Elteria Endures

Just shy of a year ago, I received an invite to the alpha test of a sandbox mmorpg by the name of Elteria Adventures. I gave it a go and wrote a First Impressions post in which I described the game as being like "Landmark and Free Realms had a baby". I called it a "solid" and "convincing" start.

That was pretty much the last time I mentioned it until this February, when I wrote a catch-up post in which I went back and looked again at all the First Impressions posts I'd ever written to see how well my initial takes held up. Things didn't look all that promising:

"I went back and played a few times but I ran out of new things to do and stopped. Development seems to have stalled. The Steam page says "There's no recent activity from the developers of this title..." I might look into that later.

Turns out I was a tad premature in writing the game off. Yesterday I was browsing through my Steam library when I happened to notice that Elteria had received an update. I took a look at the notes to see what might have changed.

The first thing I saw was a massive Ukrainian flag with "We Stand With Ukraine" emblazoned across it. Beneath that was this statement:

"Greetings from the Elteria Adventures team!

Despite this difficult time, when half of our team is hiding in bombshelters, and another half is doing everything to help, we still decided to fulfill our promise and release this update in time. It contains several months of our work, so we hope you enjoy it.

We will continue working on this project for as long as we can.
No to war."

Elteria is being developed by the eponymous Elteria Team. I'm not sure if they're actually based in Ukraine or not since information about the company on the web seems unusually sparse. The publisher, Heatherglade Publishing, is based in Hungary, which is right next door.

There followed details of an update that would have been impressive in any circumstances, let alone with a war going on.  It includes a companion for your character, a new mechanic that allows you to expand and upgrade your personal island, a major revamp of mob AI, an expansion/progression mechanic for inventory, significant revamps to both combat and building mechanics, a new Adventure Journal and a "massive rework" of the landscape generation systems. 

Oh, and Raspberry Snails that you can catch and eat. Plus all the usual bug fixes you'd expect in an alpha, naturally.

I thought I'd log in and see things for myself. My old character was still there, something you can never take for granted in an alpha, but it seemed like a better idea to roll a new one and start fresh. There was a choice of North American or European servers and for once I decided to go Euro. The 11ms ping might have swayed my decision there.

As soon as I got in, any plans I had to focus on the new stuff disappeared. For one thing, I'd completely forgotten what a brutal game Elteria Adventures can be, right from the start. 

Looking back at my First Impressions piece, I think I rather glossed over the unforgiving nature of the early stages. I did make some comparisons with Valheim, but having recently gone back to that game as well, I'd have to say that Elteria Adventures makes the Viking afterlife look like a toddlers' tea party.

In Valheim, you might get killed by a skeleton once or twice before you get the hang of things. Maybe by a boar, if you're particularly inept. Last night I lost count of the number of times I was sent to my spawn point by both of them. 

As soon as night fell (And night in Elteria is dark.) the skeletons come out to play and the boars, benign and harmless by day, turn feral. I note with some concern that last year I said that once I'd worked out how to equip a staff and fight with it I had few problems staying alive. Either I've gotten worse since then or the game's gotten tougher because having a stick in my hand didn't really help all that much this time around.

In the end I got so ticked off with pigs and animated bonepiles lunging at me out of the darkness I built myself a shelter. It didn't help much but at least it was something to do with the endless stacks of sand and rubies clogging up my bags.

As I wrote last time, the tutorial takes you through the basics up to the point where you have to make a portal to take you from your personal island to the public areas, where most of the resources are. I got so wrapped doing all that, I lost track of time. 

When I finally got my portal done and logged out, Steam told me I'd been playing for two and a half hours. As I've mentioned before, I have a real problem with games where you can build houses and terraform the landscape. It's as close as I ever get to feeling addicted to a game, which is why I'm wary of getting sucked in. 

I logged in to check a couple of things for this post and found I'd played another hour and a half. It's a yellow flag for me but a recommendation for the game. Clearly it has something going for it if it can set a hook like that.

Of the listed changes, the most immediately noticeable was the Personal Sidekick, a floating bot that accompanies you from your first moments. It neatly fixes a problem I noted last time, namely the ridiculous survival genre convention of punching trees and rocks to get started. The Sidekick does that for you with some kind of ray and it also acts as an attack droid if you haven't made yourself a weapon.

Once I had a stick the Sidekick didn't seem to atack any more. It might be nice if it joined in the fight as well. Other than that, I was very happy to have it's company. You can upgrade it, too, although I didn't quite figure out how.

About the only other changes listed in the update that I spotted were the hives from which you can get restorative honey. That was a lifesaver - literally. Until I got my hands on a honeycomb I couldn't find any way of recovering health, which was one of the reasons I kept dying.

It seemed to me the world looked more detailed and visually richer but looking at the old screenshots and the new I'm not sure I could stand that observation up. The forests do look denser but that's about it.

One difference I definitely did spot was a change to the recipe for the portal that gets you off your Personal Island. In the old post I make mention of needing "Deep Gold" and having to spend some considerable time and effort delving the caves for it. This time round I only needed iron, not that that was particularly easy to come by, either.

If I get a moment, I'm going to log my original character in and see if there's anything new for her to do. As the passage I quoted earlier confirms, the main reason I stopped last time was that I ran out of options. Maybe the new Adventure Journal will have some suggestions.

It's very good to see that development on the game is still progressing, especially given the circumstances. I hope everyone at Elteria Team, including Alice, who was kind enough to drop by and leave a comment on the original post, is safe and well. Let's hope for calmer, brighter days ahead, when the team behind Elteria Adventures can put all their efforts into making something we can all enjoy, rather than playing their own real life survival game.

Buzzcut Season: First Impressions Of Atlas.

It was barely three weeks ago, when we first heard of Atlas, the new game from ARK developers Wildcard. Hard to believe, I know. In that short time the supposedly mould-breaking, game-changing pirate-themed "ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale" has been announced, delayed, released, reviewed, reviled, refunded and written off.

Atlas held the headlines for the blink of an eye, with stories of the worst MMO launch ever (not even close) and a galaxy of negative reviews. With that excitement out of the way, just as you might have expected of a game literally no-one had been waiting for, the world shrugged and moved on.

In this corner of the blogosphere almost no-one had been talking about Atlas anyway. I mentioned it in the second half of a rambling post that began by talking about Daybreak Games. Keen used the trailer as a springboard for a finger-wagging warning against giving in to impulse. No-one else paid it much attention at all.

Meanwhile, as I said in my reply to Keen, I'd been monitoring the whole farrago with curiosity and interest. I'm not big on either pirates or survival sandboxes but Atlas looked like it might have a bit more about it so I was keeping an eye out.

