Relocation, Relocation, Relocation

Meet Mitsu, aka The Ratonga Formerly Known As Lana. Last time we saw her, she was trying to make up her mind where to go to avoid being dumped onto Antonia Bayle, when Kaladim closes down.

After I wrote that post I spent a fair while considering the options but in the end I decided to send her to Isle of Refuge on the grounds that it was a relatively new server with a ruleset I hadn't explored before. Even though I thought I'd done enough research before making my choice, it's possible I should have done more.

For one thing, I didn't realise until after I arrived that it was going to be a one-way trip. As the original press release puts it 

When Isle of Refuge launches, there will be no transfers allowed on or off Isle of Refuge. This is a new Norrathian community being formed, and we want you all to have the opportunity to build relationships and a thriving player economy. There are no plans to EVER allow transfers off the Isle of Refuge server, though we may open transfers TO this server at a future date.

Dragging out that creaky old metaphor one more time, Isle of Refuge is the Hotel California of servers; you can check in but you can never leave.

The reason for the lockdown is the Free Trade ruleset. Isle of Refuge allows almost everything to be bought and sold, including all kinds of Look-at-me! Aren't-I-amazing? items, the ones that mark a certain kind of player out as a Very Big Deal indeed, at least in their own head-canon. Can't have just anyone strutting around the Freeport docks like they're someone, without knowing they've paid their dues, can we?

Which is fine, honestly. I'll take the hit, even though I'm not going to be the one wearing any of that stuff, I can't see myself wanting to buy a transfer token to move a low-level character from one EverQuest II server to another, anyway. What would be the point?

"And see you're off the streets by curfew... or else!"

There's another aspect of the relocation I'd failed to consider. One that could prove more significant. To quote from the press release once again

To play on the Free Trade Server, you must be an All Access Member.

Which I am, at the moment. And again, it's not something I have any particular plans to change. I've been paying a subscription for EQII since the day it launched. For five years before, too, if comes to that. I'll probably still be subbing as long as the Isle of Refuge server lasts, unless it outlasts me, which I guess is not that much of a leap to imagine.

Of course, while I'll most likely keep a subscription going, who's to say it'll always be on this account? I've swapped before. It could happen again. That would leave the erstwhile Lana stranded, peering hopefully from character select, waiting for a call that could never come. I do still log in characters on my unsubbed accounts from time to time, but only those on the mainline servers like Skyfire or Maj`Dul.

But then, as the poets love to tell us, 'twas ever thus. Lana on Kaladim was as partitioned as Mitsu on Isle of Refuge. You need an All Access account to play on any of the special ruleset servers. No change there. I don't know why I mentioned it.

And anyway it's done. For well or ill, Mitsu is on Isle of Refuge. She's going nowhere. Except, maybe she is. Maybe she's going forward. I haven't quite decided.

Excuse me, but do you have a room I could rent?

I was excited to play her when Kaladim began. It was a busy, bustling new server experience with everyone starting from scratch and pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. I had fun. Only my fun was much slower than everyone else's. 

By the time Lana had clawed her way to level 20 the bubble was somewhere up by the cap. I lost traction and fell away, returning briefly when the timer got to expansion #3, Echoes of Faydwer, the first with new, low-level content. Another half dozen levels and I was gone again.

Looking back, two things kept me connected to the character; firstly her look, which I'd crafted more carefully than most, keeping her in a full set of very low-level chainmail that made her look as though she'd stepped off the boat that very day, topped off with a spectacular flashy helmet from one of the summer holiday events. Secondly and perhaps more potently, there was her name: Lana.

The look she still has. The name is lost. I knew it would never survive the move to another server, any server. You can guarantee any short, familiar real-world name will have been taken years ago, let alone one freighted with import like this one. There are a lot of famous Lanas to model a character on.

I might have been miffed about that had I not had another Great Idea. I'd just finished Supercute Futures Two and written a post about how very much I'd enjoyed it. I've always been all about naming my characters after fictional favorites, even though almost every EULA strictly forbids it. Fortunately, my tastes drift so far from the median there's precious little chance of anyone noticing, far less reporting my choices.

The question was whether to go for Mitsu or Mox. Easily answered. Mox was taken. That suited me. I prefered Mitsu. Maybe some day I'll get one of those Mercenaries you can rename and call her Mox. That would be too cool. 

It's not as nice as my old place but it'll do... for now.

So there I was, with a character, a name, a server and maybe even a goal. The only thing I was missing was a home. Except, wait... didn't I say something in that last post about how Lana had a very nice room, all decorated to her taste, back on Kaladim?  

Actually, no, I didn't. Or rather I did, but in a paragraph I took out in the edit because when I logged in to take a screenshot of the place I couldn't find it. Only an empty inn room.

It took me a while to figure out why that was. I was sure I remembered placing a bunch of holiday rewards beside the furniture Lana had crafted for herself. So where was it?

