Once Human: Winter Has Come

There very nearly wasn't a post again today. There barely is one now. I am not exaggerating when I say my desire to play Once Human is all-consuming.

Okay, I am exaggerating. That would literally be the definition of an exaggeration, to say that I am entirely consumed by the desire to log in and play this particular video game. That I would cease to eat or drink or sleep until I dropped dead of exhaustion, thirst and starvation at the keyboard. Although thirst would kill me quickest so hunger wouldn't get a look-in and no-one ever died of falling asleep unless it was at the wheel.

Okay, yes, there are lots of other ways falling asleep could kill someone. I get that. It kind of ruins the joke, though, don't you think, to have to list them all? 

There was a joke in there? Must have missed it.

Enough with the padding. The reason this post exists, other than to avoid my missing three days in a row as I work the weekend, is to share some snaps I took of the sudden, unexpectedly heavy snowfall that hit my home in Once Human this afternoon. 

Until now, the most I'd seen of snow, outside of the mountains anyway, were some thin sheets lying on the ground here and there and a flurry of flakes whirling in the air now and then. The temperature fluctuates a great deal, frequently dropping below -30, leading to hypothermia and death for anyone insufficiently well wrapped up but until today I hadn't seen anything pitch, as we say where I come from.

As you can see, that's all changed. Not only is the snow sticking (Other people say that. I don't.) it's drifting too. It's lying a foot or more deep all over my territory and it looks fantastic. 

I'm a long-time afficionado of virtual snow. It has its own tag on the blog. I once wrote an article for a fanzine about the depiction of snow in comics. I love me some good flake.

I think this is the best ground snow I've seen in a game. Rift probably had the best white-out blizzard conditions but I can't recall seeing snow lying this convincingly before. When I stand in it it comes up to my knees and when I move I see myself trudging through it, leaving a deep trench behind that doesn't fill in and disappear in moments like footsteps in most other games.

Even more impressive is the way it coats the surfaces, clinging to the flowers in clumps and leaving the grass coated and bowed down. It's almost eerily realistic. 

Meanwhile, my household deviants carry on as though nothing has happened. They happily trot through the new-fallen snow - or wade through it in the case of the shorter ones, like the somewhat startled bunny in the picture below - somehow finding their way to the rocks and plants buried beneath. The harvest must come in, regardless of the weather.

My plan for today, before I decided I'd rather play the game than write about it, was to go into some detail about how much I'm still learning and discovering, even after a hundred and thirty hours and counting. I feel like I'm only now starting to realise just how much I've missed so far. It's like I missed half the game. More.

That's all going to have to wait. I want to get another couple of hours in before I have to stop for the night and I won't be able to do much after that until next week.

No point wasting time talking about it, when you could be doing it, right?

Can You Keep A Secret? Doesn't Look Like Funcom Can.

You know that feeling, when when someone tells you there's something you can't do and even though you didn't want to do it, weren't even thinking of doing it, now you know you can't do it, you really want to? Yeah, I bet you do. Well, I had it today, when I read this news item at MassivelyOP.

It's a long time since I last thought about logging into Secret World Legends. No, actually, that's not entirely true. I thought about it yesterday, funnily enough, although not because I wanted to play. 

It was while I was running through Great Cleave in New World, looking at the dirty snow and wondering if it was the most convincing winterscape I'd seen in an mmorpg. I've always been something of an afficionado of imaginary snow. One of the first articles I ever wrote for a comics fanzine was called "Good Snow Art". 

There generally isn't all that much "good snow art" in mmorpgs. Rift wasn't too bad, particularly when it came to blizzard conditions and whiteouts, but even there everything was absolutely pristine, as it is in most games. 

Snow zones tend to share a certain unreality with lava zones. Make everything the same color and then add some glare so it hurts to look at, that seems to be the general principle. Even the Guild Wars 2 art department, otherwise exemplary, seems to throw up its hands at the thought of grading fifty shades of white. 

