Why I'm Not Playing Pokemon Go (Like I Have To Have A Reason...)

Ravanel has a post up this morning about how much she wants to be playing Pokemon Go right now. At the end of the post she asks a couple of questions that started me thinking:

Did you grow up with Pokémon? And are you playing Pokémon Go?

Well, no I didn't. No, I'm not. Just like I'm neither interested in nor excited by news of yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers movie, the mere invocation of the Pokemon brand presses none of my buttons. Well, none of the appropriate ones.

You might assume that was an age thing, what with the fairly imminent approach of my sixtieth birthday, and to some extent it is. I was, after all, nearing forty years old when the first Pokemon appeared in 1995. There's more to it than that, though.

Not only does the franchise form no part of my personal lexicon of childhood or adolescent experiences but I can honestly say I barely even noticed it at the time. Yet it's not as though I wasn't culturally exposed, open even, to such things as they were happening.

Not a Pokemon

During the 1990s I was living day-to-day alongside three children, who were aged somewhere between five and thirteen when the game first appeared. I knew who Mario was. I actually saw the movie at the cinema. There was a SNES in the living room. I bought and played FFVII. Still, I have no memory of anyone I knew ever playing, wanting to play or even mentioning Pokemon.

For a long time I had it filed away in the back of my mind as something associated with Tamagochis, which were a big thing in our house for a while. And Furbys. We had both of those and I played with them and understood them. Pokemon - nothing.

I would have pretty much forgotten Pokemon even existed if it hadn't been for Wilhelm. Over the last few years reading TAGN has told me more about about Pokemon than I ever imagined I'd know. In the same way that reading countless reports on Minecraft has left me feeling I must have played the game in some other life, I have a ghostly, vestigial pseudo-memory of catching brightly colored cartoon creatures and setting them against others in fights that come freighted with queasily uncomfortable socio-historic subtext.

Mulling this over it seems to me that, while age has something to do with the extent and the specifics of involvement, which cultural phenomenon gets to sink its hooks into which person depends a lot more on personal experience than the number of candles on a birthday cake. My childhood was mainly in the 1960s and my adolescence in the 1970s but for some reason, although many of the cultural shibboleths and touchstones of those decades resonate strongly still, in my late fifties the decade whose cultural artifacts affect me most sentimentally in recall is probably the 1980s, the time when I became an independent adult.

I say "probably" because these things drift. In the mid-90s, when Pokemon was new, my call-backs were all to the seventies. In that I was dead in tune with the zeitgeist. Pokemon arrived in the white-heat of Britpop, that final spin of the thirteen-year cycle, which sought to magpie the best from the '60s and '70s and mosaic something bright and new out of the scraps. Now, a couple of decades on, the '90s themselves are beginning to acquire a soft, rose-hued glow.

Looks a bit more like one but still not a Pokemon.

Perhaps the nodal point of nostalgia always trails a generation behind. Maybe it takes twenty years to acquire the distance needed for flaws to fade and warmth to grow. maybe it's not so much how old you were then as how many years have passed.

But to trigger a wave of nostalgia or even simple recognition you have to have been paying attention the first time round and Pokemon passed me by. Instead of warm fuzzies I have cool, hard intellectual curiosity. Pokemon Go does look like an enjoyable game. More importantly it appears to be developing into a fascinating and potentially influential cultural phenomena.

There's a chance it could mark a fork in the cultural road the way Twitter or Facebook did. In a year or two Augmented Reality gaming could be as much a part of everyday life as tweeting or updating your profile (two things that once again I know only from hearsay). Or it could be languishing wherever fads like Farmville go to die.

Obviously not the latter. The immense strength of the Pokemon brand will sustain when the fickle attention of the global horde moves on. Pokemon will be with us forever, like every other cultural phenomenon that passes a certain, hard to define, watershed. If the name of Pikachu (still the only Pokemon I can recall with certainty) isn't up there with Dracula and Sherlock Holmes quite yet, it  soon will be.

Okay, these could be Pokemon...

I probably would be playing Pokemon Go along with everyone else right now, just to be part of the buzz, if it wasn't for one other thing: I don't own a mobile phone. Not just not a smart one, like Wilhelm. I don't even own a dumb one.

I have a blind spot about phones. I am fully and happily digitized. I have a houseful of PCs. I have old gaming systems from the 1980s tucked away in cupboards. I have an iPod and half a dozen tablets and use several of them daily but I have never owned a phone. I've never even had a landline in my own name.

And even if I did have a smartphone - and sooner or later I will almost certainly have to get one  because in five or ten years it's going to be next to impossible to function as an adult without one - I would not allow it to track my whereabouts, which as far as I can tell would pretty much drop a rock on the chances of chasing down Pokemons.

I don't have a valid argument for that - it just feels completely wrong so I'm not going to do it. Not until I do, naturally. Consistency, hobgoblin, you know the drill.

So there it is. Another cultural milestone missed. Can't hit 'em all.



All images borrowed from The Internet. Any rights holders unhappy about that just let me know and they're gone.

