Going South : GW2

After a weekend of full-on World vs World action my Elementalist really needed some R&R so she thought she might take a trip to the coast. The south coast, about as far south as you can go if you want the wildlife to be, well, alive. Just past Mount Maelstrom, that huge active volcano full of Destroyers. Lovely picnic spot.

It's some hike from Lornar's Pass, where she happened to find herself when she woke up. WvW is like that - you take a nap in your Citadel and wake up in a Dolyak-herder's Yurt half-way up a mountain with ice in your beard. Not that she has a beard. She's a Norn not a dwarf and besides the dwarves are all dead. Or so they say.

Despite what Saylahsays, night does fall in Tyria!

Anyhoo, off she set in the pitch-black of a Lornar's night, snow melting on her bare shoulders (She's a Norn. I thought we'd established that...) in search of sun, sand, sea and something to slaughter.

Tyria is a fascinating place now it's not overrun with adventurers. All the better for it, in my opinion. As she worked her way slowly southward, looping around, doubling back on herself, taking time to see the sights, she crossed paths with many other rugged individualists and a few small bands of travellers but of the bustling, bullying gangs of a few months ago there was blissfully no sign.

Dredgehaunt Cliffs now rests almost entirely in the hands (or is that paws?) of the Dredge. Barely an outpost remains that they don't control. Smuts from their smelters drift in the bitter wind like confetti down the steep streets of Divinity's Reach. My Elementalist (let's call her Summer, though that's not her name) helped one desperate field team from the Durmand Priory regain control of their dig site from the Marxist Moles and assisted the Skritt in kicking the Dredge out of some caves. Then, in best Littlest Hobo style, she drifted on.

It may look pretty but people have to breathe this air

In Timberline Falls she enlisted as a volunteer research assistant at an Asuran lab for a while, then stepped in as combat medic for a Hylek village under attack by the Krait. Deep in the southern wilds of Timberline she observed the first, unwelcome signs of the malign influence of Zhaitan as Risen began to appear like rot from the lush jungle surrounding the great volcano.

A trip inside an active volcano is something not to be missed by any self-respecting Elementalist but it was in expectation of but a short-lived expedition that she ventured into its depths. To her astonisment and mine, half an hour later after a breathless and thrilling trip involving some old-school pulling to make sure no more than one or two Destroyers and fire elementals were trying to roast her at the same time, she emerged singed but unscathed near the southern shore.

Is wood the best building material next to a volcano?

Sadly even the calming presence of the Sylvari, one of whom transformed her into a rabbit for a while so she could collect herbs for him (funny people, the Sylvari) or the military know-how of the Charr, who she came across at a jetty repairing a gorgeous, golden sun-shimmered submarine with tender blows from a lump hammer, can't turn the Mire Sea or the Benthic Kelp Beds into a beach resort.

After a quick run along the sands, made all the quicker by the skelks snapping at her unsuitably high heels, she began to think about the long trip back. Which was when she stumbled upon Dierdre's Steps.

Of which more next time.

Back in Black: TSW

My MMO rehabilitation continues. Last Sunday I spent a whole three hours in EQ2, two hours of which were spent re-allocating some 500 AA points across two characters just to get them back to where they were the last time I logged them in. Did I mention how much I despise AA/Talent/Trait resets? I may well log in again today to re-do another couple of characters but after that I'll probably need another week off.

Portrait of the author as a young woman

Syp has a good piece up at Massively about coming back to older MMOs, which I would have referenced yesterday when I was going over the same subject in relation to my few hours with Asheron's Call 2, only I hadn't read it then. On the topic of MMO House Organ Massively, Kaozz at ECTmmo posted a very well-argued response to Matt Daniel's recent sloppy "Second Wind" hatchet-job on Vanguard.

