Throne And Liberty: First Impressions (Intro and Tutorial)

Another day, another game. Will it never end?

Today's entry in the Big Summer Game Lottery is the long, long awaited Throne and Liberty, the latest spin-off from the Lineage universe, published in the West by Amazon and available for free through Steam. 

The game went into open beta yesterday at six in the evening. Where I live, that is. It was a global launch so it went Live at the same time where you live but your clock said something different. Unless you also live where I live, of course. Are you in my house? You better not be! 

I was eating quiche and watching Pointless at the time (If you ever needed proof of my lack of machismo, which I very much doubt, well there you go.) so I missed the very start but I was in and making my character by seven o' clock.

Steam tells me I played for eighty-five minutes. I'd guess about fifteen of those went on making the character. Could easily have been the whole hour and twenty five and might well have been, had this been an actual launch. For a beta test lasting five days, though, I think even fifteen minutes fiddling with sliders to get the eyebrows just right is probably too much. 

Where's the slider for Windswept?

Here's an idea for a blog. Or a YouTube channel. Or maybe a TikTok... what do they call it on TikTok? A series where you go into character creation in various games and make the same character every time - or try to. Has anyone done that yet? If not, I call dibs.

This time around I actually tried not to make exactly the same character I always make. As you can see from the screenshots, I didn't entirely succeed although I can see the differences. There is a problem with drifting too far from the familiar when creating a character, though, which is that if I make a character that doesn't feel familiar enough, I don't want to play them. 

In this case, I managed to come up with one who felt a little different - more hard-edged around the jaw-line, a little stubborn perhaps - but close enough to what I generally run with that I wouldn't feel uncomfortable playing her. I was particularly pleased with the hairstyle, the kind of fly-away, gamine-inflected, androgynous look you might have seen on the rhythm guitarist in a New Romantic band circa 1984.

Seperated at birth.

And then I played through the tutorial and found I'd basically made the first NPC you meet in the game. Honestly, it was freakishly disturbing how similar they were. They could be sisters, if they were the kind of unnerving siblings who choose to dress alike and do their hair and make-up in the same way.

And of course, my character's "sister" turns out to be the younger, better-looking one. Because of course she does. Oh well. At least I'll know better when the game goes Live in September. Always assuming I'll still be interested in playing it by then.

Finding out whether that's going to happen is kind of the point of joining in on the open beta. I'd say it would generally take more than an hour and a half to decide if I was likely to carry on with the game, although there have been plenty of times where I've made my choice in more like a minute and a half. In the case of Throne and liberty, though, eighty-five minutes has told me pretty much nothing.

You look strangely familiar, old man. Have we met before?

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, the huge majority of time not spent in character creation was taken up with watching melodramatic cut scenes or following an extremely on-rails, narrative-driven tutorial. I know it's pointless to complain about how unoriginal and formulaic these things are and certainly Throne and Liberty doesn't do the whole "introduce the mechanics and set the scene" thing any worse than the rest but coming off the back of one of the better introductions to a game I've seen in quite a while in Once Human, it really did feel like "Oh god, here we go again".

It was interesting to have full cursor control and a clickable hot-bar for a change. The main problem was the hot-bar coming pre-loaded with icons that meant nothing at all. 

Even that might not have been too bad if there'd been some breathing space to go through them all to find out what they did but no chance of that. It's all Go! Go! Go! with people yelling at you about how urgent it all is and things trying to kill you all the time and finally a big boss fight that naturally turns out to be scripted so you lose anyway, at which point you realize there was no hurry and you could have taken your time but now it's too late because the fighting's over and what your hot keys do doesn't matter any more.

At least I didn't have any trouble following the instructions or the plot. Translation at this early stage seems fine, if no better than that, as does the voice acting, although it doesn't give me confidence when the voiceover and the text don't match in the very first cut scene. Either we're Starborn or we're Star Children. Make your mind up!

Every F2P needs a few whales.

Visually, the developers have pulled a clever trick in the introductory sequence, which I'm about to spoil. All the action for a quite a while takes place in a horrible, ugly, red and black hellscape that looks like it was inspired by heavy-metal album covers from the 1980s. It was starting to get on my nerves when everything took a sudden and unexpected turn as my character emerged from the underworld into a vast, open landscape filled with light and color. 

It's a great set-piece moment. There's even a fricken' sky whale taking up most of the field of view. We've moved from Iron Maiden to Magnum with the Rodney Matthews covers. (Is that helping you to picture the scene? No, I thought not.)

From then on the game looks great. I could see a world I was definitely interested in exploring. If only I get there. Which I could not.

The tutorial, as far as I got, takes place in a single-player instance. After about three-quarters of an hour in there, I finally got to the point where it looked as though I was going to be sent into the gameworld proper, the shared space that makes the whole thing an MMORPG. 

This is Helpie. And here was I, thinking post-modernism was dead...

I was standing on top of a cliff with the endearingly geeky NPC my ersatz sister hand had handed me on to a while back, when he asked me to pet his familar on the head. Apparently that was going to make me glide like never before. I'm guessing it's a line that works for him...

It sure didn't work for me. I tried half a dozen times. Mostly the game just hung and then disconnected. Eventually, the cut scene started and I got to see my character throw herself off the cliff and rise up, flying like a superhero with her arms stretched out ahead of her until...

Nothing. Literally nothing. A blank, grey screen. I know there ought to have been more to look at because the voiceover carried on talking, describing things that weren't there. Then, after a minute or two, the server lost conection and dumped me back at login. 

Skip this amazing scene? I don't think so!

