouldn't need to use.

Almost the moment I left the portal, I spotted Hugin, the enigmatic raven, sitting on a stump, cocking his head in my direction. I had a brief chat with him to find out what he wanted, which turned out to be to tell me about Hildir. 

He was about as helpful as he ever is, letting me know I might find the new merchant "somewhere in a forest such as this". He did at least apologise for not being able to narrow things down any further, which has to be a first.

After that, it was a short but very awkward trip back to my tombstones. The terrain was difficult to navigate, uneven and littered with rocks and fallen trees. It was very dark, although it was still supposedly only morning. As I neared the fringes of the Mistlands visibility was further hampered by huge spider-webs strung across every clearing. 

It was very obvious how I'd had so much trouble recovering my lost gear the last two times. The harder question to answer was what had possessed me to get myself into such a suicidal situation in the first place. And twice, no less.

When I finally managed to clamber over the many obstacles blocking the path to my graves, I discovered the final, fatal reason previous attempts had gone so terribly wrong. In the picture above, you can see the creature that killed me. It's called a Sentinel Soldier but it's really just a spider the size of a rhinoceros. Maybe two rhinoceroses.

In the next shot I've removed the special effects so you can see the damn thing. It's absolutely horrific. You can also see me just ahead of it, which gives you the exact scale. 

Last time I played, when this thing killed me then killed me again, I never got any kind of look at it. It charged me from the darkness, killed me in moments, then vanished again. Looking at it now, I'm glad I couldn't see it. If I had, I'd never have had the nerve to go back at all.

I was apprehensive as I approached, wondering whether the button I'd pressed had really made all mobs non aggressive as promised. Fortunately, it had. Very fortunately, in fact, since I now know that my death spot is in the center of a tight patrol kept by the Sentinel Soldier. There was absolutely no chance of my avoiding it. It never leaves the very small clearing in the trees where it killed me.

The weirdest and by far the creepiest part of the whole corpse recovery happened as I was crouching down, trying to sort through my belongings to take the good stuff. I obviously didn't have room to retrieve everything in one go. 

As I was making my choices, I found myself being physically pushed across the forest floor. The Sentinel Soldier had come up behind me and was determinedly trying to continue its patrol, even though I was in the way.

Since Valheim has full collision, that meant I was being shunted through the undergrowth by a slavering, giant spider. I could see and hear its disgusting mandibles clacking right next to my head. It was one of the most unpleasant things I've ever experienced in a video game. It only stopped when the spider pushed me right into a rock and couldn't go any further.

Even though I was sure the thing wouldn't attack unprovoked, I was still very nervous about accidentally poking it with my mace. I didn't dare touch any keys just in case I hit the wrong one so I had to wait until the horror moved off. It took a long while... or it seemed like it.

Once it was gone I grabbed everything and ran. I left one tombstone to loot later but all that's on it are some crafting mats and a bit of food I can easily do without. If the Sentinel wants it, it can have it.

Pausing only to take a couple of selfies with a passing troll, I legged it back to the portal and the safety of my strong, secure, stone citadel. I was very happy to put a good hour's travelling time between myself and that living nightmare. Whether I want to go back to explore the Mistlands, even with the security of knowing nothing will go for me unless I go for it first, I'm not at all sure. I'm thinking there are some things better left to fester in their own fetid lairs.

And I think it must be pretty obvious now why I'm choosing to get my survivalist groove on in the whimsical, brightly-colored, well-lit and generally happy setting of Dawnlands rather than the existential horror of Valheim. 

For now, anyway. I do hear Hildir has some pretty fancy frocks for sale...

Solid Gold Easy Action

Something I read in the patch notes for yesterday's EverQuest II update got me wondering. I don't remember any previous expansion labeling an instance in the Signature questline as anything other than "Solo" so I found the following a tad confusing:

"With their early involvement in the Signature quest, the following zones have been relabeled from [Solo] to [Signature], and no longer apply Oppressive Sands:

• Raj'Dur Plateaus: Blood and Sand
• Raj'Dur Plateaus: The Sultan's Dagger
• Buried Takish'Hiz: Terrene Threshold
• Buried Takish'Hiz: The Sacred Gift"

I infer from the mention of "Oppressive Sands" no longer being in effect that this change relates in some way to difficulty. Presumably the intent is to make the four instances easier. I didn't know what "Oppressive Sands" was until I did a bit of digging but from the name it's obviously some kind of debuff, so taking it away has to be beneficial. 

