Climb Up On A Rock

For a few days now I've been meaning to post about how it's going in Valheim but something or other kept coming up. Then Wilhelm put up his take on on life on the plains and it seemed like I might just as well link to it with a "What he said".

Seriously, the post I was going to write would have been all but identical. I guess there are only so many things left to do at this stage of the game.

 

What I have been doing is a lot of exploring, opening up long stretches of coastline to mark the outlines of islands, then criss-crossing them to fill in the blanks.  Wherever I find goblin camps, towers or villages I clean them out. Not because I need anything from them. I have self-sustaining fields of flax and barley and far more black iron than there's currently any use for. No, I clear goblin camps because it's fun.

I have a fairly well-established method. When I find a camp or a village I scout it to get an idea roughly how big it is, how many fulings live there, what classes they are and, if possible, how tough they are. Regular fulings pop like balloons with a single well-placed arrow but put the same arrow in a one or two star goblin and all it does is make them mad.

Once I've got a good idea what I'm up against I find a nice, high place to start picking them off. Ideally I like a steep rock on a flat plain. Goblins can't climb anything steeper than a gentle slope. Hell, they can't even go up and down their own wooden stairs. Odin knows how they get to the top of their towers because they sure as heck can't get down again. Maybe they're cats!

If there's a good rock and it's in range I pot them from there. If it's out of bowshot I move in, snipe one and run back. Sometimes none of the goblins even notice one of their pals exploding right next to them but usually two or three will come running, cackling and waving their spears. Then I pick them off as they mill around the rock like angry chickens.

As I've been roaming further and further I've taken to carrying a portal kit with me. The only times I've died have been when I ranged much too far and got stranded miles from home, at night, deep on the plains. 

I don't bother building a shelter for the portals any more. I put them right on top of the rocks. Nothing can get to them up there and I can see them for miles. In some ways, now I'm at home there, the plains feel safer than the black forest. Trolls, skeletons, greydwarves and even boars will smash anything you leave unprotected.  Lox and deathsquitos never attack structures and even fulings don't seem that interested. Anyway, there are far fewer of them roaming loose. They mostly stick to their camps. 

Sniping goblins is a lot of fun but more surprising to me is how much satisfying it is to meet them in combat face to face. I'm coming round to the opinion that Valheim has my favorite action combat of any game I've played and that's because it manages to be both skilful, tactical and incredibly simple all at the same time.

For me, it's all about movement and weapon selection. The fights, pulling with the bow, swapping to a sword, maybe pulling out the big hammer, feel hugely kinetic. 

Almost from the start I've ignored blocks and dodges. I tried a shield for a short while but it seemed slow and awkward compared to just hitting things really fast. For a long time I used an axe and that worked vey well. Then when I learned to work with silver I made a sword and that worked better still.

The black iron axe is statistically superior to the silver sword so I made that and swapped back for a while but although it does hit harder the sword is so much faster. Crucially, it strikes on both the forehand and the backhand. That's what makes it not just possible but productive to fight three or even four fulings at once.

Monster AI in Valheim is really excellent, I think. All creatures have particular ways of behaving and quite a lot of the behaviors are convincing. Fulings feint and dart and circle out of reach. They're always moving, looking for opportunity. What they can't cope with is being rushed and hacked at and perpetually knocked back but you have to be sure never to let them get you surrounded. It's like EverQuest on meth.

The sword, with its speed and the way it strikes both on the atack and the withdrawal keeps fulings stunned and struggling to respond. The knock-back isn't as great as with other weapons but it happens so often. So long as I make sure my health never drops much below 150 I can reasonably expect to slice up a gang of regular goblins with a one or even a two star thrown in before I get into in any great trouble.  

Shamans are a problem because they have a nasty long-range fireball attack and a very effective ward. If one of those comes out of the camp then I do back off and come back later when they've all calmed down. Then I single the shaman out and put an arrow in him and with luck he doesn't have his ward on so he explodes. 

All of that and a good bit more makes exterminating fulings good entertainment for a couple of hours. Even so, I'd probably have had enough of the plains by now if that was all there was to do. There are lox to hunt for meat, of course, and deathsquitos for their needles, which make the best arrows, but that wouldn't be enough to keep me either.

No, the reason I'm still out there clearing the fog from the map is that even after all this time I still run into things I've never seen before. While I was pushing along a coastline to the east I happened on a henge. It stood out from the golden fields like a sign, which turned out to be just what it was. It had the vegasir for Yagluth's altar. 

With that on my map I had to go take a look, even though I have no intention of summoning him until there's something in it for me. His dias was next to a fuling camp and a fuling tower, at the head of the first river I'd seen on the plains. (I've seen several more streams since then).

Last night, as I was heading south on the biggest of all the islands, I stumbled on what looked eerily like a brutalist blockhouse from some 1960s out of town industrial park. I'd never seen anything in Valheim like it before. As I approached I could hear cackling. Surely goblins couldn't have built this thing?

