Don't Bury Me 'cos I'm Not Dead Yet : AC2

Weirdest MMO news I heard all year, or possibly ever:

Asheron's Call 2 rises from the grave

Good trick! Now bring back Rubies of Eventide!

I never played AC2 during it's three-year run. Those were the days when you paid a sub or you weren't coming in and I was already subbing to two other MMOs at the time. Also I'd played AC1 and didn't get on with it so I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the sequel.

I do seem to remember that people were both surprised and upset when AC2 closed. Anyone play it and remember what it was like? Just out of sheer nosiness I may well re-sub to Asheron's Call just to take a look at Asheron's Call 2.

What's that you say? Subscribe to AC1? That ancient game that no-one in the MMO blogosphere ever mentions, even when they're desperately trying to remember MMOs that still require a subscription? Why would you want to do that? Well, because if I want to take a look at the zombie resurrection of its slightly less-ancient spawn I have to be a subscriber in good standing of AC1. Even though this utterly unexpected reincarnation is officially a beta.

Pay to play the beta of a game that went out of business well over half a decade ago; that sounds like a good idea. I'll probably do that, then. Do I need to buy the client again too? I still have my original Asheron's Call box...wonder if my characters are still there...

Forest Fires : TSW, Rift

As I write this, somewhere in the background The Secret World is patching. Subscriptions to this excellent if worrisome MMO are now optional, as I always expected they would be sooner or later. This is sooner. I would have taken a punt on TSW going a full year before F2P but competition is harsh and with so many truly excellent MMO options available for at most the cost of the box clearly Funcom couldn't hold the line.

The writing really does seem to be on the wall for pure subscription MMOs, or at least for big-ticket, would-be triple-A theme park MMOs. There may still be some wiggle room for niche operators and the MMO sandbox market, such as it is, retains a natural affinity for the kind of dedicated and loyal audience that benefits from a monthly rental, but with virtually every major player now intent on tearing down any barrier to entry, perhaps the day of the subscription MMO is finally done.

Oh, hello Rift. Didn't see you over there in that corner you've painted yourself into. With the sad news of layoffs at Trion and the small number of remaining servers, not to mention the F2P by the back door of Rift Lite (is it true that now extends to level 50?) and the free Storm Legion trial for ex-subbers, how long can never be never?

My Storm Legion plus 12 months play, which looked like such a good deal a month ago is beginning to look like money down the drain. Not only would I now bet on Rift going to some form of F2P before those twelve months are up but I don't find I have time to play Rift anyway. And now that I can log into TSW if I don't feel like playing GW2, finding time for Rift looks even less likely yet.

That's the key, really. I spend a lot of time playing MMOs and I can barely scratch the surface of the ones I want to play, with more good new ones cropping up all the time. MMOs that I might have given a look a few years back now don't even get downloaded. Others get no more than a cursory glance before being forgotten.

There's a glut and a cull will come. In the meanwhile I'll try and sample as much as I can and enjoy the bounty while it lasts.

Winter Is Icumen In : GW2

Holiday events, dontcha just love 'em? Midwinter brings the biggest sackful. Can't think why that should be...

For years and years December has meant Frostfell, the Norrathian solstice celebration. If I've been through that wardrobe once I must have been through it a thousand times. One year I even had Christmas cards printed showing my ratonga bruiser under the tree in Frostfell Wonderland Village. Tunare only knows what my relatives made of that one.

Merry Christmas, Mum! I'm the one on the left.

In Rift the Fae take charge, as they seem to do for most holidays. I've only experienced one Fae Yule. Well, there's only been one Fae Yule until now. The second is upon us, as Potshot reports, and I hope at least to pop in for a visit. HRH Queen Elizabeth II could surely take a cue from those corgis. I'd love to see one her famously ill-tempered mutts antlered up for the Queen's Speech.

It's behind you!

This year, however, my celebratory egg-nog (yeeuuuurghhhhh!!!) shall be knocked back in one in Tyria. Wintersday approaches and here's the video to prove it. Looks rather good.

Other than that there's a huge dirigible in the shape of a golem, we don't know much about Wintersday yet. I never experienced it in GW1 so no clues there. One thing we do know, though, is there will be WvW changes. What's more, we know what they are.

