Nostalgia in Reverse

It's Spring (though you might not believe it if you lived where I do) and new shoots are pushing up all over MMOland.

Neverwinter announced the start date for Open Beta. It's April 30th. Oh no, wait, it's April 27th. No, no it's April 25th! Make your mind up! There are no character wipes past the 25th, so this is an old school F2P soft launch. I'll be passing on the paid options and coming in with the Great Freeloader Horde on the thirtieth. I was mightily impressed by the city itself and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on The Foundry but how sticky Neverwinter will be I'm not so sure. Find out in a month or two, I guess.

Jostling Neverwinter at the gates of May comes City of Steam, which seems to have been in development forever although it's actually only just over a year since I first wrote about it. The official website now has a prominent, taunting "PLAY" button, frustratingly greyed-out and Cogfather Dave Lindsay commented in a recent forum thread titled "When can I play City of Steam?" "It shouldn't be too long now. Probably about a month, maybe less. And we'll start with some exclusive access as normal"

I love City of Steam. I'll certainly be playing it regularly just as soon as I can make a character that persists, be that Open Beta or Official Launch. Still not feeling the need to pay up front for access, though. I'm not that impatient and anyway there's plenty of other stuff going on keep me busy. Too much, indeed. And then I have this teeny-tiny voice whispering in my ear, telling me maybe I liked City of Steam the best back in its very first iteration, the Sneak Peak. It's gotten a lot slicker and more polished, become much more the full service lobby MMO but is that really where it needed to go? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 EQ2, which I actually played twice this last week, has a beta going on too. These days they beta Game Updates over there just like they were real expansions. Back when I played on Test as my main server that was kind of what we were supposed to be doing only there were never enough of us. Then they added a second Test server called Test Copy, where you could copy your Live character instead of having to level one up by playing it the old-fashioned way and eventually Test Copy sort of morphed into a general Beta server for Betaing things that don't need an NDA. Or something. No-one really knows.

The current Beta is for GU66 Scars of the Awakened and it looks pretty darned interesting. Cobalt Scar was always one of my favorite Velious zones and I spent an awful lot of time farming Molkors and Walruses (Walrii?) in Siren's Grotto, a zone everyone loved to hate. Thanks to GW2 taking up all our time, we haven't bought the last EQ2 expansion, Chains of Eternity and therefore don't have any characters over level 92. The current cap is 95 with the expansion. What level will the two new zones be tuned for? Will we be able to do anything there or use any of the drops at 92? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 So much for Open Betas. Those at least we can talk about. I was also fortunate enough to get a couple of invites to closed betas recently, both of which came with fairly draconian NDAs. Do I have anything to say about those? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

 One MMO actually launched this week - real launch, not a beta! I missed it completely until it started popping up in news items. Given my interest in and enjoyment of Rift it's surprising that I haven't payed much attention to Trion's second entry into the MMO marketplace, Defiance, an MMO/Shooter hybrid whose U.S.P. is a real-time development link with a new TV show of the same name on the SyFy channel.

Since I haven't watched television this century I wasn't even aware we had the SyFy channel in the UK but apparently we do and the Defiance show premieres here on April 16th. If the experience of Chris at Game By Night is anything to go by it will take at least that long for Trion to get the servers into a playable state. This appears to have been a traditional MMO launch - half-finished, half-working, lots of potential and not much polish. Will Trion right the ship in time or will it be yet another MMO already holed below the waterline as it slides down the slipway? Find out in a month or two, I guess.

There's more. A bunch of supposed Sandbox MMOs are in some kind of beta; Earthrise, Pathfinder, The Repopulation, Origins of Malu to name but a few of them. I've picked one of those pretty much at random to have a look at but where's the time going to come from? I had invites for all the Firefall beta weekends and never managed to get to one. I don't regret that particularly. Firefall's another one where you can buy into beta if you're that fussed. I'm not.

I do regret missing Otherland, in which I certainly was interested. Again I had beta weekend invites that I didn't take up and now the game looks on the verge of extinction before it's even been born so I may have missed the only chance I was ever going to get to walk in Tad Williams's world. Oh well, I guess that frees up some notional time somewhere in the future, or maybe Gamigo will find a way to keep the game alive. Find out in a month or two, I guess.

Enough talk. Let's go play.