Got To Catch A Few - Riders Of Icarus

This week it seems at least half the bloggers in my Feedly have been playing a new game. Some of them seem to be having a great time while others aren't completely convinced. And someone I expected to be all over it hasn't even started yet.

I've been playing a new game too. One other person in this quadrant of the blogosphere took the same road less trampled and of course it was Kaozz. Her first impressions piece appeared just after I'd finished my opening session in Riders of Icarus. That was probably just as well because I had been going to put up one of my own but at that stage I hadn't even finished the tutorial.

Since then I've played this newest Eastern import several more times and from the dizzy heights of level 6 I'm ready to agree with Kaozz that it's "a solid game that looks good." Well, almost.

Who has the longer neck?

Let's start at the beginning: character creation. You can be a human or...no, you can be a human. I chose to be a female for a change (stop laughing at the back) but it was a struggle getting anything I imagined I'd be happy to see looking back at me from screenshots.

There are a lot of sliders and styles but the character models are iffy. The proportions seem slightly off, particularly the necks, which all seem to be uncomfortably extended. After a few hours play I still don't feel comfortable with the character I made, which is a strong indicator that I won't be playing long.

In common with most MMOs the default graphic settings appear to be intended for someone who hasn't bought a new PC since the Bush administration. Possibly the first one. I don't know why they do this. First impressions count for an awful lot so why you'd want people to log in for the first time to the wrong screen resolution and a lot of low textures is a puzzle.

I died twice getting this wolf because he kept throwing me off into the rest of his pack.

Things improved rapidly with a few tweaks. It runs on CryEngine 3 but the art design could be from almost any of the dozen or more Korean MMOs I've played over the last few years. Everything is over-scaled and there's an oddly flat quality that seems to leech out depth of field somehow.

It's certainly pretty enough to make looking at the world a pleasure and I found no shortage of screenshot opportunities. My first and so far only character is a Berserker, flagged as the "Easy" option. She hits things with a sword that is, predictably, bigger than she is.

The controls are peculiar. The developers get a huge thumbs up from me for offering a choice between tab-target and hotbars or action settings but the traditional version, which naturally was my choice, is awkward to use. Like Dragomon Hunter, you can click the icons on your hotbar with the mouse pointer, as I prefer to do, but you either have to double-click or right-click. Why we can't have the basic single click that MMOs have used for the best part of two decades beats me.

The fiery hawk is a freebie for playing the Open Beta. The thigh-high stiletto-heeled leather boots are not optional. Or practical. Or comfortable, I'd imagine.

Bag space is reasonable. I got an additional bag for a quest around level 5 and it just goes into a slot like it would in WoW or GW2. None of this incrementing the base inventory count by two like Black Desert.

Once you're in there's a short "Escape from Prison" tutorial straight from the "Build Your Own MMO" manual but after you're largely left to get on with things on your own, with further instructions being incorporated into the basic leveling quests.

Progress seems to be linear in the extreme, down to the way maps funnel you in a particular direction, so the chances of you wandering off piste are minimal. What with only one race that's seriously going to limit replayability but that's the nature of these true F2P imports, by and large.

I did laugh out loud at the Kangaroo. It's as amusing to ride as you'd imagine, too.

The translations are excellent. I haven't come across any untranslated text or Korean voiceover yet and there are no more grammatical or spelling errors than in a Western MMO in beta. Did I mention Riders of Icarus is in "Open Beta"? No wipe so  we'll call that "Soft Launch" I think.

The writing is adequate but not much more than that. Unlike Dragomon Hunter, whose often bizarre and surreal dialog occasionally has me laughing out loud, this is quite dry. The quests themselves are cookie cutter and plain cookies at that. They all work though and they are short and tidy. Quality control seems high.

The real meat comes with the gameplay. Riders of Icarus offers two things most MMOs don't - a huge range of tameable pets and mounts and mounted combat. I haven't yet tried the latter but the "gotta catch 'em all" aspect has considerable appeal. Wonder where they got the idea from?

The NPC and monster models are variable. This is the Queen of the local fairies and she looks the part.

It took me several tries to tame my initial mount, a Unicorn. You have to sneak up to it using the taming skill and then hit Space to literally jump onto the creature's back. The first couple of times I missed altogether. When I did get onboard the Unicorn bucked me off but I got back on and just sat there and somehow I ended up with a docile mount.

There is actually more to it than that. Not much more, I'll grant you, but you do have to do something. There are various messages describing how the animal is reacting and these correspond to four keys, bound by default to WASD. Don't worry about interpreting which emotional state matches which action - the key you need lights up. Just press that one.

So far I have the Unicorn, some kind of Wolf, a Turtle and a Kangaroo. In fact I have two Kangaroos. Apparently you can tame multiples of the same creature, which is useful because tamed animals can be either Mounts or Pets but not both. When tamed they are automatically set as Mounts and the process of converting a Mount to a Pet is permanent, so you want spares.

Loading screen with the obligatory "tip". I wasn't aware there were "talent builds". I took the shot because the rabbit in the bottom left corner, who lets you know the zone is still loading, is the most appealing character in the whole enterprise.
I wish I was playing whatever game he comes from.