New World has some very odd ideas about representing weather but the art team has done a pretty good job with snow. The covering in Great Cleave is scrappy, trodden down with the dirt showing through along the tracks and not too much lying on the exposed rocks. It feels cold and bleak and wintry without the slightest hint of wonderland.

It's good but it's not as good as the snow zones in Secret World, Carpathian Fangs especially. At least, I don't think it is. It's been a while since I was there. Maybe I'm remembering it as better (or more realistic) than it was.

So, yes, I was thinking about logging into SWL just to go check. Probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Even if I'd wanted to do a post comparing the two, I could just have flicked through the hundreds of screenshots I've already taken there. No need to go to the trouble of patching up, logging in, finding the right portal in The Agartha and running halfway across the map to get a photo.

And I doubt I'd have done the post, anyway. I've posted about my feelings for snow before. I don't have anything new to say (Although when has that ever stopped me?)

It's likely nothing would have come of it, if it hadn't been for that news item, telling me I couldn't log in so I shouldn't bother trying. I tried to ignore it all day but by teatime I couldn't resist checking to see if the issue had been fixed. 

According to the update at MOP, Funcom was "looking into it". At least that suggested it wasn't intentional. They hadn't just shut the game down and hoped no-one would notice. 

I found my login details and clicked on the icon on my desktop. The patcher went through its usual four-stage routine, downloaded a few files, then handed me on to the authentication server and thence to the login server... and that was as far as I got. 

I could have left it at that. I'm sure Funcom will get things sorted eventually. They'll give us some notice before they sunset the game. They're that professional, at least.

In a way, it might be for the best if they did close the servers and call it a day. I would lay good odds that The Secret World and/or Secret World Legends would be back in emulated form in short order and I'd also bet that whoever set that up would do a better job of curating the IP than Funcom have.

For now, though, Secret World Legends is still there, even if no-one can log in. And so is the original game. I'd forgotten about that but the MOP article confirms "the original Secret World server is still up and operating", unaffected by whatever's troubling the newer version of the game.

I'm sure everyone can guess what's coming next...

 

It really wasn't that difficult. I found this post on the forums which explains the process in five very straightforward steps. I added a sixth, almost certainly unecessary, step of my own by copying the entire SWL directory and making my changes there. It was 50GB so I wouldn't recommend it. I'll be deleting mine when I'm done.

Once I'd gotten the config file sorted all there was to do was run the patcher again. There was a gig and a half of data to download, which went very slowly. I wrote most of this post while I was waiting. Other than that, the whole process was perfectly smooth.

It's been many years since I last saw my TSW character. I tried to remake her as closely as possible in SWL but I can see now that I didn't come all that close. My SWL character's something of a show-off. The original's more introverted, less flashy, a little bleak.

The other character on the account, who I remember making but not playing, seems to have suffered some kind of identitiy crisis in the long lay-off. Whoever they were, all that remains is a string of numbers and a blank space.

Once in game I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the settings, trying to get the controls to work. Unfortunately, the Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay, which I didn't ask for and can't seem to switch off, overwrites TSW's native controls. That's why the screenshots in this post aren't very good. 

It also took me the best part of half an hour to find the right portal in the Agartha to get to Carpathian Fangs so I could get a few pictures of snow. When I got there, winter seemed nowhere near as well-rendered as I remembered but there were a lot of werewolves wandering around so I was a little on edge. I may not have been appreciating the finer details.

All in all it was an interesting little expedition. It was very nice to reacquaint myself with my original character but somewhat to my surprise what that did was demonstrate that, emotionally, I've moved on. She didn't feel like my "real" character. I could sense an absence. She didn't seem to be quite there in the way my SWL character is.

That might all change if I were to play her regularly but there's precious little chance of that. It's good to know that I can drop in for a visit if I feel the urge, all the same. 

