Flame + Frost = Farrago: GW2

"Is that it?" was the refrain that echoed across Tyria as the first chapter of the Living Story limped to a close last night. Listening to map chat in Lion's Arch it was apparent that few players had read the press releases, seen the interviews or had the slightest idea what was going on.

Most did know that they were one achievement short of a Box Prize though, and not surprisingly, quite a few thought there might be a pot of gold at the end of the three-month long rainbow. There wasn't.

Next it'll be CCTV in Lion's Arch, you mark my words!

The pot of gold, such as it was, had already arrived with the conclusion of the Rox and Braham storylines more a week ago. A ticket for a pair of exotic gloves too utterly hideous even to contemplate wearing. No-one paid much attention at the time, what with the new dungeon and all. Even the anticlimax was anticlimactic.

What we did get was a bonfire and just how appropriate, in this particular case, was that? You've been driven out of your home by a bunch of burning creatures chanting about fire and setting your settlement ablaze. Do you really want to see more flames? Okay, it's cold in Hoelbrek so the warmth may be welcome but they already have rather a lot of open fires there. All the time. How special does it make you feel that they lit one more little one? And as for Black Citadel, where you're sitting on a solid metal floor that conducts heat and where the enemy at the gate even before all the recent kafuffle was always the Flame Legion? Does any of this make any sense?

In someone's dreams. Not in mine.

Then there's Rox and Braham. Hmm. These two characters that drop out of nowhere. The big, buff Norn and the wide-eyed catgirl.That we all follow. Whose story we are mostly watching, facilitating, a story clearly not our own. After that video I can't but think we're seeing Our Gods walk among us in their Mortal Form. Are we comfortable with that?

Is this whole thing a complete mess or what? I'm not saying its not been fun but has any of it made any sense to anyone? Has anything since the game launched made any sense? Did The Mad King destroying the Lion Statue make sense? Okay, he's mad, he gets a pass. Did the Karka make sense? Did Tixx make sense? The Super Adventure Box? Anything - anything at all - about the Living Story?

Might there be a whole lot of people working very hard on personal projects, obsessions,

We can't all be famous

ideas, getting them into the game with very little in the way of top-down, authoritarian control? Might things be getting greenlighted on a prospectus containing not much more than "wouldn't it be cool if...?"

Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Not at all. For my no money it's a considerably better thing than, for example, the approach Rift ended up taking, where players must at all costs not be annoyed, nothing disruptive must ever happen and everyone must get a Fair Go. That makes for an admirably solid, reliable experience but one which, after a while, tends towards the dull.

At least with ANet (as with SOE all these years) you never know quite what might happen next. Sure, some of it, arguably most of it, doesn't really come off but rather a sporadic splurge of exotic failures than a steady stream of stuff designed not to annoy anyone.

In a day or so we're off to Southsun Cove for a couple of weeks. If Team Spring Break (Really? You really want to call yourselves that? In public?) can make that a place worth spending more than five minutes in then I'll be impressed. After that, who knows? This over-excited PR blurb certainly isn't letting on but apparently "it does all tie together".

I'll believe that when I see it but I don't mind if it doesn't. It'll almost certainly be just as much fun if it all falls apart.

Step Off The Train: City of Steam

Just a few opening thoughts after some five hours' play:

There could hardly be a lower barrier of entry. You don't even need to register; you can just use your existing Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Windows Live account. In due course you'll be able to use Steam as well, at which point there will be a downloadable client but for now the browser version looks great and runs smoothly in both Firefox and Chrome. The occasionally flaky Unity Player has only crashed on me once so far, which is pretty impressive for the first couple of days of a very busy Open Beta.

When I say City of Steam looks great I should qualify that a little. It looks great once you overcome Mechanist Games' best attempts to make it look terrible. For some insane reason the game defaults to an isometric perspective with a fixed camera. I was about ready to go on the forums and start ranting about this crazy decision when a tool tip appeared pointing out that the little camera icon in the bottom right of the screen restores normal free camera movement. That, in my very strong opinion, should be the default, as it was in every previous stage of development. Had I not already been committed to playing City of Steam from previous experience there's a good chance I would have stopped playing it, probably for good, after about ten minutes. Isometric perspective does this game no favors whatsoever.

