1203 Days : GW2

Actually it's a lot more than that. That's just the one account. Factor in six accounts, between myself and Mrs Bhagpuss, four of them played almost since launch.

Mobs slaughtered must be into the millions. World Bosses killed? Well into four figures by now. Chests opened - well, who knows? Thousands upon thousands.

I got Breath of Jormag once. Sold it for 100 gold. Until tonight that was my best drop that I can remember. Technically, it still is.

Of late I've taken to throwing rares into the Mystic Forge in matched fours. Not so much because I want a Precursor. More for the amusement of playing a lottery. And because the drop rate for yellows has increased radically in the last few months. There's only so much satisfaction you can gain from salvaging ectos and selling the stacks.

There's the Mystic Forge daily too, of course. It popped today. I always like to do that one because it's quick and easy and it clears some space in the bank.

I did two accounts this morning before work. Threw in four yellow hammers and got a yellow Krait hammer back. Nice. New skin for one of the accounts. Might use that. Swapped accounts, threw in four yellow longbows and got a yellow longbow back. Basic model. Bleh.

This evening I logged in my primary account and went to The Mists. Took four pistols out of the bank and waypointed to the Forge. Dropped them in. Oh look, an exotic. Nice. Don't recognize it, either. A new skin, then. Looks like a good one, too.

I'd previewed it and noted the Berserker stats and thought about what it might sell for before I noticed the unfamiliar cyan text along the bottom of the tool tip: "This weapon is used to craft the legendary pistol Quip".

Stap me! I nearly fainted. Three years! Three years and I have never seen a Precursor for a legendary weapon, not in my own hand. Not one has ever dropped for me, or for Mrs Bhagpuss, not from all those mobs, not from all those chests, not from the Forge.

Well, now one has. What I'm going to do with it I haven't decided. I offered it to Mrs Bhagpuss if she wanted to use it to make Quip. Quip is apparently one of her favorite Legendary skins. She declined, saying "No, sell it". It sells for around 350 gold but I already have over 3000 gold banked and nothing to spend it on so that's not as attractive an option as it once was.

I don't think Mrs Bhagpuss is any keener on the fuss and bother of crafting a Legendary than I am. Also, nice though both the Precursor and the finished version look in the Preview window, in practice any weapon smaller than a staff or a greatsword disappears into the visual clutter of the game when equipped. It seems like such a waste of time and effort for such a trivial visual flourish.

So, for now, The Chaos Gun joins the ever-increasing pile of "things I keep because I like to look at them every now and again" that takes up most of my vault space. Maybe one day I'll sell it. Maybe one day I'll craft Quip. Maybe one day Mrs Bhagpuss will change her mind and relieve me of the responsibility of deciding.

At least now I can say I've seen a Precursor "drop". That's the main thing. How long 'til the next? Another three years?

Don't hold your breath.

You Know The Scene - Very Humdrum

Murf has an interesting post up right now. It's provocatively titled "MMOs are Boring"  and it opens with a great line:

Maybe my MMO fandom has been a great big lie. Even looking back to the ‘good ole days’, the genre wasn’t very good, at least as far as games go.

That's the thing, isn't it, though? MMOs never were any good as games. What's more, almost no-one ever believed they were. The genre was getting on for a decade old by the time WoW came along and for most of its life Murf's statement would have been uncontroversial in the extreme.

Before Blizzard took it upon themselves to re-invent the genre everyone knew MMOs were boring. Wait, let me re-phrase that. Until then, 99.99% of the entire population of the world had no idea MMOs even existed. It was only nearly all of the 0.01% who did that knew they were boring.

MMOs - or MMORPGs as they were generally referred to back in the olden days - were a niche within a niche. RPGs themselves represented a less than well-respected sub-genre in gaming and online rpgs were an almost invisible constituency hidden inside that. In the mid-90s, when the genre began to emerge from the almost impossibly obscure acronym forest of MUDs and MUSHes most people didn't even have internet access at home so even the idea of playing such a game seemed outlandish.

Then there was the setting. Fantasy, the country of the weird. Like SF, fantasy is mainstream now but for the longest time it was the province of men with beards and ladies with cats.

There's a long-established yet largely unexplained connection between academia and fantasy (and cats but I'm not going there - this time). In the comments to Murf's post The Mystical Mesmer mentions Tolkien, whose day job for twenty-five years was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University before he dumbed down to take the chair of Merton Professor of English Language and Literature.

"It’s been said that J.R.R. Tolkien, a philologist by practice, created the Lord of the Rings so that his invented languages would have a world to inhabit" the Mesmer says. C.S. Lewis, another Professor, this time of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and a fellow member of The Inklings with Tolkein, created Narnia to promulgate his Christian beliefs.

The notion of creating entertainment, let alone fun, must have been, at best, a by-product for these serious-minded academicians and yet there they stand, founders of a genre that became notorious for eating the lives of bright, young people and spitting out the husks, all in the name of amusement. By the time Crowther and Woods turned up in the 1970s to code Collossal Cave/Adventure on their mainframe the connection between the dry halls of academe and the dank dungeon beneath was already bonded with an adamantine grip.

