Prog Rocks : Everquest

The Open Beta for Everquest's third round of Progression Server fun has been up and running for a few days now. As Wilhelm observed, now they've been freed from the shackles of the Sony Megacorp, Daybreak Games seem determined to demonstrate their fleet-footedness and general joi-de-vivre. Everything is careering along at a breakneck pace that would have given the old SOE terminal whiplash. As far as I know there's no official launch date for Ragefire but I would bet on it being sooner rather than later.

As the years roll on, I am becoming increasingly certain that my days of doing volunteer Quality Assurance work in my leisure time are behind me, most especially for projects that I plan to play when they go live. My attempts to grab one of the dropped beta portals for the next round of Heart of Thorns testing in GW2 were desultory at best. Where some people devoted the entirety of their playtime for day after day until they got lucky I managed less then two hours.

Don't listen to Nusback. He's just our Belts guy. I'm your real Guildmaster!

Someone said in map chat that today is the last day the portals will drop and still it literally did not even occur to me to go and have one last try. When a couple of people linked their purple portals in chat at Fire Elemental this morning my immediate reaction was "Congrats! Now you get to test unfinished content on a temporary character!" I may even have said as much in /map.

As we move uncertainly into the era of buy-in betas, Early Access and the rest it seems likely that my interest in beta-testing will be limited to MMOs that are only available in that form, that are likely to remain so for a good while and that don't require me to do much more than give an email address to apply. Other than that I reckon I can manage without, thanks.

There's an NBI Talkback Challenge going on concerning Early Access vs Kickstarter to which I guess this post is some kind of response. Kickstarter doesn't interest me greatly. I don't have much faith that anything very significant will come out of it. I see it either as a way to place a long pre-order for projects that look solid and which offer good perks at an affordable price or as a way to express solidarity, as I did with both Project:Gorgon and Massively OP.

Oh come on! I can get through there! I'm a dwarf fer Brell's sake not an Ogre.

Other than that Kickstarter campaigns are a kind of low-involvement entertainment in and of themselves. Crowfall has been fun to follow, for example, regardless of how the game eventually turns out, as was EverJane before it. In the end any real choice and certainly any meaningful emotional commitment won't arrive until there's something I can actually play, and I don't mean a tech demo.

When it comes to Early Access, I'm a lot more interested. As I commented after the The Mystic Mesmer's post on the subject:

"Early Access is just a very straightforward purchasing decision like any other. The unfinished game is a product/service that you can examine and accept or reject according to whether you think it’s worth the price being asked. The only real problem (particularly for consumers who are not interested in buying unfinished games) is whether a wide acceptance of Early Access will lead to a drop in availability of “Finished Quality” products."

The apparent commercial and to some degree critical success of barely started, let alone finished, games like H1Z1 may set warning flags for those who prefer a polished product but it's still Skyrim and GTA5 that make the big headlines and the big bucks so I feel we're safe from any kind of sea change away from quality finished product for the time being. On the other hand, when Microsoft announces the end of discrete versions of Windows in favor of the kind of on-the-fly patching MMO players have come to know and love then I guess anything could happen.

Did the cracked staff go out of fashion or what?

With all that rattling around in the background, today I finally got around to making a character on the EQ Prog Beta. Since I definitely plan on playing it when it launches, albeit sporadically and to little purpose, I'm sure, it seemed like a good idea to download the client and make sure it worked, which it does.

I have it installed on a 64GB USB stick (it uses about 10GB) so I can in theory play it on my Tablet. I'm already playing EQ2 on the Tablet in my lunch hour now and then so I'm guessing EQ should run okay. So far the only MMO that won't play nicely with the Tablet is GW2, which won't even let me update the client.

I made a dwarf warrior and spent a quarter of an hour getting her out of Kaladim - and that was with the in-game map we shouldn't really have. Another fifteen minutes killing decaying skeletons and goblin whelps just in front of the gates took me to level two, at which point I logged off. It still has the magic but I'm saving my energy and excitement for a permanent character.

I might log in again while the beta lasts. There's some kind of reward for participation, most likely a bag, that will be redeemed when the game goes live. Well, sometime after the game goes live. Daybreak will decide what it is and when we get it. They're very clear on that in the new, plain-speaking style they seem to have adopted and which, I think, is going down quite well with their core audience.

They don't say how many of the tokens we need to acquire, which is very Classic EQ, but at least, unlike the GW2 portals, its a very common drop. I was getting one for about every three kills. While I was playing a serverwide broadcast announced that the progression-required raid target, the White Dragon Lady Vox, had been killed. The victor popped on to general chat to confirm that yes, he'd just soloed her and her loot was rotting if anyone wanted it.

