Pay Up! Pay Up! And Play The Game! : FFXIV

This weekend, while everyone and his uncle went to try out the Elder Scrolls Online's latest beta, I popped my head back into FFXIV. Square picked the same weekend to hand out a "come back and see what you're missing" freebie to anyone who'd ever bought the box. Or imagined they'd bought the box in the case of us digital downloaders.

I was quite looking forward to seeing the old place again. I fancied trying out the new Beast Tribe quests, having some fun in the current holiday event, Heavensturn, maybe going to gawp at the overpriced housing. It didn't turn out that way, partly for practical reasons but mostly because it took no more than a few minutes in Eorzea to remember why I never went back after our trip to Spain broke the habit of logging in last October.

The world is still as stunning to look at as it always was, of course. The New Year's decorations looked spectacular. For a while all I did was run around posing next to snowmoogles and taking selfies. Then I spent a little time looking at what the holiday vendors were selling. Hats. Really unattractive hats.

A quick visit to the Lodestone, official source of information for all things Eorzean, confirmed that was about it for Heavensturn. Some hideous hats and a lengthy runaround quest laden with heavy, labored irony about the supposed normality of riding a Chocobo rather than a horse. The reward for which, unless I'm misunderstanding it, is another really ugly, indeed quite creepily disturbing, hat.

So, pass on all that. On to the Beast Tribe quests. Where might those be? A few more minutes of running around aimlessly passed before I gave up and googled it. Beast Tribe quests start at Level 42 and require that you have reached a specific point in the personal story. The level requirement comes with the territory in MMOs and though I may grumble about it, if I was playing regularly I'd suck it up. Yoshi P's insistence on gating content through completion of a storyline, however, is the main reason why I'm not playing regularly, or indeed at all.

The upshot of the weekend free pass was to remind me precisely why we decided not to subscribe and are unlikely to play again until or unless there's a fundamental change of approach by the development team. Or, as Mrs Bhagpuss put it when I asked her if she wanted to log in and let her characters stretch their legs, "I like the game but I'm not interested while that man is still in charge".

All of which feeds into the ongoing (will it ever stop?) debate on payment models. Keen says "Who cares?" claiming "Good games can be ruined by business models, but bad games can never be helped by them." Tobold kind of agrees but claims it's all a question of semantics (isn't everything?). SynCaine disagrees, vehemently.

All of which is fine and dandy but, as always, gets us no further forward. John Smedley today reiterated his wish that "The one thing that I want for our company is to have a well-earned reputation -- I'm not saying we are there yet -- for listening to the players more than anybody else". That'll be why we have the PSS1 deal, then, will it? Despite the virtually universal player revulsion expressed from the day it was announced to, well, always.

I absolutely believe that both Smed and Yoshi P genuinely love making MMOs and believe they are doing their flat-out best both to make the best ones they can and to find a way to make as many players as possible happy to play them. The problem isn't making great games, although God knows that must be hard enough, and it very definitely isn't the way they choose for us to pay for them.

The problem is that every decision that makes one player happy makes another foam at the mouth. The very things I can't stand about FFXIV are robustly defended by others on the forums as the backbone of the game. You can't please all of the people, as they say. In MMOs you're doing well if you please any of them.

In the words of Sid Maier, which seem to be doing the rounds again, a good game is a series of interesting decisions. That surely must apply as equally to making them as to playing them. Ultimately, FFXIV turns out to be a good game that I don't want to play. It's not right for me. I wouldn't be playing it much if it was F2P because there isn't much I can do there without knuckling under to its draconian narrative imperative and I just don't want to. The subscription is an irrelevancy.

The kind of things that put people off F2P games generally don't bother me all that much. I don't mind being reminded to visit the cash shop any more than I mind advertisements in a magazine. The restrictions most game companies choose to apply to free accounts tend to add to my enjoyment rather than detract from it - I can always use a bit of enforced self-restraint when it comes to inventory management and the like.

Conversely, the tricks companies come up with to persuade subscribers to go on paying - never-ending tiers of gear or raid content that takes months to learn, for example - don't affect me either. That's part of the game I'd never bother with anyway so it exerts no hold over whether I choose to stay or go.

No, the deal-breaker often comes regardless of both the payment method and the quality of the MMO. It just takes one of those "interesting decisions" to send the game veering in a direction that doesn't work for me and that's it. Game over.