I tried once more but the next time I didn't even get off the cliff so I gave up. I'm assuming the servers for the multiplayer part of the game were under such load they'd stopped letting anyone else join. I'd picked one on the US East Coast but my ping had been excellent throughout the instanced part so I'm confident it wasn't anything at my end. 

By then it was time to take Beryl out for her evening walk and when I got back I wanted to play Once Human so that was it for the Throne and Liberty beta for the night. I'll try again today, when everyone's had time to get further into the game and when most of the Americas are still either asleep or at work. 

I feel I owe it to the game to get as far as the starting city, at least. That said, I'm really not feeling the need for yet another MMORPG right now. Maybe by late September, when T&L goes live, I'll be interested. Or maybe when I get into the actual game as opposed to the solo, instanced tutorial, I'll get invested and start counting the days until I can play the game for real. 

Kinda doubting it just now but we'll see...

Just Because I Have Nothing To Say About The Throne And Liberty Open Beta Doesn't Mean I'm Not Going To Say It Anyway...

So, here's everything I really know about Throne and Liberty...

Yeah. That much.

What I do know is that there's an open beta. It starts today, about an hour and a half from now, as I write. That's 18.00 London time. No, wait, make that a day and an hour and a half. It starts on Thursday, even if some online sources say Wednesday.

As I keep saying, this is turning out to be just about the busiest gaming summer I can remember. I'm not at all sure I'd have bothered with this one if it weren't for two things:

1. It's a mid-week start
2. It's on Steam

The first is very unusual. Since I went to working just two days a week, one of which is always Sunday and the other every other Saturday, just about every short-term alpha, beta, sneak peek or pop-up test has been largely inaccessible to me. 

Companies seem to like starting these things on a Friday afternoon and finishing them around midnight on Sunday, which means I'm lucky if I can fit in a couple of short sessions. This one is a full five days and I'm only working for one of them, so it seems almost rude to miss it.

The second is a lot more common but always makes a big difference. All I had to do was open the store page in Steam, press the "Request Access" button, which granted me permission instantly, then let Steam download and install the client. That lack of faff makes me willing to try out games I otherwise wouldn't bother with. It's not hard to see why everyone wants to get their game on Steam.

That said, I do find the relationship between Amazon and Steam somewhat odd. New World and Lost Ark are both "Amazon Games" in a manner of speaking, one being developed by the internet giant, the other being published by them. Throne and Liberty is the next big Amazon game (They hope...). 

As far as I can tell, all of them are on only available on PC via Steam. Given that Amazon has its own gaming portal, runs a proprietary cloud gaming platform and has one of the biggest server rental businesses in the world, it seems a bit strange that they don't want to host their games themselves.

I'm  not complaining, although a quick google search shows some people are. I'm a Steam convert now, with all the annoying intensity that implies. Increasingly, if it's not on Steam I'm not sure I'm interested.

I certainly wouldn't be interested in a 50GB download for a five-day beta if I didn't know I could clear the unwanted husk of the client off my hard drive with a single click when it's all over. Steam does make it exceptionally easy to add and remove games. I just pressed the button and let it all happen automatically while I played Once Human. 

When it was ready I tried to log in, just in case they'd done something clever like pre-enable character creation but no such luck. I was able to do a couple of basic things like calibrate the monitor, something I've never known to make a noticeable difference. I miss the good old in-game gamma sliders that actually worked.

One thing I hadn't come across before was the option to have the whole game "Voice Guided". That seems like a really excellent innovation although I'm not entirely convinced "hard of seeing" is the accepted terminology. I was tempted to leave it on to see how effective it was but I thought I'd probably better concentrate on the game itself rather than its accessibility credentials, at least at first.

The other notable choice I was able to make was between action combat and "a classic control mode with separated character and camera controls". I think that means what has come to be known as "WoW Style" but we'll see. 

I picked that one but as I was saying the other day in a comment somewhere, I'm starting to think that I've been boiled in the Action Combat pot long enough now to feel more comfortable with that style than with tab target and hot keys. I know I keep trying to dodge and roll in older games that don't allow it and it makes me mad when I can't... 

The two modes are hot-swappable anyway so it's not like it's a big decision.

Other than that, as I said, I know nothing. Oh, except that it has something to do with Lineage. But then I know nothing about Lineage either. 

Still, I managed to come up with several hundred words about it, somehow, and I haven't even logged in yet. I could wait until the doors open then play for a while so I'd have something of substance to offer but then I'd have to log out and write the damn post and that would kind of defeat the object.

I think I'll leave it here for now but no doubt I'll be back with some First Impressions in a day or two. 

Bet you can't wait.

Demos 'n Betas And Stuff

It seems like only a short time ago I was scratching around for new games to try. Not any more. They're coming in clumps now. Too many to keep up with. Just this last few days I've turned down two, tried and failed with another and spent an enjoyable hour in a fourth. And I'm positive there were a couple more I read about but didn't even get round to bookmarking. I'm finding it tough to keep up.

Beginning with one of the two I chose not to bother with, does anyone actually remember Infantry Online, because I certainly don't. I thought I at least knew the names of all the games in the Sony Online Entertainment portfolio back when EverQuest was the pack leader there - I even tried Tanarus once, I think - but I have absolutely no memory of this one at all.

Some people do. It's back on Steam with an even less evocative name, something I'd have would be next to impossible. It's called Freeinfantry, a name not made cooler or more edgy by running the two words together. Whatever it's called, though, there are people who just love it:

"Awesome game."

"My favorite game of all time."

"Best game ever made."

"Outshines games from the last two decades."

And there are plenty more superlatives where those came from, the Steam Store, where Freeinfantry currently enjoys a Very Positive rating from 92% of reviewers. 

