Five Year Plan: Allods

Sadly not the wonderful band of the same name, who we put on gigs with a couple of times back in the day.

Imperial Square, Nezebgrad

Nezebgrad is a heck of a city. Huge. Imposing. Overwhelming. Grand. This is the way we thought the future would look before we ended up living there.
 
Allods has an idiosyncratic take on cyberpunk. Victoriana gives way to an elegant, sweetly ironic ostalgie. The Empire capital is a city built by Stalinist planners, lovingly rendered, lambently lit, peopled by irreverent, bureaucratic, meticulously dressed nutcases.

Moscow State University

Almost everyone you meet in Nezebgrad is at least a little unhinged. From Ilona, who thinks there's sewage in her kebab to Pavel who thinks his wife is turning into an elf, everyone has their own conspiracy theory. There's a secret policeman on every corner. Any beggar could be a spy. Even the bugs are bugged.

I think I ate there once.

Everyone has something for me to do and they all have forever to chat. I don't think I've ever seen such verbose quest-givers. Every quest window comes with a scroll bar. Sometimes you have to use it more than once. Is that a problem? Hardly! The quests are as lovingly crafted, as witty and knowing as the art direction. They're extremely well-translated into clear, idiomatic English yet they retain just enough of the flavor of the original syntax to give that slightly otherworldly feel that I love.

Elf porn. Just say No.

The actual combat is much easier and faster than I remember from beta, when Allods really harked back to the pace of Everquest or Dark Age Of Camelot. A couple of zaps from my lightning bolt and a charge from my trusty goblin and most things are down before they even reach me. My shaman is level 9 now and has yet to die. So why is it taking me an age to level up?

Well, apart from the lengthy conversations, the city is so spectacular I spend half my time gawping like a tourist, taking screenshot after screenshot, trying to get the best angle to capture the wonderful quality of of the light, the flare of the sun behind another statue, the majestic backdrop of mountain and cloud. And with no mount it takes a long, long time to cross these vast squares and boulevards as I run hither with my hyena ears and thither with my rat tails. 

The Adventurer's Journey: Painting pipes in the Sewage Plant

So far I'm having a great time in Allods. It's just as I remember it, only better. I've hardly stepped out of the city if you don't count the Sewage Plant and the Sewers. I think I have another three or four levels to go before I move out onto the plains and at the rate I'm going that could take another week. Or two. And that's fine. When the journey is this much fun, why hurry?

Stone Me! : Rift

Phase Two of Rift's Ashes of History world event popped up unexpectedly last night. Unexpected by me, anyway. I've been playing a mix of Allods, Rift and EQ2 this week and I didn't log into Rift yesterday until quite late in the evening. Pretty much the first thing I noticed was that one of my Ashes quests had auto-completed. It's a handy Trion trick, where any obsolete World Event quests that remain unfinished in your journal are neatly finished off for you when the next phase begins.

Some of the Phase One quests are still active and several new ones have been added. The trend I commented on earlier continues and my Guardians had to travel significantly further, through significantly more dangerous territory to complete the same quest as my Defiants. Never mind. Purity is forged in the fire of sacrifice and all that jazz.

Travel stones? Nah, mate. Never 'eard of 'em.

The new quests are intriguing. The underlying plot of the Ashes event is all about the re-opening of the Travel Stones, a network of teleportation devices that existed before the Shattering Cataclysm Civil War. Or something. I never really understood Rift's lore. I don't recall the Porticulum guys mentioning any "Travel Stones" either, come to think of it. They all seemed to be pretty pleased with themselves for setting up their own system. You'd have thought they might have mentioned it was just a cover version.
  

My brother is much tastier than I am...hang on, that's goats.

Either way, these "Travel Stones" are coming back courtesy of the Golden Maw and The Wanton, who appear to be using the system as some kind of inter-dimensional courier service. This I found out by sidling up to the Travel Stone dressed as a deer, a reckless disguise given that the two creatures I was eavesdropping on appeared to be an ogre and a kobold. Lucky I didn't end up spit-roasted.

Then it was off to try the Travel Stones out for myself. Not to go anywhere, not yet at least. That comes after the event ends, when we get to use the Travel Stones to visit Ember Isle, the upcoming high-level zone . For now we just have to prod the stone and see what jumps out.