The shape of things to come? Let's hope not. Even if it is, though, it's not going to affect me any. I very much doubt I'll get further than Blackburrow. Still, I fear it could be a long six months in end game for some.

Remind Me Again? : Dragon Nest Oracle

Time was when Dragon Nest would get the odd mention around this corner of the blogosphere. Its biggest exponent was probably Tipa, who wrote about it a number of times. That was back in 2011, when, according to my comment in Tipa's thread there, I had reached the dizzy heights of "level 8 or 9".

That was probably about as far as I got, too. I played Dragon Nest a few times with pleasure but never with much commitment. I don't think I ever did a full post on the game although I referenced it once or twice while talking about something else. It would be fair to say I'd all but forgotten about it, having neither played nor heard about the game for several years, so it came as something of a surprise to find an email about it in my in-box this morning.

It began without pre-amble, as though I'd never been away:  

"After spending a few weeks on rates X2 and reading your suggestions, we have decided to pass on X10 for better gaming and fun!" 

Wow! Suck on that, Daybreak, you and your piddly five days of double xp! You know nothing about better gaming and fun. Although I have to say they weren't my suggestions. I didn't even know your game was still going...

There was more to come:

"To celebrate, we also added mounts available directly in shop".

Gee! These guys really know how to throw a party! I guess they need to know what they're doing though, seeing how they run

"the fastest action RPG game".

I mean, just look at what you get for your no money down. Can your MMO compete with this?

Server EXP X10 - GOLD X3 - DROP X3
Shop -50% permanent
Free Altheas Crowns voting system (okay, I have no idea what that one means...)
DDoS protection

Not to be pedantic here but once you put a permanent multiplier on your xp, gold and item drops doesn't that just set a new base level? Only the players who used to play before you upped the ante will ever know they're getting a bonus. If you want to reward any players in future you'll have to increase it again. And similarly if you cut all your prices in half forever, well, those are now just your regular prices, aren't they?

Still, no need to get snooty about it. If the result is something that feels like fast xp , a good drop rate and a cheap cash shop then who's counting? And don't I wish every MMO I played had DDoS protection! Anyway, the mounts were what really sold me on taking another look. Those are some great rides. Look at that sheep!

I'm not entirely clear on whether Dragon Nest Oracle, as it now seems to be called, is supposed to be a whole new game or a revamp of the old one but I guess it doesn't matter all that much. The extensive wikipedia entry goes into way more detail on the history behind the whole thing than I could be bothered to plow through but it's there if anyone cares.

There's a much handier and rather spiffy website which reveals that this "new 2015 action RPG" is currently in beta.  It must be one of those notional F2P "betas" because it seems anyone can join and there's already a cash shop up and running (which I haven't yet looked at and almost certainly will never use). The most important question is: is it any good?

I so want to charge into battle hanging from a gyrocopter! That better be a thing!

Yes it is. It's great. It's just like it always was only slicker and smoother and even better looking. Dragon Nest always had a goofy, cheerful, good-hearted humor about it and that's not changed. Neither has the setting nor the mechanics nor the gameplay as far as my admittedly dim memories tell me.

There appear to be several new classes, all of which are handily tagged by difficulty-of-play at character select. Naturally I went with one of the ones flagged suitable for beginners, which meant a choice of Cleric or Academic. The thumbnail descriptions indicate they are both support classes but the Cleric "does less damage than most other classes" while the Academic has a "variety of attacks that hit a wide area from mid- to long-range" and "uses the power of science to control her enemies and summon robots".I mean, come on! That's not even a choice, now, is it?

Pigeon toes /= cute.

So, Academic it is. The class is apparently called The Tinkerer on North American servers, which leans towards its evident steampunk gloss but only Academic comes up here. I guess that means I'm on an EU server. On either side of the Atlantic, however, if you choose this class you get to play it in the form of a girl child. No ifs or buts. Deal with it.

I'd have said she looks about eight or nine years old but I'd have been wrong.  Even though NPCs in game seem to concur and regularly refer to her as a "cute little girl", early on there's a quest that involves answering True/False questions from a Lie Detector and the True answer to the question "How old are you?" turns out to be "I'm 13 years old".

Okay, so I'm playing a very-small-for-her-age teenage girl carrying a BFG that looks like it weighs more than she does. I can live with that. No robot pet yet. Yet to come, presumably. That should just about round things off nicely. Oh, and it turns out I'm from the future and I can talk to my sarcastic, studenty elder sister Jasmine through some kind of transtemporal thingummy-jig. I'm liking this a lot. Syp should play this - it'd be right up his street.

