EverQuest Legends, Stars Reach And Valheim Battle It Out. GW3 Watches From The Sidelines.

There's been a flurry of announcements concerning Games Of Interest of late and I haven't found time to talk about most of them yet. Today's the day! Here's a Grab Bag of upcoming launches and what-not.

EverQuest Legends

Last to be announced, first to market. We're so used to hype cycles lasting years that a four-month arc from the opening announcement to the game going live seems almost indecent. 

To recap, this is the version of EverQuest you can solo. There's more to it but that's the USP. It was clearly inspired by the success of an unsanctioned, rogue EverQuest server by the name of The Heroes Journey whose USP was... ah, you guessed!

That one was so successful it made the mistake of making money so EG7/Daybreak took the developers to court, where a $3.5m settlement was agreed. The THJ devs toddled off to make their own game, Hollowed Oath, without the borrowed IP and assets and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, having pulled in $166k on a Kickstarter .

Meanwhile, Daybreak farmed the idea out to a company called Game Jawn, which I believe is run by some of the people behind the Officially Sanctioned, Not A Rogue Server At All legacy project, Quarm.  With the whole thing neatly formalized and codified under the catchy, if recycled, title EverQuest Legends, everyone who would have liked to play on The Heroes Journey but felt too uncomfortable about the dubious provenance can now feel happy they're giving their money to the right people. 

EQL, as I'm sure we'll end up calling it, is a bit more than just a retro server. Although it will start back in 1999, the devs, who are entirely different people from those currently running and writing for EQ itself, promise "it will evolve separately with its own lore and timeline...have its own spin on classic zones and will also add never-before-seen content.”

 The game will be on Steam and you can have it for an upfront payment of  $19.99, followed by $10 a month in subs. You do, of course, get the first month in that box fee but sadly, since Game Jawn is entirely separate from Daybreak, your All Access sub won't get you in. 

You can give Game Jawn your money right now, if you want. The game goes live on July 28 but you can pre-order. 

That gets you guaranteed access to the beta "on or about July 1", which puzzles me a little. The beta will close on July 21 so pre-ordering gives you just three weeks to try out the game, after which your character and all your progress will be wiped and you'll have to start over from scratch another week later. 

For regular MMORPGs, where there's some form of competitive raid structure, some people find this sort of thing an attractive prospect so they can learn the strats and get ahead of everyone else come launch day. For a game that's selling itself on its solo-friendliness, though, one where "even a solo player can build a character strong enough to take on the toughest challenges and acquire the most epic gear in the game", those three weeks seem like a bit of a waste of time and effort. 

I guess there will be achievements, maybe? World firsts and that sort of thing. Although it won't be very authentically old-school EQ if there are. Still, it's supposed to be a modern take on the old game...

I'm still undecided about whether to bother with EQL. I don't want to play it. I don't have time to play it. I've already seen just about all there is to see in the first half-dozen expansions so until they start adding new, original zones, there wouldn't be a lot of point. 

On the other hand, I feel I ought at least to check it out and so I can write about it a little. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Rather the opposite, in fact, for both the playing and the writing. If I do, it'll be more out of a sense of duty than with any enthusiasm, although duty to what or whom, I couldn't say. 

And I very definitely don't want to pay a sub for it, that's for damn sure. A one-off box price of $20 I can rationalize but an ongoing, monthly subscription? I think not. It'll be one month and out, if at all.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds' sandbox MMORPG set in space is coming to Early Access "this summer". A bit vague, I know, but at least they have a window. They also have a trailer. Want to see it?

It's... alright. Not terrible. The character animations look wonky but it's pretty enough. Doesn't make the game look very exciting, though, does it? Or interesting. Or new. 

It looks as though Early Access will be free to play although you can, of course, buy supporter packs. Or will be able to. Wilhelm has all the details. In fact, he has everything you need to know about the whole thing so I suggest you pop over to his place and get yourself up to speed there, if you need to.

All I'm going to do here is editorialize. I've played some Stars Reach. It's okay if you like that sort of thing although I'm pretty sure there are better options. No Man's Sky gets brought up a lot in conversations but I haven't played that so I can't comment on the similarities.  

What I can say is that Stars Reach is dull. It all works but none of it is much fun. "Worthy" is a word that keeps popping into my head when I try to write about it. "Bored" is the one that pops up when I play. 

There's not much of a game there, that's the biggest problem. It's a fairly pure sandbox so you need to make your own entertainment and the tools for that are limited. It could use some kind of spine like all the crafting/survival games have and it hasn't got one. Without one, it kind of flops around, limply. As it would.

There's been some speculation about why they're going public just now. Money drying up is one obvious possibility but my suspicion is that they just can't get enough people through the doors any other way to maintain a meaningful test population. 

That's not guesswork. HeartlessGamer said in the comments at TAGN that Playable Worlds has admitted as much on reddit. There's numerical evidence, too. The only way you can play the Stars Reach alpha has always been through Steam so we have exact numbers and concurrent population has been in single figures for months. 

The peak player count this year was 32. Average concurrency peaked at 7 in March and now it's less than half that. No-one wants to play any more. Actually, if you look back, hardly anyone ever did. The all-time peak was well below 200 players online at the same time.

I asked yesterday who Neverness To Everness was for. That game had thirty million pre-registrations. Stars Reach has one person online as I write and a 24-hour peak of four. 

Who is Stars Reach for? I guess we'll find out this summer.

Guild Wars 3

Here's an announcement I did find the time to cover. I'm not going over all that again but I will say something about how the news affects the other Guild Wars titles and particularly Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, like Daybreak, is in an interesting and somewhat fortunate position. They've been through this before. They've seen what happens to an existing playerbase when you launch a second title in direct competition with yourself. They each have that experience to draw on, now they come to launch a third. (Or in Daybreak's case a fourth. Never forget EQOA.)

First time around, the two companies took very different tacks. ANet mothballed Guild Wars the moment GW2 arrived. They shunted it straight to maintenance mode and stopped developing it at all. Daybreak (Or SOE as it was at the time, of course.) did the exact opposite, running EQ and EQII in tandem, continuing to develop them both pretty much equally.

ANet now seem to believe that was the better choice, although Colin Johansen inexplicably spins the idea that they're going to support new and old titles as "not the norm" whereas I'd say deciding not to was the exception.They've already begun to take GW1 out of mothballs and they're promising development will continue on GW2 as before. They know they need to get out there and assure the people paying their bills right now that it's worth carrying on for the next couple of years because a lot of them, like Azuriel, will be questioning whether it's likely to be worth it. 

Colin Johanson is suggesting it's just a blip. There'll be a short hiatus in new content as they go back and tidy up all the bugs, then everything will get back to normal, with annual  expansions and whatever else it is they've been doing since I last played a few years ago.

