Is Wuoshi Up? The Latest EQII Producer's Letter Drops.

A new Producer's Letter for EverQuest II usually gives me plenty to write about. They appear roughly quarterly (Maybe they're seasonal?) so there really ought to be some meat to them. You'd think...

A new one popped yesterday. It's thin. Let me break it down in bullet points:

• Reminder of the beta currently running for the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion on the Origins server.
• Reminder the Zarrakon PvP server will be merged into the Antonia Bayle PvE server in May.
• Details of a technical change to the Character Creation process.
• Information about the new Time Locked Expansion server coming in June.

And that's it. Two things we already knew about, each of which have had their own press releases in the last week or so, one thing no-one's likely to care about and a foretaste of another that, according to Senior Community Manager Angeliana, replying to a question on the forums, will have a full article and a FAQ next month.

If you were hoping for any longer-term outline of where the game as a whole is headed, especially now Darkpaw isn't doing roadmaps any more, you're out of luck. Whether this is because there's nothing to say or because saying anything isn't allowed, feel free to speculate.

So, working with what little we have, let me see if I can spin this up into some kind of post. There might be a couple of loose ends worth pulling on... 

The Origins server is the closest thing EQII has to a Classic ruleset. It doesn't go all the way back to the beginning, like WoW Classic, because no-one in their right mind would want to suffer through the first fifteen months or so of EQII ever again. Instead, it started out trying to recreate the game as it was in 2006, before moving forward, carefully, through succeeding expansions, attempting to replicate them as accurately as possible, striving always for authenticity. 

Or so the story goes. That, anyway, is why the introduction of the next expansion on the assembly line, Rise of Kunark, requires a beta. For regular TLE servers they just switch the expansions on, I think. 

I don't really know, to be honest. I never play on them. I did try Origins when it started but I think I lasted about two sessions. I can see the appeal and the server has been successful but who has the time? Well, not me, obviously.

I wouldn't have bothered going into it at all if it wasn't for the fact that the existence of Origins is highly relevant to the second bullet point, the merging of Zarrakon with Antonia Bayle, which is much more interesting.

Zarrakon launched a sliver under three years ago. It used a factional PvP system of some kind, the exact details of which are unclear to me. I was under the impression most EQII PvP was faction-based: Freeport vs Qeynos or Good vs Evil, if you prefer. 

Whatever the exact details of who could kill whom, Zarrakon barely had a chance to get started before the server itself was killed by much more popular rival. Just two years later, a second PvP server, Dozekar, arrived, using the already highly successful "Origins" model, tweaked for PvP.

PvP players are, if anything, even more nostalgic about the supposed good old days than PvE players. They're always hankering after some mythical ruleset that made PvP fair or balanced or satisfying, even if few of them can agree on when or where it happened. 

Everyone agrees it did, though, and for many the touchstone is the much-missed original PvP server, Nagafen. For once, it seems as if Dozekar came close to replicating that experience. Or, as PCGamer put it at the time, "Nagafen's back, baby!"

With Dozekar sopping up most of the demand, there was no need for Zarrakon. It does seem strange that two PvP servers should have launched so close together but presumably the possibility of an Origins PvP server wasn't in the discussion in 2023. Just bad timing, I guess.

Antonia Bayle, the server on the receiving end of the merge, has a checkered history of its own. For a long time it was the most populated server. It was also the designated roleplaying server, which may explain the popularity. 

Over time, for reasons unknown to me, Ant. Bayle fell out of fashion. The population declined until it became almost a ghost-server. There was talk about merging it into one of the others but instead Darkpaw took the opposite tack, merging failing servers into Ant. Bayle.

When I read the news that a PvP server was going to be folded into AB, my first thought was to wonder how the two populations might mix. Like oil and water, you'd think. Having done some research for this post, I'm now thinking it'll be more like dropping a pebble into the ocean. Barely even a ripple. I'm guessing there won't be enough players left on Zarrakon to make an impact and of those that remain, any still dedicated to PvP won't be logging in much after the move goes through.

So ends yet another attempt to bring PvP to Norrath. At least this time there's an alternative. 

Dozekar, by most accounts I've seen, retains a small-but-active population, which, on the evidence of the last twenty years, is about the best an EQII PvP server can realistically can hope for. Not that EQII PvP players are famously realistic...

New servers have been the lifeblood of the game in one way or another for as long as I've been playing, which is to say always. The commercial model seems to consist of a core of permanent F2P servers running the "Live" ruleset, to whose players annual expansions and various cash shop specials can be sold, along with an ever-changing line-up of special rules servers, for which a subscription is required. 

Perhaps ironically, it's the sub-only servers that have the shorter life expectancy. They're designed to run only for as long as enough people pay, after which they're merged either into each other or into the Live servers, depending on how compatible the rulesets might be.

There's a perpetual demand for new rulesets to hold the interest of a subset of players who find the endless variations appealing. Once in a while a particular variant will take off and become rather more than just stable, as seems to have happened with the Anashti Sul Origins server, reportedly now the most populated and popular server of all.