I took the trouble to read a few dozen of the many thousands of negative reviews on Steam. Almost without exception they complained of not being able to play the game at all. Most couldn't get past the log-in screen. For the few who did, there was nothing to review except lag, rubberbanding and disconnection from the server. Typical MMO launch, then.

Every character I made looked psychotic. Then, it is a Pirate-themed MMO.

The average time played for all these reviews was less than two hours. It needed to be for the writers to get the refunds they all claimed to have taken. This was certainly strong evidence that trying to play Atlas right now wasn't the cleverest of ideas but it told me precious little about the game itself.

I kept on looking at reviews, hoping for some insight beyond sour opinions on Wildcard's ethics and infrastructure. After a few days I noticed the rating had risen from "Extremely Negative" to "Mostly Negative". Yes, that's an improvement.

All the reviews at the top of the Steam page were still from people who hadn't actually played the game so I added a filter to show only the Positive reviews, paying particular attention to people who'd racked up a significant number of hours in game. A very different story began to emerge.

Apart from a few jokes, some of them amusing, the positive reviews, and there are currently nearly five thousand of them, come from people who have not only managed to log in but have stuck around long enough to play. Many of them have now been pirating thirty, forty, fifty hours or more. They say things like

"...its kind of rough to start out but once you get going with gear, base, ships, and a lot of company members, it gets really fun"

" I have had an immense amount of fun - as have the group I play with..."

"I have had a great deal of fun, and putting together that first ship felt so good I dont care if it blows up tbh, its the journey there that counts."

"for $20, I'd easily buy this again".

Value for money, fun, people playing the game day and night as soon as they managed to get in. The asking price was already low and there's 17% off until until January, so why not? I bought it.

Then I left it for a few days. Wildcard were reportedly still patching like crazy to fix bugs as well as  upgrading their infrastructure to cope with the unexpected demand. (Unexpected, that is, except by anyone who's ever experienced any MMO launch, ever). Also, the minimum specs state "100GB available space", which I took to mean a hundred gig download. For that I needed both extra storage and time.

Maybe I should start with something a tad smaller.

Both of those arrived this Sunday morning. After breakfast I successfully installed the new 2TB Hard Drive I got for my birthday back in November. Storage sorted, I hit Update on Steam, whereupon I discovered that Atlas has "only" a 40GB footprint after all.

It was all done in about an hour. I took a deep breath and hit "Play".

Everything went amazingly smoothly. I was able to log in, first time, with no difficulties or delays. Eschewing my usual preference for playing on North American servers, I picked the offical PvE server with the best ping; the EU one, unsurprisingly.

I fiddled with the options for a while. I couldn't get the 1920x1080 resolution to fit my screen properly, something that continued to mildly annoy me for a hundred of my one hundred and one minutes played. Ironically it was my first death that fixed it.

Before any of that, I had to make a character. Character creation is detailed and easy to understand. There are plenty of sliders for everything from the size of your hands and feet to the tilt of your eyebrows. The sliders only move between fixed options, so it's not the full-on Black Desert Online or Blade and Soul experience, but it's more than enough for me. Trying to get a good look at my choices I found the view of my character yawed and pitched emetically but maybe that's just because I don't have my sea legs yet.

I never thought of "Level-Up" as an abstract noun before. Interesting syntax!

After fifteen miutes I had a female pirate, as unpiratical as I could make her. I was ready to go. At some point, I forget now if it was before or after character creation, I also had to pick a starting area from a very large number of squares on a map. Some of them were "Lawless". I didn't like the sound of that so I chose a Freeport in the temperate South-West.

After a pause just long enough to make me think nothing was going to happen there was a burst of static, like an old shortwave receiver losing the station, and I found myself on a dock next to the sea. It was night-time because of course it was. And my character had somehow found time to get a buzzcut along the way. I guess it's practical, at least. Perhaps her hair will grow back, eventually.

I'd read someone complaining about the series of tutorial tips that open in a large window as soon as you log in so I was ready for that. They weren't kidding. Ten lengthy pages in a fancy font. Quite well-written and probably helpful if you read them back later but not what you want when you're already disoriented and trying to figure out where you just landed.

Still, I'm not one to miss a chance to read the manual. I kept half an eye on the pop-ups while I fiddled with the options some more, trying to get my window to fit. When the lecture finally ended I jogged off to begin tearing up bushes and picking berries. I kenw to do that from my recent experience in the alpha-that-shall-not-be-named. It's standing in me in very good stead all round when it comes to surviving in new worlds.

Y'know what? It's pitch dark, I can't see my hands in front of my face, maybe I will just pause and read these ten pages of instructions while I wait for daylight.

People who've played ARK, of course, which may well be almost everyone interested in Atlas except me, won't need any instruction on what to do. They all report that the opening stages are almost identical. Those who have gotten as far as building their raft and sailing out of the tutorial say the real Atlas, a different game altogether, lies on the far side of that zone line.

Not having played ARK, I wouldn't know. What I do know is that for the ninety minutes or so it took me to get to level four and make myself a full set of clothes and a weapon I was having plenty of fun. Also, everything worked. More or less.

There was no lag to speak of. Absolutely no hint of rubberbanding. I didn't disconnect once. All the buttons did what the tool-tips said they should. I was able to play in third-person simply by twiddling the mousewheel. The world seemed reasonably attractive, albeit not in the same ballpark  visually, as either the mysterious alpha or the recent Ashes of Creation Arena.

Wandering along the shoreline, my bags already filling with fibres and stones from repeated presses of the "E" key, I spotted my first animal. A rabbit. Come on, how tough could it be?

Is that a pig? I think it's a pig. What if it's a bear? Maybe wait 'til the sun comes up?

Still, I was wary. Forewarned by something I'd read in a review about high level mobs in the starting area I was canny enough to check the bunny's credentials before launching a frenzied two-fisted assault. Level 29. I gave him a pass.

In a while I came across a chicken. Aha! Level 2. A fair fight. The chicken didn't think so. She ran away.  But not fast enough.

Emboldened, I attacked a pig. I say "pig". It looked like a vicious wild boar. Fought like one, too. So did its piggy pal, who came barrelling across the beach like a guided missile. Social aggro, how we've missed you. Also forgot you existed.

The battle was short and manic. Everything jumps and leaps like a bull in a rodeo. Me included. I had no idea what I was doing but pummelling the left mouse button left me with two dead pigs, a screen edged in red and sound effects likely to bring concerned relatives running, concerned mostly about what the heck kind of video you might be watching.