Thinking Outside The Super Adventure Box : GW2

It's here. Everyone loves it. Dulfy knows all about it already. Does she never sleep? Me, I took a quick look inside and enjoyed it more than I expected. I might even go back.

The best part? I can skip the whole thing and still not miss out on the goodies!  ANet didn't just consider the dexterity-impaired among us by including Infantile Mode, complete with the magnificently-named "Baby's First Super Adventure" achievement, they went that extra, extra mile and made it so you don't have to go in the box at all.

When I stumbled out of the Box very late last night (alright, early this morning) and lurched over to Moto, the Asuran "genius" responsible for the whole thing I noticed an option in his dialog I'd overlooked on the way in; something about an "extra-curricular assignment". So I asked him about that.


Late though it was I set off to search Metrica Province for manifestations and it wasn't long before I found them. Twinkling spheres hanging in the air, filled with baubles.

It seemed for a while we'd be running around gathering these things by the armful. That turned out to be a bug, possibly. I woke up to a small patch and it seems someone gave the servers a hefty thump with an Asuran spanner overnight and now everything's working as intended. I haven't found any more spheres floating free, anyway.

What happens is that Chests spawn in fixed locations all over Tyria. Okay, I'm taking "all over Tyria" on trust. I can confirm they spawn all over Metrica Province and Wayfarer's Foothills. There's no need to run around blind, trusting to luck you might trip over one; they're all clearly marked on the map.

When you find one and open it out pop the same things you'd find inside the SAB: bunnies, monkeys, toads, snakes (the only snakes on Tyria as far as I know.). Bop them hard and they pop, leaving twinkling spheres filled with yummy bauble goodness. Blue spheres have a single bauble inside, green ones five and gold ones ten.

Don't hang about, though. Whereas last night the baubles hung there indefinitely, leading me to believe they were a harvestable since I came across them in situ sans chest, now they pop like soap bubbles in short order. Loot 'em or lose 'em.

The Super Adventure Box is with us for a month. The Mystic Forge consumables and Continue Coins cost one Bauble Bubble, which is a full stack of regular baubles (that's 250, the same as a full stack of anything in Tyria). The Super Adventure Box O'Fun costs three Bubble Baubles. The weapon skins cost 50 BBs - 12,500 Baubles! Plus a gold piece but who cares about that?

After an hour of Infantile Mode last night I had 36 baubles and even one Bauble Bubble looked out of reach. In a few minutes this morning, most of which I spent taking screenshots, I'd added a hundred to that tally. Mrs Bhagpuss stayed up late and has five Bubble Baubles already. From an unattractive grind doing something in which I have very little interest, the whole thing has turned into, yes, fun!

Well done ANet is all I can say. Pitched perfectly. Shoehorning a retro-platformer into a high-fantasy MMO without breaking the lore takes some doing. Making it worthwhile even for people whose hearts don't beat faster for either retro graphics or platform gameplay is exceptional. And Bonus credit for that Consortium rep who strides over to pitch Moto for the commercial exploitation rights.


Now if they'd just add some skins that Engineers could use...

It's Good To Have A Project On The Go...

There are two projects running at the moment among some of the MMO blogs I read. I don't usually follow Scarybooster but his annual "Developer Appreciation Week" has been picked up by, among others, Rowan, J3w3l and Stargrace who I do.

As an only partially-reformed old punk I have problems with the underlying concept of DAW. I reached adolescence at the height of the Prog Rock boom, when being in a band was seen as an almost unimaginable fantasy and rock musicians and lyricists were taken quite seriously as members of some quasi-mystical High Priesthood.  When punk arrived with its radical ethos of "anyone can do it" most of that meretricious nonsense was briefly swept aside and it was wonderful.

A place for everyone and everyone in his place

By and large I still believe in the punk credo "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it".
Creativity isn't the exclusive province of the magically gifted and creators aren't a class apart. We may choose to adopt roles - customer/supplier, audience/performer, player/developer - but roles are all they are and we can switch those roles at any time. I believe that when it comes to the Arts, the fundamental difference between any category of "Us" and "Them" lies in some combination of opportunity and ambition, not in some mysterious destiny.

Nevertheless, I also place a very high value on politeness and good manners and when someone does something nice for you I believe it's only right to express appropriate appreciation, so to all the many developers who've worked long and hard to bring the many worlds we visit to life..  