I am, to be polite, skeptical. In the decade I played GW2, one of ANet's defining features was a complete inability to establish either a cadence or a pipeline for supplying content. They kept chopping and changing. They rarely stuck to any of their plans long enough to see if they worked although in most cases it was blindingly obvious they weren't going to, so I suppose they should actually get some credit for dropping them as fast as they did. Just none for coming up with them in the first place.

They frequently floated grandiose frameworks for large-scale changes to the game, changes they then discussed literally for years without implementing any of them, during which time most of the key individuals would move departments or leave the company. If and when any of these plans did finally make it to the game, they'd look nothing like the promises and they'd often wither away and be forgotten almost immediately. World vs World suffered particularly badly in this respect but it hit all parts of the game at times.

And yet, somehow, the game muddled along. It rarely prospered but it didn't fail. GW2 players became inured to frequent content droughts combined with constant churn in all kinds of systems and mechanics and learned to put up with it, albeit very grudgingly. Either that or they left. 

If that's what Colin Johanson means by business as usual (Not the phrase he used but it's the implication.) then I'm willing to believe him. The game was always a shambles when I played. I'm sure it can carry on being a shambles for a bit longer.

The idea that the company that struggled so hard to maintain a steady content flow for a single game will somehow now be able to manage it smoothly and efficiently or three titles is fantasy, though. Unless, I guess, they're planing on hugely expanding the workforce. Are they doing that? And even then, I very much doubt it would help. It'd just be more daft ideas and discussion document than ever.

We'll see how it all pans out in a couple of years time, I guess. My feeling is that if GW3 is a success, GW2 will end up being like GW1 is now, a comfortable niche title that people like enough to feel nostalgic about but mostly don't play. It could still get more content but it might not even need it. GW1 pottered along for a decade and more without any and a few people still played it.

If GW3 bombs or just under-performs, though, we might end up with an EQ/EQII scenario, where the older game holds most of its current audience, while the new one fails to attract another. At that point, I suspect ANet's promises of triple-game development might fall apart quite quickly. 

By then, though, I'll be too old to care. 

Valheim

Valheim is my most-played game on Steam at 385 hours but the last time I logged in was over two years ago. When the game finally leaves Early Access on September 9, will I return? Doubtful.

The further we get from the pandemic, the more certain I am that this was one of the artifacts of that strange time. We all had more hours in the day than we knew what to do with and we weren't always even allowed out of the house. Valheim filled a need.

It also introduced me - and many others, I'm sure - to a whole new genre, the crafting/survival game. I've played a few since and most of them have been better in objective terms than Valheim, which is kind of barebones when you look at it hard.

It was my first, though, and you're always still a little bit in love with your first, aren't you? I'd like to get to the end of Valheim but the the last two biomes were so radically un-enjoyable I don't have much hope for the last one, the Deep North. I imagine it'll be a miserable experience for anyone other than gaming masochists.

At most, I might set all the controls to as easy as possible and have a quick tour around the end zone like I did with the Ashlands. At the moment, though, I can't say I'm even motivated to do that. Valheim was a game of its time and that time has gone.

And that's my bag filled for the day, I think. I have a feeling there may have been some other announcements I was going to attend to (Edit: Like this one.) but I can't remember what they were and I didn't bookmark anything so I think we're done. 

For now. 

Sweet Poison or A Girl's Story

In writing about Wuthering Waves, I find it very hard to avoid repeating myself endlessly. It's staggeringly gorgeous to look at, the storytelling is excellent and the voice acting is top-notch. There's an extraordinary amount to do, the gameplay is varied and wide-ranging and the whole game feels welcoming and comfortable throughout. Yada yada yada...

Also, as I say every time, I find it exhausting and overwhelming to the point where I need a good lie down to get over it every time I indulge. It's like a delicious but extremely rich dessert, something you crave but know, for your own good, you can only indulge in every so often.

That cadence makes it very tough to write about, too. Because I've fallen into this pattern of leaving a couple of weeks between each session, biting off a complete chunk of story every time, I'm stuck with reviewing each chapter without trying to get too spoilery, while using a selection of screenshots I took along the way as illustrations and maybe dropping in a critical comment or two about anything that strikes me as being particularly notable, unusual or well done.

I'd add "or that could have been done better" to that last but honestly, there's not very often much that I feel could be improved and there seems to be less every time I play. Wuthering Waves feels very "finished" compared to just about all the games I'm used to or that I've played over the years.

It wasn't always that way or I don't believe so. I seem to remember at the start there were a lot more translation issues and plenty of times when what the voice actors were saying didn't match what I was reading in the subtitles. This morning I saw just one example of that and even then it was only a single word that differed.

Contrast that to Once Human, another relatively slick, well-funded and successful game which, as I recently noted, gets a five star rating from me in most departments. Even there, the tendency, as it is in many games I've played, is for the words you're hearing not to match the ones you see. 

I was playing OH last night. I did a couple of new quests and the words the voice actors were speaking barely resembled the text at all. The weirdest part about that wasn't that the production team couldn't get it right, it was that both versions were coherent and well-written, so either of them would have been fine. How they ended up using both is the mystery. Just pick one, guys!

I suppose it's a minor issue anyway. There's no real reason to read along with the actors after all, even if having subtitles on for everything, all the time, is the current fashion. I do find it distracting, all the same. I wish production teams would talk to each other now and again and settle on a final version. Or at least listen to the QA reports when they tell them "The words don't match the voices". I mean, it's not like its a hard error to spot. Maybe it's intentional, I don't know...

As I said, that wasn't a problem for me this morning, as I played through the quest that came up top of the list when I logged into Wuthering Waves for the first time in a fortnight. I had kind of half promised myself I wouldn't do that - just blindly follow the prompts. I was going to go off and do some exploring, open up the map a bit, do my own thing but it's so easy to just slip into the old habit of going where the quest-marker tells you. And when what you find when you get there is often so compelling, why would you want to stop?

In this case what I was being led towards turned out to be a Companion Story. There's one of those for all the main Resonators, I think, not just the leads but the co-stars, too. I haven't done very many of them. I think this might have been the fourth. Maybe the fifth. I should check sometime because they've all been excellent so far.

This was no exception. Cantarella's horror-inflected tale is chilling, even disturbing, but ultimately joyous. It also stands well inside the boundaries of the primary storyline, adding some depth and texture to the core narrative, rather than simply filling out the biography of the character herself.

And it's long! Boy, is it ever! It took me at least two hours which, judging by the full play-throughs on YouTube, seems to be about average. The huge majority of my time was spent, as always, watching animated characters act and listening to their voice-actors speak. I watched an anime movie, basically. 

I doubt that if you cut all the gameplay and just strung the cut-scenes together you'd get a cut lasting less than seventy-five minutes, a very decent length for an animated film. There was a fair amount of fighting this time but it was all so easy, none of it took very long. Ditto the puzzles, which mostly involved not too much more than following the visual prompts and pressing a few buttons at the appropriate moment. There's even a potentially terrifying jumping puzzle that the game just takes over and does for you.