Whether they built it or not they were using it. It had stone stairs and a chest on the flat roof. Whether it was some religious structure of their own or something they'd re-purposed I couldn't say but it made me very curious. 

And then the mist came down. I hate the mist on the plains so very much. It's far too real. It swirls and billows and hangs there and you can see shapes and hear sounds through it but never well enough. If the mist blows in while I'm clearing a camp I know it's going to be a long, long day.

That's what I've been up to in Valheim this week. Looking forward, I've marked a couple of possible spots for my island getaway. I've cleared a whole medium-sized island of all fixed spawns and I'm thinking of moving there because it's a lot nicer than where I'm living now. I've done so much work on the castle, though, I couldn't bear to tear it down. I'd have to start again from scratch and I don't think I can face all that mining again.

My next project is going to be a trip to the Ashlands. I've ranged so far south now it can only be a short boat-trip away. I just need to set up a base in the far south and call on Moder for a favorable wind. And make some fire resistance potions, of course.

I guess I'm not done with this thing quite yet.

High Plains Drifter

A couple of weeks back, when I reached the conclusion of the tale of my battle with the great drake Moder, I wrapped the whole thing up with an expression of existential uncertainty: "The plains call. I don't know, yet, whether I will answer." 

I wasn't at all convinced I wanted to go to the next biome. I'd seen enough of it already to know how incredibly dangerous it was. Even at the margins, where the plains ran into meadows or black forest, to meet chittering, spear-chucking goblins or giant mosquitos meant instant death. Who'd want to go out into the middle, where they live?

And for what? The chance to corrupt the green and placid meadowlands, open the door goblins could join the skeletons already harrying the local wildlife there? That last boss drops nothing that's needed at this stage of the game but by some reports his death frees the goblin hordes. The last thing I need are fulings raiding my mostly peaceful homes.

As for the crafting, all the remaining recipes became available the moment Moder died. The tears she cries build the artisan table and that lets you build the rest of the crafting stations. So why wake Yagluth? Let him lie. 

Only that's not how it goes. I should have known better. 

Not about the boss. He can wait. I was right about that. No, what I should have known by now is that Valheim has perfect pacing. If it's time to face the terrifying plains then it is time. If you've done what you should to get there, you will be ready when you arrive. Not just ready, either. Keen.

He followed me home. Can I eat him?

I'd have known that if I'd had all the facts. Or, really, if I'd just thought about it a bit harder. When I killed Moder, though, I was still avoiding looking things up in advance. Well, things other than the strats for killing the bosses. I want the authentic experience but I'm not a zealot about it.

Not having done my research meant I was puzzled for a while as to where all the new recipes were. I made the artisan table and the blast furnace and I smelted some black metal but the only new things I could see were a couple of shields. And I don't use a shield.

I wasn't completely ignorant. I'd already managed to leech on a couple of giant buffalo kills. I never did see what they were fighting but I put enough arrows into them to make sure they lost and then I stripped them of their meat and skin, because in Valheim only vikings kill for need, it seems. Everything else just leaves the bodies to rot.

I picked up the leavings and that opened a couple of new recipes. I'd killed a few fulings so I knew they dropped the next metal, black iron, and somewhere along the way I'd picked up the idea that I'd find something else I needed in their camps. Cloth, maybe? Grain? 

It seemed I wasn't going to be able to avoid the plains after all so I set about cautiously pushing forward. Very cautiously. Really, very cautiously indeed... and guess what?

It was great! It was fun. Actual, interesting, compelling, enjoyable entertainment. Yes, it was nerve-wracking at first but I should have remembered how things had gone before, in the black forest and the swamp and the mountains. 

Twister! Oh, wait, that's a rock.

Every new biome in Valheim has seemed terrifying at first. Overwhelming, even. The terrain is difficult, the creatures are deadly, death never feels more than a stumble away. Exploration is daunting, corpse runs exhausting, the only way to get through it is to take it slow, always prepare and never lose concentration, even for a moment. It's intense.

And then after a while, as you open more possibilities, gain access to better armor, learn which potions to carry and what weapons to use, things start to feel less impossible. In a while it feels manageable. And then, one day, without even noticing it's happened, you realize you're feeling almost relaxed. You're having fun!

Okay, I don't suppose many people ever get to like the swamp but it's a long time now since I was afraid of it. It's still annoying but in the way a bad commute might be. You just get on with it and think about something else.

As for the black forest, it's positively welcoming these days. It's been a few weeks since I even bothered to stop what I'm doing there when night falls. And the mountains, while there's not much there I need to go back for, they make for a pleasant day trip and a change of scenery when I need a few hundred rocks for building or some obsidian for my arrows.

The trouble with farming is the hours. Always up before the sun.

