Trapped! : GW2

I didn't quite stick it out until the bitter end, which came at seven in the morning our time, and I missed a big chunk of Saturday due to the small matter of having to go to work but I still managed to spend more than twenty-four hours in Tyria across the weekend. That's a huge endorsement right there but I've got an even bigger one: the only time I tabbed out was to do a search after a crafting hiccup. For three nights and two days there was no blogging, no browsing, no commenting, posting or reading. I just played. And made notes.

No question then that I really like Guild Wars 2 a lot. I had a great time and if the servers were still up I'd be playing now rather than typing this. Just wanted to make that clear because when I read my notes back it turns out they're mostly complaints. Well, I shouldn't be surprised. If there's one thing nearly all MMO betas I've played have in common it's that the longer they go on, the more the bits I like get watered down or removed. Viz and to wit:

The New Skill/Trait System
 

Bet you ten silver I can limbo under that bear

We used to have complete freedom to choose any skill or trait for which we had acquired sufficient points. Now we have tiers, meaning we have to spend a certain number of points in each row before the next row opens up. This adds clarity and structure but removes flexibility and freedom. In the case of the class I'm concentrating on, the Ranger, it poses a particular problem.

I have a strong aversion to game mechanics that require me to place traps. In the first beta weekend I didn't put a single point into any trap skills. This time I was compelled to spend several points on skills I will probably never even slot into my hot-bar let alone use regularly, just to open up the third tier of Slot Skills where I can get my greedy leather-gloved paws on the essential, game-changing Signet of the Wild.

Yes, but you can always smell honey

SotW gives passive regen to you and your pet that hugely increases survivability. Last beta I acquired SotW somewhere in the low-mid-teens. This time not only did I have no option but to respend some of my returned points in trap skills I didn't want but at level 21 I still didn't have enough points to get SotW, even after foregoing the third healing skill. I had to go out and find a further three skill challenges to gain the points to get back to where I had been five or six levels ago, minus a healing option.

If that wasn't bad enough, the three "Utility Slots" into which you place these skills are level-locked at 5, 10 and 20. Signet of the Wild is in the third tier so you now have to wait twenty levels before you can get it. Edit: No you don't as Winged Nazgul points out in the comments!

Blasphemy!

In short, tidying up the presentation of Slot Skills may have been a good idea but cutting back on our freedom to build our characters how we'd like wasn't. If there really is a problem with players not understanding the choices available there are better ways to handle it. Highlight suggested options, for example or offer pre-made builds as Rift now does.

The changes to the Trait system didn't bother me as much. Or at all. I can't actually remember how they worked before, come to think of it. It doesn't do to become attached to any of these systems anyway. Next time they lift the velvet rope things may have changed again and you can guarantee all systems will change many more times after the game goes Live. Rarely for the better.

Deep breath. Carry on.

The Full Half Hour: Tera

I've never had much interest in Tera. I couldn't even summon up the enthusiasm to download the client to try the open beta. There does come a point, however, when the barrier to entry is lowered so far it's almost perverse not to take a peek. En Masse found that point with their Instant Demo. Although even then I was more interested to see how Gaikai's streaming technology held up than I was in playing the game.

My first attempt wasn't impressive. It wouldn't run at all. I left it a day to settle and tried again and second time round it worked just fine. The demo allows you thirty minutes. I used all of that last night and tonight I went back for ten minutes to take some photos. Here are my largely unconsidered observations from those brief visits.

• Thirty minutes is more than enough Tera.

• Gaikai's technology works. It takes about two or three minutes to load up on their servers and then the window appears and you're in. Everything was eminently stable while I was playing. I didn't notice any lag or hitching whatsoever. The demo runs either in a window or full screen and feels just like playing any MMO from your own machine.

Strategically-placed hotbar

• Visually it looked very muddy indeed. Blurred. I can't believe that's what the same zone would look like playing from an installed version. Granted they've chosen a zone in which it's perpetually raining and it appears to be night-time, but still...

• Come to think of it, if one of the strongest selling-points of your game was the lush, gorgeous visuals, why would you choose a zone in which it's perpetually raining and it appears to be night-time for your shop window?

