If You Can't Stand The Heat, Get Into In The Kitchen

At the weekend, the Meteorological Office issued the UK's first ever Red Warning for extreme heat, covering London and much of central England. Today, for the first time since records began, the recorded temperature exceeded forty degrees Celsius, which I'm sure sounds like a balmy spring day to someone reading this but is quite literally unheard of here.

Over in the west of the country, where I live, we're only under an Amber Warning. Yesterday was our really hot day. I measured the temperature in the shade in our back garden at thirty-seven Celsius or 98.6 in the old money. Ironically, today feels hotter, even though it's not. 

When I was growing up I lived with my grandparents and my grandfather was very interested in metereology. He had a barometer and also one of those dual thermometers that not only tells you what the temperature is when you look at it, like all thermometers do, but also records the highest and lowest temperatures it reached when you weren't watching.

I have a very clear memory of that thermometer telling us the temperature had hit one hundred degrees Fahrenheit one summer but of course a) memory is fiction b) who knows if the thermometer was accurate and c) was that temperature shade or sun? 

As far as c) goes, I also have a memory of the same thermometer going to the very top of its scale, which I recall being around 115F, when I put it in direct sunlight on a hot summer's day. That suggests the 100F reading probably wasn't due to being it being baked in the heat of the open sun.   

If it did ever hit 100F, though, that would have been higher than the UK record at the time so I think we can discount my childhood memory, other than to say we did sometimes have hot days in the summer back then. Now it seems we're going to get them all the time. 

But you didn't come here to read about the weather. I imagine you came here to read about mmorpgs. Luckily, the two are connected.

Like almost all British homes, the house in which Mrs Bhagpuss and I live with our dog, Beryl, is not designed for prolonged spells of hot, sunny weather. We don't have air conditioning and although it takes a fair old while for the inside of the house to heat up, once it does, it takes even longer to cool down again. That's why, as I said, it feels hotter today than it did yesterday, even though the mercury has actually fallen.

Beryl, being a wooly kind of dog, does not do well in the heat. She's been flat out in a stupor from just after breakfast until just before dusk. Mrs Bhagpuss bought her a couple of gel-filled cool mats and a dog paddling pool, all of which have been very well-used.

I generally do better in the heat than Beryl, but these last couple of days it's been so hot inside the house, particularly in my upstairs study, which, with it's south-easterly exposure, gets the full glare of the sun for much of the day, that I've had to spend considerable time either in the kitchen, ironically the coolest room in the house, or outside in the back garden, where we have an enormous, shady apple tree.

Beryl also likes, if not needs, to sleep on her cool mat in the corner of the kitchen but she's not happy being downstairs on her own, which is somewhat problematic given our normal pattern of spending almost all our time upstairs, where both computers, my study and Mrs Bhagpuss's craft room are.

That's two reasons for me to spend more time in the kitchen and the back garden than usual and since I am normally attached to my PC by a virtual umbilical cord, I've found myself making full use of my Splashtop account. I've had it for a very long time, over a decade I believe. I downloaded the free trial out of curiosity and was so impressed I paid the one-time license fee as soon as the trial ended, imagining I'd use it all the time but until now I've logged in so infrequently that a couple of years ago I got an email asking if they could delete my account since I clearly had no use for it. Luckily I had the foresight to ask them not to do that and now I'm reaping the rewards.

I have an ancient Dell XPS laptop, probably getting on for fifteen years old, which still works perfectly well, at least after I replaced the HDD, but which isn't capable of running anything much made in the last five to ten years. It is, however, perfectly comfortable running the Splashtop app, which means I can use it just as though I was sitting at my desktop.

Consequently I've been able to sit in the relatively cooler part of the house and play games through Steam, play EverQuest II, play whatever I want. There's no appreciable extra lag or latency and everything looks and plays great. I haven't yet tried playing New World via GeForce Now via Splahstop to see what happens at two degrees of separation but now I've thought of it you can bet I'm going to.

Even so, there's another problem. I may be downstairs in the cool but my desktop, which is doing all the work, is still up there in the hottest room in the house. I'm slightly concerned that I might be downstairs, happily fragging some boss, while upstairs my PC is melting.

If this hot weather's going to last  - and according to predictions it probably is, if not at quite the same intensity - it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a couple of games I could play directly through the laptop itself. Older games would probably work but I'd have to download and install them, something I'm not all that keen to do. The laptop has a single, small HDD that's currently admirably clean due to the re-install and I'd really like to keep it that way.

There's an obvious solution: browser games. If a game plays in a browser it will presumably play on any machine that the browser will support. My laptop has both Firefox and Chrome installed so that's the first hurdle cleared.

Are there any good browser mmorpgs, though? Well, yes, there are. I can immediately think of two that I've played: Villagers and Heroes and AdventureQuest 3D, although both need a client download so maybe they aren't pure browser games after all. Others I've tried in the past include Drakensang, Eldevin and of course Runescape but I don't see myself going back to any of those. 