Other than that, I guess we're meant to assume that something labelled "Signature" is inherently less challenging than something labelled "Solo"? Does that track? I'm not sure it does.

The notes also mention that something has been added to Tishan's Lockbox, the stash of free catch-up gear you get with every expansion, nowadays:

"The Jubilant Familiar Infusion, Monolithic Mercenary Infusion, and Tolan's Darkwood Mount Infusion are now free from Tishan's Lockbox."

Since buffs from familiars and mounts are hugely important to player power these days and since solo players rely heavily on mercenaries, these changes once again imply a leg-up for those already struggling with the entry-level content in Renewal of Ro.

Finally, there was this:

"Removed the lore tag from many of Tishan's lockbox white adornments."

That's primarily a bug fix but it means players can now equip extra, free adornments, which is another increase in power. Taken all together. it's hard to avoid the conclusion that someone feels the new content is overtuned and needs toning down.

It wouldn't be the first time, only for once my experience has been very much the opposite. So far, I've had no significant difficulty with any of the content in the new expansion, either overland or in instances. I'm currently some way through the third instance, Buried Takish`Hiz: Terrene Threshold, having killed the first two bosses before I had to stop for lunch.

Yesterday I finished the whole of the second instance, Raj'Dur Plateaus: The Sultan's Dagger without a hitch and a few days ago I ran Raj'Dur Plateaus: Blood and Sand, which also gave me no trouble. Of course, only that last one did I do before the patch, so it's impossible for me to tell if the later instances would have given me pause without the notified nerf but the first one, which is included in the change list, I did before the patch... so make of that what you will.

Whatever, the tl:dr is that so far all the instances have been very straightforward. Several of the bosses have had some kind of script with special attacks at various points in the battle but I've just ignored them and carried on tanking and spanking with no obvious problems. Twice, my mercenary died, leaving me without outside healing and cures but still I prevailed. As yet, I haven't died once.

It probably helps that quite a few of the bosses seem to think calling for assistance is their best option. That might work on some classes but my Berserker actually thrives on chaotic battles with large numbers of opponents, thanks to the number of abilities we get that are designed for exactly that situation. The more the merrier might be his motto. Or his battlecry.

More importantly, the expansion so far has been gloriously free of those infuriating developer's fall-backs of recent years, massive power drain and invulnerability. It makes things so much more enjoyable when you can rely on your massive power pool and regenerative abilities to keep up your relentless barrage of attacks and when the mob you're fighting doesn't magically switch off all damage every couple of minutes, forcing you to go break something or click a switch somewhere, just so you can get back to the scheduled mindless violence.

Well, it makes it much more enjoyable for me, anyway. I appreciate there may be other opinions. I'm just happy it's my preferred playstyle that's getting the love for once. I'm sure it won't be for long.

In the expectation of things getting tougher ahead, I took time out from hacking and slashing to get my Alchemist working on Combat Art upgrades. I didn't play my Berserker much in Visions of Vetrovia, the previous expansion, other than to get him up to the level cap. Consequently, almost his abilities between Levels 121 and 125 were the lowest quality grade available, the free "Apprentice" versions you get automatically, when you ding.

That sounds bad but in fact he wasn't really using any of them. He had the Expert or better versions from the expansion before that, when he was favored character on the account. EQII's spell progression means that higher quality versions of lower level spells are generally better than their lower quality, higher level equivalents, at least until you leapfrog more than one level-cap cycle. 

Indeed, because I've been fairly dilligent in utilizing the free, time-gated upgrade system, some of the Berserker's favored attacks are now so far upgraded it's going to take a couple more expansions before even the crafted Expert replacements take over. It's just one example of the ferociously complex, nested, sometimes contradictory network of interlocking progression mechanics that make kitting a character out for current content in EQII such a daunting prospect.