Except for MMOs it never really is Game Over, not until the last server closes and sometimes not even then. The saving grace of MMOs is that they never stand still (shhh Vanguard, no-one's talking about you...). Turn your head for a moment and when you glance back they'll have changed. Sometimes even for the better.

This visit to FFXIV didn't go well but I'll be back. Maybe one day they'll get it right, for my particular subjective value of "right". If so I'll be happy to subscribe or be cash-shopped or whatever it takes to play. It's not about how you pay or how much you pay, after all; it's about whether you get what you want.

All Mod Cons : EQNext, Landmark

One of the myriad polls running on EQNext's Round Table.

So far only 8% of respondents have stepped up to man the barricades with :

"Third-party mods should not be allowed at all by SOE".

It's an answer that tempted me at first but in the end I went for :

"I want to have customization options in the SOE UI, but I don’t usually use third party creations."

It's a less confrontational option, for sure, but it's one that might almost be considered antisocial. You could read it as a plea for fairness and an even playing field, but equally it might be taken as "You lot do what you want; just stay out of my way and don't ask me to join in". Well, there was a bit of that in my thinking as I voted, I won't deny it, but a healthy skepticism towards allowing user-made modifications in a shared, communal environment also seems like a socially-conscious attitude to take.

Whether approaching the metaspace of MMORPGs from the perspective of game design or virtual world building a certain consistency of experience would seem to be essential if the enterprise is to succeed. There's already a very wide range of unavoidable variations in what players see, hear and are able to react to as dictated by their choice of hardware and the quality of their internet connections. To allow a plethora of modifications to unsettle the foundations of the shared environment still further seems to risk knocking down the whole precarious house of cards.

How about a mod that tells people what you're really thinking?

The hoariest and thorniest issue in MMO design must surely be "balance". Can there be any MMO ever launched that didn't almost immediately find itself locked in a never-ending round of table-leg trimming? Sawing an inch off here, sliding a book under there in an increasingly desperate effort to get the thing to stand four-square. If developers find it all but impossible to balance the classes and abilities they themselves have made, how then are they ever going to achieve the stability and fairness they desire when any player could be utilizing dozens of third-party add-ons and mods or none?

The obvious riposte would be that the world's most successful MMO seems to manage so it can't be impossible. I played WoW for about four months. It's a good MMO and I enjoyed it. As far as I recall, I downloaded two mods. One blocked all duel messages and I forget what the other did but it was something similar. While I was playing I read about plenty of supposedly essential mods, the ones that run your healing for you or track nodes for harvesting or monitor the auction house and buy and sell at peak. I decided I could probably manage without them, carried on doing all those things for myself and it seemed to go alright.

Of course, I was mostly soloing or duoing with Mrs Bhagpuss, who wasn't using any mods either, and even back then four or five years ago, while leveling up might not have been the complete cakewalk it supposedly is now, the kind of content we were doing couldn't be described as particularly challenging. It would have been a lot different even had we attempted to play extensively in pick-up groups as we once did in Everquest I'm sure. When the Dungeon Finder came in, just as I was leaving, I healed a few low-level dungeons and got away with it but I don't imagine that would have remained a tenable position for long. Had we wanted to progress further and be accepted as group players I imagine we'd have had to get at least a few of the most expected mods.

Okay, so maybe that's not such a great idea...

It seems all but inevitable that as third-party mods become prevalent in an MMO two things have to happen: developers must take account of the most popular ones when designing and tuning content and players must adopt them if they have any interest in what might be called "competitive" play. Yes, if you choose to ignore the modding scene you can trundle happily along, soloing and playing with people you know, enjoying content that's meant to be taken lightly, but if you want to step up, if we can call it that, and play with strangers who will rightly expect you to play at their level of competence, well you're either going to need to be a lot better than they are or you're going to swallow your pride and your idealism and use the same autonomic assistants they do.

So on balance I'm wary of mods. They represent a potential arms-race both between player and developer in the eternal struggle to either trivialize or balance content and between player and player in the equally endless conflict of interest between the dedicated and the dilettante. Being wary, however, does not mean being completely close-minded.

Long before WoW set the agenda I used a few mods on and off back in Everquest. Some of them I'm using still, like Mapfiend (and its successor EQ2Map come to that). I also still prefer the modded xp bar in EQ that lets you see your xp in detail. For a long time I used a mod that allowed you to set set off an audio alarm triggered by a given phrase. Among other things I had it set to ring a bell when invisibility began to fade. Saved my life so many times.

