Of Cabbage Elves and Kings: GW2

The briefest of first impressions, dashed off as I eat my breakfast before going to work, based on a couple of hours play last night.

Originally I didn't plan to play this Beta Weekend at all. I am deep in The Secret World and loving it despite, or even because of its flaws. The first City of Steam alpha begins today and my alpha key is safely activated. I don't have the time or enthusiasm for a final day and a half in a beta for an MMO that I will be playing full-time live in just over a month.

Curiosity, of course, got the better of me. The compromise I made was to play both a race and class that I have absolutely no intention of playing at launch, if ever. Thus my Sylvari Thief was born hatched whatever.

Noble. So noble.

I know nothing of the Sylvari other than what I have picked up around the peripheries of my reading on other matters pertaining to Guild Wars 2. My impression was that they are elves by another name. After spending a couple of hours in their starting area this impression has changed not a jot, merely hardened to a conviction.

They look elvish. Elven. Like elves. They talk like elves. Wood elves, unsurprisingly. There is talk of a Nightmare Court so Dark Elves lurk in the backstory. No doubt there will be nobles somewhere along the line and we'll have High Elves. You'd like to think the whole being a plant thing would preclude half-elves but I wouldn't put anything past the Asura.

Your correspondent, centre, falling.

The short intro takes place in  a dream. Scratch that. The short intro takes place in The Dream. Capitalization obligatory. It was a dream with about a thousand milling first level cabbage elves in, I died twice before I could even get to the Big Wood Dragon and then I was in Tyria. It might make sense when the server isn't full to bursting and half of all people playing didn't just pick a fresh cabbage.

Only laugh I had all night

Then I was in The Nursery in Greater Faydark. Well, it was either there or one of several Korean F2Ps I've uninstalled over the years. Everything was extremely green and all the NPCs talked like care assistants in a Home For The Bewildered. Or residents.

I followed my Personal Story for a few minutes and ended up in an instance at level three, inevitably seeking the Secret Salve of the Bad Race that the Elven Sylvari Wise One needed to create A Cure for the Terrible Poisoning of an Innocent. I think it's plotline #4 in Questing For Dummies.

Things did improve when I got a gun

There I met The Troll King. He was Level Five and you have to be pretty damn hard to hold the crown at a level like that. He duly kicked my stalk and I logged out in low dudgeon and spent the rest of the evening back in The Secret World, pleased at least to have all my prejudices confirmed.

On a much more positive and less snide note, I did push past the starting area and the Sylvari lands as they open out look far more intriguing, explorable and interesting. And Mrs Bhagpuss sagely made an Asura and had a great evening, having to be dragged off the computer after midnight as she also has work today. If I'd made an Asura this post would have taken a very different tone, I'm sure.

A Girl Needs A Gun These Days: The Secret World

On account of all the Rattlesnakes.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent much of last weekend duoing in The Secret World, with mixed results. Given all the gunfire bullet points seemed appropriate.

• Combat goes much better in a duo. It's fast, fun and furious.

• Even with two guns firing, quite a few TSW mobs have too many hit points. Or their skins are too thick. Or both.

Dance, Sackboy!

• Duoing missions is up and down. Most actions update the group but not all and there's no way to sync the stage of the mission you are on if one of you had it paused when the other just took it.

• A five-stage mission that goes to a solo instance at stage four is incredibly annoying in a group. Solo means solo in TSW. Unlike your Personal Story in GW2 you can't bring a friend. That's very bad design. If you can group for the mission you should be able to group for the dungeon that comes with it.

• Mob density is overcooked, an acknowledged issue. It's also inconsistent. You can't move five feet in Blue Mountain without a bloody moth jumping on you, but you can sight-see in Carpathian Teeth (supposedly the most dangerous outdoor area) pretty much at will.

She'm too tall I tell 'ee. 'Un'll never fit in the box.

• The Ak'ab might be the most irritating mobs in any MMO ever. Moths the size of buffalo that charge at you and knock you down, repeatedly. Jump out of the way of one and you will inevitably agro another, leaving you no choice but to jump again and agro a third. After which the world goes black and white and if you are Mrs Bhagpuss you log out and watch Brian Cox.

• It gets really, really dark in Blue Mountain at night. It gets proper dark everywhere in The Secret World when the sun goes down, but Blue Mountain is full-on, original-Everquest dark. Thank god for those miner's hats.

• The New England setting is unremittingly bleak. The only place I can think of that matches it is Cartheon in Vanguard. At least it doesn't rain all the time on Solomon's Island. Come to think of it, it doesn't rain at all. There are no weather effects in TSW.