In keeping with what has been the very welcome trend in the past sessions I've played, even the final boss fight is both easy and partially completed through cut scenes. I sincerely hope it's a trend that continues. As for the narrative, without giving any spoilers, I'd say 90% of Cantarella's story was clarity itself, without any of the confusing technobabble just about all the characters are prone to. 

The wrap-up, though, did its best to make up for that with a flurry of lines about frequencies and sonoro spheres that I'm a little concerned to say I mostly understood. I worry I may have been assimilated.

And then there was very final coda, because no Wuthering Waves story is ever complete without at least three or four false endings. That was... odd. One aspect of the game I do my best not to mention is the ever-present, free-floating sexual charge that seems to hang in the air around some of the main characters like the opiated miasma across the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. 

Nervously passing over Cantarella's distracting personal appearance, which gives me disturbing of Eurotrash as presented by Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gautier back in the 'nineties, in this case I'm talking about the almost predatory way she looks at, talks to and occasionally even touches the player-character. She's by no means the only NPC to have clear and obvious designs on "Rover" but she's the first one to try to put her intentions on a co-habitational basis.

All of which might be uncomfortable if my character wasn't so very much the alpha in every situation. I'm used, as we all must be now, to having the character I'm playing be treated as some kind of famous hero or maybe even a demi-god but in Wuthering Waves it's quite self-evidently true. When NPCs act awe-struck or honored to meet her, it's with palpably good reason and they, frankly, do not know the half of it. 

With that level of authority, I'm pretty sure she can handle a few over-familiar flirtations, not that she ever seems to notice there's even a subtext. She tends to look, at most, slightly baffled by the attention but by and large it just seems to fly straight over her head. 

As I've often said, if I'm going to stick with a game for long, I really need to feel an affinity for my character, something that's almost inevitably going to be harder to achieve in a game where the player gets no choice at all in who they play, other than to pick a gender. Add to that a complete inability to affect what your character looks like (Seriously, are there no cosmetics in the game at all outside the cash shop?) and then to add insult to injury, dress the main character in the worst outfit of anyone on the team and it's surprising I've been able to bond with her at all.

That I have owes a significant amount to the skill of the actor who voices her and also to the way that vocalization is handled in production and writing. I generally prefer the good old "Silent Protagonst" approach, so I was happy enough when all my character did was nod and gesture, which was all she did for a long time after I started playing.  When she suddenly began to speak, I was first astonished and then delighted at how much I enjoyed hearing the sound of her voice.

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I really appreciate the way she doesn't speak in every scene, only when she has something worth saying or to give her internal monologue an airing. It makes the times when she does speak up feel much more significant. Secondly, and much more importantly, I love the way the actor voicing my character handles the dialog. I like her voice, which obviously helps, but mostly I love her phrasing, which is reliably close to the way I hear the lines in my head. 

You'd be surprised how often that doesn't happen. Lots of actors seem to have very different ideas to me about cadence, emphasis and even interpretation. It's jarring to hear them stressing the wrong syllables or drawing attention away from the subtext, which is why, on balance, I like my characters not to speak. If they all spoke up as eloquently and authoritatively as this, though, I'd be happy to sit back and enjoy the show rather than imagining I could do a better job myself.

With Cantarella's story told I imagine a return to the main storyline will be next. As usual, I'm going to need a while to decompress before I take that on. I'll at least try to make it a shorter break than last time. It's hard enough to remember the plot as it is.

Not Everything's Connected (It Is, Though...)

Feeling super-lazy and uninspired today so I'm just going to throw out a few scraps and not even pretend there's a theme. If you usually skip the music posts, scroll down past the videos. Things get gamey down there. Also, honestly? The first part's not really about music. More about pets dying. So you might want to skip that anyway, if it's a trigger.

Everyone left good with that? Okay. Let's start with something sad.

We all like Best Coast, right? I mean, how could you not? They're like some kind of natural high. I've listened to plenty of their sun-fuzzed, out of focus tunes, although the only one I have in my files is this:

Snacks was Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino's cat but he was much more than that, as cats can be in this modern world. "He was not just my cat. He belonged to all of you. He was the third member of this band. Our mascot. Our cover star." she says. Now he's gone. Farewell Snacks. Sleep peacefully in the eternal California sun.

It might be I'm feeling a bit more alert than usual to potential pet trauma right now. There's been no animal in this house for quite a few years (Apart from those pesky mice that keep getting in through the pipes under the sink.) but we're getting a puppy in a few weeks (Well, Mrs. Bhagpuss is getting a puppy and that means I'm getting a puppy by association.) 

We have talked about getting a kitten at the same time so they'd grow up together but I think it might be a bit too much all in one go. Also, not to be morbid about it, but as the wonderful Pony Up put it...

... is that they die. Kind of puts you off getting involved in the first place, doesn't it? Although, heaven knows, it's hardly news to me. I've had enough pets that have died over the years. I'm not sure whether having two at a time would double the odds or halve them. It might be considered hedging your bets but then again it might just be reckless.

And at our age there's the ever more pertinent question of what happens if they outlive you? Like, I wonder what happened to Black Raoul? I'd never heard of Raoul until this morning but I'd heard of his owner, Pat Fish, sometimes known as The Jazz Butcher. I own at least one album by him and I saw him play live a couple of times. Pat, that is, not Raoul.

Raoul was Pat's cat and Pat died last year. I guess someone else feeds him now. Raoul, that is, not Pat. Despite being dead, The Jazz Butcher has a new album out this month, which is how these things work. I read a review of it right after I heard about Snacks. I imagine that's why one tiny fact buried in the meat of the piece popped out at me: "apparently the “Black Raoul” who Fish chants about is known to hardcore fans as his cat." And also to the rest of us, now.

I was never a hardcore fan of The Jazz Butcher (The name of the band, really, not its leader.) but there was a time I liked either him or them well enough to name my apazine after a lyric from one of their songs. I called it "Great Big Weather Kind of Outburst" because that's the kind of thing I thought was smart back then. And still do.

At least I think it was from one of their songs. Damned if I can remember which one and the internet's no help. Doesn't really matter, anyway. We were talking about Black Raoul and he gets his namecheck in the one I already linked.

Enough about dead pop stars and their cats. Or pop stars and their dead cats. Except to note that a) there are a lot of them b) there are more of them all the time and c) I could totally get another post out of this...

Change of subject.

Lost Ark is out this week. I know, because people have been writing about it and now they're playing it. Enough of them to bring Steam to its knees, apparently. And that's just in Early Access. Wait until the official launch tomorrow.

I have absolutely no interest in Lost Ark whatsoever. It's pretty much the poster child for "Games That Don't Interest Bhagpuss". (That was fun! Talking about yourself in the third person is tight! And so is stealing other peoples' catchphrases!) Even so, I've been bracing myself for an explosion of posts about the game across the blogosphere...