I'll tell you where it was. It was in her room in Temple Street, that's where. When Kaladim launched, one of the unusual features of the server was the partial restoration of the original racial neighborhoods. For years they'd been unavailable, converted into quest-and-combat instances, only to be entered by those on one of the racial questlines. You couldn't live there any more. 

Except on Kaladim, you could and I did. That's where Lana's room was. And now she's Mitsu on Isle of Refuge that's very much where it's not. Mitsu has an almost empty inn room to keep the Freeport militia from running her in for vagrancy and that's all.

Well... the inn room and her choice of a bunch of free, Prestige homes, all available in /claim. In fact, she could have any home of her choice, if she cares to dig into the communal account slush fund. There's almost 30k in Daybreak Cash in there. 

Now she's on Isle of Refuge all the chains are broken. There's no reason for her to act like it's 2005 any more. The new server doesn't care and now neither do I. She can't share in the considerable largesse of her elders on Skyfire - shared banks aren't cross-server - but anything available on an account level is hers for the taking.

Mitsu is rich. Beyond her dreams. Will it go to her head? 

We'll see.

Street Life

I wasn't going to post today. I thought about it. I didn't have anything I particularly cared to say. Then, it was getting along around nine, I decided I didn't want to skip a day, after all.

I've been playing Backbone since I wrapped up Nine Noir Lives and I've taken a few shots. It's an extraordinarily beautiful world. I thought maybe I'd share.

It's not just a rainslick surface gloss. Each city block reels with depth. Whole lives pass in the glimpse of an open window. Every shopfront tells its story.

Paging through the shots, I wish now I'd taken more. I was too busy watching this world go by. These streets. Filled with life. The city pulses with it. Start taking pictures, you might never stop.

Behind the doors there's more. Much more. Lives lived in the evidence of their own, thick past. If I could I'd show you but I let it all wash over me. I followed the story down and now it's all gone, washed away.

On the strip, everything is neon. Reflections gleaming in the rain.  So bright.

Everywhere, dreams for sale. In plush seats. In smoke-filled bars. In paper twists. Secrets and lies, promises and horrors.

Behind the lights there's a darkness. Broken parks, bleak alleyways, lost hopes, empty bottles, hard times. And in that darkness, only chance and circumstance. Not choice. Never choice.

After what I've seen I need some air.

Feel the wind across the water. Let it clear my head.

Soon enough, it'll all start over. The city never sleeps.

But I do. 

Sweet dreams.

Once More, With Filling

A genuine Friday Grab-Bag this week, I think. Not some music or TV post trying to pass. The plan is to keep them all short but I reserve the right to extend and also repeat, as in come back another time with a full post. I might be glad of a few of these topics if next week's slow for news.

Renewal of Interest

First up, a return to EverQuest II. Yes, well, I never actually left, of course. I just haven't been playing all that much for a few weeks. Yesterday's EQ-oriented post reminded me of a couple of things. Firstly, that I still really enjoy both the EverQuest games and secondly that I'm still paying for them. 

Not only do I have an annual All Access subscription, the only one I've kept for any publisher, but I also bought the latest EQII expansion, Renewal of Ro, back in December. By this point, I'd normally have completed both the Adventure and Tradeskill storylines on several characters and be pretty much done until the next big update. Not so this year. I need to get back to it if I'm going to get my money's-worth.

As of yesterday, I was only about halfway through the Adventure timeline on my first character and I hadn't even started the Tradeskill signature on any of my half-dozen max-level crafters. The Tradeskill questline is usually much faster to complete as well as more relaxing and less demanding so on my return I decided to begin there instead of picking up where I left off with my Berserker. He was just about to go into a solo dungeon last time I played him. That was also why I stopped. 

Crafting my way to success feels a lot more like fun just now. I finished the Tradeskill line this morning. I guess it took me a couple of hours. Technically, I haven't quite finished it yet because I need to do fifteen of the repeatable public research missions to unlock flying on my Sage, the character I chose to go first, but as far as storyline goes, I'm done. And it was great.

As a player of multiple characters in EQII, I'd happily swap the long Adventure questline, which will probably take me fifteen hours or so at least, for the much shorter Tradeskill version.  I could take all my characters through the craft quest it in around about the same time as one adventurer and it would be more fun, too. 

Back to Collage

Remember Disco Elysium? It was pretty good to begin with and it gets better all the time because Za/Um can't seem to leave it alone. They keep tinkering with it, adding new bits and pieces, to the point where a second run is starting to tempt even me, someone who generally can't be bothered to play through games twice to see what would happen if I made different choices.

That said, the latest update doesn't ask that I play the game at all. It's a typically left-field idea from the developers called Collage Mode, which "grants you full access to characters, environments and props from the game, along with filters and frames". 

What it does is allow you to select character models, backgrounds and filters from a menu, then slap them all together however you like. You can also give the characters dialog of your own and frame the whole lot to look like a set-piece suitable for illustrating a blog post or a magazine article. I imagine you could make comic strips or even a graphic novel if you had the patience.