Thank You. 

Now get back to work!

The other theme, started by Syp and picked up by Jeromai revolves around playing ten unfamiliar MMOs over ten (non-consecutive) days. Leaving aside the rather obvious problem that playing an MMO for a single session is probably the best way to misunderstand it entirely, this does sound like fun. I'd very much like to join in but it would be ridiculously self-indulgent - I can't do justice to more than a tiny fraction of the MMOs I'm nominally playing already.

If I did, though I'd struggle to come up with ten new MMOs I haven't already tried. The obvious ones would be

Age of Conan
Wizardry Online
Planetside2
SW:ToR

(And I would have added Aion but Syp successfully put me off!)

Rusty Hearts is one of the few I've thought about and not tried, so that's a possibility. Beyond that most of what's left are MMOs I've considered and rejected in the past and I don't see revisiting those decisions as a likely path to a good evening's entertainment.

Maybe I'll do it and just call it The 5/5 Project...

I do have a couple of projects of my own in mind, both relating to GW2. The first, which I've already begun, is to level a character to 80 by completing each Map in consecutive order by level range and geographical propinquity. It's going both well and not so well.

My Asuran Ranger is level 18 and he's completed Metrica Province and Rata Sum. With only a few dailies and enough crafting to make his own leathers and bows thrown in, he finished  the supposedly 1-15 map Metrica around level 12. He spent almost the entire time fighting things three or more levels above him, which was almost exactly right in terms of challenge solo. The fact that almost all the Heart vendors he opened this way sold stuff too high for him to use, however, suggested that this isn't how it meant to be done.

Do you have puppies too?

Currently he's done about 20% of Brisban Wildlands and he's already well above the level of the content he's doing there, too. The game downlevels him, of course, but keeping at-level even through a single set of level-appropriate maps looks to be impossible. He'd have to forego any dailies, not gather or craft anything, never go to WvW, skip the whole of the Living Story...even jumping onto random events would be too much. it seems as clear as day to me that linear progression was never intended, indeed is actively engineered out of this game. No wonder some players who insisted on playing it that way from launch burned out so fast.

The gigantic upside to doing it this way is getting to see the incredible detail of this amazing world. There's more going on in just one GW2 Map than in some entire MMOs. I've been taking the time to speak to every NPC and to wait and watch while they speak to each other and it's a mesmerizing experience.

So many delicate, whimsical, subtle interactions, most of which don't appear to go anywhere at all. So many beautifully designed structures and buildings to explore, so many caves and lairs to find. It's a world of vignettes and wonders and only a few are marked on that Achiever-focused map.

Go everywhere. See everything. It's worth all the time you can give it. Whether I can ever give it enough time to see it all in this detail I don't know, but I plan to give it my best shot. Even if it takes a few years.

Subtlety's beyond some people

My other project hasn't even begun and yet I've already kind of painted myself into a corner with it by rolling that ranger for the Map Completion project. I only have one more character slot available and it's reserved for a Charr Engineer. Unfortunately, Engineer would be about the worst possible class for what I have in mind, which is to level up a character with the UI switched off.

Well, switched off while exploring and fighting. Going to need it on

Of course I'd miss all the jokes...

to buy and sell, allocate traits and skills, bank and all that good stuff. But out there in the big world I think it should be possible to survive and thrive without it. A ranger, with some very simple bow skills and a pet would have been ideal. I didn't think it through...

That project is on the back burner for now. I may need to buy another character slot. And think of another class that would be fun to play blind. I really don't need three rangers. Then again...

Rox Rocks : GW2

I was going to do an overview of GW2's March content drop Flame and Frost: The Razing but I don't really have enough time to do it justice and anyway Ravious and Jeromai got there before me.

In brief, then:

The Living Story finally came alive, almost literally with that full-motion cut-scene with Rytlock. That was a real surprise and a very welcome one. More of those, please. Also I took to new Charr character Rox right away. Just give me those huge green cat eyes for one of my Charrs now. I'll pay you good money.

The nursery instance was exactly the right degree of hard. I completed it without dying but I was downed a few times and it looked touch and go for a while. I hate having to restart storyline missions after a death because it completely destroys any narrative involvement I may have had with the story. If my character died, the story is over. Getting up and carrying on as if nothing happened just doesn't do it for me. So, win.