I certainly never imagined I go back to Flyff, either. Flyff launched all the way back in 2005 and since I seem to remember participating in some kind of open beta or trial it may well have been the first free to play title I ever played. I remember having a tough time with it due to lag but generally quite enjoying it.

I do know I didn't stick around long enough to take advantage of the game's signature feature, flight. Flyff is short for Fly For Fun, it being one of the first mmorpgs to offer players a freeform flight option. I've always wished I'd gotten at least that far. 

As luck would have it, MassivelyOP posted an item this morning, retailing the news that Flyff Universe,"the browser-based relaunch of the 2005 MMORPG that arrived this past June", currently has over 800,000 players worldwide. As of a few hours ago, they can add one more to that total.

It took me a matter of moments to get into the game and start playing. I didn't even need to make an account. You can begin playing as a guest and then either trust to your cache to remind the servers who you are or, if that feels too much like high-wire walking without a net after you've gotten a few levels under your belt, convert your guest account to a registered one so you can sleep easy in your bed at night.

I converted at level three. It only took a matter of seconds. Accessibility is the major selling point for browser mmos so there's no percentage in them making it any harder than it needs to be. 

When I logged out after about an hour I was level four and still in the tutorial, albeit thankfully also out in the open world, which was positively heaving with players. I'd had a good time, albeit mostly for reasons of nostalgia. Flyff World may be a remake but it's unabashedly old school. If you want a reminder of what F2P mmorpgs used to be like fifteen years ago, look no further.

It seems unlikely I'll make much progress beyond a few screenshots and maybe a post or two but it's an option for hot days when I'd rather not run the PC. Also, I'd at least like to be able to say I know what it's like to fly in a game called Fly For Fun...

Climb Up On A Rock

For a few days now I've been meaning to post about how it's going in Valheim but something or other kept coming up. Then Wilhelm put up his take on on life on the plains and it seemed like I might just as well link to it with a "What he said".

Seriously, the post I was going to write would have been all but identical. I guess there are only so many things left to do at this stage of the game.

 

What I have been doing is a lot of exploring, opening up long stretches of coastline to mark the outlines of islands, then criss-crossing them to fill in the blanks.  Wherever I find goblin camps, towers or villages I clean them out. Not because I need anything from them. I have self-sustaining fields of flax and barley and far more black iron than there's currently any use for. No, I clear goblin camps because it's fun.

I have a fairly well-established method. When I find a camp or a village I scout it to get an idea roughly how big it is, how many fulings live there, what classes they are and, if possible, how tough they are. Regular fulings pop like balloons with a single well-placed arrow but put the same arrow in a one or two star goblin and all it does is make them mad.

Once I've got a good idea what I'm up against I find a nice, high place to start picking them off. Ideally I like a steep rock on a flat plain. Goblins can't climb anything steeper than a gentle slope. Hell, they can't even go up and down their own wooden stairs. Odin knows how they get to the top of their towers because they sure as heck can't get down again. Maybe they're cats!

If there's a good rock and it's in range I pot them from there. If it's out of bowshot I move in, snipe one and run back. Sometimes none of the goblins even notice one of their pals exploding right next to them but usually two or three will come running, cackling and waving their spears. Then I pick them off as they mill around the rock like angry chickens.

As I've been roaming further and further I've taken to carrying a portal kit with me. The only times I've died have been when I ranged much too far and got stranded miles from home, at night, deep on the plains. 

I don't bother building a shelter for the portals any more. I put them right on top of the rocks. Nothing can get to them up there and I can see them for miles. In some ways, now I'm at home there, the plains feel safer than the black forest. Trolls, skeletons, greydwarves and even boars will smash anything you leave unprotected.  Lox and deathsquitos never attack structures and even fulings don't seem that interested. Anyway, there are far fewer of them roaming loose. They mostly stick to their camps. 

Sniping goblins is a lot of fun but more surprising to me is how much satisfying it is to meet them in combat face to face. I'm coming round to the opinion that Valheim has my favorite action combat of any game I've played and that's because it manages to be both skilful, tactical and incredibly simple all at the same time.

For me, it's all about movement and weapon selection. The fights, pulling with the bow, swapping to a sword, maybe pulling out the big hammer, feel hugely kinetic. 

Almost from the start I've ignored blocks and dodges. I tried a shield for a short while but it seemed slow and awkward compared to just hitting things really fast. For a long time I used an axe and that worked vey well. Then when I learned to work with silver I made a sword and that worked better still.

The black iron axe is statistically superior to the silver sword so I made that and swapped back for a while but although it does hit harder the sword is so much faster. Crucially, it strikes on both the forehand and the backhand. That's what makes it not just possible but productive to fight three or even four fulings at once.