This happy scene was repeated a number of times but only after I learned that cows, sheep and horses run away when attacked. They're safe to kill but next to impossible to catch. Pigs fight back but at least they stay in melee range.

If this scene came with sound I would have to flag it "NSFW"

I found a number of campfires left by other people but never managed to make one of my own because I couldn't figure out how to get flint. Experimenting with the crafting window I made myself a hat. It wouldn't equip at first but after opening and closing my inventory it appeared on my head, a simple square of cloth, tied at the back. Forget fashion, I just want to keep warm now I don't have hair.

Next, I somehow acquired a pick. I think I crafted it by mistake when clicking on something. I couldn't equip it, the option being grayed-out. Eventually I worked out I needed to drag and drop it on my hotbar.

With the pick I was somehow able to skin my dead pigs and with the hides I made myself a full set of clothes. Now I was getting somewhere! I'd read somewhere that before taking the raft you ought to be at least level five and have a waterskin and enough resources to keep you going for a while. Plus you have to make the raft, or at least give the relevant materials to the NPC who can.

Flush with my success and confident in my newly-clothed Survivor status I thought I'd get right on that. I attacked two more pigs. Things went badly. Oh, it was close, but there was so much jumping about and I couldn't keep that one pig targetted so I ended up half-killing both of them while they whole-killed me.

Here I am, in the glorious few moments when I actually wore pants.

At which point I learned that when you die in the starter zone you lose all your gear. The lot. Everything. Seems a tad harsh for a tutorial.

It isn't some crazed, hardcore penalty. It's because in the first few days the sheer number of corpses in the starter areas brought the servers to their knees. So Wildcard simply hid them all. It's a simple solution, I'll grant them that much. A bit like using a guillotine to cure a headache.

Luckily, my demise co-incided with the appearance of lunch, so I was happy enough to stop. After lunch Mrs Bhagpuss and I went for a walk and then I sat down and wrote this post. That's the sum total of my Atlas experience so far.

And now I'm going to log back in, take a careful note of exactly what I need to make the raft and to provide for my immediate future outside the starting zone. I'm going to get all of that done without dying and then I'm going get on the raft and set paddle for the open seas.

It's been fun so far, I'll say that much. We'll see if the fun carries on when I find the "real" game.

It's The Beginning Of A New World

This week's big talking point in MMOland has to be the unheralded info-drop on Amazon's New World. Until now we knew almost nothing about this title, other than its setting, an alternate, magical version of the 17th Century.

Massively OP seem a little confused over the timing of the reveal but no-one's questioning the authenticity. Interestingly, the last time any significant information emerged about New World it was also described as "possibly leaked", making me wonder whether there's anything truly accidental about any of this.

The M:OP piece is a tad misleading. I'd recommend reading the full article at TechAdvisor, which gives a good deal more detail and some important context. For example, the "full loot" PvP alluded to in Massively's bullet point list, is heavily qualified in the article itself, which says

"...currently when you die you drop all of your gear which can then be looted by other players"

That "currently" is crucial. This is a game in pre-alpha. Unless Amazon come out and state that full loot is a core game feature, I'd bet it won't make it out of beta. If it even gets that far.

That said, there's no glossing over the bald facts: New World is a PvP game.

 Or is it? Even the blatant

PvP seems to be at the very focal heart of the game

is more nuanced than it first appears. "Seems to be" is either a bet-hedger or an admission there's a lack of hard information. And what's with that "very focal heart"? Does that mean PvP is everywhere or concentrated somewhere in the center? I can see why Bree thought this might be a draft text.

The supposed emphasis on what sounds almost like forced socialization is also heavily tempered in the full text of the TA piece. While it does indeed say that

 "The game puts a very heavy focus on social features and everything that comes along with player interaction"

it goes on to clarify that

"Forming guilds to take on greater challenges and build your empire... will be a good idea if you want to survive".

That's really not so different from any other MMO, is it? Greater challenges almost always require guilds. We tend to call it "raiding" in PvE or "guild vs guild" in PvP. You're hardly going to be building an empire on your own, are you? I wouldn't read that as meaning there's no place for solo or small group play at all.

The article goes on to explain how empire-building might work in practice: 

You can capture land and build upon it, creating outposts and bases for your guild to operate from which can house more advanced crafting stations giving you access to better gear. Your territory can expand over time... You will be able to tax players that wish to operate or build within your territory, which allows their structures to be under your protection for a price.

So far, so familiar, but the crucial part, which I've pulled out for emphasis, is this:

"...territory control ... will be a large part of the 'end game'."

Taken in context, this suggests to me that New World's end game is very similar in concept to Ashes of Creation's. A never-ending tussle between guilds and allainces to rule the roost and rook the peasants.

As a prospective peasant in both games I strongly expect to be able to wander around largely oblivious to the machinations of my rulers. I will be beneath their notice and they will be above mine.

The writer of the piece, Sean Bradley, did at least get to play the current demonstration build, so his assessment that it feels

"...like a survival game in the vein of Rust, Conan Exiles or Ark"

 can probably be taken at face value. That's not appealing to me and neither is the choice of action combat rather than tab targeting and hotbars, although I will concede that it was inevitable. No-one but MMO nerds want WoW-style combat these days and Amazon wants to cast its net a lot wider than the pre-existing niche audience that, bizarrely, WoW now represents.

And yet, even here there's a hint of grey in the black and white. The current build allows you to lock to a target using Tab. Sean also describes it as "very fluid and responsive" and "not too fast or slow", which is encouraging for a pre-alpha.

Like Telwyn, I found a lot of the Massively:OP summary off-putting. I was inclined to cross New World off my wishlist completely. Having read the full article at TechAdviser, however, my interest has been tentatively re-ignited. It's not a long read but there's a lot in there, more than I've singled out for attention here. I recommend anyone even vaguley interested in New World to read the whole thing.

Finally, and most importantly, this is a game in closed pre-alpha. A lot can change. A lot will change. There's a "sign up" for alpha available on the website that consists merely of registering your interest on your Amazon account. It takes five seconds. I've done that.

It still doesn't look like my kind of game but who knows?

Irons In The Fire

At the very end of my "What I'm Playing" post the other day I threw in a line about how I wasn't even mentioning the mobile and non-mmo stuff. And, in doing so, mentioned it. So, here it is.

There isn't a lot because, well, I don't really play any video games that aren't MMOs, not for a long while now, but I do have three non-MMOs bookmarked so I can keep track of them in a desultorily obsessive fashion. None of them is officially released yet although two are getting close.

