Time Will Crawl : EQNext At SOE Live 2013 and 2014

It's exactly one month to SOE Live, a fact I was already aware of from news sources like EQ2Wire and Massively. Had I not known, I would have found out the moment I logged back into EQ2 this weekend after my long layoff (130 days since my last log in - shameful!).

It wasn't a pop-up or an in-game advert or anything crass like that. It was something much warmer, something that felt almost comfortingly familiar. There's this excitable fellow in one of the chat channels I belong to in EQ2, you see, and for him this particular fan convention is the highlight of the year. Every year.  For almost as long as I've been playing, he counts down the days, tells us his travel plans, what he's going to eat, the things he's going to do when he gets there. He starts anticipating his next trip sometime around Christmas and he begins reminiscing about the last one from the day he gets home so it's pretty much a year-round commentary.

For the rest of the less, shall we say, committed fans, the best part of Sony's annual festival of backslapping is the opportunity it offers for some real, firm information about the games we play and, especially, the games we hope we will be playing soonTM. On that front 2013's event appeared to deliver big-time. Not only did we get a metric tonne of info about EQNext including videos of something that appeared to be gameplay, we also got to learn for the very first time of the existence of some new, previously unmentioned project going by the name of EQ Landmark.

For a couple of weeks all the MMO world wanted to talk about was The Everquest Franchise. Excitement verged on hysteria. I put up five posts on the topic in six days. And then. And then...what, exactly?

Over the next twelve months EQNext quietly drifted off into the background. The much-hyped Roundtable turned out to be not much more than a talking-shop for the fans. The polls, which covered a bewildering range, from core gameplay issues to bizarre trivia, were confirmed to have no binding effect on development whatsoever. A cynic might well suggest their main purpose was to amuse the people making up the questions.

No more "gameplay" footage of EQNext appeared. Indeed there was precious little of anything. Have we even had a new screenshot since SOELive last year? I don't believe we have. Certainly can't see any here. As for those Beta sign-ups we all frenziedly scrabbled for a year ago ( I believe this household alone has seven accounts registered, although most of those were with PSS1 so will need to be re-submitted), well I'm glad we got in there fast. Would have hated to miss out, what with only having another twelve months and counting to get those applications in...

Landmark was promised by "the Winter" and long before Christmas Landmark was just about all SOE wanted to talk about. The alpha was delayed until February but made it out the gate before the end of the appointed season by a whisker. For a while Landmark was hot news but as alpha morphed into beta and development ground on with a truly magisterial ponderousness all but the dedicated lost focus and wandered off.

Somewhere along the way Landmark lost its EQ prefix and then Smed whipped back the curtain on yet another "unknown" MMO, the strangely-named H1Z1 and then no-one was talking about The Everquest Franchise any more, anywhere.

When attendees fill out the forms for SOE Live they have to nominate which game they are registering for. There are eight represented titles from SOE's portfolio to choose from: EQ, EQ2, EQ Next, Landmark, DCUO, Planetside2, H1Z1 and Dragon's Prophet. According to Linda "Brasse" Carson, ex-superfan turned Director of Global Community Relations, by far the highest number opted for...fifteen-year old Everquest. Not-so-closely following but still in second place came the ten-year old sequel, EQ2. Together those two titles comprise well over half of all the interest shown.

Concluding my series of pieces on EQNext after last year's reveals I suggested that the third installment wasn't being aimed at the existing fanbase but rather at the incomparably greater demographic that had managed to resist Norrath's charms for fifteen years straight. That was certainly how it appeared at the time and for a while, not least with the reveal of H1Z1 and Landmark choosing to distance itself from the EQ brand, everything seemed to confirm a company set on outgrowing its trademark High Fantasy genre roots.  

And then we're back with competitions in Landmark to "create the Foundation Museum for the dark elf style guide in game!". I'm confused. Everyone's confused. If anything's clear, though, it's that a gathering of your most hardcore fans is probably not the ideal audience for your New Direction.

When Sony Online Entertainment decided to go with the current open-door, open-arms, we're all devs now approach, inviting everyone with the odd twenty, fifty or hundred dollars to spare to come on board before the the first coat of varnish had even dried on the deck of the new ship, I don't think anyone realized just what a long, slow, tedious voyage they were letting themselves in for.

Triple-A MMOs seem to have a development cycle of around three to five years and in the traditional, old-school beta process a few, hand-picked players might have gotten their hands on the partly-finished product somewhere around a year out but most beta testers saw no more than the final few months. Now everyone is jumping in on the adrenaline rush of hype and promos only to find the game they imagined is just that - imaginary.

All there really is to look forward to is month after month of iterative system-building laying the foundations for gameplay that might, someday far in the future, offer something approximating entertainment. John "Smed" Smedley seems to have picked up on this, if a little belatedly, with this observation on the pending release of a playable version of H1Z1 on Steam's Early Access program : "We just realized ... it would be smarter to announce it after our feature list was complete".