Contrary to what my comment over there might suggest (and it's not so much a comment, more a red wine inspired late-night rant) I don't hate Massively. Massively is an invaluable resource. I pick up all kinds of tid-bits there about games and stories I might otherwise have missed. As a news site it does a great job. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be enough news to meet the extremely high posting requirement (I believe I read once that they are tasked with posting an article at least once every two hours during the working week) and the slack is taken up with a great deal of feature filler, most of which is of little interest or entertainment value.

Typically, yesterday was the exception with not only Syp's piece but a very good post by the ever-reliable Jef Reheard on his return to EQ2. Following the last couple of years of worthy but oh-so-dry reportage, I look forward to reading something sprightly, thoughtful and well-considered for a change.

Are you following me?

I'm not sure if that means Jef's no longer covering The Secret World but whether or not he's out, I'm back in. I patched up yet again, only this time I went the extra mile and logged in. Pushing through the membrane wasn't all that arduous - it's a modern MMO and it's been less than six months since I was last there.

Indeed, it's been even less time than I remembered. I found a cat in my bag and let it out. Couldn't for the life of me remember where I'd got it. Turns out it's from the Halloween event, a reward all Templars received for being the best Secret Society at apple-bobbing. Or something. I'd completely forgotten that although I'd unsubscribed by then I did log in briefly for the Halloween event under some weekend ex-subber "Welcome Back" junket. Go me! I got a cat!

The controls came back to me quickly enough, although I did have to go to the interwebs to remind myself how to access my run speed boost (Press X) and my first fight ended with me sprawled in the Blue Mountain dirt. After that it all went rather well.

Tyler's "Safe House". Neither safe nor a house. Just sayin'

Apart from a real fondness for the game, the main reason I was keen to come back after the conversion to Buy-to-Play was the good word going around for Chapter 5 in general and the Tyler Freeborn questline in particular. Syp had a piece on how good it was a while back and I've seen a number of comments about how its one of the best questlines anywhere, ever.

Well, always a bad idea to come in with high expectations. I completed Part 1 The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn and I logged out at the very end of Part 2, The Research of Tyler Freeborn, so I'm half-way through. The second half is going to need to be a lot better than the first to live up to the hype because so far it's a good, solid TSW questline but nothing more.

Which is certainly not to say I didn't enjoy it, because I did, very much. It's so good to be back in an imaginary world where NPCs are npCs with the emphasis on Character. The sheer quality of the writing carries TSW through any number of longeurs and speaking of longeurs, ye gods and little fishes, the fights! They go on forever! I have a massive sword and a frickin' machine gun, yet it takes me two or three minutes just to kill the most mundane undead nuisance mob. And don't get me started on Bosses.

Hyena escapes from local zoo - more pictures page 11

That's the reason I stopped at the last stage of Part 2. It's a fight with a 50k HP boss. It took me the best part of 15 minutes to get him to 20% health at which point he spammed me with AE pools of filth in a space too tight to maneuver and poisoned me to death. I couldn't face a second round right away. I'll try again soon, preferably in a group if I can find one.

That option exists, at least, since this isn't one of TSW's notorious Solo Instances that break up groups at the end of various otherwise groupable quest chains. Unlike the humungous boss fight I still have left blocking my main storyline. That one I have to do alone. Fun.

Shorter fights please. I'm all for straight-up hack-em-down gameplay with no tricks, scripts or funny business, but if you want me in the instance for 15 minutes can't I please have fifteen one-minute fights, not one fifteen-minuter? Other than that, great to be back.

Next on the list to get back into some kind of rotation is Rift and after that Vanguard. I'd like to get DCUO patched up again in time for the upcoming housing DLC, I want to re-visit Fallen Earth and I have an odd fascination with Argo that I can't quite explain. Then there are all the betas I wasn't going to apply for and somehow did...

I'd better get on with it. 

Nostalgia For An Age Yet To Come: AC2

Into the Unknown!

So, after much to-ing and fro-ing with automated email replies, solutions to problems I didn't have, password resets to get into an account for which the password already worked perfectly well and confirmation that my payment never went through and if I wanted to play I'd have to buy the game again, finally I was able to log in to Asheron's Call 2 and make a character.