Monster AI in Valheim is really excellent, I think. All creatures have particular ways of behaving and quite a lot of the behaviors are convincing. Fulings feint and dart and circle out of reach. They're always moving, looking for opportunity. What they can't cope with is being rushed and hacked at and perpetually knocked back but you have to be sure never to let them get you surrounded. It's like EverQuest on meth.

The sword, with its speed and the way it strikes both on the atack and the withdrawal keeps fulings stunned and struggling to respond. The knock-back isn't as great as with other weapons but it happens so often. So long as I make sure my health never drops much below 150 I can reasonably expect to slice up a gang of regular goblins with a one or even a two star thrown in before I get into in any great trouble.  

Shamans are a problem because they have a nasty long-range fireball attack and a very effective ward. If one of those comes out of the camp then I do back off and come back later when they've all calmed down. Then I single the shaman out and put an arrow in him and with luck he doesn't have his ward on so he explodes. 

All of that and a good bit more makes exterminating fulings good entertainment for a couple of hours. Even so, I'd probably have had enough of the plains by now if that was all there was to do. There are lox to hunt for meat, of course, and deathsquitos for their needles, which make the best arrows, but that wouldn't be enough to keep me either.

No, the reason I'm still out there clearing the fog from the map is that even after all this time I still run into things I've never seen before. While I was pushing along a coastline to the east I happened on a henge. It stood out from the golden fields like a sign, which turned out to be just what it was. It had the vegasir for Yagluth's altar. 

With that on my map I had to go take a look, even though I have no intention of summoning him until there's something in it for me. His dias was next to a fuling camp and a fuling tower, at the head of the first river I'd seen on the plains. (I've seen several more streams since then).

Last night, as I was heading south on the biggest of all the islands, I stumbled on what looked eerily like a brutalist blockhouse from some 1960s out of town industrial park. I'd never seen anything in Valheim like it before. As I approached I could hear cackling. Surely goblins couldn't have built this thing?

Whether they built it or not they were using it. It had stone stairs and a chest on the flat roof. Whether it was some religious structure of their own or something they'd re-purposed I couldn't say but it made me very curious. 

And then the mist came down. I hate the mist on the plains so very much. It's far too real. It swirls and billows and hangs there and you can see shapes and hear sounds through it but never well enough. If the mist blows in while I'm clearing a camp I know it's going to be a long, long day.

That's what I've been up to in Valheim this week. Looking forward, I've marked a couple of possible spots for my island getaway. I've cleared a whole medium-sized island of all fixed spawns and I'm thinking of moving there because it's a lot nicer than where I'm living now. I've done so much work on the castle, though, I couldn't bear to tear it down. I'd have to start again from scratch and I don't think I can face all that mining again.

My next project is going to be a trip to the Ashlands. I've ranged so far south now it can only be a short boat-trip away. I just need to set up a base in the far south and call on Moder for a favorable wind. And make some fire resistance potions, of course.

I guess I'm not done with this thing quite yet.

Sure To End In Tears

Let's begin at the beginning, just this once. Or what passes for the beginning, at least. 

It had been the longest journey. Moder's altar lay somewhere in the high mountains ahead. It must. There was nowhere else left for it to be. 

I'd sailed my longship almost all the way around an island whose center was one towering peak and whose shores showed nothing but plains, down to the rolling sea. Fulings in their ricketty towers cackled and waved their spears whenever I drew close to land. Deathsquitos skimmed across the waves to try their luck. 

It took me two full days to find a cove where black forest came down the mountain slopes to the ocean. It was on the northern shoreline, as far away from where I'd started as it could be. From the deck I could see a half-ruined stone tower just beyond the littoral. The wind was fair for once. I edged the longship gently in.

For a miracle, nothing came to greet me. Not even a greydwarf. I took the tower for my forward base, fortified it quickly. It was small, scarcely large enough to hold a portal, but it was secure.

With my return assured I set off to explore. Through the forest and onto the mountain. The trees stretched away in every direction. No plain or swamp in sight. It had been a long, eventful journey but I'd found what I needed, at last.

The mountain was overwhelming. Higher and steeper by far than any I'd climbed. Every few moments I had to stop and rest. Moder's marker on my map showed to the east. Not the highest but high enough. I found it, finally, on a small plateau barely wide enough to hold the low stone circle. There wasn't going to be much room to maneuver, that was clear.

I had one last preparation to make. I was going to dig out a cave in the rock below the plateau, fit it with a fire and a bed, make it my final base camp for the assault. So close that, should I die, I could be back in the fight in seconds. 

There was another ruined stone tower at the foot of the crag. I could have tried to fortify it but drakes shred wood like paper and even stone walls crumble fast when a golem strikes. Only hollowed rock holds fast. Or so I thought. 