Talk about your epiphanies! I wonder if he feels the same about EQNext? A year on from SOELive 2013 a lot of us are starting to feel like Ashgar of Ash's Adventures, whose "very strong suspicion that EverQuest Next in the previously demonstrated form is vaporware" was re-blogged to a larger audience by Syp as yesterday's "Quote of the Day".

There are five panels on EQNext scheduled for this year's convention. There's a "Keynote", which if previous keynotes are anything to go by will be a lot of hot air and some "concept art". Then there's "The Tech Evolution of the World", during which we'll no doubt hear a lot about voxels, most of which we'll have heard in countless Landmark discussions already. Speaking of which, third up is "Landmark and EverQuest Next — how they relate", a question a lot of people have been asking ever since we heard of Landmark but to which I very much doubt we'll get a definitive answer.

Finally we come to two panels that might, just might, offer something solid to get our blogging teeth into: "EverQuest Next: Combat & Classes" and, saving the best for last, "The Content of EverQuest Next". Well, thanks. That's really what we'd all like to know, isn't it? That and the release date, of course.

I'll be following SOELive as best I can from 5,000 miles away but I'm not going to let my enthusiasm run away with me this time. Here's hoping we just get some real, confirmed, hard facts for a change; not least an idea how far away the damn thing is. Right now even my worst estimate, a full launch in 2016, is starting to look wildly optimistic.

Cleaning House or Gordon Doesn't Live There Any More

One of the best features Blogger has to offer is its real-time updating Blogroll. Find a blog you like, slap the address in the widgit and presto! Every time that blog updates the link refreshes and floats to the top of the list.

It has its idiosyncracies. If Syp ever wondered why I post on his blog and quote and link to him here and yet he doesn't feature in the blogroll, it's because I've added Bio Break a number of times and it magically vanishes. I just added him yet again - maybe it'll stick this time. Not that he needs the traffic...

Then there's Scree's The Cynic Dialogues . Blogger allows that to stay on the list but will have no truck with updates, so it sits stubbornly right down at the very bottom where, presumably, no one ever looks because, well, it's a very long list. Even with the epic-length posts I churn out, the blog roll often descends well beyond the start of the previous rant and whether anyone ever gets as far as "Previously on Inventory Full" I sometimes wonder.

It's been almost a year and a half since I last culled the roll. Back then in January 2013 I was pretty aggressive about it, rooting anyone who hadn't spoken up for themselves in the previous three months. Of the seven sites that were dropped back then a few did post again, sporadically, but all are dormant now as far as I can tell. Darren who used to be The CommonSense Gamer morphed into CatholicGamer for a while, which in turn seems to have vanished into the great blogging beyond.

Even so, three months was certainly too short to tell whether the signal was really down. This time I'm raising the bar to one year, give or take a couple of weeks. Any blog that hasn't let out a peep since August 2013 is out.

The list includes a couple of Big Names, which reminds me of a term that was common currency in comics fandom back in the 80s and which I believe derives originally from science fiction fandom - BNF or Big Name Fan. I'm not sure MMO blogging has the same hierarchical structure but if it does then both Spinks of Welcome to Spinksville and Gordon of We Fly Spitfires would qualify.

Both blogs are still up, if inactive, and Spinks pops up on comment threads occasionally. They could rumble into life any day and I hope they do. Until that day, however, I am retiring them from the list of Places We Go along with the following :

Kichwas
Stylish Corpse
In Character
The Egg Baron
Get The Girl, Kill The Baddies
Braving The Elementalist (which became Chainmaildress, also now defunct)
Noob Raider
Trippin Tyria

Do you think? Could it be...?

I'd love to see any or all of them judder back to life like a re-animated corpse...erm, possibly not the best of similes... but the one I'd be most excited to welcome back from limbo would be The Egg Baron. So much fuel in GW2 now for the kind of Lore detective work in which he excelled.

If there are any miraculous revivals I should know about them because all of the above are safely ensconced in my Feedly feed. If any begin to show signs of life they shall be restored.

Wilhelm pointed out in the comments last time that removing old blogs and adding new ones to a blogroll is just part of the job and I wholeheartedly agree. I tend to be a lot better at adding them then taking them away. New ones trickle in unannounced all the time, which is why there's no list of new additions this go round.

I'd like to say that I'll keep on top of this and remove inactives on a rolling 12-month guillotine. That's my intention and if I manage it then from now on silent blogs will simply vanish from the list unanounced. Chances are I'll probably forget all about it, though, and there'll be another post of this nature along in a year or so. Until then, happy blogging!

The Chelsith Hotel : EQ2

Off we go, into the wild yellow yonder. Hmm. That doesn't scan very well, does it? It was how this morning started, nonetheless. Another short trip through the lurid yellow skies above the Danak Shipyard, another landing on the crown of the submerged iksar statue that serves as a marker for the entrance to Chelsith. We've been here before. So many times.