As seems to be standard for the era, the game has a very convoluted history, which you can learn about on its Wikipedia page, like I just did. Then you can immediately forget it, like I'm about to. The part that interests me is the way even now, a quarter of a century later, no-one really seems to agree on what the historical facts mean.

Some longtime players think of it as an SOE title, others as an independent gobbled up by a corporate. Some hate SOE for ruining it, "milking" it and/or abandoning it, others are grateful to them for returning it to the players, even though it has apparently been running continuously in some kind of emulator mode since SOE shuttered it over a decade ago.

The MMOBomb report, which was where I heard about it in the first place, places the game squarely in the SOE/Daybreak timeline, while making it clear the current Steam version "operates under a license agreement similar to that of "Project 1999". Presumably DBG picked it up as part of the job lot when they bought SOE. 

It's worth noting the P99 agreement itself only happened after the buyout. Any credit Sony is getting for any of this would seem to be misplaced. The blame for exploiting it then cancelling it in the first place though? That's still theirs.

There's no chance whatsoever I'll ever play any version of Infantry Online. Neither the setting nor the gameplay have the slightest appeal for me. The same cannot be said for another game even more tangentially connected to SOE, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, the game once thought of as the spiritual successor to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, itself occasionally referred to informally as EverQuest 2.5.

Today, a few yeara afer the untimely death of its creative force, Brad McQuaid, the man with a vision™ that, arguably, should always have been prefaced by the word "tunnel", Pantheon is just another crowdfunded wannabe-retro MMORPG but I'd still like to give it a go. I just don't want to pay the required access fee, even though the cost has been somewhat reduced of late with the addition of the "one week every couple of months" option. 

I was, then, more than a little excited to read at MassivelyOP of an opportunity to piggyback into the game for a few days on the back of a code given out for watching streamer Cohhcarnage. I wasn't going to watch the stream, of course, but MOP were kind enough to publish the code so I gave it a try.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. It had already been cancelled by the time I got there and I was quite fast, too. Credit to the Visionary Realms PR department for closing the loophole so quickly, although obviously they must have been the ones who opened it in the first place.

My first visit to whatever the name of the world Pantheon takes place in ( I can never remember.) will have to wait. Fair enough. I've been waiting years already. I've gone right off the boil, anyway.

It is odd how these games bubble up and then just go on simmering, seemingly forever. I can't recall when I first read about the whimsically, if somewhat incoherently-named Swords 'n' Magic and Stuff (Why abbreviate one conjunction but not the other?) but it must have been a few years ago.

If I've thought about it at all since then, which I kind of doubt, it would have been to wonder when it might reach some kind of publicly accessible build. Apparently that happened a while back. As in five years ago. It's on Steam with a release date of 2020. Who knew? 

A lot of people, apparently, because like Freeinfantry, SNMAS (No, not gonna work.) has a Very Positive rating, only this one's from almost a thousand reviews as opposed to FI's 60 or so. It's still in Early Access but given a) that I definitely knew about it as a game in development and b) it's "a cozy, cooperative, open world RPG centered around the joy of discovery", a description which makes it sound almost tailor-made for me, I'm at a loss to explain why not only had I never realised it was available but also why there's not even a tag for it on the blog. Have I really never mentioned it at all?

I've played it now. There's a new demo that lets you go through the very early tutorial, up to the point where you jump off a cliff. I did that. I managed to get my glider working before I crashed to my death but as I landed on the beach next to the starting town, a big banner unfurled in front of me, thanking me for my interest and suggesting I should stop freeloading and get my wallet out.

And I might, too. The game is currently on half-price offer, making it quite an attractive purchase at £10.49. In fact, looking at it more closely, the offer ends in just over five hours as I write, meaning if you're reading this it's probably already ended. I guess I'd better make up my mind. Or wait for the inevitable next sale.

From what I saw, Swords, which is what I think I'm going to shorten it to (I toyed with SnM but, well, y'know...) is a jolly romp of a game with plenty of good ideas but perhaps still some work to do on some of the details. The look is Minecraft-meets-Lego-Minifigures, which I have to say is not one of my favorites, but they do more with it than you might expect. I found it pleasant enough to look at although I can't say any of the scenery made me giddy. Then again, it was only a tutorial.

There's a mildly unusual selection of races including fauns, dryads, orcs, elves and the ubiquitous humans. The potentially divisive and difficult gender issue is handled very simply by not having any. You are you and that's that. I picked a Faun for no reason - they all look much the same and the game doesn't give any indication of practical differences between them.

There are a few customization opportunities - skin tone, hairstyle, facial hair - but none seem very distinctive. They are at least charmingly described, particularly the Face options, which include a whole range of "Cute" looks, many of which come with freckles. It only took me a few minutes to settle on something I was happy with and then it was into the game, where I found myself in the virtual equivalent of an escape room. 

Although this isn't an especially egregious example of the species, I could happily never see another introduction like this. Locked in a cell with nothing but the clothes you stand up and a disturbing inability to remember anything about your circumstances, personal background or even how you got there, your one and only job is to get out.

Why we can't just start in the village or town, with full knowledge of who we are and where we live, beats me. Still, you play the hand you're dealt, so I spent much of the next hour trying to work my way through a series of cells, rooms, caves and caverns in search of natural daylight.

During my time in an orc dungeon (For that is where I found myself.) I learned that resources respawn infinitely, not just mining or logging nodes but obstacles you'd imagine were only meant to be removed once. I had recourse to double back on myself a couple of times (The route out is far from obvious.) and each time I had to break the same crates that I'd broken before to clear my passage. 

I also got loot each time, suggesting you could easily spend the rest of your life just looting the same chests if you were so inclined. They can drop different items as well, which is both exciting and disturbing. Imagine if you missed out on an ultra-rare and could never go back to the tutorial once you'd left.