For the moment, I feel like I'm on top of things. I'm playing a character whose armor and abilities are there or thereabouts par for the new course. I realise that most players will be breezing through fights that take me some concentration and effort but I'm winning, not losing, and that's really all that matters. 

Better yet, it's not taking me too long. None of those attritional twenty minute boss fights, so frustratingly common a few years ago. Everything seems much better-judged towards helping the solo player to have fun, which I am.

That's good because the story this time is really interesting. There's a lot of lore and flavor text and I'm reading every word with relish. One stage of a quest today asked me to read a book, which turned out to be twenty pages long, huge by in-game standards. I could just have flipped the pages to get quest credit but I read the whole thing with increasing fascination. I've always found the legend of Takis'Hiz curious and compelling so I'm happy to learn more about the history behind it.

I'm also always glad to meet old friends so it was a pleasure to re-acquaint myself with Firiona Vie. She and my Berserker have met many times before and I was delighted to find she remembered him and their greatest adventure together, the Battle of Ages End. Granted, I didn't play my part until several years after the original raid but who's counting?

Redbeard at Parallel Context was talking about power creep in (mmo)rpgs and how characters who once struggled to protect a farm from bandits can end up fighting Gods and winning. It's the kind of thing that used to worry me, too, although not so much these days. 

My change of heart is mostly due to the successful efforts of writers at ArenaNet and Daybreak in contextualizing these changes, acknowledging the events that brought them about and integrating that history into an ongoing narrative. Sometimes it's done awkwardly but the fact that it's done at all helps a lot. 

When it's done well, as it very much has been in the Renewal of Ro storyline so far, it creates a warm, pleasurable sense of belonging, something like walking down the main street of your home town and passing the time of day with people you know, at least by sight or reputation.

Whether the writers can keep it up for the whole of the expansion remains to be seen. At least, given the foundation laid by both the writers and designers, I can say I'm looking forward to finding out.

What Keeps You Playing? : Noah's Heart vs The Rest

It's five days after Blaugust and I'm brimming over with ideas for posts. I took the day off yesterday but only because I wanted to relax after work, not because I didn't have anything to say. 

I'm also more engaged with the idea of playing games than I have been for a couple of months. It's this way every year. For me, high summer is the worst time for a festival of blogging. It's the time of year I'm most likely to want to be outdoors, not inside sitting in front of a screen.

Some years that would run right into September but this time the long stretch of dry, warm weather broke almost as soon as the doors closed on Blaugust. I'm sitting here, looking out the window at the rain falling and the forecast says we're getting more all week with plenty of thunderstorms to spice it up.

Last week I managed to finish the last-but-one of the outdoor jobs I needed to get done before the rains came so I don't have that nagging at the back of my mind while I play games or blog. Not that I let it stop me but it's nicer when it's not there.

From here until next Easter it'll be darker, wetter, colder and more indoorsy than it's been for months. Autumn (Fall, if you prefer.) is my favorite season and I'll still be outside when I can but it won't be all day long like it has been. 

As for winter, it can be glorious but the days are short. Even in the best of the season there's always a lot more inside than out. Of course, given the predictions of doom over energy costs, I might be too wrapped in duvets to reach the keyboard. It's always tricky typing in gloves. 

That umbrella's really not doing it for you, Domino.

Enough of that. I don't want to go all Tobold on you. One grumpy old geezer in this corner of the blogosphere is more than enough.

Let me sort through my Big Bag of Blog Ideas and see what I can find. Hmm. AI generated pictures of dogs on Mars...the September Netflix offer...whether I should start yet another Guild Wars 2 account, on Steam this time... that new-to-me band I found last night... (Listening to them right now...)

Nope. None of those. I'm afraid it's going to be a catch-up on where I am in Noah's Heart because, let's face it, I'm obsessed with the game. Who had "still playing every day six weeks after launch" on their Bhagpuss Bingo Card? Not me but I am.

What's even more surprising is that I'm getting more into it as time goes on, not less. Let me do a little comparison. 

Based on post history, how long did I play Valheim before I stopped going on about it all the time? About two months from buying the game to "finishing" the Plains. My last post in the original run was on April 15 2021 and ended "I guess I'm not done with this thing quite yet." I was, though.