Furthest along by far is We Happy Few, which also happens to be the least MMOish of the three. I came across this one when Keen's jaw dropped at the E3 reveal. "WTF…Creepy. Skipping.!" was all he had to say but it was enough to make me go check out the trailer and I've been following it ever since.

WHF went into Early Access via Steam in July last year. I briefly considered buying in then but equally swiftly decided that would be a bad idea. While I can very much understand the attraction of watching an MMO grow up around me as I play it, it would make very little sense to do the same with a game built on narrative.

It's only now, pushing towards a year later, that Compulsion Games are getting around to patching in the 1.0 version of the full story. This does seem to be a case where Early Access has worked very well both for company and players. We Happy Few currently has a Very Positive Steam rating and when they say "very positive" they really mean it: 83% all time, rising to 90% over the last month.

Running your narrative-driven game successfully for nine months without actually having the narrative in place is quite a feat in itself but such acceptance comes at a risk. Compulsion Games are well aware of this and they're understandably nervous about the big switch. "It seems like a lot of people who haven’t played the game think our game is just a sandbox survival game with zero story", they say in the latest of their admirably frequent and detailed progress reports.

To that end there's going to be a series of videos (starting with this one) explaining what current players can expect the game to become, while encouraging people who don't start salivating when they hear the words "survival sandbox" not to pass by on the other side. The video features Alex Epstein, the game's narrative director, who has an interesting blog of his own, which you can find in the blog roll to the right. I was tipped to it by Tyler Sanchez in the comments last time I mentioned the game and I've been following it ever since.

We Happy Few looks set to be a success. Whether Early Access really does a game like this any favors is less certain. At current pace of development I'd guess the full launch won't come this year and by the time it does this kind of publicity may be hard to find. Then again, you can't time every game launch to coincide precisely with a once-in-a-lifetime lurch in the zeitgeist.

Next up on the assembly line is Tanzia. This colorful online RPG has been in closed testing for a long time. It missed its intended late 2016 EA launch date but not by too much. A few days ago developers Arcanity Inc. finally announced a firm date for Early Access via Steam: April 27th.

There are a couple of reasons I've been paying attention to Tanzia, which I first heard of through a brief piece on Massively OP.  Justin "Syp" Olivetti who wrote that squib caught my interest with the tagline: "Tanzia gives you the MMO experience without the ‘MMO’. I've long believed that it's as much the actual mechanics of MMORPGs that bind me to the genre as it is any of the multiplayer or social aspects, something that certainly seemed to hold true when I played Ninelives.

Ninelives is a moody, surreal work of art whereas Tanzia looks to be more of a sugar-overload romp but it's the gameplay rather than the graphics that intrigue me. Official descriptions make repeated references to the importance of kiting, which is something I don't think I have ever seen bigged up as a PR win before. I purely love kiting so it's a hook for me.

The other reason I'm paying attention to Tanzia is the pedigree of the team behind the game. The full skinny includes a whole load of prestigious studios and games but my eye was immediately caught by mention of SOE, Vanguard, EverQuest and Free Realms.

Whether Tanzia can live up to the rep of the games that underpin its design brief remains to be seen but this time I'll most likely buy in to Early Access, depending on the cost, which I don't believe has yet been confirmed. If there are packages announced already I couldn't find them.

On the other hand, Early Access for Tanzia is slated to last for just eight weeks. If they're going to hit full launch two months after EA then maybe I'll just wait. It sounds optimistic!

Bringing up the rear, a very long way behind both in familiarity and progress, but right at the front when it comes to MMO credentials, comes Antilia. Antilia was going to be an MMO but that turned out to be too much for the developer, Right Brain Games. There was a failed Kickstarter for the MMO version back in 2014 and since then the focus has been on making something smaller.

RBG describes itself as "a small team of developers dedicated to creating unique video games for the online game market" but as far as I can tell they haven't released any games. They have made a number of tools designed to aid in the creation of games but they aren't currently licensing or selling any of those for commercial use either.

What they do have is a website with some very nice screenshots and concept art and a trickle of detail about a virtual world that I find rather appealing. The game, if it ever appears, is set to be "a sandbox-style fantasy RPG, featuring a dynamic world simulation and anthropomorphic characters", which is pretty much a nailed-on "I'd play that" as far as I'm concerned.

First I have to live long enough. Whoever is behind Right Brain Games certainly isn't in a hurry. Last year the website was barely updated at all but this year has seen a relative flurry of activity with three posts so far.

The year began with an outline of project goals for 2017. The approach is very open and honest, full of self-deprecating statements and explanations:

"Progress in 2016 was very limited. This is just something that needs to be acknowledged. There wasn't really much in the way of 'secret progress' that I'm not showing. For most of the year my time on Antilia was limited to a few evenings and maybe one day each weekend...Let's face it, the development team behind Antilia is very small. While I am grateful that a good many people have expressed interest in helping the project in any way they can, these offers are from enthusiastic gamers and community members rather than seasoned game developers. Including more people on the project means more communication and coordination, as well as an investment of my time getting people set up and training them in our development tools. Doing this one-on-one has not led to much success."

It might not be what anyone wants to hear but at least they're telling it like it is!

Those are the only three non-MMO projects I'm keeping an eye on right now. Naturally the one I'm most interested in playing is the one I seem destined least likely ever to get my hands on. And I still didn't get round to mobile games. Maybe another time.

The Bloom Comes Off The Rose : Black Desert

Last night I logged into Black Desert with a plan in mind. I was going to build myself a boat. Well, a raft, anyway.

I got the idea after my arduous trip to Luivano Island the night before. I had this quest to catch an octopus and the quest marker wanted me to stand on some lump of rock a hundred meters out to sea from the Veila coast for it. I fished for a long time.

I didn't get an octopus but I caught a Conger Eel and a couple of other rare fish. My bags were full of them and they looked to be quite valuable so I thought I'd sell them in town.

I already had a rough idea how the "Node" system works but I wasn't looking to get a big mark-up for selling my fish some great distance from where I'd caught them. I was happy to take the regular price in Velia. Only, when I got to the Trade NPC that handles this kind of transaction I discovered I hadn't caught them in Velia at all.

The rock I was fishing from turned out to be in the jurisdiction of Luivano Island. After a bit of googling and a close look at the handy map at BDOTome I worked out where that was, which just left the question of how to get there. Hobson's choice, really. I had to swim.

I'd already discovered that when you swim it depletes some bar that has no tool-tip but is presumably related to your stamina. If that gets low enough you begin to lose hit points and eventually you die. It's not drowning - there's different bar and a different death for that.