Its a translated game (into English and French, from Korean - I haven't tried the French version but I'd like to) and the translations vary wildly. None are idiomatically perfect. The best of them have that slightly askew feeling you get from earnest translations of text that would have been overblown fantasy even in the original. I love that vibe. The worst are barely comprehensible gibberish but mostly that's the explanatory system text not the dialog and this is still beta, let's remember, so that may get fixed. There''s some audio work too, mostly just a few lines here and there, which is, by contrast, universally solid; confident, knowing line readings by fluent English speakers. A couple made me laugh out loud.

My plan was just to log in and have a quick look around but I ended up playing for more than two hours, getting drawn into both the progression and the plot. There's no formal tutorial, a huge plus, although since the quests I'm getting at level 11 are still tutorialesque I probably haven't yet arrived at the game proper.

That's weird. Where did I get that axe from?

Dragon Nest Oracle calls itself an Action MMO and I'm not about to argue with that. As far as I ever saw it in its original incarnation, and as far as I've explored in this new one, it would seem to be one of those lobby-based, instance-focused MMOs like the original Guild Wars. If there are any open-world areas beyond the quest hubs it will come as a pleasant surprise.

Each "dungeon" has a difficulty setting, a feature of which I thoroughly approve. I did the first one on Easy, which led to my Academic taking no damage whatsoever even on the Boss. Thereafter I cranked it up a notch to Normal, which was still easy by anyone's standards I'd have said.

In the original you could hide the UI and your name. Doesn't seem to work any more so a lot of these shots are cropped very tight.

So far it's been fun all the way. I like the environments and the look and feel of the world (there's a particularly unusual graphical design choice that I very much like whereby your character is in perfect focus while everything more than a few yards away is slightly blurred), I like the music and the ambient soundscape. I'm already interested in the plot, fond of my character and curious to see where things are going.

Of course, I liked the first iteration of Dragon Nest a lot too but I still didn't play it very much or stick with it for very long. I'm easily hooked but harder to reel in. It's an encouraging beginning though. We'll see how much staying power it has.

Blue Skies Ahead For Daybreak Games?

It's really not my intention to stalk Smed. I don't even follow him on Twitter. Okay, that doesn't prove much - I don't follow anyone on Twitter. I don't do Twitter.

Well, not as such. I do have an account. I had to make one years ago to play Echo Bazaar, as it was called back then, now known as Fallen London and well worth a look if you haven't already tried it. As is Failbetter Games newer title, Sunless Sea, which I have only watched someone else play on YouTube. Or was it Twitch? Wait, I remember, it was Total Biscuit (what kind of a name is that, anyway?).

Sunless Sea isn't an MMO so naturally it's been reviewed, very favorably, in the mainstream press. The Guardian gave it four stars. The Daily Mirror gave it five! And that's the first and probably the last time I'm going to link to The Mirror...

Where was I? Oh yes, President Smed.

The Big Landmark Wipe finally arrived yesterday. Scheduled originally for the end of last month it got bumped, first to the fifth, then to the eleventh and finally back down again to the fifth of May, which was yesterday. The servers will be down for two or three days after which the new, all-singing, all-dancing, still-not-ready-for-open-beta-let-alone-prime-time Landmark will sidle onto the servers hoping no-one is looking. I'll probably log in then and see if it feels any different, wander aimlessly around for a while, decide it's too laggy and log out. That's the usual routine.

I may not have been playing Landmark much, or indeed at all, but I'm still interested in it. Somewhat. Enough to visit the forums, on and off, to take the temperature of the waters. Which is how I came across a couple more of Daybreak President John "Smed" Smedley's always entertaining interviews.

How about a chicken next time? Seems more of a fit, somehow. Can't imagine why...

Players of games from the Daybreak Games studio (née Sony Online Entertaiment, née Verant Interactive, or was that the other way around?) love nothing better than to use the official company forums to link to anything their President ever says, mostly so they can point to everything that confirms their perpetual belief that the sky is falling and then cluck about it.

The first is with Gamasutra where Smed is once again accompanied by his hapless PR minder Senior VP of Marketing, Laura Naviaux. It's another "industry" piece and it has plenty of meat on finances and processes.

The second is much more directed to an audience of people who actually play Daybreak's games, or might be persuaded to do so. It was conducted by Veluux of Ten Ton Hammer. He asks Smed, who seems to be soloing this time, some very pointed questions and gets some surprisingly straight answers. I thoroughly recommend everyone interested in the future of the Everquest franchise, including EQNext, takes time to read it.

Doom-mongers will be disappointed with both these two chats, especially the TTH outing, in which Smed is very clearly on some kind of charm offensive aimed at PC gamers in general and his existing Everquest playerbase, past and present, in particular. Far from confirming any falling sky rumors Smed makes every effort to lean hard on the scaffolding that holds everything up to show just how sturdy and reliable it all is.