It's been a long time since I played a game where the sense of progression was so well-judged. If you rush ahead and try to take on a new biome with gear that only just barely got you through the last one, you're going to get your head handed to you, along with other parts of your anatomy. 

If you take the trouble to max out the level before, though, upgrade everything as far as it goes, you'll find it matches, pretty much exactly, the starting point of the tier you're going to open next. Each biome is chamfered seamlessly into the one above it. When you arrive in a new ecology, if you were able to handle the previous one with comfort, you're already capable of handling what's coming next.

Moving onto the plains in the gear I made for the mountains I was able to take on a couple of regular goblins at once. Deathsquitos no longer took huge chunks off my health and they died in one hit. All I had to do was not panic and they became no more of a threat than boars or necks. 

That didn't really come as much of a surprise. I'd already skirmished with both around the hinterlands where biomes meet and I'd generally come off best. Even in bronze I'd managed to kill a couple of single, stray goblins.

Go ahead, gobbo! Report me! See how far it gets you!

Where I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself was in going deeper into the plains, away from the safe haven of the forests and meadows, with nowhere to retreat if, or more likely when, things went badly wrong. And I particularly wasn't relishing taking on the goblins in their camps, some of which looked worryingly like small towns.

Just goes to show what I know. I've cleared several of those villages now and it's been a real pleasure. It reminds me, like a lot of things about Valheim, very strongly of early EverQuest. Clearing a fuling village feels incredibly similar to breaking one of those large bandit camps in the Karanas or a dervish settlement in the Ros. Or, most of all, an ulthork camp in Eastern Wastes.

The main difference is once you clear a fuling camp it stays cleared. There are no respawns. That makes it practical, even advisable, to take your time. It takes me three or four game-days to completely annihilate a fuling tribe. I have a procedure I mostly follow that entails picking off the scouts and the tower guards first, then gradually working inward to the center, finishing with the big, troll-like berserkers.

It's almost exactly how I would have soloed an ulthork camp when I played my druid, except that instead of kiting them with a bow I'd have snared them and dotted them to death. It would have been the same whittling away of their forces, the careful pulling to separate the linked spawns, only there I'd have used Harmony instead of kiting three or four until two lose interest.

The behaviors of the fulings are fascinating. They seem to respond to certain sounds, particularly the sound of things breaking. It's possible to keep one on you while his friends give up just by putting an arrow in his back as they turn. The berserkers are so keen to show off their size and strength they often leave themselves wide open. 

Mist rolling in, looks like. Or my crop's on fire.

And so on. Working it all out is exactly the kind of thing I loved about soloing in EQ. Valheim also offers some great opportunities for using the z-axis which would have been very much not allowed in Norrath. I cleared a quarter of one goblin camp from the top of one of their own towers and I filled my bags with lox meat just by standing on a boulder. The real problem is running out of arrows.

So, it's fun clearing camps just for the gameplay but is there any more practical reason to do it? Of course there is. Despite their aggressive nature, goblins are surprisingly agricultural. They grow both flax and barley in their camps. Once I got my hands on those crops (and built a spinning wheel and a windmill to refine and process them) all those missing recipes showed up at last.

You'd need to raid a lot of villages to get all the flax and barley you're going to need but luckily you can grow your own once you have a seed crop. Neither will grow anywhere but the plains but, hey, the goblins already prepared the soil and left a bunch of buildings they won't be needing any more, what with being dead. Why not use that?

So I moved in. So far all I've done is install a portal in one of the huts in the village on my home island. I'm not too keen to live there full-time. The camp won't ever respawn but the roaming patrols do and there are always a few deathsquitos buzzing around. 

For now I just port in every morning, check the crop, harvest what's ripe, re-plant half of it and portal home again. 

The plains are astonishingly beautiful. Living there would be like living inside an impressionist painting. My longer-term plans definitely include a beachside plains house and maybe an island home, if I can find a suitable plains archipelago.

Dorothy! Dorothy! No-one breathe in!

In combat terms, two goblins or a couple of deathsquitos are barely a threat any more. I've taken on and beaten four goblins at once, although I had precisely two hit points left at the end, so I won't be repeating that little test. I can kill even two star fulings so long as I see them coming in good time, although I've yet to meet a two star berserker and I'm happy to keep it that way.

I'm working on farming and growing enough linen to upgrade my black iron axe to tier four (it's at three now) and to make a set of padded iron armor, the somewhat surprising progression from the wolfhide I have on. There are a few other odds and ends, too, and of course the all-important barley and lox meat to make the big health and stamina buffing foods. Having enough hit points is key to feeling comfortable when crossing the savannah, I've found.

All in all, the plains have been a delightful surprise. It has a lot to do with the progression, pacing and gameplay I've outlined but it's also that it feels so glorious just being there. The colors, the movement of the grass, the whisper of the wind, even the chittering of the goblins and the grunting of the lox. It's all so damned atmospheric.