Ah, Chelsith. How we love to hate you. Once your sunken, cathedral-vaulted halls were whispered, feared, dreamed-of, dared by none but the greatest, the bravest, the hardiest of Norrath's adventurers. I still remember my first, terrifying trip there, when a single bad pull or missed add meant Evac or Wipe, usually Wipe. A Chelsith run back then required an evening cleared of other commitments and complete concentration for several hours.

That seems like such a very long time ago. Over the years the ancient Iksar city, now home to a tribe of deluded, worm-worshipping fishmen, slipped sadly down the ladder of respect. At the launch of the Kunark expansion Chelsith was cutting edge Heroic content but from there it followed the predictable path: playground for well-organized guild groups, then a suitable setting for PUGs to squabble around, then on downhill from there.

Now all I need is a really big frying-pan...

 
After the groups moved on, in came the confident duos and the powerleveling pros, knocking off instances for fun and profit, ticking Chelsith off their lists. There's nowhere left to go from there but solo and once a dungeon can be run safely and easily by one person who's ever going to take it seriously again?

It ought to mean perpetual obscurity, especially given its location not just at the back end of nowhere but at the back end of nowhere underwater, save for one thing : ever since it fell from grace with the Elite, Chelsith has been one of the go-to zones for fast leveling.

For some arcane reason presumably wrapped up in zone experience modifiers and other behind-the-scenes shenanigans, certain zones and dungeons in both remaining versions of Everquest offer much better experience than others. Better xp, I should say. The play experience, the fun or entertainment value if you will, frequently correlates poorly, if at all, with the practical reward.

When it comes to efficient power-leveling, whether it's been paid-for in advance or it's just among friends or, most commonly of all, by-the-bootstraps solo-molo, some of EQ2's huge, sprawling open dungeons manage to match amusement with satisfaction almost as well on the hundredth visit as the first. There's probably never going to come a time when another jaunt through Sebilis or Chardok won't sound like a jolly good wheeze.

Another trudge round Chelsith, though, that's a whole other story. There was a time when I'd very gladly never have seen the dripping, cavernous vaults ever again. So, why go there, then, if it's such a chore?

Aw, no, Boss! Not this place again...

Well, Tipa covered the reasons very thoroughly a while back. After Kunark, SOE turned the xp hose off. Post-Kunark, when you measure it in chunks, by far the biggest xp in EQ2 comes from quests. Complete a task for an NPC in Odus or Velious and he'll reward you with more xp than you could get from killing a dozen mobs or maybe even a hundred.

Now that shouldn't necessarily be such a problem. After all I like questing. I like to read or listen to all the dialog, follow the stories and think about the implications, perform a little mental practical criticism on the prose style, write a notional review of the performance in my head. I don't even object too violently to doing some of the better sequences a few times on different characters. 

The problem is this: quests take ages. Not only that: they can be pernickety. They often involve a lot of traveling, frequently backwards and forwards over the same ground, multiple times. You find yourself fiddling with gadgets and widgets and doohickeys, training animals and rookies to do things you could do better and faster yourself, escorting idiots who don't know how to look both ways before crossing an orc highway and generally taking about ten times longer to do anything than you anticipated.

Even with all the modern-day paraphernalia of glowing trails to follow, big blue spots on the map and the UI in general doing everything but teleport you to the exact spot, questing still takes f o r e v e r. And that's absolutely fine - the first time. But not on a double XP weekend with full vitality and a 110% xp potion burning.

Another old bootstrapping favorite

No, when your bonus to Kill XP is running at over 400% you don't want to mess around with quests, you just want to KILL! You want to kill fast and you want to kill often and you really don't want to find yourself running down the hallways of Sebilis fifty paces behind a level 95 Shadowknight and his lower-level sidekick as he proceeds to pull and AE every Iksar in the godforsaken place, leaving you with the odd chokidai pup if you're lucky.

So, instances it is. First off I tried the top solo power-leveling option the Dungeon Maker had to offer. Nearly a thousand "Likes", hundreds and hundreds of awards, flagged as "best solo xp" and available instantly at the click of a button. It wasn't bad either. Nicely paced, simple, no frills. There was no storyline whatsoever nor any attempt at one but the mobs were sensibly named and it didn't rub your nose in the desperation of the act.

The XP was crap though. I was on my 91st Beastlord (that's level 91 not the 91st beastlord I've played although that's not perhaps as unlikely as it ought to be). The mobs all scaled nicely. Most were the same level or a level above and towards the end a few came in conning orange. As I said, the whole thing was nicely judged but it took about fifteen minutes and gave about 18k XP, which barely moved the bar.

There was a recent bug, received with traditional hysteria on the official forums and reported on EQ2Wire with Feldon's usual sanguine equanimity, in which every mob in  every dungeon-maker dungeon was giving just one point of xp. Reading the comments thread there is instructive - apparently the Dungeon Maker is the preferred power-leveling route these days, at least up until level 90, at which point the way XP is calculated changes radically.

Nice lighting. Decor's a tad minimalist.