  

  A storm coming? Oh, A Storm Coming!

• After a session in Cartheon it was always nice to go to Qalia for some sunshine. TSW has Egypt. Blue skies, blazing sand and The Rolling Stones on tour. Oh, wait, no - those are mummies.

• Missions are great and all but there's nothing like some old-school gear farming. After we crashed and burned on yet another poxy moth mission in Blue Mountain last night I went to Egypt and took no missions at all. Explore, kill, loot. Q7 gear, steady xp and plenty of Pax. I got up this morning and did it again until the server went down and when it comes back up I'm ready for more. Not going to stop til I'm Q7 all over

• Of course, normally I'd make my own gear but crafting doesn't quite work. Raws come from drops that you deconstruct, giving you the same quality raw as the item you destroyed. Only, to make one item you have to destroy five equally as good. Unless I'm missing something, I can't see how you can ever come out ahead on that deal.

Can I get an autograph, Mr Jagger?

• The game's really quite buggy. At one point Mrs Bhagpuss said it felt like playing a beta. The content is complete and finished, it's the systems and infrastructure that aren't. Aside from the famous chat bug, which we experienced for the first time yesterday, we got impaled on geometry several times, had a post-death color glitch and ran into several missions that just couldn't cope with a full server all trying to do them at the same time.

• Funcom could use a fashion consultant. There are a lot of clothes but most of them you wouldn't be seen dead wearing. Bad metaphor.

Despite all that I'm still having a great time. As long as I avoid moths. Mrs Bhagpuss, who's initial interest was why I downloaded the beta in the first place, is more lukewarm. She observed that TSW is a very masculine game, more Call of Duty than Call of Cthulhu, which hadn't struck me at first but which is obvious once you notice it. I wonder if that's a feature of Funcom MMOs?

Third Verse, Same As The First: The Secret World

There's something strange going on in The Secret World. Hmm. Let me rephrase that. There's something strange going on with the game design in The Secret World.

The meat of the gameplay is Missions. Jef Reahard at Massively summarized the mission system rather well back in beta and I don't think too much has changed since then. There are seven kinds of missions on offer but you only get six Journal slots, three of which are for Side missions. PvP missions overlap. Confused yet?

Strange? You don't know strange 'til you've met this woman.

The Missions are handily color-coded and the gist is that at any one time you can have one Blue (Story), one Purple  (Dungeon), one "Main" , either Brown (Action), Light Green (Investigation) or Yellow (Sabotage) and three Dark Green "Side" missions that are generally found on objects in the world. PvP missions are also Brown and appear to take Side mission slots.

Confusing to read but very straightforward in practice. Here's the weird part. You can repeat all but the Story and Investigation missions ad infinitum, once per day. In other words, the majority of missions are dailies. Given that almost all these missions, despite not being flagged as "Story" are in fact stories, this creates a contextual disconnect verging on the psychotic.

Psychotic? You say that like it's a bad thing.

But wait, there's more. The Secret World takes a decidedly odd approach to experience. XP, that is. In an apparent attempt to dissuade players from the heinous sin of powerlevelling, missions reward xp thus:

Normal or easier - 100% experience
Hard - 95% of Normal
Very Hard - 85% of Normal
Devastating - 35% of Normal

This means that far from encouraging or rewarding exploration, enterprise and endeavour, the Templar, Illuminati and Dragon authorities appear positively to discourage it. No wonder the Phoenicians and Orochi get to all the good stuff first!

I probably shouldn't be here...

This would all be very well if the only way you could hope to complete a Devastating mission would be if your much higher-level pal towed you through it like a balloon on a string, but that's far from being the case. I was soloing Devestating missions in Savage Coast and even Egypt before I found out that I was missing out on two-thirds of the xp for my presumption. Stopped pretty quickly after that, I can tell you!

Some of those missions didn't require any fighting. Some did and guess what? I could kill what I was asked to kill. On my own. Who knows how far an under-geared, under-leveled  group could get? Not to mention that some Kingsmouth missions are flagged "Devastating" when you first acquire them, bee-fresh out the tunnel. Someone really hasn't thought this through.

Kingsmouth's back the other way, lady.

The upshot is that the most efficient way to gain XP and thereby Action and Skill Points seems to be to get a little way ahead, then loop back and enter some kind of Groundhog Day pocket universe, where Danny always wants his plane back and Edgar always thinks today's the day his bus is going to get fixed. Missions flagged "Easy" or "Very Easy" that you already know inside-out. Like shelling peas.