The full skinny is here and Ravious goes through the list neatly at KTR but I have a santa hat full of comments of my own.

Advance notification of new builds

To be completely honest, I misunderstood this when I first read it and it was only Ravious's explanation that put me straight. It's a simple notification of forced relogging (what would be server down in any other MMO) only sufficiently ahead of time to allow some possible ameliorative action. Useful but not all that interesting.

Alt+F4 is no escape

"Significantly longer" my arse!

This is a non-issue to me but some people get so overheated about it that this fix amounts to emergency first-aid. For my money, if someone on one of the opposing teams chooses to F4 to desktop rather than be killed, that's an enemy knocked right out of WvW altogether for a few minutes. Stuff the loss of xp/loot/badges/bragging rights. That guy will take significantly longer getting back into the fight than if he'd just died and waypointed. In my opinion, people that wanted this weren't looking at the big picture, but there's no denying it was a hot-button issue for some.

No more insta-build walls & gates

They put this in to annoy Mrs Bhagpuss, who likes nothing better than to run behind an invading army that's just knocked down a gate and put said gate back up again trapping half the army inside and half out. It does look utterly ridiculous, though. I was fighting inside a keep a couple of days ago when the entire castle wall flipped up and down half a dozen times in a minute. On balance, a fix that was needed.

Breakout events

I'll see your "trusty Dolyak" and raise you 32 golems

The big one. This is a potential game-changer and I think we all knew it was coming. This is just the first of who knows how many "dynamic events" coming to WvW. Do we want a lot more NPC involvement in what is supposed to be a player vs player environment? Not sure. Not at all sure.

This particular example sounds nutty. On the forum thread someone has already pointed out that if the Dolyak Lord proves to be in the least effective at getting the losing team up off the floor, canny teams will simply leave one tower untaken so the event never happens. That's probably just one of many potential emergent properties of this entirely untried and untested mechanic. Could be very interesting.

That's what WvW is getting for Christmas. We get much, much more for Valentine's, apparently, with a major update being trailed for February. After all, nothing says peace and love like a good fight with your neighbor. Or something.

Traction : GW2

As we push forward into the festive season time constraints tighten and opportunities to post recede. Well, for me they do, and for a very positive reason: I find I want to play more than I want to write about playing.

That's a relatively unusual phenomenon. When there's something new and interesting moving across the MMO landscape, the urge to share my thoughts on it with an indifferent world runs a strong back-current against my desire to experience it first-hand and when things are quiet I'm even more likely to think of things I want to write about than things I want to do.

Only at the moment it's not quite working out that way. I still have plenty to say, but when I sit down of an evening after work I'm in a rush to log in and play and what I want to play is GW2.

What I feared may be coming to pass.

From memory, never a reliable source, the MMOs that have held the overwhelming majority of my attention for six months or more at a stretch are Everquest (several times), EQ2 (several times), Vanguard and Rift. Lots of others have achieved dominance for a few weeks or months then slipped back - Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars, Pirate 101, WoW, The Secret World, Fallen Earth, to name nowhere near all of them. Behind and all around those flit the countless MMOs with which I dabble, flirt and experiment.

What I prefer is to spend something like two-thirds of my available gaming time in one MMO, have a second which takes up a significant amount of what's left and then drop in and out of half a dozen others more or less on a whim. When one gets a grip, though, playing anything else doesn't seem so much like time out as time lost.

I don't like that. I pride myself on being able to pace myself and do only what I find fun in MMOs, which works extremely well for avoiding MMO ennui and a jaded gaming palate, but it's a strategy that falls apart when I find that I'm having fun all the time in one MMO. When that happens, the whole thing flips on its head. Playing other MMOs becomes something I ought to do not something I want to do.

This can stop at any time, although rarely without warning. There will be a period, usually brief, when I begin to feel slightly less interested in The One Game and slightly more in Something Else. I'll wonder what my characters elsewhere are getting up to without me and whether I shouldn't go check up on them to make sure they aren't getting into trouble. I'll start to read patch notes of games I'm not playing but might be and ponder the implications. Next thing I'll be patching them up and just "taking a look" and a week or two later my One Game will just be one of my games.