Not sure about these pants

Indeed, most of the default settings seem likely to put people off, so I strongly advise anyone trying it out to fiddle with the controls before even starting the tutorial. The first thing I did was put all the graphic settings to maximum, which I would imagine would be trivial for any PC used for gaming. Then I put it in Full Screen which required me to reset the screen resolution. Why can't MMOs automatically set the screen resolution to match the native desktop? They almost never do, which means that your first impression of the graphics is almost always much worse than it needs to be.

A few tweaks to overhead names and the visuals were set. The music, wonderful though it may be, is set far too loud so that got turned down. After the screams of ratlings woke Mrs Bhagpuss this morning and I got the benefit of her live impressions of what she'd heard through the wall, some other sound settings got dialed down as well. The sound effects, particularly in combat, can be rather strident.

The Tutorial, which has changed radically in every incarnation so far, has changed yet

Yes, but does it make my bum look big?

again. It no longer really feels like a tutorial at all, more like an in media res opening that never stops. It took me about two hours to get through it last night and all of that felt like normal gameplay. That works marvelously in every respect other than the basic purpose of a tutorial, namely familiarizing you with the controls. Several hours later and sitting comfortably at level 9 I couldn't say I yet have a firm grasp on more than half of the UI and only the very vaguest understanding of how stats and gear work. I got a pop-up once telling me I'd got an upgrade. Just once. What was so special about that item compared to all the other upgrades I'd already found is anyone's guess. As for systems like Crafting and Transmuting, trial and error appear to be the only tutorials on offer.

In this first phase only Humans are available. I picked the quasi-Soviet Stoigmari. The website has excellent lore on all the races but none of it is available during character creation, which ought to be rectified. Each character comes with family; a long-suffering elder sister and a naive younger brother in this case. Although amusing, clever NPC and background dialog is one of CoS's strengths, the comedy Russian-English accent of my character's brother Aleks makes little sense. Surely two brothers would be talking to each other in their own language and hence wouldn't make ethnically stereotypical grammatical solecisms? Never mind. It made me smile, that's what matters.

Once you reach Refuge, the aptly-named refugee sector of The Nexus, the previous long
section in which you find and clean your house seems to have vanished. The house is still there; you get it as soon as you arrive. You have to clean out both the clellar (which is much larger than the actual house) and the sewer beneath it before you can settle in. The debris on the floor and the empty bookcase and pantry remain but I didn't get the quests to fill them. Neither are the stores in town boarded up and requiring a quest to pull up the shutters. I'm guessing most of these quests may still exist; just further down the timeline.

And stay out!

Instead I found myself on a long main quest sequence to open the Sky Dock. I'm running around saying I'm helping the recovery effort while actually following a secret agenda of my own dictated to me by someone I don't know and can't see, who is talking to me on an ancient artifact I found. It's all very mysterious and quite relentless.

So far I'm enjoying City of Steam as much as I expected, which is a lot. As I also expected, it's a game to be taken in bites, not at a sitting. There's a good deal of freedom of action but only around a linear path and after three hours this morning I feel like I've done a day's hard labor. I do hope it won't be necessary to do the entire main quest line on every character just to unlock access to each area. I imagine it will, though.

Ah well, it's not like I haven't had to do that before.

Dinoville Calling : Dino Storm

Hands up everyone who's heard of Dino Storm. Now put your hand down if the first you heard of it was Beau's review at Massively. Yeah, me too.

Smile when you look at me, punk.

I'm always ready to try a new MMO, particularly if it doesn't need a download and registration doesn't ask for anything more than username, email and password. Dino Storm runs in a browser but there's a standalone client if you prefer. Either way, if you decide to give it a try you'll be riding your Dino and yelling yippee-ki-ay in a matter of minutes.