Although, come to think of it, maybe Kingsmouth is trapped in a perpetual Groundhog Day. It's already living another movie, after all.

All In The Detail : The Secret World

So very, very much to see...

Only When You're Dead...

Don't Wave That Thing At Me!

If You Want To Get Ahead...

Anyone Got 10p?

The blood-dimmed tide of puns is loosed

Uh, guys... I think I saw something...

Play 47A - Egyptian Reggae

Let Me At 'Em! : The Secret World

The Secret World passes two key tests for a new MMO: it's my first choice to play right now and I want to play it more than I want to blog about it. Even as I type I feel the pull to stop writing, log in and carry on from where I left off last night. Late last night.

The third, most important test will be whether I'm still playing this time next year and of course it's far, far too early yet to say. It's a safe bet that I won't be playing TSW with this intensity in July 2013, but will it still be in the mix?

This...

If there's some kind of Free-to-Play option, then absolutely. No question at all. If Funcom still want me to pony up a subscription fee? Hmm. Well, let's think about that.

I'm just back from holiday and with the current very favorable exchange rate a week in France worked out at somewhere around £75 each per day. An annual subscription to The Secret World costs £116. A year of investigating conspiracies and fragging zombies for the price of a day and a half strolling around castles and villages.

Sounds like a great deal. Probably won't take it.

... or this?

Chances are I'll cancel when GW2 launches and then re-subscribe when the shine wears off. By which time TSW may have some kind of F2P option or extended trial. Even more likely, as an ex-subscriber I'll get a nice "Please Come Back" sweetener deal if I re-up.

Either way, my strong feeling at this very early stage is that one way or another I will still be waving the Templar flag a year from now, if only as a part-time auxiliary. The Secret World really is something fresh and different and the recently-announced plans for both monthly content updates and changes to the world that have real and lasting impact suggest that Funcom mean to lock that freshness in.

Whatever happens down the line, right now I just want to play. That's a very good feeling and one I plan to indulge as long as it lasts.

Look Ma! No Hands!

Every time a new MMO trundles into view one of the very first things that gets torn to shreds is the UI. Oh, it looks just like WoW's, how unoriginal. Oh, it isn't as easy to use as WoW's, how annoying. Why can't I move this bit over there like I do in my other game? Where's that mod I always use? How do they expect me to play without it?

Blah blah blah.

Fighting with no UI - like you can tell!

Recently I've started to wonder why we have UIs at all. I've begun experimenting to see how much I can do with the UI switched off. I already turn it off a lot for screenshots and for years I've dropped the UI when I'm riding an on-rails mount. I managed a complete UI-less fight with an spider in Guild Wars 2 last beta and I've killed a few zombies that way in The Secret World. When you have a very small number of abilities to cast, it becomes quite feasible.

I'm a mouse-and-hotkey kind of player, though. I don't use the keyboard all that much. I'd guess that for keyboard jockeys playing UI-free wouldn't be that great a stretch. Can't see myself developing that degree of manual dexterity, sadly. Not with my knobbly old fingers. There's a limit to what I can do without my mouse-pointer clicking away.

What if it wasn't the hands and eyes doing all the work, though? Aren't there other ways to tell someone to do something or find out what someone's doing to you? I seem to remember a few other attachments on my head that work along those lines. Ah yes, my mouth and my ears!

Could have sworn I heard someone...

One of the many good things about The Secret World is the way you can tell what's happening just by listening. I was poking around an underground Illuminati library this morning, shooting the odd caretaker while musing over what Beaumont might be up to when I heard something that sounded approximately the size of an elephant coming up the stairs. Made me start, I can  tell you. I won't say what it was - spoilers and all that - but it wasn't an elephant. Nothing so jolly. The point is, I knew it was coming before I saw it.

A lot more could be done with sound beyond the ambient, too. And guess what? It has been. I used to use an add-on for EQ, the name of which escapes me, which sounded an alarm when invisibility began to wear off, something that happens about every fifteen seconds in Norrath, or whenever you're next to something that wants to eat you, whichever comes first.

In Everquest, as in most MMOs, almost every event is sent to the chat client as a line of text and this device would read all those messages in real time and allow you to assign each an audio-file of your choice. If you wanted you could hear Mrs Doyle say "Ah go on, go on" every time the game informed your character he was out of drink. (I didn't do that, by the way, in case you're wondering. I just thought of it this minute. Really.).