Whether I actually have an account and if so how much of the "free" 30 days I have left is anyone's guess. It's a moot point since I neither have the time nor the patience for more than a quick, curiosity-satisfying glance but at least I can now say I have been there. Wherever "there" is.

Hold on, haven't I been here before?

I know nothing about Asheron's Call, even though I did play it a little once up on a time. My vague, fragmentary memories of my brief visit well over a decade ago don't include any details of races, classes (I don't think AC has classes) or indeed content. I remember a lot of buildings with no doors, huge expanses of grassland, some portals and a long, long time spent running about with not much happening.

To be fair, running about with not much happening could also describe much of my experience with Anarchy Online or Horizons. Back in that pre-WoW world, running about with not much happening was kind of what we did. And anyway, this is AC2, not AC.

No Ticket, No Ride

Having looked at all the races available at character creation and picked the weirdest one it was off to the tutorial. As I may have mentioned once or twice, Tutorials and I generally don't get on and I duly didn't get on with this one. Not as usual because the hand-holding wasted my time and insulted my intelligence but because I couldn't get out of the blasted thing !

It took me about 90 minutes to do the ten-minute Tutorial. I got to the exit portal easily enough in just a few minutes. I killed the mobs that dropped the shard I needed to use the portal with no difficulty at all. Only problem was, I couldn't use the Portal because I didn't have the shard and I didn't have the shard because I couldn't loot it off the Drudge who did have it, even though I'd killed him and I could see it there, clutched in his rigored little paw, because I didn't have the quest.

That's gotta go somewhere, right?

Why didn't I have the quest? Because I couldn't find the second guy I needed to talk to, that's why. After much (much) running around he turned out to be right back where I started, only of course by the time I found out I needed him I was a lot further down the tunnels and I thought he would be too so why would I go back there to look for him?

Boy. did it take me back. Back to a place I'm not at all sure I want to go. Strip out the nostalgia that makes revisiting an MMO you played and enjoyed back in the rose-glow past so heart-warming and what really do you have? If there'd been MMOs back then with the quality-of-life enhancements most of us now take for granted (and some of us rail against for dumbing the whole genre down) would anyone have played any that didn't have them? Is it any wonder that when experienced players finally get around to trying an old MMO they missed then, as both Syl and Massively's Matt Daniel found recently when they visited Vanguard, they find little reason to hang around?

Hello clouds! Hello sky!

AC2 really does come from another age. Graphically it looks like a souped-up Everquest, which isn't at all bad and frankly I've seen worse in MMOs a quarter of its age. It's not AC2's looks that are the problem. It's the UI and the lack of those features we've come to expect. I'm very happy that there are no big ? hanging over the guys I need to speak to, but getting instructions on what to do and where to go in a barely-readable font at a microscopic point size in a transparent window that I can't move or re-size just reminds me why those ? were added in the first place. I'm also delighted to see useable armor and weapons dropping off mobs right at the beginning of the game but less delighted that I can't find a quick and easy way to see the stats and no way at all to compare one item with another.

Every game needs a windmill

And so on. It's an old game and more to the point it's an old game that I never played when it was a new game and therefore one for which I have no affinity or nostalgia. It does look interesting. People clearly are playing it and enjoying it - chat was humming with people forming groups, doing quests and generally exhibiting all the symptoms of MMO players invested and immersed in their current game of choice. I wish them and the game well.

Aw, he's kinda cute for a vermin

I won't be leveling up to join them. I feel about the same about AC2 now as I did about AC then. There's a lot of grass and it's very green but it's not the greener grass on the other side of any fence I feel like jumping. I might pop in again and have another run around before my 30 days are up (whenever that is). I might not.

I'm very glad to have had this opportunity to go time-traveling, though. If nothing else it helps clarify what it is that I do want, which would seem to be a good helping of old-school gameplay heavily spiced with up-to-the-minute usability. Someone get on that, please.