Doing what? Well, after a very brief and to the point session in Character Creation you'll find yourself dressed as a cowboy or cowgirl loping into the sprawling gold-rush town of Dinoville astride a lean, sharp-faced dinosaur. Doesn't look like the most comfortable of mounts but don't worry, bigger and better Dinos are coming your way. If you don't mind a little honest hard labor, that is.

Almost since I started playing MMOs I've had a habit of winding down the evening either with a potter around the low levels in an old favorite like Everquest or Vanguard or a quick run through something lighthearted or whimsical. The habit started with The Realm over a dozen years ago and since then many games have filled the role: NeoSteam, Rubies of Eventide, Ferentus, Eden Eternal, Dragon Nest, Argo...more than I can remember.

Recently when I'm done with GW2 for the night and my mouse pointer is hovering over the Neverwinter icon I've found it suddenly veering away to click instead on the Sheriff's badge with the reptilian eye set dead center. Neverwinter is fun but Dino Storm is funner.

Planning regulations? What planning regulations?

For a start it looks great. The colors are bright and cheerful without being brash or garish. The environments are simple but feel solid. The animations are smooth and fluid and the UI is intuitive and a pleasure to use.

Dinoville itself is a strange place. The dusty Old West buildings bristle with vidscreens  and where you'd expect to see hitching posts there are computer terminals. The Splitscreen Games website doesn't shed much light. Here's the FAQ entry on Dinoville in its entirety:

Dinoville may look weird but the tasks on offer there are very familiar. Kill those Smilodons, water these plants, deliver these letters. All the old favorites. The quest mechanics are excellent; slick, efficient, organized. On the left of the screen is your Game Guide which gives a very clear idea of what's on offer, who to speak to and where they are. Dailies and quest rewards appear there too. The quest dialog is short and pithy. It would probably seem bland if it wasn't for all the official dinosaur names; somehow being told to go kill ten Entelodons offers an off-kilter frisson you'd never get from plain old boars.

Morals are as lax as you might expect in a Wild West Gold Rush boom town. Okay, maybe not that lax - there's a conspicuous absence of Saloons and Dancing Girls - but in a game that's supposedly aimed at a young audience it's somewhat surprising to be asked to Roll the Bones and play the slots. Gambling's quite the thing in Dinoville. Best part is, it seems you always win.

Combat is very straightforward. Point your Laser Gun and get your Dino biting and down

You should the one that got away

things fall. Leveling is surprisingly slow. I've put in several hours and I'm only level four. Lots of goodies come your way when you level so there's plenty of incentive to crack on, not least the chance to upgrade to a bigger, better dino mount. Further in the distance lie all kinds of shenanigans. If I read the Game Guide correctly there's not only the prospect of controlling buildings and camps that can make you a fortune but there's open PvP over the ownership of said assets. Not to mention you can run for Sheriff. How that works I have not the slightest idea.

Will I ever find out? Will this be one of those MMOs I come back to in short bursts year in, year out or will I have forgotten it in a month or two? What about Splitscreen's other two MMOs, Pirate Galaxy and Steel Legions? Are they worth a look too? And more to the point, how come I never heard of them 'til now?

What else have I missed?

News Round-Up

News is not my thing, but sometimes a bunch of stuff comes along that demands attention.

Domino, the ex-EQ2 Crafting Dev has a blog that she rarely updates. It's on my blogroll but in no time at all today's entry will be pushed down out of sight by the many much more prolific bloggers and this is a post that deserves not to be missed.

In thirteen years of playing MMOs, Domino is the games designer who I have seen have the most dynamic, incontrovertible impact on any game I've played. With the blessing of Scott Hartsman, himself by far the most effective games producer I'm aware of, Domino took EQ2 crafting by the scruff of the neck and shook it into something tantamount to a game within a game.