How about Genshin Impact? Twelve days. Wow. That short? Really? Yep - first mention October 1 2020; last mention October 12 2020. It pops up a couple more times when I go back for another look but it seems I only played it for real for a couple of weeks.

Chimeraland, then?  Just under six weeks from mid January to mid February this year. Again, considerably less than I'd have estimated. As with all games I like, I've dipped back into it a few times since but the core first run, when it was the only thing I wanted to play, only lasted a few weeks.

I love how the heart my character's making with her hands is nowhere near perfect. Touches like that make the game.

Finally, let's take a look at New World. Definitely the longest, if only because I also put in stretches in alpha and beta and I got a new lease of life on the game when I moved over to playing it on GeForce Now. It has the mosts posts here of any of the games mentioned.

For the record, as I write, the post count stands like this:

• New World - 74
• Valheim - 44
• Chimeraland - 23
• Genshin Impact - 14

I am notoriously slack with tagging protocols, though, and very inconsistent about including tags for games I just mention in passing. Still. it paints a reasonably accurate picture.

How does Noah's Heart stack up so far? First mention was on July 15 2022 but the first real post, when I downloaded the game and made a character, came a couple of weeks later on July 28. As for the last post, obviously we're not there yet. Nowhere even close, I'd bet.

Counting that initial pre-release post, so far I've tagged Noah's Heart twenty times. That's with me actively trying to restrain myself from writing about it every day, which is pretty much what I've wanted to do. There's just so much to say.

Games that provide an awful lot of blogging prompts aren't necessarily the same games that end up being tons of fun to play, although I confess for me it's often very hard to tell the difference. If a game makes me think that's usually enough. These all did.

If I was to try to rank the five games in question in terms of "fun in the moment", which might be code for "immersion", I think I'd put them like this:

1. Valheim
2. New World
3. Chimeraland
4. Noah's Heart
5. Genshin Impact

That order is reflected in time played. At least, I think it is. I don't have stats for all of them and my Steam time played record is highly questionable due to my habit of doing things like leaving the game idling while I eat lunch or even leave the house for an hour or two. 

All of the pictures in this post are from the game's equivalent of GW2's vistas. The game takes the shot and chooses your pose.

 My estimate is that they're in the exact order of the amount of hours I've put in and that's not a co-incidence. All of the top three strongly encourage and reward exploration, meaning I can spend whole afternoons doing nothing much more than wandering across the map. They all also have housing, which requires a lot of grinding - materials in Valheim, points in New World, both in Chimeraland.

Exploration and grinding are hugely time-consuming activities but also, when tied to making a home you can feel proud of, hugely satisfying ones. In the case of all three games that satisfaction comes heavily front-loaded. 

It took me eight months to cap out in New World but that was more to do with outside factors than any slow-down in the game itself. Most players seemed to take about a quarter to a half as long as I did. In the end, what stopped me was the same as most people; I hit the point where the end-game begins and I just wasn't interested.

In Valheim, in common with pretty much everyone else who was blogging about it other than Tipa, who wrote that she would have liked to carry on for longer, I was about done with the game after a couple of months. I'd done everything I wanted to do including building a house I was really pleased with and there didn't seem to be all that much point in carrying on.

The situation in Chimeraland was similar. I'd built a house I liked and I'd done much of what I wanted to do, although by no means all. Where it differed was in how it began to take more effort than I was willing to give to progress at a comfortable pace. What had been a very loose and relaxing game began to seem like a more serious commitment. Logging in began to feel like going to work rather than out to play. The change of emphasis knocked me off track and I never really recovered.

The auto-generated shots also remove the character's name and title, something I still haven't figured out how to do.

Genshin Impact was a completely different experience. The game does have housing, something that could have given it the same kind of appeal as the others, but I was never able to access it. Of the five games, it's the only one I had to stop playing because it got too hard.

Housing is gated behind progress in the main storyline and I hit an instance at around Level 30 with a boss that I just couldn't beat. That's to say, I wasn't willing to do what would have been necessary to beat it, either practice until I became better at fighting or spend money to get better characters through the Gacha system.