The kind of person who found this kind of thing exciting was particular. It's fair to say, I think, that neither Multi-User Dungeons nor their more accessible, offline offshoot, Text Adventures made significant inroads into public consciousness. That took the addition of a graphical element. Pictures.

Somehow, being able to see even something resembling a five-year old child's crayon drawing of Bilbo's subsurface bachelor pad sent 1980s teenagers into a tizzy. Some teenagers. Mostly boys. Or so I believe. Don't look at me, I was 25, more interested in cellar clubs and substance abuse than hobbit holes and hand-axes.

However you cut it, tapping instructions onto the rubbery keypad of the ZXSpectrum in the increasingly desperate hope of having Melbourne House's idiosyncratic parser recognize a keyword does not qualify as exciting gameplay. Neither does sitting on a lumpy beanbag drinking warm, flat supermarket own brand cola, thumbing through the Player's Handbook for the umpteenth time while the brother of that friend you don't really like all that much argues with the DM over whether his character can fit the severed head of a basilisk into his halfling's backpack.

From the perspective of someone playing Quake, GoldenEye or Half Life (none of which, I should point out, have I ever played but about which I still hear people enthuse ecstatically) Ultima Online and EverQuest can barely even have looked like games at all. Instead of fast, terrifying action there was, as Murf puts it, "just auto-attacking and relying on the computer to not kill you with too many misses in a row".

It has long been my contention that MMORPGs are not "games" at all. They picked up that tag for lack of a better early on and it stuck. As development moved out of the universities and into the commercial arena the genre needed to be marketed and "game" was a term the market understood.

When I decided to try my hand at online gaming the term MMORPG was almost interchangeable with Virtual World. The lineage that leads back to Tolkien supports that clade much more convincingly than any offshoot of gaming, even now. Browsing the web for news about MMOs as I did obsessively at the beginning of the 21st century (being fortunate enough to have a job that let me do that at work and still get paid) it quickly became apparent that gaming culture held the entire subgenre in contempt, in so far as it deigned to notice it at all.

The seemingly inexorable rise of EverQuest to a peak of around half a million subscribers in 2004 eventually brought the genre out of the shadows but even then most of the commentary was along the lines of "who are all these nerds and where do they get the money to pay for those ridiculous subscriptions, living in their moms' basements, like they all do?".

WoW turned that around. MMOs became, briefly, a cultural phenomenon. The mainstream, or at least the gaming mainstream, noticed. Expectations were created; on both sides. From there we moved, slowly, often unwillingly, towards a state in which, as Murf says, "Unarguably, MMOs have gotten better as games".

Which is, of course, the problem. MMORPGs were never meant to be "games". Not really. They're pastimes, hobbies, obsessions. They're places to hide and places to go and places to live. They're the virtual equivalent of the garden shed, the attic, a quiet night in by the fire. They stand with knitting, whittling, gardening or fishing as things you can do when you don't have anything you have to do, something you can go on doing for as long as you want to go on doing something.

Missy says in the comments to Murf's post "MMO’s don’t finish, while single players do. I don’t want it to finish, I like the comfort in the familiar and not having to start completely over on something." That, I think, sums it up perfectly. For those of us who still enjoy our MMOs it's not boredom we're feeling; it's comfort. Coming home from a rough day at work to a familiar MMO is like pulling closed the cabin door against the snow and settling down in front of the fire with a whittling knife and a stout log. Or something.

Over the decades MMO developers have tried to be all things to all customers. They're fortunate in that the form supports, even encourages, sprawling undisciplined design. In that way they've had a pass on focus for a long time. It can't go on forever, which is why, increasingly, we're seeing a reversion to the core.

Murf says of EQ2 "It has so much to do too, but I just can’t get over the huge lump of dull gameplay it’ll take to get anywhere" and there he hits the nub of it: EQ2's core audience, like WoW's core audience and the core of every other MMO, doesn't want to "get anywhere". All they want is to be somewhere. And the somewhere they want to be is in their MMO of choice.

That's not enough for most gamers. Gamers crave novelty. MMO "players", by and large, aren't gamers. If they crave anything it's stasis. "More of the same" is their battlecry when they take to the forums, something they rarely do because most of them barely know there are forums.

So, yes, MMOs are boring. For a given value of boredom. Just like an evening at your maiden aunt's house is boring, as she chats about people you don't know while the knitting needles click and the t.v. glows silently in the corner with the sound turned down. The thing to remember, though it's hard to understand, is that your aunt isn't bored at all. She's just where she wants to be, doing just what she wants to do.

A Rum Cellar Indeed: EQ2

When you buy the latest EQ2 expansion, Terrors of Thalumbra, you also gain access to every previous expansion and adventure pack. That sounds like an incredible deal, and it is, although it becomes less impressive when you realize that every expansion other than two latest ones are already open to anyone under the current  F2P model.

Either way, if you're one of what must by now be a tiny trickle of genuine first-timers, or even a lapsed veteran returning after a lay-off of a year or three, it means enough content to keep you occupied for many months. Also a learning curve steep enough to make your ears pop but that's what you get for not keeping up with the pack.