The latest attempt to grab attention is the upcoming Wuoshi server, which is going to have a Free Trade ruleset but also launch with all expansions up to and including Echoes of Faydwer active. EoF was the third expansion, right before RoK, which means the new server will be one expansion in arrears of Anashti Sul. 

Why that would induce anyone to move across beats me although maybe I'm missing something. Someone on the forums certainly thinks so:

"Well rip Origins and it's RoK launch if this Woushi server coming out in June with EoF enabled."

I'd have though it'd be the other way around but what do I know?

I was more interested in the name of the new server, anyway. Mostly, when new servers are spun up for either of the EverQuest games, I have to go look it up to find out who they've been named after.  Not this time!

Wuoshi is the extremely annoying dragon that wandered about right next to the druid ring in Wakening Lands. She was the bane of every druid's life back in the day. You'd port in and WHAM! Dead from Wuoshi's massive AoE attack.

Luckily she wasn't always up. I ran a spotter over there and camped them at the ring so I could log in as an expendable character just to check if it was safe to port. Eventually they either moved Wuoshi or changed her faction and porting to Wakening Lands stopped being Druid Russian Roulette but I have never forgotten her. I might roll a character on the server named after her, just for old times' sake.

There is one other thing. Not about the new server. It's a hint about the next expansion. I didn't give it a bullet point because, as anyone who read this post in the first few hours it was up will know, I didn't even spot that the following was about the expansion. I thought it was about the new server.

I've revised the post, now I've realized my mistake. I'd talk about it in more detail only I have no idea what it means and Jenn Chan isn't about to make it any clearer. She says

"Imagine traipsing through The Crossroads for a minute... You’re just walking along the road, weary from a long day of adventures, when you glance down and see an oddity. You pick it up and open it to find a strangely coded missive. You stare at it until the characters swim about in your view, still unable to decipher it. You feel an urgency to find someone who can decrypt the piece of intel before it’s too late. What do you do? Where do you go from here? "

 Which is helpful. Not.

And even less so the image of the note itself:

Looks like gibberish to me but it turns out to be in two Norrathian languages. One is Dark Elven. I'm not sure about the other.

I only know that much because someone on the forums had the whole thing translated in a matter of hours. The full text, in English, reads as follows. 

Oh, I suppose I ought to give a spoiler warning for this...

As if anyone cares.

 

So there you have it. Gibberish in English, too! If anyone knows what any of that means in reference to where we might be going or what we might be doing come December, do tell.

Credit for the image goes to Agarth, by the way, although I'm not sure they did the actual translation. 

And that, I think, is about all the juice I can squeeze from the dry husk of Jenn Chan's latest Producer's Letter.  

Hey, I got more than fifteen hundred words out of it! I'm not complaining.

Throne Alone

I'm forced to admit I'm having a lot more fun in Throne and Liberty than I expected. The reasons why are both complicated and contradictory. 

Looked at from the outside, it very much seems like a game that wouldn't do a lot for me. For a start, it's strongly biased towards grouping with a meta-game that's built for guilds. There's a clear expectation that you'll not only be willing to party up for dungeons but that you'll want to become part of a larger organization and engage in all kinds of competitive events so you can prove your worth both on the map and on a series of league tables

The whole game is designed to enforce both competition and co-operation in a way that appears to leave little room for individuals. Even open-world events, of which there are many, come not just with a running commentary like a sportscast but with scorecards throughout to let everyone know who's winning and who's won. 

Even if you don't make the top ten and have your name blasted all across the map, there's still no escaping the performance review: at the end you get a personal report telling you exactly where you placed in the table. I came 83rd in the event I did earlier today although it didn't say out of how many.

There's also a fairly heavy emphasis on non-consensual PvP. Outside of the safe areas like towns and villages, the world is divided into Peace and Conflict zones. In the former you can't be attacked by other players but in the latter anyone of any level can attack you without warning or penalty. 

Which area is under which condition changes all the time, so you can't just avoid certain locations. You have to pay attention to what state they're in as you travel to and through them.

The main story quest also does that annoying thing where it switches from solo to group as it goes along.  I currently have two quests that started solo but reached a point where the questgiver warned me I'd better gather some friends before carrying on. For one I'll need to go into a private instance, for the other a public dungeon.

The final stage of another longish questline that had up to that point been soloable ended with a demand that I kill world boss twice my level. Not on my own, obviously, but even so...

All of this is the exact kind of thing I always say I don't enjoy. So why am I still playing, let alone having a pretty good time?

I was wondering that, too. It seems odd, doesn't it? Counter-intuitive, for sure. Paradoxical, even. 

I had a think about it and I'm alarmed to say I suspect it might be down to intelligent design. No, not that kind. The kind where someone thought about how players might feel when they run up against these kinds of barriers and made an effort to mitigate the worst of the effects for those whose preferences might lie elsewhere.

Take that Level 40 world boss, for example. He's on a fixed schedule as are all the open world events. You can see the times of all of them on a drop-down menu attached to the mini-map. You can click on each entry to port to the nearest waypoint. 