So far, I haven't hit any of these roadblocks in Noah's Heart. It's different from the other four in a number of ways, not least the sheer range of things there are to do. My main problem is keeping up with the content that's being thrown at me, which is a nice problem to have.

All the other games have Noah's Heart outclassed in some significant areas: Valheim and Chimeraland have better housing; Genshin Impact and New World have better graphics; Chimeraland is wackier; New World and Valheim have more gravitas...

If I had to choose just one of the five as my desert island game it would be a very hard choice indeed. They all have major flaws to go with their strengths. The only one I'd considered calling polished would be the one I like the least, Genshin Impact. The others are either buggy as hell (New World), barely finished (Chimeraland) or intentionally limited (Valheim) but polish has never been much of a draw for me.

I really need to start being more creative with my selfies. The game gives you all the tools.

Noah's Heart isn't polished either. The translations, as I've complained, are very poor, the UI isn't great and there are plenty of dangling wires giving off sparks - dialog stopping in the middle, voiceover cutting out. I'm not going to pretend it's a sleek, slick purr of a ride. More like a jolting jalopy at times.

For me, however, Noah's Heart does have one overwhelming advantage over the game on this list that it most ressembles, Genshin Impact and that's playability. Noah's Heart has a control system with which I felt instantly comfortable but more importantly it has a take on difficulty that just works for me. It's a lot easier than Genshin Impact is what I'm saying.

For that matter, it's a lot easier than all the others too, only I didn't have anything like the trouble acclimatizing myself to the combat in New World, Chimeraland or Valheim that I did in Genshin Impact. Indeed, if I'm going to have to have action combat at all, I'd take Valheim or New World's versions over just about anything else I've tried.

Still, I just can't imagine myself enjoying boss fights in either game the way I enjoy them in Noah's Heart. I like easy boss fights. I always have. I like going in knowing I'll win. I like it even more if I know it'l be quick. At level 75 as I am now, Noah's Heart is still giving me me both: fast, easy boss fights. It's ideal.

It doesn't give me the adrenaline rush of combat in Valheim and New World but as I've said many times, I don't just dislike entertainment that gives me adrenaline rushes, I disapprove of it. It's literally bad for your health: "persistent surges of adrenaline can damage your blood vessels, increase your blood pressure, and elevate your risk of heart attacks or stroke. It can also result in anxiety, weight gain, headaches, and insomnia." Google says so, so it must be true.

It's a bit worrying when the game can take better screenshots than the player.

Even more, I can't imagine enjoying one-one-one PvP in any of the other games, let alone being any good at it. I'm not good at PvP in Noah's Heart, either, but I do enjoy it. Not just the "my puppets against your puppets" PvP of the Fantasy Arena but the straight-up player versus player dueling in Honor. I have never enjoyed one-on-one PvP in any game before this one but I'm voluntarily using my five free daily fights most days - and I'm still winning some of them, even though I'm meeting much tougher opponents.

I think the primary reason I'm playing Noah's Heart every day and am likely to continue for a while yet is the pacing. After six or eight weeks in all the other games I've mentioned, I was either done with them for the time being, finding them a lot more effort than they had been or had hit a skill wall. I also generally felt I knew about as much about the way the games worked as I was going to or as I was interested in finding out.

Playing Noah's Heart after six weeks feels there and thereabouts the same as it did at the start. It hasn't really got any harder. There isn't any more grind. I still have plenty to do and I still don't understand a lot about how the game works. I've barely touched some of the content at all. Everything still feels fresh and at this stage that's quite unusual.

I'm aware that any day I could log in and find everything feeling very different. It's happened to me many times before. This wouldn't be the first time I've penned a eulogy to a game and then stopped playing it the next day.

For the moment, though, it all still feels good. I haven't yet reached that plateau, where daily gameplay becomes more about maintenance than discovery. Until I do, chances are there'll be more posts like this.

The Difficult Matter Of Difficulty.

Unwise though it might be, I thought I might throw in on the recent hot topic of Difficulty. It's not as if it isn't something that's come up a million times before but I can't recall the debate ever having become as heated as it is right now.

I'm sure everyone knows the provenance. It's been entirely too difficult (Alanis says "ironically".) to avoid. A game called Elden Ring and a developer called FromSoftware, who don't seem to have a space bar on their corporate keyboard, are responsible, directly or indirectly, for the current kerfuffle.