And who knows? One day it may be the only Secret World game left. I wonder which has the more players these days? There were several people in the Agartha as I was bumbling around and there was some activity in general chat. I'd log into SWL to compare but, oh, wait, that's right! I can't.

Let's hope Funcom get that fixed and soon.

Pale Lilac Snow: Elder Scrolls Online

Yesterday evening saw my return to Elder Scrolls Online, a little over a year since the last login, when I stuck my head around the door of my free inn room, saw how dark and pokey it was and promptly logged out again.

In all the time I've played the game (can't be more than a few hours in a few years) I've only ever tasted a single race and class, Khajiit Dragonknight, levelled, painfully, slowly, sporadically to level twelve. All I've seen of the game is the starting area for that combo.

Or maybe it is. Hard to remember. ESO hasn't made much of an impact. About all I recall are some caves, a bit of woodland, a rocky island where some orcs live. Oh, and a beach. Maybe I might have seen a strip of desert once, on a boat trip.

To be honest, it's all a bit of a blur. I do know I haven't seen any snow before, though, so the place I found myself in last night has to be new.

With cat-people off the menu, the options that faced me at character creation weren't doing much. There seemed to be a lot of elves, never a happy omen. Some rather ordinary-looking humans. One of those viking/barbarian types.

Nothing really bit. The faux-authentic gear wasn't helping.

I don't know, time was when what I wanted from a high-medieval MMORPG was armor looking like the artist sketched it through dusty glass at a down-at-heel market town museum in some central European backwater but I've been spoiled. These days I'd rather come on like the sugared-up second cousin of a Ruritanian princess, tricked out for a tour with a favorite band of glam-folk troubadours, on the run from that day job in the circus.

I like a bit of color, in other words. Not getting much of that here.

So I chose the lizard. If you can't dress exotic, be exotic, right? And they get frills on their heads. Or punk rock spikes. I went with the spikes.

It looked good in character create but in most MMORPGs no character design survives contact with the game engine. The screenshots tell the old story here. Ninety minutes of play, I really only got a good look at my character once.

That was the oddly blurred shot above. I'm not even sure how it happened. Must have hit some chance combination of keys. It's the only shot where you can - just about - see the character's face. Not that a lizard shows much expression. And the face markings and head-spikes are hidden under the rough cloth cowl.

ESO is one of those games where the graphics look better in screenshots. It's funny how often that happens. Or the other way round. I was only saying the other day how The Hammers End looks better than the screenshots suggest.

It must be something to do with settings. I confess that's something I almost never pay any attention to in any game, although given the ridiculous number of screenshots I take I almost certainly should. I tend to shy away from getting involved too closely with things like that, for my own safety. The last thing I need is discovering something like Black Desert's super-sophisticated in-game photo options. No-one needs a virtual David Bailey.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking at my character. I was looking at the snow. It was pretty good snow and I'm something of an afficionado. Snowficcionado. It's a word, now. I once wrote a piece on Good Snow Art for a comics fanzine. I may have done something similar here, on this blog.

Snow does make everything look better. There's all that blue in the palette. I know humans can recognize more shades of green than any other color but green in games tends towards the bland, except in jungles. Blue has much more resonance.

Blue, white, red. Winter landscapes, there's sometimes a surprising amount of red, bleeding into the blue, leeching pale lavenders and mauves. All these shots drip with it. It makes the cold seem so warm.

Which is probably just as well because, lizard. Cold-blooded, yes? Unless Tamriel evolution is very different, which of course it may be because, magic.

Anyway, I was surprised to find my lizard, whose descriptive background had mentioned something about swampland, waking up in a log cabin somewhere in the frozen north. A quick conversation with the nearest person confirmed no more than I'd expected: shipwreck, washed ashore, unconscious, found by villagers, now pressed into service against imminent threat. Yadda yadda and like that.

Could there be a more generic opening? Well, I guess. I mean, lizard in the snow, that's a twist. Explanation as to why or even how any of it happened, though? Not forthcoming.