It also tells you whether the event is Peace or Conflict and as far as I can see there's a non-PvP version of all of them. Interestingly, the reverse doesn't appear to be true so PvE players are actually better-served.

Unfortunately for me, the timings for the Peaceful versions of the boss I needed weren't ideal. I'd either have had to stay up to midnight or else wait until tomorrow morning. As I was pondering my options the three o'clock Conflict version popped very close to where I was standing, sending a massive column of red light into the sky. I thought why not? and morphed into my glide form to go give it a try.

And it was fine. I got ganked within seconds of landing and ganked again almost as soon as I got back but the respawn was barely ten seconds away and there was no penalty of any kind for getting killed so it was barely an inconvenience. 

On my second death I realised the event hadn't officially started yet. We were still in the five-minute "Come and get it" phase and the main reason I'd been killed was that everyone was standing around with nothing better to do than take pot-shots at late-comers.

I held off coming back a third time until the whistle went and this time everyone was too focused on the boss to bother with me. I found a nice spot at range and plinked arrows into him for a couple of minutes while his massive health pool slowly whittled away. Then I got in someone's way and got killed again.

As I respawned I saw I was part of a never-ending stream of resurrected players all throwing themselves off the cliff and turning into birds to fly back for another round. Dying and coming back was clearly all part of the process so I forgot about trying to avoid it and just let it happen. 

I got killed twice by the boss's massive AE and a few more times by other players. At the rate his health was dropping, it looked like the whole thing might take ten minutes or so. The event can run for almost an hour before he despawns so that seemed reasonable but around the fifty per cent mark another world event finished and a bunch of people from that one came across to join in on our guy, which just about doubled the speed we were killing him.

I died to some player with a lot of XXXs in their name when the boss was around 10% health so I just lay there and waited. By the forest of tombstones all around it looked like planty of other people had the same idea. 

When the final blow was struck a window popped up telling me I'd successfully participated in the event and my quest auto-completed too. I released and checked my inventory, where I found the rewards for the event, which were generous, given I'd done next to nothing. 

All things considered it was a productive and enjoyable experience. The fact that I'd been killed multiple times by other players seemed wholly immaterial. I've been killed far more frequently by mobs countless times, doing similar events in Guild Wars 2. Once you stop thinking of other players as anything different from mobs, it really makes no difference whether the event is flagged for PvP or not.

I'd been sitting on another quest for an open-world event, the wolf-killing one, for a few sessions and today I finished that, too. It was peaceful (Not for the wolves, obviously.) but highly competitive and it could have been a pain if it hadn't once again been for the thoughtful design. The event is scored by tallying the tails of wolves you've killed and miraculously every wolf has exactly as many tails as the number of people who helped to kill it. 

It's amazing how unstressful a competitive event becomes when the competition only relates to the final score not the contribution. If I'd wanted to make the cut to have my name up there on the leaderboard then I'd have had to make a very considerable effort but to notch up the required tails to finish the quest was simplicity itself. 

Similarly, those solo story quests that morph into "Group required"? There's a trick the game has to get around the problems and resentment that would normally cause. Every chapter comes with a flow-chart (Literally.) that shows you which sub-quest leads to which and the central narrative throughline, at least as far as I've gotten, remains solo throughout. 

Completing that gets you the achievement and reward for the chapter and marks it done. All the other sub-quests are listed as "Appendix" quests, making them optional in terms of the main storyline. To date, all the group quests have been appendices.

Inclusivity is all over Throne and Liberty, even when looks like the opposite. Take making a guild, for
example. One person can do it in about five seconds.

I usually try to make a solo guild in any game that allows it, which is by no means all of them. T&L does. I was quite surprised by that. I was expecting a game with such a focus on guild play to put some kind of protective fence around it but there's none. It could scarcely be easier.

There's no requirement whatsoever for making a guild other than having to reach Level 7, the same level you need to be to join one. No money changes hands, you don't need to have any members other than yourself, you don't even need to speak to an NPC. All you do is open the Guild window in the UI and click on Create Guild. That's it.

You are supposed to design your guild emblem at this point but I somehow managed to click straight through that part so my guild presumably has some random design or the default or no emblem at all. I don't know which because I haven't even worked out where you can see guild emblems yet.

Guild names are limited to fifteen characters, which is really short. One letter shorter than the name I usually go with, in fact. Luckily I have an even shorter version to fall back on in cases like this.

I was assuming that making the guild would be the end of my involvement with the feature. I mostly only do it to stop people sending me random invites, which is what happens if you have the temerity to run around unguilded in most games. It's rare for solo guilds to be able to do much in MMORPGs for obvious reasons. That turns out not to be the case here, or not exactly. 

It seems my one-person guild can attempt everything a larger guild can try. There don't seem to be any restrictions. It's just very unlikely I'd have the patience to make much progress. I should, however, be able to get the guild to Level 2, which is when we (That's the Guild Leader "We" I'm using there. It's very much like the royal "We" and entirely appropriate, as I'm sure you'll agree.) get our own "base" or Guild Hall as every other game would call it.