GW2 is so rich, that's the problem. Each class I play is the best class. Each pass through a map is more interesting than the last pass through the same map. Every climb to 80 just reveals how much I missed last time. I'm standing on two level 80s, a level 70 and a level 50 now and my somewhat fanciful idea of having a max-level character for all eight classes has solidified into a firm intention, one that I expect to realize. And not before all that long, either.

Indeed, if World vs World wasn't so compulsive I might already be half way there. It's not the fastest way to level, that's for sure, although it may well be the fastest way to get poor. The repair costs alone are bankrupting me. Maybe if I learned to play better...

Anyway, I'm having a great time. And the server seems very busy still, with plenty of new players down in the starting areas, whose endearingly eager contributions to Map chat leads me to believe they really are new players not refurbished ones like me. It's all going rather well.

I feel I'm just now coming to the point where I'm ready to start thinking about what I might want to do long-term. I'm very struck by the Necromancer, but then I was by the Ranger and the Engineer. I'm beginning to get into a frame of mind where fully exploring maps feels like something I want to do for myself rather than a cheesy achiever lever so I'm beginning to do a little bit of that.

With WvW becoming a thing, I can finally see a point to upgrading gear at 80th. It looks as though my necro may be the first both to go full exotic and not to enter retirement on dinging 80. Although she's only 50 right now and I thought this the last two times... And Mesmers and Elementalists both look to be having one whole heck of a lot of fun. And really, don't even mention Thieves. Or Guardians.

Okay, maybe I don't know what I want to do long term yet after all. One thing I do know, Storm Legion isn't getting a look-in right now. And another thing - I want to go play GW2 right this min...

You're Not Going In There, Are You? : City of Steam, GW2

Three months in, my sum total of dungeon runs in Guild Wars 2 is stuck at one. Is that because I don't like dungeon play? Nope. Maybe it's the terrible reputation GW2's dungeons picked up right from the start? Not really. Perhaps there's just so much else to do? Well, there is that, but no, that's not the main reason.

It's too much trouble. There, I said it. Back in the day we thought nothing of leaving our characters standing around in Lake of Ill Omen, watching the Sarnaks lope past like so many saurian Grouchos while we called " lvl 27 druid lfg" for as long as it darn well took. On a good day someone might send a tell or just /ooc "Druid come to windmill" and that was Saturday morning sorted until lunchtime.

A crate is not a chest. As I found out.

Later, with more confidence, it became clear it was faster and more efficient to start the group yourself: "Need tank and 3 more for ToFS, have cleric and chanter already". As "fast" global travel permeated many MMOs, even going to the zone where the dungeon happened to be dropped out of fashion. Much easier to find a critical mass of players in a central location, first The Nexus then Plane of Knowledge, then port out to where the action was.

This remained the status quo for years, until WoW dropped the still-controversial Dungeon Finder bomb in late 2009. As with many of Blizzard's innovations, the effects rippled across the MMOsphere and nowadays many virtual worlds come complete with some stripe of automated assistant that takes away tedious admin (and vital social interaction along with it, some would say), leaving adventurers free to, well, adventure.

Y'know what? I just can't be bothered.

We all got lazy. Alright, some of got lazy. Some of us just got out. The Dungeon Finder dropped in WoW just as I was about to finish my few months in Azeroth. I hung on just long enough to try it out. It was a huge novelty then, hard though that is to remember. I did three groups using it, twice as healer, once as DPS, all at lowish level. Can't say I liked it much but it wasn't awful.

Since then I've used similar systems in a few other MMOs, occasionally, but mostly I've just stopped doing dungeons with pick-up groups altogether. It's strange in a way because much the same mechanism is used to queue for PvP Battlegrounds and Warfronts and I've played the skin off some of those. For PvE, though, I've never taken to it.

Doesn't that take you back?

Guild Wars 2 doesn't have a Dungeon Finder. For an MMO so gung-ho for inclusivity, so keen to strip away all barriers to commitment-free socializing, that's quite weird. In GW2, if you want to do a dungeon you either go with people you already know or party up like it's 1999. The new fractal dungeons are all the rage and handily the Asura Gate for those stands in Lion's Arch, so map chat there now serves as a permanent LFG channel.

Turns out that I don't like that much either. Too much hassle. Can't be doing with all those tells and typing and meeting strangers. Don't like the new ways, don't like the old. There's no pleasing some people.