Of course, I did opt to skip the tutorial. Maybe it was in there. But the game helpfully told me I'd done it before on another character so I didn't have to go through it again and I took the offer, gladly. No matter it was half a dozen years ago and all forgotten now.  No matter I'd been a tiger, then, in another place. Let's press on.

Out of the cabin I ran around some. It was daytime, for a wonder. In the time I played, night never fell. It did get a bit less bright for a while, one time. It helped a lot, the sun on the snow, the brightness. I'm losing patience with spending half my playtime in thick twilight let alone deep night. It was nice, being able to see, for once.

I grabbed some quests as I happened across them. I didn't seek them out or linger. I don't like either the font or the background. Harsh. Dark. Abrasive. These things affect my enjoyment strongly. I have these issues with print, too. There are novels I just won't read because of the way the text lies on the page.

If it's good, you'd make the effort but the writing in ESO is ponderous. No, that's maybe not the world. Ponderous suggests uncertainty and quest text here is far from uncertain. Too confident, if anything. Portentous, that could be the word I'm groping for. Or pretentious, though usually I like that. No, it's portentous, all right. Portentous and leaden. Lies heavy on the line. A common failing of fantasy, transcribed here faithfully from those endless series that stretch an author's career across decades.

Although... let's be fair. The few quests I did last night weren't all that bad. Better, or at least, less wearing to read than those I remembered from the other starting area. More perfunctory, less long-winded. Mostly "go find this guy" and, when I found him, "go do this thing".

At one point I almost felt a sense of urgency. A ship sighted, an invasion anticipated. Danger blowing in on the wind. You wouldn't know it from the voice acting, of course, still as first table-reading as ever. I have a theory about this. It applies to video game voice acting in general, not just to ESO. I don't know enough about the process to begin pontificating. Yet.

I didn't do a lot of questing, anyway. Mostly I ran around in the snow, taking snapshots, killing stuff. I ran into a bandit camp early on. Expected to die, being only level two or three. Tried to con the bandits, couldn't figure out how, so I blasted one to see what would happen. What happened was I killed him.

So I killed some more. Quite a few. Got a hat, put it on. Burned some supplies, freed a captive. Bandit Camp 101. I dinged. It occurred to me this must be the famous equalization. One zone for all.. Makes you wonder why levels at all except I guess without them there'd be none of that drip drip drip, progress. I suppose now I can go anywhere, kill anyone, like in that old joke, the one about the army. 

My lizard's a sorceror. I thought maybe it would be easier than melee, given the awful, awful controls. It wasn't, actually. If anything it was harder. More keys to press, can't just spam LMB/RMB. But I lived, bandits died. Can't complain.

And it was fun, kind of. As much fun as the horrible controls let it be. I started thinking maybe I should get a controller and use that. Could hardly be worse. I was already thinking about it. I even looked at some on Amazon the other day.  

After the bandits I went to some kind of temple, swarming with skeletons. Again, I lived, they died Or undied. Whatever the verb is. I do like fighting bandits and undead at low levels. Simple pleasures. If these count as low levels, that is.

The game was kind of busy. Really busy, actually. There were players everywhere. It seems ESO etiquette dictates you just pile on when you see someone fighting. People were always "helping" me to kill stuff. I got the loot so that worked out. I didn't reciprocate, though.

I found all my runes, opened the crypt door, looking for the necromancer. If I followed the plot I think I was supposed to kill him but I never even saw him. There was a line. I didn't bother waiting, just spoke to a ghost. He seemed to think I'd done whatever it was I'd come there to do. Fine, then.

I grabbed a bit of paper that said something or other and left. Gave it to the guy who'd sent me. He was waiting right oustside, which saved me a run. He asked me to go back to the village, tell someone what had happened, not that I really knew what that was. I did it anyway and the guy said something bad was going to happen so it would probably be best if we all ran away. More of the supposed realism? Maybe, but it's going to be tough adventuring if all the quests go "check out if something bad's happening and if it is come tell me so we can all run away".