I spotted it last night, just before I logged out of Steam and couldn't resist fiddling around with it for half an hour. The new mode is free to to anyone who owns the game, which itself is on sale for a massive 75% off right now. If you don't have it in your Steam library, you should probably go do something about that. 

Is it Spring already?

Ah, well now. That's the question, isn't it? As the Met Office explains "How you define the first day of spring depends on whether you are referring to the astronomical or meteorological spring". Astronomical Spring begins on March 20th but Metereological Spring started over two weeks ago, back on March 1st.

Valve clearly can't make its mind up because Steam's first ever Spring Sale opened yesterday, which is neither one thing nor the other. As the video, which acknowledges the confusion, explains, the sale runs until March 23rd, which is indisputably Spring, however you count it.

I had a quick skim through the offers this morning. There seem to be a lot of bargains. I might even buy something. Spring is possibly the worst time to start selling games, though, wouldn't you think? Just when the weather's clearing up and the nights are getting lighter. That's probably why Steam has never done a Spring Sale before. 

Game Over!

Speaking of buying games on Steam, I actually finished one of the ones I bought last month. Nine Noir Lives took me just over seventeen hours by Steam's count, although you can knock a couple off for the times I left the game idling while I had tea or took the dog out. It also crashed on me twice, something I can hardly remember any point and click adventure ever doing, and since it only seems to autosave when you quit to the menu, I had to redo a substantial amount of dialog both times, adding to the running time.

I'll probably do a whole post about this one and all the other noirish adventure games featuring anthropomorphic animals I've played. It's getting to be a lot and I'm starting to wonder why it's such a popular sub-genre, at least with indie developers. 

 

For now, I'll just say that I enjoyed the game, for the most part. The humor can be hit or miss but I found it generally more amusing than not. The voice acting can be overly arch on occasion but that's hardly inappropriate given the setting. Mostly the lines are well-written and land solidly.

Visually it's pleasing in the main but the cut scenes have a weirdly unfinished feel to them, almost as though they're placeholders waiting for the real artist to come along and finish things up.

Mechanically, I found the puzzles fair enough. There were a few occasions where I knew what to do but couldn't figure out how to do it, which I much prefer to having no clue at all. I used a walkthrough on several occasions but not for much more than a nudge in the right direction.  

The real strength of the game is the characters, all of whom are strongly individuated. If most of them are one trick ponies, which they are, then at least it's generally a good trick. I particularly liked the existential Russian bouncer and the effete Henchtigers but every character had something going for them.

All in all, I'd firmly recommend Nine Lives Noir to afficionados of the furry detective point&click and mildly to anyone else.

Finish With A Song

It's just as well I wasn't relying on a roundup of what I've been listening to this week to fill my Friday posting quota. I've earmarked precisely two songs for consideration since the last time I posted. It's not that I haven't been listening to a bunch of new tunes; it's just that none of them have been anything special.

This is, though. It's the third single from Lana del Rey's upcoming album, Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. Added to the first two, the title track and the sublime A&W, it makes the strongest imaginable case for Lana's ninth album being yet another classic, her fourth such in a sequence beginning with the monumental Norman Fucking Rockwell. She's already my favorite songwriter and performer of the 21st century and if she carries on like this she's going to end up being my favorite of all time. 

The new song's called The Grants and it's about family, Elizabeth Grant being Lana's birth name. I'm guessing that's her dad, Rob Grant, on piano, although the surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry that's already up for the track doesn't mention it. It'd be a shame if it wasn't, though, wouldn't it?

That's Friday. I'm out of here.

The 24 Year News Cycle

It's been a very long time since I last logged into EverQuest but I'm by no means done with the game. I even have a return strategy of sorts.  

Daybreak's free to play offer usually rolls along a few expansions behind the current endgame. Currently it's at 2019's Torment of Velious, which was added last summer. This year, most likely, the F2P package will expand to include 2020's Claws of Veeshan and then in 2024 non-paying players should gain access to 2021's Terror of Luclin, the last expansion to raise the level cap. It went up by five levels to 120. Free access to that expansion would be a natural re-entry point. 

I still enjoy leveling in EQ. It's my main motivation for taking another turn around the Norrathian block, other than making new characters on new servers, which I also still enjoy once in a while. The last time I played for an extended period was when I was raising my Magician to the then-cap of 115. It was quite hard work but I had fun doing it.

Of course, I could just buy the latest expansion, which would include every previous one, but that would require both a degree of commitment and a level of impatience for playing EQ that I simply don't have any more. I don't feel that way about any mmorpg these days, I'm happy to say.  

Wilhelm recently posted his thoughts about the success or otherwise of the genre's move to a broadly free to play model and I commented that, for me at least, the change has been a complete success. One of the things I most appreciate about it has been the way it's reduced my desire to play any one particular game. I feel now that I can move comfortably from one to another at will, always knowing I can drop back in on a whim at any time. It's an approach that fits my mercurial personality a lot more comfortably than the old lock-in ever did.