Level 2 seems extremely generous for such a sought-after prestige perk. Even more generous is the amount of effort required or rather the lack of it. There are a few ways to level the guild up but the basic option is Guild Contracts. These give Guild Xp and at Level 1 a guild only has access to one kind of contract - Territory.

Territory Contracts just ask you to kill regular overland mobs in a specific region, something that's very easily combined with questing or world events. I tested it this afternoon. Killing boars, spiders and goblins seemed to give something like one point of Guild XP for every two kills, although it wasn't quite as precise as that. There may be a random element or some sort of variation related to the level or difficulty of the mob.

Whatever the specific mechanics, it takes just 700 points to level the guild up, a target that feels very comfortably within the reach of a single player, playing normally. I've already notched up ten per cent of the requirement since I created the guild and that's in just a couple of hours of play.

Put all of this together and it forms a picture of a game where the intent is to allow players of all persuasions to play in the way they feel suits them best without having to feel they're missing out. Obviously everything is going to be far easier if you have (Or make.) friends - it always is in MMORPGs - but there seem to be refreshingly few hard locks on content to keep loners from making at least some progress on most fronts.

I'm sure this won't last forever. MMORPG endgames almost always cleave towards more formal, organized, structured group content. It also only affects the kind of activities a single player could reasonably expect to succeed at, like finishing the storyline. 

Other parts of the game are likely to remain forever locked to organized groups. I believe a big part of the game revolves around taking and holding territory.  No-one would expect a solo guild to do well at that. Or to do it at all, probably. I'm not sure if there are raids but if there are I don't imagine anyone's going to be soloing those, either.

It's also an unfortunate truth that almost all MMORPGs, regardless of whether they paint themselves as solo-friendly or not, very quickly turn into grindfests of one kind or another. That's certainly going to stop most solo or very small guilds from leveling up too far. The xp required ratchets quickly to make leveling a guild without the numbers expected untenable for most.

The key in that last sentence, though, is "for most". With no hard lock, if you're determined (Or delusional.) enough to want to try, there's nothing actually preventing you from trying. Good luck with that.

And indeed all of this may yet prove to be the provenance of the lower levels alone. It's entirely possible that as my character level goes up I'll find more and more of the game closed to me through requirements I can't or won't meet while playing alone. If so, it will just put Throne and Liberty into the same box as most of the other MMORPGs I've played. I nearly always hit a wall in the end.

The point is, I thought the wall would be present from the start and it's not, something I find very refreshing and not a little endearing. I still think I won't be staying with the game for long but I'm already thinking that, when I do move on, it will be with fond thoughts and good memories of the short time I spent there. 

I certainly didn't expect that a week ago.

The Tarisland Devs Would Like To Tell You: They're Listening...

This morning I watched a video, brought to my attention by MMOBomb, in which Tencent, developers of upcoming, would-be WoW-beater Tarisland, addressed some of what they see as the key issues brought to their attention by the latest closed beta. As an endearingly unprofessional voice, possibly one of the developers themselves, falteringly read aloud the same words I could see for myself on screen, I found myself wondering whether I'd missed an invite to another round of testing. Or maybe never been chosen to receive one.

I was sufficiently puzzled to go check on the game's official website, where I discovered that the most recent beta had indeed been the one I played back in November. I hadn't missed out on a third opportunity to give the much-anticipated title another once-over. I can now go back to looking forward to doing that later in the year, always assuming they're kind enough to ask me.

It would certainly have been a surprise if there had been another beta since the last one, seeing that test only ended in November. Hardly time to fit in another round, what with Christmas and New Year. What made me think it might have happened were the specific questions the video attempted to answer, most of which address concerns I had no idea anyone had, over systems and mechanics I didn't realise existed. It did seem as though I must have missed a trick, somewhere.

On closer examination, it appears I just didn't happen to come into contact with most of the potential problems because they relate to things I didn't bither with during my not-insignificant time with the game. Some of that is entirely understandable, some less so. 

For example, one section of the video deals with PvP. It's no surprise I wasn't aware that players complained there weren't enough opportunities for players to beat each other up or that there were shortcomings in the matchmaking process. I vaguely knew the game had some form of PvP because there's an annoying pop-up in the never-ending Tutorial that keeps suggesting you go check it out, but I never took the trouble to find out what it was like or even where you went to do it.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't give it a go if the game was live. I've spent a lot of hours in battlegrounds in theme-parks like World of Warcraft, Rift, EverQuest II and Warhammer Online and mostly had a good time, even though I do think of instanced PvP as the candy of MMORPGs - moreish at first but too much and it makes you feel queasy. In a limited-duration beta, though, I'd have to be very short of better options to spend time running around playing digital laser-tag. It certainly wouldn't have said anything very good about the game if I had.