None more blue

•  And while we're on the subject, if another of the strongest selling-points of your game was its fast action combat which "takes the fight beyond whack-a-mole monotony with enhanced aiming, dodging, and tactical timing", why would you pick a zone for your thirty-minute demo that starts on a beach that has nothing you can fight? And that's locked behind a gate you can't get past until you complete several non-combat quests? Which use up the best part of half the time you've been given?

• It's one thing to read about the well-known issues regarding the presentation of female characters in Tera but it really doesn't prepare you for the awful experience. For my full run-through I played the big guy and he was completely inoffensive. I made the mistake of picking one of the females for the screenshot run, which is why I have very few screenshots and I feel like I need to take my eyeballs out and wash them.

My reaction exactly, Ahdun.

• If you're going to limit your trial to thirty minutes and set it somewhere that uses up half the time with busy-work and getting from one place to another, maybe also starting off with a level 20 character with a populated skill bar which you then tell the player to read and learn  before fighting anything might just obscure some of the actiony fun you were trying so hard to put across.

• It won't surprise anyone reading this to hear that I hated the combat. Just horrible. Give me whack-a-mole monotony any day. 

In summation, I was impressed with Gaikai's contribution and, erm.. no, that's it.

Adventurer For Hire. Will Quest For Food

Does anyone really like quests? I only ask because I'm starting to get the feeling MMO developers don't much anymore. We may just be on a supertanker turn back to where we began.

My first MMO was the ironically-named Everquest. I found some quests there, eventually. Hours passed happily as I wandered round Qeynos /hailing every idling armor salesman and strolling guard on the off-chance a small package might need delivering to a guy standing ten yards away or I might get offered a few silver to murder someone in cold blood.

Wolf? Kill? Pelt? Just tell me!

Back then there was often no way of telling who might have a quest, what you'd have to do once you found one, how long it would take, where you'd have to go or what you'd get when you'd done it. Not until you discovered Allakhazam, anyway.

Everquest's key-word matching was probably familiar to everyone playing back in 1999. It was largely the same system text adventures had been using for a decade and more. There are MMOs using it still, but as the genre struggled towards the mainstream many of the traits inherited from its primitive ancestors began to breed out.

Calm down! I saw the feather!

I can't recall when or where glowing question marks first appeared over the heads of NPCs as a sign they were hiring. I do recall being taken aback when Anarchy Online, which launched with a resounding clang in the late summer of 2001, used Mission Terminals to dispense information about what to do and where to do it. It seemed almost like cheating, it was so easy.

Innovations came thick and fast. Tasks, Missions, Journals, Breadcrumb Trails, Counters, Map Markers... Questing ceased to be about wandering a world, meeting people, getting drawn into their intrigues, troubles and dramas. Instead it came more and more to feel like being the intern whose job it is to go round the office asking everyone what sandwiches they want for lunch then going out and getting them.

Eventually we hit a point where the entire questing process seemed to have been subcontracted out. There are MMOs where all you have to do to quest is hit a marker on your map to autorun to the guy who wants something then another to run to what he wants. Not that that isn't fun in its own way, but where's the mystery? Where's the romance?

It looks as though that trend may just have stretched about as far as it can. The elastic's starting to snap back. Poster child for New Generation questing is Guild Wars 2, of course. Public events that fire on a proximity fuse and spin off who knows where, Hearts that fill whether you knew you were filling them or not, NPCs who don't wait for you to notice them but run up to you waving their arms and yelling "Haaaalp" like Penelope Pitstop. GW2 is determined you'll have plenty to do without needing to ask.

The Secret World has a more traditional delivery system but Funcom look to be out to break both the quest hub and text-skipping. No clicking through a clutch of question marks and loading up. Your journal has room for only a handful of Missions. Try to take a new one and an old one drops out. You have to focus, talk to people and listen to what they tell you. I know. Unheard of.

How's he keeping that thing up there?

What started me on this train of thought wasn't either of those. It was a recent comment by Scott Hartsman (which annoyingly I now can't find) relating to Rift's upcoming Storm Legion expansion. The gist was "show don't tell", which is pretty much the way Rift's Instant Adventures work as you tear around Telara in a schoolyard gang with quest objectives autopopulating your journal almost too fast to follow.