Her introduction to the 2006 Ten Ton Hammer interview she reproduces says more about the MMO genre than a hundred Ask Me Anythings ever will. When she says "The dev team didn't have anybody who really understood what the players in this niche wanted" its like Toto pulling back the curtain.

I was beta-ing whichever EQ2 expansion was Beghn's last hurrah as EQ2 tradeskill dev and I vividly remember staring in disbelief at some of the things he was doing. In the interview Domino is incredibly professional even before she was a professional but I think the feelings of the craft community back then show through even so. Beghn was just awful. We would willingly have taken anyone instead of him and as we began to realize what we'd got when we got Domino in his place we literally could not believe our luck.

Incredibly, the same thing happened in EQ1 when Naiami Denmother's husband, the House Ogre Ngreth, took over from whoever had the revolving tradeskill seat before him. As far as I know Ngreth is still there. SOE take a ridiculous amount of stick largely because of that one terrible event when the NGE was imposed on Star Wars Galaxies (something that probably should properly be laid at the door of LucasArts) but my strong belief is that, as a company, they really do try to do the best they can. These two appointments prove it.

Then there's the announcement that the upcoming City of Steam beta will be open to all. This is reported on Massively by Syp and I'm more than willing to take his and their word for it, although I see nothing to that effect on the official website.

I don't want to oversell City of Steam but I've been writing about it since I was fortunate enough to stumble across it in pre-alpha. It just clicks with me. Unless something very strange happens, expect to see much more about it here after what we must now surely call Open Beta begins in  a couple of days' time.

Finally there's the latest video from ArenaNet. The two people involved seem very nice and I really don't want to say anything snarky, but let's just say watching it made me go "Oh, that explains everything!"

That's all from me, I'm off to DinoStorm, about which more soon.

Molten Weapons Facility Take 2: GW2

Ravious and Jeromai both posted recently about how long it takes players to travel from exploration to exploitation. Nothing like as long the two weeks the new Flame and Frost dungeon is scheduled to hang around it seems.

My experience has been somewhat different. I first ventured inside the Molten Alliance's lair beneath the Shiverpeaks an hour or so after the Vigil breached the gate. No-one knew what to expect and we had no strats to follow, let alone exploits to, well, exploit. We barreled through the whole thing without single death until we reached the bosses. My ranger was never even Downed. The boss fight did see a lot of us lying on the ground, but everyone got revived as necessary and we beat both bosses on the first attempt.

Mrs Bhagpuss did the run on both of her accounts in PUGs during the first couple of days and had no more trouble than I did. That left us needing just one more trip to finish up Flame and Frost on my second account. Not wanting to leave it right to the end I took my Elementalist out to Wayfarers Foothills last night to get it done. Mrs Bhagpuss came along with her Necromancer to see what she could get out of the chest.

Having read the posts linked above, and given the relative cakewalk the dungeon had been for a totally unpracticed and inexperienced PUG on the opening day, I was expecting to get the whole thing out of the way in half an hour or so. Two hours later my Ele stumbled out into the bitter Shiverpeaks wind dressed in nothing but her underwear, surprised and profusely grateful to have gotten out at all.

How did it come to this?

Back to the beginning. There weren't many people waiting outside when we arrived. My plan was to reply to the first LFM request, join up and follow whoever took the lead, let them do the work while we trundled along at the back and did we were told. Only problem with that plan? No-one Looking For More. There weren't any parties there at all.

Rather than stand around complaining about it in the traditional fashion we joined the only other person LFP, a Thief, and started recruiting. The problem with recruiting, of course, is the people you recruit tend to think you're going to lead them. Having done the dungeon precisely once, and not having understood much of what was going on even then, I made the point strongly as we acquired each new member that I wasn't in charge and anyone who thought they knew what they were doing was welcome to put on the Captain's hat. No-one took me up on the offer.

We had five people in no time. So fast in fact that I was still recruiting and had to have it pointed out to me that there were already five of us. We stepped inside the Dungeon and before anyone could even speak to Rox one person announced his doorbell was ringing and another let on that he had to see to his dog. As the Thief observed, better then than when we were on the final boss.