It's also perhaps not all that odd that I wasn't aware that in beta you could get comparable or even better gear by crafting instead of raiding. If it's unlikely that I'd experiment with PvP in a beta, it's all but impossible to imagine I'd find myself raiding. I don't do raids in live games - why would I want to test them?

I do craft, though, so I suppose I might have found out that way. Only, as Tencent themselves have acknowledged, feedback indicates not all players love to craft: "Some players find Crafting to be too complex and time-consuming", which is why the whole thing is going to be "simplified". You can call it "dumbed down" if you like. They didn't and I don't think I will, either.

I did take a brief look at crafting while I was there but I didn't make much progress. It didn't feel like it was going to be particularly complicated but it did seem as if it might be quite tedious. There weren't that many recipes, so you'd have to keep making the same things and although I was surprised how fast some of  the fireworks I made sold, there didn't seem to be an awful lot to make in the earlier levels that would be either interesting or profitable. 

Getting to the point where I could craft something genuinely exciting, like an Invincible Kitten mount, looked like it would take a lot more effort than I would have been willing to put in so I can't say I'm disappointed to hear the plan now is to make the whole thing quicker and easier. I'm increasingly of the opinion that complex crafting is a better fit for survival games than it is for narrative-driven, theme park MMORPGs, anyway.

The real reason I imagined I might have inadvertently skipped a round of testing came right at the start of the video, when the questions being asked and answered all revolve around things I either didn't remember or never knew were in the game at all. Take the "Inscribed Stone System", the vaguest of details about which are slowly starting to come back to me as I write. 

I recall it being some kind of augmentation you can add to your gear to make it more powerful or give it extra functions and features. Lots of games have something similar and I confess it didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. It seems others were a lot more concerned, particularly by the prospect of being allowed to buy and trade Inscribed Stone Energy, fearing it would lead to some sort of Pay-to-Win scenario. 

Tencent has been running scared of the "P2W" tag since the day Tarisland was announced. There have already been some skirmishes between the developers and the playerbase (Curently defined as people who shout a lot about the game on Reddit and Discord, without necessarily having played in any of the tests.) over what constitutes "Pay To Win". If they work it out, maybe they'll tell the rest of us. 

Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, Tencent is determined not to allow anyone to pin the P2W label on this particular system, so from now on the stuff won't be tradable. Moreover, in order to discourage players from "playing too long", there will be a cap on how much ISE you can get per day. 

Playing too much does seem to be something Chinese game developers worry about, although I'm going to stick my neck out and say they're only really bothered about the home market. I very much doubt they care whether Europeans or Americans spend all day, every day, in front of the screen, especially if it involves them spending more Euros and Dollars. Or maybe that's too cynical. I don't know...

I did at least manage to dredge a few details about the Inscribed Stone System up from the swamps of my memory, when prompted. The other two economic issues featured in the video I don't recall at all. One is Gold Coins, which I'm guessing is the in-game currency. I mean, I knew Tarisland was on the gold standard, like virtually every fantasy rpg ever, but I wasn't aware it had any special significance. 

According to the feedback recap in the video, players felt it was too hard to get gold, meaning when the game goes live there could be a problem with bots and gold sellers or as Tencent prefer to call them "illegal program users". It seems that in attempting to pre-empt this problem by limiting Gold Coins to "more challenging" encounters, Tencent "pushed their guard" a little too far, something they intend to remedy in future by employing "more technical means" of countering those pesky illegal program users and by making Gold Coins easier to get for everyone else.

To which I can only say - good luck with that!

The other potentially game-breaking inclusion in the last beta, at least according to the feedback Tencent received, relates to something called CBT Benefits Cards. I have absolutely no idea what these are or were. I never saw any mention of them and as far as I know I never received any, unless it's jargon for those handouts every game throws at players just for logging in. 

Whatever they were, they were tradeable through the in-game Auction House, which sent people into a tizzy. There was great concern expressed over whether CBT cards would be included in the official launch, when the game goes live. 

Now, I would have thought that was a question that answered itself. What would you you imagine CBT would stand for if not "Closed Beta Test"? Obviously, these cards were specific to the testing process, something the video confirms. Still, just in case it was keeping you up at night, be reassured: no, Closed Beta Test Benefits Cards will not be included in the official launch version of Tarisland!

The last piece of feedback addressed by the video that I want to mention is the reaction to the dungeons in the game and the way they can be accessed. I did do a couple of dungeons, albeit only because there are points in the Main Storyline Quest when you have no choice, and I thought they were pretty good, as these things go but apparently some people - inevitably - complained they were too easy.

Other people kvetched about the time restrictions. Unlike in most Western MMORPGs, you can't just chain-run dungeons in Tarisland until your eyeballs bleed. There's an energy or access mechanic, which the video just refers to as "dungeon attempts" that once again seeks to put a brake on players whose enthusiasm for the game might verge on the self-destructive. 

It seems that the combination of easy basic dungeons and limited attempts per day led players to concentrate on knocking out as many lower-difficulty Arcane Realms as they could, while swerving the more challenging Elite Dungeons. This in turn pissed off the hardcore, who couldn't get groups for the tough stuff. I'd like to say First World Problems but...