As Kaozz mentions, there's an annoying stamina bar mechanic for both mounts and pets. As soon as the bar depletes your animal vanishes and you fall off (assuming it was a mount). The bar refills quite fast but it's annoyingly disruptive. I'm guessing you can buy something in the cash shop to circumvent the problem but I haven't bothered to check since there is no chance in this lifetime of me spending a cent on the game.

Weirdly, I seem to have found myself with a choice of "collect all the pets" games and neither of them is the one everyone else is playing. I prefer Dragomon Hunter by several country miles - it's quirky, funny and has a lot of personality. Riders of Icarus is flashier and takes itself more seriously but feels a lot more corporate and bland.

Most importantly, though, I actively like my DH character whereas my RoI avatar is a cipher. That could change over time but I don't expect to be playing long enough to find out. Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul.

The Machine Stops

I’ve killed that goblin a hundred thousand times across a dozen games over more than a decade, and I can scarcely muster the energy to read about how it is being re-skinned as a different shade of orc

Zubon - Kill Ten Rats

Yesterday brought the surprising news that Turbine, one of the longest-established and most influential of MMO developers, had made the final decision to turn its back on the genre it helped to found and form.

Turbine's first MMORPG, Asheron's Call, was one of the original "Big Three" along with Ultima Online and EverQuest. Some MMOs are bigger than others, though, and even back in October of 1999, when I was sitting in front of my 14" CRT screen at work, searching the World-Wide Web via NetScape for information about these scary, mysterious "online" role-playing games, Asheron's Call, even though it was just about to launch the following month, barely registered.

Back in those days of shortage I tried to play every MMO I could find. Unlike Lineage, which I have still never played even now, Asheron's Call wasn't hard to access. I just went to one of the three video game shops on my local high street and picked the enormous cardboard box off the shelf.

I didn't take to Asheron's Call. By the time I tried it I'd been playing EQ for a while and I'd also tried UO and would have taken either in preference to the strangely loose, unmoored experience I found in Turbine's flagship. I wasn't alone. While AC had its dedicated supporters and was commercially successful enough for Turbine to follow it with an ill-fated sequel, like Pete Wylie in The Crucial Three, the Asheron's Call franchise was destined to disappear behind its peers into the rear-view mirror of history.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for the original, I didn't pay much attention to AC2 at the time. When it went dark in 2005 I assumed I'd missed my chance but I finally got around to kicking its wheels when Turbine made the surprising decision to resurrect it as a F2P title almost a decade later. I didn't enjoy that experience a great deal more than I did the first one.

Turbine's third MMO looked a lot more interesting. In 2006 they launched the first MMO officially based on the D&D licence, Dungeons and Dragons Online. Given that I'd originally decided to give MMORPGs a try on the understanding that they offered something akin to a 24/7, on-demand automated D&D session, this looked promising.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I both joined the DDO beta and, like many, perhaps most of the testers, came away disappointed. What with the extreme instancing, the lack of an open world, the almost complete reliance on grouping and the unfamiliar choice of the Eberron campaign setting, our few forays into Turbine's first licensed MMO were not happy times.

We declined to buy DDO when it launched in 2006 but we did give it a second glance three years later, when Turbine made their industry-shaking decision to make the game Free to Play. By then DDO had been largely re-structured to be a much more open game with a fair-to-middling solo experience. I dabbled for a while and enjoyed it in parts.

DDO wasn't the first Western F2P MMO. That was Anarchy Online, which opened the doors to the great unsubbed in 2005. Somehow Funcom's innovative move slipped by largely unnoticed while Turbine's dropping of the subscription required to play DDO was seen even at the time as a harbinger of storms to come.

And come those storms did when Turbine played the F2P card for the second time. Despite the very rocky start for their first licensed outing, just a year after DDO's launch Turbine took a second run at someone else's IP and again it was a big one. Indeed, it's not unreasonable to suggest that in Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings Turbine took on the two biggest IPs the genre knew. For a relatively small and specialist player they were certainly thinking big.

Lord of the Rings Online launched in 2007, which was several years after the global success of Peter Jackson's trilogy of movies. Perhaps that was coming a little late to the party. The world may have been a little Tolkiened out by then. Like SW:toR a few years on, LotRO wasn't as big a deal as the power of the name might have led investors to expect. 

It certainly wasn't a failure. Critics loved it and it sold respectably if not spectacularly. It took Mrs Bhagpuss and I a while to get around to trying it but when we did we found a solid and enjoyable MMO wrapped around a very convincing iteration of Middle Earth. We played for several months, eventually tapping out in the mid-40s. 

Mrs Bhagpuss would probably have gone on playing longer but one Sunday morning I had one run-in too many with the roleplaying police and decided life was too short to argue the toss over authenticity with people who apparently believed Hobbits were real and Middle Earth was historical fact. There was also the issue of the combat, which alone among MMOs gave me seriously painful RSI. 

In the years since I've dropped back in a few times.The world is always a joy to explore. In 2010 dropping in became something you could do on a whim as Turbine again abandoned the subscription model. 