The next two biomes, undeveloped as yet, don't have the same allure. The mistlands are spidery and spooky, the ashlands a volcanic wasteland. I'm confident that, when they become available, the challenge will contnue to play out in a measured, manageable, ultimately satisfying fashion. Whether they'll ever become somewhere I'd want to live? That I'm not so sure.

Then again, that's exactly what I thought about the plains.

Dancing By The pool

Here's a little thing I forgot about World of Warcraft's free trial (aka Starter Edition): if you don't pay, you don't get to use the mail.

In a game with no shared bank facilities, where the normal means of passing items from one character to another on the same account is by posting them, that seems a little harsh. You'd have thought they might restrict mail to just your own characters. What harm could that do?

I found out the hard way when I logged my new Vulpera Hunter into Orgrimmar last night. Attentive readers may remember I'd prepped for the cancellation of my subscription by making several new characters and sending them thirty-slot bags and pocket money. 

It wasn't until I went to open my inventory that I remembered something. When I'd made the new fox I'd sent her the stuff but she'd never gotten around to taking it out of the mailbox. And now she can't. Bummer.

That was why I ended up playing my new Goblin Warlock instead. It was touch and go whether she'd have bags and gold either. I remembered that I had logged her in but I also recalled running around Kezan for so long, searching without success for the bank, that I'd given up and logged her out back where she'd started. 

I thought I'd better check whether she was in the same predicament. Luckily it turned out she'd at least collected her mail before leaving. Since she was out I thought I might as well play her. 

So I did. And it was fun. A lot of fun. Back in 2013 I described the Goblin starting zone as "a fascinating place... genuinely laugh-out-loud funny" and I see no reason to alter my opinion. I'm not absolutely sure I've played through all of WoW's starting zones but of all the ones I can remember Kezan is by far the most entertaining. 

In that post I also wrote "had I known I was going to be expelled from it so abruptly and terminally at around level five I would have taken a lot more trouble to explore it in depth", something I found myself thinking again last night. I did manage to spend a little more time poking around under the elevated highways, down in the slums where the poor folk live but I still think I need to make another goblin and go poke around some more. 

Here's the thing about WoW. It applies to a lot of mmorpgs, come to think of it. A huge amount of work goes into the starting zones and the character, personality and culture of the races that live in them. And then most of that work is just thrown away.

About the only races that seem to retain some measure of consistency are the ones designed as comic relief. Gnomes, goblins and talking rats, usually. (The Asura in Guild Wars 2 are a bizarre hybrid of all three). They're the short ones who speak funny and make ridiculous machines that frequently blow up in their faces. That seems to be a joke that never grows old for developers. 

All the other races, no matter how different they start out, tend to clump up into one heroic (or villainous) blur as they diasporate around the world. (Yeah, that's not a word. Just go with it).

I'd very happily play a version of WoW that focused most of its attention on the goblins and their culture. It's plain to see from the brief time we get to spend in Kezan that there would be no shortage of material. There's enough conniving and backstabbing and plotting to fill dozens of storylines. You don't need external threats with a culture like theirs. 

Except this is heroic fantasy so the external threat to end all external threats turns up before you make level five. Nothing like a dragon attack to put some fire under you. Then a volcano goes off and the island sinks so that's the end of that.

It's all go but I'm not sure any of it tops the quest where you cruise around town in a convertible, picking up your crew to go party. Seriously, that's the game I want to play. I want to get to know my guys, hear their back stories, blag our way into parties and onto private yachts, make it on the scene. 

In the short time before the volcano erupted I got to drive a car, win a footbomb match, dance by the pool and get dressed up fit for a red carpet premiere. Not to mention rob a bank and blow up my own house. Nothing's going to match that. It's all downhill from there. 

I ended up comatose on a raft with nothing left but my good name. In a place that eerily reminded me of the new starting zone, Exile's Reach. Remember that first quest there, where the Murlocs have stolen a bunch of stuff and you have to go get it back? Well this is like that, only instead of Murlocs, it's monkeys.

Levels zip by all too fast in the free lane. My goblin was already level seven when I left her, sitting at the top of some stairs, staring out across the waves to where her homeland used to be. She'll be level ten by the time she gets to Orgrimmar and her life will be half-way over. 

I just hope she can find the bank.

BFA Fever : WoW

I thought about calling this post "If All Your Friends Jumped Off Another Bridge...".  It's been a long time since I last played World of Warcraft but today I patched up and logged in again, all because every blogger in blogdom is doing the same.

And why? Expansion!

Never mind that I got Legion for my birthday two years ago, registered the code and promptly forgot about it. Never mind that I never even set foot on The Broken Isles let alone leveled up there. Never mind that I never even saw an Artifact Weapon or a Demon Hunter...