TMI - strictly roots

Which brings me to WildStar and Twitterquesting. If you can't tell me in 140 characters don't tell me at all. Possibly not the strongest new card in the pack but they may be onto something.

There's no clear agreement about the solution but there appears to be some consensus around the problem: NPCs that deliver lengthy instructions in text or voiceover that we passively receive, record and carry out like obedient droids have had their day. We're back out in the open world, getting caught up in stuff as it happens because we were poking our noses in without asking first.

Where does that leave highly directed fourth-pillar storygaming? Washed up and wiped out or just surfing a different wave? Time will tell. There's probably room for both. I'm just glad to see an orthodoxy that was ossifying begin to crumble.

You Don't Want To Do It Like That! : The Missing Ink

There has to be a good chance you don't want to know as much about The Missing Ink as I want to tell you, but since my last post I've spent several more hours there and things are looking slightly less muddy than an Inkling Peasant. There are some clarifications I need to issue.

So I look like a vicar. Wanna make something of it?

• Yes, you have to be a cardboard cut-out but no, you don't have to be an amorphous, genderless ghost-baby. At some point I gained the option to select an appearance from a dozen or so avatars each of which had further customizable options. It's possible this was there at the start and I just didn't notice it. Or it's something you can only do in your personal instance (aka your "fully integrated sandbox 3D virtual world" ), which is where I was when I spotted it. I swear that same tab had quests on it when I looked at it in the shared world. Either way, once chosen the appearance sticks and now I look like this ^^^

• I really liked the ghost-baby look, though.

Don't hate on my roof, ok?

•  I now sort of know how to use the very limited alpha sandbox tools. I built a house! A really bad house with some big holes in the floor upstairs and a roof that's going to cause me real problems come the first thunderstorm, but, hey... a house ! 

• The sandbox tools feel really alpha whereas the interface, open world and some of the questing and combat feel beta.

Anyone got 10p?

•  There are two "stories" so far: "The Princess and The Troll" and "Beer of the Gods". The former is the very familiar MMO medieval setting I referred to earlier and the latter is a very familiar MMO Nordic setting. Whoever the people behind this thing are (and they are called RedBedlam if that means anything to anyone) they have very obviously played all the same MMOs I have and had as good a time as I did doing so.

• I still haven't found any story in the "story". It's alpha, though. Maybe it's not in yet.

• Combat that consists of your character jiggling very slightly from one foot to the other and almost nothing else is just as much fun as combat where your character runs, jumps and rolls with a load of motion-captured moves. Really. No, really!

• There are Nameds.  Maybe they drop something. I'll tell you if I manage to kill one.

• A huge amount of junk loot drops. Easy to spot. It's labelled "junk". As far as I can tell there are no vendors, yet. A helpful loading screen tip advises you to drop junk loot to make more inventory space. Yeah, right. I'll just hang on to mine, thanks. I got a Sock Puppet and you want I should throw it away?

Ms Lumley! Ms Lumley!!

• The viking zone has a windmill. As adumbrated by Melmoth at KIASA, windmills, while vital, are near-universal. Northern Lights aren't, though. TMI has them.

• Three visible slots is probably not going to be enough, cardboard cut-out or not. 

• The TMI client is currently available for both PC and Mac and RedBedlam confidently predict it will also be available on iOS and Android at launch. The prospect of being able to play it at home on my 24" monitor and out and about on my 4" IPod Touch boggles the mind.

Eat your heart out, SOEmote!

• Did I mention it's PvP? Kind of theoretical at this stage since I've seen all of three other players and all of them were in the lobby. (The lobby is so cool, by the way. It has monitors and they show the old BBC Test Card. The classic one that was last broadcast in 1997. It all fits). There's a PvP toggle that I don't understand yet. I think it's optional. It probably should be.

• Corpse recovery is required. It's post-WoW return-as-a-ghost CR, but even so. Not something you expect in a browser MMO.

Best. MMO. Joke. Ever.