If taking DDO F2P had shaken the industry the move to free for LotRO rocked it on its foundations, not least because of the apparent financial windfall it meant for Turbine. The reported threefold increase in revenue six months down the line was almost certainly the spur the industry needed to move en masse away from the decade-old subscription model towards the plethora of hybrid and F2P options that have dominated the genre ever since.

That turned out to be Turbine's last throw of the dice as far as shaping the course of the genre went. LotRO was Turbine's final MMO. Since then, other than a long drawn-out and ultimately futile attempt to enter the congested MOBA market with yet a third Licensed IP, the DC Comics' based Infinite Crisis, Turbine seems to have done little more then curate, fitfully, their one money-earning product, LotRO.

The license granted by the Tolkien Estate to run that title expires next year. There's an ongoing legal case that apparently means no-one from Turbine can talk about what happens next, even if they wanted to, which they most certainly don't.

There's been a deal of speculation about what that might mean for LotRO but yesterday's announcement that the company would be "transitioning into a free-to-play, mobile development studio" would be impossible to interpret as anything other than a hard blow to the prospect of a happy outcome for the many thousands still enjoying their journeys through Middle Earth.

Massively OP managed to prise a clarification out of Turbine's owners, Warner Bros, to the effect that "The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online games will continue to operate as they do now." Be reassured if you will.

So, dark days for Elves, Hobbits and Men and a shadow over the genre. Many, like Zubon, while feeling angered or saddened by the ignominious fall of a once-respected pillar of a once-great community, will see it as another brick in the wall that separates them from their past. Undoubtedly the future for the genre is not the future we thought it would be back when the sun first rose over The Shire. 

Yet these are not the last days. For the while light still shines from the East, as the relative success this year of Blade and Soul, Black Desert and the ongoing renaissance of Final Fantasy XIV attest. As Zubon observes, old MMOs roll on, playing to their own, niche audiences, oblivious of trend. For those of us still excited to see what colors the next lot of orcs might come in there is always likely to be someone standing ready with the paintbrush.

If you want to enjoy what Turbine brought to the Tolkein table, and it was a very considerable contribution to the canon, then as Wilhelm advises "Play the games while you have the chance, as the future is more uncertain than usual and nobody is likely to make a game like LOTRO again". If, on the other hand, it's the MMORPG genre itself that fires your imagination and makes your clicking finger itch then lift your head and look up.

MMOs are coming to mobile platforms and to consoles. VR, when it settles down and beds in, looks to be made for the form. The last two decades laid down the foundation for the future of an imaginary experience that will be with us for as long as imagination itself lasts. MMOs aren't going anywhere. They're going everywhere.

Who knows, maybe Turbine will even make some of them. For your phone.

Welcome To The Museum : The Secret World

When I first heard that The Secret World was going to be giving every player their own museum it was the most intriguing and appealing news I'd heard about the game for a very long time. Prior to that almost everything seemed to be aimed squarely at end-game players and since I never even finished the main story-line from launch that was exactly what I didn't need.

I'm very fond of The Secret World. The worldscape is meticulous in its attention to detail. The writing, the cut-scenes and especially the voice acting are all significantly above MMO genre standard. There's no shortage of strong, memorable characters and stories. My character looks great and the game takes superb screenshots.

What's not to like, eh? Well, the combat isn't stellar and in a genre that relies on hitting things til they fall over that's a problem. Also it can be quite grindy and not in a good way. The very quality and intricacy of the quests makes the whole process seem even less meaningful than usual when you find yourself doing them for the fifth or sixth time just to earn some AP.

Also I'm just not very good at a lot of what I'm asked to do there. I find the gameplay significantly more challenging than almost any other MMO I enjoy and I am not a big fan of "challenge" in my entertainment. It's not just that I can't do some of the fights, although that's the most irritating part. Quite a few of the non-combat missions, which I can do, I don't much enjoy.

Nevertheless, on balance I do like the Secret World and I'm always keen to go back and have another run at it. The Museum looked, on paper, like an excellent reason to return.

Firstly, everyone gets their own instance. It's free and there's no pre-requisite. Not even a quest. You just open the door and there you are in your very own museum. It's a kind of housing. I've seen it compared to GW2's Hall of Monuments although now I've walked the corridors of the museum that's a bit like comparing a ruined folly at the end of the lower orchard to the fifteen-bedroom mansion at the top of the drive.

Secondly, the gameplay associated with stocking and decorating your museum seems eminently reasonable. Mostly it's filling out achievements, finding Lore updates and killing regular mobs. It sounds like something anyone can just pick away at in their own time, at their own pace. Perfect for my predilections.

I was very much looking forward to taking charge of my own museum as soon as it appeared in game but as it happened that coincided with the arrival of my new PC, meaning I didn't have the game installed. By the time I got around to locating the old drive with TSW on, first impressions of the museum had begun to pop up and they weren't pretty.

Syp, a big TSW booster, who'd been enthusiastic, was less than impressed, describing it as "a huuuuge grind and AP/PAX/black bullion sink". Others were less complimentary. 