Our thief, on the way to do something thiefy

That turned out to be the only such interruption in what would be a long and difficult adventure. Well, unless you count the Asura Engineer who pulled a vanishing trick after a particularly bad pull about half an hour in, which I don't, since he'd said only one word since we arrived and the Ranger was able to call in a charming Charr Guardian from his guild to replace him in less than a minute.

It all started so well, too. The ambush was dispatched almost derisevely. We loped along behind Rox and her burrowing machine burning down anything that got in our way. Mrs Bhagpuss's Sylvari necro, blithely ignoring Rox's warnings about hot coals, set herself on fire in her eagerness to get her hands on the Azurite, but her leaves were barely singed.

Everyone's on fire. That's probably not a good thing.

We rounded the end of the tunnel to confront the Champion Ember. He's supposed to be the hardest of the three possible spawns but we dampened his fires without too much trouble. On to the Weapons Test Room we marched. Someone ran straight into the Safe Corner and we all followed but after a couple of minutes the Thief decided it was against the famous thiefly code of honor to do anything sneaky so she ran out into the middle to dance with the flames. The rest of the Test passed with everyone running about and dodging back into the corner as amused them most. Gaiety and abandon prevailed.

She's usually so demure, too

Things began to take a turn for the worse in the Cryogenic Chamber. I hadn't even noticed this on my first run, we went through it so fast. This time: full party wipe. I was in Water attunement, wielding the healer's staff Memory of The Sky. Much good it did us. It was at this point that the Engineer bailed, although since he said nothing and we'd been doing very well until this first set-back maybe he just disconnected. We gave him the requisite couple of minutes then called the Charr Guardian off the benches.

He needed all his feline patience because from the moment he joined us things went rapidly downhill. I struggle to explain why, because bringing him on board made the party considerably stronger as a unit, especially since he took on the role of leader most efficiently, something we'd been muddling through without until then. Nonetheless we managed to wipe again half way through rescuing the prisoners and much of the time two or even three players were Down. Rox did a great job reviving us.

We made it to the Platform, battered and bruised but still in good spirit. A brief discussion ensued over which Boss to kill first. Everyone who had an opinion agreed on the Berserker. It was at this point that the Ranger let slip he'd done the dungeon about twenty times already, something he'd very wisely kept to himself until then.

Great grouping with you Rox...

I'll gloss over the agonies of the Big Fight. The first attempt left all of us dead and the Berserker still at 90% health. Second and third attempts didn't go a lot better, although there was some marginal evidence of improvement. For the fourth attempt we switched tactics and went for the Mole, who everyone called The Robot. Things went much better. I think we wiped first time but I'm not sure. It's all a bit of a blur to be honest. Either way, in short enough order The Robot went down and the cut scene played.

That left The Berserker. He was a nightmare. My only other experience of him was that he offered a tough fight, but my earlier group had run him around, worn him down and taken him out on the first attempt. This time it didn't go that way.

Each time we tried we ended up with three people Down and two trying to kite to victory. One time it was me and the Ranger and in what seemed like several hours we got Berserker Bill to 50%. I'm pleased I got that one good run even though it did us no good in the end because other than that I spent most of the time lying down. At least it made it look like I was trying.

...and you too Frostbite!

At this point I have to say once again that I must be very lucky with PUGs. Far from the social cesspools most people seem to dip into, my experience has largely been sunshine and rainbows. The dungeon took three or four times longer than it should, something of which the Ranger who'd done it twenty times must have been all too well-aware. Despite this and even though in the end he and his Guardian guildie ended up tag-teaming the Berserker from half health to dead while the rest of us lay around offering nothing more useful than "You can do it!" encouragement from the floor, everyone kept good their sense of humor throughout. There was never a moment when I thought anyone was going to call it quits. We'd started and we were damn well going to finish.