You can't kill me. I got my claws up!

First time I did it I got a giant crab that wasn't best pleased. What a giant crab was doing using the arcane tramlines I never found out because dead crabs don't go much for conversation and it was him or me. The next two times a startled Kelari appeared, reminding me a little of the White Rabbit.



The fourth time was far and away the most spectacular It actually made me go "Whoooaah" out loud as my eyebrows crisped.

I see why they put these stones out of town now

 Back in town, the new repeatable quest involved combining a variety of colored stones to make a resonating inscribed travel stone. Catchy name. First time I did this I spent ages fiddling about with all kinds of color combinations on the assumption that there was some meaning to be construed. Turns out it's just the bottom one on the list, then the top one. I do like simplicity.
 
Overall, another good portion of lore with some fun special effects. I'm enjoying this event a lot.

A Glorious Future Awaits: Allods

Revolutionary Dawn (please to ignore smokestack)

I re-installed two MMOs this weekend. One was Fallen Earth, because it's gone Free to Play and I always liked it. The other was Allods.

I played Allods in beta, like a lot of other people. I was planning on playing it when it went live, but somehow I never did. It wasn't really because of the infamous cash-shop debacle, although that didn't help. It was mostly that the break between beta and Live, which I remember as being a few weeks, just derailed my attention. When the official Allods launch arrived I was playing something else and I just never really got back to it. (That, by the way, shows the importance for a F2P game in allowing open beta characters to carry over to Live. Most F2Ps do that. Allods didn't. It was a mistake).

Those tabs didn't used to be there!

So, why did I decide to have another bash at Allods after all this time? Well, because of this blog. (And no, I don't mean because the full name of Allods ought to be Allods:Inventory Full either, although lack of bag space is probably the defining trope of the game).

When I got this blog up and running at last I was imagining it would mostly be about writing. I've been writing since I was about seven years old. It's pretty much what I do. Only, just like when I had a website many years ago, back in the homepage day, it turns out that I like fiddling with images as much as I like writing. Maybe more.

I've been trawling through my old screenshots as I prepare these posts. I have a lot of them. I was looking for something else when I ran across my Allods beta screenshots. WoW. Erm, no, wait, that's not what I meant... WOW! Allods takes an absolutely stunning screenshot.

Seasonally Appropriate Screenshot

Looking through them a couple of thoughts popped to mind. I'd just done that post mentioning the good/bad bad/good sides in Rift and it occurred to me that Allods has a similar moral set-up. It also occurred to me that it has almost exactly the same Nature/Religion vs Science/Steampunk dichotomy. And it occurred to me that I'd only really experienced one of those sides.

Sweetness and light...

Just as in Rift I began by playing the Nature/Religion faction, so I did in Allods. Almost all my time in Beta was spent as a Gibberling on the League side. Well, three Gibberlings. And a Squirrel. I'd had a brief look at the Empire capital but about all I remembered was the excellent pastiche Constructivist design.

Until their backs are turned

Anyway, after a fair-to-middling nightmare of a battle with the awful Allods patcher, resolved only by manually downloading the patch files and a new type of unzipper to unpack them, and having to remake a new account from scratch since my old one apparently has time-expired, (you have to wonder if gPotato actually want anyone to play this game) eventually I re-entered Allods as an Orc Shaman of The Empire.

Thus far I am extremely impressed. Details will follow.

He’s good-bad, but he’s not evil : Rift

Is that it?

Ah, the Shangri-Las. My second favorite all-female band. Clearly the inspiration for Rift's odd choice of two sides, neither of which is really good and neither of which is really evil.

The Guardians are religious zealots. The Defiants are single-minded technocrats. I wouldn't trust either of them to run an orphanage. One thing I have noticed, though, is that Defiants get a distinctly easier time of things when it comes to events.

Events, dear boy, events. Harold MacMillan would have loved Telara. How fine to live in a world where events don't pop up unexpectedly to spoil your day. How much neater to know the day and hour ahead of time. Sweeter still to know that your event is easier than the other guy's.