Well that's as may be but it didn't do anything for me, which is how a ratonga and his bear found themselves on the dock of Danak Shipyard a few minutes later. In the olden days that would have meant a bell followed by a few griffin rides or, for anyone lucky enough to have one, a few flaps of the Jarsath Hammer with its very handy teleport proc. Today it's a direct destination right there on the Freeport World Bell or, for those who can't bear the thought of even a few wasted seconds, a pay-by-SC option on the map itself.

None of this would have been necessary at all had SOE not played the Double XP card for the second weekend in a row. Boy, does that work on me. Even if I end up not logging in and taking advantage I have it in the back of my mind while I'm off in some other world, nagging away at me and making me not enjoy living in the moment the way I normally would.

Some argue that the very existence of improved XP as a reward or encouragement in MMOs is proof that the entertainment they offer is fatally flawed. After all, the logic goes, if you welcome the opportunity to spend less time on the activity then the activity must be unappealing. That logic is false. We welcome the opportunity to spend more time on the activity by compressing that activity so that we can do more of it in the same amount of time. Well, I do, anyway. Also, it's a bargain and everyone loves a bargain.

There's a particular reckless pleasure in seeing a lower-level character fly upwards as though being hauled on a rope.That's what I really like to do best when a double XP weekend rolls around - bang through thirty or forty levels on a new or barely-started character so fast it makes his nose bleed. Unfortunately, the higher levels in both Everquest and EQ2 are so abominably, attritionally slow that I feel compelled instead to grind away on those characters in most desperate need of a leg-up.

Since I'm playing neither game as my main MMO these days what tends to happen is that one or two of the high-level characters get one or two sessions each. Small but satisfying progress is made; another small step chipped in the mountain ahead of me. It's fun in itself but by no means is it the best fun I could be having. As an incentive to log in to an MMO I haven't played for a while, double XP definitely does the job. What it doesn't do is incentivize me to stay there for long after it goes away.

Still, getting me through the door is the hardest part. I just wish that once I was there I could find something as productive but more entertaining than Franklin Teek's Tasks or yet another lap of Chelsith. It's no wonder everyone hankers after starting fresh.

Full Steam Ahead With CoS:Arkadia's Patch v2.7

Well that's just typical! As soon as I start praising City of Steam's UI they go and change it and for the better, no less! The latest patch not only smartens up some of the already perfectly presentable functions like the mercenary roster it also adds some very welcome new ones, most notably a full Wardrobe system and an event Noticeboard. 
 
The patch notes are here and I think it's fair to say the whole package has been very well-received. Global chat was ringing with unsolicited endorsements for most of the ninety minutes I was there last night. The revamp to the cosmetic appearance system is very impressive. There's a whole raft of outfits to collect, from the gaudy to the sophisticated, all of which you can try on for size, allowing you to work out your look before you work out how to acquire it - or pay for it.


You even get five free cosmetic Basic cosmetic items and one Rare a day.

The new Mercenary Roster, which enhances both the appearance and abilities of existing mercenaries and adds a small army of exotic new ones is a visual treat. Arkadia was teeming with people trying out their new sidekicks, many of whom seem to be about twelve feet tall.

As well as these visual and practical improvements there seem to be yet more freebies on offer. CoS is by far the most generous F2P title I've ever played when it comes to showering non-paying customers with gifts. As well as the usual rewards for logging in there are a whole host of mini-games and activities that reward money, items, xp, collectibles and crafting materials. So much so that in the hour or so I generally have to give the game I barely have time to clear all the gimmes and get to the actual storyline quest I'm still pursuing.

So far I got a top hat, a wraparound skirt, goggles and a pipe (you can see my goblin puffing away on it in the wardrobe picture). I also got a fantastic mount, pictured below.

Mounts and pets, however, are two things the game doesn't like to give away so it's just a three-day temporary ride but I don't in the least begrudge Mechanist Games trying to tempt me. Now they're back in control of their baby they're doing sterling work in turning it into an all-round excellent entertainment and they need to make a living somehow or they'll have to stop, which, on this evidence, would be a terrible shame.
  

I was having so much fun I stayed up later than I intended and finished two more segments of the main quest. Several very close fights ran my goblin up against the level limit again and I need to hit 22 before she can do the next part. Very enjoyable and satisfying it was. Anyone who's played CoS in the past and didn't hate it could do a lot worse than check out the new patch. There's a lot of fun there waiting to be had in an all-the-fun-of-the-fair amusement arcade kind of way and the whole game feels really slick and professional, barring the odd wonky translation.

If nothing else you'll at least get free stuff and who can say no to free stuff even when you have no real idea what to do with any of it?

Look Through Any Window : GW2, CoS, Everquest

Yesterday's not very well-articulated post touched briefly on something I've been meaning to mention for a while: the significant impact of a really good UI. City of Steam, after a long and often uncomfortable journey, has arrived at a place where the form and function of its User Interface feels "right".

Having played through many iterations of the process that brought us to that end the difference is palpable. For the longest time CoS used various convoluted and complicated systems and represented them in fiddly, ornate, over-decorated frames.