My tunneling soon attracted the attention of a golem. As it raged and crashed outside my half-dug cave night began to fall. Wolves were howling somewhere in the darkness. It all seemed suddenly too much. Would I want to wake to this, naked and defeated? 

Better to wake up safe in my bed far away and return through the portal with time to plan. I abandoned my cave-making, dodged the golem's clumsy swipes and headed back down the mountain.

I ported back to rest and resupply. Five hundred arrows - poison, obsidian, frost -and just twenty made from the sharp needles I cut from the few deathsquitos I'd killed along the way. Cooked lox meat from the two giant beasts I'd taken down from a great distance as they battled with something I couldn't make out. An opportunity taken. Meads to restore my health and stamina. And, in case the fight should go badly wrong, frost resist potions to store in a chest nearby so I could recover what I'd lost.

No putting it off any longer. Time to wake the dragon. On my first trip to the altar I'd planted two eggs in the hollows made to take them and left a third lying by the side. I'd worried putting the last in place would trigger the mother drake to come before I was ready. In Valheim nothing ever moves from where it falls. I was sure the egg would be there when I returned.

It wasn't. I had to trek through the snows looking for another. By the time I'd found one it was later than I'd planned. I wasn't feeling as well-rested as I had been. It was a risk but I took it. I placed the egg. Nothing happened. 

I focused my will on the altar. Then, the sky turned red. Moder had come.

After all that it wasn't much of a battle. Moder was big and she made a lot of noise but her attacks were easy enough to avoid even in the tight space. When she came down to earth she seemed disoriented. She turned around and around like a cat trying to settle. She stayed for a long time, each time. 

I stood well back and fired arrow after arrow into her thick hide. She weakened. I became confident. Too confident.

When Moder was all but dead she managed to put herself in a place my arrows couldn't reach. I ran around to gain a vantage point and she spat blue fire at me. I was standing on the edge of the plateau just above the cave I'd dug. Moder's fire ripped through the rock beneath my feet and sent me tumbling into air.

Falling damage in Valheim is brutal. I died, falling into my own cave. 

After that it was a living nightmare. Back at base I grabbed a frost potion, drank it and ran back naked. By then night had fallen. Miraculously no wolves found me as I struggled up the endless slopes, stopping to struggle for breath again and again. 

As I neared my corpse the sky turned red and Moder swooped down. She was was gaining back her health, I saw, just before I died the second time.

Coming back through the portal to try again, I felt the ground shake. You have got to be kidding me. Trolls were attacking my base camp. Two of them. I ducked back through the portal and waited. Came back. They were still rumbling outside the frail walls. 

The attack went on all night. I slept and came back and they were still there. Finally they left. By then there was no point hurrying.

I put on my my iron armor and made it all the way to my first corpse, Moder harrying me all the way. My marker was caught on a jagged shard of rock, halfway between the flat ground and the plateau rim. Dodging Moder, I got stuck in another hole I didn't see. Moder pounced and I died again. One cairn piled next to another.

Now I was back at base with no more frost potions. I had to stop and think. Moder was recovering. My best armor and my reserves were lost. No more headlong rushes to disaster. I needed to start over.

So that's what I did. I set some more frost potions brewing but then I remembered I had stacks of wolf pelts stashed away so I made a new cloak. I dressed in yet more spare armor, ate food, rested, went back.

Moder was gone. The skies were blue. I could see my grave markers. I managed to make my way to them and recover all my things. It took two trips.

Now I needed more arrows. And food. And three more eggs. I was beginning over again.

It was when I was looking for eggs that the sky turned red again. Moder hadn't left at all. She'd been away, flying her domain. 

Once again I'd been caught out. It was past mid-day. The terrain was treacherous. Moder hadn't spotted me, yet. I could retreat, set up again, start anew tomorrow. 

Or I could take another chance. Who knew where Moder would be, next time? And now I knew her patterns and her powers. As she flew over I put an arrow into her and so it began again.

It's all a blur, what happened next. The fight went on and on. Moder swooped and shrieked and kept landing in places I couldn't reach. I had to move and move and move, trying to find places I could see her and still find secure footing.

As we danced, the darkness came down around us. Wolves darted in. I drew my silver sword and struck them down. Drakes rallied to their mother's defense. I downed them as they flew. Once a golem came by and I had to clamber over rocks in the dark to get away. I fell. I very, very nearly died. 

But I didn't die. I crouched and waited and drank a healing potion. And I came back.

We fought on, Moder and I. We'd been at it so long my Draugr Fang broke. I pulled out my Huntsman's bow and carried on. 

Moder was weakening. If it had been just her and me, in a wide open space, it wouldn't have been a battle. It would have been an execution. But my fight was never with her. It was always with the mountain and with the weather and with the world.

When Moder died it was full, black night. Her tears lay like blue diamonds on dark snow. I would have grieved for her if I'd had any strength left. I had none. I was spent. 