Actually, why stop there? All I ever saw of Warlords of Draenor was a handful of starter quests and maybe two percent of the first zone. Never even got a glimpse of my Garrison. Mists of Pandaria? I have a level four panda somewhere, I think.

I did see a few of the changes wrought by the Cataclysm, mostly because a good deal of that much-maligned expansion falls within the remit of the F2P Starter Edition. Oddly, Cataclysm is the content that most interests me because I can remember the original zones reasonably well and seeing how they've changed piques my curiosity. Also, low level play...

It's usually relatively simple to return to WoW. Not as easy as coming back to GW2, which is virtually seamless, but not too annoying. This time was no different although there were a few hiccups.

First there was a Battlenet update of some kind  That took mere seconds. After that came a huge patch for WoW itself - over 13GB. The launcher claimed the game was "playable" almost immediately but I waited for Optimal before hitting Play. That took me straight into one of Blizzard's epic cinematics.

Even with my minimal knowledge of WoW Lore I could sort of follow some of it although I have no idea of the names of any of the featured players. It was quite impressive to watch although 90% of it was just sound effects and explosions.

It occurred to me after a while that these cinematics are what two five-year olds see in their heads when they smash their plastic action figures together and shout at each other. The parts where someone yells "For the Horde!" and "For the Alliance!" really bring that home.

Once the excitement died down it was on to a list of servers. Quite a few of them were Offline including, naturally, the one on which most of my characters sleep. Rather than wait for whatever was going on to be fixed I logged on someone on a server that was working.

That's how it's meant to look.

It turned out to be a Level 1 Dwarf I'd never played (clearly, what with him being Level 1 and all...). The game treated me to another cinematic, this time just a fly-by using existing assets with a voiceover, something about some political intrigue in Ironforge. I'm guessing it had something to do with the new Dwarven racial option, the Dark Iron mob, who were enemies last I remember but who seem to have been brought into the fold at least somewhat.

I had no wish to play yet another dwarf so all I did with this one was use him to get my Add Ons working. Not that I use many. The only one flagged as out of date was the GW2 UI mod, without which I can no longer imagine playing WoW at all. (Okay, I guess I'd acclimatize if I had to but it really is so much better...).

There was already an updated version available (and indeed a beta of a still-newer version). I installed it manually and it didn't work so I fired up Twitch, which acquired the old Curse auto-updater for Add-Ons that everyone used to use. I am getting more use out of Twitch than Steam these days...

That worked flawlessly, almost instantly. I dropped the dwarf and checked to see if my regular server was back up. It wasn't but at least now there was a pop-up saying Blizzard was doing something about it.

He's small but he packs a punch! And so do I.

I still wanted to have a run around, get back in the Azeroth groove, so I swapped to my old Free to Play account. I made it before the current version of F2P, the one that lets you play any character up to level 20. 

Remarkably I was able to find the old log-in details. Before I could reacquaint myself with my old friends I had to reassure Blizzard I wasn't being  hacked by replying to an email; before I could do that, I had to reassure my email provider I was who I said I was. These things happen when you go a few years between log-ins. I'm just happy any of it still works.

Finally I was able to log in my good old Goblin Warlock. She's a great character. I took her all through the extremely detailed and enjoyable Goblin starter zones and blogged about it way back when. 2013 in fact. Five years ago. Blimey, Charlie!

For some reason she was in the Tauren homeland of Mulgore, which is one of the most attractive parts of Azeroth. If you're going to get abandoned anywhere it's a better option than most. At level 14 I don't imagine many of the recent changes have affected her much but I did notice she only had one spell on her hot bar.

"What kind of creature bore you? Was it some kind of bat?" NSFW link to source.

It takes quite awhile to kill something with just the default attack and you don't get a huge amount of xp for doing it, either. Once I'd put all her spells back, time-to-kill improved although xp remained charmingly sparse.

I seem to remember there was a time when leveling in the teens was so ridiculously fast it made the whole thing feel pointless. This time, even when I started doing some quests, the pace felt reasonable. Still brisk enough at maybe forty-five minutes to finish level 14 but not so speedy I felt disconnected.

I'm not sure if the basic spells have changed. I was using Demonology and summoning imps with a meteor, having my Felguard (?) to tank and throwing in some kind of demonic wolf now and then as well. It was fun. Reminded me somewhat of being a Minion Master Necromancer in GW2.

There was some to and fro on the weird batwinged griffins the Horde use as air taxis. It always surprises me how much time in WoW is spent just sitting on things watching the scenery. That does feel old-fashioned. 

I carried on until the Warlock dinged and then I called it a day. I'm back, kind of. When my regular server recovers I'll have to decide whether or not to re-sub. I probaly will for August, if for no other reason than it'll give me something to post about for Blaugust.

Off To The Races

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


What’s Your Favorite MMORPG Race and Why?


