Lifting The Veil On New World's Halloween Holiday

Halloween, as I'm sure I must have mentioned many times, is not my favorite holiday. Just calling it a "holiday" seems weird. No-one gets time off from work to celebrate, do they, except maybe witches and warlocks. Except isn't it their busiest work day?

I guess we could do with a new word for these sorts of quasi-historical affairs that have been hijacked by the manufacturers of cheap plastic tat. Festival, celebration, plain old event... none of the regular labels quite fit any more.

Where I come from, Halloween didn't really become much of holiday (I'm sticking with that for now.) until I was an adult out of college, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say I never saw anyone celebrate it until then. It certainly existed before that as a cultural moment, not just an archaic throwback. There was a xenophobic attempt to deny it as an American import following the success of E.T., but that movie didn't even introduce trick or treating to these shores, let alone the rest of it.

I had heard of Halloween before I grew up. I think I first came across the concept in an Agatha Christie novel I read when I was in my early teens (I forget which one but it was written in the 1950 or '60s.) and I vaguely remember someone in my primary class having a Halloween party, to which I don't believe I went. I just didn't know it as anything anyone paid much mind.

When I was a child, it was mostly our local holiday, Guy Fawkes Day that was an absolutely huge deal around that time of year. Second only to Christmas in anticipation and excitement and falling on November 5th as it does, it tended to eclipse Halloween to the point of invisibility. Over the decades, the two adjacent celebrations seem to have equalled out to a large degree, with Halloween taking over as the smaller, more personal option, all parties and kids out with their families after dark, while the myriad back garden bonfires of my childhood have retreated to municipal parks and sports grounds for organized displays, taking with them most of the intimacy with danger that made bonfire night so thrilling in the first place.

Elsewhere, Halloween rules unchallenged and supreme. Every mmorpg has to have its own version, often the biggest in-game holiday of the year, almost always at least the second-biggest, after whatever they call Christmas in imagineland.

I've done most of them to death by now, EverQuest II's "Nights of the Dead" and Guild Wars 2's "Shadow of the Mad King" especially. I'm not saying I no longer have any interest in them at all but I certainly don't feel any stirring desire to log in and run through the card all over again.

I'm always up for a new take on the old themes, though, so when I logged into New World and saw the orange, autumn leaves, drifted into piles in all the corners of the town, along with the inevitable, obligatory carved pumpkins carefully placed in prominent positions, I knew I'd have to take a closer look. Then Tyler Edwards dropped by the comments to let me know there was a Halloween World Boss and people were zerging it, which put the witch's cap on things for me.

I logged in for an hour last night to figure out how things might work in Nightveil Hallow. I was quite optimistic. Amazon Games seem to have a good handle on how to do seasonal and holiday events. The last couple I've visited have been well-designed - fun to play and rewarding as well.

This one appears to buck the genre trend in that it's relatively small and compact. Unless I've missed something, it consists of a single, introductory quest, which isn't even mandatory, and the aforementioned World Boss, the demonic "Baalphazu, Marquis of Terror".

Baalphazu spawns, repeatedly and quickly if last night is anything to go by, in any one of half a dozen mid-high level zones, Brightwood, Ebonscale Reach, Weaver's Fren, Great Cleave, Edengrove, and Mourningdale. I only saw him in Ebonscale, where he's confined to a specific, partly enclosed area. I imagine it's much the same in every zone where he appears, making the fight quite localized and unlikely to disturb people going about their regular business.

This guide recommends grouping up and people were forming parties in general chat but there's no requirement to do so. I picked up the quest from Salvatore, standing next to the giant, bubbling green cauldron in town, then watched the map until I saw the icon appear to say Baalphazu had landed.

It took me a while to get to him. Fast travel is trivially cheap now but the locations are still fixed and not always convenient to where you need to be in a hurry. The fight lasts a few minutes, though, so there's time to get there before it's all over. 

My first time, there weren't that many people. Those who were there seemed nervous to begin but after a bit we got started on the supporting cast, pumpkinites of various kinds and strengths. Killing a bunch of those seemed to agravate their Lord, who materialised in the center of the clearing and launched into whoever was closest.

The fight was a bit of a blur. I was trying to take screenshots - always a mistake - and as a melee character I had no option but to get in close. I didn't actually die but I had to retreat out of range far more often than I closed in to attack, to the point that when the boss finally fell I got no credit.