In case it isn't clear, I really like The Missing Ink. A lot. It's alpha and it's small, limited and slightly buggy but it just has that "this is going to work" vibe. Playing feels natural, comfortable and moreish. This one's going on my "highly anticipated" list. More to come as I learn.

You're A Card And No Mistake! : The Missing Ink

MMO development costs are a bit of a hot button issue right now, what with the 38Studios train wreck, SWTOR layoffs, Dominus shutdown and all. It's the voiceovers, isn't it? Can't make an MMO without voiceovers. Or the story. Just GOT to have a story. Then there's the art assets, they must cost millions. And the animations, don't get me started on the animations.

Actors, artists, animators, writers - they all want paying! Then someone has to ride herd on the lot of 'em and that means management and you know how much managers are worth... And that's before you even get to the folks who actually code the thing. No wonder everyone's coming cap-in-hand to us, the players, to put our hands in our pockets and get the projects kickstarted.

Someone's mower's got a wonky wheel

If only you could make an MMO with cardboard cut-outs. Think how much money you'd save. Couldn't happen, could it? That's got to be about as likely as your in-game character looking back out the screen at you and matching your movements like a Marx Brothers routine.

Your Author, Gentle Reader

Well, there's a theory that goes "if it can be done it will be done" and now someone did. Yesterday I signed up for The Missing Ink alpha and that's my character over there >>>

Not only is he a cardboard cut-out, he hasn't even been cut out very well! You can still see quite a lot of his white background where someone's just gone round him really lazily with a pair of those blunt child-friendly scissors. They probably don't allow them anything sharp where these developers are.

Where is that, by the way. It's Brighton? Ohhhh! Now I get it!

For those not in the know, over the last couple of decades Brighton's made a fair run at becoming Britain's San Francisco. Without the sunshine, obviously. Or the scenery. If something sounds too off the wall to be happening, chances are it's happening in Brighton.

Build or Bash? The eternal quandary

These wacky guys and their hipster cool, hey? This is going to be Glitch all over again I bet. Except it isn't. Not hardly. (I should clarify at this point that I can't stick Glitch. I tried it and it made my skin crawl). The Missing Ink is not Glitch.


So what is it? Let's hear it from the horse's mouth: "The Missing Ink, when fully launched will 'probably' be the world's first MMORPG with a fully integrated sandbox 3D virtual world for every player". I like that "probably". It indicates the kind of groundedness this project is going to need. And then some.

Don't hit me, I'm a dentist!

So, I'm winding up to slam this crazy cardboard cut-out hipster nonsense, right? That's where all this going. Nope. Not even close. I loved it. It's a demented take on the traditional MMO done with wit and style. I only meant to take a quick a look but I ended up playing for a couple of hours and getting to level 4, which took a satisfyingly long time.

The Missing Ink is another alpha  that feels like a beta to me. It's an open alpha so you can register and play in a couple of minutes. It will play in a browser but the window is pretty small. There's the option of a downloadable client as well and if you take the few minutes it takes to get that and install it you can play The Missing Ink full-screen. Do that. It looks wonderful.

Anytown, MMO

Your character is a flat, two-dimensional cut-out but he (she? it?) lives in a fully-realised 3D world. That was a surprise and a charming one. The hills roll, the sea shimmers, the paths wind. It's an MMO landscape you'll recognize, with scattered villages peopled by knights, blacksmiths and peasants. Flat ones. Some of them have books floating over their heads. Guess what they are.

Kill or Cure? Kill and Cure!

Quests, check. Combat, check. Drops, check. They should have gotten Prince to do the music 'cos it feels like it's 1999, but I'm glad they didn't because, well, those costs... and whoever did the music did a great job, as did whoever put all the bird sounds in.

It's one of those MMOs where I felt drawn in immediately. I have a good deal more to say on it but I want to dig in a bit deeper first. I didn't find the plot yet (apparently there is one) and I don't understand how to use the sandbox tools. I'll get back to you but in the meantime go take a look. There's something in this one, I'm sure of it.