Morrissey would feel right at home on any Everquest franchise forum

I was trying to hold off doing the quote thing again but I can't resist a few. Here's the President in full damage-control mode. Veluux had just asked him straight out whether Daybreak plans to move away from developing games for the PC platform:

"Let me start at the last part first, because when I get a question like that, if I'm not careful how I answer people might think I don't like PC. PC is our primary focus for all of our games. Period. We love PC, we're never going away from it."

Even more reassuringly, in response to another very direct question about the security of the older EQ titles going forward, Smed makes this forceful and unequivocal statement:

"They will continue to exist well into the foreseeable future. Not only have there been no discussions but we haven't even talked about it because these games are all very healthy."

He's even prepared to give timescales:

"What you can expect from us with EverQuest, and I'll say the same goes for EverQuest II, we expect that these games which are already out are going to be around here at least five years from now." 

It's a secured tenancy on a five-year lease...unfurnished let.

There. That clear enough for you? Now you can relax. Except now I have David Bowie's  Five Years playing in my head and that's not reassuring at all...

I could go on pulling quotes out of both interviews until, well until I'd reprinted pretty much the entirety of both of them, all cut up and in the wrong order, like one of Mr. Bowie's love-letters to William Burroughs. Probably better for anyone who's interested to go read the originals. It's all good, thought-provoking, question-raising stuff that could spawn a dozen blog posts.

The entire tenor of the Gamasutra interview is worth noting, though. Smed and Naviaux repeatedly emphasize how much more freedom the team have now as Daybreak Games, how it feels almost like a start-up, how

"it's like the difference between renting a house and owning it".

Which is all very well, except they don't own it, do they? They just have a different landlord. 

It may be true - I'm sure it is - that 

"Columbus Nova doesn't get involved, even a little bit, in game design"
 
 but they do hold the purse-strings. When you're saying things like

"As Daybreak, we've already had a conversation with our new owners about whether we can go get new people if we need them"  

then it hardly gives an impression of complete freedom, does it? (And it turns out the "new people" he means are in fact some of the old people he "let go" earlier this year. I think we all know how that works...). 

Also, it just seems odd to talk about the creative shackles being broken one minute and then come out with something like this: 

"...when we want to do something, a new business thing, we have to actually justify and make a business case for it." 

(That's enough Smedley quotes. Ed.)


Grrr. I said I wasn't going to do that, didn't I? It's just so hard to resist. I'll stop there. Until next time...

 

Tales Of Everyday Gaming: NBI, GW2

Jeromai (yes, him again) has been suffering from Blogger's Block. Rather than let ennui and inertia get the better of him he's chosen to offer himself up as an example for any NBI bloggers who may already be feeling the pressure to come up with something, anything, as they sit and stare into space in front of a blank screen.

His prescription for block-breaking is Freewriting and, leading by example, today he has a post up inspired by a dose of his own medicine. He finds himself taking a close look at the choices he makes when he sits down to play GW2, which is something I find myself doing a lot these days. Examining my choices, that is.

Before he launches into a lengthy, discursive, philosophical account of the ways he chooses to spend his gaming time, though, he wonders "Why should you or I care about what I did? What I incremented? What I achieved?" He means it rhetorically but I'm going to answer as if he was expecting a reply.

For me, it's always interesting to read the accounts of what others, personally, find compulsive and absorbing about the games they play. If the writing is strong enough, involving enough, idiosyncratic and attractive enough, then it scarcely even matters what the games are.

Ah, Silverwastes! Long time, no see and you haven't changed at all. Unfortunately.

It certainly doesn't matter whether they're games I've played or am ever likely to play. I follow Wilhelm and Stabs and Nosy Gamer's detailed descriptions and news reports and analyses of EVE Online, not because I have any particular interest in internet spaceships (I really don't) but because they're able to create narratives in word-pictures that open the game out and make it accessible and intriguing even for a disinterested outsider.

Indeed, were I to limit myself to reading blogs only about games I'm currently playing, most days most of my Feedly feed would go unread. The blogroll over there to the right is filled with blogs that, these days, mainly feature games that I've never tried or have long since abandoned. Yet I read them all with pleasure and with interest.

Think pieces (this is one) are all very well but the heartwood of MMORPG blogging is the telling of tales of everyday adventure. Be it The Sims, WoW or Ingress each everyday story opens a window not only onto another imaginary world but into this supposedly real one we all share as well.

Tip your waitress. I'm here all week.

That said, there's a special appeal in reading someone's thoughts on a game you know and love, especially when it's one you're both still playing. And it's rarely more appealing than when someone simply writes about what he or she does in the game itself.

GW2 is a very successful and popular game but it doesn't seem to generate many blogs. There weren't that many even when the game was new. There's a very active community on reddit and, for all I know, on umpteen other social media platforms but for a good while now the only people on my radar who write about GW2 regularly, in long form, are Jeromai and Ravious. I do miss The Egg Baron...