A mod that would allow screenshots with speech-bubbles but no other UI elements, now that I'd use.

Audio triggers like that are desperately underused in MMOs, which is a whole topic in itself, and it's not just triggers; the entire soundscape of MMOs remains hugely underexploited by both developers and modders alike. The first mod I ever downloaded for any game was a voice pack for Baldur's Gate that converted all my character's voice files into sound samples taken from Daria. We could do with a lot more of that. It would enhance the GW2 experience no end...well it would mine...

The Round Table polls are aimed mainly at EQNext, which is, we suppose at least, primarily a gameplay-oriented experience. Whatever the result of the poll, for the game to work as a game, SOE will have to exercise a considerable degree of quality control over the mods they choose to allow. Landmark, on the other hand, is supposedly a utility or a tool-kit designed to appeal to the creativity and imagination of its users, which would seem to make it the ideal testbed and home for would-be modders.

Perhaps that will be the through-route for approved mods to arrive in EQNext. If so, why wouldn't their creators be rewarded in the same way, financially, as the creators and designers of buildings and items, through Player Studio?

And there's another giant can of worms just waiting to be opened right there. I wonder, when they were searching around for a final name for the project codenamed EQNext, d'you think anyone suggested Everquest: The Box of Pandora?

Oops, They Did It Again: SOE, EQ2

Using the now-traditional method, a chaotic flurry of disorganized semi-reveals, mollifying forum posts, half-baked statements of intent, tweets and Reddit convos, Sony Online Entertainment, the company that likes to say "Yes! No! Wait...maybe...we're not sure...", announced...something.

Wilhelm has an excellent account of the shenanigans, including links to Sheldon's usual first-rate news coverage at EQ2Wire, so I won't go over the details here. Go read those if you need to get up to speed.

I just wanted to make a couple of quick observations from a UK perspective.

Smed briefly addresses the PSS1 elephant in the room, albeit rather pointedly not by name:

"European players – we have an idea on how to include you in this but we need to discuss with our partners.We have a pretty good idea on this though. give us a bit of time to suss this out."

 Really? I should damn well hope you do have "a pretty good idea". I'd hate to think that you were planning on offering the rest of the world unfettered access to all SOE games for a single monthly charge of $14.99 while leaving the poor relations over here in the myriad countries enmeshed in the PSS1 web to pay separate, individual subscriptions to each game.

Because, and please correct me if I'm wrong, PSS1 has no equivalent of the All Access pass. That was one of the reasons that, while SOE stopped accepting new AA Subs from PSS1 territories long ago, existing Access subscribers have been allowed to retain their accounts and pay SOE for them directly.

Then there's Landmark. The only SOE game specifically excluded from the PSS1 deal. A free-to-play title for which I am about to pay a hundred dollars to alpha test. And EQNext, which, whenever it finally arrives, will be played on SOE servers in America but for which access in PSS1 territories will be through their portal exclusively.

A mess is what that is.

Whatever the upshot, it's going to save me money. If I keep grandfather rights to the new deal I'll be paying $14.99 a month instead of $19.99 and I'll save $5.00. If it's deemed that Access no longer exists and those rights no longer pertain then I'll be playing my SOE games for free and I'll save even more!

The way SOE do these things I'm resigned to watching it play out like a slow-motion train wreck over the next few weeks but nevertheless I'm optimistic. They have the most appalling habit of making everything absolutely as difficult as possible for both themselves and their customers along the way but by and large they do tend to wind up in roughly the right place in the end.

If only they'd learn something in the process once in a while.

No, that'd be asking too much.

Buffs, Boons, Brevity : Everquest, GW2

Many years ago, when Everquest set the rules and others followed, buffs were measured in minutes, even in hours. With the exception of Bards, who had constantly to twiddle their fingers and twist their songs to keep up a seamless stream of morale-enhancing musical notes, buffing was a matter of clicking a handful of hot keys once an hour or so.

Starting out as a Cleric you'd receive Courage at level one, the first in what would become your core buff line, giving you the endlessly sought-after ability to increase hit points. It was a line of buffs known intimately to everyone, not just Clerics. Through various eras, depending on the current highest or most widely requested exemplar, the line was known by different names: Center, Valor, Temperance, Vigor, Aegolism. At the peak of my own career as a cleric the call was for Virtue. Later, when I was a user rather than a dealer, it was Tenacity and Temerity.