The negative reaction did blunt my own enthusiasm and that, plus having a lot of other things going on, meant that I didn't get around to patching TSW up and logging in until this evening. I'm very glad I did.

Jogging through the London streets I noticed that TSW is beginning to show its age a little. Either that or it looked better on my older, less powerful machine. It still revels in the same stellar art design though, even if the textures are looking a little threadbare here and there. 

Once through the door the minimal, almost severe lines of the stone-faced exhibition halls work very much in its favor. There's a brief explanatory pop-up but really everything is easy enough to figure out. Empty plinths await your efforts at collecting specimens. Read the plaques to see what's required. That's about it.

I bought the relevant writ and opened the New England wing, figuring that would be the easiest since it's the game's starter zone. I was happy to discover that I'd already completed a good deal of the necessary requirements for most of the would-be exhibits. I don't even remember TSW having an Achievement system but apparently it does and I've done some.

Some people have taken strongly against the only exhibit that comes with the museum - a giant statue of your own character. I loved it. First thing I did was take several selfies standing and sitting beside my giant doppleganger. 

The Gift Shop was a bit of a comedown. It's mostly empty. I think it fills up as you add exhibits but it looks a little sad right now with all its half-empty shelves. The few plainly carved wooden toys look positively pathetic.

One very odd duck was the postcard stand. The postcards themselves were fine - it was the prominent price sign on the top that struck a false note. Since when did any London museum price postcards in dollars?

That was about the only cavil I had although all those old masters on the walls seem a tad out of place, come to think of it. You'd think something by Dali or Hieronymus Bosch might be a better fit.

Other than that everything looks just as it ought. I look forward to happy times in the woods slaughtering  Ak'Abs and ferreting out snippets of Lore like some Lovecraftian version of Gerald Durrell. Oh, wait, no - he'd bring them back alive, wouldn't he? Not much chance of that!

New Horizons : EverQuest

Take a look at the screenshot above. What game might that be? The graphics suggest something quite elderly although with the ongoing fad for retro-visuals that might be a red herring. It's clearly something with a technological theme, possibly space-based, perhaps post-apocalyptic. Fallen Earth, maybe?

It's EverQuest. Well, of course it is. Okay, the title of the post might have given it away but anyway, I mean, doesn't that shot just scream "fantasy"?

Received wisdom has always been that the great majority of MMORPGs sit squarely in the "fantasy" genre but that's an assumption that has never stood up to even a passing appraisal. You'd have to define fantasy pretty broadly to fit in everything from airships to space travel to robots to motorbikes, any and all of which appear in most so-called "fantasy" MMOs.

You can put a lot of this down to gnomes. Actually, you can generally pin it on any race that has to stand on a box to do the washing-up. Short races make up for what they lack in physical strength and social standing by building their own mechanical friends and protectors.

New mount, new pet, new frock, new you!

Asura, goblins, gnomes, ratonga - they're all at it. Dwarves too, although they tend to claim to a spurious kind of craftsman's gravitas that places them above the dilettante tinkerers, at least in their own estimation. Do any games have a tall race as the primary purveyors of technological advancement in their world?

 It's been hard not to find myself musing along these lines while my Magician spent hour after hour in the clanking, whirring confines of Fortress Mechanotus and Gyrospire Beza. She even ventured into Meldrath's Majestic Mansion itself, the impressively riveted and excessively fortified home of Norrath's premier Mad Scientist, Meldrath The Malignant.

For days her bags filled up with gears and cogs as she forcibly dismantled clockwork after clockwork. She also compiled stacks of Gnome Meat and Gnome Blood from Meldrath's many minions. Disturbing work, what with her being a gnome herself. She'll have bad dreams.

So sorry, Madame. The Master is not at home. Please leave before I am forced to kill you.

These are delightful zones to solo. Well, perhaps not so much Meldrath's Mansion, described by Allakhazam as "One of the most challenging single-group zones ever introduced to EverQuest". That was then. Things have moved on but even so a maze of small rooms filled with crazed gnomes and tight corridors patrolled by anthropocidal clockworks is still no picnic.

So mainly I stayed outdoors, where Meldrath's landscape gardeners have laid out some huge squares and lawns, perfect for slaughter. Due, presumably, to some over-enthusiastic application of magitech explosives in a former experiment, most of Meldrath's holdings hang on unsupported islands in the sky. Access is by way of being shot from a cannon, although once you land there are some impressive elevators for more traditional access to the upper storeys.

The skies are clear, bright and all around. Just don't fall off the edge. Health and safety inspectors don't seem to have arrived in Norrath as yet. I fell off once but I got away with it, landing back in Dragonscale Hills on top of a pack of wild clockworks, which was generous by the standards of EQ. My mage survived the fall and killed the clockworks, which was a better outcome than I expected.

I also played my druid. I'd forgotten just how many trees there are in Kunark.

It's one thing, coming back to an MMO you haven't played for a few months or more. Imagine the culture shock coming back, as one person despairingly announced in General Chat while I was playing last night that he had done, after twelve years.