Hearing all this in the video, my own selfish concern was that Tencent would respond by making the Arcane Realms harder to appease the concerns of the hardcore. If they did, you could hardly blame them, seeing that would be the demographic most likely to pay the bills. Hearteningly, however, their reponse was much more nuanced, taking into account the requirements of both sides. 

They're going to consider separating the two kinds of dungeons so each uses its own "Dungeon Attempts". They also want to avoid making dungeon-play grindy, instead keeping it focused on being a fun way to level. Instead of making the Arcane Realm harder across the board they're going to give it a Challenge Mode with cosmetic rewards, while leaving the regular version much as it is (Although they do mention making it "more fun", which adds an ominous note to the proceedings...)

There's a fair amount more in the video, which manages to pack a lot into less than ten minutes. There's more about crafting and also an acknowledgement that they may have gone a little overboard in the "exploration" stakes, by which I think they mean PoIs and mini-events, which did indeed come thick and fast in closed beta.

All in all, I found the video largely reassuring, particularly when taken in conjunction with the earlier feedback report published in mid-December. Tate one covered many of the same points and also confirmed there'll be no gender-locking of classes in the final build. I get the feeling Tencent are attempting to rediscover that sweet spot WoW enjoyed around the time of Wrath of the Lich King, when it seemed for a brief while as if the same MMORPG could appeal equally to casual and hardcore players, without short-changing either.

That's a tough one to pull off but I hope they can do it. And even if they can't, good on them for trying.

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.

Digging Deeper Into Noah's Heart

I'm sure what everyone wants to know is how I'm getting on with Noah's Heart. Thank you for asking. I'm doing very nicely, as it happens. I haven't missed a single day since launch, exactly two months ago.

I have one character, Califa. She's Level 78, Adventurer Level 18, Career Level 34. Her house is Level 8. She's a Level 3 Craftsman and Level 2 in both Masterchef and Tailor.

My Valhalla is Level 69 with ten unlocked slots, three of them still unused. My current team is Charlie, Philo, Ave and Euclid. They are Level 2*, 4*,1* and 6* respectively. 

Califa is Diamond III in Fantasy Arena but only Silver I in Honor Arena. At 5222 points she's still a thousand shy of making the top fifty rankings in FA.

I've completed 100% of the first three Seasons - Light and Shadow, Scarlet Mark Mystery and Soul Inspired Art. 

There are seven people on my friends list, which can hold 60 names. I'm in a guild called ΛΣĞΙΩΝ, which is Level 3, has 89 members and a guild hall.

That's probably enough raw data to be going on with, although it's barely scraping the surface. Let me flesh it out a little, starting with the guild.

I joined my guild entirely by accident. I was coming out of an instance when a pop-up appeared as I zoned back into the open world. I clicked on it reflexively, thinking it was a reward for the instance I'd just done. It turned out to be a drive-by guild invite. 

Having joined, I thought I might as well see what a guild could do for me. Plenty, it seems. I was able to finish a mission I'd had hanging around for ages that was asking me to buy something from the Guild Store, for a start. Being a member of a guild also opened up several new dailies. 

The guild appears to be Greek in origin or at least the name, MOTD and all guild notices are in that language. You might think it would be awkward but so far I've never heard anyone speak. The language issue hasn't arisen.

Until today I was very happy in my silent guild. I've been making guild donations, receiving guild payments and occasionally joining in with guild events. Only yesterday I discovered we had a guild hall, which made me oddly happy for some reason, as if I'd somehow had something to do with it.

It's been all the fun of a guild without any of the stress so I was more than a little miffed to receive a message after today's update telling me the guild will be disbanded in 24 hours due to "Low Health".

I can't deny the guild is clearly in steep decline. Of the 89 members, only nine have registered any form of Guild Contribution this week. Mine was the second-highest and I've barely done anything. 

Even so, I can't see the rationale for forcibly disbanding us unless inactive guilds somehow place unacceptable stress on the server infrastructure, which seems highly unlikely. It seems like a commercially shortsighted move. You don't usually want to give people a reason to leave your game but kicking them out of their guild is likely to do just that.

I won't be leaving Noah's Heart just because my guild went pfutt. I'm enjoying myself far too much for that. I will look for another, though, which makes this the first time in years I've done that. I just hope I can find another guild where no-one speaks, only this time one where they do actually contribute.

Friendship is a similar story. I've had the usual smattering of drive-by friend invites but for once I've been accepting them. So far, none of my "friends" has attempted to communicate with me in any way other than to send me Friendship Points. There's a daily and a reward for doing that so I click the button every day and so, I guess, does everyone else. The points keep piling up.

Friendship Points are useful because you can buy extra Summons with them at a rate of ten points a spin. There are probably other things you can do with them, too, but what those might be I haven't discovered yet.