I'm very happy to wait a year or three to get to content I'm interested in because I have many other options now. I also feel reasonably confident most of the games will still be there when I feel like coming back to them. The flip side of the coin we were tossing around in a recent post on the extraordinary length of time it takes to develop an mmorpg is that once the games are out finally there they tend to stick around. Mmorpgs do go dark all the time but a lot more seem to just keep on going, EverQuest being the prime example.

EverQuest will twenty-four years old this month. There are going to be some celebrations, naturally, although I don't think anyone's going to claim any special significance for the twenty-fourth anniversary. That's going to come next year, when the game turns twenty-five.

A quarter of a century in continuous operation is a real milestone. It's a given that no-one on the team that made the original game had any idea it would last this long. As I remember it, John Smedley himself only gave it three years, with an outside chance of five, which is how we came to have the sequel, EverQuest II as early as 2004. Sony Online Entertainment believed they'd need a follow-up to capitalize on the unexpected success of the original a lot sooner than actually proved to be the case.

EQII itself hits a very significant marker next year, turning twenty years old in December 2024, meaning Daybreak is going to have to celebrate two major anniversaries in one calendar year. The EverQuest Show asked Darkpaw's's Head of Studio Jenn Chan about it in an interview I read yesterday.

When it comes to anything that hasn't already been announced in the 2023 Roadmap, I think it would be fair to say that Jenn is keeping her cards very close to her chest. I've seldom heard anyone stonewall so determinedly, although she really didn't have to try too hard, given the exceptionally gentle and respectful questioning she was facing. That's not to say there was nothing of substance in the interview. On the contrary, if you're the kind of person who revels in technical detail concerning the back-end operations that keep a game built on a decades-old code base viable, there's plenty to hold your interest.

She goes into the backgrounds of both the recent switch to 64-bit, the Direct X 11 port and the upcoming re-write of the UI Engine, explaining why they were deemed necessary and how they'll improve the player experience. It's useful knowledge and as an executive who's arrived in her post via a route involving more of a technician's journey than most, her enthusiasm for revealing the mechanics of the process is plain to see.

Gently pressed to offer up some firm information on either the imminent arrival of new TLP (Time-Locked Progression) and TLE (Time-Locked Expansion) servers for EQ and EQII respectively, she's much less forthcoming. She confirms the TLE server will use a PvP ruleset, with a few tweaks: "it will be a similar experience to Tarinax on Day 1, but with the PVP writs and server specific rewards. So it will be starting from fresh, we’re going back to classic to the Shattered Lands era." Not much there we didn't already know and probably nothing to trouble most EQII players other than the PvP hardcore.

For EQ's new TLP server, due in May, there seems to be something a lot more significant yet to be revealed: "it’s going to be an experimental year. We’re trying something that we’ve never really done before, and if it works out, we may introduce some of it to live servers. But that’s all I’m going to tell you right now until we released the big article with all the details." It's an announcement of an announcement. Wake me up when we get there.

As for the plans for next year's big anniversaries, Jenn has little to offer beyond a commitment to make it worth the wait:

EQ Show: That’s a big year. Are you guys planning to celebrate this big milestone?

JCHAN:
YES.

EQ Show:
That’s all you’re going to give me?

JCHAN:
That’s all I’m going to give you for now.

EQ Show:
Is it a big plan or a little plan?

JCHAN:
There are big plans.

After that, it's the usual retrenchment into praise for what the franchise is really all about (Spoiler - it's "The Community". It's always "The Community" with some people, isn't it?) and some stuff about the long-delayed EQII Swag Store, of all things. I'm guessing that's a community thing too. It's certainly nothing I've ever given a moment's thought.

Finally, Fading, the EverQuest Show's interviewer, gets around to asking Chan the question we've all been waiting for; the question everyone wants a real answer to but which no-one ever gets: “What are the plans to expand the franchise?” Do we get a meaningful answer for once?

Do we hell. 

CHAN:
So we’re definitely always talking about expanding the franchise, expanding the IP. But we’re just not ready to announce anything just yet. But definitely some serious conversations going on right now.

I guess it's better than no conversations going on right now, eh? Or frivolous ones about things that are never going to happen in a million years. It's not like that's ever happened before, right?

Anyway, there's the interview, for what it's worth. I confess I only read the transcript. I didn't watch the video. I don't have time for that. I'm not Tobold, ffs! So if anything's revealed in the nuances of conversation, I'll have missed it.

The whole thing did have one effect on me, other than to create a sense of generalized, non-specific anticipation; it made feel like logging into EverQuest again.I guess we can chalk that up as another win for Jenn Chan. She may not tell us much but what she does, she sells better than most.

Busy Doing Nothing. Again!

After yesterday's long, meaningful post, here comes today's short, meaningless one. That's what I call progress!