I gathered up her tears, took my trophy and set off, back down the mountain. Her great head hangs in the grove beside the others, now. Next to Eikthyr, The Elder and Bonemass. I'll have her breath in my sails if I go to search for my final challenge, the fuling lordling, Yagloth.

The plains call. I don't know, yet, whether I will answer.

How We Got Here

Yesterday, twelve days after I killed the third of Valheim's current roster of five bosses, Bonemass, I finished Moder, the fourth. Nearly two weeks and almost all of it in one way or another given over to the search, the preparation and the fight itself. Hours and hours and hours of my life.

Was it time well spent? I'm still not sure.

It's been six weeks since I bought Valheim. The title of the post I wrote after I'd played the game for the first time asked the question "Why Am I Doing This?" and I'm not sure I have an answer yet. It's compulsive, that's for sure. Addictive? Possibly. Healthy? I'm doubting it.

I guess I sailed too far north. So these are the Mistlands. Doesn't look so bad. Don't know what all the fuss is about.

 

An odd aspect of playing Valheim these past weeks has been the community that's grown up around the game. It's been supportive. Inclusive. Some might say enabling.

A slew of bloggers have been documenting their adventures. Some started earlier, some later. Some seemed enthusiastic, others reluctant. Some burned through the biomes so fast they were all but done with the plains before others were out of the meadows. Some started late and passed the pack as though it was standing still.

And everyone told their stories and all the stories were the same and yet none of them were. We all explored the same biomes, fought the same battles. Mostly in the same sequence. Even the outcomes all went the same way. And still, everyone's stories were decidedly their own.

Hmm. Got dark fast. I'm getting a bad feeling about this...

 

In a strange way the whole endeavor resembles some ad hoc art project; the seed of an idea passed around and iterated on until the results compile into a collage of impressions and experiences. The game is single player or it's co-op yet it feels like it's massively multiple because everyone's playing it at the same time. It's like some arcane experiment in asynchronous congruity.

And as with any experiment, everyone seems to feel the need to document what they've done. Normally in a post like this I'd link to all the people posting on the theme but by now everyone reading this knows who they are. We've all been talking about this game for weeks and it looks like most of us won't stop until we get that fifth and final boss down. Okay, I will link to that one.

The need to journal the experience is far from unique here. Every so often a game blows up, a lot of people play it, a lot of people write about it. What's rare is for so many to choose to write about it in such similar ways. And for the stories to stitch together so well.

Turn the boat! Turn it around! Now!!

 

I've learned a lot about playing Valheim from reading other people writing about playing Valheim. Their stories have made me think. Made me reassess my own experience. Made me change my mind.

My plan for today was to sit down and write a novelistic account of my fight with Moder. It started out mundane and ended up being epic. It would make a good tale. The Norn in Guild Wars 2 would absolutely love it.

Then I read Syl's post on her Moder kill and it made me rethink what I wanted to say. Yes, I still want to tell the story of the fight itself. I've been journaling my adventures in Valheim and the details need to be recorded if only for my own future nostalgic interest. This blog is a form of diary, after all.

Before the fight came the journey. I'd planned on skipping that part. I felt I'd already written enough of the preamble when I posted complaining about how long it was taking. Did anyone really need another lengthy description of a series of difficult sea voyages, where I got lost, blown off course, stranded, died a couple of times, nearly died a lot more?

Thank Odin! Daylight!

 

Probably not. And I wasn't sure I wanted to write all that, either. Between playing Valheim and posting about I'm starting to feel like I've lived little but that world these last few weeks and it's getting to me. In a couple of weeks from now or even sooner it looks as though I'll be back at work again. Do I really want to spend the rest of my time in lockdown trapped in Viking purgatory?

And yet it would be painting a false picture of how things went if I jumped straight to the fight. There's a dragon, of sorts, at the end but I'm beginning to understand that this isn't really about the big bosses at all. It's about the land and the sea and the journey.

I don't know a lot about vikings. How they lived. Just enough to understand it wasn't very much like the stories. I know something about those stories, though, and so do the people who made Valheim. They want us to live in the world of those stories, where everything is against us but we overcome through force of will and the occasional, capricious assistance of the gods. 

That's got to be it. Come in close to the coast and we'll find somewhere safe to land.

 

And like the heroes of those stories what we have to overcome, more even than the monsters and mythical creatures, is the world itself. The true bosses of Valheim aren't stags with antlers that hurl  lightning or huge conglomerates of slime. They're the elements, the wind and the waves. The fogs that roll in out of nowhere, hiding all. The storms that whip a placid sea into a chaotic maelstrom. The bitter cold that eats away all will.

I've fought four bosses so far and none of them was really all that hard. It was the world that made it so. The night that fell when Eikthyr was summoned. The forest around The Elder, filled with trolls and falling trees. The unbearable, fetid, infested waters of the swamp, where Bonemass feasts on withered bones. And for Moder the bleak, vertiginous, fatal grandeur of the mountains.