Speaking of summoning Phantoms, I was fortunate enough to get my third SSR yesterday. She's called Gretel Alexander, a name I can't place in any historical context... oh, wait a moment... I just got it! She's Alexander the Great, isn't she? OMG! that is brilliant! Seriously, that's just genius, isn't it? If someone at Archosaur can craft such excellent English puns, how come the rest of the translation is so bad?

Ahem, sorry, back to the post...

The problem with getting new SSRs is they're very slow to level up without spending money. I can shove them in Valhalla to raise their numerical level but to upgrade their star rating I have to find shards of the same character, which is a tough proposition. All my Rs and SRs are ranking up quite nicely but I've been working on getting Ave her second star for what seems like weeks and I probably still have seven to ten days to go.

Meanwhile, I've been playing around with the team lineup. You can store a number of team builds. Currently I have room for six. I found it made quite a difference when I swapped them around, especially in PvP. There seem to be some synergies I don't quite understand so it's very much a work in progress but it's a fun little game-within-a-game.

The main reason I was doing it was to try and win more matches in the Fantasy Arena. That's the one where your phantoms fight someone else's phantoms while you watch. For a while there I was steamrolling everyone by the simple trick of paying attention to the numbers. 

You can refresh the screen as often as you want to get a new slate of potential opponents. You can see their team's Strength rating, which phantoms they're playing and what their levels and stars are. It's fairly easy to work out who you can and can't beat that way... or it was.

Unfortunately, I have become something of a victim of my own success. By cherry-picking opponents I successfully raised my own standing until my Rank far outpaced my Strength. At Diamond III the average Strength looks to be somewhere around 175-250k. Mine's 114k.

For a long time I was able to find suitable matches by being patient and refreshing the options but now I'm lucky to find anyone even close to my Strength level. Finding anyone weaker than me is like Hannibal Lecter bobbing for apples.

I do have the option of downgrading. Every time you win a match you gain points but every time you lose it's the opposite. In original EverQuest you could lose your level; here you can lose your rank. I've already dropped back to Diamond IV once.

Rather than intentionally de-level, my plan is to work on improving my Strength rating but first I have to determine exactly what factors affect it. I know the level and star rating of your phantoms makes a big difference but I'm not sure if things like the level of their weapons has any effect.

In fact, I still have only the sketchiest idea how most of the systems in Noah's Heart work. There are so many of them and they all have so many levels and ranks and stats. It wouldn't be a bad idea to sit down and start changing things one at a time while making notes but do I really want to invest that much mental energy in what was supposed to be a light, fluffy, amuse-bouche of a game?

Probably a bit late to start worrying about that. I'm already playing two or three hours most days and barely doing any open world exploration at all, let alone working on upgrading and decorating my house. Even though I'm not spending any money, I still seem somehow to have managed to get myself tangled up in its myriad progression systems, most of which can be operated and maintained from the UI. It's not so much playing a game as tinkering with a construction set.

This would be a good time to start doing some proper exploring. We're on hiatus as we wait for Season Three to begin. When I finished Season Two there was an ominous prequel to the next, all black background and flowery language. I'm looking forward to it already. Today's update notes suggest it's already here but I can't see it in game. Maybe tomorrow?

Until it arrives, I have an opening of opportunity. Seasons have been occupying most of my time and I got into a routine for doing them that I have yet to break. I'm still doing all the dailies I need to get 200 Active Points every day, even though I no longer need those points to open the next tranche of Seasonal content.

Of course, those dailies also give me a ton of rewards, almost all of which I need for other things. Every activity seems to give you something you need for something else. You can find yourself in a closed loop that can be hard to break out of just to go exploring. It's worth it when you do, though. There's so much to see.

In fact, I think I'll go see some of it right now. Deeper into the Heart we go!

Come Over Here And Say That! PvP In Noah's Heart.

Since it's the weekend, no-one will ever read this, which means I can write about whatever I like! And what I want to write about is... Noah's Heart. Of course it is.

Also, if no-one's going to read this post, I don't have to bother about any of those difficult things like structure, purpose or coherency. Not that I have been bothering much about any of those, lately. Blaugust tends to do that to me. I wonder if anyone's noticed? I doubt it. Blaugust's probably doing the same to us all.

Let me think. There's a ton of odds and ends I've been meaning to to mention but couldn't find a neat way to stitch together into a post that felt like it was going somewhere. Which shall I pick? I know! PvP.

Yes, Noah's Heart has PvP. Are there any mmorpgs these days that don't? It long ago became one of the boxes any mmorpg had to check to be taken seriously, whether it makes any logical sense for the setting or not.

Begining with the usual caveat that, where Noah's Heart is concerned, I have no idea what I'm talking about, it's my current understanding that there's no open-world PvP at all, consensual or otherwise. As far as I can tell, everything happens in instances, under the Arena umbrella. 

(That's not literally under an umbrella, of course, although it could be. One of the most charming things about Noah's Heart is the way NPCs take out umbrellas and open them every time it starts to rain. That's the kind of attention to detail that raises a game to another level.)