There have been lengthy periods when EQ2 was the MMORPG of choice both for me and Mrs Bhagpuss. Expansions were eagerly anticipated, purchased and played from day one. Perversely, however, when I was playing regularly, putting in a solid thirty hours most weeks, I never had a character even close to being as well-geared, ready for action and bang up to date as my Berserker, who gets a run-out here and there a few hours a week if he's lucky.

Don't flap your undead stench in my direction!

In part this is down to changes in the way the game has been restructured. A number of major adjustments were made in latter years that recognized the changing nature of the audience. The addition of Mercenaries in the Age of Discovery "feature" expansion revolutionized solo play for EQ2 as it had previously done for EverQuest but later changes were even more significant.

The expansion that followed AoD, Chains of Eternity, added Advanced Solo Instances; copies of the new "Heroic" zones for groups that scale down to suit a single well-geared player or a duo, be that two players or a single player with a mercenary. Since then every expansion has arrived with separate, fully-developed set of progression mechanics and rewards for all the main playstyles - solo, group, raid and tradeskill. 

When DBG released the Rum Cellar Campaign last April they took a brief and arguably ill-conceived detour back to territory long abandoned by their former incarnation SOE. Back at the start there had always been a plan to update the game with parcels of content that sat somewhere between a free content patch and an expansion (both of which were also in the plan). Between launch and the first expansion, Desert of Flames, we enjoyed two "Adventure Packs": The Bloodline Chronicles and The Splitpaw Saga. Before the third expansion there came the largest of all, The Fallen Dynasty.

Pretty bird thou never wert

All of them were reasonably well-received. They were substantial in size and detail. I bought them all and over the years I've had a great deal of value from them one way and another. Nevertheless, when Rum Cellar arrived I gave it a pass. According to the promotional information it followed recent precedent for adventurers, with parallel content for their various established playstyles, although there was nothing in the mix for crafters, but it looked a little spindly. I'd not long finished the very enjoyable Altar of Malice expansion solo content and I thought I could wait a while to see how the new mini-drop went down with the early adopters before committing myself.

The reception was mixed as this Reddit thread suggests. There were no real howls of outrage but as an experiment in a way of releasing new content for players and generating a revenue stream for the new company it's probably fair to say the return to "Adventure Packs" or "Campaigns" or DLC, however you care to flavor it, was a failure. In any event the idea was quietly forgotten and by late summer we were firmly back on the Expansion trail. Indeed, with ToT up and running, apparently work on the 2016 expansion, EQ2's thirteenth, has already started.

As I mentioned before, I'm stalled on the ToT solo signature line. I watched this video to get an idea of how I might get past the roadblock and it's apparent that, as I thought, I need to gear up some. Or learn to play. Always an option although never a preference.

You'd think someone would have to notice that but no...

As Borgio says at the start, the first Advanced Solo zone required for the Signature questline in ToT comes as something of a wake-up call. The gear I have from AoM is mostly level 95. It upgrades significantly through a process that was supposed to keep solo players busy for a good long time but, while I'd been picking away at that, I hadn't made that much progress.

Then it occurred to me: along with Terrors of Thalumbra expansion I also received a side order of pirate-themed fun that supposedly sat somewhere between the old and the new in terms of difficulty and reward. Which is how I came to be sneaking around the cellars of Highhold Keep with an undead parrot at my side.

At least I think it's a parrot. When I first saw Nibbles I thought he was a vulture. Up close he looks just plain weird but I got him from a pirate and he squawks "Pretty Bird" so circumstantial evidence of parrothood is compelling.

Seriously, can't I just fight him?

Nibbles is also the character name of the last member of our original EQ2 guild to quit playing back in 2005, just before we finally left to go back to EQ, which made it a tad uncomfortable when, at the end of the short solo questline, [SPOILER ALERT] I had to decide whether to kick him repeatedly to make him attack so I could kill him for personal gain. I did actually have to think about that for thirty seconds. But...loot.

The solo instance in Rum Cellar is odd. Other than the final boss fight and the Nibbles coda there's no mandatory combat at all. It's all about sneaking and setting traps. A lot of guards die screaming and on fire as you baste them with rum and molasses and immolate them or scald them with steam. I found it mildly disturbing, in dubious taste and morally more difficult to process than the usual round of MMO mass murder.

Unlike many of the deliberately unsettling quests in The Secret World, to take a slightly unfair comparison, it feels as though whoever wrote this one was just thinking of the mechanics. The storyline is clearly supposed to be on the lighter side as these things go, with a hefty dose of pirate yo ho ho and many of the "drinking alchohol is just hilarious!" tropes so typical of certain MMOs.

Stealing liquor for someone with serious mental health issues who hates himself so much he has to drink himself into a stupor.
Then robbing him and leaving him unconscious in a burning building that I set on fire.
Hey, I'm a hero. It's what we do.

I have a built-in filter for that kind of "humor" after a decade and a half so it doesn't make me die a little inside the way it once would have done. Those qualms considered, I enjoyed the solo questline well enough. It is short, yes, but it still took me nearly three hours to complete and that was using the walkthrough on the wiki. If I'd had to work out everything from first principles you could double that at least. It's repeatable but I can't envisage going back often.