Good Things Come: EQNext

So, the supposed EQNext screenshot posted by Massively turned out to be a hoax, shot down by a terse Smed on Twitter. Although I guess Twitter is terse by definition...

Ah, EQNext. Is that even A Thing? When it was first announced back in August 2010 I didn't expect to see it in beta before 2013 at the very, very earliest. As for a final release date, given the development cycles of comparable projects such as GW2 I thought I might be sitting down to create my first permanent EQNext character sometime in 2015.

Since then the entire project has supposedly been stripped down and rebuilt not once but twice and I'd re-calibrated my expectations to somewhere north of 2016. I was a tad surprised, then to find (courtesy of Syl at Raging Monkey's) that PCGamer magazine had EQNext  listed in their "Best Games of 2013" MMO section with a release date of "Late 2013".

Where this date comes from I have no idea. It's certainly not at the link provided in the PCGamer article, which goes to a page on the SoE website that doesn't even mention EQNext. As for Smed, the most he's letting on is that there will be news of some description at SoELive, for which a date hasn't even yet been set.

Assuming I'm still alive and in control of my faculties by the time it does finally come out, be it in 2013, 2015 or 2020, there is no doubt whatsoever that I'll be playing Everquest Next. I don't care if it ends up being a sandbox, a theme park, a sandpark or a themebox. I don't care if the payment model is F2P, B2P, Subscription or Blood Ritual. I don't care if it plays on PC, Console, Tablet or Holographic Tabletop. If I have to buy new hardware to play it, new hardware I shall buy.

 I don't even care if I have to go through PSS1 to get to it. That's how much I want to play the next installment of the one, true MMO.

What I don't want is to have to suffer through an endless drip-feed of rumor, speculation and hype based on nothing but the odd, gnomic utterance of The Smed. Or, worse still, anything remotely ressembling the unrelenting pipeline of PR puffs Carbine have been force-feeding us every WildStar Wednesday. EQNext Tuesday I do not need.

It'll be done when it's done and that will be soon enough. Leave it in the oven and let it bake.

But You Promised ! : GW2

Zubon at Kill Ten Rats has a short piece up about the confusion caused by ArenaNet dev Colin Johansen's recent comments on what we might expect from his company in the early part of this year. I'd already read the original developer interview, which I picked up from a link in this Massively article.

I read it once, not particularly carefully. Rather hurriedly in fact since I was at work at the time. I took "an expansion's worth of content" to mean "the amount of content one would expect to receive when paying for an Expansion Pack from ArenaNet". That qualifier is quite important, because to ArenaNet the word "Expansion" has a different meaning to that which it would have if Blizzard or SOE used it.

The only content release for ANet's other Guild Wars game that was ever described officially as "an expansion" was "Guild Wars: Eye of the North". Historically at least, in ANet/GW terms, an "expansion" is something less than you might expect. The previous additions to the elder game which were released as boxes through retail outlets were called "Campaigns". Those were stand-alone products incorporating the original Guild Wars. Because EOTN uniquely required that you already own a Guild Wars Campaign to play it, they used the term  "expansion pack"  instead.

You can already see how muddled this is. Developers, producers, players and commentators are throwing terms around without a common understanding of their definitions. That always leads to trouble. An "expansion" for EQ2 is a very different beast to an "expansion" for EVE, which is different again from one for Darkfall and round and round we go.

Perhaps! I said "Perhaps"

Using ANet's own established benchmark for "expansion", Eye of the North, it is not unreasonable to anticipate "new content for existing characters: dungeons, a number of new skills, armor" to quote from the GW1 Wiki.

The Wiki goes on to add " Eye of the North is set in previously inaccessible territory from the first Guild Wars campaign, Prophecies". From that we might hope to see the opening of some of the areas that we can currently see on the GW2 map of Tyria but cannot reach. That's certainly what I'm hoping for.

New races, classes, levels or entire new categories of gameplay such as you might expect to find in something caled an expansion from another MMO House (Wrath of The Lich King or Scars of Velious for example)? No, we won't be getting those.