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enemy Of My Enemy: Some Thoughts On Faction In Kunark And Elsewhere : EQ2

Telwyn at GamingSF has a thought-provoking post up called "Kunark factions and character loyalties". It chimes with some things I've been thinking about this week as I've been playing through the Adventure and Tradeskill Signature questlines in Kunark Ascending. The two tracks run in parallel for the most part but there are moments when you can almost see the sparks fly as the two streams cross.

It's not uncommon, when playing MMOs, to find that what your character is being asked to do doesn't fit seamlessly with your conception of that character's motivations or personality, but when you run up against something so out of synch that it triggers a burst of cognitive dissonance it can be disconcerting. As I've mentioned a couple of times, the whole Greenmist storyline doesn't sit well with my (mostly) loyal Lucan-supporting, naturalized Freeport citizen ratonga.

That narrative strand, which goes back to EQ2's original Kunark-based expansion "Rise of Kunark" and forms the spine of the Adventure questline in the new expansion, is difficult enough to reconcile with his understanding of himself. Add in the complex, nested set of deceptions and intrigue between the ruling elites of Freeport, Neriak and Maldura that underpin both the current expansion and the previous one, Terrors of Thalumbra, and I confess both my character's motivations and moral compass seem to have swung wildly askew.

When you find yourself nodding in agreement with a lecture on morality given by a goblin, you know you're in trouble.

Not unmanageably so, however. I'm comfortable playing characters caught up in events so large and complex that the demands and rigors of political intrigue behind them go well beyond their pay grades let alone their ability to resist.

And there's an exceptionally demanding requirement for "suspension of disbelief"  in playing any MMO in the first place. Almost any aspect of any MMO you care to name will be incapable of sustaining even a superficial logic check. If you can't sustain a little doublethink then MMOs are probably not the genre for you.

All the same, there are limits.

The "Faction" mechanic used widely throughout the EverQuest franchise, an analog of which can commonly be found among many first and second generation MMOs, is in part an attempt to manage the cognitive dissonance caused simply by playing these games. Ironically perhaps, it's a mechanic over which I've been two in minds since the beginning.

I love faction work as a game activity. I find the slow process by which my characters incrementally improve their standing with a particular race, city, organization or other grouping within the game both relaxing and satisfying. It's always there in the background, something you can pick up and lay down as the mood takes you. Something to do when you can't think of something to do. I miss it in modern MMOs that don't use it.

What I don't like, however, and have never liked, is the formulaic, rote implementation. The way a player can adjust the standing of a character with faction one simply by culling another. What this has always meant in practice is that faction is impermanent and malleable to such a degree that it generally represents no barrier at all. If you want to have all the benefits of allying first to one faction, then later to that faction's sworn enemy, all you need is time and patience.

This can lead to the kind of cynical, self-serving or merely pragmatic decision-making that is the antithesis of the "role-playing" mindset for which the MMO genre is, probably erroneously, named. In the conflicting Adventure and Crafting storylines of Kunark Ascending, I'm currently stymied by my refusal to kill the same goblins, while wearing my Adventurer hat, that I just spent several evenings befriending as a Crafter.

In gaming terms there is no issue. I just need to kill half a dozen goblins for a single quest and not even a core quest at that. The faction drop that would create (even assuming there is a faction drop for killing them, which, since I haven't killed any yet, I can only surmise) would be trivial compared to the thousands of points of faction my Weaponsmith can accrue from a few dailies taking a few minutes to complete.

In role-playing terms, however, the gap is unbridgeable. These aren't wandering goblins he could pick off, furtively, out of sight, in another part of the forest. (He is, at least nominally, "Evil" after all). The goblins in question are right in the middle of Twark, the goblin settlement, in clear view of all the named goblins with whom I've taken time and trouble to establish my good intentions until now.

This is not an unusual situation for an MMO but over the years the effort made by game designers to avoid this kind of open conflict of interest has diminished almost to nothing. Gone are the days of carefully finding a corner of Freeport, where no guards path, then luring your target into the alleyway for a mugging. Now you can slaughter citizens to your black heart's content right in the town square and provided you're careful with your open AEs no-one will bat an eyelid.

All of this doesn't spoil my enjoyment, or not too much, anyway. Times change. It does mean that sometimes there are quests I won't do, even though I would like the reward. That's fine.

Less fine are the times when one of these emotional roadblocks lies squarely in the path of the progress of a lengthy narrative. When you're several hours in and committed it becomes that much harder to hold to principles that are, after all, notional in a virtual world. Easier to say "it's just a game", swallow the sour taste and do whatever needs to be done to keep moving forward.

Every time that happens, though, a thread pulls loose and the tapestry frays a little more. The big picture is made up of fine details. Keep blurring the view and one day you won't be able to tell what you're looking at any more.

There is a self-imposed solution to all this. More than one. You can keep conflicting content for different characters. You can roleplay a narcissistic sociopath. You can get over yourself.