Meridian is much easier to navigate than Sanctum. Well, it is outdoors, at least, and that's where most events take place. There's a big courtyard, a wall and a yard of scrubby grass.

More potash please

Sanctum, on the other hand, is a wheel circled by a winding path inside a retaining wall. A lot of sickly, stunted trees and rickety buildings cramp the space. Visibility is poor.

I have Guardian and Defiant characters. I even have one Guardian character who only does city events. She's never done anything else since the tutorial and she's gotten to level thirteen. I get to see all events from both sides. Each team gets the same quests for each event but I can always do the Defiant version faster than the Guardian. Sometimes it barely takes half the time.

My Guardian Hat

With my Guardian hat on I'm okay with that. We religious types are nothing if not long-suffering. The current event, however, goes beyond a little extra running between spawns. As I described before the quest in Meridian takes you just a few yards outside the gate and someone has even thoughtfully marked the path with lanterns. It took me about 10 seconds to find it.

The Guardian version is on the coast below the high bridge leading into Sanctum. I could see that on the map but I had no idea how to get there. As far as I knew, there was no way down there other than to jump off the bridge. I ran around a bit looking for another way down but I couldn't see one. So I jumped off the bridge.

Once I dragged myself, wet and shivering, out of the sea it was simple enough to complete the quest, but then I had to get back up. I was very surprised to find a path. With a neat wooden fence on the seaward side. Just to stop me falling in. Bit late for that.

Donkey rides sixpence!

Has this path always been there? I can't recall seeing it before and I spent an inordinate amount of time in Silverwood and Sanctum earlier in the year. Was it added for this event, like the lanterns in Freemarch or is it yet another example of the incredible depth of detail in the lands of Telara, where I really do still see something new every day?

Treant. It's such a tinny word.

I followed the path up. Eventually it wound back to the main road leading into Sanctum, but only after I'd dodged an aggressive level 14 treant taking a constitutional up and down the track.

Now I'm not claiming this was difficult. Compared to a trip from Ak'Anon to the Windmills or from Surefall Glade to Qeynos it was a walk in the park. But it did ask a lot more of me, and my character, than the Defiant version.

I like it. A lumpy playing field is good. Might be nice once in a while to let some moles lump up Meridian's scabby grass, though. Don't want the Guardians to have all the fun.

Ashes in the Wind : Rift

 No, much though I enjoy a bit of Joan, that's really not what I meant!

Flares are back!

So, the Ashes of History event started, finally. On the face of it, it looks remarkably like the last one. And the one before that, come to think of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Find something that works, you may as well run with it, I say.

I'd been doing Night of the Dead stuff in EQ2 for most of the evening so it was late when I logged into Rift. Only took me a few seconds to find out where the event began. Look!  Over there! A bunch of strangers standing around the same quarter of Meridian's yard where the last lot decamped a couple of weeks back. In the exact same spots I do believe. I think they may even have rented the same tents.

Sun comes up, out go the lights. Or not.

The first quest sent me looking for a Travel Stone. It wasn't hard to find. In fact it was straight out of Meridian's main gate and up a path to the right. If that wasn't plain enough, someone had thoughtfully planted a row of torches. You couldn't miss it, frankly. Nor the huge, blue crystal at the end of it.

Mrs Bhagpuss had gone to sleep so I was playing with headphones on for once. I'd also had most of a bottle of Chilean Merlot by then so it's just possible I may have been in a particularly receptive frame of mind. Whatever, when I clicked on the crystal suddenly I was pulled sharply, unexpectedly into the world before me. By the song of a long-dead dwarven bard.  

Erm, that didn't come out of your spider by any chance?

Sound gets a raw deal in MMOs.Many people turn it off altogether or turn it down and play music instead. I often have the radio on while I play and pay more attention to that than the sounds of the world I'm supposed to be inhabiting. I don't usually play with headphones on, but whenever I do I remember just how important a part sound can play in creating that elusive, desired sense of immersion. This, however, went far beyond that.

Imagine Sound Clip Here

The voice was unearthly. Softly sibilant, airy and distant, it wasn't even the  tone that chilled. It was the phrasing. Phrasing is the key to song as timing is to comedy. Get the phrasing right and everything follows. Whoever voiced this had the phrasing perfectly wrong. No human would emphasize those syllables, take those pauses. It was a voice from another world, another time. Magical. Appropriately, for once.