Sorry. Just messing with you. I have no firm evidence the game has "ultra-rares", let alone that there are any in the tutorial. But there might be...

The writing is uniformly solid. Good sentence structure, grammatically correct, idomatic. I imagine the real quests, once you get to them, might be pretty good. There's also a light puzzle element to the gameplay, although not so light it didn't completely stump me at one point. I couldn't figure out how to open a door so I had to watch someone do it on YouTube, where I learned how important it is to look up now and again, even underground.

There's some fighting, mostly (Entirely?) against dim-witted orc trainees and their teachers. I had four weapons by the end of the tutorial - a limp stick, a two-handed branch, a bow and a magic staff. The bow never runs out of ammo for the basic atack but you can also find all kinds of special arrows that do different damage, like setting things on fire. The staff sets things on fire too, or heals people, depending which magic book you're holding in your other hand. It looks like an interesting combat system; clunky but fun.

Worthwhile, too. There's lots of loot. Really, a lot. Mobs drop stuff, there are chests, you can smash vases and crates... I imagine there's a limit to how much you can carry but I didn't hit it and I picked up everything.

Eventually I found my way up and out into daylight, where I was able to meet my friend Sen, who'd escaped before me. He promptly ran off, telling me to meet him in town, leaving me to kill more orcs and generally goof around until I met the guy with the glider who told me to jump off the cliff and here we are back where we began. 

I've been thinking about it as I write the post and I'm not going to buy the game just now. Not because it doesn't look good, just because I have other things to do and I probably wouldn't play it much. I will wishlist it, though, so I can reconsider next time it goes on sale. 

All things considered, it seems like a very nice game to potter around in, especially impressive given it's all the work of a single developer. Why it doesn't get more attention when so many similar titles get more than they deserve I have no clue but at least it's firmly on my radar now so I guess the demo did its job.

And finally, the other game I opted against downloading, a decision that isn't any kind of negative criticism of the game so much as an observation on just how cluttered the field for open-world, sandbox survival games feels at the moment. It's called Soulmask and it's available on Steam in open beta format right now. 

If you're interested, you have another four days to sign up and join in. There's also a demo that's been on Steam since the start of the year, so that may still be available after the beta, although the proposed release date for the game is Q2 2024, otherwise known as "now", so maybe not. 

The screenshots look very appealing. I'm getting a pre-Columbian, North American vibe although, possibly through someone having learned from Amazon's missteps with marketing New World, I don't think that's overtly mentioned. The detailed description on the Steam store page makes the game sound amazing, too, so if it lives up to its own hype I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more about it. 

As yet, there's not a single review, so either no-one's playing or there's some kind of block due to it being in beta. I'm not sure how that works on Steam. Either way, it doesn't entirely imbue me with confidence. There are still a few days left so maybe I will try the beta before it ends. I've kind of intrigued myself now just by writing about it.

Of course, before I get around to doing anything, some new game will probably have thrust itself into the spotlight, demanding my attention. There are altogether too many of these things to give every remotely interesting game a fair examination.

I guess it's better that way around than the reverse, although some days I do wish there was some sort of pre-registration process you could sign up for, where someone would winnow out the chaff for me and just leave the good stuff. 

Oh, wait, that would be what I'm doing now, wouldn't it...?

Reign of Guilds - First And Last Impressions

I was hoping I'd be able to get a quick, short post done today so I could get on with Christmas stuff and also fit in a session of Once Human, so thank you kindly, Reign of Guilds, for making that happen! I really don't have a lot to say about this one so it shouldn't take long.

As I said yesterday, I couldn't remember hearing about this one, which surprised me. At a glance, it appeared to be the sort of thing I'd have been keeping tabs on. It's also in a very late stage of development, with a proposed launch window on Steam of Q1 2024, and there have been multiple tests throughout the year, including an earlier open one in September.

Having now played the game, briefly, I think I've figured it out. Reign of Guilds is a FFA PvP sandbox, not a "classic MMORPG" at all. That's probably why I never paid any attention to it before.

It's another in a long and so far not very successful line games in this sub-genre. As usual, it has some kind of "karma" system that's supposed to regulate predatory behavior. Has that ever worked? About the only truly successful entrant to this somewhat overpopulated field in the last few years has been Albion Online, which succeeded by developing a well-balanced playing field with graded  zones that allow new players to get started and find their feet in reasonable safety, before they move towards greater danger at a pace they can control.

Reign of Guilds doesn't do that. The only safe place for new players is the Inn, where the Tutorial takes place. From the moment you step through the door into the starter village, on the starter island, you're subject to involuntary PvP.

Potentially. There is that karma system, which supposedly makes it unwise for anyone to attack innocents in sight of the authorities. It means you ought at least to be able to walk around the actual village in relative peace. I did, but then I was on the North American server at what would have been about three in the morning on the West Coast, so it may not have been a fair test.

Things didn't go so well for me when I ventured out into the forest but we'll come to that in a bit. First I ought to go through Character Creation. Can't get ganked until you have a character!

The setting for Reign of Guilds seems to be a relatively low-magic, very low-technology, quasi-medieval world. The only playable race is human, which comes in the traditional two genders, male and female, something that already seems quaint and old-fashioned. 

At first there didn't seem to be a lot of options for making a character. The game uses a skill system with no hard classes so there's no choosing to be a Warrior or a Mage. You don't even get to set any characteristics or preferences or dump points into stats. All of that happens in gameplay.