I said I'd tell a few other people and we'd be off but actually all I did was move five feet away and log out. I'm sure he won't mind waiting although on form so far it could be another year or two.

Or maybe not. It was kind of fun. I think ESO may well be another of the growing list of MMORPGs (FFXIV, LotRO) I enjoy the more, the less I quest. Now if I could just figure out a way to make the combat not actively annoying...

Musings On Returning To WoW

The Blizzcon buzz had its intended effect on me. All the talk of Classic servers, a new expansion, fresh adventures in worlds old, new, both and neither, led me to patch up and log in to World of Warcraft for the first time in maybe a year.

In fact, I can't remember when I last played. I know I asked for and was given Legion for my birthday a year ago but all I did with it was register the purchase against my account.

I clearly remember playing for a couple of months during the exciting Legion pre-release Invasion event, at which point I presumably must have re-subscribed because I had access to my higher level characters when I was doing it. After that I seem to remember doing something in Warlords of Draenor and rapidly losing the will to live log in. After that, nothing.

Looking at character select it seems my Dwarf Hunter, who topped out in the low 70s back when I played WoW the first time, is now Level 95. I can only assume that happened during the invasions unless I used some kind of boost on him but I don't believe I've ever acquired a level boost for WoW.

I could fact-check all this by flipping through my back pages of course. No doubt I posted about most of it. It's telling, though, that I can't remember. I like WoW but it doesn't make that much of a lasting impression on me.

There are two reasons for that. Two that I can think of, anyway. One is the Lore and the other the graphics.

In the Oxford Visual Dictionary this is the entry for "Depressing"

WoW lore is opaque to me at best. Mostly it doesn't even manage obscurity. It's simply invisible. I didn't grow up with franchise. I didn't play Warcraft. Until WoW appeared in 2004 I had never even heard of Blizzard and even after the WoW juggernaut began to roll it was years before I'd have been able to name another Blizzard title.

When I did start playing none of the overarching story meant anything to me whatsoever. Plot twists and revelations must have soared over my head, not that I noticed. I did the Death Knight introduction for example, which people seem to rate very highly in terms of both lore and story, and all I remember about it was how long, tedious and claustrophobic it was.

Consequently, the only level on which the narrative connects with me is the local. I can empathize with the problems of farmers being menaced by scarecrows. I can immerse myself in the investigation of a murder or the search for a missing child but the machinations of racial leaders, tyrants, demon-kings and dragons might as well be so much static.

That's the problem with the writing but there's an even greater issue with the illustration. I'm not someone who has to have state-of-the-art graphics and I like WoW's semi-cartoon stylization - in theory.

In practice, though, as I've mentioned before, the textures are problematic. Worse, the palette has a tendency towards the morose that can be - and often is - depressing. I think my memory chooses to protect me against remembering much about all that. I guess it must do or else I'd probably never come back.

I think I saw this scene on black velvet at a craft fair once...

I think it's not insignificant that, in my first and only lengthy, successfully enjoyable run in WoW, I began in Ironforge and spent my formative first days in the snowfields. Partly it's that snowy zones are by some margin my favorite terrain, climate and geography in MMOs but more than that it's that pure blue-white snow doesn't suffer so badly from either the textural or tonal difficulties I find in almost all of Azeroth's other landscapes.

When I do take another pass at playing, Blizzard's famous polish never seems to extend to the patching process. Every time I come back after a break it's a struggle to get the game to run, even though I'm using the same installation on the same machine.

This time I had to uninstall and reinstall the Batlenet app and do a few more tweaks before the game would update. Once the patcher started to co-operate there turned out to be over 5GB of new files to install.