Hasn't really happened yet. Only a handful of people have mentioned it so far. I hadn't realised until I read Kaylriene's first impressions that Lost Ark was free to play. I'd assumed there'd be an up-front cost of some kind. And it's on Steam. I suppose that makes it marginally more likely I might end up trying it at some point but there's no room in my schedule right now even if I wanted to give it a go.

The final piece of news I propose to stuff screaming into this grab-bag of unrelated trivia is this. By the way, isn't it annoying, the way I'm hyperlinking all this stuff without context so the only way to find out what I'm talking about is to click through? I wonder if that's considered good practice or bad? I could see it going either way.

For those with mouse fatigue, here's the headline in question "Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit Movie Rights Up For Sale This Week" And here's the tag that follows "Amazon is considered a favorite to buy them." 

It's all a tad confusing. There seem to be a lot of rights involved in the sale. The package "includes many movie, merchandising, gaming, and live event rights" and some of them don't seem to be exclusive. Depending which report you read, it seems the existing owners and operators of related properties and spin-offs shouldn't be affected. Maybe.

Where that leaves Standing Stone and Lord of the Rings Online, I guess we'll find out. If Amazon do end up winning the bidding war, I wonder if they might even bring that mmorpg they killed back to life? Or maybe TenCent will buy the rights and start it up again.

Something new for LotRO players to worry about, anyway. There's always something, isn't there?

Simon Says "Now Stay Down!" - How To Beat The Amrine Excavation Expedition Without Really Knowing How.

Today, I played New World for six hours. That's the longest I've played in one day since launch. I think the game's beginning to sink its hooks into me. 

It wasn't one unbroken six-hour session. It's been years since I played anything for that long; probably well over a decade. It was two lengthy sessions, though, about two an a half hours in the morning, three and a half after lunch. That's more than I've played any game in one day since Valheim. 

I spent most of those six hours questing. I did do quite a bit of gathering and a little crafting too but I was trying to focus on quests because I'd found myself on the wrong side of not one but two progression roadblocks. I wanted to get past both of them and I'm very pleased to say I did. Eventually.

The first was Destiny Unearthed, a stage in the main story quest and also the point at which New World pulls a Final Fantasy XIV and plays the ever-popular forced grouping card. At least, that's what I suspected was going to happen, although in New World you never quite know what to expect.

Despite having had a lot more issues with queues than I have, Belghast is much further ahead than me. He posted details of his experience recently when, having gathered some friends to help him with a quest that looked like it was going to send him into what he believed would be a higher-level area, flagged for parties of five, it turned out the mobs he actually needed were on the far side of all that and readily soloable.

I had a similar experience a few levels back. I was working on another step in the Azoth Staff sequence. The item I needed was deep in a ruined temple infested with mobs several levels higher than me. The area was flagged as suitable for mid-20s and I was sill in my teens. 

I was very skeptical about being able to fight my way to where the quest marker was telling me I needed to go but it tuned out I was being over-cautious. In the event, all I needed to do was put my head down, barrel past everything at a dead run, click on a glowy object deep inside a crypt, get an instant update and leg it out again with a dozen angry undead lurching after me.

The update I needed today was in much the same place on the map but by the way the quest was worded I felt fairly sure I wouldn't be able to get away with the same ruse twice. It looked like I was going to have to go into an "Expedition", which is what Amazon have decided to call dungeons in their game. 

I'd rather they hadn't done that. Expeditions are something I associate with EverQuest's infamous Gates of Discord expansion. I still have nightmares.

Following the map marker took me to the shimmering blue curtain that delineates the entrance to an instance. It wasn't looking good but even then I thought there was an outside chance it might be something I could solo. I'd gone through a similar curtain around level eight or nine and that one had led to a solo instance. 

I clicked on the zone-in to see if the same thing would happen again. No such luck. 

The Amrine Excavation is an instanced dungeon intended for a minimum of three players of Level 25 or above. You can go in with more people than that, up to five, but not with fewer. The door won't open unless you have a) an Azoth Staff b) a key and c) at least three people.

I had the staff and I had the key. The questline gives you both of those. What I didn't have were the people and I wasn't at all sure I wanted them. There were a couple of people hanging out by the entrance but I had chat switched off so if they were trying to put a group together I wouldn't have known about it.

I wandered away for a bit to have a think about it. I'm by no means unwilling to PUG things like this but if I'm going to go down that road I like to be decently equipped, have a basic idea what my class does in a group and be at or above the recommended level for the content. In this case I had, knew and was none of those things. 

When devs throw you this kind of irritating curveball there are only a couple of ways you can go, assuming you still want to carry on at all: buckle down and join a group, even if you don't feel ready or go away and do other stuff until you do. The other options are quit following the storyline (entirely possible in New World as far as I can see) or quit playing altogether.

Since I neither wanted to quit the game nor to cut myself off from the narrative (It's quite interesting) it was going to have to be one of the first two. And since I had, at that moment, not the slightest clue how people were going about forming groups (there's no automated matchmaking and no dedicated LFG channel) it seemed like as good a time as any to find out.

I switched my chat on and went back to the entrance to see if anyone was trying to put a group together. Someone was. It was about as old school an experience as you could hope for. Or hope never to see again, depending on how you feel about these things.

One player asked in area chat if anyone wanted to do the dungeon. Someone else said yes, they did. Then I said "I'll join if you have room" and after about thirty seconds an invite appeared on my screen.

We had three people, enough to start, but thankfully the leader said "Let's get some more. It's better with five". As the lowest level and the least sure of what I was doing, I felt the more people I could hide behind the better. 

The next part really brought back some memories. We all stood about for ten or fifteen minutes. One guy decided he needed arrows so he ran back to town. Someone else wanted to join but realized he was flagged for PvP. That meant he had to run back to town too, because you can only take the flag off in safe zones and you can't join a PvE group with it on.

I had to afk for a while but I felt pretty safe doing it. Nothing was going to happen any time soon. By the time I got back there was a discussion going on about whether someone's friend would come and join us to make up the full five but before that got very far another player arrived and asked if we were going in, so we took him instead. Then we had to wait for the guy who'd gone to get arrows to finish up whatever he was doing...

We got there in the end. Someone opened the instance and everyone went inside. My PC took forever to load the zone and by the time I got there the rest of them were in the second room, fighting. I caught them up and joined in and my PC decided it really didn't want to have anything to do with all the spell effects and suchlike so I had to open options mid-battle and drop my graphics to Low. 

After that everything played smoothly enough. The game looks good even at low fidelity so I was happy. 

Well, I was until we got to the first boss. My inventory had been close to full when we zoned in. I found myself Encumbered on the very first chest we looted.

I spent the entire run shuffling through my packs, discarding anything I could bear to ditch (Wave bye bye to 400 fibres.) and salvaging everything I looted that I didn't equip on the spot. I still couldn't pick up even half the stuff that dropped.