I wasn't bothered. It was just a recce to see how things worked. The next time Baalphazu arrived I was much more aware of his attacks and the need to dodge them but more importantly someone was putting out an impressive amount of AE healing, meaning I didn't have to rely on my health potions and their lengthy cooldowns.

I wouldn't say the fight was fun, exactly. It was a typical world boss zerg battle - a couple of dozen players in a scrum at the feet of a giant creature you could barely see for the light show. I like those kinds of fights so it suited me. It lasted about eight minutes, something I can say with a certain precision because it just so happened I got the ten minute warning from GeForce Now just after it began. 

It certainly added another layer of tension, knowing I was going to be forcibly excluded from the server when the on-screen timer reached zero. Fortunately, we had our target on the ground with a couple of minutes to spare. I just had time to check that, this time, my quest had updated and then I was back at desktop.

I left it at that for the night but this morning I logged back in and did the hand-in. The rewards were crafting patterns, gold and event currency, but also  - much to my surprise - all of the reputation required to buy anything in the event store. I was expecting to have to grind that rep out somehow, something that's been a longstanding feature of the game, including previous holiday events, but apparently rep grind is another thing we don't have to worry about in Aeternum any more.

I was also very surprised to see how affordable pretty much everything in the store is. It's true, you'd need to kill a lot of Baalphazus to earn the tokens to buy everything but after just the quest and one kill I already have enough to buy literally any one of the things on sale. 

There's some good stuff in there, too - GS 600 weapon patterns that would be a huge upgrade for me, for a start, plus some striking outfits and a house pet I'd quite like. Enough to persuade me to zerg the boss a few times more before the event ends, for sure, although it's true I never need much persuasion to join a zerg.

The real problem, as I found out when I went to make a hatchet from one of the patterns I got out of the loot chest, is that you need 150 skill in the relevant crafting discipline. Mine's nine. Bit of work to do there, then.

What I'll most likely do is buy the patterns I want and stash them. I did the same for the winter event. One thing I'm not short of in Aeternum is storage so hording is always an attractive option. Then, if I ever get back to playing regularly, I'll have a handy, moderately achievable goal to work towards in raising my crafting skills.

Whether I ever will play regularly again is a matter that's largely out of the hands of the Amazon Games development team. It's going to have a lot more to do with how much time I can find for any games at all. Free time seems to be at a ridiculous premium right now for someone who only works a couple of days a week but that's how its.

All in all, though, Nightveil Hallow looks like another good holiday event for New World and another solid Halloween effort for the genre. In other New World news, I also completed the access quest for the new zone, Brimstone Sands (It only takes a few minutes.) so that's where I'll be going next.

Read all about it here, I imagine, but not until next week. I'm taking the weekend off  blogging because, sadly, I'll be working instead.

Get Smart : GW2

Festival of the Four Winds ends today. I had to be at work by eight in the morning so I thought last night's session was the last I'd see of The Crown Pavilion and Labrynthine Cliffs until next year.
I spent most of the evening on the newest of my three accounts, the only one that wasn't around last time we saw this content, grabbing bundles in the Treasure Hunt and doing any event I could find to earn Festival Tokens.

I just managed to scrape up enough treasure to by a kite and with my tokens I got a hot air balloon on a string and that yellow flower that goes on your back. The sense of satisfaction when I was finally able to buy them, just before the clock passed the absolute latest I could stay up and still be half-awake in work the next day, was disturbing. I haven't been that keen to get something in an MMORPG for a long while.

Then I get home tonight, have my tea, read Feedly, log in and find the Festival's still there! I'm  listening to the sounds of preparations for Boss Blitz in the background as I type.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I had something to say about Boss Blitz. I really enjoy it as an exciting, involving event  but I also find it fascinating as a social and psychological experiment. Or perhaps it's a demonstration.

Boss Blitz isn't hard to understand or to do. The optimal way to run the event is for everyone to split into six teams of eight to ten people. Ideally, certain classes or builds concentrate on particular bosses that suit their abilities. There are some mechanics that need to be explained, such as Boom Boom Baines' healing turret, but most of the bosses are tank&spank with a lot of dodging.

Once set up, preferably under six Commanders using different colored tags for clarity, each team goes to its designated Boss. All teams then attempt to bring their Boss to 10% health at the same time. Some inevitably get there first, meaning they have to "hold" the Boss at that point without doing further damage.