There were a couple of decent rewards from the boss at the end including a level 98 cloak that's a significant upgrade. I still have nine or ten gear slots to raise from 95 to 98 or, if possible, 100 before I take another shot at the Algorithm of Destruction. My plans in that direction include the Advanced Solo version of Rum Cellar, which, thankfully, takes a more traditional "kill em all and take their stuff" approach. With luck some of their stuff will be level 98.

I liked you, Nibbles, but not as much as I like loot.

Then there's the Advanced Solo instance Kralet Penumbra, which the questline doesn't mention but which is, apparently, considerably easier than the one it does send you to do. And I should get on with some crafting. A new set of adornments would help. And I ought to read up on Infusions.

So much to learn. Fun times. First of all, though, I need to see about getting myself a house pet version of Nibbles. That's why I decided to kill him. Kill one to buy one. If you can kill an undead parrot. If he is a parrot. Was... Is...

Whatever!

Bringing Things Up To Date

Having thought about doing it yesterday, today I bit the bullet and began patching all the MMORPGs on my desktop. What fun!

First up was Allods. That was neither alphabetical nor random. It was because, while I was choosing screenshots for yesterday's post, I came across a bunch of shots and it reminded me just how beautiful a game it is. With such great art design, rich with visual wit and flourish, plus very solid gameplay, unusual and appealing races, interesting classes and an all-round high level of polish I'm at a loss to explain either why Allods hasn't been more successful or indeed why I haven't played it more than I have.

I'm in a bit of a mess with Allods as it happens. I can't recall my old account details so I'm stuck with just the fresh account I set up to try the new starting zone. That I mostly played on my Windows 10 Tablet, where it works very well, but I very soon realized I don't want to play games in my lunch-break. I'd much rather read.

That's probably why, rather than just patch, the MY.com Games launcher decided to download the entire game to my PC. I didn't specifically use the launcher but it decided to get in on the act anyway.

This trend towards Launchers that supposedly manage updates for a company's full portfolio of games is very trying. SOE spent many years fiddling around with the concept and it never really worked better than just patching the games individually. Daybreak Games seem to have loosened up on that somewhat. There is still some kind of underlying unified launcher but I have all the individual game icons on my desktop and clicking those seems to start the update and log-in process just fine.

Trion has Glyph. What used to be Perfect World (and for all I know may still be Perfect World to the financial regulators) has ARC. Blizzard has BattleNet and so on. If it's supposed to make things easier...well it doesn't.

After Allods I patched WildStar, which went very smoothly, and then A Mystical Land aka Villagers and Heroes. That also took just a few minutes. I see from their launcher that they've had a level cap rise and added a new zone among other things. I wonder how my sheep is. Dead, probably.

From there I moved to Project : Gorgon but I actually updated that a couple of weeks back and apparently Eric hasn't added anything since then so it was playable immediately. I didn't play it. Instead I patched The Secret World and then EverQuest.

There was a time earlier this year when I was playing EQ quite regularly. Then I changed my All Access membership to the account where my EQ2 Berserker lives and that left the EQ character I was working on, my Magician, stranded on F2P. Well, legacy Silver, but it still locked her out of all the Double XP weekends that would have motivated me to log her in.

At least she's patched up and ready should a window of opportunity arise. I still harbor a theoretical desire to get her to 100 some day, even though the cap has moved past even that landmark now. And speaking of Landmark...

That's what I patched next. I'd been thinking about good old Landmark even before Tipa jogged my memory but I probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Given the total radio silence on the game for most of this year I didn't really expect it would need to patch but it downloaded almost 2GB of something. That sent me to the forums to check the Update Notes but I couldn't see that anything new had been added.

I did, however, find this news posted by Darrin "Talisker" McPherson just a week ago. Well, I call it "news". It's more like news that there might be news.

I'll get the details out to you all soon, but expect some new initiatives, team-up builds and changes to the adventuring side of things. Lets build some content together!

I have no idea what that means but at least it's some sign of life.

Elder Scrolls Online came next.  It set off at a furious pace as it downloaded a vast pile of files but it soon ground almost to a halt when I tried to save some time by patching Star Trek Online and Neverwinter on top.

They both use the aforementioned ARC portal these days and that didn't recognize either of my existing passwords. Resetting them was simple and both games patched at blistering speeds, apparently at the expense of ESO, which ground almost to a halt. There were several gigabytes of updates for both STO and NWO but together they were done in a few minutes. ESO is still patching as I write, well over an hour later.

That, really, is how I came to write this post. Something to do while ESO is patching. I thought I'd better not try any more until it finishes. It seems to be having hard enough time as it is.

Still to come I can see Rift and Trove (well, I can see Glyph but same difference), Dragon Nest Oracle, ArcheAge, DinoStorm and Lord of the Rings Online. Dragon Nest I actually do want to get back to playing. I was enjoying that one. Rift I've been having weird pangs over. I thought I was done with it for good but perhaps not quite yet. ArcheAge I always meant to get back to someday and DinoStorm I always do go back to, usually late at night on a whim.