The hundred meter swim back from the rock almost killed me so swimming a mile or two out to the island was a daunting prospect. With the help of Google, once again, I learned that you can swig health potions as you swim to counteract the damage you're taking. I had about sixty on me. Surely that would be enough?

I worked out that the shortest sea crossing was from the peninsula to the north of Velia, where the brooding Crone Castle dominates the skyline. What I didn't know until I got there is that it's occupied by hordes of highly aggressive purple con soldiers.

Running back a second time, I managed to avoid them all. I scrambled down the cliffs, got as close to the distant island as I could and swam for it. It took me a few minutes and about a dozen potions but I made it safely. Onshore I found the Node Manager flaked out on the sand. Apparently he was in the grip of the existential ennui of the near-immortal (seriously).

Even though he had lost all will even to sit up straight he was still trading and he gave me the full price for my fish. It was then that I noticed a crude log raft pulled up on the shore nearby, beached by a player more advanced than I. Well, not for long, matey!

Black Desert reminds me of Vanguard in a number of ways. The Amity mini-game is like a pale shadow of Diplomacy and the clutter of sailing ships at the Velia wharf recalls the jumble along the harbor walls at Khal. Acquiring and sailing a sloop in Vanguard is one of the fondest memories I have from all my years of gaming. Anything that might give even a faint echo of that sense of satisfaction and sensual pleasure has to be explored.

When I say "explored", of course, I mean "googled". I'm not sure how far along in Black Desert I'd be if I was relying entirely on in-game information. Probably still just outside the first village, killing weasels. Working out how to make a raft took me about an hour, several guides, a couple of forum threads and three videos. I recommend the YouTube tutorials by Pvt Wiggles.

Even then I misunderstood how the Housing system works. I went to the Shipyard in Velia but because I didn't get a pop-up to buy it I mistakenly assumed it wasn't available. That's how I ended up on Iliya Island.

Iliya is an island city a lot further from the coast than Luivano. It has a Shipyard. I thought that might be available but there was no way I was going to swim there. Luckily there's a ferry (Google told me that, too). Waiting for it at the wharf gave me an EQ flashback - standing in Butcherblock, fishing off the dock, chatting to pass the time, hoping the boats weren't broken again...

The ferry in BDO is a lot more efficient than that. There's one every ten minutes or so and it moves smoothly and safely. It's a free service and you can fish off the side as you travel, so instead of it costing you silver you actually make money as you go.

It felt like it took about ten or fifteen minutes to get to Iliya, which suggests there's more than one ferry covering the route. I wasn't really paying attention because a) I was taking screenshots b) I was fishing and c) I was eavesdropping on an interesting conversation between two players (and trying to work out how they were talking in local).

Iliya turned out to be a mountainous island with one small port and a scattering of tiny hamlets and camps. By this time I had watched a video on Housing and realized that I was doing it wrong. Other than for a Residence - the house you can decorate and live in like a regular MMO home - you don't need to go to the building at all. You just buy it from the map.

To get a Shipyard I had to buy the two houses it was connected to. Don't ask why. Especially don't ask who puts a Shipyard at the back of the town, half way up a mountain, on the second floor of a building!

Once I'd bought my three houses, two of which I didn't need or want, for a total of seven Contribution points (which, fortunately, I will get back when I sell the Shipyard later) it had to be converted for use. That took two and a half hours, which gave me more than enough time to do every quest on the small island and chop enough trees to get the twenty-five logs you need to make a raft, plus twiddle my thumbs and alt-tab out. A lot.

I also hired a worker and then spent twenty minutes trying and failing to get him to do any work before I realized he wouldn't get off his fat, Giant behind until the Shipyard was up and running. By the time I was ready for bed I had a functioning shipyard, a worker and all the wood I needed. I was still missing three black powder but I figured I could buy those from the marketplace back in Velia.

All that was left was to give the order to start processing the logs, switch off and go to sleep. Oh, no. Oh, very much no. No, no, no, no!

If you want to make something in Black Desert you have to be there. Your character doesn't necessarily have to do anything. You, the player, don't have to do very much. Just give an order or two every so often. All the imaginary work is done by your workers. But that doesn't mean anything is automatic.

Remember those twenty-five logs that have to be prepared in some undefined fashion before they can be fitted together to make a raft? Each log takes twenty-five minutes to process. You have to give each processing order separately. If you log out the whole thing stops. If you go afk the whole thing stops as soon as the log your worker is working on is done.

It takes almost eleven hours to make a raft. I have made one of those rafts in real life. I lived by a river as a kid and we used to make them in the summer holidays sometimes. As a nine-year old boy I could make one of those rafts in an afternoon. It did not take me eleven freakin' hours and I did not have a ten-foot tall professional workman and fully-fitted freakin' shipyard standing by!

Watch Pvt Wiggles video on how to make the largest sea-going vessel currently available in the Western version of Black Desert, the Fishing Boat. He begins thus: "Be warned, building this boat was the most stressful time I've had since beginning to play Black Desert". Take that warning very seriously indeed. Granted, by the end he's gushing about how satisfying and thrilling it was when he finally got to plonk the thing in the water and sail away but I take all these "it feels so good now I stopped banging my head against the wall" stories with the barrel-full of salt they deserve.

Suffice it to say that, having made two of the twenty-five required logs, I was thinking wistfully of GW2, wishing I'd spent the last three or four hours wrecking around in WvW, not wasting most of an evening setting myself up for another ten hours of tedious busy-work the next day. As a harbinger of things to come it was a black stormcrow indeed.

The simple fact is this: I'm not interested in any kind of imaginary "job" or "craft". I have never in my life yearned to run a virtual business or spend hours pretending I'm an artisan. If I was going to spend hour after hour doing something like that I'd rather switch the PC off and go do it in real life, where I might make things I could actually use or money I could actually spend.

I love crafting in MMOs but what I love are the "mini-games" and the progression. I like to level up my crafters for the exact same reason I like to level up my adventurers; because it opens up new possibilities but, most importantly, because it's fun while I'm doing it.

Vanguard's crafting system, the best I have ever seen in an MMO, was a full RPG experience in and of itself. EQ2's is another. I can spend hours, days, weeks immersed in either of them. In WoW or LotRO or Rift even GW2 crafting doesn't have that degree of complexity but it has some, and what it lacks is offset by the benefit of being simple and swift. Yes, there can be a lot of repetitive grind along the way but it's the kind of repetitive grind I find relaxing and enjoyable.