What you do get to pick is what you look like, which again seems to offer limited choice at first. Most of that was fairly standard, although one interesting wrinkle I hadn't seen before was the way height affects both the size of your character's hit box and the reach of their attack. I thought that was quite clever. 

Height also affects how quickly you get full from eating food, which may be going a little overboard in terms of "realism". I'm not sure short people eat less than tall people, especially in fantasy worlds. I guess they don't have Hobbits here.

Other than that, the initial elements of Character Creation seem a little perfunctory - until you get to the face. There, you have as many sliders as you could want and quite a few of them are interesting. I found the option to fine-tune my character's expressions appealing and effective. I can't remember being able to quirk one side of an avatar's mouth up, very slightly, into a smirk before, or certainly not this convincingly. 

Overall, I was quite impressed with the character creation options, other than having to be a boring old human. I wonder, though, what the point of all that fine detail is, when you never really see your character in the actual game. It's strange how PvP games that don't show the player character in action still obsess over what they look like close-up.

All action takes place entirely in first-person perspective. You can toggle to third-person for screenshots, something I didn't discover until afterwards, but you can't fight or really do anything much else. Still, I'm not going to knock anything that lets you take quality selfies, so a cautious thumbs up for character creation, I guess.

I'd also give a tentative high five to the graphics. If they were going for a disheveled, neglected, backwater peasant vibe, they pretty much nailed it. Everything looks clunky and worn-out and dirty, including the peasants. Outside the village, though, the countryside is oddly attractive in something like the sketchy, impressionistic way Valheim manages. Mostly it's skyboxes and mist doing the heavy lifting but it did feel quite atmospheric at times.

Before you get to see the village, you have the option to take a Tutorial inside the inn, which is where you arrive on first login. It's very straightforward but also very long-winded. I'm not sure it really needs both an in-character voice-over and so many very detailed out-of-character walls of text. I found it difficult to listen to one while reading the other but to have done the two things separately would have taken even longer and it already felt like it was going on forever.

Basic melee combat mechanics are relatively simple - LMB/RMB for normal and charged attacks etc. Nothing much new to learn there. There's blocking and dodging, both of which felt awkward, but then I'm not good at that kind of thing. I was, at least, able to complete all of the required moves, easily, to the satisfaction of the trainer, which is a lot more than I can say for some tutorials I've suffered through.

Magic is more unusual, consisting mainly powders, which you throw in people's faces. They can be heated to make them more effective but over-heating makes them explode in your hand. The heating process itself takes place in combat and happens by way of a mini-game, which feels very strange. Even so, I found it surprisingly easy to get the hang of. I'd guess it would feel quite natural, quite quickly, with practice and it's certainly original.

The tutorial goes through all the usual topics - combat, magic, inventory management, skills and so on. The one thing all of it seemed to have in common was fiddliness. Honestly, that's what put me off more than the possibility of being ganked. 

I really don't have time any more for game mechanics that seek to replicate physical processes with anything more than a nod to reality. It seems to me all that does is bring the things I'd like not to have to think about in real life into the foreground in what's supposed to be an escape from all of that. The big advantage computers have over humans is that they can do certain tedious things very much faster, so why not let them get on with it?

With that personal proviso, I'd have to say the mechanics don't look bad per se. I don't like them but they're understandable and they work. If you're into that kind of fiddle-faddle, you'll probably see it as a positive. I might have, once, but I'm older and wiser now.

When the Tutorial ends, it's out the door into the village, where one of the first things you notice is a lot of sobbing and crying. I tracked the source to a near-naked figure in a cage hanging from a gibbet on the main mud track between the huts. I assumed it was some unpleasant local color but then I saw there were lots of similar cages, all stuffed with people, whining and wailing.  On closer examination they proved to be player characters. 

I assume this is what happens if you let that aforementioned karma fall too low. I guess it would make you think twice, although clearly it hadn't stopped all these guys from doing whatever it was they did. As I said earlier, when did it ever?

It makes for a deeply unpleasant introduction to the gameworld. It turns the village into the kind of place anyone in their right mind would get away from at the earliest opportunity, which is exactly what I did. I grabbed a bunch of quests and left. 

Questgivers were easy to find even if they weren't immediately obvious. The default settings put no markers or names over NPCs to let you know who they are or whether they have quests but I often switch all of that off anyway, so it was no biggie to approach a few and talk to them to find out if they had work for me.

Of course they did. They might be peasants and yeoman but they all have plenty of spare change to dole out to strangers for doing trivial tasks they're too lazy to do for themselves. Letters to deliver, goods to collect, animals of all kinds to kill and skin for bounty. I very much dispute the idea that Reign of Guilds is a "classic mmorpg" in most ways I would recognise but they certainly have the classic questing gameplay loop nailed down.

I set out to kill a boar or a wolf for the guy who seemed to want every living thing on the island wiped out but I couldn't find anything bigger than a chicken. I shot at a hen with my crossbow but it ran away with the bolt visibly sticking out of its back and got clean away. They breed them tough around these parts, it seems.

I wandered down to the docks and took a few screenshots, then I crossed a field and went into the woods. I still hadn't seen an animal other than that chicken. As I was searching, I sensed a movement behind me and a purple light flashed past my shoulder. I turned to see what it was. Another player.

It occured to me they might be attacking me but I didn't really believe it. I was in the starting zone. I don't think I've been ganked in a starting zone since Rallos Zek in 1999. So I ignored them, whoever they were, and carried on searching for prey.

The next purple bolt caught me in the back. That cleared things up! I thought for a moment about running away but then I realised it wasn't as though I cared whether my character survived. Might as well see how low-level PvP feels in play. 