Whichever class you played, whether you were the giver or receiver of buffs, you learned two things from the beginning: as you grew more powerful buffs lasted longer and they affected more people at once. The duration of most buffs increased incrementally level by level as well as upgrade by upgrade and higher levels would bring a group version of a single-cast. Over a couple of years I progressed from a half-hourly buffing session outside Splitpaw in the thirties, where I had to hit everyone with Center separately, to a single cast of Hand of Virtue at 65 that buffed the entire group and lasted a couple of hours.

That wasn't all. As expansions rolled out both the game and the world broadened and deepened. We discovered new ways to extend and prolong the buffs we cast. Items appeared that offered a whole range of effects, able to focus spells to be more efficient, more powerful and, especially, longer-lasting. Whole fresh paths of alternate advancement opened up, bringing enhancements of every imaginable kind including the ability to cast buffs that affected not just your group or even your raid but everyone in the immediate area.

Entire playstyles arose out of these options. Clerics and enchanters grew rich, offering their spells for hard cash or desirable items. Certain locations buzzed and whirred with commerce: the lawns or boards outside the banks in Plane of Knowledge, the hill in front of the Guild Lobby, the pathway where the Priest of Discord stood, ever-patient. How he must have hated all that bonhomie. The shouts and calls of players looking to buy or sell buffs rang in the air as adventurers ported in to refresh their protections before heading out to begin the hunt once more.

Best of all, in an emergent forerunner of the kind of open, co-operative play made familiar in recent years, selfless or self-aggrandizing individuals would call all-comers to them for Mass Group Buffs, bringing dozens, scores of people at a dead run as the count-down neared zero.

Careerism

"Mass HOV at POD 3 minutes". "Extended SD at Small Bank, casting in 30 secs". "3hr KEI at GD Stone. Donations always welcome". The cries of the buff-hawkers, as familiar and cheering as the chimes of the Ice Cream Man. The thrill of receiving a buff that could make the difference between a slow, difficult session or a brisk romp, only bettered by the satisfaction of being that caster, able to stand tall and share the fruits of your hard-earned success with friends, strangers and paying customers alike.

There were downsides. Some casters became greedy, some recipients picky. Woe betide the fresh sixty Enchantress, over-excited at coming into her prime, her signature spell in her book at last, who set up stall casting KEI at base duration, a mere two and a half hours, while others were offering three and a quarter, enhanced. Then there were the imbalances: the lack of level restriction on Temperance that could turn a newbie warrior into an unstoppable killing machine for a couple of hours (working as intended) or Koadic's Endless Intellect that could do the same for a young wizard or druid for even longer (a bug, corrected only after several years, even though time and usage had long-since rendered it normative).

Acquiring long-lasting buffs became routine to the point that many adventurers simply wouldn't leave the house, or at least Plane of Knowledge, without them. Once in situ, and sometimes even with group members on the spot, willing and able to provide comparable alternatives on demand, breaks for a return to PoK for a refresh of a key buff (or a KEI buff, often as not) made for a commonplace disruption to the rhythm of the kill.

Still, for all the drawbacks, now it looks like a golden age. The synergies and interplays between classes, individuals, groups and communities; the motivators of personal pride and character progression; the exuberant spirit of play; the turning of the economic wheel.

An addiction in the making

Whole weeks, months of satisfying gameplay derived from the search for improved focus effects, the desire to make spells cast faster, cost less mana,  last longer. It wasn't that you felt more powerful having them, though you did; it was that you felt complete. And always there was the ritual of it all; the casting of buffs as the party came together, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need; the donation of reagents by the willing, the unseen mark entered into the clerical notebook against the names of those who sat on their Peridots.

Even in Norrath the glory days are gone. Mercenaries provide buffs on tap. Spells no longer require reagents. In EQ2, half a millennium on, once cast buffs last forever.  It's understandable, excusable even. Aging games must offer convenience or wither away.

But what excuse do newer MMOs have and what do they have to offer instead? In GW2 a long-duration buff might last you half a minute. A trait might extend that by ten or twenty percent. The only way to keep buffs (or boons as they're known in Tyria) up is to run in a pack with everyone chain-casting like crazy.