I'm working on a "Things I like/Things I don't like" list for a future post. The sheer quantity of loot is definitely going in the "Don't Like" column. You very definitely can have too much of a good thing, particularly when you have to lug it all around with you.

The five of us plowed through room after room. If you're interested to know what was there, there's a reasonably exhaustive walkthrough here. I certainly didn't get much chance to take any screenshots. I'd also have to say I didn't see an awful lot of the detailed mechanics until we got to the final Boss, the bathetically-named Simon Gray. 

Before we did the Poltergeist boss, Foreman Nakashima, our healer said "Worst boss next" but if he was any different to any of the others, or even some of the regular mobs, I didn't notice. I did get stunned a couple of times but it didn't seem to matter. 

At this level New World seems fairly forgiving of group make-up. We didn't have a tank at all. We had a a main healer and someone else was putting down some back-up heals when they weren't DPSing. The rest of us were just gung-ho, in there, hacking away. It was only on Simon that it all fell apart.

I had read the strats on him before going in so I knew he was going to call a lot of adds and throw up on us and that the adds would eat his vomit to heal themselves. I had a dog like that, once. 

There was some discussion before we started about tactics. As PUGs go, this one was chill, friendly and chatty. I didn't say much but only because I was fighting the UI. The chat interface is another mark in the Bad column for me. It was a pleasant experience socially, anyway, even they all probably went away thinking I must be the shy, retiring type.

It's always a good sign when no-one leaves after a wipe. We wiped with Simon at about 60% on our first try. There was talk of kiting him and using ranged attacks but since at least two of us had no ranged attacks, me being one of them, that didn't really happen.  

I did learn how to dodge effectively, though. In the two dozen levels up until then I'd never needed to bother. It's a nasty, inelegant, unsatisfying sort of dodge compared to the balletic leaps and rolls I'm used to in Guild Wars 2 but it's effective enough if you get the timing right. 

For all my successful dodging, I still got killed and so did everyone else. We wiped with Simon at about 50% that time. Getting better. And again no-one quit. Or even complained.

Third time's the charm, they say, although in my experience of PUGs like this sometimes it's more like tenth time. Not today, though. On the third try we did indeed manage to kite the Boss around fairly effectively, deal with most of the adds and slowly whittle down his health until finally he exploded.

The game was quick to congratulate us on having finished the instance but luckily I'd read ahead so I knew I wasn't finished just yet. I still had to find the item I'd come in for in the first place, loot it and update my quest. If I'd missed that I'd have had to do the whole thing over again with another pick-up group and it almost certainly would not have gone so well. And don't think I haven't done that before, either... 

As an introduction to dungeoneering in New World I'd have to say it was a decent one. I'm still strongly against mandatory group stages in mainly soloable quest lines but at least I can now complain about it from a position of authority. 

As for the mechanics of the group experience, it felt more like a GW2 dungeon than anything: frenzied, chaotic, messy, freeform. I think much of that might be down to our not having had a proper tank. The classic trinity does seem to be in place but on the flimsy evidence of one run in a low-level dungeon, it looks like there's quite a lot of flexibility.

I was just glad to get it done. I'll bet there are more compulsory group stages to come but for now I can forget about having to look competent. I think I got away with it this time but I don't want to push my luck.

The other significant quest I wanted to get done today was much more straightforward. I'd topped out on reputation for my chosen faction a couple of levels back, when I'd hit the point where you have to do a trial to get promoted to the next rank. The problem was, the NPC who gives the quest didn't believe I could do it. I was Level 23 when I went to talk to her but she wanted to see my Level 25 papers before she'd let me risk my neck.

That's going in the "Don't Like" column, too: all these arbitrary caps and gates. For a supposed sandpark there are a lot of rules and regulations. It seems to me that if I can do the stuff that leads up to a quest I ought to be given the chance to attempt the quest itself. If I get my head handed to me, so what? We fall down, we get back up. That's Aeternum.

When I did get the quest at last, having dinged twenty-five on the hand in for the Azoth staff one, it was something of a doddle. By far the hardest part was getting across the annoying planking onto the ship where the Captain I had to kill was waiting. I fell off three times. Died once because I got stuck in a box. There was swearing.

Killing the captain, when I finally got to him, was no problem. I could easily have done it a level earlier, when I first asked for the assignment. I'd say I told you so but none of the meatheads in the Marauders is going to listen. Maybe I should have joined the Syndicate after all.

With those two roadblocks cleared, tomorrow I can get on with something much more important. I have the money to buy a house. Now I just have to decide which town I want to live in. I have the standing to become a householder in Monarch's Bluff but I think I might prefer the etrnal autumn of Everfall.

I guess that means more questing. It never ends, does it?

Lessons Will Be Learned

And so another Blaugust drifts by, fading slowly into the gathering mists of autumn, shrouded in a cloak of bittersweet longing and tender regret. Or something. It's over, anyway.

So, how did you do? Belghast, like a proud coach at the end of a long season, has the final stats. Thanks, Coach! 

Is that even a thing coaches do? Schools didn't really have sports coaches in my day so I have no real idea what they do or how they talk except what I've seen in movies and TV shows. We had sports masters and my scool had what used to be called a "cricket professional", meaning someone who used to play professionally and parlayed that into a few decades of oiling the bats and shouting at people for running on the pitch. 

Maybe schools over here do have sports coaches these days. They have proms now, after all. 

God, that would have been weird - a prom. I kind of wish we had had them but I went to an all boys school and same-sex relationships were definitely not sanctioned by the authorities back then. Then again, half my friends ended up going out with girls from the same all girls school  that we seemed to have some kind of link-up with, even though it was on the other side of town. 

And so did I, come to that. And married one of them. The girls, that is, not one of my friends. Although we were friends then and still are now even though we divorced in the 1980s and haven't seen each other face-to-face for decades.

Ahem. Shall we get back to Blaugust? Should have done all this in "Getting To Know You Week" I guess, not "Lessons Learned". Lesson learned, then.

Congratulations to everyone who hit their targets and to everyone who didn't. Thanks to everyone who commented or contributed or read along in silence. Every eyeball matters. It takes a village to raise a blog, so they say. Okay, no-one says that but you know what I mean.

My own plan was to post every day and I did. It wasn't hard but then I do this for fun and anyway I don't work as much as I used to (even less, now I've had my requested reduction in hours to two days a week confirmed). Looking back to Blaugusts gone, I have no idea how I managed the full thirty-one posts when I was working almost full-time. I couldn't do it now.

Another Lesson : Random Pictures Break Up Text

Well, I guess I could. I could have done it this time but I'd have had to set up for it. Which I did. Even though I probably could have winged it.

This is Lessons Learned Week and for once I can confidently say I did learn at least one thing this time around: writing ahead really pays off. Also, another thing, so does finding a hook on which you can hang a whole bunch of similar posts.