The Dead Letter Drop mission was first-rate. Having the locations listed in just the right amount of detail in an in-game mail worked wonderfully, especially since all the locations were actual map POIs. The content of the letters when found was mouth-wateringly mysterious. It seems there is a shadowy hand behind the Molten Alliance and it's not Suspect #1 Primordus. Color me intrigued.

WvW - The removal of culling is game-changing. The combination of that and the (really rather pointless but inevitably addictive) ranking system meant a complete change of behavior in WvW, which last night resembled nothing I have seen before. I loved it. Mrs Bhagpuss was not so keen. It will settle down over time to something more in the middle, I'm sure, but for now I'm going to enjoy it for what it is - chaotic, hysterical mayhem.

My favorite changes so far, though, are the adjustments to some of the Big Ticket Events. I love the new Bonus Chest system, which seems to have the twin virtues of heavily reducing the clustering at certain events, making them far more enjoyable, while actually increasing the amount of Rare loot I'm getting. I may only be able to get the Bonus Chest once per account, but but my characters can now get the normal chest as often as they can do the events and the normal chest has one or even two Rares in nearly every time! I hope this version sticks although I wouldn't be surprised to see it tweaked down again.

An unannounced but very welcome change was the rolling-out of the increased challenge levels tested last month to more big events. Claw of Jormag last night was vastly improved. I particularly admired the way that Ice Elementals had been persuaded to cast continual AEs on the "safe rock". So many downed players! There were a number of clever changes along these lines that I noticed and the whole thing was riotous fun again in the way it used to be back in September. Whether that will last, we will see. Players do have an almost limitless capacity to game themselves out of their own fun so I imagine new strats will soon be discovered to re-trivialize the event.

That's it. Can't stop. Got a Norn to help next.

Now Where Did I Put That Tin Foil Hat? : GW2

So after I killed the Fire Elemental and opened my new-style Bonus Chest I was looking to see if the new WvW thing was in the achievements window and I spotted something odd right down the bottom. Hmm, Super Adventure Box? I'm sure I'd have remembered that...

A quick search finds this forum post from the end of February, which links to this database entry. In the actual Patch Notes? Nothing.

Let the conspiracy theories begin!

[EDIT] And already the mystery is solved and I lose interest.

Hang On...Haven't We Been Here Before?

 Yesterday, Massively reported on conversations with two unnamed designers from ArenaNet and with SOE's Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson. Each emphasized the importance of giving all kinds of players plenty to do at all times. Smokejumper rather chillingly predicted a future where MMO companies who "push the sociological stuff will make really big things that will last for years and years because no one will want to leave them".

Possibly in response to this growing zeitgeist, today Green Armadillo and Keen both have relevant observations. I don't doubt more commentators will weigh in in due course. To me about the only surprise in the idea that MMOs should offer a smorgasbord in place of a set menu is how long it's taken the developers to come right out and say it. From my perspective it's no more than what they've been doing in practice for years.

Is there a gift shop?

Most MMOs I've played for any length of time have had deep, well-constructed, intricately- detailed worlds. A huge amount of time and trouble has clearly been taken over everything from set design and lighting to incidental NPC dialog response. You can (and I frequently do) spend hour after hour just exploring buildings, villages and towns, learning how these imaginary people live.

Large, well-funded MMOs habitually offer a wide, sometimes overwhelming variety of ways to spend your time. In addition to the main course of fighting (solo, duo, group instance, raid, battleground, arena, you name it...) most MMOs offer a good selection of side-dishes, from gathering, crafting, collecting, stories, pets, wardrobes, building, decorating and designing all the way through to embedded collectible card-games and gambling dens.

Never enough, it's never enough...

I would contend that even back in the 1990s, MMOs like Ultima Online and Everquest offered a considerably wider range of possible activities than just leveling up your character and defeating tougher and tougher monsters. Over the last five or six years many MMOs have expanded their catalog of things to do to such an extent that few if any players would ever attempt to consume everything. You'd explode!

The idea that there is insufficient content is ridiculous but it's certainly the case that despite this cornucopia there are still players who feel hungry for more. For them there's always nothing to do. Whether those players are satisfiable, or rather whether attempting to satisfy them is a sound commercial strategy is another matter entirely.