Also, I realise now, I've actually done quite a lot of PvP of various kinds over the years. I think of myself as someone who doesn't enjoy PvP but quite often I do get quite a lot of pleasure out of it. I'm just terrible at it, that's all. Also I really don't like losing my stuff but since in this case I didn't have any stuff to lose - bring it on!

The fight went on for a while, always a good sign. I'm guessing my attacker wasn't much more experienced than I was. He certainly couldn't aim any better. He kept flinging fire at me and mostly missing; I got out my crossbow and shot at him, with much the same success. 

We carried on like that for a while. I managed to heal myself with a powder at one point, which I felt was something of an achievement, given the number of operations involved. It was all going quite well until, very suddenly, the screen went black and I was dead.

On respawning at the graveyard, I did what I usually do in such situations and checked the chat box to see what had killed me. It wasn't the guy I was fighting at all. It was a bloody wolf!

I never even saw the damn creature. I'd been out there looking for it, I got into a fight with someone else and the wolf saw its opportunity and took it. The irony was delicious.

It seemed so neat, in fact, that I couldn't see much point carrying on. The whole experience was obviously only going to go downhill from there. 

Anyway, I'd seen enough to know that Reign of Guilds is not the game I'm looking for. The graphics are okay but nothing special. I don't like the setting, I don't like the mechanics, I don't like the tone and I don't like FFA PvP.

From what I saw, though, I don't think it's a bad game. Everything seemed to work. It didn't feel buggy. The writing is competent, if not very engaging. The voice acting is alright. The magic system felt like it might be the most interesting part, there seems to be a lot of character progression with choices based off the skill system and of course there's seige play and organised, mass PvP to look forward to for an endgame.

I'll be interested to see how well Reign of Guilds does when it launches next year. There are always people saying they want this sort of thing. and this looks, on the surface at least, like one of the more competent attempts to service that demographic. It'll be instructive to see if those players show up and, if they do, how long they'll stay.

I'll watch that with interest but from the sidelines. I'm going to unistall RoG now. It was interesting for a moment but I think I'm done.

It's Friday. Grab Yer Bag!

A Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday? What the.. ?! Who's driving this thing?

No intro. Straight to the verse.

Palia Closed/Open Beta

Everyone seems to have been a bit taken aback by the sudden announcement that much-hyped "cosy" MMORPG Palia is going into Closed Beta in just over two weeks. Even more surprising (Astonishing, gob-smacking, dumbfounding, flat-out nuts...) is the news the Closed Beta will only last a week before they throw the doors open and let everyone in.

What's more, the Closed Beta will have no wipes. All progress will carry over to Open Beta and then to whatever they decide qualifies as "Live", making the CB effectively a soft launch. 

I'm still struggling to process this. I can't remember the last MMORPG of any stature that went from small scale, invite only, behind closed doors alpha (Which is where Palia has been for the last two years) to effective release in a week.

It's so peculiar I had to read the announcement several times beforeI understood it. At first I thought the "No Wipes" part referred to Open Beta, which made the idea that anyone would bother to do anything much at all in the one-week Closed test look highly fanciful. 

On closer reading, I realized there wern't going to be any wipes from the start of Closed Beta onwards, effectively making that the soft launch. About the only logical explanation I can come up with is that Singularity 6, the developer, is so confident in the state of the game as it leaves alpha that all they feel they have left to do is test the robustness of the infrastructure at scale. Letting in increasing numbers during the short, Closed Beta gives them the last remaining info they need before they throw the doors wide to anyone.

That analysis would be strengthened by the decision to do away with any kind of NDA for the Closed Beta, were it not for the fact that the damn thing's going to be over so fast it makes no practical difference whether people talk about it or not. It's going to be too late to change anything, anyway. 

Unless it's a disaster, obviously. Then I guess they'd have to pull back.

Given the timescales involved, I hadn't planned to bother applying for the Closed Beta at all but it turns out I already did: twice. I received two emails from different email addresses, inviting me to fill in a few more details on applications I'd already made. I have no memory of doing it but they didn't just randomly pick my email and send me the info so I must have.

I've filled out one of the new applications so we'll see if I get in before Open Beta begins on 10 August. I don't really know anything about the game, other than it doesn't feature combat, and I'm not remotely hyped about it like some, but I am curious to take a look. If nothing else, it's perfectly timed to give me something game-related to blog about during Blaugust.

Dead Gaem

I read a news item at NME this week headlined "Study shows 87 percent of classic video games are unavailable to play right now". Given the popularity of such platforms as Good Old Games, websites offering "abandonware" and the prevalence of emulators, I found that a little surprising.

The detail behind the headline clarifies the situation somewhat. The figure comes from a study commissioned by The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, two organisations hitherto unknown to me. The research was carried out by Zendo.org (Ditto.) and can be read in full here.

It's over fifty pages long. I have skimmed it but I haven't read it in full. I can tell you the criteria it used, though:

Well, that explains it. We're talking about console or home computer games that largely predate the era of digital download; the dark ages, in software terms.

The report makes much of comparisons with other "at-risk" media such as "pre-World War II audio recordings" or "American silent-era films" but it might as well bring in medieval ballads or eighteenth century broadsheets. 

Popular culture is, by nature and definition, ephemeral. It's not designed to endure and in most cases durability would not be desirable. The culture moves constantly forward, often leaving little or no trace. Try looking up the top twenty best-selling paperback novels for every year in the 20th Century some day and see how many you've ever heard of. Then check how many are still in print.

The argument seems to be that everything that can be preserved should be preserved, something that's certainly happening with many written and recorded artefacts, and there's no real reason not to support the presevation of every cultural artefact in theory. Anything might be of use or interest to someone, someday.