Black Desert seems to me to fall heavily between two stools when it comes to crafting. It has none of the deep creative aesthetic of a game that permits full-scale, open world construction, like Wurm or Landmark, yet it requires a similar degree of time commitment just to perform tasks that are not in and of themselves either involving or interesting but exist only as a means to an end. Even at this early stage, the more I see of BDO, the more I suspect that will apply to most of its systems and gameplay.

The learning curve is so steep and the visual representation so impressive that the initial impact is overwhelming. It feels as though it's a game of vast depths and infinite possibilities. Once the shock wears off, though, it doesn't take long to wonder just how deep it really is.

With no interest whatsoever in the PvP end game, no desire to run any kind of trading operation and finding crafting off-putting almost before I've gotten started, it does make me wonder what I'll find to do once the intellectual stimulation of figuring out how it all works begins to falter. There's the world to explore, naturally, but with everywhere looking surprisingly similar thus far, even that is beginning to look a less appealing long-term project than I first thought.

When I went to log in this morning and found the servers were down for five hours I felt oddly relieved that at least I didn't have to do any more work on that blasted raft. That can't be a good sign.

All Work And No Play Makes ArcheAge A Dull Game. Maybe.

It seems that ArcheAge is gathering a certain word-of-mouth momentum, which is odd, considering just how long we've all known about the game. I last mentioned it in the context of the eye-watering Alpha buy-in price but its been going the rounds for, what, three years now in alphas and betas and various live releases.

Back then, Ardwulf was drawing comparisons with Vanguard, which naturally made me feel somewhat favorably toward the possibility of playing it one day. Now Saylah is running a series of detailed "what you can do and how you can do it" type posts that are pushing  me two ways. The Piracy on the High Seas post I linked yesterday was kinda exciting but her most recent entry on the various ways of making money in ArcheAge made the whole enterprise sound anything but.

Here's the problem: just about all the activities Saylah lists - mining, crafting, trading, fishing, farming, playing the market - sound like work to me. Yes, they are, by and large, things you can do in most MMOs but in most MMOs they are sideshows, optional activities you could either go at with vigor, dabble in or opt out of entirely. They don't comprise the core activity of the game.

This, really, is my issue with sandbox gaming in general. I don't especially want to come home from a real job to a pretend one. I want to go exploring and adventuring I want to goof around. I don't want to tend crops or carry packages over long distances just to earn enough imaginary money to buy better crop-raising tools and faster package-carrying transport so I can do it all again only slightly faster. At least I don't want to have to do that.

The core activity of MMORPGs, at least in my understanding of the genre, is killing things to see what they drop then putting the best things you find on your character. Serial Killer Barbies; it's what the genre is. My characters live in the world and understand it but as a player looking in from outside, when it comes to actual gameplay, that's my motivation - kill some wildlife, dress a doll. In ArcheAge, that's right out: mobs don't drop coin, gear or crafting components. I'm not quite sure if that means they don't drop anything other than quest items but it doesn't leave much other than maybe consumables.

Saylah explains that questing is at the heart of leveling and gearing your character. "Gear is provided as quest rewards, looted from dungeons, earned with end game tokens or crafted by players...You receive gear sets at the end of quest chains – 3 pcs to the set from this guy, 2 pcs from that gal and a weapon from another one." That just happens to be a mechanic I strongly dislike. Several of them in fact. 

So, we appear to have an MMO in prospect that heavily focuses on things I would consider "work" not play, while excluding one of the key factors that draws me to play MMOs in the first place. Added to which it uses a series of mechanics I usually try to avoid whenever I can. The PvP and Piracy aspects don't put me off the way they did Syp - it's the underlying premise and basic mechanics.

Then I read SynCaine's rhetorical piece, where he asks himself, in tones positively dripping with ennui, whether he might end up giving it a run. He ponders "I still don’t get what a ‘sandpark’ is, in terms of what you are trying to accomplish...if your core gameplay (combat via questing) isn’t fun or engaging, am I really going to keep playing so I can fly around or sail a boat?" Is there a good answer to that? The only one I can think of is that the scenery really is that good and the gameplay you have to endure is not actively unpleasant. That's hardly a ringing endorsement.

Saylah, at least, is reassuring on both those points: Of the visuals she says " ArcheAge on the water has no equal in my MMO experience. It’s simply breath taking. Mining along the shoreline, fishing or standing by watching players load their ships, is a visual treat."  And on quests "All I can say is that they’re not horrible."

Unlike Syncaine I'm not struggling to find an MMO, any MMO, worth trying. I'll probably take a look at ArcheAge when it launches just because its new, it's free and it looks pretty. I wouldn't expect to stay long but you never know until you try. Perhaps what sounds like work in print will feel like play in practice.

On balance, though, the more I think about the full implications of sandbox gaming, the less attractive they seem. Oh, and since I didn't have any pictures of ArcheAge, I've taken the liberty of using a few snaps from The Hammers End. I finally caved and started the free trial last night. It's definitely not any kind of sandbox, the questing is meh and I don't think I'll be staying there long either but, hey, I'm a rat with a sword bigger than he is exploring dark woods with his undead, dual-cleaver-wielding pet fish! Beat that, ArcheAge!





 

Dry Top, Soggy Bottom : GW2, Everquest, CoS

Five days in and the choice of Dry Top as our entry-point to Maguuma shows an increasingly wry and knowing edge. After nearly two months without the constant drip drip drip of Living Story One this feels like a hiccup in the pipe, a short splash that might presage a flood and then...doesn't.

Leaving aside my feelings on the size of the map itself, which haven't changed and have indeed only become more intense as the details of the explorable area become familiar and known, there's the question of what there is to do there. Dry Top really sums up the problem, if problem it is, with GW2 in particular and, to some extent, theme park MMOs in general.

It's been a good week to make connections and comparisons. GW2 began Living Story Season Two, Everquest has a double-xp weekend for Independence Day and then there was my return to City of Steam, bringing a wider perspective and some sometimes-painful clarity.

The whole theme park/sandbox dichotomy has always been an anathema to me or perhaps more accurately a puzzlement. For the longest time, many years, I found it quite difficult even to comprehend the supposed distinctions that were being drawn by the proponents on each side of the argument. From there I moved to something approaching an intellectual understanding of the differences without ever feeling an emotional connection to them.

It seemed to me (and still does) that almost any MMO, so long as it provides even a vestigial approximation of a virtual world, can act as a sandbox for any player willing to come to it with sufficient open-mindedness, imagination and individuality. Most of my time spent in so-called theme-parks wasn't spent on or even near the rides and I rarely felt the dead hand of an organizing power shove me squarely between the shoulder-blades to send me stumbling along some appointed path.