Consequently it feels very valuable when someone gets down to writing about what they actually do in the game, even when the activities on which they focus turn out to be ones that are peripheral for me. Jeromai writes "...every night, I look at the clock and make sure my butt is in the chair by 8.10pm so that I can kill the Triple Trouble Wurm with the oceanic arm of TTS. If I have time, I might join in by 6.30pm for Karka Queen, or try my best to squeeze my way into Tequatl by 7.00pm." Let's compare.

I have never followed the Three-Headed Wurm event to a successful conclusion. I tried a few times, back when it was introduced well over a year ago, when no-one knew what they were doing. That was clearly going nowhere so after the first couple of weeks I forgot all about it and I've barely spared it a thought since. It's a long, long time since I was last even in the zone when it popped.

Famous last words.

Tequatl I like a lot now everyone knows the ropes. If I notice he's due and I'm not doing something more interesting I'll waypoint down and take up my preferred place at one of the boats or on North Hill. It's a fun event, although not as much fun as the original, unevolved  version, which Mrs Bhagpuss and I did as often as we could manage.

Karka Queen is just another stop on the World Boss train, which I jump on and off as it suits me every day.

Right now the big ticket is Maguuma Wastes. Dry Top and Silverwastes, with their numerous achiever-focused grind levers, have remained popular and populated since they arrived with Living Story 2 (remember that?). The recent addition of a time-limited, region-wide, random drop of a Portal that flags your account for the next Heart of Thorns beta event has brought the crowds flooding in.

Jeromai reports that, such is the level of interest, Triple-Trouble is on hiatus. His own time in Silverwastes has proven well-spent. "One event or another finishes, a fort defence of some kind, or a bull escort, and I realize that I have new mail and a purple beta portal in my inventory."

Move right along the lane please. Plenty of room for everyone.

I liked Dry Top when it was new but got very bored with it after a month or so. Silverwastes always seemed like a weaker iteration of the same idea. I was done with that in a matter of days. With the incentive of the beta portal I went back for the first time in a very long while last week and as a result I have now done the Vinewraith event, successfully, twice. I'd never even looked at it prior to that despite its being arguably the most significant new PvE content drop of the last six months.

It was okay. Again it felt like another very weak iteration of an earlier, stronger, better-realized idea, the Marionette event from Living Story 1, which was possibly my favorite GW2 event ever. A couple of  hour-long sessions in Silverwastes turned out to be about half a session too much. I haven't been back.

In our house the big PvE events of the day are Frozen Maw and, especially, Claw of Jormag. Maw is always the best loot for time spent but Jormag is done for fun. We like to hang at the back in Phase 2 and compete to see who can get the most bags off the Champs. Mrs Bhagpuss is the current record-holder with 11.

#nornpriorities

I think I must have done Maw more than a thousand times by now. Most days I do it twice - some days I do it four or five times. Claw of Jormag probably runs somewhere close to four figures. I have done him regularly ever since my first character reached Frostgorge, long before there was any material reward. I just like the event and always have. It's deliciously annoying.

Outside of that I always do at least the minimum three dailies on all three accounts to get the Completion reward. I never miss unless I am physically unable to reach the PC that day. The bulk of the rest of my time is spent in WvW, of which a good deal is taken up standing around in Citadel sorting my banks or out in the keeps and towers, refreshing siege or just hanging around aimlessly on the walls, chatting and watching the map.

The thing I don't do as much as I would like is map exploration. I still don''t have any character (of more than a dozen) with more than 65% map completion. I don't care about the "completion" part but it does show how much of Tyria I still haven't even seen. Must do something about that. Sometime.

The thing is this: GW2 has long since ceased to be a game that I play. It has become a space in which I live. I have few if any goals there any more. I do the achievements, kill the bosses, hoover up the loot, all for no other reason than to store it away. I have tens of thousands of Ascended crafting materials and enough gold to buy a Legendary should I want one, which I do not. I have well in excess of 10,000,000 karma, 7.5m on one account alone. I have over 2000 Laurels and nothing I want to spend them on.

Of course there are many, many things that can't be purchased, things that I don't have; seemingly endless skins and pets and titles and achievements. It's not that there are no goals left to which I could aspire, far from it. It's just that none of my characters want any of them enough to make the effort worthwhile.

And in GW2 it really would be an effort. Nothing outside of the Gem Store comes without hard work. There's a thread on the official forums entitled "Why does GW2 feel like a grindy F2p?" to which the very obvious answer has to be "Because that's exactly what it is". Or, at least, it is if that's what you choose to make of it.