With that out of the way I logged into one of my under-20s, the Worgen Druid. It transpired I'd left off playing her exactly one quest short of the very end of her racial introduction, so as soon I'd sunk a battleship (or, more accurately, vaguely wandered about behind some NPCs who sunk a battleship for me) I was free to leave the dismal, dark, foreboding rainfields of wherever the heck it is that Worgen come from for the dismal, dark, brooding rainfields of that hideous Night Elf place I loathe.

I was not best pleased to find myself back in Teldrassil but I felt momentarily happy when the first quest I took suggested I leave: less so when I fell off a cliff and died on a tree a hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on another tree branch another hundred meters below. Then ran back, revived, fell off the branch and died on a third tree branch another hundred meters below the last one.

Just the footsteps in the snow feel somehow joyous.

Fourth fall I survived. Just. I made my way to the marker on the map. Aiming straight for it was what got me killed in the first place but I'm nothing if not stubborn. All of this in the dark and the rain of Azeroth's real-time night cycle, a peculiar design feature that means that historically most of my WoW playtime has taken place in poor lighting except at the weekends. Another reason I like the area around Don Morogh the best - the snow reflects what limited light there is.

The next quest marker pointed to the other side of the bay. I could see the town there from the dock where I was standing. Naturally I jumped in and began to swim only to be hit with Exhaustion half way across.

I understand the purpose of this notional barrier when it's employed to prevent players leaving the playable area or bypassing obstacles intended to be impassable but in this instance it seemed perverse. I was compelled to swim back to shore and go speak to some NPC who put me on a griffin, whereupon the griff flew me back along exactly the line I'd just swum to exactly the place I would have climbed out of the water had I been allowed to continue under my own steam.

By the time I finally spoke to the next questgiver I was so irritated that just the sight of the execrable font Blizzard insists on using, almost unreadable as it is against the equally awful mudded texture and color of the background, that I logged out to search for and reinstall the excellent Add On that replaces WoW's clunky, ugly front end with GW2's smooth and familiar UI.

It's behind you!

Come to think of it, I already had that Add On active last time I was playing so where did it go? Wherever it went I wish it hadn't because getting it back was another fiddly exercise that resulted in the Battlenet patcher demanding to re-download the exact same 5GB it had already installed not an hour earlier.

As I said, my regular experience playing WoW suggests the famous Blizzard "polish" is something that happens to other people. I've never known the game operate any more smoothly than any other MMO and less so than some.

Anyway, it's done now and I have the thing looking a lot like GW2, which is a big improvement. I'm considering whether I want to resub for a while and get some Legion done before it's quite literally last year's thing.

Legion aside, I would like to play my Gnome Hunter some more. She's still playable for free at level 20 but I daren't do anything with her lest she level up and become "Inactive". I'd be playing a Hunter in Legion, too, with my aforementioned level 95 Dwarf, although I suppose I could take the free Level 100 Demon Hunter and roll with that instead.

At the very least the colors are upbeat...

Chances are that I won't do either. I'll probably just footle around with the Worgen Druid - if I can move her to somewhere less utterly depressing - and maybe roll someone new as well. I'm not sure I can justify subbing if I can't find the time to play - but then I've been saying that for a year now.

I suspect the real drag anchor stopping me is strongly connected to the aforementioned issues with Lore and Look. Other than in the big, social events like Invasions, I mostly enjoy WoW in the low-to-mid levels. The higher up you get the more portentous the narrative becomes and, as Syp has often pointed out, in all MMOs, end-game zones tend to be ugly, so the game doubles down on the things I already most dislike about it.

Maybe I'll play my Panda. Wilhelm says the Pandaria zones are "excellent" and I trust his judgment on these things.

Bitterfrost Symphony : GW2

Partly because it's IntPiPoMo but mostly because I don't have time to write a proper post, Inventory Full presents spoiler-free scenes from the great new map, Bitterfrost Frontier.

It's a good-sized map, around half as big as Frostgorge Sound, which lies immediately to the south.