For all practical purposes, though, this stuff is unavailable for a reason. People got what they wanted from it and moved on. For academic purposes it's enough that records are kept and representative samples retained, preferably including as much as possible of the best along with samples of the ordinary and the sub-par. To try to keep it all is both unrealistic and self-indulgent. 

Let's be honest here; the main market for this stuff is the nostalgia market. Once everyone who played these games as a kid has died off, who's going to want to look at any of it?

Compared to other media, video games do suffer from a particular problem in that there has never been a single, universally-adopted platform on which to play them. The situation has improved somewhat, with a much smaller number of manufacturers making hardware or operating systems than was the case in the 1980s and 90s, but there are still numerous, discrete iterations. The likelihood of even libraries or museums being able to maintain all of these in good working order is slim and the possibility of such hardware being widely accessible to the general public or even academia all but impossible.

Then again, just how real is the problem, anyway? If you want to play Commodore 64 games, there are seven thousand of them waiting for you here. Almost every extinct "ecosystem" has multiple emulation projects offering more games than anyone is likely to play in a lifetime. 

I'm not convinced the situation is as "grim" as the report claims. Or that it would matter as much as they seem to think, even if it was.

Wait! Are We The Bad Guys?

The Classic Games report mentions "piracy" as one way of accessing old games. I suspect it's referring to those emulators I was talking about. I'm theoretically opposed to piracy but I confess that I'm not always entirely sure what it is and I'm not particularly scrupulous in finding out.

This week I decided I wanted to watch a TV show called The Owl House. I first heard of it when I was looking for clips of Dead End: Paranormal Park on YouTube to use in a post a while back and The Owl House kept cropping up in the recommendations. 

I figured the two shows might have creators in common but actually it appears they just share a number of thematic and socio-political features: adolescence, LGBTQ+ rights, demons.... that kind of thing.  

Dead End: Paranormal Park was cancelled after the second season. I'd been meaning to try The Owl House as an alternative but before I'd gotten around to doing anything about it, I came across this article at Vanity Fair. It made me even more interested to see the show for myself so I started googling to find out where I could watch it.

My preference would have been on one of the streaming services I already subscribe to but neither was carrying it. It's on Disney+, which I don't currently have. I keep meaning to sub to it because there's plenty there I'd watch but I don't want to add a third channel and I haven't found a sensible point at which to drop one of the two I already have.

I was very willing to buy a box set of the three seasons of the show on DVD but there doesn't appear to be one. The closest I could get would be a digital download from Google Play but although the show originally ran as three seasons, for some reason it's been split into five, all of which have to be purchased separately. The total cost comes to almost $70, which seems outrageously inflated.

I watched the first episode, available free and legally on Disney's own YouTube channel as a tempter, and while I liked it, I didn't like it enough to pay seventy dollars to see the rest. Even if I'd been willing to spend the money, I can't find the show on the UK version of Play so I'm guessing it's not even available to buy in this region.

I was about to give up and forget about it when I noticed a link in the search results to the Internet Archive. Curious, I clicked on it and it took me to this. Seasons One and Two are available in full under "Community Video", a section of the archive to which "thousands of videos were contributed by Archive users and community members." 

It hadn't previously occured to me to look for currently-available material in the Internet Archive. I use it now and then to find stuff that seems to have vanished from the web. I thought that was what it was for. That you can use it to watch material that's already out there on commercial platforms is news to me.

Maybe something about the way the Archive operates makes it okay or maybe no-one who would care has noticed. If so, does that make it "piracy"? I dunno. I'm watching a couple of episodes a day, anyway. It's a good show. I'll review it when I've seen them all. Well, the first two seasons, anyway. Still don't have a source for the third. Maybe someone will have "contributed" it to the archive by the time I get there...

Not Very Rock and Roll

I keep reading stories about bands and artists cancelling performances and abandoning tours for reasons related to their physical and mental wellbeing. Some of the cancellations are wholly understandable - Celine Dion has a neurological disorder called Stiff Person Syndrome; Lewis Capaldi is still adjusting to the impact of Tourette's Syndrome. 

Some, however, don't seem very... how shall I put it... rock and roll. 100 Gecs have cancelled the whole of their European tour because "we're physically and mentally worn out". It's true  the tour was a relatively lengthy one by modern standards: fourteen dates in twenty days in cities as far apart as Dublin and Milan. There would have been a far amount of travelling. A bit like one of those old "fifteen cities in fifteen days" European Vacations.

The decision contrasts spectacularly with something I read this morning in a book about the year 1982, from which I learned that Iron Maiden, having swapped out their original singer for Bruce Dickinson the previous year and just having charted in the UK with Run To The Hills, were about to set out on a 184 date world tour that would take them from February to December.

The book in question isn't particularly well-written but it's extremely well-researched and stuffed with both hard facts and fascinating anecdotes. The image it paints is of a music scene fueled by drugs, alcohol and a general determination to do anything the hell necessary to become famous, successful, respected or popular - preferably all of them at once. 

It's very clear that absolutely no-one was taking responsibility for their own health back then, either mental or physical. You just plowed through and hoped you didn't die before you finished the tour. I am absolutely not suggesting "it was better in the old days". I'm very pleased that musicians and performers are both willing and able to take the necessary steps back from a punishing lifestyle to look after their short and long term wellbeing. Maybe it'll lead to me reading fewer obituaries of drummers dying in their forties and fifties

I'm just saying it's a very different world, that's all. No wonder Lana's so nostalgic about the 1970s.

And finally...

You Need Jesus - Yung Gravy, bbno$ (BABY GRAVY)

I dunno. I thought it was funny...

Peace Out!

Ikonei Island: Open Beta. Very First Impressions

Remember, back at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? I wanted to play, too but AC:NH is a Switch exclusive. You can't play it on PC. 