I've often thought about doing series or features on the blog but until now it's always seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. I've done a few odds and ends over the years but only in a very ad hoc, fractured fashion. I've never given anything a specific name or made a separate section for it or allocated a particular day for the posts.

I didn't do any of those things this time, either, but the Pitchfork 25 series did have the benefit of a clear framework and a very specific remit, both of which made it exceptionally easy to knock out posts very quickly. Where the average time from blank page to published post here is probably no less than three hours, most of those P25 posts took less than an hour, start to end.

They were also so much fun to put together I sometimes banged out two or three on the same day because I was enjoying myself so much. At one point I had ten pre-written and ready to go. That really takes the pressure off.

My plan was always to use them only on days when I was working and to write "normal" posts every other day, so I was well aware I'd have more than I'd need to fill the gaps for Blaugust but I couldn't resist doing them. Music posts are so moreish.

As I write, I still have three completed P25 posts in the bank, which takes us to the Top Ten. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to go on from there. I might keep the rest back for days when I wouldn't otherwise post or I might just get bang them out and put them up as they come.

They Don't Need To Be Relevant - Just Pretty.

One thing's for certain: I will finish the whole twenty-five. It would be crazy not to. And there'll be another post on the final, official twenty-five, when it comes. I have no real idea when that's going to be. Entries closed nearly two weeks ago but all it says on the website is "check back later in the year for the results". 

I was hoping when I trailed the series that a few Blaugustians might join in and do 25s of their own (or 10s or 5s) but although I got more comments than I expected on my P25 posts the only one who came up with a list of their own was Mailvaltar. 

If anyone else fancies doing one it's not too late, you know. That's another lesson I learned from Blaugust. It's never too late to join in. I watched from the sidelines for several years before took the plunge. 

Actually, I didn't dive right in even then. My first year I shadowed Blaugust without signing up. Someone did that this year, I believe, although I forget who it was. It's a bit like when I play World vs World in Guild Wars 2 and run alongside a zerg without joining the squad. Sometimes that just feels freer, somehow.

There's no perfect way to blog and no perfect way to do Blaugust. That's another lesson. Do it your way. It's a platform and an opportunity and a club with no real entrance requirements other than a modicum of interest in blogging.

When it ends a lot of people feel a bit burned out or if not that then a little singed at edges. Others still feel the fire to write burning within. One incendiary metaphor too far? Thought so. 

No matter how we feel when it's over, next year most of us will be back for another round. Good old Blaugust! Good old Belghast! 

See you all back here, Summer 2022. Let's make it a date!

That's When My Patience Went Away : GW2

Following my return to work I had the shell of a plan prepared for what I wanted to write about today. I was thinking along the lines of a meditation on the different entertainment needs brought on by enforced leisure and enforced labor, how one requires stimulation and the other just the opposite.

It was all percolating quite nicely. And then I saw this. 

The headline Massively:OP went with was

"Guild Wars 2 delays End of Dragons to 2022, brings Colin Johanson and Josh Davis back."

That's enough to put the fear into anyone. Reading through the official press release, it gets worse. Much worse:

"Alliances When?

This year."

That about puts the cap on it for me. Along with the rest of the handful of people still playing World vs World, I'd allowed myself to get comfortable. I thought this insane idea had died of neglect long ago and we could all just carry on as if the whole ludicrous farrago had never been suggested. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.

If that wasn't sufficiently disheartening, there's this:

"In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward."

It's that sickening moment, when the door opens to your nice, quiet office on the ninth floor, where no-one ever goes and most people don't even know anyone works, and in come three suits from corporate with a checklist and an appraising look. Sometimes benign neglect is the best you can hope for.

In this case, it's not just simple fear of the unknown. There's the plain fact that every single iteration on WvW since 2012 that pretended towards anything more than a basic bug fix has been at best a downgrade and frequently a disaster. Every. Single. One.

Desert borderlands even killed EBG.

 

Naturally, the plan comes with promises and safeguards. Most of the section in the press release relating to Alliances is made up of apologies for previous errors and promises not to repeat them. All of which we heard last time and the time before that and the time before that again.

There's a touching naivete in the promise of a collaborative process based around a beta:

"World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. ... Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta."

It sounds reassuring until you realize the despised revision that removed all of the alpine battlegrounds and replaced them with their desert counterparts was the result of a similar collaborative beta, albeit a closed one.  That was the update that drove maybe half of all WvW players to stop playing, most of them for good. Several badly-received revamps led to open rebellion that was only quelled by a public poll on what should be done, a poll that resulted in a humiliating defeat for ANet and the removal of all of the new content to which they'd tied their banner. So that went well.

I'm less disturbed about this than I might be. Two or three years ago Alliances seemed like a terrifyingly bad idea but that was when the game mode still retained a vestige of the camaraderie it once had. There's none of that any more. All that remains is some knockabout fun, something very similar to an oversized, hot-join, never-ending game of capture the flag in which no-one really cares where the flag is or who's got it. It's hard to see how Alliances can make it actively worse but I have faith that if there's a way, ArenaNet will find it.

We had fun, once.

 

Going back to MassivelyOP's headline, there are more bad things. First and worst is the postponement of the third expansion, End of Dragons. This is embarrassing. Guild Wars 2 has had two expansions to date, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire. The first took three years to arrive, the second pegged that back to two. So far, so good. Not great, really very not great, but at least heading in the right direction.

When (I guess I should say "if") it launches, EoD will have been four and a half years in the making. The original game only took six months longer than that to build from scratch. At this point I'm certain the better plan would have been to start on GW3 right after the second expansion. If you're going to take the time you might as well make the damn game.

The given reason is, of course, quality. It's always quality. 

"...we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha...We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves"

Seriously, screw your "creative vision". And screw the self-congratulatory tone. Just get a damn expansion out in something close to the timescale every other major manages. 

The problem doesn't just lie with the development team, unfortunately. There's a glib, knowing wink in that "we appreciate your patience".  You can start a conversation about expansions in game any time you like and half the people talking will be saying they don't want one at all or they don't want one yet. It's not patience, it's apathy and antagonism. A lot of GW2 players will be cheering today because they won't have to suffer another expansion until next year.

I am not one of those players. The game is stale. It's been stale for much of its ten year run. The only time it freshens up is when we get a new expansion and so far that's been twice. And I only liked one of those.

Straight up, if there was a good alternative to GW2 I would be done with it now. I was done with it after Path of Fire. I keep logging in because it's there and it's familiar and it's easy and because it's the game Mrs Bhagpuss plays but mostly I'm still playing GW2 because not one of the alternatives I'm waiting on has made it to market yet. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, who only plays GW2 and, unlike me, rarely goes back to older mmorpgs she once enjoyed after she moves on to new ones, has been asking more and more often when the next good game is likely to appear. I can only hope it's soon but sadly I know it won't be before the delayed End of Dragons expansion so I guess we will indeed end up being "patient". But only because we have literally no choice.