Where Frostgorge is particularly bleak and barren, all icefields and glaring white. Bitterfrost, despite being further north and even colder, enjoys a much more varied environment.

There are forests on a scale not seen anywhere else in The Shiverpeaks. The storms are equally over-sized. White-out conditions are not uncommon.

Hot springs encourage bursts of green among the blue-white snow and dark pines. Rivers flow freely. This attracts quaggans but I guess you can't have everything.

The color palette is rich and varied, especially at night.

Or in the extensive cave systems.

As you would expect, the Kodan are a strong presence here.

And as they say, if you can't beat them...

Snow On Her Shoes, Frost In Her Hair : FFXIV

MMOs tend to be much more alike than they are different. Every new entrant to the field comes freighted with ghost memories, reaching outwards from the designers, inward from the players. In the same way we struggle to describe a new band without citing past names as calibration, so all talk of new games relies on references to those we've already played.

Playing FFXIV, the constant referent in our small Linkshell has been Vanguard, in great part for the crafting which bears many similarities, but also for the settings, the feel and most especially the look. In its day the game to which the late Keith Parkinson gave his unmistakeable visual stamp was rated by many, myself among them, as the best-looking virtual world yet brought to screen. Not everyone agreed. Some people positively loathed its gritty textures and pointed at the ill-fitting rocks that could, not infrequently, be found floating a few inches clear of the ground.

I barely noticed those shortcomings at the time, swept up as I was in the richness of the tapestry of that huge, open world but re-visit Vanguard now and the dropped stitches show. It does look tired.

Technology and taste, neither of them stand still. Right now FFXIV seems to me, by some margin, the most visually accomplished virtual world into which I have stepped but five years on, maybe a lot sooner than that, Eorzea too may look worn and weary. Greedy eyes may all be focused elsewhere.

For the while, though,it's a joy to explore. If I have a current goal it's to visit all the overland zones and take a positively heroic quantity of screenshots. As I mentioned in a reply to Chris K.'s comment on the previous post, gorgeous though the screenshots are they don't really do justice to what I see in-game when I take them. The lighting and weather effects particularly rely on motion and don't always come across. Maybe I should take some video.




In a restless drive to open out the world and find new horizons, last night I made it to Coerthas Central Highlands, a 35ish zone somewhat above my Arcanist's level but not so far as to make a cautious traveler pale. It's the first snow zone and snow zones have a long history of being among my favorites in any MMO. Sometimes they can be featureless expanses of white; more often they're pristine, shimmering wonderlands of silver and winter blue. Occasionally, like Carpathian Fangs in The Secret World the snow has clearly lain for a long while, becoming trammeled with mud from the wheels of passing carts and the blood-caked boots of adventurers.

What I've seen of Coerthas so far is closer to Carpathian Teeth than Iron Pine Peaks although it's hard to be sure since it seems to have been night for most of the time I've been there. Perhaps days are shorter in the North. The only action my Arcanist has seen so far was when she engaged what appeared to be some Demons in a FATE. That turned out rather well, and profitably, but when there's no gang to follow she's felt safer behind the impressively thick walls of some very doughty keeps, not least since around her the muttering is of dragons.

Faint hear ne'er won fair screenshot, however, so in the interests of Eorzean photojournalism this evening will see her pushing ever further northwards in search of mystery, adventure and, with any luck, a snowstorm or two. until the inevitable yet almost certainly unforeseen encounter, possibly even with the rumored dragon, returns her without ceremony or warning to her bind.

Which is in Ul'Dah, the desert city far to the south. Good thing FFXIV's not quite so old-school as to require a return trip to corpse or a prayer at a gravestone. That's one nostalgic note I can manage very happily without.

Snow, Bow, Off We Go: Guild Wars

Guild Wars seems to have snagged me again. I think it was the snow that did it.