And progress is what it's all about. Well, progress of a kind. There haven't been all that many mmorpgs where the number next to my character has gone into three figures and in the few I can think of, EverQuest and EverQuest II being the ones that come immediately to mind, it took me years and years to get that far, not to mention a good deal of concerted effort at times.

In Noah's Heart, getting to Level 100 took me just over seven months, with pretty much no effort at all. 

Oh, it took some work at the start, back when I was treating it just like any other mmorpg. I followed the main storyline, took all the missions, cleared all the instances, explored all the maps... generally ran around like a good adventurer, doing whatever the NPCs or my own whims suggested. It was fun.

I still do that, on occasion. Last night, for example, I found and opened every chest in Olmec Rainforest, a large island between Innis Volcano and the Tasim Basin. A week or two back I did a chunk more of the MSQ, which I'd paused back before Christmas so my levels could catch up. 

I'd gotten myself into a state where I was underlevelled for the content, which must prove I'd been concentrating too much on the story, I suppose, although I didn't realize at the time that's what I'd been doing. The story is gibberish, partly because that's just what it is but mostly because the translation is so terrible it's hard to tell what's going on most of the time but I was still curious to see what was going to happen next.

Despite the shortcomings of the storyline and the exigiencies of the translation, there's a perfectly playable mmorpg in there, somewhere, but as I discovered after the first two or three months, you don't need to bother with it to keep on levelling. All you have to do is log in in regularly. Maybe not even that.

Noah's Heart has a passive xp system that trundles along behind the scenes no matter what you do - or don't do. It even seems to tick over when you're offline. Every day, when I log in, a whole load of red dots tell me all the things I'm entitled to claim and one of them is something called "Trial Rewards".

Of course, since this is Noah's Heart we're talking about, nothing can have one, consistent name. When you open the window, you'll find the word "Trial" has been replaced by the much more revealing "Idle" and as you can see, most of the presents you get for doing sod all are a bunch of xp points for some of the key progression systems - character, phantom and constellation levels. 

In this way, I've been leveling up steadily even on the days when I haven't been doing anything much at all. But it doesn't stop there. At a bare minimum, each day I complete enough Activities to make sure I get my maximum 200 Active Points. I need to do that to get the tokens to continue the Seasonal storylines, something that started out as relatively coherent, significantly detailed and rather entertaining sub-plots but which are now little more than poorly-disguised, scarcely comprehensible time-fillers. And yet I still do them. 

Pretty much every one of those Activities also gives xp. They give a load of other rewards too but if I was to start trying to explain all of those we'd be hear 'til next week. Even though the amount of xp needed per level has been truly enormous for months now, this steady drip drip drip of xp will wear that mountain down.

For a while there also appeared to be a cap on the level range of the specific server you played on and that may well still be the case but if it is I've never quite managed to catch up to it to find out and there's not much chance I ever will, since it appears to be an ever-moving target. I saw someone on my server a while back, who was Level 105, I think. It may have been Level 103. It was definitely over a hundred.

Now I come to think of it, though, I'm not sure where I would have seen someone's level. It isn't visible either over the heads of characters in the world or even on inspection. It must have been in the Fantasy Arena, a hands-off, automated PvP battleground, where two teams of four, each comprised of a player-character and three Phantoms, duel it out. Your level and that of your Phantoms is clearly displayed there and marks a significant element in matchmaking.

Now that I've turned 100 myself, the really strange thing I've discovered is that the level I see against my name on my character sheet isn't "100" at all. It's the delightfully ethereal Transcender 3. Whether this is an entirely new, post-100 leveling system or merely another example of the game's obsession with having at least two names for everything I guess I'm only going to find out by playing.

Or, indeed, by not playing, since it seems I'll level up whether I do or not. Given the choice, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, I guess I might as well play.

Possession Is Nine-Tenths Of The Fun

In former days, I used to pontificate - not infrequently - on general topics and trends affecting the mmorpg genre. I guess we all did, even though, by the time I came to the table, many of those themes and arguments had already been reduced to the blandest of mush by repeated rehashing. Still, that never seemed to stop anyone coming back for yet another helping. All you had to do was refer to the dead, dry horsemeat you were chewing in an arch, ironic or just plain world-weary way, so as to let people know you knew how long past its use-by date it was and you were good for another mouthful.

These days I see very few posts like that. The veterans seem to have worn out the tread on those tires at last and the newcomers have entirely different interests and concerns. This part of the blogosphere, once a support system for people with a very similar, niche set of interests - mmorpgs, basically - some time ago morphed into something much broader and - if we're objective about it - more interesting.

For years there's been an increased focus on general gaming and wider entertainment concerns, with reviews and opinions of music, movies, books, sports and TV all increasingly finding their place. There's also been a great deal more openness, a greater willingness to share personal details on everything from from lifestyle and employment to mental and physical health. 