That's why it's never boring to read about other people's experiences in a game you play, even if those very experiences are boring them to tears. Choices matter and context really helps to place your own experience. There's no better context than the quotidian narratives of other players.

So, here's my nugget of NBI advice for what it's worth: never be afraid to tell your stories of everyday gaming for fear that you'll bore your audience. Explain yourself to yourself and let the resonances reverberate as they will.

But if you've read this far you'll understand that already.

Chanelling and Chronomancy : GW2, EQ2

Jeromai has an excellent post up on the forthcoming addition of The Chronomancer to GW2. It covers most of what we know and can extrapolate thus far about just what it is that a Chronomancer does. There's a LiveStream that probably does much the same only at inordinate length and with video and commentary by the developers. I found I had better things to do than watch that but then I didn't need to because I have Dulfy to do it for me. She provides a thorough precis , which I did manage to find time to read.

It's fairly clear what the Chronomancer's abilities will be but I'm still a little unclear on just what, exactly, a "chronomancer" is, in terms of the structure of the game. ANet describe it as an "Elite Specialization" but it's also variously referred to as a class or a sub-class.

It appears to require both the equipping of a shield, the new weapon-type available to Mesmers in the Heart of Thorns expansion, and the slotting of an Elite Specialization . Indeed, on a closer reading, it would seem that Mesmers will only be able to wield shields if they slot that Elite. There will be no shield-wielding, non-chronomancing Mesmers. Probably. I think...

Presumably the same restriction applies to all the other classes. If you want to use the new weapon you have to take on the mantle of the new class. Sub-class. Whatever.

Not giving up my domes and lasers. Nossir. No way.

For certain, every class in GW2 will be given an Elite Specialization by the expansion and each will gain access to a weapon whose subtleties it was hitherto unable to understand. You wouldn't think that grabbing something flat and holding it up between yourself and whatever happens to be attacking you would be that hard to figure out but I guess, given what the Mesmer proposes to do with the shield now she's finally picked one up, maybe something as mundane as blocking always seemed a little beneath her dignity.

Depending on how you look at it, Heart of Thorns will either double the number of classes in the game or merely remove some of the existing class restrictions on weapon-use. I'm struggling to think of another MMORPG I've played that's taken this approach. The only ones that come to mind are the Final Fantasy games with their "jobs". New examples of those are added periodically both within and outside of expansions but although the "one character can be everything" model there means that the new job adds on to the existing character, the player still has to level it up in the same way he did all the earlier jobs.

As with, oh, pretty much everything ANet does with GW2, I'm also really not sure whether I like the approach or not. In a game that's arguably one of the most "alt-friendly" of all MMOs I'd far rather have had just one or two full, new classes than eight "Elite Specializations" bolted onto the existing list. On the other hand it's certainly going to give us all something to play around with for quite a while.

Did someone mention lasers?

Playing around with builds is, for better or for worse, one of the staples of MMO gameplay. Waiting For Rez, one of the new crop of NBI bloggers, has an interesting piece up about the developing mechanics of Talent Trees and Skill Point Systems. Reading both that and Jeromai's thoughts led me to consider how unclear and malleable my own feelings are when it comes to adjusting to this kind of systemic change.

A very large part of the attraction of playing MMORPGs, for me, comes in learning and understanding the systems. It's a prime reason why I try out so many different ones. I have always enjoyed entertainment that doesn't explain itself too readily; I like stories that begin in media res, I like concepts and terminology whose meaning has to be deduced from context. In short, I like starting out completely at sea and having to find my own way to solid ground.

It's why I strongly dislike tutorials and it has a lot to do with why I much prefer the early and mid levels of most MMOs to the end game. Once I've worked out which lever pulls what string I quickly become disillusioned with having to keep pulling it over and over again until I can pull it perfectly. As if I ever could.

For that reason I tend to enjoy very much the first run through a talent or trait tree. Working out how to use the user interface, how to slot the skills, where to go to acquire them, that part I like. Subsequent trips through the same detail tend to lose their appeal. I do seem to end up doing it a lot. Too much.

This looks strangely familiar.

 
Some of that isn't the fault of game design, of course. It's the over-exposure to such systems that comes with playing so many characters. Perhaps if I was the kind of player who sticks to a Main and an Alt I'd not be here having this conversation with myself right now.

For good or ill, though, I am not much of a "Main and Alt" person. And then some! That's why last week, when Daybreak Games celebrated the arrival of their new and not entirely original logo, instead of buckling down and banging some levels on any of my many existing characters I found myself rolling a Channeler instead.

It's taken me a very long time to get around to doing it. The Channeler was the most recent new class added to EQ2's already impressive (or overblown if you prefer - the game currently has 26 classes) roster but that was with the Tears of Veeshan expansion back in late 2013.

Don't just stand there! Grab his tail!