The upshot of all this is that after a decade and a half it is still a bad idea to give games developers open access to the public.

Sunlit Uplands

I wasn't going to comment on SynCaine's recent piece on the future for niche MMOs, or on Keen's very similar take on the same topic because, well, its all been said so many times already. But then I happened to read Massively's short piece this morning on the Pathfinder Kickstarter campaign.

This is the summary of what Pathfinder is supposed to be:

"a grindless, classless system that allows for limitless character progression, large-scale battles, player-built structures, player-driven content, and useful trade and crafting."

And to build this wonder they reckon to need just $1m.

This begs so many questions, not the least of which is why, if an MMO fulfilling all those criteria can be made for $1m, we don't we have a slew of them already. What's the variable that might allow this team to produce a such a God Game for 1% or less than what it would cost a big-name studio?

The main cost everyone seems to want to cut is the cost of making it look good. Is that really where that 99% cost saving comes from, though? Mightn't it really come down to how much the people making it are being paid? That, and the cost of the environment in which they work while they are making it.

How much of the $100 million in "development costs" of an AAA MMO goes on making the game look (and sound) beautiful rather than on salaries and infrastructure costs?  Is making something that looks beautiful intrinsically more costly than making something that, well, doesn't?

Is it shallow to want this level of detail?

If you could work for a big company offering all the perks and paying you the big money, why would you choose instead to work for a fraction of that somewhere far less comfortable? Won't indie studios always rely on new up-and-comers who'll be out of there as soon as a better offer comes up, on-the-slide devs just glad to get the work and mavericks who think they can do it better than anyone, regardless of the evidence to the contrary?


Or am I misunderstanding the way the industry operates? Does someone coding or 3D Modelling an indie MMO get the same industry-standard wage-and-benefits package he or she would get for doing the same thing for Blizzard or ANet?

I grew up with the punk ethic. "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it" as The Desperate Bicycles declaimed at the end of their 1977 non-hit "Handlebars". And yes, it was easy and cheap to make a punk 45. Whether you can make a sustainable, satisfying  MMO as cheaply and easily, that I'm not so sure. And, really, $1m dollars isn't all that cheap and two years in development isn't all that easy.

Or to look at a screen as though through a window?

Hugely commercial video games can be produced by small teams. In the 80s that was the norm. In the 21st century Minecraft hammers the point home beyond argument. We've had MMOs for more than fifteen years, though, and if there's been a large-scale, commercial success from a tiny team operating on a shoestring budget I must have missed it. How many people work for CCP? How much did EVE cost?

Like SynCaine and Keen, I hope we are at that watershed. I hope the next few years will see a stream of well-designed, well-executed, stable, commercially and aesthetically successful MMOs emerging from a plethora of independent developers. I hope we have choice coming out of our ears. I'm more than willing to live with the problem of having too many good MMOs to choose from to be able even to try them all.

For the moment, though, this brave New Wave isn't much more than a ripple far out at sea.

So They All Rolled Over And One Fell Out... : GW2

Just a very brief comment on a quirk of GW2's current World vs World ranking system:

Three weeks ago Dragonbrand stormed Tier 5, finishing top. They remained in Tier 5 for the next match.

Two weeks ago they had a much narrower win but this time were promoted to Tier 4, the Tier where our server, Yak's Bend currently resides.

Last week Dragonbrand  struggled in Tier 4, came third and were promptly sent back down to Tier 5.

This week Dragonbrand utterly destroyed their opposition in Tier 5. They'll end the round tonight with more than four times the points of the second-place server.

Tomorrow, Dragonbrand will not only re-enter Tier 4, they will leapfrog over all the teams currently there, push everyone down a place and start next round in first place. Yak's Bend, who will win this week's match comfortably, will begin next week in second place and Maguuma will slip into Tier 5.

Am I the only one who thinks this is peculiar?

(Full match information can be studied in mind-numbing detail at this excellent site)