Back when I was only reading blogs, before I had one of my own, I'd have been very hard to put to tell you anything about most of the bloggers I followed beyond what mmorpgs they played and possibly their gender and approximate age. Now the whole weblog thing has turned full circle, it seems, bringing back the original idea of a personal journal everyone can read. 

It's hard to say if I prefer it that way or if I've just become used to it. I think the former. There's only so many times you can fulminate over the way instant travel or flying mounts ruin the whole concept of a virtual world or argue passionately in favor or against the importance of the leveling process. These and dozens more shibboleths that seemed like hills worth dying on a decade ago now barely register as speed bumps in the rush to get to the good stuff, whatever that might be.

All of which brings me nicely, if circuitously, to my topic for the day: getting to the good stuff. Anyone would think I planned it this way. I didn't, in case anyone was in any doubt. I just type and the magic happens.

By "Getting to the good stuff" in this case, I mean getting your hands on a playable game. At all. I was pushed down this line of thinking by a couple of things that came my way recently. One was this news item at MassivelyOP. In it, Marc Jacobs, CEO of City State, the company producing long-delayed RvR mmorpg Camelot Unchained, boldly states

 "...we are almost at where I wanted us to be by summer ... we’re ahead of schedule. I really couldn’t be happier about that if I tried."

I don't always see eye to eye with MOP's editorial policies but one thing I do have to give them credit for is the way they consistently hold statements like this up to scrutiny by simply appending a clear and evidenced timeline giving context and history to whatever's being claimed. As the list of links at the bottom of the short piece confirms, Camelot Unchained, which began as a Kickstarted project, has been in development for a decade now and in closed beta for five years. If that's "ahead of schedule" I think I need a new dictionary.

I didn't back CU, luckily for me but I did back another forever game (As in it's taking forever to get finished.) Ashes of Creation. I didn't just back it, I backed it twice; I bought in once for myself and once for Mrs. Bhagpuss. 

The Kickstarter for that one wasn't quite as long ago as the one for Camelot Unchained, just a mere five and a half years. AoC, however, doesn't even have the fig-leaf of a closed beta to hide behind. As the Release Schedule on the wiki says, that's still "To be announced".

Given that, when I signed up for this thing back in October 2017, the Kickstarter gave an "Estimated Delivery" date of December 2018, I think it's safe to say the studio behind the game, Intrepid, overshot the mark somewhat. Undershot. Whatever.

If there's one thing you can say for Intrepid, though, it's that they communicate. There's no hint or suggestion that work on the project isn't ongoing. I get constant emails about the progress they're making. It never seems to be much although you wouldn't know it from how enthusiastic they all sound..

The latest in an endless series of relentlessly upbeat messages, informing us all how well the game is doing behind those closed doors, bangs on at inordinate length about the wonders of the UI they're building. It's not the most glamorous of topics to begin with but as Heartless Gamer puts it on his newly-revitalized blog, 

"As with the recent class updates the UI update this month was a typical lackluster update.  A developer was brought on and talked about their team and their approach. Then some screenshots were shown of different UI components which were followed by yet more screenshots of sample user interface windows which were followed by... more screenshots.  !  I don't think once during the UI update we saw an actual functioning UI overlaying a game being played."

It's too true. I barely scan AoC updates any more because they go on forever and tell us nothing. By comparison, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, for example, is an open book. They post massively long updates, too, but in them you can watch people playing the game for hours at a stretch and even at the pre-alpha stage it very much looks like a bunch of people in an mmorpg having a great time.

From watching a handful of Pantheon videos I know it's definitely a game I want to play. From watching the dozens of videos Intrepid have sent me, I still can't say with any confidence what sort of a game it even is! And that's a major problem.

I signed up for the AoC Kickstarter for two reasons: firstly, it was being made by a team filled with people who'd worked on other mmorpgs I'd enjoyed and secondly because the game was supposedly due out in a year or so. Not being completely naive, I never expected a finished game by Christmas but I did think I might get one inside three years, given that would be triple the time they said it would take.

Obviously, I know better now. Pretty much no Kickstarted mmorpg comes out within hailing distance of its estimated delivery date and plenty of them either never arrive at all or limp out the gate in such a spavined, emaciated form they're dead on their feet in a couple of months and just plain dead soon after.

If it was just a matter of patience, that would be problem enough but these kinds of timescales have much deeper implications than mere fractiousness over not getting something you've paid for when someone said you'd get it. Lead times spiraling from years into decades inevitably run up against two much less transient issues: growth and mortality.

I'm not the same person I was five years ago, when I put my money down for a new mmorpg called Ashes of Creation. No-one is. Back then, I was still excited by the genre, keen to see every new thing as soon as I could get my foot on the bandwagon. Now? Not so much. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, for whom I bought a copy and with whom I was planning on playing, has moved on from the hobby altogether. She prefers crafting in real life to crafting in virtual worlds now and she currently plays no mmorpgs. She says she'll pick it up again some day but even if she does I'm fairly sure Ashes of Creation won't be the game to bring her back. To different degrees, we've both aged past the window of opportunity that Kickstarter appeared to open.