The key to victory was probably when the Guardian/Ranger duo finally gave up trying to get the rest of us back on our feet. Indeed, I would say that in both groups it was trying to revive others that made the fight seem more difficult than it really was. Without the need to stop and make targets of themselves the two were able to find a rhythm, playing the Berserker between them, wearing him down steadily until he finally fell over and we all stood up.

Wanting to show willing I grabbed a bomb and placed it and in a few seconds we were all crushed together in the lift. Rather embarrassing in my Ele's case, given what she wasn't wearing. The Guardian linked the Tonic recipe he'd gotten from the chest so I guess he was happy he came, which was just as well as he'd had to do most of the heavy lifting. We said our goodbyes and I made a hasty trip to the Repairer.

Everyone find something else to look at!

So that's most likely it for the Molten Weapons Facility as far as I'm concerned. Speed runs remain notional, exploits theoretical and my interest in running any kind of dungeon in GW2 is as it ever was, marginal. The one thing it did make me realize is how very much I miss playing a proper healer in a dedicated healing role, with real healing abilities that I can target as needed. Frankly, the whole thing would have gone better and been more enjoyable with an old-fashioned Healer/Tank combo. Under GW2's Trinity-free combat model, all too often we just end up trying to cobble something similar together out of poor-quality, second-rate parts. I'm ready for the Trinity to make a comeback, as it surely will, if not in this particular game.

Was it fun? In a way, although I'm not sure "fun" is the right word. Completing something you set out to do do even though it turns out to be a lot harder than you expected is satisfying. Getting it done in good company, with good humor and a few jokes is even better. In the end, though, I can think of a lot of more fun ways to have fun. I hope ANet can, too.

Everyone's Doing It: Neverwinter

Ardwulf, Stargrace, Tipa: my Feedly overflows with Neverwinter first impressions. My own take isn't all that far from Keen's.

We really need a better terminology for this stuff. Massively Multiple Online isn't a genre; it's a medium. Even MMORPG doesn't take us all that much further. Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000 and Iron Man 3 are both movies but we don't assume that someone who likes one will automatically be interested in the other, although neither should we assume they won't be.

It's coming right at me!!

There's no particular reason someone who enjoyed Everquest in 2001 is going to jump for joy at Neverwinter in 2013. That shouldn't surprise anyone. I see no strong reason why someone who loves GW2 would enjoy it all that much either, though, and that is surprising.

 Neverwinter is fun, let's get that clear from the start. At the always-acceptable price of free there's no reason not to give it a run. The world, if that's the right word, looks good. The aesthetic and the art design follow a line. I found the lighting effects particularly engaging; the way motes drift in the sunlight is striking. For a heavily instanced environment there's a very acceptable feeling of space. The skies are wide. You always want to look up.

The detailing is well done. Rooms, market stalls, streets are all well-furnished. There's some repetitious use of assets but it's unobtrusive. Probably best not to look at the character models too closely. They do a job, that's as far as it goes. The monsters look great.

Bite me! I want to be a rat too!

I don't like the controls and more importantly I don't see the point of them. I'm entirely comfortable using mouselook and center-screen targeting. It's not an ability issue. There just doesn't seem to be much point having a fast-moving, action-oriented control system in a game where your character spends most of his time rooted firmly to the ground. Playing a Devoted Cleric I have to stand in place to cast and the "dodge" is just a bizarre stiff-legged straight-line slide. How this kind of combat wouldn't have worked better with traditional MMO hotbar and mouse freedom beats me.

With the considerable caveat that I've only seen solo up to level ten so far, combat is pretty basic. I changed the mouse buttons to fire continually when held down and all I do is spray Lance and Astral Seal at will as though I was toting twin lasers. If anything's near me I Q-tap Sunburst every ten seconds and I E-tap Healing Word all the time it's up whether I need it or not. Add in a few potions and the occasional angelic intervention from Guardian of Faith and I haven't had too much trouble thus far.