There's an Arena tab on the Adventure screen (The other two types of adventure are Exploration and Challenge.), where you can choose from half a dozen different fighting options. I'd list them but you can read the details in the screenshot so it would be a bit redundant, just like the word "bit" is, in this sentence.

Of those six, I have so far only tried two: the two which don't yet exist. Stay with me; I'll explain.

The first I tried was Honor Arena. It's a straightforward death match against a single opponent in which you fight as your own character, using the abilities of whichever phantom currently possesses you. (Just go with it.)

The second was Fantasy Arena. That one's an automated battle between your choice of Phantom team and another player's. (Do you need a glossary? Tough. You're not getting one.) 

As you can see, both of those are flagged "Coming Soon" but for once, soon is now. They're each not only available but have Seasons running.

The reason I did the pair of them was for the dailies. The reason I'm doing dailies is because dailies give Active Points. The reason I need Active Points is because Active Points give Mystery Case Clues and Midnight Intel. The reason I need Mystery Case Clues and Midnight Intel is because that's how you open the next chapter of the Scarlet Mark Mystery Season... and now I'm lost, too.

I was mildly apprehensive about going into a PvP arena, as one is, but it turned out to be fast, simple and fun. Also surprisingly successful, given I have no real idea how to play my character or my phantoms and have made next to no effort to upgrade any of them.

The thing about PvP dailies that reward items needed for non-PvP content, something I've encountered in other games as well, is that they necessarily attract people who don't give a whit about PvP. All those folk want is to get in and out as fast as possible with the least hassle. If that means standing motionless while you kill them then that's what they'll do.

Four wins as Ave. Two wins as Charlie. Four Losses not shown.

 

Honestly, I've done it myself, although not in Noah's Heart. And so far, in ten matches I've only run across one person who didn't fight back. My own record, on this admittedly miniscule sample, is surprisingly good: 6/10 in fact. 

Absolutely none of those wins involved any skill on my part. I wouldn't even say I'd been lucky, other than in drawing opponents weaker than me in the random matchmaking. If there's any weighting in the algorithm I must be too low in the mix to see it because some matches are against players the same rank as me, others higher. 

I'm currently Bronze II and the highest player I fought was, I think, something like Silver II. I have no idea what these ranks mean other than Silver has to be better than Bronze. Also that the Silver players I've fought very clearly know what they're doing, while most of the Bronze players have either been even more clueless than me or were just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.

No match so far has lasted more than about twenty seconds and matchmaking has been close to instant, so what sounds like a daunting five match requirement for the daily actually takes about three minutes. For that you get a massive 30 Active Points, which means I'm definitely going to keep at it, but there's also a decent reward for the Season Mission that I quite fancy, so I may do more than just the dailies.

Some people whose asses I kicked. I hope none of them see this!

 

That was Honor Arena. Fantasy Arena is even faster, easier and absolutely unscary in any way, even for PvE players who find the very mention of PvP makes them come over all peculiar.

In Fantasy Arena the only "skill" I can see is in the single choice you make before each match. Unlike Honor, where you have no say in who you get to kill or be killed by, in Fantasy you get to pick your opponents from a list. 

The screen shows you everything you could want to know about your opponents, namely which phantoms are in the four-person team, what levels they are, what elements they use and what the overall Strength of the team is. If you just want to win, all you have to do is pick a team that's weaker than yours. If you want to get as many points for the win as possible, obviously you try to choose the toughest opponents you think you can beat. If you don't like any of the options on offer, you can refresh the list until you get what you want.

Once you've made your choice all that's left is to sit back and watch as your four phantoms battle your opponent's four. You have no control over anything. The little NPCs dash about, dodging and blasting and hacking and dying until one team has no-one left alive. It takes maybe twenty seconds, if that.

I have no idea what most of that means but whatever the scale is, I'm not on it.

 

I deliberately picked the closest Strength team below mine every time and so far my win/loss ratio is 5/0. The fights appeared to go pretty much exactly as the relative difference in numbers would suggest. The one fight that was touch and go was the only one where our numbers were almost identical. It might be possible for there to be unexpected results but I have no evidence to that effect - then again, I've only had five fights. It's not a statistically meaningful sample.

This one also has Season rewards and they also look interesting. As usual, even after I read the details of what was required, I didn't fully understand them but the Fantasy Arena is so easy, fast and genuinely entertaining I might just do it over and over and see how far I get.

That leaves... well, most of the PvP in the game. There are no dailies for the other four types of Arena so I haven't even looked at them. I probably should do that now... 

Okay... I don't really understand any of them. One involves taking a four person team to "a new planet", one looks like it might be a Battle Royale, one looks like some kind of three-round Phantom v Phantom affair that could be similar to the way I understand Pokemon battles to work, not ever having played Pokemon, and the last is an elimination battle between four-person teams, which I think means four players, not four Phantoms.

I'll have to give them all a try and see if I'm close. I'm confident now that there's little to no chance of any PvP in Noah's Heart turning into anything scary, disturbing or tediously long and drawn out, so what have I got to lose?

Only my dignity and that I lost long ago.