Someone needs to call out the health of each boss at frequent intervals in a public channel. I often took it upon myself to do that bit. I like yelling. I got suppressed a few times for spamming map chat, something which is all too easy to do in GW2, where you can be banned from sending items to your own characters after two deliveries in quick succession. I should have used /squad which doesn't use the same anti-spam mechanics.

Once the slowest team gets their boss to 10%, their Commander gets to give the "Burn" command, whereupon everyone goes flat out to kill the boss in front of them as fast as possible. The reason for the co-ordinated kill is that each boss passes its signature ability (bombs, adds, banishment) on to all the other bosses when it dies, meaning each kill makes every other boss more difficult.

If everything goes to plan a good, organized map can complete this in about five minutes. The timer for the Gold award is eight minutes. This year I didn't get one Gold in three weeks. Four and five years ago I got plenty. I'm not sure what to read into that. Have GW2 players got worse? Is the event harder? Was I just unlucky with the maps I picked?

I did get lots of high Silvers (time limit sixteen minutes, we did it often in nine or ten) and any number of Bronzes (no time limit). I used the LFG tool to swap maps often until I got one that was at least trying to get Gold or Silver. There were fewer of those than you might expect.

Most of the maps were barely organized at all. Instead of doing it as described above (a description that I saw repeated in map chat many times by patient or frustrated players) people did what they do everywhere in GW2 - ran around in a huge zerg trying to overwhelm all opposition by weight of numbers. Some of the squads advertizing in LFG even said "zerg" or "bronze" in the description, indicating an active disinclination to make more than the minimal effort.

Of course, zerging means that not only does each boss get harder as it acquires the abilities of the ones who died before it, but GW2's scaling mechanic means every boss also gains a gigantic health pool to reflect the army of players opposing it. An event that is self-evidently intended to take between eight to sixteen minutes often stretches out to half an hour or more.

The fascinating part is that by the second week of the Festival everyone knew this and yet the majority of players carried on doing it anyway. Angry and embittered experts railed against the idiocy but it seems clear to me that most players preferred to zerg. They knew it would take longer and they just didn't care.

After all, it's not like they had anywhere else to be. This is the event of the moment so they were doing it. The rewards for finishing faster weren't significantly better so there wasn't much incentive to organize. And in any case, zerging is a social activity, not a competetive one.

Watching this drama enacted over and over again was instructive and entertaining. Some people were so angry they must have had steam coming out of their ears in real life. The accusation was almost always that those who wouldn't organize were too stupid to know what was expected of them but the replies very clearly indicated the opposite. Everyone knew what they "should" be doing - they just didn't want to do it.

I very much did want to do it properly. I love organized content. I like events where everyone has to get into teams and go to different places and do different things to achieve a collective success. I love Dragon's Stand and Auric Basin and my favorite event of all time in GW2 was Scarlet's Marionette.

And yet I still enjoy a good, mindless zerg, even when I'm well aware it's inefficient and even counter-productive. Running around in gang of fifty, taking on massive hit-point sponges and wearing them down by sheer bloody-mindedness has its own appeal.

I guess you can have smart, clever fun or dumb, stupid fun. Either way you're still having fun.

Give me the choice and I'll go for the smart option, though. Well, eight times out of ten.

Are We There Yet? : WoW, GW2

Legion draws ever nearer and I still haven't bought in. It's looking very much now as though I won't. Not at the start, anyway.

This first month of re-subscription has been...odd. When I hit the payment button on a whim my main concern was whether I'd get any use out of the subscription at all. That's proved to be an unnecessary concern. I've played every day.

The quality and nature of that play, on the other hand, has been both enlightening and confounding. I've played no more, no longer, each day than I had already been playing on my free account but I've had less fun.

The pattern has been to log into WoW only after I've done all my dailies on all three GW2 accounts plus the Bloodfen dailies on the one that has Heart of Thorns enabled. (I still haven't allocated my half-price HoT to either of the others).

Even after I've done the dailies I tend to stay on in GW2, often running around in WvW at least until Mrs Bhagpuss calls it a night. There was also rather good new Current Event added with last Tuesday's update, although it stalled very quickly as we all waited for the NPC to move to a new location (which, apparently, she did yesterday!).

This way, guys!