As MMOs move further and further away from their origins in Pen and Paper roleplaying so the number of people who care about any of this, players and developers alike, diminishes. In an environment where most players don't even read the quest text or watch the cut scenes it may well be that the average player not only doesn't care but doesn't even notice.

I do, though, and it itches a little.

One Of Nine : Ninelives

I have Psychochild to thank for this one. He found it via a news squib on MassivelyOP that I'd seen but paid no mind. Bad error. Thanks for the catch, Brian.

It would really have been a shame to have missed Ninelives even though it's not an MMO (yet) because it ticks just about all my boxes, apart from the one that says "Anyone Else Here"? Except for the phrase "single player", the Statement of Intent that introduces the project could have been drafted specifically to match my personal criteria for the perfect RPG:

Ninelives is an open world single player RPG focused on freely searching and adventuring in a unique world and building characters with items and skills. We aim to create a game where players can enjoy the pleasures of simple RPG, such as discovering, collecting, battling, in their own relaxed pace.

Let's start with what it looks like. It's just gorgeous.

Not in any flash, over-pumped, hyperactive, "look at me I'm gorgeous" kind of way. No, Ninelives reminds me of other worlds that clicked for me at first sight - Vanguard, City of Steam, Rubies of Eventide - places that immediately felt like places.

I don't know exactly what it is but I think dust has a lot to do with it. Dust and grit and the patina of age. These are lands that feel used, lived in, worn down. Much though I'm enjoying Blade and Soul, even though I find its world beautiful and involving and its hamlets and villages convincing, everything there looks so clean and new. This does not.

In two sessions last night, amounting to around an hour and a half, I took nearly seventy screenshots. Some were taken with this post in mind but most were just because I was seeing such wonders.

Ninelives has been handcrafted by a small team, with all the graphic design, world-building and modelling carried out by a single person. That pays huge dividends in consistency but that wouldn't be much of a benefit if the single person wasn't also gifted with a striking visual sense. Fortunately he is.

The SmokeymonkeyS duo describe themselves as "a team consisting of two Japanese guys, one a programmer and the other a graphic designer, formed for the purpose of creating games." With delicious modesty they claim "We are not professional game creators...We are just a team of guys that absolutely love games."

Well, I guess Morrissey and Marr were just a team of guys who absolutely loved music. No-one starts out as a professional. You become professional by producing professional quality work. This is professional quality work and then some.

Psychochild goes into some detail on the gameplay. I won't go over that ground again. Suffice it to say it's tailor-made to please me. I took his advice and went with the Blade class. A goblin because of course a goblin!

Within a minute or two of waking up in a stream I was whacking gnolls with an axe and taking their stuff. Could there be a more perfect opening to a game? No, there could not. À propos yesterday's post, Ninelives scores highly on the "How do you get gear" scale. The gnolls wear armor and use axes and bows.

When you kill them they drop axes and bows and armor, along with a few potions and recipes. I'd score it a perfect ten except that the delivery mechanic is a chest rather than looting straight from the body but I can live with that.

A short trip to the back of a mini-dungeon and a battle with a big boss gnoll netted me some nice items but really all I wanted to was explore. From the now empty gnoll camp I could see the towers of a city with airships passing overhead. I headed up the hill in search of adventure. Mostly, what I found was wonder.

The city is convincing. The scale is spot on. The buildings have function and purpose, the streets are laid out as streets would be. There are strange things to see around every corner - a huge statue of a deer, strange riding beasts stabled next to shaggy horses, emporia of mysteries and the mundane side by side.

There are posters in the streets, pictures on the walls, signs in a script I can't decipher. Everywhere there's something new to stare at and wonder. And just listen.

The two-man team got someone else in to do the music. It really would be too much to expect they could do it all. They chose exceptionally well. The music is excellent as is the ambient soundscape. There's even a torch singer in a bar, whose lonely, elegiac throb fills the room with sadness and longing.

The last thing I did before I logged out was stand in the deserted single street of Mistral, The Timeless Town, a forgotten, abandoned settlement right at the end of the map, listening to the haunting score. I'm not a big fan of soundtracks in general or of video game music in particular but this is something else. Here's a messy edit that doesn't do it anything like justice. Second half has the best.

So, clearly I could ramble on for a while, eulogizing about what is essentially a version of a game that may change to the point of unrecognizeablity over the months and years ahead. Which is what happened to City of Steam, of whose pre-alpha and alpha days this strongly reminds me.

Enjoy it while it lasts, that's my advice. It may turn into something really special one day but on the other hand this might turn out to be its Golden Age. It's free, it's a tiny download. All you need is an email address and you're in. I wish I could say I'll see you there but I won't. It's not an MMORPG.

I hope it will be, one day.