So much for the expansion. How about those two guys coming back, eh? 

Heart of Thorns introduces a hitherto unknown problem to the game: too much loot.

 

This one's a bit more nuanced. From a company's point of view, can it ever be a good thing to have to announce you re-hired people you said goodbye to years ago? I guess it depends on why they left in the first place but at best it is, by definition, a backward-looking move. 

Colin Johanson was a very controversial figure in much of his time at GW2. He was the figurehead of a direction of which a vocal majority of players strongly disapproved. Whether it was true or not, he was labelled as the guy who wanted to make GW2 harder for casuals. 

He was the showrunner for Heart of Thorns, the expansion many players found daunting and difficult. The sales of the expansion were reportedly underwhelming and the aftermath confused and chaotic. Johansen posted an emotional and upbeat farewell when he left but my summary of his tenure, written at the time, was less than complimentary:

"Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw."

Given the history, it's hard to see why his return should be greeted like the prodigal son. Or indeed, like Scott Hartsman riding in on his white charger to save EverQuest II, a comparison I am absolutely certain Colin wouldn't want anyone to make.(I imagine he'd prefer us to cast him as Yoshi P riding to the rescue of his own personal FFXIV, but then what dev wouldn't?).

I never had carried much affection for Colin Johanson's style or approach. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the direction the game took under his tenure, up to and including the release of the first expansion, made it by some margin my favorite era. 

I liked Heart of Thorns. I liked it a lot. It would quite possibly make the list of my top ten favorite expansions for any game. I've played through it start to finish twice and partially several more. I still go there most weeks and goof around just because I enjoy being there.

The adventure begins!

Conversely I dislike, maybe even detest, the second expansion, Path of Fire, which attempted to be all the things HoT was not: accessible, steeped in Guild Wars lore, commercial. I found PoF smug, irritating and, by far the worst of all video game crimes, stultifyingly dull. I forced myself to complete the main storyline on one character. Never, never again.

That does give me some hope for Colin Johanson's return. He did once do stuff I really liked and, let's be brutally honest, he can hardly make things worse. Except, of course, he can. It's amazing how often that happens. Still, we can hope. 

That just leaves the return of Josh Davis, about whom I have to say "Who?". I vaguely remember his name. I have no idea who he is or what he did. The only GW2 writer I remember is that one who got canned for fighting with players on social media and I don't even remember what their name was.

The writing in GW2 has been all over the place for years. It has some standout moments and a vast amount of ho-hum filler. Storylines blow up then blow away like dust on the wind. Who was Mr E.? Anyone know? Anyone care? How's Zojja doing? Is she dead or alive? Is Taimi still ill or did her incurable condition cure itself? Marjorie and Kasmeer, are they still a thing? 

Gliding. 100% more fun than mounts. Official!

 

It's soap opera and melodrama. Most people probably just click through it to get to the fights anyway. I'm sure Josh Davis coming back means something to someone but not to me.

And there we must leave them, Colin and Josh, setting out their desks, going down the hall to have their photographs taken for their security passes. We'll have to judge them by their works, I guess, although precedent suggests we'll be lucky if we have the least clue who's actually responsible for what.

I'll spend my summer dreading the onset of the Alliance beta although at least it's going to give me something to rant write about . I'd far rather have had an unpolished expansion in August than a supposedly tarted up version of the same six months later but no-one's asking my opinion because the people who actually matter have already decided what my reaction's going to be: I'm going to be patient. I've been thanked for it so it must have happened.

Ashes of Creation and Pantheon need to get a bloody shift on. There's an open door here waiting to be pushed. At this stage I'd even take Camelot Unchained as a stepping-stone to something I actually want. I know Mrs. Bhagpuss will try it. I wonder if she'd give New World a look... she does have that new mouse now...

Ridin' SOLO - First Impressions: Swords Of Legends Online

I had a rough plan for this weekend. It involved scanning through the demos in Steam's Next Fest, downloading the ones that looked interesting, playing as many as I could cope with, then putting together a blog post or two about the whole affair. 

I was just about to fire up Steam to get started when I ran into this news item on MassivelyOP. That changed everything. Of all the new mmorpgs due to land this summer, Swords of Legends Online stands out as the only one with a true old-school control system. That alone would make it a must-play for me if it wasn't for the fact that it's also buy-to-play. 

SOLO (a potentially misleading acronym) is already on my wishlist but I really wanted the chance to check it out before deciding whether it merited the £36 asking price. The demo is limited to the first fifteen levels but that ought to be enough to get the measure of things.

 

Yeah, you'd think. After two sessions, four and a half hours and ten levels I'm still not sure. Luckily the demo has another three days to go. Maybe I'll have a final answer by then. 

Meanwhile, let's review the situation so far. 

I guess these days when I look at any new game the first question has to be can my aging PC run it? And if it can, how well?  I'm very pleased to say that so far all the upcoming mmorpgs I've had the opportunity to trial or test have performed reasonably well on my machine. SOLO is no exception. 

I'm learning to check the default settings before I begin playing these days. Every game seems to underestimate the capacities of my hardware so I can't just trust the algorithms. SOLO has a choice of seven graphics settings, a few of which have somewhat idiosyncratic names:

My default was "Normal". Fair enough. As Jeanette Winterson's mother always used to tell her, "Why be happy when you could be normal?" 

I left it at like until I'd made it into the game and had a bit of a run around. Everything seemed, well, normal, so I bumped it up to "High". That felt normal too, only prettier. I've been playing on High ever since with no problems at all. I'll have to try "Ultra" before the demo ends, just to see how it goes, but I think that might be pushing my luck.

Before I could log into the game itself, of course, I had to make a character. That took a while. Choosing a race was easy - there is only one: Human. I was curious to see how the developers had approached the current gender debate but the answer appears to be they haven't noticed there is one. You get to pick either "Man" or "Woman", which somehow seems even more retrograde than male or female.

I picked "Woman" because I always do when I play human or human-looking. Maybe one day I might come up with a post to try and explain why but this isn't that post. Also I'm not sure I know. I probably need to think about that.

 

There are a lot of options and most of the options have a lot of sliders. You could spend a long time in character creation and if you did you might even end up with the exact character you wanted. I didn't. I ended up with one I was happy enough to play for the length of a demo but I'd have to work a bit harder on getting everything just so if I was going to live with my choices for longer than a few days.

The real sticking point was the limited choice of hair and eye color, especially hair. Henry Ford would have loved it; you can have any hair color you like, so long as it's black. As someone who almost always plays redheads (Hi Syp and no, that's not the reason. Well, not the only reason.) I think this may be the first game I've ever played where that wasn't even an option.