So combat's entertaining in a small way, if none too subtle. I can see that there's going to be a lot more to it as the points get spent and the Feats diversify. The possibilities for individualization seem reasonably complex, but no matter how far you customize, won't gameplay still come down to two mouse buttons and a few key presses? I know we all snort derisively at the banks of buttons in WoW and EQ2 but there has to be a sweet spot somewhere between the two extremes.

If wishes were horses...

The quests so far are generic but that works for me. So sue me but I strongly like Kill Ten Rats and FedEx questing. I like to curse and complain about the ineptitude and idleness of the NPCs as I toddle around doing things they clearly should be doing for themselves. That's kind of the point of MMO questing, isn't it?

I read all the quest text on the first run through in almost all MMOs I play. I rate and review it in my mind and I once had the idea of reviewing MMO quest and NPC dialog in a serious literary style, until I realized just how much work that would be. PWE's PR department wouldn't have found many quotes to excerpt if I'd gone with that plan. I've seen more leaden prose although fortunately not often. It just plods along, determined to get to the end. Reading something written by someone who didn't want to write, writing for an audience they know doesn't want to read, is tiring.

The voice acting, of which there is a lot, is uniformly dreadful. The accents are the usual extraordinary melange of celtic fringe and balkan with the odd transatlantic vowel making an unexpected appearance. Cockney scouse, a dialect unique to video games, sounds almost psychedelically weird. As always, listening to this farrago of incompetence has its own guilty pleasure.

...clerics would ride.

The plot so far seems generic and extremely linear, which makes me wonder how replayable it might be, but then with only two character slots I don't foresee lack of replayability being any kind of problem. The problem is much more likely to be the one I had with Cryptic's two previous MMOs, Champions and Star Trek Online, which is that I enjoy them quite a lot when I'm playing but I very rarely think about them when I'm not. Not thinking about MMOs leads directly to not playing them very often, which is the tightest of spirals to not playing them at all.

Hmm. +2 mace, one devout owner

I will certainly play enough to open The Foundry at level 15. So far I have played two Foundry Missions, one in beta and one Live and while they had their flaws both offered solid entertainment. The dialog in both was a step up from the stuff on offer in the official storyline, which is worrying when you note that one of the Foundry authors apologized in the introduction for English being only his third language. Writing anything takes time, of course, and creating Foundry missions would be in direct competition with writing this blog and playing MMOs, both of which I tend to think would be time better spent, but I will at least give it a go.

All said, I feel lukewarm. Neverwinter looks good and it works, which already puts it well ahead of many MMOs at this early stage. It's not what I would call an MMO, but it's becoming increasingly clear that what I would call an MMO is a quite specific subgenre of what the industry calls an MMO. I suspect that the City of Steam almost-open beta next week will mark the end of yet another brief flirtation with Cryptic for me, although the D&D/Fantasy setting does give Neverwinter a much better chance for periodic revisits than superheroes or spaceships were ever likely to. Time alone will tell.

Pardon Me But Your Tail's On Fire - A Trip to The Facility With Braham and Rox: GW2

Should have known better than to try and play an MMO on launch day. Just as I was reducing the size of my new Dwarven Cleric's nostrils in the Neverwinter character creator the screen froze and that was that for two hours. Eventually a new launcher installed itself and with my cleric restored I tore through the tutorial only to find the city of Neverwinter rubberbanding like Bouncing Boy at a Flubber convention.

Enough of that. Back GW2, which was having its own issues. The Molten Alliance was understandably reluctant to open its doors to thousands of loot-hungry adventurers and for a while no-one could get into the new dungeon. That got fixed in fairly short order and while I was standing gawping at the entrance in Wayfarer's Foothills someone popped me a group invite so in I went.

Spoilers follow, although not many because most of the time I wasn't all that clear on what was going on, what with taking screenshots, trying to clear bag space for the torrent of trivial loot and trying not to be set on fire.