What must be a problem for developers is that the kind of content that takes the longest and costs the most to produce - all those amazingly detailed zones, all that meticulously-written, painstakingly voice-acted dialog - are the very things players skip over, rush past and generally ignore. I suspect relatively few players go around every zone talking to every NPC or spend whole evenings looking at how the furniture has been arranged.

There's always a better party

The Catch-22, though, is that for an MMO to be accorded true AAA status in the eyes of the very same customers who won't really "use" this kind of content, said content still has to be there and be top quality. An expectation of standards has been built up over many years and must be adhered to lest players deem the game lacking or, worse, cheap. Players come to each game with a shopping list of features from all the MMOs they've played before and they had darned well better find all of them, even the ones they never actually use, or by golly they'll be off to someone that knows how to do it properly.

So yes, the future for MMOs is "be everything to everybody all the time". It's a future that's already here and I suspect it's already working about as well as it's ever likely to work. Well, it's working for me, anyway.

Ever Onward: GW2

I found this report on where GW2 may be headed somewhat disheartening. After a full six months of playing very little other than Guild Wars 2 I find myself in the uncomfortable position of enjoying it immensely in spite of the vision its developers have for it rather than because of it.

While there are elements with which I can sympathize, particularly the emphasis on keeping players out in the open world, much of what's reported there just rubs me up the wrong way. The two things I'd most like to hear that ArenaNet are working on - housing and an expansion - are completely off the table. Worse, the very types of new content that most interest me - new explorable areas, opening up the existing map, new races, new classes - can apparently only be expected in the expansion we aren't going to get.

Instead there's a whole lot of vague guff about how to "tell compelling stories" and teach players how to play. It looks as though the foreseeable future is more of that endless fiddling about with game systems that so obsesses developers of all MMOs, combined with a lot of bits and pieces that are supposed to (but don't) amount to a coherent narrative.

I'm not surprised by any of this. Well, perhaps by the determined insistence that there won't be an expansion in the "foreseeable future". That does seem to go against the commercial model established by Guild Wars, but otherwise it's not far off what I expected.

Compared to almost any other MMO house, ANet seem to think in almost geological time. Everything is for the long-term health of the game. Short or even medium-term pain is preferable to any kind of quick fix and the pig's ear they made of their uncharacteristic attempt at an emergency response with the Ascended Gear fiasco can only have confirmed their belief that slow and steady wins the race.

Tomorrow we get the first of the major changes to the structure of World vs World. From the limited information so far, that would appear to bolt a quasi-PvE model of character progression on top of what was previously a competitive ranking model at server level. It's hard to imagine how that will play out. The two concepts seem almost pathologically incompatible, especially when you consider that the new system is not just going to be per-character rather than per account but that "the team fully expects that players will initially feel that rewards take too long to earn".

In other words, WvW players will be faced with a menu of upgrades which they may or may not find attractive or useful, each of which will have to be ground out separately for each character the player wants to progress, at a speed which the developers have designed to be unacceptable. On the face of it, one might think the developers were telling players to suck it up and get on with it. Whether anyone's having fun no longer seems relevant.

Indeed, with all the talk of educating the players on how to play the game properly one might even begin to wonder whether these particular developers consider themselves to be in the entertainment business at all. Perhaps, like A Tale In The Desert, we should consider GW2 more in the light of a sociological experiment than a game.

It's just as well then that something else in that report turns out to be true, for me at least. "If you like playing only one part of the game, you should be able to enjoy the full game doing just that." It sounds like an oxymoron but I understand what they mean and it does gibe with my own experience. I like leveling up. I've been doing it for six months, I still like it and I am still finding a vast, a truly vast quantity of content to do that's new to me.

My Mesmer made 80 last week, leaving me just a Guardian short of the full set. Rather than hurl myself straight at that particular mountain I decided to give myself a treat and play up another ranger. I also decided to play him in an entirely different way to any character I've played so far - leveling him up by full map completion in consecutive maps starting from his own homelands.

So far this has been a fascinating, almost revelatory experience. It's like playing a different game altogether. No wonder so many people left after a month or two if they thought this was what the whole thing was about, that's all I can say. Well, actually, no, it's not all I can say. I can say plenty more than that and I will, another time, but right now I still have that first map to complete. Ever onward!