There's also the mysterious cat thing, which I spent some time noodling at while speculating why someone might have been allocated time to add this apparently purposeless piece of fluff when supposedly time constraints at ANet are so rigorous on everything else. Either it's something to keep the interns occupied or someone is testing some mechanic, either for later in LS3 or for the mysterious second expansion, that would be my supposition. Enhanced housing, anyone?

Daybreak Games threw their spanner in the ring with a big update and free Level 95s for all, so that took up some more time. I also took advantage of their generous All Access sale to put my main account on twelve-months pre-paid for the first time ever. I have to decide today whether to do the same for Mrs Bhagpuss's account, which, ironically, we had just agreed to cancel, due to her not having logged in for four years.

With all that going on, nothing else has really gotten a look-in these last couple of weeks. I did find time to check whether I needed to migrate my Dragon Nest account in the face of the imminent transfer of Nexon's North American version. Fortunately it turns out mine's DN: Europe, which appears to be staying on Steam for the time being. I'm aware that I better get on and play some Dragon Nest soon, though, or there may not be any Dragon Nest left to play.

The upshot of all this activity is that for several weeks my entire paid-up membership activity in World of Warcraft has consisted of running demonic invasions and occasionally sorting my bags into the bank. Most evenings I give it about an hour. I managed a couple of slightly longer sessions over the weekends but how people like Stargrace have managed to stick at it for hour after hour, day after day to level up whole armies of characters defeats me.

Aw, heck...where did everyone go?

As time's gone on the structure of the invasions has become a lot clearer. They seem less chaotic because, well, they aren't. There's some randomization to create a small sense of variety but the same bosses and sub-bosses appear at each location every time and the phases and cadences within  the phases are always the same.

My difficulty doesn't come from the repetition, something that all MMORPGs share as a core value. Nor does it come from the ridiculous number of seemingly unavoidable instant deaths (I had to repair to full twice in an hour last night) although the ability of some of the bosses to insta-kill without warning is intensely annoying.

No, my difficulty comes with the combat itself. It's bloody awful. I have never had any major complaints about WoW's combat in general. I have always found the solo, duo and single-group mechanics to be perfectly fine. On the evidence of what is now many hours of large-scale eventing, however, I have to say the in-event combat is the single worst MMO experience of its kind I have encountered anywhere.

There is no feedback worth the name, neither visual nor aural nor textual nor tactile. Everything floats.

I have no lag whatsoever and excellent ping. Technically nothing is standing in the way of a smooth, streamlined experience. What I don't have is any sense whatsoever that the character I'm controlling is involved in the action.

Thanks, but I had a shower earlier.

People talk an awful lot about "rotations" in WoW. I have it in mind to write about that in some depth but for now I'll just say that as far as these invasions go any "rotation" is entirely superflous. Meaningless. Worthless.

You don't need to be able to play your character to do Invasions. Perhaps there's something you might do to die less that requires player skill or class knowledge but other than that all you need to do is hit one button. Any button will do.

I hit all of them as they come off cooldown so as to have something to do but I am painfully aware that I would be better off tagging each boss once then withdrawing well out of range so I don't get insta-gibbed by some invisible AE. Still, stubbornly, I fight and more than occasionally die.

The other required skill is flocking. After each boss dies there's a moment's hiatus as everyone finds whatever button they hit to mount up and then the entire zerg takes to the skies. If you happen to be looking the wrong way or, calamity, still waiting at the graveyard, you're stuffed.

There's some arcane logic to the order in which the bosses are killed that, I'm sure, becomes second nature if you're grinding them for hours and days and weeks. It's beginning to seep into my consciousness now, just as it reaches the point when it will never, ever matter again. Meanwhile, if I miss my place in the flock it's five minutes of aimlessly flying around, looking and hoping. This is when I realize what a truly under-appreciated innovation Commander Tags were.

You fellas carry on without me. I'm just going sit here and moonbathe for a while.

In any other MMO the general channel would be buzzing thorough all these events. There would be banter and chatter and jokes - mostly very bad jokes but still... In WoW there is radio silence. People speak just often enough to let me know my chat channels aren't actually broken - maybe someone says something once every five or ten minutes. Oh, and there's a flurry of "INV" now and again, the most pared-down jargon for "Can I get an invite?" I've ever seen anywhere.