And LotRO? Well it's always there, although some of the numbers Ravanel mentions in her recent post make me wonder for how much longer.  LotRO has always been a nightmare to patch so I'm leaving it til last.

I tried to limit myself to MMOs I have at least a glancing blow's chance of playing in the next month or three, although by "playing" I really mean logging in, looking at my inventory, wandering around the main city for a few minutes and logging off again. That still leaves a few icons on my desktop that go to MMOs I really can't see myself getting back to any time soon - Istaria, Eldevin, Ryzom - although even though as I type those names I can feel interest stirring anew.

There's also City of Steam, which, being browser-based, doesn't need a specific update and whose main storyline I am determined to finish before they finally shut the servers down, assuming they haven't already - I didn't check. Then, naturally, while patching I saw at least two newish MMOs I hadn't previously heard of that I almost began downloading and as I write I've thought of another four or five that I thought I had installed but which don't seem to have desktop presence any more.

Enough! That way madness lies. And ESO is at 75% now. By the time I choose some screenshots and a title it should be done.

Waking A Tiger: GW2, WoW

Over the past few years there's been a significant change in tone from both developers and players in regard to what we might call the innate difficulty setting of the MMORPG genre. For a long time the wind was squarely in the sails of players, like me, who prefer the game itself to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to tedious things like targeting and positioning. These days there's almost an obsession with bringing the modes and means of regular video games into the previously staid and stately world of MMORPG combat to make it more "challenging".

That's something I abhor pretty much without reservation. If I wanted to play those kind of video games I'd be playing them. I don't. That's why I started playing these ones instead.

I take a much more nuanced view on the current trend towards recovering what was supposedly lost in the long march towards mass market acceptance. Call it the heart or the soul of the thing, whatever it was there are plenty who believe it's not there any more. It's a situation whose underlying causes and present complaints are neatly articulated by Marc Jacobs in the third of his Foundational Principles.

While I have some sympathy with the movement, my general feeling is that I was there, I did pay my dues and I've earned my easy ride. I don't hanker after the days when it felt like it took you half a play-session to get to the place you were going to hunt or when getting six people to the same spot on the map meant four of them dying and two of them rage-quitting before anyone even saw each other.

Neither do I look back with nostalgia to Sunday afternoons spent sending tells to crafters in the hope of finding one who wasn't too busy doing a corpse run or sitting in a guild meeting or attending an in-game wedding to travel five zones to a city with a bank where the guards would tolerate both of us, all so he or she could make me a set of level 15 armor for which I'd hand over all the money I'd managed to scrape together since I last bankrupted myself for the level 10 set two weeks ago.

I could literally tell dozens of stories like that, mostly drawn from memories of things that happened while I was playing EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard and EverQuest 2. Marc and countless others would point to the mere fact that not only do I have all those stories but that I can still remember them in detail a decade and change later as offering the strongest evidence in support of their case. It's the argument that says it has to hurt a little if you're going to care.

It's true. The reason those experiences live with me still is because they were painful and in being so the memories associated with them were laid down in accordance with the mechanisms associated with strong emotional reactions. What's questionable, in my opinion, is whether that's a desirable outcome for an activity that is, essentially, artificial and meaningless.

It would be a lot harder for me to come up with an after-dinner speech's worth of anecdotes based on the last five years of playing MMOs. Not because I've played fewer hours or paid less attention but because many of the sharp edges and rough corners have been sanded down and smoothed out. I have fewer scars.

The memories of the elation at last-second wins in boss fights or the sense of satisfaction at the completion of  lengthy questlines don't seem to be laid down to last in the same way as the recollection of the anxious hours spent waiting to see if the guy who promised to build my sloop in Vanguard would ever log in again let alone the traumatic loss of my level six corpse down the hollow tree in Blackburrow (and no, I am not ever going to get over that, thanks for asking). It seems that, when it comes to what we might call regular MMO gameplay, no matter how intense the fight feels at the time, the underlying understanding that it can be repeated ad nauseam until the right result pops out undercuts the brain's sense that anything worth recording for posterity is going on. It probably gets the same priority as your daily commute.

Or perhaps it's the lack of agency that matters. The key part of almost every one of my "MMO war stories" is that I was doing something I'd decided to do, something that required me to make choices and decisions. Bonus memory points if some of those choices were dependent on the choices of others.

It's here that I believe we might find a way in to what was actually lost rather than what we imagine has been lost. In attempting to pave all the roads and open all the gates to allow the smoothest of journeys MMO developers also closed down every side-road and took over the steering wheel. Instead of being the drivers of our own destinies we have increasingly taken on the role of passengers.

When I finally got around to playing WoW  some five years after it began my first character was a Hunter. One of the things that most interested me about the class was the relatively complex and demanding process of finding, catching and taming pets, which I'd read about in some detail on one of the many websites devoted to all things Azeroth. Of course, by the time I got there, all that had been re-assessed and re-evaluated as arduous busywork. I forget what you did have to do to tame a pet but I know there was nothing about it worth remembering.