Sufice to say, character creation is well up to par. It makes a strong first impression and that baton is taken and carried by the introductory movie, which features a big dragon and a lot of action. What it was about I have no idea but it made a lot of noise and got me all fired up for...

 

...the Tutorial. Oh ye gods, here we go again.

Actually, I should probably save the tutorial, qua tutorial, for a post of its own. I'm guessing it lasts for the entire demo. No doubt that's why they picked Level 15 as the cutoff in the first place. All I'll say for now is that as the first thing you experience it doesn't really give the game the best push it could. Things get better and better as you go along but the first few levels are visually cluttered and quite confusing.

And, honestly, the game's already confusing enough. It's rooted in Xianxia mythology, about which I know absolutely nothing. That would change pretty quickly if I stuck around, I'm sure. Here's one thing anyone hoping to play SOLO really ought to know: you're going to have to do a lot of reading. Or listening. Or both. This is a very lore-heavy game. 

I'm level ten now and it's no exaggeration to say I've spent the majority of my time either reading quest dialog or watching cut scenes in which voice actors read quest dialog out loud. (More on that later). As well as that I've been handed a number of books, all of which can be both collected and read. And they're quite long as in-game books go.

Even travelling between quest locations doesn't exempt you from reading and listening. Many NPCs talk out loud and pop up speech bubbles at the same time. I'm a big fan of speech bubbles but these are really quite jarring, with their thick green borders and the way they often overlap. 

The voicework also overlaps, a particular pet hate of mine. At one point, handing in a quest, there were three voices speaking simultaneously: the questgiver, a nearby NPC and the fragment of a soulsword my character had swallowed (Don't ask). 

Unsurprisingly, I couldn't hear what any of them was saying, even though for once all three of them were speaking in English. Translation is very clearly a work in progress in Swords of Legends Online. I hope they'll be done with it by the time the game launches because the way things are now is utterly chaotic.

It's not as though some characters speak in Chinese and others in English. Or that certain areas or parts of the game have been translated while others haven't. If only!

It feels almost aggressively random. It's not at all unusual for the same character to say one line in Chinese then swap to English for the rest of a cut scene, or for two characters in a scene to talk to each other in different languages.

Written text is much more consistent. Almost everything has been translated - quests, UI, tutorial, books, all of that. About the only exception I noticed was when a signifcant character was introduced. They all get a caption, presumably their name, but it's in ideographs. 

It wouldn't help all that much if those had been westernized, the way all names have been in the quest dialog, because the relentless flood of unfamiliar names made it impossible for me to remember who anyone was. I found the plot comparatively easy to follow so I generally knew what was being done but I was never very sure who was doing it.

 

The voice acting didn't help. Just about everything is voiced although I'd be curious to know just where they found the actors. The general effect is uncannily similar to hearing the sixth-form English class at a minor public school read set texts from the A-Level syllabus out loud. The line readings aren't incorrect and the inflections aren't wrong, most of the time, but there's the sense that it's all a bit uncomfortable and unfamiliar and everyone will be glad when they get to the end of their bit and it's someone else's turn.

On the positive side, the voiceovers frequently diverge from the written text and the spoken versions are almost invariably more idiomatically acceptable and naturalstic, plus the flow is usually better. It sounds as though the actors have been allowed to improvise a little and it helps. 

The text is odd in other ways. For reasons I couldn't begin to understand, lots of words are in different colors. It probably means something to someone but not to me. After a while I just stopped noticing so I guess it doesn't matter much. I do wonder if it will be like this at launch, though.

 

The translations may need more time but one thing that's working exactly as advertized is the switchable control system. As soon as my character loaded into the game I was offered the choice of either "Classic RPG Mode" or "Action Mode". I picked Classic and for the rest of my time I was able to play just as if I was in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft. You can switch from one to the other at any time but I don't imagine I will. If Ashes of Creation follows this model I'll be very happy.

Interaction with objects and NPCs is supposed to be done by pressing "F" but I discovered quickly that a right-mouse-click also does the job. Or at least it does most of the time. I did run into one or two quest NPCs that couldn't be targetted, which meant they couldn't be right-clicked either. Again, whether this is intentional or an oversight I have no idea.

Even though there's the option to use the Classic mode all the time it may indeed, as the rubric suggests, be more appropriate to swap to Action for combat, at least in these early stages. That's because you can get by with just two attacks if you're lazy. For the class I picked, Summoner, LMB is a small attack that also refreshes the resource and the cooldown of the large attack on RMB. I could kill pretty much everything with a simple rotation of left-left-right or in my case Q-Q-E.

 

How long that will go on for I wouldn't like to say. Not much longer I imagine because there's an extensive skill tree with numerous subsections. I'm not sure how all those are going to fit onto two mouse buttons. I suspect there may be complicated combos. I'll stick with hotbars and my trusty mouse pointer, I think.

However you choose to control it, combat at these early levels is inconsequential to say the least. I have no idea what the death mechanic is because I never came anywhere close to dying. I'm not sure I lost health, which was just as well because I also never found any way to heal myself. Come to think of it I never actually noticed where my health bar was. Maybe I don't have one.

No, I must have because my class has "magical healing abilities [that] can often prove to be the difference between life and death". If I'm going to be refilling health bars there have to be health bars to refill. 

I didn't pick the Summoner for the healing anyway. I chose it because it gets a very cute-looking pet. As is typical with these things, though, you don't actually get the pet for what seems like a very long time. 

 

I first encountered the creature that would become my close companion during a quest sequence I picked up around level eight or nine. It's a quest I suspect wouldn't have made it past alpha in a Western mmorpg, given the negative feedback it would rightly have received for its casual animal cruelty. At least I know how far I can throw my pet by the ears now. Always useful information to have. 

As usual, this "first impressions" piece has run long and I've barely touched on much of what I had to say. (I made notes!)  I think I'll wrap it up for now. Next time I'll likely have hit the demo cap at fifteen and I'll be able to come to some kind of constructive conclusion. 

What I can say from what I've seen so far is that Swords of Legends Online is a proper mmorpg with all the parts in place and working well, translation issues notwithstanding. The visuals, which I haven't really talked about much, are sumptuous and subtle and the whole game looks gorgeous. The story so far is interesting enough by the standards of the genre and the low-level gameplay feels exactly like low-level gameplay in any other similar game you care to name.

 

I'm enjoying it so far but I probably wouldn't be thinking of paying £36 for the box were it not for one thing: the Classic RPG controls. I really don't get offered that option so often these days that I can afford to ignore it when it comes. 

On that basis alone I'm leaning towards buying the thing. If it wasn't for the timing, so many other games about to launch in some fashion or other, I'd most likely have hit the Pre-Purchase button already. As it is, I might just leave it on the wishlist and wait. Maybe it'll go on sale or maybe a time will come when I'll be glad of a new mmorpg. Right now there are just too many to choose from.

We'll see how I feel by the time the demo ends on Tuesday.