Well, you can, if you want to download an emulator and jump through a bunch of hoops, some of which look highly dubious to me. I don't think I'm even going to link to the site with the instructions. I'm sure you can all find it the same way I did if you're curious.

I considered buying a Switch just to play New Horizons but as far as I remember availability was poor. It would have been aberrant behavior for me anyway, buying a console just to play one game. It was 2020, just after the first lockdown and I was still on furlough so that may have had something to do with it

In the end, I found a much cheaper and more reasonable cure for my rare case of FOMO. I installed Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on my Kindle Fire instead. As I'm sure everyone knows, AC:PC is considered a hugely inferior entry in the Animal Crossing canon but I liked it. I posted about a few times, played just about every day for several weeks and then sporadically for a few months more until I eventually, inevitably, drifted away. 

I occasionally think about playing Pocket Camp again but I'd forgotten all about New Horizons. Or I had forgotten about it until this morning, when I read this post at MassivelyOP. Describing a new game I'd never heard of, Ikonei Island, a quote from the developers namechecks both Animal Crossing and another game I've read a lot about over the years, Stardew Valley.

Srtardew Valley has never appealed to me, partly because of the graphics, which lean very heavily into a nostalgia for a period of gaming that means nothing to me, but also because farming games are boring as hell. Part of what appealed to me about New Horizons as I was reading about it was the way it didn't seem to revolve around planting and watering. 

GIven that level of disinterest, I'd probably have carried on by had it not been for the two embedded videos. Particularly the second.

Four and a quarter minutes of piratical hurdy-gurdying is a hard ask, for sure, although I'd totally rock a red velvet frock coat like Patty's. It says something about the game and its developers that they thought it would make an effective - or even appropriate - promotional tool. I guess they must have been on to something, though. I mean, it landed me.

I watched as much as I could take of the video, which was about a minute, then I took a look at the gameplay trailer. At just over ninety seconds it's a lot more approachable and it shows the game to good advantage - or it does if you can tune out the bilious voiceover. Cheese and ham, anyone?

It immediately reminded me not of the two mentioned games I haven't played but of another I have: Yonder the Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder was one of the first games I bought on Steam. I played and posted about it several times, most recently in June 2020, when I picked it up again after a long layoff for precisely the same reason I've ended up writing about it today: I saw something that reminded me of it.

I have never finished Yonder. I haven't given it a fair crack, even. I realised that as I was reading Kluwes' commentary on his own time with the game. I'd always struggled to find the thread of the narrative when I played, ending up rambling inconsequentially through the gorgeous scenery, getting nowhere and not really minding. Kluwes made it seem a much more coherent, completable game than I'd ever felt it to be. He 100%ed the entire thing and made it sound easy.

I was seriously considering starting Yonder over from scratch but of course I haven't done anything so dramatic. Or decisive. Instead, I seem to have jumped on the first available train heading the other way. 

As soon as I'd watched the videos I opened Steam, found the Ikonei Island store page and registered for the open beta. Acceptance was immediate so I downloaded it and started playing.

It says "Beta" in the description but the version number (bottom left) says "Alpha". Feels more like an alpha build to me.

First impressions are excellent. There's a charmingly illustrated introduction in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of four orphans - two humans, who look like they might be brother and sister, a lizard and a ... pig? - all of whom narrowly escape being taken by slavers (Who are also pigs for some reason.). 

They speed away on a raft powered by a magical wind released from a flask tossed to them by the mysterious narrator and end up, wrecked in a storm, cast up on the beach of some desert isle. It's a great beginning and the gameplay that follows backs it up admirably.

I would go into detail but I've only managed to play for about three-quarters of an hour.. Yes, okay, I could easily spin those forty-five minutes into a five post series if I had the mind to but I don't think that would do the game any favors. I want to leave a good impression because for the short time I was able to play, I really enjoyed myself.

"Rain, rain go away..." Or actually don't. I quite like it.

I can fill in a few notes, at least. The characters, animations and models are delightful, albeit a little hard to see, what with them being so tiny. There's seemingly being no way to zoom in with the fixed camera. The island, what little I saw of it (Mostly the shore and some ruins near the river.) is beautifully rendered in lush blues and greens, all softened contours and rounded edges. 

It rains all the time, which is both a plot point and an aesthetic pleasure. Everything looks and feels like it's been drawn in pastels then gently smdged with a damp cloth. Frogs hop, crabs burrow and occasionally an aggressive plant detaches itself from the undergrowth and has to be soundly clouted with your "sword", a branch with the leaves still attached.

Hedda is the only charracter I've tried so far. I think you can play all four of them although I haven't figured out how to swap yet.

The UI is clear and attractive and I found the controls quite manageable, which may put me in a a very small minority indeed. The game opens with a warning that it's best played with a controller because the mouse and keyboard options aren't optimised and there's a thread on the game's Discussion page, in which the OP describes the beta keyboard controls as "unbearable" and everyone else agrees. I'd have to say I've seen a lot worse. Try playing Final Fantasy XI sometime...

That said, the controls do need some tweaking and the developers have already said it won't happen in the current beta, so even though I'd encourage anyone who likes the look of the screenshots or the gameplay in the video to give it a try, do be aware that it's not even Early Access yet. It's a proper beta. Or maybe an alpha...

Fear my mighty leaf. Sword! I mean sword!

It's so much a work in progress, in fact, that I ran into a proper, gamebreaking bug. When I got to the second area of the island and a new cut-scene played, the game registered a fatal error and shut down. The same has happened each time I've returned to that area, which is why I stopped and wrote this post instead. 

Otherwise I'd still be playing.