Anytime you decide you need a Help button for your UI is time to start all over again.

There was an understandable desire to make the UI reflect the theme and atmosphere of the game but too often it came at the expense of clarity. Something has indeed been lost in the removal of all the pipes and cogs and widgets but a lot more has been gained. The current UI retains enough of the "steampunk" imagery while managing to be just about self-explanatory.

Red light spells danger!

The City of Steam UI uses a combination of fixed and moveable elements. The skill bar sits at the center of the lower edge while the quest journal pops out to the right and the character sheet to the left. Both can be retracted when required to give a clearer view. Chat, options and basic character information are lodged in the corners and all the other windows - skills, crafting, mercenaries, vehicles and so on - open on demand and can be moved around the screen at will.

Everquest's UI couldn't be much more of a contrast. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we looked out onto Norrath through 15-inch CRT monitors, Everquest had the most rigid of fixed UIs. As if our screens weren't already small enough, the default UI - make that the only UI - was large fixed frame with a small hole in the middle.

Image borrowed from The Internet without permission. I doubt I even knew how to take a screenshot back then.

After the sheer wonder of being another world with people from all over this one began to wear off, EQ players clamored for more space and better options on their ever-larger screens. The tiny window went away and the UI went through various incarnations until it achieved Interface Singularity, otherwise known as "okay, if you think you can do better, go ahead and prove it".

You can open a seeming infinitude of windows in Everquest then size them and place them any way you like. You can save them on one character and load them on another. You can change the font and the colors and who knows what-all else. For someone comfortable with the game and the options available it's a godsend. For newcomers and returnees it can be a nightmare. We're back to that too much freedom, too many choices trope again.

Somehow my gaze just naturally veers to the left...

Even for the most nimble-fingered and confident UI wrangler, however, there's something EQ's ultra-flexibility doesn't provide that GW2's much less mobile UI does brilliantly: concurrency. It's very much a background effect that gets little to no attention but the difference it makes to the quality of MMO life is out of all proportion. In GW2 you can use just about all the windows and call on just about all the UI functions simultaneously without losing mouse-pointer focus, locking anything up or otherwise getting yourself or the game tied in knots.

Want to hit auto-run, open your bags, open the Trading Post, salvage your greens and sell the mats while you chat to your guild, all at the same time? If you have the manual dexterity and the multitasking mentality for it then GW2's UI won't get in your way. What's more, you can do all of that and plenty more in combat! For a pack-rat it's astoundingly useful. The number of times I've salvaged and sold in the midst of a bag-fest at a keep in WvW, well I wouldn't like to admit - not to our Commanders anyway.

It's okay, I know where I'm going. I don't actually need to see.

Even a really top-notch UI isn't in itself enough to keep anyone playing an MMO they otherwise wouldn't enjoy, of course, but if you've been lucky enough to take one for granted in your previous game you're likely to be quite intolerant of the absence of any of life's little luxuries in your next. This has the positive effect of both establishing and raising UI standards across the genre but at the expense of originality and local color.

It's no co-incidence that most MMOs have interfaces that closely resemble World of Warcraft. The City of Steam layout described above is WoW's with a few more moving parts for example. As the developers of Alganon learned to their cost you can take an homage too far but as a rule familiarity in this field tends to breed contentment rather than contempt. If you're trying to tempt people away from their comfort zone it's probably just as well to have another ready.

Used as I am now to GW2's anytime, anywhere interface I do miss it when I travel elsewhere. It's just one of many factors contributing to my lengthening residency in Tyria and it's inevitably going to be a consideration any time I contemplate a move. It's not something that will make or break a new MMO or my interest in one. It may not even be something of which I'm consciously aware but it'll be in there somewhere, one of those niggling little feelings that something's not quite right.

Attention to detail counts for a lot; in this as in much else. It's the designers who get the little things right that see the big returns. Or it should be.

Dry Top, Soggy Bottom : GW2, Everquest, CoS

Five days in and the choice of Dry Top as our entry-point to Maguuma shows an increasingly wry and knowing edge. After nearly two months without the constant drip drip drip of Living Story One this feels like a hiccup in the pipe, a short splash that might presage a flood and then...doesn't.

Leaving aside my feelings on the size of the map itself, which haven't changed and have indeed only become more intense as the details of the explorable area become familiar and known, there's the question of what there is to do there. Dry Top really sums up the problem, if problem it is, with GW2 in particular and, to some extent, theme park MMOs in general.

It's been a good week to make connections and comparisons. GW2 began Living Story Season Two, Everquest has a double-xp weekend for Independence Day and then there was my return to City of Steam, bringing a wider perspective and some sometimes-painful clarity.

The whole theme park/sandbox dichotomy has always been an anathema to me or perhaps more accurately a puzzlement. For the longest time, many years, I found it quite difficult even to comprehend the supposed distinctions that were being drawn by the proponents on each side of the argument. From there I moved to something approaching an intellectual understanding of the differences without ever feeling an emotional connection to them.