Well, maybe there is. Which brings me to City of Steam. Got there in the end. Yesterday I did three "dungeons" in CoS. I say dungeons. Timed two-minute instances is what they were, with hardly any mobs and a lot of chests to open to find a bomb. Which I never found. It's not what I did that matters, though, it's how I came to be doing it.

City of Steam is structured rather like the original Guild Wars, with a number of open, multiplayer hubs leading onto many instanced areas. Quests happen in the open areas, which are very world-like and comprise the "MMO" part of the game. Fighting and breaking things (there's a lot of breaking things) happens in the instances.

That's a fail.

Each instance can have several functions. There's always a general mode in which the instance operates like any part of a virtual MMO world, where you can wander around at will and in which there may be quests. Then there are various Challenges that use the same instance but populate it differently and ask you to perform certain tasks. These Challenges seem to fulfill some of the functionality that both Daily Quests and Achievements provide in other MMOs.

It's all very neatly and attractively done and I look forward to getting down to it when I get a persistent character. The really clever part, though, is how the game deals with pick-up groups to take these Challenges, all of which appear to be tuned for more than one person.

There's no separate Dungeon Finder or LFG interface.

Stand on the mat, fool!

What happens is this: if you stand on the black and yellow hazard stripes that mark the entrance to every instance with the selection window for the various dungeon modes active and click on the one you want, the game checks if anyone else is standing next to you doing the same. If they are, up pops an invite to enter the dungeon with that person.

It's simple, effortless and organic. You're at the door, you clicked on the option, you must want to go in. Why wouldn't you accept? Of all the ways to automate instance run pugging this is the most elegant I've seen. In a game like GW2, where there is famously no Trinity and a viable group is anyone who turns up, this would be just perfect. Just wait at the Asura Gate with the relevant option highlighted until the team fills up and in you go.

It would just about be guaranteed to get me back in the dungeon. Even I'm not too lazy to stand on a doormat and click. Well, not on a good day...

Cats! Come On, You Love 'em!

Bloggers will occasionally post about the odd or entertaining search terms that bring people to their sites. Wilhelm, The Ancient Gaming Noob always includes a highly amusing section on "Search Terms of the Month" in his monthly review, for example.

I love to look at mine. Some of them are surpassingly weird, yet still explicable. Doesn't always stop them being disturbing.

Quite a while back, after a very early GW2 beta weekend, I mentioned a bugged Charr NPC in Fields of Ashford, who appeared to have forgotten to put his armor on. For months "charr naked" appeared in the top ten search terms for Inventory Full, leading me to seriously wonder what people were doing with their spare time.

I've always resisted the temptation to post them, mostly because I don't get enough that are genuinely amusing to merit it. I can almost always work out how a given search term ended up sending someone towards a dissatisfying two or three seconds on my blog. This  evening, however, I spotted one that floored me:

"a cat followed me in the door"

I could not for the life of me work out how typing that into Google might have led anyone to my blog. So I typed it into Google. And I paged down. And down. And down.

On page nine of the search results I found the link to this post, which is barely relevant.

Leaving aside the question mark this sets against the accuracy of Google, who is still clicking links nine pages into the search results? Did they read them all? Had the previous eight pages of feline portal pursuit penetration failed to satisfy their desire for clarity? And, most importantly, should I post more about cats, Charr or otherwise, to get my page views up?

I Heard That! : City of Steam

The City of Steam "closed" beta isn't as closed as all that. A swift google will soon find keys. Look, here's a thousand of them! Some bloggers even got sent them when they really weren't all that interested, with predictable results. 

It's very much a real beta for all that, though. Not only do things change significantly from one stage to the next but the developers are as responsive, communicative and interactive as I've ever seen in any beta. They ask for feedback all the time and reply when they get it. When I post a list of bugs on the forums I get point-by-point answers, explanations or acknowledgements, as does anyone who takes the trouble to give potentially useful feedback.

Consequently, in the brief time I have been able to give each phase so far I've spent almost all my time actively looking for bugs rather than just taking the tour. It's a model of how a beta should be done, I think. It's not just limited to the forums, either. The devs are frequently to be seen in the game itself, clearly identified as such. This morning Refuge was positively overrun with them, so I took a few snapshots.

More on City of Steam tomorrow.