WoW has changed a lot since I last played back in the WotLK era. Then the problem with chat was the never-ending squall of noise, much of it very offensive. Now it seems no-one has anything to say at all, which adds to the strange, alienating "alone in a crowd" feel of these massive public events.

Coming from GW2, where every day is a series of large-scale events, I'm used to a constant surf of chatter as I play. I'm also used to feeling a solid, responsive, physical connection between my fingers on the keys and mouse and the actions of my character on the screen. Demonic Invasions in WoW have none of that.

What they do have is incredibly fast leveling and very useful loot. Just one of those two factors, as is well known, would have most MMO players sitting in an empty room pushing one button for hour after hour. At least the invasions are visually spectacular. There's always something to goggle at.

Hey! I can almost tell what I'm doing here! Almost.

In the end, though, after the novelty of seeing gigantic demons drop from the sky wore off, which took no more than a couple of sessions, it's all about the rewards. That's why I've stuck at it. I wanted to get my Hunter to 90. He was 69 when I started and now he's 92.

I've moved the target to 95 by Legion's launch A couple more sessions. The Warlock went from the high forties to 61, where he's going to stop. He got flying and that will do him for now. As for buying Legion, I think the odds are now better that I'll cancel my sub.

Or I might do neither. I might take another month and go and play the game normally. Level up some characters the old-fashioned way. See the broken world. Flying over those Cataclysm-shattered zones I see a lot of very interesting-looking landscapes worth exploring.

One thing I am sure about: WoW's engine is not made for these big open-world extravaganzas. The utter weightlessness of everything is enervating. I feel tired just thinking about it.

I've never raided in WoW. Do raids feel like this too? Maybe I'll do some LFR and see for myself.

In Praise Of The Zerg: Rift, GW2

When some Ancient from the last century came up with the acronym MMORPG, the first two letters represented the then-astonishing ability of the internet to allow large numbers of individuals around the world to play together in the same game space. Back in those halcyon days, when everyone was making - or talking about making -  Virtual Worlds rather than mere games, to qualify for the double M club it was enough for large numbers simply to share the same imaginary milieu.

From the very early days, though, there was a drive to do more than just parcel the worlds up into pockets and have all the pockets talk to each other at a distance. EverQuest began with no formal raiding structure but players invented one of their own, bringing larger and larger gangs to clear entire zones in a rolling wave of terror. When SOE formalized matters with the Planes of Power expansion the raid size was set at 72, a number that sounds pretty massive even today.

My own first memory of truly huge conglomerations of players comes not from EQ but from Dark Age of Camelot, which debuted in 2001. Realm vs Realm saw the creation of massive forces that came together to siege or defend keeps. My PC could not handle those numbers. My experience of siege-play consisted mainly of extreme close-ups of the stretched and degraded textures of a game engine under stress as I pounded on a wooden door for what seemed like eternity.

For a while it seemed as though technology would fail us. I quit DAOC. EverQuest pared back its ambitious raids from 72 to 54 to 42. World of Warcraft set the bar at 40 and let it decline from there. It looked as though the concept of massiveness itself had been redefined.

I first noticed the tide begin to turn with the arrival of Rift. The early beta weekends were an exhilarating rush as Trion unveiled their USP - endless, rolling incursions and invasions that brought dozens, scores, hundreds of mobs down from the skies, demanding a co-ordinated response by similar numbers of players.

Someone's technology had improved. Ether I had a better PC or Trion had better developers. Whichever way round it was, for the first time I found myself caught up in truly overwhelming fantasy battles, surrounded by an army of allies, facing off against a horde of enemies, with fireworks and explosions detonating endlessly all around - and I could still move!

Rift changed everything. Since then I have felt the tug of massive-scale events like a comet feels the pull of the sun. No matter how far I retreat to my own, isolated solo instances, or potter alone in forgotten zones, the call of the crowd always draws me back to the core.

Apart from technological progress, at the heart of the ongoing, successful integration of very large scale events into the genre is the removal of the requirement for formal organization. Warhammer's Public Quests are usually quoted as Year Zero for the new age of automated socialization but for me it was Rift that set the pattern.

When it comes to reasons not to raid one of the biggest negative factors is the sheer time it takes to get things moving. I always liked the idea of raiding - conceptually. It was the experience as it played out in real time that drove me to find something more interesting to do - like sorting my bank vault or watching paint dry.