Between them all lie countless miles of uncharted ocean, fathoms deep and deadly. The true test of the viking doesn't lie in set-piece duels with summoned foes. It rests where it always did, with the weather and the land. 

Okay... I'm just going to stand on this rock until it gets light. Fulings can't swim this far, can they?

 

It's exhausting. Let's look at it clearly. It's harrowing. It's hard. It can be repetitive. It can feel frustrating. It can even turn into something close to a routine. If it's a challenge, as often as not it's a challenge to our patience as much as to our skills. Determination sees us through.

Is it entertainment? Maybe. Have I had enough? Perhaps.

There's still the story of Moder to tell. I'll get to that. Maybe tomorrow.

For now, let's celebrate the journey. It's all about the journey. We often say that but this time, for once, it's true.

Rainy Days And Mondays (And Sundays. And Tuesdays)

Just a quick post to say I went for a short holiday and now I'm back! On Sunday morning Mrs Bhagpuss and I hopped in the car and drove down to the edge of Dartmoor, about a hundred or so miles away. We stayed in Buckfastleigh and visited Buckfast Abbey, which I highly recommend. The gardens and the stained glass are both well worth seeing and the whole thing is free, something incredibly rare in the tourist traps of the South West. Well done, monks!

On Monday we drove across Dartmoor, visited several small towns and villages, then spent the night in Boscastle, a lovely seaside town that was all but demolished in a flood fifteen years ago. There's a marker in the main street showing how high the waters reached. It was two feet over my head.

This morning we took a look at Tintagel, where King Arthur was supposedly conceived (as in where his parents did the deed, although it might just as well mean where someone made him up, since there seems to be precious little evidence he ever existed). Then we came back very slowly along the Devon and Somerset coastline, visiting a couple of Victorian and Edwardian seaside resorts, one of which, Lynmouth, was also destroyed by a flash flood in 1952. We hadn't planned on a tour of deluge disasters but synchronicity will have its way.

We were exceptionally lucky with the weather, ourselves. Plenty of sunshine and we dodged almost all the rain, which was heavy and plentiful but only when we were driving between stops.

I had planned to post something before I went away to explain why I'd finally broken my 66-day unbroken posting record but in the end I didn't find the time on Sunday morning. I took my laptop with me, thinking I'd probably get a post or two in when we were pinned down in our room by the rain but that never happened. In the end I never even took the laptop out of its bag.

My return-to-work day is the 21st of October, at which point I would expect to go back to my old regime of three or four posts a week but until then I hope to bang something out every day. My post count for the year currently stands at 195, a mere two posts behind my all-time record of 197, which I managed in each of the first two full years of the blog.

This year is going to smash that. Apparently all you need to do to break your own posting record is to be seriously ill and spend half the year off work, sick. Who knew?

A Change In The Weather: WoW Classic

When it rains itn Loch Modan, boy, does it rain! Following Friday's post, which Kaylriene followed up today, I was trying to take some comparison shots with the graphics turned up to the max but the weather wasn't having any of it.

I love weather in MMORPGs. It can make a huge difference, not just to the feel of things but also to the gameplay. When I first played EverQuest in late 1999, rain closed down the field of view to such an extent it was dangerous to carry on roaming. It was imperative that you be able to see potential threats before they came into aggro range and in a rainstorm you couldn't.

If it happened to come on to rain at night, forget it. Night-time in EQ was difficult enough under moonlight but once the cloud cover filled in and the rain began you might as well just find the nearest shelter and wait it out.

Not that being indoors meant you were safe. I once spent the entire game night huddling in a hut in West Commonlands, only to be attacked through the walls by something I never saw. I managed to kill it but it wasn't until daylight that I found I'd been fighting a bear. It was dead, slumped against the stone wall, through which it had somehow managed to claw and bite me.

I guess that outfit has a certain practicality in conditions like this. Those pants are going to rust, though.

In retrospect, the game must have told me in chat what I was fighting. EQ records every last detail of gameplay in the chat log. I was so in the moment that I never even glanced at it. It was immersion of the deepest order.

By the time Kunark arrived, with its heavy jungles that already limited visibilty to a few yards, rain spelled almost certain death in some zones. It was fine on the flat plains of Lake of Ill Omen, but once you zoned into neighboring Firiona Vie you were spider bait for the hideous Drachnids that lurked in the sodden foliage. I used to wait at the zone line until the rain stopped, even if it took twenty minutes. A death would take far longer than to recoup.

Over the years a lot of that difficulty got smoothed over, even as the visuals improved by orders of magnitude. Bad weather became something to appreciate aesthetically rather than react to with frustration or fear. Final Fantasy XIV has some truly gorgeous weather effects, particularly the way wind and sand interact in Thanalan. Thunderstorms in Elder Scrolls Online are so spectacular I once spent most of a session trying to get a screenshot that did them justice.