These last few years things have changed somewhat. Thanks to this blog I'm even able to point, approximately and retrospectively, to the precise moment the rot might have begun, so early in my blogging career that it's fair to say no record of my pre-lapsarian state of mind exists in the record. This week, moving between three disparate settings, I really felt,  possibly for the first time in fifteen years, less than wholly in control of my own destiny. An uncomfortable feeling.

Taking the three MMOs in ascending order of dirigism, for anyone outside of a high-end raiding guild Everquest is generally an extremely laissez-faire affair. The world is almost incomprehensibly vast and sprawling. At any given level there are probably dozens of places you could profitably spend time and many ways you could choose to spend it. For a long, long time as you play, which you choose really doesn't matter all that much, but eventually, no mater how individualistic your playstyle, assuming your base goal is to see the level of your character rise or the number of her AAs increase, preferably both, the rate at which xp ceases to flow and begins to trickle will tend to nudge you towards efficiency.

Efficiency in leveling an Everquest character can mean many things. It can mean grouping; it can mean knowing and understanding how ZEMs (Zone Experience Modifiers) work; it can mean using xp potions and veteran rewards. For the general, casual player, however, it probably means not much more than knowing where to find Franklin Teek and how to get to the current Hot Zone for the relevant level range. This does act as a voluntary choice limiter and on my current drop-in schedule of a handful of hours a week, if I play my level 87 mage I tend to end up grabbing a couple of Teek's "simple tasks", legging it out to wherever he wants his murders done, popping my Lesson and doing whatever he's told me to do.


It's simultaneously tedious and satisfying. On a double xp weekend with a potion running it's tedious, mildly stressful and very satisfying indeed. It doesn't in any way compare to, y'know, playing the character properly, as I was doing with my Enchanter recently in Befallen.I do know at all times, however, that I'm only burning through that thirty-minute lesson in such a clinical and cynical fashion because EQ is no longer my focus game. It's an expediency. Were I to be spending 20+ hours a week there, hot zones and lessons both would figure much less prominently. Knowing that at any time, should I choose, I could re-immerse myself in the vast, still considerably unexplored world outside of the Golden Path removes almost all the sting of doing things the "right" way.

In the middle comes GW2. At under two years old there's clearly no way Tyria Mark 2 can compete with Norrath, with its decade and a half of development and twenty expansions under its belt. GW2 did, however, set out at a dead run with a very large, open, explorable world filled with incident, spectacle and stuff to do. It also featured, at launch, an ethos so far from imposing direction on players that the main complaints came from people who felt lost, unguided and uncomfortable with the lack of hand-holding and signposts.

From that enviable and admirable start the developers have backpedaled away about as fast as their development cycle will carry them. To rehash the reasons would make this post even longer than it's already shaping up to be. Suffice it to say that GW2 has become a game based around daily tasks and tables of "achievements" all set not by the players but the makers. Everything is codified and calibrated, from the Tournaments to the Living Story. The great, open world is still out there to explore but except and unless a particular locale is featured in the story arc nothing changes and, more importantly, nothing is added.

Our new playground, Dry Top, consists of a small, self-contained area that flips between two states (Sandstorm and Not-Sandstorm) on a set schedule. Players can't affect whether or when a storm arrives. Nor can they affect its intensity. All they can change is the price vendors charge for the supposedly-desirable items they sell. Neither can players make meaningful choices abut how they bring about this fiscal benefit. Events pop on what appears to be a fixed timer or a trigger. By doing events players fill a progress bar. The more events they complete the better a deal vendors offer. That's about it, unless there are subtleties I've missed, which is always possible, even likely.

In addition to the events and the worked-for, paid-for rewards there are some achievements to knock out (finding Lost Coins is particularly enjoyable so long as you don't have an aversion to ArenaNet's obsession with jumping). There are also the Buried Treasure Chests which appear during the sandstorms and which contain a range of crafting recipes and useable items. To open the chests you need lockpicks, which you can get from completing the storyline instances or from the achievements you can get while repeating them. Alternatively you can buy lockpicks from the vendors using the special currency, Geodes, that you get from all events both in Dry Top and in the associated storyline. It's a neat, closed system. Talk about owing your life to the company store.

Still, it's fun. For a while. Especially if the chests or the vendors have things you want and for as long as the events remain fairly fresh. The tradeable items and recipes, which appears to be most of them, are already on the Trading Post at very reasonable prices, though, making the prospect of grinding for lockpicks and a random chance of getting items I want seem unattractive compared to grinding some other content for Gold and just buying them. And even if I wanted to do it the "proper" way, the crowds seem very fickle already. On the opening day they were light and that's being charitable. A day later there were big zergs. Now, on the first weekend, it feels quiet again. The chances of those vendors lowering their prices doesn't look good but then again I'm not sure that matters.

Far more interesting than any of the prepared entertainment on offer are the conversations between Dry Top residents and the intrigues they hint at. For now this corner of the park is very much all about the rides but we can at least imagine that when the Living Story carnival packs its tents and moves on something of more substantial, lasting interest might replace it. Similarly, after a whole year of LS2, we can hope for a significant tract of land in which imaginary people lead imaginary lives the way background characters in MMOs do.

It's a hope beyond anything I can muster up for City of Steam, much though I still, and
despite everything, retain a strong interest and affection for that game. The hopes of anything resembling a coherent, growing, developing world there were dashed long ago. Sad remnants linger to remind us of what might have been: the housing stubs, the railhauler stations, the billboards and signs in the city squares and streets. Beautiful and useless.

The main storyline plugs away, seemingly divorced from the reality around it, which reality being an increasingly impressive, entertaining and polished series of mini-games, activities and diversions attended to by an ever-cleaner, more responsive and intuitive UI. As a game, CoS:Arkadia is both slicker and better than it has ever been and I can endorse it more wholeheartedly in that context than at any time in its peculiar, shaky history. As a virtual world, however, it died in a ditch a long while back.

I'm really enjoying playing. I've gotten almost back to where I was on the old servers before they closed, hitting level 20 this week. I'm moderately determined to see the end of the storyline which is probably another fifteen or twenty levels away I would guess. I even feel that I might be willing to play up another character, which, given the unbending linearity of the format, was something I didn't think I'd ever say.