It's a methodology that both suits and predicates GW2's zerg culture. It leads to faintly ludicrous, inelegant behavior like stacking, where everyone piles on top of one another like students trying to beat the record for packing a phone booth before charging off to throw themselves onto their opponents like a horde of rabid rats, hoping the seconds-long buffs will hold. It causes Guardians and Warriors to call constantly for company, asking people to huddle close so their auras of power or virtue won't go to waste.

The upshot is the frenetic action, the restless motion so emblematic of the modern MMO. It's entertaining but it's exhausting too, not to be dismissed lightly, with its own strengths and pleasures, to be sure, but perhaps lacking the defined, developmental purpose of the system it replaced. Traits constantly, cheaply swapped for effects that last seconds fail to emulate either the gravitas or the satisfaction of items and abilities long-desired, worked for, effortfully acquired.

Those permanent, significant and meaningful, not incremental, improvements, did more than just replace existing items or abilities with the numbers changed. They stood as markers not of linear progress but of the rounding out of a character learning to live more fully, more meaningfully in his world.

I miss it. I miss the progression and the character-building, but most of all I miss the buffing itself. How we all cursed it then, that relentless re-application, having to spend a couple of minutes at the start of every session cycling through the same half a dozen casts only to find yourself doing the same again just a fleeting two or three hours later. Talk about not knowing when you're well off.

As I run through the borderlands, blowing my warhorn for those few seconds of swiftness, trying to stay in the bubble around the commander and not fall back to the straggling tail, what wouldn't I give now for some good old Spirit of Wolf.

Extended, of course.

A Landmark Decision : EQN Landmark

Ever since Sony Online Entertaiment CEO John "Smed" Smedley twittered his new estimate of the start date for Landmark's buy-in alpha this fence I've been perching on has been getting more and more uncomfortable. With a potential door-opening just a couple of weeks away the time for thoughtful, measured consideration is coming to an end. In the immortal words of Secret Affair it's time for action.

So I asked Mrs Bhagpuss what to do.

She said "Get it for me for my birthday", which kind of answers half the question. Maybe a quarter. Get what, exactly?

Dismissing the beta-only Settler Pack, the choice is between the $59.99 Explorer or the $99.99 Trailblazer. I took a while to read the full contents list for both. Carefully. That didn't help much. Without knowing a lot more about the game itself it's virtually impossible to estimate the value of any of the goods and services that go with it.

Any value the the cosmetic gear might have is entirely subjective anyway. I wouldn't pay fifty cents for all of it put together but someone else might get hours of pleasure from watching their avatar prancing around dressed like the mascot of the Freedonia Marching Band. Same goes for the titles.

The items included in each pack at least have a practical purpose. Having a single, unbreakable tool that acts both as an axe and a pick is nothing to be sniffed at in a virtual world where, we suppose, chopping down trees and digging up ore will make up a great deal of the gameplay. Anything that gives a boost to gathering and crafting or increases your storage capacity would come in welcome in any MMO.

These are unarguably items of value and no doubt something very similar will be on sale in the Station Cash Shop once the game hits Open Beta, if not before. That knowledge doesn't help much in fixing a monetary value, however, if you neither know the price point for the items nor whether such existing Station Cash as you might own will carry over to the Landmark store.

That just leaves access and ownership. No point pretending otherwise; that's what's really on sale here.

There's no release date for Landmark. Wilhelm recently prognosticated a mid-October launch, which might be on the nose for the official release. The FAQ has no truck with any dates beyond the start of closed beta "on or before March 31". I'd guess Open Beta will come in the early/mid summer and for all intents and purposes Open Beta will be launch.

The FAQ is worth reading in detail. It answers a few important questions regarding progress. Effectively you get to keep any and all design work you do right from the start of Alpha and just about everything else, including all character progression, becomes permanent from the beginning of Closed Beta. Because you can, if you wish, keep playing the same character throughout, including through any wipes, by buying one of the Alpha access packs you are effectively paying to start playing the actual game, albeit in an unfinished format, several months before it becomes publicly available.

The only thing you don't get to keep is the location in the world where you set up home - your "Claim". Again we run into the buffers of ignorance. How important is your Claim? Does it really matter where you build, especially given that you came out of Closed Beta with your forty-room Winter Palace and Boating Lake safely templated and saved? Are you reliant on running hell-for-leather back to the exact spot where you created it or could you just flatten any old bit of land and slap it down wherever? We just don't know, so the value of those two or more days Head Start that come only with the most expensive pack is hard, maybe impossible, to judge.