Three years ago in GW2 my first character was a ranger. I was, once again, looking forward to the process of acquiring pets. It turned out that to charm a pet in GW2 you have to stand next to a juvenile of the species and press a button on a window that pops up on screen automatically. That's it.

Well, the wheel turns. That process hasn't changed a jot in Heart of Thorns and yet gaining the new pets for the first of my rangers has been one of the highlights of the expansion. The pets, which are both powerful and visually appealing and hence very covetable, have been placed in comparatively awkward to reach locations, where you would be unlikely to run into them other than by sheer good luck. Moreover, a couple are soft-gated behind the completion of the Dragon Stand meta-event, which offers only a tight fifteen minute window on success before the whole map resets.

Running across the blighted landscape after Mordremoth's defeat, trying to avoid mordrem snipers and not fall down gaping holes filled with poison gas, while attempting to follow map directions from Reddit and instructions in party chat from Mrs Bhagpuss, who'd done it before, all in the hope of finding my Tiger before being unceremoniously booted back to the Pact base camp on a map reset that loomed ever-nearer, stands a good chance of becoming a story I'll still be telling years from now. If I'd failed to find the little striper that memory would come with a lifetime guarantee.

There's a passing fair chance I'll buy WoW's Legion expansion next year. I was already minded to give it a try but the odds improved markedly when I saw this. "Most Mechanical pets will be challenging to tame, requiring you to first locate them and then use your Hunter abilities in unusual ways" they say. Well, that's the kind of challenge I can appreciate. In fact you might say it's what I came here looking for in the first place.

The idea that MMOs need to return to the levels of social interdependence that were the norm before Blizzard overturned the tables makes my blood run cold. The numerous pragmatic changes that a succession of developers has brought to the genre seem to me to have made both for better games and better entertainment. Somehow, though, complexity, nuance and, most especially, agency got tangled up with awkwardness, frustration and inaccessibility. Somewhere along the way a few babies got thrown out with a lot of dirty bathwater.

It seems ridiculous but there's just an outside chance that Gnome Hunters could help, just a little, in bringing back a taste of what was lost. Some variety, some choice, some agency. And, yes, even some challenge. It's asking a lot from something so small but who could be  better placed to herald the return of over-engineered design than a gnome?

Light All The Fires

World of Warcraft is becoming infamous for its content droughts; those long months of blank canvas stretched between the tent-poles of bi- or even tri-annual expansions, when players in their hundreds of thousands lose focus, let their subscriptions lapse and wander off to other realms. GW2, the MMO that started out as the antidote to WoW but which is increasingly growing to resemble it, took its own first stab at the content drought concept this year, letting the game drift in a long, slow arc from the announcement of the expansion that was never meant to happen to the eventual launch of Heart of Thorns last month.

As the glare begins to dim a little on these new lands we have somehow found ourselves calling Magus Falls, light begins to dawn on just why some MMO developers have become so fond of their "cadences";  the drip, drip, drip of content in small packages that we saw exemplified best in ArenaNet's Living Story but which appears throughout the genre in various guises, from EVE's six-weekly "expansion" schedule to EQ2's seemingly inexhaustible calendar of "Holidays". Anything to keep the customer playing and paying.

For some inexplicable reason I began Saturday by reading some of Marc Jacobs' Foundational Principles for Camelot Unchained. CU (working title) is not an MMO to which I have paid much notice in the past and I haven't followed its development with any close interest. I'd never read these principles before.

Several things struck me as I skimmed through the lengthy perambulations. Marc Jacobs is a good communicator and an excellent self-mythologist, that was the main takeaway, but then so many superstar game developers are. It often makes me wonder if they're really in the right business. That aside, it was his apparent willingness to leave money on the table and let dissatisfied or just plain bored customers walk away that got my attention.

The Camelot Unchained website is peppered with bold statements and brave claims to this effect:

"We respect your commitment to a subscription-based game; in return, you won’t see thinly-veiled grabs for more money. Everything you need to succeed in Camelot Unchained requires skill and effort, not an open wallet."

"...we are an RvR-focused game and if you are not feeling it that night and nothing we have interests you, well, it’s time to take a break..."

"I want the freedom to take some risks with this game without enduring sleepless nights as I worry about whether a feature (or lack thereof) will alienate too many players, anger the boss, piss off the investors, etc."

And so on and so on. It's a coherent and rational plan and so far it's raised almost four million dollars. Star Citizen, on the other hand, another game whose development I have barely been following but, if what Derek Smart tells us is true, (don't go there..) is aiming to be quite literally all things to all players, is rounding the final corner on $100m.


As Saylah at Mystic Worlds observes in passing, Chris Roberts' behemoth already has some 900,000 backers signed up and waiting to play. Come launch day (whenever that might be) that number could reasonably be expected to grow into the millions. Mark Jacobs is bullish about the degree to which that isn't likely, necessary or even desirable for his game, which he anticipates "even if successful has no chance of threatening Dark Age of Camelot’s peak subs (250k)".