It seemed to me (and still does) that almost any MMO, so long as it provides even a vestigial approximation of a virtual world, can act as a sandbox for any player willing to come to it with sufficient open-mindedness, imagination and individuality. Most of my time spent in so-called theme-parks wasn't spent on or even near the rides and I rarely felt the dead hand of an organizing power shove me squarely between the shoulder-blades to send me stumbling along some appointed path.

These last few years things have changed somewhat. Thanks to this blog I'm even able to point, approximately and retrospectively, to the precise moment the rot might have begun, so early in my blogging career that it's fair to say no record of my pre-lapsarian state of mind exists in the record. This week, moving between three disparate settings, I really felt,  possibly for the first time in fifteen years, less than wholly in control of my own destiny. An uncomfortable feeling.

Taking the three MMOs in ascending order of dirigism, for anyone outside of a high-end raiding guild Everquest is generally an extremely laissez-faire affair. The world is almost incomprehensibly vast and sprawling. At any given level there are probably dozens of places you could profitably spend time and many ways you could choose to spend it. For a long, long time as you play, which you choose really doesn't matter all that much, but eventually, no mater how individualistic your playstyle, assuming your base goal is to see the level of your character rise or the number of her AAs increase, preferably both, the rate at which xp ceases to flow and begins to trickle will tend to nudge you towards efficiency.

Efficiency in leveling an Everquest character can mean many things. It can mean grouping; it can mean knowing and understanding how ZEMs (Zone Experience Modifiers) work; it can mean using xp potions and veteran rewards. For the general, casual player, however, it probably means not much more than knowing where to find Franklin Teek and how to get to the current Hot Zone for the relevant level range. This does act as a voluntary choice limiter and on my current drop-in schedule of a handful of hours a week, if I play my level 87 mage I tend to end up grabbing a couple of Teek's "simple tasks", legging it out to wherever he wants his murders done, popping my Lesson and doing whatever he's told me to do.


It's simultaneously tedious and satisfying. On a double xp weekend with a potion running it's tedious, mildly stressful and very satisfying indeed. It doesn't in any way compare to, y'know, playing the character properly, as I was doing with my Enchanter recently in Befallen.I do know at all times, however, that I'm only burning through that thirty-minute lesson in such a clinical and cynical fashion because EQ is no longer my focus game. It's an expediency. Were I to be spending 20+ hours a week there, hot zones and lessons both would figure much less prominently. Knowing that at any time, should I choose, I could re-immerse myself in the vast, still considerably unexplored world outside of the Golden Path removes almost all the sting of doing things the "right" way.

In the middle comes GW2. At under two years old there's clearly no way Tyria Mark 2 can compete with Norrath, with its decade and a half of development and twenty expansions under its belt. GW2 did, however, set out at a dead run with a very large, open, explorable world filled with incident, spectacle and stuff to do. It also featured, at launch, an ethos so far from imposing direction on players that the main complaints came from people who felt lost, unguided and uncomfortable with the lack of hand-holding and signposts.

From that enviable and admirable start the developers have backpedaled away about as fast as their development cycle will carry them. To rehash the reasons would make this post even longer than it's already shaping up to be. Suffice it to say that GW2 has become a game based around daily tasks and tables of "achievements" all set not by the players but the makers. Everything is codified and calibrated, from the Tournaments to the Living Story. The great, open world is still out there to explore but except and unless a particular locale is featured in the story arc nothing changes and, more importantly, nothing is added.

Our new playground, Dry Top, consists of a small, self-contained area that flips between two states (Sandstorm and Not-Sandstorm) on a set schedule. Players can't affect whether or when a storm arrives. Nor can they affect its intensity. All they can change is the price vendors charge for the supposedly-desirable items they sell. Neither can players make meaningful choices abut how they bring about this fiscal benefit. Events pop on what appears to be a fixed timer or a trigger. By doing events players fill a progress bar. The more events they complete the better a deal vendors offer. That's about it, unless there are subtleties I've missed, which is always possible, even likely.

In addition to the events and the worked-for, paid-for rewards there are some achievements to knock out (finding Lost Coins is particularly enjoyable so long as you don't have an aversion to ArenaNet's obsession with jumping). There are also the Buried Treasure Chests which appear during the sandstorms and which contain a range of crafting recipes and useable items. To open the chests you need lockpicks, which you can get from completing the storyline instances or from the achievements you can get while repeating them. Alternatively you can buy lockpicks from the vendors using the special currency, Geodes, that you get from all events both in Dry Top and in the associated storyline. It's a neat, closed system. Talk about owing your life to the company store.

Still, it's fun. For a while. Especially if the chests or the vendors have things you want and for as long as the events remain fairly fresh. The tradeable items and recipes, which appears to be most of them, are already on the Trading Post at very reasonable prices, though, making the prospect of grinding for lockpicks and a random chance of getting items I want seem unattractive compared to grinding some other content for Gold and just buying them. And even if I wanted to do it the "proper" way, the crowds seem very fickle already. On the opening day they were light and that's being charitable. A day later there were big zergs. Now, on the first weekend, it feels quiet again. The chances of those vendors lowering their prices doesn't look good but then again I'm not sure that matters.