And we're still ageing. I'll be 65 this year. At the glacial rate of development Intrepid are employing I will certainly be retired by the time the game comes out (Assuming it ever does). Even trusting in continued health sufficient to allow me to play it when and if that happens, at current rates of progress I could quite possibly be in my seventies. Am I still going to be interested then?

And it's not just because I'm old. If games take a decade to arrive, people who were interested in them in their teens, twenties or thirties are even more likely to have moved on from the hobbies of their youth by the time they get that once-coveted invite to closed beta. At least I have the advantage of being set in my ways!

It seems to me that the lead times for mmorpgs have spiraled out of all reason. Star Citizen sucks all the air out of the room in any discussion of delayed development but it's only the most outrageous example of a development trend that's now so entrenched people don't even bother to complain about it all that much any more. It's no wonder so many games go into Early Access or eternal beta while unfinished but approximately playable. Just look at the alternative.

In the end, the question isn't why so many developers start taking money for games that are clearly still under development. So long as it's done in good faith, with the team continuing to work on bringing the title up to code, I don't have an issue with that. It's really no different from back when mmorpgs would launch with a nominally playable base game and charge a subscription to play it while all the polish and most of the content got added in patches, month after month after month.

No, my complaint is with the companies who keep their doors firmly bolted shut after taking money up front, issuing endless, relentlessly cheery progress bulletins but never actually coming up with anything anyone can damn well play. As far as AoC goes, in all honesty I'd almost rather they'd kept the Battle Royale spin-off they were so criticized for wasting time on and junked the mmo. At least I got to play that.

It's not even a matter of a refund. After five years it's a sunk cost I don't care about getting back. Even if it was an option, I couldn't be bothered to do the paperwork. The point is, when and if the game ever does reach second closed beta or whatever my designated opt-in point might be, I can pretty much guarantee I won't care enough to do more than make a character, write a post or two and forget about it again. Always assuming I'm still capable of using a mouse and keyboard by then.

After years of this kind of thing, which seemed so exciting once upon a time, I find I hugely prefer games that just appear out of nowhere, arriving in a flurry of publicity around a launch that's only weeks away. That does seem to be an incipient trend of its own now. I can only hope it continues and grows. 

The two new mmorpgs I've most enjoyed in the last year - Chimeraland and Noah's Heart - fit that bill. I was playing both a matter of months after I first learned of their existence. They may not be as ambitious or full-featured as Camelot Unchained and Ashes of Creation but they're here and they work. I'll take that over any number of unfulfilled promises any day.

There's One In Every Week

Thank God it's Friday! Yeah, except not really. My working week is kind of inside-out these days; every other week, Friday is my Monday and every week Monday is my Saturday. Or something. Anyway, Friday is not the guaranteed pick-me-up it's meant to be and especially not this Friday, when I'm finishing up two-and-a-half weeks off work to go back tomorrow (For a whole two days - it's great being semi-retired!)

Anyway, I won't be posting over the weekend unless something momentous happens that I just can't leave alone. I don't have a lot in the pending folder to work with (Or a pending folder, come to think of it...) so I guess I'm just going to have to wing it. Again.

I do have some music saved up, I'm happy to say. All stuff I came across since the last "What I've Been Listening To" post, which doesn't necessarily mean it's new in the sense of not having been around for a while, just new to me. And, I hope, you. There's a lot of music out there. I don't imagine anyone's keeping up with it all in real time.

One thing I might mention is that, when I post music I've been listening to, it's increasingly the case that I've been listening to it mostly as I write the post and then later because I've written the post. I tend to find the songs, listen to them once then stash them away and it's only when I come to go through the folder that I listen to them again, often several times, as I decide which to use and where to put them.

And then, when I've published the post, I'll usually revisit it a few more times and watch the videos again just to enjoy them. It's turned into a chicken eating its own tail affair, where I search out songs so I have material so I can say in the post that I've been listening to it and the act of doing so makes it true. On the other hand, I've been doing all of that bar the actual post part for a decade and more, so I guess it's just how I listen to music now.

Enough curtain-lifting. Let's rock!

I Hate Driving In The City - GeeTee

There's a higher-than-average percentage of punk in this post. No idea why. Just what came up, I guess. I certainly didn't go looking for it. 

Even though I was a punk back when it was the new thing, I very much fell out with the sound, if not the ethos, after a while. By the nineties I couldn't really listen to much of the old stuff without cringeing. Over time, thankfully, balance re-asserted itself and now I like to imagine I appreciate each band and track on its individual merits. Imagination is a wonderful thing.