A Little Touch Of Goblin In The Night : WoW

As yesterday's screenshot gallery rather unsubtly revealed, I've taken to playing a little World of Warcraft late of an evening. It's always been my habit to have a wind-down MMO or two on the go, something light that's amenable to playing in absent-minded 30-60 minute sessions right before bedtime.

Many games have filled that role over the years. Some were MMOs that only ever got an outing in that slot, others were previous favorites popping up in cameos to reprise their famous shticks. The first I can remember was The Realm, a venerable 2D MMO that predates even Ultima Online. I even paid a subscription for that one, although it was only something like $3 a month.

Other fondly-remembered late night specials included Endless Ages, Rubes of Eventide, Ferentus and NeoSteam but there have been many more that are harder to call to mind. Almost every MMO I've ever played "seriously" has passed on to an around-midnight afterlife. That's when the minor characters marooned on obscure EQ servers come out and  kill a few gnolls, or my Raki DIsciple sharpens his diplomatic skills in Vanguard.

What do you mean, I have to give him back? Don't you know who I am?

The so-far inexorable rise of the Free To Play model for MMOs has widened the available options for kick-back gaming to, well, almost everything ever made. The most notable opt-out from the trend is, of course, WoW.

I was a very late-comer to Azeroth indeed, arriving there for the first time about five years after everyone else. For me, WoW turned out to be something not dissimilar to  the classic three-monther. I forget how long I actually spent there. It could have been a month or two more, tailing off towards the end until it no longer seemed worthwhile paying the sub. Had that barrier to re-entry not been there I'd almost certainly have popped in and out ever since, but there it was so there I wasn't. 

Goblins. Surprisingly orderly queuers.

Then a week or two back I let slip an idle thought in a comment at TAGN, owning up to feeling a vague, weak but definitely tangible sense of nostalgia for WoW. I guess it shouldn't be that surprising. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had a more than passably good time there for a while. I had some characters to whom I felt genuine attached. And several bloggers I read regularly, like Wilhelm himself, Kaozz and Prinnie post screenshots and stories that keep my own memories seeming fresher than they otherwise might be.

Having outed myself as a WoW nostalgist of the mildest stripe, when Wilhelm pointed out that the first twenty levels of WoW can be had any day for the bargain price of nothing (something I knew but had been trying hard to supress) subsequent events became almost inevitable, if not immediately successful.

You want flies with that?

First I tried to revive my old account. That didn't go too well. The details I have written down didn't seem to tally with Blizzard's records although when I tried to merge them with a new Battlenet account they recognized them well enough to tell me they'd been merged already, something I dimly recall doing just before I quit.

Since the plan was to make new characters and play them for free, not get back to the old ones, it seemed a lot simpler just to start over so I made a new Battlenet account and from there everything went as smoothly as you might hope. WoW is a 22GB download now but Blizzard pumps fast and the client streams so playing the game is only a few minutes away from any rash decision you might make.

And speaking of those, first I made a Panda. I know. I think there was one on the log in screen or something. I don't really have an explanation. Or an excuse. Whatever, the Panda, a Hunter, got made and reached level four in very short order, by which time I'd seen enough to remind me that I have never much liked the Faux-Zen Monastery vibe in any MMO ever, so why would this be the exception?

The Cliche-o-meter's in the red, Cap'n. I dinna think she can tak' any more!

The second attempt, a Goblin, went much better, no surprise there. Goblins, gnomes, short talking animals, that's my comfort zone. The Goblin starting area, the Isle of Kezan, is a fascinating place, described in the Wiki as "a swarming cesspool of corruption, chaos, scheming, and invention", which is true as far as it goes. It's also genuinely laugh-out-loud funny and had I known I was going to be expelled from it so abruptly and terminally at around level five I would have taken a lot more trouble to explore it in depth. Never mind, I can do it over. The world can always use another goblin.

Don't make me choose!

Goblin #1, a Warlock, hit level 10 last night. Although I played a Warlock into the 40s last time around, I'd completely forgotten the whole "choose a specialization" thing that comes at tenth. Better do some research today so I can make a decision later tonight. That's one of the things about playing WoW that's beginning to come back to me - there always seemed to be decisions to be made about your character that required out-of-game research. For what ended up becoming the world's entry-level MMO and especially considering how far the gameplay has supposedly been ameliorated and idiot-proofed over the years, WoW has always surprised me by being a lot more complex and complicated than its reputation would suggest.

So here I am in WoW again. If my goal was to scratch that nostalgic itch then I seem to have shot wide. Playing a new race in an area I've never seen before is strapping on the scratch mitts with a vengeance. This is just the warm-up, though. WoW has a lot of races and I'm a low-level specialist, most at home in the starting areas of any MMO. For someone like me, who can't bear to see a character slot stand empty and is happiest pottering about getting characters decently dressed, WoW's endless trial looks like a perfect fit.

And it's free! Thanks Blizz!