Saylah is understandably enthused by the chance to live, fully if virtually, in another world or in this case another universe. "It's hard to explain to anyone who's not passionate about gaming, MMOs and/or space sims why people continue to invest so heavily in this project. For many of us, SC has a dream list of features, combined in a way that no company has ever attempted before" she says. She goes on to describe what must be many an MMO player's dream: "The atmosphere, graphics, attention to detail, realism and cinematic soundtrack is breathtaking to behold. No one's pictures will do it justice. The way they knit your introductory experience together, it feels like waking up in a future where man has conquered the stars."

It's what I thought I wanted, once. The chance to lose myself in another reality. To be there. It's a wish, though, that like all magical wishes, comes with a warning. Mercury expresses it well when he writes at Light Falls Gracefully about the freedom that comes from accepting someone else's rules: "There is a certain something that is called into being with the arrival of the holiday events at year’s end when the rules of everyday life are put up on the shelf for a while. As a child, these times were magical: decorations, a festive atmosphere, and a fundamentally different tone to the rhythm of life filled my little body with wondrous awe. Nowadays, the magic lies in pretending that I am not a responsible adult and that these figments of our collective imagination are somehow the real thing."

Heart of Thorns has proved much more involving than I imagined it would be. Before it landed I had arrived at something close to equilibrium in the allocation of my gaming time. I had a stable of titles I was paying some attention to and while GW2 consumed the predator's portion there was still time to flit between half a dozen other MMOs and make something that could, in a poor light, be taken for progress there.

This is a familiar experience. Every time an MMO in which I'm emotionally invested drops a large update it wins focus from all the others. It's a time of great excitement but it comes at a cost. Everything else slides. When several games decide to overlap their major updates time won't stretch to accommodate them. One will win.

And that's how I came to understand that content drought isn't necessarily a bad thing. In a way it's like breathing out. It took ArenaNet's six-months of purdah and pre-expansion crunch to create the space for me to break the pattern of habit and open out my horizons again. I'm actually happy we won't be seeing any more Living Story updates this year and quite probably not before next spring.

I have a long, long list of MMOs that I want to get back to, to re-invest in, to play. Even updating the clients and logging in would be something. There seems to be a lot of that around at the moment - Tipa, reminding me about Landmark, Wilhelm dipping back into LotRO, Stargrace firing up ArcheAge... Plus the conveyor belt never stops. There are already half a dozen new candidates I'd like to give the once-over, although not necessarily the ones on Syp's list of conversation starters.

I'd welcome some downtime just for all that although I know I'll probably have to wait for Wintersday and Frostfell and all the other quasi-Christmas celebrations to pass first.

Mark Jacobs isn't unduly worried about players like me, those who have itchy feet and eyes elsewhere. He says of his avowedly niche, specialist offering: " If on some nights it isn’t what you are looking for, well, that’s okay, your realm’s enemies will be still waiting for you when you get back." And, barring the game going dark for good, they always will.

These days that feels closer to what I want. Not a world that feels more real than the real world, where missing a day feels like a small death; more a room in a mansion filled with rooms, all warm and waiting for my return, with my things all safe where I left them and a small stack of welcome-home gifts waiting on the mantle for me to open.

In the end though I don't get to choose. When the game takes over the game takes over. That's why a little drought sometimes can quench a thirst.

Sisters Under The Skin : EQ2, GW2

Playing through two such different expansions as Heart of Thorns and Terrors of Thalumbra at the same time is a curiously instructive experience. It highlights not only the great differences between the two games and their design strategies and ethics but also some unexpected similarities.

Heart of Thorns is the first expansion for Guild Wars 2, arriving at the very late entry-point of three years after launch. Terrors of Thalumbra is EverQuest 2's twelfth full expansion; by the time EQ2 had been running for as long as GW2 has now it had enjoyed four full expansions and three smaller "Adventure Packs", one of which, The Fallen Dynasty, was probably as large as HoT just on its own.

Indeed, the sheer scale of some of EQ2's expansions looks breathtaking in retrospect. Echoes of Faydwer, for example, could perfectly feasibly have been released as a standalone MMORPG. For almost a decade these expansions were produced, at the rate of better than one per calendar year, under a subscription payment model, for a game that even its most ardent supporters would not claim was among the market leaders in its genre.

Don't start with the waterworks.

GW2, on the other hand, has a fair claim to be one of the largest, certainly the most celebrated, MMOs of the last few years. Despite operating primarily on a Buy-to-Play business model that, one might imagine, would encourage the creation and release of new product, the ArenaNet team has produced just this single example and that with considerable reluctance.

Heart of Thorns has turned out to be a controversial first step onto what we are assuming (but cannot be sure) is the expansion ladder. Although I, personally, have been very pleasantly surprised by the value I've been able to extract from what looked like a meager offering I think it would be fair to categorize the response from the paying and playing audience as "mixed".

Metacritic has settled to a "Generally Favorable" rating for Heart of Thorns but only after a prolonged battle between wildly polarized factions voting 0-1 or 9-10. As for what either the average player or video-game critic thinks about Terrors of Thalumbra, well that's anyone's guess. No-one has reviewed it. Almost no-one has even mentioned it.

Have you tried switching it of then switching it on again?

So far, I like the two about the same, although I have seen far less of ToT than HoT. Both of them are much smaller in terms of explorable imaginary real estate than we've been spoiled to expect in the past but both have made a good fist of providing depth of content through density and verticality where it might have been lacking in raw mileage.