What does very much surprise me is how persistent that core mid-70s punk sound has become. I keep reading about how guitar bands are dead and no-one under fifty listens to this stuff any more and yet all my feeds keep filling up with teens and twenty-somethings making the same old racket. I mean, this specific sound is around forty-five years old, now. It would be like me, when I was in a band in my late teens, playing swing. Of course, to play jazz you actually have to be able to play. To play punk... well, that was kind of the point. I guess that still carries.

Help Me, I'm Gay - Lambrini Girls

Then again, being able to play never hurt anyone. The bass on this is fantastic. I love the dropout (Starts at around 2.03.) when the rhythm sections vamps as the singer prowls through the crowd. Sounds almost like the bass line is doing the drum intro from New Rose, doesn't it? Tip of the beret to Rat and the Captain.

 

Basket Case - Maisie Peters (Green Day cover) 

Sounding like time's standing still is fine but moving forward is better although it does depend where you move on to. I like pop punk more and more as I grow older, which is probably the opposite of how that ought to go. We're in the middle of such a powerful revival right now, though, it's becoming a little annoying, just like the post-punk thing did a few years back. 

That makes it especially good to hear the chunking guitars dropped in favor of violin and keys and the whiny teenage angst replaced by wistful self-evaluation. Has Kelly Clarkson covered Green Day? Nope, but it's only a matter of time.

Gay Space Cadets - Lande Hekt

Punk turned into pop-punk turned into indie or so it went in one timeline, at least. I confess I clicked on this one because of the title but I stayed for the tune, the lyrics and especially the voice, which once again reminds of Tracyanne Campbell from Camera Obscura. They really are massively influential or their sound is.

Why Do I? - Fresh

Eventually indie looped back round into Britpop and by then the threads were so tangled no-one was ever going to straighten them out, as if anyone would want to try. For the last quarter of a century it's been anyone's guess. If you heard this one coming out of the open windows of a passing car, would you be able to place it, even in a decade?

It was, in fact, recorded just over six months ago although Fresh themselves were formed in 2015 by singer/guitarist Katharine Woods because "I was a teenage girl who was bored of only seeing men playing in bands."I guess no-one told any of them guitar music was over. 

I also guess she'd been going to see the wrong bands. Mrs Bhagpuss and I sometimes talk about how very much things have changed in terms of gender representation in popular music. We've been around long enough to see the status quo shift from four or five guys to three or four guys and a girl to some guys and some girls to four or five girls and a guy. (I use the word guy in its gendered sense there although generally I think of it as ungendered, as in "You guys! or even "You guys suck!")

It seems like most of the bands I run across nowadays have either no particular gender balance to speak of or lean towards female/non-binary lineups with maybe a token male, often on on drums. I think the first band I ever knew with that format was the wonderful Kenickie but I've seen a lot since they split up. Of course, my perception may have something to do with my personal tastes. Maybe things aren't as rosy as my playlists like to picture them.

Anthem - babybaby-explores

I was about to say it's probably time we moved into the present day and played something that sounds like it couldn''t have been made at any other time in pop history... and then I listened to this again and realised it sounds like Devo crossed with MX80 Sound. Or as the Pitchfork review of their new album   has it "somewhere between the subversive, no-wave skronk of Bush Tetras and the talky, lo-fi minimalism of Sneaks." Is there really nothing new under the sun any more?

Dunno. Don't care. I listened to more babybaby-explores than anything this week so whatever they're channeling it works for me. Just in case you're thinking they've lumbered themselves with a name they might regret, I ought to point out they're ahead of you. They've already cut it down from Baby; Baby: Explores the Reasons Why that Gum is Still on the Sidewalk. I imagine they'll end up as babybaby. Or maybe just baby.

I would posit a theory that the reason bands are happy to have such odd, strange, hard to remember and even harder to pronounce names these days is because no-one has to go into a record shop and ask the bored, sarcastic, cooler-than-you'll-ever-be goth behind the counter if they've got "Why You Should Read Books That Don't Exist by Congratulations On Your Decision To Become A Pilot" but then I remember Pink Military Stands Alone and Jane From Occupied Europe or  - even further back - the Strawberry Alarm Clock or the Peanut Butter Conspiracy. I'm not actually old enough to have gone into a record store and asked for anything by the last two, I feel I should make that clear.

Duck Song - babybaby-explores

I could give you more babybaby-explores but I'm not your personal shopper. Go find them for yourselves. I should have put this one first, though. It's super good. Oh well, let it be a real treat for anyone with the stamina to get this far. 

Comparisons are odious, I know, but just one more. Doesn't it remind you of Janitor by Suburban Lawns? There can be no higher praise for an experimental pop band.

All This Art - Teenage Sequence

And finally, to sum up everything we've been talking about today, here comes Teenage Sequence. A couple of apposite quotes from the extensive lyrics:

"I’d like to take a moment to point out there is nothing original about this or any other song that has been released, ever— that I’m not the first person to project over arpeggiators and I won’t be the last"

"Stop having fun immediately and think about what you’ve done"

There's nothing I can add to that. 

Peace out.