All of which gets us nowhere very much. Depending on context, undirected gameplay can be overwhelming, over-directed gameplay stifling. Depending on context, linear gameplay can be satisfying, free-form gameplay liberating. There's a point where too much freedom intersects with too little to do and another where a satisfying series of goals becomes a tedious succession of chores. Pleasure lies in the hinterland surrounding those points and a map to that territory could make someone very rich indeed.

I do feel that things are shifting, somewhere, very slowly. Things have changed. The upside is that I now get pleasure from activities that would once have irritated me yet at the same time I know I'm missing something I used to have: control. I'm just not sure, yet, whether it's control I've willingly given up or whether it was wrested away from me while my attention was distracted.

I just hope it's not going to take me another fifteen years to work that one out.

Come And Have A Go If You Think You're Hard Enough (Emotionally)

There's been something of a blogging roundtable on PvP going on recently. J3w3l has most of the links in these two posts as well as a thoughtful take on PvP as end-game content.

As must be plain from yesterday's breathless report on the current state of play in Yak's Bend's bid for Tourney glory, I'm far from averse to a little consensual PvP action, or indeed a lot, but I wasn't always quite as blase about being virtually murdered. I chose Everquest over Ultima Online as my first foray into online gaming specifically because of the horror stories I'd read. Spending two hours chopping wood only to be chopped down yourself the minute you stepped out of the forest. That sort of thing.

All the same, the idea retained some kind of sick fascination and I did make characters on EQ's Zek servers although I never really played any of them to any meaningful level. Actually, it was kind of hard to level up on Rallos Zek, the Free-for-All ruleset server, seeing as how a brand new character could be and usually was ganked on spawning into the game for the first time.  I don't believe I ever got my Ogre as far as his guildmaster even though he was probably standing only a few feet away.

When Dark Age Of Camelot arrived it was a very big deal. Western fantasy MMORPGs were not thick on the ground back then (I know, hard to believe...) and a new one was something quite special. As I recall, Mrs Bhagpuss and I were moderately apprehensive about the Realm vs Realm aspect but the draw of a new world to explore, not least one based on myths and legends we'd grown up with, was too much to resist.

DAOC was where I learned three things:

1. I enjoy PvP, in moderation.
2. PvP and PvE sit uncomfortably together.
3. Left to their own devices, other players make poor content providers.

Number One is largely a matter of personal taste and personality. For some people the entire concept of entertaining yourself by doing bad things to other people, even if the bad things are imaginary and the other people said they were up for it, is just morally wrong. For others there never comes a time when getting shanked by a player playing a rogue feels the same as getting shivved by a rogue running under AI.

Plenty of people, for all kinds of perfectly good reasons, don't like, and will never learn to like, fighting other players. Plenty more, while naturally nervous at the start, will soon get the hang of things and find that, like roughage, some PvP now and again makes for a healthy MMO diet.

PvE in the open world. It stands for Player vs Exhaustion.

 Number Three has been discussed here before. DAOC hadn't been out for very long at all before some of the shortcomings of the concept and design began to make themselves felt. Leaving aside the problems of my hardware, which turned large battles into slide-shows, DAOC fights could be both thrilling and entertaining but they were also utterly unreliable. If you come home from work on a Friday night ready for a little blood-letting, nothing sours the mood like spending two hours roaming an empty borderland looking for someone to fight.

Mythic didn't take long to recognize the problem, which is how we came to get instanced Battlegrounds. If you were looking for trouble you'd come to the right place. Except that even in Battlegrounds it turned out not everyone came just for the fight. Some people wanted to win. There were evenings where I spent two hours waiting in vain outside one of the other team's portal keeps for someone, anyone to come out because no-one wanted to move until they thought they had enough troops. Sometimes there just weren't even numbers so no-one fought anyone.

As time went on the process got refined and revised by other developers in other games. WoW, Warhammer, Rift, EQ2 - they all have automated matchmaking systems for their instanced PvP areas, drawing from a sufficiently large pool of people, usually cross-server, to ensure enough turn up to get a fight started. Specific objectives, often with timers and rewards, ensure that there's action, not just a staring contest. WoW with Wintergrasp, GW2 with The Mists and TESO with Cyrodiil combine the original "Frontier" concept with Battleground mechanics and spread the result across whole maps, zones or regions.

It's not End Game unless there's a Dragon in it somewhere

That leaves Number Three: mixed content. Some people swear by it, others swear about it. There's no question that it's not for everyone. I didn't play Vanilla WoW but it's notable how many of the rosy-tinted reveries I've read about those halcyon days come freighted with anecdotes about the running battles around Tarren Mill or the city invasions. Indeed, that's become such a predominant narrative that, not having been there myself, I just had to google to find out if WoW actually had any non-PvP servers at launch (it did).

Theme park MMOs, to use that less-than-helpful shorthand, rely very heavily on authored content. It's problematic enough when they allow players to kill NPCs in a kind of PvP proxy war; allowing one player to gank another just before she completes a long and difficult quest...well, you see the problem. Somehow I can't quite see revenge killings standing in for Heroic Dungeons as end-game content for PvE players.

Sandboxes, though, that's a different matter, isn't it? Somehow PvP and sandboxes have become almost inextricably linked in the minds of MMO players and developers, to the point where even Landmark purports to be heading down a road that might include non-consensual player versus player combat up to and including the destruction of players' homes and properties.

There's really no reason sandboxes have to be competitive. They could just as easily be co-operative. Xsyon, the little talked-about FFA PvP MMO once touted as a rival for the rather more talked-about Darkfall, recently chose to open a pure PvE server. Whether that was a flailing bid to keep a sinking ship afloat or a response to in-game demand I have no idea. It did, briefly, make me consider downloading the game though. Briefly.

Opinions are like tails. Everybody has one.

What's the point of all this rambling then? There isn't one as such. There's no right answer, no one true path. I have no great insight to bring to the debate. Mostly its that, much though I might enjoy it if it happened, I find the idea that any form of open world PvP could ever stand in for constructed, organized developer-led content quite hard to swallow.

The numbers of PvP servers and the size of their populations in what we might call mainstream MMOs suggests that both demand and take-up among players is relatively low. Even in large, successful MMOs that have easily accessible instanced PvP my guess is it goes unused by the majority of players. My guess is also that, expensive and time-consuming though it may be to produce, some form of top-down, provided content, be it dungeons, raids or narrative events, is likely to make up the bulk of end-game content for PvE MMOs for a good while yet. Player-made content like that found in Neverwinter's Foundry may carry some of the load but the real heavy lifting is still going to have to be done by paid professionals, much though their paymasters might prefer otherwise.

Unless someone can come up with some entirely new idea. That'd be nice.