Last time I tried I went pottering through Cantha. Marvelous architecture. Stunning scenery. More bamboo than you can shake a stick at. Not somewhere I wanted to spend much time, though. If it was a real place I wouldn't go there for a holiday. Too humid. Too many insects.

The time before the time before that, first time back, I started in Elona. A lot of savannah. Very ochre. Might have worked had I not made the schoolboy error of playing a Dervish. I used to use a scythe now and again when I was a schoolboy, as it happens. Tricky customer, Johnny Scythe but I still have both feet so I must have gotten the hang of it once. Sadly the skills didn't transfer.

Inbetween I ran through the Prophecies Campaign just far enough to get me to Lion's Arch. I love pre Searing. It looks remarkably similar to the countryside near here on some golden afternoon at the cusp as Summer turns to Autumn. I lingered so long that when in the end I did move on to  Ascalon City the war itself was easy going. A skip and a step and I was past the ruins  into the Shiverpeaks and all downhill to Lion's Arch.

Most MMOs if they've been around a while offer the same collection of climates. There's somewhere like the view from inside the head of an Edwardian author of books for the children of the upper-middle classes. There's some seaside with the village from the Popeye movie (I've been to that set - it's on Malta, an island where after a few days almost any distraction is welcome). There are a lot of forests with suspiciously little undergrowth and a preponderance of sunbeams. There will always be swamps, cold and dank, hot and fetid or frequently both, sometimes at the same time. You can count on a pantomime desert or two, all colored tents, camel salesman, flying carpets, genies and thieves. Somewhere there will be a land made entirely from flat rock, lava and steam.

Variety, spice etc. Just give me the snow. Falgarholm, Frostshard Lake and Northern Highlands on Telon. Iron Pine Peaks in Telara. The whole continent of Velious on Norrath. Forochel in Middle Earth. Siveria on that Allod where the gerbil triplets live. Even Dun Morogh on Azeroth. Yes, even there. I just feel settled when the snow crunches underfoot, the light goes blue-white and breath steams. 

Where you are matters but so does who. When the snow is falling and the wolves are howling out there in the pines, do you really want to be wandering around in a crimson robe, waggling your bare fingers in the bitter air, the hem of your frock sodden with snowmelt up to the knee and the wicked wind blowing your scooped sleeves back up to your elbows? How about a warrior, stumping along in full plate, such a good insulator? I think not. Do you still feel drop-dead cool dressed all in black with your scalpel-sharp stilettos stuffed down each soft-leather boot when the entire world around you is so white it hurts to look at and  there's no feeling left in your feet?

No! You want a massive axe, a fur coat with the head still on and layer after layer of cloth criss-crossed with a hundred feet of string. That's if you're a dwarf. Or you could go barbarian, lose the cloth and just keep the string so you can really feel winter on your skin.

Better yet, wear warm, comfortable, windproof leathers and a take a really big bow. And a wolf. Or a lynx. Even a raven or a hawk. Never leave the Last Inn without some kind of companion animal. Be a ranger. Or a hunter. Or a scout. Doesn't matter what you call it, just tame an animal, fletch some arrows and off you go.

So that's what I did. Went with Ogden Stonehealer to raise an army of Norns to help the dwarves beat back the Destroyers and ended up sorting out the mysterious Nornbear and rescuing not just a bunch of captured Charr but the entire Ebon Vanguard legion. And got a tapestry. Very important, that part.

Enormous fun. Very good storyline. Engaging cut-scenes. Lots of lore. Paced well enough that I managed to do every mission first time, albeit mostly with everyone on the full minus sixty morale debuff by the time the job was done. A lot of trekking through the snow and goggling at the breathtaking scenery later and here we are, level 20 with three tapestries and five points. Just got to sort out the Asura's little problem and coax my pet up to 20 too and that'll make six.

And largely thanks to the snow and the bow I'm playing Guild Wars qua Guild Wars, not just for the points and I think I might know what class I'm going to be when Guild Wars 2 arrives.