Far more interesting than any of the prepared entertainment on offer are the conversations between Dry Top residents and the intrigues they hint at. For now this corner of the park is very much all about the rides but we can at least imagine that when the Living Story carnival packs its tents and moves on something of more substantial, lasting interest might replace it. Similarly, after a whole year of LS2, we can hope for a significant tract of land in which imaginary people lead imaginary lives the way background characters in MMOs do.

It's a hope beyond anything I can muster up for City of Steam, much though I still, and
despite everything, retain a strong interest and affection for that game. The hopes of anything resembling a coherent, growing, developing world there were dashed long ago. Sad remnants linger to remind us of what might have been: the housing stubs, the railhauler stations, the billboards and signs in the city squares and streets. Beautiful and useless.

The main storyline plugs away, seemingly divorced from the reality around it, which reality being an increasingly impressive, entertaining and polished series of mini-games, activities and diversions attended to by an ever-cleaner, more responsive and intuitive UI. As a game, CoS:Arkadia is both slicker and better than it has ever been and I can endorse it more wholeheartedly in that context than at any time in its peculiar, shaky history. As a virtual world, however, it died in a ditch a long while back.

I'm really enjoying playing. I've gotten almost back to where I was on the old servers before they closed, hitting level 20 this week. I'm moderately determined to see the end of the storyline which is probably another fifteen or twenty levels away I would guess. I even feel that I might be willing to play up another character, which, given the unbending linearity of the format, was something I didn't think I'd ever say.

All of which gets us nowhere very much. Depending on context, undirected gameplay can be overwhelming, over-directed gameplay stifling. Depending on context, linear gameplay can be satisfying, free-form gameplay liberating. There's a point where too much freedom intersects with too little to do and another where a satisfying series of goals becomes a tedious succession of chores. Pleasure lies in the hinterland surrounding those points and a map to that territory could make someone very rich indeed.

I do feel that things are shifting, somewhere, very slowly. Things have changed. The upside is that I now get pleasure from activities that would once have irritated me yet at the same time I know I'm missing something I used to have: control. I'm just not sure, yet, whether it's control I've willingly given up or whether it was wrested away from me while my attention was distracted.

I just hope it's not going to take me another fifteen years to work that one out.

Opening The Gates of Maguuma - First Impressions : GW2

It's really small.

Well, it is! I've heard all the explanations and justifications. How it's just a part of the first map, which in turn is just a part of the Region. How there are hidden areas and places where access is gated by events. How it's three-dimensional with all the crystal-jumping so it's bigger than it looks.

Most especially I understand that this is The Living Story, it comes in bi-weekly segments and what, you didn't really expect to get the whole of Maguuma in one go, did you? Fine. I get that. It's still really small.

To be precise, the first new, permanent overland content we've had since Southsun a year and a half ago is around one-eighth the size of a regular map. At this rate it's going to take four months to fill out an area the size Brisban Wildlands. Always assuming we get new, explorable land in every episode of LS2.

But let's not obsess about the size. Size isn't everything, after all. Even though the pre-publicity really ramped up expectations, going on about expanding the world and opening new territory. The map might be small but we can be big about it. Okay, it's tiny. We get that, move on. Is it any good?

Well, yes it is. That's partly why it's so annoying that it's also so small. Okay! Okay! Enough. Maybe some bullet points might help to keep this thing on track...

• Visuals - Dry Top looks fantastic. It reminds me of my favorite zone in Rift, Scarlet Gorge. The desert color palette is austere yet rich and the way everything changes when the sandstorms roll in is very impressive, if completely confusing. Many screenshots were taken, especially when you consider what a small area it is.

• Music - Haunting and rather lovely but is it new? You'd think so from this puff piece but it's playing in the background as I write this and it sounds remarkably familiar. Then again, so do a lot of MMO backing tracks, which tend to be orchestral mood-by-the-yard.

• Voice Acting - Good. Some of the voice acting in the original release of GW2 verged on the embarrassing but the standard has improved consistently. It's not The Secret World but then, sadly, nothing is, still. Must be both satisfying and disappointing for Funcom to set a benchmark for the genre and then sit back and watch as absolutely no-one rises to the challenge. Nevertheless, getting back to GW2, all the characters, major and minor, both in Dry Top and the associated instances, express themselves clearly and convincingly. Could do with the ambient dialog looping about 90% less often but that's just a quirk of the game we're all used to by now.

•  Open World Gameplay - More of the same suit you? Why, yes it does. Pile it on! It's about time we had this, isn't it just? Dynamic events that aren't in the slightest bit dynamic. Points of interest and waypoints to be found and opened. Vistas, skill points (okay, skill point), a jumping puzzle...all your favorites crammed up close in one tiny little map. (/em slaps himself). Bonus points for creative use of previously underused content - looking at you, Skritt Burglar.