Thinking too much on all this could send a person over the edge. Decisions have to be made and fortunately one is easy: I will be buying the Trailblazer Pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present. For myself I'm minded to buy the Explorer Pack to see how things go in Alpha. Once I know more about it from the inside, if that Head Start begins to look crucial I can always upgrade before the time comes.

Or I may just go for the Trailblazer and be done with it. No, I don't think it's worth a hundred dollars (and we'll likely have to pay VAT on top of that here in the UK so make that $120). It will be the most expensive MMO I've ever bought and I don't even know what I'm buying. Call that half a decision made, then. Or is it three-quarters?

Whichever version I end up with, sadly an NDA is likely to be in place throughout Alpha and well into Closed Beta so my plan to report here on what Landmark turns out to be will just have to wait. Then again, it's supposed to be a game that's all about creativity, isn't it?

Maybe we'll get to find out just how creative I can be.

No Year's Resolution

I was a little surprised to see that the post count here for December was the lowest monthly total for nearly two years. I knew I'd been slacking off a bit but not that much.

Partly it's the time of year, of course. December is hectic for everyone and especially so in a bookshop, where it's the busiest month by far. Still, in December 2012 I managed nineteen posts compared to just a dozen last month. It can't just be pressure of work and present-buying.

It's clear from the nature of some of the posts here recently (the repetitive nature, some might say) that there's a degree of marking time going on right now. Most of what I'm doing is more of the comfortable same, which is entertaining and satisfying for me but doesn't necessarily make for the easiest material to work with when it comes to column inches.

It's not just me, either. Reading through Feedly these days there seem to be fewer and fewer posts on MMOs. Bloggers I follow are wandering off-topic to discuss a whole slew of other online and offline games, everything from current hot numbers like Starbound to ancient artifacts like Darklands. Some people are even reading books and watching movies. More worryingly, quite a few are posting less frequently or going silent altogether.

I try to avoid blogging about about blogging but another part of the problem specifically for me is that more and more of my posts seem to take me longer than I'd like. It's one thing to spend a whole afternoon on a post when I have four days off work, but if every post is going to take four or five hours to finish then during the working week it comes down to a straight choice between playing and posting.

Strangely, given the current MMO doldrums we're passing through and even though I was saying exactly the opposite not all that long ago, at the moment, when it comes down to a choice between playing and writing, I go for playing more often than not.

All of which navel-gazing brings me to something I am going to resist calling a Resolution. It's more like a Statement of Intent. I'm not going to attempt anything as ambitious as Rowan or Keen and Graev. No attempts to post every day, but I am going to try to throw in some shorter posts in between the longer essays to keep things moving. Posts that take half an hour to put together, not an entire evening. Maybe with just the one screenshot.

It's not the first time I've given myself this pep-talk but I'm hoping that by putting it down in print might just force me to listen to what I'm saying for once. There's always a first time.

2013 in Review: 2014 in Prospect

Meet the new year, same as the old year, as Pete Townshend might have said. New Year's never been much of a thing round our house. Seasons change and so does the weather but resolutions and predictions don't figure much. Still and all it's as good a time to reflect as any and it's always fun to speculate, so away we go.

As many have observed already, 2013 was something of a mark-time year for MMOs. The biggest event of the year was either Neverwinter or the re-launch of FFXIV. When the best the genre has to offer is a choice between the latest project on the Perfect World/Cryptic assembly line and the second coming of a game that failed hard the first time round it would be tough to claim we'd had a vintage year.

That said, a lot of people seemed rather to enjoy Neverwinter although they often seemed to be admitting to something of a guilty pleasure whereas FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, to give it its full, unwieldy title, generally received the warm, if bemused, reception accorded to an old dog as it unexpectedly manages to learn a new trick. That the FFXIV revival was done so well did surprise people but nowhere near so much as that it was done at all.

For me, Neverwinter turned out to be one of those games that I like in theory but never get around to playing very much and now that it's decided not to run at all on my PC even the theory part is, well, theoretical. FFXIV I liked a lot and played a lot, for a while, but the combination of extreme alt-unfriendliness and subscription payment model did for any plans I might have entertained for playing it long-term.

The biggest new story of the year, in my opinion at least, was the combined EQNext/Landmark reveal at last summer's SOE Live. For a couple of weeks that seemed to be just about all anyone was talking about. More surprisingly Sony just about managed to keep the buzz going for rest of the year with a seemingly inexhaustible series of pointless polls and uncomfortable videos.