Elden Ring is neither an mmorpg nor a point-and-click adventure game nor a visual novel nor any kind of quirky little confection featuring funny animals, so I have absolutely no business discussing it here. It doesn't interest me in the slightest, I will never play it and I don't care who does. 

It seems that's not everyone's opinion. Various arguments have been presented to suggest there's more going on here than mere personal choice. Rights and responsibilities have been invoked.

Having read a number of posts and discussions on the subject, there seem to be three major issues:

• Availabilty.
• Accessibilty.
• Accuracy.

Okay, I tweaked those for assonance. I thought I was going to be a poet once and teenage dreams can be hard to shake. Let's break it down.

Avilability means whether anyone who feels they'd like to play Elden Ring ought to be able to do so. I think we can already see the problems there.

Accessibility is a much thornier concept, partly involving actual legal rights as framed by authorities able to enforce them but also bringing in a moral element of communal responsibility and a sense of who we'd like to be as people.

Accuracy could better be expressed as Truth in Advertising, only that doesn't begin with an "A".

Let's take the last one first. The reason it's on the list is because of a post I read this morning: Tobold, ostensibly talking about review bombing but actually joining in the chorus of complaint about an Elden Ring playalike going by the name of Tunic. 

The protagonist is a cute, cartoon fox that, as Tobold puts it, makes makes Tunic look "like a game for children." It's an impression srongly re-inforced by the developer's website, where the sales pitch reads "Explore a land filled with lost legends, ancient powers, and ferocious monsters in TUNIC, an isometric action game about a small fox on a big adventure". 

There's also a video showing the game in play. In it, the cute fox skips through a series of landscapes, solving simple puzzles and fighting big monsters. No single incident lasts more than a second or two. At no point does the fox appear to take any damage or get hurt, far less lose a fight. Tunic has an age rating of 10+ but looks like it could easily be mastered by a smart seven year old.

I haven't played the game, obviously, but if Tobold and the Gamerant article he links are to be believed, Tunic models itself on two other game series - Zelda for the look but Dark Souls for the gameplay. Since the usp of the latter is "brutally difficult boss battles" and very little handholding or explanation on how to play, there does seem to be a problem here. At best it's misleading advertising; at worst it's wilful misrepresentation.

To me, this one seems reasonably easy to call. Finji, the company behind Tunic, ought to make it much clearer to potential purchasers what it is they're selling. I can't see any reason why a ten year old shouldn't have the pleasure of fighting brutally difficult boss battles if they want to and I suspect many ten year olds would do a far better job of it than either Tobold or me. What seems off is for anyone to be suckered into paying money for a game that expects Dark Souls skills when what it purports to be selling is something very similar to a much-loved and much more gentle franchise like Zelda.

So much for Accuracy. It's a bit of a sideshow anyway. No-one's huffing about FromSoftware trying to pass Elden Ring off as anything other than what it is. On to Availibility, because I'm not taking my own bullet points in order, apparently.

Availibility, in this context, means whether anyone and everyone who feels they'd like to give Elden Ring a try ought to be able to do so with as good a shot at enjoying it as they would any other game. It's essentially a money argument - if you pay for something you ought to be able to use it for the purpose for which it was intended - but it also has an existential premise; that all games should be for everyone.

I have a bit of a problem with this one. It seems to expect something from video games that isn't expected from most other services or products. There are legal obligations in most jurisdictions concerning purchases being "fit for purpose" but that only means they have to function as intended, be mechanically sound, not be broken.

The screen I never saw.

Video games frequently fall foul of this kind of legislation for being full of bugs or missing major features but you can't usually get your money back just because you don't have the game-playing chops to finish the game you bought. If that was the case I'd have asked for my money back when I couldn't get past the tutorial in The Crew.

The grey area here is that video games frequently come with difficulty settings. There's a very good reason for that and it's called money. A lot of game developers seem to think that the more people they can sell the games to, the better it is for their bank balance. They're very happy to add safety rails and trainer wheels in the form of selectable difficulty, so long as it makes their games as potentially attractive as possible to the largest number of customers.