I made a Beastlord at the first possible opportunity but it's taken this long to come to the Channeler because the concept of the class never really grabbed me. A leather-wearing priest class that heals by firing arrows and has a pet that can't be controlled? Say what?

It was a post by Kaozz in which she mentioned, just in passing, that her Channeler had dinged 100 that reminded me the class even existed. I'd forgotten all about it. Without fully considering what I was doing, next thing I knew I'd rolled the inevitable ratonga, set his starting city to New Halas and stepped out yet again into Norrath.

Channeler is a very odd class. I played to around level 10 without looking anything up and really had no clue what I was doing. There's a pet that looks like some kind of rock elemental. It's called a "Construct". It can't be killed or commanded (although maybe that will come later). For now it hangs around like a giant vanity pet doing... something... while my character draws a bow, excruciatingly slowly, and fires one arrow every ten or fifteen seconds like a ranger on heavy medication.

Oh! That's where they went...

The amount of information granted inside the game is minimal. I gathered as much as that it was a resource-management class similar to a Beastlord but by the low teens no access to the UI controls for those resources has arrived. I seem to remember, vaguely, that the Beastlord was much the same. A few levels in some familiar-looking skills popped onto my hotbars suggesting that, again like a Beastlord, the Channeler needs to hunt down creatures, beat them to within an inch of their life and then best them in a staring match.

But to what end? I had no idea so I tried to find out the best way - by doing it. Things didn't go well. Sometimes I killed the animal before the channeled skill completed. Sometimes the animal killed me. Sometimes the Construct killed the animal. I hadn't even realized the Construct was attacking until I read my combat log. I thought it was a defensive ward. Mostly, though, we all stood there locked in stalemate as the bear or wolf continually interrupted my channeling until I lost patience, dealt it a death blow and went off in a huff to look for another victim.
Finally I succeeded in getting the skill to complete. I successfully sucked the Essence from a rat. Best not think about that too closely. And then... I was completely stumped. I'd seen some messages pop up about new "abilities" and "customizations" for my Construct but I had no idea how to access them. I couldn't find any "essence" in my bags, there were no new skills on my hotbar. My Construct looked exactly the same as it spun there radiating smugness.

It was around that point that I cracked and went to the ever-reliable Zam, where I found the following:

"To access the Construct Window, first open the character window (C). After you've summoned your construct there will be a Construct tab, which is where you customize your construct's appearance."

Well, duh!

It's a learning curve and that's why it's fun. Even when you have to look things up. I'm not opposed to doing a bit of research, after all. That's all part of the process.

I am less convinced the class will be fun in and of itself and I feel much the same about GW2's upcoming "Elite Specializations". There's precious little chance I'll be abandoning my Berserker, or even my new Warlock, for the channeling life and I very much doubt I'll be giving up the simple life of the Longbow Ranger or Staff Elementalist for whatever over-complicated fussbudget frippery their new weapon types offer.

I will, however, be happy to enjoy the process of opening all the skills and traits and getting the hang of the systems involved in doing so -  before consigning them all to the "new-fangled nonsense" bin and going back to the tried and tested Old Ways. Because, much though I enjoy unraveling the mysteries and complexities of underlying systems and processes, when it comes to everyday combat I'd just as soon hit things with a stick.

If It's May It Must Be...

Yes, it's that time of year again. The trees are in bud, the sun's in hiding, the temperature's dropped ten degrees - it must be Spring!

And with the merry days of May, as surely as village maidens dancing round the maypole (they do do that where you live, don't they?) comes

 The Newbie Blogger Initiative.

The NBI, for anyone who hasn't run into it before, is an annual pep rally for would-be bloggers. It's for anyone who ever thought about putting finger to key and then thought again, for anyone who's tried and faltered, for anyone who's reading this and thinking "Geez, does this guy ever go on...I could do better than that...". It's for anyone who fancies giving this blogging lark a go.

The NBI began very much as an MMO-centric affair and MMOs are just about all I blog about so chances are anyone reading this is already on board that train. If not, never fear! It's already opened out to welcome all stripes of the gaming rainbow and this year Izlain and Doone, the current curators and keepers of the flame, hope to widen the appeal still further.

If you think there's nothing left to say about MMO payment models, the holy trinity or the NGE that hasn't already been said by ten thousand bloggers before you you'd be right  then maybe you'd like to try your pen at some other aspect of the Wider Geekdom. The NBI is a broad church. You could probably even blog about Broadchurch! Maybe not... anyway, can anyone ever truly say they've read enough posts about MMO payment models?