• Open World Permanency - As we understand it, all this content will be permanent. Or is it just the map? I confess I'm a bit vague on this. I get that the area is here for good but I'm not sure about the specific content. The Zephyrites (boo! hiss!) are moping about all over amidst the wreckage of their airships, the walking wounded sitting on rocks trying to come to terms with things, the severely injured lying around in a makeshift Seraph field hospital. Are they going to stay there doing that forever? Shouldn't they fix the ships, move on, get better, die - something? Leaving behind what, exactly? Similarly, will the Sandstorm meta-event that spawns special vendors and buried treasure chests be there for ever or just for this segment of the Living Story? I really don't see how this is all going to work. I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks...

Snap judgment.

•  Plot - Now we come to the nub of it and a pretty good nub it is, too. I enjoyed it a lot although there wasn't really a lot of it to enjoy. It's really short. (Sensing a theme here...). I completed the entire thing in a couple of hours. Not to give any plot spoilers but there's a look at Scarlet's back-story, something I found myself becoming invested in during the Fall of Lion's Arch sequence, along, it would seem, with a significant proportion of the previously skeptical audience. The plotting now seems to sit somewhere around journeyman comic-book level (that's a good thing) with the dramatics hitting a solid soap-opera groove (so's that). No pretensions to be anything more than hokum but at least now it's competent, professional hokum.

• Characterization - Coming along nicely. A number of commenters on the forums claimed Braham had developed an actual personality at last. I wouldn't go that far but I might have noticed just the first, dim signs as one begins to coalesce. Taimi, on the other hand, has enough personality for an entire Asuran Krewe. Kasmeer continues to become more likeable, Marjory increasingly less so, although given she had to grow up with that sister it's amazing she's not more sociopathic than she is. Rox just gets weirder.

Considered opinion.

•  Story Journal - The much-touted means to make LS content relevant and accessible to future players is certainly a technical success. The interface is elegantly integrated and intuitive. It should deal efficiently enough with all those content delivery issues that dogged Season One, making it plain where to go and what to do at all times. It takes hand-holding almost to the level of self-parody but that's what MMOs in general and GW2 in particular have become. I'm just happy it works.

• Instance Gameplay - Tough and messy. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were grouped for all the combat segments and it often felt like two people were needed. The fights seemed to require a lot of running about and burning down scores of mobs, quite a few of which were Veterans. The entire motley crew turns out for the duration which makes some of the scenes feel a tad crowded. There's  lot of dialog and banter throughout, Kasmeer does a good deal of business with portals and at one point Marjory summons a bone bridge, a spell she can teach my necro any time she feels like it. There's a Big Fight with a New Villain that I thought went on for a few minutes too long. The final instance, which is combat-free, really is worth the wait though. That's one I'll be replaying a few times.

Emotional outburst.

•  Replayability - Hmmm. Bit of a puzzler, this one. There are the "challenging" achievements, of course, which I have yet to try, but however challenging they turn out to be they're still all one-and-done. If the individual story segments give their completion rewards every time then I guess there's a reason to keep grinding them for Geodes, the Dry Top currency du jour, at least for as long as it takes to buy the items you want - there are some new recipes I wouldn't mind getting. Don't think I understand enough about how this works even to have much of a meaningful opinion yet.

• Miscellaneous Good Stuff - There's rather a lot in this short update that bodes well for the future. The dynamic use of lighting in the mines was drawing a lot of positive feedback in map chat. It was surprising and effective to see a familiar character from the Personal Story making a cameo appearance. The enhanced combat mechanics of various Champions changed things up nicely. The underlying ambiance of Dry Top itself hinted at interesting future side-plots. Lots of new recipes including some for Chefs, who also get a new gathering node - Cactus. All in all there seems to be plenty going on under the surface both thematically and mechanically.

•  Overall - A good start but where's the rest of it? Come to that, where are all the players? It's a small map (did I mention that?) so maybe there's a correspondingly reduced population cap, but even allowing for that possibility there don't seem to be many people there. Mrs Bhagpuss observed that all last night, the first session after a new drop following six weeks of content drought, it was impossible to get more than five or six people for any of the Champion events. At no point did I see even a mini-zerg. Maybe a dozen people running crystals for an event was the peak. This morning it's much quieter even than that, yet the Maw and Jormag events I did right beforehand were extremely well-attended so it's not a shortage of people in the game as a whole. Maybe everyone's just waiting for Dulfy to put the walkthroughs up. Oh, wait, she already did...

That's the problem with First Impressions pieces. You see enough to express an opinion but by definition that opinion's ill-informed. On the other hand, by the time you really know how everything works to the point that you can take a stab at a clinically accurate critique you're probably already too fed up with the whole thing to bother. And the Living Story format just fuels the use 'em up and leave 'em behind ethos. I wait to see how all this plays out in terms of persistency with considerable interest.