So Emo. No, Wait! SOEmote : EQ2

Hands up who saw this one coming. Anyone? Anyone? Thought not. Sometimes an idea starts so far out in left field you have to turn your head to the right to see it coming.

Go on, turn your head. Your froglok head.

Would you like to see your character yawn when you yawn? I think I can say with complete honesty it's never crossed my mind. Must have been itching away at someone, though because yesterday Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson gave us the benefit of a long close-up of his ever-smiling face as he enthused his way through a promo for SoE's Big New Idea. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch this.

To sum up if you didn't care to click through, EQ2 is getting both real-time facial tracking and voice fonts. Your character will be able to look more like you and sound less.

Trying to digest that news gobbet, I must have looked pretty much like Froggie the Imaginatively-Named Froglok. Let it settle a while, though and things begin to clarify. This tech was developed for something else and adapted but it's a good fit for EQ2.

Added value is what it's all about. EQ2 is becoming a portmanteau MMO. So much to do there these days the undertow is hard to fight. I keep getting sucked back in and something like this isn't fluff on the upholstery any more, it's the stuffing in the seats that's making it such a comfortable ride. (Yes, I do mix my metaphors with a blender).

"I'm not sure officer. He sounded like a froglok"

In his lengthy PCGamer interview Smokejumper says "All games should have this" and he would, wouldn't he? He's never knowingly under-enthused. But SoE have the very worst history of innovation. They spit out ideas like the old woman at the back of the bus spitting sunflower husks into a paper cup and they pay about as much attention to them afterwards, too. The question's not "should we have it?" but "will you remember we've got it after you've given it to us?"

He says "Once you get used to other people’s faces moving realistically and intuitively, characters in other games start to feel really plastic and mannequin-like". If I was charged with boosting EQ2 I'd be chary of putting the plastic dollface image back into anyone's mental field of view but that aside, he may have a point. If, that is, you habitually stare at the faces of other people's characters when you play.

Does anyone do that? Well, yes. Roleplayers do. Or at least they sit in groups facing each other, talking in /say and emoting til their fingers bleed. This I know not from EQ2 but from Rift, where in both Sanctum and Meridian I would frequently push through knots of them deep in the kind of conversation I remember from all yesterday's parties.

I don't envy them the emotional commitment and I won't be joining them but I can see how strongly something like this could play to that crowd. No, while I'm looking forward a lot to playing around with the facial imaging, it's the voice fonts that really interest me.

I ams so a troll pirates! Can't you hear my deeps troll voice?

Georgeson says of the integration of voice chat within EQ2: "Once players revealed their real voices to each other, it suddenly started feeling awkward to pretend to be a big gruff troll or a high elf princess… and roleplay took a serious nosedive". I don't know how badly it impacted roleplay but it's the main reason I've never used voice chat. I play in a really small room and the thought of filling it with a babel of Dutch, Texan and Aussie voices creeps me out more than somewhat. Imagining being surrounded by a gabbling menagerie of Kerrans, Iksars and Ratongas, on the other hand, has the opposite effect.

If you have the kind of awkward memory I do, you may recall that we were told years ago in the original PR release for EQ2's voice chat that it would include "voice masks". In typical SOE fashion, once mentioned this idea was left by the side of the road somewhere to wither up and die. There are third-party apps around already that will do what we were promised but at last we can just change a couple of settings in-game and squeak properly.

How much use am I going to make of this? Who knows? It's not in-game yet and I'll reserve judgment until I see it working. Smokejumper talks a good game and I am broadly happy with the direction he's taken EQ2 since he took control (I still think of him as being in charge of EQ2 with Windstalker as his sock-puppet) but the game he talks is sometimes better than the game we get to play.

It has possibilities, though. Enough that I'm going to buy a webcam tomorrow. An idea for an all-ratonga podcast just popped into my head...

Last Verse: NBI

So.

Farewell then

NBI.

You grew to be bigger
Than any of us thought
You would be

Or could be
Or should be.

May is over
And June is here
And we all have

Other things to be getting on
With, so

Let the blogs roll.

With the traditional apologies to e j thribb

or...