I'm not entirely sure what's planned for this year's festivities. In previous years I'd received an email by now or engaged in some other form of promotional run-up to the big day but this year the NBI has kind of crept up on me. The first mention I saw was in Wilhelm's April review.  He's obviously been paying more attention than me although he does seem to have the advantage of a time machine - the link he posted on April 30th to the Call for Organizers goes to a post that's dated 2nd of May!

If you think organizing is a thing you can do you don't need to be a Timelord or a Chronomancer. You don't even need to wait to be asked. Just go out yourself on the thread I just linked. No, not Jeromai's, although I'm sure he'd pass the message on - this one!

If you're a would-be blogger you can go sign up here.  Go on! You know you want to!

If you just clicked that last link and got put off by having to fill out a form - I know it would have put me off back when I was unmming and ahhing and sitting on the fence over whether to commit myself to public scrutiny - it's okay! Go here instead and just make yourself and your blog known on the Forum. It all comes out the same in the end.

Whatever route you choose, if you have the slightest desire to see your assumed name in links this is the place to start. Don't worry about commitment. Don't think about whether you'll stay the course. If you try it and don't like it that's fine. You can just stop whenever you want. Plenty of bloggers go round the track a few times before they hit their rhythm. There are no rules, no quotas, no targets. Just give it a go. If it grabs you you'll always be glad you did and if it doesn't that's fine too.

Very selfishly I hope this year's NBI is a huge success that brings in lots of new bloggers. I see it as a great big trawl net scooping up new blogs for me to read and enjoy. Oh yes, its all about me! And once you have your own blog it'll be all about you!

I'm going to add all the new NBI blogs to my blogroll for May, which means I might have to cull some of the dormant ones on there before I find out the hard way whether Blogger actually has a limit on that particular widget. If you start an NBI blog and don't see it listed, yell at me in the comments somewhere. There have been one or two blogs over the years whose urls Blogger simply refused to recognize but if yours isn't there it's probably just me being slack.

That's enough waffle from me. Your turn!

President Smed And The Things He Said : Daybreak Games

Here's an interesting little read:  it's an interview with Daybreak President John "Smed" Smedley and Laura Naviaux, his vice-president of marketing.

The interview is full of revelations. How about that new logo? Wilhelm was almost right. It's not an Owlbear's eye but it is the eye of some kind of owl.

Why? Well, apparently we gamers, we're all night-owls, who stay up hammering the keys until dawn's light seeps in through the tightly-closed shutters. That's why they called the company Daybreak. I'm not making this up. Here's Laura Naviaux:

"The Daybreak logo was designed to reflect that brand, with a nocturnal aspect, (the owl's eye), a technological aspect (the gear within the eye), and a more literal aspect (the "Daybreak" of a rising sun within the gear)". 

That's just an amuse-bouche before the main course. Here comes Smed:

"I firmly believe the days of the WoW-style MMO are over. How many people do you still know that are still raiding in WoW every night, or EverQuest and EverQuest II?"

Way to go to piss off your core audience there...except of course that was SOE's core audience not Daybreak's, wasn't it? Daybreak's core audience are the million-plus people who stumped up $20 for H1Z1. Apparently they're a bunch with very short attention spans:

"...the average life expectancy in H1Z1 might be 45 minutes, and that's what today's gamers want."

Smed's still very much a believer in F2P, which he expects to take off big-time on consoles soon:

 "I think it's in its infancy and you're going to see the doors blow off it...as a consumer, a gamer, when you go to open your new PS4 or Xbox One, the first thing you're going to look for is what free content is there".

I'd be looking for where to plug it in but that's just me...

Naviaux steps in just to make it clear they're not losing sight of the main target:

"We need to run a profitable, sustainable business". 

I think we can all get behind that sentiment. This took me by surprise though: 

"Going forward, it may be that there's an entrance fee to our games, but there will always be a microtransaction element as the industry moves more toward that".

When I first read that I thought for a moment they were proposing a return to the Subscription model but on reflection I think it just means things like selling alpha access and going Buy-to-Play at launch. Even so, it's a retrenchment, isn't it?

And speaking of launches, those seem to be a moveable feast nowadays. Didn't Planetside2 launch a long time ago? I could have sworn I remembered hearing something about it. Don't say it's still in some kind of beta? I only ask because:

"I can tell you [what it will take to get big budget AAA free-to-play games to take off on consoles] as soon as we launch Planetside 2 because that game cost nearly $30 million to make." 

That's not all the fun stuff. There's more on the SOE/Daybreak layoffs, the focus on mobile gaming, how hard it is to get people to take you seriously when you don't have Big Sony standing behind you...

As I said, it's an interesting little read, full of the kind of detail Smed always gives when he's talking to the business press. I first read one of his industry journal interviews way back around the turn of the century, when he was estimating that Everquest should run three years, maybe five with good luck and a following wind. 

He's the man to go to for a prediction on the future of gaming alright.