EverQuest hasn't only been around a very long time - it's been actively, some might say aggressively, updated for its entire run. The expansions my Magician is currently being sent to explore by the inexplicably well-funded and dubiously motivated Franklin Teek range from The Serpent's Spine (September 2006) to Veil of Alaris (November 2011).

Yes, I'm only five years behind! Although I've played reasonably actively if somewhat sporadically for the entire seventeen-year run of the game, there are whole expansions into which I have never set foot. Even among those that I know there are plenty of zones I have barely even visited let alone explored.

Valdeholm. Home of the Frost Giants and very poor xp.

Yesterday my Magician dinged 91. That's a level in not much more than a week, incredibly fast progress by my modern-day standard, soloing in EQ as I do for not much more than an hour or so each day. She was helped considerably by the current bonus XP event running over the 4th of July weekend. Interestingly, in EQ you don't apparently need to be an All Access member to enjoy this boon. In EQ2 you most definitely would.

Moving into the 90s is taking me to places I have never seen before. As I began by observing, this doesn't mean more castles, dragons and medieval villages as you might expect from a fantasy setting. The Buried Sea expansion seems to mix pirates with magitech, with some Ancient Egypt thrown in for spice. Secrets of Faydwer swings, like Faydwer always has, between the twin poles of sub-Tolkienian fantasy and quasi-steampunk clattering.

Seeds Of Destruction, of which I have seen more than enough by now, remakes an alternate version of Norrath under a gauzy green tint. Underfoot and House of Thule remain rather too tough to explore alone, although Franklin Teek likes to tell me otherwise.

The Crucial Three in Dawn over Beza

One of the best aspects of EverQuest is that those expansions will come to me in time. My Magician will grow and grow in strength and destructive power. Most importantly, so will her pets.

Yesterday she went to Argath, Bastion of Illdaera (no, means nothing to me either), the somewhat safe starting city from the 18th expansion to buy her level 91 spells, including a new Air pet. New pets are a big deal to a Magician and the Air pet especially so to a soloist. The 86th level pet has retired after long and exceptionally violent service. Presumably back to The Plane of Air, although Brell knows there's most likely not much in that place I couldn't solo these days.

Ahead lie another fourteen levels and four entirely untouched expansions. There's yet another in the works, name and theme as yet unannounced. Based on past experience it could be set just about anywhere. I should be about ready to take a look at it sometime around 2021-2022.

It's okay. I'm not in a hurry. Just keep a server up and I'll get there one day. Meanwhile I'll just keep looking around and enjoying the view. There's always something new to see. And something new to kill.

In Praise Of The Zerg: Rift, GW2

When some Ancient from the last century came up with the acronym MMORPG, the first two letters represented the then-astonishing ability of the internet to allow large numbers of individuals around the world to play together in the same game space. Back in those halcyon days, when everyone was making - or talking about making -  Virtual Worlds rather than mere games, to qualify for the double M club it was enough for large numbers simply to share the same imaginary milieu.

From the very early days, though, there was a drive to do more than just parcel the worlds up into pockets and have all the pockets talk to each other at a distance. EverQuest began with no formal raiding structure but players invented one of their own, bringing larger and larger gangs to clear entire zones in a rolling wave of terror. When SOE formalized matters with the Planes of Power expansion the raid size was set at 72, a number that sounds pretty massive even today.

My own first memory of truly huge conglomerations of players comes not from EQ but from Dark Age of Camelot, which debuted in 2001. Realm vs Realm saw the creation of massive forces that came together to siege or defend keeps. My PC could not handle those numbers. My experience of siege-play consisted mainly of extreme close-ups of the stretched and degraded textures of a game engine under stress as I pounded on a wooden door for what seemed like eternity.

For a while it seemed as though technology would fail us. I quit DAOC. EverQuest pared back its ambitious raids from 72 to 54 to 42. World of Warcraft set the bar at 40 and let it decline from there. It looked as though the concept of massiveness itself had been redefined.

I first noticed the tide begin to turn with the arrival of Rift. The early beta weekends were an exhilarating rush as Trion unveiled their USP - endless, rolling incursions and invasions that brought dozens, scores, hundreds of mobs down from the skies, demanding a co-ordinated response by similar numbers of players.

Someone's technology had improved. Ether I had a better PC or Trion had better developers. Whichever way round it was, for the first time I found myself caught up in truly overwhelming fantasy battles, surrounded by an army of allies, facing off against a horde of enemies, with fireworks and explosions detonating endlessly all around - and I could still move!

Rift changed everything. Since then I have felt the tug of massive-scale events like a comet feels the pull of the sun. No matter how far I retreat to my own, isolated solo instances, or potter alone in forgotten zones, the call of the crowd always draws me back to the core.

Apart from technological progress, at the heart of the ongoing, successful integration of very large scale events into the genre is the removal of the requirement for formal organization. Warhammer's Public Quests are usually quoted as Year Zero for the new age of automated socialization but for me it was Rift that set the pattern.