The Final List as per Our Glorious Leader
 

• Lotro Family of Flosiin Nightsong
• Red Neckromonger
• Casual Aggro
• SWTOR from Scratch
• Elfkina vežička
• Unwavering Sentinel
• Windy Acres Ranch
• TL-DR
• Saali in Taborea
• Bad Tauren
• Musings of an Altoholic
• Neurotic Girl
• Geo’s Ironman Challenge
• Crafty’s Corner
• Scattered Thoughts
• The Poison Mushroom
• My Staff is Bigger Than Yours
• Vagabond Goes for a Walk
• EVE All Night
• Dreadblade
• Priest All The Things
• Brazokie’s Blog Space
• Warp to Zero
• Altaclysmic
• Winniekin’s Adventures / Winnie goes F2P
• Diminishing Returns
• World’s End Tavern
• Warrior Needs Time Badly
• We do it the WASD Way!
• Middle-earth Initiative
• That Was An Accident!
• Aggrolicious
• Conveniently Placed Exhaust Port
• Adamant Nomad
• Toastman’s Blog
• Ravalation
• Gaming for Introverts
• The Incidental Analyst
• Funsponge
• Bloodthorne
• AntiPlasmaFrequency
• Kemwer Game Blog
• The Adventures of Danania, Supergirl of Lorien
• Unliving a Death Knight
• Deathstomp
• MMO Juggler
• White Charr
• Not Too Heavy
• Flask Half-Empty
• Raspberry Jammed
• Click to Loot
• Kaw Kaw! Get in the Bag!
• Mistress of Illusions
• Malefic Incantations
• MMO One Night a Week
• Omens of Onterion
• The Blue Haired Geek
• TFScribbles
• Glimpses from Middle-earth
• Goetia’s Letters
• /con mmob
• Gaming Abroad
• Backseat Game Design
• Divinity’s Reach
• Big Numbers
• Trippin Tyria
• Eons and Eons Away
• Horrible Ball of Fire
• Image Heavy
• Casually Vicious
• The Frugal Gamer
• Gaming Brew
• The Roaring Silence
• MMOARprz
• Game Delver
• The Diverted Muse
• Newbie Hobbit
• Battlemastered
• thenotsonewnoob
• Auction House on Farm
• Giddeon’s Hammer
• Noob Raider
• The Altoholic
• stnylan’s musings
• The 10th Level of Gaming Hell
• commentarilies
• Inside the Magic Shop
• Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• Argus or Bust
• Lotro Cinna
• Warlockery
• Stabby McStabStab
• Healing Mains
• The Loony Bin
• Warcraft Street
• Real Adventures in Fake Worlds
• GnomeGates.com
• Hipstalotro
• The Butterfly Gamer
• The Mighty Viking Hamster
• Why I Game
• Wald’s Wanderings
• Ald Shot First
• Sephora’s Closet
• Donovan Drones
• Beyond Reproach
• The Horn & Ivory Gates
• Landroval Style
• MMO Asylum
• Renai Hunter
• Space Fiddle

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• Games and Geekery: Why you should blog, Learning about blogging from perfect strangers
• Skycandy: Blogging wrong, blogging right
• Shards of Imagination: Choosing the subject of your blog
• MMO Compendium: Keeping up with the industry and bloggers
• Contains Moderate Peril: Some general guidance, Mind your language, Stats, Episode 61
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• High Latency Life: Finding your voice, You need a thick skin
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• Welcome to Spinksville: What you should write and how to write it
• The Stories of O: Top 4 tips
• A Ding World: Blog posting
• The Wild Boar Inn: Blogging tips
• Professor Beej: Stop writing!
• Nomnom.info: 4 blogging tips
• Gamer BC: A solid foundation and a step forward
• Casual Is As Casual Does: Tips, tricks and who am I kidding
• Roll One Hundred: Managing screenshots
• Bullet Points: I refuse to call it a blogosphere
• KIASA: Good advice
• Pumping Irony: Before taking the plunge
• Life is a Mind-Bending Puzzle: Wrapping up advice all in one place
• Rikna’s Rants: The blog rings, By this keyboard I rule!, Guests and cross posts
• Sheep the Diamond: Advice from an old bull