Bear! Where the hell are we? Where the hell are you?

WoW Classic sets a solid balance between appearance and reality. The rain didn't really inconvenience me yesterday, let alone discourage me from adventuring around the Loch, but doing so felt very different from the day before. 

When the weather was fine I'd been stopping every few minutes to take screenshots of the slowly setting sun and gosh-wow over the amazing rose-petal clouds. Now I was hunkering down, pushing on with the task at hand, getting things done despite the inclement weather, just as a true dwarf should, rather than wasting time lollygagging at the pretty view like some species of elf.

It was daytime when the storm set in. I'm not sure how much more inconvenient it would be in the dark. I'm also not all that likely to find out. WoW has a very unusual day/night cycle, one I'm not sure I've seen used anywhere else in the genre.

I love the smell of wet fur in the norning.

In most  MMORPGs day and night have specific lengths. Day is usually considerably longer than night and the whole shebang rolls round in an hour or two. In WoW a day lasts as long as it does in real life. So does night.

It means that if you play on your closest geographical server cluster - EU in my case -  and you start playing at 8am to finish twelve hours later (not that 'Im doing that...yet) you'll play in daylight the entire time. I'm currently seeing maybe a couple of hours of night, at most, before I log out around 10pm.

On the other hand, if you play on a US server, as I did on one of my free trial accounts, you would barely see daylight at all. Perhaps the soft region lock worked in my favor after all.

Now that's what I call a hunter's moon. If only this was a PvP server...

That said, night, like weather, is more about immersion and atmosphere in WoW Classic than it is about inconvenience. I was in Westfall after darkeness fell last night and I was able to roam and quest without any difficulty. Well, without any difficulty caused by the failing light, at least. The hordes of players made finding anything to kill a bit of challenge. These things are much more civilized in the dwarf lands.

The corrupted farmland of Westfall may not have the rugged drama of Loch Modan but the moon coming up over the hills towards the sea was spectacular. There were players silhouetted against the huge orb as though they were auditioning for the poster for E.T.  If this was WoW Live, someone probably would have flown past on a bike.

It looked positively ethereal. As Kaylriene so rightly says, "It doesn’t look realistic because it doesn’t need to – it is a fantasy game creating a fantasy world".

My beard needed a wash anyway. Been a few months.

And it's also a game designed, back in the early 2000s, to be less alarming, less frustrating, more welcoming than its predecessors. The balance Blizzard struck between challenge and difficulty, between inclusion and exclusion, between skill and enthusiasm, worked then and still works now.

By dint of top notch art design and world-building, coupled with a desire to render the gameplay the designers themselves loved more readily accessible to a wider audience, World of Warcraft broke down the walls of a niche genre and opened it out to the world, many millions of whom grabbed it with both hands.

No-one knows why WoW became such an unexpected success. Many have tried to emulate or recreate the magic and all have failed. Evidence suggests Blizzard had no more idea how they bottled lightning than anyone else. They veered away from the formula that had worked so well and the whole genre trailed after them. The rest of the world promptly looked the other way and the walls of the niche stood themselves back up.

And finally it ends. Now all  I need is an ale or three to wash away the taste of all this water.

We are, as they say, where we are, but nothing says we have to stay there. I never played Vanilla WoW so, for me, the emotional impact of Classic is both limited and filtered through a lens formed by my prior and far more formative experiences in EverQuest. Everything in Classic seems both harder (compared with almost any current MMORPG) and easier (compared with EQ circa 1999-2006). It's impossible at this stage to predict how big Classic will get or how long its current boom will last but I tend to agree with SynCaine, when he says

"Classic isn’t just a chance for non-Retail players to enjoy WoW again; its also a live demonstration of all the ways Retail went wrong with WotLK and beyond, as well as the rest of the genre when it copied that version of WoW."

If Classic does continue to be both a popular and a commercial success for some time to come, it could pose problems for Blizzard at corporate level. As someone said (and I have to paraphrase this because I can't remember where I read it or who to credit) Blizzard won't want to have to answer questions at an earnings call about why they wasted ten years going in the wrong direction when they already had the most profitable gameplay in the genre nailed down.

It's obviously not that simple and I don't believe Classic will outstrip WoW Live but there's a seed of truth in there, somewhere. I feel we're at a turning point for the genre, or we could be. If nothing else, Classic's overwhelmingly positive reception must surely give energy and confidence to developers looking to make more complex, nuanced, wordlike MMORPGs like Pantheon or Project: Gorgon.

Perhaps we'll even see a new cycle of Classic clones. That could be... interesting.