ANet, with what must be one of the very best art departments in the field, working with a relatively new graphics engine, provide breathtaking visuals but DBG, with a tiny team and an eleven-year old infrastructure, manage to work some small miracles of their own. As for audioscapes HoT just has the edge for ambient sound but ToT has by far the superior score.

Anet certainly packed a lot into the four new maps and when it comes to exploring and sightseeing Terrors of Thalumbra is also larger than I was expecting. Twice as large, in fact. It was trailed as coming with just a single open-world zone, Thalumbra the Ever Deep, but it also contains a full-size, new city, Maldura, which barely got a mention in the pre-publicity.

Maldura is a dwarven settlement on the model of Thurgadin, the Coldain city added in the Destiny of Velious expansion. I never really took to EQ2's version of Thurgadin, perhaps because I spent so much time in and had so many fond memories of the original back in EverQuest. Maldura, though, is a knockout.

A rat can look at a queen.

It has all the feel of a Dwarven capital. It reminds me of both Kaladim and Thurgadin from the original game and yet it also feels original and fresh. It's both easy to navigate and to get lost in as a dwarven city should be. The stone glows in a wonderfully homely fashion and yet there is the inevitable and necessary existential threat that all Dwarven cities have to face, necessitating barred doors and armed guards at every turn.

Every Dwarven city needs a pub, of course, and in The Mushroom Bar and Grill, Maldura has one of the best. I've already spent a considerable while there just listening to the live music, most of which is provided by gnomes.

We Play For Tips.

The gnomes, know locally as Gnemlin, have their own quarter that reminded me a little of the gnomish enclave in Azeroth's Ironforge. I'm unclear whether the gnemlins lost a city of their own to end up sharing a billet with dwarves but if so it would be par for the gnomish course. Losing cities seems to be a cultural pre-requisite with them.

Perhaps the story will emerge in time from the Signature questline. Both HoT and ToT offer a lengthy narrative sequence as a spine, something that seems almost mandatory in modern MMORPGs. EQ2 doubles down with a full-length questline for crafters as well as one for adventurers. I've completed, and thoroughly enjoyed, the tradeskill story but the adventure equivalent is proving...tricky.

Whose move is it?

Here's where ANet and DBG appear to have swapped hats. Where I was expecting to find the new Personal Story an arduous, tedious, neck-aching, shoulder-spasming grind similar to the largely unpleasant and annoying Living Story 2, it turned out to be a reasonably sprightly, quick-footed, gambol, at least in terms of the gameplay. Over in EQ2, however, where I've had little to complain about when it comes to difficulty while soloing the signature lines of the last several expansions, I found myself running into a brick wall in the very first Advanced Solo instance.

The experience illuminates how another strand of the supposedly divergent philosophies of the two games surprisingly intertwines as they seek to expand. GW2, famously or infamously according to taste, eschews both gear and level ladders. The theory is that HoT adds neither. EQ2 trades heavily on both but this particular expansion has no level increase and ostensibly offers horizontal not vertical progression.

In fact each of them deals directly in serious increases to the power and capability of your characters. HoT may not give us weapons with bigger numbers but it adds Elite Specializations for every class, at least a few of which have immediately become Best In Slot and Required For Raids.

A stepladder. How d'you think we hang them? A really big stepladder, okay?

As the player of two HoT-enabled Rangers I can also attest that owning the expansion allows you to tame several new pets that are very significantly more powerful than any you have access to through the base game. Once tamed, they will be the ones you choose to use from then on, unless (like me) you have an irrational, sentimental attachment to some of your old, loyal favorites.

Even though there's no level cap rise to justify it, ToT goes the familiar route of providing quest rewards for the opening, menial, introductory tasks that render the best items from the previous expansion utterly redundant. Merely for killing a few sky-rats and gathering a few mushrooms my Berserker received items that increased his hit points by a third and that's very clearly just the start. Where he'll be by the end of the questline I dread to think.

Except that, of course, at best he's running to stay still. Just as, in Heart of Thorns, the Mastery system largely exists to allow you to grind xp for weeks to earn the right to see all the content you paid for, so in Terrors of Thalumbra you need to quest to get the gear to be able to survive the quests you get sent on to get the gear. My unfortunate and repeatedly fatal experience in the very first instance just indicates that I haven't yet done enough side-quests, much as suddenly pegging out in an apparently innocuous location in Magus Falls reminds me I haven't ground out enough masteries for poison resistance.

There goes the neighborhood.

For all the supposed differences in approach, attitude and intent that separate the two current expansions for these two apparently unrelated MMORPGs I have to say the experience of playing each isn't as far removed from the other as you might expect. There may be a lot of new paint on the wagon but the wheels are rolling down the same old track.

Which is fine by me. I'm enjoying the ride. Now I just need to quest for some better gear and grind out those masteries. Oh, and I should get on with the collection that gets me my class Ascended weapons and I need to look into these Infusions that go in the new slot on that quest-reward sword because that's a big upgrade and what about this new Deity/Tithe thing and...