I was impressed. And I went on being impressed with the following quest, which also used sound excellently and atmospherically. It all bodes very well for the rest of the event. Just because you re-use the frame doesn't mean you have to paint the same picture.

Transferrable Skills: Marv Wolfman on Planetside 2

Marv Wolfman seems to have been around forever. I interviewed him over a quarter of a century ago. I vaguely recall asking him a lot of overly-detailed questions about the Teen Titans, which he answered patiently and with good humor, even when I gave him a hard time over the death of Terra. I think he was hearing a lot of that at the time...

He had a reputation as a steady, professional comics writer. A very safe pair of hands. I lost track of his career trajectory sometime in the early 90s, when I stopped buying comics for the final time. Well, it's been final so far...

Yes my mentor is Ambush Bug. What exactly are you trying to imply?

If I'd thought about him at all since then, which I haven't, I'd have guessed he would have left comics by now, possibly retired. I certainly wouldn't have expected him to turn up working  on MMOs, much less for SoE, but there does seem to be a bit of  genre bleed going on, what with Todd McFarlane over at 38 Studios and Michael Bendis on the Marvel  MMO so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. 


I knew he'd done something on DCUO but I was never entirely sure what it was. I played DCUO quite a lot and still do on occasion and it certainly has a very 70s-80s take on the DC Universe, which I appreciate. It does feel a little like being inside a Marv Wolfman title from that era, although perhaps a Gerry Conway fill-in would be nearer the mark. Maybe the DC universe hasn't changed all that much. I don't know. As I said, I'm not keeping up like I used to.

Bats is out of town, okay? You got me. Stop laughing at the back!

 Marv must have done a pretty good job doing whatever it was that he did, though, because he's back at SoE again, working on the backstory for Planetside II. Is that a plum job? I wouldn't have thought so. Not for a writer, anyway. Hard to see how much backstory a 24/7 running firefight needs. I don't think there's all that much congruity between comics and MMOs anyway. Not in the writing department. But then, a good pro can turn his hand to anything.


Oddly, given that SoE is my preferred MMO development house, I never played Planetside. I often meant to but somehow I just never got round to it. I mean to rectify that with Planetside II. I'd be doing that anyway, but knowing Marv's on board gives me just that little bit more confidence. I don't expect to notice what he's done, but his influence will be there, solid and stable. He's such a pro, after all.

Explorer Archetype

Stupid noobs can't even spell noobs

Mrs Bhagpuss and I are just back from yet another trip to Spain. Spain and France, in fact, since we flew to Bordeaux and drove down into Northern Spain through Aquitaine, the flattest place I have ever seen.

We did a lot of driving, as we always do. Well, I did a lot of driving and Mrs Bhagpuss did a lot of looking out the window. Sometimes when we go traveling we don't talk about gaming at all, but this time it came up quite a lot. After more than a decade of MMOs it seems we're still both pretty keen on them, still ready for more.

That's gnomish technology or I'm a dutchman

We observed once again how blurred the line is between what we do in MMOs and "real" life. When we go away we find it very hard to go to one place and stay there. We're always moving on, looking to see what's over the next hill, what the next town has to show us. It's quite astonishing how radically landscape and environment can change in just a few miles, a few minutes. Almost as though you crossed a zone line.

Three hour quest to find this place half an hour from where we started

Then there are the repeatable quests. We don't kill ten goats (although when you're stuck behind a herd of them meandering along the road for half an hour it's a quest you might willingly accept) but since we rarely book any accommodation in advance every day ends in a quest to find somewhere to stay. Occasionally that turns into an epic.

We see plenty of evidence of non-human races, too.

There's trolls in them thar hills

Parts of Aquitaine were clearly settled by halflings although the endless forests suggest the continuing, elusive presence of elves.

Who might live in a castle like this?

And then there are the castles. So many castles.







I subscribe strongly to the philosophy that we only have one life and all of it is real. I try not to differentiate qualitatively between virtual and physical experiences. In the end, they all happen inside my head. If I had the time and the resources to travel all the time, I'd travel all the time. Wait a moment...that's what I do!