Those first beta weekends in Rift were a revelation. Instant raids, no drama! All the fun and none of the tears - of boredom. Instead of competitiveness there was camaraderie - a sense that we were all in it together, at least until we ran into those filthy Defiants/Guardians (delete as applicable).

Over time, for reasons that escape my ability to comprehend but which, no doubt, have their roots in finance, Trion chose to dilute and eventually dismantle the underlying raison d'etre of their flagship game. Instead of the magnificent turmoil of unpredictable, inescapable and never-ending planar invasions we moved to an on-demand service.

First we players were granted the ability to craft lures that allowed us to rip open the skies and bring down the invaders we wanted, when we wanted them and wherever it was most convenient. Then came Instant Adventures. All the action you can handle at the click of a button. 

A few nights ago, back in Rift after a long, long lay-off, fiddling with the UI trying to find out what stuff does, I found myself in a Raid. Just my Rogue and twenty or so of her closest complete friends she's never met before and never will again, throwing themselves like chaff into the blades of godlike creatures in the expectation of certain death, certain loot, certain XP.

I had no clue what I was doing. No-one spoke. Prompts appeared across the screen so I followed them. Hammy, post-modern voiceovers stripped away all conceivable veneers of belief. I died and died and died. Then I died some more. 

My roles had long since been revamped in my absence to the point where almost none of the icons on my hot bars did anything at all. My contribution over half an hour was limited to auto-attacking with a bow. No-one complained. No-one cared. No-one noticed.

As Rift slumped towards self-parody, GW2 snatched the baton and ran. The direction the race was beginning to take was not universally applauded. Many seemed to fear a breaking of bonds between the human beings behind the avatars to be inherent in the move towards a more informal, ad hoc social structure. 

In the event, and with uncomfortable irony, it was the more formal matchmaking mechanisms implemented by MMOs that tried to shore up those failing traditions that led to a sense of increasing alienation. Their structures seemed designed to create groups that never spoke, their ever-shifting places filled and re-filled by strangers who came together in silent purpose, never to meet again. 

It transpired that the hurly-burly of the new ad hoc orthodoxy, counter-intuitively perhaps, fostered an atmosphere much more conducive to a sense of hail-fellow-well-met, we're all in this together goodwill. On a good day, anyway.

As this all played out ArenaNet waxed hot and cold over their own supposedly unique selling point, the dynamic event. The years piled up while they played with the concept, sometimes successfully, often less so. 

For a time they seemed set on huge, seething, surging map-wide brawls, an approach that reached its apogee with the glorious invasions of Scarlet's armies and the epochal Fall of Lion's Arch. That era seemed to end as Living Story 2 was parcelled up in instances, while the chains of timed, tamed events made gameplay in Dry Top and Silverwastes feel as desiccated as the landscapes. 

That trend continued into the dripping jungles of Heart of Thorns. Would the story of Rift repeat itself?

Coming into 2016 it seemed likely that the last remnant of glory would fly in tatters over World versus World, where the long-maligned zergs still roamed like wounded dinosaurs, awaiting the end. And then, once more, the winds changed. 

As we wait in the foyer of Living World 3, the new, post-Johansen GW2 slowly takes shape. A path to the future begins to emerge, picking its way cautiously between the wild chaos of Scarlet and her all-conquering armies and the stately dance of Heart of Thorns. 

The preliminaries began slowly but they are gathering pace. A patchwork of smaller events is building a palimpsest. The bandits, the anomalies, the competing factions, they all arrive without much fanfare but decline to leave. Now we have The Running Man and to a resounding cheer the rolling PvE zerg is back. 

All the new events are neither entirely random nor set to a fixed pattern. They move from map to map at a defined pace but incorporate an element of randomness that sees Commanders hopping waypoints, trailing their squads behind them.

This is the iteration we were looking for. It bodes very well for the still-unannounced, mysterious second expansion, and for the equally unannounced, equally mysterious Living Story 3.

The destiny of the MMORPG lies in each and every direction. The genre's greatest strength and most difficult challenge is and always has been its malleability. More so than any other form of video game, MMOs seek to be all things to all players, all at once.

Well and good. But the true defining trope remains encapsulated in that first initial: M is for massive. Without that sense of scale everything else is a mere collage of identities drawn from elsewhere. 

Let's get bigger. And then bigger still.