When it comes to reasons not to raid one of the biggest negative factors is the sheer time it takes to get things moving. I always liked the idea of raiding - conceptually. It was the experience as it played out in real time that drove me to find something more interesting to do - like sorting my bank vault or watching paint dry.

Those first beta weekends in Rift were a revelation. Instant raids, no drama! All the fun and none of the tears - of boredom. Instead of competitiveness there was camaraderie - a sense that we were all in it together, at least until we ran into those filthy Defiants/Guardians (delete as applicable).

Over time, for reasons that escape my ability to comprehend but which, no doubt, have their roots in finance, Trion chose to dilute and eventually dismantle the underlying raison d'etre of their flagship game. Instead of the magnificent turmoil of unpredictable, inescapable and never-ending planar invasions we moved to an on-demand service.

First we players were granted the ability to craft lures that allowed us to rip open the skies and bring down the invaders we wanted, when we wanted them and wherever it was most convenient. Then came Instant Adventures. All the action you can handle at the click of a button. 

A few nights ago, back in Rift after a long, long lay-off, fiddling with the UI trying to find out what stuff does, I found myself in a Raid. Just my Rogue and twenty or so of her closest complete friends she's never met before and never will again, throwing themselves like chaff into the blades of godlike creatures in the expectation of certain death, certain loot, certain XP.

I had no clue what I was doing. No-one spoke. Prompts appeared across the screen so I followed them. Hammy, post-modern voiceovers stripped away all conceivable veneers of belief. I died and died and died. Then I died some more. 

My roles had long since been revamped in my absence to the point where almost none of the icons on my hot bars did anything at all. My contribution over half an hour was limited to auto-attacking with a bow. No-one complained. No-one cared. No-one noticed.

As Rift slumped towards self-parody, GW2 snatched the baton and ran. The direction the race was beginning to take was not universally applauded. Many seemed to fear a breaking of bonds between the human beings behind the avatars to be inherent in the move towards a more informal, ad hoc social structure. 

In the event, and with uncomfortable irony, it was the more formal matchmaking mechanisms implemented by MMOs that tried to shore up those failing traditions that led to a sense of increasing alienation. Their structures seemed designed to create groups that never spoke, their ever-shifting places filled and re-filled by strangers who came together in silent purpose, never to meet again. 

It transpired that the hurly-burly of the new ad hoc orthodoxy, counter-intuitively perhaps, fostered an atmosphere much more conducive to a sense of hail-fellow-well-met, we're all in this together goodwill. On a good day, anyway.

As this all played out ArenaNet waxed hot and cold over their own supposedly unique selling point, the dynamic event. The years piled up while they played with the concept, sometimes successfully, often less so. 

For a time they seemed set on huge, seething, surging map-wide brawls, an approach that reached its apogee with the glorious invasions of Scarlet's armies and the epochal Fall of Lion's Arch. That era seemed to end as Living Story 2 was parcelled up in instances, while the chains of timed, tamed events made gameplay in Dry Top and Silverwastes feel as desiccated as the landscapes. 

That trend continued into the dripping jungles of Heart of Thorns. Would the story of Rift repeat itself?

Coming into 2016 it seemed likely that the last remnant of glory would fly in tatters over World versus World, where the long-maligned zergs still roamed like wounded dinosaurs, awaiting the end. And then, once more, the winds changed. 

As we wait in the foyer of Living World 3, the new, post-Johansen GW2 slowly takes shape. A path to the future begins to emerge, picking its way cautiously between the wild chaos of Scarlet and her all-conquering armies and the stately dance of Heart of Thorns. 

The preliminaries began slowly but they are gathering pace. A patchwork of smaller events is building a palimpsest. The bandits, the anomalies, the competing factions, they all arrive without much fanfare but decline to leave. Now we have The Running Man and to a resounding cheer the rolling PvE zerg is back. 

All the new events are neither entirely random nor set to a fixed pattern. They move from map to map at a defined pace but incorporate an element of randomness that sees Commanders hopping waypoints, trailing their squads behind them.

This is the iteration we were looking for. It bodes very well for the still-unannounced, mysterious second expansion, and for the equally unannounced, equally mysterious Living Story 3.

The destiny of the MMORPG lies in each and every direction. The genre's greatest strength and most difficult challenge is and always has been its malleability. More so than any other form of video game, MMOs seek to be all things to all players, all at once.

Well and good. But the true defining trope remains encapsulated in that first initial: M is for massive. Without that sense of scale everything else is a mere collage of identities drawn from elsewhere. 

Let's get bigger. And then bigger still.

Keep A-Knockin' And You Might Get In : Rift, ArcheAge

Well, that was unexpected.

Almost five years ago, when this blog began, Rift was my primary MMO. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta weekends, liked the game a lot, bought it at launch and played for a little over six months before we ran out of enthusiasm. By then I already had my sights set on GW2.

Rift turned out to be one of those MMOs whose luster dimmed with familiarity, something not helped by Trion's increasingly nervous attempts to hold on to a declining audience. There were gameplay and ruleset changes that made the game feel less and less unusual. The USP of huge PvE zergs fighting sky-ripping rifts or massive inter-planar invasions became diluted and diffuse.