And what about voice command? Why has that never really happened? I remember all that Japanese 5th Generation stuff from the 1980s. I was expecting talking computers along with my jet-pack long before the Millennium.  Never happened, did it? Oh, wait...what's this?

------------------------------
August 30, 2000  8:00 am
------------------------------

*Today's Patch*

*Note on Voice Recognition*

Last week we implemented voice recognition technology in

EverQuest. To use this new feature, please refer to the

EQROKManualSupplement.doc file in your EverQuest directory.

Please note that you must already have a voice recognition

engine that is compliant with the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI),

version 4.0. The voice recognition technology was

tested with Dragon NaturallySpeaking(r) v4.0. Check with the

developer of your software to find out if it is SAPI 4.0

compliant.


- The EverQuest Team

I thought I remembered that and thanks to Allakhazam I can prove it. Everquest had voice command built in as far back as the Ruins of Kunark expansion. I recall thinking about trying it and looking at the Dragon software before deciding against it. Does it still work? Did it ever?

I'm not saying we should give up the old point&click completely. God knows I don't want to cast spells by waving my arms around or hold agro by yelling "Yer mother wears army boots" over and over again, but a little variety would be nice. "Open bank vault" is easier to say than Ctrl-Shift-B is to press, for example. And wouldn't it be fun to say "Sic 'im boy!" instead of pressing the Pet Attack button?

I'm Back. Back I tell you!

Thank-you Funcom for scheduling three hours of maintenance on The Secret World starting just as I got up this morning on my first day back from holiday. Perfectly timed to allow me to skim-read analyse the 262 blog posts in my Reader.

I can feel a crunch coming. Not that I'm one for taking my own advice but what with The Secret World just starting, EQ2's GU64 and both City of Steam and GW2 beta weekends in late July and the Big One landing at the end of August, I'm going to need to pace myself. Where blogging is going to fit in around all this I'm not quite sure, but we are getting WiFi access at work in the next couple of months...

One thing I wanted to do in any case was to begin varying the length and format of posts here at Inventory Full. My natural inclination leans towards articles with something approximating a structure. An introduction, some exposition and a conclusion to wrap things up. With illustrations. Something along those lines. That can take a while. Maybe now would be a good time to investigate some snappier, zappier, faster options...

 

Coming Soon To An MMO Near You...Clown School

I came back to a wealth of material on TSW, naturally. Rowan has a linkfest here although he didn't include this or this). That last one, Keen's post, is possibly the most interesting because it points up something about TSW and the beta weekends. I think a lot of people might have come away from those with a poorer impression of what the game's about than they'd have gotten from a more traditional couple of weeks of open beta so how well the format works as a marketing exercise I'm not quite sure..

Beta weekends seem to be here to stay, though. City of Steam, rather to my disappointment, have opted for the format starting later this month. Oh alright, "alpha weekends" if you must, although that sounds even sillier. Why City of Steam are in "alpha" at this stage beats me. Someone is going to have to invent a new Greek letter at this rate.

You say it's a secret society?

Julian at KTR has an interesting and informative interview with the Mechanist Games team that's well worth reading. I wasn't familiar with The New Epoch RPG that predates the setting and content of City of Steam but it goes some way to explain the distinctly tabletop feel of the systems, at least as they presented themselves in the Sneak Peak (which now I come to think of it is an even sillier term than "alpha").

The other big news was the Vanguard combo of the F2P Matrix and the return of Brad McQuaid. I might have to add a Label for "You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up". I've moaned about the former over at PvD and Ardwullf's Lair but just to emphasize my irritation, I really don't like the way SOE have decided to go with Vanguard's F2P. I'm a massive fan of the Silver Account level on EQ2 In some ways I prefer it to the Gold (which I have under Station Access).

I was planning on making several of our EQ2 Silver accounts (we have six between us) into Silver Vanguard accounts. Now that option isn't available chances are that I won't even play those accounts for Vanguard at all. Oh well. The upside is that's time I didn't really have to spare that I can now reassign to TSW, GW2 and the rest of the new stuff coming down the pike over the next couple of months.

One bit of news that seems to have gone largely uncommented on is Sony's acquisition of Gaikai. Intriguing. That could mean playing EQ2 on an iPad or Planetside2 on Surface. What with the (delayed) SOEmote there seems to be a lot of futurework going on at SOE. I wonder if they are positioning for the demise of the PC? I do hope so.

Oh look - it's 12:58. Two minute warning for the TSW servers coming up. Kingsmouth here we come!