Sun Is In The Sky : GW2

When Heart of Thorns was first revealed as a jungle-themed expansion there was considerable pushback. Plenty of people, it turns out, don't like jungles and for good reason: they tend to be dense, confusing and hard to navigate.

With ArenaNet pushing "verticality" hard there was considerable apprehension over playability. For many players anxiety turned to anger, when the short beta tests confirmed the only new map on offer to be vertiginous, claustrophobic and, worst of all, teeming with mobs far more aggressive and powerful than anything previously seen in Tyria.

Re-reading my own words on that first beta weekend it's revealing and surprising to see just how far away from that consensus opinion I was even on first call. Far from the expected "dense jungle filled with hyper-aggressive, overpowered wildlife and featuring a three-dimensionality that requires a mastery-point grind to overcome" what I got was a stroll in the park. Literally.

"I found myself wandering about largely unchallenged for the best part of an hour along valleys and branches and rope walkways filled with non-aggressive boars, behemoths and various stripes of civilized frogs.

Even the creatures that did attack on sight, mostly bats and some new kind of ambulant mushroom, weren't the 'roided up nu-mobs that throw shapes and take forever to kill. Just normal wildlife. It seemed easy enough, pleasant even, to wander about, take screenshots, admire the view."

With only a portion of Verdant Brink to judge by, I did worry about variety. "The big problem with a jungle setting became quickly evident, though: it all looks the same." That concern faded fast when launch brought the freedom to explore the new maps at leisure. I was so taken aback by what I found that I had to shout about it:  "IT'S NOT A JUNGLE! It's a FOREST!"

ANet have been widely praised for not making the same mistakes with Path of Fire that they made with Heart of Thorns and so far, broadly at least, that seems fair. In one respect, though, they seem to have dropped into exactly the same hole.

The antipathy to deserts seems smaller than that expressed towards jungles but there was still some concern over an entire expansion filled with nothing but sand. I'm fairly sure there would be objections to any thematic environment from tundra to lava so the question has to be why bother?

Really, why is it that expansions for MMOs come with such restrictive labels? Path of Fire is no more a "desert" expansion than Heart of Thorns was a "jungle" one. It has areas of desert in it, some of them quite extensive, but that's hardly the same thing.

In the long years before it launched I don't recall anyone feeling the need to market GW2 as an "Alpine" themed MMO, even though much of the environment looks like Bavaria or Switzerland. And of course the environment was far more varied than that - from wetlands to jungle, Edwardian dreamscape to Lovecraftian nightmare and back.

Path of Fire marks what seems to be a concerted attempt to reinstate much of what people supposedly loved about the original game. I may go into what that means for the gameplay at some point but as far as the environment is concerned it means a bit of everything.

There's a lot of sand, yes, but a large area of Desert Highlands is snow and ice, where it pushes north into Deldrimor Front. Most of the rest of that map is some kind of Roger Dean fantasy (yes, him again) with lush foliage on surreal stonestacks and deep caves filled with alien vegetation. Further south, the Elon Riverlands are - spoiler alert! - a river delta. Beyond that comes The Devestation, which resembles no environment ever seen on Earth.

Even the parts that are apparently supposed to be desert, like Crystal Oasis have more flowers and gardens than Kew. There's a colossal water pumping station for heaven's sake! And some sea-front real estate that would have billionaires from across Tyria flying in for the season. I bet Evon Gnashblade has a penthouse marked out already.

All this, mind you, in the midst of a refugee crisis caused by an impending God-War. What the place must look like in peacetime beggars the imagination.

If I was running ANet's marketing department I wouldn't have run with "desert-themed expansion". That's all I'm saying.

I See A Darkness : EQ2

Darkness and night-vision have long been contentious topics in MMORPGs. At one end of the argument you have the "Night-time should be Freakin' Terrifying" crew, mostly survivors of the Rivervale - Kithicor - Commonlands run or those few Barbarians who actually owned a Greater Lightstone.

At the other extreme comes Team "Mommy lets me Sleep with the Lights On".  They feel a gentle blue tint is more than enough to let you know darkness has fallen.

There seems little doubt where the good folk at Daybreak Games stand on the matter. Allow me to illustrate:

Antonica at Dawn. A little too much of the Roger Deans, perhaps, but bright and cheery with it.

Antonica at Noon. Overcast. Looks like rain. Visibility: good.

Antonica at Sunset. Air pollution index: high. Or possibly I am. 

Antonica at Midnight. Good thing my pet's made of granite. Granite's radioactive, didn't you know?

Also, isn't it lucky I'm a Conjuror? We have Infravision! Look what a difference that makes!

The sea around Antonica seems to be mildly phosphorescent. Doesn't help much, does it?

This is The Caves. It's underground. Can you tell how it's different to Antonica at night? No? Well, this is The Caves in day time!

Antonica, just before Dawn. You can tell it's just before dawn because the crickets start chirping. And it gets just light enough to find out where in the hell you are.