Eventually there were server merges and that largely put the tin hat on things. I've found over the years that, when push comes to shove over making the hard decision to move on from an MMO, a server merge is usually enough to tip the balance. I suspect that's one reason developers now seem so determined to find any solution short of outright server merges when trying to manage a declining population.

Knee pads for dogs. It's the latest thing, don't you know?

Even on leaving we anticipated that, as has happened so many times before, we'd return for another run. We both pre-ordered the Storm Legion expansion in that belief but it turned out to be an expensive mistake. Storm Legion was so dull I barely lasted a week. Mrs Bhagpuss returned long enough to spend through the currency gifted her by the conversion to F2P but she spent her entire second run in Rift building houses behind the gates of her private Dimensions. Then she was gone, back to GW2.

For a while afterwards I kept the game on my hard drive and the icon on my desktop. I logged in very occasionally to look at something or other Trion had added. Finally the day came when I needed to make a little room for something new and, as I looked down the list of installed MMOs for the ones I felt I was least likely to play, Rift's name floated to the top.

Nothing, as they say, is forever. In recent weeks I've read some blogs and seen some screenshots that brought Rift back into the realms of possibility. I began to feel that annoying little itch. The final straw was Bhelgast, apologizing in advance because he thought he was going to start posting regularly about the game. If I'm going to keep reading about it I might as well at least have it installed. Or so I thought.

ArcheAge has the best maps.

So, I spent some considerable time yesterday, with no success whatsoever, attempting to re-install Glyph and get it to patch Rift. Glyph is a completely unnecessary, annoying front end that Trion insists its customers use to access any of its games. Games like Rift, ArcheAge and Trove, all of which I used to have installed and immediately accessible via their own desktop icons.

I have used Glyph before and it worked but now it doesn't. Not, at least, for Rift. Every attempt to run Rift brings up the 1012 error, for which extensive googling cannot provide a solution that works. I tried most of the possible fixes without success, including multiple uninstalls and re-installs, changes to processes and the sacrifice of a number of small woodland animals. Nothing worked.

In the end, in the interest of science, I thought I'd try installing one of Trion's other games, to see if the problem was generic to Glyph or specific to Rift. Which is how I found myself back in ArcheAge again for the first time since I stopped playing, suddenly, abruptly and unintentionally, over eighteen months ago.

Now, see, this is how direct action gets started.

The story of how I abandoned ArcheAge is the mirror image of what happened with Rift. There was no long, slow decline of interest; no hand-wringing or fraught, emotional leave-taking. Quite literally, one day I was playing and the next I wasn't.

The only explanation I can give is that I finished a session with my Labor Points pool filled for the first time ever. I had never actually used Labor Points for anything but I had been aware that they were a limited resource and apparently my subconscious mind translated that into a "win" condition. Yes, I know it makes no sense. I never claimed to be a rational decision-maker.

Anyway, it seems Glyph is perfectly happy to let me play ArcheAge, something I had absolutely no plans on doing, or at least not right now. ArcheAge itself seems equally confused by the turn events have taken.

On first log in all the introductory cut scenes played, which is par for the course on a fresh install for any MMO. My stalled level 28 character was safe at character select so I logged in expecting to find her wherever I'd left her, somewhere level appropriate, but no, nothing so obvious.

I don't remember tree houses...I want one.

Instead I found her at the very start of the game, facing the NPC who begins the main questline. Which he proceeded to do. Confused, I completed the first couple of "go see this guy up the road, he has a job for you" quests before deja vu took hold.

A quick check of my quest journal showed that I had indeed completed these quests already. Taking inventory of my...well, of my Inventory...I found all my quest rewards and other gear from the last 28 levels present and correct. I had my horse and my two dogs and a full set of blue armor.

So I hit the road. By the time I logged out I'd ridden as far as Crescent Throne. I didn't pass many player characters along the way. I overtook one wagon and found disturbing evidence the lack of animal health and welfare regulations in the village of Wardton but apart from that I might have been in a single-player game.

Log in to take a screenshot, it's midnight. Is there some kind of law?

I don't imagine I'll be playing ArcheAge much but then I didn't imagine I'd be playing it at all so who knows? It might be interesting to see how it compares with Black Desert, another one I'm not playing. ArcheAge is certainly much more of a traditional tab target, hotbar MMO under the thin sandbox skin, which is probably a better fit for me, but Black Desert is quirkier, weirder and more intriguing. Plus, Black Desert horses handle like ferraris, while AA nags corner like milk floats. That's a factor.

As I type this, though, I am back where I intended to be all along - in Rift. This morning I fired up Steam and installed it that way.

It still didn't go smoothly. I got another error, a different one, and at one point my entire monitor went completely black and I couldn't do anything at all. I thought I'd have to switch the PC off at the wall but first I tried hitting all the keys I could think of and after I pounded on Escape a few times the original cinematic played so I let it run and sat and watched. Apparently that was the logjam because after that everything worked.

Telara here I come!