To open proceedings Rox operated a tunneling machine she must have twocced from the Iron Legion to dig through the mountain into the Supervillain Lair weapons facility. Along the way we passed a bunch of rooms with mining nodes inside, all of which gave up Mithril and the new Azurite gems. These are on a 24-hour per account timer but their placement is such that they could probably be reached duo or even solo, allowing for a few deaths along the way.

That's as far as you'll be going without a full group because the rest of the dungeon is, well it's a dungeon. It was designed by the Holiday Content team not the dungeon team and since we completed it with a PUG, none of whom had done it before or seemed to know anything at all about it, I'd say it's probably not the most challenging of dungeons but it was challenging enough for my tastes.

There's a longish bit where we got to stand in as targets for a demented Dredge weapons tester. That was fun but it went on too long. Once you've dodged a couple of waves of fire you've dodged them all, I say. After that there was another long part where we freed prisoners, all of whom trundled along behind us adding little to the proceedings.

We made our way deeper into The Facility while many, many Molten Alliance drones tried and failed to stop our progress along the winding but linear route. It would be hard, probably impossible, to take a wrong turning of more than a few paces. There are no turnings. There are a few mild jumps to be made. The drop looked terrifying but no-one in our party fell. I imagine you can just waypoint back.

We met a Champion who had a small chest...let me rephrase that... we fought a Champion and when we defeated him we got to loot a small chest nearby. I guess that makes him some kind of a sub-boss. Finally we reached a massive platform above another sheer drop into darkness. The Molten Alliance have no concept of health and safety. They might as well be Asura. Would it have hurt them to put up a guard rail?

 At this point two comedy Bosses appear. One's a cat with an electrified waste-paper bin on each paw and the other is a mole dressed as Iron Man. Both blown up to gargantuan proportions, of course. No explanation how this has been done is forthcoming. I guess they feed them well down there in the mine.

They might look like a pair of pantomime villains but these two were rough. Until this point I hadn't even been downed but they soon sorted that out. There's supposedly some mechanic where you switch from one to the other as they hit various percentages of their hit points but no-one paid any attention to that. We just hared round and round, dodging and rolling and frantically reviving teammates. Rox and Braham went down early and stayed there. Fat lot of help they were.

We got the mole down. Actually it was more like up. He had a jetpack and it must have malfunctioned as he died because he shot off like a punctured balloon. With him out the way you'd think it would have gotten easier but Wastepaper Bin Paws got a second wind and it must have taken at least twice as long to finish him off.

He crumpled up at last and we got the requisite Huge Chest, which had some odd loot inside. I got a 400 skill recipe for Mushroom Loaf and an Insignia to make a piece of the new armor. I have crafters that can use both so I was happy enough but there were mutinous growls from some of the party.

Even then we weren't done. We had to grab some explosive charges and do some more jumping across bottomless pits to place them, then we had to leg it to the lift in 30 seconds before the whole place blew. We all made it, even Braham and Rox and the freed miners.

We emerged on Diessa Plateau, stood around blinking in the daylight wondering what had happened, then said our "thanks for the group" formalities and disbanded. The dungeon is only here for about two weeks and I need to do it at least once more to complete the meta achievement for Flame and Frost on my other account. I might well also need to do it a time or two with Mrs Bhagpuss for hers. That shouldn't be too arduous. It was fun, although I wouldn't want to make a habit of it.

A visit to see Rox interrogating the Molten Alliance prisoners down in the Black Citadel pokey followed. I recommend talking to all of them, especially the Veteran Dredge. There is More To This Than Meets The Eye. My money's been on The Consortium turning out to be the master villains of the piece for a while now and the conversation I had with the mole just adds to my suspicions.

The evening wrapped up with a trip to Hoelbrak to see Braham mouth off at Knut Whitebear again. From the way the conversation went I'm guessing Cragstead will be staying as a permanent settlement. I hope so. It would be weird if it just disappeared as though it had never been, although come to think of it that's how it arrived.

So that's Flame and Frost. I wonder what comes next?