As I explained, while I think I'm relatively clear on what to expect from EQNext (nothing this year for a start) but I'm still not much wiser as to what Landmark actually is. The time is fast approaching when all will be revealed. According to Smed alpha should start sometime in January. Will I be there? The Magic 8-Ball knows.

Other than that, 2013 was all about GW2. It's an odd game. In some ways it turned out to be nothing like most people expected or ArenaNet claimed. With amazing sleight-of-hand ANet contrived to replace the usual vertical end-game gear grind progression with a similarly exhausting version based on crafting, while at the same time converting the hitherto sprawling, cyclical, unruly open world into a tidy, manageable sequence of numbered and packaged limited-duration events. The promised flat leveling and horizontal progression elements still exist but have deftly been rendered almost entirely irrelevant. A remarkable achievement.

While the entire game was being re-purposed around us, however, one of the original articles of faith at which many, myself included, had scoffed turned out to be no more than simple truth. It had been claimed before launch that World vs World vs World would provide all the endgame that was needed and after a coughing, stuttering start so it proved. The part of the game I never expected to pay any mind to has become, over these last few months, almost the entirety of my concern. I'm not saying I like that. Indeed I may be saying I don't like it much at all. But it's a fact.

Of course there were other MMOs, foremost among them EQ2, with whose expansion before last I finally caught up and whose current expansion I am just about ready to begin to explore. Then there was City of Steam, which came badly off the rails before righting itself after a fashion and carrying on along a new track altogether. I rode herd on dinosaurs in DinoStorm, jetpacked around Firefall, snuck back into The Secret World and even revisited World of Warcraft. I thought, often, about Getting Something Done in Everquest and Vanguard but rarely did.

And so it goes. 2013, the Year of More Of The Same. A comfortable year. Not much got done but by and large I had fun not doing it. What about 2014? Are we stuck in this cosy little rut for another twelvemonth? You know, I rather fear we may be.

The prospects for 2014 look uninspiring. I imagine the Big Three on the watch list of most Western MMO fans would be WildStar, TESO and EQLandmark.

Landmark I've already mentioned. To elaborate and prognosticate, I think it will confuse and disappoint in equal measure. Half the potential audience will be wishing they were playing EQNext and lobbying hard for Landmark to be a Full Feature MMO while the rest will just want to be left alone with a toolset to make their own worlds. I predict the two demographics will not play happily together and few will feel satisfied. On the other hand, I could be the blind man at the back of the elephant telling his friends he's found a piece of old rope...

TESO, on the other hand, looks set to disappoint just about everyone. I don't have any residual affection for the IP so if it ends up appealing to me even in the slightest I'll be both surprised and delighted. Plenty of other people, however, are very heavily invested indeed and when an MMO gets made from an IP that people love it doesn't often seem to go down as well as either the developers or the fans might hope or expect. LotRO might be the exception although even that's had its ups and downs, but the commercial and/or artistic history of the rest - SWG, SW:ToR, Warhammer, AoC, STO, DDO, Lego Universe, to name just a few of the better-known - well, it doesn't make pretty reading.

WildStar, being an original property, should at least avoid disparaging comparisons to its source material. Instead it risks the usual fate of would-be mainstream themepark MMO launches of latter years - being largely ignored by most of the audience it would like to attract while at the same time drawing unflattering comparisons with established titles from those who do give it a try. Nevertheless, while WildStar doesn't hold much interest for me, I wouldn't be that surprised to see it making the best showing of these three in 2014, at least until something better comes along. It smacks rather of Rift, a clean, well-designed MMO from a commercially-focused and adept team with a lower megalomania co-efficient than the average MMO development House.

So WildStar's my horse in this three-way race. I'll back it but I don't plan on riding it. Most likely I'll spend much of next year hacking around the same familiar landscapes on the same spavined, slouch-backed old nags or bumbling around Landmark with my eyes on the horizon and the distant promise of EQNext.

Oh come on! Let's not be negative! Perhaps Landmark will surprise us all when its really A Thing. Maybe the climax of GW2's year-long Living Story will blow our socks off and leave us cheering for the next installment. Maybe something none of us has yet heard of will roar in out of left-field and bowl us all over.

Or maybe 2014 will just be The Year Of More Of More Of The Same. Could be worse.