In the case of FromSoftware, however, a good deal of brand value seems to rest on them not doing that. I've read a lot of metaphysical extemporizing over how just knowing an easier difficulty setting exists would diminish the emotional impact of beating the game for players who choose not to use it. I've also seen some statements from one of the developers about the existential value of teaching players not to fear death. Video game death, that is.

Both of these make for very interesting lines of discussion - for a freshman philosophy seminar. I'm not sure how much light any of it sheds on what's actually going on. I have a suspicion what's really in play here is the potential damage to the company's bottom line. 

If such a difficulty setting was added with the full approval of the developers, would there be the same buzz about the next game from the same company. Isn't it the aura of exclusion that's fueling at least some of the enthusiasm for these kinds of games? If everyone could finish them, how many would want to?

I can see why a lot of people are miffed they can't play these games because they're too hard. I can see why they'd wonder whether their money oughtn't to be as good as anyone else's and that if difficulty settings are good enough for other developers, why aren't they good enough for this one? In the end though, so long as the game does what it's supposed to and doesn't fail because of technical flaws, the fact that a company chooses to limit its sales by making the gameplay unattractive to more people than it could be seems like a purely commercial decision.

And finally, the big one, accessibility. The one I really don't want to get into. The one I find much more difficult than the gameplay itself.

By accessibility, I mean the degree to which the game is designed to recognize real life differences among the people who might choose to play it. I've seen a number of discussions that touch on this, including posts by Naithin and Magi, both of whom discuss it in far more depth and with much greater subtlety than I intend to attempt. 

What I will say is that I agree entirely with Naithin, when he says "Accessibility Does Not Equal Easy Mode." I feel that's a misunderstanding that's fueling most of the heat in this debate. 

Difficulty settings are what you add to your game so that any given player can choose a graded experience. Accessibility settings are there to allow people who, for reasons wholly unrelated to their gaming skills, require certain aspects of the software to behave differently to give them the same experiences as players who do not have the same concerns.

If I might digress a little, this kind of accessibility affects decision-making at a far more fundemental level than just how hard the boss fights are. In my posts on Guild Wars 2's End of Dragons I've been highly complimentary to the art team and one of the things I've enjoyed the most about their work this time around is the sheer vigor and vibrancy of the colors. 

I'm on record, repeatedly, as absolutely loving both hypersaturation and sensual overload in video graphics. I have all my settings turned to the maximum my rig can stand and if there are explosions I try to stand right in the middle of them. I literally used to tweak the colors of my desktop so even that was hypersaturated although I had to stop eventually because it made my eyes hurt.

What I had not considered when I looked at the neon greens and pinks of Cantha was how those colors might be affecting players with different visual perception from my own. Then I happened to spot a thread on the forum entitled "End of Dragons - "Personally" the Worst Expansion to date."

Since I really like EoD I was curious to see what the poster found so terrible about it. Whatever I was expecting it wasn't this: "I have already been physically nauseously ill 4 times. Litterally having to throw up. I'm a Deutan Colorblind (seeing Greens as sharp Reds) and I am very prone to motion sickness."

The thread is full of players chiming in with their own variations on this theme and also pointing out that, despite talking a good game on community and accessibility, ArenaNet have done precious little to address these kinds of concerns, choosing if anything to keep adding more and more of the kind of content that actively makes things worse.

Games that have extreme difficulty in gameplay as a design brief do not get a pass on accessibility. Where there are modifications that can be made to accomodate players with differing abilities that are not just gradations of gameplaying skill, there's a moral and sometimes a legal responsibility to make those changes. 

The whole point is to allow all gamers to stand together on something as close as possible to a level playing field. From that start they can then diverge to whatever degree their gameplaying skill allows.

I don't play Elden Ring or any similar titles so I have no idea what could be done in this direction there nor what has already been done. I'm just saying it should be whatever's possible and that doing so should not in any way be conflated with adding any kind of "difficulty setting".

And that, I think, is probably as much as I have to say on the matter. It's a very complex and emotional topic and there are probably whole PhD theses to be written on it. I, however, am not going to be the one to write them